George Will's pick for president

...is surprising. Click on the title or here for a link to his column. Your task on this treasure hunt is to find the phrases "boiling moralism" and "bottomless reservoir of certitudes."

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times is wondering whether Tina Fey's most recent impression of Gov. Palin (check it out here) goes too far. I thought so, too, when I first saw it. Tina Fey presented her as a complete ditz, a Miss South Carolina in stylish glasses. Problem is, I saw the impersonation before I saw the original interview, and after I saw the original I realized that the most cringe-making lines from the parody, when Gov. Palin was represented as being utterly (but amisngly) clueless about the Wall Street bailout, wasn't a parody at all but a word-for-word transcription of what Gov. Palin actually said. Word for word. And it was funny, too

Well, I'm glad we got that settled. Too bad it cost $700,000,000,000.00

Lots has happened over the last week. Out of all of it, though, the most startling is one that no one has noticed, so far as I can tell. It;s the absence of debate about core Republican ideals. Going back to 1981, when Reagan was elected, our government embarked on a sustained period of deregulation. The Reaganauts and their progeny maintained that on pretty much every issue, the market would sort itself out. Government needed to butt out. We don't need to closely regulate publicly traded companies, they said, because the con artists and snake-oil salesmen will soon be discovered and exposed through the incisive lens of the marketplace.

For a lefty like me, this always stuck in my throat. But there's a logic to it that cannot be denied. Establish free markets and let the marketeers sort out things amongst themselves. Strong ideas will eat, weak ideas will be eaten. The invisible hand of the marketplace is the best way to govern human behavior. If you can't succeed, you'll disappear. Intellectually, there's a lot to be said for that Republican point of view, even if lefties like me don't like it. Of course, I hope someone's paying attention at the F.A.A., because I fly a lot. I'm not comfortable with a completely deregulated airline industry.

Republicans have always advocated deregulation. Less government involvement in all areas of life has been the mantra since the Reagan Revolution of 1981, 27 years ago. Over the last week, though, we've seen the most conservative president since Herbert Hoover embrace government take-over of insurance companies, government purchase of millions of bad mortgage loans, and the adoption of an economic plan that will bankrupt our children.

The surprising thing, to me, is that the proponents of deregulation have completely vanished. Overnight. Last week, you could have engaged in a lively debate with John McCain about how regulation was bad and deregulation was good. Not today. That point of view has been revealed as stupid. Everybody knows it now, and no further debate is necessary.

In one week.

It really would be better if they were trying for the winter Olympics

Mayor Larry Langford announces the formation of an Olympic Committee to bring the 2020 Summer Olympics to Birmingham, Alabama a near-bankrupt city of approximately 650,000 with no Olympic-sized swimming or diving pools, not to mention a similar lack of velodrome, equestrian facility, gymnastics facility, or participants' housing. I was passing through Birmingham a few years ago on a weekend when Alabama was playing Oklahoma a few hours to the south and you couldn't get a hotel room south of Hoover, so to say that Birmingham is unprepared for an international onslaught is to dramatically understate the obvious. Click on the title or here for the article describing this stupidity.

Birmingham is in Jefferson County, and Jefferson County just defaulted on something like $4 billion worth of sewer bonds, bonds that were championed by Larry Langford back when he was a county commissioner. The county has informed the bondholders that they're not even going to attempt to repay them, much to the amusement of wall street. (Story here.) The bonds were written by a former employer of mine and underwritten by his son, who were also retained (for hefty fees of course) by the county to help sort out the mess shortly before the default, an attempt in which they failed utterly and completely. The favoritism (former employer=big campaign donor) and nepotism involved here are by no means in Alabama, but rarely do the participants have this much money to play with. Interesting detail aside, the default points up the clear fact that there's not a lot of extra municipal money in the greater Birmingham area waiting around to be spent on a water polo facility.

So Mayor Langford, rather than huddling with his criminal lawyer to prepare to defend against the criminal charges that are said to be coming, or huddling with the Jefferson County Commission to make sure lawyers from New York don't seize the city's sewage system, is huddling with public employees and others who can't say no to try to get the Olympics to Alabama.

It's circus maximus maximus in the redneck south. Really, the only thing that could possibly have been sillier is if he'd gone for the winter Olympics instead.

Perhaps they can have gymnastics outdoors at the abandoned dog track. Crank up the pari-mutual booths and we could gamble on tumbling.

It turns out we CAN find new ways to make the world mad at us

As I'm sure you know, al Qaeda and Talibani insurgents from the mountains of Pakistan are fond of slipping across the border into Afghanistan, blowing things up and shooting people, then slipping back over the border into Pakistan, figuratively thumbing their noses at the American armed forces as they did so. When Pakistan was ruled by our friend the dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf, when American forces located hostile forces in Pakistan, they shared their intelligence with the Pakistani government, which allowed them to conduct limited search-and-destry operations inside Pakistan. Over time, our intelligence officers became increasingly reluctant to share information with the Pakistanis, though, because it became clear that Pakistani intelligence services often leaked information to the insurgents, so our armed forces revealed less and less of their intelligence to the Pakistanis. Under Musharraf, Pakistan continued to give permission for raids into its territory even so.

This all changed, of course, when Pakistan held democratic elections that dispensed first with Musharraf's majority in Parliament, then with Musharraf himself, who lost the presidential election to Asif Ali Zardari, who ran on a platform of not being Musharraf. With Musharraf out of office and his party marginalized in Parliament the U.S found it increasingly difficult to get Pakistan's approval or cooperation for cross-border raids. As the collateral damage from such raids became worse and more public, Pakistan refused permission for any such raids at all. THis was a setback, of course, but instead of negotiating with the new government or working out procedures that would allow intelligence to be shared but protected from leaks to the insurgents, the U.S. decided to continue the cross-border raids without Pakistani permission and in the face of Pakistani demands that the raids stop, which has rankled even the most pro-western Pakistanis.

The problem is time. Negotiating new protocols for cross-border activities is not impossible, but would take several weeks or months. According to the BBC World News this morning, the current administration is anxious to capture or kill prominent al Qaeda operatives in advance of the coming American election.

As an American, that just kind of makes me feel slimy.

So now the Pakistanis have announced that Americans who cross the Pakistan-Afghanistan border without permission will be fired upon by the Pakistanis, and in fact, according to the BBC, Pakistan claims to have repulsed American helicopters with machine gun fire when they attempted to cross the border earlier today. So our troops now have to worry not only about heavily armed and bunkered Talibanis and al-Qaeda, but the Pakistan army, which we trained and armed with the latest in military equipment, as well. Let's also not forget that Pakistan is a nuclear power. A nuclear power with a chip on its shoulder, a new and highly unstable government with a president who has an axe to grind with the United States and no actual executive experience (he's Benazir Bhutto's widower and has much more job experience as a prison inmate on corruption charges than as any sort of elected official, much less chief executive). Do we really want to do things that will tick Pakistan off, with its strong Wahabi voting bloc and nuclear weapons, and push them towards wanting to help al Qaeda? Is that a sensible way to influence American election results?

As a friend of mine was once fond of saying, our country's problems are not so much sociological as they are psychiatric.

Ironically, the current administration is generally quite fussy about borders. This is the same crowd that's building a wall along our entire border with Mexico because Mexicans looking for work can't bring themselves to respect our borders. We sternly chided Russia for refusing to recognize the territorial integrity of the Republic of Georgia.

But not when there's an election at stake.

Can someone explain a way in which this is not all bad?

More views on Palin

Democratic leaders have been largely following Obama's lead in their discussions of Sarah Palin and her problems. "Really, she's one of the nicest and most photogenic inexperienced book-banning intolerant right-to-lifers you could find," said one, "but I think the personal life of that really pretty daughter is off limits." Asked for comment, John Edwards, enjoying a protracted vacation at his summer home on Figure Eight Island, 158.6 miles away from his presumably still-chilly wife Elizabeth, said "I have never met Bristol Palin and am not the father of her child."