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Turns out David Warren is a Spengler fan too. Especially the latest on Pope Benedict’s previous incarnations

The best short discussion of the subject I have seen is by a contributor to Asia Times Online, who signs himself “Spengler,” I assume after the gloomy German pessimist Oswald Spengler, who wrote The Decline of the West in 1919, and had the good luck to die in 1936, after predicting the Nazis would not last 10 years. I do not entirely agree with our contemporary Spengler (is there anyone with whom I have ever entirely agreed?) but in passing recommend his column as one of the most consistently interesting that appears today, informed by a breadth of learning and distaste for trivialities that is rare among journalists.

This Spengler refers back to his own arguments, over time: “Underlying the crisis is the Western world’s repudiation of life, through a hedonism that puts consumption or ‘self-realization’ ahead of child-rearing.” He saw the U.S. banking crisis coming, and connected the dots between demographic developments and financial catastrophe. He affirms the Ratzinger argument, that we must competently analyse mechanisms of supply and demand, and avoid cheap moralizing by recognizing that these are written into nature.

Charles Krauthammer says Obama’s no centrist.

Bjorn Lomborg says Obama is full of hot air when it comes to the environment.

NY Times Op-Ed says Obama will soon see the value of rendition.

Froma Harrop says a Senate seat is not a Kennedy heirloom.

James Taranto on the silliness of computer analogies.

P. J. O’Rourke says journalists need to be bailed out.

Dilbert on what we could do if we were free.

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Scott Turow on Blago and Chicago.

David Harsanyi likes Blago’s language.

Karl Rove plots a GOP comeback.

Michelle Malkin has background on Carol Browner, one of Obama’s troubling appointments.

Bunch of Corner posts on various subjects, like Blago or this by Mark Steyn on immigrants.

From today’s Washington Post:

Every few weeks for nearly four years, the Secret Service screened the IDs of employees for a Maryland cleaning company before they entered the house of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the nation’s top immigration official.

The company’s owner says the workers sailed through the checks — although some of them turned out to be illegal immigrants…

“Our people need to know,” said the Montgomery County businessman. “Our Homeland Security can’t police their own home. How can they police our borders?”

In fairness to Homeland Security, it’s not that they can’t police their own homes, but that they choose not to. Take the head honcho at Logan Airport, where the 9/11 killers boarded their planes. From last week’s Boston Herald:

A U.S. border official whose job it is to keep illegal aliens out of New England was busted yesterday for knowingly employing three Brazilian housekeepers who snuck into the United States unlawfully, federal prosecutors charged.

Lorraine Henderson, who supervised 220 employees as the Customs and Border Protection agency’s Boston area port director since 2003, faces up to 10 years and a $250,000 fine if convicted of harboring an illegal alien.

She was taped by the feds in September warning her wired cleaning woman to be “careful” not to get detected by immigration officials when trying to obtain documents for her newborn, according to an affidavit.

It could be worse. Any day now, the Head of Customs and Border Protection will turn out to be an illegal alien.

Labor Pains.org has a picture of the Ford/UAW contract.

Ever wondered what a UAW contract looks like? Here is all 22 pounds of it (in this case, Ford’s 2,215 page 2007 master contract; Coke can is for scale and because I was thirsty).

I’ll tell you this much, those 2,215 pages don’t include much regarding efficiency and competitiveness. What you’ll find are hundreds of rules, regulations, and letters of understanding that have hamstrung the auto companies for years. …

Cool visualization of immigration data.

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Spengler is here with kudos for the economic prescience of Pope Benedict.

“President Roosevelt is magnificently right,” John Maynard Keynes wrote of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to devalue the American dollar in 1933. If any economic policy stance deserves such praise today, it is that of Pope Benedict XVI, whose views on ethics and economics occasioned a flurry of comment last month. Italy’s Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti observed, “The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found” in a 1985 paper (see Market Economy and Ethics, Acton Institute) by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which Tremonti called “prophetic”. I don’t know whether it was prophetic, but the future pope was right, and magnificently so.

An unethical economy, he argued, will destroy itself, and economics cannot determine whether any activity is ethical or not. Internet stock valuations, the market delusion of a decade ago, presumed that pornography, gaming, music downloads and shopping would be the driving forces of the future economy. It is easy to ridicule this Alice-in-Wonderland accounting after the fact, just as it is easy to laugh at television advertisements that even today urge Americans to buy homes because their prices double every 10 years (for example this commercial by the National Association of Realtors posted on YouTube). But what should we say of an economy based on consuming as much as one can without troubling to bring children into the world?

Here is what then Cardinal Ratzinger said about it more than 20 years ago: …

… Americans spent the 1990s in a fantasy world, where technological change supposedly would transform the human condition, taking as their intellectual guide science-fiction writers like William Gibson. There was nothing wrong with the market mechanism as such; what went haywire was the childish imaginings of the American public.

The future pope’s 1985 paper insists that it is mere moralizing, not morality, to dismiss what economics has learned about the market mechanism. But economics cannot find a remedy for the imagination of an evil heart, or a foolish one, for that matter. Ethics founded on religion are the precondition for long-term economic success, if for no other reason than economies depend on family formation. If the present economic crisis helps the West to reflect on its moral weakness, the cost well may be worth it.

Camille Paglia’s monthly Salon column is here. Among other things, she wants to know what the Clintons have on Obama. And she sees Mumbai as a warning.

… Because seven years have passed since 9/11 without another attack on native soil, many Americans, particularly urban professionals, seem to have been lulled into a false feeling of security. But jihadism as a world movement — even if its membership is a tiny fraction of young Muslim men — will continue to pose a serious threat to every open democratic society over the next century and more. Anyone who has studied ancient history knows that great civilizations, from Egypt and Persia to Rome and Byzantium, broke down in stages separated in some cases by many superficially tranquil decades. Because of the unprecedented fragility of our intertwined power grid and complex transportation system, the technological West is highly vulnerable to sabotage and chaos.

The tragic fate of so many innocent victims in Mumbai deserves our pity. But what should live in special infamy was the ruthless execution of the Lubavitcher rabbi, Gavriel Hertzberg, and his lovely wife, Rivka, who was 5 months pregnant. These were two idealistic young people of obvious warmth and humanity, who sought only to serve. The rescue by their Indian nanny of their orphaned 2-year-old son, Moshe, crying and smeared with his parents’ blood, is already legendary. Was this zeroing in on the Chabad Jewish Center in Mumbai about Israel, or was it simply a gruesome eruption of the medieval tradition of anti-Semitism? Why have Muslim organizations, very quick to protest insulting cartoons, been mostly silent about the atrocities in Mumbai?

The slaughter of the Hertzbergs and other Jews at Chabad House should be a wake-up call to Western liberals who believe that jihadism can be defeated through reason and happy talk. Only other Muslims can launch the stringent internal reform necessary to stomp this barbaric extremism out. But the events in Mumbai confirmed my opinion about the looming problem of a nuclear Iran: While I oppose all American military operations and bases in the Mideast, I continue to believe that Israel, whose security is directly threatened, has every right to take preemptive military action against Iran. …

John Fund says that maybe now Barack Obama will find the courage to speak out against Chicago corruption.

… To date, Mr. Obama’s approach to Illinois corruption has been to congratulate himself for dodging association with it. “I think I have done a good job in rising politically in this environment without being entangled in some of the traditional problems of Chicago politics,” he told the Chicago Tribune last spring. At the time, Mr. Obama was being grilled over news that he bought his house through a land deal involving Tony Rezko, a political fixer who was later convicted on 16 corruption counts. Rezko is mentioned dozens of times in the 76-page criminal complaint against Mr. Blagojevich.

Mr. Obama has an ambiguous reputation among those trying to clean up Illinois politics. “We have a sick political culture, and that’s the environment Barack Obama came from,” Jay Stewart, executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, told ABC News months ago. Though Mr. Obama did support ethics reforms as a state senator, Mr. Stewart noted that he’s “been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state including, at this point, mostly Democratic politicians.”

One reason for Mr. Obama’s reticence may be his close relationship with the powerful Illinois senate president Emil Jones. Mr. Jones was a force in Mr. Obama’s rise. In 2003, the two men talked about the state’s soon-to-be vacant U.S. Senate seat. As Mr. Jones has recounted the conversation, Mr. Obama told him “You can make the next U.S. senator.” Mr. Jones replied, “Got anybody in mind?” “Yes,” Mr. Obama said. “Me.”

Starting in 2003, Mr. Jones worked to burnish Mr. Obama’s credentials by making him lead sponsor of bills including a watered-down ban on gifts to lawmakers. Most of Mr. Obama’s legislative accomplishments came as result of his association with Mr. Jones. …

David Warren looks at Obama’s appointments.

Now that Barack Obama is making the sort of appointments John McCain would have made — mainstream centrists from the political establishment — I can perhaps stop worrying about “change we can believe in.” The president-elect himself will be the only unknown quantity in the mix, and the appointments suggest he may turn out to be little distinguishable from George W. Bush both in foreign policy (force where necessary, but diplomacy when there is any hope for it at all), and economic policy (throw money at problems, in proportion to the public perception of the problem’s urgency).

Mr. Obama will say and sometimes do ghastly things in social policy — be verbally as “pro-choice” as Mr. Bush has been “pro-life” — but this is unlikely to make much difference. Social policy is out of a president’s hands. He makes symbolic statements, to assuage his key constituencies, as all politicians do. But as we are reminded by the California court challenge against the result of the state referendum on same-sex marriage, the real decision-making has been taken out of the hands of voters, and put in the hands of elite judges and lawyers. The will to confront this extra-constitutional migration of power was not there, even under Reagan.

Mr. Bush was a typical centrist politician, who suddenly had to face unprecedented circumstances on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He distinguished himself (according to me) by the courage and decision with which he addressed the issue thus raised. America and the West had just proved extremely vulnerable to large-scale terrorist assault by low-tech Islamist fanatics, and we would have to go after them. …

CNN’s Jamie McIntyre says Shinseki’s “speak truth to power” reputation is overblown. Makes sense that he would be nominated by someone with similar overblown qualifications.

… “When he had his disagreements with the administration, he wasn’t afraid to speak up,” Vietnam Veterans of America’s John Rowan told CNN on hearing of the nomination.

It’s an appealing narrative, but the facts as we know them are not nearly so complimentary to the retired Army chief.

You see, Shinseki never made any recommendation for more troops for Iraq. In fact, as Army chief of staff, it wasn’t really part of his job to take part in direct war planning.

But as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he did owe the president his best military advice. And if he felt strongly enough that the advice was not being taken, he could have resigned.

According to senior military officers who were in the pre-war meetings, Shinseki never objected to the war plans, and he didn’t press for any changes.

When the joint chiefs were asked point-blank by then-Chairman Gen. Richard Meyers if they had any concerns about the plans before they went to the president, Shinseki kept silent. …

John Stossel says we should worry about the deficit.

President-elect Obama says don’t worry about the federal budget deficit.

“The consensus is this: We have to do whatever it takes to get this economy moving again — we’re going to have to spend money now to stimulate the economy. … [W]e shouldn’t worry about the deficit next year or even the year after; that short term, the most important thing is that we avoid a deepening recession”.

It must be music to a politician’s ears when a “consensus” tells him not to worry about deficits. He can spend without limit. So Obama talks about a “stimulus package” that he says will rebuild the infrastructure and “green” the energy industry. That won’t happen, of course. Government performance consistently falls far short of its goals. Forgive me for again pointing out that President Jimmy Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation cost taxpayers at least $19 billion without giving us an alternative to oil and coal. …

American.com wonders if our airports should be privatized.

In 1977, as a group of policymakers attempted to apply economic theory to the regulation of airlines, future American Airlines (AA) chairman Robert Crandall was not happy. Then an executive at AA, Crandall claimed that the economists’ ideas would ruin the airline industry. Things came to a head when he confronted a Senate lawyer prior to a hearing, reportedly shouting: “You f—king academic eggheads! You don’t know s—t. You can’t deregulate this industry. You’re going to wreck it. You don’t know a g——n thing!”

Thirty years after a bipartisan coalition passed the Airline Deregulation Act (in October 1978), the subject is still hotly debated. Supporters of deregulation claim that it worked mostly as predicted: fares fell dramatically in real terms as new entrants clamored to serve competitive markets. Critics such as Crandall point to numerous bankruptcies, industry upheaval, and the increasingly miserable experience of air travel as evidence of its failings. …

Al Gore must be in Houston with warming warnings because snow there ties a record.

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After the summary, there is an important note about next week’s postings.

Thomas Sowell on the meaning of Mumbai.

Will the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai cause any second thoughts by those who are so anxious to start weakening the American security systems currently in place, including government interceptions of international phone calls and the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo?

Maybe. But never underestimate partisan blindness in Washington or in the mainstream media where, if the Bush administration did it, then it must be wrong.

Contrary to some of the more mawkish notions of what a government is supposed to be, its top job is the protection of the people. Nobody on 9/11 would have thought that we would see nothing comparable again in this country for seven long years.

Many people seem to have forgotten how, in the wake of 9/11, every great national event — the World Series, Christmas, New Year’s, the Super Bowl — was under the shadow of a fear that this was when the terrorists would strike again.

They didn’t strike again here, even though they have struck in Spain, Indonesia, England and India, among other places. Does anyone imagine that this was because they didn’t want to hit America again?

Could this have had anything to do with all the security precautions that liberals have been complaining about so bitterly, from the interception of international phone calls to forcing information out of captured terrorists? …

Christopher Hitchens with his take on the possibility Pakistan was involved in the late Bombay (Mumbai) unpleasantness.

The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep “open” minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was “an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai’s commercial center.” Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that “[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the “bloody coordinated” assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer’s excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—”[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?”—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it. …

George Friedman of Stratfor speculates on possible Indian reactions to the Islamist strike.

In an interview published this Sunday in The New York Times, we laid out a potential scenario for the current Indo-Pakistani crisis. We began with an Indian strike on Pakistan, precipitating a withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border, resulting in intensified Taliban activity along the border and a deterioration in the U.S. position in Afghanistan, all culminating in an emboldened Iran. The scenario is not unlikely, assuming India chooses to strike.

Our argument that India is likely to strike focused, among other points, on the weakness of the current Indian government and how it is likely to fall under pressure from the opposition and the public if it does not act decisively. An unnamed Turkish diplomat involved in trying to mediate the dispute has argued that saving a government is not a good reason to go to war. That is a good argument, except that in this case, not saving the government is unlikely to prevent a war, either.

If India’s Congress party government were to fall, its replacement would be even more likely to strike at Pakistan. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress’ Hindu nationalist rival, has long charged that Congress is insufficiently aggressive in combating terrorism. The BJP will argue that the Mumbai attack in part resulted from this failing. Therefore, if the Congress government does not strike, and is subsequently forced out or loses India’s upcoming elections, the new government is even more likely to strike. …

Peter Wehner posts in Contentions calling Mumbai Pakistan’s 9/11.

News reports today indicate that Pakistani authorities arrested a slew of people, including the suspected ringleader of last months savage attacks in Mumbai, in the town of Shawai Nala (a small town in Kashmir).

Pakistani officials arrested more than 20 people in all, including Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, one of at least five members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group named by Indian authorities as having organized the siege on Mumbai last month. Lakhvi, a founder of Lashkar, is accused by New Delhi of masterminding a 2002 attack on a military base and a 2006 bombing of a commuter rail in India, which killed 187 people.

Dozens of Pakistani soldiers descended on a camp run by Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a Muslim organization said by the U.S. to be a front group for Lashkar-e-Taiba. Lashkar, founded in 1990 and shaped by Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is an Islamic insurgent group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. It was banned six years ago, after its members were charged with the deadly attack on India’s Parliament in 2001, but Lashkar still operates in the open. …

The folks at The Corner are having a lot of fun with Blagojevich news. We have a series of posts, with Mark Steyn first.

I am not a connoisseur of profanity, but the Blagojevich transcripts seem almost parodically foul-mouthed, as if he’s learned his swearing from bad mob movies and figures this is how you’re obliged to talk if you want to sound tough. The use of the m-f word is particularly revealing in this regard. It invariably comes over like a second-tier Vegas lounge act complaining about his dressing room. Still, I enjoyed this helpful bit of annotation by Patrick Fitzgerald:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherf***er [the President-elect] his senator. F*** him. For nothing? F*** him.”

Shouldn’t that be “the motherf***er-elect”?

One of the best part’s of McCain’s platform was his proposal to break health insurance away from employers. In a WSJ Op-Ed, a doctor and Dem senator suggest the same.

Not many people are buying cars built 60 years ago. No one is watching TV on a set manufactured in the 1940s. Patients are not lining up to see a doctor who hasn’t cracked a book since before the polio vaccine was discovered. Why, then, do millions of Americans get their health care through an employer-based system from the 1940s?

Employers didn’t start offering health benefits roughly 60 years ago because they were experts in medical decisions. It was a way of circumventing the World War II wage and price controls. Barred from offering higher salaries to attract workers, employers offered health insurance instead. Aided by an IRS ruling that said workers who received health benefits did not have to pay income taxes on them, and by the fact that employers could write off the cost of the health benefits as a business related expense, this accidental arrangement became the primary way most Americans access health care. …

And also from the Journal, Holman Jenkins on why the auto bailout will be a disaster.

… To become “viable,” as Congress chooses crazily to understand the term, the Big Three are setting out to squander billions on products that will have to be dumped on consumers at a loss.

None of this was mentioned at four days of congressional bailout hearings, because Detroit knows better than to suggest Congress has a role in the industry’s problem. Yet its own recently updated Corporate Average Fuel Economy regime, or CAFE, makes a mockery of the idea that government money will render the companies profitable, even as the same bailout bill demands that the Big Three drop their legal challenge to a California mileage mandate even more unsustainable than the federal government’s.

Forget Chrysler, which has needed a bailout from Washington or Stuttgart in three of the last four recessions. The tragedy of GM and Ford is that, inside each, are perfectly viable businesses, albeit that have been slowly murdered over 30 years by CAFE. Both have decent global operations. At home, both have successful, profitable businesses selling pickups, SUVs and other larger vehicles to willing consumers, despite having to pay high UAW wages.

All this is dragged down by federal fuel-economy mandates that require them to lose tens of billions making small cars Americans don’t want in high-cost UAW factories. …

So what happened at Sam Zell’s Tribune? Daniel Gross in Slate with some answers.

What’s the difference between Smart Money and Dumb Money? Twelve months, the popping of a credit bubble, and about $800 million.

In the run-up of asset prices, which ended about a year ago, everyone was a genius. Hedge-fund managers felt wise for borrowing large sums of money and buying stocks, commodities, or pretty much anything that went up. Private equity barons bought companies, issued debt to pay themselves dividends, and were hailed as master investors. Heck, even millions of homeowners felt like Einsteins for refinancing at lower rates. And hardly anyone was deemed smarter than Sam Zell. …

Option Armageddon says Somali pirates are negotiating to buy Citigroup.

… The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said.  ”You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things.  Be happy we are in the mood to offer the shareholders anything,” said Ali.

The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities.  The PRBS’s are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden.  Moody’s and S&P have already issued a AAA investment grade rating for the PRBS’s. …

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Cathy Young in the Weekly Standard reminds us of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930′s.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the Soviet Union: the great famine the Ukrainians call Holodomor, “murder by starvation.” This catastrophe, which killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people in 1932-33, was largely the product of deliberate Soviet policies. Inevitably, then, its history is fodder for acrimonious disputes.

Ukraine–which, with Canada and a few other countries, observed Holodomor Remembrance Day on November 23–seeks international recognition for a Ukrainian “genocide.” Russia denounces that demand as political exploitation of a wider tragedy. Some Russian human rights activists are skeptical of both positions.

Meanwhile, the famine remains little known in the West, despite efforts by the Ukrainian diaspora. Indeed, the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.

In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada. …

Ilya Somin posts on the subject in Volokh Conspiracy.

… On a more personal note, I recently discussed this dispute with my grandmother, who actually lived through the famine in early 1930s Ukraine (though she is not Ukrainian). She reacted with incredulity. “How can anyone doubt there was a genocide,” she said, “I saw the starving and dying people myself!” I tried to explain to her the genocide-mass murder distinction embedded in current international law as neutrally as I could, noting some of the justifications offered for it. She, of course, was unmoved, and continued to see the distinction as a dubious contrivance. I have to agree. …

Good Contentions post on what a Peace Nobel is worth.

2005 Nobel Peace Prize Winners Mohammed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency are once again gathering attention — and once again, not in a good way. They are being criticized by Israel for their utter failure to provide any meaningful check on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

This should come as no surprise. This is the same IAEA that watched North Korea set off a kinda-sorta nuclear bomb, had no clue that Syria was building a bomb factory until Israel converted it into a crater, and was caught completely off guard by Libya’s nuclear program when it announced it had turned the whole kit and kaboodle over to the US.

But they’ve been very, very attentive to Israel’s nuclear program, which — by definition — is none of their business, as Israel never signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Unlike, say, the above-mentioned nations. Or India and Pakistan, for that matter, who have also joined the nuclear club. …

Bill McGurn in WSJ says now we’re going to have a real debate on Gitmo.

Not all that long ago, Guantanamo was simply one more manifestation of the wickedness of George W. Bush. Back then, the operating assumption appeared to be that the only people being held at Guantanamo were innocent goat herders whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result, the focus was on detainee abuse and their lack of rights, as witness an Associated Press headline from last December: “Lawyers complain iguanas at Guantanamo get more legal protection than detainees.”

One year later, we now have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters at Gitmo saying they want to plead guilty. And the headlines have begun to concede that closing the detention center will not be as easy as the critics suggested. “Closing detainee camp a minefield of critical steps,” notes the Miami Herald. “Closing it may be the easy part; With Guantanamo, the issue for Obama will be deciding what to do with the 250 prisoners, experts say” reports the L.A. Times. “Close Guantanamo prison? Sure. But that’s the easy part,” says USA Today.

What unites all these stories is the acknowledgment of the basic fact of Guantanamo: The problem is the people, not the place. …

David Harsanyi reports on GOP internecine warfare as Kathleen Parker takes on parts of the God squad.

Do we need God in politics?

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker recently penned a provocative column titled “Giving up on God,” wherein she suggested that the Republican Party ditch G-O-D. The piece so rankled James Dobson (Ph.D in Divine Insight) that he compared Parker to that seditious bum Benedict Arnold.

Among factions of conservatism, there is a general willingness to co-exist and — sporadically — win elections. Dobson, conversely, employs a saintly litmus test that marginalizes large swaths of his own party. He has redefined “traditional values,” an essential ingredient for Republican victory, to mean “illogical rigidity.”

Californians, Dobson rationalizes, prove that values voters still matter because “many who pulled the lever for the ‘change’ he [Obama] espoused also pulled it for the stability provided by marriage as recognized for millennia in all civilized societies.” …

Ed Morrissey looks at Obama’s public works. Says it is a “new old deal.”

… Now, with the federal government deep in debt, unwilling to address an entitlement disaster, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at private enterprises in a vain attempt to rescue them from their own bad management and labor practices, Obama wants to create a new WPA to renew American infrastructure not because it’s needed as much as Obama needs to ensure his re-election.

The original WPA should serve as an object lesson for us now.  It was bureaucratic, inefficient, and since it served mainly as a work-to-welfare program, had almost no way of disciplining its employees to improve production.  The massive resources it ate could have been much more efficiently utilized by the private sector, which could have produced higher-quality work at a lower price.  That has been the lesson of privatization in infrastructure that we have seen in Minnesota with the St. Anthony Bridge project and the rebuilding of Southern California freeways and overpasses after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. …

David Brooks is underwhelmed too.

… In a stimulus plan, the first job is to get money out the door quickly. That means you avoid anything that might require planning and creativity. You avoid anything that might require careful implementation or novel approaches. The quickest thing to do is simply throw money at things that already exist.

Sure enough, the Obama stimulus plan, at least as it has been sketched out so far, is notable for its lack of creativity. Obama wants to put more computers in classrooms, an old idea with dubious educational merit. He also proposes a series of ideas that are good but not exactly transformational: refurbishing the existing power grid; fixing the oldest roads and bridges; repairing schools; and renovating existing government buildings to make them more energy efficient.

This is the federal version of “This Old House.” And this is before the stimulus money gets diverted, as it inevitably will, to refurbish old companies. The auto bailout could eventually swallow $125 billion. After that, it could be the airlines and so on. …

So what does one of the left-wing blogs think of Caroline Kennedy as senator? FireDogLake has an answer.

… It’s a truly terrible idea.

Her leadership could have been really helpful when the rest of us were trying to keep the progressive lights on and getting the stuffing beaten out of us by a very well-financed right wing for the past eight years.  But when things were tough, she was nowhere to be found.

Now that the Democrats are in power, she’d like to come in at the top.  We have absolutely no idea if she’s qualified, or whether she can take the heat of being a Kennedy in public life.  She’s certainly shown no appetite for it in the past.  She’ll have a target on her back and if she can’t take it, if she crumbles, she will become a rallying point that the right will easily organize around. …

ChiTrib reports on Walgreens retail medical clinics.

The push into retail medicine is regaining momentum, and Deerfield-based Walgreen Co. is leading that charge.

Although the economic downturn slowed growth this summer, retailers and hospital systems continue to open retail clinics. The number of U.S. clinics jumped to 1,135 as of Monday compared with 1,104 as of Nov. 1, according to Merchant Medicine. …

Samizdata on why the chicken crossed the road.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change!

JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.

HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure – right from Day One! – that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road.. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. T he chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here. DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun? …

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If Jimmy Carter had never been president, Robert Mugabe would not have come to power in Zimbabwe. We got rid of Jimmy as quickly as we could. Africa was not so lucky, but WSJ Editors say Comrade Bob may soon be ousted. Desmond Tutu is beginning to sound like, er, ah, - George W. Bush.

… The situation has become so dire that Mr. Tutu, the Nobel Peace laureate and former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, told a Dutch TV station Thursday that African leaders cannot stand by any longer. “If they say to [Mugabe], step down, and he refuses, they must go in . . . militarily,” Mr. Tutu said.

Africans are welcome to finally resolve this crisis. And there’s a chance that force won’t be necessary. Mugabe has held onto power despite the West’s targeted sanctions, in part because other African leaders have been reluctant to criticize the onetime liberation hero. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki was one of the most lenient with Mugabe over the past several years, but his successor as head of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, has signaled a tougher line. Political pressure and no more economic lifeline from South Africa could sap Mugabe’s regime. …

Dr. John Sentamu, a native Ugandan, and the present Anglican Archbishop of York adds his voice against Mugabe in an OpEd in the Guardian.

When Jesus Christ wanted people to know what he was doing, he chose a passage from the Old Testament to describe his mission. It was a passage from the prophet Isaiah, written to encourage a disillusioned and demoralised people. It looked forward to a new day when there would be justice for people being treated unjustly and in poverty and release for the oppressed. It promised new life for the present and hope for the future.

President Robert Mugabe was right when he said only God could remove him. That’s exactly what happens. No tyrant lives for ever. No cruel regime lasts. God acts. And he is acting. An international chorus is at last being raised to bring an end to Mugabe’s brutal regime.

As cholera devastates a Zimbabwe already on its knees, our Prime Minister, our Foreign Secretary and the US Secretary of State have all called for an end to the regime of Mugabe. Now these voices must unite for a further call to bring an end to the charade of power-sharing that has enabled Mugabe to remain in office, assisted by his ruthless politburo. …

The closing paragraphs of James Kirchick’s June 2007 Weekly Standard piece on how Jimmy Carter interfered to put Mugabe in power.

… Carter is unrepentant about his administration’s support for Mugabe. At a Carter Center event in Boston on June 8, he said that he, Young, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had “spent more time on Rhodesia than on the Middle East.” Carter admitted that “we supported two revolutionaries in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo.” …

… History will not look kindly on those in the West who insisted on bringing the avowed Marxist Mugabe into the government. In particular, the Jimmy Carter foreign policy–feckless in the Iranian hostage crisis, irresolute in the face of mounting Soviet ambitions, and noted in the post-White House years for dalliances with dictators the world over–bears some responsibility for the fate of a small African country with scant connection to American national interests. In response to Carter’s comment last month that the Bush administration’s foreign policy was the “worst in history,” critics immediately cited those well-publicized failures. But the betrayal of Bishop Muzorewa and of all Zimbabweans, black and white, who warned what sort of leader Robert Mugabe would be deserves just as prominent a place among the outrages of the Carter years.

Obama is rumored to plan a speech in a Muslim country during his first 100 days. We have a series of Contentions posts on the subject. There is a lot of fool in this president-elect.

The election of Barack Obama comes at a time when the black family continues its decline. In 1950 85% of blacks were born into two parent families. Now. 70% of blacks are born to single families. Kay Hymowitz lays it out in a WaPo op-ed.

In the nearly half-century in which we have gone from George Wallace to Barack Obama, America has another, less hopeful story to tell about racial progress, one that may be even harder to reverse.

In 1965, a young assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan stumbled upon data that showed a rise in the number of black single mothers. As Moynihan wrote in a now-famous report for the Johnson administration, especially troubling was that the growth in illegitimacy, as it was universally called then, coincided with a decline in black male unemployment. Strangely, black men were joining the labor force more, but they were marrying — and fathering — less.

There were other puzzling facts. In 1950, at the height of the Jim Crow era and despite the shattering legacy of slavery, the great majority of black children — an estimated 85 percent — were born to their two married parents. Just 15 years later, there seemed to be no obvious reason that that would change. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, legal barriers to equality were falling. The black middle class had grown substantially, and the first five years of the 1960s had produced 7 million new jobs. Yet 24 percent of black mothers were then bypassing marriage. Moynihan wrote later that he, like everyone else in the policy business, had assumed that “economic conditions determine social conditions.” Now it seemed, “what everyone knew was evidently not so.” …

Kimberley Strassel says Obama’s picks for energy and the environment are critical.

… You might think now that Barack Obama has staffed his economic and security teams, the hard choices are over. But he has one more doozy of a decision to make. And the worry is that his picks for that final, crucial team — those overseeing energy and environmental policy — will undo any smart moves the president-elect has made so far.

It isn’t yet clear Team Obama understands that it doesn’t have the luxury of making a mistake here. Energy is the engine of, and inextricably linked to, the American economy. Environmental policies and regulations that punish energy markets will only deliver a further economic hit.

In the process, this will damage Mr. Obama’s own goals. He has picked an economic team that has already successfully discouraged him from proceeding immediately with any tax hikes. Good. But an ill-crafted cap-and-trade program that dramatically escalates energy costs is the same as a giant tax hike. Mr. Obama is promising to save or create 2.5 million jobs. Fabulous. But drowning industries in exorbitant energy prices will only encourage further overseas flight. If the president-elect thinks Detroit is a problem, just wait for the impact an upward march in electricity prices would have on, say, the manufacturing South. …

George Will thinks there’s a lot of silliness, and some danger, in Obama’s jobs promise.

Three days after the president-elect announced in a radio address that he had directed his “economic team” to devise a plan “that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011,” he said at a news conference that he favored measures “that will help save or create 2.5 million jobs.” To the extent that his ambition is clear, it is notably modest.

It is, however, unclear. How will anyone calculate the number of jobs “saved”? In what sense saved? Saved from what? Saved by what? By government action, such as agriculture subsidies or other corporate welfare? What about jobs lost because of those irrational uses of finite economic resources? Should jobs “saved” by, say, protectionist policies that interfere with free trade be balanced against jobs lost when export markets are lost to retaliatory protectionism?

In recent years, in normal conditions, the economy has “lost” tens of millions of jobs through capitalism’s “creative destruction” (Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase). It also has created a few million more than that, which is why the destruction is creative. …

… In his wise book “Capitalism, Democracy & Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery,” John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes’s central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that “the state is wise and the market is stupid.” Mueller continues: “Working from that sort of perspective, India’s top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally — leading one of them to lament recently, ‘India’s misfortune was to have brilliant economists.’ ” Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes’s followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the president-elect’s economic team is composed of brilliant economists.

Jeff Jacoby reviews the progress of climate change skeptics.

THE MAIL brings an invitation to register for the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, which convenes on March 8 in New York City. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank, the conference will host an international lineup of climate scientists and researchers who will focus on four broad areas: climatology, paleoclimatology, the impact of climate change, and climate-change politics and economics.

But if last year’s gathering is any indication, the conference is likely to cover the climate-change waterfront. There were dozens of presentations in 2008, including: “Strengths and Weaknesses of Climate Models,” “Ecological and Demographic Perspectives on the Status of Polar Bears,” and “The Overstated Role of Carbon Dioxide on Climate Change.”

Just another forum, then, sounding the usual alarums on the looming threat from global warming?

Actually, no. …

And a Dilbert is here. If it catches you right, you’ll hurt yourself laughing.

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Mark Steyn wonders when the media will call a spade a spade.

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:

“British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”

Indeed. And so it goes. This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion”.

Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-” and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations – “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” – and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok.”

Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion. …

… The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?” …

… We are told that the “vast majority” of the 1.6 billion to 1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, but they’re also quiet. And, as the AIDS activists used to say, “Silence=Acceptance.” It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam – “Allahu Akbar.”

I wrote in my book, “America Alone,” that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Quran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Mumbai in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.

Because he is a grown up, Charles Krauthammer reminds us of new success in Iraq.

The barbarism in Mumbai and the economic crisis at home have largely overshadowed an otherwise singular event: the ratification of military and strategic cooperation agreements between Iraq and the United States.

They must not pass unnoted. They were certainly noted by Iran, which fought fiercely to undermine the agreements. Tehran understood how a formal U.S.-Iraqi alliance endorsed by a broad Iraqi consensus expressed in a freely elected parliament changes the strategic balance in the region.

For the United States, this represents the single most important geopolitical advance in the region since Henry Kissinger turned Egypt from a Soviet client into an American ally. If we don’t blow it with too hasty a withdrawal from Iraq, we will have turned a chronically destabilizing enemy state at the epicenter of the Arab Middle East into an ally.

Also largely overlooked at home was the sheer wonder of the procedure that produced Iraq’s consent: classic legislative maneuvering with no more than a tussle or two — tame by international standards (see YouTube: “Best Taiwanese Parliament Fights of All Time!“) — over the most fundamental issues of national identity and direction. …

John Fund grew up in California so he can provide interesting background on the movie “Milk.” And he has an update in Minnesota.

… Politics aside, “Milk” is a fascinating celebration of a man who was both a symbol of gay empowerment and a martyr to gay rights. The film premiered on the 30th anniversary of his death in 1978. Harvey Milk only served as a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors for 11 months before he, along with Mayor George Moscone, was gunned down at age 48 by Dan White, a former Supervisor who nursed political grudges against both men. White was convicted only of manslaughter after putting up a preposterous defense that too much junk food had impaired his judgment — a foretaste of even stranger legal arguments in later years as more and more people have sought to avoid responsibility for their actions. …

Tony Blankley says he thinks Obama will revert to form.

… Unlike some of his supporters, I take Obama at his word. In my reading of history, men with his level of intentionally displayed self-confidence should be believed when they earlier have asserted grand — even grandiose — goals. Whether they are actually that self-confident or tormented by secret self-doubt, it often leads to efforts at grand and “heroic” public policies once in office.

And as long as the president-elect will not declare himself publicly, these foolish psychological games are necessary. So I rather doubt that a man with his self-image is likely to be content to leave the White House eight years from now having been a mere steward of Republican capitalism and military policy. I suspect he wants to play for the history books and do something dramatic with America. I suspect, as he says, he intends to be the change — and not merely of the “can’t we all just get along?” variety. In fact, I suspect he doesn’t want to get along with his philosophical opposition; he wants to overwhelm us politically.

On the foreign policy front, likewise, solid appointments may not lead to solid policies. Remember during the campaign when he was on his way to Iraq and he was quite dismissive of the role of the top generals? Once again, he used the phrase “my job, as president,” and he said it is to make the policy. He said the generals’ job is merely to carry out his orders. That was a very unrealistic view of the relationship between civilian and military leadership — even by the example of such towering civilian leaders as FDR, Churchill and Lincoln.

Here is my suggestion to those who disagree with what, during and before the campaign, Obama seemed to be saying about economics, diplomacy, culture and foreign policy: Do not take too much comfort from his appointees. Brace for the change you do not believe in.

George Will on the Fairness Doctrine.

Reactionary liberalism, the ideology of many Democrats, holds that inconvenient rights, such as secret ballots in unionization elections, should be repealed; that existing failures, such as GM, should be preserved; and, with special perversity, that repealed mistakes, such as the “fairness doctrine,” should be repeated. That Orwellian name was designed to disguise the doctrine’s use as the government’s instrument for preventing fair competition in the broadcasting of political commentary.

Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better. …

While much of the country and world have been making fun of him, George Bush has been making us proud with his efforts in Africa. Mona Charen has the story.

I can see it now. The world will be very different. The president of the United States will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his lifesaving aid to victims of disease in Africa. Government and civic leaders from Europe and Asia will express their admiration. Americans will walk a little taller. Barack Obama will bow his head as the ribboned medal is extended …

But wait. The president who deserves such an honor is in office now. It is George W. Bush who has devoted so much time, energy, and money (well, our money, but it was legal) to fighting AIDS and other diseases in Africa.

From the beginning of his administration, President Bush has pushed for more aid to Africa. Motivated perhaps by his deeply felt Christian faith (relieving poverty in Africa has become a major charitable push among evangelicals), the president has pressed for greater aid to Africa across the board. The original PEPFAR legislation (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which passed in 2003, was the largest single health investment by any government ever ($15 billion). At the time the initiative was launched, only about 50,000 sub-Saharan Africans were receiving antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Today, 1.7 million people in the region, as well as tens of thousands more around the globe, are receiving such treatment. PEPFAR has also funded efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus, provided compassionate care to the sick and dying, and cared for 5 million orphans. One aspect of the program has been to reduce the stigma of the AIDS diagnosis in Africa. …

Claudia Rosett covers the latest UN conference formed to bash Israel.

… Epitomizing the hypocrisy of this exercise is a statement submitted to the U.N. earlier this year by Iran, which also helped organize the original, 2001 Durban conference. Tehran proclaims that “The Islamic Republic of Iran, according to its formal and practical policies, is opposed to any policy based on racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and has fought against this phenomenon at national, regional and international levels.” This comes from the Iranian regime, which along with supporting terrorists, threatening to wipe Israel off the map and violating five U.N. Security Council resolutions meant to stop its nuclear bomb program, pursues domestic policies of forcing women to wear the veil and executes homosexuals. …

Walter Russell Mead in the Australian says booms and busts are the way of the West.

THERE is a lot of gloom and doom around today. Even very optimistic people are understandably shaken when they see George W. Bush, one of the most conservative presidents in the history of the US, presiding over the effective nationalisation of the banking industry. And now it looks as if the same may occur with the automobile industry.

We face what could well be one of the most sustained and deep economic recessions since World War II.

The past 300 years is the story of the rise of two interlinked systems: the global capitalism system and a geopolitical structure resting on the power of first Britain and now the US.

And those 300 years have been marked by one financial crisis after another.

Even before the English began to dominate global markets, the Dutch suffered though the tulip bubble of the 17thcentury. There was the South Sea bubble of the early 18th century. There were the panics of the Napoleonic wars, followed by successive and intensifying panics and crashes during the 19th century. Financial crises have continued throughout the 20th century and now into the 21st.

And none of those panics and crashes interrupted or fundamentally altered the liberal capitalist path of development. …

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American.com thinks the decline of the U. S. is over stated.

… In Europe and Japan, where labor forces are already shrinking, fewer workers will have to pay more taxes to support the growing pensioner population, triggering a vicious economic cycle. Workers will have less money to save. That will mean less investment, which will translate into slower productivity growth and sluggish income progress, making it ever harder for the fewer workers to support the pensions of more seniors.

China will face similar challenges. Thanks to its notorious one-child policy, it has the world’s most rapidly aging population: between 2005 and 2020, the number of Chinese aged 65 and over will grow by 65 percent. China does not offer much government support for its elderly, which may lead to unrest, particularly among seniors living in urban centers such as Beijing and Shanghai.

The United States faces a more encouraging demographic future. To be sure, it will need to make adjustments and reform its entitlement programs. But America has maintained higher fertility rates than the countries of Europe and Japan, and its population has been rejuvenated by two generations of high immigration. …

Great Corner post by Andy McCarthy on the fact that now the Dems have to be grown-ups on the war. Gitmo can’t be closed until Congress does some work. Work they refused to do when Bush made the request.

… Naturally, now that it’s Obama rather than Bush doing the asking, there will surely be action — probably even quick action (though, as Obama will remember and come to rue, many in the hard Left from which he comes, don’t mind the prospect of terrorists being freed and would prefer the more detainee-friendly procedures that courts are likely to make up on their own if Congress continues sitting on its hands).

It all underscores a reality that grates even though that we’ve long understood it:  Democrats were never going to get serious about the war until they owned it.  Be prepared for all sorts of things that were “constitution-shredding” for the last seven years to transform before our very eyes into “smart, effective counterterrorism.”

Along the same lines, The Weekly Standard blog spotted Diane Feinstein doing some back-filling on her military interrogation bill.

Michael Scherer flags this quote from Dianne Feinstein in today’s Times:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush.

But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.

Afterward, however, Mrs. Feinstein issued a statement saying: “The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them.”  …

Eric Posner in Volokh covers another aspect of the debate posting on the chance Bush will issue blanket pardons to ”officials involved in controversial war-on-terror tactics.”

Such a pardon would be a generous Christmas gift to the Obama administration, which appears to want to avoid prosecutions. It would greatly disappoint a lot of Obama supporters, but these people could not blame Obama for pardons issued by Bush. At the same time, Bush would protect loyal administration officials. So a pardon would seem to be win-win, at least for the people who have power—who are about to have power or about to have had it.

Why does the Obama administration (appear to) want to avoid prosecutions? A number of possibilities, none of them very clear: …

Professor Anderson used to wonder if the best way to fill offices would be to put the jobs out for bids. The highest bidder wins. Karl Rove thinks Chicago’s Golden Rule applied this year.

… To diminish criticism, Mr. Obama’s campaign spun the storyline that he was being bankrolled by small donors. Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, calls that a “myth.” CFI found that Mr. Obama raised money the old fashioned way — 74% of his funds came from large donors (those who donated more than $200) and nearly half from people who gave $1,000 or more.

But that’s not the entire story. It’s been reported that the Obama campaign accepted donations from untraceable, pre-paid debit cards used by Daffy Duck, Bart Simpson, Family Guy, King Kong and other questionable characters. If the FEC follows up with a report on this, it should make for interesting reading.

Mr. Obama’s victory marks the death of the campaign finance system. When it was created after Watergate in 1974, the campaign finance system had two goals: reduce the influence of money in politics and level the playing field for candidates.

This year it failed at both. OpenSecrets.org tells us a record $2.4 billion was spent on this presidential election. And with Mr. Obama’s wide financial advantage, it’s clear that money is playing a bigger role than ever and candidates are not competing on equal footing.

Ironically, the victim of this broken system is one of its principal architects — Mr. McCain. He helped craft the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform along with Sen. Russ Feingold in 2002. …

Writing in Human Events, Ann Coulter gets us up to date with political events in Minnesota.

Until now, Minnesota was always famous for its clean elections. Indeed, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel recently attested to the honesty of Minnesota’s elections, joking: “Believe me. I’ve tried. I’ve tried every way around the system out there, and it doesn’t work.”

But that was before Minnesota encountered the pushiest, most aggressive, most unscrupulous person who has ever sought public office, Al Franken.

On Election Day, Franken lost the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota to the Republican incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman by 725 votes. But over the next week, Democratic counties keep discovering new votes for Franken and subtracting votes from Coleman, claiming to be correcting “typos.”

In all, Franken picked up 459 votes and Coleman lost 60 votes from these alleged “corrections.”

As the inestimable economist John Lott pointed out, the “corrections” in the Senate race generated more new votes for Franken than all the votes added by corrections in every race in the entire state — presidential, congressional, state house, sanitation commissioner and dogcatcher — combined.

And yet the left-wing, George Soros-backed Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, stoutly defended the statistically impossible “corrected” votes. There’s something fishy going on in Minnesota besides the annual bigmouth bass tournament. …

IBD editors will not let the Dems and their media lie about the sub-prime crisis.

… Here at IBD, we’ve done more than a dozen pieces — most recently, in yesterday’s paper — detailing how rewrites of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 under President Clinton, along with major regulatory changes pushed by the White House in the late 1990s, created the boom in subprime lending, the surge in exotic and highly risky mortgage-backed securities, and the housing boom whose government-fed excesses led to inevitable collapse.

Despite this clear record, we’re now besieged by enterprising journalists blaming Republican “deregulation” or the president’s failure to recognize the seriousness of the problem or act. But these claims fall apart, as a partial history of the last decade shows.

Bush’s first budget, written in 2001 — seven years ago — called runaway subprime lending by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “a potential problem” and warned of “strong repercussions in financial markets.”

In 2003, Bush’s Treasury secretary, John Snow, proposed what the New York Times called “the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.” Did Democrats in Congress welcome it? Hardly.

“I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis,” declared Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., in a response typical of those who viewed Fannie and Freddie as a party patronage machine that the GOP was trying to dismantle. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” added Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.

Unfortunately, it was broke. …

Writing in National Review, John Miller gives us a tour of the capitol visitor’s center.

Carpenters follow a simple rule: Measure twice, cut once. The builders of the brand-new Capitol Visitor Center (CVC) might have benefited from a similar adage about checking facts before etching them into stone. Just a few weeks before the opening of their $621 million underground complex on December 2, they were trying to correct a dumb mistake. A major display misidentified the nation’s motto as “E pluribus unum.” In reality, the national motto is “In God We Trust,” as Congress established by law in 1956. Anyone who looks closely at the panel in the front of the exhibition hall will see the temporary plaster fix-up job.

Confusion about the motto is the type of innocent blunder a person might make while playing a casual game of Trivial Pursuit, but not the kind of error you’d expect to see chiseled into the hallowed halls of the Capitol. And some conservatives worry that this is more than a routine case of federal incompetence. “There’s a terrible movement to rewrite our history and obscure our faith,” says J. Randy Forbes, a Republican congressman from Virginia who chairs the Congressional Prayer Caucus, about the CVC.

In September, Forbes and more than a hundred members of the House, from both parties, released a letter to Stephen T. Ayers, the acting Architect of the Capitol: “We have been troubled to learn in recent weeks that some aspects of the new CVC . . . [may] reflect an apathetic disposition toward our nation’s religious history.” Their efforts have led to improvements, but it’s a fight that shouldn’t have needed waging in the first place — and even in its aftermath, plenty of problems remain unaddressed. …

Al Gore must be in England lecturing on globaloney. London Times says a blizzard is about to hit the UK.

Blizzards and snowdrifts threaten to disrupt rail services and motorways today as heavy snow and high winds make milder winters seem a distant memory.

From Scotland to the Midlands, snowfalls of up to 20 centimetres are expected to play havoc with travel arrangements, and even London can expect traces of snow among the rain.

Trains equipped with snowploughs have been placed on standby by rail operators to clear routes crossing the Pennines, where the heaviest conditions are expected. During the night, Network Rail was using special trains to spray warm deicer on mainline stretches of track on lines in the North West and North East. …

News Biscuit found an honest Christmas letter.

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Sobering thoughts from Mark Steyn.

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

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

Christopher Hitchens helps us understand why Bombay is important.

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

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

Mark Steyn liked Hitchens piece too.

John Fund with Eric Holder and Mike Huckabee thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

Enter FDR and the NRA. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Republicans shouldn’t fall for this routine. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, he could be wrong.

Thomas Sowell on the importance of freedom.

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

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

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

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