Two Quick News Items

I'm "tired and emotional" and don't feel like blogging too much after last night's British election debacle so just two quick news items.

How come environmentalists don't pick on Beavers for "re-engineering the landscape"? They pick on humans for doing it all the time. World's biggest beaver dam discovered in northern Canada

And.

This sucks big time! Meet the Unemployable Man

The betting is that the Labor Department's Friday snapshot of the job market will show that employers added workers in April, perhaps even that the unemployment rate fell.

That would be good news, but not good enough. It's hard to exaggerate how bad the job market is. Here's one arresting fact: One of every five men 25 to 54 isn't working.

Even more alarming, the jobs that many of these men, or those like them, once had in construction, factories and offices aren't coming back. "A good guess…is that when the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working," Lawrence Summers, the president's economic adviser, said the other day.

This is not one of the many things that can be blamed on subprime lending, inept regulators or Goldman Sachs. "The Great Recession has reinforced prevailing labor market trends that were under way long before the recession," David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, observed in a recent paper commissioned by two Democratic-leaning think tanks, the Center for American Progress and the Hamilton Project.

Men get a raw deal these days from feminists to commercials and TV shows depicting them as clods and now this. Ugh!

Now tack on this - Jobs up 290,000; jobless rate rises to 9.9 pct.