ABOUT THAT report showing that 1 of every 50 American children is homeless, Mickey Kaus smells a rat:

[It's] one of those statistical assertions that you know is BS before you even set out to show it's BS. If you just live here and go around with your eyes open you know it's BS. Sure enough, it's BS!

According to the study, published by an advocacy group for the homeless, you're "homeless" if your family has moved in with friends or relatives. You're "homeless" if you live in a hotel or a trailer park. This is, as Kaus notes, a far cry from the bleak picture painted in a reporter's question to the President last night ("With shelters at full capacity, tent cities are sprouting up across the country . . . .") However less-than-ideal a trailer park might be, it's hardly a "tent city."

By the study's logic, I was homeless for three months in 1986 when my family moved in with my grandparents . . . while we were waiting for construction on our brand-new house to be completed. Amazing how I've risen above it.

I LIKE THIS nutshell explanation for the anti-AIG-populist-rage-debacle, from Nicole Gelinas in City Journal:

Because the public has utterly lost faith that the government will allow failed executives to take financial losses or failed companies to die, the public is trying, bluntly, to do this job itself—and it’s an ugly, dangerous, and scary spectacle.

She argues that an AIG bankruptcy would have been better than what the bailout has become.