Clueless appeal to aid gov't workers  —  A startlingly listless President Obama appeared in the White House press room yesterday morning, spoke some dull preliminaries about the European financial crisis — and then slipped and tumbled headfirst into re-election quicksand from which he will find it very difficult to extricate himself.

Berlin is ignoring the lessons of the 1930s  —  Is it one minute to midnight in Europe?  —  We fear that the German government's policy of doing “too little too late” risks a repeat of precisely the crisis of the mid-20th century that European integration was designed to avoid.