General Motors recalled another 718,000 of its vehicles yesterday to correct defects serious enough to require the action. This puts the number at “nearly 30 million vehicles since the start of the year, by far a record for any automaker and more than half the vehicles recalled by the industry as a whole.”

Many of those 30 million were built buy the “old GM,” which the taxpayers bailed out in a unique bit of economic jury rigging that Vice President Joe Biden once liked to celebrate with a clever couplet: “Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive.”