Wildfire at Westmont

As gentle readers likely know, the wildfires in Santa Barbara destroyed several buildings and faculty homes on the campus of Westmont College, a leading Christian liberal arts institution. No one was injured, thanks to the college's implementation of a plan to keep residential students in the gymnasium on campus rather than risk evacuation in an area surrounded by highly inflammable flora. One can also thank divine providence.

The LA Times story is here. Westmont has posted photos here. They're cleaning up and will reopen December 1.

Relative Qualifications and Complications

It seems that the only thing standing between Hillary and her appointment as Secretary of State is her husband's business dealings with various rich folk, American and non-American, who give him money for speeches, advice and the like.

We note that these matters did not seem to be a concern when Mrs. Clinton was merely a candidate for President. Secretary of State, however, is a job that calls for only the most trustworthy individuals, so careful vetting is of the highest importance.

They Don't Make Personality Cults Like They Used To

November 18, 2008 is the thirtieth anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre, when People's Temple founder Jim Jones persuaded more than 900 of his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana.

The anniversary provides the backdrop for the upcoming holiday production from Know Theater of Cincinnati, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant. The award-winning musical employs a cast of children to explore the story of L. Ron Hubbard and his highly profitable, made-up religion.

Meanwhile, Google shows well over half a million hits for the combination "Barack Obama" and "anitchrist." However, we urge gentle readers to exercise due caution. Many of these hits are from liberal, pro-Obama sites complaining about Republicans feeding rumors about Obama being the antichrist to their gullible evangelical supporters.

After all, we know Obama is not the antichrist. He's not Romanian!* No less an authority than Hal Lindsey,** who has been warning the world of the antichrist's immiment appearance for over a generation, said back in August in the esteemed WorldNet Daily that Obama clearly is not the antichrist but does provide a foretaste of what the antichrist's reception will be like.

__________________
*Or is he?

**See also the views of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, who seem pretty sure that no antichrist worthy of the name could be an American.

PuppyProfits

Headed into the Worst Economy Since the Dawn of Time, we feel obligated to share with gentle readers those opportunities for pecuniary gain that are largely recession-proof.

PuppyProfits.com seems to be one: a proven system for getting rich in the growing industry of dog fighting.

We commend this highly informative site to our gentle readers for their thoughtful consideration.

Is This the Blithering Idiot We Were Told Was Running for Veep?

Wolf Blitzer's interview with Sarah Palin is unremarkable, a typical interview with a politician. But that makes it exceptional, inasmuch as Palin was judged to be significantly below typical.



Palin, it seems, does have a political future. Her discourse is cliche-ridden but fluent and coherent, about what we've come to expect from national leaders.

Hillary at Foggy Bottom

WaPo reports buzz that Hillary is now on the not-so-short list for Secretary of State.

Apparently the Obamanoids aren't happy with Kerry, Richardson, Hagel, or Nunn as alternatives. They're obviously right on that, except for Nunn. We assume this means that Lugar said no or did something to offend The One.

Hillary would be better than anyone except Nunn on this list, though Nunn would be better for Defense if BO doesn't want Gates to stay. But we think she still belongs as Majority Leader. That keeps her close, but not so close that Bill will lurk nearby.

Bill has no ticket to the Senate. But he does in an executive-branch department. He'll be the unwelcome guest at every event if Hillary runs State. He'll have to stay mostly sidelined if she's in the Senate.

Bush the Brave, SWNID the Digressive

Greg Sheridan, foreign editor for The Australian, offers a fine column praising Dubya's genuine accomplishments.

We find much to affirm in Sheridan's analysis. Right now, political opinion is about as volatile as commodities or securities. Which means it's not at a point of accurate valuation. Saying Bush is a jerk is like saying stocks are worthless. That's just how they're valued at the moment.

Among other points, Sheridan notes that Bush's persona was part of his offense:

His stubbornness, which is courage if you look at it a different way, was amplified for foreign audiences a thousand times by the Texan accent. In rejecting elite American opinion, he too often looked as though he was rejecting international opinion. In dismissing The New York Times, he seemed to dismiss Europe.

Funny, but this reminds us of how we felt about Clinton, who always seemed to us like the guy at the high school football game who wanted to talk to our girlfriend too much. Not that we actually had a girlfriend then. Not that we're still bitter about that. Uh, never mind.

OK, Clinton was like the guy who always turned in his paper late but talked the teacher into giving him full credit anyway. And he manipulated his girlfriend into writing it. And she was the one we really wanted to date. Not that we're still bitter. Uh, never mind again.

Back to the point:

We think a guy who crushed an international terrorist organization and overthrew two brutally totalitarian dictatorships deserves some credit, even if he mangles the language and smirks a lot. We also think that Bush was extremely correct on three massive issues where Congress wouldn't budge--immigration, Social Security and health insurance reform--as we have elaborated SWNIDishly for some three years. We expect future generations to ask why folks didn't do what Bush said.

By the way, we are ready to bet $1 with the first willing gambler that Osama Bin Laden will either be dead of natural causes or still at large in 2012 and again in 2016.

Memo to the President-Elect: Things That There's No Such Thing As

Our President-Elect promised his daughters a dog if he won the election and moved the family to Washington. After the election, he said the dog would have to be "hypoallergenic," as daughter Malia is allergic to dogs.

Well, doctors say there's no such thing, per an AP story today. Some dogs don't shed much, but all dogs provoke allergic reactions in some measure in people who are allergic.

So there's the first campaign promise that is crushed by harsh realities. Too bad it was a promise to the Obama children. "Yes we can!" is now "Subject to reality check."

We invite gentle readers to suggest other things that don't exist, the non-existence of which will impede progress toward the Obamanoid Utopia.

We start with the obvious one:

Free Lunch

Will Obama Outlaw Bankruptcy?

The SWNIDish view of the coming Big Three Bailout is aptly expressed by the sagacious Holman Jenkins at WSJ. We tantalize with a quotation:

The media have been terrible in explaining how the homegrown car companies landed in their present fix, when other U.S. manufacturers (Boeing, GE, Caterpillar) manage to survive and thrive in global competition. Critics beat up Detroit for building SUVs and pickups (which earn profits) and scrimping on fuel-sippers (which don't). They call for management's head (fine -- but irrelevant).

These pre-mortems miss the point. Critics might more justifiably flay the Big Three for failing long ago to seek a showdown with the UAW to break its labor monopoly. In truth, though, politicians have repeatedly intervened to prevent the crisis that would finally settle matters.

The issue at hand is the future of the UAW, not the future of automobile manufacturing in the United States. Nonunion shops like Honda, Nissan, Toyota, BMW and Daimler (minus Chrysler) are doing fine making and selling cars in the US despite miserable sales.

Once upon a time, businesses facing economic hardship were reorgainzed by the courts in a process known as bankruptcy. Chapter 11 would give GM, Ford and Chrysler the opportunity to void their UAW contracts and compete for labor like everyone else. The Dems will instead seek to keep the courts, normally their preferred forum for political change, far from this issue to protect their Big Labor patrons.

On the side we note and interpret the convergence of two seemingly unrelated elements of all this. One is that Obama leaked to the press (via surrogates, no doubt, but doubtless from him, as he was the only person in the room with Bush) that Bush asked for support for free trade with Colombia in exchange for support for the Big Three Bailout. The other is that Caterpillar is an example of a company that has reorganized under financial difficulty, managed to keep a UAW workforce, and is very profitable in manufacturing. As it happens, Caterpillar is one of the companies that would stand to profit most from free trade with Colombia, along with its UAW workforce.

Will Obama, Pelosi and the UAW do the reasonable thing in all this? The leak suggests not.

Our President-Elect appears to be set to "rule" in precisely the way that his thin but consistent legislative record suggests.

P. J. on the Present Mess

It's not coherent or substantive, but it is a lot of fun. P. J. O'Rourke has sobered up to write a rant on the multiple crises of the moment. Hat tip to Son of SWNID for directing our attention to it.

We remind gentle readers inclined to rant in response that, among other things, the esteemed Mr. O'Rourke still stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that any part of the conservative coalition except the libertarian part is legitimately "conservative." Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, George Will and SWNID disagree.

But not as much as we disagree with the ascendant Ruling Party of our shaky Republic.

Expectations, Arrogance, Messianism and All That

Close on the heels of the election results, an anonymous commenter on this blog claimed that the Republic would now be governed rather than ruled.

Yesterday, Valerie Jarrett, an old Obama friend and now co-chair of his transition team, used "rule" as the verb to refer to Obama's upcoming actions as POTUS.

We hope that such minor embarrassments will help the triumphant mute their smug disparagement of the outgoing administration's smugness.

Another Unintended Consequence of the Election

We can't resist:



Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Coming soon: Obama Win Causes Religious Right to Obsess over Coming Obama-Induced Crises, Onset of Tribulation

Whither the Big Three? And the Prius?

As US automakers seek $50 billion from Uncle Sugar and, because two of them are also European auto makers, a similar pile of Euros from the EU, we consider why they're in a pickle when everyone's car sales are down, including the Japanese, Korean and European manufacturers who don't seem to need a handout.

Many journalists will parrot the party line that Japanese and other manufacturers got ahead of their US competition in the manufacture of fuel-efficient cars. We think the problem lies elsewhere.

First, there's the matter of what the Big Three owe present, future and former employees thanks to two generations of labor contracts negotiated with the UAW. They're on the hook for pensions and health insurance for retirees, aside from current employees' wages and benefits. Labor costs for the Big Three are substantially higher than for Japanese, Korean and European manufacturers who operate stateside.

Second, there's the matter of CAFE standards. These require that the Big Three divide their entire "fleet" of manufactured cars into two groups, domestic and foreign. Their domestic fleet must then meet certain overall standards for fuel efficiency. With their high domestic labor costs, the Big Three can only make money on big, expensive cars if they're made in the US. But they have to make and sell small, cheap cars at a loss to be allowed to sell the ones that are profitable and meet CAFE standards. Worse, if they import cheap, efficient cars from their overseas plants, they don't count against CAFE standards for the domestic fleet. That last bit, by the way, was the demand of the UAW: it has no effect whatsoever on actual, overall fuel efficiency.

We think that the Big Three have made some dumb business decisions along the way also. They have that in common with other businesses. Ford, for instance, built unreliable cars and then muddled their marketing on top of it. But one can easily misunderestimate the degree to which the government from which the Big Three now seek a bailout is responsible for the mess that they're in.

But given the exchange of political parties just completed over the last two years, we expect that whatever proceeds to become an expensive compounding of existing problems. CAFE will get more strict. Discussion will focus on saving "well-paying" jobs, which is to say jobs on terms acceptable to the UAW, whether economically viable or not. CAFE will get stricter. All this will be rhetorically supported with talk about the failure of the Republicans to regulate properly, the Golden Age of American Manufacturing when everyone who worked belonged to an AFL-CIO affiliated union plus the Teamsters and the gap between rich and poor was narrower, and how the executives and their massive salaries and bonuses are the true bad guys.

The question is how long folks will believe that story.

There may be another tale developing that will be revealing. More or less simultaneously, the tax credit for buying a Toyota Prius and other Toyota and Lexus hybrids has run out. It will soon run out on Honda's hybrid too. Meanwhile, gasoline is below $2. The economic incentive for buying such vehicles has officially evaporated and will perhaps leave both manufacturers with a lot of unwanted cars to sell and a lot of manufacturing capacity that needs to be retooled. Such things happen in freer markets. But in more regulated markets, they happen with greater frequency and severity.

Gore: Obama Victory Proves Internet (My Invention) to Be True Messiah

Is Obama the Messiah?

No, says prophet Al Gore. The Internet is.

Gore says that the Obama victory shows that people can work together on the Internet to make "a collectively intelligent decision." And so the next project for collective intelligence is to address climate change, of course.

Um, has anyone told Mr. Gore what the predominant uses of the Internet are? Consider the following list and ask whether these are indications of collective intelligence:

• celebrity gossip
• sports fantasy leagues
• social networking
• porn
• gambling
• blogs like this one

We maintain that the Internet is essentially a new version of AM radio: massive amounts of advertising, some mindless entertainment, and lots of static.

Still, we want to take up Gore's challenge. So here's our contribution to the collectively intelligent decision on climate change.

What should we do about climate change? Adapt!

Oxford Lists Top 10 Irritating Phrases.

At the end of the day, I personally should of absolutely acknowledged that at this moment in time, lots of people, with all due respect, use irritating phrases 24/7, while those who don't are fairly unique. It's not rocket science after all.

Background here.

Crouch on Hopefulness

Maybe the best essay we've seen so far on being a Christian in a fiscal crises is Andy Crouch's "Why I Am Hopeful."

A quotation:

And this is why I can't share the sense of satisfaction I sense in some of my "prophetic" friends. I believe the first step in culture making is not creating (let alone condemning, critiquing, or consuming) but cultivating: keeping what is already good in culture, good. American Christians, on the right and the left, have been painfully bad at cultivating. We want to jump to "transformation" and "impact" (words generally used on the right) or to "resistance" and "revolution" (favored words of the left). We often seem incapable of seeing ourselves first as gardeners: people whose first cultural calling is to keep good what is, by the common grace of God, already good. A gardener does not pull out weeds because she hates weeds; she pulls out weeds because she loves the garden, and because (hopefully) there are more vegetables or flowers in it than weeds. This kind of love of the garden—loving our broken, beautiful cultures for what they are at their best—is the precondition, I am coming to believe, for any serious cultural creativity or influence. When weeds infest the garden, the gardener does not take the opportunity to decry the corruption of the garden as a whole. She gets patiently, discerningly, to work keeping the garden good.

But that's not even the heart of the thing. We urge reading the whole essay.

A Barometer for the New Administration

Wal-Mart, not surprisingly, is doing well. Cautious shoppers are looking for bargains. Wal-Mart does well in moderately bad times.

Wal-Mart also does well in good times, as the less well off do better and shop more or move up from Family Dollar.

Meanwhile, the President-Elect and his Congressional Majority (a name for a rock band?) are on record as supporting card check, i.e. allowing unions to organize workplaces with an open petition of employees as opposed to a secret ballot.

If card check passes, Wal-Mart will be the first target for organized labor, and its biggest prize.

If a year from now Wal-Mart is not doing so well, it will mean one of two things: either the economy is so totally in the tank that no one is buying anything or Wal-Mart's workforce has been organized via card check. In the latter case, the economy will be headed to the tank.

We suggest monitoring Wal-Mart's stock price as a means of assessing the economy's prospects and the new administration's success. It closed today at $13.34, up $0.70 or 5.5%, on a day when the market as a whole took another cold bath.

SWNID Predicts: This Will Not Work

MGM has announced that the Farrelly brothers have contracted to make a Three Stooges movie, with yet-to-be-named A-list actors playing the diminutive slapstickers.

We venture the prediction that this movie will not work.

The true, classic Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard) perfected their routines with countless hours of live performance in vaudeville. So in Hollywood studios given miserable scripts and lousy direction, they nevertheless created timeless comedy classics, at least as far as the world's 12-year-old boys are concerned.

No amount of talented writing, clever direction or high-tech special effects can replace the woodshedding that enabled the original Stooges to knock heads and gouge eyes with comic perfection.

We preemptively urge all gentle readers to stay away from this upcoming abomination.

Transition Day One: What Kind of Democrat Will Rule?

One day into the presidential transition, we see two developments that disquiet us.

One is the announcement of Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills [no kidding!]) that he wants to give up his chair of the House Governmental Oversight Committee (a.k.a. the Democrats' show-trial committee) to challenge John Dingell (D-Detroit [again, no kidding: can one imagine a more class-oriented political battle?]) for the chair of the House Energy Committee. Waxman's move is easy to interpret. With the Democrats in control of the government, there will be no show trials (that this obviates the threat of hearings about Bush administration misdeeds is at least mild comfort to a Republic that would like to look forward instead of backward), so Waxman wants another platform. His move to Energy means that he intends to make oil company profits and carbon emissions the subject of his media events for the foreseeable future. If he gets his way, assume that America's energy future will consist of bicycles, rickshaws and composted sewage.

The second development, not a surprise at all, is Obama's invitation to Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff. No one represents the dark side of the present Democratic Party better than Rahm-bo. He's the shrewdest operative among the Clintonistas, a brilliant fundraiser and a ruthless enforcer. The question is whether he will be Obama's Luca Brasi or Pelosi's . . . or both.

The latter is the worst outcome, as it means that Obama will work for his party's left. He doesn't have to, of course. He financed his campaign with grassroots donations, so he can tell MoveOn where to GetOff. Whether he will remains to be seen, and Emanuel's disposition in the matter will be an ambiguous indicator until things really start to roll.

Emanuel is presently ruminating his decision. Publicly he says he will base the decision on his commitment to his family, the constituency that elected him again to Congress, and his commitment to public service. We don't doubt that he's really asking himself which route advances his own bid for power. At which end of Pennsylvania Avenue he judges the balance of power to lie will tell much about the next eight years.

The question that lies before us is whether our future is center-left or just left. So far, the signals are at best ambiguous, like Obama's entire campaign.

Whither GOP?

Thinking about the future of the defeated Republican Party makes the SWNIDish head hurt. But we're trying to do it as a public service.

First, we affirm all that is affirmed by the founder of Crunchy Conservatism, Rod Dreher. His commentary on NPR today says just about all that SWNID would say, with two exceptions.

Exception One: The GOP must also stop doing things that antagonize the growing number of voters who aren't persons of pallor. Hammering on immigration, legal or otherwise, is wrong on many counts, including informed self interest and basic human morality, in our view. But it's also killing the Rs at the ballot box. The same may be said for the kind of subtle racism that still infects Republican rhetoric forty years after Nixon invented the Southern Strategy. No more talk about "real Americans," OK?

Exception Two: Dubya has been a massive drag on the party politically for the last three years. But it's time, or it will be eventually, to recognize him not as an inept president but as a president who presided with an impressive record of successes in extremely difficult times.

We're thinking about this Future of Republicanism thing. We ruminate on expressions like "opportunity," "responsibility," "self-determination," "economic enfranchisement," "environmental realism," "efficiency," "human dignity," "global democracy," and "international vigilance" as objects of hope versus fear. Governor Jindal will need a thoughtful platform and a clear way to speak about it when he runs against President Obama in 2012.