Iceland broke; Iranians’ nuke aid; Magic Obama, Derty Pouiiy’s bro; Racism x2 & Racism as Strategy

1) Iceland considers bankruptcy. From the International Herald Tribune:

People go bankrupt all the time. Companies do, too. But countries?
Iceland was on the verge of doing exactly that on Thursday as the government shut down the stock market and seized control of its last major independent bank. That brought trading in the country’s currency to a halt, with foreign banks no longer willing to take Icelandic krona, even at fire-sale rates.

As the meltdown in the Icelandic financial system quickened, with the government seemingly powerless to do anything about it, analysts said there was probably only one realistic option left: for Iceland to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund.

“Iceland is bankrupt,” said Arsaell Valfells, a professor at the University of Iceland. “The Icelandic krona is history. The IMF has to come and rescue us.”

Read the rest ->
The Guardian (UK) had this to add:

Gordon Brown has told the Icelandic prime minister that he is considering legal action against the country over the collapse of its national banks.

The prime minister said tonight that Iceland’s decision not to recompense those with savings in the bank was “completely unacceptable” and the British government would do “whatever is necessary to recover the money”.

“I’ve spoken to the Icelandic prime minister, I have told him this is effectively an illegal action that they have taken. We are freezing the assets of Icelandic companies in the UK where we can. We will take further action against the Icelandic authorities where necessary to recover the money.

While Britain, like the US, insures individual depositors up to a point, large depositors don’t necessarily have the same protections.

But up to 20 UK councils who banked with Icesave could lose millions of pounds because wholesale deposits are not protected. The Tories have estimated that up to £1bn may be at stake.

I expect the recriminations are just starting to fly and as governments try to protect themselves and their citizens, it’s going to get a lot uglier. I hope we elect someone strong enough and pragmatic enough to do what needs be done.

2) The NYT has an article on the financial crisis, saying Bush and other European leaders will meet this weekend to look at a more coordinated response to the global crisis.

The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans.

Both remedies will be center stage on Saturday, when President Bush meets with finance ministers from the world’s richest countries at an unusual White House meeting to swap ideas.

Mr. Bush’s invitation to finance ministers from Britain, Italy, Germany, France, Canada and Japan came on a day of phone calls and letters between European leaders and with Washington.

Adding to the urgency, the Japanese stock market plunged more than 10 percent Friday morning, after having dropped 9 percent on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, the NYT must feel that flogging the “troopergate” story is critical for national attention. It still devoted 3 (online) pages to that. With the global financial crisis and people starting to use the “d” word, this manufactured “scandal” is an indefensible waste of time.

3) Also in the NYT today is an article about Russia and Iran. There is some thought that a Russian scientist has been helping Iran develop nuclear weapons.

International nuclear inspectors are investigating whether a Russian scientist helped Iran conduct complex experiments on how to detonate a nuclear weapon, according to European and American officials. As part of the investigation, inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency are seeking information from the scientist, who they believe acted on his own as an adviser on experiments described in a lengthy document obtained by the agency, the officials said.
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Asked about the potential contribution of the Russian scientist in detonator experimentation, a senior Russian official who has long followed Iran’s nuclear program said, “It is difficult for me to add anything.”

Ah, global financial crisis and Iranian nukes. And you thought today was going to be dull?

4) Charles Krauthammer writes today about the character question and Obama.

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.
Krauthammer faults McCain for not going after the character issue much earlier. However, given all the vitriol at even the hint that Obama’s character and pals are less than absolute sterling, I’m not sure McCain could have reasonably done otherwise.

Why are these associations important? Do I think Obama is as corrupt as Rezko? Or shares Wright’s angry racism or Ayers’ unreconstructed 1960s radicalism?
No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us two important things about Obama.

First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and use them he did. Would you attend a church whose pastor was spreading racial animosity from the pulpit? Would you even shake hands with — let alone serve on two boards with — an unrepentant terrorist, whether he bombed U.S. military installations or abortion clinics?

Most Americans would not, on the grounds of sheer indecency. Yet Obama did, if not out of conviction then out of expediency. He was a young man on the make, an unknown outsider working his way into Chicago politics. He played the game with everyone, without qualms and with obvious success.
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Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama’s core beliefs. He doesn’t share Rev. Wright’s poisonous views of race nor Ayers’ views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.

Well, that IS the point some of us have been making for several months now. Before today’s news cycle is over, you’ll hear more screams of “racism.”

5) Today’s WSJ has a sarcasm-laced op-ed about the wonderful magic of Obama. Here’s a snippet:

We’re back now. And just watch the Great Obama perform a feat never yet managed in all history. He will create that enormous new government health program, spend billions to transform our energy economy, provide financial assistance to former Soviet satellites, invest in infrastructure, increase education spending, provide job training assistance, and give 95% of Americans a tax (ahem) cut — all without raising the deficit a single penny! And he’ll do it in the middle of a financial crisis. And with falling tax revenues! Voila!

Now will I be called a racist if I say that’s an Obama fairy tale??

6) Even the NYT now has a “fake donors for Obama” story. Who’d a thunk it?

It appears that campaign finance records for Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, contain far fewer obviously false names, although he has taken in about $200 million in contributions, less than half Mr. Obama’s total. Mr. McCain did collect about $173,000 from donors who appear in campaign finance records with only a name and have no other identifying information. Mr. Obama collected about $314,000 from such donors.

Although campaigns have long wrestled with questionable donations, Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, said the record-setting number of new donors Mr. Obama has drawn, many of them online, presents new challenges to a compliance system that remains stuck in the past.

Ms. Krumholz pointed out, however, that it would take an extraordinary amount of coordination to pull off widespread fraud.

Yeah, but isn’t ACORN in trouble in several states now? Couldn’t one reasonably call that “widespread?”

But even a contributor who used the name “Jgtj Jfggjjfgj,” and listed an address of “thjtrj” in “gjtjtjtjtjtjr, AP,” was able to contribute $370 in a series of $10 donations in August.

A pair of donors named “Derty West” and “Derty Poiiuy,” who listed “rewq, ME” as their addresses and “Qwertyyy” or “Qwerttyyu” as either their employer or occupation, contributed a combined $1,110 in July.

Hey!!! It’s Derty Poiiuy! I wrote about him in yesterday’s roundup. Didn’t know he had a brother, though. Derty West DEFINITELY sounds like a porn star. Maybe BO has the porn industry demographic locked up. Yeah, it’s part of Hollywood, so that makes sense.

The questionable donations to the Obama campaign, most of which appear to have been given in small increments online, are bolstering the contentions of some campaign finance groups that additional disclosure requirements are needed for contributions of $200 or less.

Federal candidates are not required to itemize such contributions to the F.E.C. unless the donor’s cumulative total adds up to more than $200. Roughly 70 percent of these contributions to Mr. Obama are not reported, compared with more than 75 percent of Mr. McCain’s.

“Mr. Obama” has an aversion to reporting and paperwork, as we know. And this is the third story I’ve done recently on fake donors.

Uh, remember what I snarked earlier about Obama potentially having the porn industry on his side? Well, ask and ye shall receive. . . .

From the NYPost:

ONE of the “bundlers” who has raised $50,000 to $100,000 for the Barack Obama presidential campaign is Terrence Bean, who once controlled the biggest producer of gay porn in America.

Bean, the first gay on Sen. Obama’s National Finance Committee, is the sole trustee of the Charles M. Holmes Foundation, which owned Falcon Studios, Jock Studios and Mustang Studios, the producers of about $10 million worth of all-male pornography a year

7) In “Your Daily Racism” Time has yet another version of the “it must be racism” theme.

Does that mean race doesn’t matter this year? Hardly. It just matters in a different way. In the past, Republicans often used race to make their opponents seem anti-white. In 2008, with their incessant talk about who loves their country and who doesn’t, McCain and Palin are doing something different: they’re using race to make Obama seem anti-American.

To grasp the difference, imagine if the Democrats had nominated Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Republicans would have slammed them as profligate, divisive and militant but not as foreign. Even racists couldn’t deny that Jackson and Sharpton are fully American. In fact, because slavery ruptured ancestral ties of language and culture, African Americans often have fewer transnational connections than Americans whose forebears traveled voluntarily to these shores. Our national vernacular is filled with antiblack euphemisms, but cosmopolitan isn’t one of them.

Yet when critics attack Obama, that’s the word that keeps popping up. Rudy Giuliani mentioned it in his convention speech. So has Rush Limbaugh, along with several national conservative columnists. Ever since the primaries, Obama’s detractors have tried to depict him less as threatening to white America than as distant from America itself.

You see, it’s a subtle thing. Making Obama seem “anti-American” is strictly about race and not a fairly typical political gambit. Nah. Politics has NEVER BEFORE had candidates accused of being anti-American. Well, except for Ronald Reagan’s race against Jimmy Carter. And except for some of the ‘92 Clinton references to GWHB. Oh yeah, and the JFK race where people wondered if the Pope would be giving the US President orders. Nah, I guess BO is the first politician to EVER be attacked as “distant from America.” MUST BE RACISM.

8 ) The Washington Times encapsulates some of the recent BO stories.

Something odd is going on. The Obama campaign boasts of a landslide in the making even as his polling lead slips a point or two, and there’s anger bordering on rage when John McCain and Sarah Palin raise questions about Barack Obama’s judgment in his unexplored past in Chicago.

An investigation of ACORN, a cabal of “political activists” hired to register voters in the neighborhoods where few friends of John McCain abide has now spread to 10 states. Investigators discovered that the entire offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys had signed up to vote in Las Vegas, unless it turns out that someone forged their signatures to make a quota. The rules for this game were written in Chicago.

The senator’s campaign only wants to talk about the economy, and who can blame him? Wall Street is tanking to uncharted depths, banking is at a standstill and fear stalks Main Street and all the avenues and boulevards running across it. But Sen. Obama wants certain questions about the economy, and how it got this way, declared off-limits. Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, declares questions about Franklin Raines, his stewardship of Fannie Mae and his relationship with the senator to be racist because both men “are African-American.”
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The unanswered questions are not about crimes, but about his judgment. Just as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have never repented for terrorism against their country, the senator has never expressed repentance for his association with them.

After all this time we still don’t know a lot about Sen. Obama’s murky Chicago past, and maybe we won’t until he’s in the White House for a while and the mainstream media looks to actual reporting for its orgasmic thrills.

Yep, yep, yep, and yep.

9) Also in the Times is another piece questioning what Obama said to Iraqi officials during his visit some months ago.

At the same time the Bush administration was negotiating a still elusive agreement to keep the U.S. military in Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tried to convince Iraqi leaders in private conversations that the president shouldn’t be allowed to enact the deal without congressional approval.
Mr. Obama’s conversations with the Iraqi leaders, confirmed to The Washington Times by his campaign aides, began just two weeks after he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in June and stirred controversy over the appropriateness of a White House candidate’s contacts with foreign governments while the sitting president is conducting a war.

Of course, the BO campaign says he was speaking strictly as a US Senator, while the Iraqi official (Mr. Zebari) with whom he spoke got a different impression. But it’s all “he said, he said.”

10) Now for your second helping of “Your Daily Racism.” The NY Post does a long piece on the race card. It claims Democrats have embraced using the race card as part of overall strategy.

It was bound to happen, and so it has: Democrats and their allies are playing the race card.

Big time.
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As for the party itself, no less a luminary than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid yesterday lit into a radio host who had the temerity to note that former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines has been an adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign.

“The only connection that people could bring up about Raines and Barack Obama,” said Reid, “is that they both are African-American. Other than that there is nothing.”

Actually, The Washington Post has reported that the Obama campaign sought advice from Raines “on mortgage and housing policy matters.”

That may not be the end of the world, but it’s sure not “nothing.”

Then there’s Democratic luminary Barney Frank - a fellow most accomplished at diverting attention from his own sins by indulging in some old-fashioned demagogy.

Which is precisely what he did this week when he charged that GOP criticism of subprime mortgage loans being made to those who couldn’t afford them - a practice he most emphatically encouraged - is racially motivated.

Michelle Malkin(I know, I know) covers some of the same ground, listing some of the new definitions of racism. Here’s the first:

How many racial bogeymen have Obama operatives and sympathetic journalists discovered lurking in “coded language” and attire? Let us count the ways:

* During Tuesday’s presidential debate, John McCain referred to Obama as “that one.” Official Obama press agitator Bill Burton sent off an e-mail blast to reporters: “Did John McCain just refer to Obama as ‘that one’?” Horrors.

Taking their cue from Burton, spooked Obama supporters hyperventilated like teens on the film set of “The Blair Witch Project.” “The racial undertones were subtle but unmistakable,” declared Maya Wiley of the leftist Center for Social Inclusion. “McCain was tapping into a current of superiority among white voters. It was an attempt to ‘otherize’ Obama.”

“Otherize”? Sounds like something you do to your car tires to prepare for winter. UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff was also haunted by “That One”:

“The phrase was meant to say, ‘You and I are in the same area, but he’s the outsider.’ ”

Memo to McCain: Next time, call him “The One.”

Hey, watch your finances today and get an extra cup of coffee. You’re gonna need it.