Klein Interview
Here, it’s a good read.
Klein: And the other thing I think we need to stress is the extraordinary level of responsibility in the Bush Administration in allowing this crisis to get to the point that it got to, which was not just predictable but predicted. Alan Greenspan was saying a year ago that there was a housing bubble, and what bubbles do is they burst because they are filled with hot air. Everyone knows it. This was entirely predicted, and they end up with a two and a half page – barely two and a half page – plan with one idea, which is to turn the U.S. government into the world’s biggest trash can. Take all of this trash and give it to the taxpayers. That is their only idea, their only preparation.
Amato: That was one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen, and of course John McCain hasn’t read those two and a half pages yet.
Klein: He didn’t have time. I have to say – I’ve said this before that their biggest mistake was how short it was because it was short enough that people actually read it. Usually what they do is ram through legislation that’s hundreds of pages long and say we have to do it in two days and nobody has a chance to read it, then they read it after the fact. But I think in its case brevity really was their downfall
Mark Krikorian Is An Asshole
Confirmed my previous suspicion. Greenwald agrees.
Krikorian has since sent me an email, which blames political correctness for Wall Street’s gambling.
Failing Services = Failing State
Afghanistan :
While Taliban insurgents stage increasing attacks in the Afghan countryside, equally fast-expanding violent crime — kidnappings, carjackings, drug-related killings and highway robberies — is plaguing the capital of 5 million and the vital truck and bus routes that connect the country’s major cities. It is making some Afghans nostalgic for the low-crime days before 2001, when the Taliban sternly ruled most of the country.
Today’s problem, which experts say is intertwined with widespread official corruption, opium trafficking and the get-rich-quick boom of postwar aid and reconstruction, is threatening to destroy public confidence in the government of President Hamid Karzai and drive away what little investment the desperately poor country is attracting.
Baer On Car Bombs
Short fun Time column on car bombs –
What I came away with is the certainty that the car bomb in unstoppable. It is detectable only if every car moving around a city is stopped and inspected, which obviously can’t be done.
BTW, Baer has a new book on Iran coming out. The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.