Is GM the New Amtrak?
Dr. James Langenfeld is a director at the economics consulting firm LECG and teaches at Loyola University Chicago. Previously he was a senior economist at General Motors and an analyst at Amtrak.
Taxpayers are still sinking billions of dollars into Amtrak-almost 40 years after buying it. Economist James Langenfeld says the bailout of GM could be an even bigger disaster.
Questions for Obama's Car Czar
Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard, and received a PhD from Harvard in 1973. The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood is his 13th book. The sequel, The Hollywood Economist will be published in January 2010.
Why did Quadrangle Group, run by Steven Rattner whom the president has chosen as the auto industry's fix-it man, have a subsidiary buy the DVD rights to Chooch, a movie co-produced by a pension-fund official? It's among the many things New York's attorney general needs to figure out.
Senate Republicans killed a $14 billion rescue of the American auto industry, threatening one or even two bankruptcies in Detroit with a wide-ranging impact that could jeopardize up to 2.5 million jobs. The fate of the rescue now lands on the desk of a lame duck president.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Jeffrey Koterba is an acclaimed syndicated political cartoonist. Since joining the Omaha World-Herald in 1989, he has been a finalist for Editorial Cartoonist of the Year from the National Cartoonists Society and has placed second in the National Headliner Awards. His work is distributed through King Features Syndicate to 400 newspapers nationwide, and has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post, among others.
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