Posted inPolitics: National

Say you want a revolution?

I was in Phoenix over the weekend to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore and mark the launch of the short-story collection, Phoenix Noir. For those of you with thin skins, be proud of the cool new restaurants downtown. And that Barry Schoeneman of Men's Apparel Club, who sells the best suits for the lowest prices in America and has toughed out a retail-hostile downtown for more than 4 years, is moving to a bigger store uptown, but still in the central core. And if you care (I don't), there are still plenty of hip, skinny, rich people at Snottsdale nightclubs despite the overall depression. More gravel. Less shade. More vacant lots. Fewer completed projects. Light rail still succeeds (gloat). Yea, my hometown.

But what caught my attention most was not this or even another well-intentioned civic project rolled out in the Information Center. It was an article on the front of the Viewpoints section, beneath pieces trumpeting this well-intentioned project. It was headlined, "A rebuttal: Why I am a conservative," by the "school choice movement" activist lawyer Clint Bolick, who now has what seems to be a well-endowed sinecure at the local Krack-Pot "Think" Tank. I thought: Why is this a rebuttal? The reactionaries have won in Arizona and the efforts of the latest well-intentioned project will go nowhere. They, not Bolick, should be the rebuttal to the ruling reactionary/growth status quo. But it was just bad newspaper design. Bolick was chastising my former colleague Richard Nilsen who had the guts to write an op-ed saying why he was not a conservative. In Arizona this is an enterprise akin to trying to teach opera to pigs (it's futile because it can't be done and it irritates the pigs).

Read and enjoy. But the biggest problem with the argument is that the "conservatives" that rose to prominence after 1980, and especially 1994, didn't want to conserve. As Sam Tanenhaus makes clear in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, today's "conservatives" are radicals, with little connection to the Burkean conservatives who sought to conserve the best of the old, showed respect for tradition and custom, etc. But thanks to the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic Party, these radicals still control the agenda.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Leggy blonde coed hooker foreign debt forces Frannie bailout

I’m late posting this morning on the takeover of Fannie and Freddie because I spent last night and part of today writing for the Seattle Times on the ouster of Washington Mutual’s chief executive. It’s not a far leap from one to the other, because both bags of trouble have their genesis in the collapse of the housing bubble. In the case of Fannie and Freddie, of course, the problem became so serious that it put the entire financial system at risk.

That’s right. Don’t be fooled by Hank Paulson’s "what this means to you" comments about how the federal takeover will make it easier for Americans to buy homes. The Bush Treasury was forced into using taxpayer money to back these two giant corporations to avoid a financial China Syndrome. And India, Japan, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, et al. Here’s the chilling line buried in Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday New York Times story:

The proposal to place both mortgage giants, which own or back $5.3
trillion in mortgages, into a government-run conservatorship also grew
out of deep concern among foreign investors that the companies’ debt
might not be repaid. Falling home prices, which are expected to lead to
more defaults among the mortgages held or guaranteed by Fannie and
Freddie, contributed to the urgency, regulators said.

Toes curled yet? This is what it means to be the world’s largest debtor nation. As the duhs and ignos rush to coronate McCain and Palin, there it little understanding of this predicament.

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