Texas Acts Against Polygamy

Is the primary purpose of this costly move to protect the children, or to make polygamists think twice about continuing their expansion into Texas?

To me it looks a lot like something that was planned long in advance, while politicians waited for an appropriate triggering event to take their pre-planned action.

Elitist Politicians

You think Obama's an elitist? Get a load of this guy:

For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.

May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?

It's kind of hard to imagine him pretending to like pork rinds, or making fun of a political candidate for eschewing Cheez Whiz (yes, that was Tucker Carlson calling John Kerry "elitist") or for eating fried chicken with a knife and fork, isn't it....

Housing Handouts

Pretty much everybody and his brother has published an editorial describing one stimulus or another for the housing market. A minority prefer to leave things alone. George Will, on the other hand, takes a middle road, apparently clinging to his belief that a handout is only a handout when it is made to an individual and not a corporation.

Oh? The idea that protracted golden years of idleness are a universal right is a delusion of recent vintage. Deranged by the entitlement mentality fostered by a metastasizing welfare state, Americans now have such low pain thresholds that suffering is defined as a slight delay in beginning a subsidized retirement often lasting one-third of the retiree's adult lifetime.

You know, for a guy who looks like he has never engaged in physical labor in his entire lifetime, Will should give it a try. He's only 67 years old - let's see how well he does when he's pushing something heavier than a pen, for something closer to minimum wage than his sinecures at The Washington Post and Newsweek.

Subprime mortgages are a small minority of mortgages, and only a minority of subprime borrowers are not making their payments. Casting this minority of a minority as victims of "predatory" lending fits the liberal narrative that most Americans are victims of this or that sinister elite or impersonal force and are not competent to cope with life's complexities without government supervision.

This represents Will at his best - half right. I agree with him that most of the people who are in trouble made poor individual choices. But that does not mean that there were no predatory practices by lenders, and it certainly doesn't justify Will's willful blindness toward the massive federal handouts being given to lenders who were much better positioned than any individual to recognize the folly of these loans - yet made them time, and time, and time again. As is his wont, Will also has to wrap his point in a silly smear against "liberals". (But perhaps he's now among those who think of John McCain and G.W. Bush as liberals, so who even knows what that means at this point.)

But I agree with this point, despite its condescension:

The 96 percent of mortgage borrowers who are fulfilling their commitments, often by scrimping, may be grumpy bystanders if many of the other 4 percent - those who found the phrase "variable rate" impenetrably mysterious - are eligible for ameliorations of their obligations.

The proposed "remedies" to the "foreclosure crisis" seem to be taking the form of handouts - either bailing out borrowers who are in over their heads, or subsidizing new home buyers to try to soak up some of the "excess inventory" in the housing market. Picking up where Will left off, David Ignatius presents a "slippery slope" (i.e., logically fallacious) argument as to where this all leads us.

We're now in a comparable cycle of bestowing special economic favors on members of the national family who have been hurt by the credit market crisis. "It's not fair," argue the housing interests and consumer advocacy groups. "Bear Stearns got a financial bailout, so why shouldn't we?" And they're right, by the simplest schoolyard definition of fairness.

So the line grows of people demanding breaks on financial obligations they can't afford. Last week, the Bush administration agreed to rescue 100,000 homeowners who are at risk of foreclosure on their mortgages. Congressional Democrats promptly announced that this wasn't fair enough and that they intended to expand the bailout to as many as 2 million distressed borrowers.

But why stop there? What about onerous commercial mortgages? And credit card debt? And student loans? Why should anyone have to pay back anything? It's not fair

Well, actually, we do have a mechanism where businesses and individuals can escape debts. It's enshrined in the body of the Constitution. It's called... bankruptcy. With some relatively modest tweaking of bankruptcy law, borrowers facing foreclosure can get individualized relief through the bankruptcy courts. The lenders who chose to give them too much money will take a loss, sure, but often less than the cost of a foreclosure. And there is no need for federal handouts to the borrowers.

As for those handouts, some of them inspire the "Say what?" response....

The only solution is for the federal government to offer a temporary 5 percent tax rebate — up to $25,000 — for first-time home buyers.

Here's where the point made by Ignatius and Will kicks in - that proposal is manifestly unfair to responsible borrowers, including first-time home buyers who may have lost part or all of their equity after buying houses they can afford. It also assumes that the problem exists at the bottom of the market. While I don't dispute that there seem to be many areas where foreclosures are affecting large numbers of entry level homes, there are also many areas where even with a subsidy the homes affected are out of the reach of first-time buyers.

I guess the idea is that making homeowners out of a population that has insufficient savings or interest in presently becoming homeowners will reinflate the bubble, such that other owners "get their equity back". But if that works, does it do more than postpone the present market correction? And don't we risk creating a new population of home buyers who don't have the financial stability or discipline to consistently pay their mortgages, setting ourselves up for "foreclosure crisis II"? There's a reason, after all, that lenders traditionally chose not to give mortgages to first-time borrowers who hadn't saved up a down payment, even if somebody else was willing to give them the money. Also, while the subsidy may inspire renters to buy homes, what happens to the vacant rental properties? Higher vacancies usually lead to lower rent, and rental rates typically correlate to housing values.

Meanwhile it does appear that there are individuals and investors who are bargain hunting, raising the question of whether such a subsidy at the bottom end of the market is even necessary.

Attacking Obama On Campaign Financing?

For the second time, the Washington Post has an unsigned editorial attacking Barack Obama for declining to take full federal funding for the general election. There's plenty of room for criticism, given Obama's history of statements in favor of campaign finance reform and public funding. But talk about a free pass for John McCain....

We praised Mr. Obama last year when he asked the Federal Election Commission to let him raise private money for the general election but later give the money back and decide to participate in the public financing system if he were able to persuade the Republican nominee to do the same. In that circumstance, Mr. Obama's spokesman vowed, he would "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." Well, the Republican nominee turns out to be John McCain, who agreed way back when to Mr. Obama's challenge. Where's Mr. Obama's aggressive pursuit now?

Um... that would be the same John "McCain-Feingold" McCain who accepted federal money for his faltering primary campaign, used it to secure a loan for his campaign, and then flip-flopped the moment he discovered that his pledge would limit his spending?

It's also flat-out false that McCain has agreed to use only federal funding for his presidential campaign. Or, more accurately, he did make that pledge but then repudidiated it, adding a new condition that Obama has to commit to public funding first.

“It was very clear to me that Senator Obama had agreed to having public financing of the general election campaign if I did the same thing,” he said after a town hall meeting here. “I made the commitment to the American people that if I was the nominee of my party, I would go the route of public financing. I expect Senator Obama to keep his word to the American people as well.”

Asked if he would use public financing even if Mr. Obama did not, he said: “If Senator Obama goes back on his commitment to the American people, then obviously we have to rethink our position. Our whole agreement was we would take public financing if he made that commitment as well...."

As for Obama,

Mr. Obama did not rule out the possibility of accepting public financing, but declared on Friday, “I’m not the nominee yet.”

“If I am the nominee, I will make sure our people talk to John McCain’s people to find out if we are willing to abide by the same rules and regulations with respect to the general election going forward,” Mr. Obama told reporters at a news conference in Milwaukee. “It would be presumptuous of me to start saying now that I am locking into something when I don’t even know if the other side will agree to it.”

Do the members of the Post's editorial board read their own paper? Or does this fall into the category of the mendacious, embarrassing brand of editorial that is unsigned because nobody wants to associate their name with it?

That Has To Be The Explanation....

The Post speculates,

Why is it that teachers were more apt to see problems with the behavior or character of minority students? One board member, according to The Post's Michael Alison Chandler, was "perplexed" that disparities in measures of character education mirrored the gaps in academic achievement. No one should be surprised that students don't do well when their teachers expect less of them.

Yes, that must be it - all the teachers are racist and expect less of minority students, and that's what causes behavior problems in class.

It couldn't be something as mundane as, say, kids whose parents have little interest in school performance raising kids who share their values. Could it? Because you'll find the same correlation in predominantly white school districts as well.

Absurd Hypotheticals

Jim Hoagland presents a hypothetical scenario worthy of William Kristol or Michael Gerson.

Would Iran welcome a newly elected President Obama with a nuclear enrichment freeze or - more likely - by testing him by moving identifiable Iranian militia units into Basra province on a large scale, as some Persian Gulf Arab states may fear?

Not only is the scenario hypothetical, but it's premised upon the hypothetical fears of unnamed Arab states?

If you have an IQ above room temperature, you already know that any U.S. President faced with the movement of "identifiable Iranian militia units" into Iraq will respond with swift, decisive military action. Hoagland's IQ is above room temperature, so what's his agenda? Is it perhaps highlighted by this obsequious hypothetical about McCain?

Or if it is President McCain, will the ayatollahs show something like the Reagan reflex? After all, they greeted the election of a conservative hard-liner in 1980 by releasing U.S. hostages.

Sure. They think G.W. Bush is a real softy, and they're terrified that once elected McCain will... invade Iraq, or something.

Law Firm Marketing Spam

Yet another marketing spam:

Hello.

Have you been to Google lately to see if a listing of your law firm‚s website appears on the first page of search results? If it is not there, you may be losing a lot of business to your competitors.

To check it, go to google.com and enter the name of your town and the word „attorney.‰

If it is not listed, we can list it on the first page of search results within 24 hours. We have done this for hundreds of professionals like you.

We charge monthly for this service. There is no contract. In most cases, the cost is $49.95 per month. To learn how much it would cost in your city, please visit the website at the address below:

http://www.attorneyweblinks.com

Sincerely,

Joseph F. Alward, PhD
Spectrum Web Design and Advertising
2524 Bonniebrook Drive
Stockton CA 95207-1304
(209) 473-8423
(800) 506-5866

Boy, lawyers must have a reputation for being a bunch of rubes.

For most people, having your law firm pop up under such a generic search term is worthless. If you handle bankruptcy cases, you need qualified leads, not just random people searching for attorneys in your town. (And what about people searching for "lawyers" instead of "attorneys"?)

Worse, from following the link, all this site is doing is offering to purchase you AdWords ads under that generic search term. I doubt many people are using that search term for your town. Also, this type of flat fee deal creates a perverse disincentive for the marketing company, in that it is selling "pay per click" ads and will make more money if your ad is sufficiently unappealing that it doesn't generate many clicks.

If you want to find out how much it actually costs to set up an ad campaign like this for your town, open a free AdWords account, set up an ad, and see how much they project as the cost. You can even authorize a maximum monthly budget of $49.95.

Also, make sure you're registered with local search - it's free, and may get you a link next to a map at or near the top of the first Google search results page.

So Where Does The Surge Leave Us

If I set aside my cynicism for the moment, it is fair to observe that "the surge" has resulted in a significant reduction in violence in many areas of Iraq. The testimony of General Petraeus indicates that these successes are fragile. Meanwhile, a similar tactic of relying upon local militias has fallen into disfavor in Afghanistan.

The change in policy perhaps signals a shift in Western attitudes towards the growing ranks of sanctioned tribal armies that perform routine security functions in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The “Sons of Iraq” militia groups, in particular, are a key facet of the U.S. strategy for preventing extremists from taking root in vulnerable Sunni communities.

But some military officers have questioned the long-term wisdom of arming sectarian groups whose allegiances are notoriously fickle. "In my mind, the biggest fear is that we can't integrate these guys into the government and into society quick enough," U.S. Army Captain Glen Helberg told the Columbia Journalism Review in February.

NATO officials had the same worry. “Afghanistan has long struggled with warring tribes and warlords,” said U.S. Army Brigadier General Robert Cone, the top coalition training officer, during a March telephone interview. “What we saw was that the effect of paying people to support us when we needed them, despite the positive impact over time, also had the effect of arming people who were not necessarily in line with the [Afghan] government."

At this point, relying upon the Maliki government to move Iraq toward "national reconciliation" doesn't appear promising. The U.S. is not going to team up with the al-Sadr Brigades. The other leading faction, Sunny and Kurdish, are not going to be placed in charge of the country. Iran appears happy to exploit our conundrum, and appears to have a positive relationship with both the Maliki government and al-Sadr. (And, for that matter, with Ahmed Chalabi.) Are we nearing a point where our "best case scenario" is to allow Iraq to be run by factions closely allied with Iran?

I'm willing to take a reduction in violence as a "sign for optimism". But I seen no sign that the Bush Administration has a plan to "strike while the fire is hot." Despite what I observed a couple of days ago, that the proponents of the war are increasingly speaking in terms of years until Iraq is reasonably stable, there is a question of "what happens in the next six months".

I suspect that the Bush Administration is desperately hoping that the relative lull in violence holds, and that the problem can simply be passed off to the next President. Assuming that is true, will we have again missed an opportunity due to Bush Administration incompetence? And if it does not... just what is it that the next President will inherit?

Lieberman's False Accusations Against Lamont

You know this by now - the FBI has concluded that the Lamont campaign was not responsible for attacks on Lieberman's website. If you followed the issue at the time, you probably expected that outcome. As I stated back then,

It gives me no confidence in the Lieberman campaign staff, or their accusations of sabotage, that they seem to think that their website is served from a magic box which can only fail in the event of the malicious acts of others.

The FBI's determination as to the cause? Lieberman's magic box server was misconfigured.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

"The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. . . . Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack."

Has Lieberman apologized yet? He should.

The Stupid News Story Of The Day

Presidential Candidate X says "I'm the most qualified on issue A". Presidential candidates Y and Z deny that.

Er, no kidding.

Obama, describing what he would want in a running mate:

"I would like somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I'm not as expert on," he replied. "I think a lot of people assume that might be some kind of military thing to make me look more commander-in-chief-like. Ironically, this is an area - foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain."

Clinton's response:

She laughed, actually, before responding on Fox News. "Well I’m somewhat shocked by that since I don’t see any evidence of it," she said. "This is kind of hard to square with his failure to ever have a single policy hearing on the only responsibility he was given, chairing the European and NATO subcommittee the foreign relations committee.

"I don’t know," she continued. "I’m speechless. Making an assertion like that belies the facts and the record."

Okay, Candidate Clinton, what are the facts and what is the record? Laughter doesn't cut it - please give us the specifics. No puffery this time around, please.

McCain's proxies answer:

Blair Latoff, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said in an earlier statement, “Perhaps in an effort to one-up his own ridiculous assertions about John McCain’s record, Barack Obama laughably claimed to have more foreign policy experience than Senator McCain. Even by Obama’s standards, this is a horrifyingly false claim without a shred of supporting evidence. Perhaps the junior Senator from Illinois should focus on explaining to voters what exactly his foreign policy experience is before comparing it to John McCain’s wealth of experience on the issue.”

It's fascinating to me that the Republican response to Obama is to lie about what he said, particularly as they're accusing him of misrepresenting McCain on the "100 years in Iraq" quote. Obama didn't say a word about McCain's much touted experience. He indicated that he believes he knows more about foreign policy issues than John "Iran is training al-Qaeda" McCain. He suggests that he has a better understanding of the world than John "100% behind the invasion of Iraq" McCain. You know, because experience is not a synonym for either knowledge or understanding.

Although Obama didn't raise the issue, it may also be noted that experience does not automatically translate into good judgment.

In any event, this is good campaigning by Obama. He is confronting his opponents squarely on the issue where they claim to have superior qualifications. He's couched it as an opinion, so there are no facts or foibles of memory that can be disputed. So far, his opponents' responses have been, dare I say, pathetic. Didn't they see this coming? (See my joke campaign song recommendation for Obama.)

When You Start With A Fiction....

David Brooks writes,

The U.S. brought no shortage of misconceptions into Iraq, but surely the longest lasting has been what you might call: Founding Fatherism. This is the belief that peace will come to the country when the nation’s political elites gather at a convention hall and make a series of grand compromises involving power-sharing and a new constitution.

The Bush administration has been pushing the Iraqis to make this sort of grand compromise for years — to little effect.

What the Bush Administration was hoping for in Iraq was Ahmed Chalabi. Basically, an acceptable strongman who would, as necessary, bludgeon the rest of the country into following a central government.

America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately - the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him.

Once the Chalabi gambit failed, the Bush Administration had no suitable alternate plan in place. But its ideas for the reform of Iraq into a flat-taxed laissez-faire economy, a playground for foreign investors, depended upon their being a central government that could approve the necessary legislation. So here we are.

The search for a council of wise founding fathers who would create a constitution for Iraq and hold its fragments together? That was always a fiction. If you believed that, it's excusable - why should you know the intricacies of Iraq, or look deeply into realities being openly denied by the U.S. government? If Brooks believed it? Well, that is culpable, as he feigns some degree of expertise. If we take today's column at face value, he suggests that he never believed that the Bush Administration's plan was feasible. But what's his excuse for waiting five years to point out the obvious?

The idea of building democracy starting at the local level has some potential, but the Bush Administration has never been interested in that approach. That's not what it's doing now and, contrary to Brooks' suggestion, the hobbling together of a "truce" between independent armed factions and militias is not a recipe for stability. That's what Petraus is testifying about right now - the escalation qua "surge" must continue indefinitely as even the downturn in violence is precarious, and there has been no meaningful political progress.

Brooks pretends to be arguing in support of "bottom up" progress, but he's not. He's advocating what he admits are "fragile truces" between "local clans". He pretends on the one hand that "the Iraqi people are sick of war and are punishing those leaders and forces that perpetrate it". I don't dispute that the people of Iraq are sick of war. I do question the idea that they will "punish" their local militia leaders for engaging in war, likely to be depicted as defensive or preemptive, but even if it is offensive. What does Brooks imagine that they will do?

These groups have created a fluid network of fragile truces. They squabble over money, power, ideology and sectarian issues. But they have incentives to keep the peace. Sunni leaders have come to realize that they can’t win a civil war against the Shiites. Shiite militia leaders recognize their own prestige and power drops the more they fight.

Really? Sunni militia leaders have reconciled themselves to living under Shiite rule? Forever? And Shiite militia leaders find that their power drops when they fight - so Brooks believes that Muqtada Al-Sadr has been weakened by his recent conflict with the central government?

The surge didn’t create the network of truces, but the truces couldn’t have happened without the surge. More than 70,000 local council members are paid by the Americans. They rely on the U.S. military to enforce bargains and deter truce-breaking. Thanks to these arrangements, ethno-sectarian violence dropped by 90 percent between June 2007 and March 2008. That’s the result of political progress, not just counterinsurgency techniques.

So Brooks believes that we have truces that exist only because the U.S. pays bribes to tribal leaders, and which are enforceable only by the U.S. - this, Brooks tells us, represents political progress? By what conceivable definition of the word?

It has become common to belittle these truces. After all, they are not written by legislators on parchment. And indeed there’s a significant chance that they will indeed collapse and the country will devolve into anarchy.

But in certain societies, this is the way order is established, through what Salzman calls “balanced opposition.” As long as the network of truces holds, then the next president (Democrat or Republican) will have an overwhelming incentive to nurture the fragile peace.

Belittle, nothing. You have to recognize the truces for what they are. And you have to recognize our role for what it is. Right now we are the paymaster and enforcer. If we are to escape that role, we either need genuine political progress or we need somebody else to take over as paymaster and enforcer. The recent conflict between the Iraqi central government and the al-Sadr Brigades indicates that the current Iraqi government is a long way from ready to take over, and in fact it may never be ready. (Incredibly, Brooks dismisses the recent armed conflict between al-Sadr and the central government as a "flare-up". That was the best the central government could muster against a militia of the same sect - and without U.S. backup for the central government, it would probably have turned into a full-scale civil war.)

Then you have to face the reality of ethnic conflict. Yes, you can use various techniques to put a lid on it - Marshall Tito did so quite effectively in Yugoslavia. But upon his death, the lid blew off the pressure cooker. The break-up of Czechoslovakia similarly indicates how even when peacefully resolved, ethnic tensions run deep and long - with no obvious solution. Brooks doesn't even pretend to have a solution to Iraq's ethnic conflicts, and seems to be pretending that we don't need one. So who does Brooks propose will take over the central government with a firm enough hand to keep the lid in place, but with a pleasant face to present to the West? (And why do I suspect it might be Ahmed Chalabi?)

On the same note, have you noticed how the hardcore backers of the war have stopped telling us we can expect progress in Iraq within a number of months? I guess after five years of promising that progress is "six months away", that argument is no longer credible with any portion of the population. So now we get the new line - we're seeing progress so we must stay in Iraq... but we won't know whether our efforts are succeeding for many years. I suppose this is easier for a shallow pundit, who will no longer have to explain why his many projections of progress have every time proved wrong. But can we be honest? Unless the next President wraps this up, we'll see a repeat of what has happened under G.W. - repeated denials of reality, with the President ultimately punting the problem onto the next administration.

Google App Engine

I've been expecting Google to do something like this for a long time, particularly given the hosting innovations offered by Amazon.

At tonight's Campfire One we launched a preview release of Google App Engine -- a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.

If you're a developer, sign up quickly - only 10,000 get to participate in the preview.
_______
Update: All developer spots are now taken.

Oh, Spare Me

William Kristol pretends,

And an experienced Democratic operative e-mailed: “Finally, I think [McCain’s] going to win. Obama isn’t growing in stature. Once I thought he could be Jimmy Carter, but now he reminds me more of Michael Dukakis with the flag lapel thing and defending Wright. Plus he doesn’t have a clue how to talk to the middle class. He’s in the Stevenson reform mold out of Illinois, with a dash of Harvard disease thrown in.”

Because that's what anonymous "experienced Democratic operatives" do... they send emails to meretricious Republican hacks, savaging Democratic candidates.

"I once thought he could be Jimmy Carter..."? Please.

Is this a subsidy?

Wall St banks 'hooked on emergency funds scheme'

Fears are mounting that Wall Street banks are relying too heavily on tens of billions of dollars in loans made available by the US Federal Reserve. Their borrowing levels have rocketed by almost 200 per cent to $38bn (£19bn) a day in just three weeks.

The latest loan data released by the Fed shows that Wall Street banks and investment firms borrowed an average of $38.4bn every day last week, a big jump from the $32.9bn borrowed the week before, but almost three times the $13.4bn borrowed when the emergency scheme was launched on 17 March.

(See the prior post for context.)

Who Should Get The Taxpayers' Money

In flattering McCain (who Will still appears to detest), George Will presents a false dichotomy, pretending McCain supports a solution to the "economy's housing-related credit woes" that doesn't involve any bail-outs whatsoever. Quoting McCain, Will writes:

He says "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers." For now, he is with Senate Republicans in opposing the Democrats' proposal to empower judges to rewrite the terms of some mortgages, an idea that strikes at the sanctity of contracts and hence at the ethic of promise-keeping that is fundamental to social life. He opposes an additional dose of the toxin that has made the credit system sick -- he favors strengthening rather than weakening down-payment requirements for loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration. And he has admirably avoided the rhetoric of victimology, such as that used when The Post editorialized that "lenders pushed tens of billions of dollars in potentially high-interest mortgage debt on people ill-equipped to handle it."

So the honest translation would be that McCain opposes only aid directed at borrowers. While he wants stronger guarantees that federal loans will be repaid, something that to me is a perfectly reasonable demand, he has not actually opposed bail-outs of financial institutions. He just wants to add a few more strings to the bail-out packages they receive.

The honest question this might raise is, why support bail-outs of those who were in the best position to prevent this from happening in the first place, while providing no benefit at all to those (whatever you think of their culpability) on the other side of the loan? If Will were to think about it, he would recognize that offering bankruptcy relief to those borrowers wouldn't let them avoid their loans - it would allow them to discount their loans to the present market value of their homes. The borrowers would have their creditworthiness severely downgraded for a decade. But the owners of the loans, not the taxpayers, would have to absorb the difference. That, it seems, is unacceptable to either George Will or John McCain.

I'm not going to benefit from the bailouts - If I even own stock in any of the financial institutions involved, it's part of a mutual fund. And I'm the opposite of the sort who purchases "more home than I can afford" than maxes out my HELOC. As a conservative borrower and spender, who believes in paying my bills in full, I am hardly brimming with sympathy for those who chose to believe promises that were plainly too good to be true. Yet if my choice is between having my tax money used for a bailout, or having irresponsible lenders take a loss due to the bankruptcies of their irresponsible borrowers? I'll support the bankruptcy reform, thank you very much.

School Funding And Special Education

Cato Institute directory Andrew J. Coulson has a piece in today's post arguing that the true annual per pupil spending in the D.C. schools is "close to $25,000 per child", not the commonly recited "$8,322 per child". Although he admits to inflating that figure by including the teacher retirement fund, which seems rather misleading, I would be interested in seeing follow-up on the actual numbers.

But what really caught my eye was this claim:

So why force most D.C. children into often dilapidated and underperforming public schools when we could easily offer them a choice of private schools? Some would argue that private schools couldn't or wouldn't serve the District's special education students, at least not affordably. Not so.

Consider Florida's McKay Scholarship program, which allows parents to pull their special-needs children out of the public schools and place them in private schools of their choosing. Parental satisfaction with McKay is stratospheric, the program serves twice as many children with disabilities as the D.C. public schools do, and the average scholarship offered in 2006-'07 was just $7,206. The biggest scholarship awarded was $21,907 -- still less than the average per-pupil spending in D.C. public schools. If Florida can satisfy the parents of special-needs children at such a reasonable cost, why can't the District?

Is Coulson truly reporting that Florida has found schools that will accept the highest-need of its high-need kids, with the cost never exceeding $21,907, and the private school declining any further public support toward that child's education? If so, that's pretty remarkable. If not, it's exceptionally dishonest of Coulson to fail to acknowledge the enormous public expenditures often directed at special needs children enrolled in private schools. Because the public schools may be providing additional thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, per pupil for such costs as aides and medical attendants.

What Happened to Google Knols?

I thought Google was going to take on Wikipedia, Squidoo and the like. What happened?

She Proved Me Wrong....

I had expected Clinton to delay releasing her tax returns until after the primaries were over, and even then to perhaps enter into a quiet understanding with McCain that they would agree not to make disclosure an issue. But she finally came through:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton reported more than $109 million in gross income since 2000, the Clinton presidential campaign announced this afternoon.

Of that amount, the Clintons have more than $57 million in after-tax earnings and paid more than $33 million in federal taxes, the campaign said. It released tax returns from 2000 to 2006 and highlights for 2007.

* * *

Both Clintons have done well as authors. During the years, former President Clinton earned more than $29 million for his books and Sen. Hillary Clinton earned more than $10 million.

Bill Clinton earned more than $51 million from speeches, the campaign said.

It's not bad work, if you can get it....

Big Mistakes By Politicians

When politicians talk about things they supposedly know about, and make colossal mistakes, what are we supposed to think? I will grant that some politicians are pretty dense, but most are above average in intelligence. So they're capable of grasping basic facts. So I'm left thinking that the primary problem is one of two forms of disinterest:

1. They don't actually care about the subject that they are discussing, or
2. They are unable to break out of their pre-existing constructs about the subject.

Perhaps both.

If we take the Lieberman/McCain Iraq War tag team, first we have Lieberman correcting McCain, that the Iranians are not training al-Qaeda. Now we have Lieberman making a similar gaffe,

If we did what Sen. Obama wanted us to do last year, Al-Qaeda in Iran would be in control of Iraq today.

My impression of McCain is that he just doesn't care about the subtleties. Arab, Persian, Sunni, Shiite, whatever. An insurgent is an insurgent is a terrorist, and to support one is to support them all.

Lieberman, on the other hand, has never failed to surprise me with how little he knows about the Middle East, or pretty much anything else he chooses to discuss, sometimes to the point of being a buffoon. He seems to have tried to brush up on his foreign policy credentials when he thought he could be President, but to demonstrate the acumen of a bored college freshman. Iran? Iraq? We know from his correction of McCain that he knows the difference between Sunni and Shiite, but we can't really expect him to stay on top of the terminology for stuff that was on "last month's test", can we?

But answer this: How ignorant do you have to be of Iraq and its various factions to believe that "Al Qaeda in Iraq" would find a welcome home if we pulled out, rather than being extirpated at the hands of the Shiite majority? "Al Qaeda in Iraq" isn't even popular with Iraqi Sunnis.

Lieberman leaves me wondering if he cares about anything other than reelection, or perhaps scoring a Cabinet post in a McCain Administration.
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Update: On a similar note:

[General Odom] blasted the hawks who want to expand the war to Iran, noting that such people are actually seeking to fulfill a key Al Qaeda strategic aim. “One need only take note of the al Qaeda public diplomacy campaign... they implore the United States to bomb and invade Iran and destroy the apostate Shiite regime. As an aside, it gives me pause to learn that our vice president and some members of the Senate are aligned with al Qaeda on spreading the war to Iran.”

Pretty good stuff. Over to you, Dick Cheney, Senator Lieberman, Senator McCain: why are you aligned with al Qaeda on spreading the war to Iran?

You can have valid reasons for not liking the Iranian government, or wanting to replace it, but... pause for a moment and think?

Krugman on Obama on Health Care

I agree with Krugman's general thesis - McCain's health care plan is a joke, and Clinton's is better than Obama's. I'm not sure, though, about this point:

Worse yet, Mr. Obama attacked his Democratic rivals’ health plans using conservative talking points about choice and the evil of having the government tell you what to do. That’s going to make it hard - if he is the nominee - to refute Mr. McCain when he makes similar arguments on behalf of such things as privatizing veterans’ care.

One criticism of Obama, and a valid one, is that he refuses to support mandates. I haven't yet seen evidence to suggest the innuendo sometimes cast about, that he's adamantly opposed to mandates. If Congress sends him a bill that does everything he has proposed but also includes mandates, I expect that he would sign it.

As for whether Obama would hold hands with McCain in an effort to savage the V.A. hospital system, I very much doubt it. Whatever mileage the Republicans might try to gain from Obama's talk of freedoms, privatizing veterans' care is one of those issues that you should be able to undercut with a standard, Republican-style, "Our troops are getting injured right now, and those hospitals are the best source for the specialized care they need after leaving the military! Why don't you support the troops?"

Talk of "choice", really, is to reassure people that if a national health plan passes the government won't be picking their doctor or defining their medical treatment. (That job will remain with a bureaucrat in their HMO.)