Playboy: In Like Flynt

Playboy: In Like Flynt

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Morning Must Reads | Washington Examiner

Morning Must Reads | Washington Examiner

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Intolerable Behavior

Now tell me why again I should be feeling sorry for Islamic countries: Al Qaeda Says It Executed Briton.

Oooh, Brutal!

Notable & Quotable

Auto expert William J. Holstein writing at BusinessWeek.com:

The Big Three figured [that the arrival of foreign auto manufacturers in the U.S.] would saddle the Japanese with the same labor costs and the same labor problems they had. But they were wrong. The Japanese located in mostly southern and border states that were solidly anti-union. They hired younger, less expensive workers, and they created an entirely new relationship between management and labor. This led to an entirely new auto industry. The net effect was to rachet up the competitive pressures on Detroit, not ease them. . . . That was followed by yet another rude awakening last November when the then-CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler came to testify in Washington, D.C., and found out that the government wouldn't be bailing them out. Southern Republicans, many of whom represented states with nonunion auto factories, chewed the CEOs up before the cameras. Newly powerful California environmentalists assaulted them. The center of the national consensus regarding the importance of the domestically owned auto industry had shifted, and American media coverage was also thoroughly hostile.

Carter, Really?! Who would've thunk it?

Jenkins: If Obama Had Carter's Courage . . .

Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter. The latter really did face the unraveling of an indispensable industry. Mr. Obama faces not a collapse of the domestic auto industry, but collapse of two companies miserable enough to have been extant in the 1930s when the Wagner Act was foisted upon the industry.

We have a second auto industry, founded after the political and legal system had thought better of mandatory unionization, born of foreign parents, mostly in the South. It's surviving the recession without extraordinary help...

We're still waiting for the brave, original thinking that we were told Mr. Obama represented. Like Washington circa 1978, he has landed for once in a situation where something more than symbolism is required of him. He has finally glided into the land of the real, where the key measurable outcome is no longer whether an audience is glowing with self-approval when he leaves the room.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama, that freethinker, took to the CAFE fraud like a bat to a belfry. He signaled his arrival on the presidential stage by sternly demanding higher mileage standards early in his campaign. The "change" candidate who might have broken with a generation of political cant about CAFE instead appropriated the fraud for his own careerist purposes. (Emphasis mine)

Please read the whole thing, then rethink any liberal ideas, you might harbor, about who's to blame for the fall of Chrysler and GM.

The Race Maze

Victor Davis Hanson attempts to sort through the tangled web of racial and identity politics in the world of the guilt-ridden liberal white: Lost in the Labyrinth of Race.

Shuttle Returns to Florida

The Space Shuttle Atlantis rides aboard the 747 transport aircraft June 1 as it takes off from Edwards Air Force Base. In the background, the NASA camera airplane.
Credit: Nick Smirnoff

Space shuttle Atlantis back home in Florida

More here with pics.