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Streetwise Professor says if Occupy Wall Street wants to do some good they might consider occupying Fannie and Freddie.
It is passing strange–or maybe not–that the OWS crowd/mob is giving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a pass. They are the best example of an unseemly nexus between government and business. Look at the guys who were their CEOs and board members over the years. Democratic Party stalwart–and Obama BFF–James Johnson, who walked away with a cool $200 mil. Former Clinton appointees Jamie Gorelick and Franklin Raines. Bill Daley. All of whom did very, very well feeding at the GSE teat.
Us? Not so much. For those of you keeping score at home, the tab for F&F is now $169 billion. And the meter is still running: current estimates are for an additional $51 billion in losses over the next 10 years. That’s $220 billion for you OWS types who majored in sociology. …
Charles Krauthammer comments on the latest debate.
On Tuesday night, seismologists at the Las Vegas Oceanographic Institute reported the first recorded movement of a hair on Mitt Romney’s head. Although it was only one follicle, displaced a mere 1.2 centimeters, the tremors were felt from Iowa to New Hampshire. Simultaneously, these same scientists detected signs of life in Rick Perry, last seen comatose at the recent Dartmouth debate.
Such were the highlights of Tuesday’s seven-person Republican brawl at the Venetian. To be sure, there were other developments: Herman Cain stumbled, Newt Gingrich grinned, Rick Santorum landed a clean shot at Romneycare and Michele Bachmann made a spirited bid for a comeback.
But the main event was the scripted Perry attack on Romney, reprising the old charge of Romney hiring illegal immigrants. Perry’s face-to-face accusation of rank hypocrisy had the intended effect. From the ensuing melee emerged a singularity: a ruffled Romney, face flushed, voice raised. …
McCain campaign aide on why he hated the debates and why they’re useful.
When the 2008 presidential election ended in defeat for my candidate, John McCain, I was consoled by the knowledge I would never again have to be involved in a candidate debate. I hated them.
For seemingly endless stretches, it felt like the chief activities of our campaign were helping our candidate prepare for debates, pacing anxiously in holding rooms while he slugged it out on stage with his opponents, and arguing about the results after they were over. Why, I often wondered, had we ever agreed to do so many of the damn things?
The biggest winners of those contrived contests were the sponsoring cable news networks that showcased themselves and boosted their ratings at the expense of the miserable candidates and their staff.
Debates have become the most important function of the campaigns for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and my sympathies go out to all the candidates and their teams. …
USA Today OpEd thinks Romney is in the lead.
Mitt Romney is the equivalent of the Republicans’ backup prom date, the standby if no better offer comes along.
Will the candidate who has always been near the head of the pack but never run away with the nomination, a man who is not always in step with an anxious and anti-establishment GOP base, get into the big dance with President Obama because Romney is perceived as the Republican most able to beat Obama in 2012?
Republican primary voters “are in a rebellious mood and Mitt Romney is not a rebellious candidate,” said the Pew Research Center’s Andrew Kohut.
Yet a CNN poll Oct. 14-16 said 41% of Republicans believed that Romney had the best chance of beating Obama next year. Herman Cain was a distant second at 24%. And 51% said they expected Romney to be their party’s 2012 nominee.
WSJ OpEd by John Yoo celebrates 20 years of Justice Thomas.
This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. In his first two decades on the bench, Justice Thomas has established himself as the original Constitution’s greatest defender against elite efforts at social engineering. His stances for limited government and individual freedom make him the left’s lightning rod and the tea party’s intellectual godfather. And he is only halfway through the 40 years he may sit on the high court.
Justice Thomas’s two decades on the bench show the simple power of ideas over the pettiness of our politics. Media and academic elites have spent the last 20 years trying to marginalize him by drawing a portrait of a man stung by his confirmation, angry at his rejection by the civil rights community, and a blind follower of fellow conservatives. But Justice Thomas has broken through this partisan fog to convince the court to adopt many of his positions, and to become a beacon to the grass-roots movement to restrain government spending and reduce the size of the welfare state.
Clarence Thomas set the table for the tea party by making originalism fashionable again. Many appointees to the court enjoy its role as arbiter of society’s most divisive questions—race, abortion, religion, gay rights and national security—and show little desire to control their own power. Antonin Scalia, at best, thinks interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning is “the lesser evil,” as he wrote in a 1989 law journal article, because it prevents judges from pursuing their own personal policies. Justice Thomas, however, thinks that the meaning of the Constitution held at its ratification binds the United States as a political community, and that decades of precedent must be scraped off the original Constitution like barnacles on a ship’s hull. …
Huffington Post mines the book on Steve Jobs.
Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.
“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.
Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.
The Economist reviews a documentary on the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. The conclusions seem to be scattered, but we like the piece because it reminds us how foolish the bien pensants really are.
THE filmmakers behind “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” confronted a formidable task: to strip away the layers of a narrative so familiar that even they themselves believed it when they first set out to make their documentary. Erected in St Louis, Missouri, in the early 1950s, at a time of postwar prosperity and optimism, the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing project soon became a notorious symbol of failed public policy and architectural hubris, its 33 towers razed a mere two decades later. Such symbolism found its most immediate expression in the iconic image of an imploding building, the first of Pruitt-Igoe’s towers to be demolished in 1972 (it was featured in the cult film Koyaanisqatsi, with Philip Glass’s score murmuring in the background). The spectacle was as powerful politically as it was visually, locating the failure of Pruitt-Igoe within the buildings themselves—in their design and in their mission.
The scale of the project made it conspicuous from the get-go: 33 buildings, 11-storeys each, arranged across a sprawling, 57 acres in the poor DeSoto-Carr neighbourhood on the north side of St Louis. The complex was supposed to put the modernist ideals of Le Corbusier into action; at the time, Architectural Forum ran a story praising the plan to replace “ramshackle houses jammed with people—and rats” in the city’s downtown with “vertical neighbourhoods for poor people.” The main architect was Minoru Yamasaki, who would go on to design another monument to modernism that would also be destroyed, but for very different reasons, and under very different circumstances: his World Trade Centre went up in the early 1970s, right around the time that Pruitt-Igoe was pulled down. …