A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
Haste Could Make Waste on Stimulus, States Say - With President-elect Barack Obama vowing to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into the nation's infrastructure, some state officials are warning that public works projects will fail to effectively lift the country out of recession unless they are chosen carefully and implemented rapidly. (READ MORE)
Obama Teams Are Scrutinizing Federal Agencies - Wearing yellow badges and traveling in groups of 10 or more, agency review teams for President-elect Barack Obama have swarmed into dozens of government offices, from the Pentagon to the National Council on Disability. (READ MORE)
Experience Is Prime Asset for New Spy Chiefs - President-elect Barack Obama faces a dilemma in selecting his top intelligence advisers: finding experienced leaders who understand the challenges facing the various U.S. intelligence agencies -- but who are untainted by the controversies and problems that have plagued the intelligence apparatus... (READ MORE)
Coaxing Militiamen Out of Congo - NYABIONDO, Congo -- The couple had spent three hard years in a militia camp deep in the forests around this eastern Congolese village when they finally decided to escape. (READ MORE)
A Lifeline Abroad for Iraqi Children - BAGHDAD -- A couple of months after Capt. Jonathan Heavey, a Walter Reed Army Medical Center physician, arrived in Baghdad, an Iraqi doctor handed him the medical file of a 2-year-old boy with a life-threatening heart ailment. The doctor said the boy couldn't get the care he needed in Iraq. (READ MORE)
Gunmen Used Technology as A Tactical Tool - NEW DELHI, Dec. 2 -- The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. (READ MORE)
Sheila Bair's Mortgage Miracle - What do you do if you've spent your career encouraging mortgage loans to people who can't repay them? Barney Frank's answer is to grill federal officials on why they aren't preventing foreclosures. Infuriated at the difficulty of modifying mortgages, the Beltway crowd doesn't understand that such contracts weren't designed to let people live in houses they can't afford. (READ MORE)
'No Line Responsibilities' - On October 18, 1999, Citigroup announced that former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin was joining the firm. But what exactly would Mr. Rubin do at Citigroup? Citi's SEC filing eight days later noted that Mr. Rubin would be joining the bank's board of directors. After that, the message to investors began to get murky. (READ MORE)
Tax Fraud Finale - The Department of Justice finally got something right in what was once the biggest criminal tax-fraud case in history: It dropped the case. The charges against a group of former KPMG employees were supposed to be part of a sweeping crackdown on corporate crime, especially tax evasion. But in the three years since the charges were filed, they had become a symbol of prosecutorial overreach and misconduct. (READ MORE)
On the Web:
The Belmont Club: A self-made hell - One of my theories is that anti-Semitism itself destroys the anti-Semite. The real problem with letting a hatred possess you isn’t just that you may eventually destroy the object of your hatred, but that you’ll eventually destroy yourself. It’s a peculiar curse. Dennis Prager asks why the Mumbai attackers would waste precious manpower, ammunition and operational planning to kill and torture a handful of Jews. “Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize Indias major city devote so much of its efforts — 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 — to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?” Why? Because they were there. The Islamic world has untold mineral and human riches much of which has lain fallow and unused because too many people lie awake nights thinking of the Jew. (READ MORE)
Big Dog: Should We Believe Obama’s Granny? - Obama’s Granny Sarah in Kenya is telling folks that Obama’s granddaddy was tortured by the British many years ago and the way he was treated caused him to despise them. She claims that grand pappy Hussein Onyango Obama (are we allowed to write Hussein) was a cook for a British officer and the officer found out that grand pappy was sympathetic to the group that wanted to oust the Brits and gain Kenyan independence. He was jailed and tortured for this. I have two questions. Should we believe her and why is this a news story? The first thing is, should we believe this story? The Media sure seems to since the Times UK has a two pager detailing the exploits of young pappy Hussein (as Britney would say, Oops, I did it again). It is major news as evidenced by the link at Drudge. This woman has been deemed credible by the media. After all, she is the granny of The One and when she speaks they should hang on every word. (READ MORE)
Dafydd: Lunatic "Indictments" of Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales Rejected by Judge - In an unsurprising but still satisfying development in the latest sad chapter of criminalizing political differences, the bizarre and unbalanced floccillations of defeated Texas DA Juan Guerra have been rebuked and nullified: “A judge dismissed indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday and told the southern Texas prosecutor who brought the case to exercise caution as his term in office ends. Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra had accused Cheney and the other defendants of responsibility for prisoner abuse. The judge's order ended two weeks of sometimes-bizarre court proceedings. Guerra is leaving office at the end of the month after soundly losing in his March primary election.” All of the indictments brought by Guerra's heavily manipulated grand jury were quashed; the reasons varied, but they all amounted to gross imbecility in pursuit of personal or partisan advantage. (READ MORE)
Uncle Jimbo: The delusions of the media - John Nichols is the Washington Correspondent for The Nation & Assoc. Editor for The Capital Times in Madison, WI. I actually have a nice relationship with him and he is a brilliant man and great speaker, he's just generally wrong. He as much as any single person bears the blame for my current status as a new media loudmouth. I have always known that if I disagree with him I am probably dead on target. I started writing on the madison.com website and basically fisked his columns and op-eds every day. It was easy and fun as well, and it's been much too long. So here is Johnny Nick on Obama's foreign policy team and being informed. “On the outside chance that anyone thought that Susan Rice might be the exception to the rule of wrong thinking that characterizes Barack Obama's foreign policy team -- well, think again.” Hmmm, seems like good news so far. If Johnny hates her she may be a keeper. (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: What does the Chambliss blowout victory mean? - Republicans around the nation breathed a sigh of relief at Saxby Chambliss’ re-election yesterday, but no one could have predicted its scope. Chambliss barely missed winning a majority four weeks earlier, but Jim Martin came within three points of Chambliss in the general election, and most observers figured on a relatively close race. Instead, Chambliss won by a whopping 16 points: “Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) easily won reelection Tuesday night, trouncing his Democratic challenger in a runoff and thereby ensuring that the GOP will retain the ability to filibuster bills in the Senate. With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Chambliss held 58 percent of the vote to Jim Martin’s 42 percent. Chambliss was introduced at his victory party Tuesday night by Republican National Committee Chairman Robert M. ‘Mike’ Duncan as ‘Mr. 41,’ and he declared that Republicans ‘now have the momentum’ after his victory.” Momentum? That’s an overstatement, but it does call into question the Democrats’ standing after the Obama phenomenon. (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Slam the troops - AP’s Pauline Jelinek misleads about military divorce rates. Paragraph 13. It is always Paragraph 13. That is the paragraph where one of these imbalanced reports is shown for what it is. The writer has to balance out the report with a few countervailing facts. By then it is too late because some newspaper editor only had room for 12 paragraphs or less. That makes the newspaper. The damage is done. In her first paragraph, Miss Jelinek wrote, “The divorce rate among soldiers and Marines increased last year as military marriages suffered continuing stress from America’s two ongoing wars.” If that were true, then the military divorce rate would be higher than the civilian divorce rate because, after all, the civilian marriages do not suffer the stress of two ongoing wars; all they suffer is the stress of two ongoing sales at the mall. In fact the military divorce rate would be significantly higher. But the two divorce rates are nearly identical. (READ MORE)
Subsunk: Leadership 401 - What would you miss the most after leading a great country for 8 yrs, denigrated completely by the press the disloyal opposition, and even your own party, yet never losing faith in the people you lead, nor the path you were treading towards completion? And how would you feel about being away from the privileged, yet high pressure and adversarial environment the press and Congress put you into every day? How would you feel about leaving the job that perpetually sucks because no one gives you a break, and yet many privilieges come with such a job? What is it that inspires a Man to do his best every day despite being the most hated man in the world today? Compared to Stalin, Hitler, and Osama bin Hidin', what is it that keeps you going? And how would you feel about leaving the best and the worst job you ever had? (READ MORE)
Jules Crittenden: Transformation Complete - Obama = Bush on Iraq. Bush/Obama SecDef Gates explains. NYT: “When asked specifically if he considered himself ‘at odds’ with Mr. Obama on a withdrawal timetable, the secretary replied, ‘I think that I would subscribe to what the president-elect said yesterday in Chicago. He repeated his desire to try and get our combat forces out within 16 months,’ Mr. Gates acknowledged. ‘But he also said that he wanted to have a responsible drawdown, and he also said that he was prepared to listen to his commanders. So I think that that’s exactly the position a president-elect should be in.’” Now, he just needs to get on board re the mullahs, also, stop trying to drum up war between India and Pakistan, and everything’s good. (READ MORE)
Victor Davis Hanson: California Declares a Fiscal Crisis! You Think? - After various special sessions of the Legislature, assorted cries from the heart of our Governor, and the usual media sensationalism about an amorphous “they” who did this to us, California is once again broke. Very broke, it seems, this time around. The only mystery is whether the annual shortfall is to the tune of $20, $25, or $30 billion. (Remember, we cannot print money, though I suppose we could sell bonds to the Chinese in hopes of undercutting the Fed; or we could ask everyone of us 30 million-plus residents to donate $1,000 to Sacramento this year—and in fact every year.) There are no longer many people here of character and civic-mindedness stepping forward to inform us that we have spent like crazy; and to suggest a modest return to per capita spending levels, adjusted for inflation, of about 5-6 years ago; and to create a more attractive climate for businesses to operate and relocate here. (READ MORE)
Chicago Boyz: Instinctive Lout, Instinctive Hero - Kaus critiques the Mumbai responses, but if the tragedy demonstrated failings in law enforcement, it also showed us what man could be. A&L often links to cynical academia, but this time is found virtue. Michael Pollock’s “Heroes at the Taj” concludes: “It is much easier to destroy than to build, yet somehow humanity has managed to build far more than it has ever destroyed. Likewise, in a period of crisis, it is much easier to find faults and failings rather than to celebrate the good deeds. It is now time to commemorate our heroes.” He and his wife had separated, hoping their children would have at least one parent. They survived because in their “entire group, not one person screamed or panicked”; but, more importantly, he is certain: “Far fewer people would have survived if it weren’t for the extreme selflessness shown by the Taj staff, who organized us, catered to us and then, in the end, literally died for us. They complemented the extreme bravery and courage of the Indian commandos, who, in a pitch-black setting and unfamiliar, tightly packed terrain, valiantly held the terrorists at bay.” The New York Times interviewed the executive chef, Hermant Oberoi, of the Taj. His response was beautiful in its simplicity: “The only thing was to protect the guests,” he said, “I think my team did a wonderful job in doing that. We lost some lives in doing that.” (READ MORE)
In From The Cold: Bracing for that 3 A.M. Call - Before too long, British bookies will be taking bets on which early-morning crisis call Barack Obama will take first. Experts are now warning that the president-elect is facing a veritable "hornet's nest" in the Middle East, led by the prospect that Iran will have a nuclear bomb within a year. Interestingly, predictions of impending crises from the West Bank to the Persian Gulf came from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution--organizations that are anything but unfriendly to the next commander-in-chief. The think tanks outlined their concerns in a joint report entitled Restoring the Balance, which offered a blue print for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Gary Samore, one of the authors, said that the level of alarm over the “hornet’s nest” facing the President-elect in the Middle East, and the need for the swift adoption of previously untested approach, had inspired the decision to write policy for him. (READ MORE)
DJ Drummond: Worse Than You Think - Part 2 - Yesterday I trashed GM pretty hard, and they deserved it. The short version for GM, is that the management is both clueless and dishonest, and if they manage to avoid heavy penalties from the SEC, it would only be because the government decided not to pick on the mentally handicapped. Let's move on now to Ford. Ford is just plain weird from the start, a two-tier company which on the one hand wants to be a big public corporation, but on the other refuses to allow the stockholders' control of their own company, by keeping a level of stock in family hands, an effective oligarchy. Ford is also noteworthy for its selection of pyrotechnic vehicles, from the traditional Pinto to the more modern F150. Looking at the 2007 Annual Report, we see that Ford received 154.4 billion dollars in revenue, on sales of 6.55 million cars and trucks, or $23,562 apiece. (READ MORE)
This Aint Hell: Educated idiots - I’m so tired of hearing how the US is falling behind the rest of the “developed world”. First off, the US IS the developed world. Anyone who has spent a minute in Europe or South America or any other country (with the possible exception of Canada and Australia) would immediately recognize that the US is head and shoulders above the rest of the world as far as our standard of living. Our poor people have flat screen TVs, and generally speaking the poor are fat. Show me another place in the world where the poor have it so good. But that’s not today’s discussion. In the Washington Post, there’s a “study” by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education that claims we’re falling behind the rest of the world in the number of college educated youngsters we produce. “We’re standing pat while the rest of the world is passing us by. If we continue on this path, our chances of being the leader in the knowledge economy in the decades to come are between slim and none.” What dolts. We have so many people going to college, we even send illiterate, drooling morons and let them pay for grade school level “remedial” reading, writing and mathematics classes to keep up with people who are already semi-literate beyond the seventh grade. (READ MORE)
Melanie Phillips Blog: Histrionics, not history - Obviously I don’t know what the Speaker will say later today about the Damian Green affair. But the unease I have felt from the start about the reaction to the police raid on Green’s home and Parliamentary office finally boiled over when the Tories released the video of the police searching his office. From the start, this drama has been presented as the biggest threat to Parliament since Charles 1 confronted Speaker Lenthall. But the implication that Green’s assistant, who was shown being politely asked to end the use of the camera, was some kind of dissident resisting the secret police as he was dragged off to the gulag is just pathetic. Releasing the video was the kind of response you would expect from members of a student union, not a professed party of government. And all the hysterical references to Britain as a police state being made by Tory politicians, bloggers and members of the public, with comparisons flying around with Zimbabwe or the Stasi, are as offensive as they are absurd. Do these people really not know what a police state actually looks like? (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: Our Frightened Elite - Although the mind is an incredibly complex structure, much of the time the ideas that animate our defenses are really rather simple, for all that they are also unacceptable. As Samuel Abrams once remarked in a wonderful paper "Insight, the Tiresian Gift", the things we can't bear to know about ourselves are often very simple: I love this persons; I hate that person; I want to have sex with this person: I want to kill that person. Depending on the object of our passions and the strength of our passions, we often must erect sophisticated structures, know as psychological defenses, in order not to know that the person who is the object of our passion is a forbidden object. We construct elaborate defensive structures to defend against knowing that we are frightened of something, enraged at something else, enraged and frightened at the same time. We hide our baser desires under layers of obfuscation so as to avoid knowing too fully about our less acceptable wishes. (READ MORE)
McQ: Freedom, liberty and mandated "community service" - Thomas Sowell brings us face-to-face with the banality of evil. It sounds wonderful, but it is nothing more than another encroachment on freedom and liberty. “One of the most innocent-sounding examples of the left’s many impositions of its vision on others is the widespread requirement by schools and by college admissions committees that students do ‘community service.’ There are high schools across the country from which you cannot graduate, and colleges where your application for admission will not be accepted, unless you have engaged in activities arbitrarily defined as ‘community service.’”
The requirements, of course, aren’t academic in nature as they do nothing to prepare you for academic advancement. They’re political in nature - the "vision" that a particular group has conjured up as defining "good citizenship" and imposing it, through the requirements Sowell notes, on a population with no means of resisting it. (READ MORE)
Michael Gerson: Closet Centrist - It is a lineup generous in its moderation, astonishing for its continuity, startling for its stability. A defense secretary, Robert Gates, who once headed the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. A secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who supported the invasion of Iraq, voted to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and called direct, unconditional talks with Iran "irresponsible and frankly naive." A national security adviser, retired Gen. James Jones, most recently employed at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who served as a special adviser to the Bush administration on the Middle East. A Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who is one of Henry Paulson's closest allies outside the administration. A head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, whose writings and research seem to favor low tax rates, stable money and free trade. (READ MORE)
Ruth Marcus: Was Summers Right? - Was Larry Summers right about women and science, after all? As the mother of two girls, I hope not. In fact, Summers himself said in his infamous comments about intrinsic differences between the genders, "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong." But Summers may have been on to something, recent research suggests. Math and science test data, he noted, show gender differences at each end of the performance spectrum. In other words, men are overrepresented at the very top and bottom. This small but significant variance, he hypothesized, suggested differences in innate aptitude -- "whatever the set of attributes are that . . . correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley" -- that help explain the dramatic underrepresentation of women in tenured jobs on elite science and engineering faculties. These remarks, of course, led to Summers's ouster as president of Harvard. (READ MORE)
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: The Bailout So Far - Here's a fact to mull over: Washington a few months ago might have bought the entire stock of subprime mortgages for about half the money committed by the Fed and Treasury last week to prop up Citigroup and spur consumer and mortgage lending. True, had it done so, it might have irritated taxpayers and moral-hazard philosophers, since it would have meant relieving bank shareholders of their mistakes. But buying up bad mortgages would at least have left the private sector in charge of issuing new credit, which -- however bad its performance during the housing bubble -- would likely produce better results than government directing credit allocation in the economy. Sadly, that's where we are today. Bless them for trying, but our firemen have done an objectively crummy job. They failed to douse the confidence/systemic-risk fire and now have moved on to fighting recession by turning credit allocation into a public utility. (READ MORE)
Thomas Frank: Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP - Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it. For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side. One of their fondest slogans is "Defund the Left," and under that banner they have attacked labor unions and trial lawyers and tried to sever the links between the lobbying industry and the Democratic Party. Consider as well their long-cherished dreams of privatizing Social Security, which would make Wall Street, instead of Washington, the protector of our beloved seniors. Or their larger effort to demonstrate, by means of egregious misrule, that government is incapable of delivering the most basic services. (READ MORE)
Oliver Hart & Luigi Principle: Economists Have Abandoned Principle - This year will be remembered not just for one of the worst financial crises in American history, but also as the moment when economists abandoned their principles. There used to be a consensus that selective intervention in the economy was bad. In the last 12 months this belief has been shattered. Practically every day the government launches a massively expensive new initiative to solve the problems that the last day's initiative did not. It is hard to discern any principles behind these actions. The lack of a coherent strategy has increased uncertainty and undermined the public's perception of the government's competence and trustworthiness. The Obama administration, with its highly able team of economists, has a golden opportunity to put the country on a better path. We believe that the way forward is for the government to adopt two key principles. (READ MORE)
Bernard-Henri Levy: Let's Give Pakistan the Attention It Deserves - "The world is decidedly poorly made," Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and president of Pakistan, must be saying to himself. The French expression Le monde est décidément mal fait sums things up quite nicely. For it was at the very moment that Mr. Zardari was attempting to modernize his country -- to break with the equivocations of the Musharraf years and move forward with a peace process with India for which he took the initiative -- that the tragedy of Mumbai occurred. But what's done, unfortunately, is done. And if the authors of the carnage are, as it seems, linked to the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, we can already draw a certain number of appalling and unquestionable conclusions. The Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the jihadist groups with which I became familiar while working on my book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl." This group is, without a doubt, based in Pakistan. (READ MORE)
Michael Medved: Messages From Mumbai - The savage terror attacks in Mumbai send three powerful messages to all Americans who are willing to pay attention: 1. The threat of Islamo-Nazi terror remains real and urgent, and Americans must not take our safety for granted. While both the public and the president-elect focus almost exclusively on our dire economic challenges, we tend to dismiss the possibility of new terrorist attacks on American soil. Exit polling after the presidential election showed that less than one-in-ten considered terrorism a serious issue for the candidates; the unheralded but significant success of the Bush administration in the seven years since 9/11 has lulled the American people into a false and foolish sense of security. The experience in Mumbai shows the way that a small handful of determined and well-trained fanatics can murder hundreds, while paralyzing the financial center of India for several days. (READ MORE)
Walter E. Williams: Ignorance Reigns Supreme - How about a few civics questions? Name the three branches of government. If you answered the executive, legislative and judicial, you are more informed than 50 percent of Americans. The Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently released the results of their national survey titled "Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions." The survey questions were not rocket science. Only 21 percent of survey respondents knew that the phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people." comes from President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Almost 40 percent incorrectly believe the Constitution gives the president the power to declare war. Only 27 percent know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States. Remarkably, close to 25 percent of Americans believe that Congress shares its foreign policy powers with the United Nations. (READ MORE)
Michelle Malkin: Say No to Newspaper Bailouts - It was supposed to be a joke. As an endless parade of corporate beggars marches to Washington in search of handouts for their beleaguered industries, some of us in the news business snarked that journalists would be next in line. I launched a Newspaper Bailout Countdown Clock on my blog after The New York Times Company's bonds plunged into junk territory in October. A few weeks later, columnist Jon Fine published a tongue-in-cheek memo in BusinessWeek outlining a federal newspaper rescue proposal. The jibes were meant to be facetious critiques of for-profit enterprises demanding massive taxpayer expenditures under the guise of preserving the "public interest." But now, in a rather unfunny turn, the newspaper bailout push has actually come to pass. The Republican governor and the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut went on the record last week in support of government intervention for failing local newspapers. God save us from bipartisanship. (READ MORE)
Tony Blankley: Brace for the Change You Do Not Believe In - From The Huffington Post and Daily Kos to National Review and The Washington Times -- and all the mainstream media in between -- commentators are puzzling over who the dickens President-elect Barack Obama really is. On the progressive left, they are beginning to fear he may not be for "redistributive justice." On The Wall Street Journal free market right, they are seeing in his economic team the possibility that he is really as safe for capitalism as a banker. Karl Rove has concluded: "(The) announcement of Mr. Obama's economic team was reassuring. He's generally surrounded himself with intelligent, mainstream advisers." Those impassioned by the anti-war slogan "no blood for oil" are getting nervous. According to Politico, Jodie Evans -- a CodePink co-founder who, with her husband, helped raise a lot of money for Obama during the primary and general elections -- recalled her interaction with Obama: (READ MORE)
John Stossel: Government Sets Us Up for the Next Bust - If an athlete injures himself and suffers great pain, we'd recognize the shortsightedness of giving him painkillers to keep him going. The pain might be masked, but at the risk of greater injury later. That's a good analogy for the inflationary policies now pursued by Washington. These policies may temporarily "stimulate the economy," but they also disguise and aggravate the underlying problems. We will all pay a serious price. Policy makers have thrown caution to the wind. Twelve-digit dollar figures are tossed about casually. The other day, after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson changed course -- yet again -- and announced that the Federal Reserve would commit $800 billion more in "new loans and debt purchases," The New York Times reported, "Fed and Treasury officials made it clear that the sky was the limit." The total federal commitment to date is over $7 trillion. (READ MORE)
Brent Bozell III: Barbara Walters Falters - On the night before Thanksgiving, just an hour after Rosie O'Donnell had publicly belly-flopped with a horrible attempt at an old-time variety show on NBC, Barbara Walters made a fool of herself interviewing Barack and Michelle Obama. The toughest questions dealt with whether there was enough "change" in his cabinet picks, and whether he was "waffling" on tax hikes for the rich -- questions his (and ABC's) liberal base would enjoy. Let's go back eight years. On the Friday before the Inauguration, Walters interviewed then-President-elect George Bush and his wife Laura. But it was only one part of a routine "20/20" hour, and she brought harsh questions to carve up Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft as a divisive disaster. This time, the media's favorite won. The Obama interview drew a whole hour, which Walters promoted with a gooey splash of Obama fawning and interview clips all across the ABC News schedule. (READ MORE)
Austin Bay: Mumbai: The Terrorists' Gambit - The Islamist terrorist attack on Mumbai sets the stage for another major war between India and Pakistan. To avoid it, statesmen will have to control inflamed public passion and manipulative politicians as well as confront the terrorists responsible for the heinous crime. Diplomats know the act of mass murder spurs legitimate anger and rage. Mumbai's death toll reached 180 earlier this week, with some 240 people wounded. Most of the dead were Indians, but the list of victims included foreigners from at least 12 other countries, including the United States, Germany, China, Great Britain and Israel. India's outrage has deep roots. Islamist terrorists likely connected to Pakistan have struck Mumbai many times, with attacks in 1993 and 2006 particularly notable. The July 2006 attack mimicked al-Qaida's March 2004 bombing of commuter trains in Madrid. (READ MORE)
Jonah Goldberg: An Ugly Attack on Mormons - Did you catch the political ad in which two Jews ring the doorbell of a nice working-class family? They barge in and rifle through the wife's purse and then the man's wallet for any cash. Cackling, they smash the daughter's piggy bank and pinch every penny. "We need it for the Wall Street bailout!" they exclaim. No? Maybe you saw the one with the two swarthy Muslims who knock on the door of a nice Jewish family and then blow themselves up? No? Well, then surely you saw the TV ad in which two smarmy Mormon missionaries knock on the door of an attractive lesbian couple. "Hi, we're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!" says the blond one with a toothy smile. "We're here to take away your rights." The Mormon zealots yank the couple's wedding rings from their fingers and then tear up their marriage license. (READ MORE)
John McCaslin: Pay Raises - Not that either elected official is hurting when it comes to household income, but President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. each will be getting a substantial raise by leaping from Capitol Hill to the White House. The rundown of salaries for the executive and legislative branches, as of Jan. 1, 2008: President: $400,000 Vice president: $221,100 House speaker: $188,100 Senators/congressmen: $169,300 Actually, Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, probably can use the extra dough. She's a teacher, after all, and he's spent most of his professional career in the Senate (Mr. Biden also teaches part time at the Widener University School of Law). The couple's 2007 joint tax return lists a total income of $319,853, all but $66,546 (Mrs. Biden's teaching salary) earned by the senator. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, have seen their incomes increase in 2007 to more than $4.2 million, much of it coming from book royalties. (READ MORE)
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