Daily News

Over at NRO I have an article suggesting that the Tea Party movement adopt as its program what I am calling “Reagan’s Unfinished Agenda.”? In one sentence, it describes a way of going on offense, and getting out of the defensive crouch that is the dominant posture of conservatives at the moment.

… starting in 1987, Reagan offered a more comprehensive package he called the ?SEconomic Bill of Rights.? In addition to the balanced-budget and line-item veto amendments, Reagan proposed three additional amendments that would impose a federal spending limit, require a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate for any tax increases, and prohibit wage and price controls.

In February, I found myself bobbing around the Caribbean for a week with about 70 supporters of the National Citizens Coalition and half a dozen other talking heads.

One of the other chattering types was my National Post colleague, David Frum. Over post-dinner drinks one evening, David and a clutch of guests started talking about airlines. Much to the guests' chagrin, David gave a very spirited defence of Air Canada, claiming it was either the finest or one of the finest airlines in the world.

Only in Canada (or at least among a gaggle of Canadians cruising a tropical sea) could a discussion of which carrier provided the most legroom in economy class or the best buy-on-board treats or the most on-time departures become a symbol for a broader political debate.

To this day, conservatives -- especially Western conservatives -- dislike Air Canada. Our enmity comes from the way the former state airline was forced on us in the bad old days of airline regulation. You say you want to fly to Ottawa, Mr. Hick. Well, you'll do it when we tell you and pay what we tell you. And you'll fly through Toronto both ways, even though there's no special need to. And when you get home, you'll pay added income tax to subsidize keeping our head office in Montreal to encourage Quebecers to vote Liberal.

All of this was compounded, too, by the way the shelter of regulation bred sneering indifference for customers among Air Canada's staff. The eye-rolling sigh of the ticket agent at an extra-heavy bag. The perceptible harrumph of the gate agent when posed a simple question. The tongue-click of the flight attendant asked for a drink refill.

We were giddy, then, when we got the chance to fly WestJet instead. Not only was it a point of regional pride, there were leather seats, cheap fares and the flight attendants were like the cool-kid waiters at your favourite hip-casual restaurant. They liked the fact you were on board. You weren't an impediment to them enjoying their day.

And they joked about having to play a recording in French of every announcement they made live in English. (Yeah! Rage against the bilingual machine!)

But come closer now. This is just between you and me: David was right. Air Canada is a pretty good airline.

Having had to make several cross-continent junkets this year on American air carriers, Air Canada looks like limousine service by comparison. U. S. airlines offer buses with wings. They leave late, a lot. They manage to turn a four-hour flight into a 12-hour ordeal by routing you from Edmonton to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Charlotte, Charlotte to Atlanta or Charleston or Fort Lauderdale. And there's no food on board, not even for purchase and not even if they make you so late there's no chance for even a fast food dinner before your connecting flight.

Meanwhile, on a recent 10-hour, transatlantic flight with my family, Air Canada had an exceptional service crew, fantastic seat-back entertainment choices, a couple of decent meals and even ice cream midflight.

I am still a dedicated WestJet customer, but I would fly Air Canada without hesitation.

Still, that's not why I want Air Canada to survive. As a consumer, I want the competition so prices are kept in check. In fact, there is nothing that says that competition has to be Air Canada. Some successor airline or airlines would do. Open Skies -- a policy in which any airline, Canadian or foreign, could fly all-Canadian routes -- would suffice, too.

Heck, I don't even trust wonderful, funky, casual-Fridays-seven-days-a-week WestJet to stay lean and innovative in the absence of other choices for passengers' dollars.

As a taxpayer, I don't like Air Canada, or WestJet or any other airline enough to bail them out and keep them in the skies. Making you and me give billions to air carriers through our taxes so we can save a couple hundred dollars on our next ticket to Montreal makes no sense.

Still, if there are going to be other options for my flying dollars, I think Frum is right: Air Canada is a good one. And I never expected to say that.

National Post

If you’ve been following the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the term “reverse-racist” has undoubtedly appeared in a story you’ve read. Rush Limbaugh branded Sotomayor a ‘reverse-racist’ on his radio show, while Newt Gingrich labeled her a racist when he posted a statement on his Twitter account.

Some right wing groups claim that Sotomayor is a judicial activist who will bend the law based on her own personal views.

Wendy Long of The Judicial Confirmation Network, a conservative-leaning organization involved with judicial nominations, sent a letter to Senators yesterday outlining these concerns:

“Judge Sotomayor challenges the belief that the law needs to be knowable and predictable . . .” 

Long accused Sotomayor of embracing judicial activism, and claims that “when judges drive such change, based not on the written Constitution and laws enacted by the people, judges use their own sense of personal "justice," based on their own experiences, personal views, feelings, and backgrounds.”

Sadly, the facts get in the way of Long’s argument. Take, for instance, Sotomayor’s ruling in the case of Pappas v. Giuliani. In short, the case involved Thomas Pappas, an employee of the New York City Police Department, who was fired for mailing racially offensive, anonymous letters to organizations that had solicited him for donations.

A reverse-racist, judicial activist, such as Sotomayor, must have ruled in favor of the city, claiming that Thomas violated the rights of others through his offensive remarks, right?

Wrong. It turns out that Judge Sotomayor did exactly what Wendy Long would have wanted?"she made her ruling based “on the written Constitution and laws enacted by the people.” Citing the NYCLU’s briefing on the case, Sotomayor and her Second Circuit panel concluded that: 

“The reduced free-speech protections accorded to public-employee speech related to the workplace also extended to private and anonymous speech by employees that took place away from the workplace and that was unrelated to the workplace” 

 Rather than let her personal beliefs get in the way of her ruling, Sotomayor upheld one of America's oldest laws by defending a bigot’s right to be a bigot.

So John Cole has pretty much addressed this, but last week Jonathan Chait criticized me and others for referring to Jeffrey Rosen's piece on Sonia Sotomayor as "gossip".

"Gossip" is an effective label for those who wish to denigrate Rosen's reporting or the reputation of TNR, but it's an inaccurate one. Gossip is unverified information. Gossip is something you hear all the time--say, Senator X mistreats his staff. No serious publication can pass off gossip as reporting. However, if you actually speak with the principals firsthand--you interview staffers for Senator X who report that he mistreats them--then what you have is reporting. That's what Jeff did. He spoke first-hand with several of Sotomayor's former clerks, who provided a mixed picture. Unsurprisingly, they declined to put their names on the record, but that's utterly standard for people who are speaking in unflattering terms about people they worked with or for.

Chait is one of my favorite writers on the interwebs, but this is less than persuasive. A big publication printing gossip doesn't change the definition of gossip. The issue isn't that the information was "unverified" as in, no one told Rosen these things, it's that it was objectively unverifiable, as in, assertions about Sotomayor's intelligence are unprovable. Rosen, as a well-respected legal expert, could have made that argument himself in some form, but he didn't, possibly because he wanted to present it as an "unbiased" observation. But since the source is anonymous, there's no way to judge the individual's motivations or perspective. There's reason to give people anonymity under certain circumstances to relay unpleasant information about a colleague or a superior, but not when that information can't be verified. Anonymous, unverifiable information is gossip.

Most oddly, Chait suggests I, along with others have some sort of agenda against the New Republic. I can only speak for myself, but in my many posts on Sotomayor and Rosen, I didn't say anything about the New Republic except that to identify the publication Rosen had been writing in.?

-- A. Serwer

"Late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down at his church in Kansas Sunday morning in a thoroughly evil, cold-blooded act of domestic terrorism. Yes, terrorism. Not 'extremism,'" - Michelle Malkin.

What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

James A. Dorn, vice president for academic affairs:

After 20 years China has made substantial economic progress, but the ghosts of Tiananmen are restless and will continue to be so until the Goddess of Liberty is restored.

The Chinese Communist Party's "Human Rights Action Plan" (2009-10) addresses several human rights abuses, but it fails to establish a well-defined boundary between the individual and the state that protects rights to life, liberty, and property. Until China limits the power of the CCP and allows people to exercise their natural rights, there will be corruption, and the goal of "social harmony" will be elusive. The lesson of Tiananmen is that the principle of nonintervention (wu wei) is superior to the heavy hand of the state as a way to bring about true harmony.

MOO-ED OFF THE STAGE?

After Faux Waterboarding, Mancow Appears To Lose DC

How's this for interesting timing? Less than a week after an ill-advised "waterboarding" stunt led to a supposed ideological conversion, shock jock turned syndicated talk host Erich 'Mancow' Muller has apparently lost a key radio affiliate.

According to DCRTV, as well as one of your Radio Equalizer's own sources, the Chicago-based Mancow will be removed later this month from his morning drive slot on DC's WTNT-AM (Freedom 570):

DC Times Radio Show To TNT? - 6/1 - DCRTV hears that the most likely spot on the DC radio dial for the new Washington Times morning radio show is Red Zebra righty talker WTNT (570 AM).

The WTNT morning slot is currently occupied by the Chicago-based Mancow. The nationally syndicated Times news and political talk radio show debuts on 6/15 from studios at the Times' New York Avenue headquarters.

Expected to take Mancow's place in DC is a new program featuring former KSFO / San Francisco morning host Melanie Morgan teamed with John McCaslin of the Washington Times:

Longtime radio personality Melanie Morgan and award-winning newspaper columnist John McCaslin have been named the anchors for The Washington Times' new morning-drive radio show, set to debut nationwide June 15.

"America's Morning News" will hit the airwaves from 6 to 9 a.m., five days a week, showcasing The Times' investigative and accountability journalism. The new team will hash out politics, defense, security, policy, culture and entertainment from a newly built, state-of-the-art broadcast facility inside The Times' newsroom.

"Melanie and John will leverage every ounce of expertise, energy and gumshoe reporting out of The Times' investigative newsroom. They know how to break stories that matter to the American public, are passionate about holding the powerful to account and are committed to unearthing the stories that matter most to Americans - at the dinner table, by the water cooler and inside their pocketbook," Executive Editor John Solomon said.

Both Mancow and the new program have a syndicator in common, the Oregon-based Talk Radio Network.

Whether there's a direct connection between the sudden station loss and last week's waterboarding stunt, widely derided as a stunt despite (or because of) Keith Olbermann's ringing endorsement isn't known. But the backlash over what may have been an outright hoax certainly hasn't helped his career, that's for sure.

FOR New England regional talk radio updates, see our other site.

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