However, the court's ruling doesn't necessarily apply to all LGBT couples who want to be listed automatically on their children's birth certificates (as the husbands of birthing mothers are, regardless of genetic parentage).

The judge specified that in line with the Iowa Supreme Court's 2009 decision on marriage (Varnum v Brien), "where a married woman gives birth to a baby conceived through use of an anonymous sperm donor, the Department of Public Health should place her same-sex spouse's name on the child's birth certificate without requiring the spouse to go through an adoption proceeding."

The nation's unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent in December from 8.6 percent in November, the government said. The Labor Department revised the number of new jobs added in November to 100,000 from 120,000.

The employment report built on a flurry of heartening economic news in December, when consumer confidence rose, manufacturing came in strong and small businesses showed signs of life. It was the sixth straight month that the economy has added more than 100,000 jobs -- not enough to restore employment to pre-recession levels, but enough, perhaps, to cheer President Obama as he enters an election year.

The upward trend restored some of the ground lost this spring and summer, when global events like the earthquake in Japan and domestic ones like the debt ceiling debate slowed the American recovery to a crawl and raised fears of a second recession. Then, even signs of modest growth were dismissed as too anemic. Now, they are drawing tentative praise."

Link

From Calculated Risk:  

This was a decent report compared to expectations, but it was still weak compared to the number of people unemployed and the high level of unemployment.

There were 200,000 payroll jobs added in December. This included 212,000 private sector jobs added, and 12,000 government jobs lost. The unemployment rate fell to 8.5% from a revised 8.7% in November (revised from 8.6%). U-6, an alternate measure of labor underutilization that includes part time workers and marginally attached workers, declined to 15.2% - this remains very high. U-6 was in the 8% range in 2007.

For the year, the economy added 1.64 million total non-farm jobs or just 137 thousand per month. This is a better pace of payroll job creation than in 2010, but the economy still has 6.0 million fewer payroll jobs than at the beginning of the 2007 recession.

There were 1.92 million private sector jobs added in 2011, or about 160 thousand per month.

Both the participation rate and the employment population ratio were unchanged in December at 64.0% and 58.5% respectively.

Lots more numbers and graphs included in the CR post.

David Dayen:

The reason that the unemployment rate was able to tick down, however, is that the labor force participation rate remained unchanged at 64.0%. This low participation rate means that, even with the economy growing and the job market improving, a fair number of able-bodied workers have not rejoined the labor force. When they do, and when the labor force participation rate increases, that will put upward pressure on that topline unemployment rate. And unless everyone came into found money, that's fated to happen. The employment-population ratio also remained unchanged in December (58.5%), despite the job additions. The average workweek and average pay went up very slightly over the month.

We still have a major problem with long-term unemployed, those out of work 27 weeks or more. They account for 42.5% of the total unemployed, a record 5.6 million workers. They need more than just decent reports; a surge in hiring would be required to get them back to work. Involuntary part-time workers fell in December, so really the long-term jobless stick out even more.

[snip]

Transportation employment, particularly couriers and messengers, went up sharply in December, along with the expected gains in retail, given the holiday shopping season. A boost to couriers makes complete sense around the holiday season as well. Manufacturing jumped by 23,000 after four months of stagnating. Health care and restaurant services added jobs. Professional business services stalled out.

If you strung together a bunch of months like this, the economy would still not be where it was in the Clinton years, when 300,000 jobs a month were created on average. This is a decent growth report that, even if replicated, would still take years to get back to a normal rate of employment.

As Felix Salmon said - in the part of the excerpt ABG left out:

Of course, the long-term problems remain long-term problems, including the number of people unemployed for more than six months or a year, and the overall percentage of the population which actually has a job. None of those numbers moved significantly, and none are likely to any time soon. They're not things which get changed by a month-long bout of hiring: they're deeply engrained in the economic structure of the country, now, and are likely to prove stubbornly resistant to change.

But for the majority of us who are working now or who have had a job in recent months, things are looking relatively rosy. Average weekly earnings rose to $799.46, continuing a steady upward rise. And there's even hope that the painful public-sector layoffs might be coming to an end: while we now have 280,000 fewer government employees than we did a year ago, that number was pretty much unchanged in December. (Or maybe it's just that even the government has a little heart, and doesn't like laying people off right before the holidays.)

(2) It's hard to "lighten" a tone that comes from what most of us recognize as the pain - both physical and mental - of being in Jeff's situation - a situation you cavalierly dismissed as being not enough to drive any policy that affects a lot of people.

(3) There is no double standard: your history of polite conflation of comments, measured mangling of the facts, selective use of buzz words to substitute for reading and following the information others have provided because you wouldn't or couldn't, set you up for what happened last night; in my opinion, it was long overdue.

(4) This is just a dalliance for you, a diversion, a place to push buttons and take your passive-aggression out to play - that's your persona, the one you brought here, so don't get all whiny when people treat you accordingly.

I have learned that after the first Gulf War, President Clinton took this very seriously.  He was downsizing the military, and many of them had gone overseas to fight a war.  He greatly respected that and in light of that fact offered buyouts instead of curb kicking through evil promotion boards. Nobody can remember how much he offered soldiers to get out though.  And I have too much to do to look it up today.  But Clinton was sending them into a much different job market.

My husband asked me how much I thought should be offered in a buyout.  I said a starting base of $150,000.  In this economy most people are unemployed for at least a year.  Also, these people spent ten years making war and I don't know how many of them have the skills that employers will immediately find attractive.  Talking about how responsible and capable of learning someone is takes a backseat to every other credential.

Deborah Ruiz, an investigator with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, writes, "in that the victim was acting in the capacity of a referee during the game, she is considered a protected person. The suspect knowingly threw a basketball at her after the game ended for calls he didn't agree with. The victim and both witnesses believe that his intent was to hurt her and that he could have hurt anyone of them by his actions."

I've received the following email 6 times in the the past 6 hours... purportedly from george.friedman@stratfor.com

Hello loyal Stratfor clients,

We are still working to get our website secure and back up and running again as soon as possible.

To show our appreciation for your continued support, we will be making available all of our premium content as a free service from now on.

We would like to hear from our loyal client base as to our handling of the recent intrusion by those deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds. Please fill out the following form and return it to me

My mobile: 512-redacted
My home phone: 512-redacted

I've redacted the phone numbers, and there were also three links in the email that I've not included here that I will not click on. One to a youtube, one to a jpg file called butthurtreportform.jpg, and one to a .es url.

All or any of the three could spread a virus or trojan.

There is no "form" included in the email.

On the heels of his strong performance in the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has moved into second place in the GOP presidential race, according to a new national poll.

The poll, conducted by Rasmussen Reports a day after Mitt Romney won in Iowa by just eight votes, shows the former Massachusetts governor in the lead with 29 percent support, up from 17 percent in a Rasmussen poll released on Dec. 1. Santorum has 21 percent, up from 4 percent in the December poll.

Rockets were fired against Baghdad's Green Zone as Iraq's military marked its anniversary with a parade Friday, a day after the country suffered its worst attacks since August and weeks after US troops left.
[snip]
In Baghdad, insurgents fired three rockets against the heavily-fortified Green Zone as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presided over a huge military parade to mark the 91st anniversary of the founding of Iraq's armed forces.

The rockets hit the outer edge of the Green Zone, home to the US embassy and parliament, at 12:25 pm (0925 GMT) and did not cause any casualties, a senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity.

The noise caused by the rockets exploding could be heard from inside the grounds where the parade was taking place, an AFP journalist said.

more, at RawStory...

do you think they all just suddenly thought "ah hell, I really dont care about being president"?

do you think they altruistically step aside and give the second string occupants of the clown car a shot?