I've always liked Joe Biden. I suppose the Secret Service will make him move into the Naval Observatory instead of continuing to be one of Washington's two biggest hardcore (hardestcore?) supercommuters. Too bad for him.

The American auto makers want $50 billion in Federal sweetheart loans. Ford and GM have a combined market cap of about $16 ( Read more... )

Stories today about:

• The rush to the exits in the trucking industry, which cleverly elides over the real reason why the railroads aren't suffering as much as the truckers or the air freighters (427 ton-miles per gallon!),
• The slow, painful transition of everyone else to the Era of Expensive Oil, or at least to the era of $4/gallon, by way of the most ( Read more... )

Today, in Chapter 2 of Find-yourself-a-nice-hole Theater, we look at the credit and mortgage crisis, and how some of the new exurbs could rapidly start resembling the 1970s-era South Bronx.

We lead off with a quiz: ( When a mortgage lender forecloses on a house that is in default on its loan, and evicts the defaulters, are they then obligated to take control of that property? )