"The recession left millions of college-educated Americans working in coffee shops and retail stores."

"Now, new research suggests their job prospects may not improve much when the economy rebounds."

"Once the robots are in place you still need some people, but you need a lot less than when you were putting in the robots," said Paul Beaudry, an economist at the University of British Columbia....

Was the Wall Street Journal trying to make Elena Kagan look gay?

"A spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal said today its cover art was not intended as innuendo about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's sexual orientation after the paper's front-page use of an image of Kagan playing softball provoked a mixture of irritation and amusement from gay and lesbian advocates."

Ha ha. This takes me back to 2005, when John Roberts was nominated and I wrote that the New York Times used photographs (and other material) to try to create the impression that John Roberts is gay:

Just look at the series of photographs they chose: young John in plaid pants, young John with his boys' school pals, young John in a wrestling suit with his fellow wrestlers, John with footballers, and -- the final pic -- John smiling in an all-male wedding photograph. The article also says Roberts married his wife when both were in their forties and that that their children were adopted.

There was a huge discussion on the internet at the time, much of it focused on the question whether plaid pants suggest gayness.

Whatever it means for a man, here's Gawker laying out "The Case that Kagan Is a Lesbian":

The haircut...
She's never been married...
She's opposed to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"...
She played softball...
She wears plaid: Okay, since we're digging out the circumstantial evidence, there is a picture of Kagan from 1977 where she is wearing a plaid, flannel shirt. Sorry, but, like softball, flannel=lesbian.
The mayor of Gaytown has endorsed her...
She's never denied the rumor...
Obama digs lesbian judges...
The gay establishment is suspiciously quiet...
CBS News reported it...

So, do newspapers use photographs and other signals to create the impression that a public figure is gay? I certainly think so. I think it matters mainly because of the way it creates the impression that the newspaper is not journalistically...  straight.

I keep wanting to blog editorials in the Wall Street Journal.

But I can't, because they're all just teasers that go behind a subscription wall. My getting a subscription wouldn't make these things bloggable, and if I can't blog it, I go looking for something else to read. I wish they'd reconsider!

If Clarence Thomas wasn't ready to be a Supreme Court Justice, is Obama ready to be President?

The Wall Street Journal notes Obama's statement that he would not name nominated Clarence Thomas...

"I don't think that he, I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution."

... and compares the records of the 2 men at the time they presented themselves as ready:

By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General's office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second most prominent court....

Meanwhile, as he bids to be America's Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama isn't yet four years out of the Illinois state Senate, has never held a hearing of note of his U.S. Senate subcommittee, and had an unremarkable record as both a "community organizer" and law school lecturer. Justice Thomas's judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama's Presidential résumé by any measure. And when it comes to rising from difficult circumstances, Justice Thomas's rural Georgian upbringing makes Mr. Obama's story look like easy street.

The WSJ goes on to diagnose Obama's "political habits of mind" and to knock him for "instinctively revert[ing] to the leftwing cliché that the Court's black conservative isn't up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are."

I just heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio reading this editorial and making much of that charge of racism.