Thursday's reports that unemployment claims are edging downward take on a slightly different cast after reading a complaint filed with the Labor Department detailing how a new Florida law is hindering unemployed people from claiming the benefits that are rightfully theirs.

The changes in the unemployment law are just one of the ways Republican Gov. Rick Scott and his tea-party-dominated legislature is remaking the state into a extremist conservative dystopia. They are detailed in a 10-page complaint sent to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis by Florida Legal Services Inc. and the National Employment Law Project.

These changes, which were enacted in 2011, "uniformly benefitted employers, making it more difficult for unemployed workers to access, qualify for, or maintain benefits, and decreasing the amount of benefits qualified unemployed workers are eligible to receive. Reasons to disqualify claimants were expanded, and barriers to securing benefit eligibility were either created or increased, seemingly with the intent to ensure that fewer unemployed workers access benefits."

As a result, only 17 percent of Florida's unemployed residents receive unemployment benefits; the national average exceeds 25 percent. And that percentage is continuing to fall.

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Melissa Harris-Perry will be a featured speaker at the Take Back the American Dream conference, convening June 18 to 20 in Washington, DC, as part of the plenary session, "2012 and Beyond: Victory Necessary, Not Sufficient." The following is an excerpt of an article originally published by The Nation. Click here for the full article.

***

Conservative strategists have been toying with how to use race against President Obama in this year’s election. Since Obama’s May 9 announcement supporting same-sex marriage, some Republicans have been salivating about the delicious possibility of dampening black voters’ enthusiasm for the president by casting him as out of touch with their religious sentiments. Then the leaked Joe Ricketts plan, “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama,” revealed GOP strategists’ idea of employing “an extremely literate conservative African-American” to discredit Obama among white voters by reminding them of his link with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Thus, the black church would be both a wedge to weaken black support and a tool to discourage white supporters.

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One thing about Ayn Rand's influence is that, for the most part, it tends to wane as people grow up and wise up. But until they do, they tend to be insufferably single minded and painfully aggressive about it.

So, does this seem like a good idea?

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At today's Amazon shareholder meeting in Seattle the company announced that it is dropping support for ALEC, while fudging questions about its taxes and voting down proposals to report its efforts to address climate change and to disclose its political spending.

The Meeting

Amazon's annual shareholder meeting took place in Seattle this morning. It was a brief, pro-forma event that took place in a small auditorium in an art museum and lasted only about 45 minutes. The general meeting was run by two corporate communications staffers, with CEO Jeff Bezos appearing (in jeans) for a brief presentation. There was a brief "mic check" disruption at the close of the meeting and a crowd outside protesting the company's practices.

These shareholder meetings are often displays of corporate arrogance and near-defiance of government requirements to hold public meetings. Amazon's meeting today was notable, with the company announcing the results of shareholder balloting even as the ballots were being collected from attendees. The real voting had already taken place; the shareholders who count -- the 1% owns 50.9% of all stocks, bonds and mutual funds, the next 9% own another 39.4% -- had already spoken.

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• MORNING MESSAGE: GOP Chooses Pentagon Over Americans
• Dems Draw Lines For Next Budget Battle
• President Touts Cuts, Romney Goes Keynesian
• Bain Of Romney's Existence
• Congress To Examine Facebook IPO
• Who'll Take Treasury?

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There's a growing chorus of calls for Jamie Dimon, CEO of troubled JPMorgan Chase, to resign from the Board of the New York Federal Reserve.

The latest JPMorgan Chase scandal, combined with Dimon's hypocrisy and relentless self-promotion, make him an obvious source for concern. But he's hardly alone in his conflict of interest at the Federal Reserve. Bankers dominate the Fed's Boards at the regional and national levels, while most of the outside Board seats not reserved for bankers are held by executives from large corporations. (Remember Herman Cain?)

In what may not be a coincidence, banks and large corporations are among the few sectors of the economy that are doing well in our current dismal state.

Should Dimon resign? They all should.

The Board Member With No Name

The scary thing is, Dimon may not be the Fed's most inappropriate board member. Consider the individual I call the Board Member With No Name. I don't to want inflame emotions by identifying her. What she represents is more important than who she is.

Speaking of which: If your résumé includes leading lobbying for the big banks and working for a firm that laundered a third of a billion dollars for Mexican drug cartels, shouldn't that disqualify you from the Federal Reserve?

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Van Jones will be a featured speaker at the Take Back the American Dream conference, convening June 18 to 20 in Washington, DC. The following was originally published by The Huffington Post and co-written with Roger Kim, executive director of Asian Pacific Environmental Network.

***

If you listen only to the propaganda machine of the Koch Brothers, the power companies and the "clean coal" industry, solar power is only desirable to a white rich ex-hippie with a Malibu beach house.

Their latest tactic is to paint local clean energy, such as rooftop solar, as an elitist energy source that low-income Californians and people of color are subsidizing.

Pitting the interests of low-income ratepayers and people of color in California against the solar industry and clean energy future is wrong and won't work. Ask the Texas oil companies that tried to pass Proposition 23 in 2010, which would have repealed the state's pioneering clean energy law, AB 32. Voters of color and residents from low-income communities overwhelmingly rejected that proposition because they understood that California's climate policies were good for their health and the economy.

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Jeffrey Rosen will be a featured speaker at the Take Back the American Dream conference, convening June 18 to 20 in Washington, DC, as part of the panel "The Supreme Court & Constitutional Policy for Progressives." The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by The New Republic.

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President Obama’s announcement that he supports same-sex marriage may have had an immediate impact on political discourse, but the same can’t be said of its implications for constitutional jurisprudence. For those hoping for a forthright defense of constitutional protections for gay rights, Obama’s announcement seemed to raise more questions than it settled.

Commentators were right to point out that Obama’s announced position—that he supports gay marriage, but every state should decide on the matter for itself—is inconsistent with the position his administration took last year in opposing the Defense of Marriage Act. Indeed, the Department of Justice announced that “strict scrutiny” of anti-marriage laws reveals them to be motivated by anti-gay animus, and thus unconstitutional; in other words, Attorney General Eric Holder suggested this was precisely an issue that states aren’t free to decide on their own.

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I wanted to wait a few days before commenting on Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s spontaneous criticism of Barack Obama for picking on Mitt Romney's experience at Bain Capital. Booker doesn’t know much of anything about private equity, but many financial services donors have his ear. He took in nearly half a million dollars in campaign donations from the industry over the last nine months, and he frankly sounded like its mouthpiece.

Booker backtracked, but it would be nice if he knew something about the private equity business before he spoke publicly about it. This expectation of knowledge should also apply to widely read columnists like David Brooks, who, as usual, reflexively defended the Wall Street practice without presenting evidence. He issued a piece of public relations diatribe that no doubt soothed the right but contributed nothing to our understanding. The contention is that these buyouts turned fat American companies into lean and productive ones since the 1970s. Other pundits less well known for their conservative reflex responses have also given partial defense of private equity.

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This can't possibly be right. Everyone knows the bully pulpit is a total myth and nobody with a thought in their head would ever dream that something the president said could ever make a difference in anything:

Public opinion continues to shift in favor of same-sex marriage, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, which also finds initial signs that President Obama’s support for the idea may have changed a few minds.

Overall, 53 percent of Americans say gay marriage should be legal, hitting a high mark in support while showing a dramatic turnaround from just six years ago, when just 36 percent thought it should be legal. Thirty-nine percent, a new low, say gay marriage should be illegal.

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I have "Build Me Up Buttercup" stuck in my head and I think I figured it out.

President Obama is coming to Redwood City today (and I am fleeing, heading to Seattle to cover tomorrow's Amazon shareholder meeting.) Look at the marquee at the downtown Fox Theater:

ABBA THE CONCERT

PRESIDENT OBAMA

AIR SUPPLY

So I was thinking, is he going to perform "Waterloo"? And so I got Waterloo stuck in my head:

But then I realized, this is the same song as Build Me Up Buttercup!

And that put Build Me Up Buttercup in my head. I can't get it out.

And THAT made me realize that something is going on -- I think the right wingers are blasting the vicinity with secret frequencies, that are affecting people's THOUGHTS!

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• MORNING MESSAGE: 10 Reasons To Be Suspicious About Wall Street's Facebook Fiasco
• More Evidence Wall Street Needs Supervision
• Romney's Job Was Not To Create Jobs
• Austerity Breeds Recession Fears In US and Europe
• Breakfast Sides

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Three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO, so why were people immediately suspicious when the stock soared and then promptly tanked? Easy answer: Because three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO.

Each of them - Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase - has a history of exactly the kinds of unethical and/or illegal behavior that might, just might, explain what happened with Facebook.

Mark Gongloff offers a good overview of Mr. Zuckerberg's Wild Ride, in which a stock that was offered at an IPO price of $38 soared to $45 and then plunged to its current (as of this writing) price of $31. A lot of people lost money - which means a lot of people made money, too.

Zuckerberg promptly sold his 30.2 million shares, netting a quick billion dollars and change. That tells you what he thinks of this investment.

Here are ten reasons why it makes sense to be suspicious of the Facebook IPO, starting with the fact that any overview of the three institutions which handled it might best be described as "rounding up the usual suspects":

1. Morgan Stanley has a history - and a culture - of tricking their own clients into making lousy investments.

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It's about time for us to break into the closed-door negotiations in Congress over a surface transportation bill.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is asking people on Wednesday to call their members of Congress to support "transportation equity" in the transportation bill, which will fund highway and public transportation projects for the next two years. The Leadership Conference has in mind some specific concerns affecting urban and low-income populations, but everyone concerned about making the economy work again for working-class and middle-class people has a reason to make their voice heard. This bill is too important to be left to the lobbyists who have access to the members and staffers huddled in a House-Senate conference committee.

The Leadership Conference is specifically concerned about protecting language in the Senate version of the bill that would require the federal government to continue technical assistance programs and studies related to public transportation and its accessibility to low-income people and people of color. The importance of public transportation, of course, transcends race and class—the more people use public transportation, the less clogged and the less polluted our roads are, and the less fuel we're consuming.

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This strange political season gets stranger by the day. The things I'm hearing and seeing from Newt Gingrich and Cory Booker today reminded me of a song from one of the last (and, in my opinion, underrated) albums by Culture Club; my favorite band from my 80's youth. The lyric that comes to mind is from the band's 1984 single, "Mistake No. 3," when Boy George sings of people getting "dragged into a conversation they can't hold."

It's been 28 years, and I still can't figure out what that song's about. But, it's not hard to figure out that, despite coming at Mitt Romney's Bain Capital history from opposite sides, Newt Gingrich and Booker let themselves get dragged into conversations they can't hold.

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