Republicans unveil a 'cut-jobs-and-call-it-job-creation' summer agenda

Eric Cantor with House Republican leadership, no jobs here. Where are the jobs? Not in Majority Leader Eric Cantor's summer agenda. What he says will be a "focus on economic growth and small business'producing results that get Americans back to work" is more job cuts and a lot of political posturing.

A bill set for consideration by the House before the August recess would revamp the finances of the struggling U.S. Postal Service and permit the mail agency to eliminate more than 100,000 positions in the coming years through buyouts, early retirements and layoffs, if labor union contracts are renegotiated. And a series of appropriations bills set for votes this summer would cut thousands of well-paying, highly skilled federal jobs.

Public sector jobs, of course, don't actually count as jobs if you're a Republican. Those lovely austerity measures to punish public sector workers come on top of the tax cutting, Obamacare repeal and bitching about gas prices part of the agenda we already knew about. Specifically, in the next few weeks they'll take up two more Affordable Care Act repeal efforts, drill baby drill, and measures that would prevent the federal government from making any new regulations, at all.

There are a couple of things made conspicuous by their absence in Cantor's memo: the bane of Speaker John Boehner's legislative existence, the transportation bill; and an extension of low federal student loan interest rates, which expires in a few short weeks.

Cantor's objectives are obvious: Score as many political points with the extreme base as possible, governing be damned.