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How to predict if "New"GM--as bailed out and restructured--really is a "sustainable" company?** Here's one way: The company is launching the new Chevrolet Cruze into the highly competitive compact car market. It will be built at GM's once-infamous Lordstown assembly plant in Ohio, a UAW-organized facility that now makes the depressing, not-very-reliable Chevy Cobalt. Ask yourself: Will the Lordstown Cruze ever be able to match, say, the Honda Civic, produced in Marysville, Ohio without the UAW's involvement? If you say "no," then I'd say GM has not been saved by the Obama administration. ... P.S.: I say "no."

Update: An early mixed review of the Cruze is here.

**--I'm deeply suspicious of the dramatic, positive financial results GM is turning out in the run-up to the desperate, hurry-up IPO the administration would like to see before the November election. We'll see how suspicious the market is. ... 8:51 P.M.

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Boxer down 5 in Survey USA poll. ... Hey, Jon Alter! You still think the Democrats can't lose the Senate? ... P.S.: According to NYT's Joe Nocera, GOP nominee Carly Fiorina's tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard was not as disastrous as commonly believed!. ... 

One thing I found surprising this week was learning that to many H.P. observers Ms. Fiorina no longer seemed quite so bad. It was actually her strategic vision that Mr. Hurd had executed, I heard again and again. Her problem was that while she talked a good game, she lacked the skill to get that big, hulking, aircraft carrier of a company moving in the direction she pointed.

P.P.S.: Nocera also calls her "Carleton 'It's All About Me' Fiorina." ... P.P.P.S.: No management skill? Talks a good game? Egomaniacal glory-hound? Sounds like a made-to-order U.S. Senator! But to get away with the Daniel Patrick Moynihan don't-come-to-me-to-get-your-highway-built Senate act, it helps to be as charming as Moynihan was. Fiorina seems to rub people the wrong way--people she worked with on the McCain campaign as well as at H-P. ... 9:25 P.M.

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Visionary media leader Jon Klein moves from triumph to triumph: CNN ratings down 43% compared with last summer. (Fox News down only 9, and MSNBC only 7.) ... 10:25 P.M.

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Dreidel buries lede: Marc Ambinder reports that administration economists are at least thinking about a payroll tax holiday. ... A good idea, it seems to me, if the government can actually get away with raising the tax later to make up for the shortfall. But its biggest advantage is speed--the ability to pump up demand in the economy at the first sign of recession. It's a little late for speed. ... 11:02 P.M.

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Paul Steiger, editor of ProPublica, pays himself $571,687?  Irresponsible unions have got nothin' on the Journalism-Respectability Complex. ...1043 P.M.

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Who writes @FredThompson's witty twitters? He's got a million of 'em.  Too many! I smell ghost. ... 10:45 P.M.

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