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After the summary, there is an important note about next week’s postings.
Thomas Sowell on the meaning of Mumbai.
Will the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai cause any second thoughts by those who are so anxious to start weakening the American security systems currently in place, including government interceptions of international phone calls and the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo?
Maybe. But never underestimate partisan blindness in Washington or in the mainstream media where, if the Bush administration did it, then it must be wrong.
Contrary to some of the more mawkish notions of what a government is supposed to be, its top job is the protection of the people. Nobody on 9/11 would have thought that we would see nothing comparable again in this country for seven long years.
Many people seem to have forgotten how, in the wake of 9/11, every great national event — the World Series, Christmas, New Year’s, the Super Bowl — was under the shadow of a fear that this was when the terrorists would strike again.
They didn’t strike again here, even though they have struck in Spain, Indonesia, England and India, among other places. Does anyone imagine that this was because they didn’t want to hit America again?
Could this have had anything to do with all the security precautions that liberals have been complaining about so bitterly, from the interception of international phone calls to forcing information out of captured terrorists? …
Christopher Hitchens with his take on the possibility Pakistan was involved in the late Bombay (Mumbai) unpleasantness.
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep “open” minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was “an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai’s commercial center.” Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that “[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the “bloody coordinated” assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer’s excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—”[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?”—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it. …
George Friedman of Stratfor speculates on possible Indian reactions to the Islamist strike.
In an interview published this Sunday in The New York Times, we laid out a potential scenario for the current Indo-Pakistani crisis. We began with an Indian strike on Pakistan, precipitating a withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border, resulting in intensified Taliban activity along the border and a deterioration in the U.S. position in Afghanistan, all culminating in an emboldened Iran. The scenario is not unlikely, assuming India chooses to strike.
Our argument that India is likely to strike focused, among other points, on the weakness of the current Indian government and how it is likely to fall under pressure from the opposition and the public if it does not act decisively. An unnamed Turkish diplomat involved in trying to mediate the dispute has argued that saving a government is not a good reason to go to war. That is a good argument, except that in this case, not saving the government is unlikely to prevent a war, either.
If India’s Congress party government were to fall, its replacement would be even more likely to strike at Pakistan. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress’ Hindu nationalist rival, has long charged that Congress is insufficiently aggressive in combating terrorism. The BJP will argue that the Mumbai attack in part resulted from this failing. Therefore, if the Congress government does not strike, and is subsequently forced out or loses India’s upcoming elections, the new government is even more likely to strike. …
Peter Wehner posts in Contentions calling Mumbai Pakistan’s 9/11.
News reports today indicate that Pakistani authorities arrested a slew of people, including the suspected ringleader of last months savage attacks in Mumbai, in the town of Shawai Nala (a small town in Kashmir).
Pakistani officials arrested more than 20 people in all, including Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, one of at least five members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group named by Indian authorities as having organized the siege on Mumbai last month. Lakhvi, a founder of Lashkar, is accused by New Delhi of masterminding a 2002 attack on a military base and a 2006 bombing of a commuter rail in India, which killed 187 people.
Dozens of Pakistani soldiers descended on a camp run by Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a Muslim organization said by the U.S. to be a front group for Lashkar-e-Taiba. Lashkar, founded in 1990 and shaped by Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is an Islamic insurgent group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. It was banned six years ago, after its members were charged with the deadly attack on India’s Parliament in 2001, but Lashkar still operates in the open. …
The folks at The Corner are having a lot of fun with Blagojevich news. We have a series of posts, with Mark Steyn first.
I am not a connoisseur of profanity, but the Blagojevich transcripts seem almost parodically foul-mouthed, as if he’s learned his swearing from bad mob movies and figures this is how you’re obliged to talk if you want to sound tough. The use of the m-f word is particularly revealing in this regard. It invariably comes over like a second-tier Vegas lounge act complaining about his dressing room. Still, I enjoyed this helpful bit of annotation by Patrick Fitzgerald:
ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherf***er [the President-elect] his senator. F*** him. For nothing? F*** him.”
Shouldn’t that be “the motherf***er-elect”?
One of the best part’s of McCain’s platform was his proposal to break health insurance away from employers. In a WSJ Op-Ed, a doctor and Dem senator suggest the same.
Not many people are buying cars built 60 years ago. No one is watching TV on a set manufactured in the 1940s. Patients are not lining up to see a doctor who hasn’t cracked a book since before the polio vaccine was discovered. Why, then, do millions of Americans get their health care through an employer-based system from the 1940s?
Employers didn’t start offering health benefits roughly 60 years ago because they were experts in medical decisions. It was a way of circumventing the World War II wage and price controls. Barred from offering higher salaries to attract workers, employers offered health insurance instead. Aided by an IRS ruling that said workers who received health benefits did not have to pay income taxes on them, and by the fact that employers could write off the cost of the health benefits as a business related expense, this accidental arrangement became the primary way most Americans access health care. …
And also from the Journal, Holman Jenkins on why the auto bailout will be a disaster.
… To become “viable,” as Congress chooses crazily to understand the term, the Big Three are setting out to squander billions on products that will have to be dumped on consumers at a loss.
None of this was mentioned at four days of congressional bailout hearings, because Detroit knows better than to suggest Congress has a role in the industry’s problem. Yet its own recently updated Corporate Average Fuel Economy regime, or CAFE, makes a mockery of the idea that government money will render the companies profitable, even as the same bailout bill demands that the Big Three drop their legal challenge to a California mileage mandate even more unsustainable than the federal government’s.
Forget Chrysler, which has needed a bailout from Washington or Stuttgart in three of the last four recessions. The tragedy of GM and Ford is that, inside each, are perfectly viable businesses, albeit that have been slowly murdered over 30 years by CAFE. Both have decent global operations. At home, both have successful, profitable businesses selling pickups, SUVs and other larger vehicles to willing consumers, despite having to pay high UAW wages.
All this is dragged down by federal fuel-economy mandates that require them to lose tens of billions making small cars Americans don’t want in high-cost UAW factories. …
So what happened at Sam Zell’s Tribune? Daniel Gross in Slate with some answers.
What’s the difference between Smart Money and Dumb Money? Twelve months, the popping of a credit bubble, and about $800 million.
In the run-up of asset prices, which ended about a year ago, everyone was a genius. Hedge-fund managers felt wise for borrowing large sums of money and buying stocks, commodities, or pretty much anything that went up. Private equity barons bought companies, issued debt to pay themselves dividends, and were hailed as master investors. Heck, even millions of homeowners felt like Einsteins for refinancing at lower rates. And hardly anyone was deemed smarter than Sam Zell. …
Option Armageddon says Somali pirates are negotiating to buy Citigroup.
… The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said. ”You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things. Be happy we are in the mood to offer the shareholders anything,” said Ali.
The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities. The PRBS’s are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden. Moody’s and S&P have already issued a AAA investment grade rating for the PRBS’s. …