My Donkeys

The key to Courtland Sutton having a good day seems to be:

Just throw it where he can't catch it, and watch him catch it.

Add it to the highlight reel 🤯

📺: CBS | @SuttonCourtland
pic.twitter.com/t9Bnasz8zX

— Denver Broncos (@Broncos) December 10, 2023

And just like that, Denver's a game over .500 - 1 game out of first place in the AFC West - and hotly pursuing a chance to lose in the first round of the playoffs.

Tornadoes

... in December.

At least 6 dead, 23 injured after tornadoes touch down near Nashville

Six people were killed and nearly two dozen injured after tornadoes touched down around Nashville on Saturday, according to local authorities, who feared the death toll could rise as rescue efforts continued late Saturday night.

The severe thunderstorms that spawned the tornadoes erupted ahead of an intense cold front that stretched from Michigan through western Tennessee and into eastern Texas. Ahead of the front, abnormally warm and humid air — as much as 20 degrees higher than average for this time of year — surged northward, helping to fuel the storms.

More than 75,000 customers were without power in Tennessee as of Saturday night. The hardest hit areas appeared to be Clarksville, Tenn., and the northern side of Nashville. A child and two adults were killed in Clarksville, the city’s mayor said, and the Nashville Emergency Operation Center reported three people were killed by severe storms there.

“This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones,” said Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts, who declared a state of emergency and enacted a 9 p.m. curfew for Saturday and Sunday night. “The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief.”

Rescue efforts were still underway in both areas Saturday night. Photos from the Clarksville Fire Rescue showed at least two homes with their front facades and roofs torn off, a tractor-trailer truck that had been flipped onto its side and rescue workers scouring neighborhoods for people trapped or injured. Northeast of Nashville, utility poles, trees and power lines were downed in the nearby city of Gallatin, while buildings were at least partially collapsed in parts of neighboring Hendersonville.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) directed the public Saturday night to follow guidance from local and state officials. “We mourn the lives lost,” he said in a social media post.

Through 8:30 p.m. Eastern, the National Weather Service had received about 75 reports of severe weather from northern Louisiana to southern Kentucky. But most of the severe weather was concentrated in western and central Tennessee, including 15 reports of tornadoes. The NWS said that as of 10 p.m., the severe weather threat had ended for all of Middle Tennessee.

The same front is forecast to barge toward the East Coast on Sunday. Some severe storms could erupt in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic but they are not predicted to be as widespread or violent as Saturday’s storms in the Tennessee Valley.

In the Northeast, the front is expected to trigger torrential rains Sunday night into Monday morning. Flood watches are in effect from northern Virginia to eastern Maine, including Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, where 1 to 3 inches of rain are predicted.

And BTW - 

November wrapped up 6th-warmest autumn on record for U.S.

2023 Atlantic hurricane season ends as nation remains at 25 separate billion-dollar disasters so far this year

Last month wrapped up a remarkably warm meteorological autumn across the U.S., with the season ranking as the sixth-warmest autumn on record for the nation, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

A busy Atlantic hurricane season also came to a close, ranking fourth for the most-named storms in a year since 1950.

Below are highlights from NOAA’s U.S. climate report for November 2023:

Climate by the numbers

November 2023

The average November temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 44.4 degrees F (2.7 degrees above average), ranking as the 19th-warmest November in NOAA’s 129-year climate record.

November temperatures were above average across much of the U.S., while below-normal temperatures were observed in parts of the Northeast. No state in the contiguous U.S. saw its top-10 warmest or coldest November on record. However, Alaska saw its fourth-warmest November in the 99-year period of record for the state.

The nation’s average precipitation across the contiguous U.S was 1.38 inches (0.85 of an inch below average), ranking as the 12th-driest November on record. Indiana saw its third-driest November on record, while Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin all saw a top-10 driest November. No state saw a top-10 wettest November.

Meteorological autumn

It was an exceedingly warm meteorological autumn (September through November) across the contiguous U.S. The average autumn temperature was 56.1 degrees F (2.5 degrees above average), ranking as the sixth-warmest autumn on record.

New Mexico and Texas saw their third-warmest autumns on record, while Maine saw its fourth warmest. Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming all had their top-10 warmest autumn.

The total autumn precipitation across the U.S. was 5.66 inches (1.22 inches below average), which ranked as the 15th-driest autumn on record. Tennessee’s autumn ranked as third driest, with three additional states — Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi — seeing their top-10 driest autumn. No state ranked in their top-10 wettest on record for the September–November period.

Year to date (January through November 2023)

With just one month to go in 2023, the YTD average temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 55.8 degrees F — 2.0 degrees above average — ranking as the 10th-warmest such YTD in the record.

Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas each ranked warmest on record, while Connecticut, Florida and Massachusetts each ranked second warmest for the January–November period.

The YTD precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 26.89 inches, 0.70 of an inch below average, ranking in the driest third of the historical record.

Louisiana and Maryland ranked seventh and eighth driest on record, respectively, for this YTD period. Meanwhile, Wyoming ranked seventh wettest on record, while Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire and Vermont all saw their top-10 wettest such YTD.

Head Space

I only played 4 years of full contact tackle football (thru high school), and not counting the several times I kinda got my bell rung (on and off the field), my number of actual concussions is likely well under 10.

Whether or not they all might've been real concussions, repeated blows to the head can be a problem, so I surely do worry a little. I'm in my 8th decade now, and I have to wonder if there's some really bad shit waiting for me that will take away what little sense I had in the first place.

Of course, "really bad shit" could be waiting for me no matter what - I just don't like thinking about some kind of increased risk.

Here's a bit of an update via WaPo that tells the story from a slightly different perspective.

They watched their husbands win the Heisman – then lost them to CTE

For years, Heisman weekend was a chance to remember their husband’s glory. Now it’s a reminder of a sport’s violent toll.

Behind the doors of sports’ most exclusive and secretive club is the sight of oil paintings and hardwood, the smell of cigar smoke baked into cushions and walls, the feel of familiar faces and the shuddering reminder of hangovers past.

“'The Heisman flu,'” says Barbara Cassady, whose late husband, Howard “Hopalong” Cassady, was granted lifetime entry into the club in 1955, when the Ohio State halfback was awarded the Heisman Trophy, the annual honor for college football’s most outstanding player. From then on, one weekend every December was a massive reunion with a guest list filled with sports’ upper crust — a high school reunion meets a royal wedding meets Oscar Night.

“We were treated like kings and queens, and everybody would be half-smashed," Cassady continues. “Then we’d all go home.”

Nobody thought much about what life was like in the months that divided their Decembers. It was just exhilarating to see each other, to welcome a new member and get a break from whatever stresses may be playing out at home, because for a few days, the band was back together in New York and the Blarney Stone stayed open all night.

“All the guys welcome you back and tell old stories,” says Jean Sullivan, whose late husband, Pat, played quarterback at Auburn and joined the club in 1971.

The years passed; change was inevitable. The weekend, once open to men only, expanded to include a women’s luncheon at the opera house, a Broadway play and a hospitality room. Even when ESPN turned the annual presentation into a made-for-TV spectacle, there were dimly lit places to hide and catch up — the bar or breakfast the morning after the ceremony, wives turning up still in their pajamas.

One thing that never changed, though, was that certain topics were taboo. O.J. Simpson, for instance, who won the 1968 Heisman, or Charles White, whose high-profile addiction and mental health issues led to the sale of his 1979 trophy. The weekend was too short to talk about Rashaan Salaam’s suicide or to dwell on the cognitive problems emerging as one more thing many members had in common. If a winner died or mysteriously stopped coming, nobody said anything.

“The players and wives do develop a unique friendship,” 1996 winner Danny Wuerffel says. “But it’s not really built to be someone’s close-knit support group.”

In 2019, not long after her husband died, Barb Cassady went to New York to visit with these friends she had known for decades. She greeted Paul Hornung, who joined the club in 1956, but Hornung looked at her blankly.

“Oh, my God,” Cassady remembers thinking, “he doesn’t know me.”

Still, she didn’t mention it to Hornung’s wife. Because as long as they had known each other, as close as they had become amid all the good times, there were some things you just didn’t talk about.

But when past winners line up to welcome a new member, they will do so as one of football’s grim realities breaches their club’s inner sanctum. Four Heisman winners have been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative and often devastating brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.

Many of the winners’ wives, often their husbands’ caretakers and support beams, find it increasingly difficult to ignore the changes that afflict their friends — and the challenges their peers have learned to live with or ignore.

“We’ve been together all these years,” says Jerri Spurrier, whose husband, Steve, won the Heisman in 1966. “We have experienced the downfall of these men over the years, and that’s what has hurt the most.”

In the 1980s, back when the club was smaller and the weekend more intimate, winners got whisked around the city by limousine. Judi White-Basch, who married her freshman-year sweetheart, Southern California running back Charles, remembers feeling as if she had joined a royal family. The first year the couple came back, they shared a limo with Simpson and his wife, Nicole, after whom Charles and Judi had named their first daughter.

“This is what we’re all about!” Judi recalls Simpson saying that December evening in the mid-1980s. He and White had attended Southern Cal a decade apart, became record-breaking running backs and were feted as superstars who would change the game. “You’re the most prolific Trojan out ever!”

Judi says she noticed that members of the Downtown Athletic Club, which hosted the Heisman for decades, were elderly and White. But because Charles had won football’s most prestigious trophy, it was as if he was one of them. “I was just tagging along,” she says.

The other wives were kind and welcoming, Judi remembers, and she joined them on a group vacation from reality. Because the daily schedule was packed with social events and autograph signings, couples spent hours talking and bonding: Skeeter and Doak Walker, Jane and Jay Berwanger, Jerri and Steve Spurrier.

“We couldn’t wait until the next year to go and see these people again,” Jerri Spurrier says. “You learn to trust and love each other.”

Judi fit in by telling stories about Charles’s appearance on “American Gladiators” and how he would take their five children for nature walks. He seemed to have a sixth sense for detecting when his wife was exhausted or overwhelmed, letting her sleep in or drawing a bath so she could unwind.

“To a woman,” she would say, “you couldn’t wish for anything better.”

It was enough to get her through the weekend because, especially in this gilded setting, she didn’t want the other wives to know that Charles invited his NFL teammates to their daughter’s birthday party but no-showed it himself. Or that, in 1987, police found him outside a warehouse, high on cocaine and wielding a trash can lid, convinced someone was trying to kill him. Or that sometimes Charles was so volatile that Judi checked herself and the kids into a hotel near Disneyland, waiting for him to turn back into himself.

“Then come back,” she says, “and pretend like nothing ever happened.”

Eventually Charles’s problems became so severe that Judi just stopped making plans. They stopped going to the Heisman ceremony in part because the man in the oil painting — smiling, chiseled, the adonis Judi had known since they were teenagers — was slipping away.

She struggled to explain Charles’s behavior to her best friend, their children, herself. So she stopped trying. Charles was just Charles, Judi told herself, because to win a Heisman Trophy and reach the NFL, you’re just … different. The man from the portrait still showed up most days, and when he didn’t, Judi and the kids agreed that Daddy was just as wonderful as always but that, for some reason, he occasionally went “haywire.”

At least at home, she wouldn’t have to cover for him. If they skipped the December weekend in New York, she wouldn’t have to smile and pretend as if it was an effective — if all-too-brief — escape from the isolation, loneliness and powerlessness she often felt.

“And I’ll add another word: shame,” she says. “I doubled down on trying to make everything perfect. I thought that if I could make the perfect house, if Charles didn’t have to worry about anything, if I take care of the bills, if I did everything — that he would be okay.”

Judi takes a breath.

“I loved him with my heart, soul and mind,” she continues. “But I was so ashamed. I had to protect myself, protect our family. And I didn't want anybody to know.”

IN 1994, AFTER SIMPSON was arrested (and later acquitted) in connection with the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Judi’s mother and sister begged her to leave Charles. But she couldn’t. Not for another 10 years, anyway.

“I only left when I felt like I couldn’t live anymore,” she says. “My life was ebbing away. I lived with so much uncertainty, so much chaos.”

He would call Judi sometimes, slurring as he demanded that she get him a house or a new Cadillac. He worked for Southern Cal then, first as an assistant coach then as an office worker. He slept in the locker room sometimes; other times he asked players for a few bucks. In 2012, he wrote a letter to the school to announce his immediate resignation.

He sold his Heisman a dozen years earlier. Eventually his Heisman ring, a less famous token of the club’s membership, was gone, too. So was his Rose Bowl watch and another ring commemorating the Trojans’ 1978 national championship. Judi says Charles would later suggest some of the items were stolen, though because he was later diagnosed with early-onset dementia, she cannot be sure what’s true.

Either way, she says, “everything is gone.”

Charles’s condition worsened, and in 2018, Judi and the kids moved him into a memory care facility. With his memories vanishing, he scrawled his kids’ names on a card so he wouldn’t forget. He wore Trojans gear to remind himself of who he used to be. Judi and daughter Tara took turns as his caretaker, and sometimes eldest daughter Nicole, who used to ride on her daddy’s shoulders and sit across from him when they went to Buffy’s on Sundays after church, broke down crying because not only were White’s mementos gone but so was the man who collected them.

“The best father in the world,” Judi says Nicole told her, “and then he just left. There’s no explanation.”

TWO DECADES AGO, a Florida resident went to give a speech, something he had done dozens of times, and just froze. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” Howard Cassady told his wife.

A man in Alabama began experiencing panic attacks, anxiety and paranoia, blanking as he tried to remember friends’ names. “I don’t think my brain is right,” Pat Sullivan told his wife.

Club members kept sojourning to New York for their gathering each December, and the wives ate their lamb chops and drank their cocktails and pretended nothing was wrong. Even amid the discovery and rise of CTE, it didn’t feel right to talk about the fact that Tony Dorsett, who won the 1976 Heisman, said in 2013 that he sometimes drove his daughters somewhere and forgot where he was going.

Nobody asked Roger Staubach, who won the 1963 Heisman, about the long-term effects of the 20 concussions he estimated he suffered. Nor did anyone bring up 1970 winner Jim Plunkett’s declaration six years ago that his “life sucks” because of chronic headaches and unexplained neurological conditions. At the 2017 Heisman ceremony, when Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield hoisted the trophy, nobody asked 1985 winner Bo Jackson whether he was serious months earlier when he told USA Today he would have never played football had he known about the sport’s link to brain injuries.

“We never talked about it. Never,” Barb Cassady says. “Everybody knew Hop was having a rough time. Every Heisman winner knew it. But it was never a topic.”

When Howard Cassady and Pat Sullivan died in 2019, their wives donated the men’s brains to Boston University’s CTE Center. Months later, Jean learned her husband had Stage 3 CTE, or a debilitating amount of scar tissue on their brains. Cassady’s was Stage 4, the disease’s most debilitating and advanced form, and after Hornung died in 2020, he, too, was found to have Stage 4 CTE.

Jean Sullivan went back to New York, and she could avoid the subject no longer. The Heisman Trust discontinued the women’s luncheon, she says, but she nonetheless finds time to ask winners with visible CTE symptoms if they have resources and support.

“When I go back, I see the struggles,” she says. “You recognize memory issues; you recognize anxiety. We know of so many that have these symptoms, but they don’t know where to go or where to get help."

She wishes the Heisman Trust would direct some of its power toward making sure the winners of its trophy are connected with mental health experts, those trained in cognitive decline, organizations such as the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Jean says her attempts to spearhead such an effort have been disappointing because they have been met with silence.

The Trust’s executive director, Rob Whalen, says Heisman weekend includes no presentation or formal discussion about CTE or football-related brain injuries.

“We hope to God that something gets figured out and there’s an improvement in this area,” Whalen says. “But it’s not really what the Trust is focused on for our charitable giving. ... Our missions are youth development and underserved communities, and we don’t know how the two tie together.”

Regardless, Barb Cassady can’t help but study the men each year. She watches their faces as they gather and a new member is announced.

“Am I thinking, ‘That poor guy has CTE?’ You don’t know,” she says. “The quarterbacks, they — well, he gets hit a lot, too. So who knows?”

A moment later, she continues.

“There’s going to be so many more,” she says.

CHARLES WHITE DIED IN JANUARY of esophageal cancer, just 64 years old. Judi was holding her former husband’s hand as he passed. A few months later, she and several of their children joined a video conference with Thor Stein, the Boston University pathologist who studied Charles’s brain. He revealed that Charles had Stage 4 CTE, and if Judi felt closure, daughter Nicole felt relief. Because this proved that her father hadn’t abandoned the family. He had been taken away.

“The Dad that used to be was something so powerful,” Judi says. “This let us forgive.”

Months later, Judi received an invitation to the Concussion Legacy Foundation’s annual gala in Boston. It had been years since she attended an event such as this, but early last month, she put on a black, off-the-shoulder pantsuit and drove from her home in New Hampshire to a hotel in downtown Boston. Her 22-year-old granddaughter went with her, and the two of them mingled despite not recognizing most anyone there.

Then up walked Lisa McHale, the foundation’s family relations director. Her own husband, former NFL player Tom McHale, had CTE when he died in 2008. Lisa is often among the first voices to comfort families after they learn a relative had a disease that, she says, “makes our loved ones not terribly lovable.”

Judi White-Basch, former wife of 1979 Heisman Trophy winner Charles White, and granddaughter Giovannia Hemmen flip through a book looking at pictures of Charles from his college days. (Andrew Dickinson for The Washington Post)
Lisa introduced Judi to other football wives. Their husbands had endured similar fates, and of the 1,035 brains of football players examined at Boston University, nearly three-fourths had CTE. In many cases, their wives had dealt with it, covered it up, kept their families together just as Judi had.

“Everybody has got the same story,” she says. “Everybody that I was talking to, they had this same shame and pain, like: ‘All this time, I had to hide. I had to protect. I had to pretend.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m not alone.’ ”

At the end, Lisa McHale shared another contact. There was a woman in Alabama who had even more in common with Judi.

Judi made the call last Friday, only a week before this year’s Heisman ceremony. She paused as she dialed, thinking of what she hoped to say, waiting to hit the call button. She was dialing Jean Sullivan, Pat’s widow, and she wanted to know how Jean felt as she watched the decline of the man she loved. She wanted to talk about being the member of sports’ most exclusive and secretive club, though not the one everyone talks about each December. She and Jean and Barb are charter members of a new community, a fledgling sisterhood of those who had been with a star football player at their peak and nadir, a support group whose membership will surely grow.

“Their special club takes a toll. There was a cost. We didn’t know it, but there always is,” Judi says. “She had the wonderful joy of being with him and loving him through the joy and anticipation of it, the experience of it and also the opposite, still loving and supporting them at their worst.”

Finally ready, she pressed the button and waited.

“I just knew,” Judi says, “I was going to talk to somebody that could understand.”

Today's Coaching Thing

1) Know when you're happy     - and don't make promises when you're happy
2) Know when you're sad         - and don't make decisions when you're sad
3) Know when you're angry      - and don't reply when you're angry
4) Know when you're ignorant  - and don't judge until you learn
5) Know when you're envious  - and don't criticize in that frame of mind

Riddle Me This

Question:

Why don't Alabama girls do Reverse Cowgirl?

Answer:

Because you don't turn your back on family.

Taylor Swift

I've never heard a Taylor Swift recording. All I know about her is that she consistently sells out 70,000 seat concerts, she's sold over 100 million album units, she's a legit billionaire, and she's dating an NFL star.

Oh yeah - and she's moved many many thousands of 18-to-34-year-olds to get registered.

All of  which is making the MAGArubes crazy - crazy enough (I guess) to think that attacking her and trying to tear her down won't piss off all those newly registered voters to the point where they'll never vote Republican. Ever.

MAGAdorks are so addicted to contrarian horseshit, they need their "thought leaders" to turn everything upside down and inside out so they can get a good red pill fix before they Jones out. It's like whoever comes up with the craziest Shutter Island-style fantasy is the one everybody follows - today - it'll be different tomorrow - or in an hour or two.

And I'll harp on it some more - this shit fits with the Daddy State mold perfectly.

Today's Keith

TRUMP LEAK: VICE PRESIDENT...TUCKER CARLSON? BECAUSE HITLER IS DEAD? - 12.8.23

SERIES 2 EPISODE 87: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT:

Dictator-On-Day-One Trump continues to measure the windows for the new curtains in his White House, and I don’t know if that has been PROCESSED on the fascist side or if we have properly done so on the, you know, Non-Dictatorship Side but it is increasingly obvious that Trump is increasingly confident that he will seize power next year.

That is the ONLY possible explanation for what he has now done: leaking, to the gullible and willing stenographers from Axios Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei for publication yesterday, a set of choices for his administration that would make Jair Bolsonaro blush: Vice President Tucker Carlson, Chief of Staff Steve Bannon, CIA Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Stephen Miller, or Attorney General Mike Davis, or Attorney General J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Tom Cotton, Secretary of Denial Kari Lake, Secretaries-of-to-be-announced Kristi Noem, Byron Donalds, Johnny McEntee, and of course Secretary of Lecterns Sarah Huckabee.

We will never fully now, not even after the autopsy, what PRECISELY is wrong with Trump’s brain but it seems clear that whatever it is one of its symptoms is that he must convince himself that he IS winning, WILL win, will ALWAYS win. Jack Smith is right and he IS a serial election denier but it’s deeper than that: at his advanced age and with his advanced diseases, if he ever believed he was defeated, he would die – figuratively or maybe literally. So the greatest relief he could possibly have would be to believe, 334 days before it happens, that he has already won the 2024 election and that is how he is behaving and I’m not sure WHAT to do with that but it HAS to make him sloppy and vulnerable and better minds than ours can problem figure out which soft spot on his head to PUSH.

What VALUE is there in saying “here’s Tucker Carlson: psychopathic white supremacist whose career stability makes Keith Olbermann’s look like that of Bob Cratchit – I’m going to put him in government. Along with Kari Lake, whose highest elected office was weekend weather-girl in Rock Island.” It’s the kind of things you do NOT to rally your base and NOT to scare your opponents but because you really can’t STOP yourself from doing them, and suddenly you are more convinced than ever than you can get away with them.

And if that isn’t a motto for the entire Trump Nazi Party I don’t know what is.

PLUS:

• Matt Gaetz is about to get Robespierred
• J.D. Vance wants to get a head start on prosecuting writers.
• Competing January 6 Truthers fight it out over whose bullshit is true.

(17:35) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD:

MAGA Congresswoman McClain makes a fool of herself but not as much as would-be MAGA Congressman Philip Sean Grillo does. The NFL coach who really doesn't have to "hand it to" the 9/11 plotters. Poor Nick Fuentes and Vivek Ramaswamy pushing white supremacy without realizing that if the Trumpers run out of brown immigrants, the next people they'll purge will be... Fuentes and Ramaswamy.

B-Block (33:31) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: Mr. Preble Gets Rid Of His Wife

C-Block (43:32) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: A Box To Hide In

Today's Press Poodles

WaPo reports a pretty good jobs number for November with "labor market slowdown" (even though the number for Nov was higher than Oct), and that bit was in big bold headline type, but then - in tiny little sub-head font - it's "favorable to workers".

And they bury the rest of the good news in the last 2 paragraphs.

• 4% Wage Growth
• Unemployment down to 3.7%
• Inflation is less than Wage Growth
• Bankers feel encouraged

Fuckin' Press Poodles

U.S. adds 199,000 jobs in November as labor market slowdown continues

The unemployment rate dipped to 3.7 percent, reflecting a labor market that remains favorable to workers

The U.S. economy created 199,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate fell to 3.7 percent, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reflecting the continued slowdown in labor market.

The labor market has tightened through the end of the year with just a handful of industries, health care especially, fueling job growth, keeping the economy out of a recession that economists had widely feared just a year ago.

“The current state of the labor market is a good one,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director at the jobs site Indeed. “For the last year plus, we’ve been talking about a normalizing labor market. We’re at the spot where that process is complete. This is a normal labor market. Things have calmed down in a painless way.”

Health care and government created the most jobs, as consumers have continued to shift spending toward services and an aging population has intensified that demand. Health care added 77,000 jobs in November, mainly in ambulatory health-care services, hospitals and nursing-care facilities. The government sector added 49,000 jobs in November, finally catching its pre-pandemic employment levels, as wages in state and local government have caught up with the private sector.

Manufacturing also trended up by 28,000, reflecting the return of union auto-manufacturing workers from their strike. Leisure and hospitality added nearly 40,000 jobs, mostly at restaurants and bars, after months of choppy growth.

Other industries showed negative or sluggish growth. Retail lost 38,000 jobs, while transportation and warehousing, construction, financial services and the information sector, which includes tech, showed little change.

Some of the slowdown is a reaction to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes. The central bank, which has lifted interest rates to the highest level in 22 years to bring down inflation, so far has achieved its goal of easing demand in the labor market and wage growth enough to bring down inflation, to 3.2 percent over the year in October, without triggering catastrophic job losses so far. Economists caution that it remains too early to see the full impact of the rate hikes.

Investors are optimistic that the softening in the labor market will spur the Fed to cut rates early next year, which has spurred enthusiasm in the financial markets. Friday’s jobs report provides one of the last snapshots of the labor market before the Fed meets Tuesday and Wednesday to consider policy on interest rates, which are designed to curb inflation.

By most measures, the labor market remains just as strong or stronger than the years leading up to the pandemic, a period marked by low unemployment and hardy job growth. The percentage of Americans who are unemployed has been below 4 percent for two years, a sign that the labor market remains unusually favorable for workers, giving them leverage to demand raises and switch into better jobs. Layoffs also remained low in October, according to the Labor Department’s job openings survey released Tuesday, despite some concentrated pockets of job losses in finance, tech and media.

Meanwhile, job openings have dropped substantially from their peak at 12 million in March 2022 down to 8.7 million jobs in October, according to the Tuesday report, in a sign that employers are no longer on a hiring frenzy. The low layoff rates and reduction in hours worked since earlier this year are signs that employers are acting cautiously, holding on to workers despite tempered demand, after years of competing for labor.

“Employers aren’t willing to close their eyes and pay for labor anymore,” said Drew Matus, chief market strategist at MetLife Investment Management. “But they’re paying attention to who and what they need. And they’re thinking, what if everything gets so much better and I’m understaffed? Some of that is a hangover from the covid experience.”

In welcome news for the Fed, wage growth moderated in November, rising by 4 percent over the previous 12 months in November, to $34.10 an hour. The good news for workers is that even as wage growth has moderated since earlier this year, inflation has slowed more, meaning average hourly earnings are beating price increases, boosting Americans’ spending power.

“This is encouraging for central bankers and the people getting real wage gains,” Bunker said. “It’s helping people spend more which is good for GDP growth and for everyone. It’s a win-win for a variety of audiences.”

It Goes Around

... and then it comes around.

Today's Tweet

McCarthy is no hero. He's not suddenly a friend of the American Everyman. I think all he's doing is telling the GOP they need to change the window dressing.

Kevin McCarthy: “When you look at the Democrats, they actually look like America. When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America.” pic.twitter.com/UFJTmTY75c

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) December 7, 2023