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Call it Dodd-Frank Inc. A year after Congress passed the broadest financial overhaul since the Great Depression, the law has spawned a host of new businesses to help Wall Street comply — and capitalize — on the hundreds of new regulations.

Besides the lawyers, there are legions of corporate accountants, financial consultants, risk management advisers, turnaround artists and technology vendors all vying for their cut.

“It is a full-employment act,” said Gregory J. Lyons, a partner at Debevoise, where a team of a half-dozen lawyers has drafted 30-plus comment letters in the last six months.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The study, which analyzes 176 failed terrorist plots against U.S. targets, was conducted by Erik J. Dahl, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Cal., in conjunction with the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) program at the University of Maryland.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, Mohammed.

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The 53-year-old was grating soap into a saucepan at his home after trawling the internet for bomb-making tips, a court heard.

The two officers were responding to a complaint about eggs being thrown at his house in May when they found Smith “stressed and anxious” as he made the concoction.

It helps not to confess to making napalm while being interviewed by police.

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Everyone who’s dealt with “Gypsies” or the dozen or so different tribes affiliated with the word know they’re about as romantic as abortion. I first learned my utopian vision of them was bullshit back in 1993 when I spent some time in Palermo and saw toddlers stationed on highway medians covered in soot and begging for change. All over Italy, I saw dirt-encrusted pickpockets under the age of ten, and few of them had shoes. The only time I’ve ever seen adult male Gypsies anywhere in Europe has been in bars partying their asses off. One Essex cop told me they shut down all pubs in a ten-mile radius of a Gypsy wedding because there is inevitably complete chaos if they don’t. The men drink all the booze, vandalize the pub, and leave without paying a cent.

The Gypsies in Dale Farm are affectionately referred to as Irish Travellers because although they have essentially the same culture as the Roma, they are white and talk very differently (see Brad Pitt in Snatch). Nobody’s sure why the Irish nomads are so similar to their Romanian counterparts because it’s been this way for hundreds of years. One theory is the redheads met the brunettes at an annual horse fair in the northwest of England called Appleby which began shortly after Oliver Cromwell’s war against the Irish left so many of them wandering aimlessly throughout the countryside in the 1600s. I personally couldn’t give a shit exactly where one Gypsy culture strays from the other. They all suck and for the exact same reasons. The men are king and do nothing but sit on their asses all day. The women are barely considered human beings. The children rank way below that.

Outside of the children, the primary breadwinners in these communities tend to be the women, but when they are arrested for their various petty crimes, the kids are left with no guardian. Men see looking after kids as beneath them, so the police wind up sending the poor bastards to foster care. It’s not unusual for Gypsy women to use foster care itself as a hustle. They play victim, but their entire income is based on scamming innocent victims.

The ones in Dale Farm who will be facing the police on the 19th (along with an army of volunteer soldiers) embody many things the left purports to hate. The examples of environmental destruction, misogyny, homophobia, and child abuse rival extremist Islam. A great behind-the-scenes book about it is Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh. It’s the true story of a Romanian Gypsy who grew up getting the shit kicked out of him every day by his bare-knuckled boxing coach/dad and then getting raped every night by his uncle. When Walsh realized he was gay he was forced to leave the group because Gypsies tend to agree with Ahmadinejad when it comes to homosexuality in their community—it does not exist.

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James Taranto points out some inconvenient truth.

Perhaps the most striking statement at last night’s Republican presidential debate came not from Rick Perry or Mitt Romney but from the audience, which applauded the preface of one of moderator Brian Williams’s questions.

Capital punishment draws strong emotional reactions on both sides, doesn’t it? And whatever one thinks of the death penalty or the audience’s behavior last night, the harshness, self-righteousness and simple-mindedness of these responses belie the left’s self-image as intellectually sophisticated and tolerant of other viewpoints.

It seems to us that the crowd’s enthusiasm last night was less sanguinary than defiant. The applause and the responses to it reflect a generations-old mutual contempt between the liberal elite and the large majority of the population, which supports the death penalty.

Jonathan Last cuts through the crap.

What has amazed me over the last week or so is the silliness of those who treat the argument as if it’s somehow out of bounds just because Rick Perry is making it. Believe it or not, Rick Perry is not the first person to view Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”

The first person I’ve found drawing the parallel is economist Paul A. Samuelson. In the November 13, 1967 Newsweek Samuelson defended Social Security by pointing out that it was linked to population growth and that “A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi scheme ever devised. And that is a fact, not a paradox.”

The Other McCain points out that Obama’s ‘jobs plan’ has about as much chance of seeing life as a Democrat’s unwanted baby.

It’s dead on arrival in Congress, so all the hype about his jobs plan was just sound and fury signifying nothing. Like everything else Obama says or does, the Big Speech was a complete waste of time.

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I wish I’d seen this before the speech.

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I’m somewhat surprised that they picked Beinecke (The Clock Radio) rather than Sterling Memorial at Yale. But I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

Raheem Kassam can take the heat.

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Harbor Beach Community Schools paid one teacher tens of thousands of dollars to leave, despite the teacher getting caught kissing some students and head-locking one after being confronted for his behavior. Dearborn Public Schools paid four teachers a total of $197,353 to get rid of them after charges of sexual misconduct and possession of illegal substances on school grounds. Gladwin Community Schools has dished out about $40,000 thus far in a legal case against a kindergarten teacher arraigned on charges of furnishing alcohol for minors.

These are a few of at least 156 tenure cases brought by Michigan public school districts over the past five years. These 156 cases cost school districts and taxpayers at least $7.7 million to cover the costs of removing, or attempting to remove, tenured teachers.

Must be something in the water.

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The fashion industry has its knickers in a twist over “manties.” A contraction of “man” and “panties,” the wordplay is meant to describe certain undergarments for males.

It’s part of a special lexicon that has emerged, over the past decade, as a sort of shorthand for men’s fashion. Men can also wear “mandals” (male sandals), “murses” (purses), “mantyhose” (pantyhose) and “mankinis” (swimsuit variants)—though not necessarily all at the same time.

You knew it had to happen.

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Following yesterday’s ousting of Carol Bartz as the CEO of Yahoo, the former chief executive is now eligible for a hefty severance package.

A form 8-K the company filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today notes that Bartz was “removed from her role” as CEO, and will receive severance benefits “for termination without cause.”

According to some number crunching by CNN, that includes $3 million in cash, as well as a pro-rated yearly bonus worth somewhere between $1 million to $2 million. Add in company stock and you get an extra $5.2 million, a payout figure the company floated in December of last year, which is now higher.

On top of all that are restricted shares that have not vested that Bartz could still get, CNN notes.

Sometimes being a failure is more profitable than being a success. That could explain a lot about our government.

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For months, gay men have been using a hugely popular iPhone application, Grindr, to find nearby dates. Now the company behind Grindr is going straight with the more innocently-named Blendr.

The new free app comes weeks after OKCupid, the free dating site, launched an app that lets its members scroll through a list of other members who happen to be close by. Like Grindr, Blendr and OKCupid Locals use the mapping software on iPhones to give you a list of singles (or non-singles, for that matter) who are within walking distance and willing to meet up for, say, a drink.

Yeah. Sure. A drink.

‘Hey, what are you drinking?’ ‘Don’t ask the question if you’re not ready for the answer.’

Like Grindr, Blendr will also monitor profiles for inappropriate material like nude photos and profanity. Users can also report others for “offensive content and conduct.” And when necessary, the company will cooperate with authorities to track down people who have broken the law while using the service.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun.

Yglesias is too young to remember exactly how and why Jimmy Carter’s presidency failed. After eight years of GOP control of the White House, liberals in 1976 very much wanted to see a Democratic presidency succeed. And when Carter’s policies quickly proved unpopular, liberals blamed Carter personally.

Liberals believe that liberalism is right. They believe that liberal policies should be both successful and popular.

So when the Carter administration proved to be a policy disaster, and when that disaster led to political unpopularity for Democrats — the party that defines the meaning and embodies the spirit of liberalism in America — liberals were faced with a choice: Admit the failures of liberalism, or find an explanatory excuse.

The scapegoating of Carter was the convenient excuse that permitted liberals to avoid confronting the evidence that liberalism had failed.

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That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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A mother-of-two had a ‘first date from hell’ after she was duped into becoming the getaway driver for a thief she met on Facebook.

Leah Gibbs, 23, had planned to spend an evening watching a DVD and getting to know 21-year-old Adam Minton.  

But instead, when she arrived at his home, he asked her to give him a lift – claiming he briefly had to visit a friend.

 She drove him to a shopping area, where he left her for five minutes. When he returned in a panic he ordered her to: “Go, go, go!” 

That fizzing sound is my trying to keep from laughing.

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Cops in Florida have written thousands of tickets to motorists for flashing their lights to warn other motorists of speed traps. Problem is, flashing your lights to communicate isn’t against the law in the Florida.

So one motorist has filed a class action.

Which sounds odd, since each ticket is supposed to carry a citation to the statute supposedly violated. If, in fact, no statute has been violated, then the recipient ought to be able to challenge the ticket in traffic court. (Of course, few people bother to challenge tickets in traffic court.)

Richard Cohen, Court Jester for the East Coast Establishment, reveals a ghastly truth.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned.

Oh noes! When you’ve lost the Crust, you’ve lost it all.

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Seven dogs starved of food and water for two weeks are suspected of eating their Indonesian owner after he returned to his hometown in Manado from a holiday, local media reported on Tuesday.

A neighbourhood guard was curious when he saw luggage lined up at the front of Andre Lumboga’s house, days after the 50-year old arrived back home. He approached the house, smelled something foul and called the police, according to a report.

“His skull was found in the kitchen, and his body was found in the front of his house,” Eriyana, a local police chief in Batam, an island off Sumatra, told VIVAnews website.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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But the harmony of this idyllic Suffolk community has been shattered – by a golliwog.

Yesterday, a 65-year-old grandmother was preparing to appear in court charged with a race hate crime after placing the doll in her window.

Jena Mason was arrested when her black neighbour, Rosemarie O’Donnell, complained that it was a racial taunt following a long dispute between the two households.

A rather stark reminder that there is no First Amendment in Britain, where you can be arrested for putting a child’s doll in the window of your own home.

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Not bad, for a Communist country.

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Crony capitalism is not just a game Americans play.

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As Mulder always said, the truth is out there.

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The Obama administration made what was supposed to be a pre-emptive strike on Texas Governor Rick Perry, but which turned out to be, in baseball terms, a “swing … and a miss.” The administration unleashed Education Secretary Arne Duncan to attack Texas’s record on education, with Duncan saying he feels “very, very badly for the children.” When pressed to explain precisely what Texas has done wrong on education, Duncan came up a bit short on specifics. The Education Secretary’s arguments have generated a lot of useful discussion across the web, but I thought I would throw some rudimentary data analysis into the picture.

Not really news, but a useful reminder. Crustian bureaucrats are no more a dependable source of information than Crustian media; neither can be trusted without independent corroboration.

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Welcome to the modern Security State. Bend over and spread ’em.

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The full extent of the campaign of intimidation, attacks and death threats made against scientists by activists who claim researchers are suppressing the real cause of chronic fatigue syndrome is revealed today by the Observer. According to the police, the militants are now considered to be as dangerous and uncompromising as animal rights extremists.

And you can’t get more dangerous and uncompromising than people who can’t see any significant difference between people and animals. (Of course, in their case, they’re probably right.)

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For Perry, Paul is like that little bit of manure you can’t quite get off your shoe.

One of the few dependable facts about politics: If politician A releases an ad attacking politician B, it’s sure and certain proof that politician B is kicking politician A’s ass in the election, as judged by the person in the best position to know.

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In the ideal world, this latest stupendous failure of the push for a planned-energy economy will be the end of the matter, and governments will embrace a free-enterprise energy economy. Of course, we don’t live in that world. Instead, watch for the re-branding, where “green” becomes “clean,” and the same failed ideas are offered up as the new panacea.

Read it. And watch the video.

And he’s exactly right. If the ordinary voter is as stupid as term-limit legislation assumes, then the ordinary voter is too stupid to be allowed to vote. You can’t have it both ways. Either you support democracy or you don’t. People ought to be obliged to live with their choices.

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My father used to tell me that if I worked hard, it would pay off in the long run. How could he have been so blind? Laziness pays off now!

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NPR shores up its reputation for quirkiness with an article about type fonts.

But with great power comes great responsibility … and some didn’t use their typeface forces for good. To wit: Comic Sans. If you’ve ever printed signs to advertise a yard sale or sent invitations to your child’s birthday party, chances are you’ve employed the wildly popular Comic Sans. The playful letters became so overused that it inspired a backlash. Garfield is hardly a fan, but he comes to Comic Sans’ defense.

“The key thing with Comic Sans and with all fonts is really the use to which it’s put,” he says. “If you used it … to invite people to your school fair, that was great. [It was] not so great, however, when it began appearing on the sides of ambulances and gravestones.” Garfield recalls one member of the Ban Comic Sans “movement” saying: “If you use it in the wrong place it’s like inviting a clown to a funeral.”

I happen to like Comic Sans. Apparently this means I’m not among the Cool Kids.

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The process of Islamization is not uniform across the European continent. In each country, Muslim immigrants traditionally come from certain regions, even from specific countries.

For example, the Netherlands is being Moroccanized. Britain is being Pakistanized. France is being Algerianized.

And Germany and Austria are being Turkicized.

This process of turning Germany into Turkey is deliberate, and the plans of ethnic Turks in Germany are no secret. German Turks suffer no consequences for expressing their intention to take over, so they can state their goal openly. They know they will not be charged with sedition, nor even censured.

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How’s that Hope and Change working out for everybody?

Tevi Troy turns over a rock.

Recent statements and actions by Pelosi and other Democrats reveal that the Democratic Party believes that making political use of Medicare is more important than ensuring the viability of the program itself.

The eagerness to exploit the politics of Medicare is already influencing the Democratic party’s approach to policy. The Washington Post recently reported that Senator Patty Murray, chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC)—and newly appointed Democratic co-chair of the deficit reduction super committee—is working behind the scenes to stop any Democratic compromise or effort to reform Medicare. A source close to Murray described her political rationale: “We shouldn’t be giving away our advantage on Medicare….We should be very careful about giving away the biggest advantage we’ve had as Democrats in some time.”

Here’s proof.

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Hoffa’s comments were much worse than Biden’s, though the vice-president’s demeanour suggests he could be a liability on the campaign trail (I’d wager there’s a campaign plan for him to be used only in “rev up the base” type events). Put together, they are embarrassing enough to require an apology from Obama.

But will Obama have the political and moral courage to repudiate a powerful union boss and his own vice-president?

Hint: No.

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Engineers in Sweden have announced the development of a prototype tank which is covered in “pixels” that enable it to disappear from thermal images – or to disguise itself as something else.

Because, of course, Sweden has a crying need for an invisible tank.

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It’s not the first single-molecule nano-motor, but it’s the first one to be driven by electricity: a Tufts research team has demonstrated that you can “provide electricity to a single molecule and get it to do something that’s not just random” (as team leader Charles Sykes put it).

We have the technology.

David Friedman is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The argument for large and expensive efforts to prevent or reduce global warming has three parts, in principle separable: Global temperature is trending up, the reason is human activity, and the consequences of the trend continuing are very bad. Almost all arguments, pro and con, focus on the first two. The third, although necessary to support the conclusion, is for the most part ignored by both sides.

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Private property rights specify the property owner’s rights to decide how property will be used, to accrue income from its uses, and to transfer these rights to others in various voluntary arrangements. Because the content of private property rights is complex, threats to such rights can arise from many different sources, including actions by legislators, administrators, prosecutors, judges, juries, and others (e.g., sit-down strikers, mobs).

Because of the great variety of ways in which government officials can threaten private property rights, the security of such rights turns not only on law “on the books,” but also to an important degree on the character of the government officials who administer and enforce the law. An important reason why regime uncertainty arose in the latter half of the 1930s, for example, had to do with the character of the advisers who had the greatest access to President Franklin Roosevelt at that time—people such as Tom Corcoran, Ben Cohen, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and others of their ilk. These people were known to hate businessmen and the private enterprise system; they believed in strict, pervasive regulation of the market system by—who would have guessed?—people such as themselves. So, as bad as the National Labor Relations Board was on paper, it was immensely worse (for employers) in practice. And so forth, across the full range of new regulatory powers created by New Deal legislation. In a similar way, the apparatchiki who run the federal regulatory leviathan today can only inspire apprehension on the part of investors and business executives. President Obama’s cadre of crony capitalists, which he drags out to show that “business is being fully considered,” in no way diminishes these worries.

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Ah, the New York Times. Once the paper of record, now the paper that has broken all records for idiocy and irrelevance brings us the ruminations of a dozen “Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media” on “what they’d do if they were president.”

Searching for, ” ideas that might challenge or inspire, ” Jesse Kornbluth assembled a group of 12 illuminati and asked them what they would do if they lived in the White House.

The responses, which come from professors, authors, a CEO, a nun, the president of something called the Children’s Zone in Harlem, an artist, an inventor and an astrophysicist, read like a perverse combination of Rainbow Fish and Pedro’s campaign speech from Napoleon Dynamite. (Vote for me and your wildest dreams will come true.)

An exellent fisking of peripheral members of the cognitive elite; not one person who ever made something intended for sale, all people dependent on existence in an apex civilization such as ours. I’d be more interested in how well they would survive if stripped naked and dropped in the Pacific Northwest. I suspect that the ‘inventor’ might make it out alive, but the rest would be bear-food.

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Four obese children are on the brink of being permanently removed from their family by social workers after their parents failed to bring their weight under control.

In the first case of its kind, their mother and father now face what they call the ‘unbearable’ likelihood of never seeing them again.

Their three daughters, aged 11, seven and one, and five-year-old son, will either be ‘fostered without contact’ or adopted.

Send them to Pakistan, that will thin them down right quick.

Welcome to Nuremberg Scotland.

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Jihadists among the Libyan rebels revealed plans last week on the Internet to subvert the post-Moammar Gadhafi government and create an Islamist state, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi is a religious advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. His theological ideas have been influential in the formation of Iranian state policy.

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It’s the Guardian, so it’s a hit piece — not really news, that — but it shows that Perry has the Crust in a tizzy.

Never mind that it’s far and away better than any other state in the country, and that most of its problems are caused by Washington; no, it’s somehow Perry’s fault that Texas isn’t a paradise … and the fact that it isn’t a paradise after all means that Perry sucks, and Texas sucks, and Republicans suck, and Obama’s the answer even though he’s failed at everything he couldn’t affirmative-action himself through.

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In a new AEI Education Outlook “Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers: When Everyone Makes the Grade,” University of Missouri economist Cory Koedel reports that grades awarded to education students at America’s universities are considerably higher than grades in every other academic discipline. What makes those findings especially striking is that education majors score significantly lower on standardized college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT than students majoring in other academic areas like science, business, social sciences and humanities. In other words, it’s a case of the least academically qualified college students getting the highest grades and GPAs on campus.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The welfare state chickens coming home to roost. All of the progressive policies of the last fifty years have taken a land flowing with milk and honey and are proceeding to destroy it utterly.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.