Wise fools

This is … dismaying. Yet one of the perennial questions is "How can such smart people be so dumb?" Reason magazine's 2008 Presidential poll. Obama wins by a mile among this group of highly intelligent, highly imaginative people, who apparently have not been paying attention, and are mostly so annoyed with Bush that they want to slap him with a fish, never mind that he isn't even running.

Tim Slagle makes sense:

Who are you voting for in November? I'm voting for Palin. Maybe it's just the tendency of a guy with a big crush to project his ideology on that crush, but she just smells like a Libertarian to me. I'm probably wrong, but the alternative really frightens me. The darkest moments in world history have occurred during the confluence of a bad economy and a charismatic leader. Those videos of children singing and marching for Obama are really disconcerting. I don't care for McCain, but with Palin behind him, his age is an asset.

And Michael Shermer is funny (and I hope not serious about those first three words):

Who are you voting for in November? I’m voting Democrat because I think lawyers should run the country, because the last two years under their control has gone so well, because the government has done such a great job with FEMA that they should also be in charge of our school choices, health care choices, and retirement choices, because they protect me from crime so well that I don’t need a gun, because I want to pay more taxes (especially Capital Gains), because unions need to be stronger against evil corporations, because trade with foreign corporations is anti-American and we need to protect American jobs, and mostly because I’m tired of having so many choices and want someone else to make them for me.

But most of them seem to be suffering from the notion that a vote for Obama will be seen as a vote against current Republican policies, which will indicate to the Republican party that it needs to get back to the principles of Reagan and Goldwater. Or else they believe, out of sheer wishful thinking, apparently, that Obama will govern as a moderate. Do I need to say it: a vote for Obama will be taken by him as an endorsement of whatever he wants to do. There is no way to mark a ballot to say that "I am only voting for you because I don't like the other guy, even though I like you less." Can't do it.

Wise fools.

Possibly more scary

How is MySpace like a tattoo?

Sing along on the chorus:

How I hope that you forget your MySpace
I hope it slips completely from your mind
And I hope it stays up long enough for the next generation to find
And I hope that it embarrasses your children
I hope their bratty friends all forward it around
And I hope that you forget your password
So you cannot take it down

Click through for complete lyrics.

(via, via)

Scary

Trick or treat! (Received in email from Bud.)

Brits debate warming, in the snow

I'll just quote Instapundit on this, I can't improve on it:

HEH: Snow blankets London for Global Warming debate. "Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday - the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922."

Update: I can't improve on it, but Luboš Motl can, by linking to sites with pictures. One of which I shamelessly have swiped:

Duet for paint pot and politics

At American Digest.

Van der Leun establishes the theme, Sippican takes the cadenza.

"Tools for Fools:" ought to be a series.

Obama spelled backward is "Amabo"

Which is Latin for "I will love." It is common knowledge that "backwards, in a dead language," is the way to make a spell. Put that on a poster with a picture, and you have a charm. Magic, in other words. So this is the secret of Obama's success: his followers have been using Magick in Crowleyan style, following the prescription to "invoke often."

This is the only way to account for Obama's success, considering his obvious lack of qualifications and disqualifying associations and history. Every time his name is spoken, the charm is invoked. It works even better when chanted by a group. It's magic! But to call it "black magic" would be racist.

Swiping someone else's magic has also been known to work, but this attempt seems premature.

Related: Althouse: I contemplate the symmetry of the names Obama and Biden.

Also related: Althouse, again: "Is Barack Obama.... deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis...?"

Possibly also related: Video: Obama Jedi Mind Trick.

Questions about Obama's fundraising

raised by Scott Johnson (who has more at Power Line): DUBIOUS DONATIONS: BAM'S WEB SITE INVITES FRAUD, Neil Munro at National Journal: FEC Rules Leave Loopholes For Online Donation Data: Reports Of Irregularities In Donations Under $200 Raise Questions Of Who Bears The Burden Of Filtering Out Improper Money, Patrick Ruffini at The Next Right: BarackObama.com's Lax Security Opens Door to Online Donor Fraud, and Paul R. Hollrah at New Media Journal: Obama is Bought, But Who Owns Him?

Megan McArdle's comments start getting interesting after the willfully obtuse have left, about here.

A question: IF the dubious fundraising activities amount to something criminal, AND Obama wins the election, THEN who will investigate?

Update: David Blue has more at Winds Of Change: The Big Steal, 2008. "That assumption that only Americans will decide the results of America's elections was old-fashioned, as the Obama campaign has demonstrated by opening its doors to unlimited millions of dollars in illegal donations, including foreign money."

Another update: Thanks to Patterico commenter AMac, I see that there is now a website dedicated to this topic: Obama Shrugged.

And see above, Stolen elections.

Laffer: "The Age of Prosperity Is Over"

Talking heads on CNBC were discussing this on Monday. I hope he's wrong, but I would hate to bet against him. In the WSJ:

Twenty-five years down the line, what this administration and Congress have done will be viewed in much the same light as what Herbert Hoover did in the years 1929 through 1932.

That's Laffer as in "Laffer curve."

Cited in discussion at Jerry Pournelle's place.

Update: Speaking of Hoover, he was only in till March '33. It took FDR to keep the Depression going. FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

Ayers, Dohrn, Weather Underground planned American genocide

It's all in the book, Prairie Fire. Zombie found a copy of the book. (One of a long list of dedicatees is Sirhan Sirhan.)

Confederate Yankee found documentary film footage of an an FBI informant describing what he had heard in the Weather Underground meetings. They had big dreams. Quote from the clip:

I asked, "well what is going to happen to those people we can't reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?" and the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated.

And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.

And when I say "eliminate," I mean "kill."

Twenty-five million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

And they were dead serious.

This is socialist thinking. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin; for the greater good. Socialists just do not see human beings, other than themselves, of course. Hence the willingness to "spread the wealth." Those doing the spreading have to take some off the top, though. And since wealth creation is likely to stop once the spreading starts, it gets spread awful thin after the first few passes. If there's not enough to go around, it can be made to cover a larger percentage of the (remaining) population by reducing the population. Which would be why socialist revolutionaries want to kill the rich, not just take their stuff.

There is so much disputation about the definition of socialism that it might be worthwhile to quote Ayers's definition, from Prairie Fire:

Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit. Socialism means control of the productive forces for the good of the whole community instead of the few who live on hilltops and in mansions. Socialism means priorities based on human need instead of corporate greed. Socialism creates the conditions for a decent and creative quality of life for all.

"Violent … dictatorship … eradication … control …" leads to "decent and creative," somehow. This has got to be good. Right?

Update: Listening to McCain speak at a rally in Hershey, Pa., I'm pleased to hear him hit this note: "He's running to spread wealth—I'm running to create wealth."

Another update: Bob Owens (Confederate Yankee) has a new interview with Larry Grathwohl, the FBI informant quoted above, at PJ Media.

And another update: I didn't want to link to this; so I'll link to Victoria, instead. Bill Ayers's blog.

"Dodd has guaranteed himself a permanent spot in the pantheon of the privileged oblivious."

Kevin Rennie of the Hartford Courant takes on Senator Dodd, in a link-rich report.

The senator, the reports tell us, in the midst of the meltdown, put the squeeze on the businesses that his committee oversees.

(via)

That there Google can be quick

I did not expect to see this:


at all, certainly not so quick.

What a kick!
Top o' the Google to you, Rachel Lucas. I couldn't have done it without you.

The link is to the post right before this one. I won't name it here; the screenshot shows quite enough wackiness for one day!

My "Links to this post" has not worked for a year, though. Oh, what do I want, caviar? Sorry. Room service sent all the caviar up to the Obama suite.

Update: There might be some caviar left after all. It seems that story was fake. Don't believe everything you read in the papers! Only on the Internet are all facts guaranteed!

McCain : Palin :: Théoden : Éowyn

Rachel Lucas explains it all. She sounds like Winston Churchill: "[T]he only honorable thing to do, ever, is to fight until you cannot fight any more. Even when you are horribly outnumbered, outgunned, outwhatevered - you must never give up because if you do, you’re handing victory to the enemy." That's a Texan speaking, one who, I imagine, remembers the Alamo.

Part 1: Do not despair, Part 2: Fell deeds awake.

That leaves Obama : Biden :: Saruman : Gríma Wormtongue.

That's assuming that Obama is not actually in the pay of foreign enemies, though the many dubious contributions give one to doubt that, but believes himself to be acting in his own behalf; one receiving such contributions might imagine that he could take their money, but not be beholden to them afterwards. So, assuming that he is self-deluded in this way is actually a charitable assumption.

I should explain that in this analogy I do not see Gríma so much as the evil counselor who nearly destroyed Théoden, but more as the feckless clown, trailing around after Saruman, who speaks words, lots of words, that are only loosely connected with reality.

Update: see here for a laugh. (That's the next post in chronological order, or the one above in blogological order, so if you arrived from the index page you have already seen it.)

Compare and contrast: law school students, poll respondents, and Clever Hans

Althouse has this: "Professors Found to Keep Political Views Quiet, but Students Detect Them." Zombie has this: The Left's Big Blunder, in which are mentioned the Clever Hans phenomenon, and the Solomon Asch conformity effect. There seem to be some striking parallels.

I am trying to watch Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live while writing this; I don't think I can do both at once. So this post is a stub, as they say at Wikipedia. I'll see if I can come back to it.

Sharp teeth of a weasel puncture pretentious gasbags

That would be S. Weasel, specifically. A brilliant reduction of the wheezy, overblown rhetoric of "second-rate intellect[s] that [have] been dragged through a first-class education."

Update: Somehow or other, what Weasel has to say about language ties in with this Sam Schulman essay: Class Will Tell: Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?

What the Ayerses now teach, think, and do hardly matters as long as they observe good form, the form of "educated community activists." Stern wants us to hear a mellow Chekhovian tone in their lives (and his prose). Perhaps, but in his moral reasoning I hear Oscar Wilde's Cecily Cardew, in The Importance of Being Earnest, observing that the Ayerses "have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance."

Ayers's wealth and family connections have something to do with it. (via)

Obama's Secretary of Education?

I seem to recall Ronald Reagan calling for the elimination of the Federal Department of Education. That didn't happen. Presidents do not get to do everything that they would like to do. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's not so good. Maybe it evens out. Although in the case of the Department of Education, maybe not. We, in our capacity as "the government," keep throwing more and more money at education, without achieving much in the way of results.

There is a prominent educator to whom Obama owes much: William Ayers. His portrait:
A wealthy man, scion of wealth, who hates the country and the system which made him wealthy. He has not given it all to the poor, though. No, he lives pretty high. In Russia, or the USSR in earlier days, he would have been called a member of the nomenklatura.

"Guilty as sin, free as a bird." Feet on the flag, unrepentant terrorist. He is the penultimate step of the "long march through the institutions." Is his disciple, Obama, the ultimate step? Obama's opacity makes it impossible to say. We know more about "Joe the plumber" than we do about Obama. From Chicago Magazine, "No Regrets."

One fish, red fish

In the light, this fish is a regular, though funny-looking, fish-colored fish. Raccoon eyes, pouty lips, veils, and all, still a fairly regular fish-looking critter.

But in the dark, look at that thing! Bright red and glowing.

"Kill him" shout fictional

It's a pity this news didn't break a few hours earlier. In last night's debate, in the course of declining to repudiate John Lewis's remarks comparing McCain and Palin with George Wallace, Sen Obama spent a fair amount of time agreeing with Lewis that Gov. Palin is inciting hatred at rallies, proved not by anything she said but by something someone heard shouted by a single voice during a speech by somebody else.

We now have a story from the other Scranton paper:

Secret Service says "Kill him" allegation unfounded.

SCRANTON – The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled “kill him” when presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s name was mentioned during Tuesday’s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.


The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Oabama’s name a man in the audience shouted “kill him."

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

“I was baffled,” he said after reading the report in Wednesday’s Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, from news media to ordinary citizens in attendance at the rally for the Republican vice presidential candidate held at the Riverfront Sports Complex. He said Singleton was the only one to say he heard someone yell “kill him.”

“We have yet to find someone to back up the story,” Slavoski said. “We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.”

Hackett said he did not hear the remark.

Slavoski said Singleton was interviewed Wednesday and stood by his story but couldn’t give a description of the man because he didn’t see him he only heard him.

When contacted Wednesday afternoon, Singleton referred questions to Times-Tribune Metro Editor Jeff Sonderman. Sonderman said, “We stand by the story. The facts reported are true and that’s really all there is.”

Slavoski said the agents take such threats or comments seriously and immediately opened an investigation but after due diligence “as far as we’re concerned it’s closed unless someone comes forward.” He urged anyone with knowledge of the alleged incident to call him at 346-5781. “We’ll run at all leads,” he said.

Well then. One reporter says it happened; "more than 20" other people who were at the rally say they did not hear it. How convenient it is for a reporter to be present when something newsworthy happens. And the only witness, at that! If the reporter hadn't heard that unidentifiable individual shout whatever it was he shouted, the Obama campaign would have been short a race card play, Lewis would not have made those remarks, Obama would have had more time to discuss Ayers and possibly even Rev. "God DAMN America" Wright during the debate. Funny how that happens, that a reporter is the only one to notice something important. Of course he would write it up, whether he had a supporting witness or not. He is his own witness.

Thanks to Byron York at The Corner.

Update: Or as Glenn Reynolds says, with characteristic brevity: "It's as if they're just making stuff up to make McCain and Palin look bad."

What kind of Cassandra ...

… am I? I predicted this stock market crash back in February 2007. But did I get into bear market mode at the end of August? Ha! If only.

It's bad enough to be a Cassandra who predicts doom only to be ignored by all who hear; how about being a Cassandra who does not even follow her own dismal advice? "Come in out of the rain, Hector! You're gonna get wet!"

To try to analyze why I failed at this: I underestimated the perfidy of the Democrats. I thought they would just put out in the media the usual stories claiming that the economy was bad, regardless of the actual numbers, and let it go at that. It never occurred to me that they were so desperate to win this particular election that they would go ahead and really try to tank the economy. Of course, since Democrats don't know what the economy is, they misfired; stock market, housing prices, these things are not the economy. They partake of the nature of the economy, but the economy is much more than these things.

But since the strategy was 2-pronged, "lose the war and tank the economy," when the first one failed, the second one had to be executed with that much more emphasis.

Remember 1929? Of course not. I don't either. If I were actually Hector Owen, from the novel, I would remember it vividly. (FDR on TV, and all.) After the crash, the factories and farms were all still there. It took FDR to start enacting policies requiring destruction of food, to keep prices up, when people were hungry; oh, I'm not going to expand (or expound, or expatiate, either) on this any further, just go read The Forgotten Man.

ACORN becoming flagrant

It seems that even CNN can't ignore ACORN's flagrancy any more.

Does that do it for you?

I wonder how long this one will last on YouTube.

Via Glenn Reynolds:

MORE REPORTS OF MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD BY ACORN. "They turn in 5000 new voter registration forms in Indiana, election officials start checking them and give up after the first 2100 were found to be fraudulent." Where's the Department of Justice on this? CNN report below.

Or above, if you're here.

When in Roma ...

… one might try to speak Latin, or Italian, so as to be understood. When in America, or even some other English-speaking country, one might speak English, for the same purpose. We don't say "Deutschland," we say "Germany." The French don't say "Deutschland" either, nor do they say "Germany," they say "Allemagne." The affected pronunciations of the candidates in Tuesday's debate led to some discussion over at The Corner, which led to this delightful piece by Jay Nordlinger, “Gutter” Politics. A sample:

Last winter, I was thinking of starting a "Torino Watch." Why? Katie Couric was broadcasting from the Salt Lake City Olympics, and she was looking forward to the next Winter Olympics, to be held in . . . "Torino," she said. Why she said "Torino," instead of good ol' Turin, is shrouded in mystery. Would-be sophisticates are always saying "Torino" instead of Turin and "Milano" instead of Milan. But, oddly, they don't say Roma — except "when in Rome," presumably — and they don't say "Venezia" (Venice), "Firenze" (Florence), or "Napoli" (Naples).

Even I, though, draw the line at "Leghorn": I say Livorno. But this puts me at odds with Winston Churchill, who wrote to his foreign secretary in 1941, "If you approve I should like Livorno to be called in the English — Leghorn." Though "if at any time you are conversing agreeably with Mussolini in Italian, Livorno would be correct." This is the same Churchill who would write, four years later, "I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts." Without a firm stand, "the B.B.C. will be pronouncing Paris 'Paree.' Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names."

But if you don't call the city "Leghorn," then how are the kids to know where the chickens come from?

Update, Dec 3: Althouse is changing her "Mumbai" tag to "Bombay."

An Obama olio

A whole lot of open windows, not much energy to make a coherent post.

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis, by James Simpson. Thanks to blake for this one. It describes the Cloward-Piven strategy and its relationship to ACORN, Obama, and various foundations, and of course George Soros. Also at Simpson's blog. I mentioned this strategy, though not by that name, a year and a half ago: Got to break it before you can fix it.

Inside Obama's Acorn, by Stanley Kurtz. From last spring.

Why the press hides Obama’s lies, by Roger L. Simon at PJ Media. Lots of comments.

AT HOME WITH: Bernadine Dohrn; Same Passion, New Tactics, by Susan Chira, NY Times from 1993. At home with Mrs. William Ayers.

They named their children after some of their heroes. Their older son, Zayd Osceola Ayers Dohrn, was named in honor of Zayd Shakur, the Black Panther killed in New Jersey during a shootout with police in 1973, and Osceola, the Seminole chief who sheltered runaway slaves. Their 13-year-old, Malik Cochise, takes his names from Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and the 19th-century Apache chief who fought settlers encroaching on his land.

Not Quite Ready to Join the Crusade, by Victor Davis Hanson at PJ Media.

Hot Air has some videos: The Ayers connection. The third video includes a brief interview with John Murtagh, who wrote this, in City Journal last April: Fire in the Night: The Weathermen tried to kill my family. Inline update: at 7:34 in this last video, after the Murtagh interview, is a clip from a 1998 interview in which Connie Chung begs Ayers and Dohrn to repent of their violent actions. Their response is to fall all over each other with interruptions in their eagerness to say that they did not do enough. "I wish we'd done more." "We'd do it again." No ambiguity here.

The WSJ has Bill v. Barack on Banks: Clinton instructs Obama on finance and Phil Gramm.

A running cliché of the political left and the press corps these days is that our current financial problems all flow from Congress's 1999 decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that separated commercial and investment banking. Barack Obama has been selling this line every day. Bill Clinton signed that "deregulation" bill into law, and he knows better.

How allies of George Soros helped bring down Wachovia Bank, by Ed Lasky. If you didn't quite understand what was going on in that Saturday Night Live video that is so hard to find (try here!), the one with Herbert and Marion Sandler, this will lay it out for you.

Stanley Kurtz asks, "What exactly does a "community organizer" do?" in O's Dangerous Pals: Barack's 'organizer' buds pushed for bad mortgages, in the NY Post.

And here's one from last February on the Global Poverty Act, Obama's Global Tax, by Lee Cary in the American Thinker.

Just a couple more here. Powerline is keeping up with ACORN: "Is ACORN stealing the election?"

It is reasonable to ask whether ACORN is in fact a criminal conspiracy to subvert the voting rights of Americans. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Barack Obama paid ACORN $800,000 to register new voters, and then lied about it, falsely telling the Federal Elections Commission that the $800,000 went to a group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance work."

ACORN's Criminal Enterprise, Continued. "At least nine states have now launched criminal investigations of ACORN…." Oh, look, they also have this video of Louis Farrakhan, last Feb 24, calling Obama the messiah.

Post-debate malaise

That was a lame excuse for a town hall meeting.

So McCain has also bought into this business of having the government rescue everyone who screwed up.

"That's why we're gonna have to go out into the housing market, and we're gonna have to buy up these bad loans, and we're gonna have to stabilize house, home values, and that way Americans can, like Allan can realize the American dream, and stay in their home."

"I think if we act effectively, if we stabilize the housing market which I believe we can if we go out and buy up these bad loans so that people can have a new mortgage at the new value of their home…"

AP: McCain would buy bad homeowner mortgages. "… stabilize home values …" sounds an awful lot like price controls. That worked out so well when Nixon tried it. If the market is not allowed to find the bottom, it will be in a metastable state, which will always need to be propped up artificially. Of course, now that the government is taking control of the banks, I suppose Congress will do a fine job of that.

Obama doesn't understand the difference between regulation of "the financial system" and regulating corruption in Fannie and Freddie.

VP debate

I just about wanted to throw something right at the beginning when Palin condemned "predator lenders" instead of going after the Democrats, who set up this whole CRA, Fan & Fred mess.

It got better after that.

Watching Biden throw the bull is almost enjoyable, in the way that one enjoys watching any master practice his craft. Almost, but not really, because the future of our country is at stake—and the future of our country = the future of the free world, aka Western civilization. He slings the BS so well that people don't call him on it. The US and France threw Hezbollah out of Lebanon? Please!

Jim Geraghty at NRO has a list. Part 1, Part 2. There may be more to come.

But possibly the most important and dangerous thing he said Thursday night was that he and Obama would somehow make it possible in cases where people were having trouble paying their mortgages for the principal to be adjusted! We have heard a lot of crazy talk from the Democrats in this campaign, but this is past crazy and into psychotic territory. Gerard Van der Leun calls this "just simply mind-numbing." (Like being hit with a brick?) Do read the comments. Donald Sensing says "Biden promises to destroy the American housing market." Hope and change, all right. Let's just change everything, and hope we survive. Might lose a few Kulaks along the way, but it's for the greater good.

A little more on Fannie and Freddie

Rather than update the Fannie and Freddie post again, here's a new one.

A nice collection of quotations from some of the legislators involved in the mess, from the WSJ, including:

House Financial Services Committee hearing, Sept. 25, 2003:

Rep. Frank: I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .

Pesky "safety and soundness!" It would take a no-fun conservative to want to focus on those things. Rolling the dice is way more fun. And:

Senate Banking Committee, Feb. 24-25, 2004:

[…]

Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.): I, just briefly will say, Mr. Chairman, obviously, like most of us here, this is one of the great success stories of all time.…

From the WaPo, Where Was Sen. Dodd?

Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has the gall to ask in a Bloomberg Television interview: "I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years."

Barney Frank is also mentioned in the article, and he replied in a letter to the editor. The article was reprinted in the Hartford Courant, and drew some comments. I mentioned Sen. Dodd a while back, in this post.

Here's video of Bill O'Reilly going ballistic on Barney Frank. If you look closely, you can see that Rep. Frank actually does appear to have teeth, lowers at least. In the course of the confrontation, Rep. Frank mentions a bill passed in 2007. This WaPo piece about it, House Tightens Reins on Fannie, Freddie, tells us that the Administration wanted more regulation of Fannie and Freddie than the Democrats were willing to allow:

[I]n House action last Thursday, the bill was reshaped in a way that lessens the power of the new federal regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over their mortgage holdings compared with an earlier version that moved through the House. An amendment adopted by voice vote puts some restrictions on that authority.

The Bush administration has insisted that the new regulator have the discretion and authority to reduce the companies' mortgage portfolios.…

Fannie Mae quickly signaled its satisfaction with the amendment limiting the new regulator's authority over the companies' mortgage holdings.

In other words, Republicans opposed this bill because it was not tough enough, but was simply an effort by Democrats to appear to be doing something, while not actually doing anything.

What, an update already? The Instapundit has a new video: What Just Happened?

One more: the Bovina Bloviator remembers, well, not personally, the crash of 1907, and how J.P. Morgan straightened it all out, in a smoke-filled room. No taxpayers' money required.

NY Sun sets

I'm sorry to see it go. I had been a regular reader of Ira Stoll's Smarter Times website before he closed it, when he was starting the newspaper. I bought the paper whenever I was in their circulation area, which was very limited. It's too late for anything but Monday morning quarterbacking, BUT, I do think that if they had paid more attention to circulation, figured out how to do mail subscriptions, they could have become a national paper. Paying too much attention to the news side, not enough to the business side. As Susan Berger says, in a comment at Hit & Run, "We get the NY Post and NY Daily News in our grocery stores plus our other local newspapers, but the Sun was unable to send me copies even with me asking for a subscription."

Vale.

The last editorial: The Arc of the Sun.

Chris Rozvar at NY Magazine. One of many eulogies to come.