I don’t know what to think about today’s news that Harry Reid stepped forward to stop the Baucus-Grassley jobs bill. Steve Benen says it was a stinkeroo of a bill that would not have created many jobs but which would, of course, cut taxes. Specifically, these were estate and gift tax cuts that would have created no jobs at all and which would have added billions of dollars of cost to the bill. Benen wrote yesterday,

So why would the Senate move forward on a jobs bill that’s underwhelming in the job-creating department? It’s not a mystery — in order for legislation to pass, it necessarily has to be made worse. Democrats could write a terrific jobs bill — which, you know, would create lots of jobs — but Republicans won’t let the Senate vote on it. Republicans will, however, let the chamber vote on a weaker bill that does less good.

Democrats are effectively given a straightforward choice: embrace a good bill that gets killed by GOP obstructionism, or embrace a weak bill that won’t do much good but can pass. And here’s the kicker: when Americans notice that the jobs bill didn’t deliver impressive results, it’s the Democratic majority that will get the blame, even though Dems wanted a better bill.

Reid is being skewered for being against “bipartisanship.” Some news stories suggest that too many Senate Dems told Reid the Baucus-Grassley jobs bill gave away too much to Republicans; other suggest the Dems thought Republicans weren’t going to vote for it anyway.

So it’s back to the drawing board.

You may have heard about the troop of Baptist evangelicals who got caught trying to take children out of Haiti without proper paperwork. It appears a judge in Haiti is about to release them so that they can leave Haiti (without the children).

Eugene Robinson wrote about this episode earlier this week. Essentially what the “missionaries” did was take advantage of the confusion and deprivation in post-earthquake Haiti to gather up 33 children and take them out of the country. Their stated intention was to find American families to adopt the children.

According to CNN, some of the children’s parents — who had no food or water to give their children — have since testified that they did in fact give the evangelicals permission to take their children with the understanding that they could see their children whenever they wished. This suggests to me the parents did not realize their children might be adopted by people living thousands of miles away.

As Robinsons says, “I can’t imagine more duress than trying to provide for a family in the days after a disaster of the magnitude of the Haiti earthquake. It was a moment of overwhelming need and despair — precisely the wrong moment to expect a parent or guardian to make a permanent, life-changing decision.” I can only imagine how traumatized those kids must be.

News reports say the group had made an earlier attempt to take another busload of children out of Haiti and had been stopped. Although they claimed to have proper authorizations and permissions, in neither kidnapping attempt were the evangelicals able to produce proof of this.

The group’s leader is a woman named Laura Silsby who has a history of initiating grandiose plans that later fall apart. It appears she abandoned a new home and a start-up company — leaving employees unpaid — to begin her Haitian adoption venture. She also seems to have inserted herself into the efforts of a Kentucky couple to adopt three children —

She even found a Kentucky couple, Richard and Malinda Pickett, who had been trying to adopt three siblings from Haiti and told them she could get the children out.

The Picketts say they politely declined, figuring the youngsters were safe and would soon be evacuated to their new home.

“My wife told her that under no conditions should she try to move the kids – that would just interfere with our plans. But she called two more times, and the last time she called, on the 25th, she said she was getting on a flight and would like to pick up our kids,” Richard Pickett said. “My wife, for the third time, told her no way – stay away from them.” …

… The Picketts said they were immediately suspicious of Silsby. The Kentucky couple didn’t need her help – the government had already given them permission to go pick up the children. But Silsby persisted, they said.

She showed up at the Compassion for All orphanage in Haiti, asking to collect the Picketts’ three adopted children and claiming to be Malinda Pickett’s friend, according to Richard Pickett.

When the orphanage told her the children had been moved, Silsby went on to ask for any other kids she could have, Richard Pickett said. She paid a worker to take her to other orphanages in the region and translate for her.

“She asked for kids at each of the orphanages, and at the end of the day when no one would give her any, she cried,” Richard Pickett said. “Why would you cry after you see these kids are being taken care of?”

The Picketts’ adopted children are now with the couple in Bowling Green, Ky. Richard Pickett said he was recently interviewed by an agent with the Department of Homeland Security who is helping investigate the Silsby case.

By all appearances Silsby is massively screwed up. One suspects some kind of personality disorder. But she apparently had the blessing of her Baptist pastor back in Idaho to round up random poor children and spirit them out of the country and put up for adoption.

Although there has been speculation Silsby and her crew intended to make a fast buck by selling the kids into servitude, I suspect she really did intend to see them adopted. The Southern Baptist convention has been promoting adoption, especially adoptions from poor, non-Christian places. (For more background on the Christian adoption craze, go here.) They seem to think the poor places of the world are stuffed with unwanted babies waiting to be adopted, but in fact most abandoned children are older children. Unwanted babies are relatively rare; at least, there are not nearly enough of them to meet the demand.

However, because there is demand, there is a growing black market of babies who were either stolen or purchased.

In 2007, 98 percent of U.S. adoptions from Guatemala were babies who had never seen the inside of an institution were signed over directly to a private attorney who approved the international adoption—for a very considerable fee—without any review by a judge or social service agency.

For a taste of the sheer arrogance of some of these “adopters,” check out this personal account:

It didn’t matter to us that the nurses in the orphanage across the seas still called these boys “Maxim” and “Sergei”; we had on their walls nameplates reading “Benjamin” and “Timothy.” It didn’t matter what their current birth certificates read; they would soon be Moores.

This newness of identity also informed the way we responded to questions, whether from social workers or friends, about whether we planned to “teach the children about their cultural heritage.” We assured everyone we would, and we have.

Now, what most people meant by this question is whether we would teach our boys Russian folk-tales and Russian songs, observing Russian holidays, and so forth. But as we see it, that’s not their heritage anymore, and we hardly want to signal to them that they are strangers and aliens, even welcome ones, in our home.

We teach them about their heritage, but their heritage as Mississippians. They learn about their great-grandfather, the faithful Baptist pastor, about their countrymen before them in the Confederate army and the civil rights movement. They wouldn’t know “Peter and the Wolf” if they heard it, but they do know Charley Pride and Hank Williams and “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” They are Moores now, with all that entails.

One adopter wrote,

… we also have the advantage of understanding our host culture’s worldview and their very deep superstitious beliefs. thus, we were not surprised that sterling was given to us with a jade luck charm – a buddhist charm meant to bring good luck, fortune and protection. we, however, know that this charm is associated with spiritual forces meant to keep people in bondage. thus, we smiled and accepted it as we should, and then later went to the park, broke it, and threw it into the pond, and prayed for our sterling that all spiritual bondage over him would be broken. these spiritual forces are alive and real, and manifest themselves in more obvious ways (but with the same degree of power) than in the west, but we know that the power and grace of the God who created the heavens and the earth is infinitely greater than the forces of evil

The original post is now password protected, but not before it got copied and linked all over the Web.

Gone.

I think it’s time to remind people that in the early Red Scares, post-Bolshevik Revolution, communism didn’t represent “totalitarianism” but “anarchy.” In early anti-communist literature, “communist” and “anarchist” are used as synonyms. You see this in this 1920 essay by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds.” The case Palmer makes is not that Communism would create an oppressive totalitarian state but that it would destroy all authority and let lawlessness and crime run rampant.

Of course, as government calling themselves “communist” became ruthlessly dictatorial, peoples’ ideas about communism shifted. But Marx’s original vision was of a society without government where free people, unencumbered by class distinctions, would communally and democratically make decisions together. Yeah, it didn’t work.

I thought of this after reading the comment thread attached to this post at Reason. The blogger dutifully criticizes Sen. Richard Shelby for holding up nominations just to secure pork for Alabama. But most of the commenters don’t see it that way. Example:

Yes,Team Blue is in power.They hold the executive and legislative branches of government.When Team Red is trying to constrain state power I’m rooting for them.

Exactly how Shelby’s act of grandstanding isn’t “state power” also eludes me.

Anyway, some of the commenters refer to themselves as “an-cap,” which I take it stands for “anarchist-capitalist.” The an-caps are opposed to all government, period. When one person issued a challenge, “Who enforces your contracts,” an an-cap had a ready answer — a link to this document, “Privatizing the Adjudication of Disputes,” in which a couple of whackjobs seriously argue in favor of a private, for-profit criminal justice system.

Just read it. It’s one of the most jaw-dropping-ridiculous things I’ve ever seen. The bozos authors criticize the “near-monopoly of law that most governments possess,” and argue in favor of putting “public” courts out of business.

Here’s a radical idea of returning to the good old days:

Legal centralists posit that legal systems must govern everyone to function at all. If lawbreakers could simply drop out of the system, law could hardly protect us from their misdeeds. And yet, history contains many instances of pluralistic legal systems in which multiple sources of law existed in one geographic region. These were much more sophisticated than primitive law. In medieval Europe, for example, canon law, royal law, feudal law, manorial law, mercantile law, and urban law co-existed; none was automatically supreme over the others. Naturally, some jurisdictional conflicts occurred. But this system of concurrent jurisdiction overlapped with a period of economic development (c.1050-1250), not a period of chaos and impoverishment. Apparently these diverse systems did what Thomas Hobbes declared impossible: They created social order and peace in the absence of a distinct, supreme sovereign.

Look at the time peoriod — they are talking about the glory days of European feudalism, folks. I guess you could say there was social order and peace, but there was also serfdom. The real thing, not the kind Friedrich von Hayek wrote about. If you were one of the privileged few born into the aristocracy, I guess life probably was pretty sweet. But otherwise, Hobbes was right — for serfs, life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Here’s the conclusion of the paper:

For arbitration to live up to its full potential, however, government has to stop holding it back. Public courts should, as a matter of policy, respect contracts that specify final and binding arbitration. Legislatures should abolish laws that hamper ostracism, boycott, and other non-violent private enforcement methods. These small changes would make private courts much more attractive than they already are – and go a long way toward putting the public courts out of business.

“Private enforcement methods.” It sounds so banal. As in sending around that nice Vinnie “the Nickle” De Luca to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Before long a small coterie of people with means will have a monopoly on “private enforcement.” That’s not at all what the authors of the paper intend, of course, but it’s how their ideas would turn out in the real world.

The early Marxist ideal was to eliminate private property, and utopia would follow. The an-caps think that by making everything private, utopia will follow. Both groups value human freedom and desire an end to oppression. Put into practice, seems to me both inevitably lead to the utter subjugation of most people under the rule of a powerful few. Extremists may go around opposite sides of the circle, and their rhetoric and ideals may be utterly different, but sooner or later they end up in the same place.

This is grossly over-simple, but it’s how politics works. Extremist ideas all end up in about the same place, whether they originated on the Left or the Right. That’s because ideas that aren’t based in reality and real human nature generally pave the way for oppression and, eventually, totalitarianism. Anarchism has never brought about greater freedom; it just sets up conditions for some sort of Strong Man, whether tribal warlords or a national dictator, to step into the power vacuum.

All we can hope is that “an-cap” ideas never get put into practice.

For another perspective on Shelby et al., see Krugman.

One of the bright spots in the recent SOTU speech was about stopping subsidies to private student loan lenders. This practice is a huge ripoff for everybody, students and taxpayers alike. Cutting out the “middleman” could free up billions of dollars that could be loaned to students directly by government. Or we could just subsidize education, period. But that’s another rant.

Well, apparently loan industry lobbyists have brought the plan to a stop.

All together: ARRRRRGHHHH!

Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put a “blanket hold” on at least 70 of President Obama’s nominations, meaning the nominations can’t be voted on by the Senate until the Dems put together a 60-vote majority. Apparently the Senator is holding the nominations hostage until he gets two lucrative programs for Alabama: a $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers and an explosive device testing lab.

It’s not clear to me how one Senator could put a hold on nominations, but several sources are reporting this.

I may have more to say about this later. Right now I’m just feeling pure disgust.

Update: Ezra Klein explains how the “hold” thing works.

Surfing around this morning, looking for something to blog about, finding a big pile o’ nothin’.

Recently the President suggested that during tough times, people shouldn’t “blow a bunch of cash in Vegas.” This has been blown up into a scandal. The White House had to issue a statement that the President supports the tourism industry.

Righties are still outraged that the “Underpants Bomber” was read Miranda rights, even after it was revealed the “Shoe Bomber” of 2001 also was read Miranda rights. William Jacobson argues that “Bush did it too” doesn’t make something correct, and for once I agree with him. But this is only a “scandal” because to righties the only way to handle an accused terrorist is to torture him, preferable on video. However, by all accounts the Underwear Bomber is providing actionable intelligence.

We learn that Gov. Mark Sanford didn’t break his marriage vows, because he had the “faithfulness” clause removed when he got married.

Senator Chris Dodd says the President’s new plans to rein in Wall Street are “too grand.” Dear Senator Dodd: STFU.

The health care reform bill is still stalled, and Francisco Franco is still dead.