A Stitch in Haste

Mitt Romney, January 14, 2008:
Michigan is enduring a one-state recession, and the problem has only been exacerbated by poor choices made by some of the leaders in Lansing to raise taxes and take that course instead of cutting spending.
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A lot of Washington politicians are aware of the pain, but they haven't done anything about it. [...]

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Bob Herbert is confused:
The famous Daily News headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," ran on Oct. 30, 1975.
New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, and President Ford (who never actually said "drop dead") had made it clear, after listening to conservative hard-liners both inside and outside of his administration, that he planned to veto [...]

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Anyone still pretending that China's authoritarians are committed to free-market principles?
Companies in two Chinese provinces, Shandong and Hubei, have been told they must seek official consent if they want to lay off more than 40 people. The order highlights the Chinese authorities' concern over mounting job losses.
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The Chinese authorities are keen to avoid social instability, [...]

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Some hasty stitches regarding calls to use TARP money to bail out the Big Three automakers:

General Motors is not "the U.S. auto industry." The Big Three are not "the U.S. auto industry." There are many different metrics (vehicle production, revenue, employment, etc.) but a good benchmark is that the Big Three represent only about one-half [...]

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Can't quite fit this on Twitter:
I'm sure opponents will dust off the same old slogans they have used to try to block every major advance in health care. They will call it "socialized medicine" and a "government takeover," just as they did when they opposed Medicare and the children's health program — and they are [...]

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Another oblivious contribution from the increasingly silly New York Times "Ethicist" column. The question put to him:
I own a busy cafe-delicatessen with 25 employees. All the workers except two enjoy listening to background music from the radio while they work, as do I; those two say it irritates them, gives them headaches and makes it [...]

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Barney Frank calls for making Wall Street bonuses illegal:
"There should be a moratorium on bonuses," Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, told reporters yesterday in Washington. "They have a negative incentive effect because they are the ones that say if you take a risk and it pays off you get a big bonus," and if it causes [...]

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled marriage blogging to bring you … marriage blogging:
Young people believe, according to the survey, that the main reason for marriage is "commitment". But Thatcherism drove the concept of commitment out of working-class lives: the commitment of employers to their workers, of workers to their unions, of skilled men and women [...]

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Several commentators (as well as one commenter here) duly noted how an early Associated Press account of Treasury Secretary Paulson's $250 billion partial nationalization of major banks quoted him as saying that the offer was "not voluntary."
Later versions of the report mysteriously purged those two words. As I noted previously, the Bank of Orwell seems [...]

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Without prologue:
–Today's Treasury press release insists that the direct preferred equity stakes are "a voluntary capital purchase program." That's quite the reversal from 24 hours ago, when Paulson insisted that the stakes were, um, "not voluntary." Apparently the investments are being underwritten by the Bank of Orwell.
–Regarding those preferred stock shares, the President insists:
And the [...]

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