JustOneMinute

Laugh Du Jour

If this whole Presidential thing doesn't work out Obama has a future in stand-up.  Here he is on the Treasury rescue plan:

"This is a global crisis and the United States must insist that other nations join us in helping secure the financial markets," Obama said.

Hmm.  How about if they help by not dumping the Treasury securities they currently hold? 

For heaven's sake - there are plenty of reservations in Washington about whether the US taxpayer ought to be saddled with these losses while bailing out Wall Street's fat cats.  Does Obama seriously think a plan that drags in the French, German and Japanese taxpayers will be passed in this decade, or ever?  Does he think that going to Europe and Asia hat in hand is the way to restore America's standing in the world?

The Fed and Treasury have been coordinating with foreign central banks and will no doubt continue to do so, but Congressional action on this Treasury rescue plan cannot be made contingent upon the open checkbooks of our allies.

He'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitress.

Losing Is Stressful

From an interview with General Keane (ret.), the other architect of the surge:

The U.S. came "within weeks or months" of defeat in Iraq in 2006, he says. The consequences of that were "unacceptable" for the region, "not to speak of an institution that I loved." And what about the military chiefs who thought the extra battalions and extended service tours would be too much of a strain on American forces? "When people talk about stress and strain on a force, the stress and strain that would come from having to live with a humiliating defeat would be quite staggering."

The Mystery Of Asset To Capital Ratios

Paul Krugman, in yet another attempt to assess the rescue plan, raises some interesting issues but demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of a basic and critical point:

Thinking the bailout through

...

3. The financial system, in its efforts to deleverage, is contracting credit, placing everyone who depends on credit under strain.

4. There’s also, to some extent, a vicious circle of deleveraging: as financial firms try to contract their balance sheets, they drive down the prices of assets, further reducing capital and forcing more deleveraging.

So where in this process does the Temporary Asset Relief Plan offer any, well, relief? The answer is that it possibly offers some respite in stage 4: the Treasury steps in to buy assets that the financial system is trying to sell, thereby hopefully mitigating the downward spiral of asset prices.

But the more I think about this, the more skeptical I get about the extent to which it’s a solution. Problems:

(a) Although the problem starts with mortgage-backed securities, the range of assets whose prices are being driven down by deleveraging is much broader than MBS. So this only cuts off, at most, part of the vicious circle.

(b) Anyway, the vicious circle aspect is only part of the larger problem, and arguably not the most important part. Even without panic asset selling, the financial system would be seriously undercapitalized, causing a credit crunch — and this plan does nothing to address that.

Or I should say, the plan does nothing to address the lack of capital unless the Treasury overpays for assets.  And if that’s the real plan, Congress has every right to balk.

His point (a) is well taken.  However, point (b) is simply not theoretically accurate.

Firms have capital to support their business activities.  If they are undercapitalized they need to either (a) raise more capital or (b) scale back their business activities.  By selling $700 billion of troubled assets to the Treasury financial services firms are scaling back (or exiting) a line of business.

Imagine, *hypothetically*, that across the financial services sector these $700 billion of troubled assets were supported by $70 billion of capital, i.e., a 10-1 assets to capital ratio (that is lower than the average leverage across all lines of business but most business lines are less risky and can support higher leverage).

Selling $700 billion of assets to the Treasury reduces the sector's collective balance sheets by $700 billion and frees up $70 billion in capital which then becomes available to support other activities.  Will the financial services sector still be undercapitalized after this happens? Maybe, maybe not.  But Krugman ought to at least acknowledge the theoretical possibility that the Treasury plan can solve the capital problem by allowing firms to shed assets rather than raise capital.  There is no *theoretical* requirement that the Treasury pay premium prices in order to boost the capitalization of the financial services sector to an appropriate level.

As to why Krugman is stuck on this point of premium prices, I can only guess.

Let me be clear - as a matter of fact, it is possible that the financial services sector will still be undercapitalized after selling $700 billion of assets.  But as a matter of theory, it is also possible that they will have adequate capital after this sale.  For Krugman to state as a theoretical certainty that "the plan does nothing to address the lack of capital unless the Treasury overpays for assets" (his emphasis) is simply not accurate.  In fact, the plan does something to address the capital problem - it allows firms to de-leverage by shedding assets. 

Whether it does enough, I don't know.  Given the resources and reporting available to the Treasury, the Fed and the SEC, I suspect they have a reasonably well-informed opinion on this point, and I certainly hope that by the end of the week our also Congressman also have a well-informed opinion.  I also hope the reality-based community can formulate their objections to this rescue package on the basis of, well, reality.  Heaven knows there is plenty to which one might object.

MORE:  Matt Yglesias is bamboozled I see.

KIDDING?  Newt Gingrich sees this as an opportunity to restructure out tax code and our national energy policy.  All by the end of the week?  Geez, maybe Congress could work through the weekend and solve Social Security and health care, too.

Stray Thoughts

Stray thoughts on the rescue proposal:

1.  I'm trying to picture the Republican reaction if this were happening under Clinton....  Psych!  No I'm not.

2.  Timing is everything - I am not trying to picture the Dem reaction if Bush had a couple more years left in office.  I think he has lost their trust.

3.  Shorter John Cole - I think Krugman was right about the war and Maguire was wrong about Scooter, so Krugman must be right about this rescure plan. 

Hmm, that is not quite the same as actually evaluating the arguments, but I'm sure it is comforting for folks who prefer to rely on authorities rather than reason independently.  That said, Krugman's record on economics is not 100 percent.

Out Of This World

Joan Winston, Start Trek superfan and organizer of the first Start Trek convention, passed away on Sept 11.

For the “Star Trek” faithful, it was a historic event. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the series, showed up. So did the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, not to mention fans dressed as Klingons, Tribbles and Bele from the planet Ceron. NASA delivered a scaled-down lunar module and a spacesuit.

It was January 1972, and the first Star Trek convention was under way in a rented ballroom at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan. The organizers had expected a crowd of about 500. In the end, more than 3,000 fans turned up, so many that by the final day of the event registrars were issuing ID cards made from torn scraps of wrapping paper. For fans of the series, the convention marked the moment when a diaspora became a nation.

And it made a subculture celebrity of Joan Winston, who played a leading role in creating the event and went on to achieve a second-order fame as one of world’s most avid “Star Trek” fans. She died of Alzheimer’s disease on Sept. 11 at age 77, her cousin Steven Rosenfeld said. She lived in Manhattan.

I believe I went to the 197 Star Trek convention in Manhattan, escorting my younger sister.  I met Isaac Asimov and played my first (and only) hand of three card monte, paying $20 for a quick education in something or other.

RIP.

If I Were Grading Papers...

Krugman's "analysis" of the Treasury bail-out proposal, "No Deal", is so weak it is embarrassing:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

...

The Treasury plan, by contrast, looks like an attempt to restore confidence in the financial system — that is, convince creditors of troubled institutions that everything’s OK — simply by buying assets off these institutions. This will only work if the prices Treasury pays are much higher than current market prices; that, in turn, can only be true either if this is mainly a liquidity problem — which seems doubtful — or if Treasury is going to be paying a huge premium, in effect throwing taxpayers’ money at the financial world.

No.  If the problem is liquidity rather than solvency (a big if, and Krugman guesses it is solvency) then removing the troubled assets at fair value will reduce the variance of the firms balance sheet without changing its expected value.  This reduction in value may be enough to reassure lenders thatt the firm in question is safe.

Developing... I have more in the UPDATE here but I am still working on my scintillating killer example of the impact of mean and variance on lenders (but not equity holders).

K Drum Is Good On The Bail-Out

Kevin Drum has a useful overview of the upcoming bail-out of the financial industry; Krugman provides an interesting hand-wringer, and Dean Baker (as summarized by Mark Thoma) is useless.  Let's roll Drum:

It's true that the Bernanke/Paulson bailout is aimed at illiquid debt instruments. And those instruments are illiquid largely because they contain lots of toxic mortgage securities and nobody knows how much this stuff is really worth. It's unlikely that the toxic sludge makes these instruments literally worth nothing, but who knows? The mere possibility that they're worthless means that anyone who owns them might be insolvent, and since everyone owns at least some of them, this in turn means that everyone might be insolvent. Result: no one is willing to loan money to anyone else, because who wants to loan money to a bank that might never pay it back? This has caused the credit markets to seize up. (And if this WSJ tick-tock is correct, the seizure became critical on Wednesday, which is why B&P changed their minds midweek about pursuing a systemwide bailout that they'd opposed earlier.)

The purpose of the bailout, then, isn't to recapitalize the banks, it's to put a firm value on the toxic sludge once and for all. Maybe it's a dime on the dollar, maybe it's 50 cents on the dollar. Whatever. When that's done, some banks will turn out to be insolvent, and perhaps they'll be allowed to fail. Others will turn out to be in bad shape but still solvent, and they'll continue doing business. Once that's sorted out, the commercial paper market will loosen back up since everyone will know who it's safe to loan money to and who it's not.

Well, yes.  Suppose Merrill Lynch (to pick a name at random) has marked its sludge down to 50 percent of face value.  Let's further suppose that with perfect foresight investors could see that this is the "right" price in the sense that over the life of the assets Merrill will receive that amount in present value, risk adjusted terms.

Does this mean that Merrill's financial statements are reliable and lenders will lend to them?  Not in the current environment.  Fannie Mae and Fredddie Mac went poof; Lehman was rumored for months to be in trouble and finally went bust; AIG was rumored for days to be in trouble and disappeared; one of the oldest and largest money market funds had to suspend withdrawals and pay out at 97 cents at the dollar. 

Lacking perfect foresight, investors have no idea whether 50 cents on the dollar is fair but even if they suspected it was they also have an excellent idea that lightning could strike and Merrill could go bust tomorrow, which means they won't lend to Merrill today.  Or, if the idea of a lightning strike seems too abstract, investors might believe that, although 50 cents is the mean expected value of the assets in question there is a high enough probability that they will ultimately be worth 25 cents that a loan to Merrill is too risky.

However, if Merrill sells those assets at 50 cents, they have not received a subsidy but they have removed a major source of volatility from their financial statement - there is no possibility that Merrill will later mark those assets down to 25 cents because they have been sold.  Of course, they will never mark them to 75 and book a profit, but lenders were hardly worried about that (This reduction in volatility is a bummer to equity investors, who lose the "heads I win tails, the lender loses" option on the sludge.  However, the equity investor gains value since prospective reorganizations costs in liquidation or merger have been reduced.)

So why doesn't Merrill and everyone else sell their troubled assets and move on?  Well, sell them to whom?  Merrill did sell some of this stuff but the collectively the financial firms simply have too much to move.  Hence, there is a role for the government as a patient, well-capitalized investor of last resort - it is *possible* that the government can break even or make money on these assets if the purchase price is fair.  Obviously, it is also possible that the government will get stuffed with the worst of the worst at inflated prices, or that the government will consider it its patriotic duty to pay inflated prices in order to quietly re-capitalize some of these firms.  But this bail-out can be effective without assuming that to be the case.  Here is Dean Baker:

The most obvious question: is how will paying market price for near worthless assets prevent the collapse of zombie institutions like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG? These institutions needed money. They won't get it from selling mortgage backed securities, that are chock full of bad mortgages, at the market price. We already know this, because they already had the option to do so. ...

Well, there are market prices and market prices.  If I had to sell my home on Monday Sept 22 for cash in 50s and 100s, the price would be substantially discounted from the value I would receive if I could wait a few months and go through a more regular process.  Firms that thought they could hold their troubled assets and earn their way out of trouble have run out of time and there simply are no bids for this stuff.  From that it does not follow that these assets are worthless any more than it follows that the "cash price on Monday" value of my home represents its fair value.

From Mark Thoma:

Here's a proposal. First, in return for taking toxic assets off of a firms books at a price that is higher than the market rate, the government would get a share of any future profits the firm makes for some time period, say 10% for ten years, something like that.

Well, we don't know that the government will be overpaying, although it is a possibility.  A trickier argument would be to wonder whether it is fair to the taxpayers for the government to pay a "premium" price based on its ability to buy and hold in a market where no other major bidders can afford to do so.  I'll say this - no private investor would surrender the premium created by the investor's own financial strength.  OTOH, no private investor has a particular duty to promote the national economy.  And if fifteen years from now the government entity managing these assets has broken even, well, good for them.  On a risk-adjusted basis they will have gotten fleeced (anyone borrowing at the risk-free rate *ought* to make money) but the economy will have been stabilized (fingers crossed) and the taxpayer won't be out of pocket.

My key point - this "bail-out" can work (at least conceptually) if the Treasury pays "fair", non-subsidized prices for the problematic assets.  An auction mechanism that determines a fair price will be difficult but I'll toss out an obvious idea - run reverse auctions for any of the non-unique bonds held by more than one firm.  Start at five cents and work up until a target amount has been purchased by the government, then pay everybody the clearing price.  For uniform, widely held bonds approach should be fine (Collusion?  These firms wouldn't do that, would they?).  For the truly unique (and uniquely awful) fragments and structured tails hanging around, well, get back to me.

Let me close with Drum:

Now, there are obviously all sorts of problems here. How is the Treasury going to value all the sludge? If they value it too high, then we really are bailing out irresponsible bankers who made stupid loans, and the taxpayers will foot the bill when the sludge eventually gets sold off at a loss. Value it too low and the feds are acting as vultures, causing more bank failures than we really ought to have. Furthermore, once the sludge is off Wall Street's books and some big banks turn out to be insolvent for certain, will they really be allowed to fail? Or will Bernanke and Paulson prop them up yet again?

Excellent.  Or at least, I completely agree.

BONUS WORRY:  Krugman also wonders what happens if, after buying mountains of sludge at "fair" prices we then discover some firms to be insolvent.  What indeed.  Take heart - Bob Rubin's invisible hand is near the helm.

UPDATE:  A leaked draft of the "plan" is at Calculated Risk.  Paul Krugman has a new post, "No Deal", which includes this misleading analysis (my emphasis):

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

...The Treasury plan, by contrast, looks like an attempt to restore confidence in the financial system — that is, convince creditors of troubled institutions that everything’s OK — simply by buying assets off these institutions. This will only work if the prices Treasury pays are much higher than current market prices; that, in turn, can only be true either if this is mainly a liquidity problem — which seems doubtful — or if Treasury is going to be paying a huge premium, in effect throwing taxpayers’ money at the financial world.

It is true that paying a premium would help troubled firms (or untroubled ones for that matter).  However, as noted in the Merrill-lightning strike example above, reducing the variance of a firm's balance sheet will make that firm more appealing to lenders even if the mean value of the firm does not change (i.e., the assets are sold at fair value, not a premium).  Allowing Merrill to remove an asset at 50 that is fairly valued at 50 can make Merrill more attractive to lenders if they no longer have to factor into their lending decision the fact that the assets in question is illiquid and of highly uncertain future value.

Now, if the underlying crisis is due to solvency rather than liquidity (Krugman's guess, but who knows?) then after all the firms have dumped their waste we will see that some firms lack sufficient capital to continue.  What then?  A possible answer - since the mysteries of their balance sheet have been resolved (and the variance of their future value reduced), these firms ought to be more able to attract new capital than they are at present.  Fingers crossed again (and is hope a plan?)

Too bad - the Times readership would probably benefit from some sound economic analysis of this plan.  Instead the Times is peddling the hyper-partisan Krugman.

Barack's Interference With The SOFA Negotiation - The Fog Thickens

ABC News leaps to Obama's defense on the question of whether Obama interfered with negotiations between the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government on the Status of Forces Agreement governing the US troop presence in Iraq and/or the Strategic Framework Agreement covering the broader diplomatic, economic and strategic relationship between the two countries.

At this point the McCain camp has over-reached a bit and the Obama camp has enough cover and confusion that their press allies will declare this round for Obama.  The truth is more complicated, of course - we can find lies and deceit on the Obama side that more than match the confusion on the McCain side.

ABC News talked to people familiar with the meeting between Obama and Iraq Foreign Minister Zebari in Baghdad during Obama's overseas trip and concluded that Obama had not improperly interfered with the Bush negotiations, as had been originally reported in the NY Post by Amir Taheri:

  WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

However, there were *two* contacts between Obama and Zebari.  In a follow-up column defending his original story, Taheri cited a phone call between the two men that occurred in June while Zebari was visiting the United States:

Here is how NBC reported Obama's position on June 16, after his conversation in the US with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari: "Obama also told Zebari, he said, that Congress should be involved in any negotiations regarding a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. He suggested it may be better to wait until the next administration to negotiate such an agreement."

Obama had two contacts with Zebari and the case is pretty strong that Obama urged a delay in the SOFA during the June phone call, based on Obama's own description of the phone call and Zebari's discussion at a subsequent press conference.  Although Taheri's original column sparked interest in this story, it is reporting from ABC News, NBC News and the NY Times, as well as Obama's own website that suggest that, at a minimum, Obama sowed confusion in the Iraqi camp, as I emphasized in an earlier post.  They admit to this in the latest ABC News story, by the way - talk about your buried lead.

However, that was not what Taheri originally reported - he focused on the Baghdad meeting, and that was what the McCain camp seized upon (my emphasis):

At this point, it is not yet clear what official American negotiations Senator Obama tried to undermine with Iraqi leaders, but the possibility of such actions is unprecedented....  If news reports are accurate, this is an egregious act of political interference by a presidential candidate seeking political advantage overseas.  Senator Obama needs to reveal what he said to Iraq's Foreign Minister during their closed door meeting...

That gives ABC News the opening they need to claim to have fully refuted McCain's charge of interference while ignoring the June 16 phone call subsequently offered by Taheri in support of the story.

Let's review some of the deceptions offered by the Obama campaign and dutifully passed along by ABC News:

"Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations," said Obama campaign national security spokesperson Wendy Morigi, "nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades."

That marks quite a change from the Morigi's initial "denial", which said this in reference to the initial Taheri report about the Baghdad meeting:

Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, [Wendy Morigi] said.

I'll accept that Obama has never urged a delay in troop drawdowns.  However, Obama has certainly urged a delay in the Strategic Framework Agreement (as noted in the "denial") and apparently the SOFA as well.  Here is how Obama himself described the June 16 phone call:

"I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq, but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. troops, making clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq, that any negotiations for a Status of Forces agreement or strategic framework agreement should be done in the open and with Congress's authorization, because I believe that it's in the interests of both Iraq and the United States that any such critical negotiations have strong bipartisan support and that they can be sustained through a future administration," Obama told reporters.

Bush has had no intention of involving Congress in this process for either accord.  At Obama's website he calls for a delay in both the SOFA and the SFA.  And here is Zebari, from a NY Times account of his early July press conference:

He said that Mr. Obama had asked him: “ ‘Why is the Iraqi government in a rush, in a hurry? This administration has only a few more months in office.’ ”

Mr. Zebari said he told Mr. Obama that even a Democratic administration would be better off having something “concrete in front of them to take a hard look at.”

Mr. Zebari also indicated that even a full agreement would be short. “We are not talking about 50 years, 25 years or 10 years; we are negotiating about one or two years, so this is not going to be another colonization of Iraq,” he said.

The Strategic Framework Agreement would not be a one or two year deal so it seems that Zebari was referring to the SOFA.  But in any case, Obama clearly wanted a delay in the negotiation of something, despite the current denial for security adviser Wendy Morigi, which seems to have supplanted the initial "denial" in the ABC reporting.

Here is more bafflegab from Morigi passed along by ABC News:

Morigi said in a statement that "Barack Obama has consistently called for any Strategic Framework Agreement to be submitted to the U.S. Congress so that the American people have the same opportunity for review as the Iraqi parliament."

Again, at his website Obama calls for the SOFA and the SFA to be submitted to Congress and seems to call for a delay in both, so this statement is true but incomplete.  Let's reprint the website here (my emphasis):

The Status-of-Forces-Agreement

Obama believes any Status of Forces Agreement, or any strategic framework agreement, should be negotiated in the context of a broader commitment by the U.S. to begin withdrawing its troops and forswearing permanent bases. Obama also believes that any security accord must be subject to Congressional approval. It is unacceptable that the Iraqi government will present the agreement to the Iraqi parliament for approval—yet the Bush administration will not do the same with the U.S. Congress. The Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress or allow the next administration to negotiate an agreement that has bipartisan support here at home and makes absolutely clear that the U.S. will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

Congress has been considering their role in both agreements and Obama certainly does not make a clear distinction between them here.  Since Bush has no intention of weakening a traditional Executive Branch prerogative and submitting the SOFA for Congressional review a fair reading of this website is that Obama wants the SOFA to be delayed.

Finally, the Obama people admit to the charge I have been making.  If Obama is confusing foreign leaders he ought to pipe down:

It’s possible, Obama advisers believe, that either Zebari or Taheri confused the Strategic Framework Agreement -- which Obama feels should be reviewed by Congress -- with the Status of Forces Agreement, which Obama says the Bush administration should negotiate with the Iraqis as soon as possible.

In light of Obama's previous gaffes with the unconditional pledge to meet with foreign leaders and to keep Jerusalem undivided I think that at a minimum it is highly likely that Obama confused Zebari on the SOFA/SFA point during the June phone call and perhaps during the July meeting.  And if Obama's position is that the SOFA should be negotiated post-haste he ought to clarify that at his website - what if foreign leaders are reading it?

I also agree with ABC News that McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann should have poked at this a bit more carefully before plunging in.  Bah!  Send better candidates.

WaPo To McCain - You Effed Up... You Trusted Us

The Fact Checkers at Animal Post couldn't be funnier - they give McCain two Pinnochios for lying in an ad that relied on Washington Post reporting:

So what evidence does the McCain campaign have for the supposed Obama-Raines connection? It is pretty flimsy, but it is not made up completely out of whole cloth. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers points to three items in the Washington Post in July and August. It turns out that the three items (including an editorial) all rely on the same single conversation, between Raines and a Washington Post business reporter, Anita Huslin, who wrote a profile of the discredited Fannie Mae boss that appeared on July 16. The profile reported that Raines, who retired from Fannie Mae four years ago, had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

...

The Pinocchio Test

The McCain campaign is clearly exaggerating wildly in attempting to depict Franklin Raines as a close adviser to Obama on "housing and mortgage policy." If we are to believe Raines, he did have a couple of telephone conversations with someone in the Obama campaign. But that hardly makes him an adviser to the candidate himself--and certainly not in the way depicted in the McCain video release.

Byron York goes animal himself.

UPDATE:  Oh, geez - I did not steal the Animal Hosue reference from here.

Shock And Awe

A thought on the Treasury plan to create a multi-billion dollar entity to buy mystery paper - if the rumored size is $200 to $500 billion, the actual size will be $600 billion.  There is no way Washington re-enacts the "too few troops" debate in the financial arena - this plan has to be too big to fail.

And my second thought - I would prefer to see Republicans lead the nationalization of the US economy since there is at least a chance they will do so reluctantly.  Democrats would be happy to put a Congressman on every corporate board in America.  Republicans may do the same thing but at least they will be frowning when they do it.

As to whether these steps are necessary and appropriate - if the credit crunch was threatening to spill over into the real economy, as seemed likely, the boost to GDP from these interventions should more than compensate the taxpayer for any losses.  Its a shame that not all the Wall Streeters who profited from this debacle will be flogged and the moral hazard problem gets kicked down the road (to Detroit, actually) but sufficient unto the day...

MORE STRAY THOUGHTS:  The Faster Failure Thesis (OK, close) that the public processes news more quickly has also taken hold in our political system - although the crisis has developed over seveal years, the takover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a mere two weeks ago.  The "no Federal money" decision to let Lehman go bust was a mere weekend ago.  Now we have nationalized the largest insurance company and promised to toss half a trillion at the structured debt market.  So nimble!

In Whose National Interest?

The Times reports that the Status of Forces Agreement legalizing the presence of US troops in Iraq after the UN mandate expires on Dec 31 is in jeopardy:

WASHINGTON — An agreement to extend the American military mandate in Iraq beyond this year — near completion only a month ago — has stalled over objections by Iraqi leaders and could be in danger of falling apart, according to Iraqi and Bush administration officials.

The disagreements threaten a capstone of President Bush’s Iraq policy during his remaining months in office. Mr. Bush has already offered significant concessions to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in the negotiations, including his willingness to accept a specific date for withdrawing American forces: the end of 2011.

The major remaining point of contention involves immunity, with the United States maintaining that American troops and military contractors should have the same protections they have in other countries where they are based and Iraq insisting that they be subject to the country’s criminal justice system for any crime committed outside of a military operation, the officials said.

In a television interview this week, Mr. Maliki cited the example of an Iraqi killed by an American soldier in a market, saying that a case like that should fall “to Iraqi courts immediately.”

“This,” he said of the American position, “they reject.”

Prime Minister Maliki has his won domestic political reasons to wait for a better deal:

Michael E. O’Hanlon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said Mr. Maliki’s objections reflected a combination of factors. He cited Iraqi nationalism, Mr. Maliki’s own domestic political necessities and a desire to await the outcome of the American presidential election, on the assumption that the next president could offer different terms.

“He knows there has to be a deal in the end — even if it’s with an Obama administration,” Mr. O’Hanlon said, referring to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for president. “But by trying to get what he wants — or being seen trying to get what he wants — he shores up his position at home.”

Since Obama has already urged him to wait, Maliki may feel confident he can get a better deal next January or February.

Now to be fair, Maliki could have guessed at Obama's views simply by reading his website.  However, it appears that Obama served his own political interest rather than the American national interest by urging Maliki to delay.

Oh, well - maybe as part of his informal co-Presidency Obama can get back on the phone and urge the Iraqis to take the deal Bush is offering.

CAVEATS:  Presumably the Obamatons will argue that this is not a zero-sum process and that in the long run, a better deal for Iraq is a better deal for the US - a happy ally is a good ally, yes?  How does that saying go - every happy alliance is the same but every unhappy alliance is unhappy in its own way?

Oh, THAT Explains It!

Karen DeYoung, associate editor for the WaPo, explains why Obama's apparent meddling in the negotiations between the US and Iraq over the status of US forces [and see UPDATE]:

Falls Church, Va.: Did Obama intrude into negotiations with the Iraqis over the Status of Forces Agreement, as the New York Post is reporting?

washingtonpost.com: Obama Tried to Stall GIs' Iraq Withdrawal (New York Post, Sept. 15)

Karen DeYoung: The NY Post, which published the piece, said that Obama had "demanded" that bilateral agreements with Iraq be delayed until there's a new president here. As I read the comments made by both Iraqi FM Zebari and by Obama, Obama seemed to have the same position as most Democrats (and some Republicans) over the agreements--saying that Congress has the right to examine and approve the agreements (which the Bush administration has rejected) and asking whether it makes sense to negotiate and sign an accord for the next several years when a new administration may want to do something different.

Oh - it's not a problem because Obama meant it and anyway, Obama has the same position as most Democrats.  Dare we wonder out loud - are most Democrats nominated as their party's candidate for President?  Are most Democrats currently the front-runner to become the next President?  Are most Democrats presenting their views to the Iraqi foreign minister while negotiations between the US and Iraq are underway?

It appears, since she has it in quotes, that Ms. DeYoung is hung up on the word "demanded".  Well, let's roll the videotape - here is how ABC News quoted Obama's description of his telephone discussion with Zebari (my emphasis, and Fox had the same quote):

"I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq, but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. troops, making clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq, that any negotiations for a Status of Forces agreement or strategic framework agreement should be done in the open and with Congress's authorization, because I believe that it's in the interests of both Iraq and the United States that any such critical negotiations have strong bipartisan support and that they can be sustained through a future administration," Obama told reporters.

Let's flash back to our misspent youths and play the SAT game: Of "insisted", "making clear" and "demanded", which does not belong?  Hah!  Trick question!  If Obama insisted and made clear that Congress needed to be involved and the deal could be delayed, that is the same as demanding it be delayed.  Of course, as a mere US Senator he is not in a position to make demands, but as the leading Presidential candidate his words carry more than ordinary weight.

As to why this is A-OK with the WaPo, we eagerly await a sensible explanation.  In fact, I insist and demand that we get one - did I make myself clear?

MORE:  Yes, my demand and a buck-fifty gets you a cup of coffee, but it was fun typing it.  I, of course, am neither a US Senator nor a front-running Presidential candidate.  Not yet.

UPDATE:  The Times reports the current deal is in jeopardy.

So Now Obama Is Lying In Spanish

ABC News fact checks an Obama Spanish-language ad tying John McCain to El Rushbo.

Shorter ABC - linking McCain to Limbaugh makes no sense sense Limbaugh is not exactly a supporter of McCain, and anyway, the evil Limbaugh quotes were taken out of context and are quite tame in context.

Quite a tony and high-minded campaign on both sides.

Well, We're Bailing Out SOMEBODY!

The Captain is pretty funny - in their press release reacting to the AIG takeover, Team Obama can't even get the right name for AIG.  They must have put this release together at 4 AM, after the euphoria of the 3 AM phone call wore off. 

The Captain's main point is well-taken - McCain was leading the 2005 charge for Fannie Mae reform while Obama was cashing checks from Fannie's supporters.

Health Care

Health Affairs offers assessments of both the Obama (.pdf) and McCain (.pdf) health care plans.

Both plans will radically change the current employer-based coverage model.  McCain proposes to make the employee health insurance benefit taxable and offset that tax increase with a refundable tax credit for people who buy private insurance.  From the abstract:

Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) health plan would eliminate the current tax exclusion of employer payments for health coverage, replace the exclusion with a refundable tax credit for those who purchase coverage, and encourage Americans to move to a national market for non group insurance. Middle-range estimates suggest that initially this change will have little impact on the number of uninsured people, although within five years this number will likely grow as the value of the tax credit falls relative to rising health care costs. Moving toward a relatively unregulated non group market will tend to raise costs, reduce the generosity of benefits, and leave people with fewer consumer protections.

As noted by DeLong et al, the loss of tax deductibility represents a tax on jobs:

The immediate consequences of the McCain plan are even worse. The McCain plan is a big tax increase on employers and workers. With the economy in recession, that's the last thing America's businesses need.

Obama has his own proposal to upend the employer-coverage model, and his approach, known as "pay or play" will drop a disproportionate burden on low-wage jobs (do Obama backers know this?)  From the abstract:

Heavy regulation coupled with a fallback National Health Plan and a play-or-pay financing choice also raise questions about the future of the employer insurance market.

The "pay or play provision, detail of which are vague, is discussed by the NCPA and by  James Capretta at NRO. Briefly, Obama will require employers to either provide health insurance or pay a supplemental payroll tax to a Federal health care fund.  This also represents a tax on jobs.  From Capretta:

The consequences for the lowest paid workers would be devastating. For those earning just above the minimum wage, employers would not be able to take the full cost “pay or play” out of wages because it would push cash compensation below the minimum allowable. These employers would therefore have no choice but to eliminate these jobs, lest they end up paying more for their workforce than it is worth to the firm. Katherine Baicker of Harvard and Helen Levy of the University of Michigan estimate that an employer health-insurance mandate would destroy about 224,000 low-wage jobs, with the losses disproportionately concentrated among non-whites, high school drop-outs, and women. Another study found that a version of California’s “pay or play” scheme, passed in 2003 but later repealed, would have eliminated 71,000 jobs in that state alone.

Tough to introduce that during a recession - talk about change we don't want to believe is happening.

Obama's plan also has an odd quirk that was beaten to death during the Democratic debates - he obliges insurers to accept new applicants regardless of pre-existing conditions, yet does not require anyone to buy coverage.  The probable consequence - healthy people will tend to delay purchasing insurance until they are sick.

Reuters has a pox on both houses report:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's health care plan would cost too much and create more regulation, while Republican John McCain's plan would leave 60 million Americans without health insurance and reduce coverage, experts said on Tuesday.

Neither plan would fully fix the broken U.S. health care system, the separate teams of experts concluded in the journal Health Affairs.

...

A survey of benefits managers released on Tuesday showed wide disapproval of both plans, also.

"Rather than taxing workers' health benefits and compelling employers to provide coverage they can't afford, candidates should focus on initiatives to control costs and promote top quality care," James Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, which represents employer-sponsored health plans, said in a statement.

...

The American Benefits Council survey found that managers want both candidates to focus more on controlling costs and improving the quality of health care.

It found that 74 percent of the 187 managers surveyed disapproved of McCain's tax proposal while 46 percent disliked Obama's plan to require employers to "pay or play."

Companies currently offering coverage ought to prefer Obama's plan, which imposes costs on their rivals that don't offer coverage.  Companies not offering coverage (which I think is the smaller number) should favor McCain, from the perspective of their own bottom line anyway.

Barack Negotiating With Foreign Leaders?

Amir Taheri repeats the charge he leveled on Monday - Obama improperly negotiated with Iraqi leaders in an attempt to delay the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq.  The original story, the Obama "denial" (which seemed to admit the charge) and my own thoughts noting that Obama's website jibes with Taheri's version are in this earlier post.      

To recap briefly, the US is negotiating both a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) with Iraq.  The SOFA would cover the legal status of US forces in Iraq and is needed by Dec 31, when the UN mandate expires.  The SFA would be a long term deal describing the economic, diplomatic, and military relationship between the countries.  Taheri alleged that Obama was urging the Iraqis to go slow on the Status of Forces Agreement, which eventually covered the topic of US troop withdrawals; Obama's response was that they discussed a delay in the Strategic Framework Agreement.  My point - at Obama's website the line between SOFA and SFA is blurry, so at a minimum Obama may have confused his Iraqi counterparts, which is a risky business.  And one might well wonder, why is Obama describing a US position anyway?  He ought to be hearing their views, not presenting those of the United States and negotiating on Bush's behalf.  With that background, let's pick up with Taheri's latest:

Here is how NBC reported Obama's position on June 16, after his conversation in the US with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari: "Obama also told Zebari, he said, that Congress should be involved in any negotiations regarding a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. He suggested it may be better to wait until the next administration to negotiate such an agreement."

In other words, Obama wanted a delay on the Status of Forces Agreement, not on the Strategic Framework Agreement - as his rebuttal now claims.

Hmm, this was widely reported - here is the NY Times Caucus blog's account of that same June 16 event:

As Mr. Obama arrived in Michigan for a campaign stop on the economy, he shared details of his morning telephone call with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. On Sunday, Mr. Zebari had a face-to-face meeting with Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Among the issues being discussed with the two presidential candidates is the long-term security accord between Iraq and the United States. While the Bush administration would like to see an agreement reached before the summer’s political conventions, Mr. Obama said today that he opposed such a timetable.

“My concern is that the Bush administration, in a weakened state politically, ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next administration, whether it’s my administration or Senator McCain’s administration,” Mr. Obama said. “The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that’s currently made.”

That version gives a bit of oxygen to the Obama side; where NBC specifically cites he Status of Forces Agreement, the Times refers vaguely to a "long term security accord".  ABC News offers a third choice - Obama mentioned both:

Obama said Zebari told him the Iraqi government is deeply interested in negotiating an effective Status of Forces agreement and a strategic framework agreement with the United States — agreements that would hammer out rules for U.S. troop operations in Iraq.

So far, talks between the U.S. and Iraq have stalled, and the agreements remain controversial inside Iraq and the United States. Obama said he told the Iraqi foreign minister that the U.S. has no interest in establishing permanent bases in Iraq.

"I emphasized to him how encouraged I was by the reductions in violence in Iraq, but also insisted that it is important for us to begin the process of withdrawing U.S. troops, making clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in Iraq, that any negotiations for a Status of Forces agreement or strategic framework agreement should be done in the open and with Congress's authorization, because I believe that it's in the interests of both Iraq and the United States that any such critical negotiations have strong bipartisan support and that they can be sustained through a future administration," Obama told reporters.

Fox News supports the ABC quote mentioning both.  That supports Taheri's reporting - at his website Obama says that

The Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress or allow the next administration to negotiate an agreement that has bipartisan support...

and it appears he hewed to that line with the press.  If he told Zebari the same thing, Zebari might well have come away with the idea that the next Administration ought to negotiate the SOFA.

In any case, subsequent Times reporting from July 3 reinforces Taheri - this is an account of a press conference with the Iraqi Foreign Minister:

Noting that the United States cannot stay in Iraq without legal authorization, Mr. Zebari cited three options: “Either we conclude a status of forces agreement; or we have an interim agreement until a SOFA can be completed; or we go back to the Security Council at the end of the year and ask for another extension.”

...

Mr. Zebari said that on his recent trip to the United States, in addition to President Bush, he had met with the presumptive presidential nominees, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat.

He said that Mr. Obama had asked him: “ ‘Why is the Iraqi government in a rush, in a hurry? This administration has only a few more months in office.’ ”

Mr. Zebari said he told Mr. Obama that even a Democratic administration would be better off having something “concrete in front of them to take a hard look at.”

Mr. Zebari also indicated that even a full agreement would be short. “We are not talking about 50 years, 25 years or 10 years; we are negotiating about one or two years, so this is not going to be another colonization of Iraq,” he said.

Well, the Strategic Framework Agreement would not be a one or two year document; from the context of the discussion, it seems fair to infer that Zebari is discussing the SOFA.

From multiple accounts it seems clear that Barack was urging the Iraqis to go slow on something.  And based on the confusion at Obama's website, I would say that at a minimum Obama may have confused the Iraqi Foreign Minister (and the NBC reporter).  As to why he was offering these points rather than humbly listening, who knows?

And who cares!  Zachary Roth, a TPM Muckraker, presents a defense of Obama with wisps of plausibility masking an empty box:

But there are a couple reasons why the bloviation looks to be uncalled for. The Obama camp yesterday put out a statement of its own asserting that the story "bears as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial," and charging that Taheri has confused a long-term Status of Forces agreement with negotations over a shorter-term drawdown.

Well, now wait - if the Obama defense is that the foreign leaders to whom Obama was speaking got confused by what he was saying, that is not much of a defense.  Just words?  If Taheri is confused it is because Zebari (and an NBC reporter) are also confused.

It's worth looking at that distinction more closely to get a sense of what the Obama camp means here and where Taheri may have erred. In terms of a Status of Forces agreement, Obama has consistently made clear that he believes any such agreement should be delayed until after the election -- so that a President Obama or McCain would not be bound by an agreement negotiated by a weakened Bush administration. The McCain camp did not object when, in June, Obama told reporters at a press conference that he had made exactly this argument to Zebari in a phone call.

Well, the non-objection by the McCain campaign means nothing, obviously - they have enough to do running their own campaign without also being obliged to track every utterance of The One.  But isn't it great that we have a diligent watchdog press ready to record Obama's foreign policy gaffes?

As to the point that Obama has consistently called for a delay in the SOFA, well, I sort of took that from the website, and now Roth is admitting the charge himself (or maybe Roth is confused - it's catching!).

So let's recap his defense - Obama has consistently called for a delay in the SOFA but when Taheri reports that Obama suggested a delay in the SOFA to Zebari, Taheri was confused (as was an NBC reporter).  Hmm, now I'm confused, too - the plan is working!  But I lean towards the simpler explanation - Obama has consistently called for a delay in SOFA, explained that to Zebari, and subsequent reports are accurate.

This Roth defense doesn't cut it - if Obama can't communicate clearly he would do well to keep quiet, however difficult that may be for him.  Given Obama's penchant for "foreign policy by gaffe", as with his revised pledge of unconditional meetings with foreign leaders or his revised promise of an undivided Jerusalem, maybe a bit of silent contemplation before he takes to the world stage would be a great idea.

BACKSTORY:  More on the Obama "denial" at The American Spectator:

STANDING BY THE STORY
The Obama campaign spent more than five hours on Monday attempting to figure out the best refutation of the explosive New York Post report that quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari as saying that Barack Obama during his July visit to Baghdad demanded that Iraq not negotiate with the Bush Administration on the withdrawal of American troops. Instead, he asked that they delay such negotiations until after the presidential handover at the end of January.

The three problems, according to campaign sources: The report was true, there were at least three other people in the room with Obama and Zebari to confirm the conversation, and there was concern that there were enough aggressive reporters based in Baghdad with the sources to confirm the conversation that to deny the comments would create a bigger problem.

PILING ON:  Villainous Company is excellent.

WHERE I DIFFER WITH TAHERI:  It certainly appears that Obama was interfering with negotiations between Bush and a foreign leader, which ought to be a big story (but won't be, for obvious reasons).  However, I dispute his notion that this would have delayed a US troop withdrawal - Zebari stated at different times that some sort of stopgap SOFA would have been put in place by the Dec 31 deadline, and in any case a decision by the US to withdraw some of our troops would not be blocked by the lack of a formal SOFA.

The Mortgage Debacle - Not Enough Blame To Share Some With The Democrats?

Nancy Pelosi somewhat implausibly insisted that Democrats are blameless in the current mortgage debacle:                                       

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked Tuesday whether Democrats bear some of the responsibility regarding the current crisis on Wall Street, had a one-word answer: “No.”

Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped President Bush’s “mismanagement” of the economy and a lack of regulation that led to the current situation.

“I think the American people have had it with this situation where the middle-income people in our country are not protected from the ramifications of the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” Pelosi told MSNBC.

Barack Obama blames Bush for slack oversight:

When the White House is hostile to any kind of oversight, corporations cut corners and consumers pay the price.

However, the record tells the opposite story - Bush has been pushing for stricter regulation of Fanni Mae and Freddie Mac for years and has been blocked by Congressional Democrats.  Let's go back to 2003 with the NY Times:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

Prescient!  So what happened? 

The proposal is the opening act in one of the biggest and most significant lobbying battles of the Congressional session. 

But who could be opposed to more stringent regulation?

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.

Bloomberg News recapped what happened:

In September 2003, Treasury Secretary John Snow urged Congress to get tough with Fannie Mae, the giant mortgage company run by former Seattleite Franklin Raines.

Snow said lawmakers needed to create a strong federal regulator to scrutinize Fannie Mae, which controls almost $1 trillion of home mortgages.

Raines, Fannie Mae's chief executive officer, said he welcomed the idea.

"Fannie Mae looks forward to working with Congress and the administration to see the proposal enacted into law this year," Raines told the House Financial Services Committee.

But behind the scenes, Fannie Mae's Chicago office mobilized to gut Snow's plan.

"Hi everyone -- We are reaching out for your help!!" the office wrote to mortgage bankers in an Oct. 6 e-mail. The note urged recipients to tell congressional leaders to keep their hands off Fannie Mae. Within days, the initiative died.

Bush and his Republican allies in Congress pushed again for tighter regulation in 2005:

Senator Richard K. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who is chairman of the banking committee, said on Wednesday that Mr. Raines's departure would almost certainly give Congress renewed impetus to crack down on Fannie Mae, the nation's largest source of financing for home mortgages.

The dismissal "does not obviate the need for enhanced regulation," he said in a statement, adding that "if anything, this change in management reinforces the need for comprehensive regulatory reform."

Similarly in the House, Representative Richard H. Baker, a Louisiana Republican and member of the financial services committee, said he would reintroduce legislation early next year to create a new regulatory agency for government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and its smaller brother, Freddie Mac.

The legislation, expected to have the strong backing of the Bush administration, would grant the agency the power to bar such companies from creating new lines of business, a move that Mr. Raines has opposed, saying it could raise the cost of borrowing money for new homeowners.

By October 2005 the Senate was sitting on a tougher bill but the House version was watered down:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - Responding to the accounting scandals at  Fannie Mae and  Freddie Mac, the House of Representatives approved legislation on Wednesday overhauling the regulatory oversight of the two huge mortgage financing companies.

The legislation, approved by a lopsided vote of 331 to 90, would create a new regulator for the Federal Home Loan Banks and for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, companies formally known as government-sponsored enterprises. The new agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, would be financed through assessments on the banks and companies. It would have the authority to set capital requirements, reject new business products being offered by the companies and limit their portfolio holdings.

"What we enable with the passage of this bill is the creation of an independent regulator with all the tools necessary to protect the taxpayer," said Representative Richard H. Baker, a Louisiana Republican who is the chief sponsor of the bill. "This is a fair compromise."

But the measure was sharply criticized by the Bush administration and differs significantly from legislation moving through the Senate.

Even as they have weathered financial scandals and management shakeouts, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with their political allies in Congress and the mortgage and construction industries, continue to exert considerable political influence on the legislation.

They soundly defeated one attempt to eliminate Fannie's and Freddie's ability to borrow money from the federal Treasury and a second amendment that would have given their new regulator greater authority. They also saved a provision that would give them the ability to provide financing for larger and more lucrative loans.

By a voice vote, the House also approved an amendment supported by Fannie and Freddie and opposed by the Bush administration that would continue letting the White House select a number of board members. In the past, investors have inferred that such political appointments mean that the federal government will rescue Fannie and Freddie in case of default. It is that belief that has enabled Fannie and Freddie to pay lower interest rates on their bonds than most other companies pay.

Times editors were pleased by the bill, which directed more money towards affordable and low-income housing.  However, opponents of the bill managed to run out the clock in 2006 despite more problems at Fannie and Freddie.  When the housing crisis become unavoidable the Federal Housing Finance Agency was finally created in 2008 as part of a deal in which Democrats got more aid for distressed homeowners and Republicans got a tougher regulator.

I know what you're thinking - why didn't anyone realize that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were contributing to a housing bubble?  Actually they did - this is from a 2005 Heritage paper:

In 2003, Wayne Passmore, a Federal Reserve economist, wrote that “the GSE’s [Government Sponsored Entities] implicit subsidy does not appear to have substantially increased home-ownership or homebuilding” and argued that the GSE’s activity slightly lowered mortgage rates for some homeowners.[10] More recently, an article in the prestigious Journal of Eco­nomic Perspectives contends that “it does not appear that the companies’ activities have appreciably affected the rate of homeownership in the United States” and cites several other studies that support that view.[11]

One reason for the tenuous connection between a general increase in mortgage credit and increased homeownership is that beyond some point, an increase in mortgage credit availability mostly makes itself felt in higher loan-to-value ratios (lower down payments), higher home prices, and/ or a diversion of mortgage credit to non-housing investments. As the early postwar record indicates, existing private credit markets were perfectly capa­ble of driving the homeownership rate into the mid-60 percent range. However, as more credit is forced into the system through the creation and expansion of subsidized GSEs, mortgage interest rates may fall somewhat, but this encourages pri­vate financial institutions that provide housing credit to look elsewhere for investments with better yields. While the slightly lower interest rates encourage and/or allow some moderate-income borrowers on the margin of eligibility to become homeowners, this stimulative effect may be partly or wholly offset by a credit-induced rise in home prices in excess of the growth in personal incomes.

We saw the rise of home prices in excess of income growth, higher loan-to-value ratios and a search for higher yields on the part of restless lenders.

Plenty of blame to go around but Bush may actually deserve a bit less and Pelosi and Congressional Democrats a bit more than they realize.

Why, Indeed?

Chris Bowers blows the whistle to signal the start of lay-up drill with this headline:

Why Should Anyone Respect The Netroots?

After you...

MORE:  The Big Tent captures the spirit with this:

While I strongly disagree with Palinpaloooza for political reasons, I must say that I owe the Netroots a modicum of respect because they are acting in detriment to Barack Obama's political fortunes because they despise Sarah Palin.

There you go - he admires their self-destructive insanity.  OK, a good entry.

Barack Versus Barack On Iraq

Yesterday Amir Taheri of the NY Post made news [and followed up] with the allegation that Barack Obama, during his fact-finding tour to Iraq in July, had interjected himself into negotiations with Iraq:

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

The Obama campaign a baffling "denial" which some keen observers noted did not seem to deny much:

But Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial."

In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

In the face of resistance from Bush, the Democrat has long said that any such agreement must be reviewed by the US Congress as it would tie a future administration's hands on Iraq.

"Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades," Morigi said.

Now, this could actually be meaningful if taken at face value.  The US has been negotiating two related agreements with Iraq: the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) replaced the UN mandate under which US forces would operate until Dec 31 2008, and covered such issues as aspirational time horizons and conditions-based withdrawals; the Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) covered broader issues between the two countries (CNN, LA Times, C Rice).  (Unsurprisingly, Congress would like to have a role in this process.)

So if Obama could convincingly argue that he was asking the Iraqis to go slow on the Strategic Framework Agreement while moving full speed ahead on the Status of Forces Agreement, his rebuttal to the Taheri story would mean something.

But is such a claim plausible?  Well, it sets Obama against Obama - here is what we see at his website, with my emphasis:

The Status-of-Forces-Agreement

Obama believes any Status of Forces Agreement, or any strategic framework agreement, should be negotiated in the context of a broader commitment by the U.S. to begin withdrawing its troops and forswearing permanent bases. Obama also believes that any security accord must be subject to Congressional approval. It is unacceptable that the Iraqi government will present the agreement to the Iraqi parliament for approval—yet the Bush administration will not do the same with the U.S. Congress. The Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress or allow the next administration to negotiate an agreement that has bipartisan support here at home and makes absolutely clear that the U.S. will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

The SOFA and SFA are both distinguished and mingled in this passage.  Is SOFA included in the "any" security accord which must be subject to US approval?  Presumably, since other evidence indicates Congress wants a role in this.  And since US troops levels and withdrawal timelines can be governed by SOFA (see anonymous Iraqi official here), doesn't it follow that Obama was comfortable having the next Administration negotiate it so as to avoid permanent bases?

And if Obama thinks the SOFA should only be negotiated in the context of a broader commitment to withdraw (presumably covered in the Framework) and is asking the Iraqis to go slow on the Framework, doesn't it follow that he is looking for them to slow down on the SOFA?

Beyond that, the press report of Obama's denial also jumbles SOFA and SFA - let's focus on this:

In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

The future of US forces was certainly being discussed in the SOFA as well as the Strategic Framework, so this certainly creates an opportunity for misunderstanding, at a minimum.  Or maybe this is bum reporting.

If Obama simply read to an Iraqi official the words on his website then this reporting from Taheri would be reasonable, so I'll repeat it for emphasis:

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

At a minimum I think Obama has been caught reading his campaign literature to foreign negotiators, which may have led to confusion.

MORE:  Background on other SOFAs.  This is thought-provoking:

SOFAs are often included, along with other types of military agreements, as part
of a comprehensive security arrangement with a particular country. A SOFA itself does not constitute a security arrangement; rather, it establishes the rights and privileges of U.S. personnel present in a country in support of the larger security arrangement.

From that alone one might plausibly argue that the SOFA would normally cover the legal status of US forces and the Framework would cover strategic issues such as military bases, therefore clarifying Obama's blurry website.  However...

There has been considerable interest in possible future security agreements
between the United States and Iraq. The Administration has indicated that it intends to enter into two distinctive agreements. The first is a non-binding security agreement, and the second is a U.S.-Iraq SOFA. The SOFA may be unique from other SOFAs concluded by the United States in that it may contain authorization by the host government — the government of Iraq — for U.S. forces to engage in military operations within Iraq.

Permission to operate within Iraq was going to a part of this SOFA, and eventually aspirational timelines were included as well.  That blurs the line between status and strategy.

UPDATE:  This story is lifting off - a follow from Taheri, and I should have more.

Health Care Plans Compared

Brad DeLong co-authors a comparison of the candidates health care plans in the WSJ and provides the talking points here.

I find this comment to be cryptic:

- Pooling. The Obama plan would give individuals and small firms the option of joining large insurance pools. With large patient pools, a few people incurring high medical costs will not topple the entire system, so insurers would no longer need to waste time, money and resources weeding out the healthy from the sick, and businesses and individuals would no longer have to subject themselves to that costly and stressful process.

My thought - if insurers can only drop "pools" from their coverage and not individuals, then I can see that large pools would discourage a lot of this patient evaluation.

However, large insurers are not going to "topple" based on a few people getting sick.  And if individuals can be disqualified without dropping the entire pool, I see no obvious difference to a large insurer's bottom line between covering 100 small pools and weeding (awful metaphor) each of them for sick individuals and covering 1 large pool formed by the 100 small ones and weeding that large pool for patients likely to produce high coverage costs.  (Sorry, people with medical issues are not "weeds" but the metaphor is clear - they are the people an insurer does not want in an otherwise appealing pool.)

Clearly I need to research this point.

Developing...

The Answer Is Blowing In The Wind

Blowing in the offshore wind, actually - the Mid-Atlantic Bight, to be specific.  The NY Times magazine has a fascinating piece on wind power politics which includes this:

The amount of power Dhanju was describing, Mandelstam knew from Kempton, was but a small fraction of an even larger resource along what’s known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight. This coastal region running from Massachusetts to North Carolina contained up to 330,000 megawatts of average electrical capacity. This was, in other words, an amount of guaranteed, bankable power that was larger, in terms of energy equivalence, than the entire mid-Atlantic coast’s total energy demand — not just for electricity but for heating, for gasoline, for diesel and for natural gas. Indeed the wind off the mid-Atlantic represented a full third of the Department of Energy’s estimate of the total American offshore resource of 900,000 megawatts.

The Mid-Atlantic Bight was particularly attractive to Mandelstam because offshore winds blow strong and steady throughout the day, which means offshore wind is more likely than land-based wind in the Northeastern United States to generate electricity when demand is high. More important, offshore wind farms, Mandelstam explained, can be built close enough to big, power-hungry cities — or “load centers” — to avoid construction of expensive and politically unpopular transmission lines. “That’s a chronic problem facing land-based wind in West Texas or in California,” Mandelstam said, “or in the Dakotas, or Wyoming,” where wind resources are often many hundreds of miles removed from the cities they are meant to serve.

The DOE has a 248 page study on 20% wind power by 2020 and here is a cool wind resource map.  While we work towards 2020, drill here, drill now.

The Ace Comes Up Aces

The Ace of Spades has an instant-classic YouTube attack clip which includes never-before seen footage of Barack Obama touting his experience in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge as a key qualification for national office.  Of course, this was back in 2000 when he was contesting Congressman Rush's seat; today, there is nothing about Barack's failed attempt at school reform at his website.

Doug Ross provides the transcript and a few video captures but his presentation totally loses the impact of the ominous music - watching the clip I kept waiting for Freddy Krueger (or Bill Ayers) to jump out from behind a door.

A few quibbles - the video asserts that Ayers created the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and hired Obama.  The record is clear that Ayers was instrumental in writing the grant proposal that brought the Annenberg money to Chicago, and it is an excellent guess that he was involved in hiring Obama.  However, his specific role in hiring Obama has not yet been documented (we await the results of Stanly Kurtz's research into the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for more insight on that point.  And a personal bete noire - on a slide mentioning the Woods Fund money that went to Barack's allies at mega-churches such as Jeremiah Wright's, Ayers is spelled "Ayres".  Ahhhh!

Steve Diamond provides an excellent synopsis of the development of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and places it in the context of an ongoing tussle between the mayor's office and the Local School Councils.  Here I noted the many prevarications and Obamafuscations that the Obama campaign and Obama himself have put forward to mask the Obama/Ayers connection.

Some open questions:

(1) why the current cover-up of something that was once a source of pride to Obama?

(2) what is the real tie between Obama and Ayers?  The Times wrote just enough to cover themselves but did not push on this story or this angle, despite this provocative quote:

“Let me say the room had no shortage of egos, including my own,” said Stanley O. Ikenberry, a board member who at the time was president of the University of Illinois. “It was unusual: here you had a person trained in the law chairing a board on school reform.” Still, he said, Mr. Obama won his colleagues’ respect.

So why was Obama tapped as chairman?  My guess - during a 1988 push for school reform his Developing Communities Project teamed up with the ABCs Coalition which was coordinated by Bill Ayers.  This is just about the time Obama went back to Harvard but it is likely that the two men met then and resumed their alliance in 1995.

We know the Times will want to probe this after they resolve open issues about Ms. Palin's 4-H dues from 1971.  Jim Geraghty has more on the Times priorities.

Does The Times Read Its Own Paper Without Laughing?

The NY Times pries into the role played by First Dude Todd Palin up in the Great North and comes away with this:

It is not necessarily clear whether Mr. Palin is helping shape his wife’s agenda or simply advocating for it, nor whether he ever put pressure on lawmakers, but his role has not been the customary one of a governor’s spouse in Alaska.

That has made many people in government uncomfortable and often confused over how to react.

The editors may have forgotten but the Times endorsed Hillary Clinton in the NY primary.  As they also may have forgotten, the possible role in a Hillary Administration of the former President turned First Spouse had everyone scratching their heads about the Wild Bill question.

The Times may also have forgotten that Hillary, a non-Government employee, led the disastrous stab at health care reform in 1993.

Well - I am certain that Todd Palin is not the forst influential political spouse.

Que Pasta At Sitemeter?

Sitemeter, the widely-used traffic stats service, took the weekend off in order to "upgrade" their system.  The results were so poorly received that they are rolling back to their old system.

They played a similar game a few weeks back, when some enhancement bollixed any visitors using Internet Explorer.  What a clown show.

HMM:  Ann Althouse notes the hope and change connection:

Some people think the status quo can't really be very good. We need change. Let's try some things. A lot of things. America wants change. Yeah, but what if you do all those things you think might be really cool and it's just a bad, terrible mess? Then what?

Roll it back? 

Let Us Pray For Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd, a fine Catholic lass, seems not to understand the power of prayer.  Or maybe she is just being willful.  In any case, she repeats the "God on our side" misunderstanding which came out of the Gibson-Palin interview even though she seems to understand that Gibson used a truncated and misleading Palin quote.  What she had said was this:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

In his question (which probably relied on a bum AP truncated quote) Gibson was adamant but wrong:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN:  You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON:  Exact words.

But of course they were not her exact words.  So how does MoDo handle all this? Here we go:

She tried to finesse her previous church comments about Iraq, asking worshipers to pray “that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” Earnestly repeating after her tutors, she said she had meant to echo Abraham Lincoln, that in war we must pray that we are on God’s side rather than that he is on ours. But her original comments sounded more W. than Abe — taking your policy and ideology and giving it the hallowed mantle of a mission from God.

I think there is a difference between "finessing" and "clarifying" - Gibson had presented a misleading quote (dare we say, a "Dowdified" quote?), Ms. Dowd seems to be aware of the correct context, yet she is bashing Palin anyway.

Oh, well - Ms. Dowd also joined the WaPo and Bob Herbert in doubting the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq:

The trigger-happy John McCain has indeed found a soul mate. Trigger squared. In Fairbanks on Thursday, at a deployment ceremony for her son who is going to Iraq, Governor Palin followed the lead of McCain and W. in fusing Osama bin Laden’s diabolical work on 9/11 and the mission in Iraq. She told the departing troops, “You’ll be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans.”

Maybe she ought to bash Gen. Petraeus as well - this is from Sept 10:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 9 -- Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the departing commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said that the country remains "the central front" for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups but acknowledged that violence is rising in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- battlegrounds he will soon oversee as the next head of the U.S. military's Central Command.

In an interview Tuesday, hours before President Bush spoke about the need to send more troops to Afghanistan, Petraeus said, "Iraq is still viewed as the central front, if you will, for al-Qaeda and extremism of that flavor."

So Gen. Petraeus thinks Iraq is the central front against Al Qaeda, Gov. Palin thinks that her son's unit will have a chance to battle Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Ms. Dowd thinks Palin is a partisan hack.  well, somebody is.

Looks Like A Sunday Open Thread

I'm pretty sure Sarah Palin has been in the news.

I Know What He Is But What Is She

Bob Herbert skates boldly onto the thin ice with his lead:

While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

I'm in sympathy here - I get that same feeling every time I read a Herbert column.

Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president.

And what does he imagine her view on evolution to be?  The Times reported this:

She has supported the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, alongside evolution.

But that is false.  A bit later:

I feel for Ms. Palin’s son who has been shipped off to the war in Iraq. But at his deployment ceremony, which was on the same day as the Charlie Gibson interview, Sept. 11, she told the audience of soldiers that they would be fighting “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

Was she deliberately falsifying history, or does she still not know that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

My goodness, does Bob Herbert not know that, despite their near-total absence there on 9/11, Al Qaeda is so well represented in Iraq that today they call themselves (in a breach of security) Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia? Does he not realize that US troops still fight them in Iraq?  Even the WaPo, which launched this absurd smear, backpedaled.

Dim indeed.

Was ABC News Kidding?

Newsbusters offers the unedited transcript of Governor Palin's interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News.

Now, do remember - prior to the release of the first interview, this was the ABC tease:

EXCLUSIVE: GOV. SARAH PALIN WARNS WAR MAY BE NECESSARY IF RUSSIA INVADES ANOTHER COUNTRY

From the unedited transcript it is astonishing the length to which ABC went to get to that hawkish headline.  The bold text represents passages that were originally edited out:

GIBSON: Let me ask you about some specific national security situations.

PALIN: Sure.

GIBSON: Let’s start, because we are near Russia, let’s start with Russia and Georgia.

The administration has said we’ve got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?

PALIN: First off, we’re going to continue good relations with Saakashvili there. I was able to speak with him the other day and giving him my commitment, as John McCain’s running mate, that we will be committed to Georgia. And we’ve got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable and we have to keep…

GIBSON: You believe unprovoked.

PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I think it was unfortunate. That manifestation that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals. That’s why we have to keep an eye on Russia.

And, Charlie, you’re in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They’re very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.

GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they’re doing in Georgia?

PALIN: Well, I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

We also see from Palin's following remark, which was also edited out, that she is far from some sort of latter day Cold Warrior which the edited interview made her seem to be:

 

We cannot repeat the Cold War. We are thankful that, under Reagan, we won the Cold War, without a shot fired, also. We’ve learned lessons from that in our relationship with Russia, previously the Soviet Union.

We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

Palin's extended remarks about defending our NATO allies were edited out to make it seem that she was ready to go to war with Russia.

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to — especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

Sure - clipped carefuly she is an insane warmongerer.  She says repeatedly that we must have good relations with Russia and we won't have a war, acknowledges Gibson's point that sending troops is one alternative among many under Article Five of our NATO obligations, cites her preference for economic sanctions and voila! - she is Dr. Strangelove.

Whatever - maybe its just as well that ABC did not clip this to make her appear a Helpless Dove.

 

And yes, Obama favors NATO membership for Georgia as well.

Immigration Men - Leaders And Cheerleaders

A dubious McCain claim that Obama killed immigration reform sparks a ludicrous rebuttal from the McClatchy News Service.  Here we go:

The [McCain] campaign Friday launched a 30-second Spanish-language television ad charging that Democrat Barack Obama and his Senate colleagues torpedoed meaningful changes in immigration laws.             

"The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail," the ad charges. "The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his congressional allies ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."

What that's wrong: Media accounts cited two votes as effectively killing immigration reform last year — and Obama was on the same side as McCain in both.

So what does McClatchy say were the key votes that killed immigration reform?

On June 7, supporters failed by 15 votes to cut off a filibuster. McCain and Obama voted to limit debate. The Politico headline the next day: "Senate immigration compromise collapses."

On June 28, another effort to limit debate failed by 14 votes; CNN called it a "crushing defeat." Obama and McCain again voted to cut off debate, but it was largely Republican senators who led the filibuster.

In its review of the 2007 Congress, Congressional Quarterly cited both votes as crucial to killing the immigration measure.

Oh, for heaven's sake - the cloture votes were a symptom of the bill's failure to attract a bipartisan coalition, not a cause of that failure.

Now in my humble opinion Republican hard-liners were going to kill any bill with anything that looked like an amnesty provision.  It is also true that when a bipartisan effort fails there will be people on both sides blaming the other.  However, there was a bipartisan group of Senators who took political risks and offended their own party by conceding points to the other side; McCain was in this group and Obama was not.  In fact, Obama voted for a successful deal-killing amendment backed by Big Labor at a point when the bill was in its death throes. 

Full Disclosure

Jim Geraghty knows who has been keeping secrets.

McCain Is Not Cool Like Barack

This should work:

Obama mocks McCain as computer illiterate

By  NEDRA PICKLER  –  6 hours ago

NEW YORK (AP) — John McCain is mocked as an out-of-touch, out-of-date computer illiterate in a television commercial out Friday from Barack Obama as the Democrat begins his sharpest barrage yet on McCain's long Washington career.

Every parent who has struggled to set the clock on the VCR or program the TiVo and is baffled by their kids iPods and iTunes will hear this ad and want to get right in line to vote for Obama.  Uh huh.

Suggested McCain response - they didn't have email for the five and a half years I was a prisoner in Vietnam... OK, maybe not.  [OK, maybe - see UPDATE.]

The broad theme of McCain being out of touch is possibly useful to Team Obama.  However - talk about imperfect messengers - the notion that Mr. Arugula and Senator for Life Joe Biden, who was born on a Metroliner and has been a Senator since age eleven exemplify "in touch" is problematic.  Sarh Palin, on the other hand, is EveryMom.

But if Obama thinks he has lost the Hopey-Changey mantle to the real reformers who actually take on their own party and work across the aisle, well, this may be worth a try.

UPDATE:  So much for my attempt at humor - McCain's war injuries make it very difficult for him to type.

"She Has Governed From The Center"

USA Today runs a paean to Sarah Palin:

But in her 21 months as governor, Palin has taken few steps to advance culturally conservative causes. Instead, after she knocked off an incumbent amid an influence-peddling scandal linked to the oil industry, Palin pursued a populist agenda that toughened ethics rules and raised taxes on oil and gas companies.

And she did so while relying on Democratic votes in the Legislature.

"She has governed from the center," says Rebecca Braun, author of Alaska Budget Report, a non-partisan political newsletter. "She has in some small ways supported her religious views — for example, proposing money to continue the office of faith-based and community initiatives — but she has actually been conspicuously absent on social issues. She came in with a big oil and gas agenda, which really required Democratic allies to get through."

Hmm - either USA Today missed the mainstream media memo announcing Pounce on Palin Day or they are hoping to irritate and disappoint her Republican base (as if!), or... this is actually something resembling straight and favorable news.

I'll slide past her tax increase on Big Oil and laud the USA Today emphasis on the "crusading reformer who took on her own party" angle:

Palin's oil populism isn't just one aspect of her record: It's central to her identity as a politician. And it was instrumental in her rise to power.

After serving as mayor of small town Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, she ran for lieutenant governor that fall. She came in second, but her out-of-nowhere performance made an impression across Alaska, says Republican state Sen. Lyda Green.

Gov. Frank Murkowski, a Republican, appointed her to a $118,000-a-year job on an important oil and gas commission. Several months later, she filed an ethics complaint against a fellow commissioner — the state chairman of the Republican Party — alleging he was doing political business on state time. He resigned and later paid a $12,000 fine.

Palin complained that Murkowski hadn't taken the complaint seriously. She quit and began planning to challenge him in the 2006 primary. Among Palin's lines of attacks: He was too close to the oil industry.

The unpopular Murkowski also was being challenged in the GOP primary by state Sen. John Binkley of Fairbanks. Because few initially thought Palin had a chance, Alaska lobbyist Ashley Reed recalls, party activists asked Reed to approach her to see whether she would step aside and run as Binkley's lieutenant governor.

Palin refused. She handily beat Murkowski and Binkley with 51% of the vote; Murkowski finished third with 19%.

That was the primary - check this stat from the Gubernatorial race and exhale:

It was a three-way race against a seasoned former governor, Democrat Tony Knowles, and a former legislator, Andrew Halcro. There were 23 debates, says Bitney, who helped Palin prepare. She wasn't particularly conversant with public policy, he recalls, but she "learned enough about issues to know where not to go."

23 debates?  There is no way she falls in a faint at Biden's feet.

OK, it's tax time:

On Dec. 19, she signed the oil tax increase. Six days before, in the U.S. Senate, an energy bill that would have repealed billions in tax breaks for oil companies failed by one vote. Obama voted yea; McCain skipped the vote.

Financial news service Bloomberg opined that when it comes to extracting more revenue from oil companies, Palin, "is succeeding where Venezuela President Hugo Chávez, a former paratrooper and military coup leader, so far has failed."

Hugo Chavez with lipstick?  Ouch.  But taxes on oil companies are not exactly fertile ground for a Dem attack and I really don't see smitten Republicans dropping Sarah in favor of Big Oil.  You can read my lips on that one.

OK, if America's newspaper is read by middle Americans, this story will be helpful.

LET'S SEE: 

Ross Douthat - this is the Sarah Palin I want to see and which the McCain campaign will probably quash.  OK, probably, but if she has star quality (what am I saying, "if"?) it will shine through.  She gets credit for a McCain victory, he will be tagged with the loss.

And The Captain: he knew about the taxes but gritted his teeth and moved on:

Her efforts to reform government and to ensure that Alaskans got their share of their mineral wealth may not meet with conservative approval — I think it was a mistake — but she clearly had to curb the influence of the oil companies in government.  The Ted Stevens-Veco scandal proved at least that much.

I'm a conservative and I approve!  Conservatism has got to mean more than a reflexive rejection of any and all taxes and reflexive support of any and all businesses.  Where is that Mankiw proposal for a revenue neutral carbon tax?

With God Still On Our Side

Jim Lindgren points out that Charles Gibson utterly flubbed his preparation when he used a truncated quote to mischaracterize Sarah Palin's hope that her church members would pray that out troops in Iraq are on a mission from God.  I had beaten the same point last night.  Gibson's truncation amounted to recharacterizing her position as asserting that God was on our side.

And look how far the media rot has spread.  Here is Mary McNamara of the LA Times Show Tracker column:

Gibson’s probing of a videotaped claim that the Iraq war is a task from God led to a rather convoluted explanation - that it was really a paraphrase of an Abraham Lincoln quote that seemed, frankly, utterly dissimilar.

Geez, Mary, look it up - here is what Ms. Palin said:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

Is that really so dissimilar from the Lincoln  (cited here from author Jim Wallis):

Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said: "Our task should not be to invoke religion and the name of God by claiming God's blessing and endorsement for all our national policies and practices—saying, in effect, that God is on our side. Rather," Lincoln said, "we should pray and worry earnestly whether we are on God's side."

Well.  The confusion has spread to San Francisco.  Joe Garofoli of the San Fran Chronicle Politics blog is at least trying to track down the Lincoln quote.  Carla Marinucci, also of the Chronicle, takes Gibson at his word and claims Palin "deflected" the question:

Palin - who has spoken in her church about U.S. troops being "on a task that is from God," was asked if she believed the United States is fighting a "holy war."

Quoting Abe Lincoln

She deflected the question and said she was merely quoting Abraham Lincoln, adding, "I would never presume to know God's will."

Uh, that was a correction, not a deflection.

The idea that Ms. Palin thinks we are on a mission from God fits so nicely with the libs preferred vision of her as a religious nut-job that getting these reporters to do a bit of research is an uphill struggle.  But I pray they will run clarifications.  And a theological note to Charles Gibson - my praying it is so does not make it so.

 

Desperate To Smear

Anne Kornblut of the WaPo was torn between duty and honor - report the truth, or smear Palin.  Somewhat comically, she chose both [after the first pass came back from rewrite - see Ace or Bill Kristol]:

Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11 In Talk to Troops in Alaska

By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; A01

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 -- Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

OMG!  Everyone knows Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and suggesting he did causes libs to clutch their hearts!  OTOH, Al Qaeda has made Iraq one of their central fronts since the 2003 US invasion.  Here goes Anne:

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

In other words, it is widely agreed that these newly-deployed soldiers will have a chance to take a bite out of the people who killed thousands of Americans, just as the governor said.  Hey, Anne, where's the lead? [Bill Kristol fires away at the initial version, which omits the obvious fact that yes, there are Al Qaeda in Iraq today.]

Anne rallies nicely in covering our imminent war with Russia discussed below:

Palin continued to take a hard line on national security issues when asked whether war with Russia could be necessary if Georgia were to join NATO and Russia crossed its borders again. Palin replied, "Perhaps so."

"I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help," she said.

This completely omits Palin's emphasis of non-military alternatives to war, all permissible under the NATO treaty:

It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

This also lacks context, since Obama also favors expanding NATO to include Georgia.

They lacked commitment on the absurd Saddam-9/11 link but it's Mission Accomplished on the war with Russia.

THIS IS HOW ITS DONE: Anne K should take a lesson from Jim Rutenberg of the Times, who tucked this in paragraphs six and seven:

At a separate event on Thursday, a deployment ceremony for her son Track and thousands of other soldiers heading to Iraq from Fort Wainwright, Alaska, Ms. Palin told them they would be fighting “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

The comments sounded reminiscent of the disputed connections the Bush administration once made, but no longer does, between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. But a senior McCain campaign aide said Ms. Palin did not believe Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks.

Well, I hope the campaign aide also pointed out that Al Qaeda is currently in Iraq (in diminishing numbers, thanks to US troops).

And since there is no real story there, other than in a desperate lib attack fantasy, the Times buried the war with Russia near the end:

Ms. Palin was particularly forceful in discussing Russia, saying its incursion into Georgia earlier this summer was “unprovoked,” a description that some foreign policy analysts have argued with. But, pronouncing the name of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, with perfect pitch, she avoided a question that has bedeviled experts on Eastern European affairs: what the United States can or should do to “restore Georgian sovereignty” over its separatist regions.

“We’ve got to keep an eye on Russia,” she said, then repeated the phrase.

She expressed full support for the induction of Georgia and Ukraine into the NATO alliance, which has prompted strong Russian protest. The position is shared by Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama and Mr. Obama’s running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Ms. Palin acknowledged that such membership could require the United States to join militarily in defense of Georgia if Russia was to move against it again.

"Acknowledged" is good, since it was Gibson doing the warmongering.

LET'S GO TO THE VIDEOTAPE:  Palin-Gibson interview here.

Now It Is Defeat That Has A Thousand Fathers

Gen. Petraeus said about Iraq roughly what George Bush has said but lefties are buzzing with glee - let me lead with Matt Yglesias:

General Petraeus recognizes what all sensible people can see, but John McCain and George W. Bush can’t, that there will be no victory in Iraq no matter what we do.

Combine this with Nouri al-Maliki’s endorsement of progressive proposals for a timeline for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and in a sane universe we’d all be recognizing about know that the conservative emperor has no clothes on Iraq.

Geez, whatever did Petraeus say?  Nothing that surprising, actually:

No victory in Iraq, says Petraeus

The outgoing commander of US troops in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, has said that he will never declare victory there.

In a BBC interview, Gen Petraeus said that recent security gains were "not irreversible" and that the US still faced a "long struggle".

When asked if US troops could withdraw from Iraqi cities by the middle of next year, he said that would be "doable".

...In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight programme, Gen Petraeus said that when he took charge in Iraq "the violence was horrific and the fabric of society was being torn apart".

Leaving his post, he said there were "many storm clouds on the horizon which could develop into real problems".

Overall he summed up the situation as "still hard but hopeful", saying that progress in Iraq was "a bit more durable" but that the situation there remained fragile.

He said he did not know that he would ever use the word "victory": "This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not war with a simple slogan."

That is hardly declaring defeat or saying that we can't win in the sense of creating a stable, democratic Iraq capable of securing itself.  Here is Bush from Jan 2007 announcing the surge:

Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.  But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world -- a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people.  A democratic Iraq will not be perfect.  But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them -- and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and our grandchildren.

Michael Yon declared "victory in Iraq over the summer:

"A fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won."

And from the McCain website:

I do not want to keep our troops in Iraq a minute longer than necessary to secure our interests there. Our goal is an Iraq that can stand on its own as a democratic ally and a responsible force for peace in its neighborhood. Our goal is an Iraq that no longer needs American troops. And I believe we can achieve that goal, perhaps sooner than many imagine.

McCain is not insisting that we will only have achieved victory in Iraq if every neighborhood is as pleasant as Georgetown on a September afternoon.  And Petraeus is not saying that a stable, democratic Iraq that can defend itself is not achievable.

I can't imagine Matt's resolute commitment to defeat is a vote-getter.

Know Your (Warmongering, Insane) Candidate

Glenn sends us to Mark Hemingway at The Corner, who provides this bit of hysterical hysteria from Josh Marshall, reacting feverishly to the Palin-Gibson interview:

Wow, going to war with Russia might be necessary if Russia invades another one of the former states of the Soviet Union. So says Sarah Palin.

...[This] sort of shows the consequences of taking a freshman governor with no experience in foreign policy and giving her a ten day crash course with Randy Scheunemann and the rest of John McCain's neocon brain trust that got booted from the Bush inner circle for being too nutty.

Late Update: Do we all understand now why former Sen. Chafee (R-RI) called her a "cocky whacko" earlier this week?

I'll hold off on the punchline while I present this follow-up post in which Dr. Marshall expands and expounds on his theme:

Sarah Palin's "perhaps" in response to the question of whether we might have to go to war with Russia over Georgia is getting a lot of attention. The truth, though, is that Palin was doing little more that drawing out the logical inference of McCain & Co.'s unhinged policy vis a vis Russia -- not a huge surprise if you've just learned the policy in the last week.

Hmm, speaking of policies learned in the past week - in March of this year Obama supported NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine.  And did he back down during the scuffling in Georgia this August?  He did not:

Going forward, the United States and Europe must support the people of Georgia. Beyond immediate humanitarian assistance, we must provide economic assistance, and help rebuild what has been destroyed. I have consistently called for deepening relations between Georgia and transatlantic institutions, including a Membership Action Plan for NATO, and we must continue to press for that deeper relationship.

Too funny.  I think we can count on Dr. M to simply move on (what, you expect a correction or clarification? [Well, you get one, and its a whopper.]) but the real fun will be in seeing how many other Attack Drones follow his lead. 

So let's look in on Andrew:

All I have learned thus far is that a McCain administration would be prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia...

Actually, folks who read the transcript learned that Charles Gibson is prepared to go to war with Russia - he misunderstands our NATO Article Five mutual defense obligation, which includes but is not limited to using force to defend a NATO ally.

Time dos not permit me to wallow in Marshall's embarrassment or to see how many sheep have followed him out to pasture.  But do enjoy the barrel-fishing.

PROPS WHERE DUE:  Kevin Drum:

This is not a gaffe of any kind.  Nor is it something that Palin blurted out due to inexperience.  John McCain's official position on NATO expansion is that we should include Georgia and Ukraine posthaste. This means that if either of those countries gets into a border skirmish — or worse — with Russia, the United States may be obligated to go to war on their behalf.

However, unless I'm mistaken, this is also Barack Obama's official position. So I wouldn't expect a whole lot of pushback on this from his camp.

THE LAUGHS KEEP COMING: Dr. Marshall backpedals, or at least staggers backwards in an attempted clarification:

Late Update:  A further point.  It's true that Obama and Biden both favor Georgia's accession into NATO -- a very bad policy position, as I've argued before. However, I do not think that their positions and McCain's positions are equal. The best analogy I can point to is the nominal agreement on Iraq policy (embodied in the Iraq Liberation Act) between the Clinton administration and the most radical neocons in the late 1990s. Nominally, they shared a policy. In practice, however, it was one group that was completely nuts and gung-ho in favor of a reckless idea and another that was sort of dabbling in and passively favoring the same policy. Not that that is saying much in the latter's favor. But there's a big difference.

Sure, there was a big difference on Iraq - Clinton was posturing and the neocons really believed the military option made sense.  But only the most delusional partisan could take Palin's answer, where she said "Perhaps" to Gibson's misstatement of our treaty obligation and then cited the intermediate steps we could take (such as sanctions) and turn that into advocacy of war with Russia.  Let me provide a snippet of her response as a reminder:

It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

But we are left wondering - Palin advocated economic sanctions to support our NATO treaty obligations in the hypothetical scenario described.  What does Dr. M imagine that Obama would suggest?  Would Obama completely ignore the treaty?  Declare war?  Or do something in between?

Maybe his 300 foreign policy advisers could put on their thinking caps on this one.  I don't know what they'll advise but I know it will be muscular.

I Slowly Come Up To Speed

As I gear up for this weekend's cocktail party circuit I am busy prepping to rebut a big talking point from a certain slice of last weeks crowd, to wit - Sarah Palin wants creationism to be taught in schools.

Now, I could have gone to Charlie's helpful list debunking the Sarah Palin rumors and misinformation, where this topic appears at #186.

But since Google is my friend I quickly found this contemporaneous account of the debate that started it all; let's go to the Anchorage Daily News from Oct 27, 2006:

The volatile issue of teaching creation science in public schools popped up in the Alaska governor's race this week when Republican Sarah Palin said she thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the state's public classrooms.

Palin was answering a question from the moderator near the conclusion of Wednesday night's televised debate on KAKM Channel 7 when she said, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

...

In an interview Thursday, Palin said she meant only to say that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms:

"I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

She added that, if elected, she would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state's required curriculum.

Members of the state school board, which sets minimum requirements, are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature.

"I won't have religion as a litmus test, or anybody's personal opinion on evolution or creationism," Palin said.

Seems innocuous enough, although there is plenty there for an Attack Dem.

With God On Our Side

Sign me up for the Sarah Palin fan club.  Unlike a Dem poser at a candidates debate in 2004, our next Vice President knows her Lincoln and knows who is on whose side in wartime.  Here she is with Charles Gibson:

Sarah Palin on God:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN:  You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON:  Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.

That's what that comment was all about, Charlie.

For non-link followers, the poser at the Dem debate was John Kerry; John Edwards actually nailed the Lincoln connection.  So there you go - on this topic anyway, Sarah Palin is at least as prepared for the Vice-Presidency as John Edwards.

I'll post the exchange and my snideries after the break.  [The Gateway Pundit has the accurate Palin quote which Gibson misrepresented:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

For folks with an actual nose for news, the question about expanding NATO to include Georgia and the Ukraine is interesting.  Presumably Ms. Palin is simply defending McCain's approach here (which is to expand NATO to include both), and Gibson asks the obvious follow-up:

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

Her "perhaps" was accurate and Gibson was wrong about the US incurring an obligation to go to war - that's odd, since Gibson had prepared the question.  I am not an authority on our NATO treaty obligations, but Article Five looks like the relevant paragraph:

Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.            

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

OK, that includes but does not require an armed response - I'll score one for Palin's briefers and smite the ABC News prep team.  Geez, maybe Palin is ready to be Vice President and maybe she's not, but is ABC qualified to interview Vice Presidents?

Finding The Lost Years

The WSJ runs a piece on the gaping hole in the Obama life story - whatever did he do at Columbia?

The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of them. Why not release his Columbia transcript? Why has his senior essay gone missing?

I have read that Obama's photo is not in his 1983 graduating yearbook.  However, if an enterprising JOM reader had access to a Columbia yearbook from 1982 or 1983, it would be worth paging through to see whether Obama is listed in any interesting clubs or activities.

SIDEBAR:  Back in April Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy looked at the links between Ibama and Ayers that were known at the time and made this cryptic comment about Ayers, Obama, and the Woods Fund of Chicago:

The Woods Fund was created to focus on children by Kelm and staff director Jean Rudd (who probably coincidentally has the same last name as former Weather Underground fugitive Mark Rudd).

Hmm - since Mark Rudd went to Columbia and was close to Bill Ayers from their Weather days, that would be an interesting connection.  However, per Mark Rudd's auto-biography, he never married a Jean nor lived in Chicago.  However, that does not rule out the possibility that Mark and Jean are cousins or in-laws of some type (FWIW, Mark Rudd was born in 1947 and has a brother who is eight years older and a retired attorney).

Jean Rudd gets a mention in this TNR piece.

The Wolves Are (Back) At The Door

The wolves are back!  Four years ago they were terrorists out to destroy America (and we all knew John Kerry couldn't protect us from them).  Now they are Democratic Party operatives (practically the same thing!) out to destroy America's Super Mom, Sarah Palin.  Hmm - why doesn't she get in a small plane and gun them down like, well, dogs?

I'm kinda looking forward to 2012.  Maybe the wolves could go unite the nation by going after the agent for Britney Spears.

Oh, Sure - They SAY It Was A Success

I have my doubts:

Success! The world hasn't ended

Published: 10 Sep 2008

WE are all still here!

The world's most powerful physics experiment is well and truly under way.

Scientists cheered as a beam of proton particles completed their first circuit of the 27km long Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

At 8.30am today, the machine which some fear could create a giant black hole capable of swallowing the planet was switched on.

Dr Lyndon Evans, known as Lyn, is leader of the Large Hadron Collider project at the Geneva-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

The white-haired Welshman showed few signs of stress, however, even finding time for a small joke when the machine took a second longer than expected to demonstrate it was operating correctly.

“Five, four, three, two, one, zero,” he counted down, then smiled as he added: “Nothing.”

But then, as if on cue, a blip appeared on a computer monitor to signal that the long years of planning, construction and minute calibration had paid off.

Oh, I know it appears to the casual observer that we all survived.  But my belief is that when the machine was activated it created a black hole which rent the fabric of space-time, thereby creating a googol of alternate universes, most of which were promptly destroyed by ever-expanding black holes.

And now some reporter is all atwitter because we are one of the few surviving parallel universes.  Big deal.  Back in the original universe that preceded this space-time calamity, I knew where I had left my car keys, so no, it is not all good.

The Captain Is A Must-Read

Captain Ed has a must-read on public education, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin.

FULL BLOGGER DISCLOSURE:  I read the same piece as the Captain and did nothing with it.  Color me green.  Of course, that's why he's the Captain...

IN ONE SHORT (FOR ME) PHRASE (WITH A FOLLOW):  Everything Barack Obama knows about public education he learned by working with an unrepentant terrorist and sending his kids to private school; Sarah Palin started in politics as a PTA mom.  Hmm, maybe the community organizer could have tried organizing his own kids public school.  Nahhh...

I Guess He's Not The Rose Of Spanish Harlem

Charles Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who is happy raising taxes on the rest of us, explained why he couldn't quite figure out his own taxes:

WASHINGTON — Representative Charles B. Rangel said on Wednesday that “cultural and language barriers” had hindered him from understanding the finances of his Dominican Republic beach house, and vowed to repay several thousand dollars in federal taxes he owes after failing to report $75,000 in rental income from the villa.

At a Capitol Hill news conference, during which he was by turns remorseful and combative, the congressman said that he had not been aware of the income and unpaid taxes in part because he had trouble getting detailed financial statements from the resort’s managers in the Dominican Republic.

“Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they’d start speaking Spanish,” Mr. Rangel said.

Not even the Times could keep a straight face:

The explanation was greeted with skepticism and surprise by some people in his district, where Spanish is the primary language in nearly half the households and even Mr. Rangel’s own Congressional Web site can be instantly translated to Spanish with just two clicks of a computer mouse.

Anyway, this is all just a personal matter having nothing to do with his day job:

The congressman brushed aside calls that he step down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and accused Republicans who have demanded that he do so of trying to exploit his financial missteps.

“I really don’t believe making mistakes means you have to give up your career,” said Mr. Rangel, a Democrat from Harlem.

Mistakes were made.

On A Glide Path

Per The Hill, Dems are nervous about the state of the Obama campaign, and well they might be.  Obama essentially peaked in February of 2008 - the Wright story broke in March, as did the bitter-clingers, and Hillary won most of the remaining primaries (IIRC).  Obama could have caught an updraft with his excellent Iraq/Afghanistan/European adventure but the press countered with unexpectedly tough questions about the efficacy of the surge while McCain countered with the empty celebrity attack.  And which bright light thought that hundreds of thousands of Germans screaming for Barack would really motivate Americans?  Aren't those the people that start wars we have to finish?

Well, if he can coast from a peak in February to victory in November, good for him.  His "message" of hope and change is in taters - as Brooks and Broder noted, he has morphed from promising to change the ways of Washington to promising to substitute a twenty-year old Dem agenda for a twenty-year old Rep agenda.  That may rally his base but at this point in the election cycle he ought to be reaching beyond his base, not back towards it.

McCain has the Big Mo.  Today.

No Prisoners At Beldar's Blog

Sarah Palin has a staunch defender and true - Newsweek is the target du jour.

The Lion, The Mouth, And Marc Ambinder

The courageous and always interesting Marc Ambinder muses about the nature of truth and asks this:

Perhaps it's the Republicans who lie more and the media fails to note this; perhaps it's the Democrats who lie more and the media fails to note this. (Has anyone figured out how to figure out whether Democrats lie more often or more consequentially than Republicans? Republicans more often or more consequentially than Democrats?)

OMG.  I don't want to be near his inbox when the email stack up claiming "Bush lied, thousands (of US troops) died.  One might argue that, lately anyway, Dem lies have lacked consequence becuase they have lacked power.  Reaching back, one might argue that Dem advocacy for the welfare state was in many ways a social disaster and may have been based on "lies", but (despite the importance and success of welfare reform) it is hardly a point on which there is general consensus.

Well, good luck with this one, Marc - I won't be emailing.

The Times Discovers The Chicago Annenberg Challenge

[Steve Diamond is the dean of this story - do see his excellent post.]

Barack Obama wants to talk about education reform and has realized he can't duck his history with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.  Fortunately the Times is here to help:

CHICAGO — Senator Barack Obama learned how hard it can be to solve America’s public education problems when he headed a philanthropic drive here a decade ago that spent $150 million on Chicago’s troubled schools and barely made a dent.

Ahh, the old "I learned from my mistakes and occasional successes" spin I had suggested a few weeks back.  Let's watch the Times hone in on the Bill Ayers connection - regular readers will recall that Bill Ayers co-wrote the grant proposal that led to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, then worked for years with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge through a group he formed and led called the Chicago School Reform Collaborative.  There is an excellent chance that Obama and Ayers first partnered up on public school reform back in 1988, during an earlier city-wide push for hope and change in the Chicago schools.

The Times takes this up beginning at paragraph seventeen:

Mr. Obama immersed himself in education issues after his return to Chicago, where he began lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School and joined the boards of two education foundations.

Chicago received $49 million from a $500 million endowment by Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher, for school reform efforts nationwide, and the city added $98 million in matching funds for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a philanthropic campaign that financed enrichment projects at a third of the city’s 600 schools.

Mr. Obama was nominated to the Challenge board and was elected chairman in 1995, said Ken Rolling, executive director of the group, which operated through 2001. Mr. Obama continued to teach law during his five-year unpaid tenure as board chairman, and he was twice elected to the Illinois Senate.

Several board members, including two university presidents, far outranked Mr. Obama in education experience.

“Let me say the room had no shortage of egos, including my own,” said Stanley O. Ikenberry, a board member who at the time was president of the University of Illinois. “It was unusual: here you had a person trained in the law chairing a board on school reform.” Still, he said, Mr. Obama won his colleagues’ respect.

Obama's role was unusual?  Dare someone ask him whether Ayers lobbied for him based on a joint effort in 1988?

Supporters of Mr. McCain have been trying to taint Mr. Obama by highlighting his ties to William Ayers, a member of the violent Weather Underground in the 1960s, by pointing out that they worked on the Challenge project together. Mr. Ayers was indicted on conspiracy charges that were later thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged that he is a friend of Mr. Ayers but has sought to minimize their interactions.

Note:  "Minimize their interactions" is awfully polite - "lie by omission" would be more accurate but improbable given the source.

Records show that Mr. Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, helped write the Challenge proposal. The records also show that he and Mr. Obama worked on the Challenge project together and that they attended some of the same meetings.

The Challenge’s overall approach — supporting many diverse education projects rather than a coordinated school improvement strategy — had been established before Mr. Obama was named board chairman, and the board came under immediate pressure to approve grant proposals quickly.

No Maoist left behind - one of the first grants went to Michael Klonsky, a Maoist and former SDS colleague of Bill Ayers.

“If you throw $10 on the table in Chicago, people are going to fight over it, and we had $50 million,” Mr. Rolling recalled.

Proposals poured in and the board eventually financed projects involving 210 schools. Some were imaginative: one, for example, connected schools with museums in the Chicago area so that students learned science from a paleontologist at the local dinosaur exhibit. But many were not.

“The project proposals by and large were awful,” one board member told an evaluation team in 1998.

Relations with school authorities were difficult. Just as the Challenge got under way, the Illinois Legislature gave Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the school district, and he began an improvement campaign based on high-stakes testing and other measures. Annenberg’s let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach often seemed at cross-purposes with that strategy.

Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said the reading and math scores of the lowest-achieving students improved in the years when the Challenge was investing in the Chicago schools.

But a final report on the Challenge concluded that the huge effort had brought little change.

“The Challenge’s ‘bottom line’ was improving student achievement,” the report said. “Among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes.”

But the experience gave Mr. Obama an appreciation for the multiple problems facing urban schools, Mr. Rolling said. The city has been a pioneer ever since in exploring ways to recruit, train and support teachers.

Left unmentioned - the Ken Rolling quoted here is the same Ken Rolling who tried to get the Chicago Annenberg Challenge archives locked down.

And what about an examination of Bill Ayers' hard-left educational philosophy?  I love his speech to Hugo Chavez while down Venezuela way in which he explained that "La educacion es revolucion!".  Get 'em young.

The Times won't attempt to follow the trail back to 1988 or ask the Obama campaign to explain their misrememberings and deceptions, but perhaps real reporters will.

MISREMEMBERING:  I love this candid disclosure from Team Obama last February to Ben Smith of The Politico:

I didn't get to ask Obama about his relationship with Bill Ayers today, but did ask his chief strategist (and reigning expert on Chicago's political tribes), David Axelrod, about the two men.

"Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school," he said. "They're certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together."

Their kids go to the same school!  By April The Politico knew more:

Information about the pair's connection has been dribbling out over the past few months. Obama first met Ayers in 1995, during Obama's first state Senate campaign, and the two met with a small group of local liberal activists at Ayers' house. Exact details of the meeting are unkown because Obama and Ayers have declined to discuss it.

Bzzzt!  Wrong again!  That fundraiser was in the second half of 1995, well after Obama had taken his seat as board chair.

Why the cover-up Team Obama?  Why the enabling by the Times? Why the absurd rhetorical questions with such easy answers?

UPDATE:  Steve Diamond has an excellent post.  I picked up the probable Obama/Ayers 1988 connection from him, and we both flogged it today.  I also got Klonsky from him, but he let that slide - score one for the MinuteMan (OK, I was kitchen-sinking it, but still...).  His background on Chicago school politics is helpful but beyond my pay grade.

BACKGROUND:  Lots of research links in this old post, including to this panning of Obama's school reform efforts by Alexander Russo, writing in Slate.  I'll snip this:

The story of Obama's involvement suggests that on similarly contentious fronts involving national education policy, like the No Child Left Behind Act, he might respond the same way—holding back when powerful interest groups collide, only to support the status quo of local control in the end. The candidate's Chicago record on education also raises questions about his much-vaunted ability to bring different sides together to find lasting solutions.

He did not bring people together nor did he bring real change. 

PILING ON:  WLS from Patterico's Place notes the story, as does Jeff G of Protein Wisdom.  Jeff's Big Finish:

Attempts to tether Governor Sarah Palin to Pat Buchanan (along with other supposed anti-semites) and a secessionist party have both proven unremarkable — largely because they were so easily debunked.  Attempts to tether her to cuts in funding for special needs children, or to economic mistreatment of rape victims, have, too, proven feeble — though I suspect that the goal here is to tarnish her in the aggregate by throwing anything and everything against the igloo wall and see what blubber happens to stick.

And yet here we are, months away from a presidential election, and the mainstream press has only tangentially and defensively explored the connections between Barack Obama and an unrepentant (and largely unreconstructed) domestic terrorist — even though Obama has lied both about the extent and  duration of that relationship.

And that strikes me not only as proof of a partisan bias, but also as a failure of due dilligence — and even on the more extreme end, a dereliction of its duty.

Well, yes - they don't even know if there is a story there before deciding there is no story there.

See Ya In The Funny Papers

Looks like Joe Biden is helping out with Obama's speeches.  Plagiarism we can believe in!

MORE:  Looks like we shouldn't blame Joe:

Asked about the borrowing, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Obama used Toles's lines unwittingly, after being alerted to them by a friend who didn't mention the source.

"This came to Senator Obama from a friend who didn't indicate where he had gotten it from, but the questions it raises certainly continue to ring true," Psaki said in an email. "He did not know it was from a cartoon and now that he does he will certainly credit the cartoonist."

In fact, the campaign says, Obama used the line again while campaiging today in Michigan, this time crediting the "cartoon in The Washington Post."

Back In Iraq

The Times has a couple of interesting stories on Iraq.

The first, Should We Stay Or Should We Go Now, presented an interesting mix of thoughts of the man (or woman) in the Iraqi street to Dead Tree readers.  On-line I can only find the summary article, although there seems to be more live quotes at the Times Baghdad Blog, including "They Won't Go" and "Go".  My favorite from the Dead Tree was by Times employee Tareq Maher; his gist is here at their blog:

BAGHDAD — As an Iraqi journalist, each day I meet dozens of officials, some government ministers, some members of parliament, some advisers to senior ministers.

All of them declare in public that they are against the Americans remaining in Iraq. They demand Iraqi liberation. They always raise the same slogan: “Independence for Iraq.” They are against the long-term security agreement, which sets the terms for the continuing presence of American soldiers in Iraq, that has been made public.

But in private sessions or meetings they are always telling me and other reporters that the Americans must stay, and that if they leave right now it would be a big mistake and misadventure.

The reasons for this political hypocrisy are like a disease. Most of the Iraqi politicians suffer from it. Their aim is to maintain their reputation in the public eye.

We never see that sort of posturing in this country.

The second story describes US efforts to reassure Sunnis participants in the Awakening councils around Baghdad that the approaching October 1 transition to the Iraqi government will be smooth and fair:

BAGHDAD — Gathered in the domed hall of a palace built by Saddam Hussein, Awakening Council leaders in the Adhamiya neighborhood met with Iraqi and American military officers on Monday to learn what the future holds for them once the Sunni-dominated citizen patrols begin reporting to the Iraqi government on Oct. 1.

...

The meeting, the Iraqi and American officers said, was called in part to quash rumors that there would be mass arrests of Awakening members and that American forces would no longer be involved with the patrols.

...

Many American military officers say the councils have done as much to reduce violence in Iraq as the surge in American troops has, and maybe more. After the transfer is complete, it is unclear how much leverage the Americans will have with the Iraqi government in how it deals with the councils.

...

Tensions in Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold, have been increasing as news of the pending transfer spreads. Some Awakening leaders have expressed fears that the Iraqi government may dissolve the councils and that their members will not be allowed to join the Iraqi security forces.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has said that about 20 percent of the roughly 99,000 Awakening members on the American payroll would be incorporated into the Iraqi Army, the national police and other security forces.

This is going to be tricky.

Debate Prep

Dahlia Lithwick has advice for Joe Biden in what is surely the most anticipated Vice-Presidential debate in forever:

There is no easy way to tell you this, Joe Biden, but the surest way for Joe Biden to lose a debate against Sarah Palin is by being Joe Biden. If you are windy, pompous, unctuous, or pushy, you will come across as patronizing and condescending—the guy who puts the "boy" into "old boys' network." If you flirt and smirk and flatter (Did you truly tell an Ohio crowd you thought Palin was "good-looking"? Did you really introduce us to your wife, Jill, by leering that she is "drop-dead gorgeous"?), you're going to sound like the creepy guy in the trench coat at the back of the porn theater. If you can manage to be your warm, amiable self, even if you're going batshit on the inside, you will do fine.

Compounding Biden's problem is that he is surrounded by people who loathe Sarah Palin, all of whom will be subtly encouraging him to mock and ridicule her.  I foresee a Biden debacle.