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As we hit send, it appears the GOP has stopped the Bush/Dem bailout. That is a good thing. We will have some short term difficulties, but we’ll be over them faster if the government does not help us. Remember the scariest words in the language are; “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Want to know where the Fannie/Freddie problems came from? Watch the video linked by Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner. It is pieces of C-Span tapes of a House committee hearing on problems discovered by federal regulators from The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Watch as committee Dems gang bang regulators who had the audacity to report on near criminal activity at Fannie.
Ralph Peters comments on the latest success in Iraq.
LAST week, Iraq passed another milestone on the difficult road to political maturity: Its parliament unanimously approved a new election law insuring broader participation than ever before.
In early winter, Iraqis will vote in regional elections in the country’s 14 Arab-majority provinces (the Kurds are ahead of the cycle – as they are in most things). Only the tricky status of Kirkuk must still be resolved.
Despite legions of international nay-sayers, democracy worked. After posturing for their own party bases, Iraqi politicians compromised on critically important issues. The result is the most enlightened electoral blueprint between Israel and India.
The systemic clout of religious blocks and parties has been reduced. A quarter of the contested seats are reserved for women. Safeguards promise the most honest balloting ever held in an Arab-majority state. …
Spengler continues his comments on the “bail out.”
The US Congress went into labor this weekend, and gave birth to a gnat. With some cosmetic adjustments, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s US$700 billion bank bailout plan will be adopted this week. Markets barely budged on the news, which was punctuated by government bailouts of two giant banks – America’s Washington Mutual and Belgium’s giant Fortis group. A third rescue, of Britain’s Bradford and Bingley, sees it taken over by the government.
Paulson’s plan likely will provide temporary relief to the stockholders of some American banks, whose balance sheets do not look all that different from Washington Mutual’s. But this has nothing to do with the larger problem, namely the de-leveraging of the American household. …
ChiTrib editors on the credit crisis.
… When this crisis has settled down, Congress and the president are welcome to consider if the experience indicates the need for some precise and prudent changes in the law governing financial institutions. But it’s more likely a careful examination will prove that the biggest failures were ones of too much government, not too little.
Bill Kristol on how McCain can win.
John McCain is on course to lose the presidential election to Barack Obama. Can he turn it around, and surge to victory?
He has a chance. But only if he overrules those of his aides who are trapped by conventional wisdom, huddled in a defensive crouch and overcome by ideological timidity.
The conventional wisdom is that it was a mistake for McCain to go back to Washington last week to engage in the attempt to craft the financial rescue legislation, and that McCain has to move on to a new topic as quickly as possible. As one McCain adviser told The Washington Post, “you’ve got to get it [the financial crisis] over with and start having a normal campaign.”
Wrong. …
Zev Chafets wrote a profile of Rush Limbaugh which was in Pickings July 7, 2008. He is mining that vein again in an LA Times Op-Ed which reports on the value Rush has to the McCain campaign.
… A satisfied Limbaugh means an enthusiastic Limbaugh, and an enthusiastic Limbaugh could be the difference in a close race. Between 14 million and 20 million people listen to him every week, by far the largest audience in talk radio. His show energizes the Republican base, but, even more important, it appeals to a great many conservative Democrats and independents of the kind McCain needs to win swing states.
Senior Republican strategists have seen Limbaugh do this before, especially in the 1994 congressional races that gave the House to the GOP for the first time in decades. Limbaugh was so important to that victory that the GOP declared him an honorary member of the Republican House of Representatives’ freshman class.
Fourteen years later, Limbaugh’s influence is greater than ever. No single Republican — not Karl Rove or Roger Ailes, James Dobson or Sean Hannity — has his reach and clout. Certainly President Bush doesn’t. Limbaugh is, very simply, the single most influential conservative voice in America. …
The Economist’s bellwether state this week is Michigan.
ECONOMIC gloom is no stranger to Michigan’s cities. A house in Detroit was recently sold for one dollar. But now despair extends to the suburbs, too. Orchard Lake, a main drag of shops in Farmington Hills, has “for lease” signs planted like tombstones on the side of the road. The national unemployment rate reached a dismal 6.1% in August. Michigan’s rate is almost three points higher, at 8.9%.
It is not surprising then, that in the war over which candidate can revive America’s economy, Michigan is the front line. On a recent rainy night in Farmington Hills, Barack Obama tried to persuade voters that Michigan could be pulled out of the gloom. The crowd cheered wildly—“I’m absolutely positively sold on Obama!” gushed Ninevah Lowery. But not everyone is so convinced. Al Gore won Michigan by five points, John Kerry by just three. Mr Obama leads in the polls, but victory is by no means certain.
Much of Michigan’s bleak outlook is caused by the car industry, which remains at the heart of the state’s identity. Each August residents line Woodward Avenue, which runs north of Detroit, to watch the Dream Cruise, when vintage cars buzz by and conjure memories of glories past. The present is more of a nightmare. Since 2000 Michigan’s car industry has shed more than 300,000 jobs. Within the past year, Ford and GM have posted their worst quarterly losses ever, with dire effects for suppliers and small businesses. …
Part 2 of the National Geographic article on Neanderthals.
… But then things changed. When the coldest fingers of the Ice Age finally reached southern Iberia in a series of abrupt fluctuations between 30,000 and 23,000 years ago, the landscape was transformed into a semiarid steppe. On this more open playing field, perhaps the tall, gracile modern humans moving into the region with projectile spears gained the advantage over the stumpy, muscle-bound Neanderthals. But Finlayson argues that it was not so much the arrival of modern humans as the dramatic shifts in climate that pushed the Iberian Neanderthals to the brink. “A three-year period of intense cold, or a landslide, when you’re down to ten people, could be enough,” he said. “Once you reach a certain level, you’re the living dead.”
The larger point may be that the demise of the Neanderthals is not a sprawling yet coherent paleoanthropological novel; rather, it is a collection of related, but unique, short stories of extinction. “Why did the Neanderthals disappear in Mongolia?” Stringer asked. “Why did they disappear in Israel? Why did they disappear in Italy, in Gibraltar, in Britain? Well, the answer could be different in different places, because it probably happened at different times. So we’re talking about a large range, and a disappearance and retreat at different times, with pockets of Neanderthals no doubt surviving in different places at different times. Gibraltar is certainly one of their last outposts. It could be the last, but we don’t know for sure.”
Whatever happened, the denouement of all these stories had a signatory in Gorham’s Cave. In a deep recess of the cavern, not far from that last Neanderthal hearth, Finlayson’s team recently discovered several red handprints on the wall, a sign that modern humans had arrived in Gibraltar. Preliminary analysis of the pigments dates the handprints between 20,300 and 19,500 years ago. “It’s like they were saying, Hey, it’s a new world now,” said Finlayson.