The American Spectator

Where are these warriors? Save for a select few (such as Indiana’s own Rep. Mike Pence), Republicans head for the tall grass once the shooting starts. If I were an “undecided,” I’d at least know the Democrats thought they had something important to say. The Grand Old Party…the Party of Lincoln is cursed with too many who lack conviction.
— Mike Dooley

MAKING SACRIFICES
Re: Eric Peters’s The Sweet Stench of Failure:

One thing lost in the last act of Iphigenea at Detroit: The doleful effects of selective protectionism and fuel economy standards. Let’s start with protectionism. Tariffs on imported trucks are at 25% and cars 2.5%. This, of course builds in a 25% profit margin head-start for trucks and solid business reasons for deemphasizing passenger cars as a business focus.

Meanwhile, fuel economy standards, in particular the Corporate Average Fuel Economy set up, enabled the auto makers to spread fuel economy goals over their entire product lines. The result: they could safely abandon fuel economy as a design goal for trucks so long as they could make enough small cars to balance the books. This alone probably kept the domestic makers in the car business and maintained a vestigial competence in fuel economy-focused engineering, but at a high price. They would continue to make high-mileage vehicles, but these cars would be cheap, nasty and seemingly designed to convince consumers that they really needed to trade up to a cushy high-profit, low-mileage truck or SUV to maintain any sense of self respect. The brand message, now reinforced for forty years running, is that anything that isn’t a truck from Chrysler, Ford, or GM is junk and marks the driver as either uninformed, an AARP member of 15+ years standing, or a rental car customer.

Now it’s 2008 and suddenly no one wants to buy gas-thirsty trucks, and gave up on Detroit cars years ago. As a taxpayer, I will now bend over and prepare for another reaming, but after a trillion dollars to save banks, corrupt debt rating agencies, and deadbeat borrowers, what’s an extra $50 Billion among friends? One additional insult to injury. Now that New Dealers are going to quasi-nationalize the car companies, they will want a say in design and production issues. Make way for the sensible shoes on four wheels of every car-haters pathetically earthbound dreams.
— Otto Nordpol

Democrats, use Soviet sales tactics: Compel car-buyers to purchase an American car with every foreign car they buy. (Unions, please make the American cars 100% recyclable.)
— David Govett
Davis, California

PRAYING FOR FAILURE
Re: Jeffrey Lord’s The New Adventures of Wonderboy:

Jeffrey Lord writes: ”In fact, the only president other than Jimmy Carter (hmm) to come from an engineering background was, as Coolidge well knew, a champion of the idea of government intervention.”

I’ll take an engineer over a community-organizing lawyer any day. At least there is a chance, with an engineer, that he will understand how things work. And if a system is complex enough, say, those forces that determine the level of the seas, most engineers will lack the hubris required to jeopardize that system.

“Once past the warm glow of Inauguration Day, busily implementing policies that have a notable historical record of failure, Obama faces the same problem as Herbert Hoover. Which is to say that a failure to act correctly courts a curt dismissal as yet another failed president.” 

Pray God that this statement is true for Obama, as it was for Hoover. It certainly wasn’t vis-a-vis FDR.
— Dan Martin
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Mr. Lord has hit another homerun in tagging Barack Obama as the new Herbert Hoover with the worst inclinations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is also right on target in suggesting Republicans should demand an investigation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That includes investigating the Obama’s chief of staff and his dear friend Franklin Delano Raines (McCain should have used this to tarnish Obama’s “economic” advantage) the man who along with Democrats Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama helped undercut the booming Bush/Republican economy in less than 2 years.
— Michael Tomlinson
Habbaniyah, Iraq

LIQUIDITY EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A DROP TO LEND
Re: Joseph Lawler’s A Deflating Era: