JABMI:"A major point you refuse to acknowledge is that while the many mistakes the auto companies have made have seriously weakened them economically, they would not be facing imminent bankruptcy if it were not for the fact that the economy has gone into a serious recession and the credit markets have frozen up."

Sorry Jabmi, the big three were dead men walking long before the economic crisis. It just took a little white water before all that paper wealth got soggy.

JABMI:"The government is the only institution in a position and willing to offer up credit...Let me know where all the "innovative" companies that will "emerge from the ashes" will find their financing?"

Agreed. I just don't think the credit should go to GM and Ford. there are a thousand plus other companies out there that if they had a boost would do ten times more good than GM or Ford are even capable of.

JABMI: 3 million jobs is not a few..unless you compare it to the millions more that will follow.

3 million is a rank exageration but I admit that there will be a lot of jobs lost at first. However, I believe that those jobs will be sucked up by the demand created by the loss created by the automakers. Do you think that when Arthur Anderson went tits up that those jobs were lost for good? No, the other companies absorbed them. It will be slower in the case of the auto companies but this is a relative net loss compared to the alternative.

JABMI: Are you living underground or in some parallel universe?

No, I just think that the big three have had their day in the sun. They chose the status quo over innovation and that is unexcusable in the business world.

On a personal note, I have a very real vested interest in one of those automakers getting bailed out--and yet at the same time I don't want to see it happen for reasons that I have already stated. So please don't think that I am just out to get the big three because I am not. I'm just a student of history and I see no benefit in pumping money into a dead corpse that has no real possiblility of helping to solve this nation's problems.

As a long time Obama supporter I was appalled when he appointed Larry Summers to his finance post last month. Since them I have had to watch in horror as Obama has put in a whole slew of centrists, Clintonistas and holdover from the Bush junta. It’s one thing to be bipartisan and reach across the isle to your rivals—it’s another to completely sell out and appoint foxes to guard the henhouse. I fear Obama has done the later.

I'm purging my home of decorative pillows this evening. I just hope they go without a fight.

Last month Paglia compared Palin’s speech to a bebop jazz saxophonist. This month it’s “jagged, but always exuberant” and “closer to street rapping.” What bullshit analogies will she come up with next month to characterize Palin’s nasal, trailer park whining?

Anyway, Camille (as usual) is missing the point. It's not the "cadence" or "accent" that people find annoying in Palin's speech- it's the fact that half of everything she says is just plain stupid.

'The Day the Earth Stood Still'is one of my favorite old SciFi films. It's profound in a very hokey sort of way but pretty fun when you look at it in the context of the paranoid cold war mentality that was so prevalent in the 50's. So why the numb nuts in Hollywood decided to remake this picture is beyond me. The charm of the original is that it captures a certain zeitgeist of the times. Did these unoriginal morons really think that giving the movie an environmental message and some expensive special effects would bring this picture into the twenty first century?

Unfortunately it also sounded great when I read 'Shadow of the Wind' and 'Kings of Infinite Space' on your recommendation. Both of which turned out to be very mediocre books. The clincher was when you wrote a gushing review of 'The Ruins', which turned out to be the worse piece of fiction I'd read in fifteen years.

I think you are my 'bizarro' reviewer. If you give it a good review I can be fairly assured that I won't like the book.

Sherman was far too conservative with the torch on his march.