WHAT’S NEXT for Swine Flu?

MEGAN MCARDLE: How Do I Know That the Chrysler Bailouts are About the Unions? “This question was asked recently by a seasoned political reporter of my acquaintance. Frankly, I hadn’t realized that anyone else seriously believed there was any other reason to bail out Chrysler. But let’s go through a couple of the other stated rationales, to see why I find them so implausible.”

ON PJTV, I talk with Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett about his “Bill of Federalism.” (Bumped).

THOMAS COOLEY: Are There Any Rules In The Bailout Game? For the Obama administration, the answer is ”no.” “Many investors are sitting on the sidelines, as is much money. Why? Because it is impossible to know what the rules of the game are. And that’s because the administration and the Congress keep changing the rules in capricious ways in pursuit of larger political objectives. . . . The Obama administration has shown repeatedly that it is willing to change the rules and even challenge the sanctity of contracts in the interests of its political agenda. The best, most recent example is the Chrysler restructuring.”

I think the resulting “capital strike” — which will apply to foreign capital as well as domestic, and which will extend to a reluctance to purchase even Treasury securities if people find the Obama Administration sufficiently capricious — will do harm that will outweigh any conceivable good that these programs can produce.

FROM CHRYSLER TO G.M.:

GM and its bondholders are at odds over $27 billion in claims ahead of a June 1 deadline. The bond group called GM’s April 27 offer to swap their claims for a 10 percent equity stake “neither reasonable nor adequate” and asked to be treated more equitably with labor unions. The counter-proposal by bondholders hasn’t been adopted.

GM’s offer is “grossly unfair to the point of abusive,” Glenn Reynolds, chief executive officer of CreditSights Inc. in New York, wrote in a report this week. “Politics remains an overriding factor in the equation and has been decidedly unfriendly to the interest of bondholders in a contest with the disproportionately outsized power of organized labor and other Washington-heavy constituencies and interest groups.”

CreditSights recommends bondholders reject GM’s debt exchange and expects the offer to fail.

No, he’s no relation, but I see him quoted now and then. Seems on-target here, anyway. . . .

SO WILL THE NEW, OVERSIZED AMAZON KINDLE DX save newspapers? Some think so. I’m not so sure. I wrote a while back that I had subscribed to the Financial Times on my Kindle. I canceled that subscription the other day; it wasn’t worth it, and that wasn’t because of the size of the display.

POLITICIZED INVESTIGATION-TIMING backfires.

HEH: President Obama hosts a dinner for Chrysler’s Creditors.

ARTHUR ALLEN: Why is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy?

Plus, a man whose daughter got sick because of anti-vaccine hysteria. (Via Aetiology.) Note this: “The sorry MMR saga began in 1998 with a tiny study (since partially retracted) in the Lancet.” Seems like there’s a lot of bad science in The Lancet. Some vaccine-related thoughts of mine here.

READER KEVIN MENARD WRITES:

How come gas has gone up about 50 cents since January and we don’t hear the media complaining about the little people?

Just wondering…

Doesn’t fit the narrative.

JOHN BERLAU: Obama Policy As Bankrupt As Chrysler.

PJTV: Tea Party Patriots.

MARCHING FOR SCHOOL CHOICE IN D.C.: Just a bunch of right-wing wackos. “This afternoon, more than 1,000 students, parents, and concerned citizens gathered across from city hall to rally in support of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. A number of prominent D.C. leaders spoke, including former mayor Anthony Williams and former councilmember Kevin Chavous. But the most moving speeches were from the parents and students participating in the scholarship program. High-school student Carlos Battle spoke about how he was personally working to redefine the image of the black teen in Washington, D.C. — and how the Opportunity Scholarship program was giving him a chance to fulfill his dream. A father of a scholarship student pointed out the hypocrisy of Congress bailing out failing corporations but taking scholarships away from D.C. students.”

JUST ANOTHER VICTIM of a shifting, churning landscape.

HEH: America’s Most Infamous Gay-Marriage Opponent Under Increasing Pressure to Engage Gay Issues.

I blame those topless photos.

SHIMON PERES ON IRAN: Overreaction Is Better Than Underreaction.

WHAT EVERY PARTY NEEDS: A pocket-sized DJ system.

THE EX-JOURNALISTS NOW WORKING FOR OBAMA. Leaving a dying industry, the press, for a growing one — government.

CHRYSLER BANKRUPTCY LAWYER TOM LAURIA is scheduled to be on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show tonight.

SELECTIVE judicial empathy.

MEGAN MCARDLE: THE KING’S SHILLING: “This is troubling, because it’s now clear that the worry many of us had at the time of the bank bailouts has come true: the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government’s special friends. . . . Countries that use their banking systems this way don’t get good results.” Not for the country. For the political crowd in charge it can be pretty sweet.

Plus this: “We are hardly Zimbabwe, or even Venezuela. But if we keep using TARP to create a sort of ‘Most Favored Borrower’ status, we’ll erode the safeguards that keep election to office in America from being the kind of giant spoils system that’s common in much of the world.” We didn’t used to be a place where it was necessary to remind people that we are not Zimbabwe or Venezuela. But we’ve crossed that line already . . . .

“SHE HAS PAINTED A TARGET ON MY BACK.”

RANKING the Star Trek movies. They certainly got it right with #1.

SOME LESSONS FOR REPUBLICANS, from Alexandria.

PROTESTING LIFETIME TV’S “DEADBEAT DADS” SHOW.