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Thank goodness that some commentators, at least, are cutting through the B.S. and explaining how we got into this subprime meltdown mess.

Barney Frank’s talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn’t wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so - or else.

This is Jeff Jacoby writing in the Boston Globe, and it’s a lucid, hyperlinked piece (i.e., not just raw assertions but backed by actual FACTS) that lays out the entire history of the subprime mortgage debacle.

You can’t solve a problem unless you correctly identify the cause. Blaming Wall Street and the Republicans is nauseating for precisely this reason: it muddles American’s ability to understand why this all happened in the first place.

Let’s hope more of this comes out so that we can get our thinking straight before November.

Nobody believes it any more. From Rasmussen:

Seven out of 10 voters (69%) remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama win versus 11% who believe they are trying to help his Republican opponent John McCain. Twenty-six percent (26%) say reporters offer unbiased coverage . . .

The article goes on to break down the numbers by party.

Dems are most likely to think reporters are unbiased most of the time.

They also are least likely to think that the media treats their candidate more fairly.

How to ’splain that?

One possibility is that it’s just a coincidence.

More likely: the perception of “bias” is so subjective that people don’t even realize they’re accommodating it. Take this side by side comparison of the questions that Charlie Gibson put to Obama and Palin, which I’ve adapted from this Hillary Clinton forum:

Obama interview:
(Source: ABC News transcript.)

Did you truly, in your gut, think that a black man could win the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States?
Has it sunk in yet? Do you take joy from the win?
What did your daughters think of you winning the nomination?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?

Palin interview:
(Source: Fox News transcript.)

Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking?
Doesn’t it take hubris to accept the VP nomination, considering how inexperienced you are?
Have you ever met a foreign head of state?
Do you believe America is fighting a holy war in Iraq like I claim you said you did?
Are you sending your son to fight as a task from God?
What are your positions on territorial integrity of Georgia?
. . . Allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO?
. . . NATO treaty?
. . . Iranian nuclear threat?
. . . What to do if Israel attacks Iran?
. . . Al Qaeda motivations?
. . . The Bush Doctrine?
. . . Attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan?

Now an objectively “unbiased” interviewer would put the same set of questions to both individuals. I think everyone could agree on that. If anything, the more hard-hitting questions would go to the Presidential candidate, as opposed to the VP candidate.

But suppose you believe that Obama is the best Presidential Candidate since Washington himself? In that case, to your thinking, questions about hubris or attacking Pakistan or whatever wouldn’t be warranted, because you’ve already decided that Obama is a fine guy — those issues are settled, to your mind, before they’re raised.

If a candidate is prima facie superior, what would be the point of difficult questions?

Put another way: to some peoples’ minds, Sarah deserves the tougher questions; Obama does not. Therefore, lobbing softballs at him isn’t bias — it’s just How Things Should Be Done.

Simple!

From Rich Hailey, someone who actually took the time to understand why gas prices rise and fall. Via Instapundit.

Profit margins on the gasoline business are very slim. The profit margin on gasoline sales was only about 6 percent in 2006 (noted in that NPR article’s Bottled Water sidebar). That’s why you seldom see a gas station without a convenience store or Wal-Mart attached any more. Gasoline is the barely-above-cost incentive to get you to stop someplace where you’ll then hopefully buy a bunch of other stuff.

Wouldn’t it be nice if basic economic cause-and-effect phenomenon like this were taught in our schools? Then maybe people would be a bit less likely to jump to unwarranted conclusions about price-gouging every time supply disruptions or commodities trading drives prices up.

Date: September 11, 2008.

Scene: Cozy Harlem joint. Ex-U.S. President Bill Clinton and Dem nominee Barack Obama are are engrossed in conversation over Cosi sandwiches and flatbread pizza.

Obama: What should I do, Bill? This Palin thing is killing me.

Bill: sniggers

Obama (angry): It’s not funny!

Bill (sips diet soft drink to squelch lingering smirk): Okay. Yeah. You’re right. Not funny.

Obama: This isn’t just about me, you know. It’s also about the Party.

Bill: Yeah, that’s right, sure.

Obama: So?

Bill (leans over table): Well, I do have one idea.

Obama: What! What!

Bill: Not many people know this . . .

Obama (half stands, then sits) : Know what? Know what?

Bill: John McCain . . .

Obama: whimpers

Bill (lowers voice further): John McCain . . . has a self-confessed inability to . . . send emails!

Obama: Oh WOW! That is . . . and you think . . . ?

Bill (sits back): I do think. Just link it back to change. ‘John McCain, he’s not about change, he can’t even send an email’! They’ll eat it up.

Obama (moaning slightly in relief): Oh wow, Bill, really, I don’t know how to thank you. Really, I don’t.

Bill: Never mind, Bar, your next attack ad will be (coughs) . . . thanks enough.

finis

Obama has vowed to go on the attack now, of course — the only way to salvage his foundering campaign.

As soon as word of the attack hit the ‘net, speculation began to abound. What vulnerability would he exploit? McCain’s temper? That he’s “just like Bush”?

We now have the answer. Prepare to be horrified. McCain has only a “vague grasp of computers”. He has a “self-confessed inability to send e-mails.”

That’s IT?

That’s the ATTACK?

Oooh boy. I think the Democrats picked the wrong guy to lead their ticket. Every move he makes is weirder than the last.

Deepak Chopra is trying his hand at political commentary. With a metaphysical gloss, of course. Unfortunately he falls flat on his face. I’m kinda sorry about it, too, I thought he was sharper than this.

Palin’s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.” For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don’t want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind.

Huh?

You’ve missed the mark, Deepak. Way missed. Shadows are psychological projections, not objective fact: Obama is as much Palin’s shadow as she is his.

Holding Palin up as somehow objectively negative–as objectively embodying “anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion,” therefore, does nothing to raise the discourse spiritually. It just feeds into the already half-psychotic partisan frenzy that is distracting so many people from the things that really matter. Roman-style Games, only played out in conversation instead of the arena.

Chopra makes a quick aside to make sure we have no cause to question his own virtue . . .

(Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)

Got it. You’re not a racist. Check.

He’s just looking out for our greater good:

I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message.

Nope, it’s not the least bit helpful, sorry. It’s a justification for some of the worst impulses poisoning our contemporary political discourse, all dressed up in high-falutin’ pseudo psychology speak, is what it is.

You want to add perspective, Deepak? How about this: we need to start accepting that people on both sides of the political spectrum are equally privy to goodness and understanding and love. That Palin can legitimately embody loyalty, bravery, duty, grace, confidence, tradition, selflessness, strength, optimism — virtues every bit as lofty and admirable as those Chopra projects onto Obama.

Chopra sells books because people believe he has advanced his understanding to a point where he has something to share. That only works if he’s actually, like, “advanced.” This column just makes him look like a Hollywoodized mock-up of “advanced.” Silly man.

Featured on the front cover of First magazine as the “food switch” that “revs metabolism by 250 percent.”

Like I’ve written before, for some reason I seem to stumble upon alt health trends ahead of the curve. Iodine is a perfect example. You will start seeing lots of articles about it in the very near future.

A good portion of them, of course, are going to be Scary Warnings about how Dangerous it is. Navigating these things is tricky.

Threshold Guardians abound.

Paglia. We both lived, as children, in the same town. Not at the same time, but very nearly. My dad taught in the same school where her dad taught.

She mentions it in this new Salon article on Sarah Palin.

Just so you know how unlikely a coincidence this is, the town numbered about 3000 when I was a kid.

Something else I have to wonder. Take a bright, observant, verbal post-WWII young girl with aspirations to be a writer and plunk her down in that setting and maybe some of what happens next is a bit inevitable. I mean, the passage where she mentions Oxford. This is exactly the kind of thing that I experienced as a kid, and I completely “get” how it shaped Paglia’s understanding of gender and feminism. I was shaped by the same sort of experiences.

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was another version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.

Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”

I could Bideniarize that anecdote, use it in my own life story, and it wouldn’t even be a stretch.

Brilliant article, incidentally, a highly recommended read regardless of whether your initial impressions of Palin are from the right- or the left-hand side of the Proverbial Spectrum. Not that you’d expect less from Paglia. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my homey ;-)

Isn’t it nice to know that everything anyone pours down the drain — ya know, like Drane-O, and expired meds, and oh! don’t forget! Industrial waste! — can be captured, concentrated, BRANDED and sold as “fertilizer” to be spread on fields where our food is grown?

And who should we thank for this brilliant idea?

Why, our government, of course! Because forbidding meat packagers from testing for mad cow and saying “hell yeah!” to irradiating our food isn’t mischief enough!

Be sure to tell them how happy you are that they keep The Peoples’ best interests foremost in their pure little hearts. Here’s your chance:

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, announced that EPW will have hearings on the disposal of sewage sludge on agricultural and other land. These hearings will be held on September 11, 2008, in Washington, D.C.

The September 11 hearing on sludge is currently scheduled for 10:30 AM.

The hearings are usually live streamed on the web. Check the EPW website the day of the hearing. Confirmation of the day and time are usually posted a few days beforehand on the EPW website.

That info comes courtesy of Sludge News. Because not everyone agrees it’s a good idea to eat our own waste. You go, Sludge News.

Who would DO such a thing?

Why, our very own United States Department of Agriculture, that’s who!

The Agriculture Department is within bounds to bar meatpackers from testing slaughter cattle for mad cow disease, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel said in a 2-1 ruling on Friday.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC, a small Arkansas packer, filed suit on March 23, 2006, to gain access to mad-cow test kits. It said it wanted to test every animal at its plant to assure foreign buyers that the meat was safe to eat . . .

In a 25-page ruling, Appellate Judges Karen Henderson and Judith Rogers said USDA has authority under the 1913 Virus-Serum-Toxin Act to prevent sale of mad-cow test kits to meatpackers. USDA interprets the law to control products for “prevention, diagnosis, management or care of diseases of animals.”

David Sentelle, chief judge of the District of Columbia appeals circuit, dissented from the decision. He said USDA “exceeds the bounds of reasonableness” for a law enacted to prevent the sale of ineffective animal medicine.

Because, you know, if any ol’ meatpacker had the capability to test for mad cow, it might, um. Mess things up. They might — horrors! — use the results to “market” their product as mad cow-tested.

USDA . . . says the tests should not be used as a marketing tool and the cattle that comprise the bulk of the meat supply are too young to be tested reliably.

And we can’t have that. The USDA has to be in CONTROL.

USDA allows the mad-cow test kits to be sold only to laboratories that it approves.

This is where our tax dollars go. This is how a federal agency established to serve this country’s interest is spending our freaking money. To protect ITSELF and its hold on power and the status quo IT has established.

Rather like the Food and Drug Administration, which thinks we should be irrradiating spinach to kill E. coli. Who cares that we’re adding one more item to our lengthening list of biologically altered foodstuffs, as meanwhile we’re already dropping dead from the crap we eat? Who cares if irradiation destroys folate and Vitamin A and who knows what other phytonutrients and might have other, poorly-understood effects on our food?

(Hey, here’s an idea — lets turn over healthcare to a government agency too! It’s worked so well in so many other areas.)