An Interesting Week

It's been an interesting week. The Gulf oil spill remains staunched and a more permanent fix may be near. In related news, former BP chief Tony Hayward is receiving his wish about getting his life back. He's currently even casting himself as the victim. See the Wall Street Journal on this here.

Ag Department official Shirley Sherrod's image went from racist to lightning rod to wronged party to hero in the span of three days. News now is she is planning to sue right wing blogger Andrew Breitbart for intentionally and falsely maligning her by doctoring that speech of hers to the NAACP many years ago. See Breitbart defending himself on Fox News here. It'd be fun to see the would-be character assassin get what he deserves in court. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

Private First Class Bradley Manning is being held in Quantico, Virginia on charges of leaking classified material. He may well be the primary suspect in the 92,000 pages of Afghanistan War reports recently sent to WikiLeaks. The Washington Post reports evidence this young man was a rather troubled fellow already, having already been busted down in rank. Liberal sources are making much hay over the numerous references to heavy civilian loss of life there as a result US and coalition action and pointing to that and the hushing it up as causative of the ongoing conflict there. Conservatives rage about the leak of classified materials they fear will help insurgents in the war. Both are right to be upset. I'm disturbed that one 22-year-old PFC has access to so much of that kind of information. Who the hell is in charge of security over there?

The performance of GM and Chrysler is vindicating the Obama Administration's decision to extend them stopgap loans over a year ago. Both have returned to profitability and GM has paid its back four years ahead of schedule. If the Republicans had had their way both companies would now be defunct and another 400,000 workers in the two corporations and their suppliers would now almost certainly be unemployed. Good move.

Meanwhile, the slow recovery continues. The second quarter GDP grew at an annualized rate of 2.4%. The pundits are painting this negatively because a higher rate was widely forecast. Still, given where we have come from, another quarter of positive growth is, well, positive. If an economy were to grow at 2.4% every year its overall output would double in less than 30 years. Revised figures also point to a worse recession than previously thought. CBS News reported the economy contracted 2.6% from the last quarter of '08 through the middle of '09. Expect to see better job growth return fairly soon. Soon enough to help the Dems in November's midterms? We'll see. A lot of that depends on whether the media reports the glass half empty or half full.