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We’ve been saving this story since April 30 when Bill Clinton got into the prediction business saying he doubted oil would ever go below $100 a barrel again. We touched the 60′s last week and are still below $75. This is a good illustration of what Clinton’s thoughts are worth.

Good article from Forbes on the chaos in the Iranian economy, in part from falling oil prices. Poor dears.

As markets floundered amid the credit crunch, Iran’s leadership celebrated the West’s economic crisis. On Oct. 11, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared, “The claim that the free market manages all things is a huge lie and benefits only thieves and criminals.” Two days later, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei decreed that the West’s financial crisis was a sign of “the ineffectiveness of liberal democracy-based policies.”

The Iranian leadership may rue their words. Ahmadinejad has run Iran’s economy into the ground. On Oct. 11, just a day after Ahmadinejad declared prices in decline, the Central Bank reported inflation above 30%. Such figures are still likely low. Both Shahab News and Aftab-e Yazd have noted the tendency of Iranian officials to pull numbers from thin air.

Parliamentarians and journalists might complain but, as the Islamic Republic reverts to a Soviet-style command economy, regime intolerance toward technocratic expertise grows. Hojjat al-Eslam Ha’eri Shirazi, the Supreme Leader’s personal representative in the city of Shiraz, explained, “The banking system wants to demand interest rates in exchange for loans to the people. We will not let them do so. And should a couple of banks go bankrupt as a result, so what? What is worse anyway, closure of factories or banks?”

Non-oil sector production is stagnant. Factories may remain open but many do not pay workers. On Oct. 2, for example, tire factory workers staged a protest in front of the Ministry of Labor seeking six months’ unpaid wages. In recent weeks, wild cat strikes have occurred in Tehran, Isfahan, Qazvin and Sanandaj. Purchasing power has plummeted. …

If you want to know how low the NY Times has sunk, check this by Ed Morrissey. Pickerhead thinks this is kinda cool. It is condign punishment for John McCain to be treated this way by the media. He thought they liked him, but he was just a useful idiot who pranced around claiming the media was his base.

Jodi Kantor apparently got so desperate for dirt on Cindy McCain for the tiresome rehash the New York Times published Sunday that she tried suckering teenagers on Facebook into cooperating with her.  The McCain campaign released the contents of an e-mail Kantor sent to one of Bridget McCain’s 16-year-old classmates through the social-networking site. Is this what “political correspondents” do?:

I saw on facebook that you went to Xavier, and if you don’t mind, I’d love to ask you some advice about a story. I’m a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. …

You’re going to love this piece by Byron York on a McCain rally in Woodbridge, VA.

… The second reason Joe the Plumber resonates with the crowds is what his experience says about the media. Everybody here seems acutely aware of the once-over Wurzelbacher received from the press after his chance encounter with Obama was reported, first on Fox News, and then mentioned by McCain at last week’s presidential debate. Wurzelbacher found himself splashed across newspapers and cable shows, many of which reported that he didn’t have a plumber’s license, that he wasn’t a member of the plumbers’ union, that he had a lien against him for $1,182 in state taxes, and that he failed to comprehend what many commentators apparently felt was the indisputable fact that Barack Obama would lower his taxes, not raise them. As the people here in Woodbridge saw it, Joe was a guy who asked Barack Obama an inconvenient question — and for his troubles suddenly found himself under investigation by the media.

In the audience Saturday, there were plenty of people who were mad about it. There was real anger at this rally, but it wasn’t, as some erroneous press reports from other McCain rallies have suggested, aimed at Obama. It was aimed at the press. And that’s where Tito Munoz came in.

After McCain left, as the crowd filed out, Munoz made his way to an area near some loudspeakers. He attracted a few reporters when he started talking loudly, in heavily-accented English, about media mistreatment of Wurzelbacher. (It was clear that Spanish was Munoz’s native language, and he later told me he was born in Colombia.) When I first made my way over to him, Munoz thought I was there to give him the third degree.

“Are you going to check my license, too?” he asked me. “Are you going to check my immigration status? I’m ready, I have everything here. Whatever you want, I have it. I have my green card, I have my passport — “

I was a little surprised. Did Munoz really bring his papers with him to a McCain rally? I asked.

“Yeah, I have my papers right here,” he said. “I’m an American citizen. Right here, right here.” With that, he produced a U.S. passport, turned it to the page with his picture on it, and thrust it about an inch from my nose. “Right here,” he said. “In your face.”

Munoz said he owned a small construction business. “I have a license, if you guys want to check,” he said.

Someone asked why Munoz had come to the rally. “I support McCain, but I’ve come to face you guys because I’m disgusted with you guys,” he said. “Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. . . . I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Byron’s article.

Thomas Sowell on Obama’s true believers.

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend.

It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don’t want to be confused by the facts, they resent being told the facts.

An e-mail from a reader mentioned trying to tell his sister why he was voting against Obama but, when he tried to argue some facts, she cut him short: “You don’t like him and I do!” she said. End of discussion.

When one thinks of all the men who have put their lives on the line in battle to defend and preserve this country, it is especially painful to think that there are people living in the safety and comfort of civilian life who cannot be bothered to find out the facts about candidates before voting to put the fate of this nation, and of generations yet to come, in the hands of someone chosen because they like his words or style.

Of the four people running for President and Vice President on the Republican and Democratic tickets, the one we know the least about is the one leading in the polls — Barack Obama. …

And we get Tom Sowell’s view of the veracity of polls.

It may seem hardly worthwhile going to the polls to vote this election year, since ACORN and the media have already decided that Barack Obama is to be the next President of the United States.

Still, it may take more than voter fraud and media spin to put Senator Obama in the White House. Most public opinion polls show Obama ahead, but not usually by decisive margins, and sometimes by a difference within the margin of error.

There has been a history of various polls over the years projecting bigger votes for the Democrats’ presidential candidate in October than that candidate actually gets in November.

Some of these polls seem like they are not trying to report facts but to create an impression. One poll has been reported as using a sample consisting of 280 Republicans and 420 Democrats. No wonder Obama leads in a poll like that.

Pollsters have to protect their reputations but they can do that by playing it straight on their last poll before election day, after having created an impression earlier that a landslide for the Democratic candidate was all but a done deal. …

Shorts from National Review.

Nobody lies with numbers like academics. The Sports Economist blog compares NCAA pretend graduation rates with the real ones.

An NCAA report proclaims that graduation rates of student athletes are at their highest ever. I certainly join in the applause for any improvement in the academic performance of student athletes. In conjunction with this report, the organization is releasing its own graduation statistic, the “Graduation Success Rate.” This measure is higher than the graduation rate measured by the Federal government. Schools don’t like the latter, in part because if fails to track transfers (are athletes more or less likely to transfer? I would think eligibility rules would make them less likely to transfer.) But they like the GSR measure for another reason, since they are allowed to “subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained.” …

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Yesterday we had Hoover Institute scholars speculating on what might have been Milton Friedman’s opinions of our present dilemma. Today Anna Schwartz who co-authored The Monetary History of The United States with Dr. Friedman, shows up in the form of the WSJ Weekend Interview.

… Most people now living have never seen a credit crunch like the one we are currently enduring. Ms. Schwartz, 92 years old, is one of the exceptions. She’s not only old enough to remember the period from 1929 to 1933, she may know more about monetary history and banking than anyone alive. She co-authored, with Milton Friedman, “A Monetary History of the United States” (1963). It’s the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression.

Since 1941, Ms. Schwartz has reported for work at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where we met Thursday morning for an interview. She is currently using a wheelchair after a recent fall and laments her “many infirmities,” but those are all physical; her mind is as sharp as ever. She speaks with passion and just a hint of resignation about the current financial situation. And looking at how the authorities have handled it so far, she doesn’t like what she sees.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called the 888-page “Monetary History” “the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history.” Ms. Schwartz thinks that our central bankers and our Treasury Department are getting it wrong again. …

Robert Samuelson gives us the historical framework for taking a long term view of the credsis.

A dozen years ago, James Grant — one of the wisest commentators on Wall Street — wrote a book called “The Trouble With Prosperity.” Grant’s survey of financial history captured his crusty theory of economic predestination. If things seem splendid, they will get worse. Success inspires overconfidence and excess. If things seem dismal, they will get better. Crisis spawns opportunities and progress. Our triumphs and follies follow a rhythm that, though it can be influenced, cannot be repealed.

Good times breed bad, and vice versa. Bear that in mind. It provides context for today’s turmoil and recriminations. The recent astounding events — the government’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Treasury’s investments in private banks, the stock market’s wild swings — have thrust us into fierce debate. Has enough been done to protect the economy? Who or what caused this mess? …

Canada’s National Post reports on the cooling earth.

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures — they’re going down, not up.

On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to “a negative PDO” or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs — El Ninos — produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones — La Ninas — produce below average ones.

Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as “solar minimums” magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded — none — and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. “This is no coincidence,” he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate. …

On a tip from Mark Steyn, we have James Delingpole’s “ordinary bloke” focus group on climate change.

… Now I concede that ten drinkers round a table in a Worcestershire pub is not a large sample. And I suppose you could argue that any man (or woman — we had those there too, serving us tea in their sexy US Red Cross outfits) who chooses to spend his weekends impersonating C Company, 82nd Recon, 2nd Armored Division, is on a different planet anyway. But what I think I might have stumbled upon here is the sort of focus group we poncy Londoners don’t often encounter. A bunch of real people. Normal people. Ones who aren’t writers or minor celebs or politicians or the sort of metropolitan bien-pensants who think tootling round town in electric cars magically negates the carbon footprint they make flying to their farmhouse in Tuscany three times a year. And what they think about the environment couldn’t be more different from the version rammed down our throats by politicians of all parties, and by most of the media too. …

… So far, depressingly few of our politicians have understood this. The EU goes on railroading through its oppressive legislation on everything from waste disposal to the kind of lightbulbs we’re allowed to use. Buffoons like Ed Miliband and the head of the Environment Agency Lord (Chris) Smith continue to witter on about carbon capture and renewable energy, quite oblivious to the far more pressing and real threat of the ‘energy gap’ which will shortly lead to widespread blackouts. Conservatives who ought to know better either believe the cant because Dave does or delude themselves it’s not a voting issue.

But the tide of history is against this Green Terror and so, increasingly, are the people. We’ve had enough of its ghastly wind turbines, its fascistic recycling inspectors and its swingeing eco-taxes. We want lightbulbs you can see by, not horrid flickery yellow ones; we want weekly rubbish collections; we want countryside unblighted by vast Teletubby windmills. And we want Al Gore’s head on a plate.

David Warren from his perch in Ottawa looks at the two elections in North America.

I am very tired of electoral politics, and I would expect my readers are, too. This after a model five-week Canadian general election campaign, quickly resolved in a few minutes of vote-counting last Tuesday night — in addition to what feels like a century of still-unfinished jousting between presidential gladiators in the gigantic republic to our south (to say nothing of the bears, bulls, wild cats, donkeys and elephants in their congressional forum).

Indeed, I retired to bed last Tuesday evening feeling a nearly smug satisfaction in the day’s principal event, and muttering, “Vive le Canada!”

For, with all but one seat reporting before midnight, the Tories were then elected or leading in 140-plus, and quite unchallengeable. Most of those seats were settled away, without risk of nasty overnight swings, and the ones that weren’t didn’t really matter. All Tories I half-way liked had been re-elected, together with a selection of backbenchers I half-liked in other parties. And overall, the best available result: all party leaders farther away from power, except Stephen Harper, who wasn’t any nearer.

A boring election; an unsurprising result; no serious consequences. A vindication of everything our nation stands for.

A (seeming) century into the American campaign, where everything is (apparently) at stake, one comes to appreciate the pleasure in a good yawn. …

And Mr. Steyn has resumed his National Review column where he contemplates what the next few years might bring.

… As to his qualifications for remaking the world, my favorite moment of the campaign was when he got briefly touchy about having his minimal “qualifications” for the presidency compared with Sarah Palin’s. The senator huffily pointed out that he has too got executive experience. Unlike the governor, he’s never run a state or a town or a business, but, as he put it, for two years he’s been running a successful presidential campaign. In effect, Barack was acknowledging that his principal talent is for self-promotion. It requires some chutzpah to offer your skill at being Barack Obama as your main qualification for the job. The man who modified the title of Sammy Davis Jr.’s autobiography for his campaign motto — “Yes, we can!” — might have done better to cut straight to one of Sammy’s signature songs: “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” L’état, c’est moi.

These next four, eight (twelve? twenty?) years seem likely to be tough for us stilted cheerers. I doubt he’ll be lowering ocean levels. But, unlike King Canute, who at least arranged a useful demonstration to apprise the sycophants of his limitations in that respect, King Barack is in no hurry to disabuse his followers. So he’ll probably set up some cockamamie bureaucratic regulation designed hypothetically to lower ocean levels over the course of the next century or two. After all, there’s no point electing a megastar leader without mega-government to go along with him. You might think this is all profoundly unbecoming to a republic of free-born citizens. But these days that’s a concept you can barely raise a roomful of stilted cheers for.

Jeff Jacoby points out the basic problem with health insurance.

… During World War II, federal wage controls barred employers from raising their workers’ salaries, but said nothing about fringe benefits. So firms competing for employees at government-restricted wages began offering medical insurance to sweeten employment offers. Even sweeter was that employers could deduct those benefits as business expenses, yet employees didn’t have to report them as taxable income. For a while the IRS resisted that interpretation, but Congress eventually enshrined the tax-exempt status of employer-based medical insurance in law.

Result: a radical shift in the way Americans paid for medical care. With health benefits tax-free if they were employer-supplied, tens of millions of Americans were soon signing up for medical insurance through work. As tax rates rose, so did the incentive to keep expanding health benefits. No longer was medical insurance reserved for major expenditures like surgery or hospitalization. Americans who would never think of using auto insurance to cover tune-ups and oil changes grew accustomed to having their medical insurer pay for yearly physicals, prescriptions, and other routine expenses.

We thus ended up with a healthcare system in which the vast majority of bills are covered by a third party. With someone else picking up the tab, Americans got used to consuming medical care without regard to price or value. After all, if it was covered by insurance, why not go to the emergency room for a simple sore throat? Why not get the name-brand drug instead of a generic? …

Barack has campaigned about a shortage of scientists and engineers. John Tierney looks at the market and says. “What shortage.”

… The only “shortage” is of American-born scientists and engineers. But with so many talented foreigners competing for positions here in schools and laboratories, it’s entirely rational for American students to head into fields where their skills are in more demand — and harder to replace with foreign labor. Mr. Greenberg sums up their options nicely:

Consider the economic fates of two bright college graduates, Jane and Jill, both 22. Jane excels at a top law school, and after graduation three years later, is wooed and hired by a top law firm at the going rate–$125,000 a year, with a year-end bonus of $25,000 to $50,000.

Jill heads down the long trail to a PhD in physics, and after six Spartan years on graduate stipends rising to $20,000 a year, finally gets her degree. Tenure-track jobs appropriate to her rigorous training are scarce, but, more fortunate than her other classmates, she lands a good postdoc appointment–at $35,000 year, without health insurance or professional independence. Three years later, when attorney Jane is raking in $150,000 a year, plus bonuses, Jill is nail-biting over another postdoc appointment, with an unusually ample postdoc recompense of $45,000 per annum. Medicine and business management similarly trump science in earning power. …

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Peter Robinson writes in Forbes about what Milton Friedman would have made of the credit crisis.

The day after Milton Friedman died in November 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article about monetary policy that Friedman had written. Unable to recall when the article had first appeared, I asked the editor. “Today,” he said. “Milton adapted it just a couple of weeks ago from a research paper he was working on.”

This took a moment to sink in. Friedman, by universal consent one of the two or three most consequential economists of the 20th century, had still been performing original economic research then describing his findings for ordinary readers–at the age of 94.

What would Milton have said if he were still with us today? Friedman spent his final three decades at the Hoover Institution–my office was just two doors down the hall from his–and earlier this week I sat down with two of my Hoover colleagues, economists Thomas MaCurdy and Jay Bhattacharya, both close students of Milton, to decide what questions we would have asked him–and how he might have replied. …

Stuart Taylor, one of journalism’s finest, weighs in on the causes of the credsis. (Pickerhead figured it’s time for a new word)

President Bush, his Securities and Exchange Commission appointees, other free-enterprise dogmatists who have stood in the way of regulating risky and opaque financial manipulations, and greedy Wall Streeters deserve the blame heaped on them for the financial meltdown that has so severely shaken America.

But the pretense of many Democrats that this crisis is altogether a Republican creation is simplistic and dangerous.

It is simplistic because Democrats have been a big part of the problem, in part by supporting governmental distortions of the marketplace through mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose reckless lending practices necessitated a $200 billion government rescue last month. It is dangerous because misdiagnosing the causes of the crisis could lead both to regulatory overkill and to more reckless risk taking by Fannie, Freddie, or newly created government-sponsored enterprises.

Fannie and Freddie aside, it’s worth pointing out that many, if not most, of those greedy Wall Street barons are Democrats. And that the securities and investment industry has given more money to Democrats than to Republicans in this election cycle. And that opposing regulation of risky new financial practices by private investment banks and others has been a bipartisan enterprise, engaged in by the Clinton and Bush administrations alike.

But the roles of Fannie and Freddie are my focus here. Powerful Democratic (and some Republican) advocates of affordable housing, including Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., have been the GSEs’ most potent and ardent champions in recent years. ..

OK, we have to cover the election. What better way than with Mark Steyn’s return to the OC Register? He has Plumber Joe thoughts.

The heart of the American Dream is aspiration. That’s why people came here from all over the world. Back in Eastern Europe, the Joe Bidens and Diane Sawyers of the day were telling Joe the Peasant: “Hey, look, man. You’re a peasant in the 19th century, just like your forebears were peasants in the 12th century and your descendants will be peasants in the 26th century. So you’re never gonna be earning 250 groats a year. Don’t worry about it. Leave it to us. We know better.” And Joe the Peasant eventually figured that one day he’d like to be able to afford the Premium Gruel with just a hint of arugula and got on the boat to Ellis Island. Because America is the land where a guy who doesn’t have a 250-grand business today might just have one in five or 10 years’ time.

I’m with Joe the Plumber, not Joe the Hair-Plugger. He’s articulated the animating principles of America better than anyone on either side in this campaign. Which is why the O-Bots need to destroy him. As Obama’s catchphrase goes:

“Joe the Plumber!

Can we fix him?

Joe the Plumber!

Yes, we can!”

For the record, I am not a government-licensed pundit. But I expect they’ll fix that, too.

Michelle Malkin reports on the efforts by Obama and the angry Left to flush Joe the Plumber.

Six-term Sen. Joe Biden’s got some nerve going after citizen Joe the Plumber. But the entrenched politician from Delaware, who fancies himself the nation’s No. 1 Ordinary Joe, had no choice. Obama-Biden simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic ticket as socialist overlords. And so a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.

The left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.

Wurzelbacher, in case you’ve been in hibernation, is the small-business man from Ohio who questioned Obama about his tax plan during a Toledo campaign swing last weekend. The revealing exchange was caught on tape and broadcast widely across the Internet and TV airwaves.

In response to Wurzelbacher’s question about why he should be “taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” Obama sermonized that he needed to “spread the wealth around” because “it’s good for everybody.” …

Michael Barone wonders if Plumber Joe can change the vote.

It was October 13. The candidate of the out party seemed to be cruising toward victory. He projected an image of confidence, promising to restore national unity, and ignored his opponent. Then he made a little mistake. Veteran reporter Robert J. Donovan tells the story:

“As the [candidate] had begun to speak from the rear platform in Beaucoup, Illinois, his train suddenly lurched a few feet backward toward the crowd in what might have been, if the movement had continued, a serious accident. However, the train stopped quickly, yet [the candidate], momentarily losing his poise, exclaimed into the microphone, “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer. He probably ought to be shot at sunrise, but I guess we can let him off because no one was hurt.’”

The candidate was Thomas E. Dewey, who was running against Harry Truman in 1948. The most recent Gallup polls showed Dewey leading Truman 46 percent to 40 percent (September 23-28) and 46.5 percent to 39 percent (September 10-15). Truman seized on the “engineer” comment, and Truman backers portrayed it as an example of elite Republican contempt for the working man. …

Charles Krauthammer says Obama is playing the race card.

… What makes the charges against McCain especially revolting is that he has been scrupulous in eschewing the race card. He has gone far beyond what is right and necessary, refusing even to make an issue of Obama’s deep, self-declared connection with the race-baiting Rev. Wright.

In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use of that perfectly legitimate issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite brilliantly, deployed the race card.

How brilliantly? The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can. …

WaPo editors want Obama to let the voucher program continue. Good luck!

IT WOULD be nice if facts, not ideology, framed the discussion over the District’s school voucher program. In an exchange during this week’s presidential debate, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama airily dismissed the program, while Republican Sen. John McCain offered a somewhat jumbled defense of it. Lost was this: 1,903 poor children have educational opportunities because of a unique program that detracts not a whit from either public or charter schools.

The stance of the two candidates is not surprising, given the history of their respective parties. Democrats loathe any suggestion of sending public money to private schools, while Republicans see the free market as a solution to the woes of urban education. It’s important, though, that the next president — and if the polls are to be believed, that will be Mr. Obama — look past these tired political arguments to the real needs of real children served by the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. …

One of the problems with Obama is he says so many things that aren’t true. Perhaps this is only part of the campaign. Many of our favorites have deconstructed his lies in the last debate. WSJ Editors are first.

In Wednesday night’s debate with John McCain, Barack Obama defended his opposition to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement this way: “The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination, on a fairly consistent basis, and there have not been any prosecutions.” Among the many falsehoods in this Presidential campaign, this is one of the worst. …

Ed Morrissey is next covering Obama lies on Ayers, Acorn, and infanticide.

In presidential debates (and campaigns), candidates usually try to put their policies and records in the best possible light.  The spin usually focuses on the positive aspects of these points to the point of hedging the entire truth, but flat-out lies are pretty rare.  Last night, Barack Obama treated us to two of them, and not surprisingly, on the two most controversial points of his record. …

Obama’s tax problems? Jim Lindgren in Volokh does the honors.

I was stunned to see some document showing Joe the Plumbers’ tax problems on my 10pm (CT)newscast on the local NBC affiliate in Chicago on Thursday night. They have very little time for any national news and they actually spent time on Joe the Plumbers’ tax problems. Amazing!

But when an actual candidate — Barack Obama — released his tax returns, which on their face seemed to show an ethics violation of Illinois law, the press couldn’t care less. …

Watching the Obama folks gang bang of the upstart, Claudia Rosett says, “First they came for Joe the Plumber…”

… It seems that Joe’s sins are less than the litany would make them. He may not have a plumber’s license, but he works for someone who does. He owes back taxes, but less than $1,200. And at least to date, it is not a crime in America to use a nickname or be a registered Republican.

But to squabble over Joe’s record is to miss the real point. Obama is the one running for public office, aspiring to the country’s highest position of power and public trust. Joe is not. He’s a private citizen, who had every right to ask a very good question. He wanted to know why he was being taxed “more and more for fulfilling the American dream?”

What he got from the well-heeled Senators Obama and Biden was mockery and contempt.

Most disturbing is this: If that’s how Joe the Plumber gets dealt with while Obama is still stumping for votes, then what happens to Joe, or anyone else who dares question Obama’s plans, should Obama win the White House? …

Corner post on Michelle’s Waldorf snack.

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George Will’s column on a new Gettysburg memorial lets us open with a nice change of pace.

In 1863, 11 major roads converged on this town. Which is why history did, too.

The founding of the American nation was the hinge of world history: Popular sovereignty would have its day. The collision of armies here was the hinge of American history: The nation would long endure. Which is why 200 or so generous private citizens recently gathered here for a quiet celebration of their gift to the nation — a sparkling new Museum and Visitor Center that instructs and inspires.

In 1997, Bob Kinsley, a contractor in York, Pa., decided that something should be done about the decrepit facilities for explaining the battle and displaying its artifacts. His determination survived more than 50 public meetings and three congressional hearings, and two years of resistance from rival bidders, some Gettysburg merchants and people who think the private sector takes up space that the public sector should fill.

He started the Gettysburg Foundation and hired Bob Wilburn, who had administered Colonial Williamsburg. Wilburn raised the $103 million that built the new center, which includes a theater for the scene-setting film narrated by Morgan Freeman, and the Cyclorama, the circular painting that depicts Pickett’s Charge on the battle’s third and final day. Americans today are so constantly pummeled by a sensory blitzkrieg — the sights and sounds of graphic journalism and entertainment — they can hardly fathom how the Cyclorama dazzled viewers when displayed in 1884. Magnificently restored and presented, it is still stunning. …

Continuing to ignore our present political predicament, we have Walter Williams who has proposed an increase in the number of representatives in the lower house.

… Excellent research, found at http://www.thirty-thousand.org/index.htm, shows that in 1804 each representative represented about 40,000 people. Today, each representative represents close to 700,000. If we lived up to the vision of our founders, given today’s population, we would have about 7,500 congressmen in the House of Representatives. It turns out that in 1929 Congress passed a bill fixing the number of representatives at 435. Prior to that, the number of congressional districts was increased every 10 years, from 1790 to 1910, except one, after a population census was taken.

We might ask what’s so sacrosanct about 435 representatives? Why not 600, or 1,000, or 7,500? Here’s part of the answer and, by the way, I never cease to be amazed by the insight and wisdom of our founders: James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, argued that the smaller the House of Representatives relative to the nation’s population, the greater is the risk of unethical collusion. He said, “Numerous bodies … are less subject to venality and corruption. ” In a word, he saw competition in the political arena as the best means for protecting our liberties. If Madison were around today to see today’s venal and corrupt Congress, he’d probably say, “See, I told you so!”  …

John Fund introduces us to Joe the Plumber featured in last night’s debate.

Family Security Matters has an interview with Joe.

At a recent campaign appearance in Ohio, Sen. Obama was approached by plumber Joe Wurzelbacher, who has concerns about Obama’s proposed tax policies. FamilySecurityMatters.org’s Pam Meister had a candid conversation with him about his experience.

PAM MEISTER: You recently met Sen. Obama on the campaign trail in Ohio, and you asked him a question about his tax policies. What exactly was your question for him?

JOE WURZELBACHER: Initially, I started off asking him if he believed in the American Dream and he said yes, he does – and then I proceeded to ask him then why he’s penalizing me for trying to fulfill it. He asked, “what do you mean,” and I explained to him that I’m planning on purchasing this company – it’s not something I’m gonna purchase outright, it’s something I’m going to have to make payments on for years – but essentially I’m going to buy this company, and the profits generated by that could possibly put me in that tax bracket he’s talking about and that bothers me. It’s not like I would be rich; I would still just be a working plumber. I work hard for my money, and the fact that he thinks I make a little too much that he just wants to redistribute it to other people. Some of them might need it, but at the same time, it’s not their discretion to do it – it’s mine.

PM: You’re a plumber, and you’re looking to buy your own plumbing business?

JW: Correct.

PM: Would that plumbing business employ other people or would it just employ you?

JW: Eventually it would employ other people. Right now it’s a two man shop and it’s got a very good footprint and a very good reputation, so eventually I would want to put other people out there. I don’t want to get huge because if you get too big your quality goes, but I definitely wouldn’t mind having two good plumbers out there with me working. …

Karl Rove says Obama hasn’t closed the sale yet.

… Mr. McCain is hitting Mr. Obama for wanting to raise taxes in difficult economic times, especially on small business and for the purpose of redistributing income, and for having lavish spending plans at a time when the economy is faltering. He’s criticizing Mr. Obama for lingering on the sidelines while Mr. McCain dove in to help pass a rescue plan, necessary no matter how distasteful. And he’s attacking Mr. Obama for not joining the fight in 2005 when reformers like Mr. McCain tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mr. McCain’s other adjustment is his schedule. His campaign understands the dire circumstances it faces and is narrowing his travels almost exclusively to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada. If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP’s 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It’s threading the needle, but it’s come to that.

This task, while not impossible, will be difficult. By mid-September, the McCain camp was slightly ahead in the polls. Then came the financial crisis. The past month has taken an enormous toll on the McCain campaign.

Whether it can find the right formula in the next 19 days to dig out is a question. If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now.

Ross Douthat in WaPo traces our present credit crisis to It’s a Wonderful Life.

If the global economy survives the autumn and our cable-TV companies are still in business come Christmas, Americans surfing the channels for classic Yuletide movies may finally figure out exactly whom they have to blame for the housing bubble and everything that has followed. Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: It all started with George Bailey.

Yes, that George Bailey — the hero of Frank Capra‘s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the most popular man in Bedford Falls, the man so indispensable that he earned a private visitation from a guardian angel just to show him how dreadful a world without him would have been. It’s easy to forget, so potent is the supernaturally charged final act of Capra’s classic, that before he was visiting looking-glass worlds where he’d never been born or scampering through the snow and shouting “Merry Christmas!” till his lungs burst, Jimmy Stewart‘s George Bailey was actually a pretty savvy businessman. And it’s even easier to forget the precise nature of his business: putting the downscale families of Bedford Falls into homes they couldn’t quite afford to buy.

This is the substance of the great war between Bailey and Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter, the richest, meanest man in Bedford Falls. Potter is against easy credit and the suburban dream, against the rabble moving out of his tenements and buying homes, while the Bailey Building and Loan exists to make suburbia possible.

The Bailey vision is economic and moral all at once. …

The Economist reviews a book on the financial history of the world – The Ascent of Money.

… Of far greater interest is Mr Ferguson’s general theory, which does not emerge until the end of the book. He thinks that finance evolves through natural selection. Although the professor cautions against the sort of Darwinism that sees evolution as progress, he believes that new sorts of finance are constantly coming into being as the environment changes. The sequence of creation, selection and destruction is what has generated many of the financial techniques that modern economies depend on.

This leads Mr Ferguson to make two timely points. One is to remember that evolution depends on extinction as well as creation. You have to allow ill-adapted techniques to fail if you are going to get something new. As the world rushes around rescuing every bank in sight, it is a reminder that the guarantor-state will later have to administer painful medicine.

The other is to observe the wonder of what financial evolution has created. Just now it is only natural to think of the “roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes.” But Mr Ferguson sees something else too: “From ancient Mesopotamia to present-day China…the ascent of money has been one of the driving forces behind human progress: a complex process of innovation, intermediation and integration that has been as vital as the advance of science or the spread of law in mankind’s escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture and the misery of the Malthusian trap.” Amid this financial bust, cleave to that.

Turns out Alaska’s glaciers have been growing. Anchorage Daily News with the story.

… “In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.”

Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.

Scrappleface reports Obama has declared plumbing a constitutional right.

After a presidential debate which focused on the needs of one man, a plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio, Sen. Barack Obama this morning announced that “plumbing, like health care, is a Constitutional right, and therefore a federal government responsibility.”

“Millions of Americans go to bed every night listening to the incessant drip of a leaky faucet, fearing a flooded basement or a backed up toilet,” said Sen. Obama. “In my travels around the country, I’ve learned that single mothers, children and seniors are hardest hit. Often it comes down to a decision between buying groceries, or getting the garbage disposal fixed.” …

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David Warren comments on the inexorable growth of government.

… Even if McCain wins, we can expect another “stagflation party,” of the kind we attended in the 1970s, though quite possibly on a 1930s scale. For in the time-hallowed tradition of party competition, the Republicans may now be offering even bigger giveaways than the Democrats in the hope of buying off swing voters.

And while there is no unanswerable logical reason why the Canadian government should follow the rest of the West down the next plughole of the Nanny State, we heard the sucking sound throughout our short northern campaign season. The era of Thatcher and Reagan is over, and the era of Herbert Hoover has resumed.

Of course I have only touched on money, and the freedom to retain your earnings and spend or invest as you think wise, in your own interest and that of your family, is only one aspect of freedom. It is a key aspect, however, for money talks, and a government that has appropriated most of it will have a lot to say about the rest of your habits.

Through the last generation the consistent trend has been towards “liberal fascism”: constantly escalating legal and quasi-legal pressure on people who do not agree with the direction society is taking. Look for more.

A telling note on media bias from John Fund.

David Harsanyi’s column reminds us of Mark Twain’s dictum; “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

How is it that most ordinary citizens can survive an entire lifetime without experiencing the thrill of a grand jury indictment or the shadow of an ethics investigation?

Well, congratulations! And if you’re curious, feel free to live vicariously through your elected official.

It’s true that by 2006, Republicans had infested D.C. with shifty and corrupt swindlers, and the party paid the price by handing Congress over to Democrats.

Remember Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi promising a new age of principled government in 2006? “The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C.,” she claimed, “and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”

Naturally, it was pure bunk. …

Speaking of corruption, how about the “card check” bill Big Labor has told the Dems to pass? The Hill says George McGovern is helping the fight against it.

… McGovern said that he became involved in the campaign when Rick Berman, executive director of the Employee Freedom Action Committee, brought the issue to his attention. The two have known each other for a number of years.

“But I wasn’t doing it to please him,” McGovern said. “I’m doing it because I believe it’s an important right that should be protected.

In the ad, McGovern says, “It’s hard to believe that any politician would agree to a law denying millions of employees the right to a private vote. I have always been a champion of labor unions. But I fear that today’s union leaders are turning their backs on democratic workplace elections.”

The ad will first air nationally on Fox during Tuesday’s presidential debate, and then in the coming weeks in seven states with close Senate elections. …

John Stossel takes exception to the “reregulation mantra.”

… It’s intuitive to assume that regulation prevents problems, but it’s rarely true. First, how would regulators know what to do? Leaving aside the bias they might have and the brutal fact that regulation is physical force, how can a small group of people understand the workings of a market sufficiently to regulate sensibly? Markets, especially financial markets, are far more complicated than any mind can grasp. They consist of many millions of participants making countless decisions on the basis of unarticulated know-how and intuition. To attempt to regulate such activity requires knowledge no one can possess.

To seriously regulate those markets you’d have to impose the “precautionary principle,” a favorite idea of some environmentalists, especially in Europe. The principle prohibits any product or activity not proven 100 percent safe. It sounds so reasonable. But Ron Bailey of “Reason” points out what it really means: Don’t do anything for the first time.

Bad idea. The world needs innovators and inventors. We need people who try things for the first time.

Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek emphasized that government planners suffer from a “knowledge problem” because “the knowledge of the circumstances of which [they] must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

In other words, the planner or regulator can’t possibly know what the multitude in a market “knows.” So what regulators really do is straitjacket market participants, preventing innovators from creating prosperity for us all. …

Drawing from a WSJ Op-Ed, Ed Morrissey points out the government interference that created affirmative action mortgages.

… Now Obama and the same Democrats who pushed Fannie and Freddie to buy a trillion dollars in bad loans want to blame “deregulation” for the crisis.  It wasn’t deregulation, and as Wallison points out, the industry didn’t get deregulated at all.  Congress created this crisis by pushing Fannie and Freddie into not just buying subprime paper but into transforming it into securities that infected the entire financial system. …

Morrissey also posts on Jesse Jackson’s Zionist slip.

Barack Obama may say that Israel has no better friend than himself, but Jesse Jackson begs to differ.  Amir Taheri wrote in yesterday’s New York Post that Jackson hailed a new era in American foreign policy, where the “Zionists” would no longer control American action:

He promised “fundamental changes” in US foreign policy – saying America must “heal wounds” it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the “arrogance of the Bush administration.”

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” would end.

Jackson believes that, although “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House. …

Peter Wehner posts in Contentions.

At a time when many people are saying Barack Obama’s past associations with radical figures doesn’t matter — and even that it shouldn’t matter – it’s worth considering the opposite argument.

From the ancient Greeks to the founding fathers, many of our best political minds believed character in our leaders matters. It doesn’t matter more than anything else, and character is itself a complicated thing. People can have strong character in some respects and weak character in others. People can demonstrate battlefield valor, for example, yet show cruelty to those over whom they have power. They can speak unpleasant truths when there is a high cost to doing so and betray their spouses. Individuals can demonstrate admirable loyalty to their friends and still lie to the public, or work for peace and yet violate the laws of our land. …

Power Line tells Barack to spread his own wealth around.

… Given that poorer citizens always outnumber the rich, political philosophers have long worried that government based on majority rule could lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. “If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city,” warns Aristotle.

The founders of the United States were deep students of politics and history, and they shared Aristotle’s worry. Up through their time, history had shown all known democracies to be “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” James Madison and others therefore made it a “first object of government” to protect personal property from unjust confiscation. Numerous provisions were included in the Constitution and Bill of Rights to protect the property rights of citizens.

Given that one of the causes of the American Revolution was a tax, the founders understood very well that taxation could become a way for one group to prey on another. So while the Constitution empowered the federal government to levy taxes, it limited this power mostly to indirect taxes like tariffs, duties, and excise taxes. For much of American history the federal government subsisted solely on those fees. …

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John Bolton doesn’t like our new North Korea policy.

North Korea has now achieved one of its most-prized objectives: removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. In exchange, the U.S. has received “promises” on verification that are vague and amount to an agreement to negotiate the critical points later.

In the Bush administration’s waning days, this is what passes for diplomatic “success.” It is in fact the final crash and burn of a once-inspiring global effort to confront and reverse nuclear proliferation, thereby protecting America and its friends. …

Same with Anne Applebaum.

… For the record, North Korea has sold missile technology to Syria and Libya, has assassinated diplomats, and has kidnapped Japanese and South Korean citizens and refuses to give a full accounting of their fate. North Korea also keeps untold numbers of its own citizens in concentration camps, which are direct copies of those built by Stalin, and knowingly starves many of its citizens to death as well. By any normal definition, North Korea is still a “terrorist” state, and everyone knows it. The administration’s decision was thus not a recognition of any change in North Korean behavior. It was, rather, a negotiated exchange of one set of words for another: We withdraw terrorist—and, in exchange, they offer a “promise,” once again, to dismantle their nuclear facilities. Ritual favors were bestowed as well: Presumably as a sign of the respect in which they hold him, the U.S. official negotiating these terms was, on his last visit to the north, ceremonially allowed to travel by car through Panmunjom instead of being forced to fly in from Beijing. …

Spengler says Americans are gamblers.

America’s homeowners feel like busted gamblers after a bender in Vegas. They wagered not only the nest egg, but the nest, with the abandon of tulip-bulb traders in 17th century Holland. Americans are hard put to explain how the American dream turned into a chip on the craps table. The focal point of speculation was the asset one usually associates with secure domesticity. What happened to the risk-averse Economic Man of textbooks?

The textbook was misleading to begin with: we are all gamblers and always have been, argues Reuven Brenner, the Repap Professor of Business at McGill University. In a series of books beginning in 1983 with History: The Human Gamble and culminating with his latest volume, A World of Chance: Betting on Religion, Games, Wall Street, Brenner yanks economics inside-out by placing risky behavior at the center of the economic model.

Conventional economics describes an artificial world of slight deviations from equilibrium; Brenner presents the real world, in all its danger and uncertainty. Man lives not only by the sweat of his brow, but by the fortitude of his intestines, for survival demands that we take mortal leaps of a kind that are unknown to the conventional model. Men who would prefer to be timid risk everything to leapfrog their peers before they themselves are left behind.

Rather than award yet another Nobel Prize to an economist who put bells and whistles on the conventional model (Princeton University Professor Paul Krugman was honored this past weekend ”for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity”,) the Swedish Academy should have honored Brenner, who gives us a model that makes sense in the real world of tumult and uncertainty – 2008 should have been Brenner’s year, given the cataclysmic breakdown of the conventional model. Only a few months ago, the governments of the world went about their business as if nothing unusual was at work; now they are lurching from one emergency plan to another and warning of a new Great Depression. …

A retort to Mike Bloomberg’s big head when George Will argues in favor of term limits.

… The Times dutifully reported that 37 governors, 15 state legislatures and nine of the 10 most populous cities have term limits, which remain popular with the people who imposed them: “Recent ballot initiatives to alter them, including one in California in February, have failed.”

Two amusing arguments against term limits are that political novices are too susceptible to the wiles of lobbyists and that term-limited legislators, worrying too much about their next jobs and too little about their current ones, are constantly in campaign mode, thinking of the next election rather than the next generation. The idea that when term limits are absent, these difficulties are absent is refuted by one word: Congress.

“Make no mistake about it,” Bloomberg said when announcing his intention to revise the law without seeking the permission of the public that enacted it. “I still think term limits are a good thing.” Just not for him, not now, in these “tough times.” Yet again, the political class’s reaction to term limits is a powerful, indeed sufficient, argument for them.

Speaking of clowns, American Spectator on Biden.

… Well, take a glance at Senator Biden’s performance just last month. On September he 22 bragged to a Baltimore audience that, “If you want to know where al-Qaida lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.” Two days later he continued his B.S.-ing that al-Qaida’s headquarters had been moved to “the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where my helicopter was recently forced down.” Both statements were rehashes of his September 9 garbagespiel that “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan [is] where my helicopter was forced down.” Left unsaid by the senator — who rarely leaves anything unsaid — was that the helicopter was “brought down” not by enemy fire but by inclement weather.

Okay, maybe those outbursts do not reveal Senator Biden as an airhead, but they do reveal him as a phony. So consider a couple more of the senator’s September follies. …

Thomas Sowell wonders why telling the truth becomes “going negative.”

… When Barack Obama donated $20,000 to Jeremiah Wright, does anyone imagine that he was unaware that Wright was the epitome of grievance, envy and resentment hype? Or were Wright’s sermons too subtle for Obama to pick up that message?

How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?

Yet those in the media who deplore “negative advertising” regard it as unseemly to dig up ugly facts instead of sticking to the beautiful rhetoric of an election year. The oft-repeated mantra is that we should trick to the “real issues.”

What are called “the real issues” are election-year talking points, while the actual track record of the candidates is treated as a distraction– and somehow an unworthy distraction.

Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do– and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.

Barack Obama has carried election-year makeovers to a new high, presenting himself a uniter of people, someone reaching across the partisan divide and the racial divide– after decades of promoting polarization in each of his successive roles and each of his choices of political allies.

Yet the media treat exposing a fraudulent election-year image as far worse than letting someone acquire the powers of the highest office in the land through sheer deception.

Charles Krauthammer says Obama’s friends are a legitimate issue and McCain was remiss in not taking up the issue sooner.

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama’s associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate. …

Dilbert is here.

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David Owen, former Brit Foreign Secretary sees coming strike on Iran.

Some key decision makers in Israel fear that unless they attack Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities in the next few months, while George W Bush is still president, there will not be another period when they can rely on the United States as being anywhere near as supportive in the aftermath of a unilateral attack.

In the past 40 years there have been few occasions when I have been more concerned about a specific conflict escalating to involve, economically, the whole world. We are watching a disinformation exercise involving a number of intelligence services. Reality is becoming ever harder to disentangle.

Last month a story in The Guardian claimed that on May 14 Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, in a meeting with Bush, had asked for a green light to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. We were told that Bush refused. He believed Iran would see the United States as being behind any such assault and Americans would come under renewed attack in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shipping in the Gulf would be vulnerable. We were told that the source of the story was a European head of government and “his” officials – as if to exclude Angela Merkel and Germany. It is, however, improbable that Israel abandoned its option to take unilateral action.

Three weeks later the Israeli military conducted an exercise over the Mediterranean to demonstrate to the United States as well as Iran that it could attack. More recently there have been a number of stories raising concern about what is happening in Iran. …

The author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street says to chill.

As the world economy reels under the weight of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we have been left with a broken financial system. Financial institutions around the world have suffered life-threatening, self-inflicted wounds by purchasing over a trillion dollars of complex mortgage-backed securities backed by dodgy loans based on inflated real-estate values. These assets have been financed with enormous leverage and with short-term debt. Just prior to its “rescue,” Bear Stearns had a debt to equity ratio of over 30 to 1, making it susceptible to a “run on the bank,” although Bear was not a commercial bank but rather part of the “shadow banking system” built on derivatives.

The long-run solution to the present crisis must involve substantial deleveraging and a recapitalization of our financial institutions. In the meantime, credit has been essentially frozen and a world-wide recession seems almost inevitable.

But just because stock markets have panicked, investors should not. The best position for investors today is not “fetal and 100% in cash.” We are not going to have a depression, and we have survived financial crises before. A century of investing experience, as well as insights from the field of behavioral finance, suggest that investors who bail out of equities during times like these are almost always making the wrong decision. …

So does David Warren.

… The things that we produce by our labour we may continue to produce, so far as they are needed; and the things we need may continue to be produced, in exchange. Money itself, so long as it is taken at face value, may continue to be the convenient mode of exchange. Neither now, nor in 1929, nor in any of the other times of stock plunge and bank failure, has anything much been lost, until, to use Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s phrase, “fear itself” became the enemy of the people.

For in practical terms, the stocks on Wall Street are not worth nothing. Formidable agencies of production lie behind each of them. When their heads have cooled, investors may sort out which are over-valued, which under-valued by comparison, and what needs writing off. The more I try to think it through, the clearer it seems to me that every “rescue plan” is counter-productive. The sorting-out process is seriously confused when the government blunders in.

Indeed, the consensus of the economists I have read is that the Great Depression was largely an artifact of government intervention, reacting to a meltdown by freezing it into place. For politicians and bureaucracies characteristically mistake money for goods, words for things, pictures for reality.

ProPublica reports on Clinton SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt who claims Clinton era officials argued against derivatives regulation.

As the world financial system implodes, Democrats have blamed the Bush administration’s lack of regulation for creating the conditions for collapse. But a top Clinton regulator acknowledges that he and his colleagues a decade ago “beat back” regulatory efforts that could have prevented credit markets from becoming so precariously balanced they were “milliseconds” from disaster.

“That was a point in history when perhaps we should have anticipated something like where we are today, at least the possibility,” says Arthur Levitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001.

In 1998, an obscure federal agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, raised the prospect of regulating the burgeoning market in complex financial instruments, which then had a notional value of $28.7 trillion. Today the notional value is $531.2 trillion, according to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.

The nation’s leading financial officials – Levitt, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and his deputy Lawrence Summers – pummeled the proposal, saying it was dangerous to even discuss the idea.  Led by Rubin, Levitt and Greenspan, the Clinton White House instead proposed a modest set of reforms. Months later, Clinton Administration officials walked away from their own recommendations, concluding the market could be best managed by the financial industry. …

Mark Steyn comments on the David Warren column in Oct 9th Pickings – The American people and their irreconcilable differences.

Another Steyn Corner post leads to David Harsanyi’s column claiming the GOP has no candidate.

This election has never been about John McCain — though his candidacy is sure to revive a debate about the worst presidential candidates of all time.

No, this is a referendum on Barack Obama. And many Republicans are exuding the confidence of a hopelessly quixotic sports fan — a person who watches his atrocious team struggle for three quarters with the false expectation that some miraculous comeback is imminent in the fourth.

It rarely is.

McCain has consistently remained inconsistent, vacillating between promises and populism. From his support of cap-and-trade to his actions during the bailout, McCain’s positions seem entirely focused on winning the middle- of-the-road vote.

No modern Republican has ever won the presidency solely focused on the ambivalent squishy inattentive center. These people don’t care enough to name their political party, much less pay attention.

But he’s a maverick. One of McCain’s central arguments has been his uncompromising valor in opposing the Bush administration.

Here’s a newsbreak: Disagreeing with the Bush administration on a handful of issues (often the wrong ones, in McCain’s case) doesn’t make you a maverick, it makes you an average American. And, sadly, the second debate proved that McCain would be incapable of making his party’s philosophical or political case even if he genuinely tried. …

Samizdata liked the Sebastian Mallaby column in Pickings last week.

This is a good, very fair-minded take on the current financial turmoil and all the more impressive for its insights precisely because the writer is not some sort of ultra-free market ideologue:

“The real roots of the crisis lie in a flawed response to China. Starting in the 1990s, the flood of cheap products from China kept global inflation low, allowing central banks to operate relatively loose monetary policies. But the flip side of China’s export surplus was that China had a capital surplus, too. Chinese savings sloshed into asset markets ’round the world, driving up the price of everything from Florida condos to Latin American stocks.”

Absolutely. China, and the massive pool of savings that Asian economies have been able to provide to Western borrowers, is the 800 pound gorilla in the room in the current saga. …

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Nobel peace prize is Finni.

Martti Ahtisaari’s Nobel Peace Prize yesterday won’t get European elites buzzing as in past years (See: Gore, Al and Carter, Jimmy). In his diplomatic and political career, the former Finnish President brokered peace on various continents — yet also recognized clear limits to good intentions. …

Spengler explains why Israel is such a happy country.

Envy surrounds no country on Earth like the state of Israel, and with good reason: by objective measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth at the 60th anniversary of its founding. It is one of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or the Netherlands. But most remarkable is that Israelis appear to love life and hate death more than any other nation. If history is made not by rational design but by the demands of the human heart, as I argued last week , the light heart of the Israelis in face of continuous danger is a singularity worthy of a closer look.

Can it be a coincidence that this most ancient of nations, and the only nation persuaded that it was summoned into history for God’s service, consists of individuals who appear to love life more than any other people? As a simple index of life-preference, I plot the fertility rate versus the suicide rate of 35 industrial countries, that is, the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. Israel stands alone, positioned in the upper-left-hand-quadrant, or life-loving, portion of the chart. Those who believe in  Israel’s divine election might see a special grace reflected in its love of life. …

Mark Steyn is back from his hiatus. His subject is the shape of an Obama administration.

Speaking personally, I’m not looking for a messiah in the White House. My favorite presidential heritage site is the Coolidge homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vt.: I have seen the mausoleums of mighty kings, but none compares with the row of headstones on a snowbound hillside cemetery, seven generations of Coolidges lined up in a row, all buried under simple, bald granite markers with only an all but imperceptible small American eagle to distinguish the 30th president from his forebears and descendants. The American ideal: the citizen-president.

Or so I always assumed. But let’s be bipartisan here. If I were a Democrat, I’d salute Harry S. Truman, the Missouri haberdasher who … whoa, “haberdasher”! There’s a word you don’t hear too much nowadays, and, if you did, it’d probably be because the treasury secretary and the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee are on cable TV, standing on the steps of the Capitol announcing a 700 gazillion-dollar bipartisan haberdashery bailout package because the global haberdashery sector is too big to fail, and if we don’t act now there’ll be a massive planetary ripple effect that could take down ladies’ lingerie, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Citizen-presidents: Who needs ‘em? The day after the most-recent debate I bumped into two Obama supporters in St Johnsbury, Vt. They said isn’t it great that he’s on course to win. Well, they were cute chicks, and I know an obvious pick-up line when I hear one, so I stopped to chat. God Almighty, it was like reverse Viagra: After 10 minutes of Babes For Barack, I never want to meet a female woman of the opposite sex for the rest of my life. Their basic pitch was:

“How do you solve a problem? Like, Obama!

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?”  …

Michael Barone on the Obama thugs.

“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

That’s what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign emails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg’s WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama’s relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago — papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN’s phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg’s example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One. …

Charges in Canada against Mark Steyn have been dismissed says Mark Hemingway in the Corner.

But Mark doesn’t want to leave it at that.

… I sympathize with the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose mouthpiece feels that, if the British Columbia pseudo-judges had applied the logic of previous decisions, we’d have been found guilty. He’s right: Under the ludicrous British Columbia “Human Rights” Code, we are guilty. Which is why the Canadian Islamic Congress should appeal, and why I offered on the radio an hour ago to chip in a thousand bucks towards their costs.

Canada is having an election too. David Warren compares the two.

… Canadians who congratulate themselves for the comparative “niceness” of our election campaign, after glimpsing the nastiness of the presidential race to the south, are peculiarly out of touch with current realities. As Americans better realize — because they have no choice but to take their election seriously — this is no time for “nice.” There is far too much at stake.

With neither the McCain/Palin nor the Obama/Biden ticket, can Americans opt for “more of the same.” Touching everything from tax-and-spending, to core moral values, they have real issues before them. They know it; whereas, up here, what is there to know?

Alas, in the United States as here, the advance of “political correctness” has made a number of key issues undiscussable, except by the brave. But after years of prelude, the battle of the brave has now begun. It is a trial by ordeal for the candidates, but the job they are seeking requires it, and there is no question that should not be asked of the candidate for such a job.

I will be prouder of my country when our own elections get much nastier.

Bjørn Lomborg was in the London Times arguing for sensible global warming policies.

… Of course, we shouldn’t ignore global warming. But instead of trying to cut CO2 emissions, we should focus on dramatically increasing the funding into energy research and development. What matters is getting low-cost low-carbon technology available faster. If the price of renewable energy dropped below the cost of fossil fuels by mid-century, everyone – including China and India – would switch to the greener alternatives. Work done by the Copenhagen Consensus suggests that such a policy could be 300 times better for the world than the UK approach. We could end up doing more than £11 worth of good for each £1 invested. While we would do much more good in total terms, the cost would also be much lower, and hence much more likely to be implemented.

When it comes to climate, we have to come to our senses. Yes, global warming is real and caused by human beings, but it doesn’t mean we should panic in our policy decisions. We need to do the right thing – and invest in discovering and developing new low-carbon technology.

David Harsanyi asks,”Is it negativity or the truth?”

Most polls tell us that Americans have a tremendous aversion to negative campaigns. What these polls fail to explain is how Americans define “negative.” It probably goes something like this: any ugly or disparaging truth about my candidate.

So until those running for office begin to voluntarily divulge their own misdeeds, bad votes, devious dealings and shady alliances, negative ads remain advantageous for voters.

As the economic news — fairly or not — has provided Barack Obama the momentum this past month, John McCain has decided to bring the Illinois senator’s shady associations to the forefront. This promises to be spectacularly “negative” — and even somewhat true. But will it matter?

Former President Bill Clinton was recently asked by Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren: “What is the difference between an association with someone like David Duke and someone like Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright?” Clinton, as suave as they come, fumbled for a several moments, before he finally stating that “we don’t have to go there” and moved on to more comfortable environs.

The answer, of course, is, that anyone linked to Duke would never have been running for national office in the first place. …

Uninspired by the last debate, Samizdata commenter invents a drinking game.

Every time McCain says “My friends…” take a drink.

Every time Obama sidesteps a question in order to work Iraq into a question which was not asked…take a drink. …

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Foreign Policy writes on Putin’s useful idiots – German environmentalists.

… Two decades of stringent environmental regulations have made Germany, Europe’s largest economy, increasingly dependent on natural gas from Russia, the world’s largest exporter. Of course, economic leverage translates seamlessly into political power, and Russia’s sway over German foreign policy has been conspicuous as the recent imbroglio in Georgia has continued to play out.

In fact, Germany has the means to power its economy without Russian natural gas, so energy dependence is unnecessary. For starters, it is home to the largest reserves of coal in Europe. But thanks to the European Union’s marquee climate-change mitigation policy—the continent-wide Emission Trading Scheme—the economics of power production have shifted decidedly against coal because its combustion releases the most greenhouse gases of any conventional fuel source.

Given that coal is currently taboo, Germany could meet its energy needs by expanding the use of nuclear energy, which emits no carbon dioxide when used to generate electricity. Yet the environmental movement in Germany opposes nuclear energy because its waste is difficult and dangerous to store. In 2000, environmentalists won passage of the Nuclear Exit Law, which commits German utilities to phasing out nuclear power by 2020. …

David Warren has a great column on the irreconcilable differences in our politics.

… To one side, it goes without saying that the crisis was caused by greed and conspiracy, in the absence of sufficient government regulation. To the other, it is self-evidently the accomplishment of a U.S. government that set the accounting rules and created the subprime monsters (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) to deliver mortgages to people who would never qualify under common-sense rules of banking.

The latter are right and the former are wrong on the history, but that is beside the point for the time being. The issue has instead found its way to the front line between two basically irreconcilable views of reality. Only in America are they so equally balanced. Elsewhere in the West, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed.

Democrats and Republicans have become two solitudes, and so, the result of the election will be ugly, no matter which side wins.

John Stossel says too bad the bailout passed.

… Steven Horwitz, an economics professor at St. Lawrence University, got it right when he wrote, “There will be short-term pain if we don’t bail out these firms, but that is the hangover price we pay for 15 years or more of binge lending. The proposed bailout cannot prevent the pain of the hangover; it can only conceal it by shifting and dispersing it among the taxpayers and an economy weakened by the borrowing, taxing and/or inflation needed to pay for that $700 billion. Better we should take our short-term pain straight up and clean out the mistakes of our binge and then get back to the business of free markets without creating an unchecked executive branch monstrosity trying to ‘save’ those who profited most from the binge and harming innocent taxpayers in the process”.

Sure, without the bailout, there might have been a severe recession. Bubbles must pop. But it’s important that we let bubbles pop. Markets would then find a floor and recover.

Now the politicians are blowing some new air into the bubble, but we may have a recession anyway. And with more intervention, regulation and ambiguity about what the real market prices for those government-supported securities are, investors won’t know where the real bottom is.

So any recession will last longer. And the moral hazard the bailout perpetuates will lead to new bubbles … and then demands for another bailout.

Free enterprise sounds nice. We should try it sometime.

Walter Williams has the real lessons of the bailout.

In my more cynical moments, I think that we Americans deserve what we get from our politicians, many of whom can be generally described as nothing less than loathsome. You say, “Williams, that’s a pretty heavy putdown.” My question to you is how else would you describe these congressmen who are now blaming the financial mess on the failure of the free market? Starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, that was given more teeth during the Clinton administration, Congress started intimidating banks and other financial institutions into making loans, so-called subprime loans, to high-risk homebuyers and businesses. The carrot offered was that these high-risk loans would be purchased by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have known that this was a prescription for disaster but there was a congressional chorus of denial.

Five years ago, Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) vouched for the “soundness” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said, “I do not see any possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury.” In 2004 congressional hearings, where the Bush administration sought greater oversight over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said, “We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac and particularly at Fannie Mae,” adding that “the GSEs have exceeded their housing goals.” Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said, “There’s nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” In these hearings Barney Frank said that he doesn’t see “anything in the reports that raises safety and soundness problems.” Earlier this year, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) praised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for “riding to the rescue” to help people get home mortgage loans, adding that they “need to do more” to help high-risk borrowers get better loans. …

Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the New Republic says we need to make sure we don’t take the wrong lessons from the credit crisis.

As was the case with the 1929 crash that ushered in the Great Depression, the current financial meltdown is giving rise to myths that will influence public policy for decades to come. It is imperative that those myths be debunked before the next U.S. administration starts to make important decisions, followed by many other countries. By far the most dangerous myth is that deregulation is the root cause of the problem.

Yes, Wall Street firms were greedy, irresponsible and, in many cases, downright stupid. But those are fairly constant features in any society and there is no reason to believe that investment bankers were any more greedy, irresponsible and stupid in 2007 and 2008 than, say, five or 10 years earlier.

As many authoritative economists are desperately trying to explain amid all the confusion, the culprit was a system geared toward loaning money to people who were not in a position to pay it back. Two policies underpinned that system: easy money by the Federal Reserve and the government-induced lowering of standards for approving loan requests. …

Karl Rove says the voters haven’t decided yet.

… Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain’s is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.

Mr. Obama’s test is that voters haven’t shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.

But here’s a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.

Camille Paglia’s column this month builds from letters. She answers a great one about Sarah Palin.

… Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.

Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin’s performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin’s digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn’t — judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin’s brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don’t we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality. …

Ann Coulter has fun with this year’s most outrageous candidate – Joe Biden.

If Sarah Palin had made just one of the wildly inaccurate statements smugly uttered by Sen. Joe Biden in last week’s vice presidential debate, there would have been 3-inch headlines in newspapers across America. (I can almost hear Katie Couric asking me, “Which newspapers?”)

These weren’t insignificant errors, such as when Biden said, “Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time, and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years.”

It turns out that Katie’s restaurant, where Biden gets his feel for the average American, closed 20 years ago. The only evidence that he spends any time in Home Depot is that it appears that a pipe wrench fell on his head one too many times.

Palin would surely have been forced to withdraw from the ticket had she said something like that, but most of Biden’s errors were not trifling mistakes like these. They were lengthy Lyndon LaRouche-like disquisitions that were pure fantasy from beginning to end.

For example, Biden said about Hezbollah: “When we kicked — along with France — we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.” Hezbollah was never kicked out of Lebanon. …

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Before our descent into the political news, a Washington Post article on the collapse of Russia is here. Behind the Russian Bear getting ready to ravage Europe are serious problems.

… According to U.N. figures, the average life expectancy for a Russian man is 59 years — putting the country at about 166th place in the world longevity sweepstakes, one notch above Gambia. For women, the picture is somewhat rosier: They can expect to live, on average, 73 years, barely beating out the Moldovans. But there are still some 126 countries where they could expect to live longer. And the gap between expected longevity for men and for women — 14 years — is the largest in the developed world.

So what’s killing the Russians? All the usual suspects — HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular and circulatory diseases, suicides, smoking, traffic accidents — but they occur in alarmingly large numbers, and Moscow has neither the resources nor the will to stem the tide. Consider this:

Three times as many Russians die from heart-related illnesses as do Americans or Europeans, per each 100,000 people.

Tuberculosis deaths in Russia are about triple the World Health Organization‘s definition of an epidemic, which is based on a new-case rate of 50 cases per 100,000 people.

Average alcohol consumption per capita is double the rate the WHO considers dangerous to one’s health.

About 1 million people in Russia have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS, according to WHO estimates.

Using mid-year figures, it’s estimated that 25 percent more new HIV/AIDS cases will be recorded this year than were logged in 2007. …

Saturday Night Live did some satire that might help the GOP. So it was removed from their website. John Fund has the story.

One of the funniest and most politically searing comedy sketches in years has vanished from the Web site of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Visitor comments asking about its disappearance are also being scrubbed from the Web site. The sketch — a harsh indictment of the housing meltdown that led to last week’s bailout bill — was clearly too much truth for someone to handle.

The seven-minute sketch featured a mock news conference of Democratic Congressional leaders on the bailout bill, during which Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank inadvertently acknowledge that it was Congress that blocked reform and effective oversight of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. …

And Roger Simon has a link so you too can see it.

We are in the midst of an important, possibly crucial, political campaign and the head honchos at NBC are engaging in thought control.  They are suppressing a Saturday Night Live sketch about the economic crisis that skewers the massive hypocrisy of Democrats like Frank and Pelosi on the issue. …

Good WSJ Op-Ed on McCain’s health care proposal. McCain’s ideas conform to Pickerhead’s dictum that to find solutions to problems, it is always a mistake to pass a law. The correct strategy is to find the bad law that created the problem, and repeal it.

With less than a month to go, presidential candidate Barack Obama wants to deliver a knock-out punch by hitting John McCain on health care.

On Saturday Mr. Obama called his rival’s health-care proposal “radical” and, in swing states, he is now blasting it in TV ads. Mr. Obama is also distributing mailers and organizing “Docs for Barack” meetings to rally voters.

It’s good politics for Mr. Obama. But it’s bad policy. Mr. McCain’s proposal — to give every American the tax credit businesses get for buying health insurance — is the right prescription for what ails our health-care system.

The foundation of that system — employer provided health insurance — is crumbling. For decades, the percentage of Americans who get their health insurance at work has been shrinking. In August, the Census Bureau reported that the decline continues. Today, 59% of Americans get their health insurance through the workplace. Twenty years ago, three-quarters of us did. With costs skyrocketing — health-insurance premiums roughly doubled since 2000 — the current path we are on is not sustainable. …

Thomas Sowell writes on the real Obama.

Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his “past associations.” That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against “guilt by association.”

We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.

Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands. …

Sol Stern in City Journal comments on Bill Ayers – school reformer.

… Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!” …

Melanie Phillips from London with more on Ayers who turns out to be the topic de jour.

… And in what appeared to be a pre-emptive strike to neutralise what it knew was coming, the New York Times finally published a story about the Obama-Ayers connection – only to dismiss it, disgracefully, as a relationship that had been exaggerated and, even worse, to sanitise Ayers as having been ‘rehabilitated’ in Chicago. The laziness and dishonesty of this piece was quite breathtaking. It produced this stinging response from Stanley Kurtz, the journalist who has been bringing the full extent of this troubling connection to light ( – once again in the blogosphere, on NRO):

There is nothing ‘sporadic’ about Barack Obama delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of many years to fund Bill Ayers’ radical education projects, not to mention many millions more to benefit Ayers’ radical education allies. We are talking about a substantial and lengthy working relationship here… The point of Ayers’ education theory is that the United States is a fundamentally racist and oppressive nation. Students, Ayers believes, ought to be encouraged to resist this oppression. Obama was funding Ayers’ ‘small schools’ project, built around this philosophy. Ayers’ radicalism isn’t something in the past. It’s something to which Obama gave moral and financial support as an adult. So when Shane says that Obama has never expressed sympathy for Ayers’ radicalism, he’s flat wrong. Obama’s funded it.

The line of counter-attack is clear. Dismiss all these associations as sporadic or exaggerated – hey, we might all be on a board sometime with someone we don’t approve of! – and categorise all this mountain of evidence and questions as a ‘smear’. Which is of course itself a smear. The whole point about a real smear, however, is that it isn’t true. The evidence that is being so painfully dragged into the light has yet to be refuted and looks pretty damn solid. The smear by Camp Obama is that the evidence of their man’s radical connections amounts to ‘guilt by association’. Wrong. This is guilt by participation. And big media is in collusion to keep it quiet.

Turns out CNN can do some real reporting. They did a six minute segment on Ayers the other night. Ed Morrissey from Hot Air has details.

You’ll want to double-check the logo at the bottom left corner during this report.  It really is CNN and Anderson Cooper fact-checking Barack Obama’s claims to have barely known William Ayers — and calling it dishonest.  Stanley Kurtz even gets to make an appearance on a network other than Fox for this report (via Dirty Harry’s Place): …

Power Line with a couple of Bill Ayers posts

Sarah Palin’s calling out of Barack Obama over the Bill Ayers connection has finally caused some mainstream outlets to report the story (albeit generally in misleading fashion) and has compelled the Obama campaign to respond. That response is surprising, to say the least: Obama now claims that he didn’t know about Bill Ayers’ terrorist past through all the years when he worked with Ayers in Chicago! …

… Exactly as Obama dropped out of Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright’s church only when the association became politically inconvenient, he insincerely “denounced” Ayers only after his association with the terrorist had become a liability. That was after years of working with Ayers as a radical political ally, without showing the slightest concern about his friend’s career as an attempted mass murderer.

One wonders, sometimes, what it would take to convince an American reporter that a Democratic Presidential candidate has poor judgment.

Jennifer Rubin is next.

We end this with a Dick Morris column.

In the best tradition of Bill Clinton’s famous declaration that the answer to the question of whether or not he was having an affair with Monica depended on “what the definition of ‘is’ is,” Barack Obama was clearly splitting hairs and concealing the truth when he said that William Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”

The records of the administration of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), released last week by the University of Illinois, show that the Ayers-Obama connection was, in fact, an intimate collaboration and that it led to the only executive or administrative experience in Obama’s life.

After Walter Annenberg’s foundation offered several hundred million dollars to American public schools in the mid-’90s, William Ayers applied for $50 million for Chicago. The purpose of his application was to secure funds to “raise political consciousness” in Chicago’s public schools. After he won the grant, Ayers’s group chose Barack Obama to distribute the money. Between 1995 and 1999, Obama distributed the $50 million and raised another $60 million from other civic groups to augment it. In doing so, he was following Ayers’s admonition to grant the funds to “external” organizations, like American Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to pair with schools and conduct programs to radicalize the students and politicize them. …