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A Quick Look at Bloomberg News's Opinion Section for March 16, 2012

O.K., give me a few minutes of your time before returning to what's left of
your NCAA bracket, which, if you are one of the fortunate few, you will soon
be looking at on a new iPad 3! "Today is International Wait in Line for Your
New iPad Day, an annual rite of spring for thousands of urban American
hipsters and an official holiday in many regions of the Internet," write the
View editors. "It will not, however, be celebrated in China. That’s because
the new iPad is not yet available in China, except in Hong Kong ... The
irony here, almost as vivid as the new iPad’s 2048-by-1536-pixel screen, is
that there are already millions of the devices in China. As it says on the
back of every iPad: 'Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in
China.' It’s nice to have a two-sentence illustration of the concept of
comparative advantage handy, especially in an election year." [2]Link.
Links:
2. http://bloom.bg/w8ZJsH

Columnist Michael Kinsley, bereft perhaps at Harvard's quick exit from the
tourney at the hands of Vanderbilt, has thoughts on a former professor there
and Obama mentor who has become a right-wing talking point. "Derrick Bell,
who died in October at age 80, was an eccentric and bitter man, as well as a
distinguished legal scholar," writes Kinsley. "He founded a school of
thought called critical race theory, a cousin of critical legal studies, a
worldview that roiled Harvard and other top law schools during the 1970s and
1980s but probably won’t last the ages. Nevertheless, to make him out to be
radioactive and poisonous to the touch would implicate not just Barack Obama
but also Harvard Law School (where Bell became the first black tenured
professor -- in 1971!), the University of Oregon School of Law (where he was
dean) and the legal establishment generally, of which he was, however
ambiguously, a part." Of course, that might just be the idea. [3]Link.
Links:
3. http://bloom.bg/zb2kuF

View columnist Stephen Carter, switching seasons on us, believes that
a football controversy offers insight into America's political friction.
"Chances are you have heard about the controversy surrounding Gregg
Williams, who recently coached the defense of the New Orleans Saints," says
Carter. "Williams supposedly offered cash bounties to his players for
knocking opposing teams’ stars out of the game. Sportswriters are
appropriately outraged, but if you follow the comment threads, you will find
a lot of anonymous fans who insist that this is just hard-hitting football.
Most of Williams’s defenders, I suspect, are fans of teams he has coached.
Meanwhile, fans of teams whose players might have been injured by
Williams’s schemes are screaming for his head. In sports, we have come to
expect such double standards. The trouble is, they have spilled over into
every area of life, including politics." Call in the refs, at the [4]link.
Links:
4. http://bloom.bg/yXTWng

"The most important thing to understand about the Federal Reserve’s latest
stress tests is what they were not intended to do," writes columnist
Jonathan Weil. "Their purpose wasn’t to test whether the nation’s biggest
banks could survive a financial blowup like that of 2008 without government
assistance. Rather, the Fed designed its tests to measure the effects a
hypothetical crisis would have on banks’ regulatory capital. Capital is the
financial cushion a company has available to absorb future losses. While the
Fed would like for us to believe that regulatory capital is the same thing,
it’s quite different. And too often it bears little resemblance to reality."
[5]Link.
Links:
5. http://bloom.bg/y9zNYY

Also, the editors have ideas on turning oil into democracy in Libya;
columnist Jonathan Alter accuses Mitt Romney of messing with Medicare
statistics; and op-ed contributor Steven Greenhut sees public pensions as
fiscal poison.

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