A Brief History…

Obama says different things to different groups and often gets away with it. He gets into trouble, however, when he says things on camera. Here are two clips of Obama saying opposite things about the same topic. I hope someone is collecting these things and will use them to run political ads during the fall campaign. There are already a few examples. One is here.

Obama is a gaffe machine saying, for example, that he has campaigned in 57 states and will be dealing with world leaders as president for 8 to 10 years.

Obama supporters, like Alan Colmes on Fox News, tries to counter with alleged McCain gaffes. One was his statement that Iran was supporting Sunni terrorist groups. He was accused of not knowing that Iran is Shiite and will not cooperate with Sunnis. That is untrue. Secondly, this week, Colmes tried to make an issue of McCain saying that the Surge was responsible for the Anbar Awakening. This story is all over the left wing blogs. What they don’t understand is that “The Surge” was not the addition of more troops to Iraq but a change in strategy that required more troops to carry out. That change coincided with the Anbar Awakening. The video linked to by the piece above is absolutely accurate. It is the political left’s ignorance of military strategy that is on exhibition, not McCain’s error.

Here is more on McCain’s statement.

“Yesterday,” a reporter asked McCain, “you suggested that the surge in Iraq predated the Anbar rebellion, and actually the Anbar rebellion came a couple of months previously. Did you misspeak, or did you have something else in mind?”
McCain said that he was referring to the successful counterinsurgency strategy in the Anbar — the co-option of the Sunni sheiks — which provided a model for troops who later surged into the country.
“First of all, a surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy,” McCain said.
I’ll separate that, because McCain says it often. Most of us equate the surge with troop levels, but for McCain, it has always been about a strategy; to executive the strategy, more troops were needed.
Colonel McFarland, in Anbar province, McCain said, “had already initiated that strategy in Ramadi by going in and clearing and holding in certain places. That is a counter-insurgency. And he told me at that time that he believed that that strategy, which is quote the surge, part of the surge, would be, would be, successful. So then, of course, it was very clear that we needed additional troops in order to carry out this insurgency.

Don’t expect to see anything about that from Obama supporters. You-Tube will define this campaign, both supporting and refuting what the candidates say. McCain is consistent and it should help him.

UPDATE: John McCain has come out with a good op-ed on the topic that should be reprinted widely. Unfortunately, it looks as though Bush has given up and will sign the pork fest bailout bill. I guess he is ready for next January and President Obama.

That’s not a very good headline but the Paul Gigot article today in the Wall Street Journal tells the story of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with the names named. It can’t be any clearer how the Washington insiders kept the ball rolling.

Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods. It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal’s editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae. I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie, whom I had run into by chance at a reception hosted by the Business Council, the CEO group that had invited me to moderate a couple of panels.

Mr. Mozilo loudly declared that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t understand accounting or the mortgage markets, and that I was in the pocket of Fannie’s competitors, among other insults. Mr. Raines, always smoother than Mr. Mozilo, politely intervened to avoid an extended argument, and Countrywide’s bantam rooster strutted off.

I remember reading those editorial page pieces and wondering why nothing happened. Now we know.

In late 2001, I got a tip that Fannie’s derivatives accounting might be suspect. I asked Susan Lee to investigate, and the editorial she wrote in February 2002, “Fannie Mae Enron?”, sent Fannie’s shares down nearly 4% in a day. In retrospect, my only regret is the question mark.

Mr. Raines reacted with immediate fury, denouncing us in a letter to the editor as “glib, disingenuous, contorted, even irresponsible,” and that was the subtle part. He turned up on CNBC to say, in essence, that we had made it all up because we didn’t want poor people to own houses, while Freddie issued its own denunciation.

The insiders turned up the pressure by complaining to Dow-Jones executives, Mr. Gigot’s bosses.

At the time, Wall Street’s Fannie apologists outdid themselves with their counterattack. One of the most slavish was Jonathan Gray, of Sanford C. Bernstein, who wrote to clients that the editorial was “unfounded and unsubstantiated” and “discredits the paper.” My favorite point in his Feb. 20, 2002, Bernstein Research Call was this rebuttal to our point that “Taxpayers Are on The Hook: This is incorrect. The agencies’ debt is not guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury or any agency of the Federal Government.” Oops.

Mr. Gray’s memo made its way to Wall Street Journal management via Michael Ellmann, a research analyst who had covered Dow Jones and was then at Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. “I think Gray is far more accurate than your editorial writer. Your subscribers deserve better,”

Paul Gigot, who was not then the editor of the op-ed page, is not deterred although Congress is busy feeding at the trough and does not want to hear any bad news.

I also received several interventions from friends and even Dow Jones colleagues on behalf of the companies. But I was especially startled one day to find in my mail a personal letter from George Gould, an acquaintance about whom I’d written a favorable column when he was Treasury undersecretary for finance in 1988.

The companies eased their assaults when they concluded we weren’t about to stop, and in any case they soon had bigger problems. Freddie’s accounting fiasco became public in 2003, while Fannie’s accounting blew up in 2004. Mr. Raines was forced to resign, and a report by regulator James Lockhart discovered that Fannie had rigged its earnings in a way that allowed it to pay huge bonuses to Mr. Raines and other executives.

Remember that Raines was a Bill Clinton appointee, even though this was now the Bush administration. They still had enough politicians in their entourage to stave off the final reckoning, though. Republicans were every bit as complicit in the fiasco.

Such a debacle after so much denial would have sunk any normal financial company, but once again Fan and Fred could fall back on their political protection. In the wake of Freddie’s implosion, Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida held one hearing on its accounting practices and scheduled more in early 2004.

He was soon told that not only could he hold no more hearings, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert was stripping his subcommittee of jurisdiction over Fan and Fred’s accounting and giving it to Mike Oxley’s Financial Services Committee. “It was because of all their lobbying work,” explains Mr. Stearns today, in epic understatement. Mr. Oxley proceeded to let Barney Frank (D., Mass.), then in the minority, roll all over him and protect the companies from stronger regulatory oversight. Mr. Oxley, who has since retired, was the featured guest at no fewer than 19 Fannie-sponsored fund-raisers.

Bipartisan financial malpractice. And the taxpayers will be bailing them out.

Or consider the experience of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the GOP’s bright young lights who decided in the 1990s that Fan and Fred needed more supervision. As he held town hall meetings in his district, he soon noticed a man in a well-tailored suit hanging out amid the John Deere caps and street clothes. Mr. Ryan was being stalked by a Fannie lobbyist monitoring his every word.

When none of that deterred Mr. Ryan, Fannie played rougher. It called every mortgage holder in his district, claiming (falsely) that Mr. Ryan wanted to raise the cost of their mortgage and asking if Fannie could tell the congressman to stop on their behalf. He received some 6,000 telegrams. When Mr. Ryan finally left Financial Services for a seat on Ways and Means, which doesn’t oversee Fannie, he received a personal note from Mr. Raines congratulating him. “He meant good riddance,” says Mr. Ryan.

That wasn’t enough.

about half of the implicit taxpayer subsidy for Fan and Fred is pocketed by shareholders and management. According to the Federal Reserve, the half that goes to homeowners adds up to a mere seven basis points on mortgages. In return for this, Fannie was able to pay no fewer than 21 of its executives more than $1 million in 2002, and in 2003 Mr. Raines pocketed more than $20 million. Fannie’s left-wing defenders are underwriters of crony capitalism, not affordable housing.

And we will bail them out because “they are too big too fail.” Why did a Republican Speaker cooperate in this debacle ? The GOP paid the price in 2006 but the rest of us will be paying for years.

Apologies to the WSJ but I was afraid that piece was behind the subscription wall and it is too important to hide. Everyone should read it.

Here’s what they were saying a year ago. Pretty funny, eh ?

Obama is set to visit the West Bank and Ramallah soon. His pro-Palestinian sympathies are well known but this goes a bit beyond the expected.

Members of the most active West Bank terror organization are set to serve in security forces being deployed to protect Sen. Barack Obama during his trip to the West Bank tomorrow, WND has learned.

Interesting.

Look at that image for a second. If Hitler had risen from the grave, what do you think he would look like ? This is one of the Palestinian “Freedom Fighters” that Israel released in exchange for two bodies of kidnapped soldiers. We can talk about the present folly of the Israeli government. Ehud Olmert is mired in scandal, but look at the enemies he faces. The face of pure evil stares from that photo.

On the other side, the disgraceful celebration of baby-murderer Kuntar as a national hero in Lebanon, where the government shut down to celebrate his arrival, and by the Palestinian Authority, which called him a “heroic fighter,” reveals the depths of Lebanese enmity to Israel and its immorality, disturbing to anyone concerned with the Arab soul.

Read the account of Kuntar’s “operation.” Then look at that celebration again.

The unforced error by Prime Minister Maliki this weekend, described below, makes the possibility of a President Obama more likely. This is a frightening prospect but it is worse even than we had been told. The real threat to the western world is not Iraq or Iran. It is Pakistan. The government is unstable and has the Bomb. What could be worse ? Read the story and see.

Then think about a new president who does not know that Afghanistan does not speak Arabic ! I thought the infamous interview with Bush in 2000 showed appalling ignorance but that was before 9/11. We are now at war in Afghanistan. The young man who scolds his fellow countrymen for failing to learn languages that he, himself, does not speak, is frighteningly ignorant, not only about the world outside Chicago, but about about how ignorant he is.

UPDATE # 3: Politico has an explanation of Maliki’s behavior but it also suggest that he has lost control of what he was trying to do.

ASTONISHING QUOTE OF THE DAY – AP’s Baghdad bureau chief, Robert H. Reid, writes in ‘Analysis: Iraq playing US politics for best deal’: ‘The Iraqi prime minister’s seeming endorsement of Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal plan is part of Baghdad’s strategy to play U.S. politics for the best deal possible over America’s military mission. The goal is not necessarily to push out the Americans quickly, but instead give Iraqis a major voice in how long U.S. troops stay and what they will do while still there. …

On Maliki’s unconvincing walk-back of that endorsement, an administration official told the aforementioned Jonathan Martin: ‘We suspected Maliki didn’t intend for his comment to be interpreted the way it was. He didn’t know it was being interpreted that way. The U.S. government let the Iraqis know that it was being picked up widely. The Iraqis issued a statement to make Maliki’s position clear.’

Maliki may be wiser now. I’m sure he does not understand that Democrats will throw him and his country under the bus just as quickly as they threw Pastor Wright and a numbers of others, including Obama’s grandmother who raised him. No one can get between Obama and his ambition and be safe.

UPDATE #2: Maliki still has not been able to control how his words are being used against him. The New York Times today repeats the Der Spiegel version of his comments.

The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”

He continued: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

There is still no inclusion of the words:

Assuming that positive developments continue, this is about the same time period that corresponds to our wishes.”

That caveat changes the meaning of the statement. Either the NY Times deliberately omitted that sentence (not an unreasonable assumption) or the story is still going.

UPDATE: It looks as thougn Der Spiegel lied about Maliki’s remarks but we will see how this plays out.

Asked in an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel of when he would like to see American forces leave Iraq, Maliki said: “As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned.” He then added that “Obama is right when he talks about 16 months. Assuming that positive developments continue, this is about the same time period that corresponds to our wishes.”

Maliki has just gotten a lesson about international media. They are no friends of Iraq.

Yesterday, Der Spiegel, the German magazine published a story that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki supported Obama’s plan to withdraw US forces from Iraq in 16 months. A furor ensued and Maliki put out a clarification that he had been misquoted. The left was having none of it and even was alleging tha Maliki’s denial was false.

The retraction claimed that Maliki’s comments were “were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately,” which might be plausible if there were only a single sentence in question. However, how likely is it that Spiegel mistranslated three separate comments? Here are the relevant excerpts from the interview:

“Today, we in Iraq want to establish a timeframe for the withdrawal of international troops — and it should be short.

….U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

….Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic….The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.”

There’s just no way that all three of these passages were mistranslated.

Why, when his success as the head of a free country is at stake, would Maliki make such an error ?

The most plausible explanation to me is that this was Iraqi politics speaking.

Why did al-Maliki do it? Your choice of interpretations, not mutually exclusive:

a) “Yanks Out!” is a winning slogan in Iraqi politics, and al-Maliki has an election to fight in October.

b) He figures Obama is going to win, and this way Obama owes him one.

c) He thinks he’s now strong enough to take out the Sadrists and either make make a deal with some group of Sunnis or just rule them as a subject population after our troops leave.

d) “100 Years” genuinely creeps him out.

I’m not offering any bets about what al-Maliki really wants in the way of a timetable. But I’d bet something that he really doesn’t want a long term protectorate, and/or doesn’t think he can make that fly politically in Iraq.

My personal theory is that Maliki doesn’t understand that Democrats want to ditch Iraq and they don’t care what happens after we leave. Maliki just gave them the cover they needed. It may have been a fatal mistake.

Those Republicans, who think that letting Obama win the election and who are then counting on him being the worst president in American history, might have gotten their wish compliments of Maliki. All we have to do now is survive it.

I grew up in the 1940s and that was the end of the big band era. When I was in high school, we had several of them play at high school proms as they were in decline at the time. I remember listening to records of the female vocalists, especially Margaret Whiting and Jo Stafford. Jo Stafford began in the 1930s as a band singer, at first with Frank Sinatra, and was hugely popular all through the war. Her albums kept coming out when I was in college and my favorite still is Ski Trails. That was the first of the “theme albums” and she and her husband Paul Weston thought it up and brought it out. She died this weekend at 90 and was interviewed two years ago about her career. She had a perfect voice and a great personality to match. Her voice is part of my youth.

Senator Obama is now saying that Afghanistan is the central front in the war of radical Islam (He didn’t say that last part) but how does he know ? When they held hearings on Afghanistan, he wasn’t there, and that was even before he started running for president.

For a guy who says that’s where the war should be, he doesn’t show up much. How do we now? Joe Biden told us.

But since joining Foreign Relations, Obama has missed three meetings on a “new strategy” in Afghanistan, a country he has never visited.

On Feb. 15, 2007, Obama also missed a committee hearing on U.S. ambassadors to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Well, he just knows these things. Lesser mortals have to study and listen to experts.

This article from the Daily Telegraph describes the process by which the British were stripped of the right to self defense.

Self defence, wrote William Blackstone, the 18th-century jurist, is a “natural right that no government can deprive people of, since no government can protect the individual in his moment of need”.

What changed ?

For almost 500 years, until 1954, England and Wales enjoyed a declining rate of violent crime. In the last years of the 19th century, when there were no restrictions on guns, there was just one handgun homicide a year in a population of 30 million people. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world.

We still remember this reputation of Britain as a peaceable kingdom. The Lord of the Rings trilogy contrasted the peaceful Shire, inhabited by hobbits who were more concerned with warm hobbit holes, good food and smoking tobacco than with politics, with the harsh outside world. The books have been interpreted as allegorical comparison with Nazi Germany. What has happened since Tolkein wrote them ?

The practical removal of the right to self defence began with Britain’s 1920 Firearms Act, the first serious limitation on privately-owned firearms. It was motivated by fear of a Bolshevik-type revolution rather than concerns about householders defending themselves against robbers. Anyone wanting to keep a firearm had to get a certificate from his local police chief certifying that he was a suitable person to own a weapon and had a good reason to have it. The definition of “good reason”, left to the police, was gradually narrowed until, in 1969, the Home Office decided “it should never be necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person”.

Thus, crime was never the problem that led to the disarming of the population. Once guns were banned, the principle was extended to any potential weapon.

The 1953 Prevention of Crime Act made it illegal to carry in a public place any article “made, adapted or intended” for an offensive purpose “without lawful authority or reasonable excuse”. Any item carried for defence was, by definition, an “offensive” weapon.

Thus, it became illegal to defend yourself. The rule became to wait for the police to defend you. What if they didn’t arrive ?

Rather than permitting people to protect themselves, the authorities’ response to the recent series of brutal attacks on home-owners has been to advise people to get more locks and, in case of a break-in, retreat to a secure room - presumably the bathroom - to call the police. They are not to keep any weapon for protection or approach the intruder. Someone might get hurt. If that someone is the intruder the resident will be sued by the burglar and vigorously prosecuted by the state.

What was the result of this policy ?

At the same time as government demanded sole responsibility for protecting individuals, it adopted a more lenient approach toward offenders. Sentences were sharply reduced, few offenders served more than a third or a half of their term, and fewer offenders were incarcerated. Further, they were to be protected from their victims. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another, was denied parole because he posed a danger to other burglars.

The “more guns, less crime” argument has been attacked in America as flawed research and the author of several of these studies has been vilified. What about the experience in Britain, far from the National Rifle Association?

This trade-off of rights for security has been disastrous for both. Crime has rocketed. A UN study in 2002 of 18 developed countries placed England and Wales at the top of the Western world’s crime league. Five years after the sweeping 1998 ban on handguns, handgun crime had doubled. As was forecast at the time, the effect of outlawing handguns has been that only outlaws have handguns.

The recent Heller decision has stimulated this debate once again. We will hear more about this issue in the months and years to come. Here is a Glenn Reynolds law review article on the future course of gun law litigation.

UPDATE: The original plaintiff, Heller, had his application denied today. The bureaucrats don’t give up that easily.

John Derbyshire today has yet another example of people writing about science who don’t understand it, even a little bit. I have a lovely daughter who has an honors degree in Anthropology. Unfortunately, she got indoctrinated in the “Blank Slate” theory of child psychology, as promoted by “Mismeasure of Man” author, Stephen Jay Gould. The blank slate advocates are enthused about molding children’s minds and include behavioral psychologists as well some rather scary characters from Stalin’s USSR who were going to invent a “New Soviet Man.” This is all about politics, you see.

Steven Pinker actually wrote a book called “ The Blank Slate, which should have debunked much of the behavioral nonsense. I tried to get my daughter to read it when we were on a trip together but she refused. Pinker shows from identical twin studies that much behavior is inherited. We can argue about nature vs nurture all day but to assume that behavior is all one or the other is to risk being shown a fool. Unfortunately, the nurture assumption has gotten involved in politics and that skews the debate.

Then along came The Bell Curve, which makes one point that low IQ people seem to be having more children than high IQ people and scared everybody into thinking it was racist. In fact, it was nothing of the sort but facts are less important than rumors in some political circles. I was at Dartmouth when it came out and it was hilarious to see people, who would not be seen buying the book in the Dartmouth Bookstore, quietly asked me to borrow it when I finished.

David Brooks seems to be in that category as Derbyshire quotes him:

Prof. Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia, conducted research showing that growing up in an impoverished environment harms I.Q.

Lysenko would be proud of Brooks for that howler. Turkheimer actually didn’t say that but Brooks confuses low income and intelligence of parents who have low income and intelligence children with environmental influence.

Children reared in low-SES (socio-economic status) households, therefore,
may differ from more affluent children both environmentally and genetically
(Gottesman, 1968), and the models we employed in this
study do not allow us to determine which aspect of SES is responsible
for the interactions we observed.

It’s only a step from that to say that environmental influences will affect inherited characteristics like IQ. That is at the root of Gould’s theory of the Blank Slate. The child is like every other child, capable of responding to environment or parental influence to become more intelligent or more aggressive or passive. It’s only a step to the New Soviet Man.

Central to Lysenko’s tenets was the concept of the inheritability of acquired characteristics.

Brooks:
There seems to be a general feeling, as a Hastings Center working group put it, that “behavioral genetics will never explain as much of human behavior as was once promised.”

No. Feeling it may be but it is not true. Do some reading.

How about an IQ test for reporters and columnists ?