WRT Government Motors, well, of course it's beneficial in the short term at least to those two companies, but Obama is the President of the US, he's supposed to take a wider view of things. Massive global overcapacity does not suggest that propping up the worse losers is an ideal solution and the thuggish cram-downs of senior debt holders in favor of the unions sends a terrible signal.

But the bottom line is how this is going to play out the in long term. It's way too early to declare success, let's see if Government Motors really recovers or instead will need more cash bailouts. If Obama's actions were a bad bet he's only delayed and worsened the pain.

On health care "at least he did something" just doesn't cut it as an argument, not with the dog's breakfast the Congress passed. And death panels are inherent in government takeovers of health care. Somebody, some mechanism is going to determine who gets treatments and who doesn't. The U.K. has it's NICE plus the various units of the NHS make their own resource allocations.

My bottom line is that we're rich enough that the obsession with decreasing our health care outlays ("bending the cost curve") to European levels is not an imperative. We pay a lot more and we get a lot more (like clean hospital wards).

And then there's all the knock on effects, like the inevitable suppression of new drugs and therapies. But at least here there's some justice in the world, for a whole bunch of ObamaCare supporters will some day needlessly die because the program they support will abort something that would have saved them.

Anyway, again we'll see; assuming it isn't repealed wholesale in 2013 or defunded before then by a Republican Congress we'll find out if it makes things better soon enough.

As for oil and gas, when left along (i.e. not in the '70s) the market does it's thing by signaling the relative current scarcity of oil, which prompts all the players concerned to automatically adjust. And I'm much less concerned about the recent gyrations, for you can't expect to add 2.5 billion or so people to free market (PRC and India) without short and medium term discontinuities. Also don't forget about how many of those price shocks were prompted by devaluations of the US dollar, in which oil is denominated. Nixon's closing of the gold window in 1971 was after all what started the mess.

I.e. it's an issue, even a problem, but not a crisis.

And I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on "startups as a vehicle for IPOs". If you think the VC game is legitimate, if you think there are ventures that can't organically grow from an angel start (e.g. serious hardware ones), then IPO exits are necessary for healthy VC investing.

Just think of all the companies we probably wouldn't have with out VCs: Apple, Sun, any number of chip and hard disk vendors. Some worthwhile things require a lot of upfront money.

Pointing out the one post SARBOX blockbuster high tech successful IPO isn't germane; I'm more concerned that there will be no future Googles because the money to build such capital expensive ventures is gone due to the termination with extreme prejudice of the potential of a high payoff at the end of private financing. VCs aren't charities.

WRT to Ailes, if you can point out how Murdoch is warping the Journal's editorial board then maybe he's relevant, alhtough I gather he has bigger fish to fry, like the massive growth of Fox News. I just don't see Murdoch doing that, in practice (I read the editorial page every day) or in theory, since his objective is to have the Journal muscle in on the NYT, which is much more of a front page thing.