Ann Coulter on Neil Cavuto on FOX, Sept. 10:
Democrats want America to lose and Al Qaeda to win.
Better yet:
Democrats hate the troops.
(they think the troops are toothless, she claims. Toothless??)
And more:
Move On.org are Stalinists
but also
anarchists…
Amazing.
This, from a woman who graduated at the head of her law class from top-ranked Michigan U and is as sharp as they get.
Ann – your slips are showing…
“On Tuesday, Sept 11, the anniversary of the WTC terrorist attacks, Ron Paul is giving a keynote policy address at the influential Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.His topic is “A Traditional Non-Intervention Foreign Policy.”
If you wanted to quibble, you could. Personally, I would have preferred it to read,
“A Rational Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy.”
Or “A Constitutional Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy.”
Because there are traditions and traditions. And while those of us who are intellectually of a conservative bent tend to give any tradition the benefit of the doubt, it will not do to consider non-intervention a good by virtue only of its history, when history is composted with the bones of institutions that rotted from the inside. Traditions are prone to developing hardening of the categories – as some wit noted – and if we classify non-intervention as one, then we are surely inviting some clever update of it. We are asking for the Monroe Doctrine to be turned into Manifest Destiny
— with gender neutrality and racial sensitivity thrown in to certify it kosher.
But the Constitution of America – whatever its alleged and real flaws (and it isn’t free of them) – has been a guiding light to this nation and countless others not because it is a tradition but because the principles it embodies are rational, in the highest sense of the word, and because they are worthy of emulation. The Constitution is universal in its appeal. But it is universal because its persuades by its reasonableness, not because it imposes itself over the breadth of the globe as the law of an empire.
The distinction is of some importance today.
Because there are those who demand exactly the opposite – an interventionist foreign policy – for exactly the same reason — universality. You could call them ‘liberventionists.’ They are the humanitarian bombers, like Mr. Hitchens…..
More at Lew Rockwell.
David Galland of Doug Casey Research on why in an election year cycle, the dollar (and dollar-saving schlepps) may be sacrificed to save King George….
“In a call with long-time friend Clyde Harrison, one of the most seasoned and sharpest players on the commodities scene (he invented the Rogers International Commodities Index Fund), he quipped to the effect of, “We’re in an election cycle and the foreign holders of U.S. dollars don’t vote. By contrast, the U.S. voting public is up to its neck in debt. When push comes to shove, the dollar will be sacrificed.”
We think he is right. And I would add one more observation. The only shred of fabric remaining somewhat intact in George Bush’s tattered legacy is the relative strength of the economy over his term. To now have the economy go down in flames on his watch is unacceptable to him and, more important, his political cronies. What moves are left to them at this point other than ramping up the money engines? None at all.
Oh, and choosing the path of inflation offers one more tangible benefit. The effect of a massive ramp-up in the supply of money, enough perhaps, to rescue the hundreds of billions otherwise destined for money heaven, is that the inevitable consequence — higher prices — won’t be fully felt until after the upcoming presidential elections. In other words, it won’t be crisis diverted, but rather crisis delayed.
There is a fly in the ointment, however. This particular fly won’t sit passively while its wealth is destroyed. I refer, of course, to the aforementioned foreign dollar holders. Looking under the hood as he is wont to do, our chief economist Bud Conrad has already found signs that they are starting to edge back from the weekly Treasury auction…”
“Yes, I was quite sceptical. Less so over the years. They’re desperate. Everything they touch is in ruins. They’re even in danger of losing control over Middle Eastern oil — to China, the topic that’s rarely discussed but is on every planner or corporation exec’s mind, if they’re sane. Iran already has observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — from which the US was pointedly excluded. Chinese trade with Saudi Arabia, even military sales, is growing fast. With the Bush administration in danger of losing Shiite Iraq, where most of the oil is (and most Saudi oil in regions with a harshly oppressed Shiite population), they may be in real trouble.Under these circumstances, they’re unpredictable. They might go for broke, and hope they can salvage something from the wreckage. If they do bomb, I suspect it will be accompanied by a ground assault in Khuzestan, near the Gulf, where the oil is (and an Arab population — there already is an Ahwazi liberation front, probably organized by the CIA, which the US can “defend” from the evil Persians), and then they can bomb the rest of the country to rubble. And show who’s boss….”
Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif, former Pakistani PM and a determined opponent of the Musharraf government (our ever-so ambiguous partners in the War on Terror) has been arrested on corruption charges on his return from exile in, of all places, Saudi Arabia.
More at Bloomberg.
And if that is a non-sequitor, make what you will of it…..
“Home loan colossus Countrywide Financial Corp. announced Friday that it would slash as many as 12,000 jobs, or nearly 20% of its workforce, saying the downturn in the housing market and the credit crunch related to sub-prime loans have created the worst conditions ever seen by the modern mortgage industry.
The announcement by Calabasas-based Countrywide came hours after a smaller rival in the mortgage business, Pasadena-based savings and loan IndyMac Bancorp Inc., warned that it probably would record its first loss since 1998 in the third quarter. IndyMac said it would cut 1,000 jobs, 10% of its total.
Countrywide, the No. 1 home lender, funded $284.2 billion in mortgages this year through July 31, up from $255.8 billion in the same period in 2006, but said it expected lending to decline 25% next year….”
More by E. Scott Reckard at the Los Angeles Times.
Is this just a subprime lender problem?
At Thoughts from the Frontline, John Mauldin doesn’t think so:
“Goldman Sachs suggests home values could drop as much as 20%. Gary Shilling has been saying 25%. We don’t have time and space this week to go into housing prices, but many of the mortgages sold in the past two years only made sense in a housing market that was rising by 10-15% a year. A market that is dropping 10-15% a year, as it may do in the next 12 months, is only marginally be helped by a Fed funds cut.
But that does not mean they should not cut. They should, simply because the economy is clearly slowing, and the risks are now to the downside.
I have maintained for a long time that the bursting of the housing bubble would cause a serious slowdown or a recession in the economy. My critics would counter that housing is only 5-7% of the economy and a housing recession would not be enough to drag the whole economy down.
They are wrong for the following reasons. First, rising home values have allowed homeowners to use their homes as an ATM through mortgage equity withdrawals, which have added almost 2% to GDP annually over the last five years. That is now evaporating.
Secondly, falling home construction and lower home sales means fewer jobs not just in the direct home building market, but in the parts of the economy related to the home building markets, like mortgage brokers, real estate agents, hardware and furniture, etc. As an example, Countrywide announced a planned 10-12,000 person lay-off, when just a few weeks ago they were thinking of expansion, as they now think new mortgages may drop 25% in 2008. Fewer jobs mean lower consumer spending.
Consumers are not going to spend as much due to the wealth effect. If you feel your house was going to be a major part of your retirement, and now the value is going down, you are going to be more cautious and actually think about saving. This has been a dangerous prediction for 50 years, but I think consumer spending, some 71% of the US economy, is due to slow down. Year over year growth could drop below inflation later this year.
Further, with all the additional homes coming onto the market due to foreclosures, hone values are going to drop even more, and new home construction, which peaked at an annual run rate of 2,000,000 homes per year, is likely to fall to less than 1,000,000. We are currently at a level of 1,400,000, so we are not yet close to the bottom.
Rising unemployment. A housing market looking at the deepest recession in values since the Great Depression. A consumer under siege. A visibly slowing economy……”
Rate cut or not?
Since he seems to be setting himself up as a foreign policy advisor, maybe we should ask Osama Bin Laden.
“Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa; all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system,” he said….”
“What Rothbard shows is that the cause of peace is our heritage, and that free markets has been united with the antiwar cause from the founding fathers through the Old Right and as late as the 1950s. There is so much in this book to appreciate but especially valuable are his comments on the Left in the 1960s. There might have seemed to be some hope for some type of collaboration. They were against war and for civil liberties at a time when the right was becoming increasingly imperialist and warmongering. Rothbard explains his attempt to educate the left on economics. Alas, there was no hope. He had to go it alone and forge a completely new movement called libertarianism.”
From The Betrayal of the American Right, a new book by Murray Rothbard, published posthumously.
“If all my possessions and powers were to be taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of speech, for by it I could recover all the rest.”
Daniel Webster.
Is progressive legislation always good for “the people”? Or is it a statist fable? A detailed analysis of the rise of the technocratic managerial class as a function of the growth (rather than the constraint) of the corporate-state:
“The conventional understanding of government regulation was succinctly stated by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the foremost spokesman for corporate liberalism: “Liberalism in America has ordinarily been the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community.” Mainstream liberals and conservatives may disagree on who the “bad guy” is in this scenario, but they are largely in agreement on the anti-business motivation. For example, Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business Review lamented in 1968: “Business has not really won or had its way in connection with even a single piece of proposed regulatory or social legislation in the last three-quarters of a century.”
The problem with these conventional assessments is that they are an almost exact reverse of the truth. The New Left has produced massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, virtually demolishing the official version of American history. (The problem, as in most cases of “paradigm shift,” is that the consensus reality doesn’t know it’s dead yet). Scholars like James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman Williams, in their historical analyses of “corporate liberalism,” have demonstrated that the main forces behind both Progressive and New Deal “reforms” were powerful corporate interests. To the extent that big business protested the New Deal in fact, it was a case of Brer Rabbit’s plea not to fling him in the briar patch.
The following is intended only as a brief survey of the development of the corporate liberal regime, and an introduction to the New Left (and Austrian) analysis of it.
Despite Schlesinger’s aura of “idealism” surrounding the twentieth century welfare/regulatory state, it was in fact pioneered by the Junker Socialism of Prussia–the work of that renowned New Age tree-hugger, Bismarck. The mainline socialist movement at the turn of the century (i.e., the part still controlled by actual workers, and not coopted by Fabian intellectuals) denounced the tendency to equate such measures with socialism, instead calling it “state socialism.” The International Socialist Review in 1912, for example, warned workers not to be fooled into identifying social insurance or the nationalization of industry with “socialism.” Such state programs as workers’ compensation, old age and health insurance, were simply measures to strengthen and stabilize capitalism. And nationalization simply reflected the capitalist’s realization “that he can carry on certain portions of the production process more efficiently through his government than through private corporations….. Some muddleheads find that will be Socialism, but the capitalist knows better.” Friedrich Engels took this view of public ownership:
This, from legendary Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, who died on Thursday, September 6 at the age of 71:
“I’m not a politician, I’m a musician,” he told the BBC Music Magazine in an April 1998 article about his efforts for Bosnia. “I care about giving people a place where they can go to enjoy themselves and to begin to live again. To the man you have to give the spirit, and when you give him the spirit, you have done everything.”
More at the New York Times.
Maryland Public Television is running a performance at the Metropolitan of one of the operas he was most famous for, Donizetti’s comic opera, “L’Elisir d’Amour” (The Elixir of Love) – a gorgeous example of the bel canto style (literally, “beautiful singing), and an infinitely better use of human breath and lung capacity than anything emanating from the halls of power.
Classical music, fortunately, never caught onto the doctrinaire and self-indulgent egalitarianism of our times. It takes completely unearned talent and relentless self-discipline and criticism; it glorifies individualism and self-actualization, disdains the slightest mediocrity and bestows its prizes only on an aristocracy. No amount of sweat, good intentions, or legislation will turn you into either Pavarotti or Donizetti.
Supremely unfair, but a lesson best learned early. As my piano teacher once told me crushingly: You can’t have something just because you want it.
And what people never seem to remember is that great talent usually goes hand in hand with torments beyond the ordinary — Donizetti, who composed 31 operas in about a dozen years, also lost his three children and his wife, suffered from syphilis and died after a bout of insanity at the age of 51. I wonder how that could be distributed equally to everyone.
Glen Greenwald on Dick Cheney’s wishful thinking:
“Two revelations in particular are extraordinary and deserve (but are unlikely to receive) intense media coverage. First, it was Goldsmith who first argued that the administration’s secret, warrantless surveillance programs were illegal, and it was that conclusion which sparked the now famous refusal of Ashcroft/Comey in early 2004 to certify the program’s legality. Goldsmith argued continuously about his conclusion with Addington, and during the course of those arguments, this is what happened:
[Goldsmith] shared the White House’s concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists. But Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.
Their goal all along was to “get rid of the obnoxious FISA court” entirely, so that they could freely eavesdrop on whomever they wanted with no warrants or oversight of any kind. And here is Dick Cheney’s top aide, drooling with anticipation at the prospect of another terrorist attack so that they could seize this power without challenge. Addington views the Next Terrorist Attack as the golden opportunity to seize yet more power. Sitting around the White House dreaming of all the great new powers they will have once the new terrorist attack occurs — as Addington was doing — is nothing short of deranged. Contrary to the claims made by Bush and his followers ever since the NSA scandal arose, their real objective in secretly creating “The Terrorist Surveillance Program” was never to find a narrow means to circumvent FISA when, in those few cases, it impeded necessary eavesdropping. Rather, the goal was to get rid of FISA altogether and return the country to the days when our government could spy on us in total secrecy, with no oversight. Of course, until they could “get rid of” that law altogether — through the only tactic they know: exploitation of Terrorism — they simply decided to violate it at will….”