On Tuesday, South Carolina became the fifth state this year to follow Arizona's lead and pass a law requiring local police officers to check the immigration status of people they stop or pull over. South Carolina lawmakers also mandated that businesses use the federal E-verify system to screen all potential employees, a law the local Chamber of Commerce lobbied against.

GOP South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants who campaigned on battling illegal immigration, says she plans to sign the bills.

A whopping 53 omnibus immigration bills have been introduced in 30 states this year, many of them containing provisions similar to those in Arizona's SB 1070 enforcement law that sparked a national debate on immigration when Gov. Jan Brewer signed it last spring. A judge partially enjoined that law before it could go into effect last July, after the American Civil Liberties Union and the Department of Justice sued.

Fourteen of the proposed immigration bills have already failed, but dozens are still pending. According to Ann Morse at the National Conference of State Legislatures, none of the still-pending immigration bills has yet to pass one house of a state legislature--which means it could be a while before another state follows the lead of Arizona, Utah, Indiana, Georgia, Alabama and now South Carolina.

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The economic recovery is proceeding "somewhat more slowly" than expected, Federal Reserve policymakers acknowledged in a statement this afternoon.

At a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed scaled back its projections for growth this year and next. Fed officials now say they expect the economy to grow at a rate of between 2.7 percent and 2.9 percent this year, and between 3.3 percent and 3.7 percent in 2012. That's down from last month's estimates by about 0.4 percentage points for this year, and 0.35 percentage points for next year.

If the Fed's prediction is borne out, that rate of growth likely wouldn't be enough to put a significant dent in the 9.1 percent jobless rate. Indeed, the Fed also said unemployment was likely to fall at a slightly slower rate this year and next than previous projections had suggested.

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The Federal Reserve, traditionally seen as independent from politics, is finding itself a popular target on the Republican presidential campaign trail.

Newt Gingrich plans to aim his fire at the central bank in a speech today, according to an advance text of his comments examined by the Wall Street Journal. The former House Speaker will slam the Fed for not pursuing policies designed to maintain a strong dollar, and for lending money to subsidiaries of foreign banks during the financial crisis.

And in a web video released today, Gingrich -- whose presidential bid has lately been rocked by the resignations of several key aides -- said the Fed is "clearly acting in ways that violate equality, violate the rule of law and violate the sense of fairness."

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Yet another poll has found that Americans are deeply pessimistic about the current state of the economy. The survey also suggests that many now support an approach to fixing things that most experts think would only make things worse.

Just 23 percent of respondents to a Bloomberg poll said they see signs of improvement in the economy, while 66 percent said they think the country is on the wrong track. Meanwhile, 55 percent say their children will have a lower standard of living than they did. And in particularly bad news for the White House, 44 percent say they're worse off than when President Obama took office in January 2009; just 34 percent say they're doing better.

Those results are in sync with other recent polls that have showed pervasive economic gloom. Unemployment is currently at 9.1 percent and forecasters are expecting another quarter of tepid GDP growth.

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Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas reveals in The New York Times Magazine that he's lived in the United States for nearly 20 years as an illegal immigrant.

Vargas writes that his Filipino mother sent him to live with his grandparents--who were legally living in the Bay Area--when he was only 12 years old. He was placed on a plane with a man who he was told was his uncle--in actuality, a "coyote," ie., a person who helps marshal illegal immigrants across the U.S. border--and has never seen his mother since.

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The Bank of Canada is rolling out new, plastic-based $100 bills, which will hit the country's wallets by November.

In this frankly mesmerizing video, above, a narrator explains the bill's numerous security features, including a hidden circle of numbers that match the note's value. It can only be seen by holding up the "frosted maple leaf window" to a "single-point light source."

Gawker called it "currency erotica," joking that the "$100 bill bends seductively" in the video as the narrator's voice intones in the background.

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Strange as it may seem, one of the lesser-known jobs crisis in America today involves an actual shortage of workers in manufacturing and skilled trades. Over the past few weeks, President Obama, the German manufacturing giant Siemens, and 52 percent of employers in one survey have said that American workers lack the skills that employers are looking for.

Meanwhile, nearly 14 million Americans are unemployed, but hundreds of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and other skilled trades remain open. The percentage of trade employers who say they can't find critical employees is up from 14 percent to 52 percent this year, according to a survey by the temp agency Manpower.

Some employers have started to try to close this skilled-labor gap by sponsoring a new approach to vocational education. In 2005, a group of manufacturers and politicians called the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council tried to address this problem by setting up a school they hoped would foster the next generation of high-tech manufacturers in Chicago's poverty-ridden West side. The goal of the Austin Polytechnical Academy is to prepare kids for careers and college at the same time, with students receiving a manufacturing certificate upon graduation that qualifies them for jobs with starting pay of up to $65,000 right out of high school.

The school seems a model of career integration--there's buy-in from the local business community, state-of-the-art technological equipment for students to train on, and a reform-minded city leadership that is willing to give the school latitude to experiment. Even better, the city didn't bear the entire cost of setting up the school: Some of Austin's 65 business partners donated $200,000 for high-tech training equipment and offered internships to students over the summer breaks.

So why has the school been widely written off as a failure in Chicago? And what does it take to build a high school program that gives young people the skills to land a high-paying job without shortchanging them of a more wide-ranging educational experience?

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Since the tea party movement exploded onto the political scene over two years ago, one of its key players has been the advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Founded and run by Dick Armey, a former top Republican congressman, FreedomWorks isn't exactly a tea party group itself. Rather, it's a well-funded Washington-based lobbying organization that has played a crucial role in supporting and co-ordinating the grassroots activism of the movement's far-flung factions. FreedomWorks was a central organizer, for instance, of the 9/12 March that last year brought tens of thousands of conservative activists to Washington.

FreedomWorks also has helped defend the tea party movement against charges of racism. "Ours is a colorblind movement based on principles not race," the group's president, Matt Kibbe, has said.

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"Americans are now more miserable than at any time in 28 years."

That's the finding of a recent research report published by Capital Economics, an economic consulting firm.

No, the firm hasn't been eavesdropping on people's therapy sessions. Instead, it's referring to the Misery Index, which is simply the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI). The Misery Index offers a simplistic but useful way to gauge just how bad things are for ordinary American workers and consumers.

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