Community Reinvestment

Stephen Bainbridge rubbishes the idea that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the Wall Street meltdown:
Put simply, the freezing up of the credit markets doesn’t have anything to do with either affirmative action or illegal immigration, and people who believe it does are on a par with the conspiracy theorists who think fluoridation is a Chicom [...]

Friendly Fire (II)

David Brooks:
If McCain is elected, he will face conditions tailor-made to foster disorder. He will be leading a divided and philosophically exhausted party. There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats. He will confront Democratic majorities that will be [...]

Friendly Fire

Noah Millman:
Foreign policy looms exceptionally large for me this time, and so far while I find Obama disappointing I find McCain genuinely alarming. Whether deep inside him he still harbors the “old McCain” who opposed the Lebanon intervention, supported the Powell Doctrine, and led the way on normalization with Vietnam, as a candidate McCain clearly [...]

Winning Attitude

Ross Douthat:
He’s running for the Presidency at a time when the Republican brand is in the toilet, with a party that seems unable to excite its hard-core supporters or woo swing voters, and a leadership — McCain included — that gets the heebie-jeebies when called upon to discuss any topic save terrorism, 9/11 and the Surge. Even [...]

Quitter (II)

Orson Scott Card, remembering fondly Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard critique of American society:
We are what Sozhenitsyn accused us of being. Unwilling to listen to and learn from him, we are acting out the tragicomedy of national decline. Is there still greatness in us? Just as the dying British Empire, led by the genuinely brave Winston Churchill, had [...]

Palin and Abortion

As usual, the right misses the point when it comes to abortion:
I saw a concerted effort by the media to marginalize her as a far right winger, out of touch with moderate and pro-choice women.  This is unfair to her, and to all of us who respect her admirable decision to carry to term a [...]

Quitter

John Derbyshire:
In this age, optimism is for children and fools. And liberals.
Some children will be left behind. You cannot “remake the Middle East” or “defeat evil.” The poor will always be with us. Black and white will never mingle together in unselfconscious harmony. Corporations will not research and explore without hope of profit. Russia will [...]