Just 184,000 people filed for first time unemployment claims in the week ending December 4th, the Wall Street Journal reports, the lowest level seen in the United States since September 1969.  The news comes one day after the Labor Department reported 11 million job openings and 4.2 million Americans voluntarily leaving their jobs in November.

The data show a significant shift in workforce dynamics since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in the first quarter of 2020.  The number of “quits” indicates worker confidence in being able to obtain employment in a preferred position after leaving jobs the workers found unsatisfactory for any variety of reasons.

The tight marketplace for workers is also reflected in a 4.8% increase in wages in November as employers battle to attract job applicants and the national unemployment rate fell to 4.2% in November.  “We expect claims will start to more consistently hover around pre-Covid averages of 220,000 or perhaps slightly lower given current tight labor market conditions,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie have welcomed their second child, a daughter, Thursday morning, Politico reports.  “Both mother and daughter are doing very well. The couple would like to thank the brilliant NHS maternity team for all their care and support,” a spokeswoman stated.

Married earlier this year, Boris and Carrie Johnson have a son, Winfred, who was born in April 2020 while Boris Johnson was incapacitated with a severe case of COVID.   With this birth, Johnson has fathered at least seven children with three wives.  He also impregnated a woman with whom he was having an affair at least twice; one pregnancy was aborted and the other resulted in a miscarriage.

Reality television creature Josh Duggar has been found guilty of two counts relating to obtaining and possessing child pornography, with each count carrying up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 fine, USA Today reports.

The 33-year-old Duggar, part of the family featured in the TLC series “19 Kids and Counting” about a hyperbreeding clan that adheres to the evangelical “Quiver” philosophy of popping out an excess of offspring to populate the world with their version of “christians,” reportedly has a history of abusing his sisters and female family friends.

Law enforcement officers found explicit images of children on a computer Duggar uses as a salesman at a used car dealership.  The computer had a program loaded onto it that allowed Duggar’s illegal graphic files evade a detection program that would have alerted Duggar’s wife about the pornographic content.  The content presented at trial was reportedly downloaded in May 2019.

A database set up by the FBI to track incidents of police violence and abuse is at risk of shutting down because local, state, federal and tribal law enforcement agencies are not submitting data in sufficient quantities to meet federal guidelines, the Washington Post reports.

Data sent to the National Use-of-Force Data Collection program, set up by the FBI in 2019, cover less than 60% of the police officers in the United States, the threshold set by the Office of Management and Budget to ensure the data are representative.  If the dataset doesn’t hit the 60% threshold by the end of 2022, the OMB guidelines require the effort to be halted.  Currently, 57% of all officers in law enforcement agencies are reported.

“Due to insufficient participation from law enforcement agencies,” the GAO wrote, “the FBI faces risks that it may not meet the participation thresholds” established by OMB, “and therefore may never publish use of force incident data.”

Screenshot of page 11 of Mark Meadows’ “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference and Options for 6 JAN” PowerPoint slideshow obtained by the Capitol riot committee. The “options” presented are more or less the same as what MAGA lawyer John Eastman wrote in his now infamous coup memo.

Side note: The PDF comes from a page archived from the site IngersollLockwood.com, which is some kind of defense contractor, but the site looks half-finished and there’s hardly any content explaining what the hell they are. Ingersoll Lockwood was a 19th century inventor and novelist, whose 1896 book The Last President tells of a a populist leader from New York whose term ends in a violent attack on the US Capitol. Lockwood also wrote The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulgar and Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey. Not quite Futility, but still freaking weird – and even weirder in the context of their website hosting but later deleting this PowerPoint. There’s not a whole lot of info out there on Ingersoll Lockwood, Inc.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James will seek a deposition from the Orange God Emperor early next year as part of her investigation into his fraudulent businesses, the Washington Post reports. James requested the Donald sit at her office on January 7th to answer questions specific to his inconsistent valuations of properties he owns given in tax returns and loan applications.

National Zero will (probably) report live from the scene Thursday afternoon.

Tim Unes, an event planner for the Elizabeth Dole foundation who had been in charge of arrangements for former Senator Bob Dole’s funeral was fired Wednesday after foundation officials learned he’d been subpoenaed by the House Capitol riot select committee in September, the New York Times reports. Unes, who was Dole’s campaign travel director for his 1996 presidential run, went on to found Event Strategies Inc, a major Washington DC event planning firm, and was listed as the stage manager on the January 6th Ellipse rally’s permit application with the National Park service. “This evening, I made Senator Elizabeth Dole aware of Mr. Unes’s alleged involvement in the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Senator Dole was previously unaware of his participation and terminated his volunteer role” said Elizabeth Dole Foundation CEO Steve Schwab in a statement.

Brian Kilmeade also incorrectly says it was six children who were killed in the attack, when in fact five of the victims in the attack were women over 50 years old. The sixth and last victim to die from his injuries was tragically a 9 year old boy. Also on Thursday the NY Post reported suspect Craig Tamahana, 49, has been released without bail. Tamahana was also arrested last week for exposing his genitals to the crowd of reporters outside the courthouse where Ghislaine Maxwell is on trial.

Facing criminal charges for the stupid “fake arm” stunt he says was a protest against vaccine mandates Italian dentist Dr. Guido Russo tells a talk show he went and got vaxxed against COVID-19 for real the next day, the AP reports. Appearing on La7 Russo said he’s not against vaccine itself, but purposely showed up with the fake arm knowing he’d get caught as a protest against mandatory inoculation. “I think at this point the vaccine is the only weapon we have against this terrible disease, but there should be a freedom of choice” Russo said.

Kids as young as nine years old are among those who have been arrested for copycat threats of school shootings, The Daily Beast reports. “We have charged 18 youth in the last few days with crimes relating to school threats. Much has been written about these types of cases lately, yet still these serious events continue to happen,” Wayne County DA Kym Worthy said in a statement.

Two or three men firing guns into the air on jet skis set ashore on the beach at the hotel zone of Cancun, where Senator Ted Cruz (R-Quintana Roo) enjoys spending periods of disaster in Texas, sending hundreds of tourists scattering for safety, NBC News reports.

Lucio Hernández Gutiérrez, the chief of police of the coastal state of Quintana Roo, said men on two jet skis rode onto the beach firing handguns into the air.  No one was reported injured, and the police confiscated the jet skis.

“There were two guys and maybe even a third, who came in on jet skis, and what I saw was them shooting up into the sky,” Rick Lebassa, a tourist from Maine, said. “I did not see any shots coming in toward the shoreline.”

A father and son from California have been arrested for suspicion of starting the Caldor Fire, a wildfire that burned from mid-August to mid-October and scorched more than 221,000 acres in California, threatening Lake Tahoe, USA Today reports.

David Scott Smith, 66 of Somerset, California, and his son, Travis Shane Smith, 32, of Folsom were arrested on what’s called a Ramey warrant–a rare move that allows a judge to issue an arrest warrant before a prosecutor files charges–after U.S. Forest Service and the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office presented evidence about their guilt.

The lawyer for the Smiths claims that Travis Smith called 911 after spotting flames near the town of Pollock Pines.  The Smiths acknowledge being near the scene when the fire started, but they deny doing anything to start it to fan the flames.

So Republican Congressman Brett Guthrie of the Kentucky 2nd District announced that he has COVID, but thankfully he’s vaccinated so he only has slight symptoms, but it’s amazing that it happened today of all days because it was 1,774 days from today that Kellyanne Conway mentioned the Bowling Green Massacre on national television, and Guthrie represents Bowling Green and of course, 1774 was the year that the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia at Carpenter’s Hall and the Carpenters were a popular singing group in the ’70s, which is the median age for a member of the Senate, which is where, as we all know, is where Rand Paul makes speeches and Rand Paul is a doctor and Mehmet Oz is a doctor and Oz is a fictional place where little people do all the work with their hands and hands is how you measure how tall horses are–but why did they never use the little people’s hands?  Would that make horses taller?–and people on horses are made into statues and the statue of Robert E. Lee sit on a horse as a sign that we’re supposed to take horse drugs to overthrow the government because Lee actually won the war but was forced into hiding by the Men in Black and […a miracle happens here…] THAT’S why we’re going to go to Dallas and meet John F. Kennedy, Jr.   Simple, right?

Jerdge Jernleen thanks Geraldo for a feature on his show.  The problem?  Geraldo doesn’t have a show on Fox, and she’s actually on Sean Hannity’s show.  Honest mistake, right?  (hic)

We’re not saying Jeanine Pirro’s got a drinking problem.  We’re saying she has an alleged drinking problem, and apparently memory loss (allegedly).  We’ve seen no evidence that Jernleen doesn’t have a drinking problem, and we’ve seen evidence that she does–like drinking on the air.

“Torching Christmas trees is an attack on Christianity, obviously,” Fox News host (and the “before” guy in a stool softener commercial) Tucker Carlson sneers.  “It’s an assault on a religious observance.  But current standards, destroying someone’s religious symbol would be called a hate crime.  That’s a category much beloved and meticulously catalogued by the Biden Justice Department.  The DOJ can tell you how many Korans were burned last year in the United States but they don’t keep track of Christmas trees.  Why is that?  Because they could care less.  Christopher Wray isn’t dispatching a squad of FBI agents to investigate a case of Christmas arson.  Merrick Garland is not going to issue a press release about it.”

With the help of Democratic Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Republican Senators were able to pass a resolution to defund and repeal the private employer vaccine mandate supported by President Joe Biden, NBC News reports.

The 52-48 vote damages a significant part of the Biden plan to combat the spread of the coronavirus as the nation girds itself for the oncoming Omicron variant, reportedly a more contagious strain than the Delta variant.

The mandate requires employers with at least 100 people on payroll to have a policy in place for employees to be vaccinated or submit to weekly tests.  As Biden has pointed out, employers including Fox News already have similar or more stringent policies in place. 

https://youtu.be/hhWJv8M9A7k
Audio clip of Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson at a tele-town hall event. On Wednesday Johnson also claimed he had never said anything to downplay the severity of COVID-19 infections.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday that would cease the federal government’s purchase of gas-powered passenger vehicles by 2035 in an effort to cut the carbon footprint of the nation’s largest employer, Reuters reports.

The directive is also a push for infrastructure for electric vehicles, which will get a major boost from the Biden infrastructure program.  The federal government operates 650,000 vehicles, purchasing an average of 50,000 vehicles annually.  Biden’s order also states that all new vehicles purchased after 2027 be emissions-free.  Currently, only 0.5% of the federal fleet are electric vehicles.

The order noted the U.S. government is “the single largest land owner, energy consumer and employer in the nation” and can transform “how we build, buy and manage electricity, vehicles, buildings and other operations to be clean and sustainable.”

California government officials and abortion clinics in the state have proposed a plan that would the Golden State an “abortion sanctuary” if the Supreme Court overturns the Roe v. Wade precedent legalizing abortion, the Associated Press reports.

“We’ll be a sanctuary,” Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said. “We are looking at ways to support that inevitability and looking at ways to expand our protections.”  Newsom included funding in a recently passed budget bill to provide assistance, including for travel and lodging expenses, for women seeking an abortion.

A strong advocate for women’s health, the right to abortion is enshrined in the state law.  California’s Medicare system pays for abortions for low-income residents, and the state requires insurance providers cover the cost of abortions.