Uh oh: GM backlog looking a lot like 2008

“Is GM falling into old, bad habits?” asked one industry analyst when the backlog data for General Motors was made public yesterday. The bailed-out automaker now has a growing inventory in its truck lines of 122 days worth of sales, nearly twice that of its non-bailout domestic competitor Ford Motors for similar lines. With sales flattening in the auto market, GM has now returned to the high inventory of its pre-bailout condition:

The Detroit-based automaker, 33 percent owned by the U.S. after its 2009 bankruptcy, has 280,000 Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups on dealers’ lots around the country. If sales continue at June’s rate, that would be enough to last until November.

After GM’s truck inventory swelled to 122 days worth of average sales, the company said 100 to 110 will be normal going forward for such a large and complex line of vehicles, compared with 60 to 70 days for most models. Peter Nesvold, a Jefferies & Co. analyst, isn’t convinced.Ford Motor Co. (F), which makes similar trucks, is running at 79 days, and Nesvold says GM averaged 78 days on hand at year end from 2002 to 2010.

“It’s unbelievable that after this huge taxpayer bailout and the bankruptcy that we’re right back to where we were,” Nesvold, who has a “hold” rating on the stock, said in a telephone interview. “There’s no credibility.” In a research note he asked: “Is GM falling into old, bad habits?”

GM says that the answer to the question is “no,” but there are other similarities noted by Bloomberg in this analysis. A former chief sales analyst calls GM’s line “dated,” and now predicts that GM will have to heavily discount in the fall to move the moribund inventory. The pickup line hasn’t changed since 2006. Ford, in contrast, began offering a V-6 engine on its trucks as an option and has been rewarded with significant movement in inventory.

The federal bailout of GM only made sense if the automaker’s difficulties entirely sprang from the financial collapse (caused mainly by government intervention in housing and financial markets through Fannie and Freddie junk bonds), and had been both competitive and profitable without it. That was obviously not the case; GM had struggled for years against foreign and domestic competition. The bailout forced GM to make some long-needed changes, such as consolidation of its product lines, as well as allowed the company to benefit from a politically-engineered bankruptcy that left the legacy benefit issues largely on the backs of taxpayers.

However, the basic management issues remained and apparently still do. Even with the bailout, the company has trouble operating in a profitable and efficient manner. That points to the bailout being a very bad investment for taxpayers, and with billions of dollars already lost on loans to GM and Chrysler, is a rather easy conclusion to reach. As Doug Ross puts it, more succinctly:

You mean that abrogating bankruptcy law, screwing over secured creditors and rewarding Democrats’ union supporters with billions in equity, tax breaks and subsidies didn’t really fix GM?

Gee, that was hard to predict.

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Nike signs Vick to new endorsement deal

Despite the bad publicity that still dogs Michael Vick, with fans still hounding him for his dogfighting conviction, Nike decided to re-sign the Eagles QB to a new endorsement deal four years after canceling a multimillion-dollar contract. No terms were released, but one has to conclude that Vick didn’t sign for kibbles and bits:

Nike re-signed Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick to an endorsement deal Friday, nearly four years after dropping him amid his legal troubles.

Nike, which signed Vick as a rookie in 2001, terminated his contract in August 2007 after he filed a plea agreement admitting his involvement in a dogfighting ring. Vick spent 21 months in prison.

CNBC first reported the deal. Terms were not released.

”Michael acknowledges his past mistakes,” Nike said in a statement. ”We do not condone those actions, but we support the positive changes he has made to better himself off the field.”

Nike resumed a formal relationship with Vick in 2009, in which Nike supplied Vick with product for free, but paid him no fee. It appears that Nike intended to test the waters with Vick in two ways: to see whether an association with him would create a consumer backlash, and to see whether Vick really had turned a new leaf. After two years, Nike must have concluded that an endorsement deal wouldn’t backfire on them.

Coughing up free product is one thing, however; paying Vick cash for an endorsement is quite another. Vick has done well to keep his nose clean after his second chance in the NFL, but outside of Philadelphia, plenty of fans still believe that Vick got off too lightly for his dogfighting and cruel treatment of the dogs in his possession. Did Nike have no other athletes in better position to represent its product than Vick? And what will the slogan be for this ad campaign — “Stop dogging it” instead of “Just do it”? And does it make sense to sign Vick to a new endorsement deal when it appears likely that the NFL will shut down for at least part of the 2011 season?

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Leaders of the Christian Right find their preferred candidate in Rick Perry

In advance of any kind of campaign declaration (or even any kind of confirmation of campaign rumors), Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry is sitting pretty for the GOP presidential nomination.

Just two recent successes, ripe for bragging: The Republican Governors Association, of which Perry is chair, raised $22.1 million for the first half of the year, eclipsing its six-month totals for 2007 to 2009, and erased its debt left over from the 2010 elections. (Admittedly, that cash is not for presidential campaign purposes, but it surely says something about Perry’s popularity and the general appeal of a Republican governor.) And Perry’s supporters independently secured a vendor slot at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll, just because they’re that committed to him as a(n undeclared) candidate.

Add to that, this: Leaders of the Christian Right are now seeking him out behind the scenes.

In early June, TIME has learned, a group of prominent figures on the Christian Right held a conference call to discuss their dissatisfaction with the current GOP presidential field, and agreed that Rick Perry would be their preferred candidate if he entered the race. Among those on the call were Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; David Barton, the Texas activist and go-to historian for the Christian Right; and John Hagee, the controversial San Antonio pastor whose endorsement John McCain rejected in 2008.

Religious conservatives have often played a substantial role in choosing past Republican nominees, but leaders on the Christian Right have been conspicuously quiet so far in this campaign season. Privately, however, they are enthusiastic about Perry and are encouraging the Texas governor to throw his ten-gallon hat into the ring.

Perry’s favor with the Christian Right is relatively new, and he is their candidate of choice as much by default as anything.

If that’s true, he’s a pretty decent default. Take his current project — an all-day Christian prayer event called “The Response” — as just one example of the way he’s showing his support for the Christian conservative cause. The American Family Association will co-sponsor the explicitly Christian event, scheduled for Aug. 6 in Houston. Perry also recently signed a gay marriage ban into law at a Christian school in Fort Worth with evangelical heavyweights Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Rod Parsley (Ohio mega-church pastor), and Don Wildmon (American Family Association) in attendance.

So, it’s not so much a surprise that the Christian Right would support Rick Perry, as it is a surprise they find the present GOP field so dismal. You’d be hard-pressed to find two more socially conservative presidential candidates than Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, for example. Santorum might be easily dismissed — as Time’s Amy Sullivan so wittily put it, “his poll numbers in Iowa are smaller than the number of children he has” — but Bachmann’s impressive surge in popularity might conceivably have garnered her the support that Perry has picked up seemingly without so much as lifting a finger.

It must come back to that little thing called electability. In the minds of the Christian Right, it seems, Perry’s got it.

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Video: Mexican officials want Fast & Furious officials extradited for trial

Imagine, Fox News’ William Lajeunesse asks, if Mexico had decided to investigate American drug distribution and links to cartels by allowing a flood of cocaine to cross the border for tracking purposes. Americans would be outraged, especially as deaths mounted, and would demand the extradition of the government officials who sent the cocaine streaming into the US that caused the deaths. Similarly, some government officials in Mexico want the extradition of ATF and DoJ officials who greenlighted Operation Fast and Furious and flooded their country with illegal weapons:

While I understand their passion, Mexico’s government doesn’t have a very sturdy moral platform on which to preach in this instance. There is ample evidence of official corruption in Mexico that already does send illegal drugs over the border. The US would probably demand extradition if they could identify officials as part of that process, so the point is well taken, but it’s hardly a hypothetical, either.

Besides, those officials should be held accountable here in the US for their handiwork, especially as those guns continue to flood back into the US. The administration’s attempt to score points on those who legally own and purchase weapons in the US backfired when the ATF decided to become an illegal gunrunner itself. There must be accountability for those who ordered and approved the illegal sale and trafficking of these weapons.

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Reagan parallels won’t work for Obama in 2012

So says Jonah Goldberg in USA Today as a rebuttal to supporters of Barack Obama in advance of the 2012 election. The latter have claimed that the trajectory of the 2012 election parallels that of 1984′s presidential contest, with high unemployment and a short distance from a sharp and painful recession. Goldberg points out that the trajectory isn’t similar at all — in fact, it’s nearly an opposite:

5.1, 9.3, 8.1, 8.5, 8, 7.1 and 3.9.

While that might sound like a controversial series of Olympic curling scores, these numbers in fact add up to a grave problem for Barack Obama.

They are the quarterly percentage gains in gross domestic product starting in 1983 through to Election Day 1984. And they aren’t the only significant numbers. In 1984, real income for individuals grew by more than 6% and inflation plummeted. The unemployment rate in November 1984 was still 7.2% — relatively high — but ithad dropped from 10.8% in December 1982, and it was clear the momentum was for even lower unemployment. “Staying the course” with Ronald Reagan made sense to most people, which is why he won re-election in a 49-state landslide.

Sadly for Obama — but far worse for the country — that kind of growth seems like a pipe dream. Last month, the Federal Reserve lowered its forecast for 2011 GDP growth from a range of 3.1% to 3.3%, made just two months earlier, to a much slower 2.7% to 2.9%. And it revised downward its projections for 2012 and 2013 as well.

The White House clearly assumed that they would see similar numbers from their stimulus package spending. As Jonah points out, Obama’s team encouraged comparisons to Reagan last year in anticipation of “Recovery Summer” and a wave of economic growth. Instead, the best quarter in the last five has been 2010Q3′s 2.8%, a number so anemic that it falls more than a full percentage point below Reagan’s worst quarter leading into his re-election. The initial Q2 number due at the end of this month will almost certainly fall below Q1′s 1.7%, and might go negative based on economic indicators in April and May.

Unemployment has also been just as problematic. Obama promised that spending $775 billion would keep the jobless rate below 8%. Instead, we have only had a handful of months below 9% in the two-plus years since the stimulus passed, and unemployment has started rising again. Civilian participation in the workforce has fallen to a 30-year low, masking the real jobless rate. The June figure is due on Friday, and like the Q2 GDP number, is almost certain to be unhelpful for the administration.

Obama has a year to get the economy moving in order for the comparison to be fully valid. By this time in 1983, however, Reagan already had a roaring recovery and a kick-start to the massive job creation that dropped unemployment by more than three full percentage points by the time of the election. The more relevant comparison might be George H. W. Bush in 1992, when a weak recovery had started by the end of 1991, but the perception of recession stuck with the electorate. And that might be the best-case scenario Obama has.

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WH intervenes in Texas execution

Over the weekend, quite a few e-mailers sent over the story of the Obama administration’s attempt to intervene in a controversial Texas execution. Humberto Leal Garcia faces execution for a kidnapping, rape, and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1994. Leal, a Mexican national, had not been advised of his consular rights, and his case has become a cause celebre at the UN and a source of anxiety for the State Department:

The Obama Administration is taking the unusual step of trying to halt the execution of a Mexican citizen who has been sentenced to die for the brutal kidnapping, rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl more than 16 years ago.

U.S. authorities want to delay Humberto Leal Garcia‘s execution –scheduled for Thursday — for up to six months to give Congress time to consider legislation that would directly affect his case.

The federal government rarely intervenes in state death penalty cases.

Leal, a 38-year-old from Monterrey, Mexico, wasn’t told he could contact the Mexican consulate after his arrest-something his lawyer’s argue is mandatory under international law.

The UN has already appealed to Gov. Rick Perry for a stay, but in Texas, that decision has to originate as a recommendation from the clemency board, which has refused to provide one. One federal court has already rejected Garcia’s claims of lack of due process regarding his consular rights, which is complicated by the fact that Garcia had lived in the US since he was 2 years old. He was in his early 20s when he committed the rape-murder of a teen. This is not the case of a tourist arrested for a crime and being unfamiliar with his rights and legal process.

Still, the federal government sees a need to protect itself from the impression that it won’t enforce the treaties that guarantee consular access for foreign nationals in legal trouble — and it’s not difficult to see why. Americans traveling abroad might be more vulnerable than most, making assumptions about the universality of legal processes that simply have no basis in fact. Any administration would want to protect the reciprocity of consular-access agreements in order to prevent other nations from railroading American citizens based on ignorance of their rights and access to effective counsel through consulates.

In fact, as Elizabeth Meinecke pointed out at Townhall, the Obama administration is not the first to intervene in this type of controversy:

It is rare for the federal government to go to the Court to support delays of execution in state cases. The new legal efforts of Leal’s defense counsel and the Obama Administration are an attempt to gain a different outcome for him than similar efforts met three years ago. Then, the George W. Bush Administration and defense lawyers made the attempt to save another Mexican with the same treaty complaint, Jose Ernesto Medellin. After losing his challenge in the Supreme Court, Medellin was executed in August 2008 in Huntsville, Texas.

Medellin and Leal were among 51 Mexicans, convicted of crimes in the U.S. without having access to a home-country diplomat, who won a World Court decision in 2004 declaring that the U.S. had failed to live up to its obligations under the Vienna Convention — that is, the duty to give those individuals a chance to contest their convictions because of the breach of the treaty. Medellin’s case went to the Supreme Court after President Bush sought to directly order state officials to abide by the treaty.

The Supreme Court ruled at the time that Congress had not passed a law requiring state courts to comply with the treaty. They refused to stay Medellin’s execution, saying that the prospect of new legislation (which had yet to be proposed) was too unlikely to justify any delay in the execution. Seven years later, we find ourselves back in the same position, but the White House has now pushed for a bill to close the gap. Patrick Leahy introduced it to the Senate three weeks ago:

On June 14, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont, introduced a bill to carry out the Vienna Convention for foreign nationals like Leal. The measure also would delay executions in such cases until the convicted foreign nationals had had a chance to show that their convictions violated the Convention. Chairman Leahy, the new filings noted, has promised to hold a Judiciary Committee hearing in July.

Verrilli noted that the Obama Administration has been engaged in strenuous efforts to craft the new Leahy bill. He also noted that the Bush Administration had not been involved in earlier efforts to craft such legislation, so that situation, too, has changed since the Medellin ruling. The Solicitor General urged the Court to delay Leal’s execution until the end of the current session of Congress — which can run no later than next Jan. 3 — in order to give Congress time to pass the new legislation.

It is vitally important to U.S. foreign relations, Verrilli contended, that the U.S. obey the obligations it undertakes under global agreements like the Vienna Convention.

Garcia seems a poor poster boy for this effort, given his nearly lifelong residence in the US and the nature of his crime. However, for those Americans who do travel abroad, reciprocity in consular access is no small matter, and neither the Obama or Bush administrations can be much blamed for taking an interest in protecting it. If the US is to have the ability to sign treaties protecting such access while the Constitution denies states the power to negotiate such treaties on their own (Article I, Section 10), then Congress needs to make that jurisdiction explicit in law if courts won’t recognize it otherwise.

1:37 PM | 1 comments | Read More

* * Vault * Green Room * Ed Morrissey Show Pawlenty’s new senior political advisor: Huckabee’s daughter

Gamechanger?

Here’s the news that Pawlenty campaign manager Nick Ayers promised via Twitter earlier today: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of the 2008 presidential candidate, is joining the Pawlenty campaign as a senior adviser.

She served as national political director for her father — who won the Iowa GOP caucuses — during the last presidential cycle. She also worked as the campaign manager for Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) in 2010.

She’s got a caucus-winning rolodex and a brand name that’ll get Pawlenty a second look from Christian conservatives who might have been tilting towards Bachmann. Will it get him her dad’s endorsement, too? That would be a real gamechanger, but maybe only if it happens sooner rather than later: T-Paw desperately needs a shot in the arm before the straw poll next month to halt the swell of Bachmania and convince big donors he’s capable of beating Romney. Is there any chance whatsoever that Huckabee would endorse before Ames? I’m guessing no, although…

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is joining Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s presidential campaign as senior political adviser. She begins her new role in the campaign’s Iowa headquarters today, taking the lead for the campaign on the Iowa Straw Poll effort with a focus on expanding the campaign’s grassroots operations across the first-in-the-nation caucus state.

Coming in a few weeks: *Ring* “Hi, dad. It’s Sarah. Listen, I need a favor…” And speaking of Iowa gamechangers, take five minutes to read RCP’s report on Palin supporters quietly organizing inside the state to help her hit the ground running if/when she jumps in. One local tea partier with state organizing experience thinks she’d be the frontrunner once she jumped in — but warns that she’d probably need at least 30 days to be well positioned for Ames, which is just … 39 days from now. If she decides not to run, where do those Palinista boots on the ground go?

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