Though the Associated Press is now basically admitting it, we all knew it. Obamacare's 30-hours-per-week definition of a "full-time employee" for employer health insurance coverage purposes has been responsible for one of the fundamentally negative changes in the American workforce — a noticeable move away from full-time to part-time employment.

In a report with a current Saturday morning time stamp at the AP's national web site which originally went up on Friday, the wire service's Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak covered the "new normal" in the job market. This writeup will receive yours truly's fuller attention later. But for now, I must note that the pair's report largely abandoned the AP's and the establishment press's years of near denial (bolds are mine throughout this post):

All three major broadcast networks covered on their Thursday evening newscasts the June 2015 jobs report, but it was ABC’s World News Tonight that neglected provide any further details and/or context beyond the unemployment rate and number of jobs added and omitted how hourly wages remained flat and the labor force participation rate sunk to its lowest level in 38 years. While CBS and NBC chronicled the numerous pitfalls to varying degrees, neither chose to look at why the numbers remained sluggish or assign blame for the state of the economy.

Vox's David Roberts, who describes himself at his "drvox" Twitter page as a "Seattleite transplanted from Tennessee," clearly does not have a lot of love for his region of origin.

Tuesday afternoon, in the wake of Dylann Roof's racially motivated massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, Roberts tweeted his belief that "The American South has always been the most barbaric, backward region in any developed democracy." He then asked, "Can we admit that now?" No we can't, David, and we won't.

On May 5, PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson kept with the alleged "fact-checking" web site's actual role as pack of leftist hacks by issuing a fundamentally dishonest "Half True" ruling on a statement made by CarlyFiorina.org's cybersquatter. I raise the matter now because the web site's critics, while raising most of the relevant points, haven't gone far enough in tearing apart Jacobson's work.

As his headline states, the cyberquatter "accuses Carly Fiorina of wishing she'd laid off 30,000 employees more quickly" during the Republican presidential candidate's tenure as Hewlett-Packard's CEO which ended a decade ago. The squatter is lying. She didn't make that statement in connection with H-P's layoffs. That should have been the end of it, but Jacobson still pretended that the lie is "Half True" in his evaluation.

The Census Bureau reported today that sales new homes in the U.S. (seasonally adjusted at an annual rate) plunged sharply in March to 481,000 after hitting a seven-year record level of 543,000 in February.

As has been the case so often, AP reporter Josh Boak didn't look past the seasonally adjusted numbers, and as a result gave the "expert" he quoted a free pass to supply sunnyside-up commentary in his mid-day Wednesday dispatch. He also shakily claimed that "winter storms" were a "likely" major impediment to March sales (bolds are mine):