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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. …