China, Japan, and the US

As usual,  Jonah Goldberg brings clarity to the confusion sewn by left media pundits from all over.  His thoughtful  piece highlights the interdependency of the world's leading nation states and debunks the notion that competition among those states in the world economy is a zero sum game, and finally, highlights the conditions that lead to growth and maximum economic performance on the part of  an individual country's economy.  Not bad for one short article.

GM farce

The bailout of the unions and favored political allies of the Democrats by the bailout of GM has established a destructive and perhaps ruinous precedent for American business and businesses.  The way this bailout was conducted was ridiculous.  Now Obama is claiming victory as GM showed a profit and is conducting an IPO.  Good luck.
a couple of quarters of profitability does not constitute a trend.  Once the huge cash infusion (50 billion) wears off and the company has to operate on the basis of its own cash flow, we'll see, won't we now?  As this article points out, the real problem here is the precedent and the trampling on bankruptcy laws and the rights of bondholders that the administration trashed.  F****** thugs and socialists!

Hagia Sophia

Here we have the c. 600 Hagia Sophia, minus the minarets which were added by the Ottomans when they converted this remarkable and splendid ancient Christian basilica to a mosque.

This is truly one of the most stunning sites in Instanbul.  Having visited this site several times, one is always struck by the grandeur of the building and the loss of its uniqueness as a Christian Basilica once the Ottoman's exercised the typical Moslem intolerance toward non-Islamic religions.  Forcing this magnificent Christian building into something it was not intended to be resulted in the loss of priceless murals, which were plastered over in the 15th century, and the loss of several other features unique to Christendom  and the basilica building genre.

Disengenuos liberal

For anyone interested in how the MSM (liberal) media routinely slimes  conservatives, which is to say every time they write a column about one, here is a piece by Joe Conason, a Boston Globe newspaper columnist, and James Taranto's deconstruction of that column here,.  What you find is a very good example of the genre: a) take quotes out of contact and use to impute bad motives to the speaker; b) accuse anyone who does something that can possibly be construed as racist of being a conservative or a Republican (whether you know he is for a fact or not); and c) simply lie about the the facts of an incident in order to slime your intended subject.  This is what these people do day in day out and have been doing so for many, many years.  It's nice to see someone call them on this "technique" of theirs once in a while:  thank you James Taranto of the WSJ.

A new wine site

The LATimes today featured a story about a wine site that has apparently revolutionized the wine retailing business by providing transparency in pricing that was not available before.  The full story is here.

Saul Alinsky

To this particular historical figure is ascribed most of the evils perpetrated by the left.  But wait a moment!  Turns out not necessarily to be the case as is seen in this review of a book written by one of Alinsky's followers, Nicholas von Hoffman.   Turns out he's more of a savior of the capitalistic system than anyone ever knew, a role some ascribed to Ralph Nader when he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, wherein he excoriated General Motors for producing the innovative Corvair which, it is true, had severe handling problems in its first iteration. Alinsky apparently was very afraid of big anythin, including big government and big business.  He actually apparently shared some of the beliefs of the arch conservative Barry Goldwater who was afraid of the government involvement in the Civil Rights movement.

Requiem for Obama

There is nothing more to say about the Obama administration and the man than the analysis offered by Fouad Ajami in this WSJ article today.  From day one of his nomination as the standard bearer for one of the two major political parties in the US, many of us were incredulous that a person about whom no one seemed to know anything substantive, ended up in this position.  Once more was revealed about him, but not everything to say the least, it became even more improbable that he could possibly become the President of the US.  But he did, and we are now paying the very heavy price for the foolishness of those who joined Obama's bandwagon and elected an unqualified, inexperienced outsider to the highest political position in the country..  Ajami covers this catastrophic national failure in his article, so nothing more needs to be said here.