Walter Russell Mead does a nice job shooting down Thomas Friedman's contention that electric cars are the key to rejuvenating American manufacturing and the middle class. To just add a bit to Mead's case, the idea that electric cars will transition America off of "foreign sources" of energy and help us compete with China is simply not true. As frequent RCW contributor Daniel McGroarty has tireslessly pointed out, the batteries we'd be inserting into those electric cars rely on Rare Earth minerals to function. And guess who has the bulk of those minerals?
China.
(AP Photo)