The bailouts of Chrysler and General Motors have had no shortage of critics, this page among them. We were against the idea in the waning days of the Bush administration, saying that automakers should instead use bankruptcy to shed debt, cut costs and rework labor contracts. When President Obama linked government help to bankruptcy restructuring, we saw some hope but were still skeptical.

With GM filing paperwork Wednesday to return to its status as a publicly traded company, it’s time to ask whether some crow needs to be eaten, at least as it concerns GM. The answer is: possibly.

It’s far too early to declare the GM bailout an unqualified success. But it is certainly going a lot better than critics thought likely. News of the initial public offering of stock follows a lightning fast exit from reorganization, two profitable quarters, the repayment of a $7 billion loan and rising consumer satisfaction scores. GM, in fact, could now be in better shape than the economy as a whole, which is saying a lot considering that two years ago it could have been mistaken for roadkill. It certainly is a leaner, healthier company, thanks to the forced restructuring, and the devastated Detroit economy […]

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WASHINGTON — The oil is there, at least 22 miles of it. You just can’t see it.

A lot of the crude that spewed from BP’s ruptured well is still in the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s far below the surface and invisible. And it’s likely to linger for months on end, scientists said Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume of oil from the disaster.

The plume consists of droplets too small for the eye to see, more than a half-mile down, said researchers who mapped it with high-tech sensors.

Scientists fear it could be a threat to certain small fish and crustaceans deep in the ocean. They will have plenty of time to study it for answers.

In the cold, 40-degree water, the oil is degrading at one-tenth the pace at which it breaks down at the surface. That means ‘the plumes could stick around for quite a while,’ said Ben Van Mooy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, a co-author of the research, published online in the journal Science.

Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly ‘gone,’ and it is gone in the sense that you can’t see it. But […]

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Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.

The entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans ‘a people of poets and thinkers.’

‘That famous phrase is completely misconstrued,’ declares economic historian Eckhard Höffner, 44. ‘It refers not to literary greats such as Goethe and Schiller,’ he explains, ‘but to the fact that an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany.’

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today’s level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. ‘For the period of the […]

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IRAQ-KUWAIT BORDER – The last U.S. combat troops were crossing the border into Kuwait on Thursday morning, bringing to a close the active combat phase of a 7½-year war that overthrew the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, forever defined the presidency of George W. Bush and left more than 4,400 American service members and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.

The final convoy of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., began entering Kuwait about 1:30 a.m. (6:30 p.m. Wednesday ET), carrying the last of the 14,000 U.S. combat forces in Iraq, said NBC’s Richard Engel, who has been traveling with the brigade as it moved out this week.

The departure marks the official end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, P.J. Crowley, a spokesman for the State Department, told msnbc TV. But while it is ‘an historic moment,

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Fueled by anti-Obama rhetoric and news articles purportedly showing scientists manipulating their own data, Republicans running for the House, Senate and governor’s mansions have gotten bolder in stating their doubts over the well-established link between man-made greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

GOP climate skeptics have held powerful positions on Capitol Hill in recent years, including the chairmanship of the House Energy and Senate Environment panels. But they’ve typically been among the minority. Now, they could form a key voting bloc, adding insult to injury for climate advocates who failed to pass an energy bill this year.
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Environmental groups fear that adding more voices to the skeptic camp could further polarize the debate and make it more difficult at all levels of government to pass legislation curbing carbon dioxide emissions, especially if coupled with the defeat of standard-bearers such as Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

Ron Johnson, running against Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, is the latest in a line of Republicans to take a shot at the validity of global warming.

‘I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change,’ Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday. ‘It’s not proven by any stretch of the imagination.’

Johnson told […]

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