Blomberg News, fair and unbiased?

I am watching Washington Week with Glen Ifill this morning. Gwen has Genenne Zacharias of Blomberg news on, and Genenne is talking about the Bhutto assassination. "It's a terrible setback for George Bush" says Genenne.
Setback for Bush?? It's a tragedy for Bhutto's family, Bhutto's party, all of Pakistan, all decent Muslims everywhere, and for the United States. But Genenne has her red and blue sunglasses on and just sees something to bash Bush with. She faulted Bush for dealing with a Pakistani politician who got herself assassinated. Which is kind of dumb thing to say.
Benizar Bhutto was an important Pakistani politician with a strong following and, had she lived, would have been able to share a great deal of power with Musharref. Pakistan is a very important Muslim country and any responsible US administration will maintain close ties with major Pakistani politicians.
But all Blomberg news can see in the assassination is a setback for Bush, they don't see it as a disaster for everyone except Al Queda.

Troublesome Young Men by Lynne Olson, Pt 2

Finished the book. Excellent read. Paints a fascinating picture of British politics of the era. England was run by an old boy network elite. These guys were alumni of the same few schools, partied together, married each other, and owned all the important businesses. Parliament was operated by the Tory party which had total control over who could run for parliament, who got a prestigious position, who became prime minister. All done by word of mouth and tradition, nothing formalized in writing. Tory MP's found it impossible to vote against any government bills. Even if they deeply disapproved, the furthest they could go was to abstain from the vote. Voting against a measure of your party was simply never done. American visitors and reporters had difficulty understanding this.
The end came for Neville Chamberlain over the Norway disaster in the spring of 1940. After some vigorous Chamberlain bashing on the floor of Commons, Chamberlain made the next vote a vote of confidence in him. After the votes were counted, Chamberlain had won, but by a narrow margin of merely 80 odd votes, when the Tories had 400 and something seats in Commons. The narrowness of the margin was adjudged a defeat, and Churchill became Prime Minister.

The 2nd amendment, or Can Lawyers Read?

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security a free state" proceeds the "Right to keep and bear arms" clause of the second amendment. Various lawyers have argued this qualifying clause reduces the second amendment to merely the right to join the National Guard. That idea merely displays ignorance on the part of lawyers. Militia was always a bring your own gun thing. Militiamen (all able bodied men of the community) were required to take the musket down from over the mantle piece when the militia mustered. The town, county, or state did not issue arms, members had to furnish their own. In fact there were laws requiring all citizens to possess serviceable firearms in case Indians, pirates, redcoats, rebellion, oppression, or riots caused the militia to be mustered.
The second amendment should be read as "In order to have a militia, the citizens must be allowed to keep and bear arms, because mustering the militia without arms is pointless."

Life imitates science fiction

Years ago Mack Reynolds wrote science fiction about a war between massive dictatorial Betaland and small outnumbered and democratic Alphaland. To compensate for their numerical inferiority, a squad of daring Alphaland commandos attacked the Betaland national databank center and erased the entire Betaland database. The ensuing chaos was the downfall of Betaland.
Now a days it doesn't require highly trained commandos, apparently plain old burglars can do the same thing. Thieves broke into country offices in Tennessee and swiped laptops containing the country voter list, names, addresses and social security numbers.

Is the Wall St Journal getting smaller for 2008?

Now that Rupert owns the paper, is he going to shrink it to save money on paper? They reduced the height and width of the paper last summer by a couple of inches. Up til last week the A-section was around 20 pages long. Last few days the A section is down to 12-14 pages. And next year?

Shoot 'n Scoot Lenders, WSJ

On Wednesday's Wall St Journal op ed page, John W. Snow, former treasury secretary wrote:
"Fifth, banks should be required to stay on the hook after making an asset backed loan . While the securitization has clearly been an important cost saving financial innovation, an important source of discipline is lost when a loan originator simply sells off a loan to an unwitting investor without any continuing stake.
" Requiring banks to hold onto some portion of these loans would be a good safeguard against improvident lending practices. It would also help avoid the duplicitous behavior of publicly marketing an asset based security while privately betting it will fall in value. "

With these words Mr. Snow becomes the first, and perhaps only person to write about the real cause of the "subprime" crisis. Banks and mortgage operators hve been writing super bad junk mortgages left and right and then selling them off to more gullible investors. The mortgage originators don't care if the mortgage defaults and forecloses, just sell it fast before it goes belly up. Hence the teaser rate mortgages that will only last as long as the teaser rate lasts.

Earmarks

Aviation Week reports that the 3400 page omnibus appropriations bill has enough earmarks to choke a pig.