…because, after all, they are so beautiful and so talented and so, so essential. Here is the text of the petition to free Polanski.

Petition for Roman Polanski

We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

Morals? What a trifile!

Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.

“Inadmissable?” This sounds like Kingfish trying to talk important. I think the word they wanted was “unthinkable.”

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

Why, it’s like making an arrest in a cathedral!

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

Simple solution: filmmakers should not commit felonies then go on the lam.

Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renown and international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians – everyone involved in international filmmaking – want him to know that he has their support and friendship.

On September 16th, 2009, Mr. Charles Rivkin, the US Ambassador to France, received French artists and intellectuals at the embassy. He presented to them the new Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the embassy, Ms Judith Baroody. In perfect French she lauded the Franco-American friendship and recommended the development of cultural relations between our two countries.

If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.

Here is what Polanski said about the rape in 1979.

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

Former Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was sentenced Tuesday to more than 24 years in prison by a judge who accused him of funding his fraud by manipulating the political process in a way that “strikes at the very core of our democracy.”

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero sentenced the 58-year-old Hsu, who raised money for Hillary Rodham Clinton and others, to 20 years in prison for his guilty plea to fraud charges and another four years and four months in prison for his conviction at trial for breaking campaign finance laws.

The New York Times editorial:

“Judicial lynching,” said Jack Lang, the former French culture minister. “Absolutely horrifying,” echoed the current French culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand. “Provocation!” shouted Andrzej Wajda and other Polish filmmakers. From across Europe, nearly 100 representatives of the entertainment industry, including Pedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders, signed a petition declaring themselves “dismayed” by the arrest, especially since it happened at the time of the Zurich Film Festival.

But hold on a moment. After being indicted in 1977, didn’t Mr. Polanski, now 76, confess to having sex with a 13-year-old girl after plying her with Quaaludes and Champagne? Didn’t he flee the United States when the plea bargaining seemed to fall apart, raising the prospect of prison time? Isn’t there a warrant for his arrest?

Indeed.

Maybe it’s a language barrier, but Jack Lang should understand that lynching is an extra-judicial act. For example, the victim’s parents and friends decide that Roman should pay for his crime and string him up.

Steve Lopez, on the front page of the LA Times has done everyone a favor by reading the trial transcript and including it in his column. In fact, he begins with it.

Q: Did you resist at that time?

A: A little bit, but not really because . . .

Q: Because what?

A: Because I was afraid of him.

That’s Roman Polanski’s 13-year-old victim testifying before a grand jury about how the famous director forced himself on her at Jack Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive home in March of 1977.

I’m reading this in the district attorney’s office at the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts Building, digging through the Polanski file to refresh my memory of the infamous case, and my blood pressure is rising.

Is it because I’m the parent of a girl?

Maybe that’s part of it.

But I wish the renowned legal scholars Harvey Weinstein and Debra Winger, to name just two of Polanski’s defenders, were here with me now. I’d like to invite Martin Scorsese, as well, along with David Lynch, who have put their names on a petition calling for Polanski to be freed immediately.

What, because he won an Oscar? Would they speak up for a sex offender who hadn’t?

To hear these people tell it, you’d think Polanski was the victim rather than the teenager.

And then there’s Woody Allen, who has signed the petition too.

Woody Allen?

You’d think that after marrying his longtime girlfriend’s adopted daughter, he’d have the good sense to remain silent. But at least Soon-Yi Previn was a consenting adult.

Zing!

The girl says Polanski, who was in his 40s at the time, opened a bottle of champagne and shared it with her and with an adult woman who later left for work. That’s when Polanski allegedly began taking pictures of the 13-year-old and suggested that she remove her blouse.

Quoting again from the grand jury transcript, with the girl being questioned by a prosecutor:

Q: Did you take your shirt off or did Mr. Polanski?

A: No, I did.

Q: Was that at his request or did you volunteer to do that?

A: That was at his request.

She said Polanski later went into the bathroom and took part of a Quaalude pill and offered her some, as well, and she accepted.

Q: Why did you take it?

A: I don’t know. I think I must have been pretty drunk or else I wouldn’t have.

So here she is, at 13, washing down a Quaalude with champagne, and then Polanski suggested they move out to the Jacuzzi.

Q: When you got in the Jacuzzi, what were you wearing?

A: I was going to wear my underwear, but he said for me to take them off.

She says Polanski went back in the house and returned in the nude and got into the Jacuzzi with her. When he told her to move closer to him, she resisted, saying, “No. No, I got to get out.”

He insisted, she testified, and so she moved closer and he put his hands around her waist. She told him she had asthma and wanted to get out, and she did. She said he followed her into the bathroom, where she told him, “I have to go home now.”

Q: What did Mr. Polanski say?

A: He told me to go in the other room and lie down.

She testified that she was afraid and sat on the couch in the bedroom.

Q: What were you afraid of?

A: Him.

She testified that Polanski sat down next to her and said she’d feel better. She repeated that she had to go home.

Q: What happened then?

A: He reached over and he kissed me. And I was telling him, “No,” you know, “Keep away.” But I was kind of afraid of him because there was no one else there.

She testified that he put his mouth on her vagina.

“I was ready to cry,” she said. “I was kind of — I was going, ‘No. Come on. Stop it.’ But I was afraid.”

She said he then pulled off her panties.

Q: What happened after that?

A: He started to have intercourse with me.

At this point, she testified, Polanski became concerned about the consequences and asked if she was on the pill.

No, she told him.

Polanski had a solution, according to her.

“He goes, ‘Would you want me to go in through your back?’ And I went, ‘No.’ ”

According to her, that didn’t stop Polanski, who began having anal sex with her.

See the other 49 here.

LBJ’s Great Society programs were just taking hold as I entered college. It was a time when many believed that science, properly applied to people, could solve social problems.

These were the “soft sciences” of  sociology and psychology. I remember well the feeling, that wonderful frisson that came with grasping a theory that explained so much, so elegantly. My classmates and I would buzz with the sense of understanding something important, something that not everyone knew.

Later, as I took a few courses in real life, I came to understand that the neat theories I’d absorbed in college didn’t always hold up.

Open classrooms were an educational fad at the time. Instead of having the teacher dictate the curriculum, students were allowed to study what interested them. Classrooms were set up with learning centers and teachers worked in teams to man them.

My college class visited one of these experimental classrooms on a field trip, and I remember coming away very impressed — this was the future of education and I was there to see it happen!

Today, open classrooms are a dead idea. But as that idea died, many others sprang to life. Our universities today churn out thousands of kids — yeah, you’re still a kid at 21 — with heads full of exciting, liberal theories on how to remake our lives.

This all came to mind after reading a recent Thomas Sowell column that summed up the dangers of intellectualism.

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies.

FDR himself said that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win-the-War.” But those today who are for big spending like to credit wartime big spending for bringing the Great Depression to an end. They never ask the question as to why previous depressions had always ended on their own, much faster than the one under FDR, and without government intervention or massive government spending.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant “whiz kids” tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

by Burt Prelutsky

There are certain dates that are indelibly etched in our minds because they were drummed into us in school, such as the 1066 Battle of Hastings; some because they commemorate joyous events such as July 4^th, December 25^th or the births of our children; and some because they remind us to never forget how quickly everyday life can be turned into something horrific.

The first of three such dates for Americans is 12/7/41.  That was, as FDR put it, a day of infamy.  It was a Sunday between Thanksgiving and Christmas when, without warning, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians.

The second of the nightmarish dates was 9/11/01 when 19 Islamics hijacked four airliners and murdered 2,998 human beings, most of whom were Americans.

The third such date was 11/4/08, when 64,385,746 American voters decided it would be a fine idea to vote for a man with an Islamic name, an Islamic upbringing, a man who said that if push came to shove, he would side with Islamics.

If you lost loved ones in Hawaii 68 years ago or in Manhattan 8 years ago, I can fully understand why you would disagree with me when I insist that the third of those dates is the most tragic.  The reason I voice that opinion is because, aside from the 5,401 innocent lives lost, ships, planes and skyscrapers can always be re-built.  But once lost, freedom and liberty can not always be regained.

Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS is thrown out of court.

++

Whoopie Goldberg demonstrates, not just her warped moral sense, but her ignorance of the law.

Hint: a minor cannot give consent to sex.

Patterico finds the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, who wrote a column supportive of the rapist dwarf, failed to disclose that her husband is a Polish muckety-muck working to get the case dismissed.

Jim Lindgren brings us wisdom from George Orwell:

In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.

In case you missed the HBO documentary that has supplied Polanski-backers with a sense of righteousness, there is this from Salon.

Bad art is supposed to be harmless, but the 2008 film “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” about the notorious child-sex case against the fugitive director, has become an absolute menace. For months, lawyers for the filmmaker have been maneuvering to get the Los Angeles courts to dismiss Polanski’s 1978 conviction, based on supposed judicial misconduct uncovered in the documentary. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if Polanski, who fled on the eve of his sentencing, in March 1978, wanted to challenge his conviction, he could — by coming back and turning himself in.

Espinoza was stating the obvious: Fugitives don’t get to dictate the terms of their case. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was welcome to return to America, surrender, and then petition the court as he wished. Indeed, the judge even gave Polanski more than he deserved, saying that he might actually have a case. “There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct during the pendency of this case,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Other than that, he just needs to submit to the jurisdiction of the court.”

Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated, of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed. The film, which has inexplicably gotten all sorts of praise, whitewashes what Polanski did in blatant and subtle fashion — and recent coverage of the case, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and elsewhere, has in turn accepted the film’s contentions at face value.

500 hoppers invade Barcelona.

Mark Hemingway:

…after one week of hearings in the Senate Finance Committee — presided over by the legislation’s principal author, committee chair Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) — it’s become obvious that Senate Democrats want to pass this bill in a hurry, and that hiding the contents from the American people is an instrumental part of their attempt to do so.

The lack of transparency is stunning. Let us count the ways.

1. Democrats are hiding the true cost of the bill.

The Baucus bill will likely entail $1.7 trillion in government spending over the next ten years. That’s offset by some $838 billion new taxes and fees; the Democrats like to simply subtract the latter from the former, and claim that the bill will cost $900 billion over ten years. What they’re hiding is that the government will begin collecting the taxes and fees next year, whereas the main spending provisions in the bill don’t kick in until 2013. In other words, they’re comparing seven years’ worth of spending to ten years’ worth of offsetting taxes and fees.

Further, the bill’s long-term deficit-reduction plans depend on cuts to Medicare — year after year — that Congress seems unlikely to support once Baucus’s bill is passed. Even when the Congressional Budget Office tallied up the costs of the bill based on the assumption that these cuts would be made, the CBO voiced doubts that they will be. “These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified to avoid reductions in those payments,” reads the CBO score of the Baucus bill. That’s bureaucrat-speak for “Not gonna happen.”

Keep reading.

John Nolte at Big Hollywood:

Pleading guilty to unlawful sex with an underage girl — the drugging, raping and sodomizing of a 13 year-old — isn’t stopping Hollywood from ginning up an indignation campaign over the possibility of fugitive director Roman Polanski being held accountable for his crimes. Yes, these are the values of those who control the most powerful propaganda device ever created.  Which begs a question: If his unspeakable deed doesn’t meet the standard, what exactly would Roman Polanski have to do in order to become a pariah in this town … I mean, besides vote for Sarah Palin?

My favorite part of the [Patrick Goldstein column] questioning the ethics of the LA district attorney for extraditing Polanski “at a time of severe statewide budget cuts.”

Now the Left worries about government spending!  This reckless, out of control, bringing-child-rapists-to-justice spending must stop!

Maybe I’m just a simplistic right-winger but everything stops for me upon learning a child was raped. That doesn’t mean we don’t eventually examine judicial misconduct or government spending, but only after we throw away the key.

Photographer/artist Liu Bolin makes himself disappear in his photographs. Check them all out.

Having shot portraits for two full days last week, I can appreciate a good smile. Some can’t do it to save their life.
But Obama has one of the most consistent smiles I’ve seen. This video was made from a series of 130 shots taken last week during his UN visit, all available on the White House website. Video by Eric Spiegelman.

Barack Obama’s amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Reader Richard Bauman brought this video to our attention. It’s a concise 10-minute summary of how two disparate views of human nature have yielded wildly different societies and underscores how much ideas do matter.

VIDEO HERE.

“We are here to guarantee peace. We are right to talk about the future. But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises. The peoples of the entire world are listening to what we are saying, including our promises, commitments and speeches. But we live in the real world, not in a virtual one.

We say that we must reduce. President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions. [Ed note: Sarkozy then listed international proposals for dialogue with Iran attempted in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.] I support America’s extended hand. But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusion are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to take decisions.

… Secondly, there is North Korea — and there it is even more striking. It has violated every Security Council decision since 1993. It pays absolutely no attention to what the international community says. Even more, it continues ballistic missile testing. How can we accept that? What conclusions should we draw? …”

… and put on a great concert. We were lucky to get tickets early and thus sat in the fifth row, dead center, which made it easy to watch each of the 15 players closely.

He’s playing two more shows in SoCal, so for those interested, read the review from Saturday’s event.

If mainstream jazz has what could be considered an ambassador in 2009, it’s Wynton Marsalis.

A member of jazz royalty practically from the moment he could hold a horn, Marsalis rolled into the sprawling Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on Saturday night with his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, a taut, 15-piece group that he’s directed since its inception in 1988. (The tour continues to the Orange County Performing Arts Center and Royce Hall later this week.)

While this conjures images of the trumpeter leading from a conductor’s podium, Marsalis instead led his charges through brightly swinging arrangements while seated among the orchestra. Positioned in the back near versatile drummer Ali Jackson, the trumpeter was an authoritative but democratic figure as his group flowed through tradition-rich jazz numbers like a wave.

If a plumber had raped his 13-year old neighbor and eluded the police for 32 years, would the LA Times argue that the poor fellow had suffered enough?

Hardly. But that’s what LAT’s Patrick Goldstein does:

But at a time when California is shredding the safety net that protects the poor and the unemployed, not to mention the budget of the public school system, you’d hope that L.A. County prosecutors had better things to do than cause an international furor by hounding a film director for a 32-year-old sex crime, especially one that Polanski’s victim wants to put behind her.

The victim understandably doesn’t want to relive this. But Polanski committed a crime against society, not just against her.

In an otherwise sympathetic article in 2003, the victime inadvertently made this point:

The one thing that bothers me is that what happened to me in 1977 continues to happen to girls every day, yet people are interested in me because Mr. Polanski is a celebrity. That just never seems right to me. It makes me feel guilty that this attention is directed at me, when there are certainly others out there who could really use it.

Back to Goldstein:

Still, actions have consequences and Polanski’s sins have not been forgotten. He has been barred from returning to the U.S. and prevented from traveling to other countries, including England, because of extradition issues. His career has clearly suffered from his inability to work in Hollywood, where he made such celebrated films as “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” He has been embraced by many — having won a number of awards over the years, but also shunned by a number of detractors. As he put it in his autobiography: “I am widely regarded, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf.”

Oh, poor Roman. When he won his Best Director Oscar, he couldn’t come collect it in person.

The horror!

World leaders gathering in New York to resolve global problems? Sounds like the UN General Assembly — well, except when they’re all across town with Bill Clinton.

The Democratic Party legend basked Tuesday in his unofficial role of world problem solver as he opened the fifth annual session of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), timed to coincide with the huge UN meeting a few blocks away.

Swelling, movie-style music accompanied the white-haired Clinton as he took the stage at the Sheraton hotel where he joked of having been afraid, following the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, that “we’d throw a party and no one would come.”

Not that there were real worries on that score.

President Barack Obama gave the keynote speech, saying “Bill Clinton has helped improve and save the lives of millions.”

Bill Clinton watched from the sidelines as 800,000 innocents were macheted to death in Rwanda — 8,000 a day for 100 consecutive days.

Bill Clinton emoted about the AIDS epidemic, but did nothing. President Bush acted and saved millions of African lives.

Speaking of Africa, has Obama done anything to improve the life of his half-brother or other kin in Africa?

FLASHBACK to February 2008:

Mr. Geldof is an Irish rock and roll singer and longtime social activist who has helped, along with U2 rocker Bono, raise awareness about need in Africa. His most well known achievement is organizing the Live Aid concert in 1985, which raised money for debt relief for poor African countries.

But Mr. Geldof has remained closely engaged with African affairs since then, and he spoke off the cuff to reporters today who were waiting for a press conference with Mr. Bush and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Mr. Geldof praised Mr. Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement.

Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, “has done more than any other president so far.”

“This is the triumph of American policy really,” he said. “It was probably unexpected of the man. It was expected of the nation, but not of the man, but both rose to the occasion.”

“What’s in it for [Mr. Bush]? Absolutely nothing,” Mr. Geldof said.

Mr. Geldof said that the president has failed “to articulate this to Americans” but said he is also “pissed off” at the press for their failure to report on this good news story.

“You guys didn’t pay attention,” Geldof said to a group of reporters from all the major newspapers.

Bush administration officials, incidentally, have also been quite displeased with some of the press coverage on this trip that they have viewed as overly negative and ignoring their achievements.

Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down:

President Bush made a courageous decision in the summer of 2006 to reverse direction, but not the reversal sought by Congress (including then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden), the American public, the overwhelming majority of the press (including this newspaper), and even most of his own military advisers. Instead of cutting our losses and pulling out of Iraq, as we did in Vietnam, Bush doubled down. He invested more troops and, more important, embraced an entirely new strategy.

And Bush was right. What had happened beneath all of the politics was a small revolution in war-fighting philosophy, championed and implemented by an unlikely military leader, Gen. David Petraeus, a soldier/intellectual molded as much by the think tank as the battlefield. He calls the movement his “Counterinsurgency Nation,” and it has rewritten the way America fights. It is not a completely new idea – there are few of those in the study of war – but its basic principles came into clearer and clearer focus as a new generation of military officers fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its guiding principle is simple: The prize in these countries is not territory, but people.

Now President Obama must decide whether to let this new generation of battle-tested soldiers apply what it has learned to Afghanistan. Those who argue that the methods employed in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan are right and wrong. They are right that the two conflicts are not identical. What worked in Iraq will not apply in all cases in Afghanistan. But they are wrong to assume the lessons of Iraq have no application in Afghanistan. The counterinsurgency consensus grew out of experience in both wars. America’s new military leaders have been managing both conflicts simultaneously for most of this decade, and the hard-won lessons they have learned derive from both.

I am not a military expert, but I suspect that most wars that last for more than a few weeks follow a roughly similar trajectory. Established generals misjudge the war, and once the battle is joined, a generation of younger leaders discovers the truth, adapts by hard necessity, making life-and-death decisions on the battlefield, and learns, often by trial and error, how to define and fight the new war on its own terms. If the national leadership is smart enough to embrace this knowledge and experience, as Bush was, the tide turns.

There are a number of excellent studies that document this turnabout, notably Thomas Ricks’ The Gamble, Linda Robinson’s Tell Me How This Ends, and Kimberly Kagan’s The Surge. The Iraq war is not over, of course. It remains to be seen if Iraqis can forge a nation from its various contending factions, but there is no denying the extraordinary reversal engineered by Bush, Petraeus, and the remarkable soldiers who have risked and all too often sacrificed life and limb for the last six years. They accomplished it amid a persistent chorus of critics and doomsayers – doomed was actually the word then-Sen. Biden used to describe Petraeus’ chances in April 2006.

Counterinsurgency doctrine is as warm and fuzzy as war can get. It embraces distinctly liberal, humanistic values like protecting civilians, cultural sensitivity, and rigid adherence to ethical standards and the law. It is geared toward partnership, not dominance, and always seeks to minimize violence. In Iraq it rapidly (in months) isolated the murderous extremists who were trying to provoke civil war. The new effort set up a sharp contrast between their methods and goals and America’s. As one Marine officer, Col. Julian Dale Alford, said

Radley Balko:

State bureaucrats threaten to fine, jail a Michigan woman for watching her neighbors’ kids.

Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.

The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors’ kids, or face the consequences.

“It’s ridiculous.” says Snyder. “We are friends helping friends!” She added that she accepts no money for babysitting…

A DHS spokesperson would not comment on the specifics of the case but says they have no choice but to comply with state law, which is designed…

…wait for it…

…to protect Michigan children.

Roman Polanski, Hollywood’s favorite pedophile, has been nabbed.

Director Roman Polanski was arrested by Swiss police as he flew in for the Zurich Film Festival and faces possible extradition to the United States for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, authorities said Sunday.

Polanski was scheduled to receive an honorary award at the festival when he was apprehended Saturday at the airport, the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement. It said U.S. authorities have sought the arrest of the 76-year-old director around the world since 2005.

“There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming,” ministry spokesman Guido Balmer told The Associated Press. “That’s why he was taken into custody.”

Polanski, the director of such classic films as “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” fled the U.S. for France in 1978, a year after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with the underage girl.

Polanski has asked a U.S. appeals court in California to overturn a judges’ refusal to throw out his case. He claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged on it.

Sniff, sniff. In American today, Polanski would never get a plea deal for feeding a 13-year old girl drugs and wine, then sodomizing her. He’s bitching because the judge went back on a 42 day term for rape.

In Paris, Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said that he was in contact with French President Nicolas Sarkozy “who is following the case with great attention and shares the minister’s hope that the situation can be quickly resolved.”

Mitterrand added that he was “dumbfounded” by Polanski’s arrest, adding that he “strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them.”

Yes, he lost his parents in the Holocaust and his wife to the Manson family. That doesn’t excuse a man in his 40s from inflicting pain on a child.

If you have any sympathy for Polanski, read this transcript.

Via American Digest.

WSJ on Democrats’ self-imposed timetable to revolutionize American healthcare.

Yeah, sure, history repeats itself the second time as farce—but what to call the White House’s latest imposition of a health-care deadline on Congress? Budget director Peter Orszag told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that now “the goal” is to wrap everything up “over the next six weeks or so, maybe sooner.” Farce is too kind for this one.

Recall that as late as July, President Obama was exhorting Democrats to hustle legislation through Congress before the August recess with minimal debate or public scrutiny. Back then, “the goal” was to prevent voters from thinking for too long over such minor details as the then 13-figure price tag, the farrago of new taxes, regulations and mandates that will drive up costs, and the consequences of converting all health decisions into political disputes.

All these questions have only grown more urgent, while Senate Democrats are still riven by internal schisms. The Finance Committee only started to mark up its bill this week and has so far processed only a fraction of the 564 proposed amendments. It spent an entire morning arguing over one provision that would have required the committee to wait 72 hours before voting.

Perhaps pausing to breathe for a moment would have allowed the Senators to make a more thoughtful decision—or, more likely, not—but either way, the amendment was cashiered 12 to 11. “We’re doing this all on the fly here,” Chairman Max Baucus later noted, unironically. “Which is a little bit—makes me a little bit nervous.”

You don’t say. And it turns out that the Congressional Budget Office won’t even be able to provide a full cost estimate to the committee before it votes. Mr. Baucus admonished director Douglas Elmendorf for not hewing to his schedule, which was to finish the markup by today. “We are working almost literally around the clock,” Mr. Elmendorf responded, saying he would not compromise “the quality of the estimates that we present.” He added, “I think a crucial part of CBO’s relevance over time has been [our] reputation for doing our work carefully, as well as quickly. And we will continue to proceed at the maximum safe speed.”

With apologies to Ralph Nader, the new Orszag deadline is unsafe at any speed. The real White House goal is to sign any bill before Mr. Obama’s approval ratings further decline as people begin to understand the policies he supports. The six-week limit also happens to fall—conveniently—before the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, both of which the GOP has an even-to-better shot of winning. Democratic losses will terrify the Blue Dogs, who are already wavering in their support for an extreme health makeover.

In the end, the new deadline is a purely political exercise that is meant to preclude both the public and Congress from being too careful or prudent, which might upset Mr. Obama’s ambitions for the next Great Society or New Deal. Democrats figure they can deal with the costs and consequences of remaking one-sixth of the economy—later.

That’s a big insult coming as it does from the UK.

Barack Obama’s chances of re-election in three and a half years’ time may be evaporating at unprecedented speed, but his presidential ambitions could still be realised in another direction. He would be a shoo-in to win the next Russian presidential election, so high is his popularity now running in the land of the bear and the knout. Obama has done more to restore Russia’s hegemonial potential in Eastern and Central Europe than even Vladimir Putin.

His latest achievement has been to restore the former satellite states to dependency on Moscow, by wimping out of the missile defence shield plan. This follows on his surrender last July when he voluntarily sacrificed around a third of America’s nuclear capability for no perceptible benefit beyond a grim smile from Putin. If there is one thing that fans the fires of aggression it is appeasement.

Despite propaganda to the contrary, 58 per cent of Poles were in favour of the missile shield. But small nations must assess the political will of larger powers. Thanks to President Pantywaist’s supine policies, the former satellite states can see that they are fast returning to their former status. The American umbrella cannot be relied upon on a rainy day. They have been here before. Poles remember how a leftist US president sold them out to Russia at Tehran and Yalta. The former Czechoslovakia was betrayed twice: in 1938 and 1945.

If the word is out that America is in retreat, it will soon find it has no friends. The satellites will pragmatically accept their restored subordination, without openly acknowledging it, and co-operate with their dangerous neighbour, ushering in a new generation of Finlandisation.

Bringing unstable states like Georgia into Nato would be a liability, not a defence. The crazy notion of a US-Nato-Russian combined defence policy has all the staying power of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Ronald Reagan, assisted by Margaret Thatcher, implemented the sensible principle that Russia, from the time of Peter the Great, respects only strength and steely political will. A pushover in the Oval Office is the best news Russian expansionists have heard since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Barack Obama is selling out America and, by extension, the entire West. This is a catastrophe for America and the wider world.

Brussels Journal:

It has become a pattern in several European countries: The Muslim electorate tips the balance towards the Left. In Germany, too, Turkish immigrants are likely to play the pivotal role in the general elections next Sunday. All the parties are hoping to attract their votes.

The regional elections in a number of German states in late August did not go as expected for Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her Christian-Democrats had hoped for clear victories over their Socialist coalition partner. This would allow the Christian-Democrats to swap the Social-Democrat SPD of the uncharismatic Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, for the Liberal FDP after the elections.

Unfortunately for Mrs. Merkel, the Left did well in the state elections, so that next Sunday’s general elections have suddenly become a very close race. If the Christian-Democrats of CDU/CSU and the FDP are able to form a majority in Parliament, they will undoubtedly do so. Four years ago, Merkel already had such a center-right coalition in mind, but the 2005 election forced her into a centrist, so-called “Grand Coalition” with the SPD. If, next Sunday, Merkel’s party and the Liberals again fail to win 50% of the seats in the Bundestag, Germany is in for difficult and frustrating coalition talks in the following weeks.

As in many countries, the German electoral system is complicated. Being Germany, the system is extraordinarily complicated. The country has an electoral threshold of 5%. However, in every district only half of the seats are directly elected, the other half of the seats are proportionally assigned to the parties. Suppose that a district has 60 seats. Party A, with 33% of the votes, wins 15 of the 30 directly elected seats – which is possible when the other votes go to small parties unable to obtain 5%. The other 30 seats are proportionally assigned. Having won 33% of the votes, party A is entitled to 33 % of the 60 seats in the district, hence to 20 seats. Since it already won 15 seats in the direct elections, it gets an additional 5 seats.

Washington Times:

Yes, there are death panels. Its members won’t even know whose deaths they are causing. But under the health care bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Montana Democrat, death panels will indeed exist – oh so cleverly disguised as accountants.

The offending provision is on Pages 80-81 of the unamended Baucus bill, hidden amid a lot of similar legislative mumbo-jumbo about Medicare payments to doctors. The key sentence: “Beginning in 2015, payment would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician’s resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization.” Translated into plain English, it means that in any year in which a particular doctor’s average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor’s payments by 5 percent.

Forget results. This provision makes no account for the results of care, its quality or even its efficiency. It just says that if a doctor authorizes expensive care, no matter how successfully, the government will punish him by scrimping on what already is a low reimbursement rate for treating Medicare patients.

The incentive, therefore, is for the doctor always to provide less care for his patients for fear of having his payments docked. And because no doctor will know who falls in the top 10 percent until year’s end, or what total average costs will break the 10 percent threshold, the pressure will be intense to withhold care, and withhold care again, and then withhold it some more. Or at least to prescribe cheaper care, no matter how much less effective, in order to avoid the penalties.

Powerline:

One of President Obama’s mantras with regard to the Democrats’ health care proposal (whatever it turns out to be) is that if you like your present health insurance coverage, you will get to keep it.

More recently, when the fraudulent nature of that pledge was revealed, he changed the formula to “the bill won’t require you to lose your coverage.” That’s right; it won’t require you to lose your coverage, it will just cause you to lose your coverage.

On Thursday, as the Senate Finance Committee was marking up the Baucus version of the bill, Senator Orrin Hatch tested the Democrats’ sincerity on this issue by offering a simple amendment:

The purpose of this amendment is simple. If the secretary of Health and Human Services certifies that more than 1 million Americans would lose the current coverage of their choice because of this bill, then this bill would not go into effect.It seems like a very, very simple but perfect amendment for those of us who have integrity. This amendment is simply trying to safeguard President Obama’s pledge to the American people, you’ll get — that you will get to keep what you have.

Every Democrat on the committee voted the amendment down.

…that Obama, citing US intelligence reports about Iran’s missile program, concluded that we didn’t need the missile shield in Europe.

Intelligence reports are not always “slam dunks,” as Bush learned vis-a-vis  Iraq. No matter: Obama was using them as a fig leaf.

But here’s a big oops.

The crisis in relations with Iran escalated ominously yesterday after the leaders of the US, Britain and France accused the regime in Tehran of operating a secret uranium enrichment facility buried deep in a mountain bunker near the ancient religious city of Qom. Barack Obama called Iran’s activity “a direct challenge” to the international community.

Iran had previously insisted that its plant at Natanz, which is open to international inspection, was the only one involved in enrichment. The new revelation sharply raises the stakes at a time when Israel has been signalling that military strikes against Iran are on the table.

IBD:

We must stop the spread of nuclear weapons,” the president implored the U.N. Almost on cue, Iran announced its second nuclear plant and Brazil talked up its own bomb. U.S. weakness gets noticed.

President Obama delivered numerous applause lines before the United Nations last week, like this one regarding nuclear proliferation: “Those nations that refuse to live up to their obligations must face consequences.”

But what consequences? Only the most crippling of sanctions, like a concerted oil export and gasoline import embargo, would constitute real punishment for Iran, for instance.

And we’re nowhere near getting that to happen.

Which leaves us with what might best be called Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Diplomacy. Dustin Hoffman, the divorcing dad in the movie “Kramer vs. Kramer,” haplessly warns his bratty little boy again and again not to get the chocolate chip ice cream out of the freezer before finishing dinner.

“You take one bite out of that, you’re in big trouble,” the ever-more-ridiculous-looking father says. As the bite gets closer to the boy’s lips, he says: “You put that ice cream in your mouth and you are in very, very, very big trouble. Don’t you dare go anywhere beyond that. Put it down right now. I am not going to say it again.”

That’s us now. Neither Iran nor any other terror state has any reason to believe America’s tough words have steel behind them. (more…)