BLAGO AND OBAMA
What does Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have to trade for a lighter sentence? Pondering this question is, I suspect, keeping many prominent people in Chicago awake nights. Mr. Blagojevich is accused of conspiring to sell government favors for personal benefit. But his great crime, in the eyes of many politicians, is that he has made "pay to play" all too easy for ordinary people to understand and too ugly for them to ignore. "Hot Rod" Blago tried to sell Barack Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate. He held up an appropriation for a children's hospital to extort a $50,000 contribution from a hospital executive. He tried to have journalists at the Chicago Tribune fired for writing editorials critical of him. The FBI has Mr. Blagojevich on tape, incriminating himself in vulgar, profane language. Hot Rod's brazen overreach is shocking, which is one reason why this scandal is likely to have longer legs than any since Monica Lewinsky's trysts with President Bill Clinton. The other big reason why this scandal has legs is, of course, the relationship between Hot Rod and the president-elect.
BIBI AND OBAMA
The "international community" is eagerly anticipating the incoming Obama administration's policy toward Israel. It is widely assumed that as soon as he comes into office, Mr. Obama will move quickly to place massive pressure on the next Israeli government to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the interests of advancing a “peace process” with the Palestinians and the Syrians. Obama's team, like its supporters in the international foreign policy establishment, is dismayed by the Israeli opinion polls that show that Likud, led by Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, is favored to win February 10's general elections by a wide margin. In the coming contest between Bibi and Obama, it is important to recall that one of Netanyahu's most difficult challenges during his tenure as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 was handling his relations with the hostile Clinton administration. From the moment Netanyahu was elected until the moment he left office, the Clinton administration's Israel policy was devoted entirely to bringing down his government. It is likely that the Obama White House will duplicate these efforts against a Likud government.
ATLAS IN AMERICA
Insanity has its consequences. Every day now, another consequence of America's insanity - and I mean that literally - of November 4 becomes apparent. It's funny to see the MSM frantically trying to disconnect Zero from Blago, as the dim bulb in the brains of those who voted for him starts to shine a glimmer of light on his corruption. Insanity and stupidity usually go together (the evil genius is a Hollywood myth, rare in reality). And when Atlas shrugs, it makes a lot of stupid people go nuts. That's what's happening in Greece this week. After all the unending ever-increasing assaults on entrepreneurial capitalism by Washington for decades, November 4 has turned out to be the last straw. Electing Zero is what it took for Atlas to shrug in America, with one result the huge increase in unemployment since the election. Massive job losses are only the start of bad news in 2009. Zero hasn't a clue of how to create wealth. Like all liberals, he only thinks of how to steal it ("redistribution" is just a liberal euphemism for "theft") from those who have created it and give it to those who have not for personal political gain. But what happens when the creators of wealth stop creating, so the thieves no longer can continue stealing and the moochers can no longer live off stolen wealth? That was the question asked and answered by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. There is now the very real possibility that America is going to live through the answer in the coming Zero years - and that what is happening to Greece this week is going to come to our shores starting next year.
IT WON’T BE A NICE WORLD FOR MR. O
Warnings about the foreign challenges the Obama administration will face early on focus on the usual suspects - al Qaeda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia and, not least, the global solvency crisis. While each of these issues demands serious attention, the crises abroad that shocked, consumed or defined a succession of presidencies came "out of the blue." Focused on ending our Indochina war, Richard Nixon was blindsided by an oil-price shock (thanks to our eternal buddies, the Saudis). Jimmy Carter literally woke up to find the Soviets in Afghanistan - and our embassy staff held hostage in Iran, a collapsed ally. Ronald Reagan faced the Beirut Marine-barracks bombing. Somalia panicked Bill Clinton; Rwanda embarrassed him - and the rise of al Qaeda paralyzed him. W got 9/11. For Mr. Obama, too, the first international crisis could be something that not one of us foresees (although, as always, events will seem obvious in hindsight). But there are also a number of potential crises hiding in broad daylight - and ignored.
THE MIND OF JIHAD
Laurent Murawiec's The Mind of Jihad is, at last, a book on radical Islam that does it all. Unlike many engaged in the heated debate over the nature of our enemies, Murawiec does not believe that ancient texts tell us all we need to know. He insists that all ideas change over time, even those believed to have been dictated by God's angel. He has therefore immersed himself not only in the sacred texts of Islam but also in the richly variegated speeches, writings, and actions of its most extremist practitioners: the jihadis waging war against us. He candidly admits that it was not easy, that many of his initial ideas turned out to be wrong, and that his current understanding of "the mind of jihad" surprises him. This understanding holds that the current doctrine is far more than the resuscitation of medieval commandments, and in fact has a lot to do with modern European and Soviet totalitarianism.
ZEROCARE
As the TTP Weekly Report was being delivered to your inbox last Friday afternoon (12/05), thanks to our fine TTP staff, I was undergoing abdominal surgery at Akta Medika, a small private hospital in Sevlievo, Bulgaria. I'm writing this from a hospital bed there right now. Abdominal surgery is a serious matter, especially when it's done to repair the errors of a previous surgery ten years ago. So I didn't come here just because it's 1/20th of the cost in the US. I came because it's better. That's not a putdown of American physicians - but it sure is of American medicine, so completely hamstrung by government rules and regulations, the nonsense of "third-party providers," and protections of medical monopolies like the AMA: the antithesis of free market medicine. Yet if you think it's bad now, wait until you see what Zerocare does to it. This is not the place to discuss the specifics of how the government makes medical care in the US ridiculously expensive, complicated, and obsolete. It is, rather, to discuss the opportunities for you to avoid - and even profit from - the mess that Zero will make so much worse with his and Teddy Chappaquiddick Kennedy's "Universal Health Care" health fascism. And to explain the "flanking movement" Republicans can make to provide an alternative to Zerocare health fascism, saving Medicare hundreds of billions of dollars in so doing.
THE ZERO WHITE HOUSE AS A TARGET-RICH ENVIRONMENT
Are we having fun yet? We might as well try, amidst the multiple looming disasters awaiting our economy and our country - not to mention a lot of other countries as well - with the Zero White House running Washington. One way to do so is to look at Zero's new home as a target-rich environment. Here's target number one. "Zero," of course, is an alternate name for the individual we called NMP - Not My President - shortly after November 4. Now it's turning out that vast multitudes don't look upon him as their president either, due to this crazy controversy over his birth certificate. Crazy because producing a verifiably genuine birth certificate should be the simplest thing in the world to do, instantly squashing the controversy. Yet Zero won't produce it, allowing the issue to metastasize to the point of full page ads in the Chicago Tribune.
THE FRAUD OF ECONOMIC STIMULUS
How much should the U.S. government spend on an economic stimulus program? If you have trouble answering the question, it is because it is the wrong question. The United States (and the world) economy is (or at least has been for the last few months) in decline with rising unemployment rates. It is widely believed the government must "do something." The political and media classes, and even many economists, call for an "economic stimulus program." But what do they mean by "stimulus," and will it do any good? The argument is made that many Americans are suffering from a decline in income, and thus the government should give them money so they can buy more and put others back to work. Sounds good - but where does the government get the money? It must either tax someone else now or borrow more money, which diverts productive saving to current consumption. Either way, it is less than a zero-sum game.
A DETROIT BAILOUT: POLITCAL SENSE AS THE OPPOSITE OF GOOD SENSE
The Detroit Lions were thrashed, as usual, in their annual Thanksgiving Day football game, bringing their record for the season to 0-11. This prompted some sports fans to wonder why the Lions' owners tolerate such consistent failure. But then, the Lions are owned by the Ford family. This column is about the automobile industry. But I want to begin it with three numbers, because they define the environment in which the fate of the Big Three must be discussed. The first is $13.84 trillion. That's the estimated value of all the goods and services produced in the United States last year. The second is $7.6 trillion. That, according to the Bloomberg News Service, is the current amount for which taxpayers could be on the hook for the bailouts to date of financial institutions. It's more than half the value of the gross domestic product. The third is $4.6 trillion. That, according to Jim Bianco of Bianco Research, is the inflation-adjusted cost of World War II.
MUMBAI AND THE SILIGURI GAP
Before we get started, let's first dispense with this stupid name of "Mumbai." The place is Bombay and that's what we'll call it. The city was created and named by the British East India Company in 1668, after the Hindi name for the area, Bambai. It was just typical politically correctness to rename it in a local dialect (Marathi). As Bombay was created by the Brits, so was all of India as a unified nation, as they stitched together hundreds of small kingdoms and petty statelets ruled by Hindu rajahs and Moslem sultans. It was not stitched well. Thus the question to ask in the wake of the Bombay terrorism just committed by Moslem proto-hominids is: will it precipitate India's unraveling? One place to look for the answer is far away from Bombay, called the Siliguri Gap.