Category Archives: Political Commentary

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

About Time

4 Comments

UCLA economists have calculated how long FDR extended the Great Depression. Seven years.

Roosevelt’s role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century’s second-most influential figure.

“This is exciting and valuable research,” said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. “The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can’t understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won’t happen again?”

…”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

Remember this the next time someone talks about a new “New Deal.” The myth of Roosevelt is akin with the current idiotic nonsense being promulgated by Democrats that the financial crisis was a result of “deregulation.”

[Update about 9 AM EDT]

Sebastian Mallaby has a nice corrective to the “deregulation” nonsense:

The key financiers in this game were not the mortgage lenders, the ratings agencies or the investment banks that created those now infamous mortgage securities. In different ways, these players were all peddling financial snake oil, but as Columbia University’s Charles Calomiris observes, there will always be snake-oil salesmen. Rather, the key financiers were the ones who bought the toxic mortgage products. If they hadn’t been willing to buy snake oil, nobody would have been peddling it.

Who were the purchasers? They were by no means unregulated. U.S. investment banks, regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, bought piles of toxic waste. U.S. commercial banks, regulated by several agencies, including the Fed, also devoured large quantities. European banks, which faced a different and supposedly more up-to-date supervisory scheme, turn out to have been just as rash. By contrast, lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part — though they are now vulnerable to the broader credit crunch because they operate with borrowed money.

If that doesn’t convince you that deregulation is the wrong scapegoat, consider this: The appetite for toxic mortgages was fueled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the super-regulated housing finance companies. Calomiris calculates that Fannie and Freddie bought more than a third of the $3 trillion in junk mortgages created during the bubble and that they did so because heavy government oversight obliged them to push money toward marginal home purchasers. There’s a vigorous argument about whether Calomiris’s number is too high. But everyone concedes that Fannie and Freddie poured fuel on the fire to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

As he points out, it’s important to understand the actual cause, because if we misdiagnose the disease, we’re likely to come up with nostrums that make it worse, just as FDR’s “brain trust” did. And that’s exactly the path we’re on with Obama. McCain may make similar mistakes, but with him, at least it’s not a sure thing.

[Mid-morning update]

Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on the upcoming speculative bubble in regulation. I agree that we need to design the system to be much more fault tolerant.

Political Commentary

Playing The Rubes

Jen Rubin:

…more than hypocrisy is at work here. It is not just far Left, American-hating radicals he now disowns. You get the sense that he believes everyone can be played. Rashid Khalidi can believe that Obama finds no one suffers more than the Palestinians. Jews can buy that he was moved by the Holocaust from a summer camp experience. Voters in his Congressional race in 1990 can be told that there is no difference ideologically between him and 100% ADA-rated Bobby Rush, but the rest of the state in 2004 (and eventually the country) can buy that he’s a post-partisan reformer. Terrorists come to believe he shares their scorn for America, but Iowa voters hear him talk about his appreciation that only in America could his story have happened. Primary voters in Ohio are coddled with protectionist promises – and then privately scorned while he is talking to San Fransciso liberal donors.

There is no end to it — everyone gets the version of Obama that perfectly fits his own world view. It is not hypocrisy. It’s fraud. Whatever he told or shared with Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, or Pfleger counts for no more that what he told or shared with other now inconvenient groups and individuals. He’s sold the same piece of political real estate to multiple buyers for multiple, conflicting uses.

Unfortunately, so far, he’s been right, taking a page from P. T. Barnum, and the sucker production rate has increased quite a bit with the population increase over the past century. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but unfortunately, you can fool enough of them to get elected.

Political Commentary

As If We Needed One

Radley Balko has another reason to fear an Obama/Biden presidency–increasing federalization of crime:

Since the vice-presidential pick, Obama and Biden have embraced criminal justice policies geared toward a larger federal presence in law enforcement, a trend that started in the Nixon administration and that has skewed local police priorities toward the slogan-based crime policies of Congress, like “more arrests” and “stop coddling criminals.”

Wonderful.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Don’t Forget Bernadine

65 Comments

Bob Owens notes that it’s not just Bill Ayers. And he also points out the absurdity of thinking that one could be a member of the Weatherman at all, let alone a founder, and not have murderous intent:

BarackObama.com, the campaign’s official website, offers up a “fact check” that Obama was just eight years old when the Weathermen were active in 1969. The Obama campaign has tried to use the founding date of the Weathermen as a touchstone, claiming that the acts of the group were something that happened “40 years ago” when Obama was a child. Far closer to the truth is the December 6, 1990, sentencing date of Weathermen Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, when the last of the Weathermen were sentenced for their role in a string of bombings in the mid-1980s, including bombs that detonated at the National War College, the Washington Navy Yard Computing Center, the Washington Navy Yard Officers’ Club, New York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building, New York City’s South African Consulate, and the United States Capitol Building.

Barack Obama’s ties to the Weathermen aren’t ties that were 40 years removed from a child’s experiences, but the conscious decision of a young radical to establish a relationship to an infamous terrorist because of shared ideology and interests.

Barack Obama never set any bombs. But he’s never had problems with associating with those who did.

This talking point that Obama was “only eight years old” is stupid, as is anyone who buys it.

[Afternoon update]

Abe Greenwald has more:

Okay, let’s go with that judgment thing, shall we. Barack Obama served on the board of an educational organization headed by a terrorist bomber. He launched his political career in said bomber’s home. He then went on to serve two years alongside said bomber on the board of a “charitable” organization. Not quite done, Obama gave the bomber the gift of an enthusiastic blurb for the bomber’s book jacket. Even if Obama’s preposterous new claim about not knowing who Bill Ayers was was true in 1995, was it true in 1997 when Obama, then state senator, endorsed Ayers’s book? Had he not yet found out the identity of his buddy by 2000, when he took the position serving with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund? Did no one slip him a note over the next two years reading, “Don’t indicate that you’re reading this note, but the guy next to you is a terrorist”? Frankly, if Obama didn’t find out that Bill Ayers is a terrorist until it came up during the primary, then there’s more to worry about than the candidate’s political leanings.

No kidding.

[Early evening update]

Here’s a flash from the past. A 2001 piece by David Horowitz about the terrorist couple:

This is the banal excuse of common criminals – the devil made me do it. “I don’t think you can understand a single thing we did,” explains the pampered Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers “without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War.”

I interviewed Ayers ten years ago, in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner city children. Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.”

That would have been 1991. This was a man who would later be put in charge of millions of dollars, with Barack Obama, to propagandize and radicalize Chicago schoolchildren. Either Obama had no problem with his past, or he was unaware of it. I don’t believe the latter. But either way, I don’t want him to be running the country. For all we know, he’ll appoint Ayers to be head of the Department of Education.

[Evening update]

“Bill Ayers has never hidden the fact that he was part of the Weather Underground, part of this radical group. In some ways it has made him somewhat famous in the South Side, Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood where he lives.”

I guess we’re supposed to believe that he somehow only hid it from Barack Obama.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Off To The Movies

9 Comments

I very rarely see a movie in a theater. I’d say it averages once or twice a year (though we did see Dark Knight a couple months ago–the last one before that was The Astronaut Farmer). But tonight Patricia and I are going out to see American Carol to boost its opening weekend ratings (plus, it looks like it should be pretty funny, and I think we can all use a good laugh right now, given current events). At this point, I’m all about promoting and encouraging alternate media/viewpoints, particularly from Hollywood. I may or may not review it tomorrow.

[Monday morning update]

Meh.

It was entertaining, and a good story, but not roll-in-the-aisles funny, at least for us. Of course, I’ve never been that big a Zucker/slapstick fan (e.g., I’ve never even seen any of the Naked Gun series). It’s not the sort of flick that I would normally want to see in a theater, but I was happy to help boost the first weekend ratings. Of course, unlike the previous ones, there are some emotionally affecting moments in this one (quickly broken up, of course, by more crude slapstick).

So if you want to support this sort of politically incorrect movie (always a noble goal, in my opinion), spend a couple hours and spend the ten bucks. You’ll have a good time, but don’t expect too much.

[Note: this post has been bumped to the top, new stuff below]

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Obama’s Space Pro-Activity

8 Comments

The Obama campaign seems to have gotten way out front of the McCain campaign on space. The problem is that, like its domestic policy in general, McCain doesn’t seem to have a coherent policy with regard to civil space. He’s going to freeze discretionary, which includes NASA, and whether NASA will be exempt seems to depend on which campaign aide you ask. And regardless of how much money is spent, the campaign is equally vague on how it is spent, and what the near-term and long-term goals of the expenditure are. On top of that, the McCain campaign has lumped in the new Obama proposal to increase the NASA budget by two billion with a lot of so-called liberal spending proposals. As Jeff Foust notes, it’s a little mind blowing, politically.

Obama, after having gotten off on the wrong foot with the initial idiotic proposal to delay Constellation to provide funds for education, seems to have actually gotten inside McCain’s OODA loop on this issue. The McCain campaign really needs a smart political adviser in this area (as Obama apparently has now with Lori Garver, who seems to successfully jumped ship from Hillary’s campaign), but there’s no evidence that they’ve come up with one yet.

Of course, it’s not an issue on which the election will hang, probably not even in Florida.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a little more at NASA Watch. It seems to be a disconnect between the McCain campaign and the RNC. Which, of course, doesn’t make it any better, or excuse it.

[Another update a few minutes later]

Well, this would seem to clarify the McCain position:

Perhaps more important were McCain’s remarks on Wednesday that only the Pentagon and veterans would see a budget increase in his administration because of the high price the proposed economic bail out. Everything else – including, presumably, NASA — will be frozen or cut. Several space advocates in Florida and Washington DC expect the worst.

As I said, it isn’t clear that space will be a key issue, even in Florida. But if the McCain campaign position is that the budget is going to be frozen, they should at least put forth a description of how they expect, and will require, NASA’s priorities to change to accommodate it. So far, there’s zero evidence that they’ve even given the matter any thought.