Couldn’t Help But Comment ….. (122208, Morning)

The parade of attempts at blaming the Bush Administration for decades-in-the-making housing-price declines and the mortgage-industry mess is beyond tiresome.

IBDeditorials.com rebuts the Washington Post, (“In effect, the media are blaming Bush for Clinton policies”), while the White House does the same to the New York Times. This Fox News report from a while ago rebuts the claim that Republicans didn’t try to do something. They didn’t try hard enough, but blaming them is like blaming the teller in a bank robbery because he or she pushed the panic button at the right time, but the police didn’t show arrive quickly enough. Update, Dec. 23: IBDeditorials.com correctly calls BS on the Times.

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I’ve put up a few item in the past few days at NewsBusters that I didn’t cross-post here, but that merit attention:

• “Chavez Plans Expropriation of Nearly Complete Megamall” — The money quote from Hugo Chavez: “We’re going to expropriate that and turn it into a hospital – I don’t know – a school, a university.” He has no idea what he’ll do with the property; he just wants it. Tyrants do that.
• “AP Parrots Henry Waxman’s Lie About the Still-True ‘Sixteen Words‘” — These people are pushing the same tired BS that was disproven years ago. The “sixteen words” (“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”) were true, have been true, and always will be true.
• “Name That Party: MA Speaker’s ‘Pal’ Indicted” — Six politicians named, no Democratic party affiliation identified. All in a day’s work at the Associated Press.

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Late addition to the “Could it Be ….. Recovery?” list — A small reason for more optimism, or at least less pessimism — Leading indicators last week were expected to be down 0.5%, but were down 0.4%.

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At Reason Online (“More laws and further regulation wouldn’t have prevented the Bernard Madoff scam”):

(The) scandal highlights the ineffectiveness of regulatory agencies such as the SEC. This should temper the faith we put in them, not cause us to increase their power.

Certainly not until they can demonstrate that they can exercise consistent and proper oversight relating to the regulations that already exist. Instead, we’ll likely get more regulations they will poorly oversee. That’s not an improvement.

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A, uh, well, “broad” definition of “stimulus” — The Obama stimulus plan wish list apparently includes this item from the US Conference of Mayors: “a $1.5-million push to curb prostitution in Dayton, Ohio.”