From Investor’s Business Daily:

Rep. Barney Frank, the Democrat who sits atop Congress’ efforts to deal with the financial crisis, has enough chutzpah for 100 politicians — which is saying a lot.

In comments before testimony from both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed chief Ben Bernanke Tuesday, Frank said he wants to regulate pay on Wall Street — even for companies that aren’t getting bailouts.

And he called retention bonuses — a time-honored practice on Wall Street and elsewhere in America in which key employees are compensated for their enormous value — "extortion" and "bribes."

Frank, one of the chief architects of the housing mess that’s brought us so low, isn’t satisfied merely with pretending he and his Democratic pals aren’t to blame for all this. No, exploiting voter anger over the now-infamous AIG bonuses, he also wants to dictate to American capitalism what it can earn and what it can’t.

This is the kind of thing that normally happens in Third World countries ruled by tinhorn dictators, or in fascist states, where the democratic rule of law has collapsed. Not the U.S.

Yet, that’s where we find ourselves today, isn’t it? Democrats in Congress, who steadfastly rejected virtually all efforts to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they went on the wildest, most irresponsible lending binge in the history of finance, now pose themselves as the saviors of fallen capitalism.

The hypocrisy is nothing short of stunning.

Take Frank. As we’ve written before, he spearheaded congressional Democrats’ efforts in 1992, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2005 to block reform of Fannie and Freddie.

Those two "government-sponsored enterprises" were the nexus of this crisis, holding $5.4 trillion of the $12 trillion in U.S. mortgages, while originating or funding 90% of the subprime market.

Their failures presaged the subsequent financial meltdown from which we’re still trying to regain our economic footing.

Then there’s Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, another posturing moralist in the flap over AIG bonuses. He turns out to have inserted the bonuses into the bailout legislation in the first place.

An innocent move? Please note Dodd was No. 1 on the list of recipients of AIG’s political contributions. Also that his wife was a former director of IPC Holdings, a company controlled by AIG.

We wish all this tinkering with the private sector was limited to Congress. But it isn’t. The Treasury wants what the Washington Post called Tuesday "unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy."

Citing the AIG precedent, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs defended this radical move, saying on CNN, "We need resolution authority to go in and be able to change contracts, be able to change the business model, unwind what doesn’t work."

Breathtaking. Coupled with the vast expansion of government spending over the next 10 years, this is socialism, pure and simple.

Yes, we know it’s unfashionable to use the "S" word. But we’re willing to be unhip in the service of the truth.

It’s a frightening thing to see a once mighty, and free, capitalist economy placed under the heel of an incompetent government. But that’s precisely what’s happening now.

Executive pay, the focus of much public fury right now, is only the start. Your pay will be next, rest assured. So hold on to your wallets, sure, but also hold on even tighter to something even more precious that now seems at risk: your freedom.

 From an article in The American Prospect:

Despite valiant efforts to assure their people that nothing is wrong, the autocrats cannot cover their economic holes. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, after first mocking the financial crisis as a danger to the West, now admits, "The fall in oil prices due to the current global financial crisis may have a negative influence on the economy of Venezuela." In Russia, where the stock market has fallen by some 70 percent since last spring and the ruble has weathered fierce attacks, Vladimir Putin recently declared he would launch new tax cuts because of the steep drop in Russia’s economy. As Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, "Russia is confronting virtually all the negatives at once – sharply declining export earnings from energy and metals, overleveraged corporate balance sheets and a chorus of bailout appeals, a credit crunch and banking failures, a bursting real-estate bubble." While unemployment, poverty, and unrest indicate cracks in the system of autocracy, there are signs that a nascent movement toward liberal democracy could take its place. Indeed, increasing numbers of Chinese are challenging the government, and in December, 303 Chinese intellectuals signed and published a daring manifesto called Charter 08, which demands an end to one-party rule. Charter 08 is only one sign that the autocracies are feeling the pressure. In Venezuela, Chavez’s allies lost ground to opposition parties in recent regional elections. In Russia, a worried President Dmitri Medvedev recently instructed police to stamp out social unrest caused by the downturn. In December, the police arrested some 100 people at a protest in the poor eastern city of Vladivostok; at roughly the same time, 1,000 people attended a protest in Moscow against the government. Even in the Persian Gulf and Central Asian states, normally some of the quietest parts of the world, the crisis has had political consequences. Kazakh activists have started holding rallies against the government, previously a rare occurrence in the country. Iran, too, faces instability. Inflation in the Islamic Republic is now running near 30 percent, and a powerful cleric mused publicly that the crisis could do "big damage." The autocrats clearly are worried. In addition to cracking down on the Charter 08 signers and other activists, Beijing recently announced a stimulus package worth $586 billion. In Gansu, local officials actually met with the protest leaders and vowed to invest some $3 billion in the area. The autocracies have money to burn. China has stockpiled nearly $2 trillion but is eating it up fast. Russia is spending nearly $10 billion a week defending the ruble, to little avail, as the value of the currency keeps plummeting. Though they can plow money into their economies, the autocratic leaders cannot make Western consumers shop or guzzle gas and so are powerless to control their major economic engines. And if regimes like Chavez’s try to get their economies under control by cutting government spending, they risk undermining their own power, which was bolstered by government social-welfare programs that often targeted the middle classes whose support they now need. Unlike 20th-century autocrats, such as Fidel Castro, who led their countries in wars of independence, most of today’s leaders came up through the political system and have no revolutionary bona fides to play. The modern authoritarian governments long ago abandoned real ideology. (Chavez is an exception: He has tried to fashion a modern statist ideology he calls the "Bolivarian Revolution.") China remains a nominally communist country…

In order to improve their standing on the world stage, today’s autocrats at least try to create the facade of democracy. Their people know about democratic movements in other countries, can access free media, and are not easily subdued. Because the authoritarian governments have created some semblance of a legal system, workers have begun to think they have rights. Compared to the 1980s, when word of demonstrations in China was passed from person to person, today middle-class demonstrators organize by text message, and news of protests quickly appears on Chinese blogs. Chinese and foreign reporters can also follow protests, making it harder for the security forces to get away with a real crackdown.

Neither the short term nor the long term looks good for Moscow, Beijing, and the other autocrats. In the near future, their economies will slow down severely and, in the case of Russia, likely fall into a serious recession. In China, many analysts believe unemployment will rise to its highest level in a decade. Growth is likely to dip below 8 percent, the magic number needed to keep creating enough jobs for all the people entering the work force in China.

Millions of Chinese migrant workers who can no longer find factory jobs will return to the interior of the country. Back in rural areas, anger is already rising. These unemployed workers, who have seen the wealth of urban elites in cities like Shanghai, could begin organizing larger demonstrations, smashing up local Communist Party offices and even attacking local officials. Middle-class protests are likely to rise as well – over issues of government competence like safety, land prices, and land evictions. Since the urbanites have media connections, they are able to get their stories onto Chinese blogs and news sites. Recently, parents of Chinese children who were made ill or died from tainted milk gathered together to push the government for better health care, refusing the regime’s attempts to essentially buy them off. (The government recently sentenced two people to death for playing a key role in the tainted-milk scandal.)

Thus far, the autocracies have kept groups of people with grievances against the government from forming united fronts. Moscow has achieved this through the skillful use of nationalism, which drives a wedge between liberal Russians and ethnic minorities with grievances against the government. Beijing has used a combination of crackdowns and payoffs to top demonstrators to keep labor protests separate from one another, preventing them from developing a common theme or common leaders.

Divide and conquer, though, won’t work forever. In China, rural and urban protests might soon begin to link up – through activist networks, religious groups, or blogs – and form a national protest. Charter 08 and a nationwide taxi-driver strike, both organized on the Internet, are a first hint of this nationwide movement.

The Great Depression fed dangerous new autocratic ideologies like fascism and communism; a second Great Depression could destroy them. While the economic crisis will cause untold human suffering in these and other countries, it is quite possible that, on the other side of it, we will see the end of that distinctive phenomenon of the late 1990s and early 21st century: the growth autocracy… 

Except perhaps in the US, where it is only just beginning?

 Thomas Sowell writes in part (read it all here):

We are not yet a banana republic, though that is the direction in which some of our politicians are taking us– especially those politicians who make a lot of noise about "compassion" and "social justice."

What makes this all the more painfully ironic is that it is precisely those members of Congress who have had the most to do with creating the risks that led to the current economic crisis who are making the most noise against others, and summoning people before their committee to be browbeaten and humiliated on nationwide television.

No one pushed harder than Congressman Barney Frank to force banks and other financial institutions to reduce their mortgage lending standards, in order to meet government-set goals for more home ownership. Those lower mortgage lending standards are at the heart of the increased riskiness of the mortgage market and of the collapse of Wall Street securities based on those risky mortgages.

Senator Christopher Dodd has played the same role in the Senate as Barney Frank played in the House of Representatives. Now both are summoning government employees and the officials of financial institutions before their committees to be lambasted in front of the media.

Dodd and Frank know that the best defense is a good offense. Both know how hard it would be to defend their own roles in the housing debacle, so they go on the offensive against others who are in no position to reply in kind, given the vindictive powers of Congress.

This political theater is in one sense cheap beyond words. In another sense, it is costly beyond words.

It is cheap because the politicians who are creating this distraction from their own role also voted for the very legislation that enabled contracted bonuses to be paid by companies like AIG that received government bailout money. If members of Congress can’t be bothered to read the laws they pass, then they have no basis for whipping up lynch mob outrage against people who did read the law and acted within the law…

Whether the particular executives who received bonuses were the ones responsible for AIG’s problems, or were among those who warned against those problems, is something that those of us on the outside don’t know. That includes those in politics and the media who are making the loudest noise.

The politicians claim to be protecting the taxpayers’ money. But having politicians trying to micro-manage any business is far more likely to make those businesses lose more money, including the taxpayers’ money.

Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.

Politicians and bureaucrats micro-managing the mortgage sector of the economy is precisely how today’s economic disaster began. Why anyone would think that their micro-managing the automobile industry, or executive pay across a wide sweep of other industries, is likely to make things better in the economy is a mystery.

The real point is to pander to envy and resentment against people who make a lot of money. Envy is always referred to by its political alias, "social justice."…

 

 From Power Line: 

 Earlier this month, the Heartland Institute sponsored the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York. The Conference differed from most such events in that it was devoted to science, not politics or propaganda. Heartland has now made the materials presented at the conference available online, here. You can review the agenda, watch videos of the keynote presentations, read transcripts of some of the speeches, and see the Power Points that were presented by the speakers. More information will be posted as it becomes available.

These are a few of the many slides that I found interesting. This one, by Dennis Avery, puts the climate swings of the last 12,000 years (i.e., since the last Ice Age) in perspective; click to enlarge:

This one, by Syun Akasofu, also takes a long-term view, and compares the politically-driven prediction by the UN’s IPCC with the historical trend as the earth has recovered from the Little Ice Age:

Don Easterbrook makes the basic point that, contrary to the hysterical predictions of the alarmists, the earth is cooling, not warming:

This one by Dennis Avery shows the lack of any correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperatures in the atmosphere:

Don Easterbrook compares the correlations of solar activity and CO2 concentration to temperature. It seems pretty obvious where the explanation for fluctuations in temperature lies:

Due to the efforts of Heartland and others, the public is beginning to catch on to the cosmic scam that Al Gore, James Hansen and others–mostly not scientists–have been perpetrating. Meanwhile, the Obama administration, seemingly determined to inflict the maximum possible damage on the economy in the shortest time, is trying to ram a cap-and-trade carbon tax through Congress before opposition can be mobilized. It’s easier to do that, of course, when you know that Congressmen won’t read the statute before they vote on it. So our only hope is an informed citizenry.

Scott Johnson of Power Line lists the causes of his depression: 

I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can’t keep up and I can’t stand to pay attention.

His aim seems to be to reduce us to government dependents. His inattention to rehabilitation of the financial system in lieu of vastly expanding the size and scope of the government is a dead giveaway, as is his lack of concern over the vast destruction of wealth his policies are working (and will continue to work).

Perhaps most depressing to me is the manifestation of his adolescent grandiosity in his stewardship of foreign policy and national security. He doesn’t understand that the government of Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons it can put to evil purposes. He thinks he can sweet-talk them out of achieving this objective.

He doesn’t understand that the government of Iran is a tyranny that oppresses the Iranian people. He thus addresses the mad mullahs as though they represent the people of Iran…

Get a clue, man! The mullahs who rule Iran with an iron fist hate you and everything you represent. They hate you in part because they view you as an apostate. They hate you in part because you represent the United States. They hate you in part because you represent the American people. They don’t hate us becasuse President Bush didn’t talk nice to them!

Make no mistake. The mullahs love the weakness and stupidity that President Obama transmits at ear-shattering levels in his message to them (and in his earlier Al Arabiya interview). They rebuff his advances because they know he will only treat their rebuffs as reasons to pursue them with renewed ardor.

Obama believes his cluelessness represents the higher wisdom. It is a source of his monumental self-regard. Thus his response to Vice President Cheney’s criticism of Obama for undoing, and vowing to undo, the Bush administration policies that kept the American people safe from attack safe for seven years after 9/11:

President Obama, rejecting former Vice President Dick Cheney’s contention that Obama has put the nation at greater risk of terrorism, suggests in an interview airing tonight on "60 Minutes" that the previous administration’s stance was an "advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

"How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?" Obama asks. "It hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

"Brought to justice"? Good god, man, what the hell are you talking about? I don’t know what he is talking about – they haven’t seen the inside of the United States District Court for the District of Colulmbia? – but I do understand what Obama means when he says the Bush policies were "a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment." Obama and his fellow Democrats helped make them so by spreading pernicious falsehoods about their illegality and cruelty. Even worse, like the pitiful Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Obama aspires for us to be be well liked!

I am depressed because the president of the United States is a fool who will immiserate us, render us wards of the state and lose us our life and liberty to those who understand what they are about.

 Mark Steyn sums it up:

Any sentient being dumb enough to fall for this AIG huffin’ an’ a-puffin’ from Barry, Barney, Doddy and the gang is a fool who deserves the vaporization of his assets that the national political class is lining up for him. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, the $165 million in bonuses is less than 1/18,500th of the $3.1 trillion budget. The massive expansion of government the president is planning is forever, and will ensure you that end your days in what Peggy Noonan calls "post-prosperity America." More immediately, what message do you send to the world when legal contracts can be abrogated by retrospective confiscatory bills of attainder? You think that’s going to get anyone investing in America again?

The investor class invests in jurisdictions where the rules are clear and stable. Right now, Washington is telling the planet: In our America, there are no rules. Got a legally binding contract? We’ll tear it up. Refuse to surrender the dough? We’ll pass a law targeted at you, yes, you, Mr. Beau Nuss, of 27 Plutocrat Gardens, Fatcatville. If you want a banana republic on steroids, this is great news. So cheer on thuggish grandstanding by incompetent legislators-for-life like Barney Frank if you wish. But, in any battle between the political class and the business class, you’re only fooling yourself if you think it’s in your interest for the latter to lose.

The first two months of the Age of the Hopeychange have been an eye-opener. I expected it to be ideologically distasteful to me, but I didn’t expect it to be so inept. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama’s executive skills. But I assumed he’d have folks around him who could take care of details like governing, while he pranced around as the smiley-face hopeychange frontman. But the bench is still empty save for a handful of mediocrities. And the disconnect between the smoothly scripted mush and what’s actually happening makes the telepromptered cool look even more ridiculous.

 Diana West also writes about what’s going on behind the smokescreen [see our post below]:

Sigh. Dear American Taxpayer: If only you knew how easily you have been gulled, played like a greenhorn, a rube, a Madoff mark. This $165 million scandal may have unleashed the first genuine feeding frenzy of the Obama administration, but it is a distraction, a sideshow, a smokescreen over what is really going on: namely, the Bush-initiated, Obama-Pelosi-Reid-led incursion into the private sector designed to nationalize the workings of the economy in order to take over, capture and enslave enough of the free market to transform the fundamental character of this nation. Remember what our 44th president said back in 1995: "In America," he told the Chicago Reader, "we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations." That is exactly what’s going on behind the $165 million smokescreen – truly, a masterpiece of misdirection. I have no reason to believe it was planned, although I am open to suggestion. After all, it is notable that the nearly $4 billion in Merill Lynch bonuses, doled out just before the dying firm’s Jan. 1 takeover by Bank of America (which received bailout funds partly due to the takeover), failed to churn the same national waters. But I digress. Up in arms about the AIG bonuses, the body politic remains calm, cool, practically collected about the trillions of taxpayer dollars Obama & Co. are drawing on to buy out the economy, expanding the population’s dependency on Biggest Government in the process. There are simply too few of us seeing red, for example, over the surprise Federal Reserve decision (announced this week at the height of Bonus Rage) to pump another $1 trillion into the economy, money the International Herald Tribune said the Fed "will create out of thin air." Still, there is good in Bonus Rage. It’s a sign of life… For several days this week, the influential Senate Banking chairman – he who never met a sweetheart deal he didn’t find irresistible – lied about his role in writing legislation that protects AIG’s bonuses. Repeatedly, Dodd insisted that he had had nothing to do with the bonus-protection language in the, ahem, Dodd Amendment until, mirabile dictu, he remembered that he had. As he finally told CNN on Wednesday evening, he actually wrote the provision himself with, he added, input from the administration. Did I mention President Obama was the No. 2 recipient of AIG largesse? Dodd received $103,100. Obama received $101,332. Now Dodd, after being scorched by these disclosures, says he’ll give his AIG money back. Will Obama? Does it matter? The proof is already in the pudding, even if the burnt offerings go back to the kitchen. Fume, baby, fume. But there’s more. The nationalization of AIG is not just bankrupting the country by throwing billions of our dollars at AIG’s toxic assets. The nationalization of AIG is forcing the American taxpayer to support a very different kind of toxic asset. I refer to AIG’s promotion of Sharia (Islamic law) in its Takaful division, the Sharia-compliant insurance sector of AIG. Since we the people own 80 percent of AIG, we the people now promote Sharia, too. Don’t believe me? Takaful insurance, our very own AIG Takaful Web site explains, "avoids prohibited elements in accordance with the Sharia law," adding: "We do not invest in anything that is haram (prohibited under Sharia). We do not borrow, lend or enter into any financial transaction that is unIslamic." At the very least – aside from promoting from the law of the Koran, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran, the clerics of Saudi Arabia (not to mention Afghanistan, whose Sharia-supreme "justice" system recently upheld a journalist’s 20-year prison sentence for "blasphemy") – taxpayer support for AIG is by definition sectarian and therefore in violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. It is on these grounds – that the American taxpayer is now directly funding sectarian Islamic religious activities – that a lawsuit, conducted by the Thomas More Law Center, has been filed against the government. Recently, the Justice Department, another U.S. taxpayer-funded entity last time I checked, entered the case to defend the AIG bailout, filing a motion to dismiss, the Thomas More Law Center notes, based on this being a time of "crisis." You better believe this is a time of crisis – but not the crisis envisioned by Justice officials charged with safeguarding gross government fecklessness. Only two of our elected officials – Reps. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., and Frank Wolf, R-Va., and bless them for it – have publicly decried the government’s AIG Sharia-bailout; that’s a crisis. Chump change bonuses arouse the wrath of the nation – not the nefarious movement to nationalize the marketplace; that’s a crisis, too. The American people are angry, good. But we need to understand there are far more important things to be angry about.

 

 … Obama and the Democrats are steadily pursuing their sinister agenda. 

Michelle Malkin writes (see the whole article here):

I ask you now to turn away from the bogus bonus smokescreen over $165 million in taxpayer-backed compensation packages for AIG employees. It is a pittance compared to the gargantuan spending spree happening right under our noses. The AIG bonus price tag amounts to one tenth of 1 percent of the total AIG giveaway ($85 billion in September, $37.8 billion in October; $40 billion in November; $30 billion in early March), which took place with the assent of a Republican administration, a Democratic administration and the congressional leadership of both parties.

Taxpayers might be less skeptical of the born-again guardians of fiscal responsibility if these evangelists were actually practicing what they preached. While the Obama administration now issues impassioned calls to stop rewarding failure, they moved Thursday to dump another $5 billion into the failing auto industry. That’s on top of Thursday’s announcement by the Federal Reserve to print $1 trillion to buy Treasury bonds and mortgage securities sold by the government – which no one else wants to buy.

Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz tallied up $8.5 trillion in bailout costs by December 2008 between Federal Reserve, FDIC, Treasury and Federal Housing Administration rescues (not including the $5.2 trillion in Fannie and Freddie portfolios that the U.S. taxpayer is now explicitly responsible for). Then there’s the (at least) $50 billion proposed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in February to bail out home owners and lenders who made bad home loan decisions, which would be just a small sliver of the $2.5 trillion he wants to spend on the next big banking bailout, which would draw on the second $350 billion of the TARP package over which an increasing number of Chicken Little lawmakers are having buyer’s remorse.

Phew. We’re not done yet: As AIG-bashing lawmakers inveighed against wasted taxpayer funds and lamented the lack of accountability and rush to judgment that led to passage of the porkulus bill that mysteriously protected the bonuses, the Senate quietly passed a $10 billion lands bill stuffed with earmarks and immunized from amendments. GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, fiscal conservative loner, pointed out that none of the provisions for special-interest pork projects – including $3.5 million in spending for a birthday bash celebrating the city of St. Augustine, Fla. – was subject to public hearings. That’s on top of the pork-stuffed $410 billion spending bill passed two weeks ago.

Oh, and did I mention that the House passed a $6 billion volunteerism bill (the "GIVE Act") on Wednesday to provide yet another pipeline to left-wing advocacy groups under the guise of encouraging national service?

Also coming down the pike: the Obama administration’s "cap-and-trade" global warming plan, which Hill staffers learned this week could cost close to $2 trillion (nearly three times the White House’s initial estimate) and the administration’s universal health care scheme, which health policy experts reported this week could cost about $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

It is no wonder that when earlier this week Vice President Joe Biden told local officials in Washington that he was "serious, absolutely serious" about policing wasteful spending in Washington, he was met with the only rational response his audience could muster: laughter.

The guilty men accuse.

This is by Mona Charen in Townhall:

Rep. Barney Frank played Madame Defarge on Capitol Hill. AIG’s recently installed CEO, Edward Liddy, agreed to testify before a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, which Frank chairs. Liddy was actually a poor choice for scapegoat as he has only been on the job since September. Additionally, he is serving as a dollar-a-year man hoping to rescue the company and our financial system from a downward spiral.

These facts slowed the momentum of some committee members. But most plowed ahead. Here’s Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York: "There’s a tidal wave of rage throughout America right now, and it’s building up and it’s expressing itself at this latest outrage, which is really just the tip of the iceberg. And that rage is because the taxpayer knows that they are the ultimate sucker on the list of who pays for all of the greed that has been going on in the marketplace for years and years."

There was a lot more along those lines, but the most sinister move came from Frank. He demanded that Liddy reveal the names of the 73 executives who had received retention bonuses. Liddy said he would do so if he could receive a promise of confidentiality. Frank refused and threatened to subpoena the names. Liddy said if subpoenaed he would obey the law, but he then read to the committee some of the death threats his company had been getting over the past few days. Some threats spoke of hanging the executives with piano wire, others of finding where their kids went to school.

That is the sort of ugliness and criminality that Frank is willing tacitly to encourage by demanding the names. And for what? The bonuses amounted to just one tenth of 1 percent of the AIG bailout (to say nothing of the stimulus bill and the gargantuan budget bill Congress and the president are hanging around our necks). If politicians want to metaphorically flay away at evil businessmen, well, that’s regrettable. But when they cross the line into encouraging the targeting of actual individuals, they are no longer "honorable gentlemen," but leaders of a mob.