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David Harsanyi writes on Iran and Ahmedinejad.
Iranian “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rejects American ideas — all of our ideas, that is, but nuclear fusion.
When Ahmadinejad told a crowd at Columbia University in 2007 that the United States must investigate “who was truly involved” in 9/11, students may have confused the speech with ethnic studies class.
There should be no confusion.
It’s bad enough this bird-brained troglodyte was again walking the streets of America’s greatest city this week, a place teeming with women, Christians, Jews and gays. Ahmadinejad has something to offend all. Holocaust denier. Misogynist. Religious fanatic. Terrorist enabler. Homophobic inquisitor — though, Ahmadinejad does claim, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.” …
Foreign Editor of The Australian says Iran is a bigger problem than Wall Street.
IRAN is a problem from hell. The next US president, be it Barack Obama or John McCain, is going to have plenty to worry about: the Wall Street financial crisis, the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s internal crisis, the relentless military build-up of China and the temptation it will soon have of trying to retake Taiwan militarily. But you can be sure of this. At some stage during the next presidency, Iran will blow up into a full-scale crisis that will dominate global politics and that may indeed be more important even than the other problems listed above.
The new president will have one modestly useful extra resource, a bipartisan report commissioned by two former US senators and written primarily by Middle East expert Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. The Weekend Australian has obtained a copy of the report, to be released later this week. Before I got the report, I had a long discussion with Rubin.
Rubin is a Republican, but the report he wrote was the consensus work of a bipartisan taskforce that includes Dennis Ross, Obama’s key Middle East adviser.
The report is sobering and in some ways shocking reading. It begins baldly: “A nuclear weapons capable Islamic Republic of Iran is strategically untenable.”
It points to the disastrous consequences of an Iran with nuclear weapons: “Iran’s nuclear development may pose the most significant strategic threat to the US during the next administration. …
John Fund on how the crisis took hold in our economy.
We will look back on the failure of Congress to reform the government-sponsored enterprises at the heart of the mortgage meltdown as one of the most expensive derelictions of its duty ever. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used their lobbying clout, political contributions and even charitable largesse to charm or bully anyone demanding reform in their lending practices. …
Jeff Jacoby with similar details.
… Because while the mortgage crisis convulsing Wall Street has its share of private-sector culprits they weren’t the ones who “got us into this mess.” Barney Frank’s talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn’t wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so – or else.
The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and “redlining” because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.
The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to “meet the credit needs” of “low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods.” Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this “subprime” lending by authorizing ever more “flexible” criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.
All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. …
IBD editors back the “rescue” plan.
… Watching the same politicians who created this mess grill Mssrs. Paulson and Bernanke yesterday about what they intend to do about it was almost surreal.
Where, for example, does Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and the leading recipient of Fannie Mae campaign cash, get off acting so self-righteously when he and his panel were asked to move quickly on the administration’s $700 billion rescue plan?
“I understand speed is important,” Dodd huffed, “but I’m far more interested in whether we get this right.”
Get this right? Who is he kidding? …
Richard Epstein does not.
… It had been my devout wish to write a set of disinterested columns about labor markets to illustrate the power of the presumption against state regulation of voluntary agreements. But the financial meltdown of the past week has rudely interrupted my plan to pillory the minimum wage.
Instead, I shall turn on a dime to address two connected questions: How did we get to that sorry state where great institutions topple, and what should be done?
On both questions, our bipartisan consensus is holding true to form. In a system that is chock-full of heavy regulation, they instantly blame the current collapse on the excesses of the free market, for which a still heavier dose of regulation supplies some supposed cure. That indictment contains few particulars. It typically rests on a populist broadside whose centerpiece is greed on Wall Street, but never on Main Street–where there are more voters. …
Same with David Warren.
… President Bush might as well be a Democrat in this pantomime. The package he commissioned from Mr. Paulson was, naturally, designed to pass quickly through a Democrat-controlled Congress. It was arguably the only responsible thing for him to do, given the pressure of time.
I may be in a minority of one, however, by further suggesting that John McCain was in fact showing real leadership by dropping everything and rushing to Washington — for the express purpose of contributing to an agreement between the “hard knob” and “the rest.” We’ll see how badly this blows up in his face — while Barack Obama stands by doing, as usual, nothing of consequence, but “looking presidential.”
National Geographic with the latest efforts to solve the Neanderthal mystery. This is Part 1 of 2. Since we were earlier speaking of the troglodyte Ahmedinejad, it seemed appropriate to include this interesting piece from NatGeo.
In March of 1994 some spelunkers exploring an extensive cave system in northern Spain poked their lights into a small side gallery and noticed two human mandibles jutting out of the sandy soil. The cave, called El Sidrón, lay in the midst of a remote upland forest of chestnut and oak trees in the province of Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay. Suspecting that the jawbones might date back as far as the Spanish Civil War, when Republican partisans used El Sidrón to hide from Franco’s soldiers, the cavers immediately notified the local Guardia Civil.
But when police investigators inspected the gallery, they discovered the remains of a much larger—and, it would turn out, much older—tragedy.
Within days, law enforcement officials had shoveled out some 140 bones, and a local judge ordered the remains sent to the national forensic pathology institute in Madrid. By the time scientists finished their analysis (it took the better part of six years), Spain had its earliest cold case. The bones from El Sidrón were not Republican soldiers, but the fossilized remains of a group of Neanderthals who lived, and perhaps died violently, approximately 43,000 years ago. The locale places them at one of the most important geographical intersections of prehistory, and the date puts them squarely at the center of one of the most enduring mysteries in all of human evolution. …
Division of Labour post shows petty officious government bastards are always with us.