Why militant unionism is a threat

Mickey Kaus and Michael Barone have very revealing dialogue on auto co. woes:

Mickey Kaus, pretty much alone among the commentators I've been reading, indicts "Wagner Act unionism" for the decline and fall of the U.S. auto industry. The problem, he argues, is not just the high level of benefits that the United Auto Workers has secured for its members but the work rules—some 5,000 pages of them—it has imposed on the automakers. As Kaus points out, unionism as established by the Wagner Act is inherently adversarial. The union once certified as bargaining agent has a duty not only to negotiate wages and fringe benefits but also to negotiate work rules and to represent workers in constant disputes about work procedures.

Brilliant and frightening essay

In finance, once you can have leverage, you must have leverage.

the real problem with a Detroit bailout

No car czar can address the real problem, more and more observers are saying.

The bust

Fascinating piece:

A former Wall Street insider explains how the financial industry got it so badly wrong, why it always will—and why all of us are to blame.

Why Gates would be hard to fire

From Kausfiles:

On Warren Olney's To the Point, LAT veteran Doyle McManus says Robert Gates

is in the unusual position of not being a cabinet member who can't really be fired because if the president and the secretary of defense were to end up at loggerheads on an issue, that could be politically very damaging to the president. [E.A.]

This seems astonishingly wrong. Obama can fire Gates more easily because Gates is a Bush holdover, no? Obama won an election by opposing Bush's policies. ..

###

But .... isn't Gates hard to fire not because of political factors, but because he's widely recognized as being ... how shall I say it ... competent?

And it doesn't matter what Obama ran on. (Kennedy won on a "missile gap" that didn't exist.) He has to govern on what is, not what turns on the left. And Gates at least stands for successful policies. (Which are also Bush policies.)

Gates might be hard to fire because, for Obama to succeed as prez, he might have to listen to Gates.

Barack Obama and citizenship

On the brouhaha over Obama's citizenship, one issue is his residence in Indonesia.

As one source reports:

A 2007 Associated Press photograph taken by Tatan Syuflana, an Indonesian AP reporter and photographer, surfaced last week on the Daylife.com photographic website showing an image of Obama's registration card at Indonesia's Fransiskus Assisi school, a Catholic institution.

In the picture, Obama is registered under the name Barry Soetoro by his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. The school card lists Barry Soetoro as a Indonesian citizen born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His religion is listed as Muslim.

However -- I've been to Indonesia. It's a Third World country. And we're talking the early 1960s. Things are not as organized as they are here, and now.

So what if his stepfather put something down on a school record? It's Indonesia. "Official" records need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Ditto his grandmother's "recollection" he was born in Kenya. Grandmothers "remember" a lot of things.

Of course, if Obama produces the birth certificate, this goes poof.

Maybe he finds other embarrassing info on the form.

Moab, Utah and Oil

I was down in Moab, Utah, for Thanksgiving.

Agreed: it's one of the most beautiful spots in America. I stayed at my father-in-law's house in Castle Valley.

No, oil wells shouldn't be put on the top of the arches, as one poster put it.

But there are thousands of square miles of land in which some oil or gas wells were be utterly inconspicuous, if you could find them at all.

Yes, drill, baby, drill.

I don't object to having spots in national parks that are off limits. But environmentalists won't accept any. Either people will see the wells -- or the land is unpolluted by humanity, so it must not have wells either.