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David Warren sees off George W. Bush.

… After eight years of him, I would say, that of all the U.S. presidents in my life (from Eisenhower forward), Mr. Bush has been the most impressive, except Reagan. This is mostly a judgment on his foreign policy, in which — instant history requires clichés — he has taken various bulls by their horns, and has not been flipped by them.

I think it will be seen more clearly, as hindsight develops, that the stand he took in Afghanistan, then Iraq, prevented the exponential growth of Islamism. Ditto: his refusal to be horse-whipped by international public opinion very far along the ridiculous “roadmap to peace” between Israel and her fanatic adversaries. His confrontational attitudes toward other rogue regimes held the line — against Libya, Syria, North Korea, and even Iran. We would be in a far worse position if such regimes had been persuaded that America really was a “paper tiger.”

Mr. Bush, as the saying goes, “kept America safe,” and in so doing, defended universal Western interests. We are all indebted not only to him, but to the American taxpayer, and American soldiers, for missions to which we did not contribute adequately. Forward positions were taken and maintained. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Obama will give all these positions away. …

Telegraph, UK Op-Ed on Bush as president.

The American lady who called to see if I would appear on her radio programme was specific. “We’re setting up a debate,” she said sweetly, “and we want to know from your perspective as a historian whether George W Bush was the worst president of the 20th century, or might he be the worst president in American history?”

“I think he’s a good president,” I told her, which seemed to dumbfound her, and wreck my chances of appearing on her show.

In the avalanche of abuse and ridicule that we are witnessing in the media assessments of President Bush’s legacy, there are factors that need to be borne in mind if we are to come to a judgment that is not warped by the kind of partisan hysteria that has characterised this issue on both sides of the Atlantic.

The first is that history, by looking at the key facts rather than being distracted by the loud ambient noise of the 24-hour news cycle, will probably hand down a far more positive judgment on Mr Bush’s presidency than the immediate, knee-jerk loathing of the American and European elites.

At the time of 9/11, which will forever rightly be regarded as the defining moment of the presidency, history will look in vain for anyone predicting that the Americans murdered that day would be the very last ones to die at the hands of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the US from that day to this. …

According to Harvard prof Ruth Wisse, Bush rid the world of one dictator, while Clinton installed one.

As President George W. Bush prepares to leave office amid a media chorus of reproach and derision, there is at least one comparison with his predecessor that speaks greatly in his favor. Mr. Bush removed the most ruthless dictator of his day, Saddam Hussein, thereby offering Iraqi citizens the possibility of self-rule. Bill Clinton’s analogous achievement in the Middle East was to help install Yasser Arafat, the greatest terrorist of his day, as head of a proto-Palestinian state.

This is not how these events are generally perceived. The image that still looms in the public mind is that of President Clinton, peacemaker, standing between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in the Rose Garden on Sept. 13, 1993. With the best intentions, Mr. Clinton had worked hard for this peace agreement and would continue to strive for its success, hosting the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the White House more than any other foreign leader.

But the “peace process” almost immediately reversed its stated expectations. …

Walter Williams has a point about regulation.

… The Federal Register, which lists new regulations, annually averaged 72,844 pages between 1977 and 1980. During the Reagan years, the average fell to 54,335. During the Bush I years, they rose to 59,527, to 71,590 during the Clinton years and rose to a record of 75,526 during the Bush II years. Employees in government regulatory agencies grew from 146,139 in 1980 to 238,351 in 2007, a 63 percent increase. In the banking and finance industries, regulatory spending between 1980 and 2007 almost tripled, rising from $725 million to $2.07 billion. So here’s my question: What are we to make of congressmen, talking heads and news media people who tell us the financial meltdown is a result of deregulation and free markets? Are they ignorant, stupid or venal? …

Forbes Op-Ed says the worst of the recession is over.

… Meanwhile, despite the fear (some of which is stoked by political salesmanship) that the U.S. faces the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, initial claims for unemployment insurance have fallen dramatically, from 589,000 the week before Christmas to 467,000 in New Year’s week. If initial claims come in for last week at the consensus-expected 501,000, the four-week moving average would be down to 512,000, the lowest since November.

These figures signal that the most intense period of the recession is behind us, not in front of us. Any “stimulus” applied by government has less to do with creating the recovery than letting politicians take credit when the recovery happens.

Same thoughts from Econ department at Stanford. A little too techie here, but worth a look.

A key source of the today’s economic weakness is uncertainty that led firms to postpone investment and hiring decisions. This column, by the authors whose model forecast the recession as far back as June 2008, report that the key measures of uncertainty have dropped so rapidly that they believe growth will resume by mid-2009. …

James Taranto on Obama’s decision to make a decision about closing Gitmo.

… Wow, on his very first day in office Obama is going to issue a directive starting the process of deciding what to do. That’s the kind of bold leadership America has been hankering for, lo these eight awful years!

The AP reports that “also expected is an executive order about certain interrogation methods, but details were not immediately available Monday.” Details also were not immediately available Sunday, when, Obama appeared on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” The Chicago Sun-Times has a transcript: …

Taranto also posts on Geithner’s tax problems.

… Did Geithner have an incompetent accountant? Maybe. A Senate Finance Committee statement reports that he prepared his own returns for 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2005.

We’re tempted to say America needs a Treasury secretary who is smart enough to figure out his own taxes. But such a cheap shot would be beneath us. Instead, we are going to make a serious point:

America needs a tax code simple enough for the Treasury secretary to figure out.

And WSJ Editors on the subject.

Washington is abuzz over Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner’s $34,000 self-employment tax “mistake.” The brouhaha has prompted a second delay for Mr. Geithner’s confirmation hearing, which was originally scheduled for Friday but will now be put off until after the inauguration.

When he does appear, Senators will want to know how a reputed financial wizard could have overlooked his Self-Employment Tax liability for four years. All the more so because he had signed a document from his employer at the time, the International Monetary Fund, certifying “that I will pay the taxes for which I have received tax allowance payments.” Democrats are saying this is no big deal, but if that’s true then perhaps they should consider applying their tax absolution a little more broadly. …

John Stossel writes on the false sense of security provided by regulation.

… But Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme is fascinating precisely because it caught some very knowledgeable people. They knew Madoff. Everyone trusted him, including the regulators.

That’s one reason those savvy investors gave him their money. But there is surely another reason. Since the 1930s, investors have been led to believe the regulatory system watches out for dishonest investment schemes. That creates a false sense of security — and sets people up to be conned.

Advocates of regulation attribute almost magical powers to regulators, but clever cheats can get around any system. They always have. It’s their chosen profession, and the regulators can’t look everywhere. Regulation advocates also assume that bureaucrats are disinterested and incorruptible, but we know this is not always true. People who work in government are like anyone else. There will always be a percentage of individuals who can be tempted by corrupt opportunities. The logic of regulation would require that super bureaucrats be appointed to watch over the regulatory agencies.

But who will watch over them?

This is why regulation is counterproductive and a poor substitute for investor vigilance. The more rigorous the regulatory effort appears, the more risky it is. …

Using the passing of Father Richard John Neuhaus, David Brooks defends death.

William D. Eddy was an Episcopal minister in Tarrytown, N.Y., and an admirer of the writer and theologian Richard John Neuhaus. When Rev. Eddy grew gravely ill about 20 years ago, I asked Neuhaus to write him a letter of comfort.

I was shocked when I read it a few weeks later. As I recall, Neuhaus’s message was this: There are comforting things you and I have learned to say in circumstances such as these, but we don’t need those things between ourselves.

Neuhaus then went on to talk frankly and extensively about death. Those two men were in a separate fraternity and could talk directly about things the rest avoided.

Neuhaus was no stranger to death. As a young minister, he worked in the death ward at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, a giant room with 50 to 100 dying people in it, where he would accompany two or three to their deaths each day. One sufferer noticed an expression on Neuhaus’s face and said, “Oh, oh, don’t be afraid,” and then sagged back and expired. …

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Spengler speculates on how Obama’s background may guide his time in office.

It is technically correct, but misleading, to label president-elect Barack Obama an “African American”. His father’s Luo tribe in Kenya has less in common with the West African ancestors of American blacks than a medieval Laplander had with an Anatolian Turk.

Until the middle of the 20th century, no Luo had ever met a West African, much less visited West Africa. No road today connects Kenya with West Africa. There is no link of language or culture, in fact, nothing in common but a concentration of melanin.

This might benefit the United States in crises to come. Obama is close enough to the life of actual Africans to know what the pre-Christian tribes of primitive society always knew: that the life of every ethnicity is finite. In a world full of dying peoples, this knowledge is beyond price. It is something that Americans have forgotten, as surely as if the River Lethe girded their continent, and it has become taboo to contemplate, much less pronounce.

Extinction of whole peoples is unthinkable to Americans, but routine in Obama Sr’s part of the world. If you want someone to consign a whole people to the dustbin of history, ask an African. Of Africa’s 2,000 spoken languages, 300 have fewer than 10,000 living speakers, and 140 have fewer than 500 speakers. There are 3 million Luos alive today, but they suffer from an HIV infection rate variously estimated at 18% to 26%, among the highest in East Africa. The president-elect lives with the knowledge that disease and deracination might erase his father’s ethnicity from the Earth before his grandchildren grow up. …

… Sentimental attachment to Third World cultures, though, is a Western phenomenon; in the Third World as it actually exists, one encounters other cultures, and kills them. It remains to be seen whether the president-elect is a Western sentimentalist, or a Third World anthropologist who has talked his way into the leadership of the United States. In the latter case, it is likely that he will deal with America’s enemies with a harder hand than Bush ever would have employed. Governance in Africa is not about ideology, but about the raw exercise of power. Confronted with multiple crises that threaten the power of the United States, this clever Luo from Hawaii by way of Indonesia may defend his prerogatives more ferociously than anyone expects.

Camille Paglia is here with her quarterly reader’s column. Her answers sizzle.

…And let me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC’s “Today” show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric’s small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network. And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric’s TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There’s many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizzazz. …

… The usual tranquil transition period between an election and inauguration has certainly been overshadowed by the murky Blagojevich scandal, but I think most reasonable people would give Obama a pass on it. Any new president must learn crisis management the hard way. No evidence to date directly implicates Obama in Blagojevich’s follies. But Obama’s future chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the arrogant Chicago scrapper who was reportedly a conduit to the governor, already seems like an albatross who should be thrown overboard as soon as possible. Nobody wants a dawning presidency addicted so soon to stonewalling, casuistry and the Nixonian dark arts of the modified limited hangout. …

… but Harry Reid is a cadaverous horse’s ass of mammoth proportions. How in the world did that whiny, sniveling incompetent end up as Senate majority leader? Give him the hook! …

… We should all be concerned about environmental despoliation and pollution, but the global warming crusade has become a hallucinatory cult. Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases. …

…We should all be concerned about environmental despoliation and pollution, but the global warming crusade has become a hallucinatory cult. Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases. …

Abe Greenwald with a great example of media bias.

Contentions post tells us how things are going in the land Jimmy Carter wanted Robert Mugabe to lead.

Anyone can become a billionaire  . . .  if they move to Zimbabwe.  Yesterday, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the country’s central bank, unveiled a new $50 billion note, worth a little more than one greenback.  In August, Harare knocked ten zeros off its currency.  After the maneuver, a newspaper cost $10.  Now it takes a little more than $15 billion to buy one.  Good luck trying to find someone willing to accept Zimbabwe’s money.

The currency is not the only thing disintegrating:  Since Robert Mugabe won the election in June-he was the only candidate-the country itself has fallen apart.  Famine, disease, government failure, societal collapse-Zimbabwe has got it all.  Now citizens, due to various factors, are dying in large numbers. Douglas Gwatidza, chief of Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights says, “The whole country is turning into some kind of giant mortuary.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Geithner’s tax problems.

… Is he toast? If he were a Republican the answer would surely be yes. We’ll have to see whether he and the Obama team can get away with it. (The blogspheric cheerleaders are already assuring us it is but a “hiccup.”) This, of course, brings us to the bigger issue: what the heck is wrong with the Obama vetting process?

One strike on Bill Richardson. Two strikes on this — the transition team found the  housekeeper problem and the “error” for additional years of nonpayment and arranged for the tax repayment back on December 5. But they seemed not to have appreciated the impact tax nonpayment would have on the confirmation prospects of a Treasury Secretary. (Actually this sounds strangely similar to the Richardson case, in which the problem really was or should have been known.) Why do we get to the eve of the hearing (now canceled) without this fully surfacing? …

Contentions post on Hillary’s “smart power.”

… So why was Clinton championing smart power as if it were a revolutionary concept? What I read between the lines is that she has nothing new to offer, but must assure her party’s base that the Obama administration will overhaul foreign policy somehow. Since Bush is universally characterized as stupid in the Left’s collective imagination, Clinton touts the word “smart” to distance the new administration from his policies.

There was never a president, including Bush, who didn’t want to be smart about using power and who repudiated feasible diplomatic solutions in order to pursue foreign-policy goals militaristically instead. Everyone is for smart power. The open-ended issue concerns finding the ratio of soft to hard power needed to yield optimal results.

The Obama-Clinton team — believing, in Clinton’s own words, in “principle and practicality” and not “rigid ideology” — can talk about smart power as the magic wand that will “persuade both Iran and Syria to abandon their dangerous behavior.” The question is whether this new combination they propose — specifically relying more on soft and less on hard power — can achieve the practical goal of persuading these countries to curb their destructive ambitions. Or maybe Tehran actually understands  American smart power — as used by the new administration — as less power, and thus finds no reason to even consider concessions or behavioral changes.

NFL Nation at ESPN with a story about retiring Indianapolis Colts’ coach Tony Dungy.

TAMPA, Fla. — Forget for a second the Super Bowl victory and all the great players he coached. If you want to know what truly set Tony Dungy apart from other football coaches — really, apart from a lot of human beings — there is a story you need to read.

It sums up Dungy, who is retiring from the Indianapolis Colts and the National Football League today, as a person and a coach. It’s the story of a man with a vision and the courage to stick to it quietly, no matter how much the world outside was banging on the windows.

The year was 1997. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in Dungy’s second year as head coach, were showing some signs the lowly franchise might be ready to escape the so-called Curse of Doug Williams. With a young cast that featured Derrick Brooks, Warren Sapp, John Lynch, Warrick Dunn, Mike Alstott and Trent Dilfer, the Bucs got hopes up with a 5-0 start.

Then, it all seemed as if the season was about to fall apart because of one man. Well, make that two men because Dungy could see the problem as clear as the rest of Tampa Bay. But that stubborn streak that would become a part of his legacy was keeping him from, outwardly, doing anything about it.

The Bucs had a talented young kicker named Michael Husted who all of sudden started missing kicks. Not only was Husted missing field goals, but even extra-point attempts were flying badly off target.

The fans and the media were up in arms. It seemed Husted had to go or else the whole season would spin out of control. It was obvious to everyone, it seemed, except Dungy. …

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David Warren says, “dealing with punks is no time to be a liberal.”

In Toronto, on Thursday, I witnessed a little incident of some value to the interpretation of world affairs. It happened on a crowded westbound King Street trolley, trapped at Yonge Street by the early rush hour crowds. (Ottawans may envy any kind of functioning transit service.)

Three young men, whom one might characterize as voluntary members of the underclass from the way they were dressed (expensive ghetto gear), jumped the back door of the trolley, in order to avoid paying fares. It is the sort of thing people just get used to in a decaying society. The drivers have their hands full processing paying customers through the front entrance, and can hardly be expected to guard the rear.

But in this case, the driver more than noticed what was happening, apparently through his rear-view mirror. He shut the front doors, stalled the car, and elbowed his way through the standing passengers to confront his unpaid guests. “I’ve got bad news for you punks,” he declared, loudly. “I am not a liberal.” Upon being told this, they left the car peacefully. Though I should add that, this being Toronto, the passengers looked more astounded by the driver’s declaration than by the punks’ behaviour. …

Christopher Hitchens asks “Why are so many oligarchs, royal families, and special-interest groups giving money to the Clinton Foundation?”

Here is a thought experiment that does not take very much thought. Picture, if you will, Hillary Clinton facing a foreign-policy conundrum. With whom will she discuss it first and most intently: with her president or her husband? (I did tell you that this wouldn’t be difficult.) Here’s another one: Will she be swayed in her foreign-policy decisions by electoral considerations focusing on the year 2012, and, if so, will she be swayed by President Barack Obama’s interests or her own? …

WSJ Editors on the same subject.

These columns have long believed that a President deserves the cabinet members he wants, barring some major dereliction. So if Barack Obama wants to make Hillary and Bill Clinton part of his governing team, that’s his business. We can only hope he understands the Clinton family business he’s taking on.

Take Mr. Clinton’s post-Presidential fund-raising, the scope of which he finally disclosed in late December after years of refusing, and under pressure from the Obama transition. Amid the holidays and economic news, this window on the Clinton political method has received less attention than it deserves. Here is the spectacle of a former President circling the globe to raise at least $492 million over 10 years for his foundation — much of it from assorted rogues, dictators and favor-seekers. We are supposed to believe that none of this — and none of his future fund-raising — will have any influence on Mrs. Clinton’s conduct as Secretary of State.

The silence over this is itself remarkable. When Henry Kissinger was invited merely to co-chair the 9/11 Commission, the political left went bonkers about his foreign clients. In this case we have a Secretary of State nominee whose husband may have raised more than $60 million from various Middle East grandees, and Washington reacts with a yawn. Maybe someone will even ask about it at her nomination hearing today.

A Senator should ask, because this has the potential to complicate life for the new President. All the more so because under terms of his agreement with Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton will be able to keep raising foreign cash as long as the donors send the checks to a Clinton entity other than the “Clinton Global Initiative.” …

P. J. O’Rourke opines on hope and change.

… In the language of politics there is only one translation for the phrase “hope and change,” to wit, “big, fat government.” Mr. Obama, if you’re going to give us big, fat government, you need to be a big, fat politician. You need to be a Tip O’Neill, a Teddy Kennedy, a Richard Daley, a Bill Clinton at the very least. And you don’t seem to be a big, fat anything–literally or otherwise. You seem to be . . . smart and organized. Like Jimmy Carter!

So we may speak without compunction of the failed Obama presidency. What a blessing that it’s a failure. Things are bad enough the way they are. There’s already a huge ongoing government intervention in the economy. Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, “Dad burned dinner, let’s get the dog to cook.” Now the government’s going to take over the auto industry. I can predict the result–a light-weight, compact, sustainable vehicle using alternative energy. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn. And next in line for political therapy is health care. Voting will cure what ails you. Go to the doctor when you’ve got cancer, and he’ll say, “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I’m going to treat your disease by going inside this small, curtained booth and putting an ‘X’ next to a very special name.” …

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on the UAW’s GM legacy.

General Motors lost $10.6 billion in 2006. GM lost another $38.7 billion in 2007, the largest annual loss in automotive history. Through the third quarter of 2008, GM lost another $21.2 billion.

On Sept. 24, 2007, a year during which GM lost an average of $3.2 billion per month, the United Auto Workers launched a national strike against the company, ordering the shutdown of 80 GM plants in the United States. More than 73,000 UAW-represented factory workers walked off the job and hit the picket lines.

The UAW said that GM had failed to address job security issues during negotiations.

“No one wants to see GM go down the tubes,” said picketing Jim Brown. “But we have to keep our standard of living, and GM is going to have to cooperate.”

GM’s labor cost for a factory worker at the time was $71 per hour, with $27 per hour going to current workers and the remainder made up of costs for pensions and health care for retirees. If archaic work rules and other contract mandates reduced productivity at GM’s plants by half, the company’s real labor costs were $142 per hour of work counting retiree costs and $54 per hour for current labor. …

Thomas Sowell does an emergency book review.

This is an emergency book review.

Before you do anything else, make a note to read “The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care” by Sally C. Pipes. It might literally save your life, by checking the political stampede toward a government-controlled medical profession– usually presented politically as “universal health care.”

It is one of the painful signs of our times that millions of people are so easily swayed by rhetoric that they show virtually no interest at all in finding out the hard facts. Any number of other countries already have government-controlled medical professions. Yet few Americans show any interest in what actually happens to medical care in those countries.

Instead, we are being lured into a one-way process– much like entering a Venus fly trap– by the oldest of all confidence rackets, the promise of something for nothing.

Fortunately, Sally C. Pipes is one of the few who has explored the reality of government-controlled medical treatment in Canada and other countries. …

Shorts from National Review.

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Mark Steyn wonders what a trillion dollars is, and what it might buy.

… And by then we’ll probably need a new round number. What’s the name for the avalanche of dough that comes after a trillion? I asked Senator-designate Caroline Kennedy, and she said: “Cotillion?” Close enough. By 2011, we’ll need a cotillion-dollar stimulus package to . . . um, “create jobs” and, er, “help middle-class families.”

That’s the funny thing. The price tag may be unprecedented but the products are distressingly precedented. “The administration’s number-one goal,” said the new president, “is to create 3 million new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector.” And that sounds kind of impressive — unless, that is, you’re one of those capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw types who wonder what kind of functioning polity is so structurally decayed that it’s supposed to be good news that a mere 20 percent of new jobs will be government work. Are 600,000 new government workers really necessary to stimulate the U.S. economy? And, come to that, will a $3,000 tax credit really persuade a private company to take on a new employee it wouldn’t otherwise have hired, or will the bulk of the dough just go to companies that would have hired the extra workers anyway?

Then there’s infrastructure. “Infrastructure,” says James Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, “is going to be the cornerstone of this stimulus initiative.” Representative Oberstar has a fairly expansive definition of “infrastructure investment” — it includes remodeling the National Zoo in Washington — but one assumes at least a portion of the outlay would do some good. After all, freight trains that take two days to get from the Port of Los Angeles to the outskirts of Chicago currently spend another 48 hours crawling across the congested rail lines of the Windy City.

But it’s not lack of money that’s responsible for America’s sclerotic infrastructure, it’s the inability to make things happen on an expeditious timeframe. You think that Chicago bottleneck’s bad? If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the golden spike to celebrate the point at which the feasibility commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the zoning board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor. If 9/11 was (as they used to say) “the day everything changed,” that seven-year hole in the ground in the heart of Lower Manhattan is a monument to how hard it is to get anything changed in today’s America. So good luck “stimulating” the economy with infrastructure. One reason Google and Apple and other American success stories started in somebody’s garage is that that’s the one place where innovation isn’t immediately buried by bureaucracy. …

And David Brooks looks to coming to his senses concerning Obama.

… The problem is overload. Four months ago, no one knew how to put together a stimulus package. Now Obama wants to use it to rush through instant special-ed programs and pre-Ks. Repairing the power grid means clearing complex regulatory hurdles. How is he going to do that in time to employ workers in May?

His staff will be searching for the White House restrooms, and they will have to make billion-dollar decisions by the hour. He is asking Congress to behave and submit in a way it never has. He has picked policies that are phenomenally hard to implement, let alone in weeks. The conventional advice for presidents is: focus your energies on a few big things. Obama just blew the doors off that one.

Maybe Obama can pull this off, but I have my worries. By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.

Cafe Hayek leads us to Arnold Kling’s analysis of the stimulus.

Here’s Kling with the “Stimulus and the Somme.”

… I was reminded of the Battle of the Somme, one of the worst policy blunders of all time. Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was….a really big offensive. Just as Feldstein and Stiglitz pay no attention to the on-the-ground the housing market, the British generals ignored the impact of machine guns on men advancing over open fields.

My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media. …

Sacramento Bee reports a story in Fullerton, CA. Is this the beginning of the end for government pension increases?

Jennifer Rubin looks at the work product of Harry Reid.

The Senate Democrats are not amused with the handling of the Roland Burris mess. (Re-enacting a scene from the civil rights era – in which a neatly attired African-American man gets thrown out of a building to huddle in the rain — was one heck of a way to start the session, wasn’t it?) They are mad at the Senate leaders and at the President-elect according to this report …

This is a good issue of Pickings to consider Ayn Rand and “Atlas Shrugged.” Stephen Moore in WSJ does the honors.

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism. …

Al Gore must be peddling his nostrums in Slovenia where temperatures are setting all time record lows. Macedonia On Line has the details.

Pravda warns of new ice age.

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years. …

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Mark Steyn on the “oldest hatred.”

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!,” and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.”

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from Jan. 1, 2009, but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews”; in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, Sweden …

David Harsanyi writes on the protest that asked for “Death of all Juice.”

In our nation, even twisted extremists are welcome to express their opinions.

Take, for instance, the young Muslim woman in Florida who used her constitutional right to tell Jews to “go back to the oven!” last week. Or the more befuddled protester in New York who brandished a sign that read, “Death to all Juice.” (And I thought we Jews ran the country. Clearly, someone is sleeping on the job.)

These rare but revolting displays of hate do offer the “Juice” a valuable reminder that a secure Jewish state in Israel is a historic imperative.

Nevertheless, it is distressing to hear the large number of supposedly peace- loving critics of Israel in essence defend Hamas, one of the most virulently un-intellectual, illiberal, bellicose, misogynistic, hateful and violent brands of religious fanaticism on Earth. …

Guardian, UK Op-Ed on the fears of London’s Jews.

… In August 2001, I turned 21 and my parents gave me a Star of David necklace. Then a month later, the world changed and my mother, with remarkable foresight, began her campaign to rescind the gift, begging me to take it off because she was frightened it would make me a target in the wake of mounting evidence that fanatical Islamism was tightening its grip on the country. My argument was always the same – when I am no longer safe being identifiably Jewish on the tube, I don’t want to live in England.

Now it’s happening and I am devastated. …

Andy McCarthy Corner post notes a good LA Times piece on Eric Holder’s part in the pardoning of FALN terrorists.

Thomas Sowell takes up the case of Scooter Libby.

John Tierney posts again on John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor. If you want to know more about the Simons v. Ehrlich/Holdren wager, Tierney wrote about it in the NY Times Magazine December 2, 1990. Click here for the link.

My post on John P. Holdren’s appointment as presidential science advisor prompted complaints that I was making too much of Dr. Holdren’s loss of a bet to the economist Julian Simon about the price of some metals. But that bet wasn’t just about metals. It was about a fundamental view of how adaptable and innovative humans are, and whether a rich modern society is “sustainable.” Dr. Holdren and his collaborator, Paul Ehrlich, were the pessimists.

Dr. Ehrlich made the best-seller lists in the 1960s with apocalyptic visions of imminent international famines, food riots in America and catastrophic shortages of natural resources because humans were exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity. (JC’s comment lists some of his failed prophecies.) In 1971, he and Dr. Holdren wrote an essay wrote warning that if “population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.”

They declared that “present technology is inadequate to the task of maintaining the world’s burgeoning billions, even under the most optimistic assumptions,” and warned of shortages of food and water that would have to be overcome in the next two decades for humans to “be to be granted the privilege of confronting such dilemmas as the exhaustion of mineral resources and physical space later.” …

Are government statistics reliable? Think for a minute. Who created them? Of course they are unreliable. Real Clear Markets has the story.

… Probably the best place to start is the alleged trade deficit given that it’s arguably the least understood economic statistic. It should be said plainly that there is no such thing as a trade deficit. It is a myth. For one, countries don’t trade; instead people trade. When we consider it in that light we must conclude that rather than deficits, individuals are constantly exchanging what they deem personal surplus for something they don’t have but want.

The best way to look at trade is to view it in an individual context. As individuals we run trade deficits with our landlords, our grocery stores, and restaurants we frequent. But are we in deficit? Hardly. We’re able to maintain those supposed deficits in trade thanks to the work we engage in elsewhere. In the end all trade balances due to the basic truth that we can’t buy from anyone unless someone’s purchased something from us of equal value first.

The question then becomes why the government produces statistics suggesting we’re in “deficit” on a monthly basis? The answer lies in what they define as “trade.” When Americans buy shoes, socks and shirts that are made in China, those purchases accrue to the deficit. Conversely, the Chinese are big purchasers of our equities, land and debt. None of those purchases count in the alleged “trade” balance because they are “capital” assets. But we export opportunities to invest in our generally booming economy in exchange for goods that are not in our economic interest to make.

The reality is that trade deficits are a sign of economic health. And while GDP figures are highly misleading (more on that later), periods when our GDP has grown the most have regularly correlated with rising trade “deficits.” …

Borowitz reports Obama has refused to reveal the size of his package.

Scrappleface and News Biscuit are here too.

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Carpe Diem with a post on how markets deal with medical care costs. This is a post that ought to be repeated every week.

… in health care markets where patients pay directly for all or most of their care, providers almost always compete on the basis of price and quality. Examples include:

Cosmetic surgery: Since it is rarely covered by insurance, patients pay out of pocket and are thus sensitive to prices; they can typically compare prices prior to surgery and pay a price that has been falling over time in real terms (see chart below). …

… In health care markets where third-party payers do not pay the bills, the behavior of providers and patients is radically different. In these markets, entrepreneurs compete for patients’ business by offering greater convenience, lower prices and innovative services unavailable in traditional clinical settings. What lesson can we learn from these examples of entrepreneurship in health care? The most important is that entrepreneurs can solve many of the health care problems that critics condemn. Public policy should encourage, not discourage, these efforts.

Spengler says Hamas is committing suicide by Israel.

A policeman’s nightmare is the prospective suicide who forces the constable to shoot in self-defense. No matter how justified the killing, others always will wonder whether the shooter had an opportunity to avoid a fatal outcome.

Peoples commit suicide as much as do individuals. The geopolitical cognate of “suicide by policeman” is Hamas’ attempted suicide by Israel. Israel’s objective is to eliminate Hamas rule. There are only two ways to do that: destroy Hamas’ international support, or make its rule in Gaza insupportable.

I hate to be the one to bring up the unpleasant things that no one else wants to talk about, but just what do you do when a substantial group of people would rather die on their feet than live on their knees? For Hamas, to live on one’s knees would be to accept a permanent Jewish presence in the historic land of Israel, an outcome which Hamas was formed to prevent in the first place. …

Samuel Huntington was recently mentioned in passing by Spengler and Steyn. David Warren devotes a column and helps us understand why our favorites were interested in the man.

… The Clash of Civilizations was in some ways a recapitulation and summation of Huntington’s life work. It argued that secular ideological conflict between the “Capitalist West” and “Communist East” had masked deeper conflicts between cultures and civilizations, and that these would re-emerge. He called particular attention to the Islamic realm, as a source of potential world-altering violence, and made his infamous, politically incorrect observation that “Islam has bloody borders” — not only with Israel, but wherever the Islamic realm comes in contact with non-Islamic realms, from West Africa to the Caucasus to the Philippines.

As I hinted above, Huntington was essentially a liberal, but one of the old-fashioned kind who insisted on wrestling with facts and realities, rather than drawing the happyface over them. He was predictably not merely chastised, but wilfully misrepresented and demonized, for calling attention to this problem, well before 9/11.

To people who think that human cultures are the transient product of purely material influences — to “social Darwinists” in the broadest sense of that term — evidence that they are not is deeply upsetting. And to those with a vested interest in the current doctrine of “multiculturalism,” the notion that we should examine a flaw in any civilization, other than our own, is deeply repugnant. …

Debra Saunders comments on the Eric Holder nomination in “Pardons ? Us.”

… A story in the Hartford Courant on Dec. 28, 2008, however, suggests that Holder has more than the Rich pardon to regret. Holder also will have to account for his role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists, most of them members of FALN, the Spanish acronym for Armed Forces of National Liberation, which staged some 130 bombings in the United States from 1974 to 1983.

Why did Clinton remit fines or commute the prison sentences of convicted terrorists? Cynics believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s novice run to represent New York in the U.S. Senate was a motivator. Clintonia denies it, although Hillary Clinton did meet with advocates for these self-styled political prisoners. The Courant story notes that four of the 16 pardonees were convicted for their role in a $7.2 million robbery of a West Hartford bank in 1983. Yet: “None of the four was pressed by the Justice Department to provide information on the whereabouts of the never-recovered money or three participants in the robbery, including Hartford native and inside man Victor M. Gerena. Such pressure is a common precondition for amnesty.”

What’s more, none of the 16 had applied for a pardon, because they refused to acknowledge U.S. authority. …

John Fund with some shorts on Burris and Reid.

Speaking of Reid, we go again with something from the Huffington Post.

I want to play poker with Harry Reid. Really I do.

Rather than call for a special election in Illinois to fill Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, Reid sends a letter to Blago signed by everyone in the Democratic caucus asking him to step down. They assert that they will not seat anyone he appoints.

Harumph.

Blago wipes his ass with it and appoints Burris anyway. …

Knoxville paper says enjoy the gas prices now. Because next year they will start to move up again.

Times, UK’s Literary Supplement reviews a book on American’s in Stalin’s GULAG.

Mountainous Kolyma, only a few hundred miles west of the Bering Strait, is the coldest inhabited area on earth. During Stalin’s rule, some 2 million prisoners were sent there to mine the rich deposits of gold that lie beneath the rocky, frozen soil. In 1991, when researching a book about how Russians were coming to terms with the Stalin era, I travelled to the region to see some of the old camps of Kolyma, legendary as the most deadly part of the gulag, some of whose survivors I had interviewed. In a country beset by shortages of building materials, all of the hundreds of former prison camps accessible by truck had long since been stripped bare. The only ones still standing were those no longer reached by usable roads, and to see them you had to rent a helicopter. …

… No one knows exactly how many Soviet citizens met unnatural deaths during the quarter-century that Stalin wielded absolute power, but adding together those who were sentenced to death and shot, died in manmade famines, or were worked to death in gulag camps like these, authoritative estimates put the total at approximately 20 million. Like the other great horror show unfolding in German-occupied Europe in the same period, the Soviet story was one of mass deaths on an almost unimaginable scale. But, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets, in their first two decades in power, were partly sustained by great idealism on the part of people all over the world who were fervently hoping for a more just society. The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis is a poignant reminder of this. For his account of the Stalin years and their aftermath is seen through an unusual prism: the experience of tens of thousands of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them, like the Russians they lived among, fell victim. Bits and pieces of this story have been told before, mainly in survivors’ memoirs. But to my knowledge this is the first comprehensive history, and a sad and fascinating one it is. …

Serious business now as the WSJ gives us background on how Natalie rescued Adrian Monk. If you are not a fan of that show on the USA Network, you might want to skip this.

… Ms. Howard’s casting was a variation on the understudy-to-the-rescue bit. Midway through the series’ third season, audience favorite Bitty Schram, who played Monk’s no-nonsense nurse/assistant Sharona, made a precipitous departure. Reportedly, there was a contract dispute. “At the time I was developing my own series — so when my manager said ‘get in on this,’ I resisted,” said Ms. Howard of the “Monk” audition. “I didn’t want to get sidetracked. But he said: ‘Go. It’s good show.’”

In fact, she’d never seen the series, a lapse that became clear when she read for the creative team. “I think it was the way I was pronouncing the names of the characters,” she recalled with a laugh. They said, ‘Take a DVD and look at some episodes.’ I watched and thought, ‘Wow, this is good.’ I’d never been on an hour show. I’d never played that sort of drama-comedy thing.”

She got the job as Monk’s aide-de-camp and partner in crime-solving. She also got a cool welcome from a certain number of fans who were no more fond of change than the troubled Adrian Monk himself. “People would say to me ‘I really didn’t want to like you,’” said Ms. Howard, who understands that they were protective of the show and protective of Monk. “He can be very mean to me. But if I say one little thing to him, people react. When you think about it, he’s very selfish. But he gets away with it.” …

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Gaza in the eyes of Christopher Hitchens.

The deaths of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, and of Israelis (Muslim and Christian Arab, and Druse and Bedouin, as well as Jewish, don’t forget, in Ashdod and Sderot), are hardly ennobled by the sordid realization that the timing of the carnage has been determined by three sets of electoral calculation.

The first and the most obvious is the interregnum between U.S. presidencies, in which only the faintest of squeaks will be heard from our political class as our weapons are used to establish later bridgeheads and to realign our uneasy simultaneous patronage of the Israeli and the Egyptian and the Palestinian establishments. Benny Morris, one of the most tough-minded Israeli intellectual commentators, used to speculate that Israel would employ the Bush-Obama transition to strike at Iranian nuclear sites. He may have been wrong in the short term, but, in fact, the current attack on Gaza and Hamas is the same war in a micro or proxy form.

Second comes the impending February election in Israel. Until last week, Benjamin Netanyahu was strongly favored to come back as the man whose hard line against territorial concessions had been vindicated by the use of long-evacuated Gaza as a launching pad for random missile attacks. It now seems unlikely that he can easily outbid the current ruling coalition, at least from the hawkish right. …

In his column, “Get Out of the Way, You Old Fogies,” David Harsanyi says a gerontocracy has taken over the country.

… Thirty years after Ted Kennedy griped about Ronald Reagan’s advanced age, the man serves as a 76-year-old, nine-term senator recovering from brain-tumor surgery. Really, is there no one else available in the state of Massachusetts who can drop his Rs and vote dependably Maoist?

An average adult would not trust Sen. Robert Byrd (who is 91) to pet-sit their mutt for fear that the unfortunate creature might accidentally turn up in chili con carne. Yet, Byrd sits on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, where he doles out massive amounts of taxpayer funds for West Virginia landmarks with “Byrd” in the title. Fortunately, this session Byrd has lost his chairmanship to make way for a young whippersnapper in Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye, who is 84.

And, sure, there has been some progress in the Senate with the ousting of Alaskan criminal Ted Stevens (85). The youth movement continued in the House with the ejection of 82-year-old John Dingell from his chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to make way for Henry Waxman, who comes in at a stylish 69. …

John Stossel says Madoff made off with chump change compared to the federal government.

Bernard Madoff, who stands accused of bilking sophisticated investors out of $50 billion, is reported to have told two of his executives that his business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

Perpetrators of Ponzi schemes lead clients to believe their money is invested and that their profits are the fruits of the money manager’s savvy. But in fact, the “profits” are merely revenue provided by the next group of dupes. Eventually, when no more new dupes can be found, the scheme crashes.

Political leaders say Madoff’s alleged crimes show what’s wrong with the country. President-elect Obama said the “massive fraud that was made possible in part because the regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball”. Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid added, “[R]egulators have been asleep at the wheel”.

Politicians go on and on about Wall Street “greed” and “irresponsibility.”

But Madoff’s scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare. …

Contentions likes Sanjay Gupta .

Commentary wonders when the left crazies are going to notice Obama is starting out like Bush 44.

… Open-ended global instability has made certain that the U.S. will stick to the most vital Bush national security positions. Similarly, economic uncertainty requires the continuation of the Bush tax cuts and the indefinite postponement of pie-in-the-sky entitlements. Despite the campaign scraps thrown to the left-wing chorus and the sham apologetics offered to the international community, many liberal policies have been temporarily rendered non-starters. But if Democratic leaders are resigned to the judicious employment of conservative principles, and Democratic voters are not, where is the party heading?

It’s hard to say, but it can’t hurt to look at how this gap came about. One place to start is with the netroots. The runaway train of preposterous (and liberal) expectations that delivered Barack Obama into the White House first gained speed as a runaway train full of preposterous accusations against George W. Bush. With their cartoonish demonization of every Bush policy and associate, groups like the Daily Kos and Moveon.org made it impossible for any liberal with a web browser to give a single conservative policy a fair shake. Barack Obama’s exploitation and mobilization of this online hysteria made for an unstoppable campaign, but also for an illusory state of political affairs. Democratic politicians, President-elect Obama included, always knew better than the frenzied multitude that voted in “change.” But the netroots were duped as a result of their own momentum.

It’s too early to know how the betrayed will repay their leaders in the next Congressional or Presidential elections, but if Democratic fragmentation is to be avoided down the line, perhaps the introspection about re-branding, redefining, and reaching out needs to happen on the Left.

Turns out Barron’s is a fan of Dilbert’s Blog too.

… In his blogs, Adams is equally unkind to real advisers and money managers. In his view, formed long before the disrobing of Bernie Madoff, they’re always conniving to steal investors’ money. Perhaps this depiction is payback: Adams lost a bundle following advice during the tech bubble, which also convinced him that investing in individual stocks and “professionally managed” funds is a losers’ game. His advisers put half of his portfolio into WorldCom, Enron and other sure things and lost 40% of his invested cash, he says. He managed the other half and lost 20% in the tech wreck.

“Most of the investments I made in individual stocks went bad because managements were lying. They are the source of the information for the markets.” His conclusion: “It is even dumber to pay an expert to talk to the liar for you and charge you 1% of your portfolio.” Some folks who bought funds of funds that invested with Madoff surely would agree.

After that ugly experience, he put all of his money into tax-free municipal bonds and thus missed the first big stock bust of the 21st century. Recently, he began moving some of those funds into exchange-traded funds, including some that track the S&P 500.

Though he admits there’s a chance he could get lucky — this being one of those rare times when he thinks that decimated markets could recover significantly — his real reason for edging back into equities is to diversify. “I was more afraid that my muni bonds would become worthless than I was convinced stocks would be a good investment. The minimum I want is that the companies in the Fortune 500 don’t go completely under. That was my play.” …

Great Britain’s Independent reports new buzzwords.

… Micro-boredom: What we used to call downtime, now increasingly filled by fiddling with mobiles or BlackBerrys. Those who market these devices, or the services they use, see it as an opportunity to sell us something. Potential victims of this can be recognised by their adoption of the:

BlackBerry prayer: The hunched-over, self-absorbed pose adopted by those fingering their Blackberry, or texting on their mobile. Often accompanied by facial expressions to match tenor of the message being sent.

Digi-necker: Driver who, when passing a road accident, whips out their mobile and takes a picture. …

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Huffington Post, of all places, says an apology for his lies will be accepted from  -  -  -  Al Gore!

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:

1. First, the expression “climate change” itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. During the Holocene there have been numerous sub-periods with dramatically varied climate, such as the warm Holocene Optimum (7,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., during which humanity began to flourish, and advance technologically), the warm Roman Optimum (200 B.C. to 400 A.D., a time of abundant crops that promoted the empire), the cold Dark Ages (400 A.D. to 900 A.D., during which the Nile River froze, major cities were abandoned, the Roman Empire fell apart, and pestilence and famine were widespread), the Medieval Warm Period (900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., during which agriculture flourished, wealth increased, and dozens of lavish examples of Gothic architecture were created), the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850, during much of which plague, crop failures, witch burnings, food riots — and even revolutions, including the French Revolution — were the rule of thumb), followed by our own time of relative warmth (1850 to present, during which population has increased, technology and medical advances have been astonishing, and agriculture has flourished).

So, no one needs to say the words “climate” and “change” in the same breath — it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. That is the redundancy to which I alluded. The lie is the suggestion that climate has ever been stable. Mr. Gore has used a famously inaccurate graph, known as the “Mann Hockey Stick,” created by the scientist Michael Mann, showing that the modern rise in temperatures is unprecedented, and that the dramatic changes in climate just described did not take place. They did. One last thought on the expression “climate change”: It is a retreat from the earlier expression used by alarmists, “manmade global warming,” which was more easily debunked. There are people in Mr. Gore’s camp who now use instances of cold temperatures to prove the existence of “climate change,” which is absurd, obscene, even. …

While we’re talking about fairy tales, WSJ Editors remind Dems of some facts about aggressive interrogation techniques.

Barack Obama’s choice of former Congressman Leon Panetta to lead the CIA at least puts a grownup, if also an intelligence rookie, in that crucial job. It also means that Mr. Panetta and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will soon have to decide if they want to join the left-wing crusade to purge their agencies of anyone who had anything to do with “torture.”

In particular, at their nomination hearings they’re likely to be asked to support a “truth commission” on the Bush Administration’s terrorist interrogation policies. We hope they have the good sense to resist. And if they need any reason to push back, they could start by noting the Members of Congress who would be on the witness list to raise their right hands.

Beginning in 2002, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats (as well as Republicans) on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were thoroughly, and repeatedly, briefed on the CIA’s covert antiterror interrogation programs. They did nothing to stop such activities, when they weren’t fully sanctioning them. If they now decide the tactics they heard about then amount to abuse, then by their own logic they themselves are complicit. Let’s review the history the political class would prefer to forget. …

Kathryn Jean Lopez with a great Corner post on Obama’s CIA pick.

“Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books. I asked him this morning what he thought of the Panetta pick and what Obama should be thinking about the CIA.

Q: Would Leon Panetta have been your CIA chief choice?

A: He’s an excellent choice because he will be loyal to the president first, not to the CIA. Mr. Obama needs someone who can be trusted, a person who will support him when the going gets tough.

A “safe” choice, viewed as inoffensive by the CIA’s top bureaucrats, would have been dangerous. Directors Tenet and Hayden were placid Washington civil servants of neutral loyalties, quickly coopted by the CIA’s bureaucracy. A military officer might have had good leadership experience but would have lacked sound partisan political connections.

The choice is a brave one because it can open Mr. Obama to charges of appointing a loyalist to a crucial post. But that is exactly what is needed at this time. …

Contentions post on worrying about the “Arab street.”

… “Inflamed” is a good description of the Arab street as is. They were “inflamed” over the Mohammed cartoons, they were “inflamed” over the bogus “Koran in a toilet” story Newsweek peddled, they were “inflamed” over Theo Van Gogh’s film, they were “inflamed” over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they were “inflamed” by a whole host of  things. One time I distinctly remember the Arab street being happy instead of “inflamed” was on 9/11, when we saw images of people rejoicing and literally dancing in the streets.  So it seems that “inflaming the Arab street” might be a good indicator that you’re doing something right.

So far Israel has seriously degraded Hamas’s weapons, leadership, and infrastructure and trisected the Gaza Strip in its drive to cripple the terrorist group. Hamas has lost hundreds of fighters and tremendous stockpiles of weapons. Its ability to wage war against Israel is seriously impaired. That is the only result Israel need note.

Words from David Warren on Gaza and Hamas.

… What has happened in Gaza is horrible. It is not even necessary to look at the sentimentalized atrocity pictures, which are the specialty of Gaza’s freelance photographers, to understand how horrible. Of course we condemn war, and do so most effectively through literature and art. But it is trite to condemn war without qualification — when everyone knows that war is hell. And, trite moral posturing is itself an evil.

Moreover, in the case of recent Israeli operations in Gaza, it is not enough to justify them, by mentioning the (literally) thousands of rockets Hamas has been pumping into every Israeli town within their range, expressly to massacre the defenceless. This, and this alone, necessitated decisive Israeli action. A government has a solemn duty to protect its people from gratuitous acts of violence. The Israeli government is unambiguously justified in taking whatever measures are necessary to make the rocketing stop. Hamas carries the entire moral responsibility for putting the people of Gaza in harm’s way.

But we should not stop at justifying Israeli action. As their allies against a common enemy — against Islamists who consider the West to be their ultimate target — we should be offering our help and encouragement for the completion of the stated Israeli task: the complete annihilation of the Hamas organization. For by no other means can peace be obtained across the Gaza frontier.

An organization that persistently declares Israel has no right to exist, and persistently acts upon this premise, cannot be negotiated with. The Israelis have the material means to destroy Hamas, and therefore the moral imperative to do so. …

Want to know why governments can’t pay their bills? The last paragraph in this pull quote from Bill McGurn nails it.

It seems not to have dented the consciousness of our political class that New Jersey’s dismal economic performance might be linked to the state’s tax policy. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, New Jersey is home to the most hostile tax environment for business in the nation. We also bear the nation’s highest burden of state and local taxes. And on the list of the 10 counties with the highest median property tax, we claim seven of them.

During the last recession, we began to feel the full weight of these burdens. Other states responded by cutting back on spending and getting their houses in order. Not New Jersey. Then-Gov. Jim McGreevey added to the burden by borrowing and spending and raising the corporate tax — including the imposition of an alternative minimum tax on business. And we’ve been paying for these bad choices ever since.

Mr. Obama might pay special attention to what these measures have meant for jobs, especially given his expressed concern for the struggling middle class. Though the state did ultimately emerge from recession in 2003, private-sector job creation since then has been a pale shadow of what we enjoyed after the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s.

Of course, there was one area where jobs did grow. From 2000 to 2007, says the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, the government added 54,800 jobs. To put that in proper perspective, that works out to 93% of all jobs created in New Jersey over those seven years.

Contentions on Thomas Friedman.

Pickerhead was criticized for yesterday’s News Biscuit satire about the Swiss man who, rather than committ suicide went to one of Great Britain’s hospitals for a minor procedure with the idea they’d kill him, instead of doing the deed himself. Today the Telegraph says it’s no joke.

NHS records show that 3,645 people died as a result of “patient safety incidents” – including botched operations and the outbreak of infections – between April 2007 and March 2008. The figure was 1,370 higher than two years earlier.

Patient groups have warned that the true toll is likely to be higher because some hospitals do not record all incidents. …

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Pickerhead was waiting for Spengler to weigh in on Israel’s Gaza incursion. Instead he takes a more global view by jumping off, as does Mark Steyn, on the death of Samuel Huntington.

… I submit that the basis for our great civilizations (Judeo-Christian, Chinese, Hindu, Orthodox Christian, Islamic) is existential. Civilizations exist because men wish to overcome death, and have learned that ties of blood and language are not sufficient to win immortality. They require a form of social organization that rises above mere ethnicity, that promises a higher form of continuity between the dead and the yet unborn. But supplanting the ties of blood and language is a daunting task at which most civilizations ultimately fail.

Half of the world’s population now lives in three supra-ethnic states, that is, states in which citizenship has no ethnic connotation. These are China, India and the United States. The three great supra-ethnic states are internally stable and have little cause for conflict anywhere on their borders, let alone with each other. Empires have existed throughout recorded history, but always with fragile borders and mortal conflict with their rivals.

In addition to the 3 billion inhabitants of China, India and the United States, we may add nearly another billion people on China’s periphery whose prospects for peace and prosperity are robust thanks to the strength of the supra-ethnic states. This is a great turn for the better in the blood-soaked history of humankind. During the long darkness of prehistory, two-fifths of males could expect to die violently in every generation. War has overshadowed human society throughout all of history, but less so today than ever before. Most of humanity lives in states where each man may sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there is none to make him afraid. …

A Contentions post starts today’s items on Israel and Gaza.

… Hamas is getting a very harsh lesson — Israel doesn’t bluff. And it is getting it in the only language it has ever truly understood — blood and violence.

Will they actually learn from this lesson? I hope so, but sincerely doubt it. The best we can hope for is that they will be weakened to the point where they can’t attack Israel again for at least a little while.

Mark Steyn has Mid-East thoughts.

So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they’re putting the Christ back in Christmas, they’re certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on Dec. 23 Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia – Islamic law – to the Palestinian territories, including crucifixion. So next time you’re visiting what my childhood books still quaintly called “the Holy Land” the re-enactments might be especially lifelike.

The following day, Christmas Eve, Samuel Huntington died at his home at Martha’s Vineyard. A decade and a half ago, in his most famous book “The Clash Of Civilizations,” professor Huntington argued that Western elites’ view of man as homo economicus was reductive and misleading – that cultural identity is a more profound behavioral indicator than lazy assumptions about the universal appeal of Western-style economic liberty and the benefits it brings.

Very few of us want to believe this thesis.

“The great majority of Palestinian people,” Condi Rice, the secretary of state, said to commentator Cal Thomas a couple of years back, “they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”

Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: “Do you think this or do you know this?”

“Well, I think I know it,” said Secretary Rice. …

Ed Morrissey spots a sign during Manhattan protests against Israel.

Jim Taranto explains Israel’s “knock on the roof” as the IDF calls with warnings.

LA Times Op-ed says the real enemy is Iran.

The images from the fighting in Gaza are harrowing but ultimately deceptive. They portray a mighty invading army, one equipped with F-16 jets that have bombed a civilian population defended by a few thousand fighters armed with primitive rockets. But widen the lens and the true nature of this conflict emerges. Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a proxy for the real enemy Israel is confronting: Iran. And Israel’s current operation against Hamas represents a unique chance to deal a strategic blow to Iranian expansionism.

Until now, the Iranian revolution has appeared unstoppable. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s ended with Iranian troops occupying Iraqi territory. Iranian influence then spread to Saudi Arabia’s heavily Shiite and oil-rich Eastern province, and to Lebanon through Hezbollah. Since the fall of their long-standing enemy, Saddam Hussein, Iranians have deeply infiltrated Iraq. Syria has been drawn into Iran’s sphere, and even the Sunni sheikdoms of the gulf now defer to Iran, dispatching foreign ministers to Tehran and defying international sanctions against it. Iran has co-opted Hamas, a Sunni organization closely linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a jihad against the Jewish state. But Iran’s boldest achievement has been to thwart world pressure and approach the nuclear threshold. Once fortified with nuclear weapons, Iranian hegemony in the Middle East would be complete.

All of which helps explain the public statements from moderate Arab leaders, such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, who have blamed the end of the tenuous Israel-Hamas cease-fire on Hamas. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has even called on the Arab world to stop using the U.N. as a forum for blaming Israel alone for the fighting, surely a first. Those leaders understand what many in the West have yet to grasp: The Middle East conflict is no longer just about creating a Palestinian state but about preventing the region’s takeover by radical Islam. …

Alan Dershowitz defends Israel’s warriors.

… While Israel installs warning systems and builds shelters, Hamas refuses to do so, precisely because it wants to maximise the number of Palestinian civilians inadvertently killed by Israel’s military actions. Hamas knows from experience that even a small number of innocent Palestinian civilians killed inadvertently will result in bitter condemnation of Israel by many in the international community.

Israel understands this as well. It goes to great lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties – even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that are too close to civilians. Until the world recognises that Hamas is committing three war crimes – targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member-state of the UN – and that Israel is acting in self-defence and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue.

Kim Strassel says now that Dems have to be grown-ups, the chance for card check legislation is looking dim.

Responsibility has a way of focusing the mind.

Take Mark Pryor, Democratic senator from Arkansas. In 2007, Mr. Pryor voted to move card check, Big Labor’s No. 1 priority. And why not? Mr. Pryor knew the GOP would block the bill, which gets rid of secret ballots in union elections. Besides, his support helped guarantee labor wouldn’t field a challenger to him in the primary.

Postelection, Mr. Pryor isn’t so committed. He’s indicated he wouldn’t co-sponsor the legislation again. He says he’d like to find common ground between labor and business. He is telling people the bill isn’t on a Senate fast-track, anyway. His business community, which has nimbly whipped up anti-card-check sentiment across his right-to-work state, is getting a more polite hearing.

It hasn’t been much noticed, but the political ground is already shifting under Big Labor’s card-check initiative. The unions poured unprecedented money and manpower into getting Democrats elected; their payoff was supposed to be a bill that would allow them to intimidate more workers into joining unions. The conventional wisdom was that Barack Obama and an unfettered Democratic majority would write that check, lickety-split.

Instead, union leaders now say they are being told card check won’t happen soon. …

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Many of our favorites write on expectations for an Obama administration. Pickerhead has grown very tired of the media’s over use of “team of rivals” suggesting there is some prairie wisdom in Obama’s picks. Seems like we will have chaos instead, since our new president is a rather unformed immature 46 years old. Is there any guiding thought or idea that lies behind his quest, other than narcissism and change?

We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him. As a consequence Washington’s policies will be guided by those most skilled at leaking. The media will love this as they will be the conduit for all the back-biting.

Jennifer Rubin is first.

… we also know that throughout the campaign and transition he has been cautious to a fault, often declining to articulate a position (e.g. Gaza) or trying to delay as long as possible (e.g. the AIG bailout, Russia’s invasion of Georgia) offering an opinion on issues of great import. But that was then. What will happen when he is not critiquing, but deciding?

For the sake of the country we can hope that, like Harry Truman, he rises to the occasion once in office without the benefit of any prior executive training. And certainly we know executive experience didn’t do Jimmy Carter, for example, any good. We’ll have to see how it all works out — and pray for the best.

Then Tony Blankley.

As President-elect Obama vacations with his family in Hawaii and publicly complains about the intrusiveness of the press pool and the intense scrutiny of his Secret Service team, I suspect about now Obama may be recalling George Bernard Shaw’s heartless observation that: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.”

This last week of December 2008 is a strange moment for the country. It must be positively bizarre for our president-elect. It seems as if all the problems of the world are lining up and just waiting for our new president to handle. For every American but one, we are merely waiting to see what Obama will do in three weeks. For that one — Obama — he, presumably, is puzzling over finding the right policies — if there are any right policies. Probably there are only terrible and catastrophic policies to pick from.

There are media reports that he is smoking more than usual. Who could blame him? For many of the rest of us, we wake up at 2 in the morning worried about our family’s or our business’s finances. Obama has to worry about the nation’s and the world’s finances — and wars and threats of yet more wars.

Americans continue to not shop (until recently the world, including citizen of the world Obama, condemned Americans for shopping to the tune of 25 percent of world consumption. Now the whole world is begging us to buy more stuff to keep the world from going broke.) How long will it be before President Obama repeats Bush’s advice to Americans after September 11 to go shopping. …

Tom Elia of the New Editor.

Amity Shlaes in WaPo op-ed on the havoc caused by the New Deal.

… Many of FDR’s initial plans did bring stability: His first Treasury secretary worked to sort out banks with the outgoing Hoover administration in a fashion so fair that an observer noted that those present “had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats.” By creating deposit insurance, FDR reduced bank runs. His Securities Act of 1933 laid the ground for a transparent national stock market. Equities shot up.

But other policies were more arbitrary. Using emergency powers, FDR yanked the country off the gold standard. Both American and international markets looked forward to a London conference at which a new monetary accord was to be struck among nations. Over the course of the conference, though, FDR changed orders to his emissaries multiple times. Some days he was the internationalist, sending wires about international currency coordination. Other days he was the cowboy, declaring that all that mattered was what the dollar bought in farm states. The conference foundered.

Some of the worst destruction came with FDR’s gold experiment. If he could drive up the price of gold by buying it, he reasoned, other prices would rise as well. Roosevelt was right to want to introduce more money into the economy (the United States was deflating). But his method was like trying to raise an ocean level by adding water by the thimbleful. What horrified markets even more was that FDR managed the operation personally, day by day, over a breakfast tray. No one ever knew what the increase would be. One Friday in November 1933, for example, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that he thought the gold price ought to be raised 21 cents. Why that amount, Morgenthau asked. “Because it’s three times seven,” FDR replied.

Morgenthau later wrote that “if anybody knew how we set the gold price, through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened.”  …

The terrible price paid by Cuba for Castro’s win. From the NY Times no less.

Four months after they appeared in the waters between Havana and Miami, the four dead men remain nameless. At a morgue in the Florida Keys, they lie on stretchers stacked like bunk beds, their bodies chewed by sharks, their faces too putrefied to be recognized.

The police suspect they were Cuban rafters. Nilda Garcia thinks one of them might be her son — and the thought makes her weep. Fourteen years after she left Cuba on her own makeshift boat, she finds herself wondering once again: When will it end?

“How many mothers are going through this?” Ms. Garcia said in an interview at her daughter’s apartment here as she awaited DNA results on the bodies. “How many more are crying for their losses? How many young people have drowned in this sea? How many?”

Fifty years ago today, many Cubans cheered when Fidel Castro seized power in Havana, and even now, the revolution attracts many fans — as evidenced by the Canadian tour agencies advertising trips “to celebrate five decades of resilience.”

But the bodies speak to a different legacy. …

And Minette Marrin of the London Times on the “useful idiots” that praise Cuba.

… It is a rule of thumb that anyone given to praising Cuba under Castro is a person of poor judgment. This has nothing to do with how much or how little Castro achieved; it has to do with what is necessary for good judgment. An essential part of good judgment is a respect for facts and, in the absence of many facts, a willingness to suspend judgment. It is an intellectual and a moral mistake to become cheerleaders in ignorance. It is the mark of a useful idiot, like those famous western cheerleaders for the communist USSR who were secretly despised by the Soviet leaders.

Useful idiots have always been a mystery to me. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1960s, student radicals would always proudly announce that although socialism might have failed in the USSR – it was never properly tried, they claimed – it worked in the People’s Republic of China. Then I went to live for several years in Hong Kong, off the coast of mainland China, and began to learn a few facts. It wasn’t easy to learn much, as China was a closed and paranoid society, difficult to visit and almost impossible for the Chinese to leave. But I couldn’t help noticing that almost every day bodies were washed up, mauled by sharks, of people who were prepared to brave the shark-infested waters, tied to air beds because they could not swim, in their desperate longing to escape the repression of communist China. This was in the early 1970s in the years following the horrors of the cultural revolution. …

Noemie Emery says the Kennedy legacy has lost some luster.

… Would Jack, who threatened pre-emptive war over missiles in Cuba, have really opposed a war with Iraq after Saddam defied U.N. resolutions? Would Bobby, who made his chops busting corrupt labor unions, have supported the end of the secret ballot in union elections? What would Jack and Bobby have said to the feminist social agenda, up to and including late-term abortion? And what would Bobby have said of gay marriage?

If Caroline wants to run as a legatee, she should explain which Kennedy legacy she supports, and why she supports it (including the tax cuts put in by her father.) She could start by reading her father’s inaugural and seeing if there are any parts she believes in. Would she “bear any burden and pay any price” to ensure the survival of liberty? If she wouldn’t, she should tell us why.

David Harsanyi rebels against the nanny state.

… Now, poor Barack Obama has been subjected to a thousand wagging fingers. Journalists have dug deep to uncover the president-elect’s nefarious three-cigarette-a-day habit. Quit, for your own good, Mr. Obama, because those ruthless Iranian mullahs are pussycats compared to these indefatigable health stormtroopers . . . I mean, “activists.”

Meanwhile, I’ll be making only one, completely horrifying resolution this year. Not only do I plan to regularly eat cheap, salt-infested, cheese- drenched meat products, but I also plan on washing them down with various brands of needlessly sugary beverages.

I may even drive my car an extra few miles when in Oregon, even after that state passes an Orwellian measure that tracks me with a GPS system to tax my mileage and induce me to take a train.

Or I may head to Massachusetts and try to find a blunt-tipped cigar, now banned. Maybe I’ll take a trip to Atlanta in some loose-fitting slacks. (There is talk that they may be banned there.) When in New York, I may have a soda pop before sin taxes put it out of my price range.

This year may be my last chance.

Northern Ireland’s Environmental Minister says it is globaloney.

… “I think in 20 years’ time we will look back at this whole climate change debate and ask ourselves how on earth were we ever conned into spending the billions of pounds which are going into this without any kind of rigorous examination of the background, the science, the implications of it all. Because there is now a degree of hysteria about it, fairly uninformed hysteria I’ve got to say as well. …

Starting off the humor section is a story from Religious Intelligence, UK reporting the Church of England has invested £150 million in Al Gore’s responsible investing scam.