Day: November 14, 2008

Michael Eisenstadt is a nonexistent senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, a nonexistent think tank, but he has a blog and the “Institute” has a Web site and for parts of the blogosphere that’s credibility enough.

Eisenstadt is actually Eitan Gorlin, half of a team of aspiring film makers who over the course of the campaign generated loopy Web postings that, while something of a stretch had a hint of plausibility: plans to build a casino in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the assertion that Joe the Plumber was related to McCain nemesis Charles Keating, angry calls to the McCain campaign from Paris Hilton’s family.

When Congress established the $700 billion bailout fund, it promised strict and thorough oversight. Over a month later, with $290 billion already committed, we have our answer: There isn’t any.

The legislation called for a special inspector general within the Treasury to audit and investigate the bailout, reporting on what assets the government is acquiring, its reasons for doing so and their value. The special inspector has yet to be named, although the Bush administration is said to have a candidate lined up, but there’s a question whether the Senate can confirm him in a timely fashion.

The nation’s 21 Republican governors are in defense mode. They know they’re the best and the brightest but fear the rest of the world doesn’t understand that.

Meeting in Miami after the election, now solidly the minority party, the governors embraced Haley Barbour’s statement: “When I became chairman of the Republican National Committee after Bill Clinton’s election, I quickly found out that our governors were the most popular, influential people in the party. When the other party has the White House and both houses of Congress, as it did then and will now, the only place people can actually see Republican ideas being implemented is in the states.”

Barbour, of course, is now governor of Mississippi.

It wasn’t too long ago that most Americans accepted the adage that what is good for General Motors is good for the nation. That symbolic concept of U.S. industrial might certainly has slipped dramatically over the last four decades, but at this moment it just may be truer than it ever was.

For those of us of a certain age, the possible demise of the nation’s auto building giant and its remaining competitors in Detroit, Ford and Chrysler, is inconceivable. The loss of national pride alone is almost as devastating as the impact on jobs, GDP, taxes and personal income and those figures are enormous. American entrepreneurship and ingenuity so long admired around the globe would lose what credibility it has left. No longer would we be the geniuses of industrial development as evidenced by our remaining brands still represented on the world’s highways.