Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

Governor Palin and I don’t agree on a lot of things, mostly social issues. But I have grown to appreciate the Governor. I was one of those initial skeptics and would laugh at the pictures. Not anymore. When someone takes on a corrupt political machine and a sitting governor, that is not done by someone with a low I.Q. or a moral core made of tissue paper. When someone fights her way to get scholarships and work her way through college even in a jagged line, that shows determination and humility you can’t learn from reading Reinhold Niebuhr. When a mother brings her son with special needs onto the national stage with love, honesty, and pride, that gives hope to families like mine as my older brother lives with a mental disability. And when someone can sit on a stage during the Sarah Palin rap on Saturday Night Live, put her hands in the air and watch someone in a moose costume get shot—that’s a sign of both humor and humanity.

"The corporations are running things now, so it's not going to make much difference who's in there, but McCain would be much worse. He's a warmonger. He's a scary, scary person — more dangerous than Bush. Obama, according to his book, Dreams Of My Father, is a racist and I have no problem with black racists. I've got the quote right here: 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's white race.' The problem with Obama is he's being dishonest about his racial views. I'd respect him if he'd just come out and say, 'Yeah, I'm a black racist.' I don't hate black people. I just think it's in the best interest of the races to be separated as much as possible. See, I'm a leftist. I'm not a rightist. I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person."

Obama really is a depressing man, and he sees a depressing country. He sees an America with nothing but victims. He's got a depressing family; he has depressing friends. His solutions are depressing. He's got depressing methods of running a campaign. He's got policies that are going to lead to an economic depression! The word that we need to associate with Barack Obama is depressed and depression.

"...just to take a, sort of a realist perspective...there’s a lot of change going on outside of the Court, um, that, that judges essentially have to take judicial notice of. I mean you’ve got World War II, you’ve got uh, uh, uh, the doctrines of Nazism, that, that we are fighting against, that start looking uncomfortably similar to what we have going on, back here at home."

I want to emphasize that this is a small example of how property rights play an important role in protecting unpopular people. Private property gives minorities with unpopular views, lifestyles, or identities, a secure space in which they are protected from the hostility of the majority.

Stop jumping every time Drudge hypes something in Armageddon-sized font.

I have a hard time that she would keep her head still enough for the perp to carve that "B" on her face.

Note this detail:

"She told police the man then sat on her chest, pinning both her hands down with his knees and used what she believed was a dull knife with a roughly 5-inch blade to carve the B"

http://hotair.com/headlines/?p=21533

(Link via a skeptical Michelle Malkin.)

That means that her head was right side up when the mugger carved it (if that's what happened).

Maybe it's an underlined M instead of a B?

Actually, it looks like two thirds of the EIB logo

Look at her pic in the Malkin post. The skin isn't even broken. What kind of a mugger carries a knife that dull? I've seen butter knives sharper than that.

If it weren't for the letter carving allegation, this would be dog-bites-man. Of course muggers are offended by the party that's tougher on law enforcement.

Finally, in 1967, tucked into an omnibus revision of criminal law, approved without discussion, was a section that altered the traditional standards for self-defence. Everything was to depend on what seemed "reasonable" force after the fact. It was never deemed reasonable to defend property with force. According to the Textbook of Criminal Law the requirement that an individual's efforts to defend himself be "reasonable" is "now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it still forms part of the law".

Colleges are quick to argue that a college education is more about enlightenment than employment.

In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama’s formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to 'delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals.' All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers...As CAC board chair, Obama was essentially authorizing the funding of Ayers’s own educational projects, and the projects of Ayers’s radical allies.

The results of an August 2003 final technical report of the Chicago Annenberg Research Project by the Consortium on Chicago School Research "suggest that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on school improvement and student outcomes, with no statistically significant differences between Annenberg and non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain, classroom behavior, student self-efficacy, and social competence.

He routinely fudges facts and, when called on it, refuses to admit error. He never presents both sides of an argument dispassionately and then uses reason and observed experience to discern the truth. He consistently demonizes anyone who doesn’t agree with him. His shrill, hysterical voice trivializes honest differences and invites counter-attack rather than reasoned rebuttal. Plus he’s not even well-informed on many issues that fall outside his academic specializations.

I know the Nobel committee doesn’t judge entirely on the basis of someone’s career, but Krugman’s Nobel should make them rethink this. He continues to use his NYTimes column in a way that diminishes the intellectual standards of his field. This does significant, long-run harm to what the Nobel Committee calls “Economic Sciences,” perhaps entirely offsetting the value of Krugman’s academic contributions.

Since the subject was Ayers, then the "Kill him", if it existed, would most likely be about him. And Ayers would not be on very good philosphical ground for opposing it.

They will come forth,- their eyes humbled - from (their) graves, (torpid) like locusts scattered abroad, Hastening, with eyes transfixed, towards the Caller!- "Hard is this Day!", the Unbelievers will say. [Yusufali translation]

Some modern-day Muslims, however, claim that this verse constituted a prophecy that was fulfilled during Neil Armstrong’s moon landing in 1969, when the astronauts dug up a bit of the lunar soil and brought it back – although, despite their imaginative forays into numerology in connection with this claim, it is more than a stretch to consider that gathering of a small amount of soil as amounting to a splitting of the moon.

[Robert] Willumstad, who was CEO from June through the September action by the Federal Reserve, said "mark to market" accounting rules - which require companies to value securities at current prices in distressed situations - forced financial institutions to book billions of dollars in losses for securites that were not in default.

He said those losses led to a spiral that included debt rating downgrades.

[Martin] Sullivan, who was CEO from March 2005 until June, said the accounting rules were key among several factors leading to AIG's problems, saying they had "unintended consequences for financial institutions when markets seize up."

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.

So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank's relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

...

The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses "helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs."

Stephen: In 1982, Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since. In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?

Obama: I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them--which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration--is ridiculous.

It seems Biden is right on the very narrow factual point: Obama did not specify Ahmadinejad as the Iranian "leader" with whom he would meet. But Palin's broader critique of Obama is quite on target: Whichever Iranian Obama had in mind, it was both naive and dangerous for him to advocate allowing Iraq to collapse and then expecting Iran and Syria to behave "responsibly."

I'm less inclined to see this as a copyright infringement. The Mouth Peace tried reposting it with a claim of "safe harbor" because he wouldn't see any profit from the use of the copyrighted material, but that doesn't give people leave to reproduce copyrighted material without permission. The property rights of the owner allow him or her to determine the circumstances of publication, not anyone else. Since the entire songs were used in this publication, it doesn’t qualify under "fair use" excerpting either.

The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.

Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.

In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.

So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.

Five years ago, Barney Frank vouched for the "soundness" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said "I do not see" any "possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury."

Moreover, he said that the federal government has "probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing."

Earlier this year, Senator Christopher Dodd praised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for "riding to the rescue" when other financial institutions were cutting back on mortgage loans. He too said that they "need to do more" to help subprime borrowers get better loans.

In other words, Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default.

I think that the responsibility that Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans and the Congress, or by me when I was President, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie May and Freddie Mac.