OUCH: “Jeffery Fagan, professor at Columbia University, and Stephen D. Sugarman, professor at U.C. Berkeley, have a plan on how gun manufacturers can help curb gun-related homicides in the U.S. If their credentials alone don’t make you chuckle at this premise, reading their actual plan might.”
HELLER’S KITCHEN: Dave Kopel looks at the decision’s impact on New York.
WOMEN AND DEMOCRATS: “Why do they hate us?”
They hate you for your freedom.
STRONG EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING.
Well, better that than global cooling.
ERIC EGLAND VS. Bill Delahunt. I’ve never liked Delahunt since I read about his water-carrying for Kennedy on the Cape Wind matter. That, however, was just ordinary sleaziness, not extraordinary sleaziness.
EXTREME MORTMAN: “Poor Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. In a year in which Democrats are making news for heading toward a supposed bulldozing of Republicans, the six-term Detroit Congresswoman faces bad news of her own: a tough re-election battle, in the primary. Who’s to blame? Would you believe, her son?”
BUZZ ALDRIN: Beat the Chinese to Mars.
IN HONOR OF GEORGE CARLIN: 7 Words You Can’t Say in Campaign 2008.
REMEMBERING THE PORSCHE 944: “It’s nearly impossible to describe the Porsche 944 without comparing it to the Porsche 924. . . . If the 924 is a nerd, the 944 is a jock. If the 924 is technobeat, the 944 is new wave. If the 924 is punk, the 944 is goth. Where the 924 is a scientist, with an engine optimized for longevity and fuel efficiency, the 944 is an athlete.” The 924S, however, was a nerd who could kick the jock’s ass as often as not.
ARNOLD KLING: “My wife’s pet peeve is colleges that charge $50,000 a year and wind up graduating students who take jobs for $25,000 a year, if that much. My pet peeve is the nonprofit virus that college spreads.”
MORE ON OBAMA’S APPALACHIAN PROBLEM: “Newsweek discovers that hey, those dumb hillbillies may decide the 2008 race — like they did the 2000 race.”
Apparently, the vote for me, you ignorant rednecks approach isn’t working that well.
DANIEL GROSS on why neither McCain nor Obama will be able to do much for the economy. Nope. Presidents’ don’t have much of a role in the economy, except taking credit or blame. And to the extent that they have the ability to affect the economy, it’s more to screw it up than to make it better.
A TRAILER from the upcoming Star Wars Clone Wars movie.
CHANGE YOU CAN PHOTOSHOP.
NO BABIES? That’s in Europe. Here’s the difference between Europe and the United States:
“There’s much less flexibility in the European system,†Haub says. “In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid.†There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: “In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost — in the form of lower lifetime wages — is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force.†An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.
Flexibility is the key to success. But read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Related thoughts here.
BUT OF COURSE: Court to Mull Individual Right to Drill for Oil. Though I thought we achieved “liquid liberty” with the 21st Amendment . . . .
A GUN-RIGHTS SUGGESTION FROM CHARLES AUSTIN: “What if Colt made a big show of offering Senator Obama a custom engraved 1911 to celebrate Heller? If he accepts it, his base is up in arms, no pun intended. If he declines it, well, let’s just say that 5-4 vote will look a little more frightening to everyone not in his base. Seems like a win-win to me.”
OMAHA RESIDENTS FACE UP TO A WEEK WITHOUT POWER:
They probably can’t read it, but here’s a blackout survival guide. And here are some home generator safety guidelines.
Or you could get one of these, though at this new, higher price (it was 180 bucks when I linked it before) I don’t think it’s much of a deal. Heck, for that price you can get what looks like a pretty decent little inverter generator, with 1800 watts of clean power.
BIZARRO WORLD: Bridge-to-nowhere Porkmeister Don Young gets a Taxpayer hero award? Don Young is a taxpayer hero in the same way a tapeworm is a public-health hero.
IN THE MAIL: Lawrence Alexander’s Rubicon, and Cintra Wilson’s Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny. The reader reviews on Alexander’s book are amusing.
I predict that if Obama is elected President, we’ll see no more last-days-of-Rome books from left-leaning authors. Anyway, the Caligula example is unfair. He only named one ass to the Senate, while we have many more in ours. . . .
Knoxville, Tennessee. On the UT campus.
UPDATE: Reader John McGinnis emails:
A striking picture, well done.
But the young lady in the picture disturbs me. She reminds me of my daughter with the cell phone stuck in her ear. An opportunity to ‘smell the roses’ is foregone. Conversations can sometimes wait, fact generally. But a contemplative moment? They are few and worth observing.
Yes, that was just my thought — oblivious to the world, despite it being a beautiful day. As I noted when I originally posted this picture, you see that a lot — though in the intervening years I think you see it less, probably because people are texting more and talking less.
Question: What is the reaction to the Heller ruling in Canada?
Answer: Some Canadians are wondering why they cannot have guns, too.
Because that would be too American! And not being American is the core of Canada’s sense of national identity, apparently.
ROSS PEROT is back.
ERIC S. RAYMOND HAS THOUGHTS on the Heller ruling and the 2008 elections. “I’m left with a choice between a candidate hostile to both my First and Second Amendment rights and one that supports the Second Amendment. (Normally I’d vote Libertarian, but the LP’s isolationist foreign-policy stance seems so batty after 9/11 that I can’t stomach that option in this cycle.) But Obama’s problem is actually worse than this, because he responded to Heller on the same day with a mealy-mouthed recantation of his earlier public statement that the D.C gun ban was constitutional.”
DAVE KOPEL: “Justice Stevens’ dissent in Heller begins by acknowledging that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. The rest of the dissent critiques Justice Scalia’s arguments for construing the individual right according to the Standard Model of the Second Amendment. . . . . So I encourage commenters who have had the time to study the Stevens dissent carefully to describe the individual right that the Stevens version of the Second Amendment would protect. Further, if the Stevens individual right model were correct, what would be the practical applications of that right?”
IRAQIS: Doing more than twice as well as Americans! Iraqis: 43% say Iraq is going well while 17% of Americans say USA on right track.
RESIDENTIAL SOLAR ELECTRIC: Still too expensive?
THE IROBOT LOOJ Electronic gutter-cleaning robot. Cool, though I suspect the next-gen model will be a lot cooler. (Via Slashdot).
THE DESIRE TO BE SUBSUMED IN SOMETHING BIGGER AND MORE ROMANTIC than one’s quotidian self: “She’s one of those young Obama supporters who’ve adopted ‘Hussein’ as their middle name. . . . How did you become estranged from your own name, to regard it — as opposed to yourself — as vanilla, white, female, and American, and to think of that combination in a negative way?”
Our own lives are weak and meaningless. Only through identification with a great leader can they achieve substance and purpose.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Hilarious. The photo, and the entire story, are right out of ‘Stuff White People Like’. Don’t these kids realize that what they’re doing makes them appear even whiter?”
SUBPRIME SIX UPDATE: More on Chris Dodd’s Countrywide mortgage deal, in the Hartford Courant. “Dodd declared he will not trust our leaders unless he gets to see certain national security documents. Dodd insists, however, that we trust him when he says he didn’t know he received special treatment when he borrowed nearly $800,000 from Countrywide Financial Corp. in 2003. Dodd continues to refuse to release the standard documents (commitment letters, good-faith estimates of costs and fee summaries) that accompany every residential mortgage. They might confirm Dodd’s contention that he received the same deal that anyone shopping the rates could have secured in the spring of 2003. Or maybe they won’t.”
COMING THIS WEEK: Space Camp Barbie.
LEARJET LIBERALISM: Private Jet Aficionado Laurie David On “Greening Our Airports.”
VITAMIN D AND HEALTH: A roundup.
JERRY POURNELLE ON SHORT-TERM THINKING:
Five years ago we were told that increased refinery and oil pumping capability in the US would do no good because it would take five years for those to affect gas pump prices. Query: if we had greatly increased supply over the past five years, would not oil be at about $75/bbl, still high, but not headed to $200? And if we do nothing to increase supply now, where will oil go? . . . We are in a time of national emergency, but it does not affect the politicians, who continue business as usual.
My response to those who say that increased drilling is pointless because it won’t yield immediate results — like Arnold Schwarzenegger –is why worry about the greenhouse effect, then? Nothing we do will cool the planet immediately. Yet we’re told immediate action there is vital. In fact, we’re told that by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the very same speech.
UPDATE: TigerHawk: “One would have thought that this point was so obvious it would not have to be made at all.”
You can never be too obvious, it seems.
I’D SETTLE FOR SOME OF THE OLD KIND: Healthy eating is “the new patriotism.”
DAVID WARREN ON CANADA’S “HUMAN RIGHTS” KANGAROO COURTS:
The people are still sleeping, but some “blowback†has finally begun to occur. Given its very eccentric inquisitorial practices, which have been documented and publicized on the Internet, the CHRC is now under an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation, and there is a Parliamentary investigation pending. (As a public relations exercise, the CHRC has also hand-picked its own “independent†investigator to do what we can only assume will be a defensive whitewash, as usual at taxpayer expense.)
It is against this background the CHRC decided that the better part of valour is discretion, and that it truly did not need to be prosecuting such high-profile targets as the bestselling author, Mark Steyn, and the mainstream newsweekly, Maclean’s, at the present time. The CHRC can retrench, and return to its bread-and-butter business of destroying little people who command no publicity — biding their time until circumstances are propitious to “extend their mandate†again.
Vigilance is the price of liberty, and it is crucially important that we not take the heat off Canada’s HRCs when they retreat. Canadians need to know the whole truth about what these vile “human rights†investigators have been doing.
Yes, now is not the time to slack off. I also think it would be a good time for Canadians to flood the HRCs with complaints about racist and sexist speech from Muslim clerics, Womyn’s activists, and the like. God knows there’s plenty of material to work with.
RALPH PETERS: ” If current trend-lines continue, it may not be long before Baghdad is safer for Iraqi citizens than the Washington-Baltimore metroplex is for US citizens. Iraq’s government is working, its economy is booming – and its military has driven the concentrations of terrorists and militia from every one of Iraq’s major cities. And our troops are coming home. Where’s the failure?”
A RECIPE for hummus. I used to make that all the time. May have to do it again, soon.
A BIG HONKIN’ SUNFLOWER, from Les Jones.
BECAUSE IT’S NOT AS IF WE NEED MORE ENERGY: U.S. Halts Solar Projects Over Environment Fears.
Okay: Nukes are out, coal is filthy, wind power destroys Ted Kennedy’s view, and solar leads to “environment fears.” Do they just want us all to freeze in the dark? Pretty much, I’d say . . . .
(Via Sonic Frog). Seems like this would be a good campaign issue for somebody . . . .
UPDATE: Reader Robert Schwartz emails:
Whatever happened to the Democrats? It used to be that their sole criterion for evaluating proposals was how many blue collar jobs they would create. Oil drilling and nuclear power would have been no brainers as both activities require millions of man hours of labor, real blue collar, sweaty, dirty labor. These days Democrats seem to care more about beachfront property values than worker’s jobs.
Yes, the Democrats have become the party of the upper-crust now.
KNIFEBLOGGING FOLLOWUP: A big cutlery sale.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Iraqification of Lebanon.
“SOMEONE IS GOING TO BE DISAPPOINTED.”
UPDATE: Corroded corruption?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Yes we can!
MORE: Rage!
In surprisingly blunt language, U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler complained this week of “a lack of maturity” in the U.S. House.
The North Carolina Democrat accused some of his fellow lawmakers of thinking they’re “Hollywood stars” and said many of them spend more time playing politics than doing what’s best for the country.
“It’s quite embarrassing,” he said. “I mean, I wish all constituents could sit sometimes in the gallery and just see what goes on on the House floor.”
Indeed.
ZIGZAGGING ON IRAQ: “Recent reports and rumors have indicated that Senator Obama plans to aggressively move to the middle on Iraq in the coming months. This is a good political move for Obama, if only because he’s finally starting to recognize reality.”
Plus, Keith Olbermann will praise his “manly posture on Iraq.”
PHIL GRAMM: “They didn’t live up to what they promised to do. Power corrupted them. They spent lots of money and tried to buy votes. Republicans concluded that they could make voters love them by governing the way Democrats did.”
Plus this: “Why is America the richest country in the world? . . . It’s not because our people are more brilliant; it’s because we have a better free-market system. Why has Texas created 1.6 million jobs in the last 10 years whereas Michigan has lost 300,000 jobs and Ohio has lost 100,000 jobs? Because governance matters, taxes matter, regulation matters. Our opponents in this campaign are so dogmatic in their goal of having more government because they love the power it brings to them that they’re willing to let it impose costs on the working people that they say they want to help. I am not.”
AT VODKAPUNDIT, a Bill Clinton photo caption contest.
MORE GUN TALK over at Inside Higher Ed. Plus, Arming Obama.
Plus, Morton Grove ends its gun ban. “The Heller dominoes are falling.”
WELL, THIS IS CHEERY: “Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall ‘below zero’. Alarmist? Maybe, but I”m worried about inflation too.
SOME LINKS on the anti-aging conference at UCLA this weekend.
TOM MAGUIRE: “The same folks who can read the Constitution and Bill of Rights and find an unassailable right to abortion and gay marriage can’t find a right to possession of a firearm.”
A BLOG REVIEW OF WALL-E.
IF YOU CRITICIZE MUGABE, you’re a racist.
THE AMERICAN NON-EMPIRE. If we were an empire, we’d be acting more like Putin’s Russia. And, as a consequence, getting better press. . . .
Barack Obama is under hostile fire for changing his position on the D.C. gun ban.
Oh, I’m sorry. He didn’t change his position, apparently. He reworded a clumsy statement.
That, at least, is what his campaign is saying. The same campaign that tried to spin his flip-flop in rejecting public financing as embracing the spirit of reform, if not the actual position he had once promised to embrace.
Is this becoming a pattern? Wouldn’t it be better for Obama to say he had thought more about such-and-such an issue and simply changed his mind? Is that verboten in American politics? Is it better to engage in linguistic pretzel-twisting in an effort to prove that you didn’t change your mind?
Regardless of what you think of the merits of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling overturning the capital’s handgun law, it seems to me we’re entitled to a clear position by the presumed Democratic nominee.
Good luck with that. Kurtz even notes that Big Media is covering for Obama:
But even though the earlier Obama quote and the “inartful” comment have been bouncing around the Net for 24 hours, I’m not seeing any reference to them in the morning papers. Most do what the New York Times did: “Mr. Obama, who like Mr. McCain has been on record as supporting the individual-rights view, said the ruling would ‘provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.’ ”
Supporting the individual-rights view? Not in November. . . .
Even the Tribune–the very paper that the Obama camp told he supported the gun ban–makes no reference to the November interview. Instead: “Democrat Barack Obama offered a guarded response Thursday to the Supreme Court ruling striking down the District of Columbia’s prohibition on handguns and sidestepped providing a view on the 32-year-old local gun ban. Republican rival John McCain’s campaign accused him of an ‘incredible flip-flop’ on gun control.”
So McCain accuses Obama of a flip-flop, and the Trib can’t check the clips to tell readers whether there’s some basis in fact for the charge?
USA Today takes the same tack
The November view is down the memory hole. Apparently you have to go to the blogs to find people who can use Google.
Over at EU Referendum under the heading “Caught red-handed” there is an instructive YouTube video. It shows a bunch of MEPs showing up at their place of work at quarter to seven in the morning. Exemplary devotion to duty? Well, no. What they are actually doing, suitcases in hand, is signing the attendance register on a Friday morning before heading home for the weekend. Then they will be paid, most lavishly, for working that day.
The cat really lands among the pigeons around 2 minutes 30 seconds in. Watch the MEPs dodge back behind doors as they register the camera’s unwelcome presence. Listen to the cries and squeals. “It is not your business!” “Such impertinence!” I did not catch the name of the genial chap who claimed to be about to start work in his constituency before running for the door, but Irish MEP Kathy Sinnott (of, I am sorry to say, the EU-sceptic Independence and Democracy Group) said she had already been at work for seven hours, and Hiltrud Breyer of the German Green Party really ought to look at people when she talks to them.
We bloggers often criticise the mainstream media but I take my hat off to Thomas Meier, the intrepid journalist here. He represents a tradition of – literally – foot-in-the-door reporting that the “colleagues” would like to put an end to if they could. In this case, as soon as they could, they did. The fun ends with Herr Meier being escorted out by seven heavies.
Here’s the video.
UPDATE: Okay, actually, despite the praise above this is amateur hour, even if it’s being done by professionals. What you do is, you start staking out this space every week. And you have a second (concealed) camera covering what’s done to the guy with the open camera. Then — since the security guards threw out an accredited journalist with a right to be there — you sue everybody in sight; doesn’t matter if you win (though you should) because it’s more publicity. And you start tailing the MEPs on Friday to see where they actually are on Fridays after having signed in.
If you’re really serious, that is. Note that Big Media folks don’t do this much, because they fear the blowback. And bloggers, well . . . we’re just getting started at this kind of thing. Give us time.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, in Louisiana . . . .
GALLUP: “When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans. . . . A separate question finds Americans more likely to believe government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses (50%) as opposed to saying government should do more to solve the country’s problems (43%).”
I note that some people think the country has drifted far to the left. This suggests that it hasn’t.
THE HELLER DECISION: A victory for gay rights.
CADILLAC TIGHT: How many voters will the Supreme Court’s decisions swing? I have to say that more pro-gun folks seem to have been energized by Heller and the follow-on litigation than I expected.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: “Obama claims he believes the Second Amendment says you can own a gun but that local communities can still opt out of the Constitution. What will he say as his political hometown is sued by the NRA?” Plus, waffles.
M’UTAH FOR NOTHING and chicks for free?
IN THE MAIL: Jerry White’s I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis. It’s impressively blurbed.
Knoxville, Tennessee. The University’s Engineering and Science research building. I post this in response to reader Herschel Smith, who suggested that the beautiful Law School rotunda indicated that the University undervalued engineers relative to lawyers. His specific beef was with the (different) building housing the Nuclear Engineering department — which I’ll admit isn’t much of a building — but I’ll note that they have access to some pretty fancy facilities out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the University is the prime contractor.
MORE THOUGHTS ON HELLER FROM DAVE KOPEL, with an amusing beer-related title.
ANN ALTHOUSE on Obama’s flipflops: “Every single one of those flipflops has been an improvement, in my opinion, so am I supposed to reject Obama for flipflopping? I voted for Obama in the Wisconsin primary in part because I predicted he’d turn out to be flexible and pragmatic. I do agree with Krauthammer that it’s funny the way the people who fell for the Obama of the primaries — who, unlike me, actually liked those positions he was taking — are letting him get away with the flipflop. I suppose, just as I convinced myself that the real Obama was not the one I was seeing back then, they are convincing themselves that the real Obama is not the one they are seeing now.”
As always with Obama, it’s a question of who the rubes really are. It’s the power of glamour.
UPDATE: Ann Althouse responds. I wasn’t calling her a rube, particularly — the “who are the rubes?” line has been a running thing with Obama, going back to this post: “When it comes to things like NAFTA, there seem to be only two possibilities. Either Obama’s anti-NAFTA talk is a ruse to fool the rubes, or his coterie of distinguished economic experts is a ruse to fool a different batch of rubes.”
To expand a bit: Either the people who believed the early-primary left-talk are the rubes, or the people who believe Obama now are the rubes . . . or anyone who thinks Obama has fixed principles at all is a rube. Your call.
ANOTHER UPDATE: From one of Ann’s commenters:
I think the meaning of “rube” is similar to a hustler’s mark — someone who believes things they shouldn’t because of some externally generated desire to believe. There’s an element of conscious deception, too — a rube is lied to, not misled.
I think the rube factor with Obama comes into play on two issues in particular: NAFTA and the war. On both issues, you get the impression that he’s making promises that he not only won’t keep, but that he can’t keep and shouldn’t keep.
Indeed.
Also, I originally read Althouse as calling my statement “gnomic,” and was going to protest that I am not, and never have been, an Aorist. But she actually said “gnomish.” That works, and demonstrates her deep learning, as Gnomish is a fairly loose language. Hence the need for me to post a clarification.
A COLLECTION OF summer grilling recipes. But grilled Angel Food cake?
Question: Did the murder rate really triple under the Washington, DC, gun ban?
Answer: Yes. The murder rate was 26.8 homicides per 100,000 people in 1976, when the ban became law. That would be its lowest rate for the next 30 years. It peaked at 80.6 homicides per 100,000 people in 1991.
Question: What’s the highest the murder rate has been in gun happy West Virginia in that time?
Answer: 6.9 homicides per 100,000 people.
Question: So why did Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post write: “The practical benefits of effective gun control are obvious: If there are fewer guns, there are fewer shootings and fewer funerals. As everyone knows, in the District of Columbia — and in just about every city in the nation, big or small — there are far too many funerals. The handgun is the weapon of choice in keeping the U.S. homicide rate at a level that the rest of the civilized world finds incomprehensible and appalling.â€
Answer: Ignorance.
Ouch. The rest of Robinson’s piece isn’t really so bad, though.
UPDATE: Scott Ott comments on the gun photo accompanying Eugene Robinson’s piece: “Whoever’s holding that gun needs to get his finger away from the trigger. Perhaps we need to offer handgun safety courses for reporters and photographers. I don’t want anyone to get hurt while covering this story. It’s funny that the price tag is still on it. I think they wanted their readers to know that the pic was snapped in the store…they didn’t actually purchase the weapon. It’s a nice looking 1911. WaPo has inspired me to head back to The Golden Trigger (my local shop) to have a look at one of those.”
GETTING TOUGH ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, in Europe.
BLUES, BREWS AND BARBECUE: A photo shoot from Rick Lee, plus some D300 advice.
BOSTON GLOBE: Grim proving ground for Obama’s housing policy. “The candidate endorsed subsidies for private entrepreneurs to build low-income units. But, while he garnered support from developers, many projects in his former district have fallen into disrepair.” And Rezko appears:
Antoin “Tony” Rezko, perhaps the most important fund-raiser for Obama’s early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas buy a home in 2005. Rezko’s company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama’s district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.
Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers – including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko – collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.
One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations.
Butler and Davis did not respond to messages. Rezko is in prison; his lawyer did not respond to inquiries.
Chicago politics = hope and change?
DICKIE SCRUGGS SENTENCED: Scruggs Gets 5 Years in Prison; Judge Calls Conduct “Reprehensibleâ€.
NEW YORK TIMES: “About that Mortgage, Senator . . .”
It turns out that the chieftain of Countrywide — which is smack in the middle of the mortgage mess — extended privileged borrowing status to two Senators, Chris Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, and Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota. Both Senators deny any ethical violations.
The disclosure of the V.I.P. arrangments by the political website Politico.com left constituents angry and suspicious — particularly because the revelations came just as Congress was rousing itself to do something about the mortgage foreclosure crisis.
It would be nice to think that members of Congress did not go into the process with any undue friendships with the mortgage companies.
The Senate ethics committee, normally known for profound silence in the face of members’ scandals, has proposed having more stringent disclosure rules as a part of the chamber’s standing regulations. Currently, home mortgages are exempt from loan disclosure rules. (Why? we’d like to know. Is there something about graft given in the form of a home mortgage that is less corrupting than other forms of graft?)
Indeed. Plus this: Mortgages: Sleaze-o-rama:
More sleaze oozed out of the subprime mortgage mess this month with news that two U.S. senators got sweetheart loans from a giant mortgage company.
One of them, Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., heads the Senate Banking Committee, which gives him heavy clout over mortgage lenders. The other is Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D.
Angelo Mozilo, the controversial chairman of Countrywide Financial, gave both of them loans at low fees and reduced interest rates. . . .
It’s difficult to say what is more remarkable about the senators’ behavior: the petty venality or the stupidity.
Mr. Conrad was the more crass of the two. While shopping for a loan, he called James Johnson, the former chairman of mortgage giant Fannie Mae and a former top adviser to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Johnson happened to be with Mr. Mozilo when Mr. Conrad’s call came through. Mr. Mozilo got on the line and got the senator’s loan application rolling.
Mr. Dodd says he didn’t ask for favors from Mr. Mozillo. Maybe so, but the senator knew that Countrywide had placed him in a special program for VIPs. It got him special treatment and an interest rate available only to special customers. Mr. Conrad borrowed more than $1 million, Mr. Dodd more than $775,000.
It also turned out that Mr. Johnson himself got a sweetheart loan from Countrywide. When that fact surfaced, he resigned his position heading Mr. Obama’s vice presidential search committee.
Sleaze-o-rama, indeed. And as I’ve noted before, the real problem isn’t so much the mortgages, as the culture of entitlement that made the mortgages seem no big deal.
Heck, even The Socialist Worker sees the problem:
BUT WHILE millions grapple with rising mortgage payments or see their wealth evaporate with falling house prices, members of Congress continue to benefit from favorable treatment by mortgage lenders–the very same lenders who will get a bailout if proposed legislation passes.
The housing bill’s key backers in the Senate–Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), head of the Senate Banking Committee, and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who chairs the Senate Budget Committee–both got special deals from the nation’s biggest mortgage lender, Countrywide, thanks to their connections with the company’s CEO, Angelo Mozilo.
“Dodd, the lead sponsor of the bill, secured no-closing-cost mortgages at interest rates of 4 percent and 4.25 percent, and continues to insist he got no special favors,” the Rocky Mountain News reported. Conrad admitted calling Mozilo for help with a discount on a $1 million mortgage for a beach house, but also claims that it was legitimate.
Now Dodd and Conrad are in position to return the favor to the mortgage industry. If the current bill passes the House, Countrywide and other lenders will see U.S. taxpayers assume responsibility for mortgage defaults.
Do tell. Plus, from the Hartford Courant: “Come Clean, Senators.”
SHOWING CONTEMPT FOR CONGRESS? I was tryin’ to conceal it.
THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, PEOPLE WOULD BE ARRESTED FOR “OFFENSIVE” YOUTUBE VIDEOS: And they were right! “After seeing a YouTube video made by Andre Moore, Philadelphia police broke down Moore’s front door at 6 a.m. yesterday and arrested him for assault. Unlike the case of eight Florida girls who assaulted another girl, however, Moore’s video didn’t contain evidence of any criminal wrongdoing—unless verbally advocating violence against police constitutes a crime.”
HEY, HERE’S A LICENSED GUN DEALER IN D.C.
JAMES TARANTO: “We hope they both lose. But actually, Greenwald has a good point at Olbermann’s expense. . . . In our view, Greenwald is wrong. But he is consistent. Olbermann, on the other hand, rails against ‘fascism,’ then yields to it in the name of political expediency. Obama does the same thing in a more soothing manner.”
Plus this: “The Keith Olbermanns of the media world outnumber the Glenn Greenwalds, so when an Obama administration curtails civil liberties (justifiably or not), the outcry will be far more muted than it is now. If civil liberties are your top concern, then, you better vote for John McCain.”
BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of Apple Computer and iPhone news.
JUSTICE SCALIA’S pro-women’s rights position.
A HATFILL WIN: “The DOJ has agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement with former Army scientist Steven Hatfill, whom the government called a ‘person of interest’ in the 2001 anthrax attacks.”
HEH: “What is wrong with the British? Islamists regularly demonstrate in the street promising to behead Jews, Christians and other infidels. No foul, no crime. A man whistles at a girl, it’s jail time.” It’s just a question of who they’re afraid of, and who they’re not.
WILMETTE, ILLINOIS suspends its handgun ban in response to Heller.
CANADIAN KANGAROO COURT UPDATE: “Human Rights” complaint against Mark Steyn dropped.
But beware: “They know that in going after high profile targets they’ve bitten off more than they can chew — any action against them would likely stir political action to do away with the commisions altogether. If they drop the complaint against Steyn, the political pressure will simply go away and they’re free to continue zealously violating the rights of lesser known individuals and organizations.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides. Or perhaps it’s not as remarkable as we’ve been led to think.
And making gross errors of fact in the process of the knot-tying.
I’VE MENTIONED THE BIG ANTI-AGING CONFERENCE AT UCLA THIS WEEK BEFORE, but now it’s underway. Here’s a piece in Wired, focusing on researcher Aubrey de Grey.
CAR LUST: The Vauxhall VX220 Turbo. “The VX220 is a lightweight giant-killer for both the road and the track, meant to embarrass much more expensive Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches.”
FOR WHEN CARBON FOOTPRINTS DON’T MATTER: Test-Driving the 2009 Bentley Flying Spur.
Now the gun controllers pour out of the woodwork to claim that you’re more likely to kill yourself or a family member with a gun than a criminal.
Some of the people deploying this statistic really ought to know better.
Some of them do know better, and deploy it anyway. Some related thoughts from Jim Lindgren. “That the New England Journal of Medicine would publish a time-series article that did not account for population changes over roughly a two-decade period is embarrassing, but then peer review seems to suffer when gun control articles are involved.” Plus, a Bellesiles story.
BOB ZUBRIN: The Saving Grace in McCain’s Energy Policy. “Amidst a pile of campaign nonsense, John McCain just set forth one policy that could save the nation.”
CHICAGO TRIBUNE: Court gun ruling has Chicago thinking it’s next. (Via NewsAlert).
RANDY BARNETT: So what gun regulations are reasonable?
