ninme

Posted by ninme at 9:31 am No Comments

The Sunday Times - Desperate McCain gets tough with attack on Obama’s character
As the Democrat builds a lead in key states, the Republicans are trying to fight back by focusing on his ties to a corrupt donor

Some McCain advisers believe it is better for outside groups to hit back with personal attacks on other “friends” of Obama, such as his pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright. But Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, went straight for the jugular yesterday with an attack on Obama for “palling around with terrorists”, a reference to his links to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground which took responsibility for explosions at the Pentagon and Capitol during the Vietnam war.

The New York Times yesterday chronicled Obama’s relationship with Ayers and concluded that the Democrat had “played down his contacts” with him, even if the two did not “appear to have been close”. In 1995 Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a left-wing project to raise school performance co-founded by Ayers, which distributed $50m funds to little effect. Obama later served on the board of the Woods Fund, an anti-poverty charity, with Ayers.

Ah right, the whitewash. Then there’s the CNN article that says — in passing, mind (”don’t worry, y’all can take our word for it”) — that National Review has debunked the “close relationship” along with the NYT, Chicago Sun-Times, etc.

Then, late last night:

CNN has now apparently changed its faulty article and substituted The New Republic for National Review in the list of publications supposedly debunking the notion of an Obama-Ayers relationship. That doesn’t solve the problem but only highlights it. To report fairly, shouldn’t CNN also note that National Review has offered evidence establishing a significant working relationship between Obama and Ayers?

Hah. Not to mention the fact that getting a quasi-pro-Obama statement from National Review isn’t exactly on par with yet another one from The New “Shock Troops” Republic. Back to The (London) Times article:

Independent groups are stepping up their attacks. The conservative Judicial Confirmation Network has started to run a $1m advertising campaign in bellwether states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, linking Obama to Rezko, Wright and Ayers — “a man who helped to bomb the Pentagon and said he didn’t do enough”.

Freedom’s Defense Fund, another independent group, has been running advertisements in Michigan which begin, “Meet Tony Rezko. One of Obama’s top donors”. They go on to list Rezko’s convictions before concluding, “You should know who Obama’s friends are”.

Grover Norquist, the influential conservative tax lobbyist, said there were more well funded attack advertisements on the way. “Obama comes from the most corrupt political machine in the United States,” Norquist said. “The McCain campaign should be saying, ‘Let’s take the guy’s head off. He is a crook’.”

Norquist believes McCain will eventually side with those advocating more negative attacks. “At the end of the day he’ll say, ‘Guys, I want to be president. One thing I believe about John McCain is that he really, really, really wants to be president.”

The resurrection of Palin, 44, in her first and only vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, her Democratic opponent, has lifted spirits inside the McCain campaign. Advice to “let Palin be Palin” has worked, they believe. Insiders say she is no longer as “tightly wound” as she was when conducting disastrous television interviews with Katie Couric, the CBS newscaster.

I dunno. I think the whole thing is weak sauce. Weak sauce in a way that looks worse than it is and is just going to turn people off. “Ooh look at these horrible attack ads he’s running when the NYT and CNN have proved they weren’t even close!”

Posted by ninme at 1:06 pm 1 Comment

Curtsies to Vanderleun for:

“…further evidence that our cultural engine is running on fumes. I have not put the numbers into the computer yet, but I have a theory that our culture is about to become so self-referential that it collapses under it’s own weight of ironic self-awareness and forms a giant black hole of metaness.”

(Oh gawd that made me laugh. While waiting at the bank. I think the lady across from us thought I’d gone insane with the pressure of banking at WaMu.)

Posted by ninme at 5:50 pm 7 Comments

Last night I saw this, at Ace of Spades: McCain Holding Back on Fannie and Freddie? Um… Wait For It

No confirmation on this, no tip, no hint.

But I know what he’s doing.

John McCain is waiting until the bill passes.

And then he will unleash the dogs of war.

And he will say, “I stayed away from making these partisan attacks, even though you lied ridiculously about me and your own attempts at ‘reform.’ I held back, because partisan attacks — even truthful ones — would harm our country and reduce the chances of getting a vital bill passed.

“Well, the bill is now passed. I put country first. You didn’t, and you lied on top of that. And now — only now that this crisis has been dealt with, to the extent we can — I’m going to give you a bit of straight-talk about Fannie, Freddie, my attempts to reform it, and your attempts to block reform on behalf of your big donors and friends in ACORN.”

Count on it.

And I was about to start a new post entitled: And Then Pigs Will Fly and Politics Won’t Suck. Then Bush signed the bill at 2 pm Eastern, and maybe:

I like the music. Anyone know what piece that is?

Posted by ninme at 11:04 am No Comments

The Corner:

Piper [Rich Lowry]
Of course, the other big winner last night was Piper. How adorable!

YES.

Posted by ninme at 10:36 am No Comments

Like I said at Phib’s place when the story broke, “‘The heat of her nights’? How do we know if the sex was any good.” Maybe they could repurpose that “heat” to mean a different kind of “hot”:

TMZ - CBS Newswooman Likes Saddams, Not Chagalls

Lara Logan — that hot homewrecking war correspondent for CBS — could be between Iraq and a real hard place for allegedly taking some loot from Iraq.

A video — shot by Broadcasting & Cable — shows pre-invasion portraits of Saddam Hussein hanging in Lara’s New York office. The New York Post points out, taking items out of Iraq could constitute theft. They say Immigration and Customs Enforcement is checking into it.

Lara’s been in the news lately for getting involved with, and knocked up by, a married guy while reporting from Iraq. They’re getting married. Logan didn’t talk to the paper, and a CBS rep says the allegation is “not worthy” of comment.

She has a poster (click the link to see it) of Saddam embracing adorable children hanging in her office? Is this irony?

Posted by ninme at 10:16 am No Comments

The Times - That rubbish they talk about the credit crunch
Capitalism is dead. America has gone socialist. US leadership has collapsed. Europe has shown the way. Oh yes? By Gerard Baker

For starters, acquiring the financial equivalent of a junkyard is not quite what socialists have in mind when they urge nationalisation.

In any case the actual outlay will not be anything like $700 billion. The Government is merely proposing to use that money to buy the putrid assets that now clog the balance sheets of banks. When the frozen credit markets thaw, it will sell them back. It’s unlikely the whole exercise will cost more than a couple of hundred billion dollars, which represents about 1.5 per cent of the US economy.

That leads us to the argument about capitalism’s terminal failure.

As I’ve argued before, the current collapse owes as much to government intrusion into the free market (the abominable hybrid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the regulatory requirement that banks lend money cheaply to those who couldn’t afford to repay it) as it does to the madness of free market savagery. There’s been precious little financial deregulation in the past ten years. The one big piece of liberalisation - the abolition in 1999 of Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banks - has been a lifesaver, enabling investment banks to save themselves by merging with, or becoming, retail banks.

Capitalism’s Cassandras might also want to consider that the crisis the current mess most closely resembles is the Swedish banking collapse of 1991-92. I don’t remember Sweden being reviled in those days as a model of heartless capitalism.

I just had Rush on. Ranting about Fred Barnes and the “idiotic” conservative line on this against government intervention. It was upsetting me. But Gerry, ahh, Gerry.

Posted by ninme at 5:35 pm 1 Comment

10 Debate Bingo Cards!

For the adults:

Telegraph Blogs - Sarah Palin V Joe Biden: the drinking game

Either way, guaranteed fun for the whole family!

Update: iPhone blogging!

Does Joe Biden have his eyes pinned back? Baybe it’s a Botox thing but something’s going on when he “raises” his eyebrows.

Scranton! Drink!!!

Biden looks like he’s really enjoying himself when Palin talks. I’m sure it’s affected, but sometimes with Biden I’d almost wonder if it isn’t.

I think Palen’s decided to answer every question by bringing up Alaska’s energy resource wealth. Even the gay marriage one. Okay not really, but still.

Scranton! Drink!!!

Oh GAWD he’s crying. He’s the Hillary. …So what does that do to the Hillary replacement rumour…

Is this really the most important election ever? I don’t think so, I think last time was.

Oh god. We’re doing this on NBC. Peggy Noonan?!

Okay, what is going on with the internet. Specifically (cuz who cares about the other stuff), NRO. Not only slow or failing, neither the Corner or Campaign Spot have been uploaded in 2 hours.

At this point I’m checking the blogs. Has no one else noticed the stretchy-eye thing?

I do with tho she’d wear a pinker lipstick. That neutral brown is too 90s.

Ah:

I’m Deeply Sorry [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

We have at least five times the traffic we had last Friday night and our server couldn’t handle it. Most of us couldn’t access the NRO because of it. I am sorry. Cnn.com has more money so it doesn’t happen to them. We will do our darnedest with our resources that it never happens again.

Posted by ninme at 4:25 pm No Comments

The Times - Russian admits massacre of the Tsar and his family was a Bolshevik crime

The ruling may not change the lives of the family, but it does represent a milestone: it is the closest that any post-Soviet government has come to accepting the criminal nature of Bolshevik rule.

Westerners may see that as a truism. But present-day Russia is still in the thrall of the iconography of Lenin. His image is emblazoned on schools and underground stations; his embalmed body is still visited in Red Square, even if not by the thousands of Socialist pilgrims who turned up in the Soviet days.

If the Romanovs were innocent of any crime, and if their death was an execution ordered from above, then Lenin could in theory be an accomplice to murder. It is at the very least the beginning of a debate. And Russian school textbooks will have to go into more detail about the last day of the dynasty.

The shootings occurred on July 17, 1918, in the cellar of a merchant’s family in Yekaterinburg. The Tsar’s family was told to stand as if about to be snapped for a group photograph. Their guards then shot them, but the Tsaritsa and the girls had jewels sewn into their corsets and these appear to have deflected the bullets.

This reportedly terrified the killers, who had been brought up to believe that the royal family ruled by divine right and was therefore somehow shielded by God. The bayoneting also failed to kill all the group, so they were shot in the head at point-blank range.

I picked a good time to marry a part-Russian!

/ambitious

Posted by ninme at 7:39 am No Comments

A couple weeks agp I had a story about this:

The Times - Gurkhas: the right thing to do
The High Court has shown that it understands the meaning of honour

(I think I’d prefer the High Court show it understands the meaning of the law, but whaddya gonna do.)

The shame was the spectacle of five of them, and the widow of another, fighting the legal system to overturn the ban, having fought for Britain in real battles from the Falklands to the Gulf. Gurkhas are Nepali citizens. For Britain, in 2008, to employ Nepali citizens to fight and sometimes die in its Armed Forces is a proud legacy of the two countries’ shared history, but also a peculiar one. No other Western power does anything quite like it. For these soldiers to be denied the right to live in Britain on retirement was simply unjust. The High Court acknowledged this yesterday. Not only that, Mr Justice Blake said Britons owed them a “moral debt of honour”.

The contrast with the court’s treatment of British Forces interpreters in Iraq could not be more stark. Like the Gurkhas, the interpreters worked for the Crown, expecting to be able to live at peace in their own country afterwards. Unlike the Gurkhas, the Iraqis became targets in their homes because of their British association. Some have now been resettled in the UK - but not those murdered by insurgents, or those who served before 2005. The cut-off date was upheld by the court last month, but it is meaningless, not least because the Iraq war began in 2003. It deserves the Gurkha treatment.

Posted by ninme at 7:31 am 1 Comment

Austria’s in the news again…

The Times - Austria, still hobbled by its history
The country’s old xenophobia has raised its head again. We can hardly be surprised, by Nigel Jones

Telegraph - Far-Right’s showing in Austria’s election is worrying, by Edward Lucas

The moral of the story:

The clear lesson for Europe’s mainstream politicians is to compete, not to collaborate. Voters like a choice between sensible parties. When they don’t get it, they will vote for silly ones.

Posted by ninme at 3:45 pm 1 Comment

Curtsy: American Digest.

The above goes really well with this, at Instapundit:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.” I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

Update: I showed Peter, and he immediately went looking or this.

Posted by ninme at 3:31 pm No Comments

Filed under “These Are the Clowns that Determine the Course of History”:

The Times - Congress is the best advert for dictatorship
We needed leadership. We got childish shenanigans on Capitol Hill. Thank goodness, Europe is finding its own way, by Camilla Cavendish

Welcome to the post-American world. It has come sooner than we expected. But as bank shares gyrate and the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake, the country I have loved for so long looks as parochial and myopic as a banana republic. Its politicians would apparently rather impoverish their own people - and ours - than risk their careers at the polls in five weeks’ time by being seen to “bail out greed”. The global financial system is out of control, and in Washington no one is in charge. No one has been in charge since Republicans and Democrats voted down the bank bailout Bill at 7.10pm on Monday night.

This woeful absence of leadership is a hammer blow to America’s status as a great power. I do not mean that America has ceded its economic dominance to Asia quite yet. China and India are still too dependent on the American consumer and foreign investment for that to happen. But America’s reputation may not recover from having forfeited leadership at the time when its leadership is most desperately needed to restore confidence in a panicking world. …

It is a depressing spectacle when the only men with vision are political appointees. Without Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, we would have had a crash many months ago. Mr Bernanke did his PhD thesis on the 1929-1934 Great Depression. Sadly, few politicians seem to have his grasp of history.

Few politicians have a grasp of much of anything, really.

The most flattering reading of the turmoil in Congress this week has been that this is democracy in action. Personally, I have never felt more attracted to benign dictatorship. But the reality is that politicians who are using their taxpayers as an excuse to do nothing are condemning those same taxpayers to suffer: savers, homeowners, employees and entrepreneurs struggling to make a go of the businesses that will create the wealth the world needs.

It should come as a desperate irony to every American that the only grown-ups today are in the capitals of Europe. Europeans are forging the way ahead as Washington’s childish sulk brings America to a new nadir.

Hmm. Meanwhile, here’s a good breakdown of the whole thing: Who caused “the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression?”

And, more general Clownage:

Wheat & Weeds: “everyone is a schmuck.”

Posted by ninme at 9:02 pm 6 Comments

Bailout fails.

The Wall Street Journal explains: Lehman’s Demise Triggered Cash Crunch Around Globe

Australia: down 5%

The Times - Asian markets nosedive after US banking bailout rejected

Asian dealing rooms opened on Tuesday with a massive deluge of selling as investor sentiment across the region reeled from Washington’s stunning rejection of a $US700 billion bailout plan for Wall Street.

With the benchmark Japanese, Australian and New Zealand stock indexes plunging nearly 5 per cent from the opening bell, traders in Hong Kong, which opened more than 5.5 per cent lower braced for similar carnage as dealing began later in the morning.

It was worse in Taipei, where the first half hour of trading saw the main index pummelled by more than 6.3 per cent. Tokyo shares, breaking through levels of support like a knife through butter, struck a year-low as uncertainty reigned.

A friend of mine, on Facebook (”very liberal”), put up a status indicating he was happy at the failed bill. A friend of his asked why he was against it, and he said, paraphrasing, “$700 billion? Where’s my cut.” I think he was trying to be slightly cute in order to avoid a tense political discussion with a friend, but meanwhile, the world’s economy is at stake, and I don’t think this is the time for a random American to be coming off as quite so, well, cute.

Meanwhile, in informed-opinion-land:

Andy McCarthy:

This was a terrible bill. To take just a few particulars, why is there no reform of the government interventions that got us to this point in the first place? Why aren’t Fannie and Freddie being wound down — even after we’ve now had to make explicit the implicit, disastrous government guarantee?

Joseph Calhoun: “Trust Capitalism”

Last week Goldman Sachs raised $10 billion in new capital in one day. They sold $5 billion in preferred stock and warrants to Berkshire Hathaway and also completed a secondary offering of common stock that raised another $5 billion. Friday, JP Morgan raised $10 billion in a secondary offering to help pay for the Washington Mutual takeunder. Both of these offerings were oversubscribed, meaning that the companies could have raised more capital if they wanted. There is not a shortage of capital for well run financial companies.

There is, however, a shortage of capital for companies that have acted irresponsibly with investor capital in the recent past. For some reason, our political leaders believe this is a failure of the market, but isn’t this what should be expected from rational investors? Given a choice, why would a rational investor allocate limited capital to the losers rather than the winners? If capital is really as scarce as it seems, isn’t it better for our economy if we make sure that it is allocated wisely?

The biggest bank failure in the history of the United States happened last Thursday night and by Friday morning, it was business as usual. The only difference was the name on the door and the losses suffered by those unfortunate enough to invest in Washington Mutual bonds or stock. The taxpayers didn’t lose anything and depositors didn’t lose anything, only investors. That is how capitalism works in case everyone has forgotten.

That would be Peter’s mortgage!

[Wheat & Weeds] tallies up the fors and againsts: Scoring The Bailout

And, last, but probably one of the more convincing arguments, Bubblehead (from whom I’ve borrowed half my title):

Michael Moore: Against the Bailout Warren Buffett: Supports the Bailout

I think I’d rather take my economic advice from Warren.

Posted by ninme at 11:08 pm 2 Comments

LGF - Pirates Die Strangely After Hijacking Iranian Ship

Posted by ninme at 9:55 am 1 Comment

Apparently Jeremy banks at AIG:

The Sunday Times - Don’t let banks lose your money – do it yourself, by Jeremy Clarkson

As you can imagine, the past two weeks have been most enjoyable. No wait. That’s the wrong word. I mean blood-in-my-feet, dead-faint-half-the-time terrifying.

As I sat there on that horrible Monday, watching the whole financial world on the brink of collapse, I thought back to all the midnight oil I’d burnt writing these columns, all the crappy hotels I’d stayed in while making various television shows. And how all of that revenue would be lost for a raft of reasons I simply didn’t understand.

Of course I made strenuous efforts to get my money out of AIG as soon as the scale of its problems became apparent. But it wasn’t possible. It had shut the fund in which I’d invested and it would remain closed for three months while it tried to sell the assets. “We need to do this in an orderly fashion,” said the man on the phone, calmly.

Inwardly I was screaming. I don’t give a shit about an orderly fashion, any more than a man in the trenches wants to look smart while running for his life. It’s my money. I gave it to you. You’ve squandered it on a Mexican’s house in San Diego and a stupid football team and that’s your problem. Not mine.

We went to poor beleaguered WaMu yesterday to deposit our paper-formatted wedding presents and add me to Peter’s account. I said I didn’t need a debit card yet but did she have any idea when the new signage would switch over, since if they’re going to just send me a new card that says JP Morgan Chase I might as well wait till then. She said she didn’t know, but judging from some of the stuff they’ve said about other things, it might take as long as sixth months. I wonder what it’ll look like.