Gerrymandering and Arrogance

I ran across a couple of rants over the weekend that will save me the effort of documenting my thoughts on the two subjects. One is this article on how dysfunctional the US Senate has become. As a small state resident it's theoretically against my interests to argue for reform of the Senate, but as a progressive reform would clearly result in legislation more to my liking. Another is this article on the hubris of Cerberus, which clearly never should have bought Chrysler to begin with. However, to be fair, I think the newly independent Chrysler was doomed from the start because it was saddled with an awful product lineup thanks to years of mismanagement by Daimler. Even if Cerberus had executed perfectly, the business cycle would have caught up to it before any new products made it to market. At the time of the sale, I hoped Magna would buy Chrysler because it was a manufacturing company that already assembled Chryslers in Europe. The conventional wisdom was that Cerberus really wanted Chrysler Financial, and that sounded to me like Cerberus was going to just slash costs and then dump the car-making business. I thought Magna would take the product side more seriously (though I had no proof of that). Anyway, that's all ancient history - except the products, which still kinda suck.