Adjustment

Crime of the day (Reuters): “Russian Police Arrest Man for Stealing a Bridge.”

Unfortunate headline of the day: “Iraqi Leader Blasts Sunni Hardliners.” Unfortunate because in Iraq that could be true in the literal rather than the metaphorical sense. (Maliki is blaming this week’s sectarian violence on Saudi Arabian clerics).

With all the talk about Fred Thompson being mistaken for his Law & Order character, it occurs to me that no one mentions Rep. Adam Schiff, Adam Schiff also being the name of the original DA character on L&O, who was still on the show when the real Schiff first ran for the California Legislature. I commented that his bumper stickers should say, “Just make the deal, Jack.”

Obama charges admission to his campaign rallies? How much? Shouldn’t he at least pretend that his campaign events are intended to persuade people rather than to raise money?

Bush, in his weekly radio address talked about the crisis in the mortgage industry. Did I say crisis? No, evidently it’s a “period of adjustment.” I forgot: capitalism never has crises. He said, “it is not the government’s job to bail out speculators, or those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could never afford,” raising two straw men presumably beyond the pale of healthy, honest, benign capitalism. I’m not sure who these “speculators” are supposed to be. Making loans to people inevitably entails speculating on their ability to repay those loans. And the people who took out these sub-prime loans, financial idiots or victims of deceptive lending practices, however you view them, probably don’t include many people who actively decided to take out a home loan they knew they would default on and have their homes foreclosed two years later. Just a few bad apples in a fundamentally sound system just needing a few adjustments, Bush is saying.