Filling the SEC posts

By statute, there are five SEC commissioners, and no more than three of them are supposed to be members of the same political party.

At the moment, there are three commissioners, all Republicans. Presumably, the President could name a Libertarian and a Green Party member to fill the vacant spots, just so long as he doesn't name any more Republicans.

Of course, the two major parties have an implicit compact to ignore the existence of any others, so given that pact it was always a near certainty that Mr. Bush would nominate two Democrats. The open question was one of timing -- how long would he let the SEC drift along understaffed rather than nominate Democrats? The second of the two Democrats to depart, Annette Nazareth, has been gone since the end of January.

The White House answered that question yesterday, naming Elisse Walter and Luis Aguilar as its nominees. Although anything is possible -- some skeleton could pop out of a closet -- there seems no great difficulty barring either of these nominees from a quick confirmation.

With due respect to Mr. Aguilar, Ms Walter is the more interesting of the two to me just now. She's a career regulator. She's been working of late at the NASD, which of course is a private organization. But her job there is to head the "regulatory policy and programs." So she's one of the securities industry's primary "self regulators," the folks who try to prove to the SEC that "everything's under control over here -- no need to make a fuss over us." That makes her a government regulator by proxy.

She was a full-fledged government regulator for two years, roughly the second half of Bill Clinton's first term, when she was a member of the SEC's sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That's the job she left in 1996 to take the post at NASD.

So what? As I've mentioned here a time or two, I'm an anarcho-capitalist. I'm no fan of either the CFTC or the SEC. They tend to cause the problems they pretend to cure. I say this not in a dogmatic ideological way but as a pragmatic conclusion from my understanding of the course of human history.

Thinking "within the box" though, I'd just as soon if we have to have regulators we take somebody right out of a trading pit, somebody who's career has been spent in a colorful jacket jumping up and down shouting "BUY! Soybeans BUY!" or whatever exactly they yell. Or that we pluck somebody from behind a computer screen where he's been doing the same thing without the pantomime.

Or (poor third best) if we must have lawyers in these agencies, we have lawyers who've spent their careers concerning themselves with the interests of the folks in the trading pits.

It distresses me that regulators spend their whole career as such, shuffling around from one regulatory agency (or its proxies) to another.

Bah, I say. Bah and humbug.

Mike Huckabee

The old primary season in Presidential politics is dead. There was a time when casual readers of newspapers started following the campaign as the New Hampshire primary neared in February, and for a series of Tuesdays, lasting sometimes into June, the field of pretenders in each party, or at least the one without an incumbent, would be gradually winnowed to one nominee presumptive.

That's all dead because everybody wanted to be first. The primaries now will all take place at essentially the same time, which of course eliminates any winnowing value. The winnowing will take place before hand.

This, in turn, has meant that key events in our electoral calender are taking place now, and that the Ames straw poll among Republicans this weekend was one of them. I regret this everlasting-campaign, but I have no suggestion as to what to do about it.

Giuliani, McCain, and Fred Thompson sat this one out, though they each received some votes anyway. For the record, among the three well-known non-participants, the "winner" was Mr. Thompson, with 1.4% of the votes cast, or 203 votes.

Over-all, of course, the winner without quotation marks was Mitt Romney, with 31.6%, which is roughly what George W. Bush received eight years ago. But Romney's showing was no surprise, and it's the element of surprise that makes news.

The news coming out of Ames, accordingly, is the second-place showing of Mike Huckabee, with 18.1%. Here are all the numbers, with some analysis about the new hierarchy, if you will, or pecking order, this has established:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070813/cm_thenation/45222461

Theories about Libby

President Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence. Why? I don't know.

There are various theories about it though. If you, dear reader, want to give them detailed consideration, you might start here.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-talk/2007/07/july_8_democrats_advance_new_t.html?hpid=topnews