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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. …

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Never a fan of religion, Christopher Hitchens has some fun with Fidel’s plans for a Russian  Orthodox cathedral in Havana.

… I have been in Cuba many times in the past decades, but this was the first visit where I heard party members say openly that they couldn’t even guess what the old buzzard was thinking. At one lunch involving figures from the ministry of culture, I heard a woman say: “What kind of way is this to waste money? We build a cathedral for a religion to which no Cuban belongs?” As if to prove that she was not being sectarian, she added without looking over her shoulder: “A friend of mine asked me this morning: ‘What next? A subsidy for the Amish?’ “

All these are good questions, but I believe they have an easy answer. Fidel Castro has devoted the last 50 years to two causes: first, his own enshrinement as an immortal icon, and second, the unbending allegiance of Cuba to the Moscow line. Now, black-cowled Orthodox “metropolitans” line up to shake his hand, and the Putin-Medvedev regime brandishes its missile threats against the young Obama as Nikita Khrushchev once did against the young Kennedy. The ideology of Moscow doesn’t much matter as long as it is anti-American, and the Russian Orthodox Church has been Putin’s most devoted and reliable ally in his re-creation of an old-style Russian imperialism. If you want to see how far things have gone, take a look at the photograph of President Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration, as he kisses the holy icon held by the clerical chief. Putin and Medvedev have made it clear that they want to reinstate Cuba’s role in the hemisphere, if only as a bore and nuisance for as long as its military dictatorship can be made to last. Castro’s apparent deathbed conversion to a religion with no Cuban adherents is the seal on this gruesome pact. How very appropriate.

A prof at NYU’s Stern Biz school nixes Detroit bail out. More proof here, in case you needed it, that Michael Moore is a fool.

Before Michael Moore became famous for documentaries like “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “Sicko,” his first big success came in 1989 with “Roger and Me.” In that film, Mr. Moore followed General Motors chairman and chief executive Roger Smith with a camera crew, asking him why the company was closing plants and producing low-quality vehicles. Mr. Smith looked flustered and inartfully avoided Mr. Moore’s camera crew while it lingered outside his country club or GM’s executive offices.

“Roger and Me” was entertaining, but it missed the real story about Roger Smith, who turned out to be a forward-thinking genius. Mr. Smith made big investments in information technology and satellite communications, acquiring Electronic Data Systems in 1984 for $2.5 billion and Hughes Aircraft in 1985 for $5.2 billion. Mr. Smith’s successors divested those businesses at huge profits — EDS was taken public in 1996 for more than $27 billion, and Hughes, renamed DirecTV, went public in 2003 for more than $23 billion. (The man who sold EDS to Roger Smith at a bargain price was H. Ross Perot, who then convinced many people that the experience qualified him to be president.)

Mr. Smith understood all too well that GM shouldn’t continue investing in its failing automobile business. That was 25 years ago. Today, our government is being asked to put tens of billions of dollars in GM, Ford and Chrysler, but we would be much better off if Washington allowed these companies to go bankrupt and disappear. …

George Will has Detroit thoughts.

… In his new book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” Post columnist Robert Samuelson recalls that in 1950, when GM signed a five-year contract with the UAW, Fortune magazine celebrated this as the “Treaty of Detroit.” Under “pattern bargaining,” Ford and Chrysler struck similar bargains, thereby eliminating competition in labor costs. In 1950, the Big Three’s share of America’s domestic auto market was about 95 percent, Japan’s and Germany’s war-smashed economies were feeble, and the VW Beetle was a barely discernible harbinger of a huge threat. The Big Three and the UAW probably did not doubt the immortality of their oligopoly. …

Martin Feldstein thinks it’s Chapter 11 time for Detroit.

The Big Three U.S. automakers need more than an injection of $25 billion from the federal government. Because of their ongoing losses, they would burn through that money in less than a year and would soon be back for more.

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler can make excellent cars, but they cannot sell them at prices that are competitive with the prices of cars produced in the United States by Toyota and others or with the prices of cars imported from Europe and Asia. The basic reason is the labor costs imposed by union contracts.

The Big Three pay much higher wages than production workers are paid in the nonunion auto firms and in the general economy. And the health-care costs of current workers and retired union members are an enormous additional burden.

The simplest solution is to allow GM and the others to file for bankruptcy. If the companies file under Chapter 11, they would be able to continue producing cars, and the workforce would remain employed while the firms reorganized. The firms would also be able to get short-term credit under bankruptcy protection. …

A Contentions bailout post.

Management of the Big Three automakers will be on Capitol Hill today, begging for federal money to bail them out of the mess they are in. Right there beside them will be their partner in failure, the United Auto Workers.

As a general proposition, when an industry and its unions want the same thing from the federal government, the answer should always be no. In the 1970’s, the airlines and their unions fought deregulation. So did the trucking industry and the Teamsters. Both got told no, and the American economy is much better off as a result. In 1980, shipping costs were fifteen percent of GDP. Today they are about ten percent. Translation: when the Interstate Commerce Commission cartel ended, shipping costs declined by a third, reducing the price of goods generally. …

Now a series of three Contentions posts on the idea of Hillary Clinton as Sec. State. Justin Shubow Eric Trager Daniel Halper

Marty Peretz takes a dim view of Hillary at State.

… So the fact is that she is not a committed leftist at all.  She is something worse: like Bill, a committed situanionalist.  Hillary is not a person of principle.  She is  a person of shifting position.  The best you can say of her, then, is that she is flexible, endlessly felxible.

Now, if Barack Obama has actually offered Hillary the post of secretary of state, he has reversed what most Americans thought was one of the much sought-after consequences of his nomination and his electoral victory.  That is, sought after by the voters.  And this was to end the Clinton dominion in American politics.   That’s certainly what the primaries were about.  Once Obama freed himself and the party from the vice presidential blackmail almost everyone assumed that, with Joe Biden as their candidate’s running-mate, the Democratic nominee did not need the experience of someone who’d visited 81 capitals for a day or two or who’d been to Bosnia “under fire” or who kissed Suha Arafat only moments after the pampered lady had accused Israel of spreading cancer in the West Bank. …

In a National Review Corner post, Jonah Goldberg introduces us to a NY Times item on National Review election controversies.

… As much fun as it might be, I’m not going to spend a lot of time addressing the individual personalities here. But: please. This is an old complaint of mine, but it’s no less true for being tiresome. National Review is not, and has not been, an unalloyed intellectual defender of the Bush administration. Most of the people who say this sort of thing simply don’t read the magazine. We have criticized the Bush administration from the Right. We were very skeptical about the DHS reorganization, the federalization of airport security, his faith-based initiatives, big-government conservatism and compassionate conservatism. We opposed his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind,  his steel tariffs and his expansion of national service programs. We opposed the campaign finance “reform” he signed into law and his farm bill. We led the opposition to his amnesty plan for illegal immigrants and against Harriet Miers. …

Here’s the NY Times article.

In a span of 252 days, the National Review lost two Buckleys — one to death, another to resignation — and an election.

Now, thanks to the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse, the magazine may have lost something else: its reputation as the cradle for conservative intellectuals and home for erudite and well-mannered debate prized by its founder, the late William F. Buckley Jr.

In the general conservative blogosphere and in The Corner, National Review’s popular blog, the tenor of debate — particularly as it related to the fitness of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be vice president — devolved into open nastiness during the campaign season, laying bare debates among conservatives that in a pre-Internet age may have been kept behind closed doors.

National Review, as the most pedigreed voice of conservatives, has often been tainted — unfairly and by association, some argue — by the tone of blogs, reader comments and e-mail messages. “Bill was always very concerned about having a high-minded and thoughtful discourse,” Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor, said. “If you read the magazine, that’s what it was and that’s what it is.”

In October came the resignation of Mr. Buckley’s son, the writer and satirist Christopher Buckley, after he endorsed Barack Obama for president. He did so on Tina Brown’s blog, The Daily Beast, to avoid any backlash on The Corner. …

Dilbert likes pirates.

I love pirates. I love their parrots, their wooden legs, their eye patches, and obviously their AAARGS! But I have never loved pirates more than the day they seized a fully laden supertanker off the coast of Somalia.

We should have seen this coming. I blame Obama and his whole “Yes I can” philosophy. Suddenly even the pirates are thinking big. Six months ago these pirates were probably robbing convenience stores. After they saw Obama get elected president, they figured anything was possible. …

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Two good pieces from WaPo. First, Howard Kurtz on media hype and then Chris Cilizza on five myths from the election. The Washington Post continues to be the grown-up part of the media. Pickerhead can only explain his Sunday NY Times subscription as a form of ancestor worship (Roger Simon’s words). The Post is definitely a better read.

Howard Kurtz notices the media has gone gaga.

Perhaps it was the announcement that NBC News is coming out with a DVD titled “Yes We Can: The Barack Obama Story.” Or that ABC and USA Today are rushing out a book on the election. Or that HBO has snapped up a documentary on Obama’s campaign.

Perhaps it was the Newsweek commemorative issue — “Obama’s American Dream” — filled with so many iconic images and such stirring prose that it could have been campaign literature. Or the Time cover depicting Obama as FDR, complete with jaunty cigarette holder.

Are the media capable of merchandizing the moment, packaging a president-elect for profit? Yes, they are.

What’s troubling here goes beyond the clanging of cash registers. Media outlets have always tried to make a few bucks off the next big thing. The endless campaign is over, and there’s nothing wrong with the country pulling together, however briefly, behind its new leader. But we seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking.

“The Obamas’ New Life!” blares People’s cover, with a shot of the family. “New home, new friends, new puppy!” Us Weekly goes with a Barack quote: “I Think I’m a Pretty Cool Dad.” The Chicago Tribune trumpets that Michelle “is poised to be the new Oprah and the next Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — combined!” for the fashion world.

Whew! Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed “Generation O”?

Each writer, each publication, seems to reach for more eye-popping superlatives. …

Chris Cilizza writes on five 2008 election myths.

The 2008 presidential election ended less than two weeks ago, but the mythmaking machine has already begun to churn. President-elect Barack Obama transformed the face of the electorate! The Republican Party will be a miserable minority in Congress for the next century! Cats and dogs are now living together! Below we explode the five biggest myths that have already sprung up around the election that was. …

Since we were reporting on media fools, Ed Morrissey has the details of how the “warmest October on record” turned out to be September.

The main statistical facility for global-warming activists compounded error with folly and have undermined their credibility entirely.  NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that last month was the warmest October on record, surprising meteorologists who had seen colder temperatures and unseasonal snowstorms and wondered where all the heat originated:

GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-skeptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. …

Mr. Morrissey also notices that, Gasp!, lobbyists have key positions in The One’s transition team.

To put the old song on its ear, everything new is old again.  Remember when Barack Obama said this?

To rousing applause, Barack Obama formally announced this afternoon that the Democratic National Committee will follow his lead and begin refusing donations from registered lobbyists and special-interest political action committees.

“They do not fund my campaign,” the presumptive Democratic nominee told a small-town southwest Virginia crowd, after delivering a standard refrain that blames drug and insurance interests for blocking universal health care. “They will not fund our party. And they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I’m President of the United States.”

They may not have funded his campaign, although that’s highly questionable, but the Washington Post reports that they’ll be running his government. …

This is fun. BBC News painted their name on a forty foot shipping container. They also fitted it with a GPS system. All of this to start a year long illustration of global trade as they follow it around the world. The first stop for the container was the Chivas distiller in Scotland for a shipment bound for Shanghai, China. Along the way, the box went thru the Suez Canal and BBC did a piece on that too. From time to time we’ll check in on the BOX.

WSJ Interviews Malcolm Gladwell on his new book.

In the thoroughly engaging “Outliers,” author Malcolm Gladwell asserts that success seems to stem as much from context as from personal attributes. Read the review of “Outliers.”

In “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell’s third book, he casts his eye on people who have excelled in their fields — and then analyzes how their lives have been as influenced by serendipity as much as their own talents. His publisher, Little, Brown, has ordered up a large first print run of 640,000 copies. (See review on W10.) Mr. Gladwell, whose two earlier titles, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” were national best sellers, asks his readers to question individual success stories. “People don’t rise from nothing,” he writes. “They are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” The 45-year-old Mr. Gladwell, who lives in New York City, reflects on his new book as well as how he frames his ideas.

Scrappleface says Obama resigned from Senate so he could write a new memoir.

Claiming that the hectic pace of his work in the U.S. Senate has taken its toll, Barack Obama announced today he would resign his senate seat effective Sunday, and take a couple of months off to relax and finish a tell-all memoir. …

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Remember a year ago when Israel bombed a site in Syria’s eastern desert? What did happen there? Speculation from Contentions ties off some loose ends.

A Contentions post on Obama’s contradiction of Polish leadership.

Barack Obama’s miscommunication of plans to move ahead with an American missile defense project in Poland, and his subsequent contradiction of Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s statement, are bigger problems than most are readily admitting. John Bolton, characteristically, calls it like he sees it. In the Wall Street Journal, Bolton writes that Russia’s recent vow to place missile assets in Poland was an act of aggression aimed at Obama and at Kaczynski. Obama’s mistake and disavowal leaves a Polish-American partnership looking very foolish, because Obama “should have understood that foreign leaders, both friends and adversaries, are in a state of high tension.” …

Another Contentions post on what we can expect from the new administration.

Come January, when Barack Obama takes the oath of office as our 44th president and the Democrats formally take possession of two-thirds of our government, many people will wonder just what the Obama administration will do. What will be its priorities? What legislation will become most important?

Those who are even slightly familiar with Obama’s record ought to have a firm grasp of what is to come: whatever Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi think is most important to them will be pushed first.

Obama, in his entire political career, has lived by one overarching philosophy: “go along to get along.” He has never once bucked the leadership of his party, never publicly disagreed with those who hold the reins of the Democratic party, never once put principle ahead of partisanship.

And it certainly has not been for lack of opportunity. Obama came up through the ranks of the Chicago Democratic machine, an institution so ripe with corruption and cronyism and back-room deals and whatnot that only Louisiana, with its storied (and broadly ecumenical) legends of rogues and villains and scoundrels, could hope to rival it. …

Charles Krauthammer writes on a “lemon of a bail-out.”

… With almost 5 million workers supported by the auto industry, Democrats are pressing for a federal rescue. But the problems are obvious.

First, the arbitrariness. Where do you stop? Once you’ve gone beyond the financial sector, every struggling industry will make a claim on the federal treasury. What are the grounds for saying yes or no?

The criteria will inevitably be arbitrary and political. The money will flow preferentially to industries with lines to Capitol Hill and the White House. To the companies heavily concentrated in the districts of committee chairmen. To clout. Is this not precisely the kind of lobby-driven policymaking that Obama ran against?

Second is the sheer inefficiency. Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. As we have seen with the airlines, bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping to shed fatally unsupportable obligations. For Detroit, this means release from ruinous wage deals with their astronomical benefits (the hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota: $48), massive pension obligations and unworkable work rules such as “job banks,” a euphemism for paying vast numbers of employees not to work. …

David Brooks, who drank the Obama Kool-Aid, is now surprised Obama wants to appoint a car czar.

Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target. The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth. Over time, American government built a bigger safety net so workers could survive the vicissitudes of this creative destruction — with unemployment insurance and soon, one hopes, health care security. But the government has generally not interfered in the dynamic process itself, which is the source of the country’s prosperity.

But this, apparently, is about to change. Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. …

… The second part of Obama’s plan is the creation of an auto czar with vague duties. Other smart people have called for such a czar to reorganize the companies and force the companies to fully embrace green technology and other good things.

That would be great, but if Obama was such a fervent believer in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats, he should have mentioned it during the campaign. Are we really to believe there exists a czar omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent enough to know how to fix the Big Three? Who is this deity? Are we to believe that political influence will miraculously disappear, that the czar would have absolute power over unions, management, Congress and the White House? Please. …

Speaking to Brooks, Jennifer Rubin indulges in some “I told you so.”

… Perhaps Brooks missed it, but at every turn during the campaign, Obama gave us plenty of warning that he believes “in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats.” Government bureaucrats are going to control lots of things in the Obama administration. They are going to decide which size of business must carry health insurance, and the type of insurance they must have. They are going to decide what type of energy is worth subsidizing, and which projects will get billions in taxpayer funding. They are going to tell the whole world the labor standards they must abide by in order to trade with us. And on it goes. It really isn’t quite fair to say we were not warned. Maybe not on this particular item. But Obama’s penchant for having the “deity” of government command and control a great many things was hard to miss during the campaign.

So what happens if, in January, the Democratic Congress passes, and President Obama signs, an auto bailout? This would show downright economic ignorance on Obama’s part, revealing the new President to be either less bright or less courageous than the pundits assured us he was. We will see if the scales fall from their eyes. But make no mistake: they were warned that this is exactly the sort of thing Obama would favor.

David Harsanyi always knew the government would screw up.

… What is one to make of Democrats enlisting the genius who helped bring about the Freddie and Fannie mess, Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and a Michigan senator, Carl M. Levin, to craft the Detroit bailout legislation? It’s a shame Jack Abramoff is too busy to chip in with his thoughts.

Though Congress already has approved $25 billion in loans to prop up a defective auto industry, one wonders if anyone in Washington has asked if this near- corpse is worth saving in its present form. If it is, surely other corporations and investors will excavate the facets of the business that work.

Yet, if you happen to listen to backers of a car bailout, you may be led to believe that the Tahoe is a pillar of American life. “It is critical that the nation understand this isn’t just a Michigan problem, that one in 10 jobs in the country are impacted by the auto industry,” Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm recently proclaimed in an interview.

We’re still going to buy cars, Madame Governor, but perhaps we will buy them from companies that have the temerity to say “no” to unions and crushing legacy costs associated with them. These corporations may not even be headquartered in Michigan. …

The Economist doesn’t like the idea either.

… Bailing out Detroit would be a bad use of public money. It would be bad in principle, because it would be an open invitation to companies everywhere to apply for aid to survive the recession. Banks qualify for help because the entire economy depends upon their services. They are vulnerable to sudden collapses in confidence that can spread to other banks that are perfectly solvent. A good car company does not face the same threat. And although Detroit employs a network of suppliers, which would suffer if production shuts down, nothing would sap a recovery and job-creating enterprise like locking up badly used resources in poorly performing companies. …

Michael Barone puts a human face or two in his doubts about bailing Detroit.

… As one born and raised in Detroit and its suburbs, who once lived next door to Big Three factory workers and later went to school with the children of Big Three executives, I have mixed feelings about this proposal. My native Michigan is ailing, with the highest unemployment in the nation, plummeting housing values and cascading foreclosures. Its economy, despite the efforts of two previous governors — Democrat Jim Blanchard and Republican John Engler — is dangerously dependent on what used to be called the Big Three and are now called the Detroit Three.

The bankruptcy of one or more of them would deeply impact the personal lives and dash the seemingly reasonable expectations of those who, directly or indirectly, have depended on them. I can’t help but think of these people when the issue is raised.

And yet the implications of a bailout are frightening. The Detroit Three were unprofitable well before the current financial crisis hit, and GM is reportedly hemorrhaging $1 billion a month. The huge cost of lavish employee and retiree health care benefits, negotiated with the United Auto Workers (UAW), makes it impossible for the companies to sell for a profit anything but the big cars and SUVs that, after gas prices hit $4 a gallon last spring, almost no one wants to buy. …

Shorts from National Review.

WSJ piece on doctor’s use of placebos.

About one in two American doctors say they prescribe placebos to their patients, and more than two-thirds believe it permissible to do so, according to a new study from the National Institutes of Health. Surveys of physicians in other countries, including Israel, Denmark and the U.K., have found similar results. These revelations, published last month in the prestigious BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, seem disquieting, even unethical. After all, when doctors prescribe a medication, we trust them to dispense the real thing.

In their coverage of the new study, the media portrayed placebo use as commonplace — “For Many Doctors, Placebos Are an Answer” said the Washington Post — and even a guilty indulgence: “Many MDs Admit, Privately, Giving Patients Placebos,” as the Star-Ledger put it. It would be no surprise if most people concluded that arrogant, impatient doctors were cheating them or pushing their concerns aside. In this light, the placebo story was simply further evidence that the cherished doctor-patient relationship is becoming a relic of the past.

But before we rush to judgment about placebos and the physicians who use them, let us examine what doctors actually mean when they say they occasionally use placebos and why so many of them find these pseudomedications valuable. …