"Silence in Syria, Panic in Iran"

According to Instapundit, the September 6 Israeli raid on Syria may be panicking Iran.

I too have made that small hop of the imagination. Heh.

Sarah Palin

IMO Alaska's Governor Palin might fill out into presidential timber along Reaganesque lines.

There's a blog pushing her for VP, but Glenn Reynolds says she should run for Ted Stevens' seat.

Viewing Palin as a potential POTUS, I have doubts about both suggestions. Re VP: most of the recent Vice Presidents who became President did not have successful administrations. Re Instapundit: Palin needs more than two years of executive experience before running for President; furthermore, the modern Senate has not been a viable launching pad for presidencies (though Clinton may change that).

On the other hand, national-level experience would help Palin if she seeks higher office. If the GOP had a clue, they would put Palin on their presidential farm team and help her acquire such experience.

Of course, if the GOP had a clue they wouldn't have lost Congress.

Military Rule: A Modest Proposal

So the mortgage mess has put us at risk of recession or worse, and what does the establishment want? Cheap labor and cheap votes, of course!

According to the LA Times, immigration legislation is back:

The first to come up is expected to be the "Dream Act," a bill championed by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) that would give conditional legal status to immigrants brought to the U.S. at a young age.

...

Durbin plans to attach the bill as an amendment to a defense funding measure scheduled to come before the Senate today, his staff said.

Durbin is putting this kind of amendment onto a military bill during wartime.

The Roman Republic used to appoint dictators to deal with emergencies. Eventually this practice led to autocracy, but it was viable for a long time. Maybe we need a Constitutional amendment authorizing the military to take power for a limited period, e.g. the balance of a presidential term, if in their judgment the security of the nation is at risk.

The foregoing is meant as brainstorming, not as a serious proposal. However, something is very wrong with most or all of our civilian establishments: political, business, academic...

The Boomers

Dinocrat:

It is quite possible that the baby boom generation is the single worst generation of Americans that this country has ever produced.

There was considerable overlap between the subsets of the Great Generation respectively characterized as 'the best' and 'the brightest'. The boomers changed that.

I fear our best are no longer our brightest and our brightest sneer at our best.

Patriotgate

The New England Patriots have been marketed as the epitome of family wholesomeness. To some extent I willingly suspended my capacity for disbelief and bought into the story.

I'm now a New Englander, but the reports about Belichick's somewhat messy divorce and Brady's kid didn't sit well with my Midwestern roots. Of course the full stories are not known, and my lack of approval is not the same as condemnation.

Then the taping thing--it's not worth the time to dig out links--came up and my attention was pulled back to the team. As the affair grew, I found the same link about the NFL commissioner as this poster did, and reached the same conlusion: Goodell's objectivity is in question and he should have recused himself from the affair. This was even before the Patriots' confiscated film was leaked to the media.

NFL football is a game, played for overly high stakes. To be good at the game requires a variant of martial virtue, but it does not necessarily make one admirable across the board. After my spasm of pro-Patriots indignation, I'm going to resume my resolution to ignore sports and focus on my business.

9/11

Never forget.

I was tempted to soften on Bush. Then he put himself back in the news. (#2 & #2.5)

From the Washington Times (HT: Instapundit):

Congressional Democrats are trying to undermine U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus' credibility before he delivers a report on the Iraq war next week, saying the general is a mouthpiece for President Bush and his findings can't be trusted.

"The Bush report?" Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin said when asked about the upcoming report from Gen. Petraeus, U.S. commander in Iraq.

"We know what is going to be in it. It's clear. I think the president's trip over to Iraq makes it very obvious," the Illinois Democrat said. "I expect the Bush report to say, 'The surge is working. Let's have more of the same.'"

The timing of Bush's Iraq visit is partisan and provocative. Maybe he doesn't care because he has the votes he needs--but if the day comes when he needs every vote he can get, this occasion will not be forgotten.

The Democrats' statements are reprehensible, but it is Bush who has exposed the military, i.e. Petraeus, as a target for political mudslinging.

Addendum. From Iraq, on to Australia and the APEC meeting:

"Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit," Mr. Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
...
Mr. Bush quickly corrected himself. "APEC summit," he said forcefully, joking that the confusion was because Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year (though neither Australia nor the United States is an OPEC member).

The president's next goof went uncorrected, at least immediately. Talking about Howard's visit to Iraq last year to thank his country's soldiers serving there, Mr. Bush referred to them as "Austrian troops" - though the official text released by the White House and posted on whitehouse.gov fixed it to "Australian."

After his speech, Mr. Bush confidently headed out - the wrong way.

He strode away from the lectern on a path that would have sent him over a steep drop. Howard and others saved him, redirecting the president to center stage, where there were steps leading down to the floor of the theater.

The audience remained quiet throughout the president's remarks, applauding only when he was finished.

Did the audience applaud because they saw Bush heading toward the dropoff?

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald notes:

What an irony. When the leader of the free world comes to town, the first casualty is freedom. Parts of the city look like a war zone, wreathed in five kilometres of fencing wire. Helicopters buzz, jumpy police bark at motorists. Riot cars tear through the city; the new water cannon lies in wait. Some city workers are forced to shuffle like prisoners through a series of chook runs. Laws are passed to give police extraordinary powers to search, detain, confiscate. There is a fenced-off "restricted" zone and a wider "security" zone.
.....
...But the clampdown on civil liberties is so over the top, the restrictions extending so far from the key venues, that some believe the Premier, Morris Iemma, has an ulterior motive in mind - to annoy the citizens of Sydney so much they will vent their anger on John Howard at the federal election.

Even if the qualifier is true, the use of his visit for partisan games is itself an indication that the American president is not respected.

Toward a Modest Proposal about the Mortgage Mess

Bernanke speaks:

the mortgage market has become more like the frictionless financial market of the textbook, with fewer institutional or regulatory barriers to efficient operation. In one important respect, however, that characterization is not entirely accurate. A key function of efficient capital markets is to overcome problems of information and incentives in the extension of credit. The traditional model of mortgage markets, based on portfolio lending, solved these problems in a straightforward way: Because banks and thrifts kept the loans they made on their own books, they had strong incentives to underwrite carefully and to invest in gathering information about borrowers and communities. In contrast, when most loans are securitized and originators have little financial or reputational capital at risk, the danger exists that the originators of loans will be less diligent.

And this holds even more for derivatives.

The big financial houses that make big money from peddling toxic financial waste as portfolio vitamins don't want regulation--but if they must endure regulation, they want a lot of it because the costs will overburden their nascent competitors. (To rectify the financial system and economy, more lawyers should get paid more money...yeah, that'll do it.)

If sunlight is the best disinfectant, the first thing to do is to get all these instruments into the sunlight. After they are assessed, society can assess how the markets should be regulated in order to keep them reasonably free and efficient.

A very rough thought follows. For starters every piece of US-traded paper--CDO, CMO, OTC derivative, etc.--should be posted on a publicly accessible central database together with the most recent transaction price and rating. Confidentiality of buyers and sellers should be respected, but the rating agency/agencies should be revealed[1].

Let this data be swarmed over by think tanks and legions of rabid dissertation-seeking finance graduate students and tenure-hungry junior faculty. Even with modern computer processing, that's going to take time. Only after an overall picture emerges should regulation be structured.

Formatting requirements should be kept simple to minimize the reporting burden. The USA should take the lead--the mess is primarily due to the negative consequences of our financial innovation--, but we might wish to team internationally.

The danger is that such regulation will drive business offshore and, like Sarbanes-Oxley is said to have done, further erode American leadership of global financial markets. A way to offset that is to maximize transparency and minimize complexity. The goal is that listing in the database, by creating confidence, will add value to an instrument relative to a similar one that is unlisted offshore. Ideally, once the system is in place, participants will recognize its value and its mandatory nature will almost be beside the point; I'd like to say that it could eventually be relaxed, but, given the proclivities of Wall Street wise guys, I hesitate to do so.

Clarification. This post was begun in September 2007 but not published until late January 2008. I wanted to develop a more cogent formulation, but finally realized that

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

[1] Update May 12, 2008: During an interview, George Soros proposed something similar.

The Law: It Keeps Growing and Growing...

A legal working paper claims that judges consistently rule in a manner which expands the scope of the legal profession and the privileged standing of lawyers (HT: Instapundit). A speech by Dennis G. Jacobs, Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to that effect is transcribed in the May 2007 Fordham Law Review (PDF here).

Are these two documents inconsequential--neither mentioned Warren Burger's bygone warning--or will society begin taking the issue seriously?

Two big legal fish have been hooked recently. Richard Scruggs (tobacco companies) has been indicted for criminal contempt:

(Federal Judge) Acker feels Scruggs did not comply with an injunction in December, refusing to hand over documents from E.A. Renfroe, a claims-handling company working with State Farm, back to the company's attorneys.

Instead, Scruggs gave them to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. Acker recommended to U.S. Attorney Alice Martin that she pursue criminal contempt charges, but she declined. That's when Acker enlisted the special prosecutors.

William Lerach (securities law) has left the firm he founded, which is dropping his name, to defend himself against plaintiff-kickback charges:

Sources familiar with the matter said in June that Lerach and founding partner Melvyn Weiss had rejected an offer from prosecutors to plead guilty and serve prison sentences.

It remains to be seen whether all the above is the beginning of a trend. Skepticism is warranted: Burger's warning made no more difference than did Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex.

Addendum May 31, 2008. The worthy Professor Barton, author of the working paper mentioned above, has written another one, which "argues that the shared characteristics, thought-processes, training, and incentives of Judges and lawyers lead inexorably to greater complexity in judge-made law."

China: Westward Ho?

Dinocrat discusses an example of how China's prosperity is migrating inland from the coasts.

Currently China's growth is export-driven. There might come a point at which it is driven by a mandate to bring prosperity to the interior, thereby creating internal markets for Chinese products. Perhaps a Chinese version might emerge of the Turner thesis of the frontier's effect on the American character. (By titling a post 'The Wild West', Dinocrat comes to the verge of this hypothesis. Note that the upgrading of the Chinese interior goes hand-in-hand with urbanization, which was not the case in the USA.)

A growing China has an obvious interest in the energy resources of the Middle East. As it climbs toward its ancient place as the Central Kingdom, might it not 'accept' the obligation to 'assist' its fellow primal civilizations, i.e. might China not concoct its own version of Manifest Destiny? And wouldn't it be ironic if restoring Mideast Christianity were part of the pretext?

Should Mortgages Go Back to the Future?

Victor Davis Hanson is usually thought-provoking:

I Guess We Forgot the Laws of the Past

There used to be certain laws about mortgages, wisdom slowly acquired through past boom and bust cycles of American history. You got a fixed, usually 30-year mortgage. You paid 20% down. And you bought a house whose debt payments did not eat up more than 30-40% of your monthly income.

Tales of wild real estate riches and speculative profits, even if true, meant little, since a home was more than just an investment. Somehow all that was forgotten with no or little down payment loans, adjustable-rate or interest only schedules, and excess purchased square footage.

Apparently the idea was either to appreciate yourself into 2nd and 3rd mortgage equity, or to expect interest rates magically to go down and thus lower payments, or to buy and sell/buy and sell yourself into a mansion. So the house of straw is now tragically collapsing, and the old wisdom of the past being relearned.

From the abstract of "Do Households Benefit from Financial Deregulation and Innovation? The Case of the Mortgage Market" (Public Policy Discussion Paper No. 06-6) by Kristopher Gerardi, Harvey S. Rosen, and Paul Willen from the Boston Fed:

The U.S. mortgage market has experienced phenomenal change over the last 35 years. Most observers believe that the deregulation of the banking industry and financial markets generally has played an important part in this transformation...This paper develops and implements a technique for assessing the impact of changes in the mortgage market on individuals and households.

Our analysis is based on an implication of the permanent income hypothesis: that the higher a household’s future income, the more it desires to spend and consume, ceteris paribus. If we have perfect credit markets, then desired consumption matches actual consumption and current spending on housing should forecast future income. Since credit market imperfections mute this effect, we can view the strength of the relationship between housing spending and future income as a measure of the “imperfectness” of mortgage markets. Thus, a natural way to determine whether mortgage market developments have actually helped households by decreasing market imperfections is to see whether this link has strengthened over time.

We implement this framework using panel data going back to 1969. We find that over the past several decades, housing markets have become less imperfect in the sense that households are now more able to buy homes whose values are consistent with their long-term income prospects.

The full text is available at the above link.

Excesses and malfeasances should be corrected and their recurrence should be disincentivized, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The possessions that pioneers loaded on their prairie schooners were important--not just for survival, but to create a new and better future. So, too, the lessons of history are important.

America, O America...

Lawyers have showed up faster than a fly-by-night mortgage broker would approve a 2% teaser ARM with a balloon payment.

"It's a three-part business cycle now," said Don Lampe, a partner with the law firm Womble Carlyle, whose specialty is mortgage matters. "Boom, bust and recrimination..."

No fan of the bar, I must acknowledge that Mr. Lampe deserves a niche in the historical record for that.

A Feminist? Me?

I took the feminist quiz that Dr. Helen linked last week. My rating:

You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights... I don't see why believing that makes me a feminist.

A Modest Proposal for CBS

Since CBS paid Don Imus to be an abrasive jerk, I'm inclined to believe that he was treated unfairly when CBS fired him for being an abrasive jerk.

It is rumored that Imus is returning to the air, possibly even to his old job.

A better idea for Les Moonves: have Imus replace Katie Couric as anchor of the evening news.

(Having never watched or listened to Couric or Imus afaik, I am objective and unbiased in the matter...)

Tin Ears at the Mint

The Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony dollar coins were not accepted by the public. Presumably in the hope that the third time is the charm, the Mint is trying again with a series of dollar coins commemorating the Presidents. According to the Mint site, the dollar coins are 'historic change'. No comment.

Mint Director Edmund Moy speaks (with an eye on postretirement career options?):

"Vending machine companies are spending up to $1 billion a year in maintenance costs due to paper jams," he said. "More use of dollar coins will mean less in maintenance costs."

Compassionate conservatism in action: when vending machine companies are hurting, the government has got to move.

There is also a First Spouse Coin Program under which gold coins are struck with Presidents on one side and their First Ladies on the other. 'First Spouse' jars my ear: if 'First Lady' offends enlightened sensibilities, how about 'Presidential Spouse'? IMO the upscale PC crew that would insist on 'First Spouse' will not collect these coins, and the term repels traditionalists who might do so.

The Next Post Will Be My Fourteenth

I'm triskaidekaphobic, and my prose is too prolix.

Collectivist Indoctrination in Seattle Elementary School

This has been kicked around the blogosphere: I saw it at Dinocrat and other places I can't remember. The post title and the links give the gist; I won't recapitulate.

However, I have a small quantitative point to add. Searching the teachers' article for the word liberty yields no hits. Searching for free gives only this passage:

As children finished their drawings, we gathered for a meeting to look at the drawings together. The drawings represented a range of understandings of power: a tornado, love spilling over as hearts, forceful and fierce individuals, exclusion, cartoon superheroes, political power.

During our meeting, children gave voice to the thinking behind their drawings.

Marlowe: "If your parents say you have to eat pasta, then that's power."

Lukas: "You can say no."

Carl: "Power is ownership of something."

Drew: "Sometimes I like power and sometimes I don't. I like to be in power because I feel free. Most people like to do it, you can tell people what to do and it feels good."

Drew's comment startled us with its raw truth. He was a member of the Legotown inner circle, and had been quite resistant to acknowledging the power he held in that role. During this discussion, though, he laid his cards on the table. Would Drew's insight break open new understandings among the other members of the inner circle?

(Boldface mine.) The single free stands bracketed by multiple powers. In fact, searching for power gives 44 (forty-four) hits.

Vile.

Fleeing America

The Euro has appreciated by almost 50% against the dollar on Bush's watch, but that's not the only thing to be concerned about.

I happened to check on a foreign stock I'd once bought on the New York Stock Exchange, but couldn't find it...? Foreign companies, citing high administrative and regulatory costs, are delisting from the NYSE in droves.

Such costs presumably contribute to the decision of many American companies to go private, and to the number of IPOs which are occurring on foreign exchanges rather than in the US. Then there's the situation with securitized American mortgages.

Will the world's financial traffic reroute around America the way the Internet routes around censorship? My guess is that we're not at that point yet, but if it happens it will happen faster than people expect. If the next president is also incompetent, that might be enough to trigger the shift; if the next two are, IMO that should do it.

This ought to be an issue in the next election.

Displacing America as the world's financial nerve center would be wrenching for all involved. Whatever arrangement followed might become worse than the current one. But the Bush administration--not to mention the Democratic and Republican parties who concocted Sarbanes-Oxley--has flagrantly thumbed its nose at the electorate, and apparently they have not yet learned from the consequences.

Afterthought. Although Oxley has conceded that Sarbanes-Oxley went too far, perhaps the establishment is still in denial about its consequences at the margin. The law enhances upper management's personal responsibility for a public company's financial statements. Combine American civil litigiousness and scalp-hunting criminal prosecutions like the Conrad Black trial--not that Black is a paragon--, and it's not surprising that foreign CEOs decide they don't need the aggravation.

Slim and Bill

The world's richest individual may no longer be Bill Gates, but Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim. This Wall Street Journal article is currently free but may eventually go into the pay archive:

The Secrets of the World's Richest Man
Mexico's Carlos Slim makes his billions
the old-fashioned way: monopolies
...
Mr. Slim's strategy has been consistent over his long career: Buy companies on the cheap, whip them into shape, and ruthlessly drive competitors out of business....

His control of Mexico's telephone system has slowed the nation's development. While telephones have long been standard in any American home, only about half of Mexican homes have them. Only 4% of Mexicans have broadband access. Mexican consumers and businesses also pay above-average prices for telephone calls, according to the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development.
...
There is no obvious successor to the patriarch's empire. That gives some Mexican officials hope that one day the state can regulate his companies. Says one high-ranking official: "When Slim dies, we can finally regulate his kids."

I have no problem with this per se.

(In defense of America's cowboy reputation, I assert that if our Mr. Bill were as free to act monopolistically as Carlos Slim is, it would be no contest. Gates is not as free: Microsoft was reined in by the courts.)

Sensible regulation of monopolists presumably benefits our economy. If a titanic illegitimate monopoly damages the Mexican economy, presumably that is no concern of the United States.

However, we are undergoing massive illegal immigration. To what extent is this due to the lack of opportunity in the stifled Mexican economy? Does the situation increase the radical US-unfriendly left's attractiveness to the Mexican electorate?

Is America in effect subsidizing the fortunes of Slim and those like him?

Goose Creek, SC...Again

Two foreign Arab students were arrested after a routine traffic stop. Explosives--fireworks, according to the students--were found in the car. See here and here.

They might be terrorists or jihadis: dilettantes or pros. They might be punks. They might be damfool college students. They might be from privileged families and believe that they can disregard American laws.

We're at war. But if the detainees are not terrorists, they should not be tossed onto our ever-expanding flypaper of laws and regulations. If they're jihadis and/or terrorists, treat them accordingly. If they're not, give them a figurative slap on the rear end and deport them or let them go back to school, whichever is prudent.

Wartime authorities should err on the side of caution, but Goose Creek has made itself notorious. After the 2003 drug raid during which police burst into a high school with police dogs and guns drawn, Internet wags were calling the place Goose Step. (The incident has been settled for $1.2M.)

Time may tell.

I was tempted to soften on Bush. Then he put himself back in the news.

In 2006, an average of almost 100 motorists died daily in passenger vehicles and large trucks and on motorcycles.

Most significantly, fatalities of occupants of passenger vehicles—cars, SUVs, vans and pickups—continued a steady decline to 30,521, the lowest annual total since 1993...

according to the NHTSA.

May the Minneapolis toll stay comparatively low: under 20, or even 15 or less.

It's bad enough that lawyers are swarming the situation, looking for any deep pocket that can be linked, however peripherally, to the bridge:

Private contractors and the insurance companies that represent them could face hundreds of millions of dollars in legal claims arising from the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge, attorneys familiar with such cases said Friday.

And the Bushes, both of them, made separate visits to the site while people were working after the accident. Conceivably the rescuers appreciated the visits, but in their place I'd be angry to be interrupted by rigamarole.

From a White House press release:

I'm here with the Secretary of Transportation, because our message to the Twin Cities is, we want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible; that we understand this is a main artery of life here; that people count on this bridge and this highway system to get to work. There's a lot of paperwork involved with government. One of our jobs is to work with the Governor and the Mayor and the senators and the members of the Congress to cut through that paperwork, and to see if we can't get this bridge rebuilt in a way that not only expedites the flow of traffic, but in a way that can stand the test of time.

I make no promises on the timetable. I do promise that Mary Peters, the Secretary of Transportation, is going to be in charge of this project. I do promise she's going to listen to the local authorities to find out what the folks here need. I do promise that when she sees roadblocks and hurdles in the way of getting the job done, she'll do everything she can to eliminate them.

There's a lot of paperwork involved with government. Republican Bush states this as a given. Even Jimmy Carter did better. One of our jobs is to work with the Governor and the Mayor and the senators and the members of the Congress to cut through that paperwork,... The people who are responsible for the stifling unnecessary paperwork mug for the cameras as they offer to help with it. ...and to see if we can't get this bridge rebuilt in a way that etc. So the most powerful man in the world flies halfway across the continent and says he's going to "see if we can't get the bridge rebuilt." I do promise that Mary Peters, the Secretary of Transportation, is going to be in charge of this project. He puts the Secretary of Transportation in charge of building a single bridge in the upper Midwest. I do promise...I do promise...I do promise... None of these promises involves anything for which he is accountable.

Minnesota's Republican governor let it be known that he's open to a tax increase. Times are good, and Minnesota is a prosperous state. If a rainy-day fund hasn't been established for this kind of emergency, the political establishment is irresponsible, to put it as kindly as possible.

Naturally, Congress has gotten into the act.

More from Republican governor Pawlenty:

While the searchers continue their work, efforts are under way to build a replacement bridge. Congress and the President are expected to provide $250 million for a new structure. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty says that's appreciated, but there may be a need for more federal money.

"We view the 250 as a wonderful gesture and a very, very meaningful step. But we also may be asking them, will be asking them for additional help," Pawlenty said.

Bridge industry analysts say the cost of building a new Interstate-35W bridge could be as high as $350 million. During a news conference in the park by the old Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis, Pawlenty said he wants the new bridge finished as quickly as possible. While the governor spoke a steady stream of people walked by to view what they could see of the collapsed bridge.

Hey, fiscally responsible Republican governor, maybe you won't need to raise taxes because you can get money from the federal government, in whose coffers it spontaneously materializes.

This wasn't Hurricane Katrina. Prosperous Minnesota has about 5 million people, 3 million of whom are in Minneapolis-St. Paul. $350M divided among 5M people comes to $70 each. Spread over say 20 years, that's hardly overwhelming even after interest is added. Although Minnesota has a AAA credit rating and the economic outlook was just upgraded from stable to positive, I don't want to be mean (in either sense) or doctrinaire. If the state asked the feds to cover the interest on a bond or for a no-interest loan, I wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand. But when the federal government gives a blank check, the state has no incentive to control costs. (Maybe that's the point: the money may serve to increase the "role" of the federal government...in a civilian bridge.)

"The President protects you from other people's Congressmen."

"The Democrats are the mommy party and the Republicans are the daddy party."

Yeah, right.

NC Flag-Desecration Charges Dropped

See here for background. In brief, a NC couple provocatively prominently displayed an upside-down American flag in front of their home to express their political concerns. Apparently incited by local National Guardsmen (!), a lout with a badge newbie county deputy told them to stop and, according to witnesses, broke into their house when they refused. Police swarmed the property and arrested the husband.

I can't stand sanctimonious obnoxious goo-goos. I wouldn't have condoned scrawling a nastygram on the Kuhns' sidewalk or TPing the house, but it wouldn't have perturbed me very much either.

However, illegal use of force by law enforcement, egged on by members of the armed forces, overrides my distaste for the victims. The responsible officer should be fired and perhaps charged and, although I grit my teeth to write this, the Kuhns should get a fat settlement from the county.

Today's Date: August 2, 2001?

Dinocrat notes that the recent increase in consumer confidence returns it to its pre-9/11 level.

Yet I have not felt so anomic about the future since the Carter administration.

Objectively, things are much better today than they were then. However, back then I drew on the invisible psychic capital that comes with youth. What would I be thinking if things today were as bad as they were under Carter? I hope not to find out.

Parasitic(?) Lawyers

There's been a kerfuffle in the blogosphere about the social value of lawyers. Ward Farnsworth's guest post at the Volokh site apparently started it, Classical Values and others joined in, and Instapundit linked.

Nowhere in my (unthorough) scanning of these posts and comments did I notice a reference to Warren Burger's warning:

We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.

I gather that Burger is not regarded as an eminent Chief Justice, but you'd think that his position alone would give his comment classic status among anti-lawyer critics.

Maybe Burger is anathema to Republicans because he presided over Roe v. Wade, and anathema to Democrats because he was a Republican.

Addendum 20091127. The Time cover about lawyers is here; the cover story is here.

Is Bush a Dry Drunk?

Ellen Ratner's thought has crossed my mind as well. Alcoholics who quit drink without dealing with the psychic aftereffects are sometimes described as stark raving sober.

Maybe Bush rationalizes the symptoms as divine guidance.

Of course, Gore exhibits similar self-righteous inflexibility. In 2000, Bush seemed the more human of the two. Afaik Gore (or Kerry or McCain or Howard Dean, for that matter) have never had drinking problems.

Beverly Sills May 25, 1929--July 2, 2007

I missed the breaking news and learned of her death by chance.

I'm not much of an opera person, but I finally got a recording of 'The Barber of Seville.' The female lead was a singer with talent but a reputation for being difficult. The performance didn't make much of an impression. Figaro Figaro Figaro la la la la la...fine, okay, but I'm not an opera person.

Then for whatever reason I bought another recording with Sills in the role. The thing just came alive. I'm still not an opera person, but I'm an admirer of Sills as a performer. And for what she surmounted in human terms. And for what she achieved after singing.

A tribute site is here.

Moon Landing

Friday was the anniversary of the first moon landing. Tax dollars were well spent, as they were on Voyager etc. Hubble.

A salute to all involved in Apollo. May we soon return to the moon...at will and in numbers.

We sent men to the moon while sending conscripts to an ill-thought-ought overseas war. While disrupted by racial and generational turmoil. While in a half-century sumo match with another superpower. It's a glib claim that the country is not what it used to be, but such assessments are properly left to history.

Back when technological progress was characterized by the space race, the foundations of the Internet were being laid.

A salute to those who persevere in obscurity.

Attn John Doe: Keep Quiet or Get Sued

I give the Republican party a higher failing grade than I give to Democrats. That doesn't mean I trust the Republicans.

Congress has considered a measure that would protect citizens from being sued if they report suspicious behavior that is potentially terror-related. According to Michelle Malkin, Democrats have succeeded in deflecting the measure despite a clear majority in both houses.

In the Polipundit post about this, I commented that Republicans called for public pressure on the measure, but they were listless about rallying such support.

No surprise that the Democrats don't want to do anything anytime that might restrain any trial lawyer anywhere under any conditions, but could the Republicans also be playing politics here?

Might they let the measure fall just short, at least for a time, in order to create a national-security campaign issue? I don't want to believe that, but I'm unable to disbelieve it.

Update 20070731: The immunity provision has been restored in somewhat diluted form. Analysis, links, and a sensible call that a pro bono organization be formed to protect John Does from legalistic retaliation are here.