In a NYT op-ed entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” Mitt Romney argues that Congress should let creative destruction do its job.
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
I agree wholeheartedly. Funny thing is, though, when he was vying for votes in the Michigan primary — which he ultimately won — he was saying something rather different. A January 13 NYT piece titled “McCain and Romney Tangle Over Job Losses in Michigan” tells the story:
Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts whose father was president of American Motors in the 1950s and ’60s, insisted that the auto industry can be revived and blamed Congress and Mr. McCain for ignoring Michigan’s problems.
“The question is, where is Washington?” Mr. Romney said, speaking to a gaggle of reporters across from a General Motors transmission plant near Ypsilanti, where 200 layoffs were announced this week. “Where does it stop? Is there a point at which someone says ‘enough’? Or are we going to allow the entire domestic automotive manufacturing industry to disappear?”
[...]
In Warren, Mr. McCain said he would be “ashamed” to tell voters that the lost jobs would return to Michigan, but he vowed to take care of displaced workers through a promised job retraining program that would be offered through community colleges. “We are a Judeo-Christian values nation,”Mr. McCain told the group at the town hall in Warren. “We cannot leave people behind.”
My OTB teaser post yesterday afternoon, “Should Obama Hunt Osama?,” has thus far generated 30 comments. My much more substantive New Atlanticist post, “Hunting Bin Laden,” has only one.
Is there a barrier that I’m unaware of that’s depressing commenting at the latter site? We’re getting quite respectable traffic but having difficulty generating much discussion.
Senator Ted Stevens, who looked to have narrowly won re-election to the Senate weeks after being convicted on felony corruption charges, has now apparently lost as absentee ballots are slowly counted.
Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, narrowly lost his re-election bid Tuesday, marking the downfall of a Washington political power and Alaska icon who couldn’t survive a conviction on federal corruption charges. His defeat by Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich moves Senate Democrats within two seats of a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
[...]
Tuesday’s tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to 143,912, or 46.76 percent, for Stevens.
A recount is possible.
Interestingly, I’m not seeing any cries of Foul, as has been the case in Minnesota, where new votes for Al Franken seem to be discovered on an hourly basis.
What I haven’t seen in any of the reports is an explanation for why the absentee and “other” ballots are so radically different than those cast on election day. It’s especially odd to me that they’re trending much more against Stevens given that some substantial number of them were cast before his conviction. Is there some reason that Alaska’s Democratic minority votes absentee at a greter rate?
When I was 8 years old, I got a compilation album in my Santa Claus presents called Star Trackin’ ‘77 — one of those Ronco-style collections. The cover was a picture of a guy in a spacesuit on the lunar landscape with a microphone (which he was holding, inexplicably, outside his helmet; I knew even at 8 that wouldn’t work in a vacuum). This song is the only one I can remember being on it. Which is to say, I’ve pretty much always loved it.
ISAF Commander GEN David McKiernan at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC
During his address this evening to the Atlantic Council, ISAF commander General David McKiernan emphasized the many positive trends in Afghanistan, noting that he preferred a “Glass Half Full” view.
At the same time, he emphasized that Afghanistan is in the middle of a war — not a peacekeeping, stability, or human assistance operation. Afghanistan is not Iraq and faces a myriad of complex challenges, including a near total lack of human capital, a population that has mostly faced a lifetime of violence, and a tribal relationship almost impenetrable to outsiders.
In “Hunting Bin Laden,” a piece for New Atlanticist, I look at arguments made by Juan Cole and Robert Baer on President-Elect Obama’s vow to renew the effort to hunt down the al Qaeda leader.
Short version: We’re already trying and success won’t matter all that much.
Joe Lieberman is going to keep his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee after all but, in a stunning rebuke over years of constant disloyalty to the Democratic Party, he’s being stripped of his Environment and Public Works subcommittee.
Steve Benen reports feeling schadenfreude at the news that James Dobson’s Focus of the Family has announced that it is cutting 202 jobs, the deepest cuts in the organizations 32-year history, fresh off of having spent $539,000 to help pass an anti-gay marriage referendum in Colorado. He cites Jim Newell’s snark:
Sure, you have no income now because James Dobson burnt all of your company’s money on a state ballot proposition. But imagine the alternative! Would you want to be employed knowing that several hundred miles away, in another state, pairs of consenting adults that already have been living together, people whom you’ve never met and will never meet, were applying for state licenses (pieces of paper, really) that offered them some new tax and medical options??
Or, put another way, “Would you want to be employed at an activist institution that didn’t do its job?”
Look, I’m no fan of Dobson and see no reason why gays shouldn’t be able to marry one another. But, surely, organizations that exist solely to do political activism in support of ideological causes ought to deploy their resources on the most high profile issues related to said cause. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Beyond that, unless the 202 people in question were working for an average annual salary of $2661.31, not having fought Proposition 8 wouldn’t have saved their jobs. Indeed, I’d guess that fundraising around Prop. 8 yielded a net plus in revenue for Dobson’s group.
Andrew Sullivan, who was editor-in-chief of The New Republic when he was 12 and now works at The Atlantic, notes that the websites of conservative opinion magazines National Review and The Weekly Standard get no more traffic than the top conservative blogs.
So the competition for the opinion-reader is intense. And the financial edge of individual bloggers with relatively no overhead and free content will surely undermine the clout of such magazines over time.
It may be that the blogosphere will kill off opinion journalism as we have known it. In so far as that might mean less groupthink, less control by a few big money machers, and lower barriers to new talent and expertise, that strikes me as pretty good news overall. Or maybe the print magazines will hang on as appendages to the online debate, as a way of milking those email addresses for money and offering a luxury product that will still be worth it.
The main advantage magazines have over blogs, it seems to me, is institutional gravitas. Television and radio bookers, publishing houses, opinion columnists, mainstream journalists, and other influence leaders are far, far more likely to turn to someone with the imprimatur of an institution that to a self-published blogger.
There are exceptions, of course. Markos Moulitsas, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and others have managed to become regular talking heads almost exclusively through their blog-gained fame and at least three of them got book deals, too. I can’t off the top of my head think of a conservative counterpoint, though — maybe Glenn Reynolds?
Ultimately, it’s television that matters if you’re trying to get the word out. Bill Kristol, George Will, Bob Novak, and others have had much more impact with their on air commentary than for their written work. Indeed, most viewers are only casually aware that these people have columns at all.
There are a couple of interesting snippets this morning in the coverage of the seizing of a Saudi oil tanker by Somali pirates I commented on yesterday. First, the Financial Times echoes my observations about the potential impact of this on the oil trade:
While most other seizures have been of vessels heading into or out of the Suez Canal, the latest incident will raise question marks about the safety of the route from the Arabian Gulf to the Cape of Good Hope – a route taken by the largest oil tankers heading from the world’s main oil-producing regions to both Europe and North America.
The development therefore puts at risk a far higher proportion of the world’s energy shipments than the 12 per cent that shipping organisations had already considered in danger. “That route from the Cape to the Gulf was not considered the riskiest route,” said Mr Mukundan.
The New York Times has an interesting observation about the sophistication of the pirates’ operations:
The location of the latest attack, far out to sea, suggested that the pirates may be expanding their range in an effort to avoid the multinational naval patrols now plying the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.
“I’m stunned by the range of it,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference in Washington. The ship’s distance from the coast was “the longest distance I’ve seen for any of these incidents,” he said.
The vessel was headed for the United States via the Cape of Good Hope when it was seized, Reuters reported.
Maritime experts recently have noticed a new development in the gulf — the pirates’ use of “mother ships,” large oceangoing trawlers carrying fleets of speedboats which are then deployed when a new prize is encountered.
“They launch these boats and they’re like wild dogs,” said Mr. Choong in Kuala Lumpur. “They attack the ship from the port, from starboard, from all points, shooting, scaring the captain, firing RPGs and forcing the ship to stop.”
