"Bloody Baghdad" is one press agency's moniker for the string of car bombings in Iraq's capital but Strategy Page rightly calls the terrorists' highly localized concentration of urban murder "beyond ineffective." In the southern quarter of the city, the enemy's naked brutality has won him nothing, Iraqi and Allied perseverance and courage far stronger than a muddled frenzy of killing:
Everyone knows that all living things need water to survive and during the upcoming summer months in Iraq, the demand for clean drinking water will drastically rise. The near-term completion of a project in [Baghdad's] Al-Rasheed district will fulfill this need and provide more than 100,000 villagers fresh water. The $500,000 project began six months ago and employed 36 people, of which 30 were from the local area.
Another story narrates dozens more reclamation and construction projects, while USAID publishes staggeringly full weekly reports on work across a vast countryside unrestrained by shiftless thugs.
IN SPADES: Several hundred paragraphs of Iraqi determination and terrorist failure is what one can find in Arthur Chrenkoff's latest volume of reconstruction news.
While the economy's important numbers hold steady, the politically favored set just improved:
U.S. employers added 274,000 workers in April, more than economists expected, suggesting that higher costs and first-quarter slowdown haven't shaken companies' confidence in economic growth. The increase follows a revised gain of 146,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department said today in Washington. All told, the economy added 93,000 more jobs in February and March than the government previously reported. The jobless rate held at 5.2 percent.
Including April and March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has recorded in its monthly non-farm payroll reports over 3.4 million jobs created since President Bush signed the Jobs & Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003; tax cuts that exceeded predictions from the President's Council of Economic Advisers to have added at least 1.4 million jobs by the end of 2004 by over thirty percent. And as Larry Kudlow explains today, the market windfall from lower taxes has produced tax receipts aplenty — just as it did after the first year of tax reform.
"[T]he suicide bomber drove his car and hit the Stryker when about twenty children were jumping up and down and waving at the soldiers." Murder, pain, hope and friendship in Mosul, Iraq — the kind of reporting the world deserves but mostly does not receive, from Michael Yon, to whose weblog I will now return daily. (Hat tip, CDR Salamander.)
Frank words from a forthright lady in support of President Bush's vilified nominee for United Nations Ambassador: Argentina and the broader left won't be impressed but John Bolton, the president and many more of us will. (Hat tip, the Corner.)
Those so long mystified by an American economic restoration that did not appear to match longer payrolls with market success may have their answer:
Productivity, a key factor needed to boost living standards, rose at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the first three months of the year, the best showing in nine months. The Labor Department reported Thursday that the increase in productivity, a measure of worker efficiency, compared to a 2.1 percent rate of increase in the October-December quarter of last year. It was a slightly better gain than economists had been expecting and represented the fastest increase since a 3.9 percent jump in the April-June quarter of last year.
Productivity surpassed historical records earlier this year. From greater output by existing staff comes a disincentive for additional hiring — but greater wealth, of course, ensures the creation of new employment opportunities. So is it wise to assume that productivity will level off in the age of blinding technological innovation? Ingenuity and resilience aren't bad prerequisites.
One month ago James Robbins assessed terrorism's downward arc, inspired by the enemy's spectacularly futile efforts in Iraq and elsewhere to defeat organized, national military forces following the established conduct of war. At a time when al Qaeda's operational leadership has been disrupted and its gangs in southern Afghanistan faltering, Robbins remains confident:
The daily life of an al Qaeda leader is an endurance test for survival. They spend their time moving from safe house to safe house, in constant fear of discovery, attempting vainly to organize large-scale attacks on their enemies and speculating when they will be betrayed by their friends. It is not a rewarding existence, not even by terrorist standards. This cannot be the jihad they signed up for. Even the most committed among them may be wondering when Osama's master plan is going to kick in and they will start winning a few rounds.
They can kill but if challenged, they can't win. We knew this from the beginning.
For those seeking expert opinion on the economy's speed and trajectory, the Federal Reserve rendered testimony yesterday:
The Committee believes that, even after this action, the stance of monetary policy remains accommodative and, coupled with robust underlying growth in productivity, is providing ongoing support to economic activity. Recent data suggest that the solid pace of spending growth has slowed somewhat, partly in response to the earlier increases in energy prices. Labor market conditions, however, apparently continue to improve gradually. Pressures on inflation have picked up in recent months and pricing power is more evident. Longer-term inflation expectations remain well contained.
No decline, no danger — which means, to the disappointment of those placing personal gain above public welfare, no political exploitation.
Wall Street ended Friday on an incline while the press was overwrought — or happy to be overwrought — over news that American Gross Domestic Product expansion for the first quarter of 2005 was 3.1%. "Slowest growth in two years," charged headlines. True; or so said the initial report. GDP was believed to have grown by 3.1% during the three-month period previous to last, the fourth quarter of 2004, before its twenty-percent revision upwards four weeks later. Larry Kudlow doesn't take downturn talk seriously:
Three months ago the first government estimate of gross domestic product for the fourth quarter of 2004 came in at 3.1 percent at an annual rate. At the time, the market consensus expected 3.5 percent growth. Immediately, the mainstream media started talking about an economic slowdown. Turns out, that 3.1 percent was finally revised up to 3.8 percent. ...Well, history is repeating itself — even though, if you look under the GDP hood, you’ll find that the country’s economic engine is humming along.
Bears, Kudlow notes, have had a penchant for seizing on one or two clunker reports not to draw attention to a lagging market sector, which is reasonable and sensible, but for predicting economic entropy — too often politically motivated. Or they've dismissed positive general indicators while decrying flat numbers on employment, wages and the consumers' well-being. Were they watching the news on Friday? As oil prices fell the Commerce Department released two figures defying expectations: income rose by a third more than forecast, consumer spending up twenty percent above predictions.
Is today's economic disappointment objective or subjective?
ON 'SLUGGISH': I've made this comparison before but as a good one, it's worth repeating — the United States' economy outsizes anything in the world it hasn't outperformed. At 3.1% growth, America expanded at 500% the United Kingdom's pace; 3000% of Australia's; over 700% of Japan's; and unspeakably greater than Germany's pace, since the federal republic's Gross Domestic Product most recently shrank.
Where can this perspective be found in the news? Scarcely anywhere since it's hidden out of sight, says Bizzy Blog. Why must America consistently perform above average to stave off sudden, gripping media panic? Or has the bad press anything at all to do with economic expectations?
Nearly one year ago a congregation of terrorists in the extreme west of Iraq, close to the Syrian border, was targeted and destroyed by Allied aircraft. Widely conflicting accounts from locals were amplified by the elite press and controversy ensued. At the time, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt volunteered that "bad people have celebrations, too." Iraqi expatriate Ahmad offers one explanation.
First reported one month ago, the visual sighting of a planet around Brown Dwarf 2M1207 now comes with photographic evidence. Two, in fact; the second a gas giant orbiting AB Pictoris, a young star spinning in a disc of dust and gas like the one from which our own solar system is believed to have formed. It's heady stuff:
New images taken of an object five times the mass of Jupiter confirm that it is a giant planet closely orbiting a distant star, an international team of astronomers reported. The team of European and American astronomers said this is the first time a planet outside of our solar system has been directly observed — a claim other scientists have also made.
Strikingly, 2M1207's planet orbits at a distance twice that of Neptune; AB Pictoris' is more than nine Neptune-lengths away. Given that many confirmed exosolar planets — all of them enormous gas giants — sit in absurdly close proximity to stars, some described as being "blowtorched," these finds suggest planetary configurations more similar to our own, the detection of tiny nickel-iron planets then conceivably dependent only on Earth scientists' instrument precision.
