Major newspapers around the country including the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal are urging President-elect Barack Obama to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement in the lame duck session. The Los Angeles Times said it bluntly, “It’s time to stop playing games with a trade pact whose economic and political benefits are good for both nations.”

Some reports of the meeting between the president-elect and President Bush said that the president had pushed for the trade agreement in exchange for support of the auto loan package, but that was denied.

CEI has strongly supported the passage of this agreement based on its own merits – it provides surety for continued liberalized trade for Colombia, it opens up Colombian markets to U.S. goods without high tariffs, and it helps cement the close relationship with a Latin American ally besieged by leftist neighboring governments.

While conservatives are angry about a number of things at the moment, they should be at least as angry that the Congressional Democrats who helped stoke the mortgage crisis are getting away with blaming everyone else for it. Today, Senator Chris Dodd, the prime recipient of GSE lobbying funds and proud holder of a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide, is holding hearings where the witnesses will blame everyone but Dodd, Barney Frank and their cronies. Republicans asked to invite witnesses but were barred from doing so. The Wall Street Journal has more:

In February 2004, while Republican colleagues warned of the systemic risks posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Mr. Dodd pronounced the mortgage market “one of the great success stories of all time.” A year later, the Connecticut Democrat voted against a reform that would have limited the size of Fan and Fred’s mortgage portfolios…At today’s hearing, his mission is to weave a tale that somehow manages to avoid mentioning his own role in this debacle. That won’t be easy, but Mr. Dodd has shrewdly selected a series of witnesses who, like him, contributed to the mess, and have every incentive to point fingers elsewhere.

Read the whole thing for details of the ridiculous witnesses and a strong suggestion for who should be called. Meanwhile, in The Washington Post, Peter Schiff has a good outline of how government - and the actions of Bill Clinton - really did help cause this mess and is probably now making it worse:

Yes, many Wall Street leaders were irresponsible, and they should pay. But they were playing the distorted hand dealt them by government policies. Our leaders irrationally promoted home-buying, discouraged savings, and recklessly encouraged borrowing and lending, which together undermined our markets…By refusing to allow market forces to rein in excess spending, liquidate bad investments, replenish depleted savings, fund capital investment and help workers transition from the service sector to the manufacturing sector, government is resisting the cure while exacerbating the disease.

There’s actually a school of thought that this decade is paralleling the 1930s quite closely (see the Oct 7 edition of The Short View, about 2 minutes in) and that we’re in the thick of something that actually began in 2000 or so. Over in Britain, Gordon Brown has apparently decided that increased public spending is necessary. The 1930s all over again, indeed. We need to get angry about the wool Chris Dodd and co are pulling over our eyes.

Few things are as exasperating as watching two sides argue — and neither rise above being half-right, at best. Still, the resulting exchange in this case is thought-provoking.

Today, the left-liberal Center for American Progress responded to a Washington Post editorial calling for a tougher stance on the part of Washington against Latin American autocrats like Hugo Chavez and his cronies in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador. While the Post editorial is right on more counts than is the CAP piece, they both seem to buy into the notion that the internal policies of Latin American countries are any of American policy makers’ business.

Yes, the United States wields enormous influence in the region as the biggest economic and political player, but the biggest contributions it can make to the well-being of Latin America  countries are — and should be — limited to maintaining open trade and immigration policies (I know, easier said and done) and changing America’s Sisyphean drug policy.

CAP author Stephanie Miller rightly mentions “drug consumption” in the U.S. as an important factor affecting Latin America, but she fails to develop even this important point. Moreover, she doesn’t even identify it properly — it is drug prohibition that is driving Latin America’s rising crime wave. No amount of drug laws can ever kill off demand itself. Moreover, drug prohibition is causing great damage in Latin America, but the enormous damage it is already causing in the U.S. is enough reason to change policy, independently of any foreign policy implications.

Regarding the Post editorial, it rightly emphasizes the importance of trade. However it seems to imply that trade preferences for countries with hostile regimes somehow constitute “subsidies,” even though trade preferences usually entail the removal of trade barriers (however selectively).

Meanwhile, CAP’s Miller argues that, “Trade is important, but it is clearly not the magic bullet that promoters of the Washington consensus of the 1990s believed it would be.” Magic bullet? This is clearly a straw man. It’s a big jump to go from saying that trade is crucial — which it is — to it being a panacea to societies’ ills — which it is clearly not. Many development factors are necessary; none are sufficient on their own.

Finally, regarding what American policy should be, both the Post and CAP argue for interventions of different sorts. Miller argues that, “the United States must very proactively engage with civil societies in all of these countries at the grassroots level.” The Post contends that, “Sooner or later [Latin Americans] must be forced to choose between Mr. Chávez’s half-baked socialism and the democracy of the 21st century.”

What about just stepping back and let Latin American countries solve their own problems — and deal with the consequences of their own decisions? Contra Miller, development in foreign countries is not something the American government is well suited to promote. And contra the Post, the U.S. cannot save people in other countries from themselves, no matter how bad their choices.

On the front page of the Washington Post, writer Steven Pearlstein contradicts himself by writing that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are being “rescued from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments,” undercutting arguments for “privatization, deregulation, and a faith in free markets.”

But the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is hardly an indictment of the free market: Fannie and Freddie are “Government-Sponsored Enterprises,” not products of the free market or the private sector.

Moreover, mortgage lending is not exactly an unregulated, free market. Just a few days ago, Pearlstein himself admitted in his column that federal affordable-housing mandates deserved a “good chunk of the responsibility” for the Fannie and Freddie failures that he now blames on the free market. (Earlier, we noted that federal regulations promoting “affordable housing” and “diversity” helped cause the real estate bubble and the mortgage crisis). Read the full story

The Religious Left seeks to impose its authoritarian social agenda through lawsuits and other means.  They love speech codes, despite the fact that they are often utterly uncivil.  The most sanctimonious and insufferable people I have ever met in my life were students and faculty at Harvard Divinity School, whom I had the misfortune of meeting during my studies at Harvard Law School.

One divinity professor at Harvard, a devotee of feminist theological studies, was fond of saying in and out of class that the proper role of men in religion should be to “shut up for a milennium,” to offset milennia of “patriarchal” religion.

The pompous left-wing clergy and theology professors who participate in the Newsweek/Washington Post forum “On Faith“ share a similarly intolerant ideological bent, although they insult not only men, but also women, claiming that conservative women like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin are guilty of “hypocrisy” simply for considering themselves to be “women,” when their politics are not liberal.  (Ironically, at Harvard, the most liberal female students didn’t claim to be “women,” but rather “womyn” or “wimyn,” erroneously viewing the word “women” as being of patriarchal origin).

Harvard Divinity School students made my classmates at Harvard Law School, themselves a fractious and often dogmatically left-wing lot, look like a model of open-mindedness and civility by comparison.  Apparently, things aren’t much better at the University of Chicago, home to wackos like Wendy Doniger.

I’ve often taken positions that are at odds with the Religious Right.  But compared to the Religious Left, the Religious Right is tolerant, easy-going, and sensible.