Waiting for the search warrant.

I expect that at some point the current supreme court will rule that if a police officer has a good-faith belief that a warrant might have issued, or might issue in the future, they are authorized to go wherever they damn please and detain anyone they find there.

Posted at September 2, 2008 4:16 PM in response to Amy Goodman Arrested at RNC; Reports of Tear-Gassing

Regulations are like whack-a-mole only if the regulators are underfunded and lack political support. Thank you, right-wing revolutionaries.

Posted at August 22, 2008 9:58 PM in response to Does regulation undermine financial innovation?

How much tuition could the schools be rebating annually if they just passed the fees back to the student body?

Uusually when someone gets a name to sell for a mailing list they've provided a separate service to get it. (Yeah, it goes without saying that in a country with decent privacy laws this would be unlawful six ways from sunday...)

Posted at August 22, 2008 8:54 PM in response to Should universities profit from secret deals with credit card companies?

There's a huge moral hazard for companies in forcing consumers into arbitration, because cutting corners only makes sense when you know you're going to prevail in the vast majority of disputes regardless of merit.

And eventually, as we've seen in so many other situations, moral hazard becomes financial hazard.

Posted at August 22, 2008 6:36 PM in response to Keeping Sham Research from Distorting the Policy Debate

I just lost a bunch of respect for Cass Sunstein. Of course regulation inhibits innovation, both by barring certain paths and by diverting resources to compliance. But unless you have evidence that some particular kind of regulation will hinder a particular innovation path that we're agreed we want, it's just a shibboleth to utter to show you're a "serious", "moderate" type.

As for the underlying idea that transparency should allow all options to be made available, sure. As soon as all conversations between mortgage brokers and clients are recorded, and the brokers and their employers are jointly and severally liable for any misrepresentations made during the course of those conversations. Transparency is as transparency does, and no amount of disclosure documentation is ultimately going to trump someone whose paycheck depends on getting you to sign the papers that earn them the biggest paycheck.

So yes, regulation should take some options off the table, same as we don't let people buy cars without seatbelts or houses made of nitrocellulose, no matter how much cheaper or more innovative they might be, and no matter how fully the risks are disclosed.

The idea of electronic disclosures is pretty cool. Imagine, for example, that every loan package had to show a bunch of sensitivity analyses with graphics depicting the odds of keeping your house for the next 1-10 years depending on income, local costs, market fluctuations and so forth.

Posted at August 22, 2008 3:20 PM in response to Does regulation undermine financial innovation?

You know, there was a time when hiring political cronies for government-funded make-work positions was considered criminal corruption.

But now it's just GOP business as usual.

Posted at August 22, 2008 2:50 PM in response to He's Baaaack: Civil Rights Commission Hires Spakovsky to Work on Voting Rights

The quoted section would make a good legal brief for McCain, but it is really lousy for a draft from a supposedly impartial arbiter. If McCain had simply declared his intention to withdraw after initial qualification, relatively few people would be complaining. And the fact that nothing in the law prevented the commission from decertifying a candidate would be relevant (as would be the fact that the commission did not decertify McCain, because McCain and his cronies were actively preventing it from meeting with a quorum).

But that's not what happened. McCain pledged his eligibility for matching funds as collateral for a loan. Either that eligibility was a thing of value that came to McCain from the FEC, in which case McCain was bound by FEC rules for the duration of the primary season, or else the bank that made the loan gave McCain an enormous (and illegal) corporate contribution by approving a loan with non-existent collateral.

So the fact that the FEC might be legally allowed to decertify a candidate who hasn't used the matching funds allocated by the FEC really doesn't come into play here.

Posted at August 15, 2008 9:16 AM in response to FEC Draft Opinion Sides With McCain On Loan Question

Does anyone else remember when "a go-along, get-along attitude" was known as being an accessory or a co-conspirator?

Posted at July 31, 2008 2:15 PM in response to DOJ Report Shows Partisan Culture Reigned Beyond The Few Names Named

Of course, if you give them nothing, that just fuels their story that they're the honest ones being subjected to a partisan witch hunt.

Posted at July 15, 2008 8:26 AM in response to OPR Reaches Out to Siegelman's Camp for Assistance in Investigation

I don't expect Bush to pardon everybody, even if Cheney stands over him with a shotgun. He's going down as the worst president in history, and it's all their fault.

Posted at July 9, 2008 4:15 PM in response to Biden to Mukasey: "You Really Are an Enigma to Me"