Things You Might Have Missed

1. Congress is giving up on the American auto industry. One can quibble over the relative merits of American or foreign owned domestic manufacturing, but does it strike you as a trifle odd that the demise of the keystone of America's 20th century prosperity has engendered little more than a shrug.

Oh, and by the way - so much for the wonderful corrective powers of the free market. If Adam Smith was so right, then why is Ford so dead? Rational actors would have learned that building gas guzzlers in a time of high oil prices is stupid, but Detroit has made that error not once, not twice, but three times.

2. The GOP thinks the immigration issue can bail them out. I think they might be right. But I would like to point out that a) as predicted, they are defaulting to white nationalists when in trouble, b) that this strategy will essentially end any hopes the pachyderm party has of winning Latino support. Whicy means in a few years they are dead dead dead.

3. Crime is on the rise again. I started to notice this looking at police stats in New York. They flattened out and then started to inch back up again over 2-3 years. The police response was to downplay the change, and then to say it was petty crime from ipods, etc. Pretty soon they'll confess that there's a problem. It's no secret why crime is increasing, though: budget cuts and a poor economy. Kudos to Benjamin Wallace-Wells calling this one 2 years ago.

But wait, you ask. Aren't the Republicans "tough on crime"? Why would they reduce anti-crime efforts. Well, the conspiratorial among you could say that if crime is low, then Republicans can't run on being tough on crime or whipping up anti-black and anti-latino fears among their whitebread voters, now can they?

4. Can we use Bush's manifest incompetence as a corrective to the idea that executives should be the most powerful actors in politics? Please? Pretty please? When one individual in the political system has so much power, you run an awful risk that that individual is going to be a boob. And not the good kind. The extinct bird kind.