States prioritize fixing roads over public transportation projects with Obama's planned mega-stimulus plan.

“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”

California's public works projects are biting the dust due to financial crisis.

California’s worst budget crisis has held up $3.8 billion in spending on public works, possibly including the courthouse adjacent to Santa Ana City Hall. Sills and his seven fellow jurists had planned to move in before the lease on their temporary offices expires June 30.

“Everyone will have to work from home,” said Sills, 70, “and we’ll have to rent a place for when we hear arguments.”

Many still defend Milton Friedman like Toys R Us defends the existence of Santa Claus.

“When Friedman’s Platonic ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed -- whose remedies, ironically, entail countermeasures of nationalization,” Marshall Sahlins, an emeritus professor of anthropology, said during the debate, speaking in a room adorned with murals of female students parading through the campus in medieval gowns.

Sahlins, 77, noted a few weeks later socialist and capitalist countries alike are regulating or nationalizing financial institutions in a rebuff to Friedman.

Economic crisis causes global shipping to grind to a halt. 

One 140-acre tract at Long Beach is filled with more than 25,000 new Toyotas that dealers can’t sell. Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s second-largest automaker, yesterday forecast its first operating loss in 71 years on weak demand. Nearby, scrap metal meant for export to Asia piles up behind a fence. From the observation deck, Lytle pointed to piles of empty containers stacked four high and numbering in the thousands. Some of the dockside cranes “haven’t turned a wheel in months,” he said.

Statism. Say it out loud. It's not a word you've used in a decade if ever. Practice saying it over and over again.

Government activism has become a “necessary evil” to help pull the global economy out of recession, says Marco Annunziata, chief economist at UniCredit MIB in London. Even Bush, who ran for the U.S. presidency espousing smaller government, agrees. He told a CNN interviewer last week he has “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”

Rachel Maddow is the up-and-coming Cronkite of the 21st century. Sorry, Wolf.

Yet, Tyson didn't tell viewers that she sits on the board of directors of Morgan Stanley, a bank that has received $10 billion in bailout money. That's right - according to Morgan Stanley's SEC filings, Tyson makes about $350,000 a year from Morgan Stanley in total compensation from that position, and she now owns about 79,000 shares of the company. In other words, she has a direct financial interest in defending the bailout, absolving bailout recipients of wrongdoing, and justifying the use of bailout money for shareholder dividends.

Progressivism vs Conservatism is about to get very, very ugly. "The American Way of Life": Structural or Cyclical?

Right now, Wall Street and Detroit are willing to say whatever they need to say to keep the taxpayer money coming. But when the economy begins turning up, my betting is that their Washington lobbyists will push back hard against any major restructurings the government wants to impose on them. New regulations of Wall Street will be watered down and circumvented; new requirements on the Big Three for green technologies will be resisted.

General Motors has a market valuation about 1/3 of Bed, Bath, and Beyond [via MarginalRevolution)

General Motors [Steyn writes], like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary. The UAW is the AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people