From my comments section

Some very smart words from jmk

It's very difficult to dialogue with many of the Liberals here in the U.S. Pela, as they deliberately seem to seek to villify those they disagree with, rather than to dialogue at all.

I'd hope it's better elsewhere. The few Scandanavians I've met have been very reasonable people.

The American Left (as exemplified by the likes of Michael "Sicko" Moore and Al Franken) are extremely misguided people, who often appear to be more malevolent than merely wrong-headed.

Reasonable people can certainly disagree with America's foray into Iraq, but to deny that radical Islam is at war with what it sees as "the decadent West," is quite another thing.

Typically, the American Left sees that as "Muslim-bashing."
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Right now, I'm looking at the global credit crisis and for anyone interested, it started right here in the U.S. and it ISN'T "a failure of Capitalism" as some have suggested, as America hasn't had a "free market" since 1912...we've had a government-regulated market-based economy since that time and have alternated beween Keynesian (a more government regulated system) and Supply Side (more market-based system) since that time.What has caused the current debacle is "credit-socialism" or "lending affirmative action" BY the government! BOTH American Democrats and Republicans supported more loans being made available to more low-income, high-risk borrowers, so they re-tooled a 1979 law called "The Community Reinvestment Act" to force private banks to lend more money to more high-risk borrowers.THAT resulted in the "subprime" mortgage mess - "subprime" refers to subprime or UNCREDITWORTHY borrowers not the interest rates, which are ultimately higher rates.The part that the two American GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in all this was (1) backing, then buying and ultimately fraudulently packaging them for sale to financial markets worldwide as "U.S. Government-backed mortgage instruments."Of course, the folks at Fannie and Freddie KNEW that the U.S. government was unable to back up or guarantee the $1 TRILLION in bad/high-risk loans before they packaged and sold them - that's the fraud.When savvy investors saw all those financial institutions holding all that "bad debt" they swooped in to short-sell (in effect bet that the stock prices of those entities would fall) and as the stock prices tanked for those companies, most of them couldn't get the short-term credit they need to exist.What we have is a FAILURE of government OVER-regulation and TOXIC regulation, and NOT a failure of any market-based initiatives nor the private sector.Ironically enough, at least here, the media is misreporting this as "a failure of the market" and, in effect, supporting MORE Keynesianism for a problem rooted in Keynesian policies!

I'll be following his blog- Workingclass Conservative- and I suggest that all you others should too.

Addendum: Yankee Doodle made this comment to this (by the way he has an excellent blog here- don't miss it):

A very interesting analysis.

I would add one thing: The Federal Reserve is supposed to monitor loans, and make sure they go to creditworthy applicants. Banks that consistently lend to customers that don't meet the standards are supposed to be identified, and the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors is supposed to suspend such banks from the use of the credit facilities of the Federal Reserve System.

But, this didn't happen.

All the current members of the Board of Governors were appointed by President Bush; four of the five were in place by 2006.

It's just like 9/11: if they had done their jobs, they could have prevented it, but they didn't; now, we are being stampeded in the direction we are supposed to run because of the crisis which they allowed to develop.

And, some key people are making big money out of all this -- just like happened with 9/11.

It's not a question of regulation, although excessive government involvement in the economy played an important role; it's corruption.

Economic 9/11?