Reason Magazine - Staff

Strange Things Done In the Midnight Sun

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:13:00 EDT

While one pack of paranoiacs plunges into hysteria over Barack Obama's past left-wing associations -- a phenomenon that may have reached its nadir with No Quarter's breathless revelation that the young Obama sought the endorsement of the mild-mannered Democratic Socialists of America -- a similar witchhunting lunacy is brewing in some quarters of the left. Max Blumenthal and Dave Neiwert published a story in Salon yesterday that's positively breathless in tracing Sarah Palin's relationship to the Alaska Independence Party.

The article is filled with innuendo and unsupported assertions. On learning that some of Palin's 1996 campaign literature described her as "the Christian candidate," for example, Blumenthal and Neiwert assert confidently that this was a "subtle suggestion" that her Lutheran opponent was really Jewish. The authors also make a lot of the AIP's sympathy for southern separatists, implying that the group has a racist core. They don't mention that the pan-secessionist party is also friendly to Lakota separatists, Hawaiian separatists, Puerto Rican separatists, and crunchy-granola Vermont separatists -- all of which impies that it's not whiteness but devolution that drives the organization.

But enough about the AIP. What does the Salon story tell us about Palin? Basically, that she and a few right-wing populists (a) worked together on some gun-rights issues, (b) worked together on some property-rights issues, and (c) uh...well, they were together, man.

This is what "Ayers! Ayers! Ayers!" sounds like in Salonese.

The Sheriff Don't Like It

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:10:00 EDT

I have more sympathy for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart than my colleague Mike Riggs does, if the Associated Press's account of Dart's new policy toward foreclosure evictions is correct:

Dart said that from now on, banks will have to present his office with a court affidavit that proves the home's occupant is either the owner or has been properly notified of the foreclosure proceedings.

Illinois law requires that renters be notified that their residence is in foreclosure and they will be evicted in 120 days, but Dart indicated that the law has been routinely ignored.

He talked about tenants who dutifully pay their rent, then leave one morning for work only to have authorities evict them and put their belongings on the curb while they are gone.

By the time they get home, "The meager possessions they have are gone," he said. "This is happening too often."...

Dart said he believes banks are not doing basic research to determine that the people being evicted are, in fact, the homeowners.

He said that in a third of the 400 to 500 foreclosure evictions his deputies had been carrying out every month, the residents are not those whose names are on the eviction papers.

Clearly, some political grandstanding may be at work here. (Dart isn't up for reelection until 2010, but if he plans to jump to higher office this is obviously an effective way to make himself more famous and popular.) And I have yet to see a compelling case for a complete suspension of foreclosure evictions. But I don't see anything wrong with requiring the banks and landlords to keep renters informed of the ongoing foreclosure proceedings so the tenants can plan accordingly, and not come home surprised to find their homes locked and half their possessions stolen. And to the extent that the sheriff is demanding his office receive accurate, appropriate paperwork before it acts, I can't say I object.

If this story sounds familiar, by the way, it's because the populist ex-congressman Jim Traficant did something similar:

In the early 1980s, Traficant was the sheriff of Mahoning County, which surrounds Youngstown. One of his duties was to serve eviction notices, throwing unemployed steelworkers and their kids into the street.

Traficant refused to evict people whose only crime was losing a job. He went to jail himself for refusing to serve eviction notices.

Next You'll Be Telling Me Illegal Downloading Doesn't Spike During the Super Bowl

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:33:00 EDT

You may have heard that the U.S. has lost 750,000 jobs to piracy of intellectual property and that such infringment costs the American economy $200–250 billion each year. Over at Ars Technica, former reason staffer Julian Sanchez goes looking for the sources of those oft-cited numbers and finds...not much.

An excerpt:

With Customs a dead end, we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in--this is not a typo--1986. Yes, back in the days when "Papa Don't Preach" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" topped the charts, The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000."

Where did that preposterously broad range come from? As with the number of licks needed to denude a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. Ars submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce this summer, hoping to uncover the basis of Baldridge's claim--or any other Commerce Department estimates of job losses to piracy--but came up empty. So whatever marvelous proof the late secretary discovered was not to be found in the margins of any document in the government's vaults. But no matter: By 1987, that Brobdignagian statistical span had been reduced, as far as the press were concerned, to "as many as 750,000" jobs. Subsequent reportage dropped the qualifier. The 750,000 figure was still being bandied about this summer in support of the aforementioned PRO-IP bill.

Whole thing here.

Revolutionary Violence in a Wall Street Gym

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:17:00 EDT

Lehman Brothers chief Richard Fuld

was attacked on a Sunday shortly after it was announced that the banking giant was bankrupt.

Following rumours that the incident had occurred, Vicki Ward, a US journalist, said "two very senior sources - one incredibly senior source" had confirmed it to her. "He went to the gym after ... Lehman was announced as going under," she told CNBC. "He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold."

As a Matter of Fact, I Like Beer

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:40:00 EDT

Who "won" the debate? As usual, I will not presume to speak for the plain people of Peoria. But sticking to my personal reactions:

John McCain made some genuinely good points tonight. He scored a hit with his attack on Fannie and Freddie, he seemed aware that entitlements are going to be a problem down the road (though his "solutions" were inane), and his comparison of Barack Obama to Herbert Hoover was both surprising and on target. In the economic discussions, he made sense more often than Obama did. But that's a low bar to clear. McCain's repeated calls for the government to buy up bad mortgages, his obsession with the chimera of "energy independence," and his support for the Wall Street bailout should put to rest any lingering suspicion that he has a free-market heart.

In foreign policy, on the other hand, I have to give the edge to Obama. I didn't agree with everything he said, but his comment that John "Bomb Iran" McCain doesn't "speak softly" was as solid a punch as McCain's comment about Hoover. And I strongly suspect that it impressed more viewers.

The winner? As far as I'm concerned, it's Bell's Kalamazoo Stout. I'm on my third bottle.

Perot Lives!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:42:00 EDT

So John McCain's plan to fix Social Security is to be more bipartisan, and his plan to fix Medicare is to create a commission. Glad we cleared that up.

Cars for Wall Street

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:48:00 EDT

In an Entertainment Weekly interview, without actually using the phrase "moral hazard," Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert offer a straightforward, funny explanation of the concept of a moral hazard:

STEWART: We were in this huge credit crisis, out of money. Then the Fed goes, We'll give you a trillion dollars, and all of a sudden Wall Street is like, "I can't believe we got away with it!" Can you imagine if someone said, "I shouldn't have bought that sports car because it means I can't have my house," and the bank just said, "All right, you can have your house. And you know what? Keep the car." [He throws up his arms joyfully and shouts] "Yeaaaaah, I get to keep the car! Wait, do I have to give the money back?" "No, it doesn't matter." "Yeah, I'm gonna get another car! I'm gonna do the same thing the same way, except twice as f---ed up!"

COLBERT: The idea that Lehman Brothers doesn't get any money and AIG does reminds me very much of "Iran is a mortal enemy because they have not achieved a nuclear weapon. But North Korea is a country we can work with, because they have a nuclear weapon." The idea is, Get big or go home. How big can you f--- up? Can you f--- up so bad that you would ruin the world economy? If it's just 15,000 who are out of jobs, no. You have to actually be a global f---up to get any help.

Also quotable: Stewart on the media's coverage:

We've got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, "I don't know!" It'd be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, "I don't know what the f--- is going on! I'm getting wet and it's windy and I don't know why and it's making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?"

The Roots of Sarah Palin

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:18:00 EDT

Last month I wrote that I'd like to see more reporting on the rumor that Sarah Palin had tried to ban books at the local public library while she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Since then we've learned a lot more about the story. In mid-September, The New York Times reported that as a councilwoman, Palin inquired about removing Daddy's Roommate, a children's book about homosexuality, from library shelves. There is also scuttlebutt that the future mayor targetted a book called Pastor, I Am Gay.

Palin's old allies continue to deny the charges. David Chappel, Palin's deputy mayor, told The Boston Globe that his boss "never had any intention to ban books" and attributed the accusations to Palin's political enemies: "There were some vocal people in the minority, and it looks like they're still out there." Small-town politics can be an impenetrable thicket, and I know a lot of the critics emerging from Palin's past have axes to grind. That said, one of the Times' sources for the Daddy's Roommate story is Laura Chase, who now says the candidate "scares the bejeebus" out of her but in 1996 served as Palin's campaign manager.

If you're going to be skeptical, your best argument is the fact that there's no record that Palin actually attempted to remove the books once she was in a position to do so. But she may have simply changed her mind about the issue. It's also possible that at that point a ban would have been unnecessary: The Times reports that some social conservatives in town frequently vandalized library books that displeased them. (Both books are in the library now, though -- and there are people working hard to ensure they stay there. After these stories started to come out, a San Francisco man donated not just Daddy's Roommate but Heather Has Two Mommies to the Wasilla library, a DIY answer to the vandals' DIY censorship.)

In other Palin news: Dave Weigel already linked to it last week, but if you missed it, you really should read Sean Scallon's sharp take on the candidate. For Scallon, Palin "represents a wing of the Republican Party that was once close to Buchanan but has slid into the neoconservatives' grasp since 9/11" -- the "Jacksonian" populists who used to oppose figures like McCain but changed their priorities after Bin Laden's attacks. Not that Palin was a populist from the get-go: Noam Scheiber's account of her Wasilla days reveals that she actually got her start selling a business-backed tax to fund new government programs:

In the early '90s, [Nick] Carney and a group of local business leaders decided the city needed a sales tax to fund public services--such as a police force--it could no longer live without. To advance this position in an area not exactly teeming with Great Society liberals, they'd formed a group called "Watch on Wasilla" and persuaded John Stein, then the mayor, to embrace their cause. Carney won his seat on the city council in 1992 on the back of these efforts.

Heading into that election, Carney and Stein realized their program would go nowhere if they couldn't connect with what you might call Wal-Mart moms--that great mass of voters too busy earning a living and raising their families to follow local politics....Carney's daughter had gone to high school with Palin; Stein and his wife knew her from an aerobics class they attended. She seemed bright and energetic and had a winning way about her--the same qualities McCain would notice 15 years later. They invited her to attend a "Watch on Wasilla" meeting and, after a brief interview, asked her to run on their moderate plank. Carney introduced her to local business leaders and campaigned alongside her. "I took her around ... and said, 'This is a person who supports our points of view. She'll do what she can to make the police force run.' And she did it."

Tennessee Whiskey

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:28:00 EDT

Lede of the day:

Alcoholic drinks have been forbidden on Belmont University's campus since at least 1951. The small Christian school in Nashville has decided to make an exception to the rule when it hosts a presidential debate Tuesday.

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean the live audience will be able to play drinking games or just blot out the horror with beer, wonderful beer. The drinks will only be served in a hospitality tent for reporters -- further proof, I suppose, that politics and the media undermine traditional morality.

The Bailout Betrayal: Who's Who?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:28:00 EDT

Jim Harper posts a useful list of congresspeople who opposed the Wall Street bailout bill last Monday but switched their votes on Friday. He also helpfully informs us who will be running against each of them next month.

The Fish Standard

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:53:00 EDT

The Wall Street Journal's Justin Scheck reports:

There's been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say. That's when federal prisons prohibited smoking and, by default, the cigarette pack, which was the earlier gold standard.

Prisoners need a proxy for the dollar because they're not allowed to possess cash. Money they get from prison jobs (which pay a maximum of 40 cents an hour, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons) or family members goes into commissary accounts that let them buy things such as food and toiletries. After the smokes disappeared, inmates turned to other items on the commissary menu to use as currency.

Books of stamps were one easy alternative. "It was like half a book for a piece of fruit," says Tony Serra, a well-known San Francisco criminal-defense attorney who last year finished nine months in Lompoc on tax charges. Elsewhere in the West, prisoners use PowerBars or cans of tuna, says Ed Bales, a consultant who advises people who are headed to prison. But in much of the federal prison system, he says, mackerel has become the currency of choice.

One reason the mackeral standard has taken off: Hardly anyone actually wants to eat the stuff. Another reason: "each can (or pouch) costs about $1." (So it's pegged to the dollar, then?)

The authorities' response: a steep tax on excess savings, a crackdown on unregulated trading, and, um, limits on credit:

The Bureau of Prisons views any bartering among prisoners as fishy. "We are aware that inmates attempt to trade amongst themselves items that are purchased from the commissary," says bureau spokeswoman Felicia Ponce in an email. She says guards respond by limiting the amount of goods prisoners can stockpile. Those who are caught bartering can end up in the "Special Housing Unit" -- an isolation area also known as the "hole" -- and could lose credit they get for good behavior.

Bonus link: Every time I blog a story like this, I feel obliged to throw in a link to R.A. Radford's classic article "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp." If you've never read it before, you should.

Dick Cheney Wanted to Work With Special Needs Kids Too, But the Kids Said No

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:55:00 EDT

By ordinary standards, Joe Biden "won" the debate. He was more articulate, seemed more conversant with the facts, made more of an effort to answer the questions. But Sarah Palin's performance was so weird that I don't know how to judge it. She just wasn't playing the same game as her opponent.

The Alaskan dived deep into the Avatar Of The Everyday American role, not just with cloying, self-conscious allusions to "Joe Six-Pack" and "hockey moms" and soccer sidelines and so on, but by stammering through her answers like she'd won an Anyone Can Debate Joe Biden contest. Maybe there's a method to this madness. Maybe she was authentic enough to impress a lot of viewers as Someone Like Me, evasive and incoherent enough to lure Democrats into attacks that might be seen as mocking People Like You.

Or maybe she just came off as an ill-informed panderer. Who knows? I appreciated the debate as Dada, at any rate, especially that bizarre exchange about the vice president's powers.

Apropos of nothing, or everything:

The Eternal Recurrence of the Bailout Bill

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:50:00 EDT

The New York Times reports:

Senate leaders scheduled a Wednesday vote on a $700 billion financial bailout package after accepting tax breaks and a higher limit for insured bank deposits in a bid to win House approval and send legislation to President Bush by the end of the week.

Top lawmakers said the Senate proposal, worked out after a day of behind the scenes maneuvering, would include tax breaks for businesses and alternative energy and higher government insurance for bank deposits.

Two responses:

1. What does alternative energy have to do with any of this?

2. "A higher limit for insured bank deposits"? Apparently, the Senate learned nothing from the S&L debacle. But hey, if you're already creating moral hazards, why stop?

Bobos in Limbo

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:53:00 EDT

In the aftermath of the bailout vote, David "National Greatness" Brooks throws a tantrum:

let us recognize above all the 228 who voted no — the authors of this revolt of the nihilists. They showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing, and if the country slides into a deep recession, they will have the time and leisure to watch public opinion shift against them.

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame....If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century.

So if you stand up for a principle, you're a nihilist; and if you refrain from passing an enormous new intervention after a Wall Street crash, you're reenacting Smoot-Hawley. Welcome to the worldview of a man who prefers "the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed" to the dispersed expertise of traders in the market, a wise crowd screaming to us that some inflated prices need to come down and some bloated companies need to fail.

Brooks did get one thing right:

What's sad is that they still think it's 1984. They still think the biggest threat comes from socialism and Walter Mondale liberalism.

Forget Marx and Mondale. At the moment, the biggest threat to economic liberty comes from people like Hank Paulson, George Bush, and David Brooks.

The Noble Bowzer

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:30:00 EDT

Two members of Sha Na Na take to the pages of Columbia College Today to explore the recent scholarly interest in ... Sha Na Na. An excerpt:

During the revolution the year before, the Vietnam-era culture wars had escalated into fist fights, even mob fights, between the "jocks" and the "freaks" (and even "pukes"), as protestors were called....Kenneth Koch stopped his poetry class from rushing down from Hamilton to join in a brawl between jocks and freaks going on below by crying out, like a WWII movie heroine, in his campiest voice, "Stop! WE'RE ... what they're FIGHTING FOR!" His students broke up laughing, sat back down and Koch went on with the lecture, while the jocks and freaks punched it out outside.

Researching in Butler and Avery libraries, [Elizabeth] Guffey discovered George's twice-weekly Spec ads: "Jocks! Freaks! ROTC! SDS! Let there be a truce! Bury the hatchet (not in each other)! Remember when we were all little greaseballs together" (p. 113). The ads consciously "evoked," Guffey commented, a "vision of the Fifties as a pre-political teenage Eden."

After Woodstock, Sha Na Na founders John "Jocko" Marcellino '72, Don York '71, Rich Joffe '72, '93L, Scott Powell '70 and manager Ed Goodgold '65 gained the talents of Jon "Bowzer" Bauman '68 and "Screamin'" Scott Simon '70. Their popular television show joined with Happy Days and Grease popularizing the new myth. By the 1980 Presidential election, America had embraced the dream of the Fifties as a pre-political Golden Age. So much so, [Daniel] Marcus painstakingly shows, that the American political landscape was altered to take advantage of this invented cultural memory.

Watch the movie version of Grease today, with its half-disco soundtrack and its closing wisecrack about Nixon, and it's obvious that it's "about" the 1970s much more than it was ever about the '50s. But I'm not sure that was self-evident at the time. (As my mom said to my dad as my family watched the film on TV, circa 1980: "There really were people who lived like this.") Lest you think this reinvention process stopped in the Carter era, go rent The Brady Bunch Movie, with its curious conceit that the early '70s were a lost age of innocence. (For the target audience, most of whom were under 10 in the original Brady era, perhaps it was.)

The whole Sha Na Na article, well worth reading, is here. Related topics are explored here and here.

[Hat tip: John Kluge.]

Ethiopia's Quagmire

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:34:00 EDT

The U.S.-backed occupation runs into trouble:

Nearly two years after being driven from Mogadishu, Islamists have re-taken swathes of south Somalia and may have their sights again on the capital.

The insurgents' push is being led by Al Shabaab, or "Youth" in Arabic, the most militant in a wide array of groups opposed to the Somali government and military backers from Ethiopia, an ally in Washington's "War on Terror"....

Analysts say Islamists or Islamist-allied groups now control most of south Somalia, with the exception of Mogadishu, Baidoa where parliament is protected by Ethiopian troops, and Baladwayne near the border where Addis Ababa garrisons soldiers.

That is a remarkable turnaround from the end of 2006, when allied Somali-Ethiopian troops chased the Islamists out of Mogadishu after a six-month rule of south Somalia, scattering them to sea, remote hills and the Kenyan border.

The Islamists regrouped to begin an insurgency that has killed nearly 10,000 civilians. Military discipline, grassroots political work, youth recruitment and an anti-Ethiopian rallying cry have underpinned their return, analysts say.

[Hat tip: Dan Clore.]

None of the Above

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:02:00 EDT

You can divide last night's debate into two parts: the argument about the economy, and everything afterward. In the first section, my basic reaction was Both of these guys are full of shit. In the second, my reaction was Obama is a mixed bag. McCain is a trigger-happy lunatic. I guess I prefer Obama. I'm still trying to figure out how McCain thinks he can reconcile his fiscally conservative rhetoric with the aggressive and expensive foreign policy he prefers.

Does that mean Obama "won"? Who knows? At some point in the last three decades, the modal pundit moved from frankly discussing how he personally felt about the positions espoused in a debate to second-guessing how the average uninformed voter might feel. This leads to a lot of projection, as writers mistake their preconceptions for the action actually transpiring on the screen. Here, for example, is Amy Holmes at National Review:

McCain won, hands down, particularly when the conversation shiffted to war and national security. McCain was comfortable, fluent, principled and direct. Obama was weak and defensive.

There are many words to describe McCain's composure last night, but comfortable surely isn't one of them. And maybe I'm just stuck on the contrast with John Kerry, but Obama didn't seem weak and defensive to me; he stood his ground and hit back. I didn't always agree with what he had to say—when it came to NATO expansion, he sounded as crazy as his opponent—but he sure seemed to believe it himself.

They say the real winner of a debate is the man who exceeds expectations, so in that spirit I'll give the prize to Jim Lehrer. I haven't been a fan of his in the past, but I appreciated his dogged efforts to get a straight answer out of the candidates about whether they're backing the bailout. And it was good to see him encouraging the duo to engage each other. After the Blitzer/Matthews disasters, Lehrer acquited himself well; he was the only man on stage that I liked more after the debate than before it.

Paul Newman, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:15:00 EDT

Say farewell to the salad dressing mogul, Nation underwriter, and star of such fine films as The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy, The Sting, The Verdict, and this:

In each of those seven movies -- probably my favorites in his filmography -- Paul Newman plays either a rebel loner or a lovable loser. Is that enough to declare him an honorary libertarian?

What "Suspended" Campaigns Do

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:43:00 EDT

My sympathies are entirely with David Letterman.

Barack Obama vs. Free Speech

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:06:00 EDT

Here's an ad the National Rifle Association is running in Pennsylvania:

The Obama campaign disputes the accuracy of the advertisement, which is fine. It has also threatened regulatory retaliation against outlets that show it, which isn't fine. Instead of, say, crafting a response ad, Obama's team had general counsel Robert F. Bauer send stations a letter [pdf] arguing that "Failure to prevent the airing of 'false and misleading advertising may be 'probative of an underlying abdication of licensee responsibility.'" And, more directly: "For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement."

As a political move, this is stupid. Not only does it cast the campaign as a bunch of speech-squelching bullies, but it makes the ad itself into a story and thus guarantees that more people will see it. (A trivial example: I wouldn't have stuck it in a blog post if it weren't for the controversy.) But of course there's much more on display here than poor political judgment. Together with similar efforts elsewhere, the incident says something about how a President Obama might approach media regulation. In an article in the November reason -- watch for it on newsstands! -- I point out that while Obama says he won't restore the Fairness Doctrine, he isn't opposed to other, more subtle ways the authorities can influence what is or isn't said on radio and TV. For those of us who are repelled by John McCain's lousy record on First Amendment issues, it's important to remember that his opponent might not prove to be any better.

Insurgents Wanted

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:07:00 EDT

James Pethokoukis makes a prediction about the next election:

The Republican presidential nominee in the summer of 2012 will have come out against the Paulson-Bernanke bailout plan in the fall of 2008. Conservative rage against the $700 billion "rescue" attempt, as President Bush terms it, has been stoked white hot by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and the powerful pundits of the right-wing blogosphere such as Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg....

Now 2012 may seem awfully far away right now. But is there any doubt that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee today if she had voted against the Iraq War back in 2002? She was for it, Obama was against it, and Obama is the nominee. And don't be surprised if there are insurgent Republicans in 2010 who run against incumbent GOPer who voted for the bailout in a replay of the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Democratic primary battle.

At this point the dominant D.C. Democrats seem less interested in blocking the bailout than in attaching various add-ons to it. (Kinda like an "emergency" war appropriations bill.) But if grassroots Dems still perceive the results as a handout to bankers and Wall Street gamblers, we could see a similar dynamic in the Blue party in 2010 and 2012.

We Almost Lost Detroit

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:22:00 EDT

It doesn't seem so big anymore, next to that whole turn-Wall-Street-over-to-the-Treasury-Department plan, but the $25 billion handout for the auto industry is still rolling forward. U.S. News has the details. Among the bullet points:

• It's much bigger than the Chrysler bailout of 1980.

• There are few strings attached.

• There's more aid coming.

Apparently, corporate welfare has its own cycle of dependency. "This year's $25 billion is just a down payment," the report concludes. "The automakers now plan to ask the government for another $25 billion in loans next year. It's just spare change, after all."

The Shorter John McCain

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:25:00 EDT

I'd rather debate pressing issues behind closed doors with my colleagues than on national TV where voters might see me.

It Didn't Begin With the Bailout

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:37:00 EDT

Timothy Carney points out that AIG is no stranger to government assistance.

What Caused the Crisis?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:30:00 EDT

Rounding up some suspects:

* Don Boudreaux on monetary policy.

* Frank Shostak on Fannie and Freddie.

* Randal O'Toole on land use regulations.

* Chris Dillow on the principal agent problem.

* Russ Roberts on perverse tax incentives.

Meanwhile, Robert Higgs disputes the idea that the credit market is "frozen," and David Cay Johnston suggests some questions for skeptical business journalists. Ilya Somin sees a slippery slope ahead.