And if Obama goes through with it, his presidency will be over before it begins if for no other reason than the right loathes Hillary Clinton.

It would have been one thing for Hillary to be elected president and for her to have to deal with Bill (this is one of the reason I did not support her in the primaries). However, she would be a part of Obama's team and he just doesn't need the baggage Hillary brings with Bill as a two-fer.

Bill Clinton's post-presidential work is probably, as has was mentioned in the article, a minefield of conflicting interests. Think about the 9/11 Commission. Though its findings really amounted to nothing in the end, look how quickly the idea of having Kissinger head it up was squashed because of him being so close to the Saudi royal family (their "useful Jew") and the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers being Saudi nationals. Not completely analogous circumstances, but I still think it's best to keep the Clinton's away from the executive branch.

. . . whiff of Freakonomics about it - either the ideas are really half-baked and, in many cases, non-falsifiable or they are re-tellings of the painfully obvious. The example in the article about Jewish lawyers is has next to nothing to do with nurture vs. nature. It was pure happenstance - a completely random coming together of events.

Oh, and, he needs a haicut.

. . . positively purring about the possibility of HRC being our next SS, it's apparent where all the Clintonistas went to lick their wounds after the convention. I guess most of you have forgotten who she's married to.

Let the wingnuts rejoice!

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.