The Costs of “Doing Something”

Doctor Thomas Sowell points up something I’ve discussed here previously:

It is remarkable how many political “solutions” today are dealing with problems created by previous political “solutions.” Three examples that come to mind immediately are the housing -market crisis, the wildfires in southern California, and the water shortages in the west.
Congress and the Bush administration are currently vying with each other to come up with a solution to the housing crisis, brought on by widespread defaults on hom- mortgage loans — especially defaults by those who took out risky “subprime” loans.

Why were borrowers taking out risky loans in the first place? And why were lenders willing to lend to risky borrowers? In both cases, the government was a prime factor in “subprime” loans.

Many people took out risky mortgage loans to buy a house because housing prices were so high that this was the only way they could own a home. Where housing prices were highest, the most people took out risky loans.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where housing prices are the highest in the nation, risky interest-only loans went from being 11 percent of all new mortgages in 2002 to being 66 percent of all new mortgages in 2005.

Study after study has shown that housing prices are highest where government restrictions on building are the most severe. That is the ugly result of pretty words like “open space.”

Why were lenders lending to people whose prospects of repaying the loans were below average — that is, “subprime”?

Government laws and policies, especially the Community Reinvestment Act, pressured lenders to invest in people and places where they would not invest otherwise. Government also created the temporarily very low interest rates that made the mortgages seem affordable for the moment.

Now that politicians have created this mess, they are ready to play heroes riding to the rescue.

Well, look, exactly so. We’ve long been saying that the lion’s share of the problems we face now were because government felt they had to ‘do something’, which in turn led to consequences they’d not forseen.

The Doctor also points to the SouCal wildfires as being caused by the good intentions of government:

Why would people risk building million-dollar homes in the known paths of wildfires? For the same reason that people choose to live in the known paths of hurricanes. Because the government — that is, the taxpayers — will get stuck with a lot of the costs of dealing with those dangers and the costs of rebuilding.

Why is there such a huge amount of inflammable vegetation over such a wide area that fires can reach unstoppable proportions by the time they get to places where people live? Because “open space” has become a political sacred cow beyond rational discussion.

At some point, the big government Democrats are going to get the idea that ‘doing something’ isn’t always a good thing.

I dunno, perhaps that’s wishful thinking. But one gets the idea that were people to ever learn from the history the Doctor points out, government would be a lot smaller.

New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer is an ambitious man.    He used this tenure as New York State Attorney General create a wave popular support which propelled his to state governor.

Surely Spitzer would like to use the state governorship to propel himself to national office.   Spitzer won election is a landslide and assumed offcer with approval rating in the stratussphere.

Alas for poor Eliot, then one direction to go from the top, and that is down., which is where Spitzer has gone.

A smart ambitious leftarded  governor would like to achieve two goals.   One to give illegal aliens the same license as legal New York State residents.   Two, would be allow state residents to use their driver licenses as federal ID for such purposes as boarding air flights or crossing borders.

Sadly for Spiter the two goal are mutually exclusive.    A license issued to illegals is worthless as a federal ID.   That is Spiter can achieve either goal, but only at the expense of the other goal.

Spitzer has alienated the aliens.    If Eliot thinks the aliens are mad, just wait to see what would happen if if tried to nullify the New York State driver’s license as form of ID.

Hat tip:  Michelle, Hot Air.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 —NY TIMES- State Department investigators offered Blackwater USA security guards immunity during an inquiry into last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad — a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company’s employees involved in the episode, government officials said Monday.

Now why on earth would State do THAT, I wonder?

Hmmm. Seems to me the only reason you’d give up soemthing like that is because you’re after something you consider to be bigger.  Now, what would that be?

The State Department investigators from the agency’s investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, offered the immunity grants even though they did not have the authority to do so, the officials said. Prosecutors at the Justice Department, who do have such authority, had no advance knowledge of the arrangement, they added.

Hmmm. Sounds like a band of mid level wonks at State are desperate to over-ride the White House and it’s Iraq policy.  They’re after leverage against the White House, and think getting the Blackwater Guards to talk will give them that.  Given State has a long history of such attempts and given it’s been showing signs of BDS for years, now,  this would merely be one more such situation.

Oooh… interesting.

At least to a radio person.

I see Boortz is now on 1260/KGIL.

I wasn’t aware they’d gone News/Talk. Last I was out there, (early 97) they were running an all- Beatles format. No, I’m not kidding.  Hell, they’ve tried everything over the years on that channel Jazz, for which they claimed the call of KJAZ… and most recently, Classical music.  They’re decidedly small market radio struggling to survive in a big market.

They’re still doing Adult Standards after 7pm, I hear, to fill time… mostly because their night signal isn’t the strongest. Still, they do OK, with 7500 watts at night (20k daytimes) from this 4 tower array. (Pic is from buddy Scott Fybush)

I wish owner Saul Levine success. Having Boortz aboard is a real boost…

Tony Snow has a firm grip on reality:

 On the newspaper business: “The newspapers have to realize that they are a niche market and the one thing they can do better than anyone else is analysis. As a guy who spent the majority of his career in print media and loves writing, it scares me that newspapers are in the state they’re in.”

More at the link.

And yes, I put this under the technology tag… what else but technology…(Along with the newspapers themselves) have brought things to this state?

JOINT STATEMENT BY AMBASSADOR RYAN C. CROCKER AND GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS ON THE TRANSFER OF SECURITY RESPONSIBILITY FOR KARBALA PROVINCE

Posted: 29 Oct 2007 06:52 AM CDT

JOINT STATEMENT BY AMBASSADOR RYAN C. CROCKER AND GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS ON THE TRANSFER OF SECURITY RESPONSIBILITY FOR KARBALA PROVINCE

Extremist indirect fire attacks hit Baghdad residents

Posted: 28 Oct 2007 04:15 PM CDT

Extremist indirect fire attacks hit Baghdad residents

The leftards do more than forge emails.   They simply refuse to surrender their cheerished myths, even when they see refuting evidence with their own two eyes.   From the Puffington Post,  Rich Jacobs reports on a restuarant patron:

We had dinner last night at Murano, a new West Hollywood restaurant, owned by gay circuit party promoter Jeffrey Sanker, and lesbian night club owners Robin Gans and Sandy Sachs. It’s a visually stunning space, straight lines, whites and reds accented by brilliant Murano glass chandeliers (hence the name of the restaurant). It’s right at home within eyeshot of West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center, clearly appealing in a neighborhood of gay clubs, bars and restaurants.

Toward the end of dinner, one of my companions insisted that the painfully thin, emotive, long blond haired thing in a small black dress with nearly exposed bosoms was none other than Ann Coulter. I did not believe him. Why would Ann Coulter, who hates homosexuals, go to dinner at gay ground zero? Why would she spend her hard earned gay-bashing royalties to enrich Jeffrey Sanker and otherwise support gay-owned businesses?

Leftard myth says that Ann Coulter hates homosexuals.    So what do leftards do when confronted by Coulter eating eating dinner with homosexual friends in a homosexual restuarant?  

In case of Jim Newell, Wonkette,  they just speculate:

Ann Coulter, who hates all gay people because they’re all Muslim, was spotted eating last night at LA’s Murano — a new restaurant owned by three of those homersexuals! HuffPo’s Rick Jacobs sat near her and presumably her Jewish liberal boyfriend and wrote like six million words about it today. Basic summary for our purposes: Ann Coulter is a faggot.

In the case of shamanic,  Newshoggers,  just fly into a rage:

 You know, I find Rick Jacobs’ outrage that Ann Coulter would be in a West Hollywood restaurant with a coterie of gay men attending to her slightly odd. Did he not realize she’s a total hypocrite? She’s a famous, outrageous woman who spends her time in the gay capitols of America – DC, New York, South Florida, and California. How could she possibly hate gays?

In the case of Chuckles, it is simply to invent yet more lies:

I always knew that Ann Coulter was a Closet Lesbian

To take al these accounts at face value would mean that homosexuality is contagous.   You can catch it merely by having homosexual friends or apparantly by eating food handled by homosexuals.   Tell me agan how tolerant the left is.

A reader writes:

Hello-I’m sending this as an email instead of a comment because, first of all I’m not positive I’m reading this right, and secondly, for God’s sake the last thing I want is to be misinterpreted as defending anything that Greenwald says. Please take this in the spirit of just looking at a good puzzle and wanting to know the truth.

Sure.

Parsing out the email headers, it looks like the path it shows from start to finish is:

INTZEXEVSIZN02.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.16])

INTZEXEBHIZN01.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.11])

02exbhizn02.iraq.centcom.mil [214.13.200.111]

rich.salon.com 8.12.11/8.12.11 (note that actually rich.salon.com = 206.80.4.124)

This is key, we’ll get back to it.

There countless ways to configure email servers and network multiple servers internally and externally as I’m sure you are aware. The DoD email network is certainly fairly complicated with a greater attention put into security than most simple private networks. Looking at that path, I see a couple things that could be normal, and a couple things that might be odd.

DoD may have it set to use internal relays before reaching a mail server with public access. That could explain the two internal IPs at the start. The first public address that shows up, 214.13.200.111, does appear to be allocated to DoD. That could be their external mail server that then sent the message to rich.salon.com.

Correct, it was. The trouble is, we don’t know, based on the header, that it actually came from a military computer to get to that military server.  Finding an open SMTP port on a forward facing server isn’t all that hard… particularly, as I say, a hastily set up Exchange server, which 214.13.200.111 readily ID’d itself as.

As far as a few things to question, it’s my experience that the details usually start with the computer that originates the message if they are using a client like Outlook. It could be that in this case the sender used a webmail program running on INTZEXEVSIZN02.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.16]) to compose the message. Or it could be we are not seeing the entire details. Hard to say. It looks like the public IP for rich.salon.com was obfuscated one way or another so who knows?

And why would THAT be, do you suppose?  If you figure that one out, you’ll better understand why I don’t trust a word of it. Add to that Greenwald’s history with this sort of thing and the conclusion to my mind is inescapable.

The architecture of the network drives some of this as well as security concerns. When I was in IT, a message from me would have shown a path with my computer name(using outlook) and showing the public IP used by the internal network to access the DMZ where the mail server was, the next hop being the mailserver and its public IP, the next hop being to the addressee mailserver. In its simplest form.

Anyway, I think it might just be possible that the header is accurate, but I’m not sure. I thought I’d just let you know.

Thanks much for taking the time. I’ve withheld your name, because I didn’t ask to forward your note… but I thought it worthwhile to the discussion to do so.

Let me be clear, here. The header shows signs of being hacked, to my eye. The line you spec as being out of kilter, is in fact out of kilter. So, not only was the thing hacked, but it was hacked by someone who doesn’t know thing one about how the stuff works.  Greenwaldian history gives us the rest.

Background here, here and Memeorandum

They must be running out of stuff to throw at their competition… this one was already debunked.

BBCT: Memeorandum 

Hmmm. I’ve been busy most of today, and so didn’t see the follow on to the Greenwald nonsense of the week we were following last night… and later the same night
The Dread Pundit Bluto, however, HAS been following it, and reports:

Glenn Greenwald, as he had promised in his post at Salon, has forwarded the email he says he received from Colonel Steven A. Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for General Petraeus.

The parts that Greenwald chose not to publish tend to contradict his characterization of the email as “bizarre” and “unsolicited”. Furthermore, while Greenwald claims that the email doesn’t dispute his paranoid ravings about the military working with rightwing bloggers in the Beauchamp affair, it in fact dismisses them out-of-hand, and quite properly. Greenwald has also redacted the parts of the email that highlight his shoddy research.

Yeah, well, no shock for that. I doubt there’s a bottom that Greenwald can’t get past.

Hmmm. Wait a minute…..
OK, I guess that works both ways, so I’ll leave it as is.

Anyway, the others who are blogging this stuff:

The Jawa Report, Little Green Footballs, Wizbang, Classical Values Jules Crittenden

protein wisdom and of course Rick Ellensburg.

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Oh… and be sure to check Memeorandum for fresh updates.

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The New York Times Porter Wagoner, a country singer who mixed rhinestone suits, a towering pompadour and cornball jokes with direct, simple songs over a career best known for his partnership with Dolly Parton, died last night in Nashville. He was 80.

Sorry to see him go. Here’s a Bio of the man. I’ll have a beer in his honor, tonight. A Porter, of course.

The New York Post:

October 28, 2007 — Gov. Spitzer yesterday announced an indefinite delay in his heavily criticized plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal aliens as the state develops a three-tiered licensing system that will be acceptable to the federal government.

At a Washington news conference, Spitzer said the wait will bring New Yorkers “the most secure licensing system in the nation” – although Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he still strongly opposes the idea of giving ID to illegal aliens.

In short, he needs more sales time.  Keep the pressure up, folks.

The program is expected to be delayed until mid- to late 2008.

He thinks.

Let me quote from the quips list and make my position clear, here:

 There is no such thing as an “illegal immigrant”. Either they are immigrants, who arrived here and live here legally, or they are criminals. The former, are entitled to everything that our society offers, provided that they are willing to become citizens, which by nature of the word, would include learning the language, and adopting the United States, culturally, as well as financially. The latter are entitled to nothing whatsoever.

Heh… Steyn comes up with an instant classic...a quip… actually, a few of them, I wish I could have claimed as my own:

As far as I know, the movie Deliverance has featured in political discourse just the once. Back in 1996, Pat Buchanan, hot from his triumph over Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary, warned the country-club Republicans that he was coming to get them “like a character out of Deliverance.” In the film, you’ll recall, a quartet of suburban guys spend a nightmare weekend in the backwoods, in the course of which one of their number winds up getting strapped to a tree and sodomized by a mountain man. (“Squeal, piggy!”)

At the time of Pat’s remark, I remember thinking: What a great country! In how many other political cultures can a fellow identify himself with a stump-toothed inbred psycho hillbilly homosexual rapist as an applause line?

Yeah, well, in Pat’s case…. (Cough)… Nah… I’m not gonna go there.

Anyway, another one:

If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn’t be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it.

Ain’t THAT real? I mean, it’s odd how many on the left… and how many ROn Paul Troofers let that basic logic slip right by them…

But finally…. the big one:

Fantasy is a by-product of security: It’s the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix’s bondage parlor for half-an-hour after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam’s prisons.

And I wonder about that, a bit. How much of the nonsense we’re seeing from the left, these days, is able to be generated because good folks…  a lot of good folks, are doing a job that the left claims they don’t want done… and yet would be screaming if it wasn’t getting done?

Fantasy… the idea that whatever it is, it’s all Bush’s fault… is able to be bandied about freely, because ironically, Bush is doing his job correctly?

AFGHAN NATIONAL SECURITY, COALITION FORCES KILL DOZENS OF TALIBAN FIGHTERS IN HELMAND PROVINCE

Posted: 28 Oct 2007 05:22 AM CDT

AFGHAN NATIONAL SECURITY, COALITION FORCES KILL DOZENS OF TALIBAN FIGHTERS IN HELMAND PROVINCE

COALITION FORCES DISRUPT TERRORIST NETWORKS, SIX SUSPECTS DETAINED

Posted: 28 Oct 2007 05:18 AM CDT

COALITION FORCES DISRUPT TERRORIST NETWORKS, SIX SUSPECTS DETAINED

Surber this morning says:

 It is the interview heard ’round the world. French president Nicolas Sarkozy walked out on Leslie Stahl because instead of asking the world leader about France, Europe, the War on Terrorism, etc., she kept bugging him about his marriage to Cecilia. The two announced plans to divorce 2 weeks after the interview, parts of which aired last night on “60 Minutes.”

Well, good for him. And since  when did CBS start going for the tabloid stuff? I mean, has it been that way since they found they they couldn’t fake the news well enough?

I must not have noticed.