Quotes of the day

And you thought infrastructure investment meant roads, bridges and schools. It is clear that any infrastructure stimulus money given to the country's mayors will lead to thousands of tennis centers to nowhere. News alert for mayors: We are officially in a recession. American families have to get by with less, and so do American cities.--Robert Poole

There's no market price for cancer.--Richard Lefrak

An economist might suggest letting a few producers fail, so supply shrinks, prices rises, and the remaining producers become more profitable.--Greg Mankiw

A stock may look tantalizingly cheap, but sometimes that's for good reason.--Tom Lauricella

Loan modifications undermine the honesty of the market. They delay the necessary adjustments. With foreclosures, it might take two years for the housing market to find a bottom. With loan mods, it will take at least ten years.--Arnold Kling

I can imagine a consensus emerging to take Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae back under the government and use them to try to modify troubled loans. That would be the worst possible outcome. I spoke out against loan modifications, but I'm sure that I am a voice in the wilderness. The more we try to do loan mods, the longer the crisis will last and the more it will cost taxpayers. Other than that, they are a wonderful idea.--Arnold Kling

... think for a minute about the car czar's responsibility for Opel, and the negotiations which are going to start up between the US and German governments over the European marque's fate. On the one hand, Opels are clearly the kind of thing which Congress wants GM to make more of. But they want GM to make those cars in America, not in Europe. And GM has already asked the German government for money to keep Opel going.--Felix Salmon

There's something really sad about having gone so far that your indelicacy actually amazes the folks who want to legalize prostitution and open air drug markets.--Megan McArdle

Palin’s Alaskan career is roughly six times more impressive than Kennedy’s years as a high-minded Manhattan socialite and custodian of her family’s good name. That doesn’t mean that McCain was wise to pick Palin as his running mate. But if you think he wasn’t, then you should definitely hope that the Democratic Party of New York hunts a little longer through its ranks before handing a Senate seat to the editor of The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.--Ross Douthat

As an Obama supporter and contributor, I've been very gratified by his dignified deportment and steadiness at the helm to date. But I must admit to puzzled disappointment with his recycling of Clinton era veterans, who reek of déjà vu.--Camille Paglia

How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?--Camille Paglia