because in the coming years, when some GOP knuckle-dragger is running for office to prevent the sodomites from contaminating our precious bodily fluids, everybody better remember what the GOP did with one of its last chances to redeem itself.

That said, it seems to me that whether wage cuts for UAW guys is appropriate, depends on how much money they're making. 'Cause I don't know.

I have heard accounts to the effect that they make $80-, $90-, $100,000 a year. I don't know if it's true, or if it's the whole truth. If that is the case, I have to say I am not overly sympathetic. When teachers to to university for 2-4 years and end up making $30k, I don't see why a bunch of high school graduates should make salaries comparable to what a doctor gets. (Especially for making machines that are destroying the global life support system.)

On the other hand, if most auto workers only make $30- or $50k per year, and the $80k guys are rare, then forcing wage cuts is less of a no-brainer.

There isn't a working class--there's two. There's the old-style working class, i.e. people who have to work their asses off for lousy wages, like in the good ol' nineteenth century; and there is the comfortable working class with unions and good working conditions and benefits, who do better than your typical college graduate. Let's not conflate the two.

Let the Detroit automakers fail and be restructured into railroad rolling stock companies.

Let the automakers in the South continue on for a few more years, until it becomes painfully clear that the fuel to run personal automobiles has become prohibitively scarce and expensive.

Let the Southern GOP burn up the last of the goodwill, the last of the credibility, the last of any claim they might have had to saving the U.S. economy, and let them bet on a dying horse.

Then let Detroit go back to being the industrial center of America, building vehicles we can actually use in the future.

"They're looking at something on the order of a $2.5 million job restoration"

I assume/hope you mean 2.5 billion.

... it makes it look like kind of a stupid year, a bit.

If Caroline is appointed now and she's no good, in two years she'll run against a Republican and might lose. Hasn't everyone just busted their asses to get a strong majority in the Senate?

This business of political families has to go. If you're going to hand people positions because of who their parents are, why not go back to being a monarchy?

There are lots of people in New York who would be really effective senators, having DONE all kinds of stuff that nonethless isn't conducive to winning a first election campaign. Pick one of them. C'mon, man.

Let X = the number of electoral votes that will go against Obama in 2012 because of Rick Warren

Let Y = the number of electoral votes that will NOT go against Obama in 2012 in part because of Rick Warren.

If X < Y then it's worth it.

I wish he didn't have to pander to homophobes but the fact is those people are out there, there are a lot of them (even, apparently, in California) and they are organized and if you want Steven Chu to be Secretary of Energy for long enough to lock in some gains, you have to defuse that situation.

He is compromising on symbolic stuff so he can concentrate on practical stuff. I would rather he do that than the other way around.

So everybody just chill, please.

I'm trying to reconcile the title of this article with its content. I see no connection at all.

I really have the feeling that Salon is going downhill lately. What could have been a thought-provoking article on why celebrity culture might have peaked and may, if we are worthy, may be replaced by a level of seriousness we thought had arrived after 9/11, instead is a list of celebrity gossip from the past year. Honestly, what is the point of this article? If it's to rehash the celebrity gossip of the past year then mission accomplished. Otherwise, don't try to pretend it's something it isn't. Honestly, man.

"This is not to say people aren't still arguing... whether Franklin Roosevelt rescued the U.S. from the Great Depression or just made it worse."

I don't know why Salon continues to refer to this "argument" as if it's a valid difference of opinion between informed people debating in good faith. It just gives care and comfort to those deregulatory dead-enders who, having on every empirical front exhausted any and all claim to legitimacy, must now fall back on the notion that events seventy years ago might have been different had their preferred worldview been followed then.

The Great Depression happened because of factors that can easily be attributed to a failure to regulate the economy at all. (e.g. stock market bubble, excessive concentration of wealth, etc.) Then someone came along with regulations and, once those regulations were in place, the economy failed to collapse for almost seventy years. The collapse finally came after the deregulation zealots finally got everything they wanted for eight full years.

I know correlation is not causation and I know that single-cause arguments are inherently flawed but come on, man. This "did FDR fix things or make them worse?" is like arguing evolution versus intelligent design. Why waste bandwidth on these morons?

Without 9/11, Bush would have been a bad-to-mediocre one-term president.

9/11 gave him the opening (and the extra term) he needed to become one of the worst.

It's also been three whole years since any major cities were destroyed by a hurricane.

It's been four whole months since any housing and stock market bubbles have popped, splattering the entire world with sticky toxic fiscal goop.

Let's give credit where credit is due.

Oh, wait--the standards for getting credit have gotten tighter. Never mind.

Amen.