Lucid Links (100609, Morning)

Remember the $1 million that ACORN founder Wade Rathke’s brother embezzled from the organization in 1999-2000? Louisiana’s attorney general says that the number was more like $5 million (HT BigGovernment.com).

Update: The New York Times has known of credible allegations concerning the higher amount for almost a year, having learned of it “just weeks before Election Day,” and did not report it. This isn’t bad journalism; it’s flat-out corruption.

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Stumbled upon this while looking into the previous item. It’s digested as follows by Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator, as follows:

ACORN founder Wade Rathke didn’t have a problem with domestic terrorists trying to kill delegates at the Republican Party’s national convention in 2008, former radical community organizer Brandon Darby suggests at Andrew Breitbart’s new website Big Government.

Nice.

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This is rich — “White House angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan.” Awwww. How do you think McChrsytal feels as he watches his brave men and women die while the commander in chief dithers? He’s supposed to just sit there and take it?

In the Korean War, General Douglas McArthur was “insubordinate” too, because Truman wouldn’t allow him to win.

Here’s a telling excerpt from Time Magazine, well before it became a leftist rag, from April 1951:

THE drama of MacArthur’s removal and homecoming obscures a far more important fact: President Truman has brought his foreign policy into the open.

This policy, new in the sense that it was publicly stated for the first time, denies to the U.S. the efficient use of its power, guarantees to the enemy the initiative he now has, promises that the U.S. will always fight on the enemy’s terms. The policy invites the enemy, World Communism, to involve the U.S. in scores of futile little wars or in messy situations like Iran. Up to now, World War III has been prevented by the fact that the U.S. is stronger than Communism. The new policy almost certainly brings World War III closer because it throws away a large part of U.S. strength.

…. But when Truman needed (or thought he needed) a defense for firing MacArthur, he turned to Acheson for a brief. Acheson gave him one, prepared several days before for the purpose of defending Acheson’s general viewpoint. Revised for the special situation, this speech was admirably suited to the purpose Truman had in mind—charging MacArthur with trying to extend the war. Apparently, it did not occur to Truman or Acheson that the speech could have another—and far greater —effect: giving Communism worldwide possession of the strategic initiative. The new policy is an attempt to elevate Truman’s absence of policy in Korea to the dignity of a principle with worldwide applications.

The weakness of Truman in Korea emboldened communists for decades, including at least one brush with World War III.

I don’t like the echoes I’m hearing. Soviet communism may have been defeated by the Reagan-Walesa-John Paul-Thatcher alliance in the 1980s, but the Chinese version thrives.

On top of that, thanks to Obama, worldwide terrorism is on the verge of regaining the same kind of initiative ascribed by Time to communism.

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Cash for Clunkers post-mortem — Epic fail. This is from a Sunday Wall Street Journal editorial:

Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.

The establishment media meme all along was that is was wildly successful. I still can’t get over the idea of how little opposition there was to the idea that destroying hundreds of thousands of perfectly usable vehicles was considered superior to donating them to places like Goodwill or other charities.

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Chrysler is already in serious trouble. In reporting on the company’s management shakeup the AP confirms it:

With sales down sharply and pressure to start generating cash before government loans run out, Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne shook up his executive team Monday, replacing two of his brand managers after just four months and splitting Dodge into car and truck units.

…. The U.S. Treasury Department allocated roughly $8 billion for Marchionne and Fiat to keep Chrysler going until it can become profitable again, but its sales can’t seem to rebound with a slumping economy and the current poor-selling model lineup. Last year, under different leadership, the company lost billions and went into bankruptcy protection.

Treasury Department officials have said there will be no more government cash for Chrysler, but also have said they “stress-tested” the $8 billion and it was enough to keep Chrysler going after its Chapter 11 restructuring until it can make money again. Chrysler so far has received a total of $15.5 billion from the U.S. government.

The company emerged from bankruptcy four whole months ago.

Chrysler, partially owned by U.S. taxpayers, should release financial statements like any other “publicly held” company. I doubt very much that we’ll ever see that happen. General Motors thinks it’s doing us a favor by doing so, and even GM decided that we don’t need to see what happened in the second quarter (not the third, the second) until early- to mid-November, if then.