damn eagles and iran

The Eagles certainly just gave me a hell of a scare. They led 20-7 at halftime, and were up 27-10 at one point in the third quarter, but thanks in large part to a Macho Harris fumble and poor play by Donavan McNabb in the second half, Denver was able to fight back and tie the game at 27 in the fourth quarter. Luckily, after the defense stepped up and made several key stops, Jeremy Maclin made one the best catches I have seen all season to put the Eagles in field goal range with about a minute left in the game. David Akers did his thing and the Eagles pulled out a 30-27 win.

A couple of notes from todays game in no particular order:

- Brent Celek is deserving of a Pro-Bowl bid. Through 15 games he now has 69 catches for 875 yards and eight touchdowns. In my opinion the only player more worthy in the NFC is Vernon Davis. Tony Gonzales has a few more catches but less yards and touchdowns. Jason Witten has several more catches but is comperable in yardage and has only ONE touchdown. He sucks (I hate him even more because I wasted a high draft pick him in my fantasy league. And he had ONE touchdown. Gay.) Davis and Celek should go.

- Props to Champ Bailey and Andre Goodman. They played extremely well despite giving up passing TDs to Desean Jackson and Jason Avant. Neither of those Denver DBs was covering either of the Eagles WRs when they scored. For the most part they shut down the Eagles wide receivers, tackled well and never allowed the big play over the top. Champ also had a nice pick and a couple of nice pass break ups. Great game by both of them.

- McNabb needs to improve his accuracy somehow if this team is going to make a long playoff run. He played horribly in the second half and missed several open receivers. I am so tired of seeing him clap and laugh after throwing the ball at a receivers feet. Andy Reid could of helped McNabb out though by calling a little more balanced game in the second half. There was great balance in the first half, but after Asante Samuels' interception in third third quarter Reid called no pass plays on the next two possessions, and guess what? Two three and outs. On the following two possessions he called only two runs, both on first down, leading to two more three and outs. When your quarterback is struggling you've got to have more balance than that.

- Having said that, as Larry David would say, I like this team's chances next week against the Cowboys and beyond in the playoffs. They might have won ugly, but they won nonetheless. They have a chance to finish 12-4 and if either the Bears or Giants can manage to beat the Vikings, they have a great shot at a first round bye. If that happens, I think they make the conference championship at least regardless of who they play in the divisional round.

One non-Eagles note. I just want to quickly comment about what is happening in Iran. Once again the protests are heating up and pro-democracy/freedom reformists are trying to rally the nation around the ideals of freedom and liberty. These are the core values that all Americans believe in, and we should not hide our support for anyone that espouses these rights. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Obama is doing. He is more concerned with catering to needs of a illegitimate Dictator (Ahmadinejad) so that he can "engage" Iran on other issues like nuclear proliferation. Well look where "engagement" has gotten us. Iran continues to march towards a nuclear weapon and they don't give two shits that Obama wants to negotiate. Iran isn't even pretending to care what Obama and the U.N. says, they are just continuing down the path of enrichment and defiance of international law. At this point, Obama should express support for the protesters and declare that the U.S. no longer accepts Ahmadinejad as the legitimate president of Iran. In the age of global communications, this type of statement would immediately be broadcast all across Iran, especially to the protest leaders who are well-educated and most of whom live in Tehran.

Iran is the most dangerous threat to global stability in the post cold war world. If the reformers succeed in ousting this dangerous regime, world peace would be a much more achievable goal. We as Americans, and the American president, should do as much as we can to support freedom and ensure that happens.

obama and appeasement

Let me premise this by first stating that I was not a big fan of George W. Bush's foreign policy strategies. However, even if Bush was a little misguided, at least he believed in democracy and the strength of America to spread the light of freedom, liberty, democracy and prosperity throughout the world. He believed that the United States shouldn't compromise its values in the face of hostility from leaders abroad. Obama on the other hand seems to believe that compromise is always the right strategy, regardless of what's at stake for the U.S.

Take for instance the recent meetings with Medevedev and Putin in Russia. The U.S. agreed in principle to bilateral nuclear arms and launch site reductions. Sounds great right? Not really when you look at the negotiating situation each side was presented with at the opening of the talks. First, Russia's nuclear arsenal is aging fast, and many of their weapons will have to be retired within the next ten years. They are simply outdated and unreliable. With a GDP less than that of the state of California, Russia simply does not have the means to maintain a Cold War size nuclear strike force. In other words, they were going to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and launch sites regardless of what the U.S. did. So basically Obama gave up something for nothing. Any advocate with any idea what he was doing would tell you this is the cardinal sin of negotiating.

But wait, you say. Obama did this to build goodwill with the Russians, right? He wanted to mend the rift the was created by Bush. The problem with that theory is that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GOODWILL WITH THE RUSSIANS. At least that is true with the pseudo-democratic leaders who are currently in power. They are not going to budge regardless of what the U.S, does on the issues that really matter like missile defense in Eastern Europe, NATO expansion (especially to include Georgia - as an aside I just want to predict now that within one year from this date, Russia will invade Georgia again), and preventing nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. Putin lives by a cold war mentality, where his only goal is to weaken the U.S. at all costs. You simply can't negotiate with someone like that.

Obama's naivety has extended to his stances on Iran and North Korea as well. He still refuses to stand strong against the Ayatollah and support the dissenters who simply want the democracy that many of us take for granted. It is obvious at this point that the Iranian regime is intent on squashing any kind of dissent, and the U.S. and its allies should not recognize the government as legitimate. As a penalty for such brutality, the international community should place harsh and demanding sanction on Iran. Unfortunately, when the U.N. is running the show the best that is going to happen is that it will issue a strongly worded, non-binding resolution. As far as North Korea is concerned, Obama seems disinterested at best. He has taken no action despite the fact that North Korea has repeatedly broken international law in testing both nuclear devices and long range missiles for their potential delivery.

However, perhaps the most telling of all of Obama's foreign policy miscues is his support for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Now I am not one to support military coups, but the situation in Central American can hardly be called a coup. Zelaya was attempting the circumvent the Honduran constitution in order to stay in power beyond the mandatory term limit and install himself as a de facto dictator. Basically he was trying to emulate his good buddy, an American-enemy Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Chavez has been successful in destroying democracy and spreading a new form of Leftist dictatorship in his own country, and is looking to spread the model throughout the Americas. This would explain why Zelaya was attempting to distribute Venezuelan supplied ballots in order to facilitate in illegal vote where he was circumventing the Honduran legislature. The country's Supreme Court condemned the actions. Now the correct path would be for Zelaya to be arrested, tried and impeached from office, desperate times call for desperate measures. In order to protect their entire democrtaic government, the leaders felt it necessary to kick Zelaya out of the country. Its not like dictator has been put in place, instead the legislature simply elected a interim President until full elections later this year. Obama is supporting Zelaya under the guise of supporting the rule of law, but in reality he is doing it to appease people like Chavez in the hopes that he can later "negotiate" with him on a host of issues. I thought we learned that appeasement was a bad foreign policy in 1939.

iran again, and obama's reqorking of the financial regulation system

Well since my last post, things in Iran seem to be getting worse. At this point the government has begun cracking down on protesters and several innocent people have been killed while trying to assemble peacefully and voice their outrage over this sham election. Earlier today President Obama made a statement condemning the "unjust actions" being taken by the Iranian government. Many Republicans have criticized the the president for not being more forceful with his condemnation. Although I had been critical of President Obama for not speaking out more clearly, I think he took a step in the right direction today. I think the President is right not to issue a harshly worded statement condemning the Iranian government in general. Although that is how every American feels, doing so would simply give fuel to the regime to spew anti-American propaganda and use it as an excuse to crack down on the dissenters. This type of harsh crackdown could end the protests altogether, along with any chance of seeing real change in Iran anytime soon.


The President should denounce the violence against the protesters. The U.S. stands for the principles of freedom of speech and assembly, and we should tell the world that any regime that does not respect those rights is no friend of ours. However, attacking the regime directly and threatening direct military action will probably do little more than given the Ayatollah an excuse to quash the protests even further. Things are currently moving in the right direction without the help of the U.S. and we should let the people of Iran continue their push for basic human rights. I'm not saying that we should never get involved, but until the regime starts using even more brutal tactics and killing its own citizens on a wider scale, we should let the Iranian people do the heavy lifting. The U.S. should allow the Iranians to contest the issue of whether the election was free and fair, and then focus the government's efforts on standing behind the rights of Iranians to peacefully protest election results that they believe have been manipulated.


But just because we won't intervene militarily, or threaten to do so, does not mean we should do nothing. First we should impose an oil embargo on Iran. Unfortunately, doing this through the U.N. will prove ineffective. The U.S. should come out and say that any country that buys or sells oil from Iran will no longer be a favored trading partner. This must include China. The consequence of doing business in Iran should be a large tariff place on any good imported from that country to the United States. If we make the penalty strong and stick to it, not even China will be able to skirt around it. They are much to dependent on U.S. imports.

On a very different note, I just want to say a few words regarding Obama's recently passed retool of the financial regulation system imposed by the federal government. The premise behind the whole bill was that although their were several agencies overseeing individual players and institutions in the financial markets, there was no single entity on the lookout for problems that posed a "systematic risk" to the system as a whole. According to Obama's flawed rhetoric, Wall Street bankers gamed the system and took tremendous long term risks in order to make large short term profits. According to the administration, the bankers deliberately packaged volatile investments such as mortgage banked securities so that they could hide risk and sell them to banks and other financial institutions for short term profits. How could anyone believe such a statement? Most Wall Street bankers are extremely intelligent people who were simply using the information available to them at the time to try and make profits for the investors they represent.

Investment bankers are logical decision makers like anyone else, and they make decisions based on two factors: potential returns and associated risks. The real cause of the crisis was not greedy bankers trying to make a quick buck, but the distortion of actual risk in the marketplace. And who caused that distortion of risk? I'm my opinion there were three principle causes: the federal government's implicit backing of Fannie May and Freddie Mac, failure of the ratings agencies and the federal reserve's easy money policy of the first half of this decade.

The first I think is quite obvious. Fannie and Freddie have always been semi-public entities, and the federal government has pressured them to finance mortgages for lower income people, even if those borrowers would not have received the loans absent the government pressure. By giving these loans to people who would not otherwise be deserving, at rates that do not reflect this risk of default, the government created bubble whereby they were almost statistically guaranteeing that default rates would be higher than would have otherwise have been expected. Additionally, by not adjusting the interest rates of these mortgages to reflect these higher probabilities of default, they did not hedge the risk of default with a higher rate of return. However, since the mortgages were backed by Fannie and Freddie, investors assumed they adequately reflected market conditions and even if they weren't that the federal government would take any losses (which they are doing now).

This also plays into the second point, that the rating agencies gave many mortgage back securities AAA ratings. What in hindsight could be considered extremely risky and small return securities received the highest ratings possible. Why? Well first there are tremendous conflicts of interest associated with these agencies. They are paid by the sellers, so they have strong incentive to inflate their ratings to make their clients happy and earn repeat business. The ratings agencies should work for the buyer, as they are evaluating risk for the buyer, not the seller. However, only federally approved agencies can perform this work, and the federal government dictates their structure. Until the federal government gets out of the rating picture, forcing buyers to independently rate potential securities investments by use of private rating entities, thereby imposing on the buyer the known risk of what happens if they trust a faulty rating, these mistakes will continue.

Lastly the federal reserve fueled a bubble mentality by keeping interest rates artificially low for too long, making them effectively negative in terms of real dollars. An effectively negative interest rate makes it more profitable to borrow money even if you don't have too, because you will be paying off the loan with a dollar that is worth less in value in the future. This lower dollar value even made up for the interest being paid on the loan under prevailing rates. By flooding the system with excess liquidity, the fed ensured that more risky investments would be made for less chance of profit. The result is the bust we are currently enduring.

So how is the Obama administration solving the problem. BY GIVING THE FED MORE POWER. He is giving an unelected body that already wields way too much power in our monetary system even more influence. It is outrageous. They will now have the power to inspect the books and require certain actions to be taken by any entity that the chairman deems to be a "systematic risk" to the financial system. Not to mention the rating agencies are not being reformed at all. For an example of how ignorance at the fed has contributed to the current collapse please read the following three articles in order: Speed Demons at the Fed, Slack Labor Markets Will Hold Down Prices, and Bernanke at the Creation. The first is an editorial by the WSJ in 2003 which predicted many of the problems were are seeing today, and criticised the fed as creating the environment for them. The second is Bernanke's remarks from a 2003 open market committee meeting were he dismisses the journal as being out of touch. The final is an editorial which points out why the journal was right, Bernanke was wrong, and that he is now pursuing the same type of policies that caused the problems in the first place. So get ready for another boom/bust cycle, except this one will probably be marked by much higher inflation. So what is the only logical thing to do? I know, let's give the fed even more power.

iran

What is happening right now in Iran may be the most important event in the world since 9/11, and perhaps it could have more long lasting effects than anything since the fall of the Berlin Wall. No other country in the world poses as large a threat to peace and stability than an Iran that is run by the mullahs. They are a few short years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and their current President has on numerous occasions claimed that the Holocaust was a hoax. Does anyone really think that someone like that won't use a weapon of mass destruction against Israel if he has the chance? This could be a defining moment in the history of the modern world, and it is time for the strength of the free world to stand up for democracy and show that the tyranny of the past will no longer be tolerated.

For thousands of years the large majority of humans have been dominated and controlled by a ruling elite. It is only over the past 200 years or so have the ideals of freedom, liberty, and personal autonomy spread among people around the world. And by no means have these freedoms reached the lives of many of the people around the globe. Unfortunately, billions of people still suffer from the harsh realities of totalitarian regimes where their liberty and freedom of choice are extremely limited; however, there is hope. The digital age has ushered in many new ways information can be transmitted and allowed many new forms of communication. This proliferation of information has spread to the masses the ideas of freedom, equality and liberty that have directly lead to the great advances of the past two centuries. It is no coincidence that the countries that have achieved the greatest advances and provided the highest standard of living for their citizens are also the countries that have allowed their citizens to retain the most personal liberties.

Over the past week hundreds of thousands of Iranians, mostly young students and women, have sought to end decades of intolerance, brutality and injustice and stand up for their right to collectively decide how they should be allowed to live their lives. It is imperative that people all of the world who believe in freedom support their cause. Sham elections like the one that just occurred in Iran cannot be tolerated, and people have taken to the streets to stand up against tyranny. The words of Joseph Stalin are as true today as when he said them fifty years ago: "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." Below is a picture of some of the protests in Tehran, were an estimated 120,000 people came out on Monday.


It is time for President Obama to stand up for what is right, and to show the world that the United States is dedicated to protecting liberty and democracy both at home and abroad. Ronald Reagan's presidency showed what the power of an America committed to the ideals that made this country can great can accomplish. The Soviet Empire was more powerful and a greater threat than Iran, and without firing a shot we were able to topple the regime simply by promoting ideals that all free humans would consider indispensable. By supporting the pro-democracy supporters in Iran, Obama could send the message that the U.S. still stands for freedom and all that is good in the world. We can only hope that the mullahs are not allowed to simply circumvent the will of the Iranian people, unfortunately though, I think that is what is going to happen. I just hope that historians far in the future don't look back at this day as one of greatest missed chances for securing a new era of peace and prosperity around the world.