"Since the Great Depression"

After news of the Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy protection circulated among polticos, Democratic nominee Barack Obama was quick to blame the GOP for the mess.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Monday the upheaval on Wall Street was "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" and blamed it on policies that he said Republican rival John McCain supports.

"This country can't afford another four years of this failed philosophy," Obama said after the shock-wave announcements that financial giant Lehman Brothers was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while titan Merrill Lynch was being bought by Bank of America for about $50 billion.

Obama's statement, issued as he prepared to fly to Colorado to begin a swing through contested Western states, was intended to serve two purposes: to link McCain with the unpopular presidency of George W. Bush and to express sympathy with the anxiety of most Americans who say the economy is issue No. 1 in the election.

"The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store," Obama said in a statement. "Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression."

I am not sure what government policy caused Lehman Brothers to enter bankruptcy protection, or cause Merrill Lynch to sell to Bank of America, but my guess is that it has more to do with business decisions and market conditions than anything the government did, but that is hyperbole for you.

Interesting, as Obama claims it is the worst financial crisis "Since the Great Depression," there was a Washington Post Op-ed yesterday by Donald Luskin, who writes:

"It was the worst of times, and it was the worst of times."

I imagine that's what Charles Dickens would conclude about the current condition of the U.S. economy, based on the relentless drumbeat of pessimism in the media and on the campaign trail. In the past two months, this newspaper alone has written no fewer than nine times, in news stories, columns and op-eds, that key elements of the economy are the worst they've been "since the Great Depression." That diagnosis has been applied twice to the housing "slump" and once to the housing "crisis," to the "severe" decline in home prices, to the "spike" in mortgage foreclosures, to the "change" in the mortgage market and the "turmoil" in debt markets, and to the "crisis" or "meltdown" in financial markets.

It's a virus -- and it's spreading. Do a Google News search for "since the Great Depression," and you come up with more than 4,500 examples of the phrase's use in just the past month.

But that doesn't make any of it true. Things today just aren't that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression -- or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That's virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since -- yes -- the Great Depression.

Why, then, does the public appear to agree with the media? A recent Zogby poll shows that 66 percent of likely voters believe that "the entire world is either now locked in a global economic recession or soon will be." Actually, that's a major clue to what started this thought-contagion about everything being the worst it has been "since the Great Depression"

Luskin points the finger at Obama for this belief that the economy is in the tank:

Patient zero in this epidemic is the Democratic candidate for president. As it would be for any challenger, it's in his interest to portray the incumbent party's economic performance in the grimmest possible terms. Barack Obama has frequently used the Depression exaggeration, including during a campaign speech in June, when he said that the "percentage of homes in foreclosure and late mortgage payments is the highest since the Great Depression." At best, this statement is a good guess. To be really true, it would have to be heavily qualified with words such as "maybe" or "probably." According to economist David C. Wheelock of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, who has studied the history of mortgage markets for the Fed, "there are no consistent data on foreclosure or delinquency going all the way back to the Depression."

Look, only a fool would look at the current state of affairs and not wonder if something is wrong, but to say that this is a financial crisis on par with the Great Depression is simply without basis, even assuming we could measure properly the problems. While Luskin is an advisor to the McCain campaign (and thus the blame for pessimism lying solely at the feet of Obama is perhaps a little disingenuous), his statements do have more than a kernal of truth.

For one thing, our understanding of the market and the economy are vastly superior to our understanding 80 years ago and that alone has to account for much of the mitigation of the problems. Luskin goes on to point out that a number of indicators are clearly positive. What this really goes to show is that maybe our measurements of economic health are at fault or incomplete, rather than the "fact" that we are in a "Great Depression"-like financial crisis.

Luskin writes further:

McCain campaign adviser and former U.S. senator Phil Gramm was right in July when he said that our current state "is a mental recession." Maybe he was out of line when he added that the United States has become "a nation of whiners." But when it comes to the economy, we have surely become a nation of exaggerators.

I would agree with both Luskin and Gramm, we are a nation of whiners and exaggerators and that our recession is more of a mental impression built upon repeated media impressions of doom and gloom rather than on hard economic data.

Ironically, Americans may think we are in a recession, but they certainly are not acting like we are in a recession. While the personal savings rate is not exactly high (2.6 percent in Q2 2008, it is higher than the heady days of the Clinton economic expansion (1.9 percent in Q3 2000), and we continue to consume goods at our regular pace. A lot of the loss is in the financial sector, where banks and other institutions have taken risks that in the past panned out, but now are not for a variety of reasons. Lehman and Merrill Lynch are but the latest victims not of government policy gone bad but of financial decisions gone bad.

John McCain is suggeting that the patchwork of regulations needs to be overhauled. But I don't think so. Could the regulations be modernized? Perhaps, but I don't think it is a pressing need. To be sure, there will be calls for more regulations and more disclosure (a la Sarbanes Oxley), but those efforts tend to produce unintended consequences. Right now, investors with Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch are not being scalped, indeed they are probably quite busy selling off Lehman stock, and some investors will lose money because of what is happening, but again that is a result of errors in business judgment and not errors in government policy.

Of course saying the financial world is in the worst shape since the Great Depression makes for good politics, it makes for very, very, very bad policy.

Mark Steyn on Media Manipulation

Steyn is on a particularly good rant responding to Howard Kurtz' whining about how the McCain camp is manipulating the media. Kurtz rights:

The media are getting mad.

Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.

Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that).

News outlets are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign, whether it's the ad accusing Obama of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners (the Illinois legislation clearly describes "age-appropriate" programs) or Palin's repeated boast that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere (after she had supported it, and after Congress had effectively killed the specific earmark).

Here is a thought, perhaps if the media weren't so desperate to remain relevant that they would print essentially the spin put out by the campaigns, maybe everyone would be better off. Both campaigns put out questionably framed matters and sometimes outright fabrications with a infinitesimailly small kernel of truth and the media report it as news. It is not, it is campaign material not news.

Steyn then points out:

Howie feels the press is being "manipulated" by the McCain campaign.

Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved "manipulating" the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin's amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

Yes, the traditional media manipulation would be to build a warm and fuzzy picture of the first woman to appear on the GOP ticket, not all the crap that came out.

The traditional media thinks it needs to compete with the blogosphere, but the blogosphere, in large part is not beholden to a sense of "ethics" that traditional journalism claims sets them apart from the rabble such as I. Maybe take a little time to think about what a reporter writes before launching into attacks on either side.

And Howard Kurtz, you are a whiny little pansy if you think the media is being manipulated. An industry can only be manipulated if the industry allows it. Tell you "colleagues" to grow a backbone.

Is This Why I Am Not "Feeling" The McCain Campaign

Instapundit.com has a couple of really good links about McCain's campaign on the internet.

But this quote really hit home:

Reader C.J. Burch emails: "To win elections the Republicans are going to have to defeat the media...not co-opt it. That they can't figure that out is a sign that their judgement is dangerously suspect."

I have been largely underwhelmed by the McCain camp and while I am sure the election will be close, I don't think McCain is doing nearly enough to make it happen for them.

Even his ads seem.... not very aggressive.

Here is what I think is the problem, for nearly a decade, John McCain was the media darling among Republican lawmakers. But with the rise of the Messiah Obama, they have a more liberal figure to glom onto, thus, bye-bye McCain.

NBCs Tim Russert Dead of Heart Attack

New York Times reports.

I can't imagine political journalism without him. Agree, disagree with his views, he is an icon in political journalism.

Blogger Protection Act of 2008

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) plans to introduce the Blogger Protection Act of 2008 this Thursday, April 3rd.

The bill protects bloggers from dangerous campaign finance regulations. Under the proposed law, bloggers will never be considered to have made a contribution or expenditure on behalf of (or in opposition to) a candidate simply because they link to campaign websites or write about the positions of federal candidates. Additionally, blogs are treated as any other publication under the general media exemption from most campaign finance restrictions. Without such protections, bloggers could be subject to various limitations and reporting requirements under campaign finance law.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) issued regulations two years ago protecting bloggers from being hampered by these campaign finance laws. But these blogger protections are just regulatory—they are not in statute. As you know, regulations can be changed without congressional action, and there's no telling what a future FEC might decide to do. Furthermore, the FEC is currently defunct because of vacancies and a lack of quorum. Therefore, we shouldn't put the freedom of bloggers in the regulatory hands of the FEC. Congress should protect them in law.

Hensarling will introduce the bill on Thursday. Keep an eye on the Center for Competitive Politics for more.

More Evidence of Media Bias

Gateway Pundit points out the difference between a Republican Preacher Scandal and a Democratic Preacher Scandal.

Journalist Sheild Laws

A bad idea writes Glenn (Instapundit) Reynolds:

The Constitution merely protects the freedom of speech and publication — not the freedom to keep secrets, which is what journalists are asking for when they seek special privileges of non-disclosure. Increasingly, journalists seem to be focusing on what not to tell us. In doing so, they're usually pursuing their own interests, not the First Amendment's or their readers'.

The other problem with journalist "shield" laws is that journalism isn't a profession; it's an activity, one now engaged in by many. With the proliferation of blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos and the like, anyone can be a journalist. But if anyone could assert a journalistic privilege not to disclose sources, the work of the courts would be far tougher.

Efforts to limit the privilege to "professional" journalists, on the other hand, quickly transform into a sort of guild or licensing system for the press — ironically, something that the First Amendment clearly prohibits.

Complying with subpoenas might make journalists' lives more difficult, but lots of industries are burdened by having to comply with the law.

Journalists usually aren't terribly sympathetic to those industries' complaints. We should be no more sympathetic to reporters' special pleading.

The idea of journalistic confidentiality is ludicrous. While a writer can promise to keep a person's name out of the newspaper, the journalist has no ability to make the same promise about any other aspect of life--particularly the courts. There is no particular public policy served by journalist sheild laws. The idea of attorney/client privilege, doctor/patient privilege or other types of recognized privileges is that they stem from constitutional rights guaranteed to individuals and necessary for the trust and confidence of those individuals.

A journalist sheild law serves no personal interest. The freedom of the press means the govenrment cannot censor the newspaper or prevent publication. It does not mean that the inidividuals who contribute to the press (the writers or their sources) have any special status because of their connection to the press.

Another Michael In Iraq (Yon this time) who Deserves a Pulitzer

Guitar Heros in Mosul.

Men crept in darkness to plant a bomb. They moved in an area where last year I was helping to collect fallen American soldiers from the battlefield.

Terrorists. The ones who murder children in front of their parents. The ones who take drugs and rape women and boys. The ones who blow up schools. The ones who have been forcibly evicted from places like Anbar Province, Baghdad and Baqubah by American and Iraqi forces. Terrorists are here now in Mosul. They call themselves al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI cannot win without Baghdad, and cannot survive without Mosul. The Battle for Mosul is evolving into AQI’s last great stand.

And there were the men planting the bomb. It is unknown if the men with the explosives were al Qaeda, but they were planting a bomb and that was enough. Many terrorists murder only for money. Like hit men. They might have nothing against the victim. It’s just business. Although understanding enemy motivations is key to winning a war, out on the battlefield, such considerations can become secondary, as divining the motives of a would-be killer is less important than stopping him.

The bombers were being watched. Invisible to them, prowling far overhead, was a Predator.

Next, Kiowa helicopter pilots who were playing Guitar Hero while on standby, flew into action to take the terrorists out.

Sometimes I sit up on a hill and watch them in the air. The other day two Kiowas were screaming low right over the rooftops and doing hard turns. I couldn’t see the combat because they were too far away, but I knew they were toe to toe and there was plenty of shooting going on or they wouldn’t have been flying so violently. It’s scary watching them because I’ve met them and know they are mortals doing the work of immortals. At any second there could be a fireball. A “fallen angel.” I remember the call over the radio last year of a “fallen angel” down by Baghdad. All aboard had been lost.

If I am down on the street and they pass overhead, I wave. In the dining facility, I step respectfully out of their way. All the time thinking, these folks are more than Guitar Heroes.

The dichotomy is strange.

Michael J. Totten Reports from Anbar

This guy should be getting a Pulitzer and why isn't he?

"Secret" Money in Campaign Funding

It is irresponsible campaign finance media reporting like this that just drives me insane:

A torrent of secret money is flooding into the leading presidential campaigns, with more than $118 million, or one-quarter of the total raised in this cycle, banked without disclosure of who gave the funds or where the donations originated.

The money is coming from hundreds of thousands of donations of $200 or less, which have been widely praised for democratizing the system for funding White House bids. However, the surge in low-dollar gifts has come at the cost of transparency, since federal law only requires campaigns to itemize donations when a donor gives more than $200.

According to an analysis being released today by a Washington think tank, the Campaign Finance Institute, Senator Obama of Illinois led the pack with such small and secret donations, pulling in about $31 million during 2007. Rep. Ron Paul ran second in small gifts, raking in more than $17 million. At the end of the year, Senator Clinton and John Edwards, who has since dropped out, were essentially tied for third in unitemized, small contributions, with each candidate raising about $11 million.

The law says that amounts of less than $200 don't need to be itemized. The whole stated purpose behind campaign finance disclosure laws is to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption. Fine, then a calculation was made that amounts under $200 were so small that the risk of corruption was considered nil and thus the rule.

Now the $200 limit was created in 1974, when campaign finance reporting was done largely by hand, including typing the reports. Now in teh modern age of computers and sophisticated databases, it is possible to have a lower disclosure threshhold. But really, if $200 in 1974 was considered a level under which no corruption was possible and the average congressional campaign cost under $80,000, how can $200 be corrupting with the average congressional campaign costs in excess of $800,000 and the presidential campaings will cost $250 million each?

The thing that chages me, in addition to the inflmatory headline, is that it takes four paragraphs before anyone learns that the "torrent of secret money" is in fact actually legal.

What Really Happened In Jena, LA

Well, it certainly is not what the mainstream media told you, as Charlotte Allen discusses in the Weekly Standard. It all started with a noose-hanging by three white, probably historically illiterate students, progressed to a six on one beating and then a national civil rights cause bolstered by prominent civil rights "leaders" like Jesse Jackson and others. What it turned out to be was something far different.

In early December the case of the "Jena Six"--the six African-American high school students in Louisiana accused of viciously beating a white classmate in 2006--collapsed dramatically with a felony guilty plea by one of the defendants. As something that was going to trigger "America's next great civil rights movement" (to quote National Public Radio) and grassroots protests against the "new Jim Crow" and the systematic discrimination against blacks in the criminal justice system, this was quite a letdown. The Jena Six were supposed to be the new Scottsboro Boys, the nine black youths railroaded to death sentences by all-white juries in 1930s Alabama on charges of raping two white women.

snip

No one who subsequently investigated the noose incident--and that included sheriff's deputies for LaSalle Parish and the U.S. attorney for Central Louisiana, -Donald Washington, who is black himself and led a behind-the-scenes FBI probe of the Jena nooses within days of their discovery--found any connection between the nooses and the attack on Barker in December. Nonetheless, the nooses--and the supposedly unduly lenient punishment meted out to the boys who hung them--became the causal linchpin of the twin demands of the Jena Six cause: that the noose-hangers be criminally prosecuted for hate crimes and that all criminal charges be dismissed against the six defendants in the attack on Barker. Catrina Wallace, sister of a Jena Six member, summed up the reasoning at a rally in front of the Jena courthouse on July 31: "For them to say it was a prank left those kids to do only one thing: defend themselves." This interpretation gained wide currency among Jena Six sympathizers. One of them, rocker John Cougar Mellencamp, released a recording in early October with the chorus, "Jena, take your nooses down." The video accompanying the song includes footage of 1960s civil rights marches, police beatings from that era, and sheet-draped Ku Klux Klanners.

So it was that the attack on Barker--which, viewed from any other angle, was simply a brutal and potentially lethal six-against-one pile-on at a high school--became a civil rights cause célèbre. The Jena Six affair generated more than seven momonths' worth of national news headlines and scolding op-eds; became a pet cause of the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the rapper Mos Def, the Congressional Black Caucus, and dozens of black bloggers, commentators, and talk-show hosts (one notable exception was the black contrarian sportswriter Jason Whitlock); provoked a September 20 march through Jena by some 20,000 people (setting a record for a post-1960s civil rights demonstration); and inspired a BBC documentary titled Race Hate in Louisiana; and catapulted Jena into the dubious standing of "the most racist town" in America. Jackson called the charges against the Jena Six a "miscarriage of justice," while Sharpton labeled Bell "a fine young man" and vowed to keep returning to Jena until "the charges are dropped on these young men and until Mychal walks out of that jail." A strange logical inversion had occurred in which Barker became the aggressor in the December 4 incident and his six alleged assailants the victims.

That the media didn't investigate a story is not surprising and since it matched with a "racist" meme that is all but guaranteed to get headlines and ratings, it was carried on with nary a thought to the flimsy circumstances behind the "reasons" for the beating or the pea-brained idiocy behind the nooses.

Drew Carey: Renaissance Man

Look, I always thought Drew Carey was a pretty funny guy. But in recent months, he has become

1). host of the Price is Right
2). Part owner of a Major League Soccer Franchise
3). A political commentator

I could do without 1 but really like 2 and 3.

C-SPAN's Brian Lamb to Get Medal of Freedom

Betsy Newmark points to the story.

If there was ever a man in Modern America who has done more to shed light upon the workings of Congress, Brian Lamb is the man.

C-SPAN may be a political junkies haven, but when you think about all the other goverment programming on cable, i.e. local government coverage on cable, think about 20 years ago and the impact of putting Congress on TV.

The one drawback to C-SPAN has been the grandstanding nature of Congress. There used to be two types of Congressmen, the show horse and the work horse. Now all we have are show horses. Not much work is actually being done.

Michael Yon Deserves a Pulitzer Prize

So says Rick Moran and he is right.

Check out Yon's latest Dispatch and read others. No one that I have seen or read is reporting like Yon.

More on Rush

Micheal Ledeen:

It's interesting that the Dems' attack against Rush is taking place at the same time Clarence Thomas's riveting autobiography hits the bookshelves, because both illustrate one of the central features of contemporary politics: the Left's loss of intellectual coherence and confidence, and its consequent turn to the vilification of individuals.

Limbaugh v. Reid

The head of the syndicator of Rush Limbaugh's radio program defends the radio host.

In reality, this is the only route to take. To argue that one of the most profitable syndication programs around should somehow be limited or censored would not only be bad business but would also lead to "Fairness Doctrine Redux."

Of course, the irony of the whole situation is that, even if what Limbaugh said about phony soldiers is right, Democrats in Congress have routinely slammed the military--See comments of John Murtha and others.

Transcript of Limbaugh Interview with Justice Clarence Thomas

I caught about an 45 minutes of this interview with Justice Clarence Thomas. I can't wait to get his book.

The interview was interesting, some highlights include going to junior seminary at age 16, learning first year algebra on his own one summer and some thoughts on his confirmation.

Harry Reid v. Rush Limbaugh

Its getting nasty boys and girls.

NY Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

About time.

Sally Field Can't Swear on Fox

Cries of Censorship soon to follow.