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From Reuters:

By a show of hands, the National Assembly rejected Thursday a bill concerning hacking on the Internet which would have enacted a “measured reaction” up to and including the suspension of internet access for the authors of illegal downloading.

This dramatic turn of events was caused by the absence of deputies of the UMP, the majority in the Palace-Bourbon.

When the results were announced, the elected officials from the left rose to applaud.

It will be interesting to see if their counterparts in the U.S. will do the same if and when they are confronted by similar legislation.

This is really cute:

California mega-church pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life Rick Warren says he apologized to his homosexual friends for making comments in support of California’s Proposition 8, and now claims he “never once even gave an endorsement” of the marriage amendment.

Monday night on CNN’s Larry King Live, Pastor Rick Warren apologized for his support of Prop. 8, California’s voter-approved marriage protection amendment, saying he has “never been and never will be” an “anti-gay or anti-gay marriage activist.”

“During the whole Proposition 8 thing, I never once went to a meeting, never once issued a statement, never — never once even gave an endorsement in the two years Prop. 8 was going,” Warren claimed.

The referenced article shows, however, that he certainly did endorse it.

The more I follow Rick Warren, the less admiration I have for him.  And this is only the last nail in the coffin.

Perhaps he and others who were behind Proposition 8 could have avoided their present debacle if they had taken heed to the following, on this blog in August 2007:

Before Christians in California go off and begin a quest for a constitutional amendment, they need to think about a few things.

First, without going into a long theological dissertation, marriage for the Christian is an institution of God.  Allowing the state to dictate the terms and conditions of that institution as blithely as American Christians do is a mistake.  We’ve already seen that many of those terms and conditions have been changed at law.  The opinions of both the Governor and Jr. Brown confirm the obvious: with marriage, what the state gives, the state can take away.  (The phrase “rational legislative purpose” is absurd; legislatures do all kind of things for all kinds of reasons, rational and irrational.)  The “rights” of civil marriage are in reality very ephemeral, which makes one wonder why some are fighting so hard to obtain them.

Second, in order for a constitutional amendment to be meaningful, it would have to enumerate each and every one of the rights that its proponents wish to preserve, which would make quite an amendment to write, let alone get through the referendum process.

Third, preserving the rights at the state level doesn’t do anything at the federal level.  What I specifically have in mind are the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code, which have the stability of Burnham Wood.  An example of this is the back and forth on estate and gift taxes, documented here.

Finally, ending civil marriage ends the quest for same-sex civil marriage.  This is why proponents of same generally oppose the abolition of civil marriage.  It will be interesting to see how advocates of same-sex civil marriage react to this.

But they didn’t, and Warren should have the courage of his convictions to stick to his guns on this.

One of the core problems with Evangelicalism in this country today is that it’s led by bourgeois, short-sighted chickens, and Warren is obviouly Exhibit A to demonstrate that this is so.

Or at least that’s what University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos thinks:

Decisions such as the Iowa Supreme Court’s recent announcement that the state’s constitution requires the state to make same-sex monogamous marriage legal pose a practical dilemma for those of us who support gay marriage, but oppose the more egregious varieties of legal hocus-pocus.

And make no mistake—the court’s decision is a bunch of question-begging nonsense, poorly disguised by a smokescreen of law talk.

Stripped of its verbiage, the court’s opinion comes down to the following claims: First, it’s a bad thing for the state to treat people differently on the basis of sexual orientation, unless the state has a good enough reason. Second, the reasons the state gave for treating same sex-couples differently from opposite-sex couples in regard to marriage weren’t good enough.

That’s it. These conclusions might raise various questions in the mind of someone who hasn’t enjoyed the benefits of a legal education. Such as, what was the court’s basis for these claims? Is there anything specifically “legal” about these conclusions? And how did the judges figure this stuff out, especially given that it took more than a century before anyone noticed Iowa’s constitution contained this requirement?

Personally, I think a decision like this (and the whole fracas in California, and elsewhere) is one good argument for dumping civil marriage altogether.  And there are more.

He did make one statement that I found especially fascinating:

To dive into the law talk for a moment, the court said it was interpreting the equal-protection clause of the Iowa constitution, which, like the U.S. Constitution, guarantees the state’s citizens that they will be treated equally by the law.

Yet, just as in the case of the federal constitution, this phrase is, as a practical matter, meaningless. It’s meaningless because a legal directive telling the government to treat people equally in and of itself decides nothing. As my old criminal-law professor Peter Westen pointed out in a famous article 25 years ago, in terms of legal-decision-making, equality is an empty idea.

In an Elitist Snob society, equality is both an empty idea and a dead letter.  When you centralise power and the ability of people to obtain that power, you by necessity stratify society.  And that stratification eviscerates equality on a practical level, irrespective of whether you make it a mantra or not.

From Charles Freeman, via John Ross Crooks, currency trader:

“One [longer term strategic issue] is very apposite today, and that is the future of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. At Bretton Woods, the dollar became the global reserve currency, backed by gold. A quarter century later, Nixon eliminated the gold backing for our currency.

Dollar hegemony has been central to our ability to basically go off the tracks fiscally and financially here. It has enabled us to avoid addressing all sorts of problems with which we’re now afflicted, and it has enabled us to avoid having financial discipline being imposed on us of the sort we have insisted be imposed on every other country under IMF (International Monetary Fund) guidelines.

The role of the dollar as a universal currency for reserve and trade settlement purposes is absolutely central to our international power and reach. Furthermore, we have used the fact that the dollar is an extension of our sovereignty to impose unilateral sanctions all over the place and to manipulate the global banking sector to enforce our policies, even when those policies — say, with respect to Iran — are not supported by others.

So we have a big stake in this, and when we get the dollar into trouble, as we have done, this is very, very fundamental. We now have China, Russia, Brazil, India, South Korea, at least, and very likely others, calling for the gradual elimination of the dollar as a reserve currency and its replacement by stages with something else — in the case of the Chinese proposal, with special drawing rights under the IMF.

I’ve seen this coming for well over a year, and have been talking about it. It’s now upon us, and it is not a problem you can send the fleet to solve. In the end, if you create a situation where people don’t want dollars, there’s nothing you can do about that. So I think this is a strategic issue.”

The end of dollar hegemony will make the debt we owe foreign governments, corporations and individuals real, which makes the payback real.  Give the level of debt we have, that is a gargantuan thought.  The end of dollar hegemony is the end of American hegemony, and that would impact a society which is as oblivious to real consequences for actions as we are.

Many Evangelicals are trumpeting that we are about to have a world currency to supplant the dollar, which is a necessary prerequisite to the end of history.  Any currency that aspires to become the world’s reserve currency must have proper management and strong backing.  At this juncture I don’t see that emerging.  It’s one thing for countries and individuals to trumpet a new currency, it’s quite another to get them to agree to it.  For nations to allow their own money to be supplanted, they would have to both have confidence in the new money and the belief that the new money would be better for them than the old.

Beyond that, proper management at the international “government” level is an oxymoron, and more people know that than will admit it.

If I were preaching, I’d focus my hearers on their heavenly country and its resources rather than watching the end times clock.  But I’m just a layman…

The Elitist Snob discovers that the Europeans aren’t on the same wavelength as he is:

While President Nicolas Sarkozy of France did not repeat an earlier threat to walk out of the conference – “I just got here,” he joked – he made it clear he would reject an agreement that puts off stringent new regulations on banks, tax havens, and hedge funds.

“The decisions need to be taken now, today and tomorrow,” he said. “This has nothing to do with ego. This has nothing to do with temper tantrums. When it comes to historic moments, you can’t circumvent them.”

Mr. Sarkozy added that tougher regulation – he has called for a “global regulator” that would be able to reach inside the borders of the United States and other large nations to deal with international financial firms – is “nonnegotiable.”

The Chinese author Lu Xun’s greatest work was the short story The True Story of Ah Q (I also got to see the movie when in Hong Kong on my last trip to China.)  One of the more memorable characters was the Imitation Foreign Devil, shown at right affecting the Western top hat, coat and cane.  He was obviously not to be confused with the real article.

Obama is, along with many other elitist snobs in this society, an Imitation European.  He wants to impose a European socialist model on this country, and has the legislative initiatives to prove it.  He is prepared not to waste this crisis to make to make that a reality.

Well, the Real Europeans aren’t prepared to waste it either.  They want to further their own agenda, which includes a) striking a blow at the tax cheats which are part and parcel with European business and b) getting at the Americans who, in their opinion, have snookered them with what Alan Greenspan famously referred to as “irrational exuberance.”

Unfortunately their agenda is unacceptable to Obama for two reasons.  The first is that many of those irrationally exuberant were his major supporters and contributors.  They may be having second thoughts about their exuberance for him but he can’t afford to expose them to the tender mercies of the Europeans, just yet.  The second is that Americans–even such as Obama–only recognise one form of extraterritoriality: their own.  (That will make Obama’s response to Spain’s attempt to arrest Bush officials really interesting.)

Beyond that, Obama is in the process of repeating his father’s mistakes, or at least those of his father’s generation of African leaders.  Coming straight out of the chute of colonialism, these leaders (of which Robert Mugabe is the last of the breed) saw a European model of socialism and bureaucratism (I’m not sure that’s a word, but it’s the best I can do) as the model for Africa.  Needless to say, it degenerated rapidly, and Africa is only now coming out of that.  Barack Obama’s attempt to be an Imitation European will have similar consequences if he pursues it on these shores.

They used to say that in the old Soviet Union about the end result of this:

But now, in a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” would impose government controls on the pay of all employees — not just top executives — of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

Actually, in one way we’ve been here before.

In the Internal Revenue Code there exists the concept of “excess compensation.”  The idea is that compensation above certain limits is not deductible to a corporation, in the same way that dividends are not.  As this post explains, there are all kinds of hoops that corporations go through to get around this limitation, but if Congress really wanted to put the hurts on executive compensation they could pitch these hoops and that would be that.

In closely held corporations, such hoops are harder to fulfil, so this is a constant sword of Damocles over those.  But it’s remarkable that so few Americans know about this.  In the past the Internal Revenue Service has been used to enforce all kinds of social policy, and it will be interesting to see if the Obama Administration will revert to using the IRS in this way on a widespread basis, or will chose to use other blunt instruments (as they have done with all of their bailouts) to impose their will.