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Who cares? The Democrats in Congress won’t allow us to do anything about it.

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Oh, ya think?

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The basic point that financial markets are actually highly regulated and that manipulating the housing market is one of government’s favorite hobbies needs to be on t-shirts, lapel pins, and 3×5 cards for giving out to friends when they explain the Bush years as the last gasp of laissez-faire. A folk song would be nice, too.

Megan McArdle has some perceptive things to say about our auto industry.

…there was no good way to recruit new talent who might have changed things to a sinking ship.  Very few people set out to work for Detroit these days unless they’re serious gearheads, or happen to already live there.  Working for the Big Three magically combines vast corporate bureaucracy and job insecurity in one completely unattractive package.  Even the car freaks would often rather do something else–write about cars, or work for the NHTSA.

The entire thing is a toxic mess, left over from the days when interlocking oligopolies contentedly conspired to suck every last dollar out of captive consumers to whom Detroit would happily have given Flintstones cars if they could have figured out how to do them in two-tone vinyl.  But things that look like lunatic mistakes on the part of management were often quite rational responses to intolerable pressures.  I’m still not clear on why the cars had to be ugly, and all of the indicators cunningly hidden behind the wheel where they wouldn’t distract the driver, of course.  Management did many stupid and inexplicable things.

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So are homosexuals, but you don’t see them being banned from church cemetaries, or even the sacristy.

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No, they’re discriminating against high-risk groups for blood-transmitted sexual diseases. All homosexuals have to do is drop out of that group by keeping their pants zipped.

For students, of course, it’s more important that discrimination be fought than that people who get transfusions not get HIV at the same time.

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• Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
• Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

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Imagine that.

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As if the enviro-Nazis would ever permit that….

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The problem with the social sciences is that there’s little demand for social scientists. What there’s a huge demand for is social shamans who can lift the curse of the evil eye.

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What is the point to changing the time twice a year? I mean, really, just what is the fucking point? It’s a tremendous pain in the ass for everybody, and I’ve never seen a plausible, much less convincing, argument in its favor.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in San Francisco.

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They’re right, too.

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It’s been over six years since we began banging the drum around here to get Congress to repeal Sarbanes-Oxley, the law that was hastily written post-Enron to try to prevent such collapses again, but instead simply added a huge compliance tax, without doing much of anything to actually prevent corporate fraud. Corporate fraud is still rampant, and the law did absolutely nothing to prevent the financial collapse we see ourselves in today. There were, instead, massive unintended consequences, leading companies to go public elsewhere, go private or avoid the public markets altogether. The lack of IPOs, especially in the tech space over the past few years, even as the economy was looking strong, is incredibly telling.

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So much for wireless security.

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Yeah, this democracy thing is just so Republican….

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Handy — since that’s about all the RAF can deal with these days … or afford.

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And there’s a frightening thought.

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Pardon me while I snicker. Socialists don’t understand markets, so it’s no surprise that this sort of thing happens. Their response, of course, will be to pass a law against it; that’s all they every do. This will drive the market underground, thereby increasing criminality in Michigan. Just what we need more of.

All of these bright people, dumber than rocks.

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There you go, Barack, a reminder that we have enemies, and they aren’t interested in “just getting along”.

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Not that they would want to. Apparently the Workers’ Paradise isn’t such a paradise after all, since people are coming there to get benefits but avoid the work. Whoda thunkit?

Arnold Kling looks ahead to The Obama Years.

My point is that sooner or later the U.S. government is going to have to get serious about stripping the assets of those of us who have tried to live within our means. Sooner or later, the profligate are going to take from the prudent, the grasshopper is going to confiscate the property of the ants.

A word to the wise….

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And I’ll bet you really wanted to know that.

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I suppose one must applaud, however limply, the thought of council bureaucrats worrying about the needs of employees who are immigrants from Poland or Lithuania or Nigeria who might be perplexed by odd bits of Latin-derived jargon in memos. But this really smacks of the sort of P.C. nonsense that brings down ridicule on the heads of honest folk working to reduce prejudice.

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A great idea if there’s a way to implement it that wouldn’t be worse than what we’ve got now.

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Kinda gives new meaning to the phrase “more money than sense”, doesn’t it?

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Well, that’s Communism for you.

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Hey, let’s regress to the Democrat political machines of a hundred years ago. Yeah, that’s change you can believe in.

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It’s not your grandfather’s Britain.

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The Ministry of Truth is alive in well in Britain — just as George Orwell predicted.

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That means that Bush was always Dick Nixon in a Clever Plastic Disguise. With results as you seen them.

This is what happens when the only choice you have is the lesser of two evils — you get evil guaranteed, just not so much as with the other guy.

And that makes this election especially depressing, because there’s no hope for the future; even if McCain wins, the next four to eight years are going to be shitty, unless John McCain has more “surprise” in him than I’ve seen any evidence for — and most of the “surprise” in McCain has been of the unpleasant variety.

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A new EU naval task force will be unable to take tough action against Somali pirates because it must respect their human rights, its commander has admitted.

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Romsey has the only productive fields for miles around in the once-fertile Makonde South district, 90 miles north of Harare. Now it is under threat from a local strongman, Chief Nemakonde, a strong supporter of Mr Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party, whose land grab is being supported by local government officials. He has already taken over five formerly white-owned farms in the district, all of which are derelict after his efforts at planting failed.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Presumably so people can go by and thank them for speaking truth to power.

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Gotta love Australians.

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You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

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When seconds count, police respond in minutes. Buy a gun. Or die. Your choice.

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Reminder: Bureaucracy is a machine; do not be deceived by the fact that it appears to consiste of human beings. At times, it can be a very dumb machine, but by its nature it has no heart.

This creeps me out.

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In the old days it was called “Gestapo”.

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Apparently $150k a year is all it takes. Who knew?

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Nothing uncertain about these times; if you want to buy a gun, better do it before Barack becomes President.

George Will takes a look at Democrats and education. “Leave no pot of money undipped.”

Washington is having a Willie Sutton Moment. Such moments occur when government, finding its revenue insufficient for its agenda, glimpses some money it does not control but would like to.

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One of my big complaints with the law making process is that there’s no built-in process to make sure a law actually does what it’s intended to do. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, quite frequently, laws do plenty of other stuff, but do little to accomplish their stated purpose. Since politicians just want to pass laws so they can tell voters about the laws they passed, there’s no real review process. So, as long as a Congress member can claim “I helped build houses/protect children/save jobs/etc.,” because of a law that is called the Build Houses Act/Protect Kids Act/Save Jobs Act, they’re happy — even if the law did nothing to actually build houses, protect kids or save jobs.

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OK, the stage is set for an epic confrontation: the libertarian medical wingnuts of Arizona against the New Age psychological moonbats of California, with Barack Obama in the middle of it all. Can the robocalls be far behind? News at 11:00.

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On September 18, we released a report in Caracas that shows how President Hugo Chávez has undermined human rights guarantees in Venezuela. That night, we returned to our hotel and found around twenty Venezuelan security agents, some armed and in military uniform, awaiting us outside our rooms. They were accompanied by a man who announced—with no apparent sense of irony—that he was a government “human rights” official and that we were being expelled from the country.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

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Of course — that’s what Marxist dictators do.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Bush and Rove bought Latino votes in 2004 with Other People’s Money. Bush’s Housing Bubble was, more than anything else, a Hispanic Housing Bubble, with total mortgage dollars for Hispanic homebuyers going up an incredible 691% from 1999 to 2006. And all that cash flowing for home loans and home equity loans, whether to Hispanics or others, paid for a lot of Hispanic construction and home improvement workers.