27% say it hurt the economy. 31% said it had no effect. So 58% think Obama's signature plan did nothing to improve things or actually made them worse.

Not surprisingly, 62% think that Bush is responsible for the current economic situation, and only 27% think that Obama is. 10% say they don't know who is more responsible.

On that last thing: The question is badly phrased. The first two suggestions seem to suggest the question is just getting at who has any responsibility at all, while the "more responsible" phraseology then suggests we're asking about comparative blame. Here's the actual question, hinting at both:

1* Some people say the nationÂ’s current economic problems are due to the recession which began under the Bush Administration. Others say the problems are being caused more by the policies President Obama has put in place since taking office. Which point of view comes closest to your own?

62% Economic problems are due to the recession that began under Bush
27% Economic problems are caused by policies President Obama has put in place
10% Not sure

See what I mean? The question can't decide if it's asking which president has any responsibility for the current economic situation or who is more responsible for it. The Bush prong of the question asks if the Bush recession is "responsible," at all, for the, um, current recession, whereas the Obama prong asks if his policies are more responsible.

Of course Bush is partly responsible for the current recession. He may even be "more responsible" than Obama -- Obama's policies are ruinous, but prospectively so; we're only beginning to see their bad effects on the economy.

If you're going to ask who is responsible, period, do so, but don't be surprised when you get a boring answer like 90% saying "both." If you're going to ask who is more responsible -- well, do that. Cleanly.

But even that question, properly asked, wouldn't be very useful for predicting the future public mood.

Bush is out of office and Obama is President. That means that even if Obama is merely, say, 10% responsible, while Bush is responsible for the other 90%, the fact is that Obama is currently the guy with the job, making the decisions, and Bush is retired in Crawford. The fact that Bush might be to more responsible for the current problems doesn't change the fact that Obama is the one actually, legally responsible for fixing them (and not creating more of them).

Here's an analogy: Two men commit a crime. One man is more responsible for it than the other. But both have some responsibility. The man who's more responsible flees the country, leaving the other man alone in the dock.

Whether the other guy is "more responsible" or not doesn't really change the fact that the guy on trial is responsible and will answer for his actions.

Point being: This is a confused question. Further, it doesn't really tell us anything unexpected or very important. It's not unexpected because Obama's only been in office 140 days or so and did in fact inherit a recession.

Ultimately, he's the guy tasked with ending that recession, whatever his blame for having created it. "The other guy left me a big mess" is a useful defense for poor job performance, but it does have a limited duration.

Posted by: Ace at 09:44 AM | Add Comment
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Damn it.

Authorities say the incident occurred around 10:00 a.m. at a U.S. Army Navy Career Center inside the Ashley Square Shopping Center at 9112 North Rodney Parham Road. According to Lt. Terry Hastings with the Little Rock Police Department, two enlisted soldiers standing outside the office were hit when the unidentified suspect drove up and began shooting.

...According to Army Lt. Col. Thomas F. Artis, the two victims were not recruiters, but part of a recruiting program called "Hometown Recruiting Assistance." Artis says recruiters use soldiers to tell their stories and talk to potential recruits while they are visiting or based back in their home region.

Both soldiers were combat vets*. Prayers for them and their families.

It may be to early for this but if the scumbag they have in custody turns out to be part of the anti-war crowd, will the press connect him with that movement the way they are with the guy arrested for killing Tiller? Yeah, neither do I.

Thanks to Amish Dude for the tip from the comments.

(Something wacky happened to the comments on this thread, so I reposted it and they work. Unfortunately, the earlier comments were lost)

*That part of the story seems not to be in later versions of the story. Obviously, it's a fast breaking so early reports are subject to change.

More on the soldiers, they were not combat vets.

Lt. Col. Thomas F. Artis of the Oklahoma City Recruiting Battalion, which oversees the Little Rock office, said the victims had just completed basic training and were not regular recruiters. He said they were serving two weeks in the Little Rock office.

As part of the Hometown Recruiting Assistance Program, the soldiers were sent to "talk to friends, folks in the local area. They can show the example, 'Here's where I was, and here is where I am,'" Artis said.

Artis said neither of the soldiers had been deployed for combat.

I haven't seen anything more on the suspect.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:54 AM | Comments (20)
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(Please note: The comments are not working on this thread. I've left it up in case it will help Pixy figure out the problem. Please use the above thread to comment)

Damn it.

Authorities say the incident occurred around 10:00 a.m. at a U.S. Army Navy Career Center inside the Ashley Square Shopping Center at 9112 North Rodney Parham Road. According to Lt. Terry Hastings with the Little Rock Police Department, two enlisted soldiers standing outside the office were hit when the unidentified suspect drove up and began shooting.

...According to Army Lt. Col. Thomas F. Artis, the two victims were not recruiters, but part of a recruiting program called "Hometown Recruiting Assistance." Artis says recruiters use soldiers to tell their stories and talk to potential recruits while they are visiting or based back in their home region.

Both soldiers were combat vets. Prayers for them and their families.

It may be to early for this but if the scumbag they have in custody turns out to be part of the anti-war crowd, will the press connect him with that movement the way they are with the guy arrested for killing Tiller? Yeah, neither do I.

Thanks to Amish Dude for the tip from the comments.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:30 AM | Add Comment
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Just awful.

A missing Air France jet carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris ran into a tower of thunderstorms and heavy turbulence over the Atlantic Ocean, officials said Monday, fearing that all aboard were lost.

...The plane "crossed through a thunderous zone with strong turbulence" at 0200 GMT Monday (10 p.m. EDT Sunday) and an automatic message was received fourteen minutes later reporting electrical failure and a loss of cabin pressure.

That was the last communication sent from the plane, when it was about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of the Cape Verde Islands, according to the Brazilian Air Force.

Best wishes for those on board and their families.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:52 AM | Comments (11)
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Good morning comrades fellow shareholders!

Under the proposed restructuring, about 60 percent of the new GM would be owned by the United States, about 12 percent by the governments of Canada and Ontario, a union health trust would own 17.5 percent, and the company's current bondholders would get 10 percent.

The United States will invest another $30 billion during and after the GM bankruptcy process, officials said last night, bringing the U.S. commitment to $50 billion.

Following that infusion, "the U.S. Treasury does not believe or anticipate that any additional assistance to GM will be required," a senior administration official said last night, calling the restructuring a "permanent" solution.

Once again, union trust funds received a greater percentage of the new company than bondholders even though the bondholders held a greater amount of debt in GM.

Remember the old campaign urging people to "Look for the Union Label"? Well, if you find it don't invest in that industry, you'll go to the back of the line.

Aside from the specter of government run automakers, if you are of a certain age the idea that GM would be bankrupt and de-listed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average is pretty shocking.

I wanted to make a joke about Obama's plan for GM...

Step 1: Dump a ton of cash into failed company

Step 2: ?

Step 3: Profit!

Unfortunately, the government does have a Step 2 in mind. Force US car buyers into smaller cars through a combination of business decisions and regulations. Alas, that's unlike to lead to Step 3 but some people see continued government ownership of a large industrial corporation as a feature not a bug.

Meanwhile, Ford hasn't taken any bailout money. Just saying.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:45 AM | Comments (8)
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Megan McArdle is a smart journalist. She's great on many economic issues. And she should be; she went to the right schools. But she's also a libertarian. And like many libertarians--especially libertarian journalists--she's always eager to show off how much she is not a Republican to all the Lefty friends she made in those schools. She does this usually by misrepresenting the Republican positions or just outright lying about them.

I'll be honest, I stopped reading Megan back in September of last year when she embraced Trig Trutherism and wrote how impressed she was that Governor Palin relieved her daughter of the "burden" of raising Trig. So I wouldn't have seen Megan's post on Judge Sotomayor except that Instapundit linked it. I'm glad I saw it though because I expect it reflects the next stage of the Democrats' defense of Sotomayor's race- and gender-biased attitude.

Megan entitles the post "The Problem with Affirmative Action." As expected, she entirely misses the point of our objection to Judge Sotomayor. And for extra Lefty cred, she implies that we're all racists at the same time. She writes (and the italics are all hers):

HL Mencken once defined Fundamentalism as "the terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun". I've been thinking of this a lot watching some of the attacks on Sotomayor, but I'd frame the critics as suffering from the terrible, pervasive fear that some brown person, somewhere, is getting away with something.

Posit that everything the critics say about Sotomayor is true; that indeed, everything they say about affirmative action is true. Is this the biggest problem facing America? Is this the biggest problem facing America from Sonia Sotomayor?

...Making race, or racial politics, the central complaint, makes it seem like your biggest policy priority is making sure that not one minority in the land gets anything they don't deserve. But hey, we all get things we don't deserve. I'll go further: almost all of us get something we don't deserve as a result of our race, including white people. Perhaps even especially white people.

If you don't believe it, ask yourself why repeated studies show that resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than identical white resumes. Being identifiably black hurts your chances worse than having a felony conviction. Even if you want to argue that an identifiably black name is a socio-economic marker for a certain kind of parenting, an argument I find pretty dubious, are you really willing to argue that black kids should be permanently barred from employment because their parents have dubious taste in names? Well, go ahead, I guess, but I'm going to find it hard to take you seriously when you complain about affirmative action because it undermines our fantabulous American meritocracy.

Sonia Sotomayor is not manifestly unqualified to be a Supreme Court justice, so focusing on affirmative action is completely irrelevant. You can argue with her politics or her legal judgement, and hey, I'm all ears. But the affirmative action complaints aren't advancing our quest to find out whether or not she'd be a good justice. They're just alienating the people you want to convince.

I'm not sure which people Megan thinks we are alienating and I'm not particularly interested in why an affirmative action complaint we aren't making is alienating them. Perhaps if Megan would stop repeating misrepresentations of Republican objections people would stop being alienated by them.

I'll tell you what Megan's real problem is. She has the terrible, pervasive fear that some Republican, somewhere, is giving a "brown person" a hard time. It never even occurs to her that there might be a reason for that aside from skin color. That's how Judge Sotomayor's race becomes a shield from scrutiny as Megan goes off on Republicans and affirmative action instead of the real issue.

Do I believe that Judge Sotomayor was picked because of her gender and ethnicity? Absolutely yes and so does every other person on the Left and the Right that's written about it. Am I objecting to her nomination because of her gender or her ethnicity? Of course not. Her gender and ethnicity have nothing to do with whether she will make a good justice, but Obama is hardly the first to have made his selection on grounds other than merit.

So I'm going to repeat this for people like Megan who think that the fuss is because a "brown person, somewhere, is getting away with something." That's not it. The problem is that Judge Sotomayor appears to have the bigoted belief that some ethnicities and genders are better suited to judging than others. And that bigoted belief would be inappropriate in a Supreme Court justice no matter the ethnicity or gender of the person who holds it.

It's not that there will be more diversity on the bench. Whatever it is that diversity brings--alternate modes of analysis or unique foundational assumptions or whatever--difference qua difference is okay. But that's not what Judge Sotomayor said. She didn't just say that we need Latina judges because there are differences in the conclusions reached by a wise Latina and wise white man. Rather, she said that she thinks we need more Latina judges because the wise Latina's conclusions will be better than the white man's. That's bigotry.

If a male judge had said we need more men judges because they make better decisions than women judges, we would rightly call it sexism. And we would question whether that judge can set aside his sexism behind the bench. We would wonder if his sexism extends not just to the the role of judges, but to other situations including any case which comes into his court. The objection to that judge being elevated to the Supreme Court would have nothing to do with his sex, but everything to do with his sexist beliefs.

Like I said, Megan McArdle is a smart journalist. But she's wrong about this. The "problem of affirmative action" is not the problem Republicans are worried about when it comes to Sonia Sotomayor. Megan would do better to address our objections than to shoot down strawmen of her own creation. She says she's "all ears" if we'd just argue with Sotomayor's legal judgment. Well, here it is: I think Sotomayor's belief that a a wise Latina will, by virtue of her gender and ethnicity, come to better conclusions than a wise white man is a fundamental flaw in her judgment which should disqualify her from nomination to the Supreme Court.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:24 AM | Add Comment
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June!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:07 AM | Add Comment
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