One truth, that deregulation is sometimes a good thing, has been followed down so long and winding a road that it has led to an immense lie: that deregulation carried to an extreme will not lead to calamity.

If Ben Stein understands this then there really isn’t any excuse for thoughtful observers not to get it. As little regulation as possible but enough to ensure fairness and stability. It is sometimes necessary to restrain human greed, not to save people from themselves but to ensure that those people don’t muck it up for the rest of us.

Stein’s piece is here.

Tony likely has less than a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the inside of Congress in any capacity other than that of tourist as his views don’t represent more than an insignificant blemish on the American body politic. That said, if you’re a sucker for oddballs with odd ideas who link to odd sites, and I certainly am, then you could do much worse than checking him out.

Recognising most readers’ distaste for Hamas and the even greater sense of aversion for Jimmy Carter, I expect that this news will only please about three or four of us SA regulars. Nevertheless, I’m hoping that Carter’s impressions are accurate and that Hamas will be engaged in dialogue sooner rather than later.

Seriously...why would he say that stuff now?

So, just so that we’re clear on this.  We are building an army full of people who are still getting pension payments from an organization that the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.  And we are basing our entire future in Iraq on that army.

Read it at American Footprints. Take notes...there might be a quiz later.

Here’s the remarkable thing: Page 11 of the Opinion states that “[t]he Criminal Division concurs in our conclusion that these canons of construction preclude the application of the assault, maiming, interstate stalking, and torture statutes to the military during the conduct of a war.”

In other words, John Yoo checked with the Criminal Division as to whether the military could torture and maim detainees in a war, and that Division, which ordinarily strongly resists narrowing constructions of criminal statutes, agreed that the torture and maiming (and other) statutes were inapplicable.

The head of the Criminal Division at the time was Michael Chertoff (now Secretary of Homeland Security). Nine days before the memo was issued, President Bush nominated Chertoff, like Bybee, to be a federal judge on a U.S. Court of Appeals.

I have two observations. First, if this is an accurate accounting of the memo then anyone who claims that America does not or did not employ torture is terribly naive or a fool. Second, if the circumstances surrounding certain Administration appointments are accurately portrayed then anyone who claims that the Bush Administration has not engaged in cynical manipulation and hackery of the highest quality is naive or a fool.

If Lederman’s analysis turns out to be wrong then I will be quick to slap up a mea culpa and engage in ritual self-humiliation, the level of which has been never before seen on SA.

If Lederman is right, I will probably vomit.

This may go deeper than any of us thought.