Cheat Sheet

It's hard not to feel a little sorry for Eliot Spitzer. Once known as the scourge of Wall Street, he was yanked off the stage right before the financial crisis that may have proved his shining moment. He is left coaching from the sidelines in the Washington Post. "Those who truly understand economics, as did Adam Smith, do not preach an absence of government participation," he writes. "A market is a product of laws, rules and enforcement. It needs transparency, capital requirements, and fidelity to fiduciary duty. The alternative, as we are seeing, is anarchy." Spitzer obviously rues his missed opportunity: "Although mistakes I made in my private life now prevent me from participating in these issues as I have in the past, I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did." Just so.

One of the few things that the lame duck Bush Administration must deal with before scuttling out of the White House is the expiring U.N. mandate that allows American troops to be in Iraq. According to an anonymous Nouri al-Maliki aide, it's done. A draft of the security pact allowing U.S. forces to remain in Iraq until December 31, 2011, has been agreed upon, according to the aide. The next step is a vote of the 37-member cabinet. If it passes by a two-thirds majority, the pact moves on to the 275-member parliament where it only needs a simple majority to pass. The pact appeared to stall last week when the U.S rebuffed Iraqi demands for changes. But according to Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashemi, modifications were made addressing Iraq's right to try U.S. soldiers and contractors who commit crimes off-base and the country's concern that the U.S. wouldn't use its territory to attack a neighbor. "We think this is a good document that serves both Iraqis and Americans well. We remain hopeful that the Iraqi government will conclude this process soon," said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

In some of his weekly "Reflections" for the official Cuban media, Fidel Castro, who passed the presidency over to his brother Raul earlier this year, had recently expressed his preference for Barack Obama over John McCain. He had even expressed sympathy for his daughters before the elections. Yesterday, however, El Comandante was more skeptical about the new administration. "Many seem to dream that after a simple change of leadership in the empire, [the United States] would be more tolerant and less hostile. Apparently, contempt for the incumbent ruler makes some entertain illusions about a probable change in the system," he writes. Castro adds, "It would be extremely naïve to believe that the good will of a smart person could change what is the result of centuries of selfishness and vested interests."

San Francisco Examiner journo Tim Reiterman, who exactly 30 years ago was shot by members of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple sect outside Jonestown, Guyana, as he boarded a plane bound for America, has been recalling the fateful day Jones ordered hundreds of his cult members to drink Flavor-Aid spiked with cyanide. One reason he continues to write anniversary pieces about the incident, even though the other survivors are becoming less inclined to speak to him, is to stress that it was not mass suicide, but mass homicide. "There were 200 children who were killed," he says. "This was mass murder and I believe that some of that has started to sink in." Has he fully recovered from his wounds? Not quite. "I still have some pieces in there, and others have worked their way out," he says.

Count British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a leading voice in the chorus opposing the auto-industry bailout that Obama has been pushing. "I do think it is really important that we send out a signal today that protectionism would be the road to ruin," he said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "If we get into a situation where countries made decisions irrespective of what happened anywhere else, then we will see the same problems of other times. The dividing line here is between an open society capable of trading round the world, against a protectionist response that happened in the 1930s and is totally unacceptable." The E.U. has said it will take action against America at the World Trade Organization if it helps the auto industry.

Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal has been mining a new biography of multi billionaire and Obama adviser Warren Buffett to come up with top tips for investing well and becoming rich. First, go your own way. “He does not care whether other people agree with him. He cares only whether his decisions make sense to him, based on his own rigorous research. Do you invest based on what ‘everybody knows’ is ‘true,’ or do you analyze all the evidence yourself?” Timing is everything. “Buffett most likes to buy stocks not when they are going up, but when they are going down.” Which makes this a great time to buy. And, “Buffett’s uncanny ability to stay one step ahead of the markets comes from five decades of working harder on his homework than anyone else. Can you even name the three toughest competitors of every company whose stock you own?” Come to think of it, can you name one stock you own?

Once-rich clients are angry at those who didn’t warn them of the financial meltdown and they are letting it show. They are “angry over the losses. They are angry at the bad financial advice. They are angry over the high fees, the product-pushing banks, the SEC, IRS and DOJ investigations and complex investments no one understood until they blew up.” The result is a lot of stressed wealth advisors who are going in record numbers to lay on psychiatrists’ couches to let out their frustrations. “Yesterday I talked with a wealth advisor who said her firm had hired a psychotherapist specializing in trauma and life shocks,” writes Wall Street Journal blogger Robert Frank. “ ‘For clients?’ I asked. ‘No for the advisors,’ she said. ‘We’re getting screamed at and verbally abused every day by our clients. We need therapy.’”

Obama did not win the election, the Republicans lost it. Or that is the way humorist and conservative sage P.J.O’Rourke sees it in a blistering assault upon his own party. The GOP wasted the last 30 years and have left the country in ruins, he writes. “Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble.” The likes of Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich were constantly barking up the wrong tree, particularly in their vendetta against the Clintons. “We impeached Clinton for lying to the government,” writes O’Rourke. “To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.” But he has a kind word to say about those who brought the financial system crashing down on our heads. “The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)” All both funny and true.