1 Boring Old Man

Eyewitness Report on Mukasey

^{I’ve been in contact with an attendee at tonight’s Federalist Society meeting where Attorney General Mukasey spoke for roughly twenty minutes before collapsing…}

^{According to this trusted eyewitness, events transpired roughly as follows.}

^{Attorney General Mukasey was roughly twenty minutes into a speech defending the administration’s torture policies and particularly arguing against prosecutions of people who made decisions in the aftermath of 9/11 (essentially arguing against what he believed amounted to the criminalization of policy differences).}

^{Some seven or eight minutes prior to the incident a heckler start shouting, calling Mukasey a "tyrant." But the AG seemed unfazed by this; and members of the audience shouted the heckler down.}

^{The eyewitness tells me that Mukasey seemed particularly in earnest about the argument he was making. And when he first began to falter it appeared he was merely choking up. Soon, what at first appeared to be choking up blended into slurred words. Twenty to thirty seconds later he collapsed, his fall broken by a nearby FBI agent…}

^{The one additional detail is that this eyewitness says that the medical personnel attending to Mukasey were talking to him for at least part of that period, at one point asking him "can you wiggle your toes." In other words, it appears that Mukasey did regain consciousness to at least some degree before being taken to the hospital…}

Paulson: crisis happens once or twice in 100 years

^{Paulson says financial crisis rare event; warns against too-strict regulation to avoid repeat. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called the financial crisis now plaguing the world economy a "once or twice" in a 100 years event, even as he warned Thursday against imposing too-strict regulations to prevent a repeat calamity.…}

^{Paulson, whose boss President George W. Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, acknowledged that the financial crisis was caused by many factors including "government inaction and mistaken actions, outdated U.S. and global financial regulatory systems, and by the excessive risk-taking of financial institutions."}

^{Still, he cautioned against the U.S. and other countries developing a too-onerous regulatory response.}

^{"If we do not correctly diagnose the causes, and instead act in haste to implement more rather than better regulations, we can do long-term harm," Paulson said in a speech in Simi Valley, Calif.}

^{Earlier this week, lawmakers blasted Paulson for his handling of a $700 billion financial bailout package to help ease the crisis and restore stability and confidence to unhinged markets…}

^{Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious – destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government… The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their complicity in what government has become.}

But my head is anything but empty. Prior to 2000, I had a sympathetic view of "Conservativism." I certainly have never been a "Conservative," but something a mentor said to me back in my formative years had always stuck with me. It was in the lead-in the 1968 election, a time of great turmoil. Dr. Muirhead was a famous guy, an early researcher in the study of Hypertension. He’d come to Memphis as a scholar, which he definitely was, and I worked under him for several years. But he was also a wise man in other areas. He once said [paraphrasing], "Don’t lament the Republicans getting elected. We need them every once in a while to cut wasteful spending and raise some money for the Democrats to spend doing the right things." I’ve kind of held that in my mind all these decades, and applied it to Conservatives as the idea that they offer a check on government becoming too big, or too involved.

That may well have been wisdom in Dr. Muirhead’s youth, but it hasn’t been wisdom for me. Living through Nixon [Ford], Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II hasn’t born out anything like wisdom. It’s been a 28 year nightmare from where I now sit – filled with corruption, mis-management, fiscal irresponsibility, etc. I’m not blaming Dr. Muirhead. He was just trying to calm down a young liberal who was too caught up in the issues of the day. I needed calming down when he said it. But maybe I got too calm.