Monthly Archives: September 2008

This day in baseball history, recalling an ancient grudge match

Yankee Stadium is closed for good as of nine days ago, the Yankees having failed to make the playoffs fpr the first time in years. But 50 years ago today, Yankee Stadium was preparing to play host to games 3, 4, and (presumably) 5 of its ninth World Series in ten years. The opponent would be the Milwaukee Braves. The Braves had upset the Yankees the previous year. To a »

In Some Ways, the World Gets Better

A little over a year ago, the Highway 35W bridge across the Mississippi River collapsed. I had just gotten home from work and was hanging out in the kitchen with my wife when Fox News started showing footage of the collapse. The first shock was that a bridge had collapsed; the second, that it was here in the Twin Cities; the third, that it was the Mississippi River bridge on »

Compare and Contrast

Every word that Governor Sarah Palin utters is flyspecked by the mainstream media, in hopes that they can find something wrong with it. As a result, almost every day we see a news story about some alleged misstatement by her. Today the Associated Press headlined, “Campaign tries to explain Palin’s Putin comment,” the implication being that Palin has once again put her foot in her mouth, and the McCain campaign »

A Boost for the Economy

As the economic crisis has deepened over the last several weeks, a number of knowledgeable people have told me that the simplest thing the government could do that would have a significant effect on the availability of credit is to ease the “mark to market” rule. A couple of hours ago, the SEC did just that. Technically the SEC issued a clarification of the rule, to the effect that banks »

1980 revisited

Last night, in support of my thesis that the voters will probably take a long last look at Barack Obama, I cited 1980 as one of the elections in which a challenger received this sort of scrutiny. In doing so, I implied that Reagan held a large lead deep into the campaign, that the lead disappeared briefly when voters took a last look at him, and then re-emerged just before »

Blame Where It’s Due

This new McCain ad takes credit for McCain’s efforts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and puts blame for the current crisis on the Democrats, where it belongs: It flashes by pretty fast, and I’m not sure how well the details will sink in with the average viewer. But on the whole it’s effective. This issue should be a winner for McCain, but so far it apparently hasn’t »

Dueling Conservatives

Fallout from yesterday’s bailout vote in the House continues. As Paul wrote yesterday, the issue is one on which reasonable conservatives can differ. Conservative cases can be made both for and against the package, as improved by House Republican negotiators, that came to the floor yesterday. This is well illustrated by the divergent views of two Minnesota Representatives, John Kline and Michele Bachmann. Kline and Bachmann are both friends of »

A look down the backstretch

As the month of September draws to a close, it looks like Barack Obama is leading John McCain by approximately 5 percentage points. A 5 point lead is hardly insurmountable, but at this stage of the race, with the conventions and the first debate in the book, it’s fair to ask: what foreseable events might cause McCain to rally? The remaining debates are the main events of the next few »

Was the Bailout Vote a Partisan Set-Up?

Nancy Pelosi must be the most ineffective House Speaker of modern times. The Democrats have achieved virtually nothing since taking control of the House and Senate in 2006, and have consistently avoided the responsibility that goes with being the majority party. Which may explain why, until very recently, most Americans were unaware that the Democrats were actually in control of Congress. Pelosi’s ineffectiveness has been due, in part, to her »

More on the Bailout

First, a reminder of how we got where we are. House Republicans and Democrats debate reform of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac: Now, on to the merits of today’s vote. My instinct has been to support the bailout proposal, but a number of commentators have made cogent arguments to the contrary. At The Corner, Andy McCarthy questions the bill’s specific provisions: This was a terrible bill. To take just a »

Where Do We Go From Here?

I believe it was Ronald Reagan who noted that the question was not whether his policies were popular; the question was whether the effects of his policies were popular. He was proved right when the media stopped talking about “Reaganomics” once it became clear that his administration’s economic policies had been spectacularly successful. Members of the House of Representatives report that phone calls and emails coming in to their offices »

The Bailout mess, where is Barack Obama?

My friend Bill Otis has this to say about the defeat of the bailout legislation: No one likes this bailout, and there’s plenty not to like about it, starting with the fact that it does nothing to remedy the country’s addiction to debt which is the real problem. Indeed, it’s merely the next “fix” for that addiction, not to mention a bonanza for millions of foolhardy and/or dishonest people who »

Bailout Defeated

It’s official: the compromise bailout plan that was negotiated over the weekend has been defeated in the House, 228-205. On Wall Street, stocks are plummeting. It’s not clear (to me, anyway) whether a bill can be crafted that will win majority support in the House. Given the improvements that were made as a result of the efforts of the House Republican leadership, I would guess that the bill’s opponents are »

The Case Against Ted Stevens

I’m no fan of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens–anyone who has an airport named after him while he’s still alive has probably spent too much time at the trough–but this AP account casts considerable doubt on the government’s case against him, which is now being tried in Washington, DC. The prosecution sent a key witness back to Alaska without telling the Court or the defense, apparently because they realized his testimony »

Days of rage averted at the RNC in St. Paul

The lunatic left sent an array of forces to St. Paul to disrupt and destroy the Republican National Convention earlier this month. They meant to do serious harm through violent means that appear to have been closely modeled on 1969’s SDS-sponsored Days of Rage riots in Chicago. Law enforcement authorities did an admirable job of preventing the scheme from working. Media interest in what the left had planned for St. »

From little ACORN grows

In today’s New York Post Stanley Kurtz explains what community organizers do, and what Barack Obama did. Kurtz delves into Obama’s work with Chicago ACORN: IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama. When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, »

The global test 2.0

In 2004, during his first debate with President Bush, John Kerry argued that U.S. foreign policy should be subjected to a “global test.” This piece of advocacy, the closest thing to a defining moment in the four debates that year, reinforced suspicions that Kerry’s foreign policy would not put American interests first. These suspicions, in turn, probably cost Kerry dearly. It’s pretty clear that Barack Obama also favors a “global »