The old saw says that the two things no one wants to see being made are laws and sausages.  That’s probably unfair to sausages:

Buried in a 239-page amendment to the U.S. House of Representatives’ financial regulatory overhaul is a provision that appears to do just one thing: exempts financial-services company USAA from some of the bill’s tougher provisions.

The carve-out is one of a number of exceptions that allow companies to avoid fresh scrutiny envisioned by the White House, which is aiming to overhaul the nation’s financial-regulatory apparatus. The beneficiaries run from corporations such as General Electric Co. and Pitney Bowes Inc. to USAA, which caters to members of the military and their families, to so-called fraternal benefit societies.

But for those of you who think more financial regulation is necessary to avoid future financial crises, and that therefore exempting certain companies is problematic, no need to worry:

Referring to USAA, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) said … “There’s no remote prospect of them being a problem.”

From the Times of London:

Nursery-age children should be monitored for signs of brainwashing by Islamist extremists, according to a leaked police memo obtained by The Times.

In an e-mail to community groups, an officer in the West Midlands counter-terrorism unit wrote: “I do hope that you will tell me about persons, of whatever age, you think may have been radicalised or be vulnerable to radicalisation … Evidence suggests that radicalisation can take place from the age of 4.”

The police unit confirmed that counter-terrorist officers specially trained in identifying children and young people vulnerable to radicalisation had visited nursery schools.

The trouble signs surrounding Lend America had been building for years. A top executive was convicted of mortgage fraud but still helped run the company. Home loans made by its headquarters were defaulting at an extremely high rate. Federal prosecutors alleged in a civil suit that the company falsified loan documents and committed fraud.

Yet despite these red flags, a little-known federal agency continued giving its blessing to Lend America, allowing it to do business in the name of the U.S. government. The Government National Mortgage Association, known as Ginnie Mae, authorized the firm to bundle its mortgages into securities and sell them to investors around the world — all backed by U.S. taxpayer money.

Until last week, federal housing officials said that Lend America met requirements for participating in the program run by Ginnie Mae, an agency in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and allowed the firm to sell more than $1 billion in mortgages via Ginnie Mae securities.

Read the whole story; it gets worse.  The root of the recent financial crisis, and the growing seed of the next one, is the U.S. obsession with subsidizing homeownership.

Yesterday I signed up my son up for driver’s ed classes.  Under a recent revision of the laws in Massachusetts, parents must also attend two hours of classes, so I get to go as well.

Does this requirement accomplish anything?  Hard to see how.  Just two hours down the drain.

Consider this headline from today’s New York Times:

Coordinated Bombings Kill at Least 101 in Baghdad

Does that sound like a country that has achieved peace and understanding?  And we still have over 100,000 troops there.   Not to mention that since the Iraq surge, violence has escalated in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Once we leave (if we leave), civil war seems almost inevitable.  This does not mean we should stay; that just delays the inevitable, and at a large, ongoing cost.  But we should not kid ourselves about what will happen once we are gone.

Like public health care, Canada’s tight gun-control laws help distinguish the country from its powerful neighbor to the south. But as Canadians commemorated the 20th anniversary of one of the country’s most notorious shooting sprees on Sunday, their Parliament was on course to eliminate one of its most significant gun-control measures.

A long-gun registry, which requires the registration of rifles and shotguns, emerged largely from public revulsion over the massacre in 1989.

What should libertarians think about gun control laws, like long-gun registration in Canada, that inconvenience purchasers but do not, by themselves, prevent responsible persons from owning guns?

My view is that the direct costs of such laws are small, but so are the direct benefits.  It is possible that registration occassionally allows police to solve a crime or remove a gun from an unstable situation, but the number of such instances is rare.   Thus, it is hard to get excited about such laws, for or against, if one considers only their direct impact.

The crucial question is slippery slopes.  If mild controls like registration or background checks pave the way for more serious laws – bans on some or all guns – then in my judgment mild laws cause substantial harm.

What does the evidence say about slippery slopes?  Most countries had no gun control laws a century ago, and their initial laws were “mild.”  Yet over time gun control has expanded enormously, and in some countries it amounts to virtual prohibition.   This is consistent with slopes being slippery.

Given this, and my view that mild laws rarely generate direct benefits, I oppose all gun control laws, including mild ones.

In the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference, countries from China to Singapore have pledged cuts to their greenhouse-gas emissions.

One question still lurks unanswered: Who is going to pay for it?

Short answer: no one.  So any agreements made in Copenhagen will pretend to cut emissions but will not impose any mechanism for achieving those cuts.

More broadly, no international agreement will ever achieve meaningful reductions in emissions because the costs created and the cross-country transfers implied would require a level of coercion that the relevant powers are not willing to utilize.

So it is time to accept that whatever climate change is going to happen is going to happen, and learn to adapt to whatever costs this creates.

The national battle over abortion, for decades firmly planted outside the Kansas clinic of Dr. George R. Tiller, has erupted here in suburban Omaha, where a longtime colleague has taken up the cause of late-term abortions.

Since Dr. Tiller was shot to death in May, his colleague, Dr. LeRoy H. Carhart, has hired two people who worked at Dr. Tiller’s clinic and has trained his own staff members in the technical intricacies of performing late-term abortions.

Dr. Carhart has also begun performing some abortions “past 24 weeks,” he said in an interview, and is prepared to perform them still later if they meet legal requirements and if he considers them medically necessary.

What should the dividing line be for legal, late-term abortion?  I do not have a good answer, but I offer a few thoughts.

1. The frequency of late-term abortions is likely to be low, even when legal, because so many people – including some doctors and nurses – oppose them.  For example,

The late-term abortions, coming after the earliest point when a fetus might survive outside the womb, are the most controversial, even among some who favor abortion rights. A few of Dr. Carhart’s employees quit when he told them of his plans to expand the clinic’s work.

2. It is easy to demonize late-term abortions as immoral, yet banning them can harm women who face serious health risks from carrying a baby to term.

3. A reasonable way to balance competing concerns is to leave the legality of late-term abortion (like abortion generally) to individual states.  A few will permit late-term abortions, but most will significantly restrict or outlaw.  This hodgepodge may not be ”perfect,” but no perfect solution exists.   Any federal involvement – for or against late term abortions – is likely to do more harm than good.

The esstate tax is currently scheduled to disappear entirely in 2010 and then return in 2011 at a rate above that currently in place.   The incentive created by this policy is to keep your rich but ailing grandmother alive for another month; then, make sure her docs pull the cord before midnight on December 31st, 2011.

The right fix to this idiocy, of course, is to eliminate the estate tax: it punishes savings, creates windfalls for estate lawyers and accountants, and raises little revenue.

This is not going to happen, however:

The House approved Thursday a measure making the current estate tax rate permanent, overcoming the objections of an unusual coalition of liberal and conservative critics.

The bill passed, 225 to 200, with 26 Democrats joining all Republicans present to vote no. It would make permanent the current estate tax rate of 45 percent, with an exemption of $3.5 million per individual.

New York lawmakers on Wednesday rejected a bill that would have made their state the sixth to allow gay marriage, stunning advocates who suffered a similar decision by Maine voters just last month.

The New York measure needed 32 votes to pass and failed by a wider-than-expected margin, falling eight votes short in a 24-38 decision by the state Senate. The Assembly had earlier approved the bill, and Gov. David Paterson, perhaps the bill’s strongest advocate, had pledged to sign it.

The outcomes in New York and Maine are disappointing because they would have represented legislative legalization of gay marriage, rather than judicial imposition.   The former is more likely to reflect the general will of the people and therefore be more stable.

I wonder whether advocates of gay marriage would have greater success if they focussed on civil unions, rather than marriage per se.  While the actual difference is small to non-existent, the symbolic difference seems to be large.  Widespread adoption of civil union need not be the ultimate goal, but it represents a significant, positive step.

The ultimate goal, of course, should not be marriage for opposite and same-sex couples; it should be civil unions for both, with marriages a private matter left to religions.   The strategy of adopting civil unions for same-sex couples would not necessarily achieve this goal, but the current strategy does not appear especially successful either.