Just because there isn’t any evidence proving that jihadi terrorists, Chinese Communists, Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, separately or acting together, masterminded Wall Street’s great financial crash of 2008 doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened! That, in a nutshell, is the absurd, disturbing message at the heart of Kevin D. Freeman’s Pentagon-funded study, “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses.” Since so much of what happens on Wall Street is hidden from public view or regulatory oversight, we don’t know what really happened. Therefore, anything could have happened. And since there are bad guys who hate us—well, you connect the dots. ...

... Or, alternatively, the fact there is no actual evidence supporting the thesis and the analytic rigor demonstrated by Freeman isn’t what a serious person would find remotely convincing might be the real reasons for the mass shunning. Personally, I love nothing better than reaching back to ancient history to support a contemporary observation, but citing an article by an adjunct professor of rhetoric at St. Thomas University in Miami, Fla., titled “The Radical Muslim War Against the Western Tax Base,” which in turn cites Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s thesis that Arab economic warfare brought about the fall of the Roman Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D., as support for the proposition that al-Qaida was orchestrating the run-up in oil prices in 2007 and the “bear raids” on Wall Street investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, strikes me as just a bit of a stretch.

What we do know about how the collapse of the housing boom and the proliferation of dodgy mortgage-backed securities led to the credit crunch suggests that Wall Street’s traders needed no help from malevolent actors in collapsing their own house of cards. It’s not that complicated. They were greedy and stupid and government regulators were asleep at the wheel.

The Obama administration’s plan to gradually dissolve ailing housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and to shrink the government’s role in the mortgage market drew praise from House Republicans on Tuesday. The GOP chairman of the House Financial Services Committee called the proposal a good starting point for bipartisan negotiations over a housing overhaul.

The positive reaction came as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the committee that the Obama administration wants Congress to approve legislation within two years that would slowly dismantle Fannie and Freddie.

Calling for stricter enforcement of existing laws, House Republicans said Tuesday the nation’s broken immigration system is making it more difficult for minorities to land jobs because they are competing with illegals willing to work longer hours for less pay.

Democrats, though, countered that the GOP was using immigration to pit blacks against Hispanics while ignoring the “real” problems in minority communities, including the lack of education and job-training resources, that drive unemployment. ...

... Reading from a prepared statement, House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, pointed to a Pew Hispanic Center report that showed more than 7 million people are working in the country illegally and noted that the unemployment rates in minority communities - about 12 percent among Hispanics and nearly 16 percent among blacks - are well above the national average.

“These jobs should go to legal workers, many of whom would be minorities,” Mr. Smith said.

A top House Republican is concerned that former executives with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have signed comprehensive legal protection agreements to guard themselves from earlier wrongdoing.

The Senate has begun debating a bill that would fundamentally alter an important area of U.S. intellectual property laws, and it’s pitting small businesses and independent inventors against a broad coalition of powerful interests like drug companies, big software companies and some unions. The bill, known as the Patent Reform Act of 2011, would amend several areas of patent law, the most significant of which would be a change from the current application system that awards patents to the fist person to invent something to a new system that would award a patent to the first person to file an application.

Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.

A Silver Spring man convicted of falsifying immigration documents had threatened to blow up the White House, the U.S. Treasury building, a federal courthouse and a Metro stop, vowing to “slaughter the enemies of Islam,” federal prosecutors said Monday in court.

The French foreign minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, was fired Sunday because of a Christmas vacation spent at a resort in Tunisia while the country was caught up in a crescendo of violent protests that eventually toppled the authoritarian president.

As Republicans and Democrats in Congress haggle over the budget, most voters would rather have a partial shutdown of the federal government than keep its spending at current levels.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 33% of Likely U.S. Voters would rather have Congress avoid a government shutdown by authorizing spending at the same levels as last year. Fifty-eight percent (58%) says it’s better to have a partial shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can agree on what spending to cut. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

It’s not every day the AFL-CIO encourages workers to dismantle their labor union and abandon collective bargaining, but in the case of the NFL Players Association’s battle with team owners, Big Labor is cheering it on.

The Names of the 47 Congressmen That Have Voted for Every Spending Cut

A former British Airways worker has been convicted of four counts of preparing acts of terrorism. Rajib Karim’s trial revealed new details about how Islamist extremists in the West forge links with groups overseas.

Please.

Mohammed Gul, 23, edited his own films, combining footage of bin Laden, the September 11 terrorist attrocities and attacks on coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he set to Islamic songs praising holy war.