Cbs News

• GM files for bankruptcy. Washington will give the company an additional $30 billion to play with, and will take a 60 percent stake in return. The U.S. isn't the only government taking ownership: Another 12 percent goes to Canada.

• The Nevada legislature overrides a veto and legalizes domestic partnerships.

• Someone who hasn't parsed the phrase "pro-life" very carefully has killed an abortionist.

• The emergency powers behind the Fed's Wall Street bailouts.

• Irony alert: A report making the case for stronger intellectual property rights was partly plagiarized.

A presidential proclamation marking Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

Available in full after the jump.

Robert Samuelson finds that the American media's infatuation with Barack Obama is one of the great unreported stories of our time. He observes that Obama has inspired a collective fawning ; Samuelson manfully seeks to rectify it. He observes that the main check on Obama's power comes from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals. The infatuation matters, Samuelson writes, because Obama's ambitions are so grand.

James Lewis agrees. "Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps," writes Lewis. For contrast with the American media, Lewis presents Telegraph "polemical commentator" Gerald Warner: "Barack Obama: all the bad guys are giving President Pantywaist the finger." To be fair, however, Ralph Peters had much the same to say yesterday in the New York Post.

Kim Jong Il has named his youngest son, Kim Jong Un as his heir. Writing for The Washington Post, Blaine Harden reports that the younger Kim is a great fan of former basketball player Michael Jordan and action movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Like father, like son, I suppose. Kim Jong Il is known to be a movie buff himself, the Imelda Marcos of DVDs with a collection reportedly numbering some 20,000 films.

The implications of this news for U.S. policy are fairly obvious. President Obama, a fellow baller, should name Michael Jordan head of the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks. The Belgians, led by Van Damme, should take Russia?"s place in the negotiations. And if we can convince the Chinese to appoint Jackie Chan as their representative, the Kim clan will be positively giddy. We?"ll call it a ?Scelebrity surge,? and in their rush to get autographs and photographs with the stars, the Kims will quickly agree to whatever MJ asks for.

Could this really be any less effective than the six-party talks have been? Wooing Kim with Hollywood, I think, has real promise. And with celebrities leading the way, the American delegation might actually voice some real concern for human rights in North Korea. Wouldn?"t that be something?

Michael Mazza is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.