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Never a fan of religion, Christopher Hitchens has some fun with Fidel’s plans for a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Havana.
… I have been in Cuba many times in the past decades, but this was the first visit where I heard party members say openly that they couldn’t even guess what the old buzzard was thinking. At one lunch involving figures from the ministry of culture, I heard a woman say: “What kind of way is this to waste money? We build a cathedral for a religion to which no Cuban belongs?” As if to prove that she was not being sectarian, she added without looking over her shoulder: “A friend of mine asked me this morning: ‘What next? A subsidy for the Amish?’ “
All these are good questions, but I believe they have an easy answer. Fidel Castro has devoted the last 50 years to two causes: first, his own enshrinement as an immortal icon, and second, the unbending allegiance of Cuba to the Moscow line. Now, black-cowled Orthodox “metropolitans” line up to shake his hand, and the Putin-Medvedev regime brandishes its missile threats against the young Obama as Nikita Khrushchev once did against the young Kennedy. The ideology of Moscow doesn’t much matter as long as it is anti-American, and the Russian Orthodox Church has been Putin’s most devoted and reliable ally in his re-creation of an old-style Russian imperialism. If you want to see how far things have gone, take a look at the photograph of President Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration, as he kisses the holy icon held by the clerical chief. Putin and Medvedev have made it clear that they want to reinstate Cuba’s role in the hemisphere, if only as a bore and nuisance for as long as its military dictatorship can be made to last. Castro’s apparent deathbed conversion to a religion with no Cuban adherents is the seal on this gruesome pact. How very appropriate.
A prof at NYU’s Stern Biz school nixes Detroit bail out. More proof here, in case you needed it, that Michael Moore is a fool.
Before Michael Moore became famous for documentaries like “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “Sicko,” his first big success came in 1989 with “Roger and Me.” In that film, Mr. Moore followed General Motors chairman and chief executive Roger Smith with a camera crew, asking him why the company was closing plants and producing low-quality vehicles. Mr. Smith looked flustered and inartfully avoided Mr. Moore’s camera crew while it lingered outside his country club or GM’s executive offices.
“Roger and Me” was entertaining, but it missed the real story about Roger Smith, who turned out to be a forward-thinking genius. Mr. Smith made big investments in information technology and satellite communications, acquiring Electronic Data Systems in 1984 for $2.5 billion and Hughes Aircraft in 1985 for $5.2 billion. Mr. Smith’s successors divested those businesses at huge profits — EDS was taken public in 1996 for more than $27 billion, and Hughes, renamed DirecTV, went public in 2003 for more than $23 billion. (The man who sold EDS to Roger Smith at a bargain price was H. Ross Perot, who then convinced many people that the experience qualified him to be president.)
Mr. Smith understood all too well that GM shouldn’t continue investing in its failing automobile business. That was 25 years ago. Today, our government is being asked to put tens of billions of dollars in GM, Ford and Chrysler, but we would be much better off if Washington allowed these companies to go bankrupt and disappear. …
George Will has Detroit thoughts.
… In his new book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” Post columnist Robert Samuelson recalls that in 1950, when GM signed a five-year contract with the UAW, Fortune magazine celebrated this as the “Treaty of Detroit.” Under “pattern bargaining,” Ford and Chrysler struck similar bargains, thereby eliminating competition in labor costs. In 1950, the Big Three’s share of America’s domestic auto market was about 95 percent, Japan’s and Germany’s war-smashed economies were feeble, and the VW Beetle was a barely discernible harbinger of a huge threat. The Big Three and the UAW probably did not doubt the immortality of their oligopoly. …
Martin Feldstein thinks it’s Chapter 11 time for Detroit.
The Big Three U.S. automakers need more than an injection of $25 billion from the federal government. Because of their ongoing losses, they would burn through that money in less than a year and would soon be back for more.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler can make excellent cars, but they cannot sell them at prices that are competitive with the prices of cars produced in the United States by Toyota and others or with the prices of cars imported from Europe and Asia. The basic reason is the labor costs imposed by union contracts.
The Big Three pay much higher wages than production workers are paid in the nonunion auto firms and in the general economy. And the health-care costs of current workers and retired union members are an enormous additional burden.
The simplest solution is to allow GM and the others to file for bankruptcy. If the companies file under Chapter 11, they would be able to continue producing cars, and the workforce would remain employed while the firms reorganized. The firms would also be able to get short-term credit under bankruptcy protection. …
A Contentions bailout post.
Management of the Big Three automakers will be on Capitol Hill today, begging for federal money to bail them out of the mess they are in. Right there beside them will be their partner in failure, the United Auto Workers.
As a general proposition, when an industry and its unions want the same thing from the federal government, the answer should always be no. In the 1970’s, the airlines and their unions fought deregulation. So did the trucking industry and the Teamsters. Both got told no, and the American economy is much better off as a result. In 1980, shipping costs were fifteen percent of GDP. Today they are about ten percent. Translation: when the Interstate Commerce Commission cartel ended, shipping costs declined by a third, reducing the price of goods generally. …
Now a series of three Contentions posts on the idea of Hillary Clinton as Sec. State. Justin Shubow Eric Trager Daniel Halper
Marty Peretz takes a dim view of Hillary at State.
… So the fact is that she is not a committed leftist at all. She is something worse: like Bill, a committed situanionalist. Hillary is not a person of principle. She is a person of shifting position. The best you can say of her, then, is that she is flexible, endlessly felxible.
Now, if Barack Obama has actually offered Hillary the post of secretary of state, he has reversed what most Americans thought was one of the much sought-after consequences of his nomination and his electoral victory. That is, sought after by the voters. And this was to end the Clinton dominion in American politics. That’s certainly what the primaries were about. Once Obama freed himself and the party from the vice presidential blackmail almost everyone assumed that, with Joe Biden as their candidate’s running-mate, the Democratic nominee did not need the experience of someone who’d visited 81 capitals for a day or two or who’d been to Bosnia “under fire” or who kissed Suha Arafat only moments after the pampered lady had accused Israel of spreading cancer in the West Bank. …
In a National Review Corner post, Jonah Goldberg introduces us to a NY Times item on National Review election controversies.
… As much fun as it might be, I’m not going to spend a lot of time addressing the individual personalities here. But: please. This is an old complaint of mine, but it’s no less true for being tiresome. National Review is not, and has not been, an unalloyed intellectual defender of the Bush administration. Most of the people who say this sort of thing simply don’t read the magazine. We have criticized the Bush administration from the Right. We were very skeptical about the DHS reorganization, the federalization of airport security, his faith-based initiatives, big-government conservatism and compassionate conservatism. We opposed his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind, his steel tariffs and his expansion of national service programs. We opposed the campaign finance “reform” he signed into law and his farm bill. We led the opposition to his amnesty plan for illegal immigrants and against Harriet Miers. …
Here’s the NY Times article.
In a span of 252 days, the National Review lost two Buckleys — one to death, another to resignation — and an election.
Now, thanks to the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse, the magazine may have lost something else: its reputation as the cradle for conservative intellectuals and home for erudite and well-mannered debate prized by its founder, the late William F. Buckley Jr.
In the general conservative blogosphere and in The Corner, National Review’s popular blog, the tenor of debate — particularly as it related to the fitness of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be vice president — devolved into open nastiness during the campaign season, laying bare debates among conservatives that in a pre-Internet age may have been kept behind closed doors.
National Review, as the most pedigreed voice of conservatives, has often been tainted — unfairly and by association, some argue — by the tone of blogs, reader comments and e-mail messages. “Bill was always very concerned about having a high-minded and thoughtful discourse,” Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor, said. “If you read the magazine, that’s what it was and that’s what it is.”
In October came the resignation of Mr. Buckley’s son, the writer and satirist Christopher Buckley, after he endorsed Barack Obama for president. He did so on Tina Brown’s blog, The Daily Beast, to avoid any backlash on The Corner. …
Dilbert likes pirates.
I love pirates. I love their parrots, their wooden legs, their eye patches, and obviously their AAARGS! But I have never loved pirates more than the day they seized a fully laden supertanker off the coast of Somalia.
We should have seen this coming. I blame Obama and his whole “Yes I can” philosophy. Suddenly even the pirates are thinking big. Six months ago these pirates were probably robbing convenience stores. After they saw Obama get elected president, they figured anything was possible. …