The War Will Go On

In a sense, military historian Victor Davis Hanson has it backwards.  Never mind about the tactical considerations of Iraq vs. Afghanistan, he says.

Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.

Wrong, Mr. Hanson.  On the contrary, whatever we do in Iraq, the global war of Islamic terrorism against us will go on. 

After all, we don’t give a damn about whether Islam lives or dies.  As far as we are concerned we are the future and the Islamists are a bunch of parallel-cousin-marrying barbarians.

It is the fact that the Islamists won’t live and let live that we are in this war, pace the Noam Chomsky brigade.

But, of course, we are just quibbling.  Hanson is making the point that Iraq is just a battle, a tactical or operational question.  We can win it or lose it. But win or lose in Iraq the war with an enraged Islam will go on.

Most likely, it will take a western city or two damaged by a dirty nuclear bomb before the West gets mad enough to get serious.

The trouble with barabarians is that you don’t know when to take them seriously.  Usually they are just a nuisance.  But sometimes they can take down an empire.  It happened to the Roman Empire, and it happened a few times to the Middle Kingdom, most notably when Genghis Khan and his chaps took over in the 1200s and inspired Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

and so on.

Strategically speaking, the next item on the agenda is what the Democrats will do when they are next in power.

Because that is a very different thing from being in opposition.

Housing Bust: Minorities Hardest Hit

Unfortunately there’s a lot of truth in the old joke about the final news item from the mainstream media: “World Ends, Minorities and Women Hardest Hit.” 

Because when disaster strikes it is the least experienced, the most vulnerable, those least able to adapt who suffer the most.

So you’d expect that minorities would be having a hard time in the current housing bust.

And you’d look to The New York Times to tell you all about it.

From the vantage point of 34th Street, things don’t look good, at least not across the Hudson in Jersey.  Report Kareem Fahim and Ron Nixon:

Broad swaths of Newark are groaning under the weight of mortgage debt, much of it accumulated in the building boom of recent years that has transformed some parts of the city with gleaming redevelopment.

You have to feel sorry for these folks:

[A] heavy mortgage debt has led thousands of residents — many of them first-time homebuyers — close to financial ruin, experts and local officials say.

And here we go: sub-prime loans rear their ugly heads.

Federal lending data show that a high percentage of mortgages for homes on the north, south and west sides of Newark — as much as 50 percent in some neighborhoods — are subprime loans.

Expect the question of sub-prime loans to surface in the campaigns of the Democratic presidential contenders.  These are Democratic voters that are hurting, and it’s time the government “does something.”

How Do You Spell C-r-e-d-i-t-C-r-u-n-c-h?

It’s always a mystery how the economy swings from easy credit—when lenders are filling the airwaves with loan ads—to the good old credit crunch when you can’t get a loan if your life depended on it. 

But maybe the story of New Century Financial Corp. gives us a clue.

Reuters’ reporter Jonathan Stempel tells today how New Century can’t sell its paper to the government-sponsored mortgage giants any more. 

New Century said it decided voluntarily on Monday to stop selling or being the main servicer of loans for Freddie Mac, the second-largest U.S. home loan financier. Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM - News), the largest financier, cut off its own ties with New Century earlier this month, saying the company breached some contracts.

Hum.  Just when poor folks are going to need credit the government decides to cut the cord.  Or at least the quasi-monopoly government-sponsored politically-connected mortgage-bond floaters cut the cord. Or pull in their horns.

Just to be on the safe side.

It ain’t fair. 

But does it mean a credit crunch, or at least a continuing slide in the housing market?

The simple answer is that we don’t know.  We’ll know in about another year as we look back.  Pundits will knowing say either:

1. You could have seen that coming, or
2. Well, those perma-bears were wrong again.

But right now, you can place your bets.  There is still time.

Go For It: usgovernmentspending.com!

It’s a great story of rags to riches.

First it was an idea.  Then it was an article on roadtothemiddleclass.com.

Last Thursday it was up on a website completely modern with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  On Friday night it was propagated worldwide as usgovernmentspending.com.

On Saturday we sent a sitemap to Google.  On Monday night we were indexed and searchable on Google.

On Tuesday, our regular article was publicizing usgovernmentspending.com on The American Thinker.

Today Andrew Sullivan has linked from The Atlantic on his Daily Dish:

Here’s a great new online guide to where your taxpayers’ dollars end up. The vast majority goes to the elderly in pensions and healthcare. Some acerbic commentary can be found here. I’m just glad the web can expose the reality of government spending and redistribution.

Dare I send an email to Rush?  Would it demolish the site?

Oh the nightmare of success!

UAW Says It's Full of Fight

You’ve gotta hand it to the UAW.  They’re not ready to roll over and play dead.  Why, the whole idea of bankruptcy is absurd, a management trick, as Tom Krisher reports from the UAW bargaining convention.

(By the way, Tom does not tell his readers whether he is a union member.  It is the official position of us here at Road to the Middle Class that all journalists should disclose their union membership status when writing about labor unions.  Anyone that doesn’t isn’t really a journalism professional.  Disclosure: Nobody at Road to the Middle Class is a union member.)

Martin Shawl, 53, a 28-year Delphi Corp. and General Motors Corp. worker from Bay City, said he doesn’t believe the Detroit automakers are in financial trouble.

"It’s voodoo accounting," he said, questioning the timing of the Chrysler Group’s losses and GM’s restatement of earnings due to accounting troubles

He said the union shouldn’t give back anything to the companies, and it should end a two-tier wage scale that pays new hires less than longtime workers.

God bless the fellow!  It’s all smoke and mirrors designed to exploit the working stiffs on the shop floor and to force give-backs.

Tell you what, Marty, old chum.  I just checked the financial box scores today. General Motors is capitalized at about $18 billion.  Google is worth about $144 billion.

Now I don’t know what kind of voodoo goes into the pricing of common stock on the global finance markets.  Probably there is a fair amount—dead chicken, entrails, the whole Haitian thing. 

But when General Motors is worth about 12 percent of upstart Google it has to mean something beyond smoke and mirrors. Old sport.

Politics Has Always Been Risky Business

The recent Scooter Libby case moves columnist John Podhoretz to mourn that anyone taking a top government job ought to have his head examined. 

If you were interviewing a candidate for such a job, he writes, you would have to tell the candidate that the chance of

having to hire a lawyer at some point during your employment with us around 40 percent.

Who would be so crazy to do that, when the lawyer fees alone might be enough to ruin you?

It’s certainly true that politics has gotten rougher in the last twenty years.  Maybe.  But then politics has been contested more in the last twenty years.  Conservatives and Republicans have been less and less inclined to go with the flow of more and more government programs and more and more inclined to contest the issue with their liberal and Democratic friends.

And now of course they can turn to usgovernmentspending.com and get the figures.  Just how much is enough for government health care or government education?  $700 billion? $800 billion?  A trillion or two?  When would liberals cry Uncle?

Liberals and Democrats have noticed this.  They wonder what ever happened to the gentlemanly Republicans they used to know.  They remember the Ev Dirksen and Jerry Ford show on TV.  Now there was a pair of decent Republicans! Now they are all so coarse and rude—and, you know, religious.

But the fact is that politics has always been a rough game.  In our day the worst that can happen to you is disgrace and imprisonment.  But in the good old days it was treason, attainder, execution, and banishment, spiced by the occasional episode of torture.  And all because you joined with the wrong people or excited the suspicion of a powerful peer of the realm.

So it’s true what J-pod says:

Every single person who has worked in the highest reaches of the U.S. government in recent memory has worked intimately with someone who has gone to jail, been convicted of a crime or been impoverished by legal fees - someone they know to be a fine person, a dedicated person with a family, who is the farthest thing from a criminal and yet whose name is dragged through the mud and whose reputation is trashed.

 But it was ever thus.  That’s why they call fame a bitch goddess. 

Barone on Gore's Secular Faith

It’s an inexhaustible topic, the solipsism of the baby-boom generation, the idea that the world revolves around the wonderful evolved people who came to consciousness in the 1960s.

And that goes for Al Gore, baby-boomer almost, and his global-warming belief system, writes Michael Barone.

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up.

We’re told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

The trouble is that the climate of the earth has always fluctuated—in all times scales.  And in the past climate has changed a lot faster than it is doing right now.

Writes Barone: “Even The New York Times bridles” at Gore’s exaggerations.

After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists — not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls — charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.

 It comes down to a matter of spirituality, the baby-boomer word for religious faith.

The natural human yearning for spirituality has produced in many people educated in secular-minded universities and enveloped in an atmosphere of contempt for traditional religion a faith that we vulgar human beings have a sacred obligation not to inflict damage on Mother Earth.

Of course, Gore and his pals do not intend to change their ways.  It is the great unwashed, you and me, who will make the great sacrifice to propitiate the climate change gods.