The Obama camp might jack up the $700 billion bailout another $150 billion, and Congress decides to bail itself out.

The Electoral College was created in 1787 by a constitutional convention whose delegates were unconvinced that the election of the president could be entrusted to an unfiltered vote of the people, and were concerned about the division of power among the 13 states. It was antidemocratic by design.

Under the system, each state receives votes equal to the number of representatives it has in the House plus one for each of its senators. Less populated states are thus overrepresented. While this formula hasn’t changed, it no longer makes a difference for the majority of states. Wyoming, with its three electoral votes, has no more influence over the selection of the president or on the positions taken by candidates than it would with one vote.

The above was written by Jonathan Soros, son of the politically-meddling oligarch George Soros. What’s ironic is that Soros is exactly right, but he extrapolates from the founder’s logic that the electoral college is an outdated or bad thing. I am always amused when intellectuals draw all the wrong reasons from history.

The United States of America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. This isn’t my opinion, but a “guarantee” in our Constitution (Article 4, section 4): “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”

We avoid “one man, one vote,” for in history it too often became, “one man, one vote, one time.” We are governments within governments within governments, federal to state to county to city, courts within courts, councils and Congress.

A single word for what Soros calls “an unfiltered vote of the people” is “Democracy,” something of which Samuel Adams quipped, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Adams meaning was simple: Democracy equals mob rule. Adam’s sucessor in the Massachusetts Congress was Fisher Ames, who similarly opined, “Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.” The father of the Constitution, James Madison: “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” The quotes derogatory of pure democracy from the founding fathers go on and on. Jefferson, Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, John Adams, each of them understood that democracy was nothing more than 51 percent of the population ordering 49 percent to slavery or death.

This point is lost on men like the Soroses. Or is it? The fact that we’ve slowly crept away from republican government to democracy is fully instigated through dollars and power by the Soros group, creator of Moveon.org and other wonderful group-think.

They call the electoral college “antidemocratic.” But antidemocratic is precisely what the founders were aiming for, else why have checks and balances between our three branches of government, why have a Senate represented by two senators from every state no matter how big or small? Shall we abolish these “outdated” concepts too?

The point of these checks, the point of that republican form of government is to protect the rights of the numerical minority.  Federalist Paper #10, by James Madison says with democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” For our founders even the “obnoxious” deserved protection of liberty.

And so the point of the electoral college: that huge population centers in Philidelphia or New York wouldn’t dictate how South Carolinians would live. With a popular vote, what incentive would a John McCain or Barack Obama have to even visit Iowa? Or Alaska? Or Utah? Or Delaware? Let alone to listen to the demands of its people.

The argument of Jonathan Soros, on the other hand, is that of Pontius Pilate: “Hey, I was just following the will of the people.”

First, the main reason “journalists” in Saddam’s Iraq would never have thrown a shoe at a visiting dignitary is that they’d be tortured and executed for it. More importantly, can we just drop this fantasy-land nonsense that America was super-popular in the Mideast before George W. Bush came on the scene? I mean really, who is Reuters trying to kid?

Also, if someone throws a shoe at Barack Obama — at home or abroad — will that be used by the press to define Obama’s popularity, never mind his legacy? I mean if some nutter in Holland hucks a clog at Obama, does that mean all of the Netherlands, never mind all of Europe, hates Obama? Somehow I doubt that’s how Reuters et al would cover it. In a circumstance like that, we’ll be told how this was an act by one lone-shoe-man.

There’s a weird double standard buried deep in all of this, and I don’t just mean the biases against Bush. When conservatives hold up unsavory Muslims or Arabs as representative of the region’s problems, we’re told how simplistic and two-dimensional we’re being. But when the same sort of unsavory doofus behaves in ways that confirm liberal biases and coform to liberal passions, then suddenly this doofus speaks for millions.

– Jonah Goldberg.

For partisans, there’s the schadenfreude that comes with watching the Democrats — self-proclaimed anti-corruption zealots in recent years — explain why Blagojevich shouldn’t be lumped in with Congressmen Charlie Rangel (cut himself sweetheart deals), William Jefferson ($90,000 in his freezer) and Tim Mahoney (tried to bribe an aide he was sleeping with not to sue him — and you thought romance was dead) as part of a new Democratic “culture of corruption” storyline.

There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times — which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial-board meetings in a refrigerator box — created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls. See there, Suzie? That’s a Pegasus. That’s a pink unicorn. And that’s a beautiful sunflower giving birth to a fully grown Barack Obama, the greatest president ever and the only man in history to be able to pick up manure from the clean end.

– Jonah Goldberg.

Washington Post:

Internal Freddie Mac documents show that senior executives at the company were warned years ago that they were offering mortgages that could pose dangers to the firm, hurt borrowers and generate more risky loans throughout the industry.

At Fannie Mae, top executives were told it was necessary to develop “underground” efforts to buy subprime mortgages because of competitive pressures, although there were growing risks and borrowers often didn’t understand the terms of the loans, documents show.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which has the documents, is holding a hearing now to discuss Fannie and Freddie’s downfall. The companies were seized by the government three months ago after nearly collapsing in the wake of billions of dollars of losses on mortgages.

In a memo to former Freddie chief executive Richard Syron and other top executives, former Freddie chief enterprise risk officer David Andrukonis wrote that the company was buying mortgages that appear “to target borrowers who would have trouble qualifying for a mortgage if their financial position were adequately disclosed.”

Andrukonis warned that these mortgages could be particularly harmful for Hispanic borrowers, and they could lead to loans being made to people who would be unlikely to pay them off. “The potential for the perception and the reality of predatory lending with this product is great,” Andrukonis wrote.

The documents, which were released by the committee today, show that Fannie and Freddie, two linchpins of the nation’s mortgage market, continued to push into new, risky markets despite internal debate over whether the efforts were prudent.

Fannie and Freddie declined to comment yesterday, as did Andrukonis. In testimony today before the House oversight committee, Syron acknowledged he was warned about risky loans but said that executives thought they had made the right decision, balancing profit motives, public policy goals and safety concerns.

Related: Credit Crisis Primer.

The only thing worse than a bunch of inept CEOs asking for a handout is letting a bunch of inept Congressmen, who know nothing about making cars, call the shots.

Congressional Democrats are drafting legislation that would give the teetering Detroit automakers at least $15 billion in emergency loans early next week and grant the federal government broad authority to manage a massive restructuring of their operations.

The proposal, which could be put to a vote in Congress as soon as tomorrow, would establish a seven-member “auto board” of Cabinet officials and a chairman to be appointed by President Bush to oversee both the short-term loans and a long-term effort to restore the faltering industry to profitability. If the companies take the cash, they would be accountable to the government for nearly every move, and for every transaction of $25 million or more.

As part of that restructuring, General Motors, Chrysler and Ford could be asked to jettison their top executives, one of the chief architects of the plan, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), said yesterday. Stating bluntly that “GM is in the worst shape” of the three auto giants, Dodd said that GM chairman G. Richard Wagoner Jr., the company’s chief since 2000, “has to move on.”

“You have got to consider new leadership,” Dodd said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “If you’re going to really restructure this, you have got to bring in a new team to do this.”

President-elect Barack Obama seemed to echo that view during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday, saying “we have to put an end to . . . the head-in-the-sand approach to the auto industry that has been prevalent for decades now.”

Another two myths repeated verbatim without a single “yeah but” by the media. The first is that “the industry” is struggling. But the rest of auto industry is just fine — as Toyota and Nissan factories in non-union states can attest — rather it’s the Detroit Big 3 that are in trouble.

The second myth is that the Big 3 are in trouble because they don’t produce “fuel efficient” cars. What is this, 1970? I don’t know about the rest of you but I can’t spit out my window without hitting an SUV made by Lexus, Infinity, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, etc. Those companies produce plenty of cars one wouldn’t consider fuel efficient but they don’t need taxpayer money to keep them afloat. It’s not the Big 3′s fuel standards but their legacy costs, pension costs, union costs.

Hey, while you’re pulling your hair out reading about your tax dollars at work in Detroit, be sure to check out the top 10 pork projects.

Wall Street Journal:

[There was] an extraordinary exchange of letters between NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The city and the Justice Department are feuding over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the 1978 domestic wiretapping law that was amended this year and requires a warrant to listen in on suspected foreign terrorists. Mr. Kelly says that Justice’s FISA policies are “unduly constraining” his high-priority “international terrorism investigations in the greater New York area.”

Two city applications for electronic surveillance, one in June and the other in September, got quashed — not by the FISA court, but by Justice’s own legal team. As a municipal outfit, the police intelligence division cannot appeal directly to the special FISA panel of rotating judges but must instead work through DOJ. Both cases are classified.

Mr. Kelly was furious and let Mr. Mukasey know it in a searing critique. Someone leaked the October correspondence late last month, and though each party blames the other, both have since walked back from public conflict. In any event, whoever leaked made his point. Mr. Kelly’s letter exposed a “lack of urgency and excessive time lags” in processing FISA applications; as well as a bureaucracy that insists on “frequently long and unjustifiable delay,” even “weeks of delay.” This is disturbing enough given fast-moving terror plots.

But Mr. Kelly’s main criticism — “an unnecessarily protracted, risk-averse process that is dominated by lawyers, not investigators and intelligence collectors” — is far more troubling. He believes that Justice is applying “inappropriately high standards of probable cause” that stop “close cases,” which “involve considerable uncertainty,” from ever going before a FISA judge.

Justice, in other words, is not erring on the side of averting catastrophe but on the side of political self-protection from judicial second-guessing. “The real question,” Mr. Kelly writes, “is how many applications did DOJ not submit to the Court . . . In a proactive, intelligence-driven domestic counterterrorism enterprise, such omissions should be unacceptable.” He concludes that “the federal government is doing less than it is lawfully entitled to do to protect New York City, and the City is less safe as a result.”

Mr. Mukasey was just as pointed. “We are acutely aware of the stakes,” he replied, saying Mr. Kelly’s call for a relaxed reading of FISA was “to be kind, impractical” and likewise accused him of putting the public at risk. “Were the Court to be presented with a significant number of legally insufficient applications, the government’s credibility would be substantially undermined,” he wrote.

“If we were to adopt the NYPD approach and routinely submit cases lacking probable cause,” Mr. Mukasey continued, “the Court would rightly doubt our credibility and our judgment. . . . The less the FISA Court comes to trust the validity of the applications, the more inclined the judges will be to impose on all applications the kind of scrutiny that doubtful applications merit.” A higher standard for warrants inevitably means fewer warrants, which in turn means less intelligence.

Mr. Mukasey is not soft on terrorism, and no doubt his may-it-please-the-court stance is pragmatic. The real problem is FISA itself. The Attorney General is only allowed to pursue threats up to certain legalistic edges, which contracted under this year’s political compromise that greatly expanded the role of the courts in intelligence gathering. Commissioner Kelly is practically begging people to think about what this means in the real world.

FISA was passed before the advent of disposable cell phones, encrypted emails and high-speed fiber optic networks. Now we live in a world where terrorist communications that originate in, say, Peshawar happen to move through U.S. switching networks. The executive branch already possesses the Constitutional authority to monitor such communications, but Democrats and the political left claimed it was “illegal” under FISA.

Then the anti-antiterror bar filed multibillion-dollar lawsuits against the telecom companies whose good-faith assistance after 9/11 made such surveillance possible. The goal was to shut down the program, and the telcos made it clear they couldn’t cooperate without Congress’s blessing. Forced to choose between a Democratic deal that gave the companies legal immunity or giving up a key U.S. antiterror tool, President Bush chose the former. The price — the one Commissioner Kelly is paying — was narrowing the government’s antiterror wiretapping powers.

What Democrats have done, in essence, is to insert an unelected judiciary into the wartime chain of command. As Mr. Kelly notes, this is producing a “lack of accountability” and “the lack of transparency into the inner workings of the FISA process.” If some faceless FISA judge denies a surveillance request from Mr. Kelly and New Yorkers die as a result, that judge will answer to no one. Under current FISA rules, we won’t even know who that judge is. Meanwhile, the very Members of Congress who insisted on FISA’s limitations will blame the executive branch that they put under the supervision of those anonymous judges.

The probable-cause standard that Mr. Kelly cites may also be dangerous. It sounds as if surveillance is only being authorized when the police suspects or can prove the target is a terrorist, when the desperate need may be to find out who is a terrorist. It takes a wide net to fish out the clues that may prevent another attack, which is Mr. Kelly’s first duty. At stake aren’t the abstractions of some civil-libertarian seminar, but people’s lives. Though the Commissioner’s protest was filed before Mumbai, it is easy to imagine terrorists armed with AK-47s and grenades hitting Grand Central or the Waldorf-Astoria.

The larger danger is that an overly cautious outlook at the FISA-Justice nexus will undermine the intelligence collection that will be crucial for the Obama Administration to keep the country safe. This is what happened with the Clinton Administration’s infamous “wall” of separation between intelligence and law enforcement that so harmed our ability to fight al Qaeda in the 1990s. The “wall” became accepted practice out of excessive political caution, even though a FISA appellate court said in 2002 that it had never been legally necessary.

Most antiterror victories are invisible, and the best evidence of success — being spared another attack on U.S. soil — has the effect of increasing public skepticism about the seriousness of the threat. If the Mumbai terrorists had been rolled up beforehand on the evidence of a wiretap, to the extent that anyone noticed, the media response would have been to scoff at their haplessness and maybe something about “fear mongering.”

Now nearly 170 people are dead. Ray Kelly is warning that it can still happen here, and that it is more likely to happen if we let lawyers make decisions that our chief security officials should make.

It’s not everyday I quote Hillary Clinton, at least not in a complementary way, but after hearing the Iranian government’s response to Barack Obama’s “carrots and sticks” statement on Sunday (below), I think her ridicule of Obama was very prescient: “Let’s get unified. The sky will open, the light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect.”

Keep that in mind when you read this Michael Goldfarb post:

Obama may have backtracked from his absurd pledge to meet the leaders of Iran directly and without precondition in the first year of his administration, but he continues to insist on opening a dialogue with the Iranian regime — a policy he will, in fact, inherit from the Bush administration. The Bush administration has made considerable effort to engage Iran, effectively dropping the precondition that Iran halt uranium enrichment prior to any direct diplomacy. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns carried a generous offer of incentives to Iranian officials in Switzerland this summer. The offer was rejected. Perhaps Obama will send his Secretary of State to make a similar appeal, and as a signal of his commitment to a diplomatic solution. But Iran has laid down its own preconditions:

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi said on Monday that the ‘carrot and stick’ has been a defeated and unacceptable approach.

Talking to reporters, he made the remarks in response to a question on recent remarks made by the US president-elect Barack Obama, who said Washington was ready to negotiate with Tehran on suspension of enrichment.

He added, “Tehran’s stand is the same as before, that is if they (US administration) want suspension, we have repeatedly announced that we will not suspend (enrichment activities).”

Tehran’s stand is the same as before… Ha! You can bet your mullah on that.

These guys haven’t changed much since 1979, no matter how much we have.

Here’s Thomas Friedman:

When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?

After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.

I think this underscores the myth of the moderate Islamist too, at least in many parts of the world such as Pakistan.

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) — U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she believes either Congress or the Bush administration will step in to aid domestic automakers because bankruptcy is “not an option.”

“I believe that an intervention will happen,” Pelosi said at a briefing in Washington. “Everybody is disadvantaged by bankruptcy, including our economy, so that’s not an option.”

This is reminiscent of a boast by the old Soviet Union that it never had bankruptcies. It never had them, of course, because it simply would pour good money after bad into the failing industry. And we know how that went.

There’s a point to bankruptcy, and having Ms. Pelosi & company use taxpayer money to save inefficient but favored industries led by inept CEOs who make perpetually poor business decisions won’t force these industries to take the difficult steps necessary to restructure and become competitive.