• Deflation: Hillary Clinton paid $36 million for her Senate seat, but Obama’s was on the market for a mere $150,000.

• The presumption of innocence is a fine principle for the criminal-justice system to follow, but it need not keep us from reaching the obvious conclusion that Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic governor of Illinois, is a crook. In a spectacular indictment, he is accused of, among other things, trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat — the one being vacated by Obama — for personal gain. The corruption of Illinois politics these days must impress even Louisianans: Blagojevich’s Republican predecessor is in jail.

•Charlie Rangel just can’t stay out of the news. It emerges that the New York Democrat paid nearly $60,000 in campaign funds to a web-design firm run by his son. Congress writes the laws for Congress, so members are permitted to pay relatives, at least if transactions reflect fair market value. Rangel, though, pays more for Internet services than any other lawmaker. Meanwhile, a House ethics investigation continues over Rangel’s occupancy of several coveted New York City rent-controlled apartments, his alleged delinquencies on property taxes, and the raising of $11 million for, yes, a “public service” school City College plans to name after him — with scrutiny drawn to the use of congressional letterhead for solicitations and the congressman’s preserving of a lucrative tax loophole for an oil company that promised to kick in $1 million. But Rangel remains upbeat that his chairmanship of the powerful Ways & Means Committee is not in jeopardy. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi might say, it’s not easy “to lead the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.”

• On December 2, Republican senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia trounced his Democratic challenger in a special election, 57 percent to 43 percent. In the near term, the victory vaporizes Democratic dreams of a filibuster-proof majority. For the long term, it suggests that the Democratic turnout seen on November 4 does not materialize when Obama is not personally fueling it. President Bush won Georgia by 17 points in 2004, but this year John McCain carried the state by only 5 points. Chambliss fared even worse. He nipped Democrat Jim Martin by just 3 points and failed to secure a majority, which forced both men into a runoff. Sarah Palin showed up to rally the base, which helped put Chambliss over the top by his comfortable margin. If Republicans are fortunate, the result isn’t merely a faint silver lining at the end of a cloudy election cycle, but a foreshadowing of success to come in 2010.

• Republicans aren’t supposed to win in Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district, where nearly two-thirds of the residents are black. But on December 6, Anh “Joseph” Cao defeated Democratic incumbent William Jefferson. Cao’s victory owes much to scandal: Last year, Jefferson was indicted on 16 counts of bribery after the FBI found $90,000 stuffed in his freezer. It’s hard to win reelection under such a cloud, though Jefferson still managed to carry 47 percent of the vote. The soft-spoken and erudite Cao will become the first Vietnamese American to join Congress — he arrived in the United States as an eight-year-old refugee in 1975. His victory shows that Republicans are wise to put up viable and compelling candidates even in apparently hopeless districts. Just as Democrats benefited from the ethical implosion of Sen. Ted Stevens in Republican-heavy Alaska, the GOP can make unexpected gains when it takes long odds seriously rather than writes them off.

•Jeb Bush does not hunger for Washington, which is one reason we want him there. Sen. Mel Martinez has announced that he will not seek reelection, and Bush, who might have been a 2008 presidential candidate if his name were Jeb Jones, is best positioned to carry the conservative banner. He has one of the most enviable records of any Republican governor: Florida already had no income tax, but Bush found many other taxes to cut. Washington Republicans talked a good fight about smaller government, but Bush cut 11,000 jobs from the government workforce in Florida. His education reforms helped boost test scores, particularly for minority students, and he advocated school choice. He managed to privatize dozens of state services, including Medicaid collections, saving Florida’s taxpayers billions of dollars. Bush’s easy appeal, solid conservatism, and abundant energy give him the potential to join the ranks of Phil Gramm and Barry Goldwater — conservative stalwarts who helped rejuvenate both the Right and the party that remains its principal instrument. There’s a “Help Wanted” sign on the door of the Republican leadership; Jeb Bush should knock.

• Some of the same people who believed the governor of Alaska to be grossly unqualified to serve as vice president of the United States are settling on a candidate for the U.S. Senate: the honorary chairman of the American Ballet Theatre. The Manhattan socialite in question probably wouldn’t even have that sinecure if not for her surname and fortune, but Caroline Kennedy is emerging as a possibility to replace Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is expected to become secretary of state. Kennedy’s career as a gala ornament and check-magnet is the usual stuff of shiftless American aristocrats, and it would be a stretch to describe many of the items on her curriculum vitae as full-time jobs. She does not work, she presides. And she lends her name to a bland bouquet of liberal designs. It would be foolish to give her a Senate seat in tribute to her father.

Agent Provocateur

Americans in 1997, Brooks wrote (during a period of remarkable innovation, one might add), was that “if they think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose.” Imagine how much more persuasive that must have been in the original French.

Now consider the latest evidence. In a recent column in the New York Times, Brooks argued that Barack Obama’s coming tsunami of public-works spending should be targeted at locking in the latest trends in middle-class living: “the new localism.” In exurbs around the country, people want more cafés, farmers’ markets, concert halls, and meeting places. Rather than spend money on refurbishing and expanding the existing interstate highway system, Brooks wrote, the government should underwrite a grand cultural strategy whereby we augment this trend by funding new town squares where we can read Le Monde over cups of café au lait. Or something.

My point here isn’t to ridicule the idea. Brooks is right that if we’re going to have a “once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment,” we might indeed want to put some thought into it instead of reflexively refilling the same old public-sector troughs and slush buckets. But first, it’s worth noting that there is something deeply . . . Continental about this approach to public policy. The French are connoisseurs of using the state as an engine of cultural policymaking. In America, the idea of using government to guide and form culture is still deeply — and, with hope, enduringly — controversial.

Second, Brooks is a gifted trend spotter — and setter — but spotting trends and locking them into national policy planning is the sort of thing that makes the ghost of Friedrich Hayek cry. The French, too, are wonderful at trend spotting. Does anyone remember their effort in the 1980s to put an “informatique” in every home? These networked computer terminals were a sensation — you could find out when the Jerry Lewis Marathon began from your own home! — and the wave of the future. Now hundreds of thousands of them collect dust in funky antiques shops. Maybe America can beat the French at their own game, but I’d rather we didn’t try to play it.

Jonah Goldberg

• Obama’s economic team has received too much praise from Republicans, including Karl Rove. Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and Christina Romer are getting credit for not being protectionists, even though almost no economists are. Romer has had a kind word for tax cuts in the past. But Summers is a thoroughgoing redistributionist. Orszag has floated a plan to make Social Security solvent that relies almost entirely on tax increases while lending academic support to demagoguery about “benefit cuts.” Timothy Geithner’s cooperation with Henry Paulson in Wall Street bailouts, meanwhile, hardly qualifies him as a free-market champion. Republicans who offer this crew extravagant praise are doing their small part to move the center of gravity of the economic debate leftward.

• One of the unseemly features of the 2008 election and its aftermath is the persistent conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States. The Supreme Court in December rightly declined to hear a meritless complaint on the issue. There are many reasons to have opposed Obama, and there will be many reasons to oppose him in the future, but the State of Hawaii has amply documented that Obama was born there. Conservatives do themselves no favors by inhaling these vapors from the fever swamps.

• At press time, Congress and the president appeared close to a deal to bail out the Detroit automakers. The compromise calls for the appointment of a federal “car czar” to direct a restructuring of the Big Three and $15 billion to effectuate the task. The seeds of failure are sown into the deal: One provision bars the car companies from seeking injunctions against states that set tighter emissions standards than the feds. California has just adopted such a standard, which the Big Three cannot comply with while turning a profit. Without legal recourse, their most profitable cars and trucks will be shut out of the nation’s largest market. This is Nancy Pelosi’s idea of sustainability? If, as seems likely, the restructuring does not work, consider the $15 billion a down payment, for it is the nature of federal czars to attribute mission failure to inadequate resources, as it is the nature of Congress to throw good money after bad.

• Like a bunch of irresponsible college kids who have burned through their cash and maxed out their credit cards on a Spring Break bender, some of America’s governors, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, are crying “uncle” — Uncle Sam. The states that have spent too much want billions of dollars from taxpayers in the states that have not. They shouldn’t get it, and Schwarzenegger provides the case study: Since taking over from Gray Davis, no fiscal conservative, Schwarzenegger, abetted by the Democrats in the legislature, has steered the state into a 40 percent increase in spending, some $41 billion a year. If only California could return to the Gray Davis standard of responsibility (!) the state would be in the black. The spendthrift states must get their houses in order, and that is going to mean spending restraint. If cuts prove insufficient and some states are forced to restructure their debt, the markets will penalize them in appropriate fashion by making it more expensive for them to borrow money in the future. This will be a good thing, in the state legislatures as on Wall Street.

• Michelle Malkin joked that after the money-lenders and jalopy-makers, ailing U.S. newspapers would come around asking for a government handout. Michelle shouldn’t tell jokes: Connecticut politicians are considering support for several ailing newspapers, the Herald (of New Britain) and the Bristol Press among them. There are many reasons to oppose such an action. One is that these newspapers are operated by the Journal Register Co., arguably America’s least competent newspaper publisher, a firm in such disarray that its stock has gone from $25 a share to a penny. The people of Connecticut would be better off with their local newspapers run by hotdog vendors, who often have some business sense. The more pressing consideration is that it is impossible to have a free press bankrolled by the government: A press that is not financially independent is not editorially independent.

• The contempt of our political classes for us, the Great Unwashed, is for the most part kept decently well hidden. Once in a while the veil slips, though. It did so recently when Senate majority leader Harry Reid said the following at the opening of the new, air-conditioned, $621 million Capitol Visitor Center: “My staff tells me not to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway. In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it’s true.” Pity our poor legislators, obliged to put up with the noise and stink of — ugh! — citizens traipsing through their palace. What of the overlords themselves, though? Rumors from the congressional press pool suggest that the injunction “Physician, heal thyself” would not always be out of context here.

• Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, has put his state-of-the-city speech on YouTube — all seven and a half hours of it. Does he realize that the position of Cuban dictator has been filled — and that he’s not related to Fidel Castro anyway? Also, what is it about left-wing redoubts and marathon speeches by the Leader? As for us, we’ll take the Gettysburg Address.

• In 48 states, it is illegal for doctors to try to kill their patients even at the patients’ request. The prohibition stays on the books for many reasons: tradition, fear of a slippery slope, belief that the right to life is inalienable. Now a Montana judge wants to reduce that number to 47, casting all of those reasons aside and declaring a right to assisted suicide that the legislature cannot infringe. Without having made a detailed study of the matter, we venture the guess that nobody who ratified Montana’s constitution or its amendments intended to grant the state’s judges the authority to enact a moral revolution. The state should appeal, and wiser judges should overturn the ruling.

• Five top Qaeda terrorists — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the network’s operational commander and choreographer of the 9/11 atrocities — surprised the judge in their military-commission trial with a joint demand to admit guilt and move straight to the death penalty, their coveted martyrdom. For once, their interests and America’s are aligned. Upon certifying the competency of two of the combatants, the court should accept their guilty pleas and move swiftly to the capital phase: It is necessary because, however devoutly the terrorists wish for execution, that matter is not up to them. But there is no reason to delay the finding of guilt: The commission trials are proceeding based on an act of Congress that ensures review, by a federal appellate court, of any claimed errors. Going ahead promptly with this one would serve our national-security interests without tying the Obama administration’s hands regarding any other combatants or the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

• Shirwa Ahmed was a jihadist: a suicide terrorist who killed 29 people in a bombing in northern Somalia in October. He was also a naturalized American citizen, part of a tide of Somali immigration to Minnesota. In just the last few years, as the Somali enclave has grown by tens of thousands, Minnesotans have borne witness to Muslim taxi drivers’ refusing to ferry airport passengers they suspected of carrying alcohol, as well as Muslim high-school pupils’ threatening a seizure-prone student because they were offended by his specially trained dog. In Ahmed’s case, the FBI bizarrely reacted by coming to the family’s aid — retrieving the terrorist’s remains from Somali authorities so he could be buried at “home” in Minnesota. Presumably, the Bureau was motivated by the hope of gaining cooperation and intelligence: There are reports of young Muslim men missing, and Ahmed appears to have been a recruiter, urging fellow Muslims to return to Somalia to join jihadist groups there. But at some point, shouldn’t outreach and indulgence have their limits?

• “This is very good port they have given me,” remarked William Ewart Gladstone, visiting the home of the young Bertrand Russell, “but why have they given it me in a claret glass?” These high civilizational standards are still maintained at Bombay’s Taj Mahal hotel. During the recent terrorist attack on the hotel, a group of 40 guests and staff barricaded themselves in one of the restaurants for several hours. Their hiding place encompassed a well-stocked bar, but they made a collective decision not to touch it because of the need to stay alert. Hearing at last that troops had taken the hotel lobby, one of the British guests opened a bottle of champagne and began pouring it. A horrified waiter stopped him. “No, sir, those are the wrong type of glasses. I shall find you champagne flutes.” He did so, registering a tiny but memorable victory in the never-ending war between order and chaos.

• Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, met with the Dalai Lama in Gdansk, Poland. They were in that city to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Lech Walesa’s Nobel Peace Prize. China did not want the meeting to happen, of course. In the days leading up to the meeting, it put heavy pressure on France and canceled a China-EU summit. When the meeting took place, the Chinese government said that Sarkozy had “grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs.” Moreover, his meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader had “severely undermined China’s core interest, gravely hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, and sabotaged the political basis of China-France and China-EU relations.” For good measure, the PRC called the Tibetan a “political hooligan.” The Chinese government has a funny way of demanding the world’s respect.

• Out with the old, in with the new. Oxford University Press publishes a “junior dictionary,” widely used in British schools and popular with parents. More than 150 obsolete or offensive words have been dropped from the most recent edition, and a corresponding number of improving words brought in, to reflect, says the publisher, the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society. So it’s out with “altar,” “bishop,” “coronation,” “disciple,” and “empire”; in with “apparatus,” “blog,” “celebrity,” “database,” and “Euro.” How long, we wonder, before British encyclopedias follow the old Soviet example, mailing out packets of replacement pages to subscribers when some historical or political article becomes “incorrect,” with instructions to cut out and destroy the superseded text?

• The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have called for Islamic prayer rooms to be provided in their parochial schools, 30 percent of whose students are non-Catholic. The bishops don’t stop there. Devout Muslims purify themselves before prayer through a ritual called Wudhu. This involves washing the face, hands, arms, and feet three times each, gargling the mouth three times, and washing the neck and inside the nose and ears. Some Muslims also wash their private parts. Wudhu must be performed after using the lavatory or breaking wind. Well, the bishops want their schools to offer Wudhu facilities, too: bidets, foot spas, and hoses. Accommodation of Muslims sometimes seems to be the central organizing feature of British public life these days.

• When Canada’s Conservatives won the most seats in October’s parliamentary election, their leader, Stephen Harper, retained his post as prime minister. Soon afterward he announced plans to ban strikes by federal employees, end government-imposed “pay equity” for women, and — most outrageous of all — eliminate public subsidies for political parties. The opposition, evidently having followed American politics, was shocked that a conservative party would live up to its principles. Soon a majority was cobbled together from three parties: the center-leftist Liberals, the left-leftist National Democrats, and the poutine-eating surrender monkeys of the Bloc Québecois. (Our Mark Steyn, a recovering Canadian, calls the coalition “a misbegotten pantomime horse composed of three rear ends.”) But when the coalition threatened a vote of no confidence, things started getting too exciting for Canada, and the governor general, appointed by Queen Elizabeth, had to suspend the parliament for seven weeks to let everyone calm down. While National Review takes a dim view of letting foreign monarchs run a democracy, we have to admit that this system has its advantages. Is it too late for America to join the Commonwealth? Warm beer, funny spelling, and even cricket would be a small price to pay for a Congress that can be sent home when it misbehaves.

• Archaeologists investigating a 2,700-year-old tomb in the Xinjiang-Uighur region of China have identified a substance found in a wooden bowl as Cannabis sativa — marijuana. The stash of Uighur weed, meant for use in the afterlife by the deceased, contained 789 grams, which suggests that the deceased was planning to stay in the afterlife for several weeks at least. A research paper concludes that “the Gushi culture cultivated cannabis for pharmaceutical, psychoactive, or divinatory purposes.” In fact, the Gushi culture would seem to have done little else, given the extensive care with which the posthumous primo was prepared: The “seed size, colour, and morphology . . . suggest that it was cultivated rather than merely gathered from wild plants”; all the “large stalks or branches” had been removed (the famously inventive Chinese presumably developed an early form of the LP to accommodate this process); and chemical analysis shows that the Sinic chronic was specially chosen for its high THC content. A marketing slogan suggests itself: Xinjiang Gold — Marijuana to Die For.

• What would Christmas be without some new War on Christmas outrage? Online retailer Amazon.com brought us the latest such with a special promotional sale called “Twelve Days of Holiday.” When one of our readers protested to Amazon at this politically correct bowdlerization, Amazon compounded the offense by responding with a boilerplate e-mail worded thus: “Please accept our sincere apologies if you were offended by the use of the word ‘Christmas’ on our website. Our intention in referring to Christmas is to give specific ordering guidance for a specific holiday, not to exclude other faiths.” The retailer has since renamed the promotion “Twelve Days of Christmas.” Whether they have put together a new apology sincerely apologizing to customers offended at having received the wrong sincere apology, we do not know.

• The latest manifestation of Che-worship is a film by Steven Soderbergh called, simply, Che. It was screened in Havana, of course, under the approving gaze of the Communist dictatorship. The actor playing Guevara, Benicio Del Toro, was there, partying with party members — Cuban officials. It must have been very cozy. And who was Che Guevara, the real one? He was Castro’s number-one thug, presiding over summary executions at La Cabaña. That was the fortress that served as his abattoir. He would administer the coup de grâce — a bullet to the back of the neck — while his victims cried, “Vivo Cristo Rey!” or “Viva Cuba libre!” He liked to show off El Paredón, the killing wall turned red with blood. Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless citizens — dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag. Anthony Daniels once remarked that the difference between Guevara and Pol Pot is that Guevara never studied in Paris.

• In 1994, O. J. Simpson killed two people — Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and got off. A civil jury later found him “liable” for some of his crimes, but he continued a free man. Then, in September 2007, he went and broke into a hotel room, armed. He had done so, he said, to reclaim property of his that had been stolen. He has now been convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping, and has been sentenced to 9 to 33 years. His conviction took place 13 years to the day after he got off in the double-murder case. Ron Goldman’s father said that this was “some sort of karma — and good karma.”

• The actor Robert Redford has supported left-wing causes for decades, and his Sundance Film Festival is a stalwart supporter of independent films, many with gay themes. Nonetheless, homosexual activists are calling for a boycott of Sundance. Why? Because it’s in Utah, where a lot of Mormons live, and Mormons are the source of all evil. Not only did they support California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, but, according to the gay-Left blogger John Aravosis, “they quite literally steal your soul at death and force you to convert to their religion.” That’s why “if you go to Utah, you’re funding hate.” Now, boycotting an entire state because some of its residents have the wrong views is narrow-minded enough — but if that’s your modus operandi, why not boycott the state that actually voted down gay marriage, namely California? And if Utahns really are so virulently homophobic, how exactly are they supposed to feel threatened by the absence of gays?

• Christmas shopping got you stumped? Here’s the ideal present for the man who has everything, or the woman who has everyone: a Planned Parenthood gift certificate, now on sale at PP outlets in Indiana and Illinois. They can be redeemed for health exams, birth control, or what are euphemistically referred to as “other services.” How better to celebrate the unplanned birth of Christ?

• The New York Times published a piece by William Ayers on its op-ed page. This was called “The Real Bill Ayers” — and in it, the former Weather Underground leader described an unreal Bill Ayers: just an idealist who may have crossed a line or two, but only hated war and racism. What he did was commit “symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments” to those things. Ayers made no mention of the plot against young men and women as they danced at Fort Dix, and no mention of the Brinks murders. (Three men died.) Ayers said that Republicans, having nothing else to say, tried to injure Barack Obama through “guilt by association” — association with him. But, thank the Lord, “the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time.” Years ago, having been acquitted of his crimes, Ayers exclaimed, “Guilty as sin, free as a bird — America is a great country.” Yes, what a country, America. And what a newspaper, the New York Times.