Blender Defender has a solution.

“I’m Spartacus.”

Transterrestial Musings finds :

71 BC*

ROME (Routers) Diligent investigative reporters were shocked to learn today that many, indeed most of the captured slaves in yesterday’s battle in Lucania who proclaimed “I am Spartacus” were actually misleading military authorities, and not the famous rebel leader at all.

One of the investigators, Probius Ani, lead chiseler at the Tempus Romae, shared the details. “We looked into their backgrounds, and while they were all slaves at one time or another, few of them had formal gladiator training, nor did they universally use the Thracian style of combat for which he was well known.”

After the defeat, when authorities demanded to know which of the defeated was the leader, at first one of them jumped up and declared himself Spartacus**. But the situation quickly grew confused as another, and then another, and then dozens and hundreds of the defeated curs shouted out the same claim. Legitimate demands of proof of identity, gladiators’ licenses, and tax and divorce records from them were met with a sullen resistance, making it impossible to tell which to properly punish.

“These slaves have no credibility,” noted a proconsul on the scene. “Why should we grant any respect to a campaign based on false pretenses? Why should we not just spread their wealth around, and crucify them all?”

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Joe the Plumber speaks.

3:08 video

Apple mocks Microsoft’s approach to defending Vista through advertising.

0:30 video

An unidentified comedy team in Britain tests the memories and attention of some ordinary passersby.

2:05 video

Chicago developer Tony Rezko provided the bridge that made it possible for Barack Obama to buy his $1.65 million dream house by arranging for the price to be lowered by splitting the acreage and having his wife pay full price ($625,000) for a 9090 sq. ft. portion of the side yard accessible only through the main property now designated a “development lot.” Obama got $300,000 off the asking price for the rest.

Original story

Well, what do you know? It seems the side yard parcel purchased by Mrs. Rezko wouldn’t appraise, and the bank appraiser who rejected a $625,000 valuation was fired and a new reappraisal mysteriously substituted for his estimate of no more than $500,000.

They call that bank fraud.

The Washington Times has the story.

Sarah Palin behaves like a good sport while the SNL crowd pack in as many anti-Palin, anti-McCain jibes as they possibly can.

Opening skit: Tina Fey impersonates Palin. Palin watches skit and meets Alec Baldwin.
5:14 video

Sarah Palin good-humoredly plays along with rap song bashing her.
3:03 video

The Wall Street Journal responds to the latest attempt by the left to pin the credit crisis on a lack of regulation.

In an attempt to fill out Mr. Obama’s talking points, the press corps has now fingered a 2004 change in SEC net capital rules. In fact, then-SEC Chairman William Donaldson’s reform was anything but deregulation. A regulatory failure, yes, and a cautionary tale for those who think new regulation will solve everything.

The 2004 change won unanimous approval from SEC commissioners and Democrat Annette Nazareth, who ran the market regulation division at the time. Rather than deregulation, it was a breathtaking regulatory leap for an agency that had traditionally focused on protecting individual investors. Under the new program, the SEC would not simply monitor broker-dealers to ensure that client accounts were safe. The commission staff would collect new data from the parent companies of brokerages and require new monthly and quarterly reports. Firms were supposed to provide detailed explanations of internal risk models.

Before approving the rule at an April 2004 meeting, several commissioners wondered if the SEC staff was up to the task. Apparently not. It’s clear from a recording of that meeting that the commission expected investment banks to employ more debt. This was no unintended consequence but the inevitable result of adopting the so-called Basel II banking standards. The SEC was supposed to apply these standards created for commercial banks to investment banks, but with additional measures to ensure liquidity.

Was Basel II a libertarian plot cooked up at the Cato Institute? Not quite. It was the product of years of effort by the world’s major central banks, intended to avoid crises such as the U.S. savings and loan disaster. Basel embraced the theory that a common set of global banking standards and more intensive study of the risks of particular assets would yield both more efficient use of capital and a more stable financial system.

We now know it did not create stable investment banks, but the SEC could be forgiven for thinking that if it was good enough for the world’s central bankers, it was good enough for the commission. As Ms. Nazareth said of the SEC’s new approach, “It’s largely modeled after Federal Reserve-type supervision and I can’t imagine anyone would question that kind of approach.” Few did. Swiss banking regulators are only now raising mandatory capital ratios above those permitted under Basel II.

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Columbia Business School Professor Charles W. Calomiris joins in the demolition of the same contention.

As for the evils of deregulation, exactly which measures are they referring to? Financial deregulation for the past three decades consisted of the removal of deposit interest-rate ceilings, the relaxation of branching powers, and allowing commercial banks to enter underwriting and insurance and other financial activities. Wasn’t the ability for commercial and investment banks to merge (the result of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act) a major stabilizer to the financial system this past year? Indeed, it allowed Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch to be acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, and allowed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to convert to bank holding companies to help shore up their positions during the mid-September bear runs on their stocks.

Even more to the point, subprime lending, securitization and dealing in swaps were all activities that banks and other financial institutions have had the ability to engage in all along. There is no connection between any of these and deregulation. On the contrary, it was the ever-growing Basel Committee rules for measuring bank risk and allocating capital to absorb that risk (just try reading the Basel standards if you don’t believe me) that failed miserably. The Basel rules outsourced the measurement of risk to ratings agencies or to the modelers within the banks themselves. Incentives were not properly aligned, as those that measured risk profited from underestimating it and earned large fees for doing so.

That ineffectual, Rube Goldberg apparatus was, of course, the direct result of the politicization of prudential regulation by the Basel Committee, which was itself the direct consequence of pursuing “international coordination” among countries, which produced rules that work politically but not economically. International cooperation, in case you haven’t heard, is exactly what the French and the Germans now say was missing in the past few years.

So why blame deregulation and small government? The social psychologist Gustav Jahoda says that unreasonable beliefs often arise in circumstances where people lack control and need to believe in something to get them through a highly stressful situation. And a fellow named Machiavelli might help us to understand a different reason for simplistic explanations.

Sam Schulman, in the Weekly Standard, contemplates the crucial role of class solidarity in this year’s election, concluding that Sarah Palin (the Admirable Crichton of 2008), not Bill Ayers, is the real revolutionary.

A must read.

Mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated–but why? He hasn’t, like Chuck Colson, repented, or paid his debt to society by serving a prison term. He doesn’t even enjoy the prestige of a Clinton presidential pardon. Susan Rosenberg, a fellow Weatherman for whom Mrs. Ayers did go to jail rather than implicate in the execution murders of several cops, enjoys that distinction. What makes the Ayerses respectable is purely a matter of upper-middle-class solidarity. You can see the ranks close around them in the texture of Richard Stern’s elegant prose. Stern, a novelist and a long-serving University of Chicago English professor, reassures us:

I’ve been to three or four small dinner parties with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once hailed as the Weather-men’s Dolores Ibárruri (“La Pasionaria”), a fiery, beautiful muse. .  .  . Dohrn is still attractive, while Ayers maintains an adolescent fizzle in his sexagenarian bones.

Carefully, Stern engages with the glamorous couple on equal terms, before judging them:

At dinner, thirty-eight years later, Ayers and Dohrn did not seem to hold [my criticism of the 1970 University of Chicago student uprising] against me, and I didn’t hold their fiery and criminally violent behavior against them. As in Chekhov’s wonderful story “Old Age,” time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others’ arms.

As the Ayerses’ social equal, Stern can estimate them fairly.

As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn are loyal to the selves which led both of them to jail (though not for long), but they were busy doing other things, useful things, Ayers as educator, Dohrn as a legal counselor. They’d raised the child of a Weatherman who’d been jailed, they were taking care of Bernardine’s ill mother, they were doing many things educated community activists were doing.

What the Ayerses now teach, think, and do hardly matters as long as they observe good form, the form of “educated community activists.” Stern wants us to hear a mellow Chekhovian tone in their lives (and his prose). Perhaps, but in his moral reasoning I hear Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, in The Importance of Being Earnest, observing that the Ayerses “have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.”

Read the whole thing.

For at least three years, Verum Serum reports. Michael Klonsky was there, too.

Henry G. Manne predicts a long period of the expansion of statism, economic stagnation, and freedom’s retreat.

The political direction of the country is now determined for a long time to come, and it is inevitably leftward. Politicians would never resist a popular but massive demand for more government regulation (even the few with enough brainpower to recognize what is going on). The business community has never been a strong supporter of free market capitalism, and it certainly cannot be counted on to change its stance this time around. The media, the various leftist trend-setting elites and university faculties have been waiting a long time for an opportunity just like this, and we can be sure that they won’t squander it. The shrillness of their attacks on free markets will reach new heights of righteous indignation and assumed moral and intellectual superiority.

No policy issue based on private property, low taxes, small government or free trade will escape the charge that any unregulated free market will lead to disastrous excesses just as happened with the great financial crisis of 2008. This will be true for such soon to be rebuffed ideas as tuition vouchers for private schools, private health care, lower estate taxes, deregulation in its many forms, reduced use of eminent domain, tort liability restraint and free trade.

We can anticipate a new reign of mercantilism, as the protectionists among us wield this strong new weapon against globalization and open markets. And all of this is true in large degree regardless of who wins the forthcoming election.

If Sarbanes-Oxley was any indication of the kind of legislation that results from crisis, then we can be sure that even more ham-handed regulation of all kinds will be the main product of the next Congress. Henry Waxman’s grandstanding this past week about bankers’ greed has been merely the warm-up for what is to follow.

Bankers eager for federal help now will find themselves regulated not far short of total federal control of their business behavior. Banks won’t be permanently nationalized, but what we will get will differ from that result semantically more than factually. Derivatives, for all their promise of alleviating panics and distributing risk, will not now be allowed to evolve into the brave new system once predicted for them. Accounting rules will become even more convoluted as we continue to ask for more information out of double-entry bookkeeping than it can ever deliver.

Still, there is a glimmer of hope left to those who detest this seemingly inexorable slide into socialism or its first cousin, the super-regulatory state. That glimmer comes from the ghosts of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who still haunt the halls of the left. And in spite of all the claims made that this debacle marks the demise of free market philosophy, it won’t go away so easily.

Read the whole thing.

Eugéne Delacroix (1798-1863), (detail) Atilla suivi de ses hordes, foule aux pieds l’Italie et les arts (Attila followed by his Horde, Trampling under Foot Italy and the Arts), Bibliothèque, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1843-47

Bruce Bartlett, at the Cato Journal, describes how the same policies pursued by today’s democrat party produced the downfall of Rome.

In the end, there was no money left to pay the army, build forts or ships, or protect the frontier. The barbarian invasions, which were the final blow to the Roman state in the fifth century, were simply the culmination of three centuries of deterioration in the fiscal capacity of the state to defend itself. Indeed, many Romans welcomed the barbarians as saviors from the onerous tax burden. [15]

Although the fall of Rome appears as a cataclysmic event in history, for the bulk of Roman citizens it had little impact on their way of life. As Henri Pirenne (1939: 33-62) has pointed out, once the invaders effectively had displaced the Roman government they settled into governing themselves. At this point, they no longer had any incentive to pillage, but rather sought to provide peace and stability in the areas they controlled. After all, the wealthier their subjects the greater their taxpaying capacity.

In conclusion, the fall of Rome was fundamentally due to economic deterioration resulting from excessive taxation, inflation, and over-regulation. Higher and higher taxes failed to raise additional revenues because wealthier taxpayers could evade such taxes while the middle class–and its taxpaying capacity–were exterminated. Although the final demise of the Roman Empire in the West (its Eastern half continued on as the Byzantine Empire) was an event of great historical importance, for most Romans it was a relief.

Read the whole thing.

The mainstream media treated Joe the Plumber having a tax lien as a matter of national interest. But, as Jim Lindgren points out at Volokh Conspiracy, obvious ethics violations by a certain former Illinois state legislator are considered unworthy of attention.

The Illinois Governmental Ethics Act (apparently last changed in 1995) provides:

(5 ILCS 420/2-110)

Sec. 2-110. Honoraria.

(a) No member of the General Assembly shall accept any honorarium.

(b) As used in this Section:

“Honorarium” means a payment of money to a member of the General Assembly for an appearance or speech.

and

But State Senator Obama reported accepting honoraria on his 2000 and 2002 tax returns:

2000: On his 2000 Schedule C-EZ, Barack reported that he received $16,500 as a “Foundation director/Educational speaker.”

2002: On his 2002 Schedule C, Barack reported $34,491 for “LEGAL SERVCES / SPEAKING FEES.”