We're like, cool with this, so, like, chill out.

Day 524

Remember that CEO who looks for communications skills in new hires? Bet he shares this guy's beef. (For faster download, click on hyperlink below the block.)

Quick Fix: Is 'Like' the Virus of the English Language? - watch more funny videos

The first 100 days.

Day 523

I. An Obama era?

And on the 99th day, U.S. Sen. Arlen Spector, influential Pennsylvania Republican, stunned Washington by switching parties. Just when the knock on Obama for failing to deliver the bipartisanship he promised (an over-rated virtue, by the way; the Dems won resoundingly, they should govern on the agenda the electorate endorsed) - a miracle like this happens. Reminds us of the beginning of the three-decade-long Reagan era that began in 1980, whose early days were marked by Dems, particularly in the South, crossing the aisle to join the party of a popular president.

 

Harry Reid (D-NV), U.S. senate majority leader, at the podium. To his left, fellow U.S. senator Susan Collins (R-ME). On Reid's right, Arlen Spector, Republican-turned-Democratic U.S. senator of Pennsylvania. 

Granted, Spector is a moderate who ired fellow Republicans by being among only three GOP senators to support Obama's unprecedented $787-billion (U.S.) stimulus bill. (The others were the two Maine senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.) Still, Spector has carried a lot of water for Republican administrations in his four decades or so on the Hill, most notoriously his championing of Clarence Thomas, one of the least qualified Supreme Court nominees in history.  

With the likely ascension of Minnesota's Al Franken to the upper chamber, the party led by Barack Obama will achieve a filibuster-proof "super-majority" of 60 votes - the first time in decades that either party has achieved that degree of power. The black man who led Virginia, heart of the Confederacy, back into the Democratic fold and also captured deep-red Indiana and North Carolina last Nov. 4, has just seen his chance to enact an activist agenda soar.

It's far too early to herald a new, lengthy Reagan-like era for Obama. He's still in honeymoon phase, and has replaced one of the most dangerously incompetent presidents in history.

Reagan benefited from two towering strengths. He was enormously likeable, which made him impervious to comical blunders like forgetting the names of his own cabinet officers and snoozing through an audience with the Pope. And Reagan's agenda was based on tax cuts and smaller government, perennial crowd-pleasers. Few things are easier for a legislator to do than vote in favour of a president's tax cut. Few things are tougher than explaining back in the district why you voted against one - no matter how fiscally ruinous it might be, or its implications in reduced government services.

That Reagan and his two immediate successors were each, in fact, big government, big spending presidents, each leaving behind a larger deficit and national debt than the last, was easily glossed with, in Reagan's case, the Teflon-coated popularity he enjoyed (as Democratic congresswoman Pat Schroeder dubbed it) that arose from his sunny optimism. And by pitting Americans against each other in so-called culture wars over gun ownership, abortion, religion in the schools, gay rights and other issues that - if Americans stopped to think about it - had zero to do with their personal prosperity. Or with the advancement of their nation as a leader in technology, medical breakthroughs, diplomatic and military prowess (the Soviet Union wasn't toppled by the West but self-destructed, to the great surprise of an American intelligence community that would later be similarly blindsided by the attacks of 9/11), and especially progress in the social welfare issues of quality education and healthcare. The U.S. ranks about 20th in literacy and numeracy, outranked by South Korea among other rising industrial rivals. 

Contemplating the prospect of a long stay in the political wilderness, akin to the fate of Democrats from 1980 to 2008, Republicans can see from recent same-sex marriage advances in a handful of states that the culture-war card is becoming the joker in the deck. In any event, the new president actually walks the walk on family values, unlike so many of the debauched, hypocritical "moralizers" of the right. (Serial adulterer Newt Gingrich, Vegas high-roller William Bennett, recovering "hillbilly heroin" (Oxycontin) addict Rush Limbaugh, lecherous Bill O'Reilly, among other Obama scolds.)

Obama is in many ways a social conservative. He opposes same-sex marriage. He is only reluctantly pro-choice (and has long been attacked in his own party over his tepid support of Roe v. Wade). Obama for years has urged fellow Democrats to shed their widely off-putting public secularism, and adopt the language of religion in public discourse. And he has sermonized on personal responsibility in almost every major speech he has given this decade. ("Any man can make a woman pregnant. It takes courage to be a father.") And that's an authentic, loving family Americans see the in White House, one that mirrors their own highest ideals for family and community. 

The GOP's only opening is the undisguised liberal Obama agenda. The new president is more of a fiscal hawk than the left wing of his party cares for. But he believes in government. He believes in spending on neglected priorities like fixing a dysfunctional healthcare system and replacing Civil War-vintage schoolhouses. And unlike fretful Dems of the Reagan era, Obama isn't afraid to say so and make a compelling case for effective government. 

That makes Obama vulnerable to the founding American ideal of rugged individualism. Which may be an elaborately concocted myth of many generations' construction. But there it is, all the same.

Rejecting the Obama stimulus money on behalf of his state, Governor Rick Perry of Texas recently talked about secession from the "collectivist, socialist" union the right accuses Obama of trying to create. I personally would love to see Texas secede for a year, and learn what it means to struggle without federal manna for its subsidized cattle and oil industries, its highways, its Medicare and Medicaid payments for everyday Texans. And then watch the Lone Star State begin begging for renewed statehood four months into the experiment. 

But that's not how it works in the real world, of course. The every-man-for-himself America that libertarians crave has never been tried, and the ensuing chaos and misery never endured. (In the midst of one mega-project, saving the Union, Abraham Lincoln's government was also financing construction of North America's first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific.) So the anti-government message will continue to resonate, even post-Katrina, when Americans relearned the imperative of effective government. Unless, that is, Obama can powerfully show improved quality of life for everyday Americans under a regime in which their government helps them take better care of each other. 

Otherwise, the GOP is in trouble. Because Reagan's other strength, likeability, Obama possesses in depth. He is self-deprecating, a great explainer, deliberative yet decisive ("three shots, three dead pirates" is the Dems' answer on Obama possibly being soft on national security), and he readily fesses up to mistakes. With that broad, sincere smile and relentless but measured optimism, Obama is immensely likeable. The GOP can attack his policies, and with some effect. But on character, which usually is the trump card, as it was for the extraordinarily likeable, optimistic and trusted FDR and Reagan, the GOP is playing a busted straight.     

_________________________ 

 

II. Obama's first 100 days.

The "first 100 days" is a media conceit dating from FDR, who achieved legislative passage of an unprecedent torrent of legislation early on which these days would have been combined into an efficient handful of bills. And it's not like the new president is on probation, living by his wits as the leader of a minority government that could fall any day. For better or worse, Americans are stuck with Obama for at least another 1,360 days.

But we'll play.

This is not a "on the one hand, on the other" assessment. Americans chose wisely in their selection of the 44th president, who deserves his 68 per cent public-approval rating. Obama has exceeded high expectations, at home and abroad.

We'll start with the disappointments, though. Obama's state department has decided to keep the exonerated Maher Arar on a terrorist watch list. Obama has not taken Wall Street's solons of finance to the woodshed. As he did with GM's Rick Wagoner, Obama needs to force Ken Lewis' replacement at Bank of America Corp. and probably that of Lewis' counterpart at Citigroup Inc. as well. (Uncle Sam is the controlling shareholder in those firms, as well, after billions of dollars in bailouts.) Obama hasn't imposed a "course correction" on the errant bankers, who remain in arrogant denial about their role in the global financial collapse. He needs them, even at the risk of losing their ludicrous bonuses, to shed the toxic assets on their books at a loss and, thus cleansed, stop acting as a brake on economic recovery. If Obama isn't overly in thrall to the pro-Israel lobby, how else to explain why he properly extends the hand of friendship to Iran and Venezuela but is strangely silent on a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian Authority? He risks letting hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu sabotage a viable peace process. Obama's proposed cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions to combat global warming - unlikely to gain Senate passage anyway - is a needless handout to business, and a convoluted alternative to a straightforward carbon tax.

On the plus side, we'll simply endorse these observations about the water-walker. (Actually, we think of Obama as simply a guy who can walk and chew gum at the same time, which seems to astonish the jaded Beltway crowd.)

Joe Klein of Time, venerable presidential chronicler: "The legislative achievements have been stupendous - the $789 billion stimulus bill, the budget plan that is still being hammered out (and may, ultimately, include the next landmark safety-net program, universal health insurance). There has also been a cascade of new policies to address the financial crisis - massive interventions in the housing and credit markets, a market-based plan to buy the toxic assets that many banks have on their books, a plan to bail out the auto industry and a strict new regulatory regime proposed for Wall Street. Obama has also completely overhauled foreign policy, from Cuba to Afghanistan. 'In a way, Obama's 100 days is even more dramatic than Roosevelt's,' says Elaine Kamarck of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. 'Roosevelt only had to deal with a domestic crisis. Obama has had to overhaul foreign policy as well, including two wars. And that's really the secret of why this has seemed so spectacular.'"

George Packer of the New Yorker, who during the campaign last year thought Obama might be an empty suit: "Having already signed a nearly eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus bill, restored the rule of law to America’s treatment of detainees in its custody, developed plans to shore up the banking and housing sectors, demanded new regulation of private equity and hedge funds, proposed sweeping reforms in health care, energy, and education, and deepened the country’s involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Obama, in his tenth week in office, effectively put the government in charge of a large part of the automobile industry. And that was just Monday. By midweek, at the G-20 meeting in London, he had also committed the United States in principle to a new global regulatory framework for financial markets and, by some accounts, had resurrected the art of Presidential diplomacy. Then, on Thursday night, he won passage of a $3.5-trillion budget, whose tax and spending provisions mark the end of a long-term trend toward greater inequality."

Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris of Politico.com: "The White House is pushing back against what it realizes is a dangerous perception that Obama may be trying to do too much, too fast - and cynically exploiting the economic crisis to push through unrelated agenda items. Aides are urging reporters to reread his campaign speeches, dating back to 2006, to see that Obama was upfront with voters on his big ambitions. They are basically right."

David Brooks, house conservative columnist at the New York Times: "It was not automatic that an administration led by a 47-year-old with little Washington experience would run a professional, smoothly functioning operation. Yet he has. The administration has unveiled a dazzling array of proposals with a high degree of efficiency and managerial skill. This has inspired confidence in his team, if not in the government as a whole."

Lewis Black, playwright and political satirist, in a Globe interview prior to a Toronto gig: "I think he's great, in the sense that he speaks English, which is a nice thing to have for a change. Now people are... yelling at him for doing too much and pushing too fast. Well, that's what he's supposed to be doing...He at least tries to talk to the American people, and the rest of the world, as if they were intelligent...And [his family] actually seems to be a legitimate family. They seem to enjoy each other."

 Related

* WH behind the scenes: 100 photos for 100 days.

Highly recommended for both political junkies and incurable romantics taken with spontaneous expressions of First Couple affection.

* Obama official record of first 100 days.

* What a filibuster-proof U.S. Senate majority would mean.

* Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Senate moderate, on how her party blundered in losing Spector.

Unrelated

* In honour of tonight's 100th episode of "Lost," 100 questions about the show that still have us mystified.

Photo-illustration by BigFurHat. Many thanks to PJ Dempsey!

The incredible shrinking GM.

Day 522

I guess I've written a half-dozen times that the only hope for GM is to break it up. Still, this is a sad day for "GM people" like me. Such brand loyalty pretty much disappeared in the import era. (After four GM cars, I drive a German make.) But friends of my age, 51, can remember growing up in Ford, GM or Chrysler households. (Kids with quirky parents first saw the world in motion through the windows of an American Motors product.)

Click above to hear Fritz Henderson, CEO of GM only a few weeks since longtime helmsman Rick Wagoner was forced out by the White House, describe with as much enthusiasm as he can muster the dismantling of his lifetime employer. I know, I know, it's only business. But if you grew up loving cars - aspired to owning a Cadillac, as I did - this is a moment akin to the last episode of "M*A*S*H*" or "Frasier."

Because of the larger context - an unprecedented global economic slump and financial crisis - this incredible humbling of a century-old industrial icon, the largest commercial enterprise in the world for more than half a century, is oddly not resonating among business leaders. The Detroit Three have been in decline for so long that most CEOs in other industries are almost oblivious to the sudden undoing of the legacies of GM's William Durant and Alfred Sloan, and of Walter Chrysler. (Ford isn't the picture of health, either; if industry sales don't recover by early next year, it too will bring a begging bowl to Congress.)

But the obvious lesson is apparent, just the same. There's no God-given right for any enterprise to last forever. Someday, sheer size will do you in, as your enormous firm becomes unknowable and unmanageable. That's why the best days of Wal-Mart and Microsoft are behind them. Size makes you fat and lazy. And a target. When Toyota first appeared on these shores, it wasn't that firm's ambition to someday rival Studebaker in volume. From the beginning, Toyota and Honda, and before that Volkswagen, had GM in their sights. GM had been so big, so successful, so powerful for so long - it was the one to emulate and to beat.

So, yes, marvel that P&G is still thriving, keeping complacency at bay, 172 years after its founding in Cincinnati. And that the Bay lingers, no matter how diminished and in desultory fashion, 339 years after it was launched. Noting the remarkably short half-life of tech firms, Intel's Andy Grove wrote a book whose title became the mantra of Silicon Valley, Only The Paranoid Survive. Actually, the maxim applies to all business. Take a day off, smell the roses - and an unheard-of rival will bite you in the ass.  

Note: For the purposes of this blog, the inception of the Great Recession in the U.S., the epicentre of the crisis, is taken as the start date for the global slump. The U.S. has been in recession since December 2007.

Requiem for a once-great consumer brand.

Day 522

Pontiac, which GM announced yesterday is to share Oldsmobile's fate and be phased out by next year, was created by GM and launched in model year 1926. (The companies launched by David Buick and Ransom Olds predated the formation of GM in 1908.) Priced at $825, the first Pontiac was "green-lighted" by Alfred Sloan, legendary founder of the modern GM, to close a gap between GM's pricey $950 Olds sedan and $645 Chevrolet sedan.

The name derived from the Pontiac Spring & Wagon Works, formed in 1906 and honouring Chief Pontiac, an American Indian chief who led an unsuccessful revolt against the British soon after the French and Indian War. Pontiac merged with the Oakland Motor Co., acquired by GM in 1909. Intended as an affordable six-cylinder to compete with four-cylinder cars, Pontiac soon was so outselling Oakland that GM discontinued that brand in 1932.

 

An early ad for the first Pontiac, the six-cylinder 1926 "coach" shown at right, in the Saturday Evening Post. 

While it was an underpowered model in its early years, the modern Pontiac of the second half of the 20th century was marketed as an "athletic" or performance alternative to its more prosaic Chevrolet stablemate. Sex figured more prominently in its ads, single young males being a target audience for such brand-making models as the GTO and Firebird.

Pontiac, like its Chev, Buick, Olds and Cadillac siblings, did not recover from GM's 1980s decision to share so much styling and components among its divisions that distinctions among them practically disappeared. Pontiac sales peaked in the year Saturday Night Fever was released. Last year, Pontiac claimed a pitiful U.S. market share of just 2.1 per cent.

GM resisted killing the brand. Putting Olds out of its misery had cost GM about $1 billion in payments to dealers and other expenses. As recently as its turnaround plan presented to the White House a few weeks ago, GM hoped to close Pontiac as a full-fledged division but retain it as a niche brand. Even that concession wasn't enough for President Obama's auto task force, which saw the ailing brand as a costly distraction in any shape or form - a view conceded by CEO Fritz Henderson on Monday in unveiling GM's latest "viability plan" in return for continued federal life support. 

Below is an attempt to show how GM gradually destroyed the Pontiac brand with fatal design decisions.

 

The 1973 Firebird Trans Am, variously a "muscle car" or "lust car" in industry parlance, was a head-turning vehicle compared with its 2002 descendant, which could pass for a subcompact Pontiac Sunfire.

 

The 1969 Grand Prix helped define the new "personal luxury" segment of plush two-passenger coupes. By the early 1990s, GM had killed that category, and applied the Grand Prix name to a line of underpowered bloatmobiles that failed in their mission to subdue the ascendant Toyota Camry and Honda Accord.  

 

The 1960 Bonneville boasted the arresting design befitting Pontiac's top-of-the-line offering. By 1970, the vehicle at right was easily mistaken for a Chev Impala, Olds Cutlass or Buick Regal - no surprise, since the vehicles shared platforms and bodies, with only minor detailing to distinguish them.

 

GM design genius Harley Earl's outrageous flair is evident in the taillight assembly of the 1957 Laurentian (sold in the U.S. as the Strato-Chief). Earl's fins and protruding rear lights were inspired by U.S. jet fighters of the era. As early as 1969, Pontiac's bread-and-butter full-size sedan was putting on too much weight and shedding curb appeal. 

   

Three duds: The Aztec, which dealers tended to hide at the back of the lot, has joined the AMC Pacer and Gremlin, Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega among vehicles most cited on ugliest-ever-vehicle lists. The Fiero was a short-lived, mechanically-challenged shot at a muscle car for women. (1985 model shown.) The plain-as-a-plank Pontiac 6000 came as close to styling anonymity as any American vehicle has achieved. (1983 model shown.)

The Solstice spearheaded Pontiac's promising rebirth, incorporating the elements of quality fit and finish and daring looks that the Pontiac division at its best exemplified. Too bad Mazda got there first, with its Miata roadster, circa 1989.

Related

* GM to kill 83-year-old Pontiac brand.

* Slide show: vintage Pontiacs, 1950 to the present.

* GM's drastic "viability plan" makes clear GM now headquartered in Washington.

Does the Wendy's mascot look like any redhead you know?

Day 522

They like the product, hate the icon.

Leading indicators

* GM to kill Pontiac, accelerate plant closings and job cuts in Monday morning announcement.

* Magna may end up vying with Fiat for stake in Opel, GM's struggling German automaker.

  

* Bank of Canada still confident of Canadian economic recovery beginning 4Q 09.

* Surprisingly brisk market for unbuilt multimillion-dollar Toronto condos.

Analysis and commentary

* Robert Reich: Rescuing the banks should take a back seat to still more government stimulus spending.

* New York Times: Laid-off Wall Street dads adjusting to new role as Mr. Mom.

* Der Spiegel: Icelandic women, blaming men for nation's economic collapse, ready to take political power.

Note: For the purposes of this blog, the inception of the Great Recession in the U.S., the epicentre of the crisis, is taken as the start date for the global slump. The U.S. has been in recession since December 2007.

Liberal arts majors, have we got a job for you. Several, actually.

The New York Times wants to know from Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines, world's biggest carrier, about his hiring preferences.

Q. "What are you looking for in job candidates?"

A. "They already have the resume and they already have the experience base. So what you're trying to find out about are the intangibles of leadership, communication style, and the ability to...really adopt to change...I like to ask people what they've read, what are the last three or four books they've read, and what did they enjoy about those..."

Q. "What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they're from, etc.?"

A. "You're looking for a really strong set of values. You're looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communications skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you're looking for communication skills..."

Q. "Is there any change in the kind of qualities you're looking for compared with five,10 years ago?"

A. "I think this communication point is getting more and more important. People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say the written word, I don't mean PowerPoints. I don't think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don't have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn't have a subject, a verb and an object, so you aren't expressing clear thoughts. And a lot of what we do in communication, when you write e-mail, you need to express yourself very clearly so people understand whether we're going to L.A. today or we're going to Boston today..."

Q. "Any good management or leadership books that you've read?"

A. "I think good history books are the best books on management. And particularly autobiographies and biographies. Right now, I'm reading Theodore Rex. [Edmund Morris' 2001 biography of Theodore Roosevelt.]"

We're not saying skip Finance 101, just make sure your school's version of it demands lots of essay writing. And you might want to consider a heavy load of literature and history electives.

When Matt Barrett was running Bank of Montreal, posting 10 consecutive years of higher revenues and profits before heading off to run Barclays PLC, he stated an emphatic hiring preference for Chaucer majors over business grads.

So, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? By all means, after you're done with Elements of Style, Pride and Prejudice and The Power Broker, Robert Caro's epic biography of Robert Moses.

Bull market.

Day 511

Wall Street recovery must wait until errant bull completes world tour, including this surprise visit to an Irish supermarket.

Turns out there was a fourth member of the 'Axis of Evil'.

The administration of George W. Bush.

 

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, former U.S. vice president and president, respectively, and former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Will the banality of their administration's evil ever culminate in prosecutions?

"The United States does not torture," George W. Bush lied to the American people. On orders for senior Bush administration officials, America tortured Afghan and Iraq war  detainees at Guantanamo Bay; in Baghdad and Kabul prisons; at CIA "dark sites" in Germany, Thailand and other unsuspecting host nationsp; and "renditioned," or outsourced, torture to suspect allies like Egypt and outright adversaries like Syria. There has been no conclusive proof that this heinous activity protected the homeland, that torture yielded useful infomration that had not already been provided by detainees using conventional interrogation methods common to the local police station house. There is proof detainees lied during torture to stop the pain.

In acting as it did, Bush eclipsed the combined Teapot Dome, Watergate and Lewinsky scandals by an immeasurable degree. The 43rd president subverted the U.S. Constitution and the body of American law based upon it. His White House lawyers put in abeyance longstanding directives of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions - protections initially sponsored by the United States. The Bush regime made a hash of the strict torture prohibitions in the field manuals of all four branches of the U.S. military.

It did so in frenzied pursuit of a non-existent link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, to justify a war of choice against Iraq, a sovereign nation posing no immediate threat to the U.S. or its neighbours. In doing so, the Bush administration ignored the growing real threat to America by a resurgent Al Qaeda in Afghanistan that Canada, the Obama administration and other NATO members are struggling fitfully with today. And it dissuaded allies from sharing vitally useful information with a nation known within the global intelligence and foreign-policy communities as having zealously embraced torture. Lest they dirty their hands and lose favour with their own people, potentially helpful allies opted to wait out the Bush administration until its replacement by one with which they could more safely cooperate. Many years of essential detective work were thus lost.  

One thing about the Americans. They have a free press. Following the recently released memoes of the Bush justice department encouraging the use of torture and detailing the methods to be employed, you can read widely in America angry, sorrowful responses to one of the saddest chapters of a great nation. We found Frank Rich's exposition in today's New York Times especially compelling:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us a from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had noting to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality...

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won't vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don't need another commission. We don't need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation's commitment to the rule of law.

Source for Abu Ghraib photo montage: Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

Blame Canada. (Again)

Day 511

Kinda scary when the future U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had on two occasions to be corrected in stating that the 19 mass murderers of Sept. 11, 2001 crossed into the U.S. from Canada. And when, last week, both the new U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, and the senior U.S. senator from Arizona, John McCain, a 22-year veteran of Congress, repeated this canard.

 

Janet Napolitano, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security; John McCain (R-AZ), U.S. senator from Arizona; and Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State. They'll adopt metric before figuring out that Canada is not a terrorist dagger pointed at America's heart.

Scary, because it's right there in the official 9/11 Commission's exhaustive report that the 19 killers entered the U.S. directly by flights from overseas. Scary because our American friends, citing our comparatively open-door immigration policy that has served Canada extraordinarily well, don't grasp that among the nations of the world, Canada is actually a hostile place for terrorists given an elaborate Canadian internal security regimen that, like its U.S. counterpart, often over-reacts and bumps up against the civil rights of perfectly innocent Canadians. (Ask Maher Arar.)

Scary because it's just possible that these remarkably prominent U.S. policymakers with influence over our border with the U.S. - and the roughly $1 billion in goods that crosses it every day - have read the 9/11 Commission report either selectively or not at all. Considering the wealth of information the report contains about contemporary terrorism, that's hardly encouraging for Americans concerned about their domestic security.  

And scary because Napolitano is one of ablest governors in border-state Arizona history. She troubled to engage governors of neighbouring Mexican states to learn every dimension of border issues. I was impressed after listening to her in a San Francisco speech last year on common-sensical and holistic solutions to immigration problems. 

Yet here's Napolitano's next-day "correction" last week, acknowledging she was wrong about the 19 hijackers of 9/11 infamy but adding - in the typical wording of a non-apology apology - that there are plenty of cases of suspected terrorists coming into the U.S. from Canada. "Some of these are well-known to the public such as the Millennium Bomber while others are not due to security reasons," she said. (Italics are mine.)

That's how Napolitano left it, that Canada is a haven for terrorists posing a threat to the U.S. Barack Obama, who has disappointed us already by not granting justice in the case of Maher Arar, promised transparency in his administration.

So let's clear this up. First, what's the lingering U.S. evidence against the long-ago exonerated Arar (shown left, with his family), which the U.S. State Department prefers to hide behind by terming it "classified"? Expose that, and we can all learn how disinformation gets into the system. And all these other cases to which Napolitano refers, expose them to sunlight, as well, and see how they stand up to scrutiny.

True story: John Kenneth Galbraith, leftie economist expatriate from Ontario who served in three U.S. presidential administrations (FDR, JFK, LBJ), was described in the flotsam in his FBI file as having once been labeled "doctrinaire." When Galbraith finally was permitted to see his FBI file, he was surprised to discover the several assignations he'd had with a certain "Dr. Ware." Curious about this non-existent person, Galbraith traced the reference back to the first time an FBI file updater misinterpreted a field agent's handwriting, in which "doctrinaire" became "Dr. Ware."  

Let's clear it up, Mr. Obama, because in the meantime you've identified Canada as a terrorist haven, whose expatriates may be more of a threat to your country than, say, Paul Shafer and Pamela Anderson.

We're not denying it's a heavily trafficked border. Oh no.

People, many of Canadian birth, who have slipped across the porous border include J.L. Kraft, the Ontarian who built his second, and much larger cheese enterprise in Chicago. James Naismith, the Ontarian who invented basketball, an obsession of the current U.S. president. Sir William Osler, cofounder of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, whose textbooks carrying the maxim, "Treat the patient, not the disease," were a staple of U.S. med schools for generations. Louis B. Mayer, who made his way to California from a childhood in New Brunswick, and helped invent the Hollywood studio system. Jennifer Granholm, the B.C. native who is currently governor of Michigan. Joni Mitchell, whose "Chelsea Morning" was the inspiration for the name that Hillary and Bill Clinton chose for their only child. The Toronto specialist who sped down to the States to help save the life of Tipper and Al Gore's son after a near-fatal car accident...  

You're right, that is a partial list. In fairness, we fess up to Charles Ponzi, who developed his pyramid schemes in Montreal before separating the good people of Boston from their life savings. Robert Campeau, the star-crossed French-Canadian developer who bought and bankrupted the U.S. retail conglomerate that owned Bloomie's. Bernie Ebbers, the Edmonton high-school basketball coach who somehow gained control of the world's second-largest telecommunications firm, WorldCom Inc., whose collapse still ranks as the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. The Canadian partners Conrad Black and David Radler, who asset-stripped dozens of small-town U.S. newspapers and drove the proud, now-bankrupt Chicago Sun-Times to ruin. (Ebbers and Black are each doing stir in U.S. prisons.) David ("Axis of Evil") Frum, briefly a White House speechwriter, who gave Dubya some of the earliest sophistry to pitch the ill-fated U.S. invasion of Iraq. (Frum argues that his original "Axis of Hatred," for Iraq, Iran and North Korea, was changed by others - Bush himself or chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, depending on the account. Also neocon bile-spewer Charles Krauthammer, a McGill poli-sci grad and Massachusetts General psychiatrist who somehow evolved into a ubiquitous U.S. foreign-policy charlatan.

We profoundly apologize to our American friends about the most unfortunate migration pattern of Ponzi,  obvious role model for Bernie Madoff. But please, if for no other reason than your dependence on our joint defense of the continent and imported Canadian energy and BlackBerries, educate yourselves about the true origins and practices of modern terrorism, as we are doing. And stop needlessly pissing off the best friend you've ever had.  

The. Looniest. "Rescue." Ever.

Just so we're clear on the Fiat rescue of Chrysler that the White House is counting on:

* Fiat lost a ton of money ($785 million U.S.) in 1Q '09.

* Fiat has such a sound grasp of the markets in which it sells that it has, in the past few months, "revised" its 2009 profit forecast from roughly $1 billion (U.S.) to, uh, $100 million (U.S.).

* Case-New Holland, the farm and construction-equipment business that is Fiat's only exposure to the North American market, is a moneyloser that will, Fiat announced Thursday, lay of 1,500 Americans.

* Fiat has emerged this week as a rumoured buyer of Opel, GM's large German carmaker.

* And of Vauxhall, GM's large British carmaker.

* Fiat emphatically restated this week it won't invest a dime in Chrysler, not now, not ever.

Hell, if Washington is giving away a 20 per cent stake in Chrysler, give it to me. If Fiat won't be taking on any of Chrysler's debt and retiree obligations, and Washington is giving away Chrysler's massive minivan plant in Windsor, one of the biggest - if not the biggest - vehicle assembly plant in the world, I'll take it. The Jeep brand, free for the asking if your name is Sergio Marchionne? I've have some business experience - met a budget at a magazine I ran for a few years, operated a successful yard-maintenance business in my teens, bought a French-made Mercier racing bike with my paper-route earnings...(Fiat probably wants to buy Mercier, too.) 

Man, somebody's being played for a sucker here.