July 27, 2010
The judicial branch, in the person of a Clinton appointee, actually comes through again, this time in the Obama’s lawsuit against Arizona. Ed Morrissey blogs about the judge’s initial response.
It didn’t take long for federal judge Susan Bolton to zero in on the holes in the Obama administration’s argument in their lawsuit against Arizona and its new must-enforce policy on immigration violations. Bolton, a Democratic appointee, shot holes in the Department of Justice’s pre-emption argument immediately, and in a broader sense wondered why the federal government concerned itself at all over Arizona’s get-tough policy on illegal immigration…
Robert Samuelson offers interesting insights on employment and market dynamics.
WASHINGTON — Judging from corporate profits, we should be enjoying a powerful economic recovery. The drop in profits in the recession was about a third, apparently the worst since World War II. But every day brings reports of gains. In the second quarter, IBM’s earnings rose 9.1 percent from a year earlier. Government statistics through the first quarter (the latest available) show that profits have recovered 87 percent of what they lost in the recession. When second-quarter results are tabulated, profits may exceed their previous peak.
The rebound in profits ought to be a good omen. It frees companies to be more aggressive. They’re sitting on huge cash reserves: a record of $838 billion for industrial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (companies like Apple, Boeing and Caterpillar) at the end of March, up 26 percent from a year earlier. “They have the wherewithal to do whatever they want — hire; make new investments; raise dividends; do mergers and acquisitions,” says S&P’s Howard Silverblatt. Historically, higher profits lead to higher employment, says Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. Except for startups, loss-making companies don’t generate many new jobs.
So far, history be damned. The contrast between revived profits and stunted job growth is stunning. From late 2007 to late 2009, payroll employment dropped nearly 8.4 million. Since then, the economy has recovered a scant 11 percent of those lost jobs. Companies are doing much better than workers; that defines today’s economy.
…In hindsight, the massive job cuts of 2008 and 2009 should not have been surprising. “With the collapse of the financial system,” says economist Lynn Reaser of Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, “companies had to conserve cash desperately, (because) they couldn’t rely on outside financing.” So they savagely axed jobs, inventories and new investment projects (computers, machinery, factories). In the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first and second quarters of 2009, business investment dropped at annual rates of 24 percent, 50 percent and 24 percent. …
John Steele Gordon comments on the story surrounding Shirley Sherrod.
…This morning on Fox News Sunday, Howard Dean, obviously following the Obama line, tried to make it sound like Fox News had been part of the problem. Chris Wallace, in an unusually heated exchange, would have none of it. He pointed out that Fox did not carry the story or mention Ms. Sherrod’s name until she had been fired. It then ran the Breitbart tape, naturally, as part of the story. So did all other cable news channels.
So Fox, it seems to me, is blameless — it was reporting the news, which, after all, is its job. Breitbart was after attention and, perhaps, wanted to frighten the Obama administration into acting foolishly. If so, he sure succeeded. And the Obama administration has egg all over its face, contributing to the growing impression that it is incompetent.
The only hero here is Shirley Sherrod. She told her own moving story about how she managed to move beyond the racism of the past and enter the post-racial world that Barack Obama promised and has, rather spectacularly in this case, failed to deliver.
Maybe President Obama should fire one of the Chicago gang at the White House and replace that person with Shirley Sherrod. It seems the administration could use a little common wisdom and dignity around there.
David Warren doesn’t think there’s much conspiracy in the Journolists’ reporting.
…As Joe Klein, of Time magazine — prominent both as journalist and on JournoList — hath protested, he didn’t need any strategy sessions in e-mail to decide how to attack Palin; he could “easily” have selected all the angles, by himself. And I do not doubt for a moment that he is telling the truth.
It was his word “easily” that I found most significant. I could myself, in advance, “easily” have guessed from which angles Joe Klein would attack Sarah Palin, and will, as he promises, continue to attack her. The dogs in Pavlov’s experiment did not “conspire” to salivate.
No journalist can be perfectly “detached” from what he is covering; so that the pose of perfect detachment is a fraud. It is too much to ask of any human being, whether liberal or conservative. The best we can ask is for honesty and candour — for some elementary sense of fair play — and it is a shame we must search through private e-mails to find those qualities.
Ed Morrissey posts on the latest Journolist installment from the Daily Caller.
…But that wasn’t the end of it, according to the Daily Caller’s Jonathan Strong. Ed Kilgore of the Progressive Policy Institute and Todd Gitlin of the Columbia School of Journalism continued to push for better messaging against John McCain and Palin. Gitlin made it specific…
…There is little doubt that Journolisters used the listserv for cheerleading and campaigning. In most cases, that would be as surprising as hearing that journalists talk politics at bars, and worthy of the same level of outrage. It’s certainly telling, however, that a man tasked with instructing future journalists has no trouble urging writers to secretly coordinate messages on behalf of the party and candidate he likes. I doubt that’s the first time Gitlin has offered that advice, and Columbia needs to respond to this revelation. Will they stand behind this as proper ethics for their students, or will they repudiate Gitlin? …
Jules Crittenden comments on Senator John Kerry’s latest gaffe.
Oh, the hurtfulness. Boston Herald piles on, with New England boat builders wondering why, in times of hardship, Sen. Thurston Howell … I mean John Kerry, D-Mass., had to outsource his luxury, going halfway around the world to buy the $7 million luxury yacht he was berthing across state lines in tax-free Rhode Island:
…When asked to respond to criticism of Kerry’s decision not to buy American, his state director, Drew O’Brien, said: “When it comes to creating and preserving jobs and economic opportunity in Massachusetts, no one has worked harder in Washington than John Kerry. Sen. Kerry is using smarts, clout and good old-fashioned hard work to make the Massachusetts economy grow and prosper.”…
The Economist reviews a new exhibition on baseball and cricket. Now it is in England. Later it spends a year in Cooperstown.
…The true origins of both games are to be found in “Swinging Away: How Cricket and Baseball Connect”, a new exhibition for which the curator, Beth Hise, has written an exemplary catalogue. This cornucopia of bats and balls, uniforms (belonging to England’s Andrew Flintoff and the Yankees’ Derek Jeter), photographs and memorabilia has opened at the Marylebone Cricket Club’s museum at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London and will move on to the Hall of Fame.
It is based on the revisionist notion that the two games have much in common. Both are rooted in English folk traditions, and each is based on a contest between the pitcher and the batter in baseball and the bowler and the batsman in cricket. Referees are called umpires in both. “I see them as blood brothers, separated at birth but genetically linked,” writes Mr Engel in the catalogue’s introduction. …