At first blush, it seems as if this item might be one to file under “It Takes One to Know One.” That would be wrong; the circumstances are too different.

Carly Fiorina took what she thought was a private swipe (which might not even have been a swipe at all, as noted at the end of this post) at Barbara “Don’t Call Me Ma’am” Boxer’s hairdo as being “so yesterday.” The comment was captured by a live microphone.

The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan writes widely-read columns on fashion, and has all the time in the world to consider the temperance, or lack thereof, of her critiques before they are published.

Given Givhan’s situation and history, the WaPo fashion editor’s characterization of Fiorina as a “style bully” (HT to Ann Althouse) is especially galling. If anyone has a track record of style bullying, it’s Givhan, whose targets unsurprisingly are often conservatives and Republicans.

Sticking to the hair-raising subject at hand, the Media Research Center documented Givhan’s given tendencies in an April 15, 2005 item:

Givhan … today attacked UN Ambassador designate John Bolton: “His attire was not merely bland but careless. His hair was so poorly cut, it bordered on rude.” She wisecracked that Bolton’s locks looked like he had “shaken his hair dry in the manner of an Afghan hound.” His mustache looked ”like it should be attached to geek glasses and a rubber nose.”

… go back to a July 9, 2004 Post article on candidate hair, and you start wondering how much her critiques are tilted by her politics.

• George W. Bush “has enough hair to fully cover his head, but it is a dull gray thatch that is unremarkable and never seems to glisten even when he is standing in direct sunlight.”
• Dick Cheney “has thinning white hair, and the few strands that are there are so lacking in body and bounce that in the presidential hair wars, they don’t even register as wisps.”
• John Kerry’s “hair may have turned silver, but he has arrived at age 60 seemingly without having lost a strand. What man wouldn’t gloat, just a little?”
• John Edwards makes Givhan’s heart pitter-patter, writing in one ardent passage that his “hair has regularly been referred to as a mop, but that suggests that it is messy or unkempt. Nothing could be further from the truth. He has a precise haircut with artfully clipped layers. His hair is a beautiful shade of chocolate brown with honey-colored highlights. It is not particularly long, but it is smooth and shiny. It is boyish hair not because of the style but because it looks so healthy and buoyant and practically cries out to be tousled the same way a well-groomed golden retriever demands to be nuzzled.”

Robin’s rendition of the Breck Girl’s allegedly magnificent mane is more than enough to make one’s hair stand on end.

Givhan infamously went after then Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris in 2000 during Al Gore’s and the Democratic Party’s attempt to steal the 2000 presidential election, even attempting a connection between her appearance and her political temperament (text was obtained from library database; bolds are mine):

Her lips were overdrawn with berry- red lipstick–the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on shirt collars. Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double-check–before reading–her most recent “determination.”

Hers were not the delicate individual lashes that can be used to fill out sparse hairs and give the eyes a lush canopy. Instead, they were the lashes of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner or Peggy Moffitt, the ’60s model famed for her mod style and huge lashes. They were cartoon lashes. Lashes destined for a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

The cruel took to calling her the dragon lady, and it quickly became clear that her 15 minutes of fame would be spent as the butt of jokes from late-night comics, morning talk show hosts and the Internet millions.

By the time folks finished deriding her makeup, they couldn’t stop the momentum. They went on to the clothes. Hate the suit. Hate the buttons. Hate you.

… One of the reasons Harris is so easy to mock is because she, to be honest, seems to have applied her makeup with a trowel. At this moment that so desperately needs diplomacy, understatement and calm, one wonders how this Republican woman, who can’t even use restraint when she’s wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship.

Besides, she looks bad–not by the hand of God but by her own. She took fashion–which speaks in riddles, hyperbole and half-truths–at its word, imbibing all of those references to the ’70s and ’80s, taking styling cues from Versace ads in which models are made up as if by a mortician’s assistant, believing the magazines when they said that blue eye shadow was back. She failed to think for herself. Why should anyone trust her?

If Givhan has ever similarly gone after a shabbily attired or poorly put-together Democratic or liberal woman to the point of alleging that it affects the wisdom of her decision-making, I’m not aware of it.

Althouse’s take on the Fiorina incident ultimately but silently accuses Givhan of insensitivity directed at cancer survivors:

It’s a bit hard to tell unless you look for it (in the video at the link–Ed.), but I’m looking after hearing a friend, a cancer survivor who lost her own hair, insist that what we are seeing is a cancer survivor’s humorous attitude about hair.

I now think that Fiorina stopped in the middle of an anecdote when someone off camera signaled for her to shut up, but that if she had gone on, she would have made a self-effacing/sarcastic wisecrack about her own hair along the lines of: Oh, yes, because my hair is so today, if by “today,” you mean not utterly bald.

The gesture she makes at her own hair, just before she clams up, is not, I think, a mean girl’s I’m-so-gorgeous primp. It’s comic business that would have fit amusingly with the wisecrack that was never cracked. My friend, a woman who, like Fiorina, has recently regrown hair, feels sure she has the ability to recognize a shared dark humor about hair that women who have not gone through the experience don’t pick up on. Hair is a big deal to women, and our ears perk up when we hear talk about other women’s hair. Givhan explores that with good sensibility, but I think she, like many others, is judging Fiorina without a full understanding of the context.

Nice and insightful observations, Ann. Bully for you.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

You would expect a guy who has co-authored The Almanac of American Politics (2010 edition link) all the way back to 1976 to have insights into the mindset and thought processes of the current presidential administration. But Barone has this administration so totally pegged, and articulates it so well, that it’s scary.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the fact that he knows so much and says it well that’s scary; it’s the substance of that well-expressed knowledge that should be scaring us.

Barone’s Sunday column contains yet another succinct dissection of Team Obama’s mindset (bolds are mine; internal links added by me):

Obama’s thuggery is useless in fighting spill

Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP’s Gulf oil spill.

Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s remark that he would keep his “boot on the neck” of BP, which brings to mind George Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Except that Salazar’s boot hasn’t gotten much in the way of results yet.

Or consider Obama’s undoubtedly carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with experts “so I know whose ass to kick.” Attacking others is a standard campaign tactic when you’re in political trouble …

… Then there is Obama’s decision to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf. This penalizes companies with better safety records than BP’s and will result in many advanced drilling rigs being sent to offshore oil fields abroad.

The justification offered was an Interior Department report supposedly “peer reviewed” by “experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn’t include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium as more economically devastating than the oil spill and “counterproductive” to safety.

This was blatant dishonesty by the administration, on an Orwellian scale. In defense of a policy that has all the earmarks of mindless panic, that penalizes firms and individuals guilty of no wrongdoing and that will worsen rather than improve our energy situation. Ineffective thuggery.

… Finally, (as to) the $20 billion escrow fund that Obama pried out of the BP treasury at the White House when he talked for the first time, 57 days after the rig exploded, with BP Chairman Tony Hayward … House Republican Joe Barton had a point, though an impolitic one, when he called this a “shakedown.”

… what we have is government transferring property from one party, an admittedly unattractive one, to others, not based on pre-existing laws but on decisions by one man, pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.

Feinberg gets good reviews from everyone. (*) But the Constitution does not command “no person . . . shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law except by the decision of a person as wise and capable as Kenneth Feinberg.” The Framers stopped at “due process of law.”

Obama doesn’t. … the Economist … (suggests) that markets see Obama as “an American version of Vladimir Putin.” Except that Putin is an effective thug.

The quote from the Economist concisely and correctly personalizes the FUDGE factor (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, and Government Excess) that permeates the U.S. economy to the person occupying the Oval Office.

This administration’s modus operandi boils down to four words: Punk President, minted here, and Gangster Government, coined by Barone.

(*) – Not absolutely everyone, Mr. Barone.

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UPDATE: Though of course they haven’t admitted it, you can add the Economist, which endorsed Obama, to the “we were duped” list –

America’s justifiable fury with BP is degenerating into a broader attack on business

… Businessmen are already gloomy, depressed by the economy and nervous of their president’s attitude towards them. This episode will not encourage them.

… After the macho rhetoric came the demands for cash. Mr Obama decided to “inform” BP that it must put adequate funds to meet all compensation claims into an escrow account beyond its control, although he has no authority to do so. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, instructed it not to pay a dividend until all claims tied to the spill are settled. Her fellow Democrats in Congress are trying to raise BP’s liability retroactively—the sort of move America’s courts rightly frown on. Mr Salazar, on even thinner legal ice, suggested that the government would hold BP accountable not just for the harm directly done by the spill, but also for the jobs lost in the oil business thanks to the freeze on oil drilling in deep water that he himself has imposed.

… If he (Obama) sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so. The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.

The Obama campaign and the Obama administration have been about “broader attack(s) on business” from the get-go. The folks at the Economist thought he didn’t really mean it, that he was just playing to his loony-left base. Fools.

The most insightful sentence in the entire piece is about what’s not happening:

Corporate America, normally quick to resist government intrusion, has kept strangely silent, as though businessmen are afraid of the consequences of sticking their heads above the parapet.

That’s what happens when the country is run by a Gangster Government.

From Bogota:

Jun 15, 2010 / 12:07 pm

Commenting on the news that General Luis Mendieta was freed last weekend by the Colombian army after 12 years of captivity by a leftist guerrilla group, his wife asserted that “God heard” her prayers for his release.

Speaking on Colombian radio, she said, “I am the happiest woman in the world. I’m so happy, I don’t know what to do. Now is the time to hug him and I am going to celebrate his birthday with him. God heard my prayers. Thank God for this moment.”

In his first statements after being liberated, General Mendieta thanked President Alvaro Uribe for the rescue operation, the military and the media for supporting the liberation of hostages in Colombia. “May God repay you for this outcome,” he said.

The 53 year-old general was captured in 1998 by the leftist guerrilla group, FARC – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia – during a siege of the eastern provincial capital of Mitu, reported the Boston Globe on Tuesday.

“Now that I have returned there are many things about Colombia, the world, everything, that I don’t know about, as I’ve spent 12 years with no intellectual stimulus,” the general said with emotion.

“I want to listen to the news, to commentary; I want to hear the voice of the people of the world because we heard no voices in the jungle. I want to hear from you, my beloved wife, from you, by beloved son, from you my beloved daughter. I want to hear from the entire world,” he added. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

A Friday report by reporters Matthew Lee and Eileen Sullivan indicates that there is a serious shortage of critical thinking skills over at the Associated Press, or a serious desire to run interference for the Obama administration no matter how ignorant doing so makes the wire service’s reporters appear.

Lee and Sullivan try to excuse the State Department’s inaction on the vast majority of roughly 60 specific offers of assistance from over twenty nations, many of which go back to late April and early May (detailed in a 4-page State Dept. PDF here), because almost all of the offers are being made with an expectation that the costs of such assistance will be reimbursed. By my count:

• 15 of those assistance offers involve the provision of “containment boom” to protect beaches, shoreline, and other sensitive areas.
• Roughly 10 of those 15 “containment boom” offers are over a month old, and a few were made on or before April 30, over fifty days ago.
• Out of all 60 offers made involving all forms of goods and services, roughly a half-dozen have been accepted.

The reason Lee and Sullivan cast these offers as proof of a “double standard” is — wait for it — because the U.S. doesn’t get reimbursed when it provides aid in natural disasters like earthquakes, and because many of the countries involved, several of which are dirt poor, receive American foreign aid.

Here are the petty pair’s first few paragraphs:

Cleanup aid from overseas comes with a price tag

At least 22 nations – including Britain, where BP is based – have offered oil-collecting skimmers, boom, technical experts and more to help the U.S. cope with its worst-ever environmental disaster. But their generosity comes with a price tag.

The State Department confirmed that nearly every offer of equipment or expertise from a foreign government since the April 20 oil rig explosion would require the U.S. to reimburse that country.

The offers reveal a hard truth about the United States’ international friendships: With the U.S. widely regarded as the world’s wealthiest nation, there is a double standard regarding foreign aid after a crisis, especially with offers from relatively poor countries.

… U.S. disaster aid is almost always free of charge; other nations expect the U.S. to pay for help.

Here is one of the examples the AP pair cited:

China offered containment boom for a price. When a major earthquake struck in northwest China in April, the U.S. quickly gave $100,000 for relief supplies, and after another major earthquake in southwestern China in 2008, the U.S. donated $500,000 through the U.S. embassy in Beijing to the Red Cross …

Last time I checked — and regardless of how one views our current relationship with China — earthquakes aren’t caused by industrial accidents at private companies willing to pay for the costs of their actions.

It’s as if BP and its promises to pay all of the costs of the cleanup, including, as of when the AP reporters wrote their story, its “voluntary” agreement to set up a $20 billion shakedown fund — er, “escrow account” — don’t exist. Even if you cut State a little slack because agreeing on proper reimbursement levels takes a bit of work, the real story here is that a vast array of assistance has been held up for no good reason while the environmental situation in the Gulf continues to deteriorate — and environmental groups, in their virtual stone silence, prove that they are really branches of the Democratic Party who aren’t primarily interested in clean air and water.

In a Friday press briefing the AP reporters were aware of (because their report contains a quote from that briefing), State Department spokesman Mark Toner even acknowledged BP’s reimbursing role:

I believe these assistance offers, if you will, are being repaid by BP on a reimbursable basis, so – look, what we’re concerned with right now is getting these types of assistance, as they become available and as they’re useful to our cleanup operations, getting them into action so they can clean up the Gulf.

Sorry Mark, if your bosses in the government were so concerned, they would have acted on these offers weeks ago.

The idea that those running the still-richest country in the world are resisting the idea of having to pay legitimate amounts for goods provided and services rendered — fully knowing that BP will ultimately reimburse them — while a steadily worsening environmental emergency marches on is intensely offensive. It’s enough to make one think that more than mere incompetence is involved. One doesn’t want to accuse the administration of wishing that things get worse in hopes that doing so might make parts of their political agenda more achievable, but the delays in accepting help, in combination with President Obama’s sickening opportunism during his national address Tuesday evening — spending over one-quarter of it (about 750 of 2,700 words) promoting “a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill” — move what would ordinarily be considered an outlandish accusation into the realm of the sadly possible.

Lee’s and Sullivan’s excuse-making is equally inexcusable. Do I even need to note that if these kinds of hold-ups had occurred under a Republican or conservative administration, Lee, Sullivan, the AP, and most of the rest of the establishment media wouldn’t be making pathetic attempts at justifying them. Instead, they’d be finding Democratic politicians who would be calling for heads to roll and going way beyond speculations concerning the underlying motivations — or issuing the calls and making the accusations themselves.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The presidential commission tasked with investigating the BP oil spill is so short on technical expertise and packed with left-leaning politicians and knee-jerk environmentalists that even the Associated Press’s resident ClimateGate apologist Seth Borenstein is concerned.

On December 12, 2009, over two weeks after the ClimateGate e-mails first appeared, Borenstein wrote that “the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.” What part of Kevin Trenberth’s famous October 12, 2009 assertion that “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” did Seth not understand?

Nonetheless, non-skeptical Seth is somewhat taken aback at the lack of expertise in the spill commission’s membership:

Obama spill panel big on policy, not engineering

The panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is short on technical expertise but long on talking publicly about “America’s addiction to oil.” One member has blogged about it regularly.

Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent engineering background – but it’s in optics and physics. Another is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.

The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.

The White House said the commission will focus on the government’s “too cozy” relationship with the oil industry.

Geez, why even put together a commission when it’s already been told what one of its key conclusions must be?

Brief descriptions of each person on the commission are at a separate AP link (the full White House announcement is here):

• Co-chairman: Former Democratic Sen. and Gov. Bob Graham of Florida. He often has pushed for a drilling ban off the Florida coast.
• Co-chairman: William K. Reilly, Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President George H.W. Bush and during the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.
• Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
• Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science.
• Terry Garcia, a National Geographic Society executive and former chief lawyer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Bill Clinton.
• Cherry Murray, dean of Harvard’s engineering school and former president of the American Physical Society.
• Frances Ulmer, chancellor of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and former Democratic lieutenant governor of Alaska.

I suspect that a plentiful track record of environmental radicalism and far-left progressive tendencies present in several commission members will be discovered in the next several days.

Anyone hoping that co-chairman Bill Reilly will provide a dose of moderation will get a reality check by going to his still-present bio at the EPA’s web site, where the following was found:

Perhaps the most significant failure of the Reilly Administration, as Reilly suggests below, was that EPA was unable to garner the unalloyed support of the Bush Administration during the second half of that Administration’s term. This was largely due to the inability of the Agency to muster the politically valuable praise of the Administration’s environmental efforts by environmental organizations. As a result, the Bush Administration chose to work more closely with elements of its constituency that would provide political support during the 1992 election season. As a result, EPA found its agenda stifled in the White House and its credibility compromised before Congress.

After leaving the Agency during the final days of 1992, Reilly returned to World Wildlife Fund.

The “EPA found its agenda stifled”?

Just a cotton-pickin’ minute. The “EPA’s agenda” is supposed to be the agenda of the person running the executive branch, i.e., the President. It’s clear that the EPA hasn’t seen things that way for a long time. This is a bureaucracy that has instead and for decades viewed itself as its own independent branch of government accountable to no one.

If it wasn’t obvious then, it’s certainly obvious now, based on the free pass the environmental movement has given to president, that, as Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds wrote a week ago:

Environmentalists, like feminists, are just another arm of the Democratic establishment: “running dogs” to be loosed or reined in as politics require.

Any GOP attempts “to work more closely” with environmental leaders are thus predestined to bear no fruit.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From London:

Jun 17, 2010 / 11:12 pm

Soccer player Wayne Rooney’s recent comment that he wears rosary beads during soccer practice because he is Catholic has piqued the interest of sports enthusiasts who hope to hear more about his faith.

Rooney, who is a striker for England’s national team in the World Cup, was at a Wednesday conference with English journalists when a reporter asked about the rosary beads he wears around his neck during soccer practices.

According to the Mirror sports columnist John Cross, Rooney looked surprised and said “I’ve been wearing them four years now and you don’t usually watch training. Obviously I can’t wear them in games.”

Asked why he wears them, the sportsman replied “It’s my religion.”

An FA press officer then stepped in and said, “We don’t do religion.”

Cross said it was “a shame” that the comment was interrupted, declaring that the fact Rooney is religious is of great consequence and interest. He noted that other players such as Jermain Defoe and Kolo Toure have spoken about their faith.

“It’s interesting to me and I find it a shame that the topic was cut off before it could be explored,” the Mirror columnist wrote. “We live in an openly multi-cultural society, and yet it seems at times we’re afraid to actually discuss those cultures in the open.”

Rooney displayed his rosary beads before the national anthems prior to the England-U.S. match.

Noting his enjoyment of religious education, the athlete has said that he might have been a priest if he had not been successful in soccer, the London Times reports.

Fr. Edward Quinn, Rooney’s parish priest in Liverpool, presided over his marriage to Coleen McLoughlin. He told the Times he thought Rooney’s wife provided the rosary beads.

“I have seen the pictures of Wayne wearing them and it doesn’t surprise me because both he and Coleen come from families with a strong Catholic faith. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

John Cross’s original Mirror column is here.

When it comes to the performance of the U.S.-headquartered Detroit automakers once known as the Big Three, the real news in the J.D. Power and Associates 2010 Initial Quality Study (IQS) is not what the Associated Press’s Stephen Manning wrote in his Thursday coverage (“US cars top foreign brands on quality survey”) of Power’s pronouncement. While barely true and in a sense historic, it’s not even in the neighborhood of being the big story.

Because of its timing, Power’s IQS is as good a report card as any out there on the job President Barack Obama’s car czars and his apparatchik management appointees have done during the past year in improving the quality of the vehicles produced at government-controlled General Motors and Chrysler.

Previous work I did in connection with two other AP reports on perceived quality — one in April (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), and one in mid-May (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) — caused me to detect a distinct aroma of propaganda-driven misdirection in Manning’s missive. A detailed look at J.D. Power’s report reveals the full extent of Stephen’s stench.

Succinctly stating AP’s inversion of reality with a strange assist from a Power spokeperson, Manning treated us to the following paragraphs:

U.S. automakers have long lagged foreign brands, especially those from Asian manufacturers like Toyota, which many consumers believe produce higher quality cars and trucks than General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

But J.D. Power said Ford Motor Co. showed some of the biggest gains in quality among individual brands, moving into the fifth spot. Porsche was the top scorer. Toyota Motor Corp., which has suffered through huge safety recalls earlier this year, saw its score drop.

“Domestic automakers have made impressive strides in steadily improving vehicle quality,” said David Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of global research.

Sorry, folks, it just ain’t so. Only one domestic automaker “has made impressive strides.” Another has seen initial quality during its first year of government control go from a few points better than average to a few points worse. The third has gone from absolutely awful to still pretty bad.

The numbers, absent the pap from Power’s PR pumper, tell the true tale.

First, here’s how the Detroit Three’s brands fared (weighted average results are based on individual brand sales during the first five months of 2010):

Ford, which was already better than average in 2009, went to way better than average. General Motors went from a bit better than average to a bit worse. In 2009, Ford barely beat out GM in initial quality by 1.5 points. In 2010, the gap turned into an 18.6-point rout.

In fact, GM is in greater danger of being passed by Chrysler, which “improved” (i.e., got less awful) by 10.5 points. GM’s 2009 lead over Chrysler of 30 points shrunk to 11.3 points in one year.

Then there’s this enhanced graphic showing all brands, with each of the Detroit Three’s individual brands compared to 2009:

Every brand ahead of Ford is in the luxury category. One luxury brand not ahead of Ford is Cadillac, which tumbled mightily, to worse than average.

The reality is that the two auto-industry bailout projects of the Obama administration and the UAW are badly lagging in a critically important objective measurement metric. The larger of the two has seen a serious decline. The smaller entity, while improving a bit, is still seriously trailing the rest of the industry. The one U.S.-headquartered entity that hasn’t been bailed out is getting it right at an unprecedented level.

How Stephen Manning can write what he did with a straight face is beyond me.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

__________________________________________________

BizzyBlog Update, June 20: A few reinforcing points and clarifications –

• The two bailed-out companies weighted-average 2010 score is 117.1, which is 8.1 points worse than the industry average. Without Ford, the U.S. auto industry would still be eating foreign-based car companies’ dust.
• The two bailed-out companies weighted-average 2009 score was 115.0. Their combined 2010 performance was 2.1 points worse (117.1 minus 115.0).
• Chrysler’s Ram brand, which made separate from other company brands in late 2009, was part of Dodge in the 2009 calculations.
• This can’t be proven, but I believe that the quote cited above from Power’s Sargent is a very generic statement meant to relate to a several-year period. I believe that the AP’s Manning deceptively crafted the quote to make it appear as if it applies to improvements made during the past year, thus giving readers the incorrect impression that all three U.S.-based carmakers got better.

Gluttons for punishment who wish to reverse engineer the calculations in this post can go to these links for January-May 2010 sales by brand: Ford, GM, Chrysler.

Barone quoted Harry Galston’s advice for House Democrats in a post yesterday afternoon (HT Instapundit):

Democrats must face the fact that much of the legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them looks quite different to the portion of the electorate that holds the balance of political power. And they must face a choice as well—between (to be blunt) the politics of conviction and the politics of self-preservation. They can continue on as they have been going since January 2009, or they can adopt a concerted strategy designed to take the edge off public anger and reduce their losses.

Barone’s translation is pretty good, but lacks a couple of necessary sharp edges:

Read that first sentence again. It reminds me of the old story about the advertising agency and the dog food. The best ads in the world failed to increase sales of the dog food. So they sent a market researcher in and found the reason: The dogs didn’t like the dog food. The Democrats’ problem is similar. The American people don’t like the dog food (“legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them”) produced by the Obama Democrats.

He could easily added that we don’t much enjoy being treated like dogs in the first place, and that the suggested “take the edge off” strategy is more of what the Democratic Party has engaged in for decades: Don’t tell people what you really believe, demonize anyone who dares to try to point it out, and misrepresent your opponents’ views by playing the fear card.

From Henrico County, Virginia:

June 15, 2010

The Texas-born entertainer, who hit it big with the Grammy-winning ‘Big Bad John’ in 1961, also had his own TV variety shows and a role on ‘Daniel Boone.’ But many know him from his sausage brand and commercials.

When the Country Music Assn. announced in February that Jimmy Dean would be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame later this year, Dean joked, “I thought I was already in there.”

“Seriously, it brought a huge grin to my face,” he said in a news release. “I am honored.”

Dean already had been inducted into the Virginia Country Music Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Texas Music Hall of Fame in 2005.

That’s not to mention his 2009 induction into the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.

Indeed, Dean, who died Sunday evening at his home in Henrico County, Va., at age 81, may be better known by some today as “the sausage king” of TV commercial fame than a hit-making country music star and one-time TV show host who helped bring country music into the mainstream in the 1960s.

The Texas-born entertainer and businessman, who began his recording career in the 1950s, scored a No. 1 hit on both the country and pop singles charts in 1961 with his spoken-narrative song about a coal miner — “a giant of a man” — who saves fellow workers from “a would-be grave” after their mine collapses.

“Big Bad John,” which Dean said he wrote in an hour and a half on a flight from New York to Tennessee, earned a Grammy Award for best country and western recording.

The 1960s were the down-home entertainer’s heyday.

He went on to record hits including “Dear Ivan,” “Little Black Book,” “P.T. 109″ (inspired by the Naval vessel commanded by John F. Kennedy during World War II) and “The First Thing Ev’ry Morning (And the Last Thing Ev’ry Night).”

From 1963 to ’66, he hosted “The Jimmy Dean Show,” an hourlong TV musical variety show that ran on ABC and featured singers including Roger Miller, George Jones and Buck Owens. The show also regularly featured Dean’s humorous banter with a “dog” named Rowlf, the first of Jim Henson’s Muppets to attract national attention.

Along with headlining in Las Vegas and performing in venues such as Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium, Dean played fur trapper Josh Clements on Fess Parker’s “Daniel Boone” series in the late ’60s and had the supporting role of a reclusive billionaire in the 1971 James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever.”

He launched the Jimmy Dean Meat Co. in the late ’60s, after previously buying a hog farm in his native Texas. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

There several annoying aspects of today’s Associated Press report on the plight of newly-hired employees at U.S. auto plants represented by the United Auto Workers.

Mentioned by writers Dee-Ann Durbin and Tom Krisher, but not until their eleventh paragraph, is the fact that new workers, whose starting wage (mentioned in Paragraph 2) is “about half what veterans make under their current contract,” have to “pay the same union dues as those who have been at the plant for years.” But the AP pair didn’t tell readers how much those dues payments are, and how harshly they affect entry-level workers. The web site ProCon.org estimates that it’s in the neighborhood of $700 at Ford and Chrysler, and as much as $950 at Government/General Motors. When you’re making $14 an hour, that’s not chump change; it’s about 34-46 cents per hour, or about 2.5% – 3.3% of base pay. A union official (not directly quoted) deadpans that “he understands their resentment.” Sure.

As bad as that easily rectifiable AP oversight is, it’s not the worst reporting error Durbin and Krisher committed. This excerpted sentence is, in several ways:

Last year, as GM and Chrysler tumbled into bankruptcy, workers agreed to concessions, including the lower starting wage and suspension of cost-of-living raises that could amount to thousands of dollars over the life of a contract.

The AP pair gives readers the impression that the “concessions” were some kind of major giveback by UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and his merry band of negotiators. The truth is that the “concessions” really amounted to next to nothing for current workers. The UAW itself even said so in communications with its members.

The most obvious point to make about the “concessions” is that there has been virtually zero official inflation since they took effect. But it goes beyond that, as I noted in a related post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) in October of last year.

In that post, I included a graphic of the first page of a “contract outline” presented by the union to its members shortly before the changes therein were ratified in May 2009, which is reproduced here (red box added by me):

The key sentences inside the red box are the following (bolds are mine):

For our active members, these tentative changes mean no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your health care, and no reduction in pensions.

…. Unfortunately, in this process our retirees are required to make difficult sacrifices as is explained later in the summary.

As I noted last year: “In other words, the UAW protected its currently working members, the ones who get to vote on contracts, from any meaningful sacrifice, while hosing its retirees, who don’t get to vote.”

These virtual non-concessions for current workers were only possible because the Obama administration and its car-czar managers hijacked the bankruptcy processes at GM and Chrysler, shafted creditors’ contractual and common-law rights (certain secured creditors at Chrysler; unsecured bondholders at GM), poured tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the emerging entities, and kept the existing union contracts essentially intact. In a normal bankruptcy, the union contracts at a minimum would have become fair game for meaningful negotiation, and at worst could have declared null and void.

Durbin’s and Krisher’s description of “lower starting wage” for new employees as a “concession” is also seriously inaccurate in two ways.

First, those at the negotiating table and the UAW members they represented at the time conceded nothing. They pushed the lower wage onto future union members (with, as noted earlier, no reduction in their fixed cost of union membership).

Beyond that, the $14 an hour is not something new employees will endure for a few years while their pay is gradually stepped up to full scale over a 3- to 5-year period, as has been the case in several previous “two-tiered” contracts. The “lower starting wage” is for all practical purposes a “permanently lower wage.” This section of the AP pair’s report proves that point:

Bobbi Marsh, 32, was hired at a GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, two years ago, making $14 per hour. With raises she now makes $16, but that’s still less than half the wage of her father, a machinist at the Lordstown plant.

Her father’s job helped pay for her college and family vacations. She is afraid she will not be able to provide the same for her 10-year-old son.

“I feel bad for my child because I want him to have the same opportunities I had when he was my age,” she said.

In other words, Ms. Marsh is acknowledging what Durbin and Krisher won’t directly admit — that her wage is not wired into the contract to catch up to a level anywhere near that of her father’s.

Thus, new UAW hires are shouldering the burden of the union’s decades-old unstated rules:

1. Concede nothing for workers who get into the club early enough.
2. To adhere to Rule Number 1, first shortchange new members with two-tiered wages, whereby they can still get into the club in 3-5 years.
3. To adhere to Rule Number 1, next shortchange retirees (who can’t vote on contract changes).
4. To adhere to Rule Number 1, after Rules 2 and 3 have been exploited as much as possible, give new members the permanent shaft.

These rules, which in essence amount to a current member protection racket, explain the wholly justified resentment cited earlier. According to this link, starting wages at Toyota in Georgetown, Kentucky are $18-$25 an hour. The UAW rules just outlined are why GM, Ford, and Chrysler newbies start making less, and will continue making less.

The current administration in Washington is ultimately responsible for making the political decision to preserve the UAW’s current member protection racket. Hades will probably freeze over before we’ll see the Associated Press or any other establishment media outlet acknowledge that harsh truth.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From a Washington Times editorial:

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. … (is) declaring the stimulus “an absolute success” on Wednesday. Before he and the president begin their victory lap, however, they should take a closer look at the numbers. The current recovery has been one of the worst for job creation on record. Private sector hiring has virtually ground to a halt, and the administration was embarrassed last month when it was reported that 90 percent of the jobs created in May turned out to be short-term Census Bureau hires – and even those numbers appear to be exaggerated.

The job losses for this recession have been far deeper in percentage terms than in any of the 11 recessions since the Second World War. Underemployment, home foreclosures, bankruptcy filings and the number of Americans on food stamps have all increased since the stimulus act was passed. If this is “absolute success” we would hate to see what the vice president would call failure.

From an Investors Business Daily editorial:

The administration strong-armed BP into placing billions into a fund that is supposed to compensate Gulf oil-spill victims. Nothing wrong with making victims whole, but isn’t that what courts are for?

During the BP executives’ brief meeting Wednesday with President Obama, they agreed to set aside $20 billion into an escrow account that will be used to pay for damage to businesses and individuals caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The funds are to be distributed by a third party who supposedly will be nonbiased.

That party is Kenneth Feinberg, last seen serving as the administration’s pay czar. And that smell in the Gulf? It isn’t the sulfurous odor of spilled crude. Just the rancid stench of politics.

Setting up the office of a pay czar, officially known as “special master for compensation,” was another of this administration’s many violations of the private sector. The position was established to oversee executive pay at companies that took bailouts.

But the zealous Feinberg, who demanded that Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis work for free, seemed ready at any time to increase the office’s authority and begin dictating corporate salaries beyond those in the bailed-out companies.

As pay czar, Feinberg, a one-time chief of staff for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy who was recommended to Obama for his pay-czar gig by Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, felt it was his duty to send a message to Wall Street. It’s a line of thinking perfectly in sync with this administration’s eagerness to impose government authority over the private sector.

The president might be confident that Feinberg “will assure that claims are administered as quickly, as fairly and as transparently as possible.” But we’re not. …

I can’t wait to see some of the “creative” claims that get submitted.