The Democrats are now going to run the American auto industry, and they’ve got a foolproof plan to restore GM’s profits: GM should stop making so many big, high-profit vehicles and start making more small, low-profit vehicles. They’re going to lose money on each little car but make up for it on volume! You can see now why investors could never come up with such an idea. It just took a business genius like Barack Obama, with his extensive experience at making a profit in so many private industries, to make the auto industry come to its senses.

By the way, Obama, personally, bought a 4,000 pound Chrysler 300 land yacht when he got rich–his family’s safety is a high priority to him–but who’s checking?

Seriously, why does anybody think that even after GM spent years of government-mandated retooling to make small cars that it would even then be competitive with Toyota and Honda at making small, well-engineered cars? It’s not like Toyota and Honda are going to be getting worse over the intervening years. I don’t understand how that would work without slipping dumb pills to Toyota’s and Honda’s engineers. The only policy that would make sense would be a high tarriff on the car parts that are imported from Japan (transmissions?).

The fundamental problem of the incoming Obama Administration is that their thinking is based on the very 2007 assumption that the fundamental problem of scarcity was solved so now all we have to do is redistribute wealth and reorganize society in a more SWPL fashion. Instead, it turns out the Bush Boom was a Bush Bubble and we actually have much bigger problems than the conventional wisdom of 2007 assumed.

Governor Rod Blagojevich’s surname is of Serbian origin, and back in the Old Country, (or Countries) it’s spelled Blagojevic, without an h on the end. In defiance of VDARE.com’s helpful advice to to bad speller Max Blumenthal, (below) reporters around the country  have been trying to spell Blagojevich by hand, instead of using the copy and paste command, and I wasn’t totally surpised to see a headline about Governor “Blagovich”, which error is repeated several times in Google News.

Ald. Richard Mell might break silence to defend daughter Patti …
Chicago Sun-Times, United States - 6 hours ago
The first lady of Illinois was referring to alleged threats by Blagovich and a top aide to withold support for transferring Wrigley Field to the Illinois …

Bailout bill?…GOP opposition…Obama on Blagovich… | KXNet.com … KXMC, ND - 4 hours ago Rod Blagovich (blah-GOY’-uh-vich) is back at work, a day after being arrested on corruption charges. He’s accused of scheming to enrich himself by selling …

The Associated Press

Illinois gov. returns to work a day after arrest The Associated Press - 6 hours ago Rod Blagovich returned to work on Wednesday, a day after he was arrested and accused of scheming to enrich himself by selling President-elect Barack Obama’s …

Based on my limited knowledge of Balkan pronunciation, KXMC North Dakota is right in saying that it’s pronounced “blah-GOY’-uh-vich.” If he would just go away, we and the North Dakotans could stop worrying about it.

A sure indication that we are making progress in the War against Christmas is Max Blumenthal’s attack on VDARE.com’s role in first drawing attention to the issue. [See the slightly altered version at The Daily Beast, and the original, preserved and annotated, on VDARE.com. ] Blumenthal even attacks me, claiming that “Brimelow’s writers [including me] dared to name the true anti-Christian Grinch: Jews.” Unfortunately for Blumenthal, his one small paragraph referring to me is filled with errors. The piece of mine he cites repeatedly refers to “multiculturalists,” not Jews, as waging War against Christmas. He claims I was “[t]he winner of Brimelow’s 2001 War on Christmas competition,” which was actually won by Fred Fries. Blumenthal states I termed Hanukkah a “faux-holiday,” while I actually wrote that “Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and all the rest are presented as faux-Christmases.” (Blumenthal has apparently now corrected this error, without ever acknowledging that he made it or that I referred to other holidays besides Hanukkah as “faux-Christmases”).[VDARE.com Note: Mr. Blumenthal still hasn't corrected the two misspelled names, Ramesh Ponnuru's and Burt Prelutsky's, in spite of the fact that we helpfully pointed them out last night. Helpful hint to Mr. Blumenthal--if you're not a naturally good speller, do what columnists all over the country are doing with Governor Blagojevich's name--use the copy and paste function.]

Blumenthal asserts that I called Hanukkah the “Jewish Kwanzaa,” neglecting to mention that I was quoting Frederic Schwarz, who described Hanukkah as the “Jewish Kwanzaa” in an article in the December 2000 issue of American Heritage magazine in which he also discussed Hanukkah’s theological insignificance and wrote that its current incarnation is “an invented cultural celebration.” Blumenthal claims that I “insisted that those behind the assault on Christmas ‘evidently prefer’ Hanukkah.” What I actually wrote was that “The malice of the multiculturalists is revealed in the way they present the alternative holidays they so evidently prefer,” with those “alternative holidays” being “Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and all the rest” of the holidays mentioned earlier in the article—“Bodhi Day, Diwali, Ramadan, the winter solstice.” So much for Blumenthal’s reading skills.

Blumenthal also ignores the fact that I have expressly written that those waging War against Christmas are composed of all faiths and of none. In the piece I wrote for the American Conservative during Christmas 2003, I wrote, “The transformation of Christmas to ‘holiday’ and the attendant impoverishment of our culture was brought about to accommodate not the small minority of Americans who do not celebrate Christmas but the far smaller minority—comprising those of all faiths and of none—who resent the overwhelming majority who do celebrate Christmas. In my experience, most non-Christians do not resent Christmas and generally enjoy some aspects of its celebration.”

Despite Blumenthal’s feigned outrage, it is clear that the public elevation of holidays in temporal proximity to Christmas is intended to downgrade the celebration of Christmas. Indeed, the London Daily Mail reported on November 1, 2007 that a leading Labour think tank was advocating that Christmas be “downgraded” as part of an “urgent and upfront campaign” to promote a “multicultural understanding of Britishness.” [Christmas should be 'downgraded' to help race relations says Labour think tank, By James Chapman] The way this was to be accomplished was by promoting other holidays at the expense of Christmas, as I noted in my 2007 War against Christmas piece for VDARE.com.

Colby Cosh points to an AFP story Breitbart.com that says we’re eligible for a Pulitzer Prize, political considerations aside: Pulitzer Prizes to allow online-only publications.

As early as 1999 they would review online content as eligible, but only if they came from sites like National Review Online, or nytimes.com, which were associated with money-losing treezines. (The New York Times used to make a profit–National Review has always lost money, and requires much more in the way of funding than we ever ask for.) But now web-only zines like VDARE.com will be eligible. I don’t expect to win anytime soon, but it will provide an answer to anyone who is foolish enough to think that we’re not really journalists–“You might want to check that with the Pulitzer Committee!”

Everybody knows by now that one big link between the President-Elect and the now-arrested Governor of Illinois is Tony Rezko. What a lot of people still don’t know about is that Rezko, who is a white Christian immigrant from Aleppo, Syria, has been intimately tied to the Black Muslims for a quarter of a century. Here’s part of my VDARE.com column from 9/1/08, “Obama’s Kind of Town, Chicago Is:”

Jabir’s suit claims that Tony embezzled from him his Kenwood mansion, which is located not far from Barack’s Kenwood mansion, the 2005 purchase of which Tony apparently subsidized.

Strikingly, the Nation of Islam in particular and Chicago black politics in general were Rezko’s launching pad for his decades-long takeover of quite a bit of the government of the State of Illinois.

James L. Merriner wrote in Chicago magazine in November 2007:

“When Harold Washington was running for mayor of Chicago in 1983, Rezko held a fundraiser after Jabir Herbert Muhammad, who was Muhammad Ali’s business manager, urged him to get involved in the campaign. Subsequently, Rezko also joined Ali’s entourage, traveling the world with him for five years. Rezko apparently took little interest in boxing—he says he and Ali did watch a few matches together—but he relished putting together business and endorsement deals for the champ.”
[Mr. Inside Out]

I bet he did. A rich punchdrunk pugilist and Tony Rezko—what could possibly go wrong? In the 1990s, Ali’s latest wife forced out both Jabir and Tony.

Strange as it seems, the relationship between Rezko and the Black Muslims is not unique. Chicago-based columnist Ray Hanania of the Arab Writers Group explained:

“Like many Arab Americans, Rezko had close ties to the Nation of Islam, which sympathized with the Palestinian and Arab causes. He became close to the inspiring icons like Muhammad Ali and even young Obama, a little-known state legislator who later rose to stardom.”

Rezko is representative of a recent trend in Chicago politics: the rise of Arab wheeler-dealers as corruption catalysts.

(more…)

Headline of the Day from Slate:

Widespread Corruption Charges Shock Illinois

I am increasingly impressed by the professionalism of the news service of the much-reviled British National Party. True to the fact-based, empirical English tradition, they actually put it on the home page of their website! Can you imagine an American party having the confidence to do that?

Greece Suffers under Wave of Asylum Seeker-Caused Violence, BNP News, December 7, 2008 
asserts that the media

[H]ave excelled themselves once again by simply ignoring the real cause of the violent riots currently sweeping Greece…the spark which led to the current unrest was caused by asylum seekers rioting after being told that no more applications were being processed that week.

The story then links to a Press Association story Asylum seekers riot in Athens

Hundreds of migrants waiting to submit asylum applications rioted in central Athens, setting fire to rubbish bins and attacking passing cars.

and a Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News.com: Asylum-seekers riot in Athens after a man falls into a canal

Protesters said the riot began when one man fell into a nearby canal after authorities told the crowd that no more applications could be submitted Saturday.

and says

The BBC itself, while refusing to link the current unrest to the asylum seekers, carries a video report dealing with Pakistani asylum seeker unrest in Athens here.

PC - I strongly recommend this video

Now Greece is a combustible society, and is no doubt capable of supplying home-grown reinforcements to a good riot. But if the immigrants had not been there, would it have happened?

It remains extremely difficult to determine the ethnicity of the rioters from the plethora of MSM photographs. Is this accidental?

Hat tip BNP News, especially for the links, which render SPLC-type smear attacks on their story impotent.

Coming soon to a location near you…

Washington Post op-ed columnist Ruth Marcus gushes in “A Vote for Senator Caroline:”

On the question of Caroline Kennedy for Senate, my head says no, on balance. My heart says yes! Yes! Right now, as you might guess from the hedging on the former and the exclamation points on the latter, my heart is winning. …

There are any number of intriguing subplots at work here. Her uncle’s illness, and the “dream will never die” emotion of having Caroline in place to carry on his work. The don’t-mess-with-my-family payback dynamic of putting in for the job to shove aside Andrew Cuomo, her cousin Kerry’s former husband.

Imagine, by the way, how Hillary Clinton must be feeling. After all that work, after all those years, she not only lost the presidential nomination to Barack Obama, she now may be yielding her Senate seat to a woman who emerged from the political shadows to give Obama the benediction of the Kennedy legacy.

What really draws me to the notion of Caroline as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. Like many women my age — I’m a few months younger than she — Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. The stoic little girl holding her mother’s hand at her father’s funeral. The sheltered girl, whisked away from a still-grieving country by a mother trying to shield her from prying eyes.

In this fairy tale, Caroline is our tragic national princess. She is not locked away in a tower but chooses, for the most part, to closet herself there. Her mother dies, too young. Her impossibly handsome brother crashes his plane, killing himself, his wife and his sister-in-law. She is the last survivor of her immediate family; she reveals herself only in the measured doses of a person who has always been, will always be, in the public eye.

Then, deciding that Obama is the first candidate with the inspirational appeal of her father, she chooses to abandon her previous, above-it-all detachment from the hurly-burly of politics.

I know it’s an emotional — dare I say “girly”? — reaction. But what a fitting coda to this modern fairy tale to have the little princess grow up to be a senator.

Dynasticism is one of the dominant emotions in 21st Century American politics. Barack Obama just found a more sophisticated way to position himself as a rightful dynastic heir than all the Bushes, Clintons, and Kennedys.

A Washington Post article by Zachary A. Goldfarb on Rep. Henry Waxman’s hearings today on Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac going bust mentions the Hispanic connection in the mortgage meltdown:

Internal Freddie Mac documents show that senior executives at the company were warned years ago that they were offering mortgages that could pose dangers to the firm, hurt borrowers and generate more risky loans throughout the industry.

At Fannie Mae, top executives were told it was necessary to develop “underground” efforts to buy subprime mortgages because of competitive pressures, although there were growing risks and borrowers often didn’t understand the terms of the loans, documents show.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which has the documents, is holding a hearing now to discuss Fannie and Freddie’s downfall. The companies were seized by the government three months ago after nearly collapsing in the wake of billions of dollars of losses on mortgages.

In a memo to former Freddie chief executive Richard Syron and other top executives, former Freddie chief enterprise risk officer David Andrukonis wrote that the company was buying mortgages that appear “to target borrowers who would have trouble qualifying for a mortgage if their financial position were adequately disclosed.”

Andrukonis warned that these mortgages could be particularly harmful for Hispanic borrowers, and they could lead to loans being made to people who would be unlikely to pay them off. “The potential for the perception and the reality of predatory lending with this product is great,” Andrukonis wrote.

The documents, which were released by the committee today, show that Fannie and Freddie, two linchpins of the nation’s mortgage market, continued to push into new, risky markets despite internal debate over whether the efforts were prudent.

Fannie and Freddie declined to comment yesterday, as did Andrukonis. In testimony today before the House oversight committee, Syron acknowledged he was warned about risky loans but said that executives thought they had made the right decision, balancing profit motives, public policy goals and safety concerns.

Syron sponsored the disastrous 1993 Boston Fed “study” claiming discrimination against minorities that served as justification for a whole series of steps to funnel more mortgage dollars to minorities. He was rewarded for this by being appointed head of Freddie Mac, where he received $38 million in compensation.

Fannie and Freddie’s distress has its roots in the new, risky mortgages the companies bought and guaranteed in increasing numbers, largely from 2004 through 2007. These new products included home loans made to people with blemished credit histories, called subprime loans, and mortgages made without verification of income, assets or employment, often called Alt-A.

As Mudd’s and Syron’s decisions have been called into question, they have described their push into these new areas of the mortgage business as an inevitable consequence of dueling mandates to support affordable housing and maximize profit for shareholders. And they’ve said that the collapse of the housing market was unforeseeable and the primary reason behind the company’s fall.

But the documents show how top executives at both companies were told that the new subprime and Alt-A loans were dangerous both to the companies and to the borrowers they were charted by Congress to help.

At Fannie, chief credit officer Adolfo Marzol wrote to chief executive Mudd in March 2005 to warn that entering new areas of the mortgage market represented significant risks. The industry was pushing new types of loans, he wrote, including those that required little documentation and those that carried rates that would adjust in a few years.

“The combination of these risks may be difficult for subprime borrowers to understand,” Marzol wrote.

Marzol also warned that securities backed by these loans might not be as safe as they seemed. Fannie reported them as carrying the top grade given by credit-rating agencies, AAA, but Marzol cast doubt on that. “Although we invest almost exclusively in AAA rated securities, there is concern that rating agencies may not be properly assessing the risk in these securities,” he wrote.

Despite these concerns, Fannie continued to push into this new market. A business presentation in 2005 expressed concern that unless it didn’t, Fannie could be relegated to a “niche” player in the industry. Mudd later reported in a presentation that Fannie moved into this market “to maintain relevance” with big customers who wanted to do more business with Fannie, including Countrywide, Lehman Brothers, IndyMac and Washington Mutual.

The documents suggest than Fannie and Freddie knew they were playing a role in shaping the market for some types of risky mortgages. An e-mail to Mudd in September 2007 from a top deputy reported that banks were modeling their subprime mortgages to what Fannie was buying.

At Freddie, risk officer Andrukonis expressed concern about a new mortgage product called stated-income, stated-asset that the company was considering buying. The loans required borrowers to state their incomes and assets, but not prove them.

In a memo to Syron and others, Andrukonis warned that in 1990 Freddie called this product “dangerous” and stopped offering it. “I’m not convinced we aren’t leading the market into this product,” Andrukonis wrote.

Freddie offered to buy the stated-income, stated-asset loans anyway.

Andrukonis and others expressed concern about another type of mortgage Freddie was buying, where neither income nor assets were stated on the loan application. Andrukonis said these were popular with Hispanic borrowers, but the delinquency rates of 8 to 13 percent were much higher than on conventional loans. People familiar with the matter said Freddie was being pushed by advocacy groups to come up with new loan products to offer to low-income and minority borrowers.

Andrukonis acknowledged that getting out of this business could cost $50 million annually and draw criticism. “On the other hand, what better way to highlight our sense of mission than to walk away from profitable business because it hurts the borrowers we are trying to serve,” he wrote.

At times, Andrukonis grew frustrated with the response he got from Freddie leadership about his concerns as he registered worries about low-documentation loans.

… In October 2004, May ultimately recommended continuing no-income, no-asset loans, though with some changes. Through Freddie Mac, May declined to comment. Syron signed off on continuing with the loans. Bisenius, now part of new Freddie chief executive David Moffett’s inner circle, formally opposed the decision.There is some mystery surrounding Andrukonis’s ultimate role. In one document sent to Syron, he joined a group of people neither supportive of nor opposing the decision to continue no-income, no-asset loans, but registered as “neutral.”

However, a person familiar with the discussions said Andrukonis and other risk officers continued to oppose the product until the very end. Freddie executives asked him to leave the company, according to people familiar with the matter, which he did in 2005.

Mentioning the H-word in regard to mortgage defaults is evidently not good for your career. Is it any wonder so many blundered?

As a former Chicagoan, the notion of electing a Chicago politician to national office on an image of reform and general refinement always struck me as comic. The notion that Barack Obama, with the whole world to choose from, decided to become a Chicago politician always struck me as bizarre. It would be like me deciding to move to Serbia and become a politician. And keep in mind that Obama’s goal for much of his Chicago career was not some high-faluting national office. He told everybody at Harvard Law School that he was going back to Chicago to get elected Mayor of Chicago, to take the job away from Richie Daley and vindicate Harold Washington’s legacy as the first black mayor. (Becoming mayor of Chicago must have seemed to his fellow Harvard Law students as peculiar an ambition as if Obama said he was going back to Chicago to replace Mike Ditka as coach of the Bears.) But Obama wanted to be Mayor of Chicago because that job embodies “power,” and power obsesses Obama.

Obama was trying to follow Washington’s career path (state legislature, House of Representatives, mayor) when he ran for ex-Black Panther Bobby Rush’s House seat in the 2000 Democratic primary. But his rejection by black voters for not being black enough crushed his spirit and plunged him into a depression that he only got out of when he resolved in 2001 to that his future lay not in black districts but with appealing to the Stuff White People Like voting bloc.

From the NYT:

CHICAGO — Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday morning on corruption charges, including an allegation that he conspired to effectively sell President-elect Barack Obama’s seat in the United States Senate to the highest bidder.

Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat, called his sole authority to name Mr. Obama’s successor “golden,” and he sought to parlay it into a job as an ambassador or secretary of health and human services, or a high-paying position at a nonprofit or an organization connected to labor unions, prosecutors said in a 76-page affidavit by the United States Attorney’s office in the Northern District of Illinois.

He also suggested, the affidavit said, that in exchange for the Senate appointment, his wife could be placed on corporate boards where she might earn as much as $150,000 a year, and he tried to gain promises of money for his campaign fund.

If Mr. Blagojevich could not secure a deal to his liking, prosecutors said, he was willing to appoint himself.

“If I don’t get what I want and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself,” the governor said in recorded conversation, prosecutors said.

Federal authorities recorded Mr. Blagojevich speaking with advisers, fundraisers, a spokesman and a deputy governor, using listening devices placed in his office, home telephone, and a conference room at the offices of a friend, the affidavit said. In its detail, it paints a vivid picture of influence peddling and bare-knuckle politics inside the Blagojevich administration, evoking the heyday of Chicago’s political machine.

At an appearance to address climate change, Mr. Obama said he had not had any contact with Mr. Blagojevich (pronounced bluh-GOY-uh-vich) or his office, and did not know about any machinations involving the Senate seat. He said it was a “sad day” for Illinois, but declined to comment further. …

At a news conference on Tuesday, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said that Mr. Blagojevich had gone on a “political corruption crime spree,” and that his actions had “taken us to a truly new low.”

There’s been one honest politician in recent Chicago history, the Republican Peter Fitzgerald, who was elected U.S. Senator in 1998. (I never met him, but I was friends with his brother, who was the outside lawyer for the marketing research firm where I worked in Chicago.) Peter Fitzgerald chose to bring Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation) from New York to be the federal prosecutor in Chicago, where he went to work putting the last governor, Republican George Ryan, in jail for giving truck drivers licenses to bad drivers in exchange for campaign donations. One of those guys who couldn’t pass the driver’s test but got a truckdriver’s license anyway slammed into a minister’s vehicle, killing his six children. I haven’t voted for many Democrats, but I voted for Ryan’s opponent in 1998. (Patrick Fitzgerald has also won cases against Tony Rezko and Scooter Libby.) (more…)