The New York Times rejoiced in the passage of the massive and occult 2300-page Financial Reform Bill with its customary propagandistic progressive nonsense.

Congress approved a sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation on Thursday, reflecting a renewed mistrust of financial markets after decades in which Washington stood back from Wall Street with wide-eyed admiration.

The bill, heavily promoted by President Obama and Congressional Democrats as a response to the 2008 financial crisis, cleared the Senate by a vote of 60 to 39, largely along party lines, after weeks of wrangling that allowed Democrats to pick up the three Republican votes to ensure passage.

The vote was the culmination of nearly two years of fierce lobbying and intense debate over the appropriate response to the financial excesses that dragged the nation into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The result is a catalog of repairs and additions to the rusted infrastructure of a regulatory system that has failed to keep up with the expanding scope and complexity of modern finance.

Over the last half-century, as traders and lenders increasingly drove the nation’s economic growth, politicians of both parties scrambled to get out of the way, passing a series of landmark bills that allowed financial companies to become larger, less transparent and more profitable.

Usury laws were set aside. Banks were allowed to expand across state lines, sell insurance, trade securities. The government watched and did nothing as the bulk of financial activity moved into a parallel universe of private investment funds, unregulated lenders and black markets like derivatives trading.

That era of hands-off optimism was gaveled to an end on Thursday as the Senate gave final approval to a bill that reasserts the importance of federal supervision of financial transactions.

The financial crisis, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with usury, banks expanding across state lines, selling insurance, or trading securities. The crisis had everything to do with mortgage lenders who, rather than being unregulated, were specifically federally required to make more risky loans to persons with dubious credit. At the center of the current financial crisis are the federally-created mortgage corporations and they are completely overlooked by the new legislation.

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As the Wall Street Journal explains our saviours are now going to protect us with a bevy of new agencies and a blizzard of yet-to-be-defined regulations, to be worked out later behind closed doors.

The bill, to be signed into law soon by President Barack Obama, marks a potential sea change for the financial-services industry. Financial titans such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. may be forced to make changes in most parts of their business, from debit cards to the ability to invest in hedge funds.

Congress approved a sweeping rewrite of rules that touch every corner of finance in the biggest expansion of government power over banking and markets since the Great Depression.

The Senate passed the bill 60-39 Thursday, following House passage last month. Earlier in the day, three northeastern Republicans joined with Democrats to block a filibuster, allowing the bill to squeak through.

Now, the legislation hands off to 10 regulatory agencies the discretion to write hundreds of new rules governing finance. Rather than the bill itself, it will be this process—accompanied by a lobbying blitz from banks—that will determine the precise contours of this new landscape, how strict the new regulations will be and whether they succeed in their purpose. The decisions will be made by officials from new agencies, obscure agencies and, in some cases, agencies like the Federal Reserve that faced criticism in the run-up to the crisis. ...

The legislation creates a council of regulators to monitor economic risks; establishes a new agency to police consumer financial products; and sets new standards for the way derivatives are traded. “These reforms will benefit the prudent and constrain the imprudent,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a press conference. “Strong banks, the well-managed financial innovators, will adapt and thrive under the new rules of the road.”

Republicans said the bill could jeopardize the recovery by constraining credit and crimping the banking industry, and chided the expansion of government power it envisions.

The bill “is a 2,300-page legislative monster…that expands the scope and the powers of ineffective bureaucracies,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.).

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It’s all a farce, of course. The professional political class is simply taking advantage of the financial crisis it created itself to ride to the supposed rescue and carve itself out another huge chuck of power over the economy.

Well-connected people with the right kinds of background and education will regulate in collusion with the wealthiest and most influential financial industry players, friends of the system in Washington will get favors, their less-well-connected competitors will get the shaft, higher entry barriers will be put into place, and regulators when they leave office will move on to more lucrative positions and consultancies. The powers that be will prosper and the public will pay.

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Still the financial system will survive:

Kate Sullivan: One day we’ll smarten up and pass some laws and put you out of business.

Lawrence Garfield: They can pass all the laws they want. All they can do is change the rules. They can never stop the game. I don’t go away. I adapt.

—Other People’s Money (1991)

Daniel Henniger, in the Wall Street Journal, argues that Obama’s appointment of Daniel Berwick, aptly headlined by Gregory as: Obama Appoints Marxist to Lead Death Panel, is decidedly worse than the Kagan appointment.

Barack Obama’s incredible “recess appointment” of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

The court’s decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.

Dr. Berwick’s ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren’t merely about “change.” They would be revolutionary.

One may agree with these views or not, but for the president to tell the American people they have to simply accept this through anything so flaccid as a recess appointment is beyond outrageous. It isn’t acceptable. ...

These excerpts are from past speeches and articles by Dr. Berwick:

“I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.”

“You cap your health care budget, and you make the political and economic choices you need to make to keep affordability within reach.”

“Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can.”

“Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.”

“It may therefore be necessary to set a legislative target for the growth of spending at 1.5 percentage points below currently projected increases and to grant the federal government the authority to reduce updates in Medicare fees if the target is exceeded.”

“About 8% of GDP is plenty for ‘best known’ care.”

“A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing—control supply.”

“The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property.”

“Health care is a common good—single payer, speaking and buying for the common good.”

“And it’s important also to make health a human right because the main health determinants are not health care but sanitation, nutrition, housing, social justice, employment, and the like.” ...

“Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and the risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy.”

Previous Berwick posting.

Amadeo Guillet

The Telegraph published recently an obituary for Italy’s last knight, Amedeo Guillet, a cavalry lieutenant who refused to surrender with the rest of the Italian forces in 1941, and fought on, leading a mixed force known as the Gruppo Bande a Cavallo Amhara (Group Bands of Amharic Horse), under a banner of his own featuring the Cross of Savoy superimposed with an Islamic Crescent and the motto Semper Ulterius (“Always Further”). To his horsemen, he became known as “Il Comandente Diavolo.”

The Telegraphy obituary opens recalling Guillet leading a cavalry charge of 500 men, astride his champion white Arabian stallion, Sandor, through a column of British tanks.

Early in 1941, following outstanding successes in the Western Desert, the British invasion of Mussolini’s East African empire seemed to be going like clockwork.

But at daybreak on January 21, 250 horsemen erupted through the morning mist at Keru, cut through the 4/11th Sikhs, flanked the armoured cars of Skinner’s Horse and then galloped straight towards British brigade headquarters and the 25-pound artillery of the Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry.

Red Italian grenades – “like cricket balls” – exploded among the defenders, several of whom were cut down by swords. There were frantic cries of “Tank alert!”, and guns that had been pointing towards Italian fortifications were swivelled to face the new enemy.

At a distance of 25 yards they fired, cutting swathes through the galloping horses but also causing mayhem as the shells exploded amid the Sikhs and Skinner’s Horse.

After a few more seconds the horsemen disappeared into the network of wadis that criss-crossed the Sudan-Eritrean lowlands.

It was not quite the last cavalry charge in history – the unmechanised Savoia Cavalry regiment charged the Soviets at Izbushensky on the Don in August 1942. But it was the last one faced by the British Army, with many soldiers declaring it the most frightening and extraordinary episode of the Second World War.

Amedeo Guillet was born in Piacenza on February 7 1909 to a Savoyard-Piedmontese family of the minor aristocracy which for generations had served the dukes of Savoy, who later became the kings of Italy.

He spent most of his childhood in the south – he remembered the Austrian biplane bombing of Bari during the First World War – then followed family tradition and joined the army.

After the military academy at Modena, he chose to join the cavalry and began training at Pinerolo, where Italian horsemanship under Federico Caprilli had earlier in the century won world renown – the current “forward seat” and modern jumping saddles evolved there.

Guillet excelled as a horseman and was selected for the Italian eventing team to go to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. But Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 interrupted his career as a competition rider. Instead, using family connections, he had himself transferred to the Spahys di Libya cavalry with which he fought repeated actions.

He also witnessed aerial gas attacks on Emperor Haile Selassie’s lightly armed warriors, which appalled world opinion. In Guillet’s view, gas was largely ineffectual against an unentrenched enemy which could flee, and he himself was fighting with horse, sword and pistol.

At Selaclacla, after using the hilt of his sword to dislodge an Ethiopian warrior who had grabbed him around the waist, Guillet received a painful wound to the left hand when a bullet hit the pommel of his saddle.

Decorated for his actions, he was flattered to be chosen a year later by General Luigi Frusci as an aide de camp in the “Black Flames” division, which was sent to support Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It was the first post Guillet had been offered without family influence.

There he suffered shrapnel wounds and helped capture three Russian armoured cars and crews. But the atrocities he witnessed on both sides were a sobering experience for Guillet, who deplored what he saw of Italy’s German allies during their intervention.

No longer a uncritical, puppyish subaltern, Guillet returned to Italy and Libya. He echoed the views of many in disapproving of the pro-Nazi alliance of the regime and absurdities such as the anti-Semitic race laws.

With growing disgust for Europe, Guillet asked for a posting to Italian East Africa, where another family acquaintance, the royal prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, had been appointed viceroy to replace the brutal and inept Marshal Graziani. By this time Guillet had also become engaged to his beautiful Neapolitan cousin Beatrice Gandolfo, and their intention was to make a life for themselves in Italy’s new empire.

Mussolini’s decision to enter the war on the side of Germany in May 1940 ended these dreams, cutting off Italian East Africa, which was surrounded by the territories of its enemies, and separating Amedeo from his fiancée, who remained in Italy.
Aosta gave Guillet command of the locally recruited Amhara Cavalry Bande, as well as 500 Yemeni infantry – approximately 2,500 men. With almost no armour, the Italians used Guillet’s horsemen to delay the advance of the British 4th and 5th Indian Divisions when they crossed the Eritrean frontier in January 1941.

Guillet’s actions at Keru, and subsequent hand-to-hand fighting at Agordat, helped allow the Italian army to regroup at the mountain fortress of Keren, where it mounted its best actions in the entire war. After nearly two months, however, the British broke through, and the road to Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, lay clear.

Most of the Italian army surrendered, but Guillet refused to do so. Aosta had ordered his officers to fight on to keep as many British soldiers as possible in East Africa, while the new German commander in the Western Desert, Rommel, sought to reverse the earlier Italian disasters.

For nine months Guillet launched a series of guerrilla actions against British troops, plundering convoys and shooting up guard posts. At his side was his mistress, Khadija, an Ethiopian Muslim, for he never believed he would ever see Italy or Beatrice again. Two curious British intelligence officers pursued him: Major Max Harrari, later an urbane art dealer who would become Guillet’s close friend, and the driven intellectual Captain Sigismund Reich, of the Jewish Brigade, who was eager to get on with the task of killing Germans.

Despite their attentions, Guillet managed to escape across the Red Sea to neutral Yemen, where he became an intimate friend of the ruler, Imam Ahmed. He sneaked back to Eritrea in 1943 in disguise, and returned to Italy on the Red Cross ship Giulio Cesare, where he was reunited with Beatrice.

The couple married in April 1944 and he spent the rest of the war as an intelligence officer, befriending many of his former British enemies from East Africa.

In the postwar world, Guillet joined the diplomatic service. ...

Guillet later served as ambassador in Jordan and Morocco, and finally India.

In 1975 he retired to Ireland, where he had bought a house 15 years earlier for the peace and quiet and to enjoy the foxhunting.

A generous, giving man, with a disarming innocence to his character, Guillet would frequently liken himself to Don Quixote, but say that those who found him ridiculous were the true fools.

He always said he was the luckiest man he knew – surviving British and Ethiopian bullet wounds, Spanish grenade fragments and a sword cut to the face, as well as numerous bone fractures from riding accidents.

He celebrated his 100th birthday in Rome in February last year at the army officers’ club in the Palazzo Barberini, where the royal march was played and friends gathered from Ireland, the Middle East and India – as well as those members of the Italian royal family still on speaking terms with each other.

Christopher Eger article on Guillet.

Beginning of six-part Italian program on Guillet.

Hat tip to Secular Right via Walter Olson.

The way the French do it. 1:33 video.

Things are really not looking good for Harry Reid in his home state.

This obituary appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on July 13, 2010:

CHARLOTTE MCCOURT Charlotte M. Tidwell McCourt, 84, of Pahrump, passed away July 8, 2010, after a long illness. She was born Dec. 25, 1925, in Wellington, Utah, and was a 40-year resident of Nevada. Charlotte held a zest for life and loved serving her family of five children; 20 grandchildren; and 65 great-grandchildren. She had been the wife of Patrick L. McCourt for 67 happy years. Active in her community, she assisted in many political figures’ campaign efforts. As an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Charlotte served as a leader in the Relief Society for over 20 years. She and her beloved husband also served a full-time mission in the Cabanatuan Mission in the Phillipines. Charlotte is survived by her husband, Patrick; children, Pat and Nellie McCourt, Dan and Lanny Shea, Bill and Marsha Sortor, David and Sherry d’Hulst, and Tom and Ann McMullin; and many grandchildren. A memorial service was held Saturday, July 10, at the LDS Chapel, 921 E. Wilson, in Pahrump. We believe that Mom would say she was mortified to have taken a large role in the election of Harry Reid to U.S. Congress. Let the record show Charlotte was displeased with his work. Please, in lieu of flowers, vote for another more worthy candidate.

Serpentine

Newly arrived on the enemies list of the perennially concerned is California’s state rock, serpentine. A bill to oust serpentine is making its way through the California State Legislature, and geologists are flocking to the Magnesium Iron Silicate Hydroxide’s defense.

The bill to defrock the rock — which recently passed the full State Senate and is awaiting a vote in the Assembly — is sponsored by Senator Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, with the strong support of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

Declaring that serpentine “has known health effects,” the bill would leave California — one of roughly half the states in the nation with an official rock or mineral — without an official rock. (According to the bill, California was the first state, in 1965, to name an official rock.) Asbestos occurs naturally in many minerals, and indeed some serpentine rocks do serve as a host for chrysotile, a form of asbestos. But geologists say chrysotile is less harmful than some other forms of asbestos, and would be a danger — like scores of other rocks — only if a person were to breathe its dust repeatedly.

“There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock,” said Malcolm Ross, a geologist who retired from the United States Geological Survey in 1995. “Unless they were breaking it up with a sledgehammer year after year.”

Dr. Ross and other opponents of the bill are concerned that removing serpentine, which is occasionally used in jewelry, as the state’s rock would demonize it and thus inspire litigation against museums, property owners and other sites where the rocks sit; they cite the inclusion of a letter of support from the Consumer Attorneys of California with the bill as evidence.

“If they keep the asbestos issue bubbling,” Dr. Ross said, “it means money for politicians, more money for lawyers and money for scientists to investigate.”

J. D. Preston, a spokesman from the consumer lawyers group, said the group had nothing to do with drafting the legislation and was just responding to a request from the awareness organization for a support letter. “We just thought this was a good fit in our mission of consumer safety,” Mr. Preston said. “It is certainly not the intent, and we don’t even see where it opens the avenue for litigation.”

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated no position.

We were unable to interview Virginia’s state rock, as none has ever been appointed. Virginia’s state fossil Chesapecten jeffersonius, being naturally conservative, expressed mild chagrin at California’s radical politics, but was happy that California is so far away.

In debt? Having trouble making ends meet?

J. Kennerly Davis Jr., at the Richmond Times Dispatch, points out that you may have forgotten to add your household’s share of federal debt and unfunded obligations to your personal deficit. Add a negative $1,069,100.

Currently, federal, state, and local government debt, in the form of bonds and other securities, totals approximately $16 trillion. As staggering as this figure is, it doesn’t capture the full scope of the threat that confronts us.

In addition to selling bonds and other securities to borrow money, government at all levels also has made enormous financial commitments over the years, without providing funds to back up these commitments. Currently, the unfunded commitments of the federal government to programs such as Social Security and Medicare total almost $109 trillion.

It’s difficult to grasp the significance of such huge numbers and the real threat they pose to you and your family.

Let’s consider the case of a family living in Richmond. Call the parents Michael and Jennifer. They have been married 10 years, live in the Fan, and have two young sons who attend William Fox Elementary School.

They both graduated from college and have good jobs. Jennifer is a high school teacher and Michael is a corporate financial analyst. Last year they had a combined earned income of just under $125,000, the median income for the typical American two-income professional couple. They are hard-working and financially responsible.

Last year they were able to save approximately $1,500. They took one family vacation trip to Sandbridge. In 2003, they purchased their house in the Fan for $380,000. They are current on their mortgage payments and other monthly bills.

Over the past year or so, Michael and Jennifer have become very concerned about their financial situation. Recently, after reviewing some financial advice columns in The Times-Dispatch, they decided to draw up a household balance sheet to get a snapshot of all their financial assets and liabilities.

Like most Americans, Michael and Jennifer’s home is by far their most valuable asset. Its current market value is approximately $450,000. Their savings and in vestments total just under $76,000. The combined value of their two cars and other personal property is approximately $45,000.

So, altogether, their household assets are worth more than $570,000. The liabilities on their balance sheet are limited as a result of their responsible lifestyle. They owe $266,000 on their mortgage, and approximately $34,000 on their car loans.

When Michael and Jennifer compared their assets to their liabilities, they were pleased to see that the value of their total assets exceeded their total liabilities by about $270,000. They were proud that they had been able to build up this much net worth.

But wait! The balance sheet that Michael and Jennifer prepared does not begin to accurately represent the family’s real financial health and future financial prospects. It does not take account of their household share of federal, state, and local government debt and unfunded commitments.

In round figures their share is:

Federal debt: $108,000 Federal unfunded obligations: $907,100 Virginia debt: $3,100 Virginia unfunded obligations: $30,200 Richmond debt: $16,000 Richmond unfunded obligations: $4,700.
So this young family’s total share of government obligations and debt is $1,069,100.

When these obligations are added to their other liabilities their household ends up in a deep financial hole. Despite all their hard work and responsible financial behavior, decades of financial mismanagement by the government have effectively wiped out the net worth of $270,000 they thought they had. Instead, they owe almost $800,000.

How about you? What does your household balance sheet look like when you factor in $1,069,100 of additional liabilities?

Hat tip to Paul Mirengoff.

ChinaSmack, a blogsite translating Chinese news and comments, publishes a Chinese comment thread on gun ownership in America. They are even sold in Walmart!

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

In the aftermath of the Swiss decision to reject the American bid to extradite Roman Polanski, the predicatable indignant editorials are beginning to appear.

Eugene Robinson, in the Washington Post, is not at all satisfied with the outcome.

It’s relevant that Polanski has never shown remorse. He claimed in a 1979 interview that he was being hounded because “everyone wants to (have sex with) young girls.” It’s irrelevant that the victim, now a middle-aged woman, has no interest in pursuing the case and reliving a traumatic episode. What matters is what Polanski admitted doing to her 33 years ago—and the fact that Polanski decided to run away rather than face the music.

Swiss officials noted the obvious: that Polanski never would have visited Switzerland if he had thought he was putting himself in legal jeopardy. Since he’s not a legitimate candidate for kidnapping and rendition by the CIA, he’s now home free—unless he somehow makes another mistake. He’ll always have to look over his shoulder.

That’s punishment of a sort, but not nearly enough. How about this: As long as he steers clear of U.S. justice, why don’t we steer clear of his movies?

I strongly disagree with the majority of the journalistic community on this one, and since I’ve already explained why at considerable length, today I plan to take pleasure in quoting myself.

The most interesting aspect of all of this is the fact that Roman Polanski’s flight thirty one years ago was precipitated by precisely the same sort of journalistic feeding frenzy which has been replayed all over again recently. A firestorm of sensationalized accounts of Polanski’s misdeed alarmed the publicity-conscious judge who intended to set aside the conventional processes of justice and overrule a plea bargain already agreed to by both the prosecution and the defense.

Polanski did not escape justice. He had already served a 42 day term of imprisonment, which was supposed to constitute his actual sentence. Polanski also settled privately with the young lady, paying her a sum of money of a specific amount never publicly disclosed. What Polanski escaped was injustice.

He escaped a breach of the normal, impartial, and objective processes of justice, which were in the process of collapsing due to official cowardice and unwillingness to resist a wave of public indignation, mischievously created by irresponsible journalism.

Long-standing cultural restraints on sexual expression and activity have been dwindling away in America for all of the last century, but one powerful prohibition not only survives, but continues to be able to turn ordinary Americans into something very much resembling belligerent Muslims bent on wiping out any stain upon the chastity of their females in blood: the issue of age.

Underage sex is still a kind of priapic third rail. And like Nabokov’s Humbert, Roman Polanski proved to be another sophisticated European gentilhomme d’un certain âge susceptible to the charms of the knowing nymphette. His sin happens to be relatively unique in being capable of getting Americans in general worked up into a lather of righteous indignation just as effectively in 2009 as in 1978 or in 1955 (the publication date of Lolita).

In exactly the same way that the idea of black sexual aggression directed at white women was once upon a time so horrifying an idea to the general community in certain American states that any close resemblance to that supreme phobia could suffice to set into motion the processes of storytelling which would fit the details of the actual case into the terrible archetype, frequently with lethal results, so too today is the idea of adult sexual aggression directed at children a compelling, and potentially dangerous, archetype.

Let’s try another literary trope. Picture Roman Polanski, not as Humbert Humbert, but as Tom Robinson, the black defendant in To Kill a Mockingbird. Just like the Polanski case, To Kill a Mockingbird features a public frenzy of indignation at a defendant accused of being a sexual aggressor toward an innocent victim, who is supposed to be protected from the advances of anyone like the defendant by powerful social taboos. Just as in the Harper Lee novel, adjudication of the Roman Polanski case revolved around issues of just who was the actual initiator and whether female consent had been given. Fearful archetypes and framing narratives can work in exactly the same in either case, can’t they?

George Friedman of the security consultancy Stratfor discusses the differences between the Russian approach of using very long-term, deep-cover recruitments and the US reliance on technical intelligence. It’s a lot easier to find Russians willing to acquire perfect English and reside for decades in the United States than to find Americans able to speak Russian like a native and willing to spend virtually their entire adult lives living as a Russian.

Interestingly, one of the recently exchanged Russian spies made a try to penetrate Stratfor. In that case, though, the Russians were apparently trying for technical surveillance.

One of the Russian operatives, Don Heathfield, once approached a STRATFOR employee in a series of five meetings. There appeared to be no goal of recruitment; rather, the Russian operative tried to get the STRATFOR employee to try out software he said his company had developed. We suspect that had this been done, our servers would be outputting to Moscow. We did not know at the time who he was. (We have since reported the incident to the FBI, but these folks were everywhere, and we were one among many.)

Thus, the group apparently included a man using software sales as cover – or as we suspect, as a way to intrude on computers. As discussed, the group also included talent scouts. We would guess that Anna Chapman was brought in as part of the recruitment phase of talent scouting. No one at STRATFOR ever had a chance to meet her, having apparently failed the first screening.

Read the whole thing.

Neil Reynolds comments on the financial collapse of the European welfare state.

Democracies produced Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, fulfilling the expectation of Socrates and Machiavelli that democracies end in tyranny. Now democracies are fulfilling the complementary expectation of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman that democracies end in bankruptcy. Put a democracy in charge of the Sahara, Mr. Friedman once said, and sand itself will become scarce. Democracies are indeed profligate trustees – or have been for the past 30 or 40 years. Mr. Friedman’s primary fret, though, was the tendency of democracy to centralize political and economic power in the same hands. Most critiques of democracy reflect this elemental distrust. “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb,” Benjamin Franklin reputedly said, “voting on what to have for lunch.”

A must read article.

Gallup polling reveals widespread public uncertainty about the “progressive” political label—a label recently embraced by no less than Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. While Kagan described her political views as “generally progressive” during her Senate confirmation hearings, fewer than half of Americans can say whether “progressive” does (12%) or does not (31%) describe their own views. The majority (54%) are unsure.

Allow me to clear it up for you, fellow Americans.

The Progressive Movement was originally a post-Civil War American political popular movement in favor of statism, regulation, and general (so-called) reform.

The earlier expressions of the Progressive impulse involved the creation of a Civil Service, the gradual expansion of state and federal regulations, the creation of new regulatory bodies, and the licensing of professions. Antitrust legislation, alcohol and drug prohibition, the Income Tax followed.

In recent years, particularly since the West learned of Communist massacres in Cambodia, China crushed demonstrations in favor of democracy in Tiananmen Square, and the Soviet Union fell, persons on the extreme left have become uncomfortable with describing themselves as Marxists or socialists. Radicals never liked being referred to as mere liberals. They despise liberals as dupes, fellow travelers, and useful idiots. And even “liberal,” since the days of Jimmy Carter, has become widely regarded in America as a pejorative and its successful application to someone a potential political liability.

Aspiration to major political office is intrinsically incompatible with describing oneself as a radical or a revolutionary, so the preferred term of art has become “Progressive.”

The progress that progressives are in favor of is directly down the path Friedrich Hayek referred to as “the Road to Serfdom,” toward ever more statism, ever more regulation, ever more redistribution, socialism, and coercion, supposedly resulting in the ultimate triumph of the rule of experts and a world in which the calculative power of human reason will have abolished tragedy, poverty, inequality, all of the ills to which flesh is heir and all the consequences of human vice and folly.

As Edmund Burke observed: “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”

If Americans recognized exactly what Progressives really are, they would not be getting elected to much of anything or confirmed to Supreme Court seats.

76-year-old Roman Polanski is now again a free man.

European civilization and rationality, for once, triumphed over American mobocracy and barbarism when the Swiss Ministry of Justice took a technical route to dismiss the US request for extradition of internationally-renowned director Roman Polanski.

The Swiss had asked to examine American records establishing whether a previous plea arrangement for an observation period of confinement in a psychiatric unit had been accepted by both sides and subsequently reneged upon by a press-conscious judge. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office refused to supply the relevant records, which tends to suggest strongly that they would have confirmed the reality of the alleged plea bargain arrangement. So, the clever Swiss, noting that the records could prove that Polanski had already actually served his sentence making the extradition request invalid ruled that the extradition request was incomplete and consequently defective, and deserved to be dismissed.

US justice in this matter was, by comparison, politically-motivated featuring, in 1977 and now, public officials posing as champions of the people in the midst of a firestorm of gossip, innuendo, and public misunderstanding whipped up by an opportunistic press. The Swiss tried to do justice. The Americans tried to score points with the mob. I applaud the Swiss.

Variety

New York Times story

Previous Polanski coverage.

Howard Chandler Christy, Dead White Men Conspiring to Obstruct Societal Transformation

In an amazingly prolix and rambling (more than 17,000 words) essay in the Nation, Eric Alterman voices liberal despair at the failure of Barack Obama and the democrat congressional majority to enact every jot and tittle of the “progressive” left’s agenda and arrive in a single bound in the sunny uplands of Socialism.

They was robbed, Alterman complains. They won an election only to find that the system was stacked against them.

[T]he truth, dear reader, is that it does not much matter who is right about what Barack Obama dreams of in his political imagination. Nor is it all that important whether Obama’s team either did or didn’t make major strategic errors in its first year of governance: in choosing to do healthcare before financial reform; in not holding out for a larger, more people-focused stimulus bill, in eschewing a carbon tax; or in failing to nationalize banks and break up those that are “too big to fail.” Face it, the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us.

Curse those checks and balances. Blast that Montesquian system of a government divided into separate branches and that bicameral legislature which allows the minority in its upper house some additional rights of resistance.

Reading on, we learn that Obama’s long march to Utopia was unfairly burdened from the start by “significant problems” as well as “political and economic crises” left behind by “America’s most irresponsible, incompetent and ideologically obsessed presidency.” When in doubt, blame Bush, and when you really have problems, blame Dick Cheney.

Cheney, we learn, is to blame for the BP mess.

In response to the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, the Bush Administration assembled a “National Energy Task Force” which wrote a massive 170 page report, advocating all sorts of basically conventional ideas with the goal of increasing the amount of domestically produced energy.

The left identifies Dick Cheney’s leadership of this task force in 2001, as the hidden hand behind the 551-page 2005 energy bill passed by Congress which (in Section 390) allowed drilling an oil well to enjoy a “categorical exclusion” from the lengthy and burdensome environmental impact process essentially in circumstances in which the same kind of paperwork had already been completed for the same location within the past five years. The fiend!

If only we could exclude all political contributions and any external input from interested parties impacted by proposed legislation, Alterman laments. Then politicians voting on legislation would not be influenced by their actions’ potential victims, and they would then answer only to public interest organizations and the leftwing commentariat.

The current state of affairs is intolerable because vitally important measures, like Cap and Trade, are going nowhere. Alterman quotes Aloka Jha—who turns out to be the Guardian’s science and environmental correspondent, and not the Andaman Island pygmy with the blow gun working for the villain in Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890)—warning that, “even under what now looks to be an unrealistically rosy scenario,...we can expect the Amazon to turn into desert and grasslands,”

while increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere make the world’s oceans too acidic for remaining coral reefs and thousands of other marine life forms. ...

After a 3C global temperature rise, global warming may run out of control and efforts to mitigate it may be in vain. Millions of square kilometers of Amazon rainforest could burn down, releasing carbon from the wood, leaves and soil and thus making the warming even worse, perhaps by another 1.5C. In southern Africa, Australia and the western US, deserts take over. Billions of people are forced to move from their traditional agricultural lands, in search of scarcer food and water. Around 30-50% less water is available in Africa and around the Mediterranean. In the UK, summers of droughts are followed by winter floods. Sea levels rise to engulf small islands and low-lying areas such as Florida, New York and London.

Bad as all that sounds, the worse problem is the diabolical, and completely insincere efforts of conservatives in alliance with corporations to “[discredit] activist government and [present] laissez-faire policies as the natural order of things.”

We conspirators on the right are succeeding in brainwashing the credulous American public, you see, because we are lucky. It just so happens that we have the biggest gun in the fight, Alterman complains.

Fox News is by far America’s most popular cable news network and its lead over MSNBC and CNN just keeps growing. In prime time, Fox hosts regularly attract more viewers than both competitors combined. This is a matter of considerable political significance for the potential success of any progressive president because the number one cable news network in America just happens to be dedicated to a program of purposeful misinformation rather than any honest accounting of the news.

It is obviously totally unbalanced that the left has only ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, USAToday, and the rest of the mainstream media. Conservatives have Fox News, AM Talk Radio, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. It just isn’t fair!

Alterman believes journalism ought to speak with a single voice, a decidedly leftwing one, and he finds it appalling that conservatives have established even modest beachheads from which to participate in public policy debates.

As a result of a more-than-forty-year assault on journalism by right-wing funders—coupled with the decimation of so many once-proud journalistic institutions—an awful lot of the most influential perches in what remains of our media are populated by people whose loyalty to journalism is vastly outweighed by their commitment to conservative talking points. One of the primary transmission belts for such arguments is the Wall Street Journal editorial page, whose audacious refusal to countenance reality can be breathtaking.

Perhaps the only way the left can win, and can get the results it desires and is entitled to, Alterman reflects, is to change the rules.

[I]f America is to be rescued from the grip of its current democratic dysfunction, then merely electing better candidates to Congress is not going to be enough. We need a system that has better, fairer rules; reduces the role of money; and keeps politicians and journalists honest in their portrayal of what’s actually going on.

One pictures commissars appearing at the offices of the Wall Street Journal to see to it that editorials opposing socialism stop arriving in the press room.

Beyond “rules change,” Alterman sees a need for better organization, more pressure. The left, he believes, can bully politicians and shame journalists into getting in line with the left’s program of “societal transformation.”

The current situation represents a setback, but there is the future to think about.

Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I’d say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental “change” that is not possible in today’s environment. This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.

To borrow from Hillel the Elder: “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

Lots of luck with that, Eric.

The self righteous naïveté of the left is amazing at times. Picturing those entirely imaginary billions of peaceful agriculturalists wandering the earth in search of new lands produces a rueful smile.

It must be highly gratifying to be on the side so completely in possession of justice and reality that its only opponents are fiendish conspirators and cynical hirelings paid by nefarious corporate interests.

Laissez faire, i.e. spontaneous voluntary order, is not the natural state of things. In Nature, the intelligentsia sit down and decide what would be best, and the state using armed force proceeds to make sure that everyone and everything conforms to the plan. There is Nature in action.

The Constitution, the framer’s system of checks and balances, was a terrible idea that obstructs societal transformation. We should get rid of all that. It just isn’t right that people and business potentially affected by legislation are allowed any influence at all. We must put a stop to that, too. And, worst of all, intellectual opponents of the left actually possess platforms of their own these days. By definition, anything these people say is false, misleading, and mere propaganda. Maybe after he wins in 2012, the Obama the Great will do something about that.

Lord.

Matt Labash, at the Weekly Standard, has a go at following the definitive guide to living like a liberal, as prescribed in a new book offering no less than 538 ways to incorporate liberal ideology in everyday life.

[M]y lesser living was a lifetime ago. Actually, just a few weeks ago, but it feels like the distant past. It was before my road to Damascus encounter, before the illuminative flame touched my torch of enlightenment. It was B.J.K.—Before Justin Krebs.

Who is Justin Krebs, you ask? Only my sensei. My guru. The man who made plain that I had politics all wrong. I used to think along the lines of the British writer and publisher Ernest Benn that politics was “the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” Thus, I had put my politics in my political box, and my life in my living box. When I should’ve placed all the contents in the same box—a much bigger, biodegradable one. (You can get them at Treecycle.com.)

Krebs showed me that my politics shouldn’t be just my politics, but also my religion, my sun and moon, my inhalation and exhalation. Since politics, particularly liberal politics, bring people so much joy, wouldn’t I be better off politicizing everything—the way I live and work and play? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is a resounding “yes,” as evidenced right there in the title of Krebs’s new book: 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal.

The 32-year-old Krebs didn’t just write this book, which comes complete with a 538-item checklist. He’s lived it. He sharpened his liberal-living iron on the mean conservative streets of Highland Park, New Jersey; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and, finally, that repository of red state madness, the island of Manhattan. ...

It’s hard work, politicizing your whole life. And looking at Krebs’s checklist, I still have a lot in front of me: I have to remind my elected officials about the importance of open space, to speak up for progressive taxation, to ask friends to identify every news channel’s bias, to look at how movie posters treat women, to watch Battlestar Galactica, which “got people debating torture and occupation,” and to “reconsider the liberal message of the moon landing.” That’s just for starters. As one of my favorite liberals H.L. Mencken said: “Liberals have many tails, and chase them all.”