The AEI writes:

The day before Christmas, Joe Nocera did it again—wasted a perfectly good column with another attack on us, Peter Wallison and Ed Pinto.

It’s worth reading for what it says about the Left’s current situation. According to Nocera, we “almost single-handedly” have created a “myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis.” Those who have fallen for this myth, according to Nocera, include congressional Republicans and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

It’s somewhat implausible that two guys at a Washington think-tank, arguing that the financial crisis was caused by government housing policy, could create a widely accepted alternative to the conventional liberal narrative that the financial crisis was caused by the greed and lack of regulation of Wall Street. After all, the conventional narrative was created by the government, propagated by the New York Times, and accepted without question by just about every other major newspaper and electronic mass media outlet, foreign and domestic. Apparently, however, in Noceraworld, threats to the accepted narrative can never be fully suppressed.

It’s what happens when people in general have no alternate news sources — But now they do.

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It is fairly obvious to most semi-intelligent people that the current state of affairs in college football and basketball is not sustainable. There are a couple options. One is paying players. The other is creating other feeder systems for football and basketball and removing colleges from the business of big-time athletics. Since I doubt that colleges are ready to give up the cash involved (and administrators’ big salaries along with it), a system for paying players is a must.

This article in the New York Times by Joe Nocera is the best proposal I have heard to date. Enjoy.

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• The College Sports Cartel (nytimes.com)
• College football will test the Yankee Stadium turf today (hardballtalk.nbcsports.com)

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Sometimes the footnotes contain some of the more interesting material. That is true of a footnote in All the Devils Are Here, The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. As a former Chicagoan, I am well aware of the claims that the dead voted at least once in elections in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago.

According to McLean and Nocera, the dead also wrote letters to Congress in support of Fannie Mae, the Government Supported Entity, GSE, that oversaw the housing market in the US before it went bankrupt. In an attempt to increase regulation of Fannie Mae, in 1999 Congressman Richard Baker from Louisiana introduced a GSE reform bill. In the footnote on that page, this is what ensued.

“In response, Fannie hired a telemarketing company, which blanketed the Hill with tens of thousands of letters protesting the bill. Some of them turned out to be from dead people. When asked how much the campaign cost, Fannie said that information was ‘proprietary.’”

Related articles

• Joe Nocera Interview (800ceoread.com)
• Americans Less Negative About Home Values – Fannie Mae Survey (johnmurphyreports.com)
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Multifamily Outperform Single Family and Provide Essential Functions for Mortgage Markets (prweb.com)
• Survey Finds a Gloomy Outlook on Home Prices (blogs.wsj.com)

Oops.

First, Nocera writes a column about the need for increased domestic natural-gas production (which, by the way, I don’t dispute) without mentioning the significant potential environmental downside — a particularly egregious omission for those of us in North Carolina, where the battle over whether and how fracking will be permitted is being waged in the General Assembly right now.

Then, as Ed Cone observes, when called on this significant error of omission, Nocera doubles down.

OK, Times, we get it. Just die already.