Faced with a Republican base that clearly doesn’t seem to like Mitt Romney and the apparent rise of Rick Santorum, Jazz Shaw wonders if maybe the GOP shouldn’t just go ahead and nominate the former Pennsylvania Senator and hopefully bring some resolution to a debate that has been ravaging the GOP for years now:

One of the chief sources of internecine scrapping and grumbling among Republicans has come from the ranks of the social conservatives, or Socons as they are frequently known. We have already spent time speculating what would happen if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee. If he loses to Obama in November, the Socons will once again say that it was because cowardly, establishment party leaders failed to push forward a sufficiently conservative warrior who would fire up the base as a champion of socially conservative principles. If he wins, the Socons could quietly grumble that he’d simply gotten lucky against a deeply flawed president running on a failed record and bide their time until the next open seat in the Oval Office came up for grabs.

Similarly, if Newt Gingrich were to lose to Obama, the blame could be heaped on his own shortcomings and extensive, frequently controversial biography. After all, his three marriages and “complicated” history didn’t exactly make him a darling among evangelical Christians. The same excuses could be applied with slight modifications.

But Rick Santorum is a horse of an entirely different color who could serve as the ultimate test of this theory and put the question to rest once and for all. Is the secret to electoral success truly found in a take-no-prisoners, hard-core, rock-ribbed conservative? Is this truly what America is pining for?

As Jazz goes on to point out, when it comes to the core issues of social conservatism, there’s nobody left in the race that’s as hard core as Santorum. Whether it’s abortion, marriage and other rights for gays and lesbians, or even evolution, Santorum takes the social conservative position on each issue and turns it up a notch. This is the guy, after all, who doesn’t recognize any exception to his opposition to abortion even in the case or rape or incest, who wants to roll back Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and who said that same-sex marriage would one day lead to men marrying dogs, and who peppers his speeches with warnings about the threat to the Republic posed by the so-called “gay agenda.” If you’re a social conservative, there’s a lot to like about Santorum. Of course, at the same time, if you’re not a social conservative there’s a lot to dislike about him as well.

That last part, and the fact that most Americans don’t share the extreme positions that Santorum takes, would seem to make the electoral outcome of a Santorum- Obama General Election inevitable:

If you were worried that Team Obama could turn a Gingrich nomination into a referendum on the speaker’s history, Santorum would make that look like child’s play. Gone would be discussions of the president’s paltry record on job growth or the disastrous downstream effects of his environmental regulatory policy. The DNC would dump hundreds of millions of dollars into running 24/7 advertisements in the fall featuring grainy, black and white clips of Rick Santorum reading off the quotes I cited above and many, many more. Tens of millions of moderate and independent voters who are currently looking with dismay at Obama’s record and are kicking the tires of a possible Republican alternative would thunder for the exits. In short, I believe a campaign such as that would lead to Barack Obama winning in a landslide.

That would seem to be the logical outcome of a Santorum candidacy, although Santorum’s supporters inside the GOP will argue differently. There are people here at CPAC, for example, who think that the way to win the election in November is to emphasize a Santorum-like position on abortion and hammer the President with it for months on end up through the General Election. One can call these people detached from reality, and for the most part many of them do seem to have no real conception of how politics works in the United States or how you win elections, but perhaps the only way to convince people like this of the fact that reality is, in fact, real is to let them have what they want. Put that hard-core social conservative on the ballot and let them run their campaign based on those issues even though poll after poll shows them to be out of touch with the mainstream of the electorate. At the very least, maybe it would be what’s needed to finally start reconstructing the Republican coalition that put Ronald Reagan into office 30 years ago rather than letting the GOP continue to drift down the road.

If the reaction of the attendees at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, and the conservative pundits who have been watching the proceedings here at the Marriott Wardman Park, are any indication, it’s pretty clear that Mitt Romney is still not sealing the deal with the conservatives who have had doubts about him from the beginning of this process:

Mitt Romney wanted to use his CPAC speech Friday to allay concerns about his candidacy on the Republican right, but with one ad-libbed word he reinforced conservative fears that he’s not one of them.

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Romney told the annual gathering.

The response was immediate.

“Severely?”

“I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative,’” Rush Limbaugh noted on his show.

“That didn’t get a lot of applause,” firebrand Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) observed with a tight smile.

“Some things are too funny to comment on,” a laughing Newt Gingrich commented as he walked into the conference to give his own speech.

Romney’s address won repeated applause. He outlined his conservative credentials, both in his public and private life, and offered a strong indictment of President Barack Obama. But by going off-script to use an awkward modifier that no movement conservative would ever affix to themselves, he made clear why, despite vast advantages in money and organization, he’s still struggling to win the trust of a party base needed to secure the GOP presidential nomination. He’s just not a natural fit.

Success at CPAC is hardly a perfect indicator for how a candidate will perform with the Republican electorate. Romney knows this well, having captured the straw poll here in the past only to lose the nomination to a candidate, John McCain, who was booed when he addressed the conference just weeks before securing the GOP nod.

Yet Romney’s trio of losses Tuesday and his all-out effort to woo the base here — he used some variation of “conservative” 25 separate times in his speech — underscores the degree to which the party has shifted in the four years since McCain captured the nomination.

The old nominating game standbys, the notions of inevitability and success begetting success, have proven irrelevant in 2012. Romney rolled in Florida and cruised in Nevada — and then, without an aggressive campaign, had nothing to show for it in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. This election has proven momentum-proof to date.

That’s not to say that Romney’s speech got boos yesterday, because it didn’t. In fact, the applause was generally pretty loud and sustained at the right times and the speech was, overall, fairly good for a Romney speech (at least he didn’t break into an extended discussion about America The Beautiful). At the same time, though, it seemed at many times that he was trying far too hard to emphasize his conservatism as a way to address the doubts that many in the crowd no doubt have about him, and it seemed force at times. The “severely conservative” line, for example, got heavy applause but at the time seemed even more forced than it reads on paper. Would Romney have used a line like that if it weren’t for the fact that his opponents primary argument against him has been to accuse him of not being conservative enough? I doubt it.

Based on the entirely unscientific discussions I had with several people after the speech, it didn’t seem like Romney’s speech did much to win over the doubters, either. If you were an “Anybody But Mitt” person before the speech, you still were one after the speech. One speech isn’t going to change minds overnight, but the fact that it seems to have done little to alleviate the doubts suggests that Romney still has a way to go to win the base over. Of course, there’s nothing that succeeds like success and if Romney is the guy who ends up winning the nomination I personally have little doubt that most hard-core conservatives will get in line behind him rather quickly, because if there’s one person in the 2012 race they dislike more than Mitt Romney it’s Barack Obama, and they’re not going to pass up the chance to vote against him in November.

If the conservatives at CPAC are not buying Romney, though, they appear to be really warming up to Rick Santorum:

The man who’s making the latest bid to become the once-and-for-all Romney alternative, Rick Santorum, all but grabbed the CPAC activists by the lapels in his speech Friday, arguing that conservatives ought to nominate one of their own this time.

“Conservatives and tea-party folks,” Santorum said near the top of his remarks. “We are not just wings of the Republican Party — we are the Republican Party.”

The GOP, he argued, “will no longer abandon and apologize for the policies and principles that made this country great for a hollow victory in November.”

Later in his address, Santorum directly brought up the tea party-infused Republican 2010 wave, claiming that Republicans won because they were enthusiastic about their candidates.

Turning to this year’s election, and clearly alluding to Romney, the former Pennsylvania senator asked: “Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate of the party who the party’s not excited about?”

Santorum’s introducer and the chief patron of his super PAC was more blunt.

“It didn’t work with Bob Dole, it didn’t work with John McCain,” said Foster Friess, warning against nominating establishment favorites.

But with Santorum re-emerging and Newt Gingrich still lingering, Romney is making a newly aggressive case about what separates him from both Dole and McCain and his current conservative rivals.

Romney’s response to the rise of Santorum this time around looks like it’s going to be the same as his attacks on Gingrich, to point out the fact that Santorum’s record in Washington reveals him to be far from the conservative that he now claims to be. Whether that will work coming from a guy like Romney remains to be seen, but the more important point is that attacking your opponent’s bona fides isn’t necessarily the best way to convince the conservative base that they can be comfortable with you. And that, in the end, is the problem that Mitt Romney has had from the beginning of this process.

Photo via The Daily Caller

Late yesterday, the nation’s Catholic Bishops came out with a statement that noted at least two strong objections to the revised contraceptive coverage plan unveiled yesterday by the White House:

Hours after calling the Obama administration’s contraceptives compromise a “first step,” the Catholic bishops said Friday night they have “two serious objections” to the new policy and will fight its enactment.

First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”

“This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern,” the bishops said in their statement. “We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

And while Obama’s new plan allows religious-affiliated employers to refrain from paying for contraceptive coverage — insurers would be obligated to provide the coverage for free — the bishops said the change doesn’t go far enough.

“It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write,” the bishops said. “At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.”

(…)

[The Bishops] made it clear that a “lack of clear protection for key stakeholders — for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular nonprofit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals — is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.”

This last part seems to be a bit of moving the goalposts on the part of the bishops. Previously the discussion was about religious institutions that run entities like hospitals, now it’s been expanded to included entirely new classes of people, some of whom arguably have far less of a “religious liberty” claim than an organization like the Catholic Church might. Should the owner of a small manufacturing company be treated the same, for the sake of this argument, as the Catholic Church? I think there’s a fairly weak case for doing that, which is why I don’t think the religious liberty argument doesn’t really work in this case. The real question, for which no answer has been provided to date that I’ve seen, is why the Federal Government should have any power at all to tell employers and insurance companies what the contents of their contracts should be. That’s the real issue here, not some culture war argument over a non-existent “war on religion.” Why the right isn’t making it is beyond me.

A new poll from Public Policy Polling shows Rick Santorum surging far ahead of Mitt Romney in among Republicans in a new nationwide poll: Riding a wave of momentum from his trio of victories on Tuesday Rick Santorum has opened up a wide lead in PPP’s newest national poll. He’s at 38% to 23% for Mitt Romney, 17% for Newt Gingrich, and 13% for Ron Paul.

It used to be that Gingrich was leading with all these groups and Romney was staying competitive enough with them to hold the overall lead. No more- a consensus conservative candidate finally seems to be emerging and it’s Santorum.

The best thing Romney might have going for him right now is Gingrich’s continued presence in the race. If Gingrich dropped out 58% of his supporters say they would move to Santorum, while 22% would go to Romney and 17% to Paul. Santorum gets to 50% in the Newt free field to 28% for Romney and 15% for Paul.

It’s all quite improbable, really. The former Senator from Pennsylvania who lost his 2006 re-election bid by one of the highest margins of any incumbent Senator in American history, and who spent most of 2011 languishing at the bottom of the polls now the front runner in the race for the Republican nomination? Well it’s worth noting that the PPP poll is not consistent with other nearly contemporaneous polls that were released shortly before it was. Fox News’s poll, for example, showed Romney leading by ten points and the latest iteration of the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll shows Romney up by 12 over Santorum, although it’s worth noting that Gallup’s poll does show that Romney’s support level has been steadily declining while Santorum’s has been steadily increasing.  At the same time, though, neither poll (and no other poll so far) shows the kind of massive surge for Santorum that PPP does in this poll so, we could be looking at a poll that is catching the cutting edge of a real trend or, we could be looking at a massive statistical outlier due to bad sampling or some other factor.

Nonetheless, it’s fairly clear that Santorum’s victory on Tuesday, as symbolic as they may have been, have benefited him. Additionally, his speech at CPAC yesterday was fairly well received and his supporters appear to be mounting an aggressive campaign for support in the CPAC Straw Poll, the results of which will be released later today. So, this really could be Santorum’s moment, and Nate Silver argues that he has a better chance at winning the nomination than some might think:

Republicans have so far declined several opportunities to coalesce around Mr. Romney. They did not do so after he announced his candidacy, nor after Mr. Perry sunk in the polls, nor when Mr. Cain withdrew, nor after Mr. Romney’s apparent win in Iowa and actual win in New Hampshire. And after big wins in Florida and Nevada, he is struggling yet again.

Mr. Santorum is a fresher face, comparatively speaking. He clearly did not get much momentum from his strong showing in Iowa. But his Iowa surge had been largely confined to that state to begin with, and he was hurt by the fact that the next state to vote was New Hampshire, a bad fit for him culturally, as well as the fact that he was not announced as the actual winner until after the New Hampshire voting. On Tuesday, by contrast, he earned victories in three states, and he seems to be on the move in national polls as well.

But Mr. Santorum will not be as easy a mark for Mr. Romney as someone like Mr. Gingrich. The results in Florida had seemed to suggest that Mr. Romney could win a state any time he wanted to by blanketing it with advertising dollars. But almost all of those ads were negative, and almost all of them attacked Mr. Gingrich — most of them on his personal failings like his resignation from Congress and his ties to Freddie Mac.

Mr. Romney’s attacks on Mr. Santorum, by contrast, have focused on more venial sins: that he is a “career politician” who defended earmarks.

Meanwhile, Mr. Santorum closed strongly and outperformed his polls in several states so far, including Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri and South Carolina (where he was projected to place fourth by the polls but finished in third). That could indicate that voters like Mr. Santorum the more they get to know him — indeed, his favorability ratings are strong among Republican voters — or that his supporters are more enthusiastic. Either quality would be an asset going forward, allowing him to win his share of close calls against Mr. Romney.

Thus, it seems at least possible that Mr. Santorum’s momentum will be more sustainable. To have a chance at winning in the delegate count, he will need to supplant Mr. Gingrich as Mr. Romney’s major rival in the South. The results in Missouri, a borderline Southern state where Mr. Santorum beat Mr. Romney by 30 points without Mr. Gingrich on the ballot, suggest that he could run strongly if Mr. Gingrich were to bow out.

Like I said, it all seems very improbable, and the idea of Rick Santorum as the Republican nominee should scare the crap out of any Republican who actually wants to have a chance of winning in November. But this is been a year of improbabilities and, given the continued reluctance of conservatives to make peace with Mitt Romney, maybe it isn’t all that improbable after all that they’d coalesce behind the most improbable, and seemingly unelectable, candidate of them all.

Yesterday, rumors swept the Internet, primarily via Twitter, that the new leader of North Korea had been assassinated in Beijing:

The claim that Kim, supreme leader of North Korea since the death of his father Kim Jong Il in December, had died apparently stemmed from a message sent out by a man who works near the country’s embassy in Beijing.

He posted on Sina Weibo: ‘Downstairs from the office, the cars at the Korean embassy are increasing rapidly, now there are over 30 cars. It’s the first time I’ve seen this situation, did something happen in Korea?’

This seemingly innocuous question, bolstered by other witnesses who saw an unusual number of cars at the embassy, was magnified by the power of internet gossip into a rumour that Kim had been assassinated by gunmen who burst in his bedroom and were subsequently killed by his bodyguards.

Wilder commentators even spun the supposed assassination in to a broader claim that a coup was underway in North Korea which could depose the Kim dynasty, rulers of the country ever since it split with the south in 1948.

But when ABC News asked U.S. officials for confirmation of the assassination rumours, one simply told them, ‘There’s nothing to this.’

Another official said: ‘Our experts are monitoring the situation and we see no abnormal activity on the [Korean] peninsula and nothing that credits that tweet as accurate.’

It was thought that the death of the elder Kim would herald a period of instability, potentially leading to regime change, but those expectations have not been fulfilled.

A less dramatic but equally bizarre explanation for the large number of cars at the North Korean embassy was suggested by Gawker and Chinese news agency Phoenix.

They pointed out that this month would have been the 70th birthday of Kim Jong Il, and a large number of events including tours of China and North Korea are set to mark the anniversary.

It sounds like a totally implausible story, of course. The idea that the leader of a foreign country could be assassinated in his own country’s embassy in the middle of Beijing and the only news about it would be on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter makes no sense at all. And yet, the story started getting repeated. Then, someone set up a fake BBC News account on Twitter yesterday afternoon that send out a “Breaking News” alert confirming Kim’s death. That story ended up getting repeated by thousands of people, and seen by thousands more. And it was all untrue.

Max Fisher offers an explanation for why people might have found a story like this believable despite the questionable sourcing:

The answer may have something to do with how Americans conceive of the difference between open societies, like ours, and closed societies, like those of China and North Korea. If a Western head of state had been assassinated in a neighboring Western capital, the news would saturate the globe within moments. We understand that information doesn’t work the same way in China or North Korea, that news is controlled and its flow regulated. But the Western imagination often sees Chinese and North Korean societies as something akin to George Orwell’s 1984, when the truth is much more complicated.

Information about what happens inside North Korea is, in fact, rare and often inscrutable. Kim Jong Il had been dead for hours and his country officially rudderless when the news finally broke, something that would likely have been impossible in any other country. Key events are rarely understood by the outside world, if we even find out. Last December, a freight train was derailed in a suspected attack; no one outside North Korea knows why or by whom. The hermit kingdom’s bizarre and Orwellian opacity has long fascinated the world. The images out of the country are so bizarre and hard information so scant that there’s little to prevent our imaginations from running wild. And the status of Kim Jong Un’s rule is still so uncertain (is he really in charge or is the military? does he maintain tight control or is the regime nearing collapse?) that we are ready to believe anything.

But China is not North Korea. Though it still sometimes appears that way in the Western conception, the country has transformed since the days of Mao Zedong, when they really were similar. Though the Chinese state is still one of the world’s most repressive, reliably ranking at or near the bottom of every list of countries by civil liberties or basic rights, Chinese society is vibrant and noisy, especially in the capital, where the “assassination” reportedly took place. Individuals may not be allowed to organize, protest, or discuss sensitive events, but they do it anyway, in small ways they expect will be tolerated. If they do any of them too much, they know, the consequences can be brutal. The Communist Party’s hand is heavy enough to prevent mass gatherings in Tienanmen Square, but not to keep hordes of witnesses to an assassination totally silent.

Beijing has almost 20 million people; maybe about half of its Internet users are on Weibo (the rate is 30 percent nationally). Why did only one of those witness the broad-daylight murder of a visiting head-of-state, who presumably would have been plowing through traffic with an enormous entourage? Why didn’t any of the many Western and other foreign reporters scattered across the city either see or hear anything? And why did no one report the massive security shut-down that Beijing’s army-sized police force certainly would have launched across the city?

These are all questions that a Chinese observer would have known to ask before quickly dismissing the story as an obvious fraud. But far-away Western bloggers and their readers, unfamiliar with the locations of China’s red-lines and perhaps a bit confused about the differences between Beijing and Pyongyang, might be willing to believe that Kim Jong Un’s assassination could really go unreported.

So perhaps people need to realize that Mao doesn’t rule China anymore, and that they need to learn a little bit more about Asia.

Contrary to myth, the USA is still a major manufacturing power. But the factory has changed radically, with the need for unskilled workers all but vanishing.

Last month’s Atlantic has a long feature highlighting the case of Standard Motor Products and two of the workers in its Greenville, South Carolina plant.

I had come to Greenville to better understand what, exactly, is happening to manufacturing in the United States, and what the future holds for people like Maddie—people who still make physical things for a living and, more broadly, people (as many as 40 million adults in the U.S.) who lack higher education, but are striving for a middle-class life. We do still make things here, even though many people don’t believe me when I tell them that. Depending on which stats you believe, the United States is either the No. 1 or No. 2 manufacturer in the world (China may have surpassed us in the past year or two). Whatever the country’s current rank, its manufacturing output continues to grow strongly; in the past decade alone, output from American factories, adjusted for inflation, has risen by a third.

Yet the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost. Factories have replaced millions of workers with machines.

That much, I knew. I was also vaguely aware of this: “far fewer people, far more high-tech machines, and entirely different demands on the workers who remain.” That is, I understood that American manufacturing was more machine-based and high tech; I didn’t understand how much the jobs of those people who remained had changed.

Why is anything made in the United States? Why would any manufacturing company pay American wages when it could hire someone in China or Mexico much more cheaply?

I came to understand this much better when I learned how Standard makes fuel injectors, the part that Maddie works on. Like so many parts of the modern car engine, the fuel injector seems mundane until you sit down with an engineer who can explain how amazing it truly is.

[A longish discussion about how complicated modern automotive fuel injectors are.]

Luke Hutchins is one of Standard’s newest skilled machinists. He is somewhat shy and talks quietly, but when you listen closely, you realize he’s constantly making wry, self-deprecating observations. He’s 27, skinny in his dark-blue jacket and jeans. When he was in his teens, his parents told him, for reasons he doesn’t remember, that he should become a dentist. He spent a semester and a half studying biology and chemistry in a four-year college and decided it wasn’t for him; he didn’t particularly care for teeth, and he wanted to do something that would earn him money right away. He transferred to Spartanburg Community College hoping to study radiography, like his mother, but that class was full. A friend of a friend told him that you could make more than $30 an hour if you knew how to run factory machines, so he enrolled in the Machine Tool Technology program.

At Spartanburg, he studied math—a lot of math. “I’m very good at math,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you. I got formulas written down in my head.” He studied algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. “If you know calculus, you definitely can be a machine operator or programmer.” He was quite good at the programming language commonly used in manufacturing machines all over the country, and had a facility for three-dimensional visualization—seeing, in your mind, what’s happening inside the machine—a skill, probably innate, that is required for any great operator. It was a two-year program, but Luke was the only student with no factory experience or vocational school, so he spent two summers taking extra classes to catch up.

[...]

In many ways, Luke personifies the dramatic shift in the U.S. industrial labor market. Before the rise of computer-run machines, factories needed people at every step of production, from the most routine to the most complex. The Gildemeister, for example, automatically performs a series of operations that previously would have required several machines—each with its own operator. It’s relatively easy to train a newcomer to run a simple, single-step machine. Newcomers with no training could start out working the simplest and then gradually learn others. Eventually, with that on-the-job training, some workers could become higher-paid supervisors, overseeing the entire operation. This kind of knowledge could be acquired only on the job; few people went to school to learn how to work in a factory.

Today, the Gildemeisters and their ilk eliminate the need for many of those machines and, therefore, the workers who ran them. Skilled workers now are required only to do what computers can’t do (at least not yet): use their human judgment. This change is evident in the layout of a factory. In the pre-computer age, machines were laid out in long rows, each machine tended constantly by one worker who was considered skilled if he knew the temperament of his one, ornery ward. There was a quality-assurance department, typically in a lab off the factory floor, whose workers occasionally checked to make sure the machinists were doing things right. At Standard, today, as at most U.S. factories, machines are laid out in cells. One skilled operator, like Luke, oversees several machines, performing on-the-spot quality checks and making appropriate adjustments as needed.

The combination of skilled labor and complex machines gives American factories a big advantage in manufacturing not only precision products, but also those that are made in small batches, as is the case with many fuel injectors. Luke can quickly alter the program in a Gildemeister’s computer to switch from making one kind of injector to another. Standard makes injectors and other parts for thousands of different makes and models of car, fabricating and shipping in small batches; Luke sometimes needs to switch the type of product he’s making several times in a shift. Factories in China, by contrast, tend to focus on long runs of single products, with far less frequent changeovers.

It’s no surprise, then, that Standard makes injectors in the U.S. and employs high-skilled workers, like Luke. It seems fairly likely that Luke will have a job for a long time, and will continue to make a decent wage. People with advanced skills like Luke are more important than ever to American manufacturing.

But why does Maddie have a job? In fact, more than half of the workers on the factory floor in Greenville are, like Maddie, classified as unskilled. On average, they make about 10 times as much as their Chinese counterparts. What accounts for that?

[...]

“Unskilled worker,” [factory manager Tony Scalzitti] narrates, “can train in a short amount of time. The machine controls the quality of the part.”

“High-skill worker,” on the other hand, “can set up machines and make a variety of small adjustments; they use their judgment to assure product quality.”

To show me the difference between the two, Tony takes me from Luke’s station through an air lock and into Standard’s bright-white clean room—about a quarter the size of the dirtier, louder factory floor—where dozens of people in booties, hairnets, and smocks, most of them women, stand at a series of workstations.

[...]

Take Maddie’s station. She runs the laser welding machine, which sounds difficult and dangerous, but is neither. The laser welder is tiny, more like a cigarette lighter than like something you might aim at a Klingon. Maddie receives a tray of sealed injector interiors, and her job is to weld on a cap. The machine looks a little like a microscope; she puts the injector body in a hole in the base, and the cap in a clamp where the microscope lens would be. The entire machine—like most machines in the clean room—sits inside a large metal-and-plexiglass box with sensors to make sure that Maddie removes her hands from the machine before it runs. Once Maddie inserts the two parts and removes her hands, a protective screen comes down, and a computer program tells the machine to bring the cap and body together, fire its tiny beam, and rotate the part to create a perfect seal. The process takes a few seconds. Maddie then retrieves the part and puts it into another simple machine, which runs a test to make sure the weld created a full seal. If Maddie sees a green light, the part is sent on to the next station; if she sees a red or yellow light, the part failed and Maddie calls one of the skilled techs, who will troubleshoot and, if necessary, fix the welding machine

The last time I visited the factory, Maddie was training a new worker. Teaching her to operate the machine took just under two minutes. Maddie then spent about 25 minutes showing her the various instructions Standard engineers have prepared to make certain that the machine operator doesn’t need to use her own judgment. “Always check your sheets,” Maddie says.

By the end of the day, the trainee will be as proficient at the laser welder as Maddie. This is why all assembly workers have roughly the same pay grade—known as Level 1—and are seen by management as largely interchangeable and fairly easy to replace. A Level 1 worker makes about $13 an hour, which is a little more than the average wage in this part of the country. The next category, Level 2, is defined by Standard as a worker who knows the machines well enough to set up the equipment and adjust it when things go wrong. The skilled machinists like Luke are Level 2s, and make about 50 percent more than Maddie does.

For Maddie to achieve her dreams—to own her own home, to take her family on vacation to the coast, to have enough saved up so her children can go to college—she’d need to become one of the advanced Level 2s. A decade ago, a smart, hard-working Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.

It feels cruel to point out all the Level-2 concepts Maddie doesn’t know, although Maddie is quite open about these shortcomings. She doesn’t know the computer-programming language that runs the machines she operates; in fact, she was surprised to learn they are run by a specialized computer language. She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.

As generous as that excerpt is, the story is much, much longer and worth reading.

But the cases of Luke and Maddie really stuck out. Maddie, writer Adam Davidson acknowledges, is quite bright. She’s hard working and friendly. She graduated high school with honors and expected to go on to college and get a good job. Alas, she got pregnant as a high school senior. You know the rest: “The father and Maddie didn’t stay together after the birth, and Maddie couldn’t afford to pay for day care while she went to college, so she gave up on school and eventually got the best sort of job available to high-school graduates in the Greenville area: factory work.”

As a result, she’s in a job that, quite literally, a reasonably intelligent person can learn to do as well as it can be done in one eight hour shift. And the gap between her Level 1 job and Luke’s Level 2 job is so vast that it’s hard to imagine her ever bridging it. Oh: it will eventually be cheaper to have a robot do her job. And she knows it.

Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie’s job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it’s simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense.

“What worries people in factories is electronics, robots,” she tells me. “If you don’t know jack about computers and electronics, then you don’t have anything in this life anymore. One day, they’re not going to need people; the machines will take over. People like me, we’re not going to be around forever.”

This isn’t a matter of Tony and the high muckety-mucks at Standard screwing over their workers to keep a little extra for themselves. It’s just the brutal realities of a very competitive industry–supplying aftermarket car parts. If Standard doesn’t stay as efficient as possible, someone else will start undercutting their prices and put them out of business.

What’s even more interesting to me than the Maddies of the world–which, again, I at least understood as a vague reality–are the Lukes. He’s probably in the 95th percentile in mathematical smarts, has invested several years in acquiring skills, and will never stop having to acquire more highly complex knowledge. And he enjoys that fact, finding it challenging and rewarding. But despite all that, his job still sounds incredibly tedious and repetitive.

Every five minutes or so, Luke takes a finished part to the testing station—a small table with a dozen sets of calipers and other precision testing tools—to make sure the machine is cutting “on spec,” or matching the requirements of the run. Standard’s rules call for a random part check at least once an hour. “I don’t wait the whole hour before I check another part,” Luke says. “That’s stupid. You could be running scrap for the whole hour.”

Luke says that on a typical shift, he has to adjust the machine about 20 times to keep it on spec.

Because he’s conscientious, he’s actually working much harder than he’s expected to. Even so, he’s basically just measuring things. And making 20 minute adjustments over a 12-hour period. He works three of those a week, 6 pm to 6 am Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. At $20 an hour.

For the United States to rebuild a large, manufacturing based middle class, we’ll need a whole lot of Lukes. In all honestly, I don’t know how we’ll find or create them. Even if, say, a quarter of us are capable of becoming proficient in calculus–and I’d say that’s wildly high–what percentage of those with that capacity will have Luke’s tolerance for tedium and be self-driven to keep learning? Further, even if we could make a few dozen million more Lukes would we be able to create enough jobs for them? And why won’t the Indians and Chinese be able to create them faster and cheaper?

Manufacturing collage by Shutterstock.

The Marine Corps on Thursday once again did damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS — a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others.

The Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the Marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 will not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naïve mistake.

The Marines believed the SS symbol was meant to represent sniper scouts and never intended to be associated with a racist organization, said Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a spokeswoman at Camp Pendleton, where the Marines were based.

“Sniper scouts?”  That’s a new one. 

Here’s the photo, that apparently first appeared in a blog entry (url not cited) at the Knight’s Armament website:

It is impossible to know, just from the photo, what the deal is.  One thing is for sure:  it is a pretty shocking (and indeed, jarring) image.   At best is an example of howling ignorance and at worst is suggesting something more sinister (at least in terms of one or more of the individuals in this photo).  To wit:  where in the world would the flag have come from in the first place?  It would seem that someone would have had to have brought it with them to Afghanistan (as I can’t imagine that there is a local branch of “Neo-Nazis R Us” out in rural Afghanistan).  This is suggestive that someone in this group has unsavory political leanings.  It is bad enough to own such a flag and several quanta worse to think that it was sufficiently important to a person that it was something that they would have brought with them to a combat zone in the middle of nowhere.

Even if your kid is good at sports in high school, gets a scholarship, and excels in college, there’s almost no way they are going to go pro.

Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg tweeted a link today to the NCAA’s official estimated probabilities that athletes in six major sports become professionals.

Only one sport (baseball) had more than 2% of NCAA players go pro.

Here are some of the numbers

• 11.6% of college baseball players play professionally, 0.6% of high school baseball players do
• 1.7% of college football players play professionally, 0.08% of high school football players do
• 1.3% of college ice hockey players play professional, 0.1% of high school ice hockey players do
• 1.2% of men’s college basketball players play professionally, 0.03% of high school men’s basketball players do
• 1.0% of men’s soccer players play professionally, 0.03% of high school soccer players do
• 0.9% of women’s college basketball players play professionally, 0.03% of high school women’s basketball players do

The higher numbers for baseball can be explained largely by the fact that, in addition to Major League Baseball, there are also a large number of minor professional leagues in all parts of the United States. Though the numbers aren’t broken down, I would imagine that the percentage of college baseball players playing for the Major Leagues is about as low as it is for professional football and basketball. Baseball is also unusual in that it was drafting players out of high school, usually into a team’s farm system, long before most other major sports were doing so.

The lesson? Don’t assume little Johnny is going to be set for life just because he’s doing really, really well in Little League.

As anticipated, earlier today the Obama Administration announced a change in the requirement for employers to provide contraceptive coverage in the insurance they are required to provide to employees under the PPACA. Unfortunately it seems like more of a smokescreen than a solution and seems to be based on the idea that there is such a thing as “free” birth control:

Seeking to allay the concerns of Catholic leaders and head off an escalating political storm, President Obama on Friday announced an adjustment to the administration’s health-care rule requiring religiously affiliated employers to provide contraceptive coverage to women.

Women still will be guaranteed coverage for contraceptive services without any out-of-pocket cost, but will have to seek the coverage directly from their insurance companies if their employers object to birth control on religious grounds.

Religiously-affiliated non-profit employers such as schools, charities, universities, and hospitals will be able to provide their workers with plans that exclude such coverage. However, the insurance companies that provide the plans will have to offer those workers the opportunity to obtain additional contraceptive coverage directly, at no additional charge.

Churches remain exempt from the birth-control coverage requirement. And their workers will not have the option of obtaining separate contraceptive coverage under the new arrangement.

The administration’s decision to make an adjustment reflected the high political stakes of an issue that had generated intense criticism in recent days from a growing chorus of Catholic and Republicans leaders, as well as some Democrats. In Congress and on the campaign trail, leading Republicans attacked the Obama administration’s position as a war on religion.

In an appearance in the White House briefing room, Obama said he instructed aides to craft a solution quickly in the wake of the outcry.

“After many genuine concerns were raised over the last few weeks — and the more cynical desire to make this into political football — it became clear that spending months hammering out a solution not an option; we had to move this faster,” Obama said, flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whose agency is administering the rule.

“I’ve been confident from the start we could work out a sensible approach here,” the president added. “Some folks in Washington may want to treat this as another political wedge issue, but it shouldn’t be. I never saw it that way. It’s people with goodwill on both sides of the debate sorting through a complicated issue to find a solution that works for everyone. Today’s announcement has done that.”

White House officials said Obama called Archbishop Timothy Michael Dolan, Keehan and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards to explain the new rules. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the conversations.

During a conference call with reporters to explain details, a senior White House official said that the impact of the change on insurers would be cost neutral–and even potentially cost-saving–because on balance it would reduce the need to provide medical coverage related to unwanted pregnancies and other conditions that can be avoided with birth control.

“The new policy ensures women can get contraception without paying a co-pay and addresses important concerns raised by religious groups,” the White House said in a statement.

Not surprisingly, Administration allies and other groups on the left are hailing the new compromise — after all, who doesn’t like to get stuff when other people are going to be paying for it? — but it’s unclear how Church groups are going to react to this. To some extent, it seems like a shell game after all. Unlike the Hawaii Rule, the new plan does not contemplate employees paying for the additional cost of contraceptive coverage (which is, in all likelihood marginal at best) but it also doesn’t require religious employers to pay for the coverage. Instead, the payments will be made by that abstract entity the “insurance company” who some people in the White House apparently think has a pot of money somewhere that comes from some unknown source. However, as Sarah Kiff notes, there is a huge catch in the plan as revised that is likely to make it difficult to sell:

The catch here is that there’s a difference between “revenue neutral” and “free.” By one report’s measure, it costs about $21.40 to add birth control, IUDs and other contraceptives to an insurance plan. Those costs may be offset by a reduction in pregnancies. But unless drug manufacturers decide to start handing out free contraceptives, the money to buy them will have to come from somewhere.

Where will it come from, since neither employers nor employees will be paying for these contraceptives? That leaves the insurers, whose revenues come from the premiums that subscribers pay them. It’s difficult to see how insurance companies would avoid using premiums to cover the costs of contraceptives. They could, perhaps, use premiums from non-religious employers. Those businesses wouldn’t likely object on faith-based grounds, but they probably wouldn’t be keen on footing the bill for people who aren’t on their payrolls.

The proposal is also likely to raise concerns among religious employers, who may think (not entirely incorrectly, I would submit) that the cost of the contraceptive coverage will still ultimately come out of the insurance premiums they pay, and that it will be taken into account when premium increases are calculated over the life of the plan. From the perspective of the Catholic Bishops and the other religious organizations that have been protesting about this rule, it’s hard to see what has really changed from the original rule. As I said, it’s not as if the insurance companies have sources of revenue independent of the premiums they receive (or that it would even be proper for them to use those revenues for insurance purposes if they did), so ultimately the only entities that pay for the cost of coverage are the employer or the employee.

As I’ve said since the start of this debate, for me this isn’t a religious argument. I’m still not entirely convinced by the religious liberty arguments that the Church and its allies make, although whether or not those claims succeed in court is less important than the political impact that they might have. For me, the issue is whether Congress and the White House should be dictating the terms under which employers provide non-salary benefits to their employees at all. That’s a much larger debate, of course, and it will likely end up being resolved by the Supreme Court. However, if the Obama Administration truly wants to accommodate the concerns of religious institutions, then it needs to get off the high horse and admit that there is no such thing as “free” birth control, or “free anything else for that matter. Someone will end up paying for it in the end and, unless they want to take the political risk of alienating Catholics and other religious voters with a change that seems to be little more than a fig leaf, then maybe they need to consider something like the Hawaii Rule even if that means that employees end up picking up the cost.

Update: This statement from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, while not an endorsement at all, is more positive than one might have expected:

WASHINGTON— The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) sees initial opportunities in preserving the principle of religious freedom after President Obama’s announcement today. But the Conference continues to express concerns. “While there may be an openness to respond to some of our concerns, we reserve judgment on the details until we have them,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of USCCB.

“The past three weeks have witnessed a remarkable unity of Americans from all religions or none at all worried about the erosion of religious freedom and governmental intrusion into issues of faith and morals,” he said.

“Today’s decision to revise how individuals obtain services that are morally objectionable to religious entities and people of faith is a first step in the right direction,” Cardinal-designate Dolan said. “We hope to work with the Administration to guarantee that Americans’ consciences and our religious freedom are not harmed by these regulations.”

Obviously, if the Bishops ultimately sign off on this proposal then the issue is closed. The statement, however, makes it seem as if there is at least some negotiation still to be had here.

Heather Horn reveals that, contrary to the hype created by a new book an a WSJ column based on it, French mothers do not have some magical formula for raising well behaved children. Rather, it appears that the American author based her research on three or four minutes of casual observation of some rich French women.

Marion Nestle of Food Politics points to a sign of our times: “Pepsi cuts 8,700 jobs; 4th quarter profits rise.” He cites these numbers from a Reuters report:

Pepsi reports increases in:

• Annual dividends: 4%
• Expenditures on advertising: an additional $500 million
• Expenditures on display racks: an additional $100 million
• Fourth quarter profits: from $1.37 billion a year ago to $1.42 billion
• Earnings per share: from 85 cents a year ago to 89 cents
• Revenues: up 11% to $20.2 billion

Nestle rails at the juxtaposition of rising profits and “adding 8,700 out-of-work people to an already depressed job economy” and figures “public pressure and regulation” are in order.

Actually reading the linked report, however, presents a different picture.

PepsiCo outlined a plan on Thursday that included cutting thousands of jobs and increasing advertising in an effort to revive the company’s soft drink business in North America. The company’s chief executive, Indra Nooyi, said that it would have a larger-than-expected decline in near-term earnings.

PepsiCo, based in Purchase, N.Y., expects to cut 8,700 jobs, or 3 percent of its global work force, across 30 countries as part of a plan to save $1.5 billion over the next three years. It also plans to raise advertising and marketing spending by $500 million to $600 million this year, centering on 12 brands including Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Tropicana, Quaker and Doritos. It will spend an additional $100 million this year to improve delivery and display racks.

Ms. Nooyi, whose five-year tenure has been marred by the global financial crisis, recession and higher commodity costs, also took responsibility for a series of management missteps including underinvesting in some brands and overpromising Wall Street.

[...]

Ms. Nooyi has come under pressure from Wall Street for a stagnant stock price and a lagging North American beverage business. She has been criticized for taking her eye off the core business of sodas to expand into healthier products, such as hummus and drinkable oatmeal.

The company said its earnings in 2012 would decline 5 percent from 2011. It forecast an additional 3 percentage point decline from foreign exchange rates.

So, the 4% dividend boost is designed to bolster investor confidence and the company is actually down 5% from last year. And facing a 7% increase in commodity costs in the coming year. On the face of it, then, it’s perfectly reasonable that Wall Street would be putting pressure on the company to increase performance vis-a-vis its competitors (notably, of course, Coca-Cola) by getting rid of money losing distractions.

On the other hand:

PepsiCo reported a fourth-quarter profit of $1.42 billion, up from $1.37 billion. Earnings per share rose to 89 cents, from 85 cents a share in the same quarter a year earlier. Excluding items, PepsiCo earned $1.15 a share, topping analysts’ average estimate of $1.13 a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Revenue rose 11 percent to $20.2 billion.

So, while earnings for the year were down, earnings were up slightly from the same quarter. More interestingly, revenues were up fantastically even if profits aren’t. Presumably, that’s a function of the sales of such things as “hummus and drinkable oatmeal” bringing in a substantial amount of gross but netting very little or even losing money. Apparently, the money is in the established junk food brands “Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Tropicana, Quaker and Doritos.”

One of our recurring discussions on the late, lamented OTB Radio program was whether companies had an obligation, especially in tough economic times, to keep as many employees as revenues allowed. Should CEOs continue to seek maximum efficiency–cutting employees and marginally profitable departments and subsidiaries to wring out the last amount of profit? Or should they instead keep such things as a lagging drinkable oatmeal plant going so long as they can afford to?

Certainly, all the pressures on the CEO are in the direction of the former. That’s especially true of a huge corporation in a globalized economy, where the business really isn’t a part of the community in a meaningful way and has no sense of obligation to anyone other than the shareholder.

Story via John Personna. Business image via Shutterstock.

In what has to be the most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time, senators in the Arizona state legislature have introduced a bill that would require all educational institutions in the state — including state universities — to suspend or fire professors who say or do things that aren’t allowed on network TV. Yes, you read that right: at the same time the Supreme Court is poised to decide if FCC-imposed limits on “indecent” content in broadcast media are an anachronism from a bygone era, Arizona state legislators want to limit what college professors say and do to only what is fit for a Disney movie (excluding, of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. After all, those films are PG-13!).

(…)

he bill doesn’t even require that the profanity be uttered in the classroom, it just generally says that if a professor or, for that matter, a K-12 teacher, engages in FCC-regulated conduct or speech at all, he or she can lose their job. Of course, even if this were limited strictly to classroom speech it would still be laughed out of court as unconstitutional on its face.

(…)

he law not only hobbles the ability to teach about sexuality and other non-Victorian topics, but it also puts teachers in jeopardy for teaching such mainstays as The Canterbury Tales, The Catcher in the Rye, certainly Ulysses, and probably every work by an obscure English writer named William Shakespeare. These days, such a law could certainly make any professor or teacher think twice about teaching Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. And how on earth could you possibly teach a class about cinema studies without showing movies like The Godfather, The Graduate, Annie Hall, or for that matter, Pulp Fiction?

The proposed law would b e unconstitutional for a number of reasons, but that’s not even half the story here. What, exactly, is it about Arizona schools that makes legislators so concerned about potty-mouthed teachers? Things sure have changed since I was in third grade.

I noted after Tuesday’s contests in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado that turnout in those contests was down across the board, continuing a trend that we’ve seen since the beginning of the year in every contest with the exception of South Carolina. This has led many pundits, and especially many Democrats, to speculate that Republican voters are less enthusiastic about the 2012 race than some might have anticipated, which potentially does not bode well for November. Today in the Wall Street Journal, however, Peggy Noonan notes that there are other signs out there that there may be something else going on other than disaffected Republicans:

There are some small indicators something else may be going on. Cable news ratings, which should spike in an election year, and which indicate interest on both the left and the right, are relatively flat, with mild increases here and there. Broadcast evening news ratings continue their gradual decline. One network anchor, on being urged to capture more of the joy and ferocity of the Republican contest, sighed. “Every time we show those guys, our numbers go down.” A major website operator tells me people aren’t clicking on political stories.

But it’s not confined to the Republican side. Look at President Obama’s State of the Union numbers. That speech famously blankets all television and radio networks. His first speech to a joint session of Congress, in February 2009, drew 52 million viewers. A year later the State of the Union had an understandable fall-off to about 48 million. In 2011, another fall: 43 million watched. A few weeks ago his 2012 State of the Union drew just 38 million. From 52 to 38: That’s quite a decline. And again, during an continuing crisis and in a presidential election year. As for the president’s interviews and other speeches, well, when was the last time you heard someone ask excitedly, “Did you hear what Obama said?”

Whose numbers are up? The NFL’s.

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it.

There’s a problem with trying to draw a conclusion based on television ratings, of course. With the constantly expanding menu of choices available on television and online, it’s somewhat inevitable that the audience for any particular broadcast will be lower as people go off in search of other offerings. Additionally, the ratings services don’t currently track people who watch cable news online or on mobile devices, which is segment of the population that is only going to grow lager. At the same time, though, something like the State Of The Union Address is broadcast by pretty much every cable news outlet, and every broadcast network so a drop off of 14 million voters over three years, and lower viewership in an election year when people are arguably starting to pay more attention to these issues may indeed be indicative of something other than Republicans who are annoyed at a crappy field of candidates.

There’s other evidence to support Noonan’s thesis that we’re looking at an electorate burned out on politics in general rather than something indicative of the only the state of affairs in the Republican Party. Public dissatisfaction with Congress is higher than it’s ever been, and the only direction that public disapproval of Congress seems to be moving these days is lower and lower. In the new Gallup poll, for example, Congressional job approval hit the lowest point it has ever been at since galup has been polling that question. Eventually, Congressman is likely to be as disreputable a profession as Mafia Hit Man, and at least Mafia Hit Men bring some canoli along.

You can also see evidence of public dissatisfaction in the bellwether Right Track/Wrong Track poll which, while off the highs it hit in November, is still higher than its been at any time in the Obama Presidency. Given the still fragile state of the economy it’s not surprising that Americans would still think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. but I think there’s more to it than that. For three years or more now, they have seen a Washington incapable of doing anything to address their problems. Three times last year, they saw Congress drag a budget dispute down to the wire because of an inability to either compromise or seriously address the issues facing the country, only to “resolve” it by reaching a deal that accomplished nothing but kicking the can even further down the road. They’ve seen a United States Senate that’s gone more than 1000 days without passing a budget and House Republicans who have embraced a no-tax orthodoxy that even their great hero Ronald Reagan would not (and did not) embrace. And they’ve seen a President who seems more comfortable being a follower than a leader. And through it all they see a stagnant economy and a world where they can’t be sure that their children will have a better life than they did. Is it any wonder that people are pessimistic about the future of the country, or that they might be coming to have a “to hell with it all” attitude about politics?

Barack Obama was elected President four years ago on a message of “hope and change” and a promise to change Washington. Those who had faith in that message were, by and large, naive in the belief that change could or would happen quickly. However, when they look around and see that nothing has changed at all, one has to wonder if they’re just going to conclude it’s not worth caring about this crap anymore.

With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups.

The move, based on state models, will almost certainly not satisfy bishops and other religious leaders since it will preserve the goal of women employees having their birth control fully covered by health insurance.

Sources say it will be respectful of religious beliefs but will not back off from that goal, which many religious leaders oppose since birth control is in violation of their religious beliefs.

There’s no word on what form this compromise will take, but it will apparently not go as far as the so-called “Hawaii Rule” that allows religious institutions to opt out of the requirement as long as they provide employees with information regarding the availability of additional coverage for contraceptives:

Sources say it will involve health insurance companies helping to provide the coverage, since it’s actually cheaper for these companies to offer the coverage than to not do so, because of unwanted pregnancies and resulting complications.

So, instead of the employer picking up the cost of coverage, insurance companies would. The devil is, as always, in the details, but this may be a way out of what has become something of headache for the Administration.

REUTERS/Rupak De …

A lot of good captions for this picture, its worth checking them all. Here are the winners…

✰ THE WINNERS ✰

First: PeterOly – “I think we better get indoors. The Sand People are easily startled but they’ll soon be back, and in greater numbers.”

Second: Peterh – Auditions for the Indian version of “What’s My Line” is about to get very monotonous…

Third: Alan Bourdius – It will take more than just the ‘stache to win this year’s John Bolton Look-Alike contest.

HONORABLE MENTION

Hibernian Hillbilly – In a touching ceremony, Wes Welker’s moustache,is laid to rest.

Jazz Shaw – The fallout from Newt’s plan to have children work as janitors continues.

Michael Hamm – Hindu’s come prepared for the Mexican Pinata party.

John425 – Lunch break for US manufacturer’s Call Center employees.

Maggie Mama – Typical liberal: Calling me a racist because I made the off-hand remark that “they all look alike to me”.

LorgSkyegon – Despite the popularity of the “Where’s Waldo?” series, India’s attempt at a “Where’s Gandhi?” was deemed far too easy.

ℛODNEY’S BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

In the line at the Burger King, orders were rather monotonous, “Make me one with everything, please.”

In an unprecedented act of generosity Donald Trump donated his hair, providing ‘staches to hundreds of the indigent.

the solemnity of the Ghandi event aside, boys will be boys. It only took one “Do or do not, there is no try,” and they were all yodas with light sabers.

When the First Lady, who misread the memo, showed up as Condi, all hell broke loose.

The Thursday Contest is already really pumped up.