In the 1970s, my dad bought American cars on point of principle. He thought it was right to support the North American auto industry. Eventually, however, he found that American car manufacturers were doing him no favors in return. So since the late 1970s, he has bought Peugeot, Saab, Volvo, and Acura (which is Honda). I drive a Honda Odyssey.

As consumers, we direct our money to the companies we think will give us the best products. But recently, the so-called Big Three American automakers went to Washington asking for $15 billion of your money and mine to make up for the money we have not been spending on their cars. The trouble has been not only that many Americans have been preferring the products of other companies. But even when we have been buying GM, Ford and Chrysler, we have been paying only the market price, which is considerably less than what the companies need to make a profit. So having failed in the marketplace, they asked the government to take from us what we have freely chosen not to give them.

Congress refused. But on Friday, President Bush gave them, by executive decree, over $17 billion from the Congressionally established $700 billion slush fund (TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program) designated for stabilizing the financial markets.

George Will sees not just an unwise use of public funds, but a deterioration of our constitutional system of government.

The expansion of government entails an increasingly swollen executive branch and the steady enlargement of executive discretion. This inevitably means the eclipse of Congress and attenuation of the rule of law.

Mark Steyn tells us why these car companies are failing and will continue to fail.

General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has 3 times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500. That's to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it's red.

Steyn actually takes you on a jolly ride through several aspects of America's present decline: "See the USA from your Chevrolet: An hereditary legislature, a media fawning its way into bankruptcy, its iconic coastal states driving out innovators and entrepreneurs, the arrival of the new messiah heralded only by the leaden dirge of "We Three Kings Of Ol' Detroit Are/Seeking checks we traverse afar," and Route 66 looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan."

But he ends upbeat, wishing us all "a very Hopey Changemas."

Whoever said the era of Great Canadians would die with William Shatner haven't been reading Mark Steyn.

We should be thankful for what we have in this country. Regardless of what criticism people have of President Bush's No Child Left Behind education reform (NCLB), keep in kind that in Egypt education reform means NCLD--No Child Left Dead.

Look at this story about a 23 year old teacher who beat a child to death for not doing his homework. ("Egypt Teacher Tried Over Beating," BBC News, December 20, 2008.)

Cairo's Al-Ahram has a more complete account. "The trial on manslaughter charges of Haitham Nabil Abdel-Hamid, a 23-year-old mathematics teacher at Saad Othman school in Alexandria, begins on 16 November. Abdel-Hamid is accused of causing the unlawful death of 11-year-old Islam Amr on 27 October. When Amr refused to hold out his hand to be hit with a ruler along with 15 other students who had failed to do their homework Abdel-Hamid took him outside the classroom and beat him so severely that the 11-year-old died. In his defence Abdel-Hamid says he was only trying to 'discipline the boy, not to kill him.'"

The nation is outraged, not only at the "teacher" but also at the state of public education in Egypt.

This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about a horrible incident in his classroom when he was a boy in Scotland, perhaps a few years before World War I. (For those of you in the public school system, that would be around 1912.) Do you remember the pointers that teachers had in the classroom? Perhaps they still have them. Well teachers would administer corporal punishment with those rapier weapons. WHACK across the seat of the pants or the hands. On one occasion the teacher had become so frustrated with this one ill-behaved lad that she jabbed him in the back of the ear with it. (I still recoil at the thought.) This is also called stabbing. He was taken to the hospital, and my grandfather didn't know what happened after that either to the boy or the teacher. He was just a little boy.

Of course, today we have no discipline at all, neither in the schools nor in the homes. Children take full advantage of this unilateral disarmament, and as a consequence the learning environment has given way to classroom chaos and teacher despair in many instances.

Perhaps the problem lies in the very notion of a government school system, especially one that is run increasingly from state capitals and even from the nation's capital, and especially still in a nation which, as officially administered, has abandoned every philosophical and spiritual foundation for distinguishing between right and wrong. Public schooling is an impossibility for a people with no cultural consensus, and even less so for a people philosophically opposed to the very idea of a cultural consensus.

I have not posted in a few days because I am grading exams. But the reading world must be satisfied!

So here is a lesson in political economy. With all this bailin' out by government goin' on, and with this socialistic Obama administration coming to Washington, many Americans these days could do with a primer in economic theory, and, with the economy global these days, perhaps even international economic theory.

The following is a series of old jokes, but I have adapted "Capitalism," and wrote "Socialism," "American," "American Entrepreneur" and "Peasant" myself. Perhaps it shows.

DEMOCRAT:
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
You vote people into office that put a tax on your cows, forcing you to sell one to raise money to pay the tax. The people you voted for then take the tax money, buy a cow and give it to your neighbor.
You feel righteous.
There are still only two cows.

REPUBLICAN:
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

CAPITALISM:
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
Beef prices go down.
Everyone's eating steak.

SOCIALISM:
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
Cows are nationalized as a social asset. They are the People's cows.
Everyone milks them. No one feeds them.
The cows die.
No more cows.

AMERICAN:
You have a cow.
Your neighbor has a cow.
Your neighbor manages to buy a bull and begins to prosper.
You economize on your spending, take a second job, and save for a bull of your own.
You and your neighbor form the American Cattleman's Association.

AMERICAN ENTREPRENEUR:
You have a cow.
Your neighbor has a cow.
Your neighbor manages to buy a bull and begins to prosper.
You get out of cattle and into vinyl fencing.

PEASANT:
You have a cow.
Your neighbor has a cow.
Your neighbor manages to buy a bull and begins to prosper.
You shoot your neighbor's bull.

BUREAUCRACY:
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.

FRENCH:
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch.
Life is good.

JAPANESE:
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN:
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN:
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN:
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 12 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.
You produce your 10th, 5-year plan in the last 3 months.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

What makes this funny? (If you don't think it's funny, just pretend.) A chastened spirit is the last thing you expect from a Viking. Yet Haldor, who is clearly just coming off a rampage or an outburst of Nordic wrath, is looking all sheepish and so-very-sorry. My eleventh grade teacher told us that humor is the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Think of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Airplane.

But for that reason, Haldor illustrates the gospel. That transformation, that new nature, that unnatural kindness and, on the other hand, that brokenness over the evil that lurks within and bursts forth, is what Jesus does with sinners.

Christianity, in that respect, is comedy, not tragedy. My wife, a Grove City College educated English teacher, tells me that comedies and tragedies are distinguished by how they end. Comedies end in weddings, whereas tragedies end in funerals. Consider Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing ends in a wedding; Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet end in funerals. The Bible ends with the hope and promise of a wedding. "The Spirit and the bride say, 'Come!'" Christ, the bridegroom, responds, "Yes, I am coming soon" (Revelation 22:17, 20).

I recall Patrick Downey (assoc. prof. of philosophy, St Mary's College, CA) saying something like that when I knew him at Boston College fifteen years ago. You will find something of interest along those lines in his book, Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition (Lexington, 2001).

Back to humor--cartoon humor in particular--if you are interested in this subject, you need to read The Naked Cartoonist by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker. He knows what's funny, and he explains why what works works and why what doesn't doesn't. On pp. 21-22 his advice is "just a little more inking--and a lot more thinking." He shows the magic of layering an idea over what otherwise is an ordinary picture, perhaps just by a caption. I always found that this is what separated Bizzaro from The Far Side (aside from off-putting pointy characters versus attractive round ones).

You can read this 2006 HuffPost interview with him.

For example, "If you're watching America's Funniest Home Videos you never say, "I don't get it." You're not saying, "Ok, a guy fell off a chair. Can someone explain that to me again?" But if you're looking at a Danny Shanahan cartoon in which there's two praying mantises -one male and one female and the male is missing his head and the female is saying "You slept with her, didn't you?" There's something to piece together. There's a slight delay where these different sort of competing ideas come together - mesh and produce laughter."

It is not only homosexuals and Sesame Street who are trying to redefine the family out of existence, and along with it civilization itself. Ordinary moms and dads--even Christian ones--are doing the same thing. When moms and dads, husbands and wives, become merely "parents" and "spouses," indistinguishable bread-winners with careers and all the time constraints and pressures that go with careers, then children need to be raised by day-care workers and school teachers as well as by televisions and video games. If you change the family, you change the civilization. If you destroy the family, you will destroy civilization.

The role of the mother qua mother is indispensable. Children need her wise, minutely attentive, and loving attention to the thousands matters of protection, instruction, and discipline that come up in the course of every day from waking to sleeping. No one else can provide this. Many children survive childhood without it. But it is surviving, not thriving. Civilization depends on a critical mass of people thriving.

Anita Renfroe's "Mom Song," set to the tune of the William Tell Overture, captures some of what's involved in the mother's task.


The Mom Song from Northland Video on Vimeo.

Evangelical Christians need to develop a political philosophy that begins with the family and extends to the highest authorities.

(Go here to see the original with Renfroe herself performing and with a better ending. You can also see the words written out.)

Watch here as an Iraqi reporter surprises President Bush by throwing both his shoes at him at a press conference during his "Goodbye, it's been great" final visit to Iraq. After almost eight years in office, an American President becomes good at ducking, as you will see.



The shoe toss is puzzling to Americans primarily because it is so impractical. How can you make a getaway without your shoes? Even if you expect to get hauled off, why add the indignity of leaving in your stocking feet? And as much as you dislike the President, is getting a whack at him really worth a pair of Florsheims? Perhaps Payless reduces the cost of this stunt.

So what is it with the shoes? We saw the same thing when Saddam fell from power. People would take off a shoe and hit Saddam's face on a poster with it. It is symbolic of having the person under your foot in conquest. It's a disgrace. You see this expressed in the Bible. The Apostle Paul says of Jesus, "he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet" (I Cor. 15:25, alluding to Psalm 110:1). When John says he is not worthy to untie the Lord's sandals, which would involve lowering himself to the level of Jesus' feet, he is abasing himself. It is quite a statement. Then to top it all off, when Jesus takes the role of a household slave and lowers himself to bath the disciples' feet, it is an infinitely greater humiliation because, as the Lord of glory, he has further to descend.

What if coffee shops were like churches? Or rather, what if churches were even more like coffee shops than they are already?



It appears that this video is making fun of the contemporary megachurch, not because it has been commercialized, but because it has been insufficiently commercialized. Do you think I have that right?

They seem to be saying, "Look at the cheap signs and banners and community bulletin board. See how they try welcoming those two into a community, when the hapless couple only wants some coffee. How ridiculous it all is. Ha, ha, ha. We laugh at them. But here's the answer: we should treat Christ even more like a commodity, responding uncritically to people's "consumer preferences," and then the church will see more customers, and even return customers! Then money! Power! Prestige! Entertainers won't laugh at us when we're trying to be serious. The church will succeed!

Were the makers of this video just having some laughs? Highly unlikely. It's satire. It's designed to change attitudes about how the church does its work of worship, mutual love, and evangelism. It's made by "BeyondRelevance.com (what does that mean?), for a culturally strategic church." So it appears to be concerned about strategy for the church in our culture.

Ask yourself: Did God send his Son to suffer, die, and rise again...for this?

As I watched David Niven and friends puffing away on their cigs last night on The Pink Panther, I was reminded how common it was to smoke not so long ago. But smoking has largely gone the way of haberdashery. Well, good riddance...even though you wouldn't know it in New York City. But whereas a fine hat is glorifying to God in the beauty of its style, cigarette smoking is a violation of the sixth commandment (look it up; Exodus 20:1-17).

That aside, I am unaware of anything unwholesome in the enjoyment of a pipe or cigar...unless of course your wife objects to the smell.

Consider this pious meditation on smoking by Ralph Erskine (Scottish Presbyterian minister, 1685-1752).


Part One: The Law

THIS Indian weed now wither'd quite,
Tho' green at noon, cut down at night,
Shows thy decay;
All flesh is hay.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

The pipe, so lily-like and weak,
Does thus thy mortal state bespeak
Thou art ev'n such,
Gone with a touch.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

And when the smoke ascends on high,
Then thou behold'st the vanity
Of worldy stuff,
Gone with a puff.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

And when the pipe grows foul within,
Think on thy soul defil'd with sin;
For then the fire,
It does require.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

And seest the ashes cast away;
Then to thyself thou mayest say,
That to the dust
Return thou must.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

Part Two: The Gospel

WAS this small plant for thee cut down!
So was the Plant of great renown;
Which mercy sends
For nobler ends.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

Doth juice medicinal proceed
From such a naughty foreign weed?
Then what's the power
Of Jesse's flower?
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

The promise, like the pipe, inlays,
And by the mouth of faith conveys
What virtue flows
From Sharon's rose.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

In vain th' unlighted pipe you blow;
Your pains in outward means are so,
Till heav'nly fire
The heart inspire.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

The smoke, like burning incense, tow'rs;
So should a praying heart of yours,
With ardent cries,
Surmount the skies.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

Of course, Erskine is writing about pipe tobacco. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the cigar, and the cigarette is largely a twentieth century craze.

SmokingLungs.com gives us this brief history of the cigarette.

In the nineteenth century, tobacco was smoked by gentlemen only in the form of cigars. Cigarettes, which were basically the sweepings off the floor of the cigar factory, were only smoked by the very poor.

As machines to mass produce cigarettes came into the fore in the 1880s, smoking cigarettes became more common but the number of cigarettes smoked was still, relatively small. During World War I tobacco companies gave away free cigarettes to millions of soldiers, and it was only after the war that large numbers of Americans smoked cigarettes.

Since there is a time lag of approximately 20 to 30 years between the onset of smoking and the development of lung cancer, the damage done was not immediately apparent. Doctors were surprised to see a sudden epidemic of lung cancer cases in the 1930s. They quickly discovered the association between smoking and lung cancer. Large statistical studies in England and the United States in the 1950s (Doll and Hill, Cutler) conclusively proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that cigarette smoking markedly increased the chances of developing lung cancer.

By the 1970s, lung cancer had gone from one of the rarest of cancers to the number one killer cancer in the Western world.

Thomas Addison, M.D., shares this little gem of information. In 1900, "Smoking is primarily a male habit and most smokers choose cigars. Smoking cigarettes is considered pedestrian and unmanly." World War I was the turning point for cigarette popularity, however.

During World War I cigarettes become the smoke of choice as pipes and cigars prove unmanageable at the front. Between 1910 and 1919 cigarette production increases by 633% from under 10 billion/year to nearly 70 billion/year, and cigarette smoking begins to become fixed among American men. The American Red Cross and the Young Men's Christian Association, previously opposed to the propagation of cigarettes, actively supply them to the troops overseas.

Here is a bibliography on the history of cigarette smoking.

There is no rational defense for cigarette smoking. It is a form of slow suicide. It enslaves your will, squanders your money, poisons your neighbors, and fouls the air. It is a sinful misuse of God's creation and a wreckless disregard for the value of the few precious years he has given you.

Because no one in America reports on what is happening in Canadian government (perhaps because it is not wise to know much about our number one trading partner, the vast nation immediately to our north), I take up the responsibility myself. This account comes from a friend in Ottawa (look it up on a map).

At first, it seemed to me that what the opposition was doing was perfectly democratic. No one has a parliamentary majority, and as long as the province of Quebec keeps electing MPs from the separatist Bloc Quebecois, it is unlikely anyone ever will. So whoever can form a majority coalition runs the government. If the Grits (Liberals) can duct tape something together, they are entitled to do that.

But this Canadian correspondent (whose identity I am concealing so as not to expose him or her to charges of thoughtcrime) explains how it is not that simple.


I don't know how much news you have had of what has transpired in Canada. It would appear that we have a reprieve for a few weeks and perhaps common sense will yet prevail, by the Lord's grace.

We had a general election in mid-October, the results of which were 143 Conservatives, 76 Liberals, 37 New Democrats, 50 Bloc Quebecois, and 2 independents elected to a 308-seat House of Commons. The previous results in 2006 were 124 Conservatives, 103 Liberals, 29 NDP, 51 Bloc Quebecois, and 1 independent. Clearly the results showed an increase in support for the Conservatives, a decrease in support for the Liberals (who received the lowest percentage of the popular vote ever accorded the Liberal party since Confederation, at just over 26 percent), and unchanged numbers for the Bloc.

The Conservative government, under Stephen Harper, won by all accounts an increased mandate. The Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, announced his resignation within a week of the results, indicating that he would stay on until a leadership convention (previously scheduled as a leadership review, slated for May, 2009) were held. The new government was sworn in and had been back at work in Parliament only a week or so when an interim economic statement was tabled by the Finance Minister, which among other things proposed elimination of the subsidy (of $1.95 per vote received) to the political parties for funding. This was a measure introduced by former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien when he abolished corporate funding for political parties and limited individual contributions to $1,000. The results of Mr. Chretien's reform have been dramatic: the Conservative Party has done well, because it has a relatively large grass-roots network of supporters who give small donations. The Liberals and NDP have been heavily in debt because they lack the grassroots network to make up the formerly large corporate or union contributions. The Bloc Quebecois have been heavily dependent on the government's funding.

The backlash against this relatively minor (30 million dollars in total) cut to spending was immediate and galvanised the opposition parties to announce the formulation of a coalition (apparently previous conceived) aimed at defeating the government and forming a new coalition government with a signed "agreement" between the Liberals and the NDP to work as a coalition until June, 2011, terms to include installing none other than Stephane Dion as PM (until May 2, 2009 when he pledges to step down in favour of a yet-to-be-elected Liberal leader) with the NDP to have six of 24 cabinet seats, and a side-bar signed agreement with the Bloc Quebecois to support the coalition until June, 2010. Notice that the combined seats for the two parties in the coalition are 113 (76 Liberals and 37 NDP), some 30 fewer than the Conservatives. Further, note that it is only with the support of the Bloc Quebecois (a party whose raison d'etre is to work to enable Quebec to secede from Canada) that such coalition would be able to govern. All of this is under the guise of providing economic leadership for the country in troubled times (understood to mean opening the gates of government spending, deficit spending, to try to stave off or buy the way out of a recession). This is all in the face of an increased mandate given to the first economist to be elected as Prime Minister and whose approach has been to seek to maintain balanced budgets while reducing taxes to stimulate the economy, and with the result that of the major industrial nations Canada ranks first in fiscal health.

Now we are not without our problems, but it is telling that the latest poll says 60 percent of the population agrees with the planned elimination of the subsidy for political parties, even though the Prime Minister announced he would withdraw this proposal in the face of the opposition's opposition.

The non-confidence vote proposed was worded in such a way as to state categorically that the House lacks confidence in the government and that a new government-in-waiting would command the confidence of the House. The motion was due for debate and vote on December 8th. Yesterday, the Governor General acceded to the request of the Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament until late January, (thus avoiding the vote), and the Prime Minister has invited the opposition parties to submit suggestions for consideration by the government in the formulation of the 2009 fiscal budget, due to be tabled the day after Parliament resumes.

Demonstrations are planned on both sides for various cities across the land, several for tomorrow. What comes of this is known only to the Lord. The waste of time and energy which otherwise could and should have been devoted to careful governance and consideration of prudent measures in the face of worldwide economic challenges is colossal and inexcusable.

Where one is astonished and where the notion of a coup surfaces is in the grab for power by a coalition which is comprised of two parties who together saw their total number of seats drop from 132 (103 Liberals and 29 NDP) to 113 (76 Liberals and 37 NDP) and who have the audacity to propose a coalition headed by a leader who led his party through an election which resulted in the lowest-ever support for that party in the history of the country, who has promised to step down in less than six months, and yet who wants to commit the government of the country to a yet-to-be-elected leader, beholden to the support of the party devoted to the break-up of the country throughout the term of the proposed "government". The sane and sanctified mind has difficulty taking this all in and more difficulty in finding words to express what it thinks of such foolishness.

Wow. Meacham has a fit. And in public.

In this week's Editor's Desk in Newsweek, Jon Meacham takes Evangelical Christians out to the woodshed to lick some sense into them. Actually is more like a stern, disapproving frown that is supposed to shame Evangelicals into adopting a liberal view of the Bible if they want to have any hope joining the serious conversation among the most influential people on public affairs.

No matter what one thinks about gay rights – for, against or somewhere in between – this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt – it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

In his spluttering rage, he mentions "millennia of critical attention," even though the "critical" approach to the Bible goes back only as far as Spinoza in the seventeeth century, or perhaps back to Hobbes. That's only centuries, not millennia, and it only really got going a hundred and fifty years ago.

And he seems to be saying that any appeal to the Bible for an authoritative word from God is fundamentalism, and thus "the worst kind of fundamentalism."

But surely I have taken his words out of context. Perhaps he just doing a Harry Emerson Fosdick impersonation for the entertainment of his readers, giving us a parody of "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"

No. He's serious.

What is truly amazing is that despite editorials like this from no less than Newsweek magazine, the kingdom of God advances.

For intellectually serious defenses of the Bible as the Word of God, and thus as the ultimate authority on any matter it intends to address, see...

B. B. Warfield, The Inspirsation and Authority of the Bible (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948);

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Eerdmans, 1923);

J. I. Packer, "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God (Eerdmans, 1958).

Ask any American this question. Would the company that employs you be a better company, make a better product, be more innovative, if it were run by the government?

This is again in reference to the WSJ report, "US Could Take Stakes in Big Three": "Congress and the White House inched toward a financial rescue of the Big Three auto makers, negotiating legislation that would give the U.S. government a substantial ownership stake in the industry and a central role in its restructuring."

My closest personal experience with a government run company is the Long Island Rail Road. I like them. The conductors are friendly and the trains run more or less on time. They are yet another reason that I am glad I don't live in New Jersey. But the LIRR runs at a huge loss and the trains travel at half the speed they did forty years ago. That is not what made America great.

How is it that these three companies are faring so poorly in the auto market, whereas Toyota, Honda, Hyundai etc. are all turning profits selling American built cars? Does Congress have any clue? If they did understand, would they have the political will to do what is necessary to free these companies to make a profit? Given their illicit relationship with the unions (it is illicit for Congress, a publicly interested body, to be controlled by unions which are organized to promote narrowly private interests) and their fixation with regulation, especially environmental regulation, it seems highly unlikely.

If the federal government takes control of the banks, the auto industry and the health care system, why should it not also proceed to all the "commanding heights" of the economy? Why should these huge economic entities that control the lives of so many ordinary Americans not come under social control for the benefit of the people instead of the few? As the first post-war British prime minister put it, this would be "the embodiment of our socialist principle of placing the welfare of the nation before any section" or narrow interest. He advocated "a mixed economy developing toward socialism.... The doctrines of abundance, of full employment, and of social security require the transfer to public ownership of certain major economic forces and the planned control in the public interest of many other economic activities."

Perhaps Barack Obama will be remembered as the American Clement Atlee.

If so, we will have to suffer through decades of economic stagnation and self-inflicted misery until we learn our lesson and, in response to our tearful prayers, the Lord mercifully raises up an American Margaret Thatcher to remedy the whole mess.

From the WSJ this morning, under the headline "US Could Take Stakes in Big Three":

WASHINGTON -- Congress and the White House inched toward a financial rescue of the Big Three auto makers, negotiating legislation that would give the U.S. government a substantial ownership stake in the industry and a central role in its restructuring.

But Iowahawk was all over this story way back on November 24th, when he leaked the advertising campaign being considered for the new era of nationalization being planned by the Pelosi Democats.

It's got a "return to the golden 70's" kind of feel to it. What do you think?

-- by Dr. Harold Kildow, associate blogger at Principalities and Powers

The WSJ's Matthew Kaminski's Weekend Interview is with Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union-SEIU, a key interest group among the coalition that is the Democrat party. Union money was second only to Soros money in funding the huge national rush to take government back for the people. One should ignore what the titular heads of the party officially say: it is mostly legerdemain, meant to placate and distract the public, the way a magician misdirects attention in order to pull off a trick, or the way a parent distracts a fussy little one. It is a rarity, always considered a gaffe, when any of them out with what they are really up to. Obama's "spread the wealth" thing for example. Recall the war-room mobilization across the media to renounce the slander of "socialism" against the One? Unlike conservatives, who are unapologetic about being conservatives, it is hard to find a liberal besides Barney Frank who will accept the label. They know most people don't want what they are selling. They have to use subterfuge, Orwellian naming tricks, stealth legislation, the courts, and regulation through executive branch agencies to effect their policies. If taken to a vote by the people, most of the liberal agenda would still be a gleam in the eye of Wiliam Ayers and at a wholesome distance from reality.

Thus, the expectations, proclivities, and demands of leftist interest groups that have delivered us into the hands of the Democrats deserve more attention than those of elected Democrats, who, after all, must live in the limelight and be reelected. The Code Pinks, the Sierra Clubs, the Emily's Lists, NARAL, the trial lawyers, labor unions, ad nauseum, are better barometers than the Democrat political class per se. Kaminski notes in the piece that "universal health care, widespread unionization, stronger regulations on business, profit-sharing for employees, higher taxes -- all that sounds like Western Europe. Mr. Stern considers that a worthy model."

Says Mr Stern:

"I think Western Europe as much as we used to make fun of it has made different trade-offs which may have ended up with a little more unemployment but a lot more equality."

If one considers eleven or twelve percent unemployment merely "a little more", then perhaps that vaunted "equality" might seem a bargain. But then there is a lot packed into that term "equality" under socialism. Those who have seen the Europe of the working and welafare class--those Mr Stern and his ilk pretend to represent so well--understand that the equality offered by socialism is equality of poverty, with a distinctly unimpoverished upper class, reeking of solicitous concern for the masses. Ever seen the size of a flat in Rome or Paris? See what cars they drive in any European city? Wonder why everyone wears black in the cities? (black clothes don't show dirt, and since many people have only small clothing budgets, they must wear the same suits over and over. This partly accounts for the smells on a bus.) On the other hand, for those with union or government jobs--the majority of those who have jobs--things are pretty cushy--short work weeks, Adriatic vacations, retirement at fifty.

Until the thing collapses, which it must. Our unionized auto industry is European socialism writ small, and it is the model for the future Messrs. Soros, Stern, and all the leading lights among the Democrats are bringing to a town near you. We're all GM now.

-- by Dr. Harold Kildow, associate blogger

Apparently, Sean Rubin is not only a good cartoonist, he's also a mind reader.

Message to President Clinton: If Barack Obama offers you the new post as "Ambassador to the Stars," you should not envisage yourself hobnobbing in Hollywood.

Actually this is the way Peter Sellers' Heavens Above (1963) ends. It was his last film before rocketing to stardom. It is actually a fine film that explores the moral and economic consequences of thoughtless charity understood as giving to the poor. It could have been subtitled, "The Tragedy of Christian Compassion." Marvin Olasky, take note!

At first, it might seem to be a condemnation of Christian morality from the point of view of modern economic science, but the film is more multilayered than that. It is seems to be more of a dialogue than a message. The idea for the film came from Malcolm Muggeridge, but the film predates his conversion.