“History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, it is too much government involvement in the market. Our aim should not be more government, it should be smarter government.” — President George W. Bush

I have been reluctant to wade into the argument of whether President Bush is the worst President ever, it is hard to top James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison and Warren Harding. But there is little argument on who wins the title of the most moronic. That sir is your prize and yours alone. Thankfully, the village of Crawford, Texas gets its village idiot back in just over two months. Do us all a favour and stay there.

Our hapless wonder spoke today at a forum organized by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, before Saturday’s summit in Washington of the leaders of the Group of 20, a bloc of developing and industrialized nations that focuses on economic growth and the stability of the international financial system who are seemingly on a different tact.

From the Washington Post:

The president’s remarks clearly sought to influence a debate that appears headed in a direction Bush and his aides do not favor, just two months before he leaves office. Many of the world’s most influential world leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have advocated bold reforms including, to use a Sarkozy example, restrictions on executive pay.

The speech came as the Bush administration still struggles to implement the faltering federal bailout package, while fending off calls from President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats for additional stimulus measures. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. on Wednesday acknowledged that the administration had abandoned its initial plan to buy distressed mortgage securities, focusing instead on offering aid to banks and other lenders to shore up credit markets.

Bush agreed that “broader reforms,” stronger investor protections and greater transparency are needed to strengthen the global economy, and also spoke favorably of reforms at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Bush also argued that “the crisis was not a failure of the free market system” and that leaders should “not try to reinvent that system.” Rather, he said, global leaders need to “fix the problems we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free-market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people around the world.”

“If you seek economic growth, if you seek opportunity, if you seek social justice and human dignity, the free market system is the way to go,” Bush said to another burst of applause. “And it would be a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success.”

Sixty years of success? By which measures? Because from my vantage point, all I see is a widening income inequality, a growing gap between rich and poor in most of the world on all sort of metrics. If Joseph A. Schumpeter once wrote that capitalism was in danger of being killed by its successes, I will say that now capitalism is being killed by its greatest proponents and adherents.

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Ah the insanity of the Catholic Church rears its ugly head once again but a parish priest in Greenville, South Carolina has informed his parishioners that they should refrain from the sacrament of Holy Communion if they voted for the Obama-Biden ticket. Pray tell, why doesn’t he just excommunicate them and do them all a favour?

A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

“Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president,” Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

“Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, many bishops spoke out on abortion more boldly than four years earlier, telling Catholic politicians and voters that the issue should be the most important consideration in setting policy and deciding which candidate to back. A few church leaders said parishioners risked their immortal soul by voting for candidates who support abortion rights.

But bishops differ on whether Catholic lawmakers — and voters — should refrain from receiving Communion if they diverge from church teaching on abortion. Each bishop sets policy in his own diocese. In their annual fall meeting, the nation’s Catholic bishops vowed Tuesday to forcefully confront the Obama administration over its support for abortion rights.

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Via Reuters:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, who lost to Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary, is being considered to serve as secretary of state in the Obama administration, NBC News reported on Thursday.

The report cited two unnamed advisers to President-elect Obama. The report said Clinton’s office would only say that any decisions on the appointment would be up to the president-elect.

The former first lady, who was in a drawn-out battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, is in her second term as a senator from New York.

Several other names also have been mentioned for the top U.S. diplomatic post including Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee; Sam Nunn, a Democrat and former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman; Sen. Chuck Hagel, an outspoken Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who was U.N. ambassador in former President Bill Clinton’s administration and also sought the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

To begin with, I am not in favour of clearing out the Senate to fill President Obama’s Cabinet. Already, we are replacing two incumbent Senators including Senator Biden who has served in the Senate since 1973. That’s an impactful loss. Senator Obama, not so much. What has he accomplished in the Senate? It seems that he is destined for different things.

But as per Senator Clinton as President Obama’s Secretary of State, it makes little sense for Hillary to accept the post. Hillary remains a political force with her own objectives that I am not sure that she is ready to jettisoned for a title even if such allows for considerable input into US foreign policy. Hillary’s forte is more a domestic agenda, so why would she accept a post that constitutes a political exile? She has considerable legislative skills (that may actually be of use to a President Obama down the line) that would be wasted in Foggy Bottom. Let’s hope Senator Clinton remains in the Senate and not take the bait from President-elect Obama who in this seeks to marginalize her voice on domestic issues. I am dubious of this move. It seems like an early retirement ruse.

Let Kerry take the job. He’s useless in the Senate.

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The Ukraine is a country divided by language and history. Western Ukraine, which speaks Ukrainian and is largely Catholic, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I. Russified eastern Ukraine was under Russian imperial domination for centuries. And the country bore the brunt of the Second World War. Of the estimated 20 million civilian deaths during the war in the former Soviet Union, half were in the Ukraine. VOA Correspondent Peter Fedynsky recently visited coal mining regions in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east and Ukrainian-speaking west, and reports that miners are united on economic issues, but differ on the emphasis they place on divisive cultural issues.

Ukraine lies in the geographic center of Europe, which gives the former Soviet republic the option of orienting its economy toward Russia and the East, or the European Union and the West. In the video below, VOA Correspondent Peter Fedynsky recently visited both ends of the former Soviet republic and reports on some of the realities that may determine where and how well Ukraine does most of its business.

A brawl in the Ukranian Parliament illustrates the intensity of politics in Ukraine today. Remnants of Soviet style also creep into new businesses, which find it difficult to operate in a country still accustomed to the old Soviet ways. Ukraine achieved independence in 1991 but it wasn’t until 2004, when pro-Western forces took control of the country in what was dubbed the peaceful Orange Revolution that the Ukraine began to develop closer relations with the West.

Worldfocus special correspondent Dave Marash reports on today’s political realities and yesterdays revolutionary dreams in Ukraine. Yet political progress has come slowly.

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The above map compares the 2004 US Electoral Map by county with the US map at night. It should be pretty evident that in 2004 as Seattle’s The Stranger noted that the liberal Democratic-leaning areas of the United States are but an urban archipelago scattered across the land.

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion–New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too–a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida.

While the maps for the 2008 US Presidential Election will show larger islands as red seas recede especially in New England which is now a veritable Democratic continent with a red lake or two, but does this constitute a realignment of the American electoral map?

Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post that upon three glances he has come to the conclusion that the 2008 election represents a realignment of the electoral coalition in the United States.

At first glance, the victory of Barack Obama and the Democrats inspires that sense of awe that comes when we realize we are in the presence of a momentous historical transformation. At second glance, though — how much of a change in the American political order does it actually portend?

After all, Obama ran only slightly ahead of John Kerry four years ago among white voters — raising the Democrats’ total from 41 to 43 percent in the midst of a major recession, according to Tuesday’s exit polling. John McCain actually bettered George W. Bush’s margins four years ago in 22 percent of the nation’s counties, most of them in the South. And Obama won a number of his states by the slimmest of margins.

But this is an election that demands a third glance. Even though Obama’s victory was nowhere near as numerically lopsided as Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1932, his margins among decisive and growing constituencies make clear that this was a genuinely realigning election.

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Via the New York Times:

President-elect Barack Obama intends to step down from his seat in the United States Senate on Sunday, leaving his seat just as lawmakers return to Washington for a lame-duck Congressional session.

Mr. Obama’s decision allows him to avoid participating in next week’s session on Capitol Hill. The seat will remain empty until Gov. Rod Blagojevich appoints a successor to fill out the remaining two years of the term, which he said he would do by year’s end.

“It has been one of the highest honors and privileges of my life to have served the people of Illinois in the United States Senate,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on Thursday afternoon.

While Mr. Obama will play a behind-the-scenes role in the economic stimulus legislation debated in Congress during the lame-duck session, advisers said he wanted to avoid the awkward position of returning to the Senate to cast a ballot should his vote be needed. By stepping down from his post now, the pressure intensifies on Mr. Blagojevich to name a replacement.

Mr. Obama is leaving his seat as the junior senator from Illinois two months shy of the four-year anniversary of the date he was sworn in. At the time, some of his aides hinted that he would serve only one term, but replacing Mr. Blagojevich was his leading option, not running for president.

“In a state that represents the crossroads of a nation, I have met so many men and women who’ve taken different journeys, but hold common hopes for their children’s future,” Mr. Obama said in his statement. “It is these Illinois families and their stories that will stay with me as I leave the United States Senate and begin the hard task of fulfilling the simple hopes and common dreams of all Americans as our nation’s next president.”

Senator Biden should resign immediately as well. At the moment, he has his hands in two cookie jars and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. One law common in Latin America is any office-holder who runs for the Presidency must resign his office before running for the Presidency. Had such a law been in effect in the United States, it is doubtful that Senator Obama would have attempted a run for higher office. The law is meant to avoid conflict of interests as well as to allow candidates to be just that candidates and not have their time split between doing the public’s business and running for office. What exactly have Senator McCain and Senator Obama done in the Senate the past year? Senator McCain missed over 60% of the votes in this Congress and Senator Obama over 40%.

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