Ferrablog

Last year, President Bush visited Canton, Ohio and gave a speech about how his economic plan was going to work and that manufacturing would be on the upswing. The site of that speech and his example of how great things were going? A manufacturing plant of the Timken Co., a steel company and an Ohio institution. Last month, Timken announced the Canton plant was being closed and 1300 jobs would be lost.

D'oh!

Here's a good Howard Fineman piece on this story.

And with Ohio being a key swing state and all, Bush was back a couple of weeks ago in Youngstown to tout another of his pet causes: medical malpractice "reform". Bob Herbert of the NY Times picks it up from here:

As he often does, the president called for reforms to make it more difficult for patients to seek compensation and to restrict the amount of damages that could be paid to those who prove they have been harmed.

To bolster his argument Mr. Bush introduced a local doctor, Compton Girdharry, to an audience at Youngstown State University. Dr. Girdharry, an obstetrician/gynecologist, said he had been driven from a practice of 21 years by the high cost of malpractice insurance.

The president praised Dr. Girdharry and thanked him for his "compassion."

If Mr. Bush was looking for an example of a doctor who was victimized by frivolous lawsuits, Dr. Girdharry was not a great choice. Since the early 1990's, he has settled lawsuits and agreed to the payment of damages in a number of malpractice cases in which patients suffered horrible injuries.

After these facts were brought to light, what did the White House have to say?

"Had this doctor provided that information," the spokesman said, "he would not have been at that event."

Double D'oh!

Well, sort of.

MSNBC pundit/Nation columnist Eric Alterman ran my thoughts on the latest Wilco album in today's Altercation, his daily web column.

The comments he ran are pretty much in line with this post of mine on here a few months ago, when the album was first leaked, and also were a cut and paste of another post of mine on RMAS the other day. Alterman had a run a review of the album by one of his readers the day before, which had a similar take to mine, and I wrote in to stress the absence-of-Jay-Bennett factor.

Speaking of Bennett, I picked up his most recent solo release, Bigger Than Blue, about 4-6 weeks ago. It wasn't as good as his first one, The Palace at 4AM, but it's not bad. Once again, he reworks a YHF Wilco outtake, this time the song known as "Cars Can't Escape" in the YHF sessions, but here titled "Reasons for You to Love Me", and yet another Woody Guthrie leftover from the Mermaid sessions, "Cajun Angel", is included. This AMG review preferred it to Palace.

And while staying in the world of music, I just snagged an advance of Dig It Up, the new Old 97's album and their first in three years, and first after Rhett Miller briefly went solo in 2002. Haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but on first listen it sounds like a retreat to their pre-Fight Songs days, i.e., more twang, less pop. Since Fight Songs was my favorite album of 1999, it's not a development I had particularly hoped for, but I'm going to give the album a chance.

...$183.33, according to this site. Ranked #42 in the "future value" category. I have no idea why, and what it all means (most assuredly nothing), but it was amusing to see nonetheless.

Recent blogging surveys show that Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Instapundit, is the most-read blogger. For those unfamiliar with him, Insty is a righty, although he usually comes across far short of a mouth-foaming wingnut. One of his pet causes is the bogeyman known as "liberal media bias", but today he gave a ridiculous example:

NOW WHAT COULD ACCOUNT FOR THIS?


At the beginning of the year, Bush's economic policies overshadowed all other issues in news coverage. However, since April, the networks have practically abandoned coverage of his economic policy - even as the economy and labor market have shown signs of significant improvement.


Go figure.

Okay, reader(s) out there, three guesses as to what's happened since April. Hmmm...let's see...there was Clarke, Rice and the 9/11 commission, followed by the Abu Ghraib scandal, and for the last 7-10 days, the death of Ronald Reagan. With the exception of Reagan, most of this bad news that overshadowed the slightly improving economic numbers is a result of Bush's policies, especially the fact that his elective war in Iraq has gone to shit.

As Insty would say: indeed.

Says it all.