Squaring the Culture

Yesterday Canadian TV reported that while Obama was blasting NAFTA in front of Ohio audiences, a senior member of his campaign called the Candian Ambassador and assured him that it was just campaign rhetoric, and not to pay attention to it. Today, CTV is sticking with its story, and names the senior member as Austan Goolsbee, Professor of Economics at University of Chicago’s Graduate Business School and Obama’s lead economic advisor since his Illinois Senate campaign.

TalkLeft, from the Democrats’ side, finds the story credible, observing that:

…journalism does not require suspension of common sense… Goolsbee refuses to deny the meeting. It is pretty clear that it did occur. And good for Obama for that.

Personally, I find the Democrats’ ability to excuse appalling behavior frightening. TL thinks Obama is violating his public persona and pandering for votes with outright lies — and he finds it commendable that he’s warning the Canadians about it. This has the sound of a man catching his wife in bed with the neighbor, and saying “Maybe now I’ll get my lawnmower back;” he seems to have missed the point. I’m wondering when the author is going to notice that Obama is cynically lying through his teeth when he promises hope and change, and show disgust for the deficient character it displays, not to mention the deep-seated disdain for the voting public. Of course, TalkLeft bills itself as “Liberal coverage of crime-related political and injustice news;” this isn’t crime, exactly, but I suppose it fits well enough.

Damozel at The Moderate Voice gets it, though:

If CTV’s report is accurate the question becomes: Did Obama’s campaign adviser mislead a Canadian official or did Obama mislead American voters who watched Tuesday’s debate?

A presidential candidate’s capacity for truthfulness is at stake.

RedState has a good analysis by Moe Lane and a newsreel containing a pretty complete summary, best summary I’ve seen yet. Captain Ed also covers it well at Hot Air, his new mooring.

Fairness demands that I note that Ms. Clinton’s campaign is also reported to have contacted the Canadians at a lower level, with the same message. However, this sort of cynicism would be nothing new for Ms. Clinton.

Hot Air this morning highlights this article from the Economist, which draws attention to the rising populist tone from both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail (yes, she’s still officially in the race, for what that’s worth). The Brits, from their objective vantage point on the other side of the Big Pond, are seeing somewhat more clearly than American voters. The emphasis in the first paragraph is mine:

The sad thing is that one might reasonably have expected better from Mr Obama. He wants to improve America’s international reputation yet campaigns against NAFTA. He trumpets “the audacity of hope” yet proposes more government intervention. He might have chosen to use his silver tongue to address America’s problems in imaginative ways—for example, by making the case for reforming the distorting tax code. Instead, he wants to throw money at social problems and slap more taxes on the rich, and he is using his oratorical powers to prey on people’s fears.

Mr Obama advertises himself as something fresh, hopeful and new. But on economic matters at least he, like Mrs Clinton, has begun to look a rather ordinary old-style Democrat.

Given Obama’s personal history and training in radical community organizing, using his oratorical skill to prey on peoples’ fears is what we should expect. I’m pleased that observers are noticing the pattern, but will it be enough? The key to defeating Obama in the fall will be to identify him accurately as the cynical radical that he is, and not allow him to paint himself disingenuously as an optimistic centrist, which he is not.

As expected, Obama’s “new tone” amounts to nothing more than the same, tired class warfare rhetoric we’ve come to expect from the Democratic party. Obama’s public policies are nothing new, he just talks more smoothly. But his rhetoric will change rather dramatically in the general election. Let’s be sure to clip and recycle his rhetoric from the primaries, which are more like what we can truly expect from Mr. Obama.

This is ugly.

Barack Obama is assuring Ohio voters who blame high unemployment on NAFTA that he’ll back out of NAFTA if we can’t renegotiate “core labor and environmental standards.” Meanwhile, according to Canada TV, high-level staffers from his campaign assured Canada’s Ambassador to the US that it was campaign rhetoric, and he should not take it seriously.

Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama’s campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.

The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

Politics as usual? Certainly, but isn’t Barack Obama running a campaign based on being a “different kind of politician?”

Obama’s campaign issued a non-denial denial:

Late Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign said the staff member’s warning to Wilson sounded implausible, but did not deny that contact had been made.

“Senator Obama does not make promises he doesn’t intend to keep,” the spokesperson said.

Obama, we learned yesterday, spent his early career learning how to leverage peoples’ fears to spur community action, a tactic employed by leftist “community organizers.” It now appears he may be using this tactic to garner support. A large number of voters, disturbed by fears that partisan animosity may balkanize America, look to Obama in the hope that he is, as promised, a different kind of politician. If it’s true that he’s practicing politics as usual behind the scenes, it is a very big deal, indeed; if news of this gets to enough of his supporters, his support could deflate. If this story gains legs, it will hurt Obama badly.

Captain’s Quarters notes the cynicism of the Obama campaign as well, and Sister Toldjah has the denials from the Canadian embassy and the Obama camp.

Those making the claim that we need to cut development drastically to stop human-caused global climate change have been saying “the debate is over” about three, basic items for about 20 years:

• The earth is warming
• Man is causing it
• We have to cut back development to stop it

That there’s no debate used to be almost true of the first point. It’s never been true of the other two, though it was closer about 10 years ago: a growing number of scientists dispute how much man is the cause of the warming, pointing to factors like solar effects on clouding, ocean currents, and the earth’s rhythmic cycles; and sensible people everywhere note that even the most drastic plans to cut back will not affect global temperature enough to matter, and we just have to get used to warmer weather. However, on the first point — that the earth is warming — there’s been very little serious disagreement.

Until recently.

Today, that’s on the table, too. Two things have happened:

1. The earth’s measured temperature stopped rising around 1998, and this year it fell dramatically. There hasn’t been any warming for 10 years, so far as we can tell.
2. It’s becoming apparent that much of the warming we’ve seen in the last 30 years has been because of bad measurements.

Temperatures Rising?

First item first. Yesterday, Hot Air noted a blog entry at DailyTech showing that all four of the global temperature tracking agencies had updated their 2007 data, and that global temperatures had fallen dramatically.

This is not surprising to some of us who have been following the reports, though, because in actual fact, global temperature readings have not risen since 1998. Take a look at this graph showing the readings of the four global tracking agencies (two by satellite, two from ground stations) since 1979. This was adjusted through a smoothing algorithm to eliminate some of the “noise,” but you can find the original graph at the link provided above:

All the measurements agree, there’s been no increase in global temperature since 1998 (all but one say we’ve cooled since 1998), and this year, we took a dive. Meanwhile, global CO2 continues to rise. Something other than CO2 seems to be driving the weather.

Stations Going Dark

Now look at the second item, that our measurements are broken. It’s not as though we can slip a thermometer under the globe’s tongue and wait five minutes in order to get a reading. Measuring the earth’s temperature is tricky. It involves taking temperature readings at thousands of weather stations around the globe, averaging them intelligently, and noting trends in the measurements. The temperatures have to be adjusted for factors that affect the readings, like urban heat island effects (cities get hotter), lighting, altitude, and such. The outcome of massaging the data depends a lot on who’s doing the massaging, and how.

When the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1992, a large number of weather stations from that nation stopped reporting altogether. The Soviet Union’s weather stations constituted a large percentage of the Arctic weather stations in the data sample, because Russia’s got a longer Arctic border than anybody else. No adjustment was made for the loss of those stations — and suddenly, around 1990, the earth’s temperature readings showed dramatic warming. The AGW crowd likes to speak of the 1990s as “the hottest decade ever.” but that might just be because of the loss of a large number of cold-weather stations. It would be like measuring the average height at the elementary school over a number of years, and suddenly one year the kindergarten class got cut.

Look at this graph(1) produced by Prof. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, in Ontario:

That sharp decline in measuring stations corresponds closely to a sharp rise in temperature readings. Has anybody adjusted for the loss of stations in 1990? Not that I know of.

Millennium Bug

In August last year, science bloggers noted a sharp anomaly in NASA’s surface temperature readings around January of 2000. They had to reverse-engineer NASA’s graphing algorithm, since NASA refused to cooperate, but after reproducing NASA’s results, they notified NASA that they’d discovered a Y2K bug in the algorithm. NASA quietly adjusted their data the next posting cycle… and suddenly, 1998 was not the hottest year on record anymore.

As a result of the changes, four of the 10 hottest years on record now occur in the 1930s, whereas only 3 occur in the last 10 years.

Broken Thermometers

A recent comment on my blog by Evan Jones (you have to click on the link and then scroll down, it’s the long one at the bottom) reintroduced me to the work of Anthony Watts, whose blog site, Watts Up With That?, seems to come up every time I google climate change issues. Watts is a retired weatherman who does science for fun. Guys who do science for fun are responsible for a surprising number of epochal changes in science, things like genetics and relativity. I don’t know if Watts is in that league, but he’s making quite a stir in climate science these days.

Watts leads a citizen task force that’s evaluating just how sound our surface temperature readings have been, and what they’ve found so far is alarming: most of the weather stations were established in rural areas to avoid urban heat sources, but since around 1980, suburbia has crept out around them. They’re finding and photographing reading stations located just a few feet from the exhausts of air conditioners, located on asphalt roofs, located next to parking lots; this is in addition to the recognized urban heat island effect, which itself might be underestimated. None of Watts’ discovered problems are adjusted for by surface reading agencies. So far, the net bias of stations reviewed by the project suggests readings 2 degrees C high. Since the rise in global temperatures in the 20th century is less than 1 degree C, this bias could easily account for all the global warming we’ve been seeing… just because suburbia encroached on the thermometers.

Check out this photograph from Watt’s slide show. I’ve circled the sensor stand in the photo, or you might miss it.

The issues here are the concrete, the gravel, the cinder block building, and the boat. These apparently are all new additions since the placement of the sensor stand. As Evan Jones’ comment pointed out, all you have to do to raise the temperature of a greenhouse is to put a big rock in it; exposed masses with high specific heat, like concrete, steel, and stone, absorb solar radiation, hold it, and radiate it out slowly. Thus, building a concrete-and-steel cell phone tower and a cinder block building next to the sensor drives the temperatures from that sensor up, and keeps them artificially high.

So far, Watt’s project has surveyed only a fraction of all the weather stations, and only in the US; however, the US weather collection system is regarded as the Cadillac of the world’s systems (Australia’s may be just as good or better). Similar effects, or different biases, could be found elsewhere.

The verdict seems to be that the earth may not be warming at all. Global warming is, as of this writing, not a clearly established fact.

The past 20 years or so have seen activists attempting to shame and bully the entire world into turning political power over to them in order to stave off the destruction of the planet via the greenhouse effect. It’s a remarkable and powerful attempt, and if truth and learning survive the onslaught (which is still very much in doubt), will serve as a cautionary tale for centuries about how vigilant we must be to protect our liberty.

(1) Horner, Christopher, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming, Regnery Publishing, 2007, p. 112.

---

Update: Anthony Watts, whose project I highlighted in this post, responded in the Comments section and corrected a few items. Following the links in his comments, I found a much better illustration of the effect of suburban growth on weather sensor readings at the web site for his project. Here it is. The graphs are temperature readings over the past 100 years at each of the two stations, both of which have been reporting from the same location for the entire period, as reported by GISS (NASA). Notice the difference in the readings over time between the station that has been maintained properly, and the one around which growth was permitted:

The AP just announced that William F. Buckley, long venerated as the Grand Old Man of American Conservatism, died in his home in Stamford, CT this morning. He was suffering from emphysema. Buckley was 82.

I remember watching Buckley on The Firing Line with my parents as a teenager. We were liberals, but we acknowledged Buckley as the best of the other side. When, as a young man, I managed to escape the cold embraces of the Dark Side, I looked to Buckley as an intellectual model. He was a sensible, decent man, and a man of honor. He will be missed here, and enjoyed in heaven.

A Communist??? What is this, 1953? Are we the Un-American Activities Committee? First he was a Muslim, now he’s a Communist? I know, I know, but please, bear with me…

I just naturally tend toward extremes, so I deliberately temper myself when I see something that strikes me as alarming. Consequently, I didn’t say a word when Hot Air posted the picture from a Fox News broadcast that showed one of Barack Obama’s campaign offices with a Cuban flag on the wall, with a stenciled image of revolutionary murderer Che` Guevara on it. Remember this?

I just figured that office would be getting a call from the Mother Ship sometime soon. Not that Obama would be all that irritated by it, but I didn’t figure it meant much besides some hard lefties were working for Obama.

I also pretty much ignored it when Politico reported that Obama had sat down with 60s radicals Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers in a local Chicago political meeting. Those are two very scary, unrepentant terrorists, but it was 1995, he met with them once, they actually had clout in the neighborhood (both teach at the University of Chicago now), and I figured there was not going to be any serious fallout to the Obama campaign. Yes, if it had been McCain and Rev. Bob Jones it would have been front-page news on the Times for 3 days at least, but the press flacks for the Democrats, we all know it, and that’s that.

Then, I noticed this addition from Hot Air. See-Dubya there received links from readers: one showing a conference in 2002, where Obama and Ayers spoke together as two members on a panel discussing “Intellectuals in a Time of Crisis,” the other showing Obama joining the Weatherman duo giving testimonials for Rashid Khalidi, an Israel-hating Columbia professor, in 2005. And Craig Kincaid at Accuracy In Media reports that Obama and Ayers both serve on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.

Showing up on the same panels a few times doesn’t make Obama and the Weathermen friends or associates, though the Woods Fund contact suggests they’re at least acquaintances. Sitting on the same panels does, however, suggest that Obama thinks like those two on more than one issue, which is why their paths are crossing. (I suppose it’s not theoretically impossible that Obama was called to balance other views, but balance isn’t often among the stated values of gatherings that invite ex-Weathermen, so I regard this as unlikely.)

I detest two, contradictory things: sleaze attacks and dishonest politicians. They’re contradictory because you have to read and study sleaze attacks to find dishonest politicians. When I receive a report of some background dishonesty, I research it, and if it’s false (most of them are), I get angry and write nasty letters back to the source. I’ve rejected several baleful mailings about Obama’s past that were manifestly sleazy, not to mention provably false.

But in the light of the incidents above, I’m now paying closer attention to several articles I’ve run across, which appear to be both accurate and relevant:

Lisa Schiffren at National Review discusses the phenomenon of “red diaper babies” (that is, 60s children of Communist activists,) and the likelihood that Barack Obama is one of them. She does not make the case, she just describes the phenomenon: communist activists in the late 50s and early 60s choosing to marry cross-race as an attack on bourgeois society. It’s not implausible, as Barack’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a radical activist at the University of Hawaii, having been stimulated in high school by two teachers who were reputed to have been Communists (the students referred to the hallway between their rooms as “anarchist ally”), and by a Unitarian church that sported liberal theology. See these two snippets from Tim Jones of the Chicago Tribune (here and here), that dance around the question, calling Dunham a “free thinker” and the two teachers that influenced her “members on the staff that encouraged us to think about a lot of things.” This article from the same author fills in detail, pegging the teachers as radical for the times, although by modern standards they seem like run-of-the-mill leftists.

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media describes an important mentor of Obama’s teenage years, who was a well-known Communist poet. Obama, in his book Dreams From My Father, writes about “a poet named Frank,” who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of “hard-earned knowledge” and advice. Frank Marshall Davis, identified as a member of the CPUSA by the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, appears to have mentored young Barry from 1971 – 1979, when he left Hawaii for college. Davis’ biographer D. Kathryn Takara cites Davis’ “acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world” and how he held forth on American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. Professor Gerald Horne, contributing editor to the Marxist publication Political Affairs, muses about how future generations will note the significance of the relationship between Davis and Obama.

I’m particularly interested in Obama’s period of community activism in Chicago in the 1980s. His employer was the Gamaliel Foundation. Gamaliel, an activist organization strangely merging the teachings of Marxist strategist Saul Alinsky with those of the Apostle Paul, operates with that same sense of religious destiny that we’ve noticed in both Barack and Michelle Obama’s speeches. Alinsky counseled tapping anger as a motivator for radical change; Gamaliel’s Greg Golluzzo notes Obama’s energy in applying this tactic:

Barack was in the community… talking to the people, sensing their passion, their anger and he wanted to create an opportunity for them to express that anger and resolve the problem.”

Ryan Lizza in The New Republic, cites another of Obama’s mentors, radical organizer Mike Kruglic, admiring Obama’s skill at this sort of manipulation:

He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.

Kincaid also discusses Obama’s ties with international Socialist organizations. While Obama is not a member of any of these, he accepts the backing of Democratic Socialists of America and backs initiatives championed by Socialist International. These contacts, along with those of the Party of European Socialists, lurk behind the Democratic party’s eagerness to make the United States “become good citizens of the world community.” Invariably this means for the US to cooperate with neo-Marxist initiatives as put forward in the UN. This explains Obama’s sponsoring of the Global Poverty Act, which, based on the UN’s Millennium Declaration, forces the US to commit .7% of its GNP toward foreign aid. (The US, alone among the world’s nations, may already come close to this through private charity, a phenomenon ignored by the UN’s radicals.) This will likely do for the world’s poor what Johnson’s War on Poverty did for the poor of the US — enslave them to the dole, enrich the bureaucrats who administer the programs, and waste an unimaginable amount of money, making the problem worse while driving taxation through the roof.

Where does this leave us? If all the facts cited here are accurate, here’s the complete picture:

Barack Obama was born of Communist activists, mentored by Communist writer and activist, spent his college days hanging around radical activists (this from Obama’s own book), worked as a radical community organizer learning the radical tactics of Alinsky, kept contact with radicals through the years, and today lends his political skill to the international goals of radical activists, and has radicals working on for his campaign. Oh, and he believes opposition to the aims of radical activists will fail because the radicals embody the will of God.

I’m beginning to wonder whether simply pointing to the National Journal’s assessment of Obama’s voting record as the most liberal in the US Senate is strong enough. It appears to me that Mr. Obama embodies the fondest dreams of radical socialist organizers over the years — that someday, a candidate with enough broad, personal appeal would rise to lead the United States away from its defense of individual liberty, and into whole-hearted support of World Socialism. It’s even plausible — not proved here, certainly, but plausible — that Obama has trained his entire life for this role, and that he’s literally a plant from within the world of radical Marxism to help achieve their goal of world domination by removing the opposition of Marxism’s only effective enemy — the libertarian instincts of the United States.

A fairly thorough but concise history of Obama’s political synthesis can be found here.

---

Update: A companion piece showing Obama’s radical connections from his community organizer days until his run for the Senate can be found here.

Putting the final nail in the US intelligence community’s already-closed coffin, the BBC reported yesterday that British Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Simon Smith had presented evidence demonstrating that Iran’s bomb project continued well past 2003. Responding to the unsurprising Iranian knee-jerk claim that the documents presented to the IAEA were forgeries, Smith observed that

material presented to the IAEA in Vienna came from multiple sources and included designs for a nuclear warhead, plus information on how it would perform and how it would fit onto a missile.

Powerline comments, and I observe that while most of us had little doubt, this pretty much solidifies the case that the NIE was a partisan hack job, and that hold-overs from the Clinton administration continue to poison the proper functioning of government.

The true price of allowing the Clintons access to the reins of power goes beyond human ken.

I happened across an article published a few weeks ago in the New York Post that suggested that the reason underlying the current foreclosure crunch is leftist citizen activism and government regulation. The Post article, written by Stan Liebowitz, Economics Professor from the University of Texas School of Business, blames activists who insisted the government stop lenders from “red-lining” poor neighborhoods, and relax standards for lower-class and lower-middle-class home buyers.

As an economic conservative, this explanation appeals to me a great deal; liberal activism is prone to calling sound business decisions “racist” because those decisions disproportionately affect minority groups who are over-represenetd among the poor, even when there’s no racism intended. And certainly, government meddling invariably screws things up. But I didn’t want to jump on the bandwagon without verifying.

Well, now I’ve researched it, and I think he’s right on the money.

Liebowitz points to a 1992 study performed by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank that suggested (based on what Liebowitz calls faulty methodology) that mortgage lending was systemically racist due to credit standards. Based on this study, Congress altered the Community Reinvestment Act to require banks to find ways to lend to poor families. This comports well with history: Fannie Mae, the government’s seconday mortgage market, relaxed standards about then, and made huge amounts of money available for mortgage loans to less-credit-worthy borrowers.

From Gary Eldred’s 1995 book, You Can Own the Home You Want:

In the past, many mortgage lenders were reluctant to liberalize their underwriting criteria because they needed to sell their mortgages to Fannie Mae (the secondary mortgage market). And justifiably or not, Fannie Mae developed a set of rigid underwriting standards that governed the loans they bought. Lenders who violated Fannie Mae’s guidelines would be shut out of Fannie’s secondary market operations.

Now Fannie Mae is trying to lead the way with more relaxed standards. It has created a set of 11 initiatives called “Showing America a New Way Home.” In addition to pledging $1 trillion toward this goal, Fannie has told its participating lenders, “Don’t ‘flat out’ reject any mortgage loan application. Before you say no, give that application a second review. If your answer is still ‘No,’ give the application a third review. If the answer is still’No,’ get the applicant into a high-quality home buyer counseling.” Fannie Mae chairman James A. Johnson says, Every American who wants to get a mortgage will either have their loan approved, or be put on a path that can lead to approval.”

So, lenders did start lending to less credit-worthy buyers.

Real housing prices started rising in 1996, and became a full-fledged boom by 1998, according to Robert Schiller, Economist from Yale. He defines “boom” as home prices rising at least 10% in a single year in a particular regional market. In this case, though, and despite some local variation, the boom was national. Says Schiller,

Nationally, real home prices rose 86% between the bottom in the fourth quarter of 1996 and the peak 9.25 years later in the first quarter of 2006.

Economists I read tended to blame this on mortgage rates, but the prime rate was actually not that low in 1996 (see prime rate history here). Rates were in the 8% – 9% range back then, and didn’t drop below 7% until 2001. But subprime lending was taking off, regardless, and mortgage rates took a one-point dip from 1996-1998 that wasn’t explained by the prime rate. Professor Schiller notes that the boom is not explained by a rising economy, nor by rising construction costs; he argues that it was a psychological effect arising from the general notion that “housing is a great investment.” It looks to me as though encouragement by the federal government produced increased demand for homes. Whatever caused the demand, though, led to steeply rising home prices that continued until the market basically got tired of them and stopped buying. And then prices crashed.

At this point, what I wanted to know was why the foreclosure crunch hasn’t happened until now. If the cause was a relaxing of mortgage standards back in 1995 leading to a boom in subprime loans, what happened this year to trigger the huge increases in foreclosures?

The answer seems to be that the foreclosure crunch has been going on, but was masked by the housing boom. From 1998 through 2006, home prices were climbing at as much as 15% a year in some places. If a homeowner bought a home in 1998 and then got into trouble, he could quickly sell the home for a small profit and get out of it before it went into foreclosure. Sure, he’d have to go back to renting, but that’s a lot cheaper and less traumatic than a sheriff’s sale (I lost a home myself this way in 2003, due to unemployment). Same thing for funky ARM loans: if the ARM rate shot up for some reason, with housing prices on the rise, the homeowner could refinance based on a higher property value. A paper by the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending in 2006 noted that this effect masked an alarming foreclosure rate all through the housing boom:

The past housing boom masked the high proportion of homeowners who have struggled with subprime loans. For many borrowers, strong house price growth increased the amount of equity in their homes and enabled them to refinance their mortgages despite being behind on the monthly payments. When these distressed prepayments are added to the foreclosure rates, the total “failure rate” for subprime loans approaches 25 percent.

The CRL study notes that even during the boom, subprime loans defaulted around 10% of the time (compared to less than 1% for prime mortgages), but that that rate shot up to 20% in 2006. Secondary loan purchasers who planned for a 10% default rate are getting a very rude shock, and some are going out of business. Welcome to the 2008 banking crisis.

Activists note that the age of loans going into default is getting dramatically shorter (see here and here for examples), and claim that this is because of “predatory” loan practices. My own foray into the real estate market from 2004-2006 leads me to believe this is bunk; I did meet plenty of unscrupulous mortgage vendors in those days, but their unsavory practice invariably amounted to fudging the buyer’s history to make the application seem more attractive, with the full agreement of the applicant so the vendor wouldn’t go to jail if the applicant defaulted and complained. I suspect the shorter foreclosure age, like the rising foreclosure rate, is due to collapsing housing prices; loans that would have simply sold out a few years ago are showing up as foreclosures now.

Lenders are starting to tighten their standards again, lest they go out of business due to bad loans. Predictably, activists will start calling this “red-lining” and call for reforms to prevent businesses from sane economic practices (example here). This is what caused the problem in the first place. We need to stay on the alert for local initiatives demanding “fair banking practices,” and resist the pressure from the hard left that force businesses to operate in a manner that puts their owners at risk. The current crisis demonstrates that however well-meaning such movements are, the effect of forcing uneconomic behavior is as bad for the poor as it is for business. As usual, the free market, though imperfect, produces the best result all around.

Rich Galen today takes an acerbic shot at Alan Keyes over at Townhall.com. Though I agree with Galen, I’ve always liked Alan Keyes, and even voted for him in the 2000 Republican primary in Pennsylvania. So here’s my small tribute:

Alan Keyes was one of the more promising Republicans on the scene back in 2000. His Quixotic run for President that year included some unusually cogent thinking about policy, reminiscent of what Fred Thompson did this year, but with a little more populist feel. His presence in the campaign debates kept Bush and McCain from putting their moderators to sleep.

Keyes appears to be a bright and decent man, and talks like a man wholeheartedly committed to Christ. The problem is, he seems committed to doing things the way he imagines Jesus would do them. Emphasis goes on the word “imagines.”

In part, we have this crusade of Mr. Keyes’ to thank for Barack Obama. Keyes, if you’ll recall, was enlisted to run against Obama when Jack Ryan had to drop out of the Senatorial race in Illinois 3 years ago. Word was that Keyes’ campaign looked more like a tent revival than a political campaign, and Mr. Smooth Obama walked over him like he wasn’t there.

So I have a message for Alan Keyes. It’s this:

I’m as devoted to Jesus as you, Mr. Keyes, but if I run for public office, it will be “in such a manner as to win the prize.” And because you’re as literate a Christian as I, Mr. Keyes, you’ll recognize whom I am quoting, and why.

I’ll go out on a limb and say this is probably Hillary Clinton’s swan song.

Over the weekend, photos started popping up showing Barack Obama in the ceremonial dress of a Somali elder, from a goodwill tour of Africa in 2006. Today, Matt Drudge reports that the photo was circulated by the Clinton campaign. Obama’s campaign manager sloughed it off as “hateful, offensive fear-mongering,” to which the Clinton campaign replied that the Obama campaign should be ashamed to suggest that their circulating the photo was divisive.

I’m simply incredulous at that reply. They can’t possibly expect us to take that seriously. Several bloggers agree; check out Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, not a man I would ordinarily recommend as an accurate source, but he’s just as astonished by the shabby non-denial denial as I am. Blue Crab Boulevard and Hot Air express similar shock.

Let’s be serious. Nobody familiar with Clinton’s campaign is surprised that they’re circulating dirt; they’ve been doing it since day one, not to mention 8 years of slime, as if from a fire hose, from the Clinton White House. But this? She knows her campaign is being watched, she knows she’s being called on mud-slinging, and she does this anyway, in plain view? And then tries to pretend it’s innocent? There’s something truly sad about a charlatan who keeps trying to run the game even after being exposed. It reminds me of Glenn Close’s Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, being hooted out of the public theater by her peers after her conniving is exposed.

There’s even some self-pity from the Clinton camp. “Wouldn’t we be seeing this on the cover of every magazine if it were HRC?” questioned one campaign staffer, in an email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT. And Drudge dutifully produces photographs of Hillary in a head scarf, and of George W. Bush in a Chinese caftan; wearing local ceremonial garb is common gruel for politicians. However, it’s not usually circulated by the opposing campaign, with the hope that ignorant voters will mistake the candidate for the enemy, and turn away in fear. Gimme a break.

It’s obvious how desperate the Clinton campaign has become. It’s also obvious how reflexive their attacks have become. I think it’s ceased to be a calculated move and become reflex, the addict reaching for the needle because there’s simply no program for doing anything else. Pathetic.

I’ve said before that I’d rather the Republicans run against Clinton, because she’d be easier to beat. I guess this proves I was right, but alas, she was so easy to beat that even an empty resume like Barack Obama could do it. I’m not sorry to say goodbye to the Clintons as they exit the national stage, though. Not a moment too soon, sez I.

Goodnight, and Good Luck, Madame Clinton. It certainly has been entertaining.

---

Update: Blue Crab Boulevard this morning reports a truly bizarre breakfast meeting between the Clinton campaign and the press corps, quoting Dana Milbank from the Washington Post. They’re noting the same pathos I am, and appropriately (if unkindly) entitled their post “A Fat Lady Singing.”