Morning Update

It didn't start with Rathergate: A great story here from Quin Hillyer about how he and his old boss (former Congressman Bob Livingston) took on 60 Minutes and won. The final exchange between Livingston and Mike Wallace--who was forced by CBS to apologize on-air for sliming Livingston--is priceless.

Greg Gutfield boils down yesterday's ridiculous Obama/car company press conference to its logical conclusion: pricey, unsafe mini-cars foisted on a market that doesn't want them, which will inevitably result in punitive taxes levied on allegedly free citizens who won't pay up.

Here's a remarkably silly piece from the LA Times' Michael Finnegan, who blames California's fiscal crisis on the state's initiative process and tax-adverse voters. You can search Finnegan's column over and over again for references to the government employees unions or their handmaidens in the Democratic Party that controls California's gerrymandered legislature, to no avail.

Oh, and term limits are also somehow to blame. But of course.

Another interesting note: You can search and search on the LA Times' site today for the actual numbers by which the tax-hiking ballot initiatives were defeated, and unless you're very persistent, you'll do so in vain. The numbers aren't in this lead story, they aren't on the front page (just a set of pie charts), and you won't find them on the "Election Central" page. You have to dig all the way down to this "live results" page to learn that the initiatives--all endorsed by the LA Times, of course--were defeated by two-to-one margins.

A comment on Megan McArdle's blog supplies us with considerably more accurate analysis than you're liable to find in the LA Times in the forseeable future:

[T]he non-idiots are getting tired of bailing the idiots out. It's not a question of "being neighborly," it's a question of "stop asking me to finance the lifestyles of the lazy and stupid."

Finally, Tom Golisano chronicles his part of the tax-refugee exodus from New York. As Golisano notes, like in California, the New York politicians and unions have one simple solution to every issue: raise taxes. After all, it's not their money.