State News

Don't go into the center, stay away from the center, Michael Barone warns:

I think Republicans today should be less interested in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center. Here I mean a different "center" -- not a midpoint on an opinion spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.

Maybe a pun should not be unpacked, but I wonder whether the government-institution center might in time become the opinion center. I've never had a gig writing a textbook, so as far as I know, nobody is writing up the Bush-Obama Bailout for the permanent records as a hugely controversial and unpopular movement. I'd doubt the White House histories of either president or the personal finance works of the future will record it that way either. And I consider all those issues, of race, gender, life, war, private affairs, etc., in which once controversial interventions by activist judges, presumptuous legislatures, callow presidents and others eventually assumed the mantle of Conventional Wisdom.

Now it may be the case that Conventional Wisdom ain't worth what it once was, and I think in general I'd agree. But I've counted up the Republicans and the Democrats with both hands, and it still looks like they're only giving two choices.

So how can they avoid the center? It's like advising the Moon to get away from the Earth.

by Mark Silva

On the eve of President Barack Obama's address to the Muslim world from Cairo, where he will deliver an appeal for mutual understanding, the Arab world has heard from another voice: A recorded audio-tape attributed to Osama bin Laden, fugitive leader of al Qaeda, accusing Obama of fomenting "hatred'' with military action in Pakistan.

The purported broadcast of bin Laden's words, aired by the Arab-language Al Jazeera satellite television station as Obama was arriving in Saudi Arabia today, stood as a stark reminder of the hurdles that the United States still faces throughout the region.

While the president is intent on "resetting''' U.S. relations with the Muslim world in his planned televised address from the campus of Cairo University in Egypt, some of the long-elusive sponsors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults against the United States remain at large and refocused on overturning the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I don't think it's surprising that al Qaeda would want to shift attention away from the president's historic efforts ... to reach out and have an open dialogue with the Muslim world,'' Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary, said as the president was holding private meetings with the king of Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden, son of a Saudi family that gained enormous wealth in construction and built the royal palaces of the late King Saud, became involved in the militant Jihadist movement in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded that nation. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he was confined to house arrest, and left the country in the early 1990s - his Saudi citizenship publicly revoked in 1994.

If Obama's mission in the Middle East has a clear purpose, the administration maintains, so does the timing of al Qaeda's message.

The tape's broadcast follows comments from al-Qaeda's second- in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Egyptians to shun Obama and contending that the "torturers of Egypt" and "slaves of America'' had invited the American leader to speak in Cairo.

The administration has attempted to draw a contrast between an al Qaeda in hiding and an American leader taking a high-profile stance with his appeal to the Muslim world.

"You have, you know, the leader of the free world speaking from one of the great cities in the world, and you have, you know, bin Laden speaking from an undisclosed... location,'' said Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs. "That speaks volumes in terms of the contrast.''

General Motors on Monday filed for bankruptcy protection, even after $19.4 billion in federal bailout money. It now appears that taxpayers will end up with a 60% stake in the restructured company. Cato scholar Daniel Ikenson has long suggested bankruptcy as the best course for GM, and now worries about Ford's future: "The government has a 60 percent stake in GM. Who's going to want to own Ford stock—and therefore, will Ford be able to raise capital—when the U.S. government has an incentive to tip the balance in GM's favor wherever it can?"

• Full statement from Ikenson


• "An Overdue Reckoning in the Auto Sector," by Daniel Ikenson


• "Don't Bail Out the Big Three," by Daniel Ikenson