wo markets - the automobile market in the U.S. and the healthcare market in England - make interesting blog fodder this morning for free marketeer and big government junkie alike.

First, to the automakers, with the NYT reporting of General Motors:

G.M., the world’s largest automaker for decades, said Tuesday that it was in such dire straits that it would deeply cut jobs, factories, brands and executive pay as part of its plea to get $12 billion in federal loans and an additional $6 billion line of credit. …

G.M.’s president, Frederick A. Henderson, said the company would be insolvent if it did not receive federal assistance, including an infusion of $4 billion in cash before the end of the year.

“Absent support, frankly the company simply can’t fund its operations,” Mr. Henderson said in a call with reporters.

To which I say, why did it take having to grovel before the US taxpayers before you would promise to do what you should have done years ago on your own, Mr. Henderson?

Had GM dealt with its bloated workforce, eliminated costs associated with keeping Buick, GMC, Saturn et. al. afloat, and stopped paying its leadership losership as if they were actually accomplishing something, insolvency wouldn’t be just around the corner and Henderson wouldn’t be begging for $14 billion.

This is both a troubling and a glorious moment for any free marketer.

It’s troubling because we’re seeing the desperate lust for government money accomplishing what the free market should have accomplished on its own. And it’s glorious because we are seeing an admission by one of the world’s largest corporations that it is NOT anywhere close to the free market, and it’s killing them. Or it should be killing them … they may yet get hooked up to financial life support.

And speaking of life support, that takes us to another NYT article, this one a much more troubling tale of government’s influence on the free market.

RUISLIP, England — When Bruce Hardy’s kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Mr. Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught.

“Everybody should be allowed to have as much life as they can,” Joy Hardy said in the couple’s modest home outside London.

If the Hardys lived in the United States or just about any European country other than Britain, Mr. Hardy would most likely get the drug, although he might have to pay part of the cost. A clinical trial showed that the pill, called Sutent, delays cancer progression for six months at an estimated treatment cost of $54,000.

But at that price, Mr. Hardy’s life is not worth prolonging, according to a British government agency, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The institute, known as NICE, has decided that Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only £15,000, or about $22,750, to save six months of a citizen’s life.

This is a tragic but familiar type of real life story that girds our loins as we fight against the Dems’ drive to impose universal health care in the US. But wait, there’s more:

Drug and device makers, which once routinely denounced the British for questioning product prices, have begun quietly slashing prices in Britain to gain NICE’s coveted approval, especially because other nations are following the institute’s lead. Companies have said that they will consult with NICE to help determine which experimental compounds enter the final stage of clinical trials, so the British agency’s officials will soon influence which drugs enter the market in the United States.

The British government created NICE a decade ago to ensure that every pound spent buys as many years of good-quality life as possible, but the agency is increasingly rejecting expensive treatments. The denials have led to debate over what is to blame: company prices or the health institute’s math.

After seeing the auto execs fly to DC in their three private jets and looking at Wall Street execs rake in hundreds of millions as their companies fail beneath their incompetent feet, there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s more lurking behind the cost of pharmaceuticals than legitimate R&D expenses.

Government has no moral authority to use the lives and quality of life of citizens as bargaining chips in a price war; that’s verboten. While the cruel effectiveness of NICE can’t be ignored, we free marketeers must realize that whatever NICE is accomplishing, it is not doing it in a free market. Access to pharmaceuticals is highly regulated, and the companies are using that to their advantage.

If there were a free global market for these drugs (with only patents protected), then we could take our prescription to Canada or Mexico or Khartoum for filling, picking the market where Pfiser or Glaxco offers the best price. And if that were to happen, the global price would quickly fall to the best price. That price would support needed R&D and salaries at the level necessary to provide effective managers, but it would cut out excesses.

Meanwhile, Bruce Hardy will die a little earlier and his widow will be not just sad but rightfully very angry.

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ere’s Azam Amir Kasav, 21, as far as we know the sole surviving terrorist from the Mumbai terror attacks.

Does he look a bit dazed to you? It might be the painkillers he’s been given, or the interrogations he’s been through, or the awesome knowledge that he’s now a hero to millions of Muslims … or it might be this:

The Mumbai terrorists may have pumped themselves full of drugs to keep going during their murderous three-day rampage.

Indian police sources say tests on the bodies of dead Islamic fanatics revealed traces of stimulant drugs.

One said: “We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by the terrorists and later found drugs in their blood.

“There was also evidence of steroids, which isn’t uncommon in terrorists. These men were all toned, suggesting they had been doing some heavy training for the attacks. (Source)

Gosh, and here I thought all-powerful Allah gave his terrorist warriors all the special powers they need to carry out despicable, sinful, stomach-turning acts in his name. (Not really. It’s long been common knowledge that Islam’s suicide bombers and terror commandos are hopped up and stoned out when they go to their glorious martyrdom Hell. That is, if they’re not mentally retarded or unknowing children.)

And here’s one more thought about the photo: It’s a testament to the higher status of most civilizations, and the lower status of nearly all Islamic nations, that the photo exists at all. We see Kasav’s face wound treated, and his body hooked up to a medical device. If Kasav had been an American soldier captured in any of the fronts of Islamist terror’s war on us, we would see only a picture of him beheaded, or him mutilated, or his corpse dragged through the streets to the hysterical cheers of onlookers.

But it wasn’t the other way around, so we can look directly into the dazed eyes of horrific Islamist evil. And we can pray for his eternal soul.

Sure, Gates is staying on as Defense Sec, and that’s a very good thing in these tumultuous times. But good leaders require and depend on good deputies, and Gates’ deputies apparently are not too keen on working with the Obama team, or visa versa.

WaPo reports today that all of Gates senior advisers are heading out the door, and Obama-picked replacements are coming in.  Here’s the brief:

Deputy Defense Sec. Gordon England is out for sure and possible replacements include Obama campaign adviser Richard J. Danzig (Who as Clinton’s undersec and sec of the Navy oversaw a huge reduction in the Navy’s ships, from 454 to 341 - and he’s rumored to be Gates’ replacement!), transition team co-leader for the Pentagon Michèle A. Flournoy (who hopefully won’t be too French in her approach to defense) and former Pentagon comptroller William J. Lynn, who was appointed to that post by one William Jefferson Clinton.

Eric Edelman, Undersec for Policy is out in January and Flournoy is a possible replacement. Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr. is out as the Undersec for Intelligence, and no replacements have hit the rumor mill yet. Undersec for Personnel and Readiness David S.C. Chu is also rumored to be “hitting the reset button.”

One prospect for continuity is Michael G. Vickers, who the Post says may keep one of the longest titles around - assistant secretary for special operations, low-intensity conflict, and interdependent capabilities. He oversees some of the U.S. military’s most sensitive operations - which hopefully will be continuing in AO1 (Age of Obama, year one).

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addam Hussein’s most notorious cousin, cousin, “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid, gained infamy by using modern, efficient ways to kill Hussein’s enemies, real and imagined. In the end, though, it will be the age-old rope around the neck, not some missile-born gas, that kills him.

Al-Majid was sentenced to death for the second time yesterday, along with former Baath party official Abdul-Ghani Abdul-Ghafur, this time for conspiring with Abdul-Ghafur to kill thousands while suppressing a Shi’ite uprising following the first Iraq war. His other conviction was in 2007, for the crimes against humanity he carried out in 1991 against the Kurds. He’s also on trial for orchestrating another Shi’ite massacre in 1999.

Here’s a description of the first Shi’ite massacre he commanded:

The prosecutor described the incident as one of the “ugliest crimes ever committed against humanity in modern history”. According to human rights groups, government tanks, artillery and helicopters fired indiscriminately on civilian areas and government troops rounded up and executed fighting-aged men. Estimates of the death toll vary widely, however. Conservative estimates put the number of victims in the tens of thousands, while Iraqi court officials have said that up to 180,000 died and some Shi’ite groups claim the figure exceeds 300,000.

So let’s see here. Al-Majid used WMDs in the 1980s against the Kurds, and twce in the 1990s was involved in the killings of tens of thousands of Shiites with great force, by means unspecified. Does anyone reasonably think that a regime like Hussein’s - crazed, cruel, aggressive and still, today, unrepentant - a regime that thwarted every effort for international inspections of its weapons and weapons research, a regime that elevates a man like al-Majid, would not actively pursue WMDs?

Reasonable minds would conclude that WMDs were not found because they were shuttled off to Syria, not because they were never produced.

Update:  WMDs were in the news today, and the news isn’t good:

The odds that terrorists will soon strike a major city with weapons of mass destruction are now better than even, a bipartisan congressionally mandated task force concludes in a draft study that warns of growing threats from rogue states, nuclear smuggling networks and the spread of atomic know-how in the developing world.

The sobering assessment of such threats, due for release as early as today, singled out Pakistan as a grave concern because of its terrorist networks, history of instability and arsenal of several dozen nuclear warheads. The report urged the incoming Obama administration to take “decisive action” to reduce the likelihood of a devastating attack. (WaPo)

There is no doubt in my mind that if we had not toppled Hussein, Iraq would be right up there with Pakistan as a grave concern.

Joe Biden announced his VP office staff today and what a staff it is:

Counselor to the Vice President - L. Douglas Wilder, who prepped Joe to lose in the debates and dished up primary-losing advice as Biden’s traveling campaign advisor.

Domestic policy advisor - Terrell P. McSweeny, advisor to three presidential losers:  Biden, Wesley Clark and Al Gore.

Assistant to the Vice President for Intergovernmental Affairs - Evan M. Ryan, who was deputy campaign manager for Biden’s losing campaign.

Good luck guys and gals - but you’re probably not going to need it since the VP is pretty much a do-nothing job.  So unlike your earlier jobs for Biden, this one offers one great benefit - you really can’t lose.

B

ank of America has invested nearly half of the $15 billion it received as a federal bailout from the Troubled Asset Recovery Program - sending the money off to China instead of investing it in the U.S., where it would help local businesses and stimulate the economy.

The money was poured into the China Construction Bank even as B of A was shutting off funds to construction companies in the U.S.  Writes Mick Pattinson, the president of a California homebuilder:

We had thousands of homes in various stages of development, all funded with loans from Bank of America. During the 27 years my firm and I have done business with the bank, we have borrowed more than $1 billion to build more than 10,000 new homes.

We always paid off our loans.

Last year, when the housing crisis was just beginning its downward spiral, Bank of America started aggressively re-evaluating the property we had pledged to secure our loans. The bank told us that we would soon need millions of dollars in additional cash as collateral.

Then the bank told us it would not renew two of our loans, and it raised our interest rate. BofA told us to keep paying them; keep working; keep hiring sub-contractors. They were sure we could work something out. So that is what we did. Until the bank pulled the plug on us — and other homebuilders across the country.

B of A could have taken the $7 billion it ferried off to China and re-invested it in our local economy, renewling loans to homebuilders, making mortgages more available, and spurring jobs, home purchases and recovery.  Instead, it looked after itself, making a speculative investment in a country that’s no friend of America - an investment that creates no American jobs.

And it can do this, apparently without consequence, because the bail-out is so poorly structured it’s become an “anything goes” party for recipients and a great disappointment to people like Pattinson, who were hoping it would bring some relief. If anyone out there thinks this is no big deal, let’s put it in perspective:

Over the last two years, 3,000 homebuilders have closed their doors. Today, one homebuilder is going out of business every hour. And 3 million construction workers have lost their jobs.

Foreclosures, construction unemployment, property values, confidence are all going in bad directions at record rates.

All the while, builders have been losing their property to the banks, which have no idea what to do with it. So its value plunges even more, hurting shareholders in ways they could not imagine.

It didn’t have to stay this bad.  B of A could have done something about it, but they greedily looked after themselves instead.  There oughta be a law, and there oughta be a prosecution.

The Prez-elect has named his foreign policy team, and all kidding aside, there’s not much to howl about here - other than my previous Obama Drama piece on the vetting of Bill and Hil.

Hugh Hewitt’s response to the announcement reflects my view:

Conservatives should acknowledge that this is as strong a team as they have a right to expect having lost the election.

The biggest challenge facing the new president and his advisors after protection of the homeland is keeping Iran out of the nuclear club, with force if necessary.

The second biggest challenge is to maintain at least the status quo in the Middle East intact, with Israel secure and the emerging democracy in Iraq protected.

It is difficult to imagine any Democratic team better positioned to achieve both goals.  And that is a cause for celebration.

I’m sure there will be much more Obama Drama to report, but when he does something that is the best we can expect given the election, let’s give Mr. Prez-elect a tip of the hat.

W

hen asked to explain whatever possessed him to ram his pickup at a speed in excess of 100 mph into the car of the woman driving ahead of him, the driver had a simple answer for the police:  God told him to do it because the woman wasn’t driving right.

God apparently didn’t care to address whether the gentleman’s action should be considered to be “driving right” or not.

Amazingly, both cars spun in the median and came to a stop without entering oncoming lanes. Neither driver was injured, leading to the sheriff’s spokesman’s quote that God just might have been involved in this mess.

And not at all amazingly in this world that no longer sees prophets (or profits, for that matter), a psychiatric evaluation has been ordered for the pickup truck driver.

ere we go, with two more chapters of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) - which C-SM hopes will lead to you purchasing a copy of the book for yourself and any college-age kids in your acquaintance - and two more lies liberal history profs are teaching to pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #16 - Prohibition Was Unpopular From The Beginning And Failed In All Its Objectives

Prohibition … offered another example of reforming zeal channeled into a drive for moral righteousness and conformity . … The Anti-Saloon League [mobilized] Protestant churches behind its single-minded battle to elect “dry” candidates. - George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History

My grandmother was an prohibitionist and a staunchly conservative Methodist, and I thought it positively odd that my great aunt and uncle would lower their kitchen shade so grandmother wouldn’t look across the alley and see them drinking a beer with their Sunday night sausage and sauerkraut.

Be that as it may, prohibition is now offered up as a precursor to the moral battlegrounds of today - first abortion and drugs, now gay marriage - as history profs have hayseed hicks and ignorant fundamentalists battling the enlightened forces of coolness. It’s also used as an immigration lesson, with prohibition seen as the white majority forcing its will on the (then-white) immigrant populations (those drinking Irish and Italians!). And ultimately, prohibition serves as the foundation of teaching that “you cannot legislate morality.”

Temperance, in fact, was a longstanding thread leading up to prohibition. Abraham Lincoln ran on a “temperance” platform and most states had restrictions on alcohol before prohibition. Why? Because alcohol had become a huge social problem. Prohibition helped quell it, as arrests for public drunkenness and incidents of hospitalization for alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver declined during Prohibition.

Saloons - which often offered up prostitution in addition to booze - were thought by many doctors to be the source of syphilis outbreaks and the Mann Act was passed to stop white slavery that was thriving in the saloons.

So drinking wasn’t just a nice passive pastime; it was a big social problem (as it remains today), leading to wide support for Prohibition not only among conservative Protestants, but among much of America, both urban and rural, lower class and upper.

To Schweikart’s view, Prohibition failed primarily because sufficient enforcement was never funded, and because the media turned against it, followed by … sound familiar? … the intellectual elite in NY and DC. And finally, it was the desire for those lucrative liquor tax revenues during the Depression that ended the social experiment.

I’m not a fan of heavy-handed government policies like Prohibition, but I am a fan of having them taught in the proper context and not misused. If historians used Prohibition as a lesson about America’s strong and ongoing moral fiber, and against over-reaching regulation, that would be fine with me.

#17 - Sacco And Vanzetti Were Innocent And Wrongly Executed

The excesses of the fundamentalists, the xenophones, the Klan, the red-baiters, and the prohibitionists disturbed American intellectuals profoundly. … Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists and Italian immigrants. Their trial was a travesty. Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, American Destiny.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti may be lost in the mist of time to most readers, so the easiest way to put them into perspective is to consider that the anarchists of the early 20th century were akin to the terrorists of our time. Their act of violence - killing a guard and paymaster in the midst of a robbery - was just another of anarchist actions against America: They had assassinated President William McKinley, had nearly killed a Carnegie Steel exec in his office. They shot people, made bombs, and blew things up, all in the name of bringing down all government.

From the 20s until they were replaced by the Rosenburgs in the 40s, Sacco and Vanzetti were the cause clebre of the American left. Future SCOTUS Felix Frankfuter wrote a book calling for a new trial, socialist author Upton Sinclair took up their cause, and as recently as 1977, then-Governor Michael Dukakis of MA called S&V innocent, saying “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.” Says Schweikart of that proclamation:

Unfortunately for Dukakis, a firearms panel would meet only a few years later and virtually reattach the disgrace to the names of the two murderers.

But long before recent forensic tests put this issue to rest, a fair jury did the same based on overwhelming evidence that the Left would have you ignore.  Nine eyewitnesses ID’d Sacco as being at the scene; four ID’d Vanzetti.  Both defendants were caught in lies on the witness stand.  Alibi witnesses proved not to be credible.

As recently as 1985, liberals have published books coughing up “new evidence” to show S&V were good guys put down by an evil system.  But the evidence against this view is overwhelming:  Forensic tests have proved Sacco’s revolver fired the shot that killed one of the victims, that defense arguments that bullets were switched are specious, that Sacco was a participant, and separate from these tests, that Vanzetti also was guilty.  This has long been proven to such an extent that even Upton Sinclair admitted as much, saying he was “completely naive about the Sacco-Venzetti case, having accepted the defense propaganda completely.”

But some Leftist profs continue to profess their innocence, and they can no longer be called merely naive.

The Lies They Teach: #13 - #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

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hile watching the Mumbai terror attacks on Fox last week, I heard a Fox anchor, safely ensconced in NYC, interview a frightened Indian man who was hiding in the Taj hotel. He was like a golf announcer, all whispers, and she was the soccer announcer, loudly leading the terrorists to their GOOOAAAL. It went something like this:

He (whispering into his cell phone): It’s very frightening, but I think I’m safe.

She: Are you safe? How? Where are you?

He: I’m in my room.

She: How terrible. Are you sure your safe? Where are you?

No kidding. She actually asked twice where he was, as if it never occurred to her that the terrorists might be monitoring the media to find more hostages people to torture and kill. And, it turns out the terrorists were doing just that, and Fox was hardly alone:

A SOUTH Wales couple caught in the Mumbai terror attacks claimed last night that CNN put their lives at risk by broadcasting where they were.

Lynne and Kenneth Shaw, of Penarth, warned that terrorists were listening in to the media to pinpoint Western victims.

Mrs Shaw claimed the American cable TV channel had broadcast details of where they were at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. …

From her home in Penarth yesterday, Mrs Shaw said: “We have been asked by the British terror police not to talk to the press.

“But the reason I would not want to talk to anyone is because our safety was actually compromised by CNN, which broadcast where we were.

“The terrorists were watching CNN and they came down from where they were in a lift after hearing about us on television. For that reason I would appeal to the media to be very careful about what they broadcast.

“When we left Mumbai there were still around 100 people trapped there.” (Wales Online)

The great war correspondents of WWII understood war and enemies and good guys. They were, by and large, discrete when it was important to be discrete, and honest journalists the rest of the time. With Vietnam, we got a new kind of war correspondent, becoming more anti-war as the war moved along, until they became a powerful force for our abandonment of the war. Their reporting may also have helped the North Vietnamese understand our troop movements and strategies.

Now we have a new generation of war correspondents, many of whom never leave their air conditioned suites, few of whom accept that we really are at war. They’re reporting incidents not battles, and they proved last week that they’re not to be trusted with sensitive information.

CNN, of course, denies the Shaw’s claim and I’ve heard no discussion whatsoever of Fox’s dangerous foible.