Plus--Faster Flops from Ford.

Maybe Dan Neil was right  about Bob Lutz: Despite the wildly successful  GM "employee discount" promotion, Pontiac sales managed to fall 14%  in June. Yikes. Wasn't the new G6 sedan supposed to be picking up steam in the marketplace right about now? ...  [Like John Carroll of the L.A. Times, Lutz has been tasked with turning around a huge, ossified self-protective bureaucracy. It takes years.-ed. Good point. And you don't see Carroll giving up in frustration! ... Oh.] ... Lutz Damage Control #66: OK, so current GM products are less than inspired. As if to make the case for Lutz,  Danny Hakim of the NYT recently ran a little box (link lost) previewing the exciting "Lutzmobiles" that are on the way. Of the four cars featured, two are forthrightly dreary (the bland Buick Lucerne, the tired retro Chevrolet SSR), one looks OK (Saturn Aura), and only one is genuinely exciting (the limited-volume Pontiac Solstice). I hope the models GM sneak-previewed to credulous Business Week  were more impressive. ... 10:31 A.M.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

'OK, He'll Do. Now Back to Plame!' Roger Simon writes:

The last thing a wartime president needs at a moment like this is a divisive Supreme Court fight.

Hmmm. If the alternative to a divisive Supreme Court fight is returning the public's attention to a) the ongoing casualties in Iraq; b) a scandal involving the president's top aide and c) a highly unpopular Social Security plan, I'd say Bush's biggest fear is that Roberts isn't controversial or divisive enough. He might just sail through! ... 11:35 P.M.

[It's been 5 hours and you don't have a post on John Roberts!--ed. Deeply ashamed. But N.Z. Bear has a useful blog-tracking page on the subject.] 11:02 P.M.

That Was Fast: Last year Ford introduced its long-awaited new big car, the Five Hundred, and a wagon/minivan variant, the Freestyle (advertised in Southern California TV spots featuring Brooke Shields). Now, after only 10 months in production, Ford has decided to discontinue the Freestyle, according to news reports. In the automotive world--where it costs a lot of money to build the tooling for a new model--this is a stunningly rapid demise. It may be the first time in recent memory that a major Detroit vehicle has been killed off like a movie because it 'didn't open.' Faster Flops! I suppose that's progress of a sort. ... [link via Autoblog] 10:17 A.M.

Novak vs. Novak: Andrew Sullivan rightly draws attention to this paragraph from the Newsday of July 22, 2003:

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." 

That doesn't mean they necessarily wanted him to publicly identify Plame as a CIA empoyee, but it does not sit very comfortably with the account in Novak's later column on the subject: