NYT: Wisconsin Shows Signs of Industrial Rebound

All I say is that I hope Peter Goodman's piece in the Sunday Times, In Wisconsin, Early Signs of an Industrial Rebound, is on the mark.

Writes Goodman:

At the Rockwell Automation factory here, something encouraging happened recently that might be a portent of national economic recovery: managers reinstated a shift, hiring a dozen workers.

After months of layoffs, diminished production and anxiety about the depths of the Great Recession, the company — a bellwether because most of its customers are manufacturers themselves — saw enough new orders to justify adding people.

Given the panicked retreat that has characterized life on the American factory floor for many months, any expansion registers as a hopeful sign for the economy. Last week, the Federal Reserve found signs of 'modest improvement' in manufacturing. That reinforced the direction of a widely watched manufacturing index tracked by the Institute for Supply Management, which surged into positive territory last month for the first time in a year and a half.

On Racism

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last July asked: 'Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?' Sixty-six percent of black men said yes. Only 9 percent of white men said the same.
- Charles M. Blow

This reality is incomprehensible for the GOP in Wisconsin as represented by Mike Nichols and virtually the entire GOP delegation in the state legislature who strenuously objected to even collecting data on police pull-overs by race.

Summer Breeze or Hurricane Awaits Obama

Update: See TNR's Inexcusable, When will Obama get real on gay civil rights?

Summer is typically a comparatively down time for politics.

Not this summer and not for President Obama.

E.J. Dionne posits that this summer—the 6th through 9th month of Obama's presidency—is a critical period.

But Dionne, generally a fine analyst, gets it wrong by suggesting that Obama's problem is maintaining "support from both the left and the center as he faces potentially divisive choices in the context of a stricken economy."

Dionne says of the left: "For progressives, the president's long-term political well-being depends upon delivering tangible benefits to middle-class voters in areas such as health care, education and financial security, even at the risk of temporarily higher budget deficits."

What does Dionne mean? That whom he regards as centrist voters don't care about health care, education and financial security, and that the solutions progressive see are not popular?

That's crazy. The American public is with Obama on progressive solutions to these issues, and not just the "left."

But absent decisive stimulative action, Obama does face more than a few possible paths to a worse recession.

And those values voters so concerned about transparency, civil liberties, human rights and the Constitution are ignored and repudiated at Obama's political peril.

Not because the American public cares about a transparent, open and democratic government. Let's face it; most Americans don't care about the tenets of democratic government and certainly not about equal protection and civil rights. But Obama's base does care. Does Obama?

Writes Jeff Ronci in the New York Times letter to the editor:

Since his election, President Obama has had unprecedented opportunities to lead and educate on civil rights for gay Americans. His response has been alternately silent, glib, clumsy, indifferent, condescending and cavalier. In his administration’s brief supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, the tone was antagonistic.

One thing for certain is that Obama vis a vis George W. Bush won't be taking long vacations in August and blowing off aides who tell him that terrorists are threatening the United States with attack.

But it's the mounting uncertainties about the direction that Obama wishes to take this country that will make or break this administration this Summer.

See the Democratic Strategist and Ruy Teixeira for more information on public attitudes.

Wall Street in Wonderland

Growing Worry on Rescue Takes a Toll on Banks (Eric Dash, NYT) reads the headline emblematic of conventional wisdom as "fears of nationalization and of Washington’s ever-changing plans for the nation’s beleaguered banks have sapped investor confidence in the industry."

The banks want the taxpayers' money, but the taxpayers, even temporarily, ought to have none of the prerogatives that ownerships confers, say the large investors.

That's not a winning political slogan, and Obama should hit this nonsense out of the park, soon.

So a little perspective is in order, go Krugman:

So everyone agrees that fears of nationalization are driving bank stocks down. That’s probably true, but those fears have to be carefully interpreted.

We are not talking about fears that leftist radicals will expropriate perfectly good private companies. At least since last fall the major banks — certainly Citi and B of A — have only been able to stay in business because their counterparties believe that there’s an implicit federal guarantee on their obligations. The banks are already, in a fundamental sense, wards of the state.

And the market caps of these banks did not reflect investors’ assessment of the difference in value between their assets and their liabilities. Instead, it largely — and probably totally — reflected the 'Geithner put', the hope that the feds would bail them out in a way that handed a significant windfall gain to stockholders.

What’s happening now is a growing sense that the federal government, in return for rescuing these institutions, will demand the same thing a private-sector white knight would have demanded — namely, ownership.

Herbert on the Republicans

From Herbert in the Times:

Republicans in Washington have behaved like a milling crowd standing in the way of firefighters trying to respond to a devastating blaze. The best that can be said for the party is that a few senators seem to have been able part the crowd enough to let the rescuers begin to inch forward.

President Obama addressed Republican inflexibility on Thursday night when he said at a gathering in Williamsburg, Va., 'Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis.' He added that without swift action on the stimulus bill, 'an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe.'

The report of January’s enormous job losses came roughly a dozen hours later. It was the latest in a long and hideous pattern of employment woes, much of it resulting from the G.O.P.’s obsession with destructive supply-side economic voodoo.

On the front page of The Times on Friday was an article that said the number of women on the nation’s payrolls is poised to pass that of men for the first time in American history. This is not because women have been doing so well, but because men have been doing so poorly.

As I was reading the article, I thought of all the guys who used to listen to Rush Limbaugh while driving to or from work but are now tuning in from their living rooms because the benefits of the G.O.P.’s right-wing, tax-cutting ideology never trickled down to them and they are now jobless.

More Worst of Worst Going Free

Update: See McClatchy's Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series for a close look at administration lawlessness, and its utter inhumanity toward the innocent.

From the Times, Judge Orders Five Detainees Freed From Guantanamo:

In the first hearing on the government's justification for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled Thursday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release.

Bush and Cheney had called these innocents the worst of the worst, who are so evil and dangerous that we just had to throw out habeas corpus.

The Bush administration feared the consequences of innocents asking for a look at the evidence in federal court.

As human rights attorney, Scott Horton, writes: "... (T)he Bush Administration’s claims about the prisoners were revealed to be a sham not backed by serious evidence. The Bush Administration’s incarceration of five of the six petitioners was pronounced an unlawful, and indeed possibly criminal act."

Par for the course for this administration that is the single worst enemy to the cause of freedom in modern American history.

Obama has promised to close the camp, the beginning of a reversal of the Bush administration's horrid record on human rights and individual liberty.