Quotes of the day

No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down, and all of us are made better off whenever any one of us is made better off ... A rising tide raises all boats.--John F. Kennedy

The way CEOs become CEOs in America is a travesty. This is one of our major problems. I use the anti - Darwinian metaphor. The survival of the unfittest ... When the CEO retires the assistant becomes the CEO. And remember what I told you. He’s a survivor. He would never have anyone underneath him as his assistant that’s brighter than he is because that might constitute a threat. So therefore, with many exceptions, we have CEOs becoming dumber and dumber and dumber. We can all see where this is going. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t such a threat to our ability to compete and to our economy in general.--Carl Icahn

Half-empty trains are not environmentally efficient; they are pork. American rail needs a combination of higher carbon taxes to price in the mobile transport externalities, and a government that isn't determined to mess things up. I'm skeptical that we'll get either any time soon.--Megan McArdle

The New York Times reports that an adviser to John McCain accused Barack Obama of having a "Sept. 10 mindset." Obama responded by . . . exhibiting a Sept. 10 mindset:

The latest battle began when McCain's advisers held a conference call to attack Obama for comments he made in an interview with ABC News in which he said that he believed that "we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution," and noted that the United States was able to arrest, try and jail the culprits in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo," Obama said in the interview. "What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks--for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center--we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial."

The Obama antiterror strategy is to wait until terrorists kill American civilians, then arrest them and put them on trial. Of course, when we tried that in the 1990s, the eventual result was another attack on the World Trade Center. This one was far more successful, destroying the complex and multiplying the death toll nearly 500-fold.

Oh, and the men who carried out the attack were never arrested and put on trial, because it was a suicide attack. Another failure of the Bush administration!--James Taranto