. . . because the 18-30 crowd from the last two elections sat on the sidelines while a bunch of hateful, anti-intellectual, religion obsessed yahoos were allowed to elect the worst president in American history, twice!

As a matter of fact, as a group (under 30s) haven't really stood for anything, you don't volunteer as much as older Americans, you are only marginally involved in civil society. This was the first presidential election that you really participated in since 1976. So don't strain your arms too much patting yourselves on the back as you did not live through the turmoil of the Civil Rights era or the specter of being drafted for Vietnam, the second stupidest war in American history after Iraq. Your age group were complete sheep under Reagan and really not even that big of supporters of Clinton.

Only if you stay engaged and really work to hold the government and American society to higher standards for the next twenty years, then can you congratulate yourselves on helping elect Obama and starting America down a new path.

And look, we really did stand for something, underneath all the eye-rolling. We're feminists, we care about the environment, we want to improve race relations, we volunteer. We're just low-key about it. We never wanted to do it the way you did it: So unselfconscious, so optimistic, guilelessly throwing yourself behind Team Liberal. We didn't get that. We aren't joiners. We don't like carrying signs. We tend to disagree, if only on principle.

By completely misjudging what the vast majority of Americans were really concerned about this election (the economy and war), McCain's Rove-lite handlers pushed Palin on him because Lieberman and Ridge were pro-choice.

Like Palin, it's well past time that Lieberman left the national political stage. However, with him or Ridge as a running mate, this race would have gone down to the wire. Guns, gays, god and abortion didn't figure in the election in the least, except to the, maybe, 20% of the country that place these issues at the center of their stunted political lives. The choice of Ridge or Lieberman might have kept the loons of "the base" home, but they would have given McCain a much better chance with the vast sea of undecided (aka clueless) voters who have a tendency to swing from party-to-party election-by-election depending on the personality of the candidate and the perceived big issues.

Still, Honda is the best auto maker in the world, and GM is second best. Despite what you have heard, Toyota is a not-great third. -- timbuktom

No. Japanese Toyota is the best car company in the world, Honda is second and Nissan is probably third. GM isn't even in the top five, being behind the NA divisions of, yes, Toyota, Honda and Nissan. Subaru would be the best made auto in the world if they weren't yoked to the gas powered boxter engine. Hell, Mazada makes better cars than GM, Ford and Chrysler.

What a stupid, insulting article this is. How many years has Joseph Romm spent working in the auto industry?

No. It's actually a very concise depiction of how fucked-up the U.S. auto industry is.

Detroit hasn't lost money by building ladder-frame light trucks and SUV's. Detroit MADE money on those cars. People liked them. People bought them.

True. But they are pieces of crap with upwards of 90% of them being used as passenger vehicles. Can you get much stupider?

Detroit's problems with making smaller low-profit cars isn't that they don't know how to build great cars. They do. Their problem, in North America, is that they are building small, low profit cars while saddled with enormous legacy costs thanks to their devil's bargains with the UAW.

Yep. Everything is the UAW's fault. I guess the fact that the Big Three companies have been hideously managed for the last 30 years and lost 50% of their market to imports and domestically produced Japanese vehicles means nothing.

Much of their competition in the U.S. doesn't have those costs. So instead of doing what they do best, building muscle cars, light trucks, suv's and a variety of other cars and trucks . . .

No one needs muscle cars (talk about living in the past) and the Big Three actually makes really crappy SUVs. Again, the Japanese own this market.

As much as I hate to see upwards of 100,000 people out of work if the Big Three ceased to exist, the only way they will be able to recover is by ceasing to build mid-sized cars, big trucks and SUVs (no one needs a Chevy Suburban and the Ford Excursion), and switching their lines to plug-in hybrids.

gotta keep GM alive somebody needs to build Humvees; not for us, but for the troops. the military won't want to end up buying their vehicles from Korea. -- gzuckier

The Humvee is built by AM General. They sold the rights to use a modified version of the body for the Hummer (the truck not the blow job), no longer in production, which used the same GM chassis as the Tahoe and one other over-sized piece of shit GM SUV.

3. Reduction of corporate taxes across the board. The U.S. has some of the highest corporate taxes in the world.-- Elephantman

Like the richest individual tax payers in the U.S., U.S. corporations actually pay very little tax.

Nick di Paola (never heard of him) is obviously a racist and/or Bill O'Reily's next door neighbor. What a tool.

Having a Clinton in the senate is as close as you want that family to the levers of power. Bill had his chance and blew it utterly.

. . . doesn't find it's way on to the reading lists at Wharton, HBS, Tuck, etc., etc.?

I don't know, but I just ripped out my spleen and sent it to them.

Let the wingnuts rejoice!