More bad news on jobs:

The U.S. economy created just 112,000 new jobs in January, far fewer than expected, government data showed on Friday…

Needless to say, also far, far, fewer than the few hundred thousand jobs the economy would have to create every month for the next year for Bush to avoid being the first President since Hoover to lose jobs in his term…

Good news for Kerry:

Mr. Gephardt, who dropped out of the presidential race after a fourth-place finish in Iowa, planned to put his support behind Mr. Kerry today in Warren, Mich., Democrats said, giving the senator a powerful boost with the industrial unions and blue-collar workers important in the Michigan caucuses tomorrow.

It’ll be interesting to see how much of Gephardt’s base follows him. Speaking of which, this is interesting as well:

…in New York, where he raised more than $750,000 at a fund-raiser, Mr. Kerry was endorsed by Speaker Sheldon Silver of the State Assembly, Comptroller Alan Hevesi and Betsy Gotbaum, the New York City public advocate, all of whom previously supported Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.

I’d like to know what this means:

At a Portland rally, a heckler interrupted Mr. Kerry’s speech, shouting, “How about your vote for the war, and the Patriot Act and for John Ashcroft?”

Mr. Kerry, who voted against Mr. Ashcroft’s confirmation as attorney general, shot back, “I don’t run away from anything — I’ll never run away from those votes.”

I’ve never seen Casablanca, but I hear there’s an iconic moment of feigned dismay that gambling’s going on in a saloon…or something like that. Anyway, there are no surprises here – but it’s a history that’s vital to keep alive, and that White House tapes have just made that much harder to distort.

Guess who’s blogging now?

We interrupted a class of children, six to eight years old, to ask them a few questions. All of them raised their hands eagerly when asked how many had had Guinea worms and indicated the scars on their little bodies. The smallest child, named Shadrach, reminded me of our grandson Hugo, who always has clean water to drink and will never be afflicted with three-foot-long worms developing in his body and then penetrating his skin to emerge over a period of several weeks through a painful sore that may cripple him for life. At least Shadrach and his friends now know that the use of a filter cloth can protect them completely, and we’re determined to eliminate the worms permanently.

Guess who’s putting the “opportunity(/ism)” back in “opportunity” zone?

The tax break for that salary could be nearly $50,000 annually for each lawyer.

Such zones, set up by the state to rebuild poor neighborhoods by attracting firms from outside Philadelphia, have economic-development incentives that include a little-known provision that exempts partnership income – the lawyers’ salaries – from taxation.

The ACLU is taking its case against arbitrary detention to the UN:

“We are filing this complaint before the United Nations to ensure that U.S. policies and practices reflect not just domestic constitutional standards, but accepted international human rights principles regarding liberty and its deprivations,” said Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU.

Zach shares an interesting anecdote unearthed from Yale’s archives – guess who testified that the burns from being branded by the DKE fraternity were

…insignificant, like a cigarette burn…

Walter Robinson of the Globe takes a hard look at Bush’s record in the National Guard. Here’s hoping Tim Russert calls him on it on Sunday. Meanwhile, as Nathan Newman notes, the Veterans of Foreign Wars are calling Bush on his treatment of the real veterans in this country.

From the Post:

CIA Director George J. Tenet delivered a vigorous defense today of his agency’s intelligence assessments on Iraq before last year’s U.S.-led invasion, saying the country had illegal missiles, as well as the ability and intent to quickly produce biological and chemical weapons.

But he said the agency never described Iraq as “an imminent threat” in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion, and he acknowledged shortcomings in the CIA’s performance, especially in penetrating the regime of former president Saddam Hussein with the agency’s own spies.

Feel better yet?

Sam Smith on heroism and mythmaking in American politics:

As Joseph Conrad noted, heroes, like cowards, are people who for one brief moment do something out of the ordinary. It takes nothing away from the honor of that moment to understand that the courage of a critical event may not be a particularly good predictor of future behavior…Even in positions of power, the magic inner strength with which they were once blessed typically recedes except for campaigns and banquets. Certainly in this election, military heroics did not correlate with courage to oppose three of the worst bills ever passed by Congress: the Iraq War authorization, the Patriot Act, and the absurd Bush education plan.

It is useless in a time of such mythological fetishism, however, to argue the point. As John Kerry has recently demonstrated, it was only after he reincarnated himself as someone he had been three decades ago that the public – desperate for honor, decency, and bravery – leapt to his side. The myth that grants such tenure to heroism gains ascendancy when a different sort of bravery is stunningly absent from our political life, which is to say bravery marked by public lives of steady, constantly reiterated courage and integrity. With such heroes lacking, it is not surprising that so many give their support to what a candidate once was in the hope that somehow it will happen again.

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words…