COLUMBUS: Those loud booms you heard this week were not just fireworks; the economy is also booming. Not extremely loud, but still better than the whimpers of the last few years.

Almost 300,000 people found jobs and unemployment is down near 6 percent. And the stock market hit 17,000 on the Dow Jones, up from 7000 in early 2009. If you happened to have a pile of cash five years ago that you converted to good stocks, you’ve got plenty of reasons to celebrate with fireworks.

But we’ve got over 90 million adults not working, and the only way the ones that are working can afford to support ‘em is to get wages a little higher.

The President made a speech about immigration. As usual he ignored my advice from last month. Instead of suggesting a halt in the flood of Central American children, he made it worse by encouraging them. I wish Gallop would take a worldwide poll asking, “Would you like to move to the USA and become an American citizen?” I bet the response would show that at least half a billion would jump at the chance. It is nice to be popular, but we don’t have room for ‘em. Who knows, maybe in 100 years we could handle 800 million living here, but not next year.

I was in San Diego last week. Lovely city. That’s probably where the extra half a billion would like to move to. Beautiful climate, except for one thing: lack of water. Back in the Midwest we sometimes complain about getting 40 or 50 inches of rain, but we’re eatin’ pretty good. In San Diego, you can’t grow much food on less than 10 inches. Flying back by way of Las Vegas, about all I could see was brown, bare ground. Hardly any green crops until Kansas. As I said one time, out West “water ain’t gold, it’s platinum and diamonds.”

The Supreme Court stirred up a hornet’s nest again, almost like 2012 when they declared that Obamacare was a tax, and therefore legal. Last week they ruled 9-0 that the Senate itself, not the President, has the exclusive right to decide if it is “in session.” Now, it’s understandable that when the President, or another alert observer, looks in on the old Senate chambers, the absence of any discernible movement on important bills could cause you to figure they are, in fact, comatose. But the old Justices told the President if he wants to appoint someone so poorly qualified he or she can’t get the support of even 50 semi-conscious Senators, he has to wait until the Senate admits it is in recess. Or a comparable declaration is made by the county coroner.

Historic quote by Will Rogers:
“The Supreme Court, they have been the talk of the town this week. They hadn’t agreed on anything unanimously in over eighty years. Even I’ve kidded them so much that I think they all got together and said, ‘Boys, we’ve got to agree on something.’ …
Well, those nine, very fine old gentlemen – they pondered, and they finally thought of something. They come to the conclusion that the (National Recovery Act) was 100 percent in disfavor with them, so they all agreed…
Now what was the effect? All the big strong Republican papers, why you would have thought that Armistice Day had been declared. Big business, they threw confetti, cut salaries, and had a big time. They all hollered, ‘At last we’re back to the Constitution.’…
Mr. Roosevelt come in office, and he saw, or he thought he saw, that there was a great many social injustices, you know, a lot of things that ain’t right. There was a lot of things that wasn’t hardly split up so that everyone had an even break. So he told Congress some of his ideas… But where Roosevelt made his mistake was in making these changes without reading the Constitution.” Radio, June 2, 1935