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I knew they'd find a way to punish Ford: The new UAW contract with Ford apparently does not give America's surviving non-bankrupt automaker parity with GM and Chrysler, reports Bloomberg: "The plan doesn’t include cuts to retiree benefits, such as vision coverage, that were granted to GM and Chrysler." Rather, the pain seems even more concentrated on future hires (if there are any) than with the GM/Chrysler deals. ... TTAC wonders whether the UAW had an extra incentive to resist giving concessions that might make Ford more successful now that the union owns a large chunk of its main domestic competitors. ... P.S.: The argument that "the day the union owns the firm is the day workers will need another union" has always seemed a bogus argument against worker ownership. But in this case, where the union actually owns only competing firms, maybe it's not so bogus. Ford, GM and Chrysler workers used to have more or less equal status within the UAW. Now the union has a reason to give GM and Chrysler an edge wherever possible. ... 5:39 P.M.
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One Too Many Cherubim: Blog commenter "Cherubim," who may or may not be Elizabeth Edwards, has resurfaced . She's still a big Michael Jackson fan. ... P.S.: I would say this cuts against the Daily News report that Cherubim = Elizabeth. But others disagree. ... P.P.S.: And yes, there is a Multiple Cherubim Theory. ... 4:52 P.M.
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Unions Bend the Curve! 'Card check' may be stalled in Congress, but Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo report that public employee unions are still successfully bankrupting states and cities. Highlights:
-- Unionization has bent the cost curve of government health benefits--in the wrong direction:
Under the brilliant leadership of Dennis Rivera, 1199 built a top-notch political operation, and with the hospitals, which were barred from political activity, formed a partnership to maximize the flow of government revenue. The union-hospital alliance has been so successful in aligning itself with politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, that not only has 1199 been largely untouched by the downturn, but New York spends as much on Medicaid as California and Texas combined. [E.A.]
That last sentence is stunning. Coming soon to a "public option" near you? ...
-- ACORN, not a straw man! According to Siegel and DiSalvo, it's becoming a real power in New York City thanks to its affiliation with the Working Families Party (WFP):
[T]he WFP is thriving while New York's Democrats atrophy. In last week's New York City primaries, WFP candidates for city council won easily, as did the party's candidates for the city's second and third highest offices: comptroller and public advocate. Those are the best platforms from which to make a run for mayor of New York City when Bloomberg finally gives up his throne.
-- Even Barry Bluestone--the leftish economist who was one of the first to spot the rise in income inequality--worries about the vast gap in the benefits public employees win and the vastly less lucrative benefits ordinary private sector workers get. Thanks in large part to public employee unions, Siegel & DiSalvo note, the price of state and local services is growing rapidly--41% from 2000-2008, vs. 27 percent for private services. Ordinary workers have to pay for them.
The justification for public sector unionism is way weaker than that for private sector unionism. "[Government] workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes," as former N.Y. Liberal Party leader Alex Rose puts it. And the right to strike, in the hands of key public unions, approaches a blackmail power. But the political strength of the unions is such that even most Republicans, at the state and local level, are scared to question them. They gelded Arnold Schwarzenegger. You want to be next? ... 4:39 P.M.
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Q.: Who would have been a more disastrous nominee for the Democrats: John Edwards or Bill Richardson? A: Edwards, but Richardson is giving him a run for his money. ... 5:12 P.M.
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Creepy on so many levels. ... 1) He just died; 2) He wasn't that important. This isn't Winston Churchill. (The vacuity of David Gregory just makes him seem like Winston Churchill); 3) They've recreated the way his office looked on the day he died. Morbid! 4) It's like they're trying to build some kind of cult of the personality, with the family willingly invading its own privacy to help out ('Look, there's Luke's childhood drawing'); 5) Making a big deal of Russert's I-love-the-Bills schtick assumes it's shocking that a high-level Washington news guy would be an ordinary middle class American. Bureau chiefs, they're just like us! 6) Does the exhibit include an animatronic NBC butler?** 7) Will it include Lloyd Grove's famous, damning profile of Russert-on-the-make? 8) Self-important, dying industry attempts to fetishize its prominent members before it is completely forgotten. 9) NBC News in particular seems to be living in the past. ...
Coming soon: Luke Ford's Grotto! Kids will love it. ...
P.S.: I'm sure Gawker goes to town on this, but I haven't read Gawker yet. Update: They do. Jack Shafer beat me to mockery too. By hours. Lucky for me speed isn't important in this business. [The contrarian thing would be to defend the exhibit--ed Defending Russert can't be contrarian. That violates a law of physics.]
**--Ali. Maybe he gets a whole new wing! ... 3:15 P.M.
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Dan Kennedy and Oliver Willis have never heard of absentee ballots (not to mention the fun you can have with same-day registration). ... 3:16 P.M.
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The most striking statistic in Mark Kleiman's terrific Zocalo crime lecture (about his new book, When Brute Force Fails) concerned the benefits of sending nurses "into the homes of poor and undereducated first-time teenage mothers to coach them through their children's difficult first two years." From the book:
In a well-evaluated experiment in upsate New York, nurse home visitation for expectant mothers whose demographic profiles put their children at high risk of poor outcomes reduced the arrests among the children of those mothers by 69 percent compared to the matched control group. If that result is even close to correct, nurse home visitation focused on high risk mothers is surely cost-effective as crime control ... [emphasis added; footnote omitted]
This is one of those social science advocacy stats that sets off too-good-to-be-true alarm bells, as Kleiman's own reaction suggests. The number's so spectacular, though, that he thinks its clearly worth a large scale trial. "Given how important parenting is, and given how intensive the intervention is, and given how rocky some of the moms are to start out, I don't find the big numbers implausible," he writes in an email to kf. Even James Q. "Lock-'Em-Up" Wilson is on board. ... Call it something like Pinpoint Liberalism, in which a consensus forms for at least going after what looks like low-hanging fruit, while avoiding a general subsidy for, say, "community development" (which won't be as easy as you'd think). ... Lead reduction, which Kleiman (a bit surprisingly) thinks helped contribute to the recent crime drop, is another obvious targeted effort. ...
P.S.: I'd link to Kleiman's book on Amazon, but then the I might be putting myself at the mercy of a man named Richard Cleland, or someone like him. [I have no idea what, if any, arrangement Slate has with Amazon these days. **] ... Oh, all right. It's here. Come and get me, copper! [That's the lead talking-ed] ...
**-- My previous elaborate conflict-of-interest disclosures have already failed to pass muster even with Howie Kurtz, the man with the biggest conflict of interest in all of journalism, so I'd better be careful where the FTC is concerned. ...
P.P.S.--Still Digging: I just linked to Zocalo, which is kind of doing them a favor. I like their lectures, which fill a local civic need. Unfortunately, they also invited me to their fundraiser on Saturday, which I think means free dinner. Yikes. ... And now I've linked to their fundraiser. That must be worth millions. I'm a cesspool of corruption today. ... 4:50 P.M.
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More: The FTC's new blog disclosure regs seem to be governed by the established First Amendment principle of "Oh, don't worry, we'll never go after you. We like you." Don't Olson, Shafer, Althouse, et al. realize this?. ... P.S.: I don't think blogging or twittering is like talking at Denny's (Jeff Jarvis' analogy). At Denny's you talk to the guys across the table. You blog or twitter to the whole world. That means something. What it means, I think, is that bloggers are on the same constitutional footing as conventional MSM journalists. They're all publishers. That's why it's so absurd and self-contradictory for the FTC to then exempt the most important, powerful (and occasionally corrupt publishers)--the MSM itself. ... P.P.S.: These regs are so doomed. ...
Backfill: Years ago, Michael Kinsley wrote an eerily prescient reductio ad absurdum of what an actual, full conflict-of-interest disclosure would look like. I haven't been able to find it. Think it was in his Curse of the Giant Muffins. ... Update: Kinsley suggests it's this 2000 piece, which is very funny. But I remember another one. What does he know? ... 6:49 P.M.
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Breitbart's Legacy? Rasmussen's latest poll finds, rather unbelievably, that voters say "government ethics and corruption" is now a more important issue than "the economy." With unemployment at 9.8%! Hello? Is this all James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart's doing? I can't think of any big recent corruption-related events other than the ACORN and NEA scandals. ... I doubt it is all liberals concerned about the power of the insurance lobby. ... P.S.: This might explain why, while the MSM still gives the ACORN scandals restrained coverage, the pols are running for the hills. They have pollsters too. ... P.P.S.: Rasmussen's survey, taken 9/26 --9/29, was half pre-Polanski, so that seems an unlikely explanation. ... Update: Ambinder writes as if Rep. Rangel's troubles are a central catalyst, which seems unlikely. Rangel isn't that famous. It's more plausible to blame general resentment over Wall Street sleaze and the bailouts. ... 4:02 P.M.
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The Call of Chooch: GM's sales are down 45% from last September (when sales were already bad enough to drive the company into bankruptcy). Chrysler is down 42%. Ford is only down 5%. Car buyers are clearly punishing the two bailout recipients brutally. Robert Farago of Truth About Cars--who has been right before--predicts that GM and Chrysler will both "go down by the end of next year" without a second, new federal bailout. The only question, he says, is whether the two manufacturers will need the cash before the 2010 midterm elections. He adds:
For those of you who say the Obama’s army never really intended to rescue either automaker, that they were simply subsidizing the companies to facilitate a soft landing, I say bullsh[xx]. Washington’s big swinging dicks, led by private equity money men with a similar anatomical affliction, honestly thought they could “fix” Detroit.
Maybe they could have. But it looks like they didn't. ... Most obviously, they seem to have grossly misperceived consumers' reaction to the equities of the bailout itself. And that 45% can't be all Republicans. ... 1:53 A.M.
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Shafer couldn't take a full day of the Atlantic's "First Draft" conference. He tried. ... In the wheat vs. chaff contest, it appears to have been Chaff City. ... P.S.: Is it really true that only 220 people were watching the feed of the Petraeus session? Janet Napolitano drew 132? Those are almost Pseudo.com numbers! Don't tell Boeing. ... [Ah but they were the right 132 people--ed. No they weren't. One of them was Shafer.] ... Bloggingheads is CBS in comparison. ... 2:29 A.M.
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Robert Samuelson scorns the egomaniacal "quest for glory" of Congressional Democrats who are trying to pass health care reform. But of course the quest for glory may be the only reason a worthwhile reform could still pass. It ain't going to pass it because it's popular! (Orszagism has seen to that by scaring seniors.) You'd have to be an especially rigorous believer in the Howell Raines Fallacy** to think that if a policy isn't popular then it can't be a good one. ...P.S.: If I remember correctly, the untouchable contributory plan that we now call Social Security wasn't especially popular when it passed in 1935--after all, it would be years before it took full effect. (The popular part of the New Deal's central legislation was Old Age Assistance, a fast-acting straight cash dole to the elderly, which is why it was placed at the beginning of the bill. It's now part of the SSI program.)
**--The assumption that whatever changes you want are of course demanded by the great and good American people. ... 1:09 A.M.
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Did ACORN chicanery elect Al Franken? That's the import of this tactfully phrased Minneapolis Star Tribune column.** Franken won by 312 votes. ACORN claimed to have registered 48,000 43,000 ew Minnesota voters. If just 1% were ineligible but cast ballots, or had ballots cast for them illegally, and survived the recount process ... that's 480 430 votes, almost certainly overwhelmingly cast for Franken. ... Maybe in pristine Minnesota even ACORN is clean. If so, the state would apparently be an outlier. ...
**--Item originally said "story." It's a column. (I was thrown off by the byline, "Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune.") That makes no difference in Kirsten's argument, though Dave Weigel makes a fuss about it, and then bizarrely says it's a "smear" to even raise the obvious question of whether the voters--you almost want quotes around the word--registered by a highly questionable outfit like ACORN were legit and made a difference in a very close race. The most important question, I would imagine, is whether ACORN handled absentee ballots for anyone in the state. Would we trust an organization, whose registrations featured (in the NYT's words) "fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors" to distribute, collect, and maybe even mail in absentee ballots for, say, shut-ins at nursing homes? If there were funny business, would a recount necessarily have detected it (assuming the ballots were clearly marked)? ... That's more questions! Sorry! ... P.S.: There are also obvious potential problems with same-day-registration that might not be picked up on a recount. ... P.P.S.: In neighboring, also pristine Wisconsin, ACORN employed as voter registration workers felons "convicted of crimes including cocaine possession and robbery."
Carolyn Castore, state political director for the group, told the AP: “We have a lot of folks with felony records and, frankly, they need jobs.”
Update: Here's an example of funny business with absentee ballots, by a group joined at the hip to ACORN in New York. ... But I'm sure there's nothing to worry about in Minnesota. ...1:14 A.M.
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People I respect (my mother) claim Roman Polanski got a bum deal in 1977. But it's worth remembering that the French--now in the process of being outraged by his arrest--can be absurdly resistant to extradition by the ugly Americans, especially when an artiste is involved. Here's a Steven Levy article on one famous case--the Unicorn Killer, a Philadelphia hippie who seems to have stashed the remains of his ex-girlfriend in a steamer trunk. He fled before trial, winding up in France. When discovered, he successfully resisted extradition (at least initially) after a campaign that played up his having written "written four novels, one a philosophical novel on the Holocaust." He was eventually extradited, tried and convicted. ... P.S.: He also seems to have maybe invented social networking, or at least spam:
In the 1970s he persuaded Bell Telephone to finance a networking scheme in which he sent information to a list of contacts that ranged from author Alvin Toffler (whom [he] introduced to computer conferencing) to corporate Brahmins in Fortune 500 firms.
1:20 A.M.
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Monday, May 18, 2009
Clark** Hoyt's Sunday pooh-poohing of the "game changer" affair (the accusation that the NYT killed a story on illegal ties between Obama and ACORN because it might have affected the election) fails to satisfy in several respects: 1) The explanation for why the Times killed its reporters "pursuit of the Obama angle" is a bit squishy. According to Hoyt, the publication of an October, 2008 Times article on "impermissible political activity by Acorn," filled the paper's need. But that story, as Powerline points out, didn't tackle the highly-charged Obama connection; 2) Hoyt tells us what the times reporter, Stephanie Strom, says she didn't tell her source--"she does not believe she ever used the term 'game-changer.'" But he never gives Strom's account of what she did say.
Let's assume what's obvious: The story wasn't close to a game changer. Let's also agree that even if Strom did tell her source what the source says she said--namely that the paper didn't want to print "a game-changer for either side that close to the election"--it might not mean all that much. Reporters tell sources things all the time to gracefully explain why they're being dropped. The real reason might be something else--like that the reporter doesn't believe the source is sufficiently credible, in which case it's easier to give a fake reason.
But here's the thing: Are you really confident that the NYT wouldn't spike an anti-Obama story in the waning days of the election out of fear--conscious or semi-subconscious--that it might badly hurt him? I had a revealing argument with a politically sophisticated friend--call him "Max"-- when the "game changer" charge first surfaced. Max's argument: Suppose it were a scandal sufficiently big to sink Obama. Any red-blooded Times reporter would be proud to publish it and tack Obama's scalp to the wall. To have taken down a presidential nominee--that would be a professional achievement, maybe a Pulitzer. They'd be high-fiving in the newsroom.
I think my friend is right about the culture of the newsroom--about 45 years ago. As for today, I think he's living in a dreamworld. Even if the Times had published such a story, Times reporters would certainly not have high-fived the colleague who'd cost Obama the election. Not after two terms of Bush. And I have no faith the paper would even have published it (before allowing the reporter to slink out of the building). In part, that's because I have no faith that I'd publish it. The old adversarial ethic--I play my role and let the system take care of the moral consequences--rightly went mostly out the window with the ascension of the Sixties cohort.
In part it's because, if there's one major change Pinch Sulzberger has presided over at the Times, it's the end of the pretense that his reporters have to be ashamed of their strong political beliefs. And we know, in the case of the Times, what those beliefs mostly are. ...
Update: Strom's source seems to be twittering. ...
**--Name error fixed [Thx to reader K.R.] 5:34 P.M.
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Will Obama rescue John Edwards by replacing the U.S. Attorney who is investigating him? ... If he does, will Josh Marshall kick up a fuss about it? ... [Thanks to alert reader R.H. ... See also Insta] ... 5:33 P.M.
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