THURSDAY,  DECEMBER 18,  2008

LATEST ON SARAH - AT 7:17 P.M. ET:  Reader Jeff Slater alerts us to this report on Sarah Palin, from the Anchorage Daily News:   Gov. Sarah Palin didn't ask for a pay raise and won't accept one during her current term, a spokesman said Wednesday.  A new state commission appointed by Palin recommends boosting the governor's pay from $125,000 to $150,000. The State Officers Compensation Commission says the lieutenant governor, department heads and legislators need more money too.

But if the commission pushes ahead with a pay raise, Palin won't accept the money, said spokesman Bill McAllister.

COMMENT:  Great move on Palin's part, especially at a time of economic stress.  The lady has style.

THE NAME IS NOT ENOUGH - AT 6:48 P.M. ET:  From AP:  ALBANY, N.Y. — New York's Assembly will examine whether a charity that U.S. Senate hopeful Caroline Kennedy helps run was properly granted an exemption that allows her and other officials in the organization to avoid disclosing details about their finances.  Democratic Assemblyman James Brennan questions the decision by the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board to exempt The Fund for Public Schools from a state law aimed at airing the financial dealings of charities.

Kennedy, who hopes to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Senate, is vice-chairwoman of the not-for-profit organization.

COMMENT:  The fact that the question is being raised by a Democratic member of the legislature suggests the underlying bitterness in the party over Caroline's sudden rise to sainthood.  Her try for the Senate isn't going down well in some circles.

LATE, BUT SOLID - AT 6:36 P.M. ET:   Douglas MacArthur once said that all disasters begin with two words - "too late."  The New York Times does an excellent job today of reporting the disgraceful system of inflated bonuses received by some Wall Street "executives" in recent years.  This was a scandal waiting to happen, and the press should have been on it earlier.  But, although late, The Times does some fine reporting here.  Highly recommended.

COMMENT:  One of the noblest things you can do in politics, and one of the hardest, is to keep your movement honest.  It means taking on your friends.  We who believe in free enterprise should have been on top of this scandal much earlier, and now must demand reform.  This bonus racket is not the market system at work.  It's corruption at work. 

DOW DOWN - AT 4:46 P.M. ET:  The Dow closed down 219, to 8,605. 

COMMENT:  The Dow has actually held up pretty well in the last few weeks, but it does not appear there'll be a year-end rally. 

MORE GOOD NEWS ON OIL - AT 4:44 P.M. ET:  NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. crude prices dropped more than 9 percent to $36 a barrel on Thursday as slumping demand and swelling U.S. inventories offset OPEC's record supply cut agreement.

REFORMING THE COLLEGES - AT 12:26 P.M. ET:  Regarding our report, "Et Tu, Berkeley?" (just below) on bailout demands by state colleges, a highly qualified scholar writes to us:

Here's a rule for slimming universities and colleges: if the academic program has a "studies" attached to its name, eliminate it. In my experience, all of the "studies" programs are unified only by a common leftist ideology. They draw together academics from more respectable disciplines around common interests. Those interests are invariably ideological. The studies programs are bastions of political correctness on every college campus, an indulgence to faculty biases, and a major constrictor of wide-ranging discourse in academe. Good riddance!

COMMENT: Amen.

ISN'T IT ROMANTIC? - AT 8:14 A.M. ET:   CAIRO (Reuters) - An Egyptian man said on Wednesday he was offering his 20-year-old daughter in marriage to Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush in Baghdad on Sunday.  The daughter, Amal Saad Gumaa, said she agreed with the idea. "This is something that would honor me. I would like to live in Iraq, especially if I were attached to this hero," she told Reuters by telephone.

COMMENT:  Do you sometimes wonder why some cultures don't make much progress? 

ET TU, BERKELEY?

Posted at 8:10 a.m. ET

Guess who's coming to the Bailout Ball? 

With the Big Three seeking a bailout from Washington, the Big Ten are following suit. Earlier this week the Carnegie Corporation of New York took out a two-page ad in the New York Times, signed by executives of 36 public universities, state university systems and higher-education associations, urging Congress and President-elect Obama to rescue them.

Are you not excited?  Before any "rescue" (from what?), the rescuers should demand real economizing and a shutdown of frivolous, propagandistic departments.

The university chiefs seek an additional "federal infusion of capital" -- as much as $45 billion -- to build new facilities, especially "green" ones.

Ah, the trendy.  Colleges do it so well.

The Higher Education Investment Act, as the university chiefs call their proposed bailout, would allow them to make an end run around parsimonious state lawmakers.

Is there any good in this idea?

Yet American higher education might benefit from more parsimony. Economist Richard Vedder has shown that large government subsidies already contribute to making universities "relatively inefficient institutions partly sheltered from the discipline of the market -- a discipline that provides incentives for cost reductions, product improvement, and innovation." The more subsidies rise, the higher tuitions seem to go. If taxpayers are going to shovel out more money to these schools, the academic executives should at least allow outsiders to perform a cost "restructuring."

Right on.  Each of us can make a list.  Start with those vastly expensive "packets" that admissions offices send out to prospects.  Have you seen them?  Some are worthy of Neiman-Marcus. 

Then we can move on to ethnic-specific graduations.  Everyone in the class graduates together, as in real schools.

Next we can shutter these special "offices" that have sprung up since the sixties - like, "Office of Diversity, Gender Equality and Anti-Military Affairs."  Believe me, it's almost come to that in some places.

We'll have a very long list before a dollar is spent, if a dollar is ever spent.

December 18, 2008.      Permalink          

HANSON

Posted at 7:38 a.m. ET

Victor Davis Hanson, as usual, brings political discussion down to Earth with his historical analysis.  Rhetoric versus reality.  I suspect we're about to see some examples, right before our eyes.

American presidential election rhetoric always paints the incumbent as incompetent in foreign policy, the challenger insightful and skillful. A look at recent history, however, shows that once the opposition gains office, the world suddenly becomes not so black and white.

The outsider Dwight Eisenhower charged President Harry Truman's administration with defeatist incompetence in Korea. Yet, in 1953, President Eisenhower continued Democratic war policies, reached a stalemate at the DMZ, and reclaimed Truman's prior unpopular war policy as his own inspired victory...

...Maverick Jimmy Carter claimed that cold warriors Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had raised tensions with the Soviet Union due to an "inordinate fear of communism." Soon a red-faced President Carter scrambled to boycott the 1980 Russian Olympics and beef up the Pentagon after global Soviet aggression from Afghanistan to Central America.

Ah, Carter.  Mr. Goodness.  And more recently...

After the interventions of the trigger-happy Reagan and Bush Sr., feel-your-pain Bill Clinton was convinced that his charisma could achieve through diplomacy what his predecessors had failed at through their clumsy use of force. But after 1993, President Clinton ended up bombing or shooting Afghans, Iraqis, Serbians, Somalis and Sudanese -- without consulting either Congress or the United Nations.

Ah yes, I remember it well.

Once upon a time, Obama or his supporters variously asserted that Iran was a hyped-up threat, that we could go openly into Pakistan if need be after al-Qaida, that the surge wouldn't work, that the Patriot Act and the Guantanamo Bay prison have torn asunder the Constitution, that we have alienated our European allies, that defeating terrorists is more a matter for criminal justice than military force, and that pushing democracy on traditional Islamic societies is culturally chauvinistic and naive.

Vaguely remember that, too.

But like his predecessors, the Obama administration will quickly learn that present U.S. foreign policy is mostly a result of reasonable decisions taken amid bad and worse choices. Therefore, don't be surprised if a President Obama continues much of what we are now doing -- albeit with a kinder, gentler rhetoric of "multilateralism" and "U.N. accords."

What will The One do?

As Inauguration Day approaches and campaign rhetoric ends and governance begins, words begin to have consequences. The truth is there are not many alternatives to the present general strategy against Islamic terrorism.

President Obama doesn't want a terrorist attack after seven years of quiet -- certainly not of the sort that occurred in Mumbai last month. He may tinker with, but not end, Homeland Security measures.

Finally...

Most conservatives and moderates expected that candidate Obama's grand campaign talk of novel choices abroad would end with President Obama's realist admission of very few new options.

His problem is instead his left-wing base, which believed Obama's electioneering bombast that he could magically make the world anew -- and so now apparently should do just that or else!

Can you imagine what would happen if Code Pink put up a candidate against Obama?  Why, the thought is just so exciting.  Ralph Lauren in the morning, revolution in the afternoon.

December 18, 2008.      Permalink          

OIL STILL SLIPPERY - AT 6:56 A.M. ET:  From AP:  Oil prices tumbled below $40 for the first time since the summer of 2004 Wednesday despite an announcement from OPEC of a record production cut of 2.2 million barrels a day.  Markets had already priced in a vastly reduced flow of oil and traders focused instead on troubling economic data that points to a long and severe recession.

COMMENT:  That's good news.  Not only could it mean that gas prices will remain low, it also exposes the current weakness of OPEC.   This means that the Iranian and Venezuelan regimes, among others, will suffer because of the collapse of the price of oil.

THIS JUST IN - AT 6:51 A.M. ET:    HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Connecticut Democratic Party officials, after an hour of political soul searching, decided Wednesday to send Sen. Joe Lieberman a letter detailing their disappointment with his public support for Republican John McCain in the presidential race.

COMMENT:  I thought you'd want to know immediately.

WEDNESDAY,  DECEMBER 17,  2008

AUTO SHUTDOWN - AT 7:23 P.M. ET:    From The New York Times:  DETROIT — Chrysler said Wednesday that it would close all its factories for at least one month, starting at the end of this week, in response to plunging vehicle sales in the United States.  The company said the plants would resume production no sooner than Jan. 19. Some plants will remain closed for several more weeks. Normally, the Detroit automakers close their factories for about two weeks at the end of the year.

COMMENT:  Could be very serious, but could also be a gambit to put pressure on the president to hand over some bailout cash.   Combined with OPEC's decision to cut production of oil, though, we haven't had a great day of economic news.

SERIOUS WARNING - AT 6:35 P.M. ET: 

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is warning that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it could try to attack the United States.  Barak said the world should press Iran to stop it from building nuclear weapons.

He spoke at a conference of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. He said, "If it built even a primitive nuclear weapon like the type that destroyed Hiroshima, Iran would not hesitate to load it on a ship, arm it with a detonator operated by GPS and sail it into a vital port on the east coast of North America."

Indicating the possibility of a military strike, Barak said, "We recommend to the world not to take any option off the table, and we mean what we say."

COMMENT:  Politics of fear, that's all it is.  Why, Iran is just misunderstood, and a victim of BUSH.  That's right, isn't it?  Ask Arianna Huffington.

UNBELIEVABLE - AT 5:43 P.M. ET:  From ABC News:  The Federal Reserve Bank is drawing jeers for hiring a former top executive from the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns to help it gauge the health of other banks.  "How's this for sweet irony?" business publication Portfolio.com needled the pick.

COMMENT:  The hiring was done by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, headed by the same gent who was just selected as secretary of the treasury by Mr. Obama. 

A BIT OF PROGRESS IN ILLINOIS - AT 5:01 P.M. ET: 

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who is facing federal corruption charges and the state’s first impeachment in 175 years, won’t appoint anyone to President- elect Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Blagojevich, who was accused last week by federal prosecutors of trying to auction Obama’s vacant post, has decided it’s pointless to name a successor because Senate leaders would reject the appointment, Edward Genson, the governor’s attorney, said today. He made the comments to reporters after addressing an Illinois House impeachment panel.

BRONWBACK TO LEAVE SENATE - AT 4:58 P.M. ET:  From The Politico:  As expected, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) will announce tomorrow that he plans to retire from the Senate when his term ends in 2010, CNN reports. The second-term senator has been eyeing a run for governor for years now and will likely file official papers to do so next month.

COMMENT:  A good, decent man, a loss to the Senate.

LOVELY INTRIGUE - AT 11:19 A.M. ET:  From the New York Post: 

Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday called off the dogs, telling loyal surrogates to quit sniping at Caroline Kennedy with questions about her qualifications to serve in the US Senate, sources told The Post.

COMMENT:  Why don't I believe that?  Maybe because of this, which follows:

But even as Clinton warmed to the notion of JFK's daughter filling her Senate seat, she had not returned Kennedy's Monday-morning phone call as of yesterday afternoon, sources said.

Both camps last night declined to say whether the call was returned.

The grinding sound you hear is knives being sharpened.

AH, CHANGE - AT 9:03 A.M. ET:  The president-elect ran on a platform of change.  This is from The Politico: 

His secretary of state will be Hillary Clinton, the wife of the former president. The Senate seat she’ll vacate is being pursued by Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of a president and the niece of two senators. Joe Biden’s Senate seat may go to his son Beau. Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, Obama’s pick for Interior Secretary, could end up being replaced by his brother, Rep. John Salazar.

And Obama’s own seat could go to the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. – less likely now in light of developments in the Rod Blagojevich scandal – or to the daughter of Illinois’ current House speaker.

COMMENT:  I can't wait for the spin on this.  It'll probably be something like, "Well, at least we know the families."

PRAISE TO BUSH

Posted at 8:16 a.m. ET

The press has been utterly stingy about offering any praise to outgoing President George W. Bush.  But his transition team has apparently done an outstanding job of handling national-security issues for the Obama administration.  A New York Times story outlines the threats the Bush people see, and this is important reading for all Americans:

WASHINGTON — The White House has prepared more than a dozen contingency plans to help guide President-elect Barack Obama if an international crisis erupts in the opening days of his administration, part of an elaborate operation devised to smooth the first transition of power since Sept. 11, 2001.

The laundry list:

The memorandums envision a variety of volatile possibilities, like a North Korean nuclear explosion, a cyberattack on American computer systems, a terrorist strike on United States facilities overseas or a fresh outbreak of instability in the Middle East, according to people briefed on them. Each then outlines options for Mr. Obama to consider.

That is responsible, mature planning, for which Mr. Bush will receive no credit.

The contingency planning goes beyond what other administrations have done, with President Bush and Mr. Obama vowing to work in tandem to ensure a more efficient transition in a time of war and terrorist threat.

That really is change we can believe in.  And more:

In addition to the White House contingency memorandums, the Department of Homeland Security said it had given crisis training to nearly 100 career officials who may fill in while Mr. Obama’s appointees await Senate confirmation.

And...

At the same time, senior counterterrorism officials plan to hold personal briefings for their counterparts on the biggest threats they see.

There is a recognition of reality, a reality that sometimes escapes pundits:

The attention to national security in this postelection interim period stems in part from the recognition that terrorists have struck during moments of flux in national leadership before. Al Qaeda’s first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 came weeks after Mr. Clinton was sworn in. A series of bombings on a Madrid commuter train system in 2004 came three days before national elections. And an attack on a Glasgow airport in 2007 came days after Prime Minister Gordon Brown took office in Britain.

Finally...

While Mr. Obama’s national security résumé is relatively thin, many members of his national security team come with deep experience. He is keeping Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and has tapped Gen. James L. Jones, a retired NATO supreme commander, as national security adviser.

Yet returning Clinton veterans have not been in government since Sept. 11. There was no Department of Homeland Security then, no director of national intelligence. The world has changed, and so have the structures to cope with it.

I hope the nation recognizes that Mr. Bush put those structures on place.  Criticize him we may, for many things, but he has taken the security of this nation seriously.

December 17, 2008.      Permalink          

CAROLINE (CONT'D)

Posted at 7:35 a.m. ET

The most intriguing political story going right now, other than the president-elect's attempts to dig himself out of Illinois politics, is the possible appointment of Caroline Kennedy to the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Hillary Clinton.  (By the way, Kennedy is generally known here in New York as Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.  But Schlossberg, like Obama's middle name, Hussein, has disappeared from press coverage and is apparently gone with the wind.  Name change we can't believe in.)

Our reading of press coverage is that reaction to a possible Kennedy appointment is generally muted.  If there is a public "wanting" of Caroline, it has yet to materialize.  But ridicule and outright rejection are also spotty.

One reason for the quiet reception may well be that Ms. Kennedy's father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated 45 years go.  Most Americans alive today don't even remember him.  While the Kennedy name still has magic in many political circles, voters are less than overwhelmed.  Ted Kennedy tried to run for president 28 years ago and failed.  Other Kennedys have been elected to public office since then, but others have been defeated. 

This story is important.  If Caroline Kennedy goes to the Senate, the presidential buzz will begin.  As noted here yesterday, she'll be only 59 in 2016.

We rarely quote New York Times editorials, but the Times today has a reasonable take on the subject:

Ms. Kennedy has much going for her. As a public figure, she carries the glamour and poignancy of her family, the only living child of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, an uncle of hers, has reigned for years as the liberal clarion in the Senate. Another uncle, the late Bobby Kennedy, was a charismatic senator who represented New York 40 years ago.

But there are interesting questions for Mr. Paterson to resolve about this job applicant and her qualifications.

As someone who has guarded her privacy, is she ready for the heat and the criticisms that are about to bear down on her? How would Ms. Kennedy fare in dealing more publicly with the crowds and the media scrum? Would she really be able to open up? Her appearances are always gracious, but her interviews in recent years have been long on charm and short on information.

Hmm.  The Times points out that Ms. Kennedy has shown sharp political skills in her work on behalf of the Obama campaign.  At the same time, the paper wonders whether she has the larger skills needed to help the New York delegation effectively represent the state.

Finally, will she, as Mrs. Clinton did, do the hard political work to show she would represent New Yorkers who live outside Manhattan’s best ZIP codes? When one New York City congressman was asked recently whether he was interested in the Senate seat, he sniffed: “I don’t do Utica.” To get the job and keep it through elections in 2010 and again in 2012, Ms. Kennedy would have to do Utica. And Buffalo. And Schenectady.

The Times recommends, and we concur, that Governor Paterson take his time.

December 17, 2008.      Permalink