1. The NY Times reports President-elect Barack Obama unveils the team to tackle the ‘Historic’ crisis in the economy. Obama will nominate to head the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and to lead the White House Economic Council, Larry Summers, Harvard economist a former Clinton Treasury Secretary.

   Obama also said “he had chosen Christina D. Romer to head his Council of Economic Advisers and Melody Barnes as director of his White House Domestic Policy Council. Ms. Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, while Ms. Barnes is a longtime aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.”

   “While we can’t underestimate the challenges we face,” Obama said, “we also can’t underestimate our capacity to overcome them to summon that spirit of determination and optimism that has always defined us, and move forward in a new direction to create new jobs, reform our financial system, and fuel long-term economic growth.”

2. The Kansas City Star reports Economic crisis creates a cultural divide between ‘ants’ and ‘grasshoppers’.

   Two-and-a-half millennia before anyone thought of bundling toxic derivatives, Aesop knew what bugged people.

   The foolhardy grasshopper in the ancient Greek fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper” enjoyed his summer singing while the ant worked in earnest, “toiling and moiling” to store up food. Winter came and the grasshopper, starving, took to begging from the ant colony.

   Even today, “it goes to the very marrow of American society,” said Randall Miller, a scholar of political and cultural history. “Work hard. Take responsibility for yourself. Don’t expect others to bail you out for your own bad decisions…

   “But who’s the government going to help in this economic mess? The grasshoppers!

   “I sense something building, a cultural phenomenon. A lot of resentment has surfaced, and the people in Washington are feeling it.”

   Wall Street is not just one grasshopper, but rather it is a plague of locusts.

Four at Four continues with an update on the wars of the United States and a look at Russia’s new presence in Latin America.

1. With 60 days left of his _pResidency, The Guardian reports Bush is hellbent on tearing apart protection for America’s wilderness. The “White House is working methodically to weaken or reverse an array of regulations that protect America’s wilderness from logging or mining operations, and compel factory farms to clean up dangerous waste.”

   Here are some of the most far-reaching regulatory changes made so far:

   • Industrial-size pig, cow and chicken farms can disregard the Clean Water Act and air pollution controls.

   • The interior department can approve development such as mining or logging without consulting wildlife managers about their impact.

   • Restrictions will be eased so power plants can operate near national parks and wilderness areas.

   • Pollution controls on new power plants will be downgraded.

   • Mountain-top mine operators could dump waste into rivers and streams.

   • 2m acres of land in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado opened to development of oil shales, the dirtiest fuel on Earth.

   The LA Times weighs in with Bush angers environmentalists with last-minute rule changes. “Researchers who track ‘midnight regulations’ say Bush pushed 53 of them through the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the last three weeks, nearly double the pace of Clinton at this point in his final year.”

   Obama can summarily reverse anything not enacted by the time he takes office, a lesson Bush learned by blocking several of Clinton’s last-ditch environmental measures, such as a ban on road-building in national forests.

   “The Bush administration is trying to prevent Obama from doing to it what it did to Clinton,” said Matt Madia, a regulatory policy analyst for OMB Watch, a Washington-based watchdog group.

   Under federal rules, it takes 60 days to enact an economically “significant” regulation, which carries an estimated impact of $100 million or more. Other regulations take 30 days.

   Pollute baby, pollute!

Four at Four continues with protests in Iraq about 3 more years of U.S. occupation, an interview with the Obama logo designer, and Martian glaciers.

Turkeys have played a propaganda role throughout the glorious Bush years.

Who of us could forget the time when Commander Guy flew unannounced to Iraq for a photo-op as he served plastic turkey to U.S. troops?

1. The LA Times reports Antiwar groups fear Barack Obama may create hawkish Cabinet. Activists are uneasy that many “short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go to war.”

   “Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the 54-chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War.

   The activists — key members of the coalition that propelled Obama to the White House — fear he is drifting from the antiwar moorings of his once-longshot presidential candidacy. Obama has eased the rigid timetable he had set for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and he appears to be leaning toward the center in his candidates to fill key national security posts.

   Obama expects criticism of his appointees he is considering for his national security team, including hawks like Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), and Richard Lugar (R-IN). Vice President-elect Joe Biden also supported the 2002 Iraq war resolution.

   Kevin Martin, executive director of the group Peace Action, said that although Obama had campaigned as an agent of change, the president-elect is “a fairly centrist guy” who appears to be choosing from the Democratic foreign policy establishment — “and nobody from outside it.”

   “So, in the short term, we’re going to be disappointed,” he said. “They may turn out to be all pro-war, or at least people who were pro-war in the beginning.” …

   “There’s so much Obama hero worship, we’re having to walk this line where we can’t directly criticize him,” he said.

   I think it is important to remember that Obama said: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” So my question is and has been — when are wars smart?

Four at Four continues with the six men ordered released from Guantánamo, a probe finds that, shock, the CIA lies to Congress, and the woolly mammoth genome.

1. McClatchy Newspapers report Under Iraq troop pact, the U.S. can’t leave any forces behind. If the “withdrawal agreement,” as it is now being called, is endorsed by Iraq’s parliament, then “in six weeks American forces would have to change the way they operate in Iraq, and all U.S. combat troops, police trainers and military advisers would have to leave the country by Dec. 31, 2011. President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign plan to leave a residual force of some 30,000 American troops in Iraq would be impossible under the pact.”

   Of course, the agreement could be amended with written agreement from both Iraq and the U.S. However, “if Iraq wants American forces to leave earlier, it could terminate the agreement with one year’s notice. The United States has the option to do the same.”

   Among other point, the pact states the U.S. may not use Iraq as a base for attacks on another country.

   According to the LA Times, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is defending the security pact despite it giving the U.S. three more years in Iraq. “lawmakers loyal to Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, who wants the 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq to leave immediately, vowed to fight passage of the accord.”

2. The LA Times reports an Indian warship destroyed a suspected pirate ship off Somalia. For the second time in a week, an “Indian warship patrolling the treacherous waters off the Horn of Africa destroyed a suspected pirate ship… The Tabar opened fire on a pirate ship after it came under attack Tuesday evening, leaving the burning vessel to sink.” As the ship sank, some pirates escaped on high-speed rafts.

   Also “on Tuesday, pirates off Somalia’s coast seized an Iranian-owned and Hong Kong-flagged freighter carrying 35 metric tons of wheat and a crew of 25, a Greek freight ship with a crew of 23 and a Thai fishing boat and its crew of 16.”

   Meanwhile pirates have demanded a $120 million ransom delivered in cash for the captured Saudi-suptertanker, Sirius Star, carrying at least $100 million worth of crude oil.

Four at Four continues with deflationary pressures on the economy and CO₂ threatening oceanic life.

1. The Guardian reports Pirates anchor hijacked supertanker off Somalia coast. “The Sirius Star, which is fully loaded with crude oil, is understood to be at anchor close to a headland called Raas Cusbad, near Hobyo.” The ship’s crew of 25 is reported to be safe.

   “The size of the vessel and the distance from the coast where the hijackers struck is unprecedented,” said Commander Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the US fifth fleet, based in Bahrain. “It shows how quickly the pirates are adapting.”

   The supertanker is carrying 2 million barrels of oil worth about $100 million.

   The ship was on course to sail around the Cape of Good Hope to the US when it was seized. The oil on board represents more than a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s daily output. News of the hijacking caused the price of oil to jump by more than $1 a barrel.

   The LA Times adds America’s top military official is shocked by the pirates’ range.

   “I’m stunned by the range of it,” said Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, commenting at a Pentagon news conference Monday. “Four hundred fifty [nautical] miles away from the coast, that is the furthest, the longest distance I’ve seen for any of these incidents.”

   If this alarm bell doesn’t wake people up, then nothing will. Look part of the problem facing the United States is the failure to imagine and “think outside the box”. This is why events such as the September 11, 2001 terror attacks work so effectively. The American leadership is unimaginative and too conservative in their thinking.

Four at Four continues below the fold with Alberto Gonzales, trains in Baghdad, and boredom.

1. According to the LA Times, a Report to Congress states Gulf War syndrome is real. “Contradicting nearly two decades of government denials, a congressionally mandated scientific panel has concluded that Gulf War syndrome is real and still afflicts nearly a quarter of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the 1991 conflict.”

   The report cited two chemical exposures consistently associated with the disorder: the drug pyridostigmine bromide, given to troops to protect against nerve gas, and pesticides that were widely used — and often overused — to protect against sand flies and other pests.

   “The extensive body of scientific research now available consistently indicates that Gulf War illness is real, that it is a result of neurotoxic exposures during Gulf War deployment, and that few veterans have recovered or substantially improved with time,” according to the report presented today to Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake.

   The report vindicates hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied veterans who have been reporting a variety of neurological problems — even as the government maintained that their symptoms were largely due to stress or other unknown causes.

2. The NY Times reports the Iraqi cabinet approves of pact setting date for U.S. pullout.

   Iraq’s cabinet on Sunday overwhelmingly approved a proposed security agreement that calls for a full withdrawal of American forces from the country by the end of 2011. The cabinet’s decision brings a final date for the departure of American troops a significant step closer after more than five and a half years of war…

   Twenty-seven of the 28 cabinet ministers who were present at the two-and-a-half-hour session voted in favor of the pact. Nine ministers were absent…

   The proposed agreement, which took nearly a year to negotiate with the United States, not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal, but puts new restrictions on American combat operations in Iraq starting Jan. 1 and requires an American military pullback from urban areas by June 30. Those hard dates reflect a significant concession by the departing Bush administration, which had been publicly averse to timetables.

   Iraq also obtained a significant degree of jurisdiction in some cases over serious crimes committed by Americans who are off duty and not on bases…

   Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government spokesman, said the agreement allowed for the possibility that American forces could withdraw even earlier if Iraqi forces were in a position to take over security responsibilities earlier. He also said either side had the right to cancel the agreement with one year’s notice.

Four at Four continues with water pollution from oil and gas drilling, Somali pirates capture a supertanker, and a bonus story about Wallace and Gromit.

1. After months of ignoring the obvious, the rhetoric from the NY Times is changing. Today’s story is how Militants now turn to small bombs in Iraq attacks. Small, “sticky bombs”, “usually no bigger than a man’s fist and attached to a magnet or a strip of gummy adhesive,” are now the weapon of choice for the insurgent groups in Iraq. In Arabic they’re known as “obwah lasica”.

   Light, portable and easy to lay, sticky bombs are tucked quickly under the bumper of a car or into a chink in a blast wall. Since they are detonated remotely, they rarely harm the person who lays them…

   They are also contributing, in the midst of an uptick in violence, to a growing feeling of unease in the capital.

   Note that last sentence well, that denotes a rhetorical change. The violence in Baghdad is now increasing. While it has been for the past 6 months, the news agencies had been reporting violence was down due to the “surge”. Is this shift an acknowledgment of the security change in Iraq or an attempt to pressure Obama to keep U.S. forces deployed there?

   Sticky bombs have frequently been used to attack Iraqi government and military officials and important businessmen. In July, Faris Amir, the deputy general director of Baghdad’s traffic police, was wounded by a sticky bomb attack. In September, an executive at Al Arabiya, the satellite channel, narrowly survived an assassination attempt by sticky bomb, which destroyed his car. In October, the lawyer Waleed al-Azzawi and the police commander of Diwaniya Province, Omar Abu Atra, were killed in Baghdad by sticky bombs.

   Back in mid-September, I wrote a diary arguing that Americans got bored or why the “surge” in Iraq worked, but really violence was increasing. Interestingly, the NY Times and most other news groups failed to notice this trend during the presidential campaign.

Four at Four continues with offshore drilling plans for the coast of Virginia, what to do with the Obama’s grassroots organization, and financial scams.