I guess if we must have a litmus test on a Supreme Court nominee, let it be about baseball.
106 days until football season ...
Quote of the Day
Many doing the attacking and supporting will be adherents to a single issue with which they're obsessed like guns or abortion or civil rights or gay marriage. Well, I have a single issue with which I'm obsessed: baseball. So far Sotomayor is batting 1.000 in that department, so as far as I'm concerned, let's skip all of the ugliness that's about to begin, confirm her and get on with the pennant races.
Craig Calcaterra, Circling the Bases
Blog of the day here.
Quote from said blog: "To quickly review the situation, I took all dealer owners whose names appeared more than once in the list. And, of those who contributed to political campaigns, every single one had donated almost exclusively to GOP candidates. While this isn't an exhaustive review, it does have some ominous implications if it can be verified."
Not particularly remarkable. The dealers on Chrysler's list were mostly small, family-owned businesses. That demographic tends to lean GOP. -Rob
One thing I don't understand about the dealer shutdowns is how reducing the sales channel is good for the automakers. Won't franchises that aren't really viable going to fail on their own anyway? It seems to me that the real winners are the dealers that survived the cut, as they have less competition now. That's usually not a good thing for consumers.
Depends on what you mean by viable. There are small dealerships all over the landscape that own their outdated facility outright and are content to sell a few cars per month and offer almost no parts and service. All import dealerships are fairly modern and there are fewer of them. The two are related. One dealer is not going to invest in modern facilities and training at considerable expense if his main competitor a mile away is content to and allowed to stand pat.
My sense is that too many dealers also creates too much surplus inventory. When their new models are rolling out and there is nowhere to put them because the previous year's models are still filling showrooms, it is a problem. Surplus inventory necessitates dealer incentives and rebates and all of those things that dealers and consumers both like but are unprofitable for the manufacturer.
American car manufacturers have been at a disadvantage for some time versus imports. Most of it is due to legacy costs that were in place when they were the only game in town and the rest is their own doing. They were more vulnerable when gasoline spiked last summer and the economy went in the tank but the import manufacturers are in trouble and asking for assistance, too.