Dayen’s news roundup from Valentine’s day includes stories you might have missed about Boehner’s House, mortgage settlements, Federal Reserve’s [non] enforcement, safety net, Obama’s budget, Nancy Brinker, Liz Warren, Crazy Pete Hoekstra, Herman Cain, Romney’s Maine win, Israel, India, and more.

As 2011 comes to a close, millions continue to be without a job, and far too many haven’t had a job for at least half of the year.

To the MOTUs, these are statistics; to me, they are the people I see almost every day. They are my neighbors, my parishioners, and my friends. For them, my new year’s wish is that they find the jobs they so desperately seek. For the MOTUs, my new year’s wish is that they pay the taxes to fund the safety net my neighbors, parishioners, and friends so desperately need.

The Reader’s Digest version of my story goes like this:
For almost 20 years I worked as a Union Carpenter building concrete forms on bridges, high-rises, and commercial buildings. The work was heavy, dirty, and dangerous, and I loved it.

In March 2007 I started getting what I thought was just a migraine. It wouldn’t go away and I started having pain in my neck and numbness and pain down my right extremities. I ended up having three of the vertebrae in my neck removed.

I have been unable to work since this all started.

Tomorrow is May 1, and college graduation season is almost upon us. Seniors everywhere are writing their last papers, taking their last exams, preparing for the end of their college careers, and probably crying about the employment situation. College placement officers might as well be grief counselors.

For the last three years, the unemployment picture has been Ugly with a capital U, especially for those graduating from college. The Economic Policy Institute’s new paper “Class of 2011: Young workers face a dire labor market without a safety net” is a depressingly accurate take on what they face.

Glad I’m not a commencement speaker this year.

Societies collapse suddenly. Maybe the hyper-rich can find one of their trained seal economists to prove they don’t.

Decades ago, when we understood we were at war, the ratio of government debt to the economy was vastly larger than it is today. We used deficit spending to win the war and save the economy. Yet we defeated the world’s most evil regimes and emerged as the strongest nation in the world. Despite that debt, or actually because of the foundations it set, we embarked on one of the greatest, most broadly shared expansions of human prosperity in history. Today’s nihilist coalition doesn’t want you to know that.