sisu

It's the incentives, stupid

Did you say something about bailing out fat cats? Is there food involved? Baby Cakes stares down from atop the kitchen cabinets this afternoon in the afterglow of a crazy-hour episode that saw him galloping down the back stairs, banking with spinning wheels around the corner into the kitchen and then leaping from floor to counter to cabinets in the twinkling of an eye.

"I saw you on C-Span this morning, keeping your head while all around you -- Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank the first among equals -- were losing theirs," we emailed Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a member of the Financial Services Committee, this morning. Her bio — working mother of five, first Republican woman to be elected to the US House of Representatives from Minnesota, "reputation as a 'principled reformer' who stays true to her conservative beliefs," induces incoherence in leftist elitists — is reminiscent of Sarah Palin's. She voted "no" on the bailout yesterday, and she calls a toad a toad at her TownHall.com blog, citing Investor's Business Daily's "'Crony' Capitalism Is Root Cause of Fannie and Freddie Troubles":

"In the past couple of weeks, as the financial crisis has intensified, a new talking point has emerged from the Democrats in Congress: This is all a "crisis of capitalism," in socialist financier George Soros' phrase, and a failure to regulate our markets sufficiently."

Incentives are all. Reward bad behavior, and you get more bad behavior. It depends upon what your definition of bad behavior is, of course. One man's (Tuck's) delight at Baby'e "Mr. Paw" begging for treats off his dinnerplate is another man's shock at poor table manners.

The true believers — those "Honest Leadership and Open Government" Democrats we blogged about yesterday and their fellow travelers in the media — are predictably projecting responsibility for the unintended consequences of their own bad behavior onto "the private sector" (Barney Frank) and, of course "the Bush Administration’s failed economic policies" (Nancy Pelosi). As Jonah Goldberg writes in "No one's clean in this mess":

Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has spent the last few years ridiculing Alan Greenspan, John McCain and others who sought more regulation for Fannie Mae's market-distorting schemes — the fons et origo (source and origin) of this financial crisis. Now he says "the private sector got us into this mess." His partner in crime, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), a chief beneficiary of Fannie Mae lobbyists' largesse, claims this mess is the result of poor oversight — without even hinting at the fact he is in charge of oversight of banks. They sound like pimps complaining about the prevalence of STDs among prostitutes.

And let us not forget that the Democrats, with a 31-seat majority, could not get 95 of their own to vote for the bailout, largely because it didn't provide enough taxpayer money to their left-wing special interests. Would that they thought about the country.

The one man who truly tried to treat this crisis like a crisis — McCain — was ridiculed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who implored him to come to Washington to help in the first place. And the news media, which now treat any Republican action that threatens a Barack Obama victory as inherently dishonorable, uncritically accepted the bald Democratic lie that McCain ruined a bipartisan bailout deal last Friday.

What does go on in that black hole we call the "progressive" mind? We got a glimpse from a confessional offering by Ariannna Huffington, who's convinced following her conversion that only more government can save us:

Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, famously declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Twenty-seven years later, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and seven-plus years into the reign of Bush and Cheney, Reagan's anti-government battle cry should be on trial. But, stunningly, it is not …

The shift in my own thinking on the role of government was what led to my disillusionment with the Republican Party and the transformation in my political views. I've always been progressive on social issues: pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay rights — even when I was a Republican. The big difference is that I once believed the private sector would address America's social problems. But the hope that people would roll up their sleeves and solve this country's social ills without the help of government was never fully realized. There were never enough volunteers or donations — and the problems were just too massive and intractable to tackle without the raw power of appropriations that only government can provide.

A fiscal conservative/social liberal mind is a terrible thing to lose.

Being a member of the red-in-tooth-and-claw community, the Babe has been intimately familiar with the economic logic of nature and feline nature from day one.

Unlike Huffington's later-in-life loss of common sense, the political conversion regarding fiscal philosophy usually goes in the other direction, as playwright David "Why I am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" Mamet and our good friend and fellow Pajamas Media Network blogger  Neo "A mind is a difficult thing to change" Neocon — among other thoughtful former liberals mugged by reality — can attest. As we've blogged here early and often, "The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature." It's the incentives, stupid (yes, you, Arianna). Speaking of incentives, we loved Dale Franks's take on the story of the hour [via Fausta]:

So we’re in the middle of this crisis because the Government of the United States created the incentives that caused it.

And with all this current talk of making the bad actors pay for their sins, you’ll notice that no one is talking about changing the government’s policies that caused this. It’s never the government’s fault, apparently. They only create the incentives. And hold a gun to the banks head to comply with them. But they don’t actually, you know, sign the mortgage papers, so they’re in the clear. They can just point at the bankers and say, “It’s the greedy capitalists, man!”

To bail out or not to bail out? Harvard Libertarian Jeffrey A. Miron, one of 166 academic economists who signed a letter to congressional leaders last week opposing the government bailout plan, just says no:

The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government.

The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.

… Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.

In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.

… Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street's hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.

Even as "Congressional leaders, with advice from their parties' presidential nominees, scrambled" today to salvage the bailout bill, bloggers are having serious second thoughts. The Anchoress, in one of her classic comprehensive, link-rich tour de force superposts that covers all the bases, may be onto something:

The market is calming down all by itself, without congress passing a dubious bill. What will it mean for congress if — before they can pass the thing — we see the beginnings of a turnaround? What will it mean for the candidates?

To paraphrase Mark Steyn: when this many people I don’t trust are telling me something must be done for my own good … I don’t want it. I want to be far away from it.

Hillary's execrable "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" comes to mind.

Update: Fausta links.

So much disinformation, so little time

"But I think it's fair to say that the scandals that we've seen, both legal and illegal, under the current White House and Congress, are far worse than most of us could have imagined," Barack Obama told fellow Democrats with a straight face last winter at a gathering designed "to shine a spotlight on the Republican culture of corruption and highlight efforts to clean up Washington and get back to the people’s business." (Photo unattributed)

“This bill does not represent a new and sudden departure from free market principles as much as it represents an emergency response to congressional actions that have ignored free market principles, and our Constitution, for decades," says Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) in a statement released today [via Ed Morrissey]:

If anyone in Washington should offer their resignation it should be the members of Congress who peddled the fantasy of free home ownership without risk. No institution in our country is more responsible for the myth of borrowing without consequences than the United States Congress.

As much as members of Congress want to find scapegoats, the root of this problem is political greed in Congress. Members of Congress from both parties wanted short-term political credit for promoting home ownership even though they were putting our entire economy at risk by encouraging people to buy homes they couldn’t afford. Then, instead of conducting thorough oversight and correcting obvious problems with unstable entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, members of Congress chose to ignore the problem and distract themselves with unprecedented amounts of pork-barrel spending.

Roger Kimball explains "Who caused 'the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression'” in a must-read Q&A pullout of key data points from this video that names names, including the blusterous House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, who protests "The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it," even as Jeff Jacoby observes "Frank's fingerprints are all over the financial fiasco":

As the Massachusetts Democrat has explained it in recent days, the current financial crisis is the spawn of the free market run amok, with the political class guilty only of failing to rein the capitalists in. The Wall Street meltdown was caused by "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector," Frank said; the country is in dire straits today "thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best." And that philosophy goes "back to Ronald Reagan, when at his inauguration he said, 'Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.'"

There you go again, Mr. Frank. Meanwhile, the unspeakable Speaker of the House seemingly sabotaged her own efforts to lock up enough bipartisan votes to pass the $700 billion bailout bill, angering potential Republican allies with a boilerplate pre-vote finger of blame pointed squarely at "the Bush Administration’s failed economic policies — policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system." But the most egregious revelations of recent days concern the trajectory of Barack Obama's early career as an Alinsky-inspired community organizer, as James Simpson at The American Thinker explains in his eye-opening "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis" [via The Anchoress]:

When seen together, the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s …

This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy … David Horowitz summarizes it as: "The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. [It} seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

"Cloward and Piven held that poor people can only advance when society is afraid of them," writes James H. Walsh at Newsmax:

By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation’s wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state. Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended [Chicago radical activist Saul] Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government.

… how many voters know that Obama, during his four-year tenure in Chicago as a community organizer, worked as a trainer for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — the infamous ACORN, whose affiliate, Project Vote, is known for voter fraud — the same ACORN from which a mighty mortgage mess has grown.

Was this year's sub-prime mortgage meltdown ACORN's insidious project all along? And what about what Victor Davis Hanson describes as Obama's "Strategy of Preemption," including threats "to go to the courts after the NRA ads, to swarm Milt Rosenberg’s radio station in Chicago to badger guest Stanley Kurtz, or to unleash Missouri law-enforcement on McCain’s campaign ads?" Are these efforts the fruits of Obama's schooling in the intimidation tactics of community organization? So much disinformation, so little time. It's downright Gramscian.

Just stumbled upon from Newsmax: "Former Republican Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire are running the McCain-Palin 2008 Honest and Open Election Committee":

Both Rudman and Danforth voiced concern that there is or may be a pattern of registering people who are not entitled to vote, noting that of particular concern is an organization called The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

“We are concerned that ACORN has been connected with Senator [Barack] Obama and that he has ties to it,” said Danforth.

Danforth tells a doubting Colmes of Hannity & Colmes on Fox News this evening that his committee isn't accusing Obama of any wrongdoing and in fact hopes to reach out to members of both parties in a spirit of cooperation. Good luck.

Update: Dr. Sanity reaches out to the inmates of the asylum in the latest Carnival of the Insanities.

Shooting Obama out of the sky (again)

John McCain "has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop," wrote Michael Barone (and others) recently, explaining that "For a fighter pilot, that means honing in above and behind the adversary so you can shoot him out of the sky. For a political candidate, it means acting in such a way that the opponent's responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make and undermine his own position." Above, "the OODA loop in practice" over Vietnam (Thanks to Bill in the comments for the correction) from HG's World.

"As you know, I'm an old Navy pilot, and I know when a crisis calls, it's all hands on deck," John McCain deadpanned before assembled reporters yesterday, once again catching his opponents off guard — as he did three weeks ago by disorienting the immediate world with his bold choice of Governor Sarah Palin as running mate — by announcing he would put his campaign on hold to join Senate colleagues in the ongoing financial crisis debate, maneuvering his opponent into a position where Obama had no choice but to do the same, if only for a few hours. Even as members of the commentariat on both sides of the aisle were all over the map wondering what this latest "risky" move might mean, our own gut reaction was the same thrill of hope against hope — can you say "landslide"? — we had experienced when Sarah Oakley Palin came out of the gate. As we blogged then, "Oh, yeah!"

Consider, first, a "half-time" report early this afternoon on what goes on behind closed Senatorial doors (our own transcriptions from Fox News live).

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) — appointed by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to be the negotiator representing the Republicans — is crediting "the arrival of McCain and Obama in Washington yesterday with moving things along and focussing the nation's attention on the [financial crisis]." McConnell adds that "Both of them [McCain and Obama] being there yesterday underscored the significance of moving forward on a bipartisan basis and doing it quickly."

Go, Johhny go! Now listen to Fox News' grand-poobah-in-residence Chris Wallace, a member in good standing of what we term the fuddy-duddy community — J.R. Dunn's "Northeast Corridor conservatives" who "could not comprehend Sarah Palin or what she represents, any more than the liberal-left could" — telling Martha McCallum that he has good news and bad news for McCain now that Congress has gone back to work and tonight's Oxford, Mississippi debate will go forward:

The bad news is that he looked a little silly climbing up on his white horse. The good news is that once he gets up on that stage tonight, people are going to forget what happened in the last 36 hours. They will be concentrating on how each candidate does in the debate.

WHO looks a little silly, Chris? We'll have to wait and see which way the election goes, but we're guessing the flyboy just shot you and your fellow Northeast Corridor conservatives out of the sky again.

Update: Fausta links, playing with our headline in "McCain knocks Obama off the headlines," a rollicking, link-and-image-rich read.

Update II:  "Nice political rant from SISU," says Maggie's News Junkie.

"My hope is that we can reach an agreement very shortly"

"Conflicting signals on whether there is or is not a plan that both parties can accept," reports Brit. "My hope is that we can reach an agreement very shortly," says the Prez.

"The broad outlines of a deal?" When's supper, asks TIny.

Update: The broad outlines of a menagerie at Modulator's Friday Ark #210.

"Were it not for McCain's gambit . . ."

In Harvard's Sanders Theater this afternoon, bottles of Poland Spring water, microphones and name cards await an all-star panel of "some of the nation's leading scholars and practitioners in finance, policy, law and other fields relevant to the current situation." It's virtually open to the public. Starts at 4 p.m. Details below.

"I invite you to join us Thursday, September 25, for a live webcast of a special panel discussion entitled 'Understanding the Crisis in the Markets: A Panel of Harvard Experts,'" Harvard President Drew G. Faust emailed "alumni and friends" this afternoon:

We are fortunate to have on campus some of the nation's leading scholars and practitioners in finance, policy, law and other fields relevant to the current situation, and several of them have generously agreed to participate in a special session for the Harvard community to help us understand and interpret recent developments in the U.S. and world markets.

The panel will begin at 4:00 p.m. EST and will include the following faculty members:

Robert Kaplan, Professor of Management Practice
Jay Light, Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of Business Administration and Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration
Gregory Mankiw, Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics
Robert Merton, John and Natty McArthur University Professor
Kenneth Rogoff, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy
Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law (To Be Confirmed)

I hope that you will take advantage of this opportunity to hear from some of Harvard's leading experts by visiting this link. The webcast will not be password-protected and will be recorded and made available for future viewing. Real Player is required.

Since we aren't a fly on the wall of that 4 o'clock White House meeting of the Leader of the Free World with "old Navy pilot John "OODA Loop" McCain, former community organizer Barack Obama and other members of Congress this afternoon, this will have to do for now.

This just in on Fox: "Stocks jump on word of possible bailout compromise." Sheperd Smith guessed they're "reacting to the belief that this deal is about to be done." Reporter Carl Cameron, on the trail with McCain says "Were it not for McCain's gambit yesterday, it wouldn't have reached the point it has." It looks like the Friday debate is on!

Update via Drudge (Associated Press 02:58 p.m.): "Lawmakers: Financial bailout agreement reached.

Update II: In the flesh, the webcast is technically useless. It keeps signing off. Maybe we can catch it later on C-Span? But all is not lost, by any means. On Fox we are being treated to the Divine Ms. W, Rep Maxine Waters (D CA), shouting at Neil Cavuto.

The great unwashed

 

The great unwashed laundry catches the light fantastic early morning.

Beauty in unexpected places rewards the watchful eye.

"Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness"

Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 1510, Michelangelo. Fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome.

"We are reduced to Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness," asserts William Staneski in an American Thinker essay that Lucianne calls "Probably the most important piece you will read this weekend." Staneski has a lot of good stuff to say about the Gramscian march through the institutions of the "post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day," but we are frankly horrified at his gratuitous dissing of both Darwin and the animals, two of our own staffs of life. First a few Staneski excerpts and then our take:

It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism …

It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can't escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don't realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth.

All well and good, and the fish "not aware of the water in which it swims" called to mind the liberal media's who-me? cluelessness regarding their own Pauline Kael bubble [via The Qand O Blog, via Maggie's]:

It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

We weren't shocked, shocked at all, but only, once again, frankly horrified at one of our big-time fave moviemaker's, Woody Allen's totalitarianesque take on what we had thought was supposed to be a democratic election:

It would be a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win.

Forget about the electorate. These folks want an acclamation. Talk about "Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness." Speaking of which, the Vatican is a welcome voice in the wilderness:

From time to time, Catholicism can be seized with fits of enthusiasm and veer toward one extreme or another. Over the long run, however, its instinct is usually to seek the sane middle, driven by what Pope Benedict XVI has called the Catholic genius for seeking "both/and" solutions to seemingly "either/or" problems.

In Rome this week, a blow was struck for the sane middle on the most vexed issue in the modern relationship between faith and science: the theory of evolution …

Leclerc said of intelligent design that it "substitutes divine will for the mechanism which it is the province of science to study, even though this is obviously a matter of two distinct levels [of causation]."

Creationism need not apply.

Update: "Loved your post, and used it here," emails Fausta, who dives into William Staneski's "Drumbeat" — referenced above — and comes up with Obama's head:

Where is the substance? Where is the unmovable core? Where are the absolutes Obama stands for?

"Obama is indeed," she writes, "the perfect candidate for the post-modern sea."

Economy of means

Between catnaps atop the cable box this morning Babe demonstrates the Yoga Cat Pose as he switches from lying on his right side to lying on his left.

Settled back down, he demonstrates the deeper meaning of the stretch: "You will feel new life and energy come to your spine after practicing this pose," explains the Yoga Learning Center website.

Meanwhile a patriotic Tiny assumes sentry duty outside …

… keeping the side yard safe for Democracy.

If the shoe fits

Inspired by Sarah Palin's signature bright red Naughty Monkey Double Dare peep-toe pumps with three-and-a-half-inch heels, we ferreted out our own mid-seventies-vintage Elkins rosebud-pink, peep-toe pumps with three-and-a-half-inch heels from the back of a neglected closet where they had languished these many years. All that was old is new again,

"The Governor of Alaska gets our girls-just-wanna-have-fun juices flowing," we blogged three weeks back during the rumor-revved hours and minutes leading up to John McCain's announcement of his VP choice, even as members of the fuddy-duddy community counseled a "safe" pick. Now we're getting some insight into what makes those fuddy-duddies tick. "Clearly, a small but influential number of conservatives — almost exclusively from the New York-Washington axis which we will term the 'Northeast Corridor' — could not comprehend Sarah Palin or what she represents, any more than the liberal-left could," writes J.R. Dunn in The American Thinker:

In fact, the liberals can be said to have had a superior grasp of Palin's impact. They, at least, saw her as a threat.

If this is the choice of the conservative base, one said, "Then we need a new base."

Two points are immediately evident: this rhetoric echoed precisely what the liberal media was saying and at the same time was diametrically opposed to what the rest of the country had to say.

In the same way that liberals view the U.S. a racist, militarist monolith, the Northeast Corridor coterie view it as a cultural wasteland populated by backwoodsmen, halfwits who need to be guided by an enlightened but aloof elite.

We totally agree with reader Wemedge's thoughts in the comments:

This is the first article I've read since the Palin announcement which articulates my disappointment with all the Krauthammers, Noonans, Willses, and Brookses at their rejection of someone who is clearly compelling and fresh.

What most disappointed, as so well put by Mr. Dunn was that "so isolated had the Northeast Corridor conservatives become, so deeply embedded in their Jamesian parallel universe, that they couldn't recognize her clear conservative stance, couldn't recognize her personal courage, couldn't, in the end, be bothered to stand with her when she and her family were victimized by the most repellent political attack of our epoch."

So I came, all by myself to the same conclusion that this article did: they're clueless.

"We sold our Governor a pair of red Double Dare Naughty Monkey shoes a couple of weeks ago," the proprietors of Juneau's Shoefly Inc. wrote Fausta the other day. "She just wore those shoes as John McCain announced Governor Sarah Palin from Alaska as his vice president running mate. Although not everyone agrees with her politics, everyone can agree that she wears 'sexy shoes.'" Fuddy-duddies need not apply. Update: "They look like something Daisy Duck would wear," comments Tuck.

Those Northeast Corridor Conservatives need to get out more, beyond their Pauline Kael bubble, like businessman Jay Randhawa of the San Diego firm that markets the "very edgy, very hip, very street" Naughty Monkey shoes favored by Sarah Palin. "He was surprised to learn that Gov. Palin was introduced as Mr. McCain's vice-presidential choice wearing a red pair of peep-toe pumps with 3 1/2-inch heels," reports the WSJ, but instead of staring in incomprehension, he saw an opportunity:

The shoes, marketed by his company's Naughty Monkey line, generally are geared to women in their early-to-mid-20s who go clubbing, he says.

"The age bracket we target is a little younger. It's a very edgy, very hip, very street brand," adds Mr. Randhawa.

Celebrities like Paris Hilton had been photographed in the brand's shoes, but seldom, if ever, a 40-something politician.

Mr. Randhawa says he realized that Gov. Palin's footwear choice offered the chance to pitch the Naughty Monkey line to a new demographic. The company quickly sent out emails to its retailers with a photo of the Alaska governor wearing the shoes and the slogan "I vote for Naughty Monkey!"

Women in their early-to-mid-20s who go clubbing, 40-something politicians, women d'un certain age who blog. Girls just wanna have fun. Unless you're a fuddy-duddy. Yes you, Peggy Noonan. And you, Miss Hillary:

The organizers of an anti-Iran rally Monday rescinded their invitation to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin after Democrats protested that her presence would turn the event into a political rally, McCain campaign and Jewish community sources said.

The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations created a political tempest by inviting Palin to speak without clearing her invitation with another speaker, Senator Hillary Clinton. Clinton promptly dropped out of the event, saying it would be seen as unduly political.

"I guess now we know how deep Hillary's concern for Iranian nukes really is, skin deep," wrote blog buddy Sol of Solomonia in disgust at the disingenuousness of Hillary's posturing:

As soon as she learned that Sarah Palin would be there, she was out the door. Thanks for nothing. I get the feeling she reacted worse to this news than she would have had she heard that Monica would be there making a speech. Nothing, absolutely nothing, trumps cynical selfish partisan politics on Planet Clinton. Not even Iranian nukes.

Or maybe Clinton backed out in fear of her own sensible shoes' being upstaged by Palin's red peep-toe pumps with three-and-a-half-inch heels.

Update: Northeast Corridor regressives progressives liberals weigh in (Bring on the smelling salts.):

"All of my women friends, a week ago Monday, were on the verge of throwing themselves out windows," an author and political activist, Nancy Kricorian of Manhattan, said yesterday. "People were flipping out … Every woman I know was in high hysteria over this. Everyone was just beside themselves with terror that this woman could be our president — our potential next president" …

Even some prominent figures admitted to being overcome by anti-Palin feelings. "I am having Sarah Palin nightmares," an acclaimed playwright and writer, Eve Ensler, wrote on the Huffington Post. She said she was disturbed by the chants about oil and gas drilling during Mrs. Palin's speech to the Republican convention. "I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination," Ms. Ensler wrote.

That's just how Hillary's Pink Offensive made us feel back in the day, but now the shoe's on the other foot. Why can't we all just get along? Our own Dr. Sanity, quoted in the article, has the last word:

A psychiatrist and conservative blogger, Patricia Santy, said the strong emotional reactions are driven by Mrs. Palin's differing with the left-leaning political agenda of many feminists. "Their entire image of themselves is based on the fact that they are paving the way for women. What do they see? Women getting ahead, women being empowered who don't agree with them," Dr. Santy said.

Sorry. We don't have that in your size.

"Either he doesn't know what he's talking about or he's misrepresenting the facts"

Unconcerned with what talking heads are calling "the mess we're in," GOP (grand old pussycat) leader Baby Cakes shares the platform with the Republican base ("Ivory" elephant memento of our Kenyan Holiday last century).

"To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, it is much easier for a man to fail conventionally than to stand against the crowd and speak the truth," writes the WSJs Jeremy J. Siegel, explaining how "bad risk management, and a failure to understand the high risks of an overheated real-estate market [are] the root cause of our current problems":

We can argue about who was responsible for the overleveraging of the financial industry and the poor-to-nonexistent credit standards that prevailed in real estate. Certainly the regulatory agencies, including the Federal Reserve, should have sounded a warning. But the lion's share of the blame must go to the heads of the financial firms that issued and held these flawed credit instruments and then, in many cases, "doubled down" by buying more when their price was falling.

It is shocking that firms that withstood the Great Depression are now failing in what economists might not even call a recession. But their failure was not caused by lack of demand for their services. It was caused by management's unwillingness to understand and face the risks of the investments they made. The names of the players will change, but the future growth of the financial services industry is assured.

But don't confuse John McCain or Barack Obama with the facts. They've got some people out there that need to be fooled all of the time.

Forget about Government bail outs. Just keep rubbing behind that ear.

And what to make of the Fed's $85 billion rescue last night of American International Group? Another one of those entities "too big to fail"? Don't ask us. We're with Fox fox Martha MacCallum, who tells viewers "I don't know exactly what to make of these developments, but I do expect the people who are running for president to know more than I do." No such luck. As we blogged last winter, Senator McCain revealed his "contempt for the business of America in a schoolboyish attempt to cut his better, Mitt Romney, down to size" with his supercilious "He bought and sold, and sometimes people lost their jobs." Mitt's doing his best to shore up McCain's econo creds, but it's an uphill battle. Moving on to Obama, we agree with fellow Pajamas Media Network Blogger Webutante, who asks rhetorically "Who and What are really to blame for the current banking and mortgage crisis? Candidate Obama hasn't got the faintest clue." Both candidates could learn something from her personal insight into what talking heads are now calling "the mess we're in" that, in her words, "all began in Washington back in the 90s":

Several years after [my father] retired as chairman [of a small-town bank that for 120 years had had "a reputation as good as gold" with a record of making good loans at about the rate of +90% or more], the Feds in the Clinton Administration came in and started dictating to this bank as well as banks across America: they had to start making a certain percentage of bad loans even if management knew the loans would never be repaid. In essence the bank was told to start a policy that in effect was the same as giving a portion of its money away. If my hometown bank failed to comply with this insane new banking policy, it would face stiff penalties from the Feds.

Then, the Feds came in and strongly urged another insane policy: my hometown bank and over 8,000 other banks across this nation were strongly urged to buy millions of dollars of Fannie Mae preferred stock.

I and my fellow stockholders in this small, conservatively run bank are going to eat the excesses of $5,000,000 of the Fannie Mae preferred. We'll do our part to take the hit from others' gross mismanagement far away in D.C. and in the investment banks that are falling.

To hear Nancy Pelosi tell it, of course, the who, me? Democrats' hands are clean:

Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped President Bush's "mismanagement" of the economy and a lack of regulation that led to the current situation.

"I think the American people have had it with this situation where the middle-income people in our country are not protected from the ramifications of the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions," Pelosi told MSNBC.

When asked whether the Democrats "deserve some responsibility" regarding the economic crisis, Pelosi responded: "No."

"John McCain said that this is a result of overregulation by the Democrats in Congress," she added. "Either he doesn't know what he's talking about or he's misrepresenting the facts as he knows them. But it's simply not true."

Projecting again, Mrs. Pelosi?

Update: Looking for something that's REALLY too big to fail? Modulator's Friday Ark #209 is fully stocked with all things bright and beautiful.