The good news is, Alan Greenspan has seen the light. The bad news: It's a tail light of the steamroller that just pancaked us into the pavement.

Bloomberg quotes the ex-Fed chief as admitting (gawrsh!) deregulation and the Cult of the Free Market - time-bomb ideas he helped wire - may have been (how shall we put it?) ill-advised:

"'`Yes, I found a flaw,' Greenspan said in response to grilling from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. ``That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.' 

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One key component to the question of where we go from here may be: "Just who will be going along for the ride?"

No doubt we are at a crossroads in our history and culture. The financial crisis has struck so deeply our commerical - and social - institutions, capitalism itself could be settling in cinders on its own worldwide extinction layer. This nation is trapped in endless wars we can no longer comprehend or sanction. Our once-exclusive issues of immigration and civil rights are now universal, and few countries are so homogenous as to escape their profound political implications.

There must be change, everyone seems to agree on that. But who will reap the benefits of this brave new world - and who will be left behind? Who will be among the leadership elite, and who will be public enemies?

Who are tomorrow's undesireables? ...And who will adjudge them so?

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The only real surprise that Judith Miller is going to work for Fox News is that it took so long. I can't think of two entities who did more to jam this country chin-deep in the quicksand of Iraq.

As Howard Kurtz quotes a Fox honcho in his Washington Post blog, "She has an impressive resume." Amen. A pulitzer winner, Miller also hefts what can only be called impressive baggage. According to Kurtz:

"...She is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis 'Scooter' Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller's conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

"In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor's note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had 'become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.'"

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Just when the GOP thought voter fraud was a good political warhead to loop into their daunting ammo belt - alongside Joe the Plumber and that washed-up '60 radical, what's-his-name - up pops a real case of voter-connected flim-flam committed by a Republican.

Seems a guy here in Southern California listed his childhood home as his current address so he'd fit the requirements that registration lists be compiled by locals. According to the L.A. Times:

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