Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
Mark Steyn says Mumbai could happen anywhere.
… This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault – and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.
So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.
Whoops, my apologies. I mean “suspected ideology.”
Karl Rove gives high marks to Obama’s economic team.
… Mr. Obama’s announcement of his economic team on Monday provided surprisingly positive clarity. He picked as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the respected, soft-spoken New York Fed president. Mr. Geithner has been a key player with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in confronting the financial crisis. Every major decision in the rescue effort came only after the three agreed.
The National Economic Council director-designee, Larry Summers, is another solid pick. Mr. Summers has been an advocate for trade liberalization, he was the Clinton administration’s negotiator for the financial deregulation known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and he even attempted to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the 1990s.
Mr. Obama also named a respected monetary expert — Christina Romer — to head up his Council of Economic Advisors. On Tuesday he selected a first-rate thinker, Peter Orszag, to be director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
The only troubling personnel note was Melody Barnes as Domestic Policy Council director. Putting a former aide to Ted Kennedy in charge of health policy after tapping universal health-care advocate Tom Daschle to be Health and Human Services secretary sends a clear signal that Mr. Obama didn’t mean it when his campaign ads said he wouldn’t run to the “extremes” with government-run health care. …
Hugh Hewitt’s chat with Mark Steyn covers terror, turmoil, and turkeys.
… HH: Mark Steyn, let’s turn to the economic panic of recent weeks, and to the appointment by Barack Obama of a new Treasury secretary, a chief economic advisor in Lawrence Summers, a Council of Economic Advisors chair in Christina Romer. These are very mainstream, not at all radical socialists. How do you tote up the score on his economic team?
MS: Well, Bill Clinton used to like to tell people that he governed as an Eisenhower Republican. And there’s a lot of truth to that. If you imagine an Ike with a serious pants dropping problem, there is a lot of truth to that. And given that what we’re seeing is basically some retro, back to the 90s reconstruction of the Clinton administration, it’s not a big surprise to see Summers and Volker and a lot of very reassuring Eisenhower Republican type names, in effect, coming back. I think in a sense, that reflects Obama’s caution. You know, clearly the entire Western financial system is incredibly vulnerable at the moment. We saw the way Iceland just went belly up a couple of weeks ago. If you look at the numbers, and if you look at the levels of personal credit, in some senses, one could make the case that the United Kingdom is headed the same way. I mean, there could be some major countries whose financial systems take absolutely disastrous hits over this. The last thing you want to do is come up with guys who are either inexperienced or have radical ideas. In a sense, this is Obama’s caution asserting itself.
HH: Does the center-right dare hope that Obama will turn out to be a talk left-govern right kind of figure?
MS: Well, you know, in the sense that…Bush was not a conservative in key respects, and that made it hard for conservative pundits to challenge him, because in effect, you always feel uncomfortable challenging your own guy. If Obama keeps a lot of the Bush personnel, and many of the same Bush policies in place, it’s actually very liberating for conservative intellectuals, because they can challenge them untrammeled. But I would caution against the idea that somehow all this marvelous continuity means that nothing important was really lost on November 4th. I think the ratchet effect in American politics, the drift towards socialized health care, the drift toward a majority of the population who pay no federal income tax, these are all disastrous trends in American life which are not good for American conservatism. …
Jonah Goldberg says Dems sending their kids to private schools in DC is not the real scandal.
… So if Obama and other politicians don’t want to send their kids to schools where even the principals have such views, that’s no scandal. The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful schools at all. For anyone.
The main reason politicians adopt a policy of malign neglect: teachers unions, arguably the single worst mainstream institution in our country today. No group has a stronger or better-organized stranglehold on a political party than they do. No group is more committed to putting ideological blather and self-interest before the public good. …
Donald Boudreaux writes on the bounty of the market.
… A modern market economy is of a degree of complexity far outstripping the comprehension of any mortal. We miss this complexity because such economies work astonishingly well. Or, rather, we would be astonished at how well they work if we took the time to reflect upon their daily achievements.
Every morning the bagel store is filled with fresh, hot bagels; the supermarket shelves burst with milk and meats and coffee and toothpaste; the lights come on when we flip the switch, the water rushes out when we turn on the faucet, and the phone rings when a friend calls us.
These occurrences, and thousands of others just like them, are routine. Boringly so. They are as much a part of our ordinary existence as is water to a fish. And just as the fish never pauses to give thanks for the all-encompassing water that sustains his life — indeed, just as the fish likely never really notices the water — we almost never pause to reflect on the commercial world that is almost as vital to our sustenance as is the air we breathe.
In fact, the only times we do notice the commercial world is on those rare occasions when it is obstructed or working poorly. When there’s no gasoline at the service station, we feel as if some near-sacred right of ours is being assaulted. …
Holman Jenkins on the real cause of Detroit’s problems.
The wrong folks were in the witness chairs in last week’s congressional hearings on auto doom. A fantastic moment was Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch assailing Rick Wagoner about whether GM was asking China for a bailout too. The implication seemed to be that GM can’t afford its inflated UAW pay packages because it’s squandering money to build cars in China.
Mr. Wagoner mildly answered that GM’s China operations are profitable. They actually help to underwrite the massive losses in the U.S.
Mr. Lynch showed no sign he was actually listening, having illustrated his disapproval of foreigners. He didn’t ask the obvious question: If GM can make cars profitably in China, why doesn’t GM import them to the U.S.?
For that matter, any of the brainpans on the Hill might have asked why Ford and GM managed to build viable auto businesses all over the world but not in North America.
You don’t need the Hubble telescope to tell the answer: The UAW is present only in the U.S., not all over the world. …
We learn from the Sydney Morning Herald that the NY Times in profiling Vaclav Klaus starts off quoting an 80′s report on him by Communist secret police. Way to be classy Gray Lady. That’s it! Pickerhead is finally going to cancel the weekend Times. Came close when the Times reporter profiling Cindy McCain used Facebook to contact McCain’s daughter’s friends looking for dirty dish. Want to read about that again? Click here for the Oct 21, 2008 Pickings – Go to the third item.
As the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, an economist, anti-totalitarian and climate change sceptic, prepares to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union next year, climate alarmists are doing their best to traduce him.
The New York Times opened a profile of Klaus, 67, this week with a quote from a 1980s communist secret agent’s report, claiming he behaves like a “rejected genius”, and asserts there is “palpable fear” he will “embarrass” the EU.
But the real fear driving climate alarmists wild is that a more rational approach to the fundamentalist religion of global warming may be in the ascendancy – whether in the parliamentary offices of the world’s largest trading bloc or in the living rooms of Blacktown.
As the global financial crisis takes hold, perhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about climate.
One of Australia’s leading enviro-sceptics, the geologist and University of Adelaide professor Ian Plimer, 62, says he has noticed audiences becoming more receptive to his message that climate change has always occurred and there is nothing we can do to stop it. …
Global Warming foolishness spreads to counting acorns. (BTW, the oaks in on the Virginia Peninsula are having a good acorn crop this year.)
News Biscuit reports UK unemployment is being attacked with a program called “Guide Blokes for the Blind.”