- I went to 12 years of Catholic school and am proud of my Jesuit high school education. I'm also proud of my Irish-Catholic heritage but I simply cannot support the Catholic church any more, not after the molestation scandal and certainly not after episodes like these.
- A confidential Red Cross report on U.S. "black sites" has been leaked. The obvious conclusion is that many high level members of our government committed war crimes. The question though is, will there ever be an investigation? Will our system of justice finally prevail? If not and if we choose to abandon our core principles then I'd say that Osama Bin Laden has won the war.
- Ezra Klein makes a great point about AIG and what steps the Obama administration should take,
You're left, really, with punishment. It's not a question of satisfaction. It's a question of policy: If the broader populace continues feeling like they're the suckers in a massive con, the administration's ability to continue to respond to the financial crisis will be greatly reduced. For some time, we've worried about the market's reaction to a punitive approach. But the danger is increasingly the populist fury that's being fed by continued subsidies and bailouts and bonuses. Nationalization has begun to look like the only viable political option over the long-term.
It's also the only approach with a chance of changing the culture of Wall Street. When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers, he signaled the coming of a new national culture: One in which dynamism would be prized and taxes would be lower and Labor's power would diminish. This was, in part, the fulfillment of Reagan's mandate. Elections are as much about the values of the country we want as the policies of the administration we choose. But it's hard for a president to change national values. You can't do it through a bill. You need the right moment. And AIG's bonuses may provide that moment.
Unfortunately though I'm quite confident that we'll see no such action from the Obama administration
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