Today, the Senate passed a bill extending jobless benefits for the rest of the year by a 62-36 vote. Extending unemployment benefits following a recession like one the country just experienced should be a no-brainer, but as Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) and his supporters displayed last month, such a step is by no means a slam-dunk.

Throughout the course of the recession, the economy shed 8.4 million jobs, and there are currently six workers for every available job opening. The national unemployment rate is at 9.7 percent, and in many states it is much higher. 41.2 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, which is the highest since 1948. Just to make up for the jobs lost during the recession (not accounting for population increases), the economy would have to produce 350,000 jobs per month for two full years.

Still, 36 senators saw fit to vote against extended benefits (as well as extending COBRA, which helps unemployed workers pay for health insurance). Here are the 16 senators from states with double-digit unemployment (according to the latest figures, released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) who voted against the bill:

SENATORS	STATE	UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby	Alabama	11.1%
Sen. George LeMieux	Florida	11.9%
Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson	Georgia	10.4%
Sen. Dick Lugar	Indiana	11.1%
Sens. Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell	Kentucky	10.7%
Sens. Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker	Mississippi	10.9%
Sen. John Ensign	Nevada	13.0%
Sen. Richard Burr	North Carolina	11.1%
Sens. Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham	South Carolina	12.6%
Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker	Tennessee	10.7%

This vote is in line with a trend among conservatives in Congress, who have taken to displaying a callous disregard for the plight of the unemployed by continually claiming that unemployment benefits discourage people from looking for work. Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV), for instance, said that extending benefits is creating “hobos,” while Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said “we shouldn’t turn the ‘safety net’ into a hammock.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who voted against the bill today, said benefits stunt job-seeking “because people are being paid even though they’re not working.”

Sens. Kit Bond (R-MO), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), George Voinivich (R-OH) and David Vitter (R-LA) joined all of the Democrats except Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) in voting for the measure. Sens. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) did not vote. The Senate bill now has to be reconciled with a bill passed by the House last year. House Ways and Means Chairman Sandy Levin (D-MI) is reportedly considering pushing for a conference committee to work out the differences.

America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the lobbying juggernaut for the health insurance industry, hosted its annual conference at the Ritz Carlton this week. As a vote on health legislation nears, the industry announced yesterday that it is funding a new round of national ads aimed at killing reform. The insurance industry has attacked every version of health reform thus far, from the Senate Finance bill, to the bill that passed the House already, to measures proposed by the White House. On a call with investors, Goldman Sachs detailed how health insurers would benefit the most from not passing any health reform all.

Even if reform passes, political attack groups funded by big business, like the Club for Growth, and Republicans are promising to repeal health legislation, rescinding coverage for over 30 million Americans and perpetuating widespread industry abuses. In addition to leaders like Newt Gingrich (who is funded by AHIP and other insurers), National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and dozens of GOP House and Senate leaders have pledged to repeal health reform if they are successful in the midterm elections.

ThinkProgress caught up with Robert Zirkelbach, the spokesman for AHIP, after a press briefing at the conference to ask about the GOP effort to repeal health reform. Zirkelbach carefully dodged the question directly, but left the door open to possibly supporting such an effort in the future:

TP: Let’s say the current reform bills you’ve registered disapproval with, let’s say they pass in their current form. Would you support a Republican effort, the Republican campaign promise to repeal some or all of the bill?

ZIRKELBACH: I’m not going to speculate about health reform legislation, what’s going to happen after, when we haven’t seen the current bill. I think we’re a ways a way [crosstalk] I’m not going to begin to speculate about whats going to happen.

Watch it:

Yesterday at the AHIP conference, Steve ErkenBrack, a health insurance executive from Colorado, mused about what it would take for political leaders to stop the “demonization” of insurers. He then suggested that insurance company executives had to simply “wait until November [elections] get passed,” presumably when the GOP either retakes Congress or a large number of seats. Listen here:

As ThinkProgress has documented, AHIP has waged a two-faced campaign to kill reform. Understanding that health insurers are unpopular, AHIP has tried to defray potential criticism by telling the administration and the public that “this time” the industry will fully support health reform. However, insurers have quietly been working behind closed doors to kill health reform, secretly funding $20 million plus in attack ads, orchestrating a far right effort to declare reform unconstitutional, and directing employees to attend rowdy anti-health reform protests.

Earlier this week, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) announced that he had placed a hold on a pending bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), because the House-passed version of the legislation changes an inequity in labor law that makes it more difficult for truck drivers at FedEx to unionize than drivers at other shipping companies. Currently, Memphis-based FedEx is governed by the Railway Labor Act (RLA), under which the barriers to organizing are higher, while the proposed change would pull FedEx under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

Corker said that he supports the FAA reauthorization, but that he won’t lift his hold until he is assured that the House language (which is not included in the Senate bill) won’t be added in conference committee. His Tennessean counterpart, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), has also voiced his support for the hold, and today said that he will use “every right and privilege I have as a senator” to prevent FedEx drivers from organizing:

“I hope to help them pass it, but I’m going to use every right or privilege I have as a senator to make sure that in the end of the process, the legislation does not include the unfair provisions singling out FedEx that’s in the House bill,” Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said. “I’m going to work my way through this.”

That definitely sounds like a threat to filibuster, which in reality is all Corker is announcing with his hold, and it shows the extraordinary lengths to which these two senators are willing to go to protect one company in their home state from having to collectively bargain with its workers.

The RLA, which is technically only supposed to apply to airlines and railroad companies, stipulates that workers can only form one national union, with a ban on local unions. For obvious reasons, holding a unionization campaign for the entirety of FedEx’s ground organization at once poses certain logistical problems.

Even though it has a network of delivery trucks, FedEx has successfully lobbied for years to remain classified as an airline, and saying that “you can’t put stop signs at 30,000 feet.” FedEx CEO Fed Smith — “who raised more than $100,000 for 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and was George W. Bush’s fraternity brother” — has said that “I don’t intend to recognize any unions at Federal Express.”

Opponents of the change like to characterize it as a “bailout” for UPS. But as Jim Berard, a spokesman for Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), said, “it is certainly not a bailout for UPS. We are not giving UPS money. What the bill does, it brings FedEx under the same labor laws as UPS.” Though Alexander characterizes the bill as “singling out” FedEx, as Berard said, in reality “the bill’s purpose is to treat people who have the same type of job equally under federal labor laws.”

The bill which Corker is holding also authorizes higher pilot training standards that the National Transportation Safety Board has recommended in response to a fatal plane crash near Buffalo last year. Families of the crash victims are criticizing the hold.

Our guest blogger is Melissa Boteach, the Half in Ten Manager at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

For the past few months, the talk around town has been around the conflicting imperatives of job creation and deficit reduction. Yet, somehow, a provision that would have created hundreds of thousands of jobs for vulnerable workers, without adding a penny to the deficit over the next 10 years, failed to muster the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate yesterday.

A fully paid-for amendment offered by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Patty Murray (D-WA) that would have spent $1.3 billion to create up to 500,000 summer jobs for disadvantaged youth and $1.3 billion to provide opportunities for states to build on innovative Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs that are projected to create more than 100,000 subsidized jobs by September for vulnerable workers was scuttled by a 55-45 vote.

These two programs not only provide immediate economic relief for hard-hit families and communities; they have the potential to change the long-term employment prospects of youth and families by offering skills training and work experience so that workers can be full participants in the recovery that will eventually come.

It’s a tough economy for everyone right now, but among the hardest hit populations are low-income workers, youth and women heading families. A recent study revealed that workers earning less than $12,500 in the fourth quarter of last year were facing depression-era levels of unemployment (upwards of 30 percent). Those earning between $12,500 and $20,000 are not faring much better, with jobless rates hovering around 20 percent. Women heading families are also suffering disproportionately, with unemployment rates at 11.6 percent, and the most recent employment reports reveal that one in four young people aged 16-19 is out of a job right now.

Yet funding for two of the main programs to provide employment opportunities to these populations failed to pass on a procedural issue — and a silly one at that. A sizable majority supported the amendment, but Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) raised a “point of order,” charging that the amendment to the Senate’s jobs bill violated the pay-as-you-go rule, and therefore required 60 votes.

This is a technicality. The amendment paid for the job-creation over ten years instead of over five years. The pay-for strategy was actually good economics, considering that the amendment commits to pay for the provisions when the economy is likely to be stronger. But hey, never let good economics get in the way of gotcha politics!

The Senate should be applauded for moving forward on an extension of unemployment and health benefits for the jobless and providing fiscal relief to states to preserve the jobs of teachers, police officers, and firefighters. There may be other opportunities to obtain funding for summer jobs portion of the amendment, and advocates cannot give up on fighting for the TANF emergency fund in the House jobs bill.

But the Senate’s failure to pass an amendment to directly and cheaply create hundreds of thousands of jobs for our country’s vulnerable workers is difficult to comprehend. Given a choice between partisan politics and proven job creation strategies that have won the support of both Democratic and Republican governors, partisan politics won and struggling American workers lost.

Big Oil is using fake “Americans” to defend billions in tax subsidies. The American Petroleum Institute is running full-page ads in Politico and Roll Call that attack Congress for “new energy taxes”:

Congress will likely consider new taxes on America’s oil and natural gas industry. These new energy taxes will produce wide-reaching effects, and ripple through our economy when America — and Americans — can least afford it.

These unprecedented taxes will serve to reduce investment in new energy supplies at a time when most Americans support developing our domestic oil and natural gas resources. That means less energy, thousands of American jobs being lost and further erosion of our energy security.

Our economy is in crisis, and we need to get the nation on the road to economic recovery. This is no time to burden Americans with new energy costs.

The target of this ad is the Obama administration’s effort to remove $36 billion in loopholes and subsidies for the oil industry. As it turns out, the “Americans” presented in the ad are stock photos from Getty Images:

Americans are paying the price for these subsidies with our tax dollars, our health, and our national security. Removing these subsidies would “ripple through the economy” by unleashing a clean-energy future.

This is just the latest in a stream of polluter front groups using stock photos in Astroturf campaigns against clean energy policy. API was recently caught trying to add diversity to its dirty ads by photoshopping minorities into stock photography. West Virginia’s “FACES of Coal” turned out to be from iStockPhoto.com. And Virginia’s “Coalition for American Jobs” is a stock-photo front group for the American Chemistry Council.

Cross-posted on the Wonk Room.

When financial regulatory reform was being debated in the House, an amendment was successfully adopted that would exempt the financing arms of auto dealerships from the authority of the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). And now that regulatory reform legislation is working its way through the Senate, a new slew of exemptions are under consideration.

According to the New York Times, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who has been spearheading negotiations for the Republicans, “pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders.” And as Bloomberg reported, “among those benefitting would be a Tennessee-based company whose officers have been generous campaign contributors” to Corker:

Executives of Jones Management Services LLC, based in Cleveland, Tennessee, and its loan companies contributed $17,325 to Corker’s 2006 and 2012 Senate campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics…Corker has also received $1,000 from the political action committee of the payday lenders’ trade group, the Community Financial Services Association, based in Alexandria, Virginia.

The Times called W. Allan Jones a “longtime friend and supporter” of Corker’s, dating back to Corker’s 2001 campaign for mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Corker said that these contributions did not influence his decision to press for the payday exemption. “Categorically, absolutely not,” he said. In his career, Corker has received more than $3 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate industries, which makes them far and away his biggest contributors.

The exemption for the auto financiers was bad enough, but starting to exempt non-bank financial institutions like payday lenders from whatever new consumer protection regime is installed would be a big mistake. Payday loans are one of the uglier instruments found in the non-bank financial sector, with interests rates climbing to 400 percent or more.

As the Center for Responsible Lending found, 76 percent of payday loan volume (and $3.5 billion in annual fees) is due to “churning,” which is repeat borrowing by customers who paid off their loan, but because of the interest, require another loan before their next paycheck. We already have laws in place rendering payday lending to military members illegal, as the Defense Department considers them “predatory.”

Payday lending is well worth regulating, but in the grand scheme of things, it alone will not cause a financial crisis. But I’m worried that exemption will unleash a larger move to exempt more and more of the non-bank financial sector, which includes entities that can cause systemic risks. As FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair explained, “one of the important causes of the current financial difficulties was the exploitation of the regulatory gaps that existed between banks and the non-bank shadow financial system,” particularly with regard to mortgages and derivatives.

“The CFPA would eliminate regulatory gaps between insured depository institutions and non-bank providers of financial products and services by establishing strong, consistent consumer protection standards across the board,” Bair added. “It also would address another gap by giving the CFPA authority to examine non-bank financial service providers that are not currently examined by the federal banking agencies.”