FDIC and the Financial Crisis: Why Liberals Love Sheila Bair's Regulatory Views

July 7, 2009

Ryan Lizza’s lengthy and fawning profile of the socially liberal and anti-market Republican Sheila Bair of FDIC, who “has become an unlikely hero to economic liberals, who see her as the counterweight to the more Wall Street-centric view often ascribed to Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary.” We don’t think it was unlikely at all.

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Robert Kaplan: The Tamil Tigers and How to Defeat an Insurgency, or Not

July 7, 2009

“After 26 years of heavy fighting, the Sri Lankan government decisively defeated an ethnic insurgency, killing all of its top leadership.” The lesson for America? “The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is.”

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Obama to Russia: Stop Iranian Nukes and US Will Scrap Missile Defense

July 7, 2009

Trading missile defense technology for assurances from Russia on Iran: “President Obama today offered to scrap plans for a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe if Russia helped to stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb.” Isn’t this a classic case of taking the “we’ll trade future risk for an unsubstantiated temporary gain”?

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Was Iran Martyr Neda Soltani a Christian? Should the Media Care?

July 7, 2009

Was Iran’s Neda Soltani a member of the Christian minority in the country? “Would the green revolutionaries accept that fact? Would this change her status? What if she had been Baha’i (and, thus, part of another very important story that has faded from the headlines)? One of the Iranian Jews?” Evidence is uncertain.

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Ten Reasons Body Mass Index (BMI) is a Terrible Measurement of Obesity

July 7, 2009

One of the things that irritates us at TNL is the existence of BMI, the measure by which Tom Brady is described as grossly obese, which is little more than “a 200-year-old numerical hack developed by a mathematician who was not even an expert in what little was known about the human body back then.”

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The Green Shootists Are Giving Up

July 6, 2009

The Green Shootists have become a forlorn lot. After several weeks of things “not getting worse,” “starting to bottom out,” or “hinting at stability” (any euphemism will do) the fact is that things really haven’t started getting better.

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Get Ready for 14 Percent Unemployment

July 6, 2009

The June “Jobs” report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on July 2 caused shock and dismay. Payrolls declined by 467,000 jobs, more than the 345,000 lost in May, and much more than the 363,000 that economists had predicted. The only reason that the reported unemployment rate rose by only 0.1 percentage points […]

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President Plans to Vacation in Martha's Vineyard

July 6, 2009

WASHINGTON — He does not own a sprawling Texas ranch, a family compound on the coast of Maine or a retreat tucked away in the Santa Ynez Mountains of California. So President Obama, in this regard at least, is much like Bill Clinton: He has no vacation home to call his own.

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California's Financial Nightmare Continues

July 6, 2009

July 6 (Bloomberg) — Last week, we discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion […]

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Breitbart: NYT Barbie Strikes Again

July 6, 2009

What a shock that Maureen Dowd devoted her New York Times column Sunday to attack Sarah Palin. It did not so much criticize Alaska’s governor for prematurely stepping down from her official duties as to finish off what sister snipers Katie Couric and Tina Fey began last fall. The assassination of Sarah Palin – by […]

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