A Second Hand Conjecture

A Deccan Mujahedeen gunman has spoken by telephone to a television station from within the Oberoi Trident Hotel (which has since been raided by Indian special forces units), and said the motivation of the attacks was to end persecution of Indian Muslims and force the release of jailed Islamic militants.

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I’ve now read my first real “vampire” book.

Okay, so it’s a werewolf book with vampires, but I’m told this is *the* genre these days. Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn. Not bad, not bad in a lot of ways, but past annoying in others and I was thinking of ranting a bit and putting the rant on my blog. You see, I bought the book to get it signed by Ms. Vaughn at Bubonicon this fall despite the fact that I’m not much into the werewolf or vampire craze, and despite the fact that she stated on one of the panels that she really didn’t like people like me, specifically, women who say they aren’t feminists.

Not that I take that personally.

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Rasmussen has polled the public on whether they agreed with President Bush’s characterization of capitalism as the “highway to the American Dream.” Only 44% voiced support for capitalism, 33% were undecided and 22% expressed opposition. A grim finding. Only Republicans marshaled an absolute majority of support for the system, commendably voting 4:1, independents had a plurality of support, and Democrats were evenly split.

It should be observed that it is not without historical precendent that a victorious power would quickly wish to transform itself into the image of the enemy it proved its system utterly superior to, rejecting the values and virtues which had enabled her to triumph, in favor of those which had condemned her adversary to defeat. Indeed, it’s a bizarre but relatively common historical temptation if considered.

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A bit of old news I didn’t have a chance to mention, but it seems that grotesque little terrorist William Ayers won’t be speaking at my beloved UNL. Good for us.

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(via: Inkcinct)

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Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni (of Rogue Economics fame), blames the lingering financial crisis in part on the American War on Terrorism, which inaugurated an allegedly “suspicious attitude…toward Muslim investors.” She goes further though, and argues that the only solution to the turmoil lies in embracing the financial rules mandated by the doctrines of medieval Islamic Sharia:

Islamic finance is a system based in shariah law. Central principals include a prohibition against charging interest and a code of ethics for investments – for example, barring investments in prostitution. Napoleoni said these principals are actually quite similar to the principles of classical economics.

“A bank should be a profit organization, but the moment in which the social role is forgotten and the profit role takes over, then a bank is actually working against the people who are putting their money into the bank, the clients. Now that, of course, in Islamic finance could not happen, because there is this partnership between the client and the banks. There is a social commitment within finance which we had before, but we lost it.”
(UNM)

Makes sense. When you’re looking for lessons in the administration of an advanced, adaptive, and sophisticated modern financial system, clearly we have a lot to learn from economic titans like Yemen. Lately financial sharia in that country has produced a permanently premodern economy with 40 times the population of Vermont, subsisting on about 80% of Vermont’s annual GSP. Sounds like a good deal to me.

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In a Q&A session at the University of the Pacific in October, Dinesh D’Souza was asked about the moral dimensions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. I don’t agree entirely with the causality he posits exists between irresponsible consumer behavior and irresponsible governance, but it’s an interesting take. Particularly in how he adapts certain complaints more commonly associated with the political left, to serve a conservative argument:

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Russ Roberts:”Oh Please-President Bush has lost the right to say this.”

Also, he has a great Mea Culpa on why he missed this, and a discussion that fits right into my theme about how many missed this meltdown, and advice for those of us who did and might think too much of ourselves:

I should mention first that the few people who did see it coming were not necessarily any wiser than anyone else. Some of them had predicted nine of the last five recessions. A stopped clock is right twice a day. Even those who claim to have foreseen this mess couldn’t make the case well enough to alarm very many other people. And if you want to know if they were really wise or just selling a different story because the market was less crowded on the pessimistic side, you’d have to look at their bank accounts. Did they put their money where their mouth was?

Wall Street and economics are littered with the figurative corpses of those who got a big call right and got lots of attention and then became a joke as their prescience proved to be just luck.

By the way, in answer to the last question, yes I did, on behalf of myself and our clients.

Oh heck, two other gems from Cafe Hayek’s Don Boudreaux:

As Milton Friedman wisely pointed out, “If you cut taxes and revenues go up, you haven’t cut taxes enough.”

Revenues have gone up.  So tax cuts have been inadequate.

Also:

Popular sentiment has it backward: the bigger the unproductive firm, the more vital it is to let it fail.

Megan McCardle gives a touching and heartfelt explanation of why opportunity cost has to be considered in regards to GM in “Save the Rustbelt.”

Speaking of Megan, she has inspired a true decining institution to ask for a bailout:

But Megan McArdle at The Atlantic came up with a compelling argument:

“The news business is special. Without us, you wouldn’t know anything. Besides, it provides millions of low-paying, insecure jobs to overeducated yuppies who are going to move back home, into your basement, if you don’t do something, quick.

“And the news business is the other industry that can, all by itself, send the real economy into a tailspin. You think you’re worried about a depression now? We could make you really depressed. I’m not threatening, or anything; I’m just saying, it’s a nice country you’ve got here. It would be a real shame if someone convinced consumers to stop buying Blu-Ray players and shift their savings into canned guns and ammunition.”

Her colleague Ross Douthat added this:

“And remember — as a wise man once said, what’s good for The Atlantic is good for America.”

If it’s good for The Atlantic, it’s even better for Playboy. At least, that’s what we think.

Heck, I can get behind that!

Of course Glenn Reynolds has a similar theme with political partisanship:

FINALLY, A THIRD PARTY that I could get behind.

Meanwhile Hormel is betting that the present economic situation is a bullish sign for Spam! Fascinating stuff really, as Spam has a number of devotee’s. My wife spent time in Hawaii this summer studying Pearl Harbor, and came back and marveled at the many uses Spam is put to there, including in faux Sushi.

Unfortunately some of the latest data is really disturbing for everything else.

For those who commented on my two previous posts at QandO, thanks. I think the comments had more information than my posts, and gave me a good chance to flesh out a number of ideas.

Worried about what is in store for banks in Europe? You should be, and past history says it could be pretty ugly.

Finally, are stocks cheap? Is now a good time to be buying US stocks? Maybe so. Here are some things to think about.

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Boy, I love this for the Washington state secret tax on the poor lottery.

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Mike Huckabee’s new book is coming out, and in it he takes some pretty heavy shots at libertarian and economic conservatives who don’t share his populist big government views.

The real threat to the Republican Party is something we saw a lot of this past election cycle: libertarianism masked as conservatism. And it threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party.

I cannot understand this view at all. From Reason:

Huckabee trains a lot of fire on the Club for Growth, [..] Perhaps the Club’s biggest success was its pre-emptive demolition job on Huckabee. The governor responds by accusing them and other libertarians of believing in “purity of politics first; people are on their own.” In a chapter titled “Let Them Buy Stocks!” he accuses “libertarian faux-cons” of driving “the party even further away from its base of the hard-working middle class.” He names names.

You can see the growing influence of faux-cons in the 2008 election cycle from the so-called Ron Paul Revolution to the economics-only conservatism reflected by some of the supporters of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.

Hopefully the GOP does not follow Huckabee or his advice because I foresee a huge exodus of non-social cons. I know I’d be the first.

FYI, Glenn Reynolds is doing an interview with Huckabee this Wed and is currently soliciting questions. Now of course a rude and/or insulting question may make you feel better but won’t get asked so if anyone has a good question put some thought into it and make it respectful.

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The insufferable Peter Schiff has a video going around, which frankly, is just brilliant. He may be unpleasant at times, but he nailed this thing, and took mounds of abuse while doing so. More importantly, I KNOW HOW HE FEELS!

The resentment, irritation, condescension and, at times, outright hostility to my Cassandra act makes me wish I had a video of my own. Sigh…

Oh well, it pays to remember that Cassandra was right. I was never as sure of myself as Peter, but risk management isn’t about knowing you are right, but knowing what could go wrong and whether it is likely enough to act upon.

As an aside, Peter is no big government type, and he goes to prove that despite the media focusing on Roubini and others (who do deserve a lot of credit) that people across the ideological perspective warned of this. Thus having seen this coming is not the same as being correct about what to do about it, since those who saw the oncoming train differ markedly on that score.

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In commenting on Barack Obama’s renewed pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, Con Coughlin observes that most of the assembled army of Al Qaeda jihadists currently confined there would likely be released for lack of evidence, if the United States mandated their transfer to the civilian court system for trial. He then wonders aloud:

There have already been suggestions that former Gitmo detainees have carried out terror attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq after being released from Gitmo. What if one of those released by President Obama then masterminded a repeat of the 9/11 attacks?
(Daily Telegraph)

For some of us, it is astonishing that there can be an assumption made by anyone that future terrorist attacks wouldn’t happen, should one precipitate the release of the Gitmo rogues gallery. The question before us would seem to be merely one of scale and target location. It is after all extremely implausible that upon their release, the detainees would suddenly and collectively renounce their violent religious war or its tactics, as an act of reciprocal beneficence.

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Given the topic of tonight’s podcast I thought a little visual data might help. First, the explosion in US debt:

Henry Blodget explains:

From the early 1920s through 1985, the average level of debt-to-GDP in this country was 155%. The highest peak in history (until the recent debt boom) was in the early 1930s, when debt-to-GDP soared to 260% of GDP. In the 1930s, the ratio then cratered to 130%, and it remained close to that level for another half century. (See chart below).

In 1985, we started to borrow, and last year, when we got finished borrowing, we had borrowed 350% of GDP. To get back to that 155%, we need to get rid of more than $25 trillion of debt.

Do we have to get back to 155% debt-to-GDP? No, we don’t have to. But given what happened after the 1920s, and given what people will probably think about debt when they get through getting hammered this time around, we wouldn’t be surprised if we got back there. It seems to be sort of a natural level.

The banks have written off $650 billion so far. So we suppose that’s a start.

That would mean reducing (de-leveraging) our economy’s debt load by 25 trillion. I have no idea how you cut even 10 trillion in debt without massive economic dislocation.

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Pretty neat video visualization of edits to the Barack Obama Wikipedia entry from 2005 to election day.

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The premier of New South Wales, Mr. Nathan Rees, was reportedly surprised to discover that an illegal brothel was in operation above his offices, in a commercial building in the Seven Hills area outside Sydney. Unfortunately for the brothel’s owners, Mr. Rees is taking steps to have the rather obtrusively titled “Tiantian Chinese Massage Shop” shut down. Unsurprisingly, it seems journalists were intimately familiar with the parlor’s location and purposes.

But tech writer Steve Levenstein had the most amusing observation on this: Apparently now a politician knows what it’s like to be screwed from above.

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Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council issued a warning to human rights groups yesterday that should they criticize its efforts to repress “tomboy behaviour” among Malaysian women, it could result in…further repression.

One has to marvel at this sort of thinking. How dare you accuse me of being repressive and insane, I’ll show you by being repressive and insane.

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The less widely known corollary of elephant memory.

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The subject of the bloody 1965 Indonesian mass murder of suspected communists is not often openly discussed history even in today’s Indonesia. Given the pervasive silence, estimates vary on the actual number of people killed, but it’s generally accepted as being somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. Yet so infected with fear is the subject of the massacre (and so influential do many of the men who took part in it remain), that outspoken eyewitnesses are extremely rare, despite the enormous numbers of people involved and widespread knowledge of where each town’s unmarked mass graves can be found.

Some of the worst killings were carried out on a volunteer basis by village men who were members of Islamic and nationalist youth groups, often on extremely flimsy evidence of communist sympathies. Yet due testimony from actual members of these groups who performed the round-ups and committed the killings in the countryside, is virtually nonexistent in the historical record. So it is remarkable and important that some of those men have finally spoken out in old age to the Associated Press. All the men interviewed by the AP however are unrepentant and convinced that they saved their country from an impending communist takeover.

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It seems the marriage of David Pollard and Amy Taylor is heading toward divorce, due to Pollard’s virtual affair with a virtual prostitute, uncovered by a virtual private detective hired by Taylor.

It occurs to me that the key thing William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and the 80s cyberpunk movement got wrong when they were conjecturing about the future of networked data communications, was that immersive media digital communities would be cool, awe-inspiring and practical.
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According to research conducted in the UK, women find men with facial scars more physically attractive, if the scar appears to be the result of violence. Unfortunately it may be a brief affair for the scarred, as some theories suggest that the scars only stimulate women’s interest in a short-term relationship, as a facial scar may convey a signal of a masculine but risky personality type.

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If you care any about the future of the Republican party and conservatism in general, you need to be reading The Next Right.

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Modern pessimists of the human condition often see the loss of mankind’s dignity deriving from deviation from traditional religious orders. Their secular opponents see the fall conditioned by a retreat from scientific rationalism. They can have their debate. For my own part, I think the death of human dignity results from becoming an adult LARPer.

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Not sure how true this is, but here’s what the London Times says about how close Putin came to over throwing the Georgian government.

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” – he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.” Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah – you have scored a point there.”

This would seem to settle whether or not Russia aimed to actually overthrow Georgia’s government that some in the blogosphere were debating.

Also is it just me or have a lot of my titles been ending in question marks lately? Who knows?

(HT: Reason Online)

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I was sitting in an airport lounge yesterday and got to chatting with a member of the self-described “oilfield trash” who was bound for Lagos, and then for an FPSO in the Gulf of Guinea. These are rough and ready guys who lead the sort of perilous commercial-adventurer lifestyle that one has the mistaken tendency to think went extinct with the age of empires. Thus it’s always an interesting conversation when you run into them…and invariably, an intoxicated one. To form, I was soon quite drunk.

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When you think of the numerous problems routinely facing residents of Mexico City, things like an astronomical violent crime rate, standstill traffic, urban poverty, collapsing infrastructure, chronic water shortages, claustrophobia-inducing overcrowding and toxic pollution might come to mind. Even aircraft falling out the sky might reasonably have joined your list of hazards confronting the city’s densely concentrated population.

But it seems that leftist Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has very different ideas about the city’s problems. That’s because he just identified elderly sexuality as a pressing “quality of life” concern for residents, and has initiated a program to distribute impotence drugs to the city’s senior citizens free of charge.

Enjoy the irony if you don’t have to live there. It’s not every day that a government manages to confess its impotence by alleviating impotence.

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From the comments at Financial Times:

Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) — In a surprise move today, Whoopee Cushions Inc was approved bank holding company status by the Fed to enable the company access to the recently revised TURD scheme.

Imported far-eastern whoopee cushions have decimated the domestic industry over the past two decades, leaving former giants of the industry controlling a mere 0.1% of the domestic market. Some observers point to the poor reliability and high labor costs of domestic products as a defining factor in the industry’s demise, but it appears the government are prepared to spend now and ask questions later.

Chairman and CEO, Chuck Chuckles said “It is vital that the government recognises the role we play in the modern US economy. Whoopee Cushions Inc has been the backbone of US manufacturing for over 400 years and if we were to go under it would mean 100,000 people needing to learn new skills and find work in more productive industries. I think you will agree, that is something nobody wants to see happen”.

Finance Director Mr Magoo, 12, added “Whoopee! I’m off to structure some whoopee cushion backed securities to sell to the government at inflated prices”. At time of going to press it is not known whether the pun was intended.

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Michele Catalano writing at Pajamas Media yesterday, defending Obama’s call for (at one point) mandatory community service,  gets it completely wrong. To backtrack a little bit for those who haven’t been paying attention the last week or so, at President Elect Obama’s website, www.change.gov, there’s an agenda section. At one point part of it read like this:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year

(emphasis mine)

This quickly led to a swarm of criticism. Some of course went slightly overboard and likened it to slavery, as the opportunity to note the irony was just too hard to pass up I suppose. Others saw this as Obama building his “Marxist” personal army.

Now those points can be argued against and rightfully so, but that doesn’t mean their main thrust is wrong. Reacting to the criticism, the well oiled Obama online team quickly replaced the text, taking out the required part and changing it to an incentive based service. So good for them, but the piece by Michele Catalano defending it is defending the wrong aspect.

There are thousands upon thousands of high school and college students, as well as adults, doing some form of community service right now. Service to your community is an altruistic thing; it is a way of perhaps giving back to a community that has given to you. It is a way to reach out to a community, to help others who may not be as fortunate as you, to teach young adults about sharing, caring, and helping others, to do something out of the goodness of your heart that will benefit your community. This is not slavery. This is not forced labor. This is outreach. It represents values. Slavery is an act that benefits no one but the person who owns the slave; community service benefits both the giver and receiver and helps make the world a better place and leaves a general good feeling for everyone involved. It is not comparable to slavery.

(emphasis again is mine)

Respectfully to Michele, yes, this is exactly forced labor. Look, no one is saying the end is a bad result, it’s the means with which it’s achieved that is wrong. There was benefit from slavery but that doesn’t mean it’s not wrong, and who benefits has nothing to do with its definition. If you had a slave you could have him or her volunteer at the homeless shelter every day and do a lot of good, but it would still be completely immoral to do so, not because of the work that the person is doing but because the person has no choice.

So this is where she gets it wrong. No one criticising the required language is arguing community service is bad, or not a lofty goal. Millions of people think serving the army is a tremendous good that benefits both giver and receiver (receiver being the US citicizens of course), but no one argues that the draft is either moral or a good idea. So defenders can talk about how much good community service can do all they want, but they need to remember no free man should be compulsed into your definition of “doing good for the community”.

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I’m signed up to recieve emails for Zogby Polls so I too noticed the strange questions a reader at Clayton Cramer’s blog did.

If you knew Barack Obama supported a plan to place a 75% excise tax on the sale of firearms – where a $500 rifle would now cost $875 with tax, would that have made you…

More likely to vote for Obama
Less likely to vote for Obama
No difference
Not sure

If you knew about Barack Obama’s support for national legislation that would overturn concealed carry handgun laws in 40 states, would that have made you…
More likely to vote for Obama
Less likely to vote for Obama
No difference
Not sure

Of course the poll before that asked me what kind of dog I thought Obama should buy his daughters and what they should name it, so I don’t know what to think.

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Don’t complain to me if there aren’t any new posts on ASHC. I’m sitting on a beach in Miami and thus completely out of the necessary frame of mind to bitch about Obama and triumph of statism. Now, these other writers on here have no such excuses I note. In fact, they’re probably sitting at their desks right now wondering “why isn’t Lee posting anything new?” To them I toast a fruity morning cocktail with a plastic palm tree. It’s up to you gentlemen.

Even though this excursion is more business than pleasure, the economic conditions here in South Florida remind me of how much I love vacationing during recession. The worse and deeper the downturn, the better the leisure to be found. Hotels to yourself, fire sale prices for everything, pretty girls in bikinis who are more easily impressed with a boring software executive. It’s a fine time to travel to a tropical paradise. The traditional problem being how to pay for it in a recession. Ahem. As cruel a Catch-22 as there is.

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Our friend Steve Newton picks up on my post of Rudius Media’s forum rules, and applies it to the comment management of Delaware Liberal.

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You may have noticed there’s an ugly and unfortunate current developing in some of the protests against Proposition 8 in California. Namely white gays, blaming blacks for its passage. Even Andrew Sullivan, who has been blaming blacks for a couple of days now, has noticed that perhaps things are getting a little out of hand.

Altogether, as Mark Steyn puts it, this wasn’t quite the possibility for post-election civil discord people were anticipating:

The media were warning that if the election went the wrong way there’d be riots, but I didn’t realize they meant Klansmen in Abercrombie polos roaming West Hollywood itching for a rumble.
(NRO)

One of the most visible recurring problems here is the frustration many gay men and women are experiencing with the question of how blacks could “betray” the cause of universal civil rights, after such a long and noble struggle of their own to secure them. Confronting this matter directly in an opinion in the Los Angeles Times, Jasmyne Cannick raises several worthwhile points of explanation. Most notably, a misunderstanding on the part of white gays about both the origins and requirements of an appeal to the black community:

[T]he black civil rights movement was essentially born out of and driven by the black church; social justice and religion are inextricably intertwined in the black community. To many blacks, civil rights are grounded in Christianity — not something separate and apart from religion but synonymous with it. To the extent that the issue of gay marriage seemed to be pitted against the church, it was going to be a losing battle in my community.

[...]

Likewise, holding the occasional town-hall meeting in Leimert Park — the one part of the black community where they now feel safe thanks to gentrification — to tell black people how to vote on something gay isn’t effective outreach either.
(LAT)

In a consistent vein she adds on her site:

[G]ays are headed to Long Beach tonight to protest. I wonder though why they are moving from Westwood to Long Beach and skipping past Compton, Watts, and South L.A.?
(Jasmyne Cannick)

While fear and conceit are definitely in evidence, more pertinent is the matter of misdirection in the division between political friends and enemies. In ordinary times, the necessary accord for putting these two parties back into a grudging spiritual alignment would be to unify against the common enemy: the invidious conservative power structure.

Thus the real trouble is that simultaneous with the passage of Proposition 8, this conservative power structure and government has been quite visibly thrown down by the election of Barack Obama and the Democrats. The once titanic foe is now in pieces, scattered and preoccupied with internal reexamination and a painful reconsolidation project. It isn’t a party to this debate, it isn’t even a party with an agenda of any kind at the moment. So it is that without a Tito to oppose in common struggle, the Balkan coalition of Yugoslavian dissidents become Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, almost eager to turn on each other. Head north to peaceful Slovenia says me. Call it Oregon.

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Scientists have developed a process for turning tequila into diamonds. I’m more of a whiskey man myself.

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Delighted with the American election result for whatever reason, Kurdish villagers in Cavustepe, Turkey to honor Barack Obama. They also smeared the blood of the offering on Obama campaign posters, purportedly for good luck. Now there’s a weekend project for the press corps.

On a similar note, here’s another reminder that conservatives desperately need a new commentariat in addition to new leadership in the congress. Krauthammer sees Obama as the next Reagan striding across the globe, and Mary Katharine Ham reminds us of David Brooks in October, confessing to being warm quivering goo in the hands of the giant. One should always demand more than surrogacy from the opposition. One might even insist on opposition.

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Quite possibly the best board rule of all time:

If you expect to come here, spout idiotic opinions, write poorly, or just otherwise make an ass of yourself, don’t expect to be mollycoddled. If you are not smart, not funny, or simply don’t add to the collective discourse, you will be beaten like a Russian bride and sent on your way.

This is not quashing dissent. This is the cold boot of failure kicking you straight between the eyes. Just because the American educational system has taught you that everybody is a winner, and that you have some twisted right to have your opinion not only heard, but respected, doesn’t make it true.

Frankly, some of you need to be told that, objectively, you suck. And if you do, it will happen here. You have been warned.”
(Rudius Media)

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The New Republic offers a fine if brief overview of the 30 most consequential individuals for the Obama administration. Which reminds me that TNR itself just got a lot more consequential too.

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Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress is upset Fred Barnes and Dick Morris are blaming Obama for the post-election declines in the stock market. Armbruster’s case is a little defensive and misjudged (he cites the New York Times’ opinion, as if that would mollify critics), but then the transition from implacable critic of a government to determined apologist for a proto-government has been swift for all at TP.

However, in a general way he does have a point to object on I think. People are out to make cash gains where and when they can in this market, and opportunities have been rather few lately. To the extent that there was a specific macro cause, it seems to me the abrupt election day rally was the more likely culprit for the subsequent sell-off. That is what we’ve seen in other isolated spikes on events this year. The Saturnian habit for feeding yourself by eating your children, rather than letting them grow up to sow the fields, if you will.

Although it should be said that Dick Morris’ point that provoked Armbruster’s ire is not entirely unreasonable either. There’s certainly some incentive for selling on a small gain now, if you expect capital gains taxes to be substantially higher later. Comprehensively rejecting that as a buried motive is not reasonable.

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Rasmussen reports today that Sarah Palin is the choice of 64% of Republicans for the 2012 Republican nomination, and that a staggering 91% of Republicans have a favorable impression of her (equally remarkable, 65% rate their view as ‘highly favorable’).

It’s perhaps unnecessary to mention that there is no figure of comparable popular prestige left standing in the Republican party. Assuming she puts to rest lingering concerns among the Republican commentariat about her knowledge of foreign affairs, she’s in a remarkably similar political position to Ronald Reagan in 1976…standing as she is, alone among the wreckage of the GOP. And in 2012, the conservative grassroots sentiment will likely be quite similar to 1980, when no one in the GOP was eager to give the establishment favored candidates of George H.W. Bush or Howard Baker another chance, after the painful defeat of their previous hero, Gerald Ford.

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A daring scheme to use craigslist to rob a bank was ultimatley foiled by DNA.

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If the public outpouring of mourning for the loss of fascist sympathizer Jörg Haider were not enough to injure your esteem for contemporary Austrian public affairs, here’s another such moment. Klaus Emmerich, the highly esteemed former editor of Austria’s state television broadcaster, took the occasion of the election of Barack Obama to disgrace himself and embarrass his country:

“I do not want the western world being directed by a black man. And if you say this is a racist remark, I say you are damn right it is.”

“[Barack Obama's election is] a highly disturbing development [because] blacks are not as far advanced in the civilization process nor in their political progress.”
(Daily Mail)

He also described Obama as possessing a “devil-like talent” as well as being a man “branded” by his race. I think it goes without saying that we Americans should tolerate no lessons in the making of devils or the branding of human beings from Austria.

But there’s always hope for the salvation of the national reputation of course. As the tired old joke goes, Austria did convince the world that Hitler was German and Beethoven Austrian. Given such a “devil-like talent”, we might expect to hear Angela Merkel forced to apologize for Herr Emmerich’s remarks in coming days.

(HT: Foreign Dispatches)

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Apparently we’re assigning the .gov domain extension used by federal agencies to campaign slogans now. Although, there is a certain literalism to this one I suppose.

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The winners of the global financial turmoil look to be three American ’superbanks’: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. The institutions have all grown to occupy such a predominant position in the marketplace, that all three recently surpassed the Federal cap intended to prevent any one institution from controlling more than 10% of domestic deposits. A staggering realization of their scale.

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Sadly, Myrna Bushell, Bideford (UK) town councillor and stripper/phone sex business owner, is resigning her office due to a lack of respect from colleagues.

But in parting she also cited the time constraints necessary for local councilpeople, concluding that you either had to be wealthy or unemployed to have time and interest in the work. I consider that to be a profound political insight applicable to more than one level of government the world over.

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RedState launches Operation Leper to expose recently unemployed McCain aides who are trying to pin their failures on Sarah Palin. Hardly unexpected. As Grover Norquist noted yesterday, the only time the McCain campaign led the polls was during the two weeks when Sarah dominated the cycle. When it switched back to McCain, sayonara.

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This is good. This is great. This is not. John Boehner has presided over nothing but Republican defeats, why not keep him around eh? If you’ve had enough House GOP, you might notice someone of quality was reelected.

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South Korea is getting jittery about prospects for its long sought Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which is still yet to be approved by both countries, and is now under threat from a potentially protectionist Obama administration.

In the past Obama has criticized the agreement as deeply flawed, but has proven somewhat idiosyncratic about that at other times. South Korean Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon must not like the trend of things though, as today he took the remarkable step of categorically ruling out any renegotiation of the agreement to placate the incoming administration, despite renegotiation talks being something Obama has insisted on.

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Barack Obama has been president-elect for exactly one day and James Carville is already arguing for an inevitable Democratic majority for the next 40 years. Imagine predicting Jim’s claim to fame, the 1992 election, from the vantage of 1952, and you get a sense of the stupendous absurdity of this assessment in the light of history. But he’s not alone of course, Karl Rove and company were quite fond of these sorts of preposterous predictions just four years ago.

One grows weary of the taste such men have for these imperturbable majorities, lasting for decades which will predictably prove impervious to all future events and leaders. It’s not so much the unreality of it which is tiresome, but the very desire for it. Democracy has its own will, events their own timetable, voters change their minds on a dime, and wanting to grind the gears of history to a halt so that your party can rule forever, is a grotesque and contemptible ambition to begin with.

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As readers will know, I’m certainly no apologist for the social conservative movement in either its style or purposes. But it seems to me to be an awful injustice to lay at their feet the defeat of John McCain, in an election almost exclusively dominated by economic concerns:

If the GOP decides to go in the Bobby Jindal direction (fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights), it will be committing political suicide. As much as anything else, this election was a referendum on the social conservative agenda, and the social conservatives did not win.
(LGF)

A fine verdict that I’m entirely sympathetic to…had Mike Huckabee just gone down in flames, beside defeats for his favored anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened.

As frustrating and silly as the soc-cons can be, one needs to be cautious of the temptation for blaming  them for everything that goes wrong with the Republican party. John McCain is certainly not their creature by any stretch of the imagination, and yet it was the soc-cons in their core red states who arguably remained most loyal to the party.

LGF often understands the silliness of the Democratic penchant for criticizing US allies more frequently and forcefully than avowed enemies. A similar rule might be applied here.

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So we had an election. For those in the new opposition the outcome was variously enviable, troubling, or contemptible. For the victors it was…what else, an occasion for gathering an enormous outdoor rally at an urban theatrical stage to chant.

For my own part, I’m always somewhat reluctant to criticize the phenomenon of Barack Obama, because I cannot do so without confessing I miss the point itself. That’s because I possess a certain immunity to his allegedly irresistible charm. I miss the intimate personal connection supposedly conveyed through elaborately choreographed and cinematically lit mass spectacles, I find his celebrated speeches largely barren of purpose, and perhaps above all, I remain permanently unmoved by the emotional ecstasy his presence provokes in so many.

It should be acknowledged as true that if these impressions precondition your criticism, you do miss the point of Obama as political leader and cultural phenomenon on a profound level (and I surely do). For the critic, this can pose a difficulty that one must become an opponent of the phenomenon itself, rather than just its policy projects. And for the moment, that is to be the adversary of a powerful political tide.
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Interesting:

[W]e are on pace for the worst reaction to an election since Truman won in 1948.  Interestingly, the only times the DJIA has ever declined by more than 1% [are] the day after a presidential election when the Democratic Party won complete control.
(Bespoke)

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Yes, Obama has made history and been elected president. I didn’t vote for him nor support him, but I have supported every US president in my lifetime and President Obama will be no different. I am going to disagree with him on plenty of stuff I imagine, just as I disagree with my friends and family on plenty of stuff, but he’s still the President of the United States of America, and I will want to see him do the best for this country.

The slate is wiped clean today, the benefit of the doubt is given, let’s move forward together.It’s a new day, a day to rise above partisanship and just all be Americans.

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