Thoughts from Thomas Sowell:

The idea that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that no one would take it seriously.

* * * * *

Since risky investments usually pay more than safer investments, the incentive is for a government-supported enterprise to take bigger risks, since they get more profit if the risks pay off and the taxpayers get stuck with the losses if not.

* * * * *

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not deserve to be bailed out, but neither do workers, families and businesses deserve to be put through the economic wringer by a collapse of credit markets, such as occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Neither do the voters deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the notion that this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing.

* * * * *

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.

Phasing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make much more sense than letting politicians play politics with them again, with the risk and expense being again loaded onto the taxpayers.

Peter Robinson just now at The Corner:

A colleague here at the Hoover Institution spoke recently with a senior, and Democratic, member of the California congressional delegation. In the last week, she said, her office had received roughly 15,000 telephone calls, letters, and emails. How many favored the bailout?

Ten.

StrategyPage:

Defectors from North Korea believe that the Chinese will take over if it appears that the North Korean government is about to fall apart. The Chinese plan to install pro-Chinese North Koreans as head of a new "North Korean" government, and institute the kind of economic reforms they have been urging the North Korean to undertake for over a decade. The Chinese do not want North Korea to merge with South Korea, nor do they want North Korea to collapse (and send millions of starving refugees into northern China. China and South Korea both want North Korea to stay independent, and harmless. Thus China is willing to unofficially annex North Korea, knowing that the South Koreans would go along with this as long as the fiction of North Korean independence were maintained. South Korea won't admit this, but most South Koreans know that absorbing North Korea would put a big dent in South Korean living standards. That is more unpopular than any other outcome.

Also on North Korea: "The seals and UN IAEA monitoring equipment have been removed, by the North Koreans, from their partially dismantled Yongbyon nuclear reactor."

Steve Maich in Maclean's:

In October 2004, Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson published an article entitled "The Long Tail," in which he argued a novel hypothesis: the Internet had forever altered the way that businesses operate. Tiny niche audiences could now be serviced as efficiently as mass markets, and could generate prodigious profits.

The title referred to the normal distribution of sales on a graph: a short tall head (where a very few products generate the bulk of sales) that quickly drops away to a long and narrow tail of thousands of products that barely sell at all. Anderson argued that thanks to the Internet, with its limitless choice and easy searchability, people will start flocking into the long tail. . . .

Turns out . . . that although sales of obscure titles have risen, there are far more titles in the library that never sell at all. So, rather than the long tail getting fatter, it is getting longer and skinnier. More importantly, sales of those obscure movies and songs aren't coming at the expense of hits. In fact, more money is being channelled into the select few mega-blockbusters. . . .

So why did Anderson's thesis take off like wildfire? First, because it promised a radical shift. We're attracted to any compelling argument that promises a fundamental change in the way we view the world, and history is littered with examples of revolutionary ideas that turned out to be wrong.

But perhaps most importantly, it pandered to our egos. It appealed to our inner snob — the one that believes we're above the banal mainstream, and that the Internet will set us free to indulge our unique and sophisticated tastes. The truth is less flattering. We like to think we are, at heart, connoisseurs of Ingmar Bergman films. But most of us never get around to watching Smiles of a Summer Night because we were busy seeing Pirates of the Caribbean for the fourth time.

But I don't think so, and to the extent of my knowledge I agree with him. Quin Hillyer at The American Spectator's blog:

Ignoring the fact that House Republicans didn't so much boycott earlier meetings as that they were EXCLUDED from earlier meetings on the bailout, Nancy Pelosi had the gall a little while ago to go before cameras and say that they boycotted meetings in the week and that their non-participation made them, yes, quote "unpatriotic." . . . [L]et me be the first to say it: Pelosi is a rank damagogue, a despicable human being, a person who wants the United States to lose in Iraq, a bad-faith bargainer, and the worst excuse for a speaker of the House in history.

Steven Malanga paints a bleak picture of New Jersey's economic future:

The effect of all this is to make New Jersey a place where just a few businesses and residents pay the freight while so many others are on the public dole, in one way or another, that reform becomes virtually impossible. Of course, such a system cannot sustain itself very long before collapsing, as some businesses balk at expansion, others (like the newspapers) shrivel, and declining opportunities stifle job growth. That’s why Jersey now lurches from crisis to crisis.

I wonder if, once a certain percentage of a state's (or country's) population is receiving money from the government, that state's (or country's) decline becomes inevitable, though not necessarily permanent.

(Via Craig Newmark.)

That's Mark Hemingway's Jim Geraghty's [Man, what a stupid mistake—mg] assessment of this piece by Kathleen Parker, in which Parker urges Palin to relinquish her spot on the ticket:

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Parker's a solid McCain supporter (in this election anyway—I don't know whether she was always a fan). That she'd argue for such a drastic measure is noteworthy. Hemingway Geraghty suggests that it's a bit early to render a verdict:

Parker puts her finger on Palin’s real problem in these interviews. It’s not a lack of smarts or analytical ability. It’s that her past jobs as mayor, chair of the state’s oil and gas commission and governor have not required her to know about a slew of fields of knowledge that are pretty much required for a president or vice president. . . . What she did need to know – energy policy, tax policy, some social policy areas – she knows fine and can articulate her views at length.

The question is, how fast can Palin build on that knowledge base? What’s her learning curve?

The vice-presidential debate should provide some answers.

From an obituary of Martin Tytell, repairer of manual typewriters:

An idle gear, picked up for 45 cents on Canal Street, allowed him to make reverse carriages for right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew. He managed hieroglyphs, musical notation and the first cursive font, for Mamie Eisenhower, who had tired of writing out White House invitations. . . .

Mr Tytell felt that he owed to typewriters not only his love and his earnings, but his life. In the second world war his knowledge of them had saved him from deploying with the marines. Instead he spent his war turning Siamese keyboards into 17 other Asian languages, or customising typewriters for future battlegrounds. His work sometimes incidentally informed him of military planning; but he kept quiet, and was rewarded in 1945 with a medal done up on a black, familiar ribbon. . . .

Much of Mr Tytell’s work over the years was to examine typewritten documents for the FBI and the police. Once shown a letter, he could find the culprit machine.

It was therefore ironic that his most famous achievement was to build a typewriter at the request of the defence lawyers for Alger Hiss, who was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union. His lawyers wanted to prove that typewriters could be made exactly alike, in order to frame someone. Mr Tytell spent two years on the job, replicating, down to the merest spot and flaw, the Hiss Woodstock N230099. In effect, he made a perfect clone of it. But it was no help to Hiss’s appeal; for Mr Tytell still could not account for his typewriter’s politics, or its dreams.

(Via Laura Demanski.)

At Phi Beta Cons, Fred Schwarz writes that two recent books

make the same point: Sha Na Na was responsible for shaping — in fact, inventing — the sock-hop-’n’-malt-shop version of the 1950s that became a pop-culture staple in the 1970s. . . .

So move over, Hayek, Goldwater, and Buckley. Your contributions to conservative thought were helpful, but it was Sha Na Na that put Reagan in the White House.

Because few voters know politicians' records. Jay Nordlinger:

What’s depressing, to a person like me, is that Obama has mastered the trick of coming off as perfectly moderate — even when your career and thought have been very different. Listening to Obama last night, you would have taken him to be a Sam Nunn, David Boren type. No ACORN, no Ayers, no Wright, no community-organizin’ radicalism, no nothing. He certainly knows what it takes to appeal to people in a general election. Then, once he’s in — if he gets in — he will govern as far to the left as possible.

Juan A. Lozano for AP:

Wednesday marked a sad, shocking homecoming for thousands of Galveston residents who were allowed to return to their island community for the first time since Ike battered the city 10 days earlier.

The only things in abundance are the carcasses of cattle that drowned and now rot in fields outside the city, snakes, swarms of mosquitoes and piles of debris. People were warned not to return without tetanus shots — or rat bait.

City officials had hoped most of the 45,000 residents who fled before the Sept. 13 storm would stay away until more repairs could be made. They warned residents that if they returned, a lack of drinking water, reliable electricity, medical care and sewer service would be among the many hardships they would face. Officials on Wednesday extended the city's disaster declaration for 90 days.

"We didn't promise paradise when you came back here. We've got a lot of work to do. You've got a lot of work to do," City Manager Steve LeBlanc said.

Jay Nordlinger, in two posts:

I am no violet, and I know that politics is an ugly business. But I must say: The attempted destruction of Gov. Sarah Palin — by some of the worst forces in this country — is making me sick. . . .

[One reader writes,] “I am almost 60 and come from Massachusetts. In all my years, I have never seen anything like this, and don’t want to see it ever again. . . .”

Last week, I was talking to a friend of mine — a very warm and humane woman. We’ve been friends for years. I had been away, and we hadn’t talked politics — but then, we never do. We never had. She’s a liberal, of course — virtually everyone here in NYC is. And I never, ever bring up politics (with pretty much anyone — not worth the trouble) (and, of course, I do it professionally).

But she said to me, out of the blue, “What do you think of Sarah Palin?” And while I was drawing breath to answer, she said, “I hate her.”

That kind of took my breath away — because this friend of mine is no hater. But she said it with firm, horrible conviction. She said it with true emotion in her eyes. . . .

I consider myself a very patriotic person, and I have been teased or damned all my life for my pro-American views — particularly in academic settings. But, I’m sorry, this is, in many ways, a sick country.

Theodore Dalrymple:

Then I come across an advertisement for a telephone company that funds a literary prize. It features the most recent prize-winner, ending with a slogan that makes the death of Little Nell seem like a detached clinical report. ‘I am who I am because of everyone’, it says.

This suggests such grandiosity and self-congratulation masquerading as humility that I feel as though I am wallowing in treacle laced with nitric acid.

Terry Teachout finds a broader lesson in an exhibition of paintings by Richard Diebenkorn:

Why isn't Diebenkorn famous? Because his work doesn't fit into the standard narrative that many critics, scholars and museum curators use to explain the history of 20th-century art. . . .

The failure of much of the art establishment to acknowledge Diebenkorn as a major master is a tale whose moral is worth repeating each time you walk into a museum or a concert hall: Don't take historical narratives for granted. Yes, the best ones can make clarity out of chaos, but in art as in life, clarity can be deceiving, and history has a way of surprising anyone who suffers from the delusion that the world is anything other than messy. In the ever-relevant words of H.L. Mencken, "Explanations exist: they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every problem — neat, plausible and wrong."

Columnist Andrew Bolt draws a comparison to Aussie Pauline Hanson, who, when she entered politics in the 1990s, "couldn’t win a single friend in the media":

So fierce was the campaign to belittle Hanson that some reporters, years later, blushed in shame. . . .

By sneering at Hanson, they were sneering at the many Australians who shared her background, and shared her perfectly reasonable dismay that we were being divided by race.

It was that which led so many people much like Hanson to rally around an inarticulate woman of no great gifts other than courage. . . .

Sarah Palin is no Hanson. She is far smarter. She’s sharp enough to have beaten the corrupt mates network that dominated her own party, and to have run Alaska well. . . . Yet hear once again that snobbery of so many in the Left-leaning media. . . .

[A]s we saw here, the public has picked up on the media bullying. A Rasmussen poll this week reported 51 per cent of voters surveyed thought the press was trying to hurt Palin.

And guess whose side they then took? Other polls show droves of voters , especially women, have switched their support from Obama to Palin and the Republican ticket.

Once again, the media have fed what they tried to destroy, by insulting the readers they’re meant to inform. Hanson would understand.

Dave Barry answers questions:

Q: Dave, if elected will you still allow the residents of Miami to vote in official elections?
A: Are you insane?

Q: Do you have a platform, and what is your "position" on consenting moose? I think you know what I mean.
A: I think I do.

Q: The FDA just added a warning to all three erectile dysfunction drugs (cialis, viagra and levitra) - apparently they can cause Total Global Amnesia. Doesn't this give new (and unfortunate) meaning to the phrase "mind-blowing sex"? What will your administration do about this?
A: About what?

Because nowhere in his album inspired by 9/11 does Bruce Springsteen mention what happened that day, or the evil men who murdered almost 3,000 Americans, or the ideology behind the killing. Read the lyrics for yourself. The album could as well have been about a devastating earthquake or hurricane. In fact, I have no doubt that were Springsteen to write about Katrina he'd be quicker to place blame than he was in The Rising. And a few vague, brief mentions of "revenge" or "an eye for an eye" don't suffice.

Springsteen had no trouble chanting "Forty-one shots!" over and over in his song prompted by the shooting of Amadou Diallo. Why this sudden bashfulness when addressing the deliberate massacre of thousands?

Obscene. Craven. Unlistenable. Unforgivable.

I doubt that any new president can be fully prepared for the job. It's too large and broad a responsibility. Still, if "experience" is a valid criterion for judging a ticket, then the following seems to me a fair statement:

If McCain wins, we may, because of his age and accompanying health problems, soon afterward have a president who lacks sufficient experience to lead the country.

If Obama wins, we'll have, from his inauguration, a president who lacks sufficient experience to lead the country.

Civilization is a veneer. From Maclean's magazine (no link), issue of 8/18/08:

According to Jeremy Mercer's sardonic history of the death penalty in France, When the Guillotine Fell (Fenn), Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was inspired by revolutionary ideals when he changed the way criminals were executed. A quick, merciful beheading for all, not just nobles, was his aim. But commoners failed to agree: the guillotine's first use in 1792 angered spectators with its brisk efficiency, and they began shouting "Give me back my gallows."

An illustration of the decline of tv news, courtesy of Craig Newmark.

Clive Crook, blogging two weeks ago on the DNC:

Dave Barry is writing a column on the convention for National Journal. It is the most fearlessly truthful reporting I have seen so far. (What a ridiculous profession this is.)

From a piece by Byron York in the 6/30 issue of National Review:

We look to formative experiences to help us understand presidential candidates. Visit an aircraft carrier in wartime and you’ll learn something about John McCain. Pilots fly off the deck, and sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don’t. One day, McCain didn’t, and began the time as a prisoner of war that both revealed his character and launched his political career. No matter what he has done since, the U.S. Navy is the culture that made McCain, with his heavy emphasis on duty, honor, and country.

Community organizing is just as essential in understanding Obama. But what does it say about him?

The first thing is that he has a talent for, well, organizing. Everyone who worked with Obama says he was good at the job. And he has used the techniques he learned in Chicago to organize his own presidential campaign, going so far as to enlist Mike Kruglik to help start a “Camp Obama” program to instill organizing principles into Obama supporters. The result is a campaign that even Obama’s opponents admit is a very impressive operation.

But Obama’s time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for. . . .

But if Obama doesn’t have much to show for his years as an organizer, it’s fair to say that many of the people he touched revere him deeply. Remember what Loretta Augustine-Herron said: Obama had such a powerful presence that he made her believe he could do the job, even though there was little in his résumé to suggest he could. Does that sound familiar to anyone who has watched the Obama campaign? When hope is the product, Obama can sell it with the best of them.

When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not — perhaps could not — concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago’s problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land.

And what if he gets it? He’ll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He’ll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn’t expect much to actually get done.

From the afterword of Terry Teachout's forthcoming book Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

I thank my mother, who called me into the living room of our Missouri home one Sunday night and sat me down in front of the TV, on which Louis Armstrong was singing "Hello, Dolly!" on The Ed Sullivan Show. "This man won't be around forever," she said. "Someday you'll be glad you saw him." That was back when the public schools in my home town were still segregated, two decades after a black man had been dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope, and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had been wrought, my mother came to love Armstrong--and, just as important, to respect him--not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the goodness of the man who made it. I wrote this book so that she, and others like her, might know more about the man they loved.

Fascinating short piece on Alaska, by Lawrence Henry:

All the moose stories are true. The first time I rode in a car with a local, she had a moose heart in the back seat for her dogs. One of my AA buddies told a story about shooting a moose in the woods across the Cook Inlet as dark was falling, having to fly his float plane back before complete darkness socked him in, then flying back the next day to dress out the moose -- and not being able to find it. Every summer an old tame moose turns into a pet in metro Anchorage, and everybody knows it's going to turn out badly, because, when hunting season opens, someone will shoot it.

It's a tough place, and Sarah Palin's career in such a tough environment tells us vast volumes about her toughness and her character. Many Alaskans work two- or three-week shifts all day long, then get a week or ten days off. They line their windows with aluminum foil in the summer so they can sleep. P-Diddy to the contrary, there is plenty of crime in Alaska -- anywhere you find big money, you also find organized crime. In the seventies, a private investigator I knew helped bust up a Mafia ring that was skimming money off the original pipeline project. I heard some of his surreptitious recordings. They were scary, and they involved plotted murders.

Ben Stein talks with an Ethiopian immigrant in Minnesota:

"I have been here sixteen years. I came with nothing. I have a taxi now. I am in graduate school at the University of Minnesota. I have a wife and three kids. We have a house and two cars and air conditioning. I brought over my two brothers. They were grazing sheep. Now one is a chemical engineer and one is studying English literature. In the United States anything can happen."

I thought to myself, this is the real story of America, not Sarah Palin or Joe Biden. This taxi driver who found his dreams in the Twin Cities.

"Listen, I know people who talk bad about the United States," my driver said. "I tell them, if you work you can accomplish anything in this country. If you don't, there's something wrong with you, not this country. This country is the best country in the world. Everyone," and here he raised his voice and wagged his finger, "everyone in the world wants to come here. And they're right."

David Evans explains.

Like many others on the Right (and no doubt unlike many on the Left, who I'm sure were gleeful), I read with dismay this post, in which Josh Marshall details Peggy Noonan's apparent hypocrisy regarding Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign. I enjoy and admire Noonan's work, and I considered the column she posted that day among her most insightful (excepting the inexplicable inclusion of the word "bitch"). Marshall's transcript of Noonan's off-air remarks was damning.

Then I listened to the recording and realized that Marshall had been dishonest, or perhaps only sloppy, in at least two ways. First, he added an exclamation point ("No!") where it didn't belong (Noonan doesn't speak the word emphatically). Second and more important, he wrote "(cut away)" to separate the end of the on-air commentary and the start of the off-air conversation. He should've written instead "(section missing)" or something similar, because it's obvious from the recording that time has passed (no way to tell how much) between the on-air and off-air sections. Listen to it and you'll hear what I mean: after Chuck Todd's lead-in to commercial, the background noise changes abruptly, and the three speakers are in the middle of a conversation that plainly doesn't follow straight from Todd's closing on-air segue.

(The question arises, was the entire off-air discussion recorded? If so, did someone edit it so that Noonan would appear corrupt? And will we ever hear the rest?)

As to Noonan's comments, I find her subsequent explanation (added to the start of her above-linked column) believable, and her contrition sincere. I'm glad, because it means I wasn't wrong to trust her integrity, and I can again without embarrassment praise that column. Except for "bitch." Obscenity's fine in its place, but did she really think that word belonged there?

PC World supplies a list. I'd add four, not all of which work with Firefox's latest incarnation: Download Statusbar, Tab Mix Plus, AutoCopy, and my new favorite, CopyAllURLs.

That's Kevin Williamson's summary of the MSM's narrative of the Bush years. Williamson argues that the Right needs to separate itself

from some of the shortcomings of the Bush administration — shortcomings which we should be frank about. This opportunity is one of the reasons conservatives are so enthused about the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket. Conservatives have to own some of the things that have made President Bush unpopular. But some of them we don't.

"And as we try to make those distinctions," Williamson adds, "we can count on the media to resist the effort tooth and nail."

From National Review's issue honoring the life of William F. Buckley Jr., Christopher Buckley's tribute to his father.

A moving letter from a Marine general, via Donald Sensing.

Dave Barry:

The Palin choice is only one of the storylines that will be developing here over the next few days. Another one will be the Republicans' effort to contrast the tone and style of their convention with that of the Democrats, particularly Barack Obama's now-legendary acceptance speech, which he read from stone tablets, in which he promised the American public that if elected he would give them peace, jobs, healthcare, national security, energy independence, good schools, a clean environment, reduced government waste, lower taxes, the head of Osama bin Laden, giant underwater cities, time travel, and a magic flying zebra named "Sparkle" for every American pre-schooler regardless of income level.

Obama's speech was well received, but some critics felt that the stadium staging was a bit "over the top," especially the chariot race. In contrast, the Republicans plan to use a simple, spare podium made from an appliance carton, with no "show-biz" gimmicks other than a computerized electronic display that will enable the convention delegates to keep track, at all times, of the current, up-to-the-minute number of John McCain's houses.

John O'Sullivan (emphasis mine):

Two recent books - "The New Cold War," by Edward Lucas, and "The Return of History and the End of Dreams" by Robert Kagan - have argued persuasively that instead of an essentially peaceful world of cooperative democracies, we face a new struggle, global and ideological, between the Western democracies and self-confident and economically successful authoritarian states such as Russia and China. . . .

In fact, as the [Georgia] crisis revealed, the "Western democracies" were not one camp but two. . . . [T]he world is really a three-way struggle between authoritarians, national democrats, and global legalists. . . .

The global legalists were very quiet about Russia's breaking of the rules. The EU mission to Moscow led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy operated on the premise it was necessary to avoid condemning Russia in order to be a successful mediator. . . . In the end, the EU argument that pooling sovereignty leads to greater real power proved to be a sham - and worse. It led in practice to collective impotence and self-deception. There is a reason why that will always happen.

Global legalism rests upon the delusion that powers with the ability to assert their interest in some vital matter can be prevented from doing so solely by rules in which every state has a modest long-term theoretical investment. But as soon as a real crisis erupts - and Georgia is certainly such a crisis - the global legalists realize their legal restraints are incapable of restraining the rule-breaker. In order to maintain their legalist fiction, therefore, they have to deny or obfuscate the fact that the rules have been broken or that any particular state is responsible for the conflict.

If they have to take sides, they tend to support the stronger power since that makes it easier to solve the dispute in a way that seemingly conforms to the rules. Might is cloaked with Right in order to save the blushes of the "international community." If the rules are to have real impact, they must be backed by more than a legalist fiction.

In the Georgia crisis . . . [p]ractitioners of hard power were able to use soft power; advocates of soft power ended up wielding no power at all.

The passage in bold also helps explain the UN's repeated refusal to declare the Sudanese government's assaults in Darfur "genocide." If Sudan is committing genocide, then the UN is obligated to intervene (and as Michael Ledeen wrote last year, "Darfur can be saved quite simply, by destroying the helicopters and small fixed-wing planes used by the northerners for their attacks"). But because some member nations' objections would render any UN response toothless, the UN pretends that genocide isn't occurring. Thus the UN avoids looking ineffectual, and hundreds of thousands die.