The Strident Centrist Blog

This morning the main stream media reported that Muqtada al al Sadr has ordered his troops off the streets. From the way this is being pitched on every MSM account I’ve seen so far the reader is left to infer that this is a climb-down on Sadr’s part, and thus perhaps a sign of weakness and/or a loss of face.

However, within the past week I stumbled upon a new blog, Roads To Iraq, about which I know very little, but the writer of which seems pretty closely plugged into what’s going on over there. S/he frequently refers to Arabic publications and offers links to them. From the writing my guess is that English skills are very likely a recent acquisition.

In any case, the Roads To Iraq writer suggests that Sadr’s cease fire is the result of negotiations with representatives of the Maliki regime that took place in Iran following the death of Maliki’s security adviser at the hands of the Mahdi Army. The writer implies, but does not state, that the negotiations were at the behest of the Maliki regime. If this is true, the MSM narrative is very misleading, as is all to common these days.

In another set of insights from off the beaten path, Chet Richards of Defense in the National Interest offers some views on what the events of the past week might mean for the war itself as well as USA politics under the title “Is This the Iraqi Tet?”. Here are some samples: (more…)

Below is the essence of a comment I posted yesterday on Pat Lang’s Sic Semper Tyrannis blog entitled “Who Are the ‘Iraqi Security Forces’”. I thought it worth reposting it here. According to the Badger’s post of a translation from the Kuwaiti press this morning, the troops of the Maliki regime security forces are already starting to melt away from the fight. If this is accurate, one of Sami Rasouli’s predictions is already coming to pass, even before any hint that the coalition will pull up stakes.

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Last night I attended a meeting of a political club at which the speaker was one Sami Ratouli, a mid-fiftyish Iraqi-American who was born and raised in Najaf and emigrated out of his homeland in 1976. After about a decade in Britain and Europe, he settled here in the Twin City area of MN, founded a successful Middle Eastern bakery and restaurant and became a US citizen. He is a Shiite but his wife is Sunni.

He recounted how moved he was when on 9/12/01 two long-time customers, middle aged Jewish women, came into his shop, asked to speak to him in private, and told him to call one of them at any time day or night if he or anyone in his family needed help or shelter in the event of threats or persecution such as had occurred sporadically elsewhere in the country following the events of the previous day. He resolved then and there to turn his business over to others and find some way to build bridges between the Islamic world and the West, and within the Middle East itself. (more…)

Last summer, at the behest of some friends, I attended an early Obama campaign event in Minneapolis in return for a minimum donation of $15 and my email address. We left in plenty of time to be there when the doors opened, however when we arrived the line already wound around much of the block on which sat the International Market Square building in which the event was held. By the time I got inside the only space with a view available was on the fourth level of the atrium, where the acoustics were so bad that I only understood about one in ten words he spoke. The enthusiasm of the crowd, as exemplified by both the turnout and its friendly, cheering response to the candidate, gave me my first inkling that some sort of groundswell phenomenon was under way.

Needless to say I’ve been on the campaign’s email list ever since, and today’s delivery included an invitation to “Dinner with Barack?” (more…)

Why the financial system needs saving, that is, and “Why . . mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes.”

Banks exist because they help reconcile the conflicting desires of savers and borrowers. Savers want freedom — access to their money on short notice. Borrowers want commitment: they don’t want to risk facing sudden demands for repayment.

Normally, banks satisfy both desires: depositors have access to their funds whenever they want, yet most of the money placed in a bank’s care is used to make long-term loans. The reason this works is that withdrawals are usually more or less matched by new deposits, so that a bank only needs a modest cash reserve to make good on its promises.

But sometimes — often based on nothing more than a rumor — banks face runs, in which many people try to withdraw their money at the same time. And a bank that faces a run by depositors, lacking the cash to meet their demands, may go bust even if the rumor was false.

Worse yet, bank runs can be contagious. . .

As the years went by, the shadow banking system took over more and more of the banking business, because the unregulated players in this system seemed to offer better deals than conventional banks. Meanwhile, those who worried about the fact that this brave new world of finance lacked a safety net were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned.

In fact, however, we were partying like it was 1929 — and now it’s 1930.

Let us all hope that the mild-mannered Ben Bernanke is wearing the right cape.

John Dean has some thoughts on Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech at his perch at FindLaw.com, as well as some observations on how Hilary Clinton is attempting to counter his eloquence:

Hillary Clinton - who is every bit Obama’s intellectual equal - is increasingly running against his eloquence, and claiming that eloquence is all he has and that he is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief and solve real-world problems. During and since the Ohio and Texas primaries, I’ve noticed that Senator Clinton has been showing less and less of her own conspicuous wonkiness and brain-power, a strategy that seems to be working to her advantage.

Senator Clinton’s new populism has not become anti-intellectual (yet), but she surely knows that her husband hid his intelligence during his presidential campaigns, playing up his good ole boy roots rather than his Yale/Oxford credentials. Savvy Democrats understand they cannot win the White House by appearing smarter than their GOP opponent.

Here are links to two more significant statements on Obama’s speech Tuesday in Philadelphia. The first, via James Fallows, are from presidential candidate and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, followed by Fallows’ reflections thereon:

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…”

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Also worth a read are these comments by David Dante Troutt, a law professor at Rutgers:

Despite the social and religious segregation that must be the precondition to such revelations about how black folks talk, many white voters seemed appalled that over in black churches “they” are not thinking the same American thoughts that I am.

This is the angry metaphor of Wright that Obama took on in his speech—after assiduously avoiding race for so long. What Obama did was to stand in the gap with humble magnificence. The speech was often brilliant. Politically, however, it remains to be seen if this is how to talk to white people about race—giving a long, complex speech that few will hear in its entirety. And teaching, even from the middle, is not done in presidential campaigns.

But teach he did, because the dare that Obama accepted was to believe himself so capable a unifier that he could explain vast oceans of difference primarily to white people so that he could then do the work of unifying all.

Yesterday I linked to the page on Barack Obama’s website that contains the transcript and video link of the speech he gave on race in America. Today reactions continue to abound, and Talking Points Memo has a compendium of links to them. One of the more thoughtful is this one by Jim Sleeper, a political scientist at Yale. Others linked on the TPM page are definitely worth a read as well.

By the way, the link to the transcript and video of the speech at Obama’s campaign site that I put up yesterday is broken. The transcript and video link can now be found here, which will hopefully prove more permanent. I am also updating yesterday’s post with the current link.

Update: Here’s Scott Horton’s commentary on Obama’s speech.

If you haven’t yet viewed, listened to or read the speech Barack Obama gave today in Philadelphia on race in America, do it now. Here’s a link to the page on the Obama campaign site that contains both the written text and a link to the YouTube video. This may well go down as one of the great political speeches of our history.

Update: It appears I’m not alone in my high regard for Obama’s race speech. James Fallows, who watched it during the middle of the night Beijing time, had this to say:

It was a moment that Obama made great through the seriousness, intelligence, eloquence, and courage of what he said. I don’t recall another speech about race with as little pandering or posturing or shying from awkward points, and as much honest attempt to explain and connect, as this one. (italics in the original)

Late this afternoon (Sunday, March 16), it was announced that J. P. Morgan had bought Bear Stearns for $2.00 per share, after closing this past Friday at $30. A year ago it was selling for $170 per share, and as recently as February 27 the price was $85. Also, the Federal Reserve has taken several steps to stem an incipient panic including, in a step highly unusual for a Sunday afternoon, lowering the prime rate another quarter of a percent. As of this writing, at about 8:00 pm CDT, the Dow Industrial futures for tomorrow’s opening are down about 300 points. By tomorrow evening this time there may very well be a lot of drunken people staggering around whose intoxication has nothing to do with the wearing of the green. The question is when are some prominent Democrats going to start calling bullshit on the voodoo economics and foreign policy disasters that have led us into what’s looking more and more like the country’s biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Or, god forbid, a reprise of it.

Update: Oops! Just noticed I hadn’t changed the GMT time offset since we switched to CDT.

Talking Points Memo brings us the quote of the day out of the mouth of retiring Rep. Thomas Davis, Republican, of Virginia:

The House Republican brand is so bad right now that if it were a dog food, they’d take it off the shelf.