Bird's Eye View of Saturn

The Cassini space probe has been trekking across our Solar System for several years now, bringing us never-seen-before images of our celestial neighbors.

Cassini - a join project between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency - recently beamed us this series of photographs, showing Saturn in natural color.

Stunning.

(Hat tip to Towleroad)

Newslinks!

• Looks like the US isn't the only one to invade other countries without international sanction. Swiss Accidentally Invade Lichtenstein.
  
  
• Americans are waking up and smelling the medical bills, joining with the rest of the industrialized world. "A majority of Americans say the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes to do it, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."
  
  
• Bush backs off requiring a national ID card for another 20 months. "Under siege from states and angry lawmakers, the White House on Thursday moved back a deadline to implement national driver's license standards that critics say would seriously undermine personal privacy and burden states with a hefty bill."
  
  
• The bling starts to take a toll. "Music sales overall are down, but rap sales in particular have dropped 21 percent from 2005 to 2006."
  

House Passes EFCA; Fat Cat CEOs Tremble

The House of Representatives earlier today passed
the Employee Free Choice Act by a vote of 241-185.

13 Republicans voted for it while just 2 Democrats voted against.

EFCA faces an uphill battle the rest of the way. The Republicans will filibuster in the Senate; if it manages to squeak out, it then faces George Bush's veto pen (manufactured in an overseas sweatshop, paid for by MegaCorp USA ©).

For his part, Bush has already threatened to veto legislation fully implementing all of the 9/11 Commission recommendations because it grants airport screeners the right to unionize.

Nice priorities, George.

Iraqi Factory Found Making 'Iranian' Weapons

Fresh off the breathless reports eminating from the Whitehouse two weeks ago that Iran was supplying weapons ("explosively formed penetrators," EFPs) used against American forces in Iraq, a new discovery in Southern Iraq casts further doubt on the already dubious claims.

The Wall Street Journal reported (subscription req'd) Tuesday:

An American military raid in southern Iraq uncovered a makeshift factory used to construct advanced roadside bombs that the U.S. had thought were made only in Iran. The find raises fears that Shiite Muslim insurgents across Iraq may be able to manufacture large quantities of such weapons on their own...

This find...is forcing U.S. officials to reasses their belief that such bombs were being built in Iran and smuggled fully assembled into Iraq. U.S. commanders briefing reporters here said Iraqi militants appear able to construct the bombs out of materials purchased locally...

The US commanders said they hadn't found evidence linking the weapons to Iran's government, army, or paramilitary forces.

As Juan Cole noted at the time of the initial claims and reiterates today, most US military deaths are from Sunni insurgents to begin with. Shiite militias are much more active against the Sunnis than us. Iran supplying the Sunnis simply doesn't pass the laugh test.

That said, if Iraqi Shiites have the capability for widescale manufacture of these EFPs on their own--or are importating them from Iran--it's going to be a bloody civil war regardless of the targets.

Really my problem here is the Bush administration's total lack of credibility.

House of Labor

In a sign of the tidal shift in DC politics, the Democratic House of Representatives will today debate and vote on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). For years, Republicans had denied this legislation even a look in Committee.

EFCA is needed to overcome the inherent inequality in organizing campaigns to make it less onerous to join a union.

What's the problem?
Nationally, one in five union activists is fired. 78% of private employers require supervisors to deliver anti-union messages and over half threatened to shut down operations if employees join together in a union.

An employee can't decide for him/herself when supervisors are repeatedly pulling them aside to admonish them on the risk to their job if workers vote for the union.

For these violations of labor law, employers face only a slap on the wrist or reinstatement of the employee with back pay. There are no penalties strong enough to compel the employer to abide by the law. Even when employees have managed to overcome these hurdles and have certified their new union, employers routinely refuse to negotiate a first contract in good faith.

To help remedy this mess, EFCA has three equally important effects:

1. Strengthens penalties against employers who are found to engage in unfair labor practices;
   
   
2. Recognizes a union as the designated bargaining unit after a majority of employees have signed up;
   
   
3. Establishes a mediation and binding arbitration system if the employer and union cannot agree on a first contract.
   

What's so great about unions?
First off, as Americans we are endowed with the right to form unions thanks to the foresight of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What's more, unions are good for the individual employee and the economy as a whole. Unionized employees earn 30% higher wages than their nonunion counterparts, receive better benefits, and negotiate jointly for improved safety and working conditions.

In order to maximize their own profits, employers and the employees' unions must maximize total profits when negotiating for wages and benefits. Each side knows that if they take too much, they will eventually be hurt.

For instance, if employers withhold large profits, the employees will be less motivated and productive, reducing future profits. Conversely, the employees realize that employers must retain profits to invest in research and newer machinery.

Lastly, a union provides a framework to manage tensions between workers and firms, reducing lawsuits and improving morale. Employees are happier and stay longer, keeping employers' training and recruitment costs lower.

I'll leave you with a list of just a few of organized labor's achievements over the past century:

• 40 hour work week;
  
• Weekends;
  
• Workers' Compensation;
  
• Employer-provided health insurance;
  
• Safety standards (OSHA/MSHA);
  
• Disability insurance;
  
• Overtime
  

Remember to say thanks when you're throwing back your beer on Friday!

(Hat tip to the AFL-CIO)

Newslinks!

• Fired US Attorney in New Mexico alleges that "two members of Congress attempted to pressure him to speed up a probe of Democrats just before the November elections." The state's two Democrats have issued public denials; silence from the two Republicans.
  
  
• The housing market hasn't even begun to bottom out. "Sales of new homes plunged 16.6% in January... the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. It was the lowest sales pace in four years and represented the biggest percentage decline in 13 years."
  
  
• Florida town fires city manager of 14 years after he announces pending sex-change operation.
  

  
  Transgender activists on Wednesday called Stanton's firing a "shameful display of ignorance and bias." But they suggested Largo's quick decision to fire a respected government official may be the anecdote they need to convince Congress to extend employment protections to gays, lesbians and transsexuals.
  

  
  
  
• 1,646 Iraqi civilian deaths in February.
  
  
• Shame! Top military hospital officials knew about shantytown conditions. "But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews."
  

Newslinks!

• Mom in Tacoma, WA wins award for best mother/good citizen of the day. "A woman admitted Monday that she coached her two children to fake retardation starting when they were 4 and 8 years old so she could collect Social Security benefits on their behalf."
  
  
• Finally something the Pope and I can agree on (other than his fabulous Prada shoes) Pope speaks out against 'designer babies'. But then he kept talking...
  

  
  ROME (Reuters) - Pope Benedict on Saturday condemned genetic engineering and other scientific practices that allow people to select so-called "designer babies" by screening them for defects.
  
  In a speech to the Pontifical Academy for Life, a Church body of experts, the Pope also attacked artificial insemination.
  

  
  
  
• It's alive! Castro speaks. "He was heard speaking live on the daily radio programme of his ally, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez."
  
  
• Bush finally gets real, decides to talk to the neighbors. Baghdad will play host to the most awkward threesome since Big Bird walked in on Bert & Ernie.
  
  
• It seems us guys have a biological clock of our own. "But mounting evidence is raising questions about that assumption, suggesting that as men get older, they face an increased risk of fathering children with abnormalities."
  

**NOTE:Newslinks are updated periodically throughout the day. The newest ones are up top**

Manufacturing Recession

'Made in America' is taking another hit:

Wall Street was caught off guard when the Commerce Department reported yesterday morning that orders for durable goods — big items like home computers and factory machines — plunged almost 8 percent last month. That’s a big number, but it really shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise. In two of the last three months, the manufacturing sector has shrunk, according to surveys by the Institute for Supply Management that have been out for weeks.

**NOTE: I won't always be focusing this much on the economy, but with the big news out of Wall Street yesterday, it seems appropriate to give it some more attention and explain what's going on with the economy itself.**

Most Americans don't really 'get' the economy. They see the price of a gallon of gas or the changing mortgage rates as either out of man's hands or manipulated by corporate overlords.

Best case scenario, we were forced to take a semester or two of economics in college. Which we promptly forgot.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts exploring what the hell economic news means. The nightly recap of the Dow and Nasdaq tosses mention of trade deficits or consumer confidence without any look at why that caused those Wall Street traders to yell and hustle.

Manufacturing
A country's manufacturing industry is the basis for its wealth. It turns raw materials into something of use for consumers or other businesses. Even in a highly internationalized economy, it is impossible to imagine a large country prospering without some kind of healthy factories.

What would be the basis for the money to pay for the services offered by other companies? To buy all that crap down at Wal-Mart? Creating things is the clear foundation for wealth; the rest of the economy multiplies that base.

American manufacturing has been in trouble for a long time. With lower prices and fresher designs, foreign competitors decimated their domestic counterparts. For their part, corporate executives failed to see changes in consumer preference and were blindsided by more nimble foreign firms. This process started with the Japanese three decades, but has dramatically intensified with the full-scale entry of China into the world market.

However, we have managed to maintain respectable durable goods industries, such as automobiles, factory equipment, and furniture. These are larger, more long-lasting items that often require more high technology input and manufacturing techniques.

Any change in demand for durable goods is an indicator of how the consumer at large is thinking. If they are economically uneasy, they will postpone those big purchases until times are better.

Capital goods are a subset of durable goods. They only refer to goods purchased by other firms as investment in their business, such as factory or heavy construction equipment (think of a big, yellow bulldozer).

If business isn't buying capital goods, they don't think they have to expand. Basically, business is pessimistic about the future.

Check out this graph of capital goods (blue, left axis) and durable goods (red, right axis). The shaded section is the 2001 recession.

Although they generally move together, durable goods are much more volatile than capital goods; business is better at planning ahead than people are individually.

Until recently, this facet of the economy was humming along. Just as this hasn't meant that the wider economy was doing well, a downturn in the manufacturing sector isn't necessarily disaster.

However, as the New York Times notes:

For months now, the economy seemed to shrug off the forces weighing on it and just kept on growing. But those forces never went away. If anything, a number of them have gotten worse. And that’s the most worrisome part of the bad news from the nation’s factories: it fits into a larger story.

The sudden, major fall off in durable goods is worrying; the fall in capital goods more so.

(Hat tip to Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser)

Stocks Fall Worldwide

America will wake up Wednesday with--judging from the startled news reports--a whole new economy that is suddenly tettering on the verge of a recession.

Following stock sell-offs in China...

Chinese stocks plunged nearly 9 percent Tuesday, their biggest drop in a decade, rattling markets from Hong Kong and Singapore to as far away as New York amid concerns over a possible slowdown in China's economy.

One day after sending Shanghai's benchmark index to a record, investors dumped stocks to lock in profits amid speculation about a fresh round of austerity measures from Beijing to slow the nation's sizzling economy.

...and Europe...

Europe's leading stocks plunged on Tuesday after a sharp sell-off by investors in China sparked fears of a slowdown in the world's hottest economy.

Major European indexes closed about 2.8% lower

...the United States did it's part to suddenly realize the economy isn't doing so hot.

At the close, said Howard Silverblatt, an index analyst with Standard & Poor’s, the S.& P. 500 had lost $452 billion in market value, and other American stocks had shed an additional $180 billion ... It ended with a loss of 3.5 percent.

Even the participants apparently realize they haven't been paying attention and just woke up to the reality of the our economic house of cards.

“It was sort of one of those days where somebody snaps their fingers, and the market’s hypnotic trance is over,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist of PNC Financial.

It's days like yesterday that make me ponder the danger of listening too closely to Bush's harranges about how swimmingly the economy is humming along. He apparently was able to convince his sycophants on Wall Street to ignore what they ought to know.

This is to say that the state and workings of the economy are going to be a serious focus for this blog moving forward.

Update 11:12pm: Looks like Japan is keeping the ball moving (via Bonddad)

TOKYO, Feb 28 — Tokyo's Nikkei average tumbled more than 3 percent on Wednesday as investors rushed to sell shares of everything from Sony Corp. to Softbank Corp. following steep losses on Wall Street.

This, of course, followed the seven-year high reached on Monday.

National Explainer

The idea for National Explainer grew out of a story told by a great friend of mine. She has a co-worker--let's call her Laura-- at a reasonably successful family real estate business who--on paper--appears to be a well-qualified member of society and participant in the economy. Laura went to prestigious private elementary, middle, high schools and University, was raised in the best communities in the area, and was endowed with extensive family connections.

The trouble arose when Laura tried to make sense of current events. Following a day of particularly grisly violence and worried about someone currently abroad, she asked my friend if Iraq and Germany were close to each other. When presented with a map showing the relatively large distance between Germany and Iraq, she furrowed her brow.

"But where's Israel? That was a big thing about Iraq, right, because it was a threat to Israel?"

My friend showed her Israel, squeezed between Iraq's neighbors--Jordan and Syria--and the Mediterranean.

"But why would Germany mess with the Jews if they were all the way over there?!"

* blink * * blink * Excuse me?

It's not that Laura isn't capable of learning facts and understanding their significance, it's that she hasn't. My friend and I joked that what this country needed was a National Explain Day when everyone was required to sit and watch a day's worth of pertinent educational matter to catch them up with the state of world.

Something like An Inconvenient Truth (props to Al and company's success last night at the Oscars!) about a handful of very important topics: world geography, middle eastern culture, the American political system, et al.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that I would know anywhere near the appropriate amount to educate our nation on any topic. I will, however, try to back myself up with people that do. You know, experts.

I also have a full-throated and unabashed liberal bias and refuse to pretend otherwise. The horrific state of affairs domestically and on the international scene has been enabled by an electorate that likely did not fully understand much of what was happening in the wider world around them. We need to change that.

Being biased, however, does not make one untrustworthy nor necessarily partisan. I will give the Democrats my full support unless and until the Republicans offer a better alternative. That said, the modern GOP coalition of American Taliban theocrats and Grover Norquist "government in a bathtub" plutocrats is a non-starter. I will continue to criticize Democratic policies and proposals when they mess up, which is more frequently than I would hope.

I'm not going to get preachy with you or talk down to you. Hopefully. If I do, call me out. I can also understand what it's like to have a short attention span, so I'll try to keep it all as concise and interesting as possible.

That might be tough when I get to explaining Medicare part D...