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Deep in his past, Pickerhead was a UAW member. Not just a member, but assistant shop steward and member of the bargaining committee at a Hayes-Albion plant in Hillsdale, Michigan. We made warheads for 81 millimeter mortars and 2.75″ rockets. During Viet Nam, business was good. FOX News reports on the UAW’s golf course in Michigan. That’s the UAW Pickerhead remembers.

The United Auto Workers may be out of the hole now that President Bush has approved a $17 billion bailout of the U.S. auto industry, but the union isn’t out of the bunker just yet.

Even as the industry struggles with massive losses, the UAW brass continue to own and operate a $33 million lakeside retreat in Michigan, complete with a $6.4 million designer golf course. And it’s costing them millions each year.

The UAW, known more for its strikes than its slices, hosts seminars and junkets at the Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center in Onaway, Mich., which is nestled on “1,000 heavily forested acres” on Michigan’s Black Lake, according to its Web site.

But the Black Lake club and retreat, which are among the union’s biggest fixed assets, have lost $23 million in the past five years alone, a heavy albatross around the union’s neck as it tries to manage a multibillion-dollar pension plan crisis.

Critics call it a resort for union leaders that wastes money from union dues. …

Holman Jenkins has a idea the troglodytes in the UAW might understand.

In the continuing battle over Detroit, UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger doesn’t seem to get the picture. Let’s help him.

With shareholders virtually wiped out and debt holders taking a massive haircut, labor is the only stakeholder with anything left to lose. Even a friendly Obama administration will have to acknowledge this. But there is an alternative that would at least take some of the pressure off wages and benefits — and that’s freeing auto makers to build cars for a profit rather than to meet regulatory mandates.

Like all regulatory schemes, Congress’s hallowed Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules froze in place a conception of the auto industry as it appeared to the simple minds of Congress in the early 1970s, when three manufacturers dominated the U.S. market, making full lines of vehicles. Today, more than 25 companies sell vehicles here, and the corollary of such diversity, normally, is specialization.

The Big Three, left to their own devices, would surely specialize in those vehicles on which they make money — i.e., those with hefty price tags and markups relative to their man-hour content. Even at the peak of gas prices, half the vehicles sold in the U.S. were light trucks. In November, amid a collapsed home construction industry and with $4 gasoline fresh in mind, what were the two top sellers? Pickups by Ford and Chevy — and the Dodge Ram was No. 7. …

Christopher Booker of the Telegraph, UK says 2008 was the year global warming was disproved.

… Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise. …

Spengler says there are not enough young people anymore.

… In the mid-1980s, America was young, and was getting younger. Its ratio of younger (25-50) to older (50-65) workers peaked in the mid-1990s, when it had 1.5 citizens aged 25-50 for every one citizen aged 50-64. Those were heady times. The children of the baby boomers were happy to work for stock options, live on pizza, and spent 20 hours a day in a loft launching an Internet startup. Joining a startup was a rite of passage for bright young college graduates, and the exuberant young people of America momentarily persuaded the world that they had discovered a fountain of youth.

Ten years later, the number of aging workers and young workers is about even. The young programmer who worked for stock options during the 1990s still owns them, and all of them are worthless. He or she is pushing 40, with teenaged children who need money for college.

Youth needs leverage. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which launched the quarter-century expansion of 1983-2007, rested on three kinds of leverage: home mortgages, junk bonds and leveraged buyouts. Turning mortgages into mortgage-backed securities made it easy for young families to buy homes and easy for entrepreneurs to draw working capital from the value of their homes. Junk bonds allowed emerging companies without the balance-sheet strength of their big competitors to enter the market and take on entrenched interests. And leveraged buyouts allowed clever upstarts to evict stodgy managers and make capital more efficient. The financiers who created these markets were giants.

The mortgage-backed securities market allowed savers in the aging rustbelt states of America to lend money to young families in the sunbelt. Later, it allowed investors around the world to invest in American homes. Federal agencies that standardized and guaranteed US mortgages made securitization possible, by creating a generic form of mortgage that could be bundled into securities. …

David Warren looks around for a man of the year.

… As noted above, global warming alarmists are going out of fashion, owing to the collapse of their tenuous evidence, and the global cooling alarmists have yet to organize their fans. This eliminates all the leading climatologists except Reid Bryson.

The pioneer of modern climatology, Prof. Bryson has been blowing holes in man-made climate-change alarms for decades.

He is the man who replied to the “retreat of the Alpine glaciers” hysteria by asking, “And what did you find when the snow melted?” (A silver mine, with all the tools stacked up for the next spring: i.e. the glacier was recent.) He should have been man of the year around 1999.

Among other leading “scientists and thinkers,” it is the same story, endlessly repeated. The people who make the lists turn out, nearly invariably, to be wrong about nearly everything; the people who have been fairly consistently right never make the lists.

It was typical of the year in which the Large Hadron Collider debuted as the most expensive dysfunctional white elephant in history, that the Nobel physics prize went to three particle physicists. …

John Stossel says of course Caroline Kennedy is qualified.

… Senators bloviate on anything and everything, regardless of whether they know what they are talking about. This is an important part of the job. Senators must sound as though they know how to create jobs, what kind of energy the United States should use, how to make health care affordable, how to plan education for 75 million unique children, and so on. They don’t have to actually know how to do these things. They just have to sound as though they know. I know very little about Caroline Kennedy, but I’m sure she’s capable of making pronouncements about how progressive polices will save the world.

Another thing senators do is cast votes to spend other people’s money. Caroline Kennedy should be very good at that. She grew up in a wealthy family. Her stepfather was one of the richest men in the world. Now she’s married to a wealthy businessman. She’s had lots of practice spending other people’s money. She’d be good at it. …

For Christmas Anne Applebaum received a CD of presidential speeches.

… Who remembers now that a 1983 speech by Reagan, forever famous because he used it to call the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” also contained the following:

“Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back.”

In that one paragraph, there are echoes of John F. Kennedy (“Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect”) as well as of King, who so brilliantly appropriated the language of America’s founding documents and made them into an irrefutable argument for civil rights:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ ” …

Thomas Sowell says there’s much to like in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book.

“Outliers” are not politicians who lie even more than other politicians. It is a term used by statisticians to describe some data that are far away from the average— data on seven-foot women or freezing temperatures in Los Angeles, for example.

“Outliers” is also the title of a very insightful and very readable new book by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell . The book’s subtitle is “The Story of Success.” It is a study of the factors behind people who have had spectacular achievements in fields ranging from hockey to computers.

One of the first groups of outliers studied are top-level Canadian hockey players, a wholly disproportionate number of whom were born in the first three months of the year. Moreover, the same pattern was found among top Czech hockey players.

The key factor turned out to be a fixed date— January 1st in both countries— for selecting young boys to be placed on special hockey teams that were the elite of their age groups.

Players born in January were the most over-represented among the top hockey players in both countries. As young boys, they would have just missed the selection cut-off for that year and would have had another year to grow before the next selection date. ..

Chris Hitchens has fun with Bill Maher and his morons.

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Pickings today is different because of long photo essay and Dave Barry’s end of the year review.

The first item will make you like your job, whatever you do. It shows the shipbreaking operations of India and Bangladesh.

There are places on our planet, which literally resemble hell on earth… a place that you’d think was conceived by minds of apocalyptic science fiction writers… but is however quite real…

A place, closed off to the tourists, a place where no photographers are allowed to go… and those that do, get their cameras taken away and arrested by the police…..

Today we shall travel to Chittagong, Bangladesh. Chittagong has a territory of 144 000 ??² and population of 144 million people. Several beaches around the area bear strange ships, parked in sand as seen from space:

This is a city of ShipBreakers. …

Speaking of shipwrecks (sort of), London Times reporter describes to his UK readers Caroline Kennedy’s disastrous debut.

Caroline Kennedy’s quest to enter the US Senate has suffered a self-inflicted blow in a series of interviews in which she can only be described as . . . um . . . excruciatingly, you know, unerudite.

During a series of meetings with the New York press, one of which was recorded and is now being admired on YouTube in all its ineloquent awkwardness, the daughter of President Kennedy was vague, unconvincing and displayed a potentially ruinous verbal tic.

In one sequence, lasting 2 minutes and 27 seconds, Ms Kennedy, 51, revealed that she had inherited none of the eloquence, energy or charisma associated with other members of America’s foremost political dynasty: she used the phrase “you know” no fewer than 30 times.

Asked to justify her candidacy – after days spent with handlers advising her on how to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacant New York Senate seat – she began in a dull monotone: “Um, this is a fairly unique moment both in our, you know, in our country’s history, and, and in, in, you know, my own life, and um, you know, we are facing, you know, unbelievable challenges, our economy, you know, healthcare, people are losing their jobs here in New York obviously um, arh, you know. . . ”  …

After shipbreaking and shipwrecks, Dave Barry entertains with his end of the year review.

How weird a year was it? Here’s how weird:

O.J. actually got convicted of something.

Gasoline hit $4 a gallon — and those were the good times.

On several occasions, “Saturday Night Live” was funny.

There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury secretary would be Joe the Plumber.

Finally, and most weirdly, for the first time in history, the voters elected a president who — despite the skeptics who said such a thing would never happen in the United States– was neither a Bush nor a Clinton.

Of course, not all the events of 2008 were weird. Some were depressing. The only U.S. industries that had a good year were campaign consultants and foreclosure lawyers. Everybody else got financially whacked. So, we can be grateful that 2008 is almost over. But before we leave it behind, let’s take a few minutes to look back and see if we can find some small nuggets of amusement. Why not? We paid for it, starting with . . .

JANUARY . . . …

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For the most part, it’s good to ignore Ariana Huffington. She has been particularly ignorant lately. David Harsanyi is our guide.

Celebrated progressive doyenne Arianna Huffington recently penned a brilliantly absurd piece titled “Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism.”

Huffington argues, in effect, that communism and “laissez-faire” (minimal intervention) capitalism are equivalent ideological extremes.

Sure, one of these philosophies spurred the murder and misery of hundreds of millions worldwide; the other promotes liberty and innovation and welcomes foreigners to lounge around in expansive mansions paid for by their former oil-baron husbands.

So, we can agree, there is no such thing as a flawless ideology. …

Mark Steyn comments on the success of Obamanomics.

I was at the mall two days before Christmas, and it was strangely quiet. So quiet that, sadly, I was able to hear every word of Kelly Clarkson bellowing over the sound system “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” Don’t get me wrong – I love seasonal songs. “Winter Wonderland” – I dig it. “Rudolph” – man, he’s cool, albeit not as literally as Frosty. But “Grown-Up Christmas List” is one of those overwrought ballads of melismatic bombast made for the “American Idol” crowd. It’s all about how the singer now eschews asking Santa for materialist goodies – beribboned trinkets and gaudy novelties – in favor of selfless grown-up stuff like world peace.

Which is an odd sentiment to hear at a shopping mall.

But it seems to have done the trick. “Retail Sales Plummet,” read the Christmas headline in The Wall Street Journal. “Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”

Hey, that’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Sen. Obama said on the subject? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say, ‘You just go ahead, we’ll be fine.’”

And boy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales have nose-dived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Sen. Obama’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in these past few months we’ve made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-elect Barack Obama doesn’t seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. He’s proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar “stimulus” package or whatever it is now to “stimulate” it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then-Sen. Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They’re aghast, they’re terrified, they’re on a one-way express elevator down the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can restore aggregate demand. …

Ann Coulter writes a wonderful piece on Sarah Palin’s pick as Human Events’ Conservative of the Year.

… Who cares if Palin was qualified to be President? She was running with John McCain! There was no chance that ticket was going to place her anywhere near the presidency. In fact, I can’t think of a better place to put someone you wanted to keep away from the White House than on a ticket with McCain.

Palin was a kick in the pants, she energized conservatives, and she made liberal heads explode. Other than his brave military service, introducing Sarah Palin to Americans is the greatest thing John McCain ever did for his country.

But unless Palin is going to be the perpetual running mate of “moderate” Republicans who need conservative bona fides, she will need to become wiser and better read. Even Reagan didn’t run for President in his 40s. (True Obama is in his 40s, but we are not Democrats.)

Perhaps Palin’s year is 2012, but I would recommend that she take a little more time to become older and wiser. She ought to spend the next decade being a good governor, tending to her children so none of them turn out like Ron Reagan Jr., and reading everything Phyllis Schlafly, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and “Publius” have ever written. (She also might keep in mind that HUMAN EVENTS was Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper!)

In time, HUMAN EVENTS’ 2008 Conservative of the Year will be ready to be our President and someday can sweep into office and dismantle all the heinous government programs Obama and the Democrats are about to foist on the nation. Who knows? She might even be able to run as the candidate of “hope” and “change.”

Speaking of Palin, Victor Davis Hanson compares the media treatment of her to that of Caroline Kennedy.

… But, no, the real embarrassment proves to be the media itself that apparently can’t see this weird unfolding self-incriminating morality tale: It is not just that Palin is conservative, Kennedy politically-correct (e.g., pro-abortion, gun control, gay marriage, etc), or Palin a newcomer to public attention, Kennedy a celebrity since childhood. Rather it is the aristocratic value system of most NY-DC journalists themselves who apparently still assume that old money, status, and an Ivy-League pedigree are reliable barometers of talent and sobriety, suggesting that the upper-East Side Kennedy’s public ineptness is an aberration, a bad day, a minor distraction, while Palin’s charisma and ease are superficial and a natural reflection of her Idaho sports journalism degree.

A few generations ago, Democrats would have opposed Palin but appreciated her blue-collar story, and applauded a working mom who out-politicked entrenched and richer male elites. But now the new aristocratic liberalism has adopted the values of the old silk-stocking Republicans of the 1950s—and so zombie-like worship rather than question entitlement.

You know, Caroline Kennedy gives a, you know, interview to the, you know, NY Daily News.

… “I’m really coming into this as somebody who isn’t, you know, part of the system, who obviously, you know, stands for the values of, you know, the Democratic Party,” Kennedy told the Daily News Saturday during a wide-ranging interview.

“I know how important it is to, you know, to be my own person. And, you know, and that would be obviously true with my relationship with the mayor.” …

Karl Rove writes on W’s reading habits. Pickerhead thinks some of this is a stretch. But, Rove has good credibility so we include it.

… In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader.

There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one. Like so many caricatures of the past eight years, this one is not only wrong, but also the opposite of the truth and evidence that bitterness can devour a small-minded critic. Mr. Bush loves books, learns from them, and is intellectually engaged by them.

For two terms in the White House, Mr. Bush has been in the arena, keeping America safe and facing down enormous challenges, all the while acting with dignity. And when on Jan. 20 he flies from Washington to Texas one last time, he will do so as he arrived — with friends and a book nearby.

Fred Barnes on the weaknesses in Obama’s economic knowledge.

Barack Obama is an awfully good politician but not much of an economist. His model for lifting America out of its economic slump is President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The trouble with FDR’s policy, however, is that it didn’t come close to reviving the economy and restoring it to pre-Depression vigor. But FDR did use the New Deal quite successfully in another regard: to build a coalition that kept Democrats in the majority for a half century.

Obama’s plan for invigorating the economy, as he describes it, consists almost entirely of government spending “to spur demand and create new jobs.” His aim is to generate 2.5 million jobs, funded by a $750 billion to $1 trillion “stimulus” package. He favors tax cuts for the middle class and tax rebates for the tens of millions who pay no federal income tax.

Those tax cuts aren’t designed to promote investment. If Obama also wants tax incentives for private investment, he’s kept that a secret. But there’s no reason to think he does. He rarely mentions the private sector. And investment incentives would involve tax cuts for the wealthy, a no-no in the ideology of liberal Democrats like Obama.

As president-elect, Obama has talked frequently about the economy but practically never in the language of free markets. Incentives? He’s mentioned “incentives for fuel-efficient cars” and “economic incentives that would be helpful” to Iran to improve relations, but not for capital investment. “Across-the-board tax cuts” or “corporate tax cuts” or “tax cuts to increase investment”? Those phrases haven’t crossed Obama’s lips.

The contrast here–and not only in language–is with President Reagan’s economic stimulus in 1981. To generate investment, Reagan relied on a 25 percent, across-the-board tax cut on individual income–including the income of the rich–and accelerated depreciation for business. It worked, aided by monetary easing by the Federal Reserve. By early 1983, both the economy and employment were growing rapidly.

The difference between Reagan’s and Obama’s policies is striking. Reagan stressed private investment. With Obama, as with FDR, it’s public investment. Reagan cut spending in the worst days of the recession in 1981. Obama favors radically increased spending. Reagan sought to boost employment in general. Obama has particular jobs in mind. …

Amity Shlaes on how wage inflexibility may have been one of the factors putting the “great” in the great depression.

The difference between recession and depression is simple. Recession, goes the saying, is when you lose your job; depression is when I lose mine.

These days recession is starting to feel like depression to a lot of people. Recession starts to feel like depression every night at General Motors Corp. when they turn off the escalators and turn down the lights in the faint hope that one more person will get to keep his wage and benefits one more day.

Ron Gettelfinger, head of the United Auto Workers union, knows that worker packages, which cost carmakers $74 an hour in wages and benefits, are way out of line with deflationary reality. But most of Gettelfinger’s proposals aren’t about slashing those packages. Instead, Gettelfinger is emphasizing plans for federal assistance to manufacturers, or federal cash to improve terms of auto loans.

These latter approaches aim to fortify the overall economy. In a recovered economy, the logic runs, worker pay won’t seem so egregious. Behind Gettelfinger stand economists who argue that bringing down wages isn’t right or possible, even in a troubled period. Wages, economists says, may move up, but they are “sticky downward.”

These economists cite the U.K.’s John Maynard Keynes. They also often cite one of the parents of modern economics, Irving Fisher of Yale. Around World War I, Fisher wrote up a then-novel plan: index wages to the growth of the economy so that raises are automatic.

But in recent years scholars have been making a different argument. Lee Ohanian and Harold Cole of the University of California, Los Angeles, say that the high-wage method of fending off economic depression can make a depression more likely. …

More on John Holdren, Obama’s fool as science advisor. This time from Ross Douthat in the Atlantic.

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Christmas Corner post from Mark Steyn.

Stratfor’s George Friedman will give you a whole new way to look at Watergate and “deep throat.”

… The Felt experience is part of an ongoing story in which journalists’ guarantees of anonymity to sources allow leakers to control the news process. Protecting Deep Throat’s identity kept us from understanding the full dynamic of Watergate. We did not know that Deep Throat was running the FBI, we did not know the FBI was conducting surveillance on the White House, and we did not know that the Watergate scandal emerged not by dint of enterprising journalism, but because Felt had selected Woodward and Bernstein as his vehicle to bring Nixon down. And we did not know that the editor of The Washington Post allowed this to happen. We had a profoundly defective picture of the situation, as defective as the idea that Bob Woodward looks like Robert Redford.

Finding the truth of events containing secrets is always difficult, as we know all too well. There is no simple solution to this quandary. In intelligence, we dream of the well-placed source who will reveal important things to us. But we also are aware that the information provided is only the beginning of the story. The rest of the story involves the source’s motivation, and frequently that motivation is more important than the information provided. Understanding a source’s motivation is essential both to good intelligence and to journalism. In this case, keeping secret the source kept an entire — and critical — dimension of Watergate hidden for a generation. Whatever crimes Nixon committed, the FBI had spied on the president and leaked what it knew to The Washington Post in order to destroy him. The editor of The Washington Post knew that, as did Woodward and Bernstein. We do not begrudge them their prizes and accolades, but it would have been useful to know who handed them the story. In many ways, that story is as interesting as the one about all the president’s men.

London Times Op-Ed says it’s silly to blame capitalism for the economic mess caused by state intervention run amuck.

Corner post showing the normal effort to play up bad news and ignore the good.

The Economist profiles Viktor Bout, Russian arms dealer extraordinaire.

VIKTOR BOUT knew, long before his plane lifted off from Moscow, that they meant to snatch him. For years he had hunkered down in the Russian capital, making only rare forays abroad. Western spies, the United Nations and do-gooder activists were after him. They said that he had smashed arms embargoes and struck deals with a remarkable axis of ne’er-do-wells: supplying weapons and air-transport to the Taliban, abetting despots and revolutionaries in Africa and South America, aiding Hizbullah in Lebanon and Islamists in Somalia. He also found time to supply American forces in Iraq, perhaps al-Qaeda too, and maybe even Chechen rebels.

He denied all wrongdoing and, no doubt, thought his accusers irritating and hypocritical. But until the fuss died away he knew that he was safe only in Russia, from where extradition was impossible.

Yet Mr Bout, a puzzling, amoral and intelligent man, made a poor choice in March, leaving behind his wife and daughter and flying to Bangkok. As a consequence he may end up in New York as the star of a trial that would provoke echoes of cold-war spy games, further chilling relations between the West and Russia. …

Speaking of criminals, Marty Peretz takes a look a Clinton’s donor list.

This is not about former President Bill Clinton’s shakedown of the sheikhs. They can take care of themselves, Clinton Foundation or no Clinton Foundation.

This is also not about Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability to her husband’s donors. She can tell him to “go stuff it,” which people say she’s been doing for a long time anyway. Rest assured, the next secretary of state will not shirk her diplomatic obligations for the benefit of some scummy foreign mineral magnate’s uranium.

What I’ve been tying to discern about the Clinton Foundation is why — aside from the annual fancy party in New York — foreign governments, other foundations and charities have given money to fund what they already do themselves.

I understand why McDonald’s of central Arkansas would make a contribution to Mr. Clinton’s present career. He has spent so much cash on Big Macs over three decades that they actually owe it to him. But I fail to grasp why the “I Won’t Cheat” foundation gave a donation to Bill’s charity. He isn’t exactly an ideal poster boy. …

Sebastian Mallaby on some of the Madoff lessons.

For sheer toe-curling embarrassment, it may be a while before Wall Street does better than the Bernard Madoff scandal. Here was a rogue who practically telegraphed his unreliability by hiring a tiny, no-name audit firm, by reporting monthly investment results that never fluctuated and by claiming a trading strategy that could not possibly have been implemented given the billions of dollars he managed. And yet, despite these warnings, the rich, the famous and the supposedly sophisticated entrusted their money to Madoff, who defrauded them with the most laughably crude of methods — an old-fashioned Ponzi scam.

The question this prompts is not really about regulation, though some argue otherwise. Even if you define Madoff’s investment outfit as a hedge fund, which for various reasons is debatable, there’s nothing in this saga that supports clamping down on the industry.

Those who favor regulation of hedge funds start by insisting that they must register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Well, Madoff had registered with the SEC voluntarily, and a fat lot of good it did. Those who support regulation also say that hedge funds should disclose more of what they do. Well, Madoff did make some disclosures; it’s just that they weren’t true. As SEC Chairman Chris Cox has all but admitted, the scandal doesn’t show that his agency lacked the power to regulate; it shows that it failed to exercise it. Responding to this scandal with more regulation would be like thrusting more pills on a patient who refuses medication.

The real question posed by this episode concerns the market’s response. Madoff illustrates a problem with investment outfits that claim to have some special sauce that is too valuable to discuss. People who entrusted their money to Madoff thought he had a clever options trading strategy; they were wrong. Worse, people who entrusted their money to respected banks and investment advisers had no idea that their savings were being passed out the back door to Madoff. On Monday, I happened to be visiting one of the most famous traders in Manhattan. He had invested with a hedge fund that had in turn invested with Madoff, hot-potato style. …

If you’re thinking the world’s economy is about to collapse, read the WSJ report on coming South Korean investments in electricity generation. $28.5 billion.

Dilbert says we’ve won the war against terrorists.

… When oil prices were high, most people assumed prices would stay high. So oil rich countries started investing and spending like crazy, getting their citizens and friends addicted to higher standards of living. When those countries need to pull back on that spending, where do you think they will cut first? I think it will be hard to fund terrorists when you can’t afford to pay the garbage man. And keep in mind that a successful terrorist attack on U.S. financial infrastructure could further lower the demand for oil.

I’m overstating the case, as I like to do, but I have to think it is becoming clear to everyone that a frail U.S. economy is bad news for everyone who would prefer driving a car over riding a camel.

On a related note, you haven’t heard much bravado from Chavez and Putin lately.

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Bill McGurn, former chief speech writer for George W., shares a story of Bush and a grieving mother.

This Thursday morn, Julie McPhillips will awake to the great hope that is Christmas Day. And amid her joy for the Savior born of woman in a Bethlehem stable, she will offer two prayers.

The first will be for her son, Lt. Brian McPhillips, killed in action in April 2003 as the First Marine Division fought its way into Baghdad. The other will be for the man on whose orders Lt. McPhillips was sent to Iraq: George W. Bush.

You see, Julie McPhillips knows a side of the president that never seems to make it into the newspapers. Since a meeting in the Oval Office a few years back, the two have exchanged letters, many written in the president’s hand. Through the sadness that binds them together, they look eye to eye and let their hearts do the talking. …

Turns out there is a controlling legal authority – a horse’s ass. Corner post by John Hood.

David Warren waxes philosophical.

… In the coming year, the sesquicentennial of the publication of the Origin of Species, and bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, we will be constantly reminded of this “patron saint” of modern atheism and antinomianism. Our liberal political and academic establishments will celebrate the triumph of one of their “great liberators” over the troglodyte religious types.

I do not finally condemn the late Darwin himself, a reasonably honest man and fine student of natural history. The authors of so many of the world’s governing plausible ideas were likewise reasonably honest, intelligent men — teased, by some plausible hunch, into forgetfulness of the paradoxical, in a universe where the plausible is often the deadly enemy of the truth.

By contrast, the idea that God could not only make this world (by whatever means infinitely beyond our comprehension), but people it with creatures of His love; that He could take upon Himself the garment of human flesh, in the cause of our redemption — that His angels might appear in the hills by Bethlehem to announce something beyond human comprehension — this is all quite implausible. Yet, what if it is true?

David Harsanyi does not.

What is a rational American to do during tumultuous economic times? Well, you get sloshed.

The Mayo Clinic tells us that “high levels of stress, anxiety or emotional pain can lead some people to drink alcohol to block out the turmoil.” So, predictably, the sale of spirits, beer and wine have risen as the Dow Jones has tanked.

Drinking can be fun. …

Tunku Varadarajan reacts to the “heroics” of the Arab shoe hurler.

… The Arabs, who once upon a time boasted Averroes and Avicenna, are now reduced to eulogizing a boorish act of agitprop as a heroic achievement. America gave us Martin Luther King; South Africa gave us Mandela; India gave us Gandhi; the Arab world gives us … Muntader-al-Zaidi. A people who invented the zero are now reduced, themselves, to zero. Only a people who live under the boots of their rulers celebrate the throwing of a shoe at a guest.

Muntader’s Arab celebrants have fellow-travelers in the West, of course–chiefly among the anti-Bush mass on the left; but the latter’s reaction to the shoe-throwing has been one of vitriolic glee, not self-congratulatory jubilation. The Western liberal’s hatred of Bush is an ideological hatred; it may be as potent as the hatred of Bush in Arab breasts, but at least it is a hatred that has its origins in the mind, in differences of opinion. The Arab reaction, by contrast, has been damningly, disturbingly emotional and visceral. A vast swath of people, from Morocco to Iraq, have found cultural and tribal, even civilizational, catharsis in a 20-second display of theater comprising the hurling of shoes–and of that most beloved of Arab epithets, “dog.”

It makes one want to yelp: Is this the best they can do? Is this how their heroism is now defined? To me–to many–this is alarming proof of the depth of Arab impotence, of the Lilliputian self-image that drives Muslim Arabs to take to terrorism, to assault that which they cannot comprehend. The irony that has been lost on them is the fact that in the entire Arab world, only in Bushified Iraq could such an act of protest be possible. …

John O’Sullivan thinks Sarah Palin compares favorably to Margaret Thatcher.

… Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular — namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is “no Margaret Thatcher.”

Very few express this view in a calm or considered manner. Some employ profanity. Most claim to be conservative admirers of Mrs. Thatcher. Others admit they had always disliked the former British prime minister until someone compared her to “Sarracuda” — at which point they suddenly realized Mrs. Thatcher must have been absolutely brilliant (at least by comparison).

Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen’s famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): “Newsflash! Governor, You’re No Maggie Thatcher,” sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, “now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher — and no Dan Quayle either!”

Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common. …

Mark Steyn’s Corner posts.

Thomas Sowell with thoughts on the depression made by FDR.

… Let’s start at square one, with the stock market crash in October 1929. Was this what led to massive unemployment?

Official government statistics suggest otherwise. So do new statistics on unemployment by two current scholars, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, in their book “Out of Work.”

The Vedder and Gallaway statistics allow us to follow unemployment month by month. They put the unemployment rate at 5 percent in November 1929, a month after the stock market crash. It hit 9 percent in December— but then began a generally downward trend, subsiding to 6.3 percent in June 1930.

That was when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, against the advice of economists across the country, who warned of dire consequences.

Five months after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the unemployment rate hit double digits for the first time in the 1930s.

This was more than a year after the stock market crash. Moreover, the unemployment rate rose to even higher levels under both Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom intervened in the economy on an unprecedented scale. …

We could fill Pickings with NY Times stupid stuff. Gordon Chang spots one.

Dogless shepherd uses wolf picture to control flock of sheep. Metro, UK with the story.

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Stuart Taylor on how laws are strangling our economy and culture.

It’s no secret that America’s public schools, health care system, and lawsuit industry — among other institutions — are broken. After decades of alarming reports and reform efforts, they still cost far more, and with worse results, than those of almost all other developed countries. And President-elect Obama’s hope of changing things dramatically for the better faces an uphill battle.

A big part of the reason, New York City lawyer-author-civic leader Philip Howard writes in a forthcoming book, Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law, is that our institutions and their leaders are paralyzed by tangles of legal rules and diverted “from doing what we think is right” by fear of being unfairly hauled into court.

“We will never fix our schools, or make health care affordable, or re-energize democracy, or revive the can-do spirit that made America great,” Howard writes, “unless American law is rebuilt to protect freedom in our daily choices.” By this he means freeing ourselves from “the confusion of good judgment with legal proof.”

Reprising the themes of Howard’s best-selling Death of Common Sense in 1995, Life Without Lawyers also proposes some far-reaching remedies, designed in part to affirmatively define and protect the freedom of people in positions of authority to fulfill their responsibilities in their own way. To be published on January 12, its 191 pages are crammed with telling cases, anecdotes, and data. It brims with insights into how “rights” that were created to prevent “unfairness by those in authority” are now “guaranteeing unfairness to the common good.”

Howard, who is a senior partner in the New York City office of Covington & Burling and chairs Common Good, a legal reform organization that he founded in 2002, has convinced an ideologically eclectic array of leaders that he is on to something. Life Without Lawyers carries admiring blurbs by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Sen. Bill Bradley, former Harvard University President Derek Bok, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The book focuses especially on our schools, health care system, and lawsuit industry — which itself plagues schools, as illustrated by the ban on running in playgrounds that one Florida county adopted after having to settle 189 playground lawsuits in five years, and health care, as demonstrated by the surge in childhood obesity caused in part by overcautious playground safety rules. …

Spengler takes a cold-blooded look at Bernie Madoff’s accomplishments and comes out of the closet too.

Now that the whole horrible truth has come to light, I have no more reason to conceal my true identity. I am Bernard Madoff.

Well, not really. But I wish I were. Few Americans have done more to punish stupidity, pretension and complacency than Madoff, whose apparent US$50 billion swindle calls to mind the caper by Mephistopheles in the second part of Goethe’s Faust. The fictional devil persuaded the emperor to issue paper money against buried treasured yet to be discovered. …

… Madoff, 70, a former Nasdaq chairman, was arrested by federal prosecutors last week in relation to what he reportedly told his sons was a long-running Ponzi scheme – that is one in which investors are paid high returns from money paid in by subsequent investors.

Most gratifying is the fleecing of the rich and famous – director Steven Spielberg, producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, and even actress Uma Thurman’s financier boyfriend Arpad Busson got stung, along with a list of supposedly savvy investment firms. The man deserves a medal. Deplorable, to be sure, is the ruin of hundreds of families who entrusted Madoff with their life savings, not to mention charities and school endowments. Call them collateral damage. I have never been squeamish about killing civilians when urgent military objectives are at stake. We give medals all the time to people who cause innocent death in war. Tough on them if they can’t take a joke, as the artillery likes to say about friendly-fire casualties.

The very rich believe what F Scott Fitzgerald said about them, that “the very rich are different from you and me”. Serried ranks of lawyers, accountants and financial advisors surround them and keep them from harm. Madoff proved otherwise, making a few of them into paupers and humiliating a very large number of them. Not because of what they do, but because of who they are, the very wealthy consider themselves above the fate of ordinary people. They know the right people, they join the right clubs, and they have access to the right advice. Sometimes it takes a national catastrophe to teach them otherwise. The slaughter of the subalterns in World War I destroyed the flower of the English gentry, and the Russian revolution left counts driving taxicabs in Paris. There was no recuperation from such punishment. …

Yesterday we had a few favorable looks at George W. Bush. Not so today as we have Mark Helprin from the WSJ. He says, “a pox on both their houses.”

… The counterpart to Republican incompetence has been a Democratic opposition warped by sentiment. The deaths of thousands of Americans in attacks upon our embassies, warships, military barracks, civil aviation, capital, and largest city were not a criminal matter but an act of war made possible by governments and legions of enablers in the Arab world. Nothing short of war — although not the war we have waged — could have been sufficient in response. The opposition is embarrassed by patriotism and American self-interest, but above all it is blind to the gravity of the matter. Though scattered terrorists allied with militarily insignificant states are not, as some conservatives assert, closely analogous to Nazi Germany, the accessibility of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons makes the destructive capacity of these antagonists unfortunately similar — a fact, especially in regard to Iran, that is persistently whistled away by the Left.

An existential threat of such magnitude cannot be averted by imagining that it is the work of one man and will disappear with his death; by mousefully pleasing the rest of the world; by hopefully excluding the tools of war; or by diplomacy without the potential of force, which is like a policeman without a gun, something that doesn’t work anymore even in Britain. The Right should have labored to exhaustion to forge a coalition, and the Left should have been willing to proceed without one. The Right should have been more respectful of constitutional protections, and the Left should have joined in making temporary and clearly defined exceptions. In short, the Right should have had the wit to fight, and the Left should have had the will to fight. …

Helprin warns about our vulnerability to China and Forbes warns of the same thing.

… This decade, for example, the Chinese have fired lasers to blind American satellites, actions that can be considered direct attacks on the U.S. In October 2006, a Chinese submarine for the first time surfaced in the middle of an American carrier group. This episode, which occurred in the Philippine Sea southeast of Okinawa, was an obvious warning to the U.S. Navy to stay away from Asian waters.

Then, in January 2007, the People’s Liberation Army, in what was an unmistakable display of military power, destroyed one of China’s old weather satellites with a ground-launched missile. During Hu’s tenure there has been a noticeable increase in cyber-intrusions and attacks on defense and civilian networks in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Why is Hu Jintao pushing his country down a path of high-profile force projection? There are two main reasons. First, there is the inevitable change in outlook when a nation goes from poor and weak to rich and strong. So it is natural that this rising power is thinking about how to exercise newfound strength. Although not everyone in Beijing believes the bloated claims aired in the West about China’s future, most Chinese officials nonetheless feel they will profoundly change geopolitics in the coming years. In any event, more and more of them see this moment as the time for China to reassert itself. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on Senate picks.

… In light of the pending dynastic disposition of the New York and Delaware Senate seats, the Illinois way is almost refreshing. At least Gov. Rod Blagojevich (allegedly) made Barack Obama‘s seat democratically open to all. Just register the highest bid, eBay-style.

Sadly, however, even this auction was not free of aristo-creep. On the evidence of the U.S. attorney’s criminal complaint, a full one-third of those under consideration were pedigreed: Candidate No. 2 turns out to be the daughter of the speaker of the Illinois House; Candidate No. 5, the first-born son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Caroline Kennedy, Beau Biden and Jesse Jackson Jr. could someday become great senators. But in a country where advantages of education, upbringing and wealth already make the playing field extraordinarily uneven, we should resist encouraging the one form of advantage the American Republic strove to abolish: title.

No lords or ladies here. If Princess Caroline wants a seat in the Senate, let her do it by election. There’s one in 2010. To do it now by appointment on the basis of bloodline is an offense to the most minimal republicanism. Every state in the union is entitled to representation in the Senate. Camelot is not a state.

Jennifer Rubin writes on the Senate maneuvering.

Borowitz reports Caroline asked to be Time’s Person of the Year.

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Mark Steyn says we’re on our way to Bailoutistan.

“See the USA in your Chevrolet!” trilled Dinah Shore week after week on TV.

Can you still see the USA in your Chevrolet? Through a windscreen darkly.

General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of about $2.4 billion. For purposes of comparison, Toyota’s market cap is $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of $500 to $1,500. That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it’s red. …

John Fund on Paul Weyrich.

Ed Morrissey on the Detroit bailout.

… Supporters of a government bailout of the auto industry managed to hoodwink the administration in part through some very misleading statistics.  They claim that 10% of all American jobs get direct or indirect support from the Big Three automakers, a claim repeated by Senator Carl Levin on NBC’s Meet the Press.  ABC News says that they’re off by a factor of almost seven:

In an effort to convince Congress to bail out the U.S. automakers, company executives, union leaders and politicians have made the compelling argument that the industry directly and indirectly supports one in every 10 jobs in the country. The only trouble is nobody wants to take ownership of that statistic, which is almost certainly false.

The figure is routinely attributed to the Center for Automotive Research, but officials at the nonprofit organization, which has ties to labor and government, claim they never said it and have no idea where it came from.

“It’s such an exaggeration. I kind of grit my teeth every time I hear it,” said Debbie Maranger Menk, a project manager at the center who researches the industry.

The Center, she said, estimates some 350,000 people in the United States are directly employed by automakers, both foreign and domestic, and that 2.1 million jobs are indirectly connected to the industry including suppliers.

That 2.1 million jobs figure is in line with what most economists estimate to be the number of people supported by vehicle manufacturing, according to economist Richard Block a professor at Michigan State University’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations.

We have over 135 million jobs in the US.  Anyone claiming 10% of American jobs is related to the auto industry would have to show almost 14 million people working directly or indirectly for the auto industry in general.  The auto industry as a whole in the US affects a seventh of that, and GM, Ford, and Chrysler would only affect a portion of those 2.1 million jobs. …

John Tierney knows how to spot academic idiots. Obama has picked one for science advisor.

… Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and
resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

Now, you could argue that anyone’s entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who’s supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who’d seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon’s predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissent from today’s environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven’t seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Consider what happened when a successor to Dr. Simon, Bjorn Lomborg, published “The Skeptical Environmentalist” in 2001. Dr. Holdren joined in an extraordinary attack on the book in Scientific American — an attack that I thought did far more harm to the magazine’s reputation than to Dr. Lomborg’s. The Economist called the critique “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance”; Dr. Lomborg’s defenders said the critics made more mistakes in 11 pages than they were able to find in his 540-page book. …

More on this fraud from Open Market.org.

… Although touted as a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Holdren was admitted through a back door called the “temporary nominating group”, a process which appears designed and has certainly been exercised to gain entry for large numbers of environmental alarmists who, it is fair to presume from this exception, would not gain election through the normal channel.

Also typically styled as a professor at Harvard, Holdren is primarily employed by the Woods Hole Research Center (an environmental advocacy group, not to be confused with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution which is a research organization — both discussed [later in the book]). Despite his outside affiliations and activism he typically instead carries the Harvard tag, lending the institution’s academic prestige to his environmentalist advocacy, thereby embodying a growing tactic of environmentalists using credentials from an academic perch where they may not be all that active to push an activist agenda through other, pressure group perches where they are in fact quite busy. …

David Warren with interesting defense of teasing as play.

… As Christmas approaches, we have been taught to think of the poor and the disabled, the old who are shut in, the dying in our hospitals, the prisoners in our jails — and at our best we visit them.

But we must remember that the largest disadvantaged group in our society — often deprived alike of love and of their freedom — is our children. Christmas means nothing if it is not for them.

Rick Richman in Contentions posts on Bush’s four war constituencies.

Kimberley Strassel interviews George W.

… In a more than hour-long interview, Mr. Bush tells me about his tenure. He ticks off his personal list of domestic achievements: No Child Left Behind, which he says was not only an “education reform” but a “civil rights measure”; a costly Medicare prescription-drug program, which also created health-savings accounts and put “people in charge of their own health-care decisions”; his faith-based initiative, which he says was not about making the state a “religious recruiter” but about creating a government mentality that says “if it works, fund it”; his tax cut, which he credits in part for “52 months of uninterrupted job growth.” He also is proud of “fighting off protectionism and promoting trade,” and his success at getting Trade Promotion Authority back in 2002.

Mr. Bush had many big plans that never came to fruition, from school vouchers to radical health-care reform. He considers Social Security and immigration the “two big issues that were unfinished.” His immigration plan infuriated his base, which viewed it as amnesty. He remains unrepentant. “Immigration was a very tough issue, and I knew it would be tough because it’s a very emotional issue . . . On the other hand, the system was broken, falling apart, and people’s lives were being affected in a way that was really not worthy of our country.”

He also won’t agree that Social Security reform was a casualty of the Iraq war. “Social Security did not pass because legislative bodies tend to be risk-averse, and restructuring, reforming Social Security requires a certain amount of risk. And the idea of asking members of Congress to deal with a problem that is not imminent is difficult.” He contents himself with having “laid out some solutions” and hoping a future president will take courage from the fact he campaigned on it twice, “proving it was not the third or fourth or fifth rail of American politics.” …

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Spengler says a lot of Muslim states will fail.

Financial crises, like epidemics, kill the unhealthy first. The present crisis is painful for most of the world but deadly for many Muslim countries, and especially so for the most populous ones. Policy makers have not begun to assess the damage.

The diplomatic strategy of the industrial nations now resembles a James Clavell potboiler, in which an earthquake interrupts a hopelessly immured plot. Moderate Islam was the El Dorado of the diplomatic consensus. It might have been the case that Pakistan could be tethered to Western interests, or that Iran could be engaged peacefully, or that Turkey would incubate a moderate form of Islam. I considered all of this delusional, but the truth is that we shall never know. The financial crisis will sort them out first.

As I commented in the late autumn, the world is not flat, but flattened (see Asia Times Online, October 28, 2008), leaving the economies of the largest Muslim countries in ruins. It is hard to forecast the political fallout, for when each available choice leads to a failed state, it is a matter of indifference which one you adopt. As state finances crumble, states will become less important, and freebooters will seize the stage. Think of the Mumbai terrorists as a political cognate of the Somali pirates, and the character of a Middle East made up of failed states comes into focus. …

Interesting transcript from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Colin Powell has called for Rush to be booted from the GOP. This is Limbaugh’s answer.

…Let me get this straight.  The guy who has supported the Republican candidate for president should be thrown out of the party.  That would be me.  But the guy who bolted and sabotaged the Republican nominee by endorsing the Democrat candidate should stay in and be part of the team that determines what the Republican Party is going to be.  The turncoat, General Powell, is the one who the party is gonna listen to? McCain’s a moderate.  I supported McCain.  Powell, who wants a moderate, did not support McCain.  It’s unreal.  It’s just incredible.  Look, I’m trying to be a little humble here, but it’s hard when you got all this other stuff going on and Republicans out there now continue to trash me.  It’s flattering; it is amazing.  At the same time, it’s mind-boggling how I get under their skin.  What I’m learning now, folks, it really doesn’t matter about party.  It’s not getting under Republicans’ skin now. It’s getting under the skin of Washingtonians.  It’s getting under the skin of the Big Government people. These are liberals.  There’s no such thing as a moderate Republican.  A moderate Republican is a liberal.  General Powell, says, “I’m a fiscal conservative; I don’t like the social stuff.”  What’s wrong with the social side? It’s abortion.  But it’s more than that, it’s Washingtonianism.

Thomas Sowell’s Detroit thoughts.

…  Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal policies of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along.

Toyota, Honda and other foreign automakers are not heading for Detroit, even though there are lots of experienced automobile workers there. They are avoiding the rust belts and the policies that have made those places rust belts.

A bailout of Detroit’s Big Three would be only the latest in the postponements of reality. As for automobile dealers, they can probably sell Toyotas just as easily as they sold Chevvies. And Toyotas will require just as many tires per car, as well as other parts from automobile parts suppliers.

David Warren on the passing scene.

More good news: I’ve just learned the U.S. inflation rate fell in November — and at the steepest chart angle in history. I’d noticed the trend in my local supermarket. Food prices, threatening to shoot up through “global warming” (i.e. the vast transfer of grain fields to biofuel production by government subsidies to the latter, thanks to batty environmental ideas), are already coming down. There are specials especially on luxury items, and I can’t remember eating so well. (Perhaps it is just that my cooking has improved.)

There is nothing quite like a fall in demand to make everything — except governments, which do not feel guided by laws of nature — more efficient. We have watched the oil price crash; and yet people continue to act as if this hadn’t happened, and they should still feel shy about driving their SUVs. Environmentalists should be dancing in the streets. Alas, they are never happy. ..

Another Churchill bio? National Review has a look.

… Of the making of books about Churchill, therefore, there is no end. What is reality, what is myth? Revisionist arguments of several sorts spring up from the standoff between him and Hitler. Some depict Churchill as irrational, unnecessarily aggressive, sacrificing his own people out of bloodlust, or as immoral as the Nazis in waging war, for instance sanctioning the mass bombing of cities. He may even have considered using poison gas if circumstances demanded it. Others like to claim that victory came at too high a price, costing Britain its status as a world power.

In Warlord, Carlo D’Este investigates in detail how Churchill came to find the strength of character to oppose Hitler. A former U.S. Army officer who has become a military historian, D’Este takes the view that his early career of soldiering made Churchill the man he was, and gave him lasting heroic values. The sound of gunfire aroused every fiber in him; he could hardly keep away from any fight going. A biography written from a standpoint that necessarily limits treatment of other aspects of his career, this book is a thoughtful and authoritative examination of Churchill’s lifelong fascination with war. Importantly — but maybe a little contradictorily — fascination with war should not be confused with love of it; and D’Este insists that Churchill was no warmonger. For him, as for almost all who saw the man close-up in peace or war and left a record of him, Churchill was someone whose virtues and flaws were equally extreme, and often too close to be easily distinguished in his decisions and actions. Had he not been such a man, however, the course of history would undoubtedly have been different. …

Borowitz reports the Yankees have signed the Iraqi shoe thrower.

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Roger Simon on the lesson of the shoe.

… But more importantly and more apposite to today’s event was that other, oft forgotten, reason Bush went to war in Iraq – that the only way to bring true peace to the Middle East would be through democracy. He wanted to spread the democratic system preemptively.  A lot of people have sneered at that idea lately, but while they were sneering Iraq has inched forward toward a democracy.  It’s even turning into a (somewhat) decent place to live.  That buffoon-like shoe chucker – his name is Muntazer al-Zaidi from Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts from Cairo – proved it. No matter what happens to al-Zaidi now (and it won’t be much if anything), it will be nothing like what would have happened to him if he had hurled a shoe at the president during the previous Iraqi administration of Saddam Hussein. As we all know, in that case, he would either have had his tongue and scrotum cut out or both, if he would have survived at all.

And that’s the point – something good has happened.  Something very good.

What isn’t so clear, yet, is how history will treat George Bush.  I have a suspicion it’s going to be better then a lot of people now suspect – or are willing to admit.

John Stossel says the real scandal is what is legal.

… H.L. Mencken was right: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

The Public Choice economists remind us that contrary to what the civics textbooks imply, public “servants” have the same ambitions as the rest of us –wealth, career, influence, prestige. But there’s a big difference between us and them. Politicians, bureaucrats and the people they “rescue” get money through force — taxation. Don’t think taxation is force? Try not paying, and see what happens.

The rest of us must achieve our goals though voluntary exchange in the marketplace. That difference — force versus voluntary exchange — makes all the difference in the world.

In “The Road to Serfdom“, F.A. Hayek titled chapter 10 “Why the Worst Get on Top,” pointing out why the “unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful [than moral people] in a society tending toward totalitarianism. … [T]he readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power.”

We don’t live in an authoritarian society, but Hayek’s point still applies. …

Mark Steyn wonders if Nov. 4 trumps 9/11.

Is this the second coming of FDR, or Welcome Back Carter?

Newsweek asks if Bobby Jindal is the GOP’s Obama. Of course it is Newsweek, so they get their digs in, but it gives some flavor of Jindal.

Thomas Sowell has Christmas book ideas.

Holman Jenkins says put Bernie Madoff in charge of social security.

… The herding automatons of the media can never encounter lawbreaking in the financial markets without concluding that it demonstrates the necessity of more laws against lawbreaking. Congress, now in the process of convincing itself it should run the auto industry, no doubt will see in Mr. Madoff proof that Congress is needed to manage rich people’s money and ordinary people’s too. Then we’ll all be in the same position as Mr. Madoff’s clients.

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Mark Steyn says the right man was in the White House on 9/11.

Gerard Baker of the London Times has his view of Blagojevich.

Kirsten Powers on the narcissists in politics.

Stuart Taylor takes up a reverse discrimination case in New Haven.

In a WSJ Op-Ed, Todd Zywicki says bankruptcy is the perfect option for Detroit.

Praise for Laura Bush from Tunku Varadarajan.