Stop the Bailout Dot Com

from stopthehousingbailout.com

Meow! Meow! Meow! Arianna Huffington on Sarah Palin's Debate Peformance

From HuffingtonPost.com:

The only subject on which Palin displayed superior knowledge was when she corrected Biden on the proper delivery of "Drill, baby, drill!" Christie Hefner thought Palin's sex-tinged twist on the chant should be appropriated for a commercial. Perhaps for Viagra.

Other than that, Palin's grasp fluctuated between wafer thin and skin deep. The moment that most drove me to want to send her a book on Greek gods and heroes was her head-scratching response to the question about her Achilles heel. She apparently didn't know what that meant since she spent her allotted time listing all of her attributes as opposed to her most glaring weakness.

Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Haunted...

At least, that's what I think Mark Horowitz may mean, in this post from his blog, Haunted Screens.

Biden v Palin: Biden Won on Points

No links for this, must more pure personal reaction. Palin did OK, but a little too much Energizer Bunny fembot reciting talking points to have won, goshdarnit! (wink) She really believes in that GREAT AMERICAN HERO: John McCain, David Petraeus, her brother the schooteacher, whomever. As Joe Biden once said in moment of truth (called a "gaffe" by Washingtonians), Palin's pretty, which made her easier to look at--except when her smile dropped, her lips tensed, and she seemed about to scowl, SCARY! Luckily, she usually recovered he beauty-queen poise (see below).

Biden came across as an old pol...not 100 percent credible, but, on the other hand, able to think on his feet. He looks like he had one too many Botox injections on his forehead--bring back some wrinkles please, so we can see expression on what otherwise looks like a rubber mask--but he did show some emotion in a corny "choking up" moment, which worked to humanize him. He actually seemed more real than Palin. Plus the God Bless Our Troops ending was good.

Best of all was Biden saying that McCain was not really a maverick (he really meant that the OLD John McCain was a maverick, while the NEW John McCain running for President is a Bush water-carrier). That took some wind out of Palin's sails. I also liked Biden saying he changed his mind about judicial ideology in the Bork hearings, a way of getting the abortion issue into the debate.

Nice to see that Palin supports gay rights along with Biden! That clarification during the debate should cheer the Christian base of the Republican party no end. Somehow the discomfort showing on Biden's face made him appear more conservative on this issue than Palin, at least to this observer... We'll see how this plays in Peoria--or Michigan.

Meanwhile, Biden turned out to be tall, and Palin turned out to be short! That's always interesting. Palin had a bit of a hunch. She might want to consider taking classes in the Alexander technique...

One thing missing--a discussion of prinicples. Palin was a hero-worshipper, Biden seemed a deal-maker. What's needed is an injection of priniciples into the race, rather than ideology or hero-worship. Principles are what enable people to make rational decisions and plans for new situations, and the President always faces a new situation...

On to the Presdential debates next week.

UPDATE: Snap polls seem to show that the majority of Americans feel the same way I do.

Sarah Palin's 1984 Miss Alaska Swimsuit Competition

Ann Coulter on Why Obama Supports the Bush-Paulson Bailout

From AnnCoulter.com:

Obama was not merely wrong on Fannie Mae: He is owned by Fannie Mae. Somehow Obama managed to become the second biggest all-time recipient of Fannie Mae political money after only three years in the Senate. The biggest beneficiary, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, had a 30-year head start on receiving loot from Fannie Mae -- the government-backed institution behind our current crisis.

The Economists' Voice: The Bailout is Bad, Paulson is Wrong

I just received an email from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calling my attention to some items that readers of this blog might find of interest--especially given the unfortunate vampire-like undead Paulson bailout bill now in the Senate. Here's the table of contents:

Columns
PDF
Good Bailouts and Bad
David O. Beim
PDF
Please Think This Over
Edward E. Leamer
PDF
A Better Plan for Addressing the Financial Crisis
Lucian A. Bebchuk
PDF
Auction Design Critical for Rescue Plan
Lawrence M. Ausubel and Peter Cramton
PDF
What if the Median Voter Were a Failing Student?
Bryan Caplan
PDF
Questioning the Treasury's $700 Billion Blank Check: An Open Letter to Secretary Paulson
Aaron S. Edlin
PDF
Dr. StrangeLoan: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Financial Collapse
Aaron S. Edlin
PDF
Why Paulson is Wrong
Luigi Zingales
PDF
Investment Banking Regulation After Bear Stearns
Dwight M. Jaffee and Mark Perlow
PDF
Turn Left for Sustainable Growth
Joseph Stiglitz

And here's the link to The Economist's Voice, where one may download the articles in PDF format (I wish they were in HTML to read online). I assume some Congressmen and Congresswomen should be placing these in the Congressional Record, if forced to vote on the bailout bill again, so you may be hearing more about Economists Against Paulson in the future.

For the life of me, I don't understand why Obama isn't leading the charge against Paulson and Wall Street, using the mess to campaign against Bush-McCain's handling of the economy. There should be a clear difference between McCain and Obama on this, but he's fuzzed it all up, if Paulson's "cash for trash" bill passes, Obama might have a decidedly weaker hand to play when it come to the handling of the economy...

Shanah Tovah!

We're going on holiday...so won't be reading the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008"--which after watching Secretary of the Treasury Paulson's embarrassing sales pitch on 60 Minutes tonight might better be called "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute Act of 2008." If you want to read it, here's the link:

http://financialservices.house.gov/

Hope it doesn't pass.

With constitutent calls running 100-1 against it, you'd think someone in Congress or the Senate would realize that stopping this bill doesn't even require political courage. As Gillis Long used to say, when he wanted to stop legislation: "This is a bad bill."

You don't even have to read it to know it--because no one can explain it clearly.

Congressmen Rahm Emannuel and Barney Frank will have a lot to atone for, come Yom Kippur, should it pass, IMHO. It might even cost Obama the election...

I wish Obama would announce, instead of praising this bill: "The era of bipartisanship is over. We are going to throw the bums out, make them pay, and put those responsible for this criminal mess in jail..."

The way things have been going, that sentiment more likely to come from Sarah Palin! And she'll win the White House, riding voter anger all the way, if McCain ends up filibustering...

UPDATE: The bill failed to pass the House due to bipartisan opposition, which restores one's faith in democracy!

Vladimir Sinelnikov to Present WORLD WAR III: “The Terror Casino”

And I'm on the panel discussing the film on Friday, believe it or not. Here's the press release:

Vladimir Sinelnikov will present World War III:“The Terror Casino” in the Peter Zenger room of the National Press Club on Friday, September 26th from 4-6 pm. Sinelnikov’s new one-hour documentary presents a challenging Russian perspective on the origins and ideology of international terror, one seldom seen in the West. Following the screening, blogger (laurencejarvikonline) and filmmaker Laurence Jarvik (Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?) will moderate a panel discussion with the filmmaker and Novoye Russkoye Slovo critic Oleg Sulkin.

Sinelnikov is a leading Russian filmmaker, having written, directed, and/or produced over 100 films for television including Tetralogy The Bell of Chernobyl (“shelved” by Soviet censors), about nuclear disaster; The Academician Sakharov – a Man for all Times, about Russia’s Nobel Prize-winning dissident; and Oh, Russia, My Russia...People and Power, Artist and Power, about the return of emigre producer Yuri Lubimov to complete his production of Boris Godunov in the Taganka Theatre—a rehearsal interrupted by Lubimov’s flight from the USSR ten years earlier; and Mirages and Hopes, about Russian emigration to Israel.

Among Sinelnikov’s subjects in World War III:“The Terror Casino” are politicians, religious leaders, scholars, secret service agents, as well as family members of terror victims and those struggling with terror in Muslim nations. It features interviews with Russians such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Yakovlev (his last interview), Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov, and Palestinian leaders including Sami Abu-Zuchri, press-secretary of HAMAS. In addition there are interviews with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rudolph Giuliani, Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Nathan Sharansky. Finally, there is testimony from family members of terror victims.

The filmmaker will present, introduce and discuss World War III:“The Terror Casino” with the audience and panel from 4pm to 6pm. Light refreshments will be served. Audio and video recording is permitted.

The National Press Club is located at 529 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20004, at the corner of 14th & F Street, NW, at Metro Center. Seating is limited. To reserve a seat, please email lajarvik@gmail.com with the subject line “RSVP Sinelnikov,” before noon Friday, September 26th.

This event is presented in cooperation with Clotho Studio and the Russian-American Arts Foundation.

Contact:
Leah Shamalov (NY)
Russian-American Arts Foundation
(212) 687-6118
lshamalov@aol.com

RSVP:
Laurence Jarvik (DC)
http://laurencejarvikonline.blogspot.com
(202) 390-8676
lajarvik@gmail.com

Memo to Obama: Stop Wall Street Bailout to Win November Election

No links today, this is my own thought.

Obama must show that he is not part of the bipartisan establishment consensus in Washington that got the US economy into the mess it is now in by opposing any bailout legislation the Bush administration attempts to rush through Congress. No problem supporting some sort of temporary quick-fix to tide things over until after the election--but that 700 billion to 1 trillion from Secretary of the Treasury Paulson is a poison pill for the Obama campaign.

The time for bipartisanship is over. What people want now is a choice--change or more of the same. That means a partisan campaign. It is not up to Obama to fix the problem UNTIL HE IS ELECTED. He should not help Bush--and therefore McCain--fix the problem before the elections.

IMHO, if he agrees to any bailout package, he will lose in November. Because he undercuts his campaign message of change.

Further, he may even have to pull the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington tactic and threaten to filibuster any more attempts by Bush (and McCain) to shovel US taxpayers' cash into their pockets on the way out the door.

He can come up with a plan to save the economy--but the deal must be that Obama has to be elected first. Don't let Bush/McCain squirm through an opening of the emergency bailout. There has been far too much use of "emergency" legislation from 9/11 to the present. The era of "emergency" is over. Now we're going to have some rational planning.

As far as McCain goes--he can join Obama in opposition, which supports Obama's leadership credentials, or he can side with Bush. It is a lose-lose choice for McCain.

However, Obama cannot afford to be another compromising, bipartisan, establishment, go-along get-along Washington politician. Whatever short term gain or payoff to Democratic cronies is in the Bush bill, it is not worth passing. This is Obama's "moment of truth," where the American public can see whether he has what it takes to be President.

He may have to stand up to his own party to filibuster the bill--that's good, too. But he must beat Bush, beat Paulson, beat Wall Street, and beat McCain in order to win this November.

Americans want a leader who takes the time to get things right, not another Bush rush job that ends in disaster--like handing out credit cards after Hurricane Katrina...

Christopher Hitchens on Bernard Henri-Levy

From today's NY Times Book Review:

One or two of his chapters can be described as almost an interior monologue or stream of consciousness, where the son of a man who fought for the Spanish Republic is having trouble with a redefinition of what the verses of the “Internationale” call “the wretched of the earth.” Not everyone will share in the historic misery of this experience, of having seen Cambodia or Zimbabwe, say, turn into something rather worse than a negation of the liberating dream.

But for those who have, as well as for those who haven’t, Lévy provides a good register of what it felt like. And then there is this:

“I’m convinced that the collapse of the Communist house almost everywhere has even, in certain cases, had the unexpected side effect of wiping out the traces of its crimes, the visible signs of its failure, allowing certain people to start dreaming once again of an unsullied Communism, uncompromised and happy.”

If this is not precisely true, even of those nostalgic for “Fidel,” apologetic about Hugo Chávez, credulous about how “secular” the Baath Party was, or prone to sympathize with Vladimir Putin concerning the “encircling” of his country by aggressive titans like Estonia and Kosovo and Georgia, still it does contain a truth. One could actually have gone further and argued that the totalitarian temptation now extends to an endorsement of Islam ism as the last, best hope of humanity against the American empire. I could without difficulty name some prominent leftists, from George Galloway to Michael Moore, who have used the same glowing terms to describe “resistance” in, say, Iraq as they would once have employed for the Red Army or the Vietcong. Trawling the intellectual history of Europe, as he is able to do with some skill, Lévy comes across an ancestor of this sinister convergence in a yearning remark confided to his journal by the fascist writer Paul Claudel on May 21, 1935: “Hitler’s speech; a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe.”

Christopher Hitchens on Pakistan

From Slate:

The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means "land of the pure." It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind). As I once wrote, the country's name "might as easily be rendered as 'Akpistan' or 'Kapistan,' depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or Kashmir is to the fore."

I could have phrased that a bit more tightly, since the original Pakistani motive for annexing and controlling Afghanistan is precisely the acquisition of "strategic depth" for its never-ending confrontation with India over Kashmir. And that dispute became latently thermonuclear while we simply looked on. One of the most creditable (and neglected) foreign-policy shifts of the Bush administration after 9/11 was away from our dangerous regional dependence on the untrustworthy and ramshackle Pakistan and toward a much more generous rapprochement with India, the world's other great federal, democratic, and multiethnic state.

Recent accounts of murderous violence in the capital cities of two of our allies, India and Afghanistan, make it appear overwhelmingly probable that the bombs were not the work of local or homegrown "insurgents" but were orchestrated by agents of the Pakistani ISI. This is a fantastically unacceptable state of affairs, which needs to be given its right name of state-sponsored terrorism. Meanwhile, and on Pakistani soil and under the very noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganized and protected al-Qaida. Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

Bernard Henri-Levy on Afghanistan

Discussing a controversy over photographs of dead French troops published in Paris Match, in a column from Gulf News:

First, the Taliban's state of mind: the fact that they hate the French only a little less than they hate the Americans, and that the clever minds who thought they might get into the Taliban's good graces by keeping a low profile and being discreet and ingratiating - even collaborating with them - were sadly mistaken.

Then there is the fact that they are not "resistance fighters", "religious students" or anything of the sort. Instead they are motivated by cynicism, choosing to celebrate a recent military success by displaying trophies and parading around as in ancient times.

We also learn - and this is hardly without importance - that they are what we call these days good communicators, able to stage their own photographs, posing for the camera (especially since the photographer says that is exactly what happened, and there is no reason to doubt her word).

Finally, those of us who wanted it neither heard nor said, or who considered it a state secret, are reminded that for years and years, the French have had elite commandos fighting shoulder to shoulder with the American Special Forces in the Afghan mountains.

The report reminds these people - and this is key - that France is fighting a war over there, a real war that also happens to be as undeclared as the war it fought in Algeria 50 years ago.

BHL will speak again in Washington at the French Embassy's La Maison Francaise on September 20th at 8 pm. The event is sold out, more information here.

Inside Eastern State Penitentiary

Last weekend, someone I know and this blogger visited Eastern State Penitentiary in Philaldelphia, Pennsylvania--not for the "Terror Behind the Walls" haunted house experience, but for the daytime tour of America's oldest penal institution. It was here that among the most progressive of America's founding fathers conducted the first experiment to improve human behavior by eliminating torture and beatings of prisoners.

Instead, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and a group of Pennsylvania Quakers decided to use isolation in solitary confinement to induce reflection, repentenance, and a new way of life for inmates. The experiment began in 1790 in the Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail. In 1821, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons succeeding in persuading the Legislature to fund the Eastern State Penitentary for 250 prisoners. Architect William Strickland, a namesake of someone I went to college with, was fired from the job in 1822, replaced by John Haviland. In 1826, the Marquis de La Fayette, one of my favorite historical characters, visited the construction site. In 1829, the prison finally opened.

Many leaders believe that crime is the result of environment, and that solitude will make the criminal regretful and penitent (hence the new word, Penitentiary). This correctional theory, as practiced in Philadelphia, will become known as the Pennsylvania System.

Plans are finalized to prohibit all contact between prisoners at Eastern State, the world's most ambitious Penitentiary, now nearly ready for its first inmates.

Masks are fabricated to keep the inmates from communicating during rare trips outside their cells. Cells are equipped with feed doors and individual exercise yards to prevent contact between inmates, and minimize contact between inmates and guards.

Prisoners were permitted to read only one book--the Bible--by the light from a single round skylight designed to resemble the eye of God looking down on the person in the cell below, a porthole through which one could observe heaven--and repent.

In 1832, the prison was visited by a French delegation that included Alexis de Tocqueville. The so-called "Pennyslvania System" became a model for European penology, leading to the construction of similar buildings across the world. But one foreign visitor was appalled by what he saw in the supposedly humane and progressive institution--Charles Dickens. He wrote in his American Notes:"The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong...."

In 1913, Eastern State officially ended the "Pennsylvania System." Later prisoners included Al Capone, who spent eight months in a luxurious "single" furnished with rugs, lamps, and a radio (ordinary prisoners shared cells after 1913). Riots caused by overcrowding and poor conditions gave the model prison a bad name in the 1930s, it was closed in 1970.

Now, with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the William Penn Foundation, among other sponsors, the prison is run as a museum and night-time Disney-style attraction. It is well worth a visit...a living example of how the road to hell is sometimes indeed paved with the very best of intentions.

Happy Ramadan!

It's a month of prayer and fasting. Wikipedia has the full story of the holiday, here.

Parag Khanna's Second World

A little bird told me that Wired magazine will run an article on Parag Khanna, author of .

Like Fareed Zakaria, Khanna is a former insider at the Council on Foreign Relations, so his views tend to reflect those of the Eastern Establishment, which makes them significant. The bird told me about Khanna because Khanna thinks we are entering a new Middle Ages, rather than Fukuyama's End of History. And if this is the Middle Ages, that makes Central Asia very important again--no doubt because it was named as such by Sir Halford Mackinder, author of the "Pivot Point" theory of world history, where control over center of the Eurasian landmass would lead to control of the world. And Khanna seems to think that control is headed towards--China, as he explained in an excerpt from his book published in The Guardian (UK):

It is difficult to find a westerner who does not intuitively support the idea of a free Tibet. But would Americans ever let go of Texas or California? For China, the Anglo-Russian great game for control of central Asia was neither inconclusive nor fruitless, something that cannot be said for Russia or Britain. Indeed, China was the big winner.

Boundary agreements in 1895 and 1907 gave Russia the Pamir mountains and established the Wakhan Corridor - the slender eastern tongue of Afghanistan that borders China - as a buffer to Britain. But rather than cede East Turkestan (Uighurstan) to the Russians, the British financed China's recapture of the territory, which it organised into Xinjiang (which means "New Dominions"). While West Turkestan was splintered into the hermetic Soviet Stans, China reasserted its traditional dominance over Xinjiang and Tibet, today its largest - and least stable - provinces. (Beijing has now accused the Dalai Lama of colluding with Muslim Uighur separatists in Xinjiang.) But without them, the country would be like America without all territory west of the Rockies: denied its continental majesty and status.

Every backpacker who has visited Tibet and Xinjiang in the past decade knows that the Chinese empire is painfully real: the western region's going concern is undoubtedly Chinese Manifest Destiny. With the end of the civil war in 1949, China endeavoured immediately to overcome the "tyranny of terrain" and tame the interminable mountain and desert landscapes with the aim of exploiting vast natural assets, establishing penal colonies and military bases, and expand the Lebensraum for its exploding population.

Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the misfortune of possessing resources China wants and of being situated on the path to resources China needs: Tibet has vast amounts of timber, uranium and gold, and the two territories constitute China's geographic gateway for trade flow outward - and energy flow inward - with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Decades of labour by the army and swarms of workers have paved the way for unchallenged Chinese dominance. The high-altitude train linking Shanghai and Lhasa that began service in 2006 represents not the beginning of Chinese hegemony, but its culmination.

Tibet and Xinjiang today set the stage for the birth of a multi-ethnic empire in ways that resemble nothing so much as America's frontier expansion nearly two centuries ago. Chinese think about their mission civilatrice much as American settlers did: they are bringing development and modernity. Asiatic, Buddhist Tibetans and Turkic, Muslim Uighurs are being lifted out of the third world - whether they like it or not.

They are getting roads, telephone lines, hospitals and jobs. School fees are being reduced or abolished to promote basic education and Chineseness. Unlike those Europeans who seek to define the EU as a Christian club, there are no Chinese inhibitions about incorporating Muslim territories. The new mythology of Chinese nationalism is based not on expunging minorities but granting them a common status in the paternalistic state: Uighurs and Tibetans, though not Han, are told they are Chinese.

"The Soviet Union collapsed because they experimented with glasnost prematurely, before the achieved unity among the peoples," explains a Chinese intellectual in Shanghai who studies central Asia. Large empires are maintained through a combination of force and law; and as recent weeks illustrate, China is determined not to waver.

Haunted Screens

Wired Magazine's New York Editor (and my college roommate at UC Berkeley--go Bears!) has a blog called Haunted Screens. No, it's not about which Horror pix to download from Netflix, at least not yet...(full disclosure, it links to this blog)

governmentbailout.com

Attention all Wall Street Moguls. The site is real! It exists! Here's the link:

http://governmentbailout.com

If only Lehman Brothers had known about this, they might have ended up like AIG...

British-Russian Diplomatic F-Word Controversy Continues...

Speaking of international crises, using clips from a BBC radio interview with Foreign Secretary David Milliband, Russia Today puts its own spin on whether Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov used the F-word in diplomatic communication... (I think he may have done):

Putin Speaks on Russian-Georgian War

On Russia Today, Russia's version of the Voice of America, Putin told a French journalist from Le Figaro that he blames the US for the Georgian war: