Pamela requested kitty pictures. Gee, twist my arm. I can’t put the p-word into the title. But check out some of these poses by Mr. Tig. First, the view from my office chair earlier this week. Or was it last week? I can’t remember.

Next, Miss Gracie, on the bathroom vanity, which is where she goes to be petted. Often. She’s talking to me again. She meows a lot, usually, but she stopped for a while after we moved here. She’s getting more comfortable.

Now, for something different: Janet and Chris’s cat Kes (at least, I hope it’s Kes) in one of the only pictures where she did not have weird, glowing eyes.

And last, Mr. Tig’s tail in all its glory. He’s over nine pounds now, and I’m starting to think a whole pound of him is his tail. Oh, and he likes my tub. And the shower stall downstairs. He nearly slipped into it the other day, which would have been funny for me, but I think not for him. I was taking a shower in it at the time. He reared up on his hind legs and the door started sliding open. I stopped it that time. Next time, we’ll just have to see. He doesn’t seem to mind water much. But he sure likes sitting in a dry tub.

There you go. Early Caturday pictures.

I’ve been reading Megan McArdle a lot lately in an attempt to understand the current financial crisis. In one of her posts, I’m trying to decide if I’m a bad, bad person, or if I just happened to buy my condo at just the right moment and lucked out on price and interest rates.

It’s hard to tell.

I feel bad for the homeowners, and outraged that so many people got gigantic sums of money for screwing up the financial system. But that money’s gone. The mortgage bankers have already mostly lost their jobs, because their market (and often their firm) collapsed. Much of the outrageous compensation was in now worthless (or nearly worthless) company stock. And even if we dun, say, the top executives at Bear, Lehman, and AIG (I’m not opposed to doing so if it’s legal), we will get only a trivial fraction of the money lost in these markets. You know who made most of the money on the subprime bubble? Anyone who bought a house in the last ten years. Yes, that’s right, you, with your low fixed interest rate on a reasonably sized house. You’re the profiteer who laughed all the way to the bank.

I’m laughing all the way to the bank? I’m a profiteer? But—but—I saved my money, I paid down my debt, I waited until I found a mortgage I could afford, and I bought my house.

People were gambling on the housing market–nice, middle class people who would never carry a gigantic credit card balance or declare bankruptcy. In the face of the housing bubble, they took out ARMs they knew they couldn’t afford to pay when the teaser reset, in the hope that rising home equity would let them refinance. (A fair number of them got away with it, too.) When pressed on this behavior, they claimed they had to because otherwise they couldn’t afford a house–as if renting were a physical or moral impossibility.

Borrowers were not brought down by predatory lending. The terms that are causing trouble were clearly laid out in their loan term sheets, right on the top of their mortgage package. Borrowers were brought down by a willingness to gamble on rising home prices–exactly the same thing that knocked out Lehman Brothers. At least Lehman Brothers had the excuse that ten years of rising prices had completely screwed up their default models.

Bailing out home gamblers by freezing their mortgage rates, extending their loan terms, or otherwise forcing the banks to give them free money, will teach them the same thing we are trying hard not to teach Wall Street: if you gamble big enough, Uncle Sam will pick up your losses. Moreover, it’s not exactly the cleverest idea to levy a huge regulatory taking on an industry that’s already really shaky, and threatening to take the rest of us down with it in the event of a collapse.

Any bailout should not aim to help either homeowners or lenders for their own sake–we are helping them because if we don’t, the rest of us will suffer more than the cost of the bailout. The health of the Fort Meyer housing market is not the proper province of the federal government, no matter how distressing the locals may find it.

Okay, well, I don’t have an ARM, I didn’t buy a house too big for my pocketbook (though to be honest, I could have gotten a smaller condo and been happy enough in it, but hey, it was in my price range, and I really do love the extra room), and I didn’t gamble on home prices going up. So I guess she’s not talking about me after all. But that surely is an odd way of calling out the villains in this piece: People who took advantage of lower interest rates to buy a home, or refinance their higher mortgage, and had the finances to keep it. I don’t think that’s quite right. There are executives out there who have pocketed millions of dollars that are not in worthless stock options. They’re the bad guys. Not my friends who built a new home six years ago and refinanced it during the falling interest rates period.

I’m not going to need bailing out, but I will be one of the ones paying for it, I’m sure.

Apparently, all I have to do is hold out until the new Jeep hybrids hit the market.

When they get to the 2-door Wrangler, I am so there.

The MSM and world have been rather silent about Ahmadinejad’s anti-semitism. Some tools even thought to take a picture with him, as if he were some cuddly celebrity, not a madman with designs on genocide. Or even really bad on human rights.

Fortunately On Faith columnists actually showed intolerance for intolerance (for a change):

Thursday’s dinner is framed as an “international dialogue” on the topic, “Has Not One God Created Us? The Significance of Religious Contributions to Peace.” President Ahmadinejad has manipulated such dialogues repeatedly into a platform for spreading intolerance, and there is no reason to think that this event will be any different.

It is disturbing enough that a leader who has worked so ruthlessly to close off channels for free expression at home should be given an opening to expound his views here. But the invitation to President Ahmadinejad comes amid a rapidly accelerating deterioration of religious freedom and other human rights in Iran, including prolonged detention, torture, and executions often based on the religion of the accused.

The Iranian Parliament currently is finalizing a new Penal Code that for the first time would legally enshrine the death penalty for so-called apostasy, putting the members of many religious minority communities at grave risk. More than 20 Baha’is currently are in prison in Iran on account of their religious identity, and two Christian men were charged with apostasy earlier this month.

However unlike the columnists who are correct in this case, I see now reason to ascribe good intentions to the religious groups who will sup with Ahmadinejad tonight. They aren’t misguided. They’re evil.

Anne Bayefsky had some harsh but fitting words for the tolerance shown Ahmadinejad:

In its entire history, the United Nations General Assembly has never adopted a resolution dedicated to denouncing and combating the scourge of antisemitism in all its forms. Now we know why. Less than half of U.N. members are fully free democracies and among them there is no consensus that discrimination and demonization of Jews and the Jewish state is wrong.

On the contrary, at the U.N. vicious antisemitism is met by a round of applause.

The tolerance of tyranny was even too much for Ha’aretz:

Ahmadinejad’s fourth visit to New York was held against the backdrop of the disintegration of the international effort to impose sanctions on his country in an attempt to curb its nuclear program. According to an assessment by Military Intelligence presented to the cabinet this week, Iran is “galloping toward a nuclear bomb” and mastering the technology for enriching uranium, while the diplomatic and economic battle against it is ineffective.

Israel is justifiably concerned about the naivete with which Ahmadinejad was received by the American media, as well as the world’s growing tendency to view him as a legitimate leader and cease efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear program. The calls by the Iranian president to destroy Israel deserve the strongest condemnation, and we must continue the diplomatic struggle against them.

Where’s were the editors of NYT and Washington Post? Did I miss something?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The other day Eli Lake reported:

Call it Osama bin Laden’s “October surprise.” In late August, during the weekend between the Democratic and Republican conventions, America’s military and intelligence agencies intercepted a series of messages from Al Qaeda’s leadership to intermediate members of the organization asking local cells to be prepared for imminent instructions.

An official familiar with the new intelligence said the message was picked up in multiple settings, from couriers to encrypted electronic communications to other means. “These are generic orders,” the source said — a distinction from the more specific intelligence about the location, time, and method of an attack. “It was, ‘Be on notice. We may call upon you soon.’ It was sent out on many channels.”

The article also recalls:

In the week before the 2004 American presidential election, Mr. bin Laden recorded a video message to the American people promising repercussions if President Bush were re-elected. In later messages, Al Qaeda’s leader claimed credit for helping elect Mr. Bush in 2004.

If they made that claim that was an admission of failure because Bin Laden threatened to retaliate against all states that voted for Bush. The voters were not cowed.

Last year in Pakistan, Qaeda assassins claimed the life of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister who returned to her native country in a bid for re-election.

“There is an expectation that Al Qaeda will try to influence the November elections by attempting attacks globally,” a former Bush and Clinton White House counterterrorism official, Roger Cressey, said yesterday.

Mr. Cressey said Al Qaeda lacks the capability to pull off an attack in the continental United States, however. “It would likely be a higher Al Qaeda tempo of attacks against U.S. and allied targets abroad,” he said.

This is interesting. Apparently America’s counterterrorism efforts have been successful.

Q & O has a related poll.

Having to think about it my guess is that Al Qaeda attacks would benefit McCain and that Al Qaeda knows it, so it will refrain from attacking. This noise is just to keep in the news.

The Wonk Room thinks that Al Qaeda wants McCain to win also, because it will help its recruiting efforts.

But as Michael Totten points out:

Bin Laden’s lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri explicitly spelled out Al Qaeda’s strategy in Iraq on July 9, 2005. “The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq,” he said. “The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate—over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq.”

The war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq can plausibly be described as a distraction from the war against Al Qaeda. But the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq cannot possibly be accurately described as a distraction from the war against Al Qaeda.

And make no mistake: Al Qaeda’s manpower and resources have been thoroughly degraded from its disastrous fight with Americans and Iraqis, especially in Anbar Province which was briefly established as Al Qaeda’s “capital” of the so-called “Islamic State in Iraq.”

So maybe having a Republican in office is good for recruiting, but not for the continued success of Al Qaeda.

My guess, as stated above, is that Al Qaeda would rather have President Obama than President McCain, so I don’t expect any major attacks against American interests before the election. Al Qaeda couldn’t make good on its threat against America four years ago. With its organization further degraded, I can’t imagine that they’ll be any more successful this year. Assuming that they even want to try.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The president of Iran stands in front of the world body whose charter calls for peace among nations and blames Jews for causing wars, working against world peace, worshipping only money, having no god—and the silence of the response is deafening. Not a single world leader outside Israel or the U.S. condemned the speech.

There’s a laughable piece in Ynet that says they did:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic address to the United Nations General Assembly has incurred the wrath of many public figures worldwide.

Really? Name six. Israelis and Jews don’t count. The only non-American, non-Israeli I can find condemning the speech is the French foreign minister. Who is frowning heavily in Iran’s direction.

Talking to reporters at the UN headquarters, Kouchner said, “We are tired of condemning the Iranian president’s speeches.”

Yeah, so am I. But besides Kouchner, there’s no one else. And his words are hollow. Russia isn’t going to allow the UNSC to vote for more sanctions. Have France and Germany pulled their business out of Iran yet? The EU? Is there a true boycott of Iran ongoing?

Not so much that Iran is backing off on building its nuclear reactor as fast as possible.

Juan Cole, the left’s leading apologist for Ahmadinejad, managed to write an entire article without mentioning the naked anti-Semitism in the UN speech. He condemned Obama—for condemning Ahmadinejad. He writes of Obama’s rejection of Ahmadinejad’s words:

He also fell into the trap of declining to make a distinction between anti-Zionist views and anti-Semitic ones.

I suppose the learned professor doesn’t think that this is anti-Semitism:

This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will.

Why? Because Mad Mahmoud used the word “Zionist” instead of “Jewish”?

Reuters managed to cover Mahmoud’s meeting with the nutcase Neturei Karta, his pet anti-Zionist Jews. And managed to find the anti-Semitism in Mahmoud’s speech. Perhaps Juan Cole should read Reuters instead of the AP.

Ahmadinejad railed against “Zionist murderers” in his speech at the UN General Assembly, dwelling on what he described as Zionist control of international finance, echoing the libel that blamed a world Jewish conspiracy for all the world’s troubles.

But I still see no major condemnations from world leaders. The EU? Britain? The UN? No, wait. There was applause for the speech.

I checked the websites of the WCC, the Quakers, and the Mennonites, the groups that broke bread with Ahmadinejad last night. There was not a word objecting to his speech. As usual, we Jews are pretty much on our own.

People like to think we exaggerate the danger of this representative of the Iranian Mullahcracy. He says nothing that has not been approved by the Ayatollahs. He smiles and lies to reporters and fools like the Mennonites and Quakers who break bread with him. But Iran is the nation that sponsored a conference specifically to “disprove” the Holocaust. Iran is the nation that held “A World Without Zionism” conference, at which Mahmoud also said how great it would be to have a world without America (picture at the link).

He’s following the same plan Hitler followed. First, dehumanize your enemy. Get everyone to think of them as less than you. Demonize them, their actions, everything they do. Condemn them in world forums. Speak lie after lie after lie, until the lies you speak are passed along as truth (cf.: Juan Cole). Then, when you start killing them, the world won’t care. Because it will be the fault of the “acquisitive and invasive people” who are preventing world peace. Not the fault of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who supplied weapons and training to jihadists in Iraq and are now doing the same in Afghanistan. Not the fault of the Iranians, who sponsor Hamas, Hezbullah, Islamic Jihad, and who knows how many other terrorist groups worldwide. It will be done with the willing help of morons like Larry King, who repeat the Iranian lies during an interview where he tells Ahmadinejad “You don’t want to see Israelis die,” in spite of the fact that Iran does want to see Israelis die, and has killed Israelis, via its proxy armies (cf.: Lebanon, 2006, Hamas, PIJ).

This is the fourth year in a row we’ve had to suffer from the Iranian propaganda front. You’d think they’d learn.

You would be mistaken.