That is, if you’re interested in returning to the economic paradigm of the Carter years. Foreign-owned manufacturers who build cars with American workers pay wages similar to GM’s. But their expenses for benefits are a fraction of GM’s. GM is contractually required to support thousands of workers in the UAW’s “Jobs Bank” program, which guarantees nearly full wages and benefits for workers who lose their jobs due to automation or

NYT, “Post-Guantánamo: A New Detention Law?”: As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system. Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by

On FoxNews Sunday with Chris Wallace: “I think the other thing that I’ve found that’s been lacking over the last four years, especially the last two cycles–’06 and ’08—we don’t know how to talk to people. We’ve absolutely forgotten how to communicate a message … to espouse those principles in the context of people’s everyday lives. … Our party needs to have a voice, it needs to have a relevant

A dubious and self-serving equation long espoused by those scholars reared on identity politics, postcolonialist theory, and the Balkanizing structural imperatives of multiculturalism — given perhaps its most popular airing by Spike Lee, who, rumor has it, once got into a fight with a swirly cone, accusing the vanilla of suffering from jungle fever while berating the chocolate for it’s desire to “assimilate.” David Thompson explores the trajectory of such

Nope, Sorry. Never heard of the guy.

History, it is on the march. And this time it’s wearing lederhosen, munching on Belgian chocolates, and smoking Gaulloises cigarettes. So much for American “hegemony.” I have little doubt that any epic failure on the part of this new regulatory body will lead to a rather predictable round of scapegoating — with the “world banking money men” to blame. The more things change… (h/t Geoff B)

Matthew Franck, Bench Memos: It’s a trifecta in [Thursday’s] Washington Post by Ronald M. Green, who proposes a “Stem Cell Solution” for president-elect Obama. Green wants the incoming administration to change federal policy on funding for embryonic stem cell research (ESCR)—but he’d like to cloak the first step of a radical change in moderate clothing. I know this isn’t ordinary Bench Memos fare, but bear with me. (And the connection

From George Will (who, for irony’s sake, let me point out spent a month or so sniffing at the only remotely conservative nominee on either major party ticket): Conservatism’s current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican ticket’s end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government — verily, “socialism” — would impend were Democrats elected. John McCain and Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber that

Let the backscratching continue apace. I say Obama just goes ahead and commutes Tony Rezko’s sentence and names him HUD chief. I mean, if we’re going for Kafkaesque anyway, may as well go full out, right?