FRIDAY,  DECEMBER 19,  2008

OUR HEARTS BREAK FOR HARVARD - AT 11:23 P.M. ET:  From the Harvard Crimson:   Harvard Management Company announced Friday that compensation for its five highest-paid officials and former president totaled approximately $26.8 million for the year ending June 30—a turbulent time for both the markets and the company’s leadership.

Former endowment chief Mohamed A. El-Erian earned $921,000, while his five employees earned between $3.9 and $6.4 million each. The total figure represents a significant increase of 20 percent over that of the previous year, which saw total compensation of $22.3 million.

COMMENT:  I would love to know how much federal aid Harvard receives each year, and how much of it goes to pay the wildly exaggerated salaries of these "managers."  The president of the United States is paid $400,000 a year, and there's no shortage of applicants. 

THE GOOD NEWS ON OIL - AT 7:54 P.M. ET:  From The Washington Post:  Oil prices continued their slide today as worries about the global economic slump trumped recent efforts by oil-producing nations to prop up prices with massive production cuts. Analysts said prices may even dip below $30 a barrel before reversing course.

COMMENT:  Why should they reverse course?   If we have a sound energy policy in place, oil prices can be kept low.  And low oil prices can help the auto industry sell cars - if they make cars that people want.  But beware of upper-crust "environmentalists" - the kind who meet in Aspen - who want to drive oil prices up to teach those ignorant peasants out there a lesson.  They may have Obama's ear, which would be tragic.

DRIVE-BY LOOTING - AT 9:21 A.M. ET:  From The New York Times:  WASHINGTON – President Bush on Friday announced $13.4 billion in emergency loans to prevent the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler, and another $4 billion available for the hobbled automakers in February with the entire bailout conditioned on the companies undertaking sweeping reorganization plans to show that they can return to profitability.

THE CLINTON FORTUNE

Posted at 8:54 a.m. ET

The issue of Bill Clinton's financial sources, and their possible effect on his wife's decisions as secretary of state, has come up repeatedly.  Now, the former president has released details on where the money comes from.  As they used to say on Laugh-In...very interesting.

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton has collected tens of millions of dollars for his foundation over the last 10 years from governments in the Middle East, tycoons from Canada, India, Nigeria and Ukraine, and other international figures with interests in American foreign policy.

And they're not always the class of the field.

Lifting a longstanding cloak of secrecy, Mr. Clinton on Thursday released a complete list of more than 200,000 donors to his foundation as part of an agreement to douse concerns about potential conflicts if Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is confirmed as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

Wait, wait.  Did the story say "douse concerns"?  Look at this:

Saudi Arabia alone gave to the foundation $10 million to $25 million, as did government aid agencies in Australia and the Dominican Republic. Brunei, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar and Taiwan each gave more than $1 million. So did the ruling family of Abu Dhabi and the Dubai Foundation, both based in the United Arab Emirates, and the Friends of Saudi Arabia, founded by a Saudi prince.

Also among the largest donors were a businessman who was close to the onetime military ruler of Nigeria, a Ukrainian tycoon who was son-in-law of that former Soviet republic’s authoritarian president and a Canadian mining executive who took Mr. Clinton to Kazakhstan while trying to win lucrative uranium contracts.

How precisely does that douse our concerns?  Are your concerns doused?

Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said donations from “countries where we have particularly sensitive issues and relations” would invariably raise concerns about whether Mrs. Clinton had conflicts of interest.

“The real question,” Mr. Levitt said, “is to what extent you can really separate the activities and influence of any husband and wife, and certainly a husband and wife team that is such a powerhouse.”

It is, to some, a matter of perception:

Mr. Clinton’s office said in a statement that the disclosure itself should ensure that there would be “not even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

There is a memorandum of understanding between Mr. Clinton and the Obama team:

The memorandum...requires that if Mrs. Clinton is confirmed, the Clinton Global Initiative, an offshoot of the foundation, will be incorporated separately, will no longer hold events outside the United States and will refuse any further contributions from foreign governments. Other initiatives operating under the auspices of the foundation would follow new rules and consult with State Department ethics officials in certain circumstances.

That's good, and thoughtful.  But the key question is whether dubious sources can hide their contributions behind, say, American partners.  Hardly an unknown tactic.

Fairness requires us to point out that other former presidents have taken "library" contributions from foreign sources.  Carter is notorious, and Bush 41 has sources in the Middle East. 

It would probably best for former presidents to decline all foreign contributions to libraries, or at least make them public as soon as they're received.  Right now there is virtually no guaranteed transparency, and money does talk.

The effect on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?  We don't know yet, but decisions she makes involving countries from which checks came should be subjected to special scrutiny.

December 19, 2008.      Permalink          

DRIVE, THEY SAID - AT 8:07 A.M. ET:   DETROIT/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - General Motors Corp and Chrysler are close to securing emergency loans as part of a U.S. government aid package that would demand sweeping restructuring at the troubled automakers, according to sources familiar with the talks.  Bridge loans to carry the companies for several months could be announced as early as Friday, said the sources, who were not authorized to publicly discuss the negotiations.

COMMENTS:  That would place the ball in Obama's court about February.  Bailout out big auto is unpopular with the public, and the issue is how much political capital Obama would be willing to spend.

MINNESOTA MADNESS - AT 7:41 A.M. ET:  ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- Sen. Norm Coleman saw his lead over Al Franken in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race dwindle to just two votes Thursday. Meanwhile, a key court ruling put hundreds of improperly rejected ballots in play and promised the recount would drag into the new year.

COMMENT:  Looks like it'll be Sen. Al Franken.  If he were a Republican, with the obscene things he's written about women, the political establishment would be up in arms.  But left-wing politics trumps all, so there is silence.   

EMBARRASSMENT

Posted at 7:33 a.m. ET

Readers have probably noticed that we've emphasized the Caroline Kennedy story, and for good reason:  Her appointment to the U.S. Senate by Governor David Paterson would be a national, even an international story.  She would immediately, voluntarily or not, be part of the presidential sweepstakes.  And she has three children approaching office-holding age. 

There is also the issue of propriety, of appearance.  The national press is still treating this as a bit of a feature story.  However, Judith Warner in The New York Times has written a fine piece articulating what many here in New York feel.  I never thought I'd be quoting Judith Warner, but give credit where it's due:

Caroline Kennedy is, by all accounts, a smart, decent and very capable woman. There is no reason why she shouldn’t enter politics and why she couldn’t have a good shot at winning an election.

That doesn’t mean she should be handed Hillary Clinton’s soon-to-be-vacated United States Senate seat.

Running for office and getting a high-class government handout are two very different things.

That's the point.  Even Hillary Clinton, no queen of propriety, ran for the Senate when she came to New York, in her last year as first lady.  It was widely calculated that, had the GOP put up a credible candidate, she could have been defeated.  The GOP did not put up a strong candidate.

We are living in a moment when all the machinations, the corner-cutting, the inside deals, mutual back-scratching and indifference to the larger world of our nation’s wealthiest and most interconnected have led us straight into the ground. We’ve just elected a president who’s sworn to clean things up. We’re in the middle of a political-appointment fiasco in Illinois.

Thanks for reminding us of Illinois.  We have one Senate-appointment scandal.  We don't need another.

With lawmakers and taxpayers eyeing bonuses and corporate jets with angry incredulity, we’ve arrived, after years of worshipping the very wealthy, at what could be a very positive time of reckoning. This change could go a long way toward restoring people’s faith in the fairness and decency of our leaders and institutions.

In keeping with the times, it would be an appealing act of humility if Caroline Kennedy aimed her first shot at politics a bit lower — say, at the House of Representatives.

Or, she could become an ambassador to a developing nation and try to do some good.

I do think that the next United States senator from New York ought to be someone who has worked for the honor. Clearly, Caroline can’t, for the sake of her political viability — or her likability with people like me — suddenly remake herself into someone who has worked for a living. But at this point, with so many people struggling so arduously just to get by, any effort at all would be appreciated.

Finally...

Caroline doesn’t have to be a fairy-tale princess anymore. She can be her own white knight, vaulting the Kennedys proudly into the 21st century, if only she plays by the rules and waits her turn.

I think that says it very well.  If Governor Paterson appoints her, it just will send a very bad signal at a very sensitive time.  If some hack is appointed in Illinois to fill the Obama seat, that signal will flash with double intensity.  Is this the change we can believe in?

December 19, 2008.      Permalink          

PREVIOUS COMMITMENTS - AT 6:58 A.M. ET:  From the New York Daily News:   Caroline Kennedy wants to be the next senator from New York, but her voting record is already spotty, the Daily News has found.  City Board of Elections records show Kennedy has failed to vote in many elections since she registered in the city in 1988 - including votes for the Senate seat she hopes to fill and numerous Democratic faceoffs for mayor.

COMMENT:  I'd love to see the spin on this:  "Well, she was so busy helping children that day..."  The press is starting to ask some tough questions, but she's not facing what Sarah Palin faced.

QUOTE OF THE DAY (SO FAR) - AT 6:55 A.M. ET:  From Charles Krauthammer, on Caroline Kennedy's possible appointment to the U.S. Senate:  "Every state is entitled to representation in the Senate.  Camelot is not a state."

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.