Wb News

by Mark Silva

As President Barack Obama prepares to depart Tuesday for a trip that will carry him from Saudi Arabia to France -- with an address to the Muslim world from Cairo in the middle of the journey -- he is starting to aim his megaphone at a global audience.

In an interview with the BBC on the eve of the trip, the president was asked about delivering his appeal for peace to the Muslim world from a city, Cairo, where many political prisoners are being held, and how he can reconcile the two.

"The message I hope to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion those are not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries, but rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity,'' Obama said in an interview airing this evening.

"Now, the danger, I think, is when the United States or any country thinks that we can simply can impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture .. our job,'' Obama tells BBC interviewer Justin Webb.

"Absolutely we'll be encouraging ......and I think the thing that we can do most importantly is to serve as a role model, and that's why, for example, closing Guantanamo from my perspective -- as difficult as it is -- is important, because part of what we want to affirm to the world is that these are values that are important even when it's hard, maybe especially when it's hard -- and not just when it's easy."

Part of the interivew will be broadcast on BBC World News and BBC World Service radio at 9 pm United Kingdom time, and the full interview will air on Tuesday a 04:30 am UK time. The BBC Obama interview also will be shown online.

The president leaves Tuesday evening for Saudi Arabia, where he will hold private meetings with the king before traveling to Cairo for his public address on Thursday, and then on to Dresden, Germany, for a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Paris for commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landing.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) announced he will seek another term in the Senate, Tulsa World reports.

So.  Alea iacta est, as Julius Caesar might have said, if there had been a major Roman chariot manufacturer in putative need of nationalization.  The nation's largest automaker, our most iconic firm, is bankrupt,  GM and Citigroup exit the Dow in favor of Travelers and Cisco. 

The first obvious thing to say is that the only alternative the US government probably had to this massively expensive reorganization was probably liquidation.  I take seriously the claims that there was no DIP financing available for the automakers.

However.  The reason there was no DIP financing available is, at least in part, that there's no obvious upside here.  The government is acting as if GM's main problem is that it stubbornly refused to enter the lucrative market for small, fuel-efficient cars.  But the market for small, fuel efficient cars is not lucrative--they're the cars with the thinnest margins.  And no one's making it up on volume, either:  at the height of last year's oil spike, when barrels of Brent Crude were being quoted in first-born sons, small cars soared to . . . 20% of the American market.  Yes, there was a glut of SUVs, but that's because American companies were making a lot of SUVs.  Foreign companies make money on small cars because they develop them for lucrative home markets before modifying them for American production.

GM's main problem is not that the market is unreasonably unwilling to finance a potentially profitable company.  Nor that it can't produce an awesome small car that shockingly few people want to buy.  (Believe me, as the owner of a tiny, ultra-efficient car, I would that there were higher demand for my rapidly depreciating asset).  GM's main problems are

1)  A terrible, bloated cost structure
2)  A terrible, bloated bureaucracy
3)  A bunch of meh car lines

Which of these is the government going to solve?  That terrible, bloated cost structure supports a bloated union whose jobs are the entire rationale for the government intervention.  Leaning on the parts suppliers just risks UAW jobs further down the supply chain.  Maybe we can take it out of the budget for copy paper and pencils.

Forgive me if I am skeptical that the government is going to show GM how to streamline its bureaucracy.  Nor do governments historically have a good record as cutting-edge auto designers.

All the government can give GM is money.  Our money.  Perhaps we should change the name to American Leyland.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released its preliminary analysis of crime trends in the U.S. for 2008 and there's plenty of good news:

... the nation experienced a 2.5 percent decrease in the number of violent crimes and a 1.6 percent decline in the number of property crimes for 2008 compared with data from 2007. The report is based on information that the FBI gathered from 12,750 law enforcement agencies that submitted six to 12 comparable months of data to the FBI for both 2007 and 2008.

... In 2008, all four of the violent crime offense categories declined nationwide compared with data from 2007. Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter declined 4.4 percent, aggravated assault was down 3.2 percent, forcible rape decreased 2.2 percent, and robbery decreased 1.1 percent.

See FBI press release detailing crime trends here. 

Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog studies Sotomayor's abortion rulings:

Fabio Rojas has a theory: