Rahm Emanuel’s lawyers have asked for a stay of the appellate court’s order to keep Emanuel’s name off the ballot for mayor pending the outcome of their appeal:

Emanuel’s lawyers filed an emergency motion with the high court to stop the appellate court ruling and asked the court to tell Chicago election officials to keep his name on ballots. They also asked the Supreme Court justices to expedite an appeal, which they said would be filed no later than Tuesday.

“So the court may hear and decide this case as soon as possible,” Emanuel’s filing states.

The primary is a month away and early voting starts in six days time.

Like John Kass I am certain that the Illinois Supreme Court will decide the case on its merits.

It also looks to me as though Miguel del Valle has found precisely the right line of attack:

Another major candidate, City Clerk Miguel del Valle, told me that Monday’s Appellate Court ruling sends a message long overdue.

“It sends a message to the neighborhoods of the city that Hollywood and Wall Street big shots, and the millionaires of Chicago, won’t decide this mayoral election. Instead, the people of the neighborhoods will decide it,” del Valle said.

I doubt that he’ll be able to profit by it.

The most likely beneficiary will be Gery Chico. With Emanuel no longer sucking all the air out of the room, Chico will doubtless find it easier to raise funds for his campaign.

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the Illinois Appellate Court has determined that Rahm Emanuel is not eligible to appear on the mayoral ballot:

Rahm Emanuel should not appear on the Feb. 22 Chicago mayoral ballot, according to a ruling issued by the state appellate court this morning. (READ the ruling here.)

Two of the three judges on the panel said Emanuel does not meet the residency requirement. The judges reversed an earlier decision by the Chicago Board of Elections that determined Emanuel was eligible.

Next stop, Illinois Supreme Court. They’ll need to produce the ballots on Etch-a-Sketches.

As I read the decision the court distinguishes between voter residency requirements, which Mr. Emanuel has met, and candidacy residency requirements, which he has not. It will be interesting to see what the IL Supreme Court thinks of this interpretation.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

Death Toll in Moscow Domodedovo Terrorist Attack Rises to 35

To summarize: Russian language news sources are reporting that the death toll at Moscow’s busiest airport as a result of what is being described as “clearly a terror attack” has risen to at least 35, more than 40 people are in critical condition, and scores more have been injured.

Details are slowly emerging. The suicide attacker has been identified as a man, his last words were reportedly “I’ll kill all of you!”, and he was travelling to the Northern Caucasus, substantiation of the speculation that he was Chechen.

RF President Medvedev has cancelled (or at least postponed) his trip to the Davos economic forum, there are reports that Russia’s intelligence service had advance warning of the attack, and as of this point nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack.

I found reading this Newsweek article on dying cities a bit like checking the obituaries to make sure your name doesn’t appear in it. To my relief Chicago was not on the list.

I had a bit of a problem with article. As an example of the problem nearly all of the decrease in Pittsburgh’s population had already taken place before 1980. Between 1930 and 1980 Pittsburgh’s population had decreased by a quarter million people. Since then its population has only decreased by a third of that. To my mind that’s looking at two different processes that have somewhat similar consequences and trying to make them into a single process.

Is Pittsburgh’s problem really the same as Vallejo, CA’s?

The rats are already beginning to desert the sinking ship:

CHAMPAIGN – The founder of Jimmy John’s said he has applied for Florida residency and may recommend that his corporate headquarters move out-of-state as a result of the Illinois tax increases enacted last week.

Jimmy John Liautaud told The News-Gazette on Tuesday that he is angry about the moves, which boosted the individual income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent and the corporate income tax from 7.3 percent to 9.5 percent.

“All they do is stick it to us,” he said, adding that the Legislature and governor showed “a clear lack of understanding.”

“I could absorb this and adapt, but it doesn’t feel good in my soul to make it happen,” Liautaud said.

What would the economic implications of losing the company be for central Illinois?

Liautaud said his business accounts for “350 motel nights a week in Champaign, 1,400 motel nights a month.”

“They eat at Cheddars,” get automotive service at Sullivan-Parkhill and “drink at Carlos (Nieto’s) bars,” he said.

Liautaud also lashed out at union protesters who demonstrated against a “low-cost” contractor his company is using to build a Jimmy John’s in Urbana. That restaurant will provide 30 jobs, he said.

He said he’s sick of being “pummeled.”

“I’m not sophisticated enough, smart enough or politically correct enough to absorb it all,” he said.

Jimmy John’s offices occupy 23,000 square feet on Fox Drive, and Liautaud said he had considered buying a 20,000-square-foot building just north of those offices. Those plans went out the window with the tax increase, he said.

He said he also planned to hire 80 more people at the executive level.

Sounds like a lot of tax revenue that now won’t be realized to me.

In this post I want to engage in a little thought experiment. Consider this chart:

This chart illustrates the total non-farm payrolls from 1960 to the present with a regression line based on the period 1960 to 1991 extended to the present. I strongly suspect that this illustrates the trends that, probably, the last three presidential administrations have assumed to be the natural state of affairs, the norm. Given these assumptions you would see the 1990s as over-performing the trend slightly, the Aughts under-performing the trend slightly, and the present under-performing the trend a lot.

But let’s look at another chart:

I’ve drawn a green line on the chart to approximate the regression line drawn on the first chart and a red line as a rather different regression line approximating the trend if, rather than using 1960 to 1991 as your baseline, 1940 to 1970 is used. That tells a very different story than the first chart: rather than reflecting an economy that is suddenly producing significantly fewer jobs than the regression line would suggest it reflects an economy that outperformed the trend over the period of the last thirty years and is now returning to trend.

I can see why we’d prefer the green regression line over the red one. If the red one (or anything that even vaguely approximates it) is correct the economy still has a lot more jobs than we might expect which suggests that it might also have a lot of jobs to shed. Cheery thought.

However, I can’t see any reason to believe the green regression is correct. What should total non-farm payrolls be? If there should be 140,000,000 non-farm jobs, doesn’t that mean that our two consecutive bubbles were irrelevant to job creation? That seems incredible to me.

But if the number of jobs we should have is more like 118,000,000 not only do we have more jobs to shed but current economic policy is on a snipe hunt.

The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week. First place in the Council category was Council newcomer The Noisy Room’s The Herding of America – Enlightened Despotism. This was one of those posts from which I learned something about which I previously knew very little if anything, in this case about the history of propaganda.

First place in the non-Council category was Sense of Events with Seahawks Fall To Climate Of Hate In Chicago. Rev. Sensing was one of the first major bloggers (in his former incarnation) to link to my stuff. I see he hasn’t lost his touch.

You can see the full results here.

Pursuant to a discussion that has been going on in the comments of one of my posts of yesterday, I decided to research the costs of manufacture and labor as a proportion of costs of an iPhone 4. As it turns out that’s fairly easy to come by.

I presume you’re aware that the iPhone 4 is manufactured in China by Foxconn, a Taiwanese company with manufacturing facilities on the mainland. Foxconn, like many Taiwanese companies, is a a private label manufacturer. It makes products that are sold by Apple, Dell, and HP. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad are all made by Foxconn in their Shenzhen facility. I’ve heard estimates of everything from 300,000 to 1 million workers at that facility alone.

Based on teardowns, the parts for an iPhone 4 cost $188. If you’d like a complete analysis of an iPhone 4 teardown, there’s a good one here, replete with pictures.

The labor cost is for a single iPhone is estimated to be $6.54.

So, in total, what Apple pays for an iPhone is about $200, a third of its retail cost. Pretty good.

A number of things struck me about those figures. First, labor costs can’t be chaffered down much. Even if Hon Hai moves out to the provinces where labor costs are purportedly 20 to 30% lower (!) the effect on Apple’s margins will be minimal.

Second, I wonder what the labor costs of manufacturing them here would be? Ten times more? Twenty times more? I honestly have no idea. Even at twenty times more (which seems incredible to me given the experience in other industries) that still shouldn’t make the difference between a product that’s profitable and one that isn’t. It might make a difference between a product that’s profitable and one that’s obscenely profitable.

And obscene is precisely the right word. China doesn’t have social insurance, modern healthcare is only available in the big cities, it’s polluting its air, water, and soil at a ferocious rate, and the working conditions in that Shenzhen plant are wretched—the suicide rate there made worldwide news only recently. Business as usual with China really should not continue.

China is sitting on well over a trillion in foreign reserves. It should be spending some of that on its people and IMO it’s worth rocking the boat over. The status quo means that a relative handful in China become fabulously wealthy while conditions for the poor continue to deteriorate.

We really need to get on the backs not just of the Wal-Marts but on the Apples, Dells, and HPs as well. If U. S. companies are going to sell products in the U. S. that are made in China, shouldn’t we be insisting that those products be made under humane conditions and that the workers who make them be paid a decent wage?

Perahps it’s the recent Martin Luther King Day holiday (about which more some other time). As I was crusing around the blogosphere this morning I noticed several posts and articles with what seems to be a common theme: attitudes of and towards black Americans. The first piece, by Walter Russell Mead continues his theme of the death of what he calls the “blue model”:

The collapse of the blue social model, a shift from federal to local power and a shift from government to the private sector are not race-neutral topics. It’s not just the underclass in the inner cities who face problems as the old models of subsidy and support become less sustainable; middle class African Americans compared to whites tend to work disproportionately in public sector jobs or in private sector jobs like health care that are heavily subsidized by government transfers. A pension crisis for state or federal workers will hit African-American families harder, proportionately, than white ones; municipal layoffs and bankruptcies will have a disproportionate effect on both the African-Americans who depend on these services and those who are paid to provide them.

Black Americans have been faithful clients of the Democratic Party for nearly 80 years now and today they roughly a third of all Democrats and by far the most faithful. And least demanding. By my count of the 193 Democrats in the House of Representatives 40 are black. Shouldn’t it be sixty or more? All three of the post-Reconstruction Democratic senators who have been of black African descent have been from Illinois. Blacks comprise 17.5% of the federal civil service, somewhat higher than their proportion in the general population (roughly an eighth). I wonder what proportion they comprise of Democrats in the federal civil service?

There’s also an article in the Wall Street Journal, a commentary on the African-American economist Walter Williams’s autobiography. Here’s a snippet:

“We lived in the Richard Allen housing projects” in Philadelphia, says Mr. Williams. “My father deserted us when I was three and my sister was two. But we were the only kids who didn’t have a mother and father in the house. These were poor black people and a few whites living in a housing project, and it was unusual not to have a mother and father in the house. Today, in the same projects, it would be rare to have a mother and father in the house.”

Even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren’t permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father. During Reconstruction and up until the 1940s, 75% to 85% of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women. “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do,” Mr. Williams says. “And that is to destroy the black family.”

Read the whole thing.

Finally, James Taranto takes Rick Santorum to task for a nonsensical remark:

We agree that it is intellectually defensible to draw a parallel between the antiabortion movement and the civil rights movement, or between abortion and slavery–though we would also note that this is an inflammatory and highly controversial comparison. Making the argument in a way that persuades rather than alienates those who are not already convinced requires an extraordinarily high degree of subtlety and sensitivity. In this regard Santorum’s comment falls very far short.

What makes it racially invidious is not the underlying argument or the rhetorical inelegance with which Santorum makes it. It is the implication that because Obama is “a black man,” he is obliged to agree with Santorum.