At the Academy of Obama, professors and others devise plans for extracting a new and improved automobile industry from a semi-sort-of-bankruptcy arrangement that -- if it survives judicial scrutiny; that is not certain -- will give the United Auto Workers 39 percent of General Motors, with the government owning 50 percent. During future contract negotiations, will the union's adversary be an administration that the union helped to put in power?

The UAW will own 55 percent of Chrysler, so perhaps the union will sit on both sides of the table in negotiations. They should go smoothly, although the UAW may think it has made sufficient concessions, such as the one that says henceforth overtime pay will not begin until the worker has toiled 40 hours in a week.

The president's "surgical" bankruptcy plan for Chrysler requires some of the company's lenders, mostly non-banks, to receive less than they would as secured creditors under bankruptcy law.

The law may still make itself heard over the political thunder. Meanwhile, the president faults these "speculators" for not being as cooperative as are most of the banks that have lent to Chrysler.  ...

It is Demagoguery 101 to identify an unpopular minority to blame for problems. The president has chosen to blame "speculators" -- a.k.a. investors; anyone who buys a share of a company's stock is speculating about the company's future -- for Chrysler's bankruptcy and the dubious legality of his proposal. Yet he simultaneously says he hopes that private investors will begin supplanting government as a source of capital for the companies. Breathes there an investor/speculator with such a stunted sense of risk that he or she would go into business with this capricious government?

Obama overflows with advice for Americans who he thinks need admonitions such as "wash your hands when you shake hands" and "cover your mouth when you cough." He also advises that this is a good time for Americans to put their hygienic hands on the steering wheel of a new car. He hopes buyers will choose American cars. A sensible person might add: Buyers should choose cars made by the Ford Motor Co.

This is so because Ford has, so far, avoided becoming an appendage of the government.

Unwed, single, teenage mom Bristol Palin was being lauded on talk shows Wednesday -- National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy -- for encouraging other teenagers to abstain from sex. Meanwhile, Carrie Prejean (Miss California) was defending her title -- and her advocacy of "traditional marriage" -- because of sensual and revealing photographs taken of her when she was a teenage model.

I'm confused. Are we in favor of teenage sexuality or not? Are we OK using teenagers to model lingerie until they become public figures? Are we not OK with unwed teenage moms until they admit their mistakes on national TV?

I ask because teenage sexuality is one of the leading causes of illegitimacy, which believe it or not is more pandemic than the swine flu and more damaging to the institutions of family and marriage than any same-gender commitment ceremony in California or Iowa.

You've seen the stats on pregnant teens:

They are far less likely than adult women to receive timely and regular prenatal care.

Their babies are more likely to be born prematurely and at low birthweight, much more likely to live in poverty, and twice as likely to suffer abuse and neglect.

Fewer than half of teen mothers age 17 and younger graduate from high school, and fewer than 2 percent earn a college degree by age 30.

Eight out of 10 fathers don't marry the teen mother of their child, and daughters of teenage mothers are more likely to become teen mothers themselves.

...38 percent of all American children are born illegitimate, and illegitimacy rates have more than doubled since 1975. According to the Institute for American Values, illegitimacy's cost to American taxpayers is $112 billion annually for anti-poverty, criminal justice, education programs and lost tax revenue.

Talk about a pandemic.

It's not that there's a news vacuum: After all, Bank of America needs to find $34 billion, the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan were at the White House, and Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are sniping at each other on the morning shows.

But there is something of a lull in national politics...

For Rachel Maddow, the lead story was that "torture is a crime," but that "if you collaborated with other U.S. officials to devise a system in which torture would appear to be legal, so that it would be used, so that the people told to carry out the torture program would not balk at the instruction and sound the alarm -- apparently, if the crime is torture and not bank robbery, no big whoop."

In the New Republic, by contrast, Jonathan Chait hearkens back to the days of impeachment:

"Remember the Rule of Law? In the late 1990s, it was all the rage in conservative circles. Having maneuvered Bill Clinton into a position where he could either lie under oath or suffer massive personal and political embarrassment, conservatives reasoned that Clinton must be held accountable for perjury or the basic underpinnings of democracy would be shattered.”

A Director of National Intelligence report on congressional briefings about enhanced interrogation techniques conflicts with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that she was never told that waterboarding would be used on terror suspects.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, indicates that a classified CIA briefing of Mrs. Pelosi included specific details of the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," or EITs, on terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah.  ...

Mrs. Pelosi maintains that in the September 2002 classified briefing on CIA techniques, she was told that the agency considered waterboarding to be legal but was never told of any intention to use the technique.

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said the report does not contradict the California Democrat's recollection of the briefings.

The document emerged on the day that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. acknowledged that prosecuting Bush administration officials involved with its interrogation program could justify prosecutions extending all the way to members of Congress.

The president hasn't nominated anyone to the Supreme Court yet but Democrats on the fringe are tuning up the Borking machine. The target is not the nominee, but the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Jeff Sessions of Alabama became the No. 1 Republican on the committee assigned to vet the nominee when Arlen Specter performed successful transplant surgery on himself. The assault on Mr. Sessions is intended to intimidate, to tell him to remember his place, to tug his forelock and salute just as Arlen would have done.

Making Jeff Sessions out to be a clone of Gene Talmadge or Theodore Bilbo will be difficult. This is not the season for dead white males, particularly if they're not dead yet, but Mr. Sessions can't finesse the circumstances of his birth. He bears the names of both Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slaveholder of no particular distinction, and P.G.T. Beauregard, the commander of the Confederate line at First Manassas who led the rout of the Union army.

Mr. Sessions received his name from his father, who settled "Beauregard" on him with the pride that a Muslim father might feel in settling the middle name "Hussein" on a son destined for big things in Washington.

The president's farewell toast to David Souter suggests that he's not necessarily looking for a lawyer who understands the Constitution and the meaning of an oath to protect and defend that Constitution, but a nominee who knows all the words to "Kumbaya" and wants to give the world a Coke. "I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about abstract legal theory or a footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy ... as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions."

This is an odd job description from a man who once taught constitutional law, but there's a considerable difference between the Constitution and constitutional law. The Constitution is a remarkable document, written by learned men in the plain language that the common man understands. The modern study of constitutional law is the work of lawyers trained to deconstruct plain language in search of things the authors of the Constitution never put there.

Justice Souter's bland years on the court should remind us of the importance of experience in choosing our leaders. President Bush and his advisers might have thought it was clever of them to nominate a judge with almost no paper trail.

After serving on the New Hampshire Supreme Court for seven years, Justice Souter served just two months on the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals before his nomination. But for almost two decades it has been clear that he is out of his depth. The troubling thought is that the president who is about to nominate Justice Souter's replacement is out of his depth, too.