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Sobering thoughts from Mark Steyn.

… In Afghanistan, the young men tying down First World armies have no coherent strategic goals, but they’ve figured out the Europeans’ rules of engagement, and they know they can fire on NATO troops more or less with impunity. So why not do it? On the high seas off the Horn of Africa, the Somali pirates have a more rational motivation: They can extort millions of dollars in ransom by seizing oil tankers. But, as in the Hindu Kush, it’s a low-risk occupation. They know that the Western navies that patrol the waters are no longer in the business of killing or even capturing pirates. The Royal Navy that once hanged pirates in the cause of advancing civilization and order is now advised not even to take them into custody lest they claim refugee status in the United Kingdom under its absurd Human Rights Act.

“Weakness is a provocation,” Don Rumsfeld famously asserted many years ago. The new barbarians reprimitivizing various corners of the map are doing so because they understand the weakness of what Brian Kennedy quaintly calls “the Free World.” One day the forces of old-school reprimitivization will meet up with state-of-the-art technology, and the barbarians will no longer be on the fringes of the map. If that gives you a headache, I’m sure President Obama will have a prescription-drug plan tailored just for you.

Christopher Hitchens helps us understand why Bombay is important.

… I hope I am not alone in finding the statements about Bombay from our politicians to be anemic and insipid, and the media coverage of the disastrous and criminal attack too parochially focused on the fate of visiting or resident Americans. India is emerging in many ways as our most important ally. It is a strong regional counterweight to Russia and China. Not to romanticize it overmuch, it is a huge and officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on ethnic and confessional pluralism. Its political and economic and literary echelons speak English better than most of us do. Its parliament in New Delhi—the unbelievably diverse and dignified Lok Sabha—was viciously attacked by Islamist gangsters and nearly destroyed in December 2001, a date which ought to have made more Americans pay more attention rather than less. Since then, Bombay has been assaulted multiple times and the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan blown up with the fairly obvious cross-border collusion of the same Pakistani forces who are helping in the rebirth of the Taliban.

It would be good to hear from the president and the president-elect that we regard attacks on the fabric and society of India with very particular seriousness, as assaults on a close friend that was battling al-Qaida long before we were. In response, it should be emphasized, our military and financial and nuclear and counterinsurgency cooperation with New Delhi will not be given a lower profile but a very much higher one. The people of India need to hear this from us, as do the enemies of India, who are our sworn enemies, too. …

Mark Steyn liked Hitchens piece too.

John Fund with Eric Holder and Mike Huckabee thoughts.

… In interviews promoting his book, Mr. Huckabee also admits to some puzzlement about the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running-mate, a job he thought himself in line for. “She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair,” he told the New Yorker magazine. “It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.”

Perhaps one reason why Mr. Huckabee’s critics weren’t enthusiastic about him joining the GOP ticket was his attitude. Rather than attack free-market groups like the Club for Growth as “the Club for Greed,” Mrs. Palin assembled a broad coalition to win the Alaska governor’s race in 2008 and maintained warm relations with both free-marketers and social conservatives. That’s a page from the Reagan playbook that Mr. Huckabee seems not to have mastered, and indeed seems intent on ripping up.

The Austrian Economists Blog has a fascinating story about the Schechter Bros. who ran “two kosher butcher shops, poultry specifically, in Brooklyn.” This is a reminder that behind all the high-flying rhetoric you will find a bunch of government thugs.

In preparation for my spring senior seminar on the Great Depression, I’m currently reading Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man. The book is a wonderful history of the Great Depression, written by a journalist who knows enough good economics to tell the story well. In reading it last night, I had the wonderful experience of learning something new that made me think about a whole bunch of interesting questions I hadn’t considered before. As a scholar, there really isn’t a better feeling and it’s one I wish I could convey better to students so they would see that what appears to be the dorkiness of their professors is really our desire to share one of life’s most profound joys. What I learned was the story of the Schechter brothers of Brooklyn, NY.

The Schechters ran two kosher butcher shops, poultry specifically, in Brooklyn.  They were Jewish immigrants in the 1930s.  Running a kosher butcher shop is a complicated affair, as the Laws of Kashrut are far more than a “dietary” code.  Normally, keeping Kosher is thought of as just a set of rules about what food observant Jews cannot eat (e.g., pork, shellfish, scavengers, etc and no mixing milk with meat), but it is at least as much an ethical code.  And that ethical code involves both how humans are to treat the animals they kill (humanely, as kosher butchers must follow specific rules about how animals are killed) as well as how they must treat their customers.  For observant Jews such as the Schechters, the Laws of Kashrut were both a matter of religious observance and good business.

Enter FDR and the NRA. …

John Stossel says the bailouts will set us up for the next bust.

If an athlete injures himself and suffers great pain, we’d recognize the shortsightedness of giving him painkillers to keep him going. The pain might be masked, but at the risk of greater injury later.

That’s a good analogy for the inflationary policies now pursued by Washington. These policies may temporarily “stimulate the economy,” but they also disguise and aggravate the underlying problems. We will all pay a serious price. …

Human Event’s Jed Babbin with a bailout we can live with.

Washington is dizzy with a bad case of bailout fever. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been dispensed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson without apparent success in reviving the financial markets. Now one Texas conservative is challenging Congress and the White House with a common-sense plan that is much more likely to help our economy recover more than bank bailouts or any handouts to carmakers.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), a member of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, proposes to use the $350 billion left of the $700 billion bank bailout to fund a two-month tax holiday that would put money in the pockets of American taxpayers. …

If you’re wondering how our country came to elect a shallow, self-absorbed person like Obama, Walter Williams has part of the answer.

How about a few civics questions? Name the three branches of government. If you answered the executive, legislative and judicial, you are more informed than 50 percent of Americans. The Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently released the results of their national survey titled “Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions.” The survey questions were not rocket science.

Only 21 percent of survey respondents knew that the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” comes from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Almost 40 percent incorrectly believe the Constitution gives the president the power to declare war. Only 27 percent know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States. Remarkably, close to 25 percent of Americans believe that Congress shares its foreign policy powers with the United Nations. …

Harry Reid is delighted the new visitor’s center opened at the capitol since he won’t have to smell the tourists anymore. Examiner with the story.

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Dorothy Rabinowitz comments on the urge to blame the U. S.

If the Mumbai terror assault seemed exceptional, and shocking in its targets, it was clear from the Thanksgiving Day reports that we weren’t going to be deprived of the familiar, either. Namely, ruminations, hints, charges of American culpability that regularly accompany catastrophes of this kind.

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that “If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules.”

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that “our policies, our foreign policies” had alienated the Muslim population, that we had “gone after the wrong people” and inflamed moderates. And “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.” …

Melanie Phillips notes a strange wrinkle in the BBC coverage from India.

… For some time, many have argued that an element of anti-Semitism has distorted the way the BBC covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now, following the Mumbai events, we can perhaps see that anti-Semitism may even be at work in the way the BBC covers foreign news in general. …

Spengler makes the disparity between Chinese and American music education a metaphor for the clash of two civilizations. Pickerhead is not sure what to make of this essay, but it does provide a link to U Tube performances by the pianist Lang Lang.

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.

The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world – surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills – can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers. …

… American musical education remains the best in the world, the legacy of the European refugees who staffed the great conservatories, and the best Asian musicians come to America to study. Thirty to 40% of students at the top schools are Asian, and another 20 to 30% are Eastern European (or Israeli). There are few Americans or Western Europeans among the best instrumentalists. According to the head of one conservatory, Americans simply don’t have the discipline to practice eight hours a day.

As a practical matter, though, American policy-makers might think about it this way. Until now, the West has tended to dismiss China’s scientists as imitators rather than originators. As a practical matter, China had little incentive to innovate; an emerging economy does not have to re-invent the wheel, or the Volkswagen, for that matter.

This was not true in the remote past, of course. China invented the clock, the magnetic compass, the printing press, geared machines, gunpowder, and the other technologies that began the industrial revolution, long before the West. When it comes time to develop the next generation of anti-missile radar, or electric car batteries, Chinese originality may assert itself once again. Chinese who have mastered the most elevated as well as the most characteristically Western forms of high culture will also think with originality. Anyone who doubts this should watch Lang Lang’s performance of the Mozart C Minor Concerto once again.

Good Contentions post by Peter Wehner on Obama’s choices and what they might portend.

… In the early years of his presidency, for example, Ronald Reagan pursued a tight monetary policy and provided unyielding support for Paul Volcker, then head of the Federal Reserve, despite a nasty recession which saw the unemployment rate exceed 10 percent, Reagan’s approval rating stuck in the mid-30s, and substantial mid-term election losses in 1982. But these policies were vital to wringing inflation out of the system, and they began what was then the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history. A politician less committed to a set of economic principles would have given up in the face of the ferocious criticism President Reagan received.

Mr. Obama’s victory has been compared to Reagan’s, but Obama may turn out to be the anti-Reagan. When he found himself in Hyde Park, he easily adjusted to his surroundings, and when he ran in the Democratic primary, Obama became the hope of the Left. But once he secured the nomination, he transformed himself into a centrist. That trend is continuing in the transition.

Obama’s victory, then, was based largely on his (appealing) personality and ethereal promises of “change,” not on a set of ideas. After having run for President for 21 months, and having been elected four weeks ago, no one can yet articulate what Obama-ism as a political philosophy is. He appears to believe he should be president because of who he is, rather than what he believes. Mr. Obama’s self-assurance seems to derive from his enormously high confidence in himself, rather than confidence anchored in a coherent worldview. …

Jennifer Rubin thought it was cool how Obama hid Eric Holder in plain sight yesterday. Says he won’t be able to do that during confirmation hearings.

In announcing his national security team on Monday, Barack Obama included his Attorney General pick Eric Holder. This is not altogether unusual. After all, counterterrorism and intelligence matters are central responsibilities of the AG. But the politics was also obvious–put Holder in a pack of nominees who are getting praise from far-flung quarters, make the day about “the big personalities” and the rapprochement with Hillary Clinton rather than about Holder. Holder’s statement was one of the briefest and most innocuous–intentionally so, I suspect. And in January the Obama team will certainly push for a hasty confirmation and loudly complain that any extended hearings would “impair national security.”

The Republicans shouldn’t fall for this routine. …

Debra Saunders writes on the sloppy science of some global warming zealots.

… The latest skirmish in the global warming war — barely reported in America — occurred after two bloggers found that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data wrongly cast this October as the warmest in recorded history. It turns out that the mistake was due to an error that wrongly tapped September temperature records from Russia. Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph of London found the mistake “startling” in light of other contrary climate statistics, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration findings of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month.

In an e-mail, Goddard researcher Gavin Schmidt explained, “The incorrect analysis was online for less than 24 hours.” (Thank bloggers Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Canadian computer analyst Steve McIntyre for catching the mistake.) The error occurred because a report “had the wrong month label attached. There is quality control at NOAA and GISS but this particular problem had not been noticed before and the existing QC procedures didn’t catch it. These have now been amended.”

As for the snowfall records and low temperatures cited by Booker, Schmidt chalked them up to “cherry picking” data. He added, “Far more important are the long-term trends.”

Now, honest mistakes happen — even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year — again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre — Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 — not 1998, as it had figured — as the hottest year on record in American history.

Alas, it is hard to see Goddard as objective when its director, James Hansen, testified in a London court in September in support of six eco-vandals. A jury then acquitted the six Greenpeace activists on charges of vandalizing a British coal-fired power plant based on the “lawful excuse” defense that their use of force would prevent greater damage to the environment after Hansen predicted the one Kingsnorth plant could push “400 species” into extinction.

Of course, he could be wrong.

Thomas Sowell on the importance of freedom.

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.

Freedom ultimately means the right of other people to do things that you do not approve of. Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler. It is only when you are able to do things that other people don’t approve that you are free.

One of the most innocent-sounding examples of the left’s many impositions of its vision on others is the widespread requirement by schools and by college admissions committees that students do “community service.” …

Borowitz Report says China purhased naming rights to the U. S. for $1.4 trillion.

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John Fund thinks Chambliss has a good chance tomorrow in Georgia.

Ann Coulter on the foolishness of Obama’s Gitmo promises.

I thought the rest of the world was going to love us if we elected B. Hussein Obama! Somebody better tell the Indian Muslims. As everyone but President-elect B. Hussein Obama’s base knows, many of the Guantanamo detainees cannot be sent to their home countries, cannot be released and cannot be tried. They need to be held in some form of extra-legal limbo the rest of their lives, sort of like Phil Spector.

And now they’re Obama’s problem.

If Obama wants his detention of Islamic terrorists to be dramatically different from Bush’s Guantanamo, my suggestion is that he cut off — so to speak — the expensive prosthetic limb procedures now being granted the detained terrorists.

Far from being sodomized and tortured by U.S. forces — as Obama’s base has wailed for the past seven years — the innocent scholars and philanthropists being held at Guantanamo have been given expensive, high-tech medical procedures at taxpayer expense. If we’re not careful, multitudes of Muslims will be going to fight Americans in Afghanistan just so they can go to Guantanamo and get proper treatment for attention deficit disorder and erectile dysfunction. …

Amity Shlaes says Krugman’s ideas will only make things worse.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book “The Return of Depression Economics,” emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn’t spend enough.

He’s also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR’s overall policy look worse than it was. I’m interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one “whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right.”

Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn’t. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else’s mind as well. In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, “keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%.”

The New Deal is Mr. Obama’s context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn’t. New Deal spending provided jobs but did not get the country back to where it was before. …

And Reason Magazine tells what big spending states can learn from Texas and Florida.

… Policymakers also seem to be increasingly recognizing that privatization and competitive service delivery are proven tools for doing more with less. Competitive sourcing allows the private sector to compete for jobs and contracts that are currently performed by the government. Federal employees actually won 83 percent of the job competitions from fiscal year 2003 through fiscal year 2007. But the competition still helps save a lot of money. Taxpayers saved $25,000 for every job that was put up for competition because even when the government kept the job it significantly improved efficiency and reduced costs.

Privatization is also coming back into vogue these days, partially buoyed by the successful track record of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The state engaged in over 138 privatization initiatives saving taxpayers over $550 million in aggregate during Bush’s term (1999-2007). When many other states were raising taxes, Bush’s privatization initiatives helped Florida to shed almost $20 billion in taxes and over 3,700 positions in the state workforce.

And at the urban level, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a Democrat, has been on a privatization tear in recent years. Under his watch he’s privatized over 40 services and activities, saving taxpayers millions. Since 2005, Daley has initiated long-term lease agreements with the private sector for the Chicago Skyway toll road, Midway Airport, four major downtown parking garages, and the city’s parking meter system downtown. Chicago netted over $5 billion in the process to pay down city debt, establish a $500 million rainy day fund, and shore up public pensions. …

Ruben Navarette says Richardson was dissed.

… It’s humiliating to be second choice for secretary of state. But it is even more humiliating to be second choice for secretary of commerce.

This isn’t about Richardson, who might be very happy heading for ribbon cuttings in Toledo while Clinton heads for blue-ribbon summits in Tel Aviv. This is about something larger. Richardson is the nation’s only Hispanic governor and the most prominent Hispanic elected official in the country. And the way he was treated doesn’t say much about Obama’s respect for the Hispanic community. Nor does the fact that Obama seems to have filled his top four Cabinet posts — justice, treasury, defense, and state — and couldn’t find a single Hispanic to put in any of them.

America’s largest minority took a chance on Obama despite the fact that the president-elect had no track record in reaching out to them and didn’t break a sweat trying to win their votes. They deserve better.

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had nice things to say about W. Of course, she slapped him around first.

… The president-elect’s popularity stands in stark contrast to that of the man he is replacing. President Bush’s approval rating is stalled in the low 20s — and deservedly so. But Bush did at least one thing right in an eight-year tenure characterized by incompetence and hyper-partisanship: He appointed black Americans to the post of secretary of state, the highest position of authority blacks had held before Obama’s election.

Many pundits have already noted that Bush’s failures helped to create a climate in which Obama could win. So did Bush’s singular achievement — the elevation of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. It ought to be noted that it was a Republican, not a Democrat, who broke the barrier that had limited black appointees to the usual Cabinet positions dealing with housing and health.

Whatever their political failures, Powell and Rice are both bright, hardworking and honorable individuals. Their presence on the national stage, in positions that had nothing to do with affirmative action or “urban affairs,” helped white Americans get used to seeing black Americans in positions of great prestige. …

WSJ reports on W’s pardon proclivities.

A decade ago, Leslie Collier, a 50-year-old corn and soybean farmer in Charleston, Mo., pleaded guilty to poisoning bald eagles. He says the worst thing about his criminal record was that it meant he was barred by law from owning a gun.

So, after George W. Bush, a strong defender of the Second Amendment, took office, Mr. Collier wrote to the president seeking a pardon, saying he wanted to go hunting with his kids. He explained that he accidentally killed the eagles while trying to poison coyotes that were attacking wild turkeys and deer on property he farms.

On the surface, the list of the 14 people pardoned by the president this week shows few common denominators in terms of time served, geographic location or even type of crime, except that the felonies were non-violent. But a closer look at some of the newly pardoned shows many of them are church-going, blue-collar workers from rural areas (and ardent Bush supporters) who had little trouble finding jobs after their convictions. There is another common thread: the important role firearms once played in their lives.

President Bush has pardoned fewer people — 171 — than any president since World War II, with the exception of his father, who pardoned 74. …

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Mark Steyn says Mumbai could happen anywhere.

… This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault – and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

Whoops, my apologies. I mean “suspected ideology.”

Karl Rove gives high marks to Obama’s economic team.

… Mr. Obama’s announcement of his economic team on Monday provided surprisingly positive clarity. He picked as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the respected, soft-spoken New York Fed president. Mr. Geithner has been a key player with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in confronting the financial crisis. Every major decision in the rescue effort came only after the three agreed.

The National Economic Council director-designee, Larry Summers, is another solid pick. Mr. Summers has been an advocate for trade liberalization, he was the Clinton administration’s negotiator for the financial deregulation known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and he even attempted to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the 1990s.

Mr. Obama also named a respected monetary expert — Christina Romer — to head up his Council of Economic Advisors. On Tuesday he selected a first-rate thinker, Peter Orszag, to be director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

The only troubling personnel note was Melody Barnes as Domestic Policy Council director. Putting a former aide to Ted Kennedy in charge of health policy after tapping universal health-care advocate Tom Daschle to be Health and Human Services secretary sends a clear signal that Mr. Obama didn’t mean it when his campaign ads said he wouldn’t run to the “extremes” with government-run health care. …

Hugh Hewitt’s chat with Mark Steyn covers terror, turmoil, and turkeys.

… HH: Mark Steyn, let’s turn to the economic panic of recent weeks, and to the appointment by Barack Obama of a new Treasury secretary, a chief economic advisor in Lawrence Summers, a Council of Economic Advisors chair in Christina Romer. These are very mainstream, not at all radical socialists. How do you tote up the score on his economic team?

MS: Well, Bill Clinton used to like to tell people that he governed as an Eisenhower Republican. And there’s a lot of truth to that.  If you imagine an Ike with a serious pants dropping problem, there is a lot of truth to that. And given that what we’re seeing is basically some retro, back to the 90s reconstruction of the Clinton administration, it’s not a big surprise to see Summers and Volker and a lot of very reassuring Eisenhower Republican type names, in effect, coming back. I think in a sense, that reflects Obama’s caution. You know, clearly the entire Western financial system is incredibly vulnerable at the moment. We saw the way Iceland just went belly up a couple of weeks ago. If you look at the numbers, and if you look at the levels of personal credit, in some senses, one could make the case that the United Kingdom is headed the same way. I mean, there could be some major countries whose financial systems take absolutely disastrous hits over this. The last thing you want to do is come up with guys who are either inexperienced or have radical ideas. In a sense, this is Obama’s caution asserting itself.

HH: Does the center-right dare hope that Obama will turn out to be a talk left-govern right kind of figure?

MS: Well, you know, in the sense that…Bush was not a conservative in key respects, and that made it hard for conservative pundits to challenge him, because in effect, you always feel uncomfortable challenging your own guy. If Obama keeps a lot of the Bush personnel, and many of the same Bush policies in place, it’s actually very liberating for conservative intellectuals, because they can challenge them untrammeled. But I would caution against the idea that somehow all this marvelous continuity means that nothing important was really lost on November 4th. I think the ratchet effect in American politics, the drift towards socialized health care, the drift toward a majority of the population who pay no federal income tax, these are all disastrous trends in American life which are not good for American conservatism. …

Jonah Goldberg says Dems sending their kids to private schools in DC is not the real scandal.

… So if Obama and other politicians don’t want to send their kids to schools where even the principals have such views, that’s no scandal. The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful schools at all. For anyone.

The main reason politicians adopt a policy of malign neglect: teachers unions, arguably the single worst mainstream institution in our country today. No group has a stronger or better-organized stranglehold on a political party than they do. No group is more committed to putting ideological blather and self-interest before the public good. …

Donald Boudreaux writes on the bounty of the market.

… A modern market economy is of a degree of complexity far outstripping the comprehension of any mortal. We miss this complexity because such economies work astonishingly well. Or, rather, we would be astonished at how well they work if we took the time to reflect upon their daily achievements.

Every morning the bagel store is filled with fresh, hot bagels; the supermarket shelves burst with milk and meats and coffee and toothpaste; the lights come on when we flip the switch, the water rushes out when we turn on the faucet, and the phone rings when a friend calls us.

These occurrences, and thousands of others just like them, are routine. Boringly so. They are as much a part of our ordinary existence as is water to a fish. And just as the fish never pauses to give thanks for the all-encompassing water that sustains his life — indeed, just as the fish likely never really notices the water — we almost never pause to reflect on the commercial world that is almost as vital to our sustenance as is the air we breathe.

In fact, the only times we do notice the commercial world is on those rare occasions when it is obstructed or working poorly. When there’s no gasoline at the service station, we feel as if some near-sacred right of ours is being assaulted. …

Holman Jenkins on the real cause of Detroit’s problems.

The wrong folks were in the witness chairs in last week’s congressional hearings on auto doom. A fantastic moment was Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch assailing Rick Wagoner about whether GM was asking China for a bailout too. The implication seemed to be that GM can’t afford its inflated UAW pay packages because it’s squandering money to build cars in China.

Mr. Wagoner mildly answered that GM’s China operations are profitable. They actually help to underwrite the massive losses in the U.S.

Mr. Lynch showed no sign he was actually listening, having illustrated his disapproval of foreigners. He didn’t ask the obvious question: If GM can make cars profitably in China, why doesn’t GM import them to the U.S.?

For that matter, any of the brainpans on the Hill might have asked why Ford and GM managed to build viable auto businesses all over the world but not in North America.

You don’t need the Hubble telescope to tell the answer: The UAW is present only in the U.S., not all over the world. …

We learn from the Sydney Morning Herald that the NY Times in profiling Vaclav Klaus starts off quoting an 80′s report on him by Communist secret police. Way to be classy Gray Lady. That’s it! Pickerhead is finally going to cancel the weekend Times. Came close when the Times reporter profiling Cindy McCain used Facebook to contact McCain’s daughter’s friends looking for dirty dish. Want to read about that again? Click here for the Oct 21, 2008 Pickings – Go to the third item.

As the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, an economist, anti-totalitarian and climate change sceptic, prepares to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union next year, climate alarmists are doing their best to traduce him.

The New York Times opened a profile of Klaus, 67, this week with a quote from a 1980s communist secret agent’s report, claiming he behaves like a “rejected genius”, and asserts there is “palpable fear” he will “embarrass” the EU.

But the real fear driving climate alarmists wild is that a more rational approach to the fundamentalist religion of global warming may be in the ascendancy – whether in the parliamentary offices of the world’s largest trading bloc or in the living rooms of Blacktown.

As the global financial crisis takes hold, perhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about climate.

One of Australia’s leading enviro-sceptics, the geologist and University of Adelaide professor Ian Plimer, 62, says he has noticed audiences becoming more receptive to his message that climate change has always occurred and there is nothing we can do to stop it. …

Global Warming foolishness spreads to counting acorns. (BTW, the oaks in on the Virginia Peninsula are having a good acorn crop this year.)

News Biscuit reports UK unemployment is being attacked with a program called “Guide Blokes for the Blind.”

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We are a bit long today. It’s OK though because Mrs. Pickerhead thinks a day off tomorrow is a good idea. See you Sunday night.

Mark Steyn has a Thanksgiving message. Says the world should give thanks for America.

… If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:

“We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!”

Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either.

Three hundred and 15 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

We’re waiting on the finals for two Senate seats. John Fund tells us what’s going on with the recount in Minnesota.

In a government warehouse in the northeast part of this city, the recount of the Senate race between GOP Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken is orderly and transparent. Teams of workers sort paper optical-scan ballots as campaign representatives look on. Minneapolis election director Cindy Reichert allows outsiders almost to lean over the shoulders of the counters and observe their work. At least here, everyone is “Minnesota nice.”

That may soon change. Today, the state’s five-member Canvassing Board meets to rule on Mr. Franken’s demand that it review whether absentee ballots rejected by county officials can be added to vote totals. Those ballots are likely to determine the outcome and will be the center of challenges in the courts or before the U.S. Senate, which is the final judge of the winner. A lot rides on the result because the Minnesota race, along with a Dec. 2 runoff in Georgia, will determine if Democrats get the 60 votes they need to cut off GOP filibusters on a party-line vote.

“Things are clearly moving in the wrong direction for Franken [in the recount],” Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He says many of the challenges filed by both campaigns against individual ballots are frivolous and will be withdrawn or dismissed by the canvassing board: “The Franken campaign is going to win or lose based on what happens with the absentees.” …

David Harsanyi says maybe there’s hope.

Class warfare wins votes, but refusing to repeal Bush’s across-the- board tax cuts is an implicit admission that tax hikes — even if the rich happen to benefit from them — hurt the economy. If not, why not also repeal Bush’s “tax relief” in favor of more “investments” (yes, a melange of euphemisms) on Jan. 20?

Many economists believe that the burden of high taxes has a damaging impact on the economy. One of them is Christina Romer, an economic historian at the University of California-Berkeley, who was just tapped by Obama to head the Council of Economic Advisers.

So, since we’re in a hopeful mood, perhaps Obama is the leader we need to rein in spending and usher in a new age of fiscal responsibility. This is a theoretical discussion, after all.

“Politics is often backwards,” Brian S. Wesbury, former chief economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, recently told National Review Online.

“For example, only Richard Nixon could go to China, only Bill Clinton (or a Democrat) could sign welfare reform, and only George Bush could introduce a hugely expensive new drug entitlement.”

Politico piece on the real battle in the next session of Congress. It will be Dem v. Dem.

Forget the Republican filibuster and the race to 60. The real fight in the next Congress is Democrats vs. themselves.

With nearly complete control of Washington for the first time in three decades, Democrats are entering a treacherous power zone in which many of their priorities could easily be undone by the geographic, demographic and ideological factions that compete for supremacy within the party.

Unless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can whip their caucuses into unity, numerous fault lines will be revealed: Southern Democrats vs. Northern liberals on labor law; California greens vs. Rust Belt Democrats on global warming; socialized medicine adherents vs. go-slow health care reformers; anti-war liberals vs. cautious centrists on national security. And don’t forget the anti-bailout crowd vs. the powerful Michigan Democrats in both chambers when it comes to money for Detroit.

Republicans insist they will fight for their issues when they can, but they also might simply take a front-row seat to see if Democrats implode.

“When you’re playing with live ammunition and you have to actually live with the consequences of the policy, it’s much, much tougher,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Do Democrats really want to hamstring U.S. manufacturers with new climate change regulations in the current economic climate?” …

Theodore Dalrymple has not been in our pages for a long time. He spends his time in France and England, so is situated to give us a view of the Obama election from abroad.

… That a man who came from as inauspicious a beginning as Obama’s could be elected president of the United States has demonstrated to millions around the globe that the idea of America as the land of opportunity is not mere mythology, and that whatever its faults, the U.S. political system is an extremely open one. The 21st-century version of From Log Cabin to White House is now From Food Stamps to White House.

Furthermore, the election of an opponent of George W. Bush, that object of global scorn, reassured the world that, contrary to conspiracy theorists, the United States is not a giant run by a tiny coterie of ruthless men bent on world domination.

Finally, the fact that Obama is black goes a long way toward expunging America’s original historical sin, that of racism. It renders nugatory the charge of intellectuals around the world—and in American academia—that its pretensions to being the Land of the Free are hypocritical, a sentiment first expressed in Doctor Johnson’s famous question from his “Taxation No Tyranny” of 1775: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Of course, there have been important positions occupied before by American blacks, both elected and appointed. But the presidency has a symbolic importance beyond its constitutional weight, and now no one will ever again be able to say that a man of African extraction cannot obtain the votes of large numbers of whites. …

John Stossel, naturally, does not like an auto bailout.

… What Wagoner and his colleagues hope we’ll overlook is Frederic Bastiat’s lesson: Government intervention must not be judged only by the immediate and obvious consequences for the intended beneficiaries but also by the unseen effects on the rest of society. If the automakers get $25 billion from the capital markets because the federal government guarantees the loans, other businesses won’t be able to borrow that money. Resources that go into making cars can’t be used to make something else.

Why should politicians decide who gets those resources? It’s not as though congressmen using government force are better than the decentralized voluntary market at spotting the most promising investments. Far from it. They will make their decisions on the basis of political considerations, such as who gave them contributions or might finance a get-out-the-vote drive in the next election.

Private investors, risking their own money, have an acute interest in separating the economic wheat from the chaff. Their income depends on finding ventures that would have the best prospects of pleasing consumers. We already know that Detroit’s automakers have failed that test against Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai, BMW and Daimler. …

Patrick Buchanan normally writes and performs from positions of xenophobic ignorance. His new book suggesting enmity from England turned Hitler to the Holocaust, is the most recent example. A post to the Australian Conservative deals with his latest attempt to get attention.

… Buchanan states:

“Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.”

This seems to assert that the Wannsee Conference was the genesis of Nazi efforts to eradicate the non-Aryan populace within their living space and the areas they had occupied.

Not so. As Buchanan himself points out in this article, Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The SS-Einsatzkommando units went across the Russian border at the same time and were in full operation one week after the invasion. By the time of the Wannsee Conference, most expressly in western Russia and the Baltic regions, SS-Einsatzkommando units had already shot, bayoneted and beaten to death hundreds of thousands of Jews and other ethnic/ideological undesirables. By any reasonable definition, this must be viewed as an integral part of the Nazi Holocaust, and it was certainly treated as such by the post-war prosecutions held in Nuremberg.

However, Buchanan’s ignorance on this matter goes further still. If we are to view the Holocaust as a systematic effort made by the Nazi state to eliminate racial and political undesirables within the lands held or occupied by the forces of the Third Reich and its allies, we must go back even further in time, to the infamous German T4 program (erroneously referred to as a “euthanasia program”) which was responsible for the systematic murder not only of the mentally ill, the physically deformed or disabled, but even those subjectively assessed as suffering from “mongoloidism” or “idiocy”.

After September of 1939, the criteria for selection was eased even further, was applied to all ages, was applied to those with “limited impairments” and yes, simply being Jewish fell within the new parameters. In 1939, under the T4 program, a special department within the wider program was set up expressly to kill “minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds” most of the intended victims being children. Thousands were killed by that department and hundreds of thousands more of the other “undesirables” who threatened “German racial hygiene” were murdered by the program as a whole.

These people were not “euthanised”. They were not killed mercifully because they faced incurable disease and lingering suffering. They were not even killed in a painless manner. They were murdered in line with the same genocidal philosophy and by the same genocidal machine that operated the death camps in Poland. Hundreds of thousands more were also sterilized under the T4 program, which to an ardent Christian, as Buchanan claims to be, ought to likewise be viewed as an act of genocide.

Buchanan compounds his misunderstanding by associating “the Holocaust” with only the work of the larger extermination camps, which went into full operation only after the dates he describes. This is, however, completely overlooking the fact that the Chelmno extermination camp had been in full operation since 1941! …

A New Editor post on the ongoing campaign against Wal-Mart by unions.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union is at it again, campaigning to make Wal-Mart just a little bit more like the auto makers. They assume that enough attacks, half-truths and out-of-context statistics will convince Wal-Mart’s employees to go union.

Here’s why that won’t happen, and shouldn’t. …

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Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like the idea of Hillary as SecState.

… In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing. What may look like wound-healing and magnanimity to some looks like foolhardiness and masochism to me.

Monica Crowley says if Hill goes to State, Bill will go rogue.

… With Hillary at State serving a president her husband loathes, the potential for Bill sabotaging Obama is enormous. Like Carter, he’s got the global contacts. Like Carter, he’s now nothing more than a global influence peddler. Like Carter, he’s got the bitter resentment over the new guy. But unlike Carter, he’s also got a wife whom he consciously or unconsciously tried to torpedo from taking his special gig. (Shades of what he did and will continue to do to Obama for actually taking his special gig?)

Bill Clinton has never behaved himself, especially when his legacy and image are on the line. Those two things loom large now that a hipper Democrat is about to take the office which Bill Clinton still believes should be his personal fiefdom.

As much as Carter drove him bananas with his foreign policy freelancing, Clinton learned a thing or two about how to undermine a successor you can’t stand. He’s smarter, slicker and still a media magnet, so when he backstabs Obama, Clinton may dominate rather than just frustrate.

Hillary may go to State, but Bill will go rogue.

Ed Morrissey says Chambliss is up by 3% in Georgia Senate runoff.

… Voter enthusiasm for Martin has declined since the general election.  Martin got his momentum from the massive numbers of Obama voters, most of whom appear less interested in the remaining down-ticket race.  Chambliss may not have that problem, since John McCain didn’t generate an enthusiastic response from the Republican base, meaning that Chambliss’ voters will be motivated more by Chambliss himself.  Republicans have the secondary motivation to deny Obama a filibuster-proof Senate by ensuring Chambliss’ re-election.

Either way, it looks like it will go down to the wire.  Republicans around the country who want to keep at least one potential check on the excesses of single-party government had better start actively supporting the Chambliss effort.  You can help by contributing to Saxby Chambliss here or at the NRSC, and learning more about Martin’s record here.

Bret Stephens continues with Caroline Glick’s thoughts about protecting ourselves from pirates.

… Piracy, of course, is hardly the only form of barbarism at work today: There are the suicide bombers on Israeli buses, the stonings of Iranian women, and so on. But piracy is certainly the most primordial of them, and our collective inability to deal with it says much about how far we’ve regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy. A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it.

Some 250 Taliban jumped 30 Marines. Marine Corps News has details.

… “The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines can accomplish when they’re given the opportunity to fight,” the sniper said. “A small group of Marines met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in their own backyard. The insurgents told the townspeople that they were stronger than the Americans, and that day we showed them they were wrong.”

During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn’t miss any shots, despite the enemies’ rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.

“I was in my own little world,” the young corporal said. “I wasn’t even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target.” …

Thomas Sowell knows why Obama wants to “jolt” the economy.

Barack Obama says that we have to “jolt” the economy. That certainly makes sense, if you take the media’s account of the economy seriously — but should the media be taken seriously?

Amid all the political and media hysteria, national output has declined by less than one-half of one percent. In fact, it may not have declined even that much — or at all — when the statistics are revised later, as they very often are.

We are not talking about the Great Depression, when output dropped by one-third and unemployment soared to 25 percent.

What we are talking about is a golden political opportunity for politicians to use the current financial crisis to fundamentally change an economy that has been successful for more than two centuries, so that politicians can henceforth micro-manage all sorts of businesses and play Robin Hood, taking from those who are not likely to vote for them and transferring part of their earnings to those who will vote for them.

For that, the politicians need lots of hype, and that is being generously supplied by the media. …

American.com says auto bailout is a mistake.

… Bailing out Detroit is unnecessary. After all, this is why we have the bankruptcy process. If companies in Chapter 11 can be salvaged, a bankruptcy judge will help them find the way. In the case of the Big Three, a bankruptcy process would almost certainly require them to dissolve their current union contracts. Revamping their labor structures is the single most important change that GM, Ford, and Chrysler could make—and yet it is the one change that many pro-bailout Democrats wish to ignore.

The Big Three, the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Michigan Congressional delegation, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all know that $25 billion is nowhere near enough money to fix the problems ailing Detroit. The politicians must know that bankruptcy is the better course for auto companies and their workers (indeed, it could save 100,000 jobs). But they also know who fills their political coffers, and the UAW leadership is opposed to Chapter 11 because its labor contracts would be deemed toxic and abrogated by a bankruptcy judge.

The U.S. auto industry needs a shakeout, not a bailout. What we are witnessing, unfortunately, is an attempted shakedown. Let’s hope it doesn’t succeed.

Eugene Volokh says in parts of the West you don’t own the rain that falls on your land.

Weather Channel has purge.

The Onion says Bush has pardoned Scooter Libby who was disguised as a turkey.

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Spengler has thoughts on Obama’s team.

One wants to ask the Wall Street wizards who comprise the talent pool for the incoming administration, “If you so smart, how come you ain’t rich no more?”

Manhattan’s toniest private schools, harder to get into than Harvard, quietly are looking for full-tuition pupils now that the children of sacked Wall Street bankers are departing for public schools in cheaper suburbs. Harvard University president Drew Faust has warned of budget cuts to come due to “unprecedented losses” to its US$39 billion endowment.

Shares of Citibank, the current firm of Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary Robert Rubin, last week traded at less than a tenth of their year-earlier market price and may require yet another federal bailout. [Citigroup will have more than $300 billion of troubled mortgages and other assets guaranteed by the US government under a federal plan to stabilize the lender after its stock fell 60% last week, Bloomberg reported today, November 24. Citigroup also will get a $20 billion cash infusion from the Treasury Department, adding to the $25 billion the bank received last month under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. In return for the cash and guarantees, the government will get $27 billion of preferred shares paying an 8% dividend.]

Rubin, a transition advisor to president-elect Barack Obama, was mentor to Treasury secretary designate Timothy Geithner. Even Goldman Sachs, the thoroughbred trading machine that gave us Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as well as Rubin, is trading at a fifth of its peak value.

These facts came to mind while reading David Brooks’ November 21 New York Times panegyric to Obama’s prospective cabinet, which gushes, “Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.” Brooks added, “… as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons … I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.”

Has Brooks checked the markets? The cleverest people in the United States, the Ivy-pedigreed investment bankers, have fouled their own nests as well as their own net worth, and persuaded the taxpayers to bail them out. If these are the best and the brightest of 2008, America is in very deep trouble. …

Now they tell us. Time’s political blogger, Mark Halperin says the media was biased.

… “The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies,” Halperin said. “The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was “like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is,” according to Halperin. …

Since Barack Obama will soon have a chance to save DC’s voucher system, the example he set sending his children to private school is important. WSJ editors weigh in first.

Obama supporter says it’s time from the Dems to break with the teacher’s unions.

… Democrats also have to get serious about school choice. The unions oppose it because they don’t want one student or one dollar to leave the regular public schools, where their members teach. So the Democrats have been timid and weak in putting choice to productive use — even though their constituents are the ones trapped in deplorably bad urban schools, whose futures are being ruined, and who are desperate for new educational opportunities.

If children were their sole concern, Democrats would be the champions of school choice. They would help parents put their kids into whatever good schools are out there, including private schools. They would vastly increase the number of charter schools. They would see competition as healthy and necessary for the regular public schools, which should never be allowed to take kids and money for granted. …

NY Times Op-Ed on Holder’s role in the Marc Rich pardon.

WHEN President Bill Clinton pardoned a billionaire fugitive from justice on his last day in office, even usually loyal Democrats were dismayed. Representative Henry Waxman of California called it “bad precedent” and “an end run around the judicial process.” He said it appeared to set a double standard for the wealthy and powerful.

The billionaire was Marc Rich, a commodities trader, and his pardon is a subject of discussion again because Eric Holder, Mr. Clinton’s deputy attorney general at the time and a key figure in the clemency process, is reported to be Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general. In the years since the Rich pardon, Mr. Holder has said he “never devoted a great deal of time to this matter.” He also told an interviewer that, in hindsight, he wished that the Justice Department had been “more fully informed” about the case. As someone who helped cover the story for The Washington Post, I think the issue is far more complicated and deserves more scrutiny if Mr. Holder is to become our top law-enforcement official. …

Lisa Schiffren Corner post on Hillary at State.

… Will Barack Obama be a great foreign-policy president? Unlikely. Aside from his instinctual, and at the time professionally inconsequential opinion that the war in Iraq was “wrong,” it is unclear that he has given 15 minutes worth of thought to geo-politics. Yes, he wants to “restore America’s image” abroad. But that is a marketing cliché, not a foreign policy or an indication of any kind of deeper and more complicated thought about the various levels of threat and the ultimate goals and positioning useful for the U.S. as the century evolves. Is he going to fix what’s wrong in the Middle East, or between the Afghans and the Paks? Win the war on terror? Outsmart the Chinese? Contain the axis of evil?

Given his lack of depth, he does not need someone who will adhere to his views strictly. He needs someone who is a reliable reporter and who can evaluate what she sees with harsh clarity, and work with him — and bring in people with substantive experience — to devise appropriate responses. That would be a more mature relationship than one where the SoS is merely an emissary, or someone who, as pundits keep saying, “has his back.”

Hillary may or may not run for president again. Either way her execution in office matters — as a credential or for the sake of history. That gives her an incentive to see things clearly and to help P-E Obama do the same. In the Middle East, for instance, whatever sympathies she had, years ago, for Arafat and his pals, must have evolved as she watched the Palestinians devolve into terror factions in Gaza and the West Bank. She knows what they did to her husband’s hopes of brokering that chimera of a “peace agreement.” Tough and realistic is better than arrogant and naive. And I don’t see a third choice.

Tyler Cowen, George Mason econ prof with NY Times Op-Ed on some of the ways FDR made the depression worse.

MANY people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems. But while we can learn important lessons from this period, they’re not always the ones taught in school.

The traditional story is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued capitalism by resorting to extensive government intervention; the truth is that Roosevelt changed course from year to year, trying a mix of policies, some good and some bad. It’s worth sorting through this grab bag now, to evaluate whether any of these policies might be helpful.

If I were preparing a “New Deal crib sheet,” I would start with the following lessons: …

Jonah Goldberg with some thoughts on the subject.

More still from 2004 UCLA press release.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.” …

According to Borowitz, Obama names Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie to “Team of Rivals.”

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In a WSJ Op-Ed, former hedge fund manager says stop watching the market for a few months.

… So which is it now: an efficient mechanism or a manipulating liar? Should you listen to it warning of doom or anticipating renewal? I’d say stick wax in your ears and don’t listen to the market until February.

Don’t get me wrong. The freezing of the credit markets is wreaking havoc on the world economy. Corporate profits are dropping. Central banks are fighting off deflation and may not turn off the spigots fast enough — which could ignite runaway inflation. But because of the credit mess, I am convinced the stock market is at its least efficient today. Don’t read too much into any move. Here are the five biggest dislocations taking place: …

Looking at the pirate’s romp in the Indian Ocean, Caroline Glick says civilization is walking the plank.

… One of the unique characteristics of pirates is that they appear to be equal opportunity aggressors. They don’t care who owns the ships they attack. On August 21, Somali pirates hijacked the Iran Deyanat, a ship owned and operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards-linked Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line (IRISL). In September, the US Treasury Department designated IRISL as a company that assists Iran’s nuclear weapons program and placed it under stiff financial sanctions.

Iran Deyanat’s manifest asserted that its cargo included minerals. Yet shortly after the pirates went on board they began developing symptoms such as hair loss that experts claim are more in line with radiation exposure. According to reports, some 16 pirates died shortly after being exposed to the cargo. Just this week, a second Iranian ship – this one apparently carrying wheat – was similarly captured.

Then, too, in September, pirates seized the Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 Russian-made T-72 tanks. The Ukrainians and Russians claimed that the tanks were destined for Kenya, but it later emerged that they may have been seized en route to Sudan. So, ironically, in the case of both the Faina and the Deyanat, pirates may have inadvertently saved thousands of lives. …

John Fund has fun with the occasional Dem need for the secret ballot.

Stuart Taylor has a look at some of the looney left lawyers who are on the federal bench. 

How would soon-to-be-President Obama like it if the courts were to order the Navy — his Navy — to cripple its training in Southern California coastal waters in the use of sonar to detect enemy submarines, and thereby perhaps endanger the Pacific Fleet?

That’s what four Democratic-appointed federal judges in California and two liberal Supreme Court justices voted to do in a recent case, to avoid any possibility of harming marine mammals, not one of which has suffered a documented injury in 40 years of sonar training off the California coast.

And that’s the sort of thing that liberal groups want done by the judges that President-elect Obama will soon be appointing.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court overturned on November 12, in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the major restrictions on sonar training that the four lower-court judges had ordered. The majority held that with the nation embroiled in two wars, “the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors” far outweighed the speculative harm that the training might do to the plaintiffs’ interest in marine mammals.

“For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals that they study and observe,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and the four other more-conservative justices. “In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.” …

This story is so good we’ll have at it from two directions. Mugabe in Zimbabwe has told Jimmy Carter to **** off. Contentions first.

… Yet as awful as Mugabe is, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that he has at least performed an invaluable public service by giving Carter a lesson on the limits of engagement.

No doubt Mugabe’s tutorial will be lost on the always self-righteous Carter.  But at least the rest of us can learn something valuable from this snub.

Ed Morrissey is next.

… There is no small amount of irony in this snub.  Robert Mugabe began his tyranny with the assistance of the Carter administration, as James Kirchick reported at the Weekly Standard last year.  Without Carter, Mugabe would likely have been just another terrorist thug chased around in the wilderness for a while until murdered by his own people. …

Morrissey has at Dem secret ballot hypocrisy. And he defends Rush Limbaugh against attacks by Mort Kondracke.

Good post from Todd Zywicki of Volokh on what a GM bankruptcy might look like.

… GM is a classic example of a firm that looks like a financially failed rather than economically failed. We have both physical capital and human capital with high firm and industry-specific value, namely factories and unionized work forces, which value would be lost if those assets were redeployed. It also has at least some going-concern value in its goodwill and namebrands.

What GM needs to do is shed labor contracts, retirement contracts, and modernize its distribution systems by closing many dealerships. It appears to need new management as well. Bankruptcy gives them the opportunity to do all that.

So GM will almost certainly reorganize, as will the other car companies. GM does not look like an economically-failed typewriter manufacturer at this point, but rather a financially-failed company that needs to reorganize and go forward. …

A comment from Contentions suggests the auto managers don’t want a bailout, and are just going thru the motions.

Wesley Pruden tells us how lucky we are it has finally become cold. This might stop the idiots.

Turn up the heat, somebody. The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket. Winter has barely come to the northern latitudes and already we’ve got bigger goosebumps than usual. So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one.

The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn’t warmed since 1995. You may have noticed, in fact, that Al and his pals, having given up on the sun, no longer even warn of global warming. Now it’s “climate change.” The marketing men enlisted by Al and the doom criers to come up with a flexible “brand” took a cue from the country philosopher who observed, correctly, that “if you’ve got one foot in the fire and the other in a bucket of ice, on average you’re warm.” On average, “climate change” covers every possibility. …

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Karl Rove says now Obama has to govern.

Presidential transitions can be problematic. The candidate is utterly exhausted. Supporters have unattainable expectations and unrealistic personal hopes. The ease of making campaign pledges has given way to the obstinate process of legislating them. And Barack Obama is the first president-elect since Richard Nixon without executive experience. What are some of his transition challenges so far?

One of Mr. Obama’s first decisions was to make Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff. This smart, aggressive Chicago pol may turn out to be a wise pick. But first he must decide what his role is. Will he be the opinionated enforcer who ran the Clinton White House political office? Or will Mr. Emanuel fashion himself into a more traditional chief of staff? …

Cafe Hayek blogger and economist Russell Roberts answers the question, “You’re so smart, how come you didn’t see this coming?”

… Having said all that, when home ownership went from 64% to an all time high of 69%, I foolishly attributed it to our growing standard of living and Wall St. innovation. I was right about part of it. We do have a growing standard of living (contrary to the claims that the average American isn’t sharing in the economy’s expansion) and Wall St. innovation did reduce the risk of lending to people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten a loan. But I, like others, didn’t see the unsustainability of that rise. And most people thought that if the rise slowed or fell, then some people would lose their houses and others who invested in those mortgages would lose their money. We didn’t see the systemic risk.  We didn’t pay enough attention to the magnitudes. Prices are unlikely to double in ten years solely because of fundamentals. The explosion of subprime securitization in 2004 and 2005 should have set off alarm bells.

A deeper question that I have not seen adequately answered is why people who specialized in the housing market, people who were paying attention, people who put their life’s wealth on the line, were equally oblivious. What were they thinking? That housing prices would keep doubling? Or just keep going up? Were they comforted by the AAA rating of the CDO they had purchased? The credit default swap they had purchased? Should that have been enough? The standard answer that they were greedy is not an answer.

Which brings us to another reason I and others were silent in 2005. Financial markets are incredibly complicated. Even today, ex post, it’s hard to know what really happened that spiraled downward so dramatically. There are a lot of culprits. The ratings agencies. Fannie and Freddie. Greed. Innovative products that were too complicated to understand. Tax policy. Monetary policy. Mark-to-market accounting. How do all of these effects interact? The ex post story isn’t straightforward. Ex ante is much much harder. …

John Stossel says Paulson’s flips are typical of government attempts to do anything.

Is the stock market trying to tell us something? It seems like every time Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson goes on TV, stock prices drop.

I can see why. Businesses would be reckless if they made investments that might lead to recovery when they have no idea day to day what Paulson or his successor might come up with next.

By my count, Paulson is now on his third plan for how to spend the pile of cash Congress gave him.

First he was going to buy “toxic” mortgage-based assets from banks.

A few days later, taking his lead from the Europeans, Paulson decided that some of the money should be used to buy stock in banks, both healthy and ailing. Let’s put this plainly: The Treasury, on its own initiative, decided to partially nationalize the nine largest banks and many smaller ones. They would be given no choice in the matter on the logic that voluntary participation would stigmatize the participants. Direct big-business socialism had come to America.

Now Paulson says he doesn’t want to buy the toxic assets from the banks.

Huh? …

A post at Volokh Conspiracy on the auto bailout.

I have hesitated writing about the GM bailout for two reasons. First, I like GM cars; I bought two of them in March, and every car I’ve ever bought was a GM car. Second, a professor with tenure should be somewhat circumspect in writing about the jobs of people who do not have the protections that we have.

But in watching CNBC debates on the Auto Bailout, I have been frustrated by the arguments of those who favor bailouts that government largesse will on balance lead to more employment, rather than less.

Those inclined against the bailout seem mostly to say, “When will the handouts end?”

Yet the best way to meet the “jobs argument” is with another jobs argument. Making bad, uneconomic investments in failing industries does not, on balance, preserve jobs; it tends to destroy more jobs – and more good jobs – than it saves.

If you give money to failing industries to save jobs, then you are probably taking even more jobs away from other industries who would hire or retain workers but for their higher expenses. In essence, throwing money down a hole may preserve jobs in the short term but should lose jobs in the medium and long term.

If you pay for an auto bailout with today’s tax money, then over the next couple years you are taking jobs away from lots of people currently working. …

Jennifer Rubin says the bailout has died, but only for a typical Washington reason.

Unfortunately, Washington operates in sound bites and symbols. The good news is that those sound bites and symbols occasionally shame Congress into doing the right thing. That seems to have happened with the auto bailout.

Columns and columns have been written, cogent arguments constructed, and plenty of good advice rendered to the effect that a bailout is misguided,  and that only a bankruptcy proceeding can provide the legal mechanism needed to restructure major American automakers. But it took a boneheaded move by the Big Three CEO’s–flying to D.C. in private jets–to galvanize the media and make it virtually impossible for the Democrats to throw away billions more on recalcitrant, failing companies. …

Walter Williams exposes the evil in socialism.

… I don’t believe any moral case can be made for the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another. But that conclusion is not nearly as important as the fact that so many of my fellow Americans give wide support to using people. I would like to think it is because they haven’t considered that more than $2 trillion of the over $3 trillion federal budget represents Americans using one another. Of course, they might consider it compensatory justice. For example, one American might think, “Farmers get Congress to use me to serve the needs of some farmers. I’m going to get Congress to use someone else to serve my needs by subsidizing my child’s college education.”

The bottom line is that we’ve become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was horrified when Congress appropriated $15,000 to help French refugees. He said, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” Tragically, today’s Americans would run Madison out of town on a rail.

Brent Bozell doesn’t think National Review needs croc tears from the NY Times.

The liberal crocodiles at The New York Times are shedding tears for National Review magazine. The headline of media reporter Tim Arango’s piece is “At National Review, a Threat to Its Reputation for Erudition.” It is a curious topic for the Times, which usually treats the idea of intellectual conservatism as oxymoronic.

Arango mourns that the tenor of debate at National Review Online, the magazine’s Internet sister, “devolved into open nastiness” over the question of Sarah Palin’s fitness for the vice presidency, “laying bare debates among conservatives that in a pre-Internet age may have been kept behind closed doors.” Arango claims that the coarsening effect of the Internet has damaged NR’s “reputation as the cradle for conservative intellectuals and home for erudite and well-mannered debate prized by its founder, William F. Buckley Jr.” [Full disclosure: my uncle.]

Such tender concern for the fate of the conservative movement and its leading periodical is almost amusing, given that the Times spent decades savaging the magazine’s founder. …

Fifty Strange Buildings

News Biscuit says Disney enhanced authenticity by hiring a bunch of Somali’s for its Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

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Karl Rove says the GOP can find its way out of the wilderness.

Yes, we lost the election. But in a year when all currents were running against Republicans and our campaign was lackluster and erratic, Barack Obama received only 3.1 points more than Al Gore in 2000 and only 4.6 points more than John Kerry in 2004. The Democratic victory becomes durable only if Republicans make it so with the wrong moves.

Losing the election has led to a debate about whether the GOP should return to its Reaganite tradition or embark on a new reform course. This pundit-driven shoutfest presents a sterile, unnecessary choice. The party should embrace both tradition and reform; grass-roots Republicans want to apply timeless conservative principles to the new circumstances facing America.

In the coming year, we will be defined more by what we oppose than what we are for; the president-elect and the Democrats in Congress will control the agenda. We must pick fights carefully and center them around principle. The goal is to have the sharp differences that emerge make the GOP look like the more reasonable, hopeful and inviting party—which is easier said than done. A road map:

1. Avoid mindless opposition. We should support President Obama when he is right (Afghanistan), persuade him when his mind appears open (trade) and oppose him when he is wrong (taxes). It is the Republican Party’s job to hold him accountable on the merits only.

2. Be as comfortable talking about health care and education as national security and taxes. Republican health-care proposals are strong; they can trump the Democrats’ big-government ideas, but only if we advocate them with clarity, passion and conviction. …

American.com looks for good news for the GOP.

Barack Obama may have run one of the most successful presidential campaigns in American history, but the exit poll data suggest that he did not achieve the overwhelming election victory that many had predicted.

Increased Democratic Party identification, dismally low approval ratings for President Bush, and widespread anxiety over the economy and the financial crisis should have guaranteed Obama a huge win. Yet he garnered only 52 percent of the popular vote, one percentage point higher than George W. Bush’s popular vote total in 2004 and one point lower than that of George H.W. Bush in 1988. At a recent American Enterprise Institute conference, AEI scholar Michael Barone argued that such results make Obama’s triumph “overdetermined and underdelivered.” …

Noemie Emery traces the improbable story of Hillary at State.

Campaign 2008, which went on for four years, if not for four centuries, was rich in dramatic personae with strange tales — candidates from Alaska, the Canal Zone, and Hawaii; mavericks, moose-hunters, and multi-racial messiahs — but none has been so bizarre as the story of Hillary Clinton, who began her career as the wife of a liberal president, who entered the race eons ago as the liberal hope to become the first woman president, and who may end it weeks after the fact as the third female secretary of state in our history, the first ex-First Lady to become a top diplomat, to the relief and delight of many conservatives. How did the feminist wife of Bill Clinton, demonized as a fiend during much of his tenure, end up as the Great Right Hope of the party they bested? The race changed her, and it, beyond all expectations. It was all the campaign.

Candidates of course plan their campaigns, but they are defined more than they anticipate by their opponents, to whom they are forced to react. In 1992, Bill Clinton, an interesting and effective middle-way reform governor, planned to run against liberal Mario Cuomo who would have the support of his party’s establishment. To his surprise, Cuomo bowed out, and he became by default the establishment candidate. In 2000, George W. Bush, an interesting and effective reform governor, planned to run against fiscal or social conservatives as an inventive and maverick figure. He ran instead against John McCain, the maverick’s maverick, and became in his turn the establishment figure, as the fiscal and social conservatives flocked to his side by default. …

David Harsanyi thinks the idea is nutty.

… Now, I can’t think of a better person to send abroad to chastise foreign leaders into complete submission than Hillary Clinton. But Obama’s rise to national prominence is often traced to his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq on the very day President George Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the war. This bold narrative pits a brave young politico against the crushing forces of political expediency.

Forces like Hillary Clinton.

“When it came to making the most important decision of our generation, Senator Clinton got it wrong,” Obama once hyperbolically claimed. In tapping Clinton, is Obama admitting that her more “realist” neoconny approach to the war on terror, Iraq and other issues is acceptable? Or is it Clinton admitting she was completely wrong?

If Clinton genuinely flunked “the most important vote of a generation,” how would Obama justify tendering her, arguably, the highest- ranking Cabinet position in the nation? And how does Clinton rationalize working for someone she so heartily attacked as immature and unfit for command? …

Mark Steyn with a pirate post.

… It’s the scale of these operations that impresses. In the quarter ending September 30th, Somali pirates hijacked 26 vessels and kidnapped 537 crew members. According to Chatham House, their booty in ransoms so far this year may be as high as $30 million. That makes piracy about the most attractive profession in Somalia.

This is a glimpse of tomorrow. Half a century ago, Somaliland was a couple of sleepy colonies, British and Italian. Now the husk of a nation state is a convenient squat from which to make mischief. And, when freelance raiders are already seizing vessels the size of aircraft carriers, their capability in the future will be constrained only by their ambition.

London Times says the pirates have snagged another big boat.

Somali pirates struck again yesterday, seizing an Iranian cargo ship holding 30,000 tonnes of grain, as the world’s governments and navies pronounced themselves powerless against this new threat to global trade. …

The pick of Power Line’s pirate posts.

A CNN story on the use of rubber ducks in Greenland glacier research project.

… In the name of climate change science, researchers at NASA have dropped 90 rubber ducks into holes of Greenland’s fastest moving glacier: the Jakobshavn Glacier in Baffin Bay.

Scientists remain unsure as to why glaciers speed up their movement in the summer months and it is hoped that the rubber ducks — labeled with the words “science experiment” and “reward” in three languages, along with an email address — will shed some light on the phenomenon. …