Back to basics, people.

Yes, making mark-to-market accounting rules effectively optional is intellectually dishonest, and misleading.

However, we gotta remember that these accounting rules are a means to an end and not an end in itself. Lets say some nimrod decides that the market for his goods/assets is "inactive" and employs some valuation method plucked from LaLa land.

"I award myself a AAA bond rating!! Huzzah!!"

Its still just a rating. If you want to buy up his bonds/securities simply because it now has a AAA bond rating according to the new LaLa land rules, then may I interest you in a nice bridge over the Hudson I am now selling for a song? Just because the pension funds etc. may be obligated to only buy bonds/securities over a particular rating doesnt mean they HAVE to.

Really, our fears are overblown. I'm sure that the market will see through this charade and exercise real judgment rather than blindly follow a bogus Moodys rating into a new bubble. We are talking about Wall Street's best and brightest here!! They've never let us down before...

.... Oh wait ... I think I see the flaw in my logic ... And the market has already skyrocketed following this rule change you say? ... Oh sweet Lord, the monkeys have seized control of the monkey house ...

A well written article! Argues effectively against torture without relying on the fallacy that torture never works. Of course it works! The correct question is whether we should employ torure in spite of its efficacy. As with all the real questions in life, there are no easy answers. The ticking time bomb scenario forces us to make the uneasy choice between our principles and the value of innocent human lives. Grated, the author shows that the vast majority of cases are far removed from that scenario. However, we cannot discount the possibility that it will ever arise. The previous Administration's sin was to bow to the logic of the "Ticking Time Bomb" while pretending all the while that they were not engaged in torture by defining away the problem. If a nation makes the conscious and queasy choice to employ torture, the least it can do is be honest about it and lay down the most stringent checks and balances about when it can actually be employed.

On a side note, a word of caution about the author's observation that abandoning torture is critical to winning Arab hearts and minds. Not gonna happen. Remember that they come from societies where torture as a tool of state repression is the norm, not the exception. If they accept that their own governments will do such things to them, what more a foreign power allied to Israel and with a history of propping about dictators. A press release, even from Obama, that America will no longer use torture will without doubt be treated as so much hogwash. The US has no credibility in the region. Like I said, no easy answers. Its gonna take a lot more than a press release to show the Arab world that America is on the level.

My suggestion? (Again, I know I'm straying off point here) Lets start small on stuff we all agreee on. This administration, and the one before it, have routinely admonished Israel for illegal settlement building. Any sane mind will tell you its not helping the peace process. You wanna win hearts and minds? Get Israel to knock it off by threatening to sever aid. Give something the PA moderates to latch onto so they have the political capital to sell further negotiations to their supporters. Sorry again for adding in my 2 cents on the Isreal/Palestine conflict.

Again, kinda off subject.

Obama has been getting a lotta bad press about refusing to prosecute CIA operatives who engaged in torture under President George chickenhaWk Bush.

Someone needs to point out that allowing such prosecutions would have been indefensible from a legal standpoint. Think about it? How can the State instruct you to extract information from a suspect, advise you that its legally ok to use waterboarding, then turn around and prosecute you anyway for relying on that advice. I'm not saying it wasn't immoral. There is certainly a case to be made that torture, even authorised torture, is immoral. If a would-be torturer rejected that legal advice and refrained from employing torture, he made a moral choice. Not a legal one.

If the CIA torturers have indeed crossed that moral line, they will have to answer to their Maker at some future point. But it would be the height of hypocrisy to demand that they answer to the State that gave them the go-ahead in the first place.