“Deeply Disturbing”

It’s not a crime if you brag about it on T.V. In fact, it’s hardly worth mentioning.

What is this about?

“We don’t know the answer, but we hope the inspector general will find out.”

Cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for refusing to do cartoons extolling the virtues and accomplishments of Trump. According to The Association of American Cartoonists; “Rob Rogers is one of the best in the country and his cartoons have been a wildly popular feature of the Post-Gazette. Readers looked forward each morning to opening their papers to see Rogers’ latest pointed commentary.”

Things changed for Rob when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hired Keith Burris as its Editorial Page Editor. Just weeks earlier and before Rob Rogers was let go, Editor Keith Burns had written about meeting a self-proclaimed classical liberal; ”To be a liberal: five principles

2) Free speech is essential.

Freedom of speech and expression is the sine qua non of tolerance and pluralism — the grammar of tolerance; the way we make the principle work.

Liberals fight for the right of every thinker and seeker to pursue his truth, to share it, and to be heard.

The greatest liberal thinker of the 20th century, Isaiah Berlin, said: “The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.”

Perhaps this rational by Mr. Burris did not apply to Rob Rogers and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a different idea of what liberalism meant within the confines of its employment. One commenter to Burris’s editorial claimed “Keith wants us to be the ‘right’ kind of liberals” and another said “Keith Burris defining a liberal is like Donald Trump defining femininity.”

Keith Burris in an editorial for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette came out in defense of Donald Trump calling some nations “shithole countries.” Entitled “Reason as racism,” Keith Burris argued that calling someone a racist is “the new McCarthyism” defending the sentiment behind President Donald Trump’s reported suggestion the United States take immigrants from an overwhelmingly white country such as Norway rather than “shithole countries” like Haiti or from continents such as Africa.

Representing 150 employees at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh in a letter to the editor it was “collectively appalled and crestfallen by the repugnant editorial.”

It may be that Rob Roberts no longer meets the qualifications of being a cartoonists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by not conforming to the political stance taken by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Keith Burris and the publisher John Robinson Block. “Cartoonists are not illustrators for a publisher’s politics,” Rogers quips in reply to Blocks and Burris’s critique of his performance at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“If I drew Trump more often than Block would have liked, it was because I base my cartoons on the most urgent topics at hand. Sadly, Trump provides that fodder every day.”

Some recent cartoons by Rob Roberts the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette would not publish:

Originated and authored by Rob Roberts

Publisher John Robinson Block is a Trump supporter who said during a 2013 community forum on racism that people of color need to pull themselves up “by their bootstraps” like they did in the “old days.” Both Block and Burris met with Trump on his private plane at Toledo Express Airport in September 2016 after a campaign rally.

It is pretty obvious which way the wind blows today at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Children make the bestest hostages

Criticisms of Trump in the business press are especially instructive, because they have no obvious partisan motivation. So Josh Barro’s article at Business Insider this morning, castigating his “bully-and-threaten approach to dealmaking,” is particularly noteworthy. He writes:

Does Greg Mankiw Know the History of U.S. Trade Policy?

May industrial production: meh

Industrial production is the ultimate coincident indicator. It is almost invariably the number that determines economic peaks and troughs.

In May it declined -0.1%. While that obviously isn’t a positive, it does nothing to suggest any sort of change of trend:

and is in line with any number of similar monthly numbers during the expansion.

In this second graph I’ve broken it down into manufacturing (blue, left scale) and mining (red, right scale):

May retail sales come in strong

Real retail sales for May came in strong, up +0.6% just in the month:

As the graph shows, this is on trend for the entirety of this expansion, and is also a new high, surpassing that of last winter.

Per capita real retail sales also made a new high, an indicator that the expansion is likely to continue at least one more year:

Chewing over the message of online job postings

Here’s an interesting graph I came across yesterday. It’s from the Conference Board. What it does is track the number of job postings online, and breaks them down between first postings and repeat postings:

Let me say first of all that it is of limited use. The data only goes back to 2005, so there isn’t much history — heck, online job postings didn’t even *exist* until the end of the 1990s! Further, online job postings have undergone a secular increase, as more and more companies have come to use it — so I would expect the historical trend to be positive.  But has it reached maturity? Or is it still in its growing stage?  I dunno …. and probably neither does anybody else.

But with all those cautions, it struck me that the big gap between first time and repeat postings in of a piece with the gap between actual hires and job openings in the JOLTS series:

Is Strengthening Labor Good for Development?

AG Jeffrey B. Sessions: “‘I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,’ he said. ‘Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.'”

I would quote back to the hypocrite Sessions.

Leviticus 19:33-34:

33 “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.
34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

or perhaps?

Matthew 25: 41-45:

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’
42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”

We were all once foreigners . . . except for Sessions, Trump and many politicians who despise Mexicans and others.