Sun News

Al Franken should be sitting in the United States Senate today. But, instead, he's got one more court hearing -- this one is the big one. The Minnesota Supreme Court will hear Norm Coleman's last-ditch effort to win in the courts what he couldn't win at the ballot box:

Now it comes down to five votes.

Almost seven months after a U.S. Senate election that was too close to call, five justices of the Minnesota Supreme Court will hear arguments today on whether problems with absentee ballots justify reversing a lower-court ruling that declared DFLer Al Franken a 312-vote winner over Republican Norm Coleman.

Partisans across America will be watching, pronouncing judgment on a thousand blogs. The case may cast a blinding national spotlight on the state Supreme Court.

A decision upholding the lower-court ruling could end the protracted struggle and allow Franken to join the Senate, giving Democrats an invincible majority. A ruling for Coleman wouldn't return him to the Senate, but could keep his hopes alive and delay a final decision for months.

Minnesotans want the dispute to end, recent polls show. Most people say Coleman should concede. Nearly two-thirds believe that Franken ultimately will be declared the winner.

Coleman is fighting this battle at the behest of Republican leaders in D.C. They don't want Democrats to have a 60th vote. That matters to the GOP and they've been funding Coleman and his lawsuits for the past seven months.

Coleman should have conceded already. He has the burden of proof to show the lower courts were wrong. It's a high hurdle. We'll monitor what the court watchers are saying after oral arguments and hope for a good decision soon.

As I stated in the last update the Book,
WILL begin printing this month, June 2009 and I will have and begin signing, numbering and shipping the copies to those who ordered a signed/numbered copy THIS month, June 2009.
As for the process inwhich Barnes and Noble goes through in ordering books I cannot tell you at this point. I will tell you that Barnes and Noble has not once listed information correctly as is listed by Books In Print or Bowker Indentifiers.
I will receive the copies ordered directly from the printer when printing begins shortly and when that starts I will post it here for all to see as well as on the company web site at http://www.sinclairpublishingllc.com/ .
Once printing begins I will then post a link on the Company web site where the book can be ordered directly through Sinclair Publishing, Inc for anyone wanting to do so.
Again, let me make it clear, printing of the book WILL begin this month as will shipping of those signed/numbered copies ordered through this blog.

Copyright 2009 by Larry Sinclair/larrysinclair.org/larrysinclair-0926.blogspot.com/LarrySinclair0926.com and Larry SinclairBarackObama.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

General Motors on Monday filed for bankruptcy protection, even after $19.4 billion in federal bailout money. It now appears that taxpayers will end up with a 60% stake in the restructured company. Cato scholar Daniel Ikenson has long suggested bankruptcy as the best course for GM, and now worries about Ford's future: "The government has a 60 percent stake in GM. Who's going to want to own Ford stock—and therefore, will Ford be able to raise capital—when the U.S. government has an incentive to tip the balance in GM's favor wherever it can?"

• Full statement from Ikenson


• "An Overdue Reckoning in the Auto Sector," by Daniel Ikenson


• "Don't Bail Out the Big Three," by Daniel Ikenson

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

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

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