Whom do you hate most?
That has to be a common question as we read, watch, or listen to the debate over saving, or not, the Detroit 3.:Disgracefully posturing politicians? Auto executives behaving like fish out of water? Union leaders defending their hard-fought gains?

Seeking TV exposure, our elected officials behave like power-mad boors, even as they display their principled preferences for capitalism or socialism. (Those who want to fire this or that executive will undoubtedly soon demand that his replacement needs to be approved by the Senate.) The pleading auto execs come across as unsure how to behave outside their own arena, where they are all-powerful. One has to assume that quite a few congressmen and senators won't be receiving as much financial support as in the past. Labor leaders have behaved the most like valiant soldiers: fighting back hard, reluctantly but very publicly offering symbolic concessions.

Nothing they do, or don't do, will make much difference long-term.

For at least 20 years, the auto industry has been pretending it doesn't know that -- in the U.S. and worldwide -- they can produce more cars than can ever be sold each year. As the foreign firms set themselves up in the U.S., the market share dropped for each of the Detroit 3. That overcapacity still exists. Nothing that comes out of Washington can prevent the downsizing of the Detroit 3 or the reduction of the 3 to the 2. Bailout, bridge loan, or not, four years from now the U.S. auto industry will have settled into its appropriate size in terms of production, number of office and factory employees, and new compensation-levels for all of them.

NOTE The comment above was written before the Senate voted to kill the bailout and before the White House said it and Treasury might come to the rescue.

Then there's Chicago
Those frequent and sometimes frantic statements stressing that Obama, himself, is not, yet, an issue in the Chicago scandal, suggests that we will soon be hearing phrases like "plausible deniability."

International

§ Australia seeks to block 10,000 websites
Beginning with a small "live pilot," the Australian Communications and Media Authority is testing Internet filtering technology  which is intended to block "unwanted content," a too-fuzzy concept for civil liberties groups. One filtering technology slows Internet access by as much as 87 percent, according to the news report.

Energy & Environment

The Last Word?
Global Warming theory is advocated and supported in the right hand column and is attacked and derided in the left hand column. Almost every position ever taken on the matter, every argument ever brought forward -- scientific, speculative, statistical, political, moral -- is touched on somewhere in the two columns. So, except for simple news reporting, and short of some unlikely conclusive proof that one side is right, VersagiVoice will let this be the last word, about the debate itself. [More]

The world is coming to an end -- again.