[updated below (w/transcript) - Update II]

University of Notre Dame Professor of Finance Richard Sheehan has been one of the most incisive economist-critics of the Paulson plan since it was unveiled, and he's my guest today on Salon Radio. We discuss the ways in which the key fear-mongering claims of Paulson have been both misleading and exaggerated; the reasons the bailout plan won't work even if the best case scenario occurs; where and how the Federal Government will get $700 billion to fund it; and the role Paulson himself has played in the events that have caused this crisis. From Professor Sheehan in the interview:

Unfortunately, Mr. Paulson was among those that were creating the problem, rather than warning about the problem. In his role as CEO of Goldman Sachs, Goldman -- under his watch -- created a whole lot of CDOs [collateralized debt obligations] that now are under the heading of "toxic waste." So it's amusing in a twisted way to look at him now as the one who is going to save us from imminent financial collapse, when it was at least in part brought on by the actions of Goldman, in terms of being so liberal in their willingness to create new and improved CDOs.

The interview can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below. It is roughly 20 minutes and a transcript is here.

Tomorrow on Salon Radio: Digby, to discuss this important post about the severe political risks for the Democrats generally, and the Obama campaign specifically, from having the Democratic Congress voting for a bailout plan.

UPDATE: On an unrelated note, Bob Woodward is currently at FireDogLake answering questions about his new book. I asked him this question about the claim Woodward made last week that the U.S. has achieved a new technological "breakthrough" allowing it to use a super-innovative and advanced weapon in Iraq (which Woodward says he knows about but refuses to describe), and Woodward's reply to my question is here (and my further reply/question is here). Woodward will be at FDL for the next hour (until 4:00 p.m. EST) answering questions in the comment section.

UPDATE II: Without commenting on all of her recommended policies, this is really good, effective and strong political messaging from Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio):

________________________________

Interview with Professor Sheehan here:

(updated below - Update II)

In his New York Times column this morning, David Brooks announces that as a result of the financial crisis, "a new center and a new establishment is emerging" that will rule as a Benevolent Oligarchy over economic policy and will be comprised of Old Wise Men from Wall Street:

Once, there was a financial elite in this country. During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, middle-aged men with names like Mellon and McCloy led Wall Street firms, corporate boards and white-shoe law firms and occasionally emerged to serve in government.

Starting in the 1960s, that cohesive elite began to fall apart. Liberal interest groups took control of Democratic economic policy. Supply-side think tankers and Southern conservatives dominated the GOP. . . .

Year followed year, and the idea of a cohesive financial establishment seemed increasingly like a thing of the past. . . . No more. Over the past week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner of the New York Fed have nearly revived it. At its base, the turmoil wracking the world financial markets is a crisis of confidence. What Paulson, et al. have tried to do is reassert authority -- the sort that used to be wielded by the Mellons and Rockefellers and other rich men in private clubs.

Inspired in part by Paul Volcker, Nicholas Brady and Eugene Ludwig, and announced last week, the Paulson plan is a pure establishment play. It would assign nearly unlimited authority to a small coterie of policy makers. It does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge. . . .

So we have arrived at one of those moments. The global financial turmoil has pulled nearly everybody out of their normal ideological categories. The pressure of reality has compelled new thinking about the relationship between government and the economy. And lo and behold, a new center and a new establishment is emerging.

The Paulson rescue plan is one chapter. But there will be others. . . .The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week -- including Volcker, Robert Rubin and Warren Buffett. . . . We're entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable -- and often oligarchic -- framework for capitalist endeavor.

One of the most enduring and intense pundit fetishes is the fantasy that there is a small, elite group of trans-partisan, centrist, responsible Establishment Wise Men -- the Ultimate Safe and Loving Daddy Figures -- who can ride into any political crisis and rescue the warring partisan masses with their Sober and Powerful Integrity. We just need to call upon them for help, cede them absolute power, trust in them, step aside, and watch the Magic that is Created as a result of what Brooks longingly describes as "the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge." Stripped of his neutral observer rhetoric, that's all Brooks is "predicting" -- more accurately, yearning for -- here.

But beyond that, I'd love to know who has been running economic policy up until now if it wasn't these Wise Men from Wall Street? When listing our New Economic Overlords, Brooks identifies the very people from both parties who have been running economic policy for the last decades -- people like Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former Treasury Secretaries Nicholas Brady and Robert Rubin, current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner of the New York Fed. If that is the New Wise Establishment who will save us, who exactly has been dictating economic policy before now?

The central fact -- which Brooks' column aggressively and, by design, suppresses -- is that economic policy in this country has been dictated by Wall Street for the past two decades because Wall Street (meaning the firms and their clients) owns and funds both political parties. The face of Clinton's economic policy of the 1990s, Robert Rubin, had exactly the same background as Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary who presided over the current crisis -- former Chairmen of Goldman Sachs. These aren't Sober Traditionalists who shunned the complex derivatives which Brooks blames for this crisis, nor are they part of the "liberal interest groups [that] took control of Democratic economic policy." They're people who became wildly rich as Goldman Sachs led the way in staking the nation's economic health on those reckless instruments.

Brooks' announcement that we're going to vest ultimate authority in them as the New Wise Establishment to save us from our economic policy crises is like announcing that we're going to turn to a New Wise Foreign Policy Establishment composed of Don Rumsfeld, Ken Pollack, Mike O'Hanlon, and the American Enterprise Institute to save us from our foreign policy woes. The most absurd practice in American political life is throwing ourselves into the arms of the very people who have caused our crises, and this is what Brooks is advocating and hoping for here (and, as Howie Kurtz quotes me as explaining in his profile of David Brooks in yesterday's Washington Post, this status-quo-perpetuation is essentially Brooks' defining mentality in the foreign policy arena as well; it's the establishment-subservient function he serves first and foremost).

Several people, including me, wrote yesterday about many of the cynical motives behind opposition on the Right to the Paulson plan, but there is an element of authenticity to that opposition as well. One can look at these economic disputes in terms of "Republican v. Democrat" but, when it comes to economic policy, that is often unhelpful because the core leadership factions of both parties are funded and controlled by the same corporate interests. The same framework shapes foreign policy as well (before being named Director of National Security, Mike McConnell's principal goal in life was to maximize profits from the privatization of the surveillance state, policies to which he also single-mindedly devoted himself as DNI). Often, and certainly now, the more relevant dichotomy is "Plutocrat (or 'kleptocrat') v. Populist," and there are angry populists in the rank-and-file of both parties -- meaning the ordinary voters -- who haven't shared in the very limited and increasingly unequal prosperity created by corporate control of our Government.

This was one of the central arguments of David Sirota's book -- Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington: namely, that while cultural wedge issues have divided ordinary American on the Left and Right, there is a growing, angry populism among both factions against the dominant Washington establishment elite that is so transparently running the Federal Government on behalf of the tiny group of corporate elite which funds and owns them. The backlash against the Paulson plan on both the Left and Right is a function of that same anger and resentment.

That important dichotomy is illustrated by this list in Roll Call of the 50 Wealthiest Members of Congress -- evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, composed of many of the most influential and corporate-friendly leaders of both parties (led by many of the key bipartisan enablers of telecom amnesty), and heavily invested in Wall Street. Far more significant is the fact that corporate America funds and thus owns the leading factions of both parties and has long controlled what they do. That's what makes it so bizarre -- so Orwellian -- to read about David Brooks' alleged visions of a New Wise Economic Establishment composed of the very same Wall Street leaders who have been running our economic policy for the last two decades. If there is one thing that's not "new," it's turning over our economic policy to the whims of the Wise Old Men of Wall Street.

UPDATE: On the same Op-Ed page today, one finds these indisputable facts in Bob Herbert's column:

Does anyone think it's just a little weird to be stampeded into a $700 billion solution to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by the very people who brought us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? . . .

And the people who always pretended to know better, who should have known better, the mortgage hucksters and the gilt-edged, high-rolling, helicopter-flying Wall Street financiers, kept pushing this bad paper higher and higher up the pyramid without looking at the fine print themselves, not bothering to understand it, until all the crap came raining down on the rest of us. . . .

Mr. Paulson himself was telling us during the summer that the economy was sound, that its long-term fundamentals were "strong," that growth would rebound by the end of the year, when most of the slump in housing prices would be over.

He has been wrong every step of the way, right up until early last week, about the severity of the economic crisis.

David Brooks' pretense that the very same people who did this should now be vested with oligarchical power as the "New Establishment" is indescribably deceitful.

UPDATE II: What the David Brookses of the World fear most -- the reason they're so desperate to convince people to put their faith in omnipotent, benevolent rulers -- is this.

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

I wrote earlier today about the sudden right-wing resistance to vast executive authority that has emerged in opposition to the Paulson plan, but still, this post from Ed Morrissey at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air -- full-fledged advocates of every last expansion of unfettered executive power over the last eight years -- is just so exquisite, so perfectly constructed, so unbearably hilarious, that it really expands the definition of "self-satire" and demanded its own featured space:

The crux of the [Right's] skepticism over the plan comes from an absurd protocol at the heart of it. It makes Henry Paulson a de facto financial czar, in charge of potentially a trillion dollars in taxpayer money with no accountability whatsoever for his actions. Here's the relevant proviso in the legislation:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

We don't allow this kind of free agency from elected officials, let alone political appointees. Not even in his role of Commander-in-Chief does a President have a mandate that is completely unreviewable. Henry Paulson may or may not be the most brilliant thinker in high finance, but even if he was, why would Americans want to give him literally a carte blanche with the equivalent of one-third of our annual budget? With no review possible?

It's absurd, and at its heart, it's un-American, in the sense that America exists precisely because of our desire to rein in government and make it accountable to the people. We gave up on the monarchy in 1776. We certainly didn't do that to trade in King George for Czar Henry. Only in a panic, in which Congressional leadership abdicates its role to keep executive power in check, would any American Congress agree to surrender its Constitutional mandate for oversight. And that panic may be taking place now.

How is it humanly possible for that to be written without the author recognizing that everything he claims to oppose is what he's spent the last eight years endorsing? Even given the well-established authoritarian capacity to simultaneously embrace two precisely antithetical thoughts, wouldn't a minimally functioning human brain -- the kind necessary just to do things like turn on a computer -- alert someone to the fact that the ideas they are vehemently criticizing are the ones that have animated everything they've said and done for the last eight years? How does a human brain evade that recognition?

In the areas of national security and war -- so broadly defined as to include almost everything the President does both abroad and on U.S. soil -- the central theory of the Bush presidency has been, as John Yoo put it: "These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make." The Bush administration's central strategy has been repeatedly to tell courts that they have no right to review the Leader's decisions. The Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act, the FISA Amendments Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Patriot Act all provide, to one degree or another, the exact same absolute executive discretion and prohibition on judicial review that the Paulson Plan provides, and in doing so, allows the President to decide which individuals -- including Americans -- are spied on, arrested, detained, rendered, and subjected to all sorts of interrogation methods without any review at all. The administration repeatedly told Congress and courts that what they did -- in general -- was far too secret to allow any oversight or review of any kind.

The same people who cheered all of that on are now parading around proclaiming that "that America exists precisely because of our desire to rein in government and make it accountable to the people" and "only in a panic, in which Congressional leadership abdicates its role to keep executive power in check, would any American Congress agree to surrender its Constitutional mandate for oversight" and invoking the tyrannical specter of Britain's King George, who didn't even possess some of the powers that they insisted on vesting in their own contemporaneous King George.

Digby has an important post here describing some of the political motivations behind the Right's sudden re-discovery of small government principles in the context of this bailout (it's basically the cynical strategy Newt Gingrich has been advocating for more than a year) . While some of the Right's leading lights are undoubtedly conscious of those cynical political calculations, many of them -- and I'd bet anything Morrissey is included in this group -- actually believe what they're saying about how outrageous unlimited executive power and a lack of oversight are and don't realize how any of that fits in with everything they've been doing this decade. If there's an Obama presidency, they're going to start righteously spouting limited government "principles" without realizing any of this, either. It's sometimes quite jarring -- and, in a really dark and perverse way, incomparably hilarious -- to see what the human mind is capable of doing.

UPDATE: In comments, Jim White writes:

Joke number two

Q: What is a liberal?

A: A conservative who has been ripped off by Wall Street.

Liberals who become post-mugging conservatives at least generally recognize their transformation. These authoritarian followers on the Right actually perceive themselves as champions of limited government power and oversight and checks and balances and the like and think that they've always been that.

UPDATE II: A new CNN poll finds "that by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans blame Republicans over Democrats for the financial crisis." Democrats have been nothing resembling an "opposition party" in any meaningful sense, but it is still the case that the GOP has run the country for the last eight years. The GOP has had its way on virtually everything. Even the lowest-information voter realizes that -- that is, after all, why Democrats are (justifiably) perceived as being so "weak" -- and it will therefore be very difficult to convince voters that any of the grave crises facing the country are not the "fault" of Republicans.

UPDATE: Ian Welsh has had superb commentary on the financial crisis over the last week and today expresses substantial enthusiasm over the draft bill circulated by Chris Dodd, which contains numerous oversight provisions and other substantive limitations and protections absent from the Paulson plan. But as Welsh suggests, Democrats frequently offer better alternatives to the one Bush is demanding only to then capitulate at the end; it remains to be seen what will happen here (and read John Cole's wise observations about the excitement over Dodd's improved plan).

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

On Saturday morning, I noted -- quoting Atrios -- the almost complete lack of debate over the ever-changing dictates issued by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Last week, whatever Paulson said on any given day -- no bailouts; only selected bailouts; massive $700 billion bailout plan -- immediately became the unchallenged conventional wisdom.

That has all changed. Prominent economists, who had previously been defending Paulson for the most part, began voicing serious doubts about his plan. As the AP put it yesterday: "Many of the same economists and opinion-makers who'd provided a bipartisan sheen of consensus to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's previous moves have quickly begun casting doubts on the wisdom of a policy that would allow Treasury to purchase without oversight hundreds of billions of dollars of difficult-to-price assets from financial institutions." Not only Paul Krugman, who was a skeptic from the start, but conservative economic experts have also now expressed opposition, including former Bush and Romney advisor Greg Mankiw and -- in an excellent column on Saturday -- Sebastian Mallaby, who described the rapid move to embrace Paulson's plan as "extremely dangerous."

And now, some of the most rabid ideologues on the Right are voicing increasingly strident opposition as well. At National Review last night, Newt Gingrich wrote that "watching Washington rush to throw taxpayer money at Wall Street has been sobering and a little frightening" and said he "hopes Congress will slow down and have an open debate." Thereafter, NR's Yuval Levin proclaimed that nobody could read through the Paulson proposal "without concluding that everyone in Washington has lost their minds." In The New York Times today, Bill Kristol said he's "doubtful that the only thing standing between us and a financial panic is for Congress to sign this week, on behalf of the American taxpayer, a $700 billion check over to the Treasury," while Michelle Malkin posted a lengthy alarmist screed warning that "Hank Paulson must be contained."

Right-wing opposition to the Paulson plan is vital for having any meaningful chance to stop it. Does anyone have any confidence at all in the Democrats' willingness and/or ability to impede this bailout train if the Bush administration and the Right were vigorously behind it, warning the nation of impending doom unless we submit to vast, unchecked government power of the type Henry Paulson is demanding? The instances of complete Democratic acquiescence under those circumstances -- including when they "controlled" the Congress -- are far too numerous to allow any rational person to think Democrats, standing alone, would stop the Paulson plan. As sad as it is, meaningful right-wing opposition is critical for that to happen.

More interesting are the reasons why these right-wing polemicists have decided they have real doubts about the wisdom of the Paulson plan. In opposing the plan, each of them cited -- with alarm -- the provision which vests full, unfettered and unreviewable discretion in the Treasury Secretary to determine how the $700,000,000,000 is allocated: Levin (plan gives "essentially unlimited power to use $700 billion to make purchases the scope of which is defined very loosely and vaguely"); Gingrich ("We are being reassured that we can trust Secretary Paulson 'because he knows what he is doing'. Congress had better ask a lot of questions before it shifts this much burden to the taxpayer and shifts this much power to a Washington bureaucracy"); Kristol ("There are no provisions for — or even promises of — disclosure, accountability or transparency"); Malkin (Washington is demanding we "fork over $700 billion to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and allow him to dole it out to whomever he chooses in whatever amount he chooses -- without public input or recourse").

Apparently, the same political faction that has cheered on every instance of unchecked, absolute executive power over the last eight years -- which demanded that the President, and he alone, decide which citizens, including Americans, can be spied on, detained, even tortured, and that no oversight or disclosure was needed for any of that -- has suddenly re-discovered their desire for checks on federal government power. The reason? They say it themselves: with the looming prospect of an Obama presidency, they may no longer be in charge of that Government and these "small government conservatives" have thus suddenly re-awoken to the virtues of checks and balances, oversight and other restraints.

In explaining his opposition to the Paulson plan, Levin warns:

Even if Hank Paulson were the all knowing god of economics, would it make sense to give this kind of power to the treasury secretary for the next two years just forty days before an election? Shall we go through our mental list of who an Obama administration (or a McCain administration for that matter) is likely to put in that post?

Gingrich writes:

Imagine that the political balance of power in Washington were different.

If this were a Democratic administration the Republicans in the House and Senate would be demanding answers and would be organizing for a "no" vote . . . . But because this gigantic power shift to Washington and this avalanche of taxpayer money is being proposed by a Republican administration, the normal conservative voices have been silent or confused.

It's time to end the silence and clear up the confusion.

Malkin is actually worried about vesting such power in Paulson himself -- she thinks he's basically a tool of the Communist Chinese, a follower of "Gore-esque" eco-zealotry, and worst of all, someone with ties to some Democrats -- but the point is the same: people have long predicted that the Right will do a complete reversal (once again) in their positions on vast federal power and unlimited executive authority the minute that such power is vested in someone they oppose and fear rather than in themselves. The remarkable spectacle of watching these right-wing authoritarians suddenly demand Congressional oversight and voice opposition to unlimited executive power -- two months before a highly possible Obama victory -- is quite obviously reflective of that shift.

Rather hilariously, this was the very first comment from a Malkin reader after she sounded the alarm about the provision in the Paulson plan providing that his decisions are "non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency":

So something that is unconstitutional cannot be reviewed by a Federal court? I guess, not even the Supreme Court. Well, if it is accepted, a precedent has been set, which will allow other proposals/bills to go through, regardless of legality, being "non-reviewable" by Federal court. A government running amok . . . with people cheering.

This person obviously has no idea that such provisions are hardly "unprecedented," but have been appearing in several of the most controversial bills of the last eight years (as but one example, The Military Commissions Act, a right-wing favorite, essentially purported to bar courts from reviewing the President's decisions about who to detain and further barred judicial review of the Congressional scheme, and similar "court-stripping provisions" have long been a right-wing favorite in all sorts of contexts). And more generally, this is how our Government has worked: the President demands unlimited power and Congress gives it to him. It's only because visions of a Muslim, terrorist-sympathizing, socialist President Obama are haunting them in their feverish nightmares is the Right suddenly deeply fearful once again of vesting vast power in the Federal Government and the Executive.

But no matter. The blatant hypocrisy here, while extreme, craven and obvious, is also healthy. Hypocrisy of this sort is actually a vital part of how checks and balances are supposed to work. It is expected that political factions, when in charge of the government, will seek to obtain greater power for themselves, and the check against that is that the "opposition party" will battle and resist -- not necessarily out of ideology or principle but due to raw power considerations and self-interest.

That is what has been so tragically missing from our political process for the last eight years: while the GOP sought greater and greater government power, Democrats acquiesced almost completely when they weren't complicitly enabling it. While the Executive was off the charts in terms of the power it seized, the Congress was off the charts in its passivity and eagerness to relinquish its Constitutionally assigned powers to the Bush White House. That's what has caused the extreme imbalance, with a bloated Republican Party and virtually unlimited presidential power: the failure of Democrats and the Congress to serve as a check on any of that. As their newfound contempt for unlimited power makes conclusively clear, the executive-power-worshipping Republicans of the last eight years -- if there is an Obama presidency -- will quickly re-discover their limited government power "principles" and won't be nearly as accommodating.

UPDATE: I should add that Congressional Democrats, while largely on board with the fundamentals of the bailout plan, have been making noises about demanding some limits and oversight on how this fund is managed, and the political climate is certainly part of what is motivating the Right to voice these doubts, as illustrated by the bizarre and deeply cynical spectacle of the GOP presidential nominee -- of all people -- joining with the Democrats to demand limits on CEO compensation. The point, though, is that Democrats typically make noises of this type and then capitulate at the end if they stand alone. This Paulson bill can be stopped only with widespread opposition that cuts across the standard ideological/partisan lines, and it shouldn't be that hard to argue why handing over $700 billion to the very people who caused this disaster, while allowing them to walk away soaked with profits, is not a good idea, and that vesting unlimited power in the Bush administration to manage that is a particularly bad idea. If Democrats can't win that argument, what argument can they win?

UPDATE II: A Rasmussen Reports poll released today found that "most Americans are closely following news reports on the Bush Administration's federal bailout plan for the country’s troubled economy, but just 28% support what has been proposed so far." Thirty-seven percent oppose it and 35% are unsure. As El Zongo notes in comments, this bailout -- like the FISA gutting and telecom amnesty which preceded it -- has no real constituency beyond the Washington establishment. That the public is so opposed and/or primed to oppose it more doesn't mean this won't pass -- we don't exactly have a substantial connection between what Washington does and public opinion -- but it does provide an important foundation for derailing this if political leaders decide they should or must.

UPDATE III: More here on right-wing pretenses to limited government power.

(updated below)

John Diamond, USA Today, February 4, 2004 -- "A desert mirage: How U.S. misjudged Iraq's arsenal":

The assertion that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons -- and the ability to use them against his neighbors and even the United States -- was expressed in an Oct. 1, 2002, document called a National Intelligence Estimate. The estimate didn't trigger President Bush's determination to oust Saddam. But it weighed heavily on members of Congress as they decided to authorize force against Iraq, and it was central to Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council a year ago this week. . . .

The Bush and Clinton administrations, foreign intelligence services, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress all took it as a given that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons.

Walter Pincus, The Washington Post, August 11, 2007 -- "How the Fight for Vast New Spying Powers Was Won":

For three days, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had haggled with congressional leaders over amendments to a federal surveillance law, but now he was putting his foot down. "This is the issue," said the plain-spoken retired vice admiral and Vietnam veteran, "that makes my blood pressure rise. . . .

McConnell won the fight, extracting a key concession despite the misgivings of Democratic negotiators. Congressional, administration and intelligence officials last week described the events leading up to the approval of this surveillance, including a remarkable series of confrontations that ended with McConnell and the White House outmaneuvering the Democratic-controlled Congress, partly by capitalizing on fresh reports of a growing terrorism threat.

"We had a forcing function," a senior administration official said, referring to the intelligence community's public report last month that said al-Qaeda poses a growing threat to the United States and to lawmakers' desire to leave town in August. . . .

A critical moment for the Democrats came on July 24, when McConnell met in a closed session with senators from both parties to ask for urgent approval of a slimmed-down version of his bill. Armed with new details about terrorist activity and an alarming decline in U.S. eavesdropping capabilities, he argued that Congress had days, not weeks, to act.

"Everybody who heard him speak recognized the absolute, compelling necessity to move," Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), vice chairman of the intelligence panel, said later of the closed session.

Democrats agreed. As delivered by McConnell, the warnings were seen as fully credible. "He's pushing this because he thinks we're in a high-threat environment," the senior aide said. . . .McConnell deemed [the Democratic draft's] fine print unacceptable, however, and in the end, it was the Republican bill, a near-copy of his proposal, that passed both chambers of Congress.

David Herszenhorn, New York Times, today, "Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings":

It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first.

Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had made an urgent and unusual evening visit to Capitol Hill, and they were gathered around a conference table in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program "Good Morning America," the congressional leaders were told "that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally."

Mr. Schumer added, "History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment."

When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as "somber," Mr. Dodd cut in. "Somber doesn't begin to justify the words," he said. "We have never heard language like this."

"What you heard last evening," he added, "is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly."

Leave aside for the moment whether this gargantuan nationalization/bailout scheme is "necessary" in some utilitarian sense. One doesn't have to be an economics expert in order for several facts to be crystal clear:

First, the fact that Democrats are on board with this scheme means absolutely nothing. When it comes to things the Bush administration wants, Congressional Democrats don't say "no" to anything. They say "yes" to everything. That's what they're for.

They say "yes" regardless of whether they understand what they're endorsing. They say "yes" regardless of whether they've been told even the most basic facts about what they're being told to endorse. They say "yes" anytime doing so is politically less risky than saying "no," which is essentially always and is certainly the case here. They say "yes" whenever the political establishment -- meaning establishment media outlets and the corporate class that funds them -- wants them to say "yes," which is the case here. And they say "yes" with particular speed and eagerness when told to do so by the Serious Trans-Partisan Republican Experts like Hank Paulson and Ben Bernake (or Mike McConnell and Robert Gates and, before them, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell).

So nothing could be less reassuring or more meaningless than the fact that the Democratic leadership has announced that what they heard scared them so much that they are certain all of this is necessary -- whatever "all this" might be (and does anyone think that they know what "this" even is?). It may be "necessary" or may not be, but the fact that Congressional Democrats are saying this is irrelevant, since they would not have done anything else -- they're incapable of doing anything else -- other than giving their stamp of approval when they're told to.

Second, whatever else is true, the events of the last week are the most momentous events of the Bush era in terms of defining what kind of country we are and how we function -- and before this week, the last eight years have been quite momentous, so that is saying a lot. Again, regardless of whether this nationalization/bailout scheme is "necessary" or makes utilitarian sense, it is a crime of the highest order -- not a "crime" in the legal sense but in a more meaningful sense.

What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism -- where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.

More amazingly, they're free to walk away without having to disgorge their gains; at worst, they're just "forced" to walk away without any further stake in the gamble. How can these bailouts not at least be categorically conditioned on the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains from those who are responsible? The mere fact that shareholders might lose their stake going forward doesn't resolve that concern; why should those who so fantastically profited from these schemes they couldn't support walk away with their gains? This is "redistribution of wealth" and "government takeover of industry" on the grandest scale imaginable -- the buzzphrases that have been thrown around for decades to represent all that is evil and bad in the world. That's all this is; it's not an "investment" by the Government in any real sense but just a magical transfer of losses away from those who are responsible for these losses to those who aren't.

And all of this was both foreseeable as well as foreseen -- see the 2002 grave warnings from Warren Buffett on pages 14-15 of his shareholders letter (.pdf), among many other things -- and it's also happened before, when the Federal Government bailed out the S&L; industry that (with John McCain's help) was able to gamble recklessly and then force the country to protect them from their losses. The people who did this have no fear of anything -- they completely lack the kind of healthy fear that impedes reckless behavior -- because they know how our Government works and that they control it and thus believe that their capacity to suffer is limited in the extreme. And they're right about that.

What's most vital to underscore is that the beneficiaries of this week's extraordinary Government schemes aren't just the coincidental recipients of largesse due to some random stroke of good luck. The people on whose behalf these schemes are being implemented -- the true beneficiaries -- are the very same people who have been running and owning our Government -- both parties -- for decades, which is why they have been able to do what they've been doing without interference. They were able to gamble without limit because they control the Government, and now they're having others bear the brunt of their collapse for the same reason -- because the Government is largely run for their benefit.

If there is any "pitchfork moment" -- an episode that understandably would send people into the streets in mass outrage -- it would be this. Nobody really even seems to know how much of these losses "the Government" -- meaning working people who had no part in the profits from these transactions -- is undertaking virtually overnight but it's at least a trillion dollars, an amount so vast it's hard to comprehend, let alone analyze in terms of consequences. The transactions are way too complex even for the most sophisticated financial analysts to understand, let alone value. Whatever else is true, generations of Americans are almost certainly going to be severely burdened in untold ways by the events of the last week -- ones that have been carried out largely without any debate and mostly in secret.

Third, what's probably most amazing of all is the contrast between how gargantuan all of this is and the complete absence of debate or disagreement over what's taking place. It's not just that, as usual, Democrats and Republicans are embracing the same core premises ("this is regrettable but necessary"). It's that there's almost no real discussion of what happened, who is responsible, and what the consequences are. It's basically as though the elite class is getting together and discussing this all in whispers, coordinating their views, and releasing just enough information to keep the stupid masses content and calm.

Can anyone point to any discussion of what the implications are for having the Federal Government seize control of the largest and most powerful insurance company in the country, as well as virtually the entire mortgage industry and other key swaths of financial services? Haven't we heard all these years that national health care was an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking because of what happens when the Federal Government gets too involved in an industry? What happened in the last month dwarfs all of that by many magnitudes.

The Treasury Secretary is dictating to these companies how they should be run and who should run them. The Federal Government now controls what were -- up until last month -- vast private assets. These are extreme -- truly radical -- changes to how our society functions. Does anyone have any disagreement with any of it or is anyone alarmed by what the consequences are -- not the economic consequences but the consequences of so radically changing how things function so fundamentally and so quickly?

Other countries are debating it. The headline in the largest Brazilian newspaper this week was: "Capitalist Socialism??" and articles all week have questioned -- with alarm -- whether what the U.S. Government did has just radically and permanently altered the world economic system and ushered in some perverse form of "socialism" where industries are nationalized and massive debt imposed on workers in order to protect the wealthiest. If Latin America is shocked at the degree of nationalization and government-mandated transfer of wealth, that is a pretty compelling reflection of how extreme -- unprecedented -- it all is.

But there's virtually no discussion of that in America's dominant media outlets. All one hears is that everything that is happening is necessary to save us all from economic doom. And what's most amazing about that is that the Natural, Unchallenged Consensus That Nobody Questions can shift drastically in a matter of days and still nobody questions anything. This is what Atrios observed as I was writing this post:

It's fascinating to watch how easily consensus is manufactured. A few days ago elite opinion seemed to be cheering Paulson's "no bailout" line, and now they're cheering a trillion bucks thrown down the crapper. All the Very Serious People will spend their days coming up with their pony plans, oblivious to the fact that the pony plan is not an option. The Bush administration's plan is the option.

The way it works is that Bush officials decree how things will be, and then everyone -- from Congressional Democrats to the Serious Pundits -- jump uncritically and obediently on board, even if they were on board with the complete opposite approach just days earlier, and then all real dissent vanishes. That's how the country in general works. As Atrios says: "We've seen this game played before."

I don't pretend to know anywhere near enough -- in terms of either raw information or expertise -- in order to opine on the necessity or lack thereof of The Latest Plan in terms of whether the alternatives are worse. But what I do know is that an injustice so grave and extreme that it defies words is taking place; that the greatest beneficiaries are those who are most culpable; and that the same hopelessly broken and deeply rotted institutions and elite class that gave rise to all of this (and so much more) are the very ones that are -- yet again -- being blindly entrusted to solve this.

UPDATE: Here is the current draft for the latest plan. It's elegantly simple. The three key provisions: (1) The Treasury Secretary is authorized to buy up to $700 billion of any mortgage-related assets (so he can just transfer that amount to any corporations in exchange for their worthless or severely crippled "assets") [Sec. 6]; (2) The ceiling on the national debt is raised to $11.3 trillion to accommodate this scheme [Sec. 10]; and (3) best of all: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency" [Sec. 8].

Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

Bill O'Reilly, Wednesday night, calling for the arrest of Gawker's owners and managers:

The website knows the law, and says "you know -- I'm going to do it anyway. I dare you to come get me."

Associated Press today, on Todd Palin's refusal to comply with the Alaska State Senate's subpoena:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's husband has refused to testify in the investigation of his wife's alleged abuse of power, and key lawmakers said Thursday that uncooperative witnesses are effectively sidetracking the probe until after Election Day.

Todd Palin, who participates in state business in person or by e-mail, was among 13 people subpoenaed by the Alaska Legislature. Palin's lawyer sent a letter to the lead investigator saying Palin objected to the probe and would not appear to testify on Friday. . . .

Ignoring a legislative subpoena is punishable by a fine up to $500 and up to six months in jail under Alaska law. But courts are reluctant to intervene in legislative matters and the full Legislature must be in session to bring contempt charges, Wielechowski said. The Legislature is not scheduled to convene until January.

It is illegal in the State of Alaska to fail to comply with legislative subpoenas. But Todd Palin has announced he will do exactly that which the law prohibits for one simple reason -- because nothing can be done about it until after the election, and even then, it's unlikely much will be done to punish him for breaking the law. Sarah Palin has similarly ordered all of her aides to refuse to comply with these subpoenas even though doing so is illegal, because she, too, doubts there will be consequences for this illegal behavior. Or, as Bill O'Reilly put it in his righteous Rule of Law tirade: "I'm going to do it anyway. I dare you to come get me."

There is no doubt that the Legislature has the right to investigate and that these Subpoenaas are lawfully issued. Before Palin was selected as McCain's running mate, virtually everyone in Alaska -- including her -- agreed that the Legislature could and should investigate these allegations. From The Anchorage Daily News, July 29, 2008:

"The governor has said all along that she will fully cooperate with an investigation and her staff will cooperate as well," [Palin spokeswoman Sharon] Leighow said. . . .

Supporters as well as detractors of the Republican governor generally agreed the legislative investigation is needed into the circumstances leading up to Monegan's dismissal. . . .

Sen. Gene Therriault of North Pole, leader of the small Republican Senate minority that generally has backed Palin's policies, said he expects the governor will cooperate, and if she's cleared, the investigation could strengthen her. . . . Senate President Lyda Green, a Wasilla Republican and member of the Legislative Council, said the investigation is "absolutely" needed.

In August, Palin even praised herself for only suspending, rather than firing, one of her top aides who demanded -- in a recorded telephone call -- that the Police Commissioner fire her ex-brother-in-law by making this argument: "'While he is a state employee the governor can direct him to cooperate with [the Legislature's investigator], fulfilling her pledge that the administration will cooperate fully with the investigation,' [Palin spokesman] McAllister said."

But now, with the heavy involvement of the McCain campaign, Gov. Palin has embraced core GOP "principles" -- political officials can unilaterally exempt themselves from the rule of law and the people, through their elected representatives in the legislature, are powerless to learn what their political leaders have done. That, of course, has been the guiding principle of the Bush administration -- as one Bush official after the next has simply refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas as part of investigations into serious allegations of lawbreaking and other wrongdoing -- and the McCain campaign and the Palins are leaving no doubt that they are full-fledged believers in these corrupt and lawless prerogatives.

This sort of lawless arrogance doesn't merely insulate political officials from any accountability, though it does do that. It also destroys the crux of representative democracy. The ability of a legislature to investigate what the Executive Branch is doing isn't some ancillary Congressional function, but is as important -- arguably more so -- than the legislative power to enact laws. It's how the people ensure that Executive Branch officials are accountable and are required to adhere to the law. In his chapter he entitled On the Proper Function of Representative Bodies, John Stuart Mill explained why:

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government: to throw the light of publicity on its acts: to compel a full exposition and justification of all of them which any one considers questionable; to censure them if found condemnable, and, if the men who compose the government abuse their trust, or fulfill it in a manner which conflicts with the deliberate sense of the nation, to expel them from office, and either expressly or virtually appoint their successors.

And in his widely-cited 1885 essay on the proper role of Congress, Woodrow Wilson made clear:

It is the proper duty of a representative body to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents. . . .

Unless Congress have and use every means of acquainting itself with the acts and the disposition of the administrative agents of the government, the country must be helpless to learn how it is being served; and unless Congress both scrutinize these things and sift them by every form of discussion, the country must remain in embarrassing, crippling ignorance of the very affairs which it is most important that it should understand and direct. The informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.

That compliance by political officials with legislative subpoenas is a linchpin of how our government was designed to function was explained quite clearly long ago by the Supreme Court in its 1927 decision in McGrain v. Daugherty:

We are of opinion that the power of inquiry -- with process to enforce it -- is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function. It was so regarded and employed in American Legislatures before the Constitution was framed and ratified. . . . . Experience has taught that mere requests for such information often are unavailing, and also that information which is volunteered is not always accurate or complete; so some means of compulsion are essential to obtain what is needed. All this was true before and when the Constitution was framed and adopted. In that period the power of inquiry, with enforcing process, was regarded and employed as a necessary and appropriate attribute of the power to legislate-indeed, was treated as inhering in it.

These are the vital safeguards, the core democratic functions, which the Bush administration and now the McCain/Palin campaign are flagrantly subverting.

Anyone with doubts about the seriousness of this abuse of power investigation should just listen to the audio recording of Gov. Palin's top aide, Frank Bailey, calling the Police Commissioner's office and badgering them about firing Palin's ex-brother-in-law, repeatedly suggesting he was doing so on behalf of Palin. The sleaze and impropriety oozes off the audio. That was but one of dozens of similar communications made by close Palin associates, including her husband, prior to the time Palin fired the Police Commissioner. Palin quite implausibly denies that they did so at her behest, and has offered an endless series of shifting explanations for the firing. That's what the Legislature is trying to investigate by questioning her husband and top aides -- and that is what the Palins are now overtly impeding by breaking the law: i.e., refusing to comply with legislative subpoenas.

* * * * *

All of this unmistakably signals that a McCain/Palin administration would mean a continuation of the worst abuses of the Bush/Cheney administration. Worse, it signals their commitment to the ongoing disappearance of Congress from how our country is governed, in lieu of all-powerful and unchecked Executive leaders (that is to say nothing about what an Obama/Biden administration would mean for any of that).

Much of that trend is due to the willingness of Congress to make itself powerless and worthless. Much of it is due to an increasingly authoritarian elite class that is eager to be ruled by unchecked executive Daddy-figures -- benevolent monarchs -- who rule without limits but for our own Good (see, as but one illustrative example, this celebration from George Mason University Law Professor over the fact that the people (i.e., Congress) are playing no role in the ongoing, extraordinary, and almost entirely secret nationalization of the financial services and insurance industries and the forced assumption by citizens of their debt):

The other day, I offered my view that Congress today is fundamentally a silly place stocked with silly people. This latest situation illustrates the principle. I don't know whether Paulson and Bernanke are doing the right thing (I tend to think not). But I know for certain that I'd rather that they be making these decisions than Congress. . . .

As Congress has become more dysfunctional and unable to address matters of public importance, the Executive Branch has stepped in to fill the gap. In turn, this allows Congress to behave in an even less-serious manner, which in turn necessitates further action by the Executive Branch. If the Executive waited for Congress to do anything, nothing would get done. So Congress essentially spends its time bloviating and posturing, while the unelected beavers in the bowels of the bureaucracy crank out federal regulations. . . .

Put more generally, Congress's ridiculousness has increasingly caused it to forfeit its status a co-equal branch of government. . . .In the abstract, I am no fan of the administrative state and see the theoretical value of political accountability. But if I have to choose who I'd trust to deal with the big decisions, it is hard to make the case that Congress as it actually exists is who we want in charge.

And it's that precise anti-democratic mentality -- "the people don't need any say in what our Government does; it's best if the President rules without any political accountability" -- that has enabled Bush officials and now their would-be GOP successors simply to decide that they're above the law and that they can exempt themselves from investigation and accountability.

It ought to be striking to read an article that reports this:

(a) X is illegal under the law, punishable with fines and prison;

(b) Political official P just announced that s/he will do X;

(c) The reason is that P knows there will be no consequences for X.

That's the elimination of the rule of law and core democratic processes expressed in elementary logical terms, and that's what the AP just reported yesterday about the Palins' refusal to comply with subpoenas, and what media outlets have been reporting for years about what Bush officials have done. But it's not striking. It's now the standard way our lawless government functions.

Some adolescent criminal (in mentality if not age) yesterday hacked into a Yahoo account used by Sarah Palin for both personal and business email, and various sites -- including Gawker -- posted some of the emails online. While the bottom layers of the right-wing noise machine (the kind that make you run for the shower after reading them) are moronically describing the hacker(s) as "liberals" and "left-wing," nobody actually has any idea of their identity, let alone their political leanings (if any). The available evidence strongly suggests the hacker is loosely part of an assorted band of Internet pranksters ranging from the juvenile to the psychopathic. Conventional political agendas ("Vote Obama!") don't exactly appear to be their interest. Either way, whoever did this committed a serious crime -- it's rather revolting to see screen shots of someone's inbox splattered across the Internet -- and the hacker should be apprehended and prosecuted.

Still, it's really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years -- put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans' telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown -- all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin's privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.

And the same Surveillance State Worshipper leading today's screeching -- Michelle Malkin -- spent the last several years deriding those who objected to the President's illegal spying program as "privacy crusaders" and "constitutional absolutists" and "civil liberties absolutists".

Shouldn't these same people be standing up today and insisting that if Sarah Palin has done nothing wrong, then she should have nothing to hide? If Sarah Palin isn't committing crimes or consorting with The Terrorists, then why would she care if we can monitor her emails? And if private companies such as Yahoo can access her emails -- as they can -- then she doesn't really have any "privacy" anyway, so what's the big deal if others read through her communications, too? Isn't that the authoritarian idiocy that has been spewed since The Day That 9/11 Changed Everything -- beginning with the Constitution -- to justify vesting secret and unchecked surveillance powers in our Great and Good Leaders?

And then, even better, there is the righteous outrage over the fact that this hacker engaged in what they call [spat with whispered contempt] . . . . "illegal surveillance." Why, whoever broke into Palin's Yahoo account broke the law, and we all know that that can't be tolerated! Bill O'Reilly last night called for the FBI to arrest not only those who did the hacking, but also those who own and manage Gawker ("a despicable, slimy, scummy website"), simply for posting the emails. This is what O'Reilly said:

It's a felony -- a federal crime -- also a crime in Alaska -- to hack into people's private correspondence . . . We have no privacy left in this country anymore. The website knows the law, and says "you know -- I'm going to do it anyway. I dare you to come get me."

Indeed. What kind of grotesque monster would invade people's private communications even though they know it's illegal to do that? It's almost like this despicable criminal-hacker did something like this -- from Scott Horton's Harpers interview yesterday with The Washington Post's Barton Gellman:

For the next three months, Addington and Cheney tried to suppress a growing legal insurgency. Andy Card acknowledged to me that Bush was out of the loop. By early March, Jack Goldsmith ruled that parts of the [NSA warrantless eavesdropping] program were unlawful. Ashcroft and Comey backed him. . . .The next day, Thursday March 11, Bush renewed the program anyway. He signed new language–again written by Addington -- declaring that he, the president, was the ultimate authority on what was legal.

Notably, the people whose communications George Bush was illegally intercepting for years (with the virtually unanimous support of the authoritarian Right) were private citizens who -- unlike Sarah Palin -- had done nothing to cede their privacy, and who had not been found by any court of law to have done anything wrong or even to be suspected of wrongdoing. As despicable as I personally find the Palin hacking to be, it pales in comparison to the Bush crimes, because when someone runs for President or Vice President, they voluntarily cede vast amounts of their personal privacy, which is why they're required to disclose things like their medical records, tax returns, assocational history, and other financial documents -- all information that private Americans, at least in theory in the pre-Bush era, had the right to keep private. Those subjected to Bush's illegal surveillance programs have done nothing to cede their privacy -- other than live in a country which has decided to abolish most privacy protections.

Last night, O'Reilly angrily lamented that "we have no privacy left in this country anymore." That's the very same Bill O'Reilly who went on television last October to gravely warn that John Edwards was a "Far Leftist" and detailed all the dark things that would happen in America if Edwards were elected President:

Would you support President John Edwards? Remember, no coerced interrogation, civilian lawyers in courts for captured overseas terrorists, no branding the Iranian guards terrorists, and no phone surveillance without a specific warrant.

And then there's the McCain campaign, protesting this "shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law" even though the GOP nominee has supported every last expansion of surveillance power and stood by the President's every last violation of our surveillance laws. I wonder if the laws which the Palin hacker violated are similar to the federal statute that makes it a felony -- punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense -- to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans without warrants, or the multiple statutes (.pdf) which expressly outlaw the telecoms from allowing government spying on their customers without warrants from a court?

Maybe the hacker who invaded Sarah Palin's emails can hire lobbyists to pour money into the campaign coffers of Jay Rockefeller and Steny Hoyer so that they'll meet with Dick Cheney -- again -- and sit together and write a law to retroactively immunize him for the hacking. After all, this country has very significant problems that we need to fix. We need to look forward, not get bogged down in nasty partisan wars of the past. Besides, wasn't the hacker well-intentioned, acting as a good patriotic citizen, concerned about credible and obviously newsworthy reports from McClatchy that Sarah Palin -- just like the GOP administration she wants to succeed -- has been illegally using her personal email accounts to conduct business in order to evade subpoenas? What's a little lawbreaking among friends when the criminals can justify it afterwards with some good purpose?

All these privacy fetishists and (to use Joe Klein's term) "civil liberties extremists" screeching today over Sarah Palin's "privacy" need to get some sense of proportion. If Sarah Palin has nothing to hide, if she's not a Terrorist, why would she mind anyone going through her emails? And just because these things -- those things that some overly-earnest people call "statutes" or "laws" or whatever the new trendy Leftist term for them is today -- say that you can't invade people's private communications without committing a crime, does anyone other than shrill Leftists really take that seriously, really think that someone who does what the law says you can't do should get in trouble or -- more absurdly still -- be arrested? Isn't it time -- just like David Broder and so many other of our Elite Guardians have directed -- that we stop criminalizing our politics?