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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.” …