A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
Hill Clashes on Rescue Plan; Dollar Drags Down Markets - Democratic leaders said they were near agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on key provisions of a massive plan to revive the U.S. financial system, but the two sides remained at odds over other issues and were struggling to gain the support of rank-and-file lawmakers on both sides of... (READ MORE)
Financial Crisis Inhibits Effort To Oust Brown - MANCHESTER, England, Sept. 22 -- Concern over the global financial crisis has largely halted efforts by disgruntled members of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labor Party to oust the unpopular leader. (READ MORE)
Dissident Lobbies for Conditions on U.S. Aid to Egypt - Egypt's most prominent exiled dissident is prodding American legislators to use their leverage over U.S. aid to Egypt to force the Cairo government to foster greater political and media freedoms and a more independent judiciary. (READ MORE)
Obama Distorts McCain Social Security Stances - Amid the wild gyrations in the stock market, Barack Obama has been trying to convince retirees that they would be in deep trouble if his Republican opponent had succeeded in privatizing Social Security. He is telling seniors that John McCain "wants to gamble with your life savings," and he said the Republican plan would cut "Social Security benefits in half." His predictions of doom are a gross distortion of McCain's position on Social Security. (READ MORE)
Stock futures mixed ahead of hearing - NEW YORK (AP) – Wall Street headed for a mixed open Tuesday as the nation's top economic officials prepared to update Congress and investors about efforts to hammer out a $700 billion financial rescue plan. Gold prices, which shot higher Monday as investors went in search of safe assets, retreated. (READ MORE)
Bernanke, Paulson: Congress must move now - WASHINGTON (AP) – Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urged Congress on Tuesday to quickly pass a $700 billion financial bailout, warning that letting problems persist would have dire consequences for the national economy. (READ MORE)
269 tie: An electoral college 'doomsday'? - On Nov. 5, the presidential election winds up in a electoral-college tie, 269-269, the Democrat-controlled House picks Sen. Barack Obama as president, but the Senate, with former Democrat Joe Lieberman voting with Republicans, deadlocks at 50-50, so Vice President Dick Cheney steps in to break the tie to make Republican Sarah Palin his successor. (READ MORE)
Student, car debt quietly added to bailout plan - In the dark of night over the weekend when most people were snoozing, the Treasury dramatically expanded its bailout plan to include buying student loans, car loans, credit card debt and any other "troubled" assets held by banks. (READ MORE)
McCain ad links Obama to corruption - John McCain lashed out Monday at Barack Obama's political pedigree, tying his rival to notorious Chicago machine politics as the Republican struggled to reclaim the advantage that slipped to Mr. Obama as the Wall Street mess has unfolded. (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Wesley Pruden: Bonnie and Clyde, banking pioneers - Now we see what Bonnie and Clyde could have made of themselves if only they had gone to Harvard Business School. Machine guns and fast getaway cars are not nearly as efficient as computers, lawyers and imaginative accounting. Bonnie and Clyde relieved depositors of their savings at little banks in out of the way places, dealing only in retail. The Lehman brothers and their sisters, Bear Stearns and AIG, relieved investors of their money on Wall Street and now get to relieve taxpayers of their money from coast to coast, dealing in wholesale. The brothers and sisters have given "free markets" an entirely new meaning. They're free to take the money and run, with Hank Paulson driving the getaway car. (READ MORE)
Thomas Sowell: A Political "Solution" - Who was it who said, "crack-brained meddling by the authorities" can "aggravate an existing crisis"? Ronald Reagan? Milton Friedman? Adam Smith? Not even close. It was Karl Marx. Unlike most leftists today, Marx studied economics. Is the current financial crisis going to lead to crack-brained meddling or to some rational actions? Predicting what politicians are going to do is risky business. We will have to wait and see. Saints are no more common on Capitol Hill than they are on Wall Street. We can only hope that the political "solution" does not turn out to be worse than the problem. There are times when government intervention can make things better. But that is no guarantee that it won't make things worse. As they say, "the devil is in the details"-- and we don't know the details yet. (READ MORE)
Chuck Norris: America's Founders' Financial Advice - America is broke. Wall Street is going out of business. The government is borrowing and bailing like there is no tomorrow. Americans anxiously await the full impact of a second Great Depression. And we all are longing and looking for solutions and saviors. Who will deliver us from our certain financial despair and ruin? The president? The secretary of the Treasury? The Federal Reserve? Congress? An ad hoc committee of Harvard MBAs? Some of America's best and biggest financial moguls? A new president? Have no fear. Our Founders are here. It's true that we can't repeat the past eight years of government. But it's even truer that we can't repeat the past 38 years of the government's financial mismanagement, especially when only four of them since 1970 haven't been deficit-building years. What we need is to turn back the financial clock 200 years and return to the fiscal prudence of our Founding Fathers. (READ MORE)
Dennis Prager: Liberals Warnings About Obama Loss May Prove Self-Fulfilling - If Barack Obama loses the 2008 election, liberal hell will break loose. Seven weeks before the 2008 presidential election, liberals are warning America that if Barack Obama loses, it is because Americans are racist. Of course, that this means that Democrats (and independents) are racist, since Republicans will vote Republican regardless of the race of the Democrat, is an irony apparently lost on the Democrats making these charges. That an Obama loss will be due to racism is becoming as normative a liberal belief as “Bush Lied, People Died,” a belief has generated intense rage among many liberals. But “Obama lost because of white racism” will be even more enraging. Rage over the Iraq War has largely focused on President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But if Obama loses, liberal rage will focus on millions of fellow Americans and on American society. (READ MORE)
Rich Lowry: Is Phil Gramm to Blame? - Who's responsible for the panic of 2008? In the gathering legend, it's one man, former Sen. Phil Gramm, the ex-John McCain adviser who lamented "a nation of whiners" a few months ago and therefore is fit to have responsibility for one of the nation's worst financial crises heaped on his head. Gramm's gravest alleged sin is pushing the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley bank deregulation bill. Barack Obama has identified the legislation as ground zero of the financial implosion, the deregulatory predicate for Wall Street's excess. As a Texas conservative who afflicted liberaldom for years before decamping to Wall Street, Gramm is easy to vilify. That doesn't make the case against him any less unjust. The law allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate, repealing the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act that prevented banks from offering customers insurance, investment or commercial banking services. (READ MORE)
Brett Joshpe: The Ahmadinejad Disgrace - I’d like to make Senator Barack Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a formal offer. Given that the Iranian tyrant is again visiting New York City this week for the United Nations General Assembly, I would like to submit my apartment just a few blocks south of the UN headquarters for consideration in hosting the Obama/Ahmadinejad soiree. My apartment is a small studio, a bit cramped, but it features panoramic city views. I would gladly move my bed into the hallway to create a little more space, and I would even purchase a new coffee table for the occasion. I’m not quite sure whether I would ever want to return to my home if Ahmadinejad stepped foot inside, but I would gladly relocate in order to expose the utter absurdity of the man and Obama’s suggestion to meet with him. After all, what does Obama think sitting down with Ahmadinejad will accomplish? Will he look into his eyes, “get a sense of his soul,” and like what he sees? (READ MORE)
Amanda Carpenter: Violent Men at Center of "Troopergate" - The more we find about “Troopergate” the more justified Sarah Palin seems in firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. The increased media attention to the controversy has revealed both men at the center of the inquiry have disturbing records of physical abuse against their family members. Monegan is the man who Democrats believe GOP vice presidential contender Sarah Palin improperly used her political power to fire over his alleged unwillingness to fire Palin's former brother-in-law, Wooten. He recently admitted dislocating his wife's shoulder "by accident" by "wrestling and tickling" her according to the San Francisco Chronicle. His estranged wife Georgene Moldovan, however, tells it a little differently. Moldovan said she sought a restraining order against Monegan in 1994 after he threatened to kill her, waved a gun at her and knocked her shoulder out of socket, according to court papers. (READ MORE)
Gabriel Malor @ Ace of Spades: Obama, The Disappearing Man: The More the Public Gets to Know Him, The Less There Is To See - Christopher Hitchens asks: "Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?" Uh, is that a trick question? Obama acts like an aimless twit because that's what he is. There is no "deeper Barack." Sure, he does fine on the topics he's rehearsed a hundred times (race, healthcare, race, anti-Bush, race, Iraq, oh and race), but give him something new to to think about and he defaults: "Present." That's what happened with Georgia. He gives a statement that he probably read on a bumper sticker: "War is bad for humans and other living things." Then revises it after his advisers have a chance to write up a few position papers (cribbing from McCain) and run a few polls. That's what happened this past weekend with the financial bailouts. (READ MORE)
The Anchoress: Dem Script: Obama is Forrest Gump! - In the film Forrest Gump, anything that mildly-retarded character did well was magnified by the audience’s lowered expectations. It seems that the Obama camp has decided to go play the Forrest Gump card with Senator Obama; “I’m not a smart mayun…” Suddenly, there are a flurry of news articles - really, a flurry - come out as if by decree, or it’s just one of those astonishing co-incidences, like when news anchores and pundits all start using the same word; “gravitas,” “paradigm,” “mayor of a small town.” This time the decree (or the big co-incidence) is meant to lower expectations for Obama as he prepares to debate John McCain: Obama is not a stellar debater. Obama, “Mr. Eloquence”, whose Invesco field speech was called “symphonic” by some pundits is very evenly matched against John McCain. John McCain has scored all the advantages for the upcoming debate. (READ MORE)
Dafydd: Democrats Try to Hijack the So-Called "Bailout" - Republicans see the collapse of the mortgage market as a potential catastrophe that requires emergency measures... but an aberration caused by government intrusion into the market, not an indictment of capitalism and free markets. Democrats see it as proof positive that capitalism has been proven to be a fad that will soon pass away, like pet rocks... and a golden opportunity to reintroduce failed liberal fascist economic policies straight out of the platforms of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Jimmy Carter. Which George W. Bush will show up... the veto-wielding Bush with a spine that we've seen in Democratic spending legislation after the 2006 elections -- or the wimpy, appeasing Bush that we've seen in legislation on racial preferences, Israeli-Palestinian "negotiations," and Republican spending prior to the 2006 elections? (READ MORE)
The Belmont Club: International man of mystery - Winds of Change has a link to a report by the Inspector General into Mobile Telecommunications Licenses in Iraq dated May 11, 2004. The preliminary report (PDF here) contains fresh detail into the background and activities of Nadhmi Auchi. Wikileak repeats much of the speculation about Auchi in open source: he “has been tied to illegal activities in Iraq and France, and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.” However that may be, while the report prepared for the International Armament and Technology Trade Directorate, Office of Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (International Technology Security), of the US Department of Defense contains no information on the connection, if any between Auchi and Obama, it contains plenty of information about the modus operandi of Nadhmi Auchi. The report said their investigation had: (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Evita Palin - Naomi Wolf: Republican Sarah Palin will turn the nation into a police state. I worry for liberals. Some of them are too vested mentally and emotionally in this election. We have 6 weeks to go. I suggest a long walk through the park as the leaves begin to change. A good example of driving oneself off the deep end was in the Huffington Post, where Miss Wolf wrote: “Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.” Miss Wolf’s rant is amusing, portraying Gov. Palin as “embracing lawlessness” and firing a will-and-pleasure employee: “She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women’s shelters — Rove’s style, not McCain’s.” I’m pretty sure the mafia uses the garrot, not the pink slip. (READ MORE)
McQ: CAC, Obama and the Ayers Connection - Stanley Kurtz digs into one of the more interesting and yet mostly unanswered questions of Obama’s past: “Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.” It’s not just his "most important executive experience", it is his only real executive experience. Yet he doesn’t mention it or tout it. Why? Well perhaps it is because of what the CAC did and aimed to do. His relationship with Bill Ayers aside (which any fair-minded person would conclude was more than casual), what was the CAC Obama chaired? (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: The Trouble with Islam: Part I - In the New York Times yesterday, Michael Slackman wrote a long piece looking at the difficult task of being Young and Arab in Land of Mosques and Bars, in Dubai. The piece hints at some important issues though, in the nature of a newsmagazine piece, is relatively superficial. I plan on addressing the article more directly tomorrow, but as a preamble, would like to discuss some of the developmental tendencies in Arab culture that provide the substrate for the kinds of difficulties described in the article. The focus in the article is on the tension felt by ambitious young Egyptian men who move to Dubai to take part in the exuberant life there (the vibrant economic and social possibilities) and the sense of dislocation they feel coming from the stagnant Egyptian quasi-theocracy to the free wheeling "wild West" atmosphere of Dubai. My interest is to examine the intersection of the personal with the larger societal conflicts found within the Middle East. (READ MORE)
Susan Katz Keating: Putin Dreams Up New Composition: Voyage From Murmansk - My favorite international strongman, Vladimir ("I'm in charge here") Putin, is surely a man of great spirit. I detect in him not just an inner Soviet, but also a Tsarist dreamer, who whiles away his idle hours crafting great visions of renewed empire. What, oh what, could Vlady have in mind now? Perhaps music, in the tradition of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky or others from the Great Five Russian nationalist composers? In fact, I believe I hear the distant strains of a work in progress: Voyage From Murmansk, in which orchestral tribute is paid to the Russian warships now sailing for Venezuela, accompanied by antisubmarine planes and nuclear subs loaded with live weapons. Wait a minute. Russia has dispatched nukes and warships to visit Hugo Chavez' Venezuela? Yes. That is correct. And this 15,000 mile seagoing escapade will include a detour cruise through the Gibralter Strait and past the bows of U.S. Navy ships stationed in the Med. (READ MORE)
Cassandra: Smears, Lies, and Videotape: When A Corrupt Media Hijacks an Election - In a fascinating article, Todd Spivak does some digging and angers the Senator from Illinois: “It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage. Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet hit local newsstands. It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.” The good Senator, it seems, doesn't like having his past examined. As questions about his record accumulate, so does the list of Obama documents which have gotten "lost". (READ MORE)
John Robb: ONWARD TO A HOLLOW STATE - The modern nation-state is in a secular decline, made inevitable by the rise of a global market system. Even developed nations, like the US, are not immune to this process. The decline is at first gradual and then accelerates until it reaches a final end-point: a hollow state. The hollow state has the trappings of a modern nation-state ("leaders", membership in international organizations, regulations, laws, and a bureaucracy) but it lacks any of the legitimacy, services, and control of its historical counter-part. It is merely a shell that has some influence over the spoils of the economy. The real power rests in the hands of corporations and criminal/guerrilla groups that vie with each other for control of sectors of wealth production. For the individual living within this state, life goes on, but it is debased in a myriad of ways. The shift from a marginally functional nation-state in manageable decline to a hollow state often comes suddenly: (READ MORE)
Harmless Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Why a Bailout? - Now I’m not an economist or a financial wiz. I don’t have some “inside” story or scoop on the current financial situation. I’m only a concerned citizen-taxpayer watching the market, the mortgage “crisis,” and the failure of large investment companies. And I’m wondering why? Why has there been a failure in the mortgage industry? Why are these large investment banks failing? But most of all, why is it the responsibility of the American taxpayer to bail them out? Potentially to the tune of $700 Billion! Before we decide how to resolve the crisis, isn’t it important to know what contributed to it? In this election year, there’s bound to be a lot of partisan finger-pointing; and it looks like there’s sufficient blame on both sides to satisfy the most rabid political partisan. But who cares who or what is to blame. The real question is why? If we identify why this “crisis” happened and what contributed to it, we could better identify how to resolve it: (READ MORE)
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred: Of Moons And Egos - Remember the movie ‘Arthur,’ starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli? In the role of the title character, Moore plays a childish, self centered and self absorbed millionaire lush, He is quite out of touch with reality and he has no idea how to relate to anyone living in the real world. He seeks advice and comfort from his valet, Hobson, played by the brilliant Sir John Gielgud. In the course of dispensing advice, Hobson misses no opportunity to berate, insult and beat up on Arthur. A lifetime of Hobson’s tutelage should have equipped Arthur with all the skills he needed to succeed in life. Instead, Arthur rejects reality and pursues nothing more than self indulgence. He blocks out reality, so that he can live his life in irrelevance, believing that his money can buy him credibility. Of course, Hobson is a metaphor for Arthur’s own conscience. None of the advice Hobson imparts to Arthur is particularly insightful or brilliant. (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: The Trouble with Islam: Part II - In The Trouble with Islam: Part I I described how the current iteration of political Islam, aka radical Islam, aka Sharia Islam, supports the externalization of problems within the Arab world. In other words, for much of the Arab world, there is little inclination to accept repsonsibility for one's shortcomings and a powerful tendency to blame one's failures on others. The Americans and the Jews are the most popular objects of hate, but the psychological strucure can accomodate any convenient enemy. Further, accompanying the externalization is the psychological defense of projection, in which one's own unacceptable thougths and feelings are imputed to others. [Externalization: Islam is perfect and the final word of Allah. If the Arab world cannot compete with the Jews and Americans, it cannot be any fault within Islam and therefor must be because the Jews and Americans are impeding our progreess. (READ MORE)
Paul Mirengoff: Guilt by participation - In a post below, Scott links to Stanley Kurtz's piece, "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism on Schools." This is a link worth following. For Kurtz demonstrates (1) the dishonesty of Obama on the subject of his association with Ayers and (2) the underlying radicalism of the Ayers-Obama joint project. Last April, Obama dismissed the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." But in fact, Ayers and Obama were partners in the Chicago Annenburg Challenge (CAC), an organization whose mandate was the reformation of Chicago's public schools. Obama was CAC's first board chairman, serving in that capacity for four years and remaining on the board for two more. Ayers was the founder of CAC and, according to Kurtz, its guiding spirit. (READ MORE)
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