President Obama will give a “jobs speech” in September. And yet his last half-dozen speeches have been “jobs speeches,” where he castigates Congress for doing nothing, says he has a raft of ideas that Congress can get done “right now” that he would sign, and says that they involve compromise. And yes, among those ideas is deficit reduction, which he mentions during every jobs section of the speeches, usually first. Then he goes on to say that deficit reduction is not the only thing we can do.

If this is different, if it actually offers newer ideas than an infrastructure bank and extending unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut, if it touts something other than trade deals and patent reform, that would be something to write about.

So this means that the Democrats picked up a total of two seats in the recalls, and Republicans will have a 17-16 majority in the State Senate when they return to session. Dale Schultz, the moderate Republican who voted against the anti-union bill that stripped collective bargaining rights, will have a lot of say over what else of Scott Walker’s right-wing agenda gets passed. And the state waits for January 2012, when Walker and the rest of the legislature becomes eligible for recall.

This really has been the week when the non-stop chatter about the Presidential election has begun. It’s a small solace that it started a bit later this year than it did four years ago. I think I’ve seen enough stories about Rick Perry (including the tire swing stuff) that I’m already sick of the guy and he’s been in the race four days. (I do think the fact that he’s militantly pro-fracking matters, I guess.)

Hard to believe that Rupert Murdoch would lie shamelessly…yet again.

Harry James Orchestra — Green Onions (1965).

Anonymous’ #opBART dox dump of user names, emails and passwords presaged Larry Flynt’s Huffington Post blog today in which the free speech advocate wrote:

“Any information you put out into cyberspace could come back to bite you in the ass.”

Michele Bachmann tries to use her family as an excuse for showing up late, and her own mother refuses to cover for her. Awesome.

When state Attorneys General and the banks have a settlement to announce, call me. Otherwise, I’m not going to chase every rumor about the latest in negotiations that have literally been stalled for at least 5 months. I certainly think that Bank of America desperately needs a settlement, or at least desperately needs the markets to THINK they are close to a settlement, but that doesn’t mean that anything has fundamentally changed.

The banks want a steal of a deal, and an increasing number of AGs 1) don’t want to sell out cheap before undertaking an investigation and 2) don’t want to give up liability completely. And that has been the impasse for months.

A UK parliamentary committee, the Culture, Sports & Media Committee (CSMC), which has been investigating the News of the World phone hacking scandal for the past months, released letters from various individuals involved in the scandal. The contents include new revelations on News International’s approval and support of the practice of phone hacking.

With the economy stalled, President Obama is not very popular in Ohio right now but his saving grace may be that the American people strongly dislike the entire Republican presidential field.