James C. Capretta:

What the country really needs, apparently, is an automobile industry that is rolling out highly fuel-efficient cars, from the cleanest, safest, unionized factories in the world, made by highly paid workers with excellent health and retirement benefits. Of course, the production process needs to be inexpensive and efficient, too, so that the cars are competitively priced and can attract consumers who might otherwise gravitate toward bigger and heavier vehicles.

Gee, why didn’t Rick Wagoner think of that?

Arrogant, ignorant idiots.

Capretta remains optimistic for the long run:

Fortunately, in time, it gets easier and easier for politicians to walk away from the whole mess. Consumers continue to spend their money on products they actually want, for the prices they are willing to pay. Successful and profitable companies hire up workers who have left unsuccessful and unprofitable ones. The marketplace adjusts. End of story.

I hope he's right, and that Obama and co. don't do irreparable damage in the meantime.

I just listened to, and enjoyed, this EconTalk podcast from last June, in which Arnold Kling and host Russell Roberts discuss health-care-related issues. At one point Roberts mentions his reluctance (since overcome) to endure a colonoscopy, and I was reminded of this Dave Barry column on Barry's experience with the procedure. Great stuff, and excellent advice.
 
(In case I haven't noted it before: EconTalk is one of the treasures of the Web.)

David Pryce-Jones on Obama's conciliatory message to Iran:

Here is the president of the United States, occupying the position hitherto openly acknowledged as speaking for the West, turning himself of his own free will into a petitioner. The ayatollahs are bound to treat this approach as a humiliation for Obama, and broad evidence that victory is in their grasp. Over and above that, Obama has shown that he is willing to pay a price to come to terms with Iran, and naturally they will want to find out how much more he might be forced to pay. They will therefore scorn any element of good will, and continually raise the stakes to test out how far to go in cashing in on their perception of American weakness and humiliation. And sure enough, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei lost no time at all brushing aside Obama’s appeal as a mere slogan, while a crowd of tens of thousands were out in the streets chanting their well-practised refrain of “Death to America.” Many epithets are applicable to the ayatollahs ruling Tehran, but naïve and sentimental are not among them.

As disingenuous as you'd expect. But at least it's for a worthy cause.

"What's a douche?"

Here. I can't decide whether to be sorry there's no movie. NSFW.

(Via Laughing_Wolf at Blackfive.)

My favorite line in this thread from JournoList (emphasis added):

But I agree with Jon that the tendency to lapse into name-calling, or making broad assumptions about people who aren't on this list, seems at minimum like it's not the best use of our time, and at worst, unworthy of this very smart, very funny community.

(Via Mark Hemingway.)

Many people at the time of the September crisis thought they were only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, but with every month that passes you will see that they were also giving away the interests of Britain, and the interests of peace and justice.

(p. 260)

I have fought more elections than anyone here, or indeed anyone alive in the country—Parliamentary elections—and on the whole they are great fun. But there ought to be interludes of tolerance, hard work and study of social problems between them. Having rows between politicians might be good from time to time, but it is not a good habit of political life.

(p. 101)

That's Gregory S. McNeal's comment on this report:

An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say.

The pace of the Predator attacks has accelerated dramatically since August, when the Bush administration made a previously undisclosed decision to abandon the practice of obtaining permission from the Pakistani government before launching missiles from the unmanned aircraft.

Since Aug. 31, the CIA has carried out at least 38 Predator strikes in northwest Pakistan, compared with 10 reported attacks in 2006 and 2007 combined, in what has become the CIA's most expansive targeted killing program since the Vietnam War.

Because of its success, the Obama administration is set to continue the accelerated campaign despite civilian casualties that have fueled anti-U.S. sentiment and prompted protests from the Pakistani government.

Good for Obama.

The Sun:

NOEL GALLAGHER upset pal CHRIS MARTIN when he vetoed the COLDPLAY singer's attempts to get him to go green.

The singer said he "genuinely didn't give a f***" when the star quizzed him on environmental issues over dinner.

Gallagher offers a notable comment on James Blunt too.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Later: The title of this post may have been unwise. For the record, I don't know Gallagher, I like some of his music, I consider a clean environment one desideratum among many, and I'm straight.

4/20/1939 (p. 93):

If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.

1930 (p. 540):

In default of a smell the next best mnemonic is a tune. I have got tunes in my head for every war I have been to, and indeed for every critical or exciting phase in my life. Some day when my ship comes home, I am going to have them all collected in gramophone records, and then I will sit in a chair and smoke my cigar, while pictures and faces, moods and sensations long vanished return; and pale but true there gleams the light of other days.

Four reports (so far) from Raymond Ibrahim at Jihad Watch. Some revolting stuff, found in respected Islamic texts.

At least once?

(Via Tim Blair.)

And gets caught on video. Two posts from Tim Blair.

11/5/1919 (p. 355):

Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy. . . . [H]e gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world, of which he was the high priest and chief. With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low. She was laid low to the dust.

4/13/1933 (p. 137):

. . . I do not think that we need break our hearts in deploring the treatment that Germany is receiving now. Germany is not satisfied; but no concession which has been made has produced any very marked appearance of gratitude. Once it has been conceded it has seemed less valuable than when it was demanded.

*I can't promise to post one daily, because I'm lazy about blogging, but this book gives me much to work with.

David Espo, AP:

Asked directly Obama is satisfied that he found out about the bonuses in a timely fashion, Gibbs said: "Yes, the president is satisfied."

Abe Greenwald comments,

Is this going to be the refrain whenever the White House finds out about the results of its incompetence? The president will be satisfied that he was promptly alerted to a debacle he could have avoided? It looks like he may be in for a very satisfying four years.

If this piece by Amir Taheri is accurate, we should be very worried:

Thanks to the perception that the United States is in retreat while the Islamic Republic is rising, Tehran in recent weeks has played host to a dozen presidents and prime ministers from Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East. In every case, the idea is to make a deal with the Iranians before Obama makes a deal with them.

America's new policy, or lack of it, could have a devastating impact on the chances of democratic forces throughout the region as it faces crucial elections in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Algeria. America's enemies in the region may achieve a strategic coup before Obama has developed a credible Middle East policy.

John Derbyshire:

Times are hard, no doubt about it. My wife works in retail, selling jewelry for one of the big upmarket department stores (anagram of ODDLY ORAL RANT). From what she tells me over the dinner table, the department-store sales force is undergoing the employee equivalent of Omaha Beach.

An [acquaintance] in senior management at a different department-store chain (anagram of ASKS) confirms the impression. He: “We’ve let go ten percent of our commissioned sales force. Ten percent!—I’ve never known anything like it. And all of us managers are under orders to bring down our vendors’ prices by 20 percent. All the vendors—not just wholesalers, but things like modeling agencies and advertising. Twenty percent, across the board.” Me: “What if a vendor can’t reduce his price 20 percent?” He: “Then we go find a new vendor.”

It doesn’t take much thought to see how that’s going to ripple right through the economy. And considering where manufactured stuff mostly comes from nowadays, not just our economy.

This is tough, and it’s getting worse. Nobody makes much money in retail sales (Mrs. Derb sure doesn’t), but these are the kind of people taking the hit right now. Next it’ll be those vendors, model agencies, advertisers. Then the tsunami will wash back to wipe out the goods and services they all use, from software support to truckers, copy writers, restaurateurs, freelance photographers, warehousemen, . . .

Hard times, and they’ll get harder.

Because he made two miscalculations, both related to his high IQ. First, he believed that someone smart enough could master this endlessly changing and complex job, even if he lacked—completely lacked—executive experience. Second, he took as fact that Bush is stupid, rather than simply a poor public speaker. If Bush could do it, goes this reasoning, then surely someone much more intelligent could do it, and do it better, so long as he possessed the proper temperament.

I'm hoping Obama becomes the kind of president Clinton was, but without the scandals. (I choose Clinton because I think that's the best one can reasonably hope for.) The problem is that the world won't wait while he gains his balance. He'll have to show far more poise, decisiveness and flexibility, all while under enormous and relentless pressure, than we've seen from him to date.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that with Obama's victory,

Europeans got what their hearts wanted, but forgot what their heads told them. For 50 years, they have caricatured America as it served as the dumping ground for the export economies of the world. It (often clumsily) defended Europe at no cost, and got snickers and triangulation as its thanks. America’s belching cars and smokestack industries were the object of disdain by the supposedly green Euros, who in fact never met any of the Kyoto guidelines that they preached to everyone else.

Europe talked a great multicultural game, as the antithesis to America’s dirty role as the world’s cop that had to do nasty things like get Saddam out of Kuwait and then Iraq itself, rid the world of Milosevic, and chase the Taliban from Afghanistan. . . .

Suddenly America has flipped, and Europe is bewildered and afraid that we may be the new, but more powerful and influential, Europe — and thus Europe will be left alone, with no foil. . . .

What will soon scare London and Paris and Berlin is that when the Russians “haggle,” or squeeze Ukraine, or play games with gas exports, Americans will be right behind them in referring all such crises to the United Nations for multipolar talks. We may slice our deficit by cutting a carrier group or three, content to suggest that the Charles de Gaulle dock off Darfur to do a little air recon, or visit Georgia to reassure the people of Western support. . . .

Who knows? Soon our elite may be thinking of emigrating to the Netherlands or Denmark to avoid America’s high taxes and its new redistributive government regulations. Who knows? Soon a European eccentric may have to come over here, Churchill-like, to warn us about the storm clouds on the global horizons.

Jonah Goldberg on the statement (pdf) from the "Gitmo Five."

Andrew C. McCarthy:

[T]hough Congress has had several opportunities to end all debate by simply specifying waterboarding as an offense under the war-crimes law, it has refused to do this. Declining to do so was a cynical dodge that provided Democrats with political cover in two directions: They can urge that the CIA be “tough enough” in order to avoid criticism in the wake of any future terrorist attack, but also condemn the same tough methods they called for when their far-left base bays for blood.

David Pryce-Jones remembers Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, who "died too young, with the pathos of unfulfilment clinging to him."

Theodore Dalrymple recalls five he's known. His conclusion:

[T]he fact is that we are much more interested in the life histories of the moral monsters than in those of people like the five exemplars whom I have described. Their lives were neither uniform nor without interest, but I did not enquire into them with the same curiosity that I have employed in the cases of the moral monsters.

In summary, it may be said that evil attracts and engrosses us in a way that good rarely does.

He's probably right in general, but I'd rather read about good people than about bad. Anyway, the essay is excellent.

Call 1-800-GOOG-411 to find businesses. I haven't tried it, but the reviewers here praise its voice-recognition accuracy.

David Pryce-Jones:

$4.5 billion: That’s what a conference of donors has just decided to give to Gaza, and that’s in addition to the hundreds of millions already paid out by United Nations agencies. True, about half the new money is due to come from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, and they rarely deliver what they promise. According to Mrs. Clinton, the United States is in for almost a billion, and she seems to think this is fine. . . . No other people in the history of the world have ever lived at the expense of others on this scale. . . .

To reward Gazans now with $4.5 billion shows that Hamas needs make no amends for the disaster its jihad brought down on everyone. On the contrary, the decision to attack Israel has proved a wonderfully paying proposition. Stick to Hamas, the Gazans can tell each other, and your status as a rentier is assured. Hamas has already resumed firing rockets in the certainty that it is cost-free and richly rewarding to do so. The donors have laid the foundation for the next round of warfare. This is hallucinating; this is madness.

Mark Steyn:

I have to say the first six weeks of the Age of the Hopeychange have surprised me. I expected it to be bad, but I didn't expect it to be so incompetent. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama's executive skills: As I said back in the fall re the comparisons with Governor Palin, Barack ain't run nuthin' but his mouth. This is the first real job he's had where you're supposed to show up at nine in the morning and make decisions.

So I had no expectations about his executive competency. But I assumed he had folks around him who could take care of that kind of stuff - that he'd be the smiley-face hopeychange frontman on an ideologically disastrous but ruthlessly efficient team. I figured he'd have a Deputy Assistant Associate Secretary of whatever who'd know what the form was for a prime ministerial visit by a close ally, and an Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary who wouldn't compound the gaffes by telling Fleet Street who cares about the Brits anyway. I expected he'd have an Assistant Associate Deputy Secretary who'd know that Russo-American relations weren't the proper forum for lame prop gags, and a Deputy Associate Assistant Secretary who, once the decision were taken to go ahead with the lame prop gag, would at least be able to translate correctly one single word from English to Russian. . . .

Perhaps, in his hectic round of promotional interviews, David Frum could find time - just for eight or nine seconds, say - to offer some thoughts on why the President's administration is not as "honed" as his physique.

Thomas Sowell:

Who hasn't been out of work at some time or other, or had an illness or accident that created unexpected expenses? The old and trite notion of "saving for a rainy day" is old and trite precisely because this has been a common experience for a very long time.

What is new is the current notion of indulging people who refused to save for a rainy day or to live within their means. In politics, it is called "compassion" — which comes in both the standard liberal version and "compassionate conservatism."

The one person toward whom there is no compassion is the taxpayer. . . .

The old and trite phrase "sadder but wiser" is old and trite for the same reason that "saving for a rainy day" is old and trite. It reflects an all-too-common human experience.

Even in an era of much-ballyhooed "change," the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions.

Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions — namely, paying the consequences of bad decisions.

Russell Roberts:

We can't keep GM and AIG and Fannie and Freddie and every insolvent bank and every mortgage afloat. It can't be done. It's not a strategy. It's just desperation to avoid pain.

We're going to have to start letting them fail.

Sooner is better than later. Otherwise, we continue to throw good money after bad.

Let them fail. . . .

Let's taste some bankruptcy. Let's let some resources and capital get out of the hands of the people who are misusing it and into the hands of people who can use it more productively, wisely, and prudently.

In the comments, however, reader Ray G offers a cautionary anecdote:

I just now got done with a conversation with my neighbor - an East European turned American. You'd think he'd have a higher level of suspicion of the government, but the bottom line is, he just trusts the government. As much reading, and listening as I do, I sometimes forget that most people only catch a few soundbites on television, and that's the extent of their knowledge.

In his view, capitalism and free markets in general have been running rampant for the last 8 years, and it has simply failed. Now it is time to give Obama, and more government regulation a chance. A chance to correct all of that greed and corruption of the last 8 years.

That's all the citizenry sees and hears.

David Pryce-Jones:

The news that Sen. Edward Kennedy is to be awarded an honorary knighthood adds to the battering that Britain is currently enduring. . . .

The fate of Mary Jo Kopechne has not been forgotten. As for Kennedy’s services to Britain, they involved playing the Irish nationalist card and promoting the IRA throughout his career. Most probably he did not really believe in this cause but was grandstanding for the sake of the Irish vote in Massachusetts. The effect was to generate violence, cynicism, and falsehoods. . . .

Compared to the major ills afflicting Britain, this knighthood is a minor issue, but nevertheless illustrates Brown’s special flair for rewarding those who don’t deserve it, and it is another step towards the terminal fate of him and his government.

Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill's official biographer, praises Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations:

THIS IS A LONG BOOK, AND RIGHTLY SO. Many rewards will accrue to those who read it in its entirety. It can be read in small segments, set aside, and taken up again, read in moments of leisure and at times of reflection. Churchill was consistent in his thought and diverse in his expression. He could take ordinary episodes of history or politics and enliven them with wit and insight. Readers of this book can follow Churchill's own advice about the books in his library: "Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas."

This volume invites just such a voyage. There are few books of which it can truly be said that it is un-put-downable. This book is one of them.

Automotive columnist Eric Peters:

[Y]ou can thank Uncle Sam -- well-intentioned, as always -- for the fact that if you want a car capable of 40 mpg or better, your choices are very slim, or very expensive. Only hybrids and diesels make the 40 mpg cut. The best of today's "economy" cars are in the 35-38 mpg range.

Most are closer to 32 mpg.

Yet back in the early '80s, it was routine for economy cars to get 40 mpg. A few -- such as the 1982 Dodge Omni -- were in the 50s on the highway. The Mercury Lynx got 44 on the highway, the Chevy Cavalier 42 mpg's. This was with Disco-era technology such as four-speed manual transmissions, incidentally. (Almost every new car sold today has at least a five-speed transmission.)

There were literally dozens of cars available in the early-mid 1980s that got more than 40 mpg.

There is not one available today -- unless you count elaborate/expensive hybrids and diesels.

Doesn't "progress" mean we go forward? What happened?

Government happened. . . .

We can have uber-safe cars that cost $15k. Or we can have cars that get 50-plus MPG and cost $10k. We can't have both.

Whose choice -- whose business -- should it be?

Two posts and a piece. As John O'Sullivan writes in the last, "Defeating the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA depends on discrediting the sacred nationalist myth that violence on behalf of Irish unity is mandated by history," and on accepting

the moral truth that political murder is still murder and justifiable only in circumstances that long ago ceased to apply in Ireland, north or south. Only such a moral recognition can provide a sure basis for permanent peace. Without it, a revival of the Troubles remains unlikely but not impossible.

Until about five years ago, in a sustained spasm of unjustifiable hope, I regularly asked students in all my classes to write down the titles of the last five or ten books that they had read voluntarily or, if not voluntarily, then under compulsion in high school or college. . . .

For ten years, the list has been non-existent. The only books that most students have read are the politically correct parables that nowadays figure in the high school curriculum in place of what used quaintly to go by the name of the “classics.” If, at seventeen, I had taken Maya Angelou’s Why the Caged Bird Sings to represent “literature,” I might have developed no interest in books, either.

That's from the first in a series of three essays by literature professor Thomas Bertonneau. From his conclusion to the third:

Perhaps the only thing we can do is laugh, laugh at the irony of a society that was once the most literate that ever existed now reverting to the spiritual savagery of tribal existence. . . .

I see in the resentful incapacity of so many students a not-so-dim “Shape of Things to Come” whose characteristics will be theirs: perceptive obtuseness, expressive coarseness, extreme limitation of language and therefore also of concept, radical unfitness to judge complicated technical or moral problems, complete disconnection from any meaningful past and, to borrow a term from Oswald Spengler, in a condition utterly “historyless.”

The world soon to be dominated by such people (their world is already rapidly consolidating itself around us) will be awkward and ham-fisted; it will respond slowly and in all likelihood badly to the complicated problems that will impose their contingency on it. Petulance will characterize it universally: people who find it hard to think straight or to sort out complexities will balk at doing so and become adept at finding reasons for ignoring urgent social, moral, and political challenges. They will be even more amenable than many people already are to pandering, “magical” solutions to emergencies offered by cynical politicians who are interested solely in re-election.

Secretly aware of their limitations, they will also be susceptible to flattery designed to boost their all-important self-esteem. The level of commercial culture will descend even further than it already has to placate the taste of people who have rejected humane education and who do not really understand adult issues. . . . Many older, genuinely educated people surviving into this not-too-distant future will find the new world infantile and exasperating.

(Via George Leef at Phi Beta Cons.)

Funny piece by Matt Labash, though in my case he's preaching to the would-never-join-so-has-no-need-to-be-converted.

Melanie Phillips on Britain's decision to meet with Hezbollah's "political wing":

The result of this lethally misguided initiative is to abandon the Lebanese, undermine democrats and relatively moderate leaders throughout the Middle East, embolden not just Hezbollah but Hamas and the Taleban and all terrorist networks which can smell the weakness of the west, imperil Israel, strengthen Iran and increase the threat to the free world.

Phillips includes this quote, from former Hezbollah leader Hussein Massawi, that everyone should know:

We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.

The appeasers, in Britain and elsewhere, may yet get us all eliminated.

Rob Long on the television industry:

People are still watching TV -- but they're watching it in a fundamentally different way, and in a way that demolishes the secret business model of the business, which was: People hate to change the channel. Seriously: the television business has been steadily declining since the first moment people didn't have to get up off the sofa to change the channel. From clicking around 13 channels to flipping through 1300, to time shifting and now cherry-picking only the shows a viewer wants to watch, the business has been forced to do something it wasn't designed to do: make money putting on shows people want to watch. . . .

The current environment is the worst possible outcome for people in Hollywood: you have to put on good shows. All of them have to be good. And you have to make money on them, too, because you're selling that show specifically, not the time periods around those shows.

But that's not how the system is set up. And the system is changing, and it's incredibly exciting (for people like me who have been in the business for a while and who like to write and produce shows) but it's terrifying for anyone who made money the old way, [by] servicing a system that only works if the customer doesn't or can't make a choice.

That's the impression I get from this piece by Janet Daley, in which she describes news channels' treatment of the return to Britain of Binyam Mohamed, freed from Guantanamo last month.

It was the works: minute-by-minute live coverage of Mohamed's deplaning, flanked by burly men who ushered him quickly to a waiting car. These proceedings were enlivened by an offstage chorus of demands from Labour MPs, human rights lawyers, and the liberal media that the government and the security services tell all they knew about Britain's alleged role in Mohamed's alleged torture at Guantánamo. A parade of activists, from the openly Trotskyite leaders of the Stop the War Coalition to the usual array of anti-American protesters and always-available legal experts, weighed in with speculation on everything from the released man's mental state after force-feeding during a hunger strike to the judicial implications of Britain's participation in torture.

These people have no idea who their true enemies are. They almost deserve what'll happen to them as the jihadists take control. Almost.

Producer/engineer Nathaniel Kunkel, on how technology such as Auto-Tune and Pro Tools affects recordings:

Not long ago, the inability to edit minutiae meant that real musicians needed to play the music. And with the limited editing capabilities available, they needed to really play together because you couldn't tweak the arrangement after you recorded it. Our work flows were designed around just such limitations.

Now there are no limitations, and there are limitless work-flow options.

But more often than not, the grid, not the drummer, is the law, and the vocal will be tuned and phrased no matter what is sung. Everything is manipulated to be “correct.” That is our collective work-flow choice. It's cool and it's perfect, but sometimes I feel like I am hearing a presentation of the song more than I am hearing the song itself. I just hear the production; I don't feel the emotion.

Maybe it sounds crazy, but I really did believe that Buddy Holly loved Peggy Sue. That doesn't happen much to me anymore. . . .

How do we use the tools at our disposal to enhance our product without them becoming a crutch that limits us?

No matter what the answer is, we can now do anything we want to do to audio. And currently, we make it perfect.

Because their goals require the widespread use of force and threat of force against the populace. (Think how much compulsion Obama's plans assume.) The honest rightist can say that the use and threat of force, as in taxation, are an inescapable element of government, one that we should work to keep as slight as possible. It's a point of view most people would agree with, so he has no need to dissemble. The honest leftist, though, would have to admit that massive and unrelenting force and the threat of force are essential to his program. People wouldn't like hearing that, and he wouldn't like admitting it. So he lies.

Jennifer Rubin:

You know those fawning little bios which the MSM runs? Well sometimes you learn the strangest things: “[UN Ambassador Susan] Rice is married to Canadian journalist Ian Cameron, executive producer of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” Wait. The EP of a top Sunday show is married to a top Obama official? Shouldn’t this be disclosed on air, at least when they are discussing foreign policy?

Via Stephen Spruiell. The Treasury is in for a shock.

Megan McArdle:

GM's European division is in even bigger trouble than the US operations. The US division at least has some clean options: liquidation, Chapter 13 reorganization, or government bailout. But the European operations sprawl across borders and regulatory regimes. The EU has so far proven unable to muster the kind of coordinated government action that the US is capable of, as its stillborn efforts to deal with Eastern Europe illustrate quite plainly.

For all our bitching about regulation, Americans rarely appreciate just how important it is to have a central mechanism for disposing of insolvent firms. Our bankruptcy code is the best in the world: transparent, quick, and focused on making people better off rather than punishing firms that have made mistakes. When you don't have that kind of authority or skill, you get what is apparently happening to GM as it struggles to sell off Opel before the cash crunch hits.

Take a look at the "Tennessee NAACP State Conference Priorities" listed about halfway down the page here.

Via Roger Clegg, who comments, "Think about what the reaction of the NAACP’s leaders would have been if you had told them, in the 1960s, that in 2009 there would be an African American president and that their list of unfinished business — in part of the Old Confederacy, no less — would have been the eight items above."

Charles Krauthammer on Obama's economic-recovery plan:

The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

John Loring at the NYT's Green Inc. blog:

[A] report last night from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation . . . suggested that the energy savings associated with the bulbs — which use far less electricity than their incandescent predecessors — may be offset by higher heating bills, and more greenhouse emissions.

(Via Greg Pollowitz.)

Rich Lowry:

When President Barack Obama wanted to push an $800 billion “stimulus” or “recovery” bill through Congress a few weeks ago, he thought an atmosphere of economic crisis helped his cause. So he repeatedly warned of “catastrophe,” of “a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

A little more than a week later, Obama moved onto his next priority, proposing a unbridled federal budget that will spend $3.6 trillion next year and $5.3 trillion more in the next ten years than the Congressional Budget Office was projecting just last year. To get revenue for this budgetary explosion, Obama assumes the economy will be recovering at a nice clip next year, at a 3.2 percent annual rate.

What happened to the looming cataclysm? The Obama team argues that the passage of the recovery package has suddenly brightened the economic future. But there’s no way that $220 billion in extra government spending — the amount in the stimulus bill for 2010 — can be the margin of difference between irreversible catastrophe and healthy growth in a $14 trillion economy.

Obama exaggerated the downside of the economy two weeks ago so he could get more spending, and now he’s exaggerating its upside so he can get more spending. The fixed goal is more spending.

Thomas Sowell:

Do not for one moment think that we are either intellectually or morally superior to those Germans who put Hitler in power. We have been saved by our institutions and our traditions — the very institutions and traditions that so many are so busy eroding or dismantling, whether in classrooms or courtrooms or in the halls of Congress and the White House.

Daniel Pipes:

Was I the only one rubbing my eyes in disbelief yesterday. . . ?

I'd guess that yes, no one else was rubbing Pipes's eyes yesterday. At least I hope no one else was.

(The linked column, on the broad support for Hamas and disdain for Israel, is worth reading.)

But it won't be. Tom Gross writes that when Benjamin Netanyahu served as prime minister in the 1990s, one of his

most difficult challenges . . . was coping with the Clinton administration, which berated him for his belief that peace must be built from the bottom up through the liberalization of Palestinian society, rather than from the top down by giving land to terrorists. The question is whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have come round to Netanyahu’s way of thinking.

Not a chance. Obama and Clinton yearn for approval from the leftist intelligentsia, who invariably take the Palestinian Arabs' side. And so, while (in Gross's words) "no one wants the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be peaceably resolved more than Israelis do," the pressure, the responsibility and the blame for inevitable failure will continue to fall on Israel alone.

Jim Geraghty:

I'm fascinated by the Obama administration's mentality that the fact that violent Mexican drug cartels are raising hell just over the border doesn't justify additional border security or a fence, but it does justify making it harder for American citizens to own a gun.

David French on the jihadists.

It's by Rob Long, and it's in the current issue of National Review, so no free link. Here's the first section (of three):

From page 237:

. . . for an additional amount for “Watershed and Flood Prevention Operations,” $290,000,000, of which $145,000,000 is for necessary expenses to purchase and restore floodplain easements as authorized by section 403 of the Agricultural Credit Act of 1978 (16 U.S.C. 2203) (except that no more than $30,000,000 of the amount provided for the purchase of floodplain easements may be obligated for projects in any one state) is anybody reading this? Anybody? Hello? I’ve been sitting here with the other interns in Congress and we’re trying to type this as fast as we can, but this is going to be my little test. Anybody who reads this part of the stimulus bill and gets all the way to this part, I’ve taken $1,000 in cash and hidden it behind the loose panel next to the third drinking fountain on the right as you enter the Russell Senate Office Building. It’ll be there. The money cost of direct and guaranteed loans, including the cost of modifying loans, as defined in section 502 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, is as follows: $67,000,000 for section 502 direct loans, and $133,000,000 for section 502 unsubsidized guaranteed . . .