Seth,
Will, as always, makes a number of good points.
I agree with you that the Democrats wrongfully make them a target and doubt that gains them any
political capital. The economy (yup, we got one despite the overweening focus on Islamofacism) is said to be great. Since 2001, we note:
Jobs Created: +2.3%, GDP: +11.5%, Worker Productivity: +18.4%, Corporate Profits: +72%,
Median Household Income: (-0.5%). People are working harder for less, the US has dropped to 8th in the world in per capita GDP. With the economy soaring and average folks getting left out, there is a restiveness, not in terms of real numbers, but in a feeling of not keeping up.
Hard to judge if this is a factor yet, but if the trend continues, it very well may be. "Let's keep 'em focused on the 'war on terror"' strikes me just as inane as a war on WalMart. You know more on economy than I, what's with productivity
climbing while real income declines? Good post,
makes one think.

BB --

It's about numbers. We have been climbing out of a recession, and a vast amount of the newly created jobs are in the entry level or lower paying ballpark. That's not unusual, though the figures can be easily manipulated to meet a political agenda. That brings down the national average.

The "overweening" focus on Islamofascism, heh.

It is not easily digested by the sensibilities of most westerners that there could be people who literally live to kill them and sacrifice their own lives at the same time, even after we've endured 9/11 and heard about scores of suicide bombings. People tend to believe they are safe, that the gov't will protect them, that since they've personally done nothing to offend terrorists the terrorists will leave them alone.

Wrong. We have all done something to offend them -- we are infidels. That, according to their scriptures and their convictions, is all they need. We are dealing with a mentality that has absolutely nothing in common with ours -- it is a mentality that most of the world left behind centuries ago, a mentality that never left the single digit centuries.

And these people have access to WMD of various kinds, they just haven't deployed any (save for the snail mailed anthrax).

It is something to worry about, big time.

BB's right on, which seems strange considering he considers himself a liberal! LOL! Don't worry, Seth, I rag BB about that all the time on my blog.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the left would focus on the real war instead of on Wal Mart? *sigh*

"25,000 people applied for the 325 openings"

What a WONDERFUL economy the Republicans have created ...

Gayle --

The left can't focus on the real war -- that would mean standing behind the President. They would rather see another 9/11 while Bush is still in office, so they can blame it on him and try to get a Dem into the White House. They are very sick people, not the same Dems we had when I was a kid.

BB probably has a conservative deep inside him, trying to bust out -- he must, because he generally makes a lot more sense than most liberals I've ever met.

So the Dems will fight the War On Wal-Mart while the Republicans fight the War On Terror. Of course, once we've won, somewhere down the road, they'll also claim the credit for it.

John --

Contrary to the liberal line that Bush was responsible for the recession, it actually began in 1999 - 2000. Nothing a President does manifests itself in the same term, hence: Clinton inherited a healthy economy from the Reagan & Bush 1 years. Late in his second term, his first term caught up with him. The recession began.

The instant Bush beat Gore, we were suddenly in a recession and it was Bush's fault, 2 months before Dubya took office. Sorry, but I follow things like that.

Since he did, and since he introduced his tax cuts, unemployment has been shrinking by as many as a quarter million jobs per month. That's actually pretty damn good, considering the economic disruption caused by 9/11.

25,000 aps for 325 openings is a beginning, cleaning up the mess of 8 years of having a Democrat in the White House takes time.

We may have to agree to disagree on that. I happen to follow those things closely myself, and to my mind those above a certain income level are being taken very, very good care of - at the expense of folks who might seek employment at Wal-Mart - since Bush arrived.

I find no superheroes on either side, frankly, but I am particularly disgusted with the brazeness and audacity of Bush and Co. That doesn't make me a fan of Clinton, so it's not worth bringing up his special brand of brazeness and audacity.

Also, Hillary Clinton once sat on the Wal-Mart board.

John --

I know about Hillary and Wal-Mart. T.H.-Kerry, and various others who condemn Wal-Mart also have stock in the company, which can only mean they are not seriously expecting to "win". :-)

Seth,
Uh, "BB probably has a conservative deep inside him, trying to bust out.." Dang! Who ratted that I wore an 'I LIKE IKE' button through 5th Grade?
Was it that yakky Punky Schmidt again?

BB --

LOL! I hope you still have the button, it's got to be a collector's item.

Keep tellin' you, you can't trust that Schmidt kid...

Seth wrote:

25,000 aps for 325 openings is a beginning, cleaning up the mess of 8 years of having a Democrat in the White House takes time.

Yes six years into a Republican administration they still are trying to clean up 8 years of peace & prostperity.

Mission nearly accomplished.

Arthur --

You mean the "peace" we enjoyed while Clinton all but ignored terrorist attacks on two of our embassies and the USS Cole, to name just a few incidents? Or the "prosperity" that began going down the tubes over a year before Bush was sworn in for his first term?

Seth,
"Peace"...US combat KIA Riyadh 7, Somolia 8,
USS Cole 7. "Prosperity"..you've seen the Dow
and Nat'l debt charts, 1990-present,I won't bore you. I'm just not quite convinced Bush's problems are entirely the fault of Jimmy C and
Willy C. But, maybe, if you would concede that
Ronnie R.'s mess made things hard for Willy C....
Damn, what happened to dignified presidential names like Abe?

BB --

Ronnie R. didn't immediately preceed Willy C., and you will recall that all Ronnie R. had to do was get himself sworn in to secure the release of the hostages in Teheran, unlike Jimmy C., who had all kinds of time to make something happen, besides an unsuccessful rescue attempt -- why? Because even the heathen holding the hostages over there knew the game had changed when a Republican took over the Presidency.

The economy began gaining momentum near the end of Reagan's presidency and blossomed into Bush 1's -- the high tech industry led the way. As I said, economic change never happens during the term responsible, it's always in the next or the one after that.

The Left would prefer to live with dhimmi status under a caliphate than in a democratic republic with George W. Bush.

Sheer madness.

Atheling2 --

Dhimmitude might be the perfect therapy for BDS {Bush Derangement Syndrome}, LOL. However, I wish that instead of trying so hard to have the therapy come here, they would go to the MidEast and get it there.

A month of this magic therapy would cure them completely, and they would come home and sing Dubya's praises.

Seth,
Assume from your assessment of WalMart/economy that your expertise lies in business. If so, what's your take on the unraveling of Ford Motor?
[one of those ironies, a liberal like me refuses to own a foreign car!] I saw somewhere that the average Ford worker got something like $64/hr in
w/b, compared to $43 for some Japanese mfg in the south, which would be a factor. Also, I wonder if Ford's customer base eroded so far that they may never be a big player in autos again? Just wondering on your take?

atheling2 wrote;

The Left would prefer to live with dhimmi status under a caliphate than in a democratic republic with George W. Bush.

Sheer madness.

Nonsense.

Show where one Democrat has said he/she prefers to live under 'a caliphae'.

Just one will do.

Seth,
"the heathen holding the hostages over there knew the game had changed when a Republican took over the Presidency." I guess you mean they knew
they would be getting free arms and ammunition shortly through the lend-lease called Iran-Contra?

BB --

I'm not anywhere near an expert in the hands on manufacturing of automobiles, but my first question would undoubtedly be "If the average compensation, presumably a median figure, of an auto worker at Ford is 64K, not including other considerations like company insurance, furnished safety equipment, matching Social Security taxes, etc, what is the correlation between skill levels and wages? How much do they pay someone who operates an on-off lever all day and how much do they pay someone who does serious electrical work on the vehicles?"

The UAW is pretty powerful.

To digress a second, there's the problem with unions today -- and in turn with the portside viewpoint: The left yells that many American companies are selling us out by outsourcing millions of jobs. The unions fight for higher wages and more benefits. They use strikes and the threat of strikes as their primary weapons.
Most employers compensate their employees what the market will bear for said employees' contributions to the bottom line. Employee related issues are not the only and often enough not the most expensive considerations an employer has to address. The bottom line is the amount of return the employer receives above what he/she/it has invested in it. When the cost of doing business becomes too large in proportion to net profit, the employer has two choices: Go out of business or find a way to produce the product cheaper. Since the unions here could give a rat's ass whether a company can afford to pay employees above market value or not, this is pretty much a one-way street -- the only alternative the employer has is to go someplace where production is cheaper. In short, when the left howls about outsourcing, they neglect to consider that the greed that created this trend began with the unions. Funny thing, I grew up in a retail family and in years past have been in and out of the business, everywhere from sales to management to writing newspaper ads as a freelance copywriter, and have noticed an interesting phenomenon -- Republican employers in non-union businesses, in my own experience, have always compensated employees more generously than Democrats in the same size operations. Go figure. I guess that would fit well in the "Practice what they preach" Department.

Back -- In Ford's case, the problem is external, as in, "Why aren't those damn people buying our cars!?"

I don't have a clue.

I commented awhile back about the AFA's campaign against Ford because of the auto manufacturer's advertising in a gay publication opposite explicit material, and the fact that Texas Ford dealers have been suffering from the backlash, perhaps that's part of the explanation.

The left's war on traditional morality has definitely provoked a backlash from mainstream America, I can say that much with certainty.

Arthur --

It's not in what they say or don't say, it's in their actions.

Fighting tooth and nail to defeat the President's every attempt to protect this country from Islamofascism as the left does, under the guise of a false and under the present circumstances irrelevant "moral high ground", using the SCOTUS and the federal courts (explicitly forbade by our country's founders, and as we now see, for good reason) to intercede in military matters and screeching falsely to the world (and the enemy)that most Americans hate Bush and oppose the War On Terror are all healthy indicators that Atheling2 is right on target.

The left will never learn that actions speak louder than words.

BB --

No, they knew(similarly, I forget whether it was Uday Hussein or his brother, when the coalition stormed into Baghdad, said "Bush is not Clinton!") that Reagan was not Carter.

BB --

Possibly of interest,

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115837176261565277.html?mod=home_whats_news_us