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You know just how crazy Ann Coulter's worldview is getting when Bill O'Reilly serves as an honest-to-God voice of sanity in dealing with her proposals for how to reform health care, as she laid them out on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday.

Coulter, who's evidently just wrapped up another genuflecting session before the altar of Ayn Rand, thinks the whole problem could be solved just by doing away with state regulations and "opening up competition," at which point "every problem would go away":

O'Reilly: But every problem wouldn't go away. The one thing that I would like to see the federal government do is strict oversight on the insurance companies when they hose people. I mean, I don't think they should be throwing you, Ann Coulter, off the rolls if, God forbid, you get MS or something.

Coulter: That will not happen. But Bill, that will not happen under competition. Look -- [Crosstalk] -- no, no, let me make this point. No it will not. The government was regulating, the SEC was closely watching Bernie Madoff. Government regulation doesn't stop that sort of thing. What stops it is, people knowing you're investing with this guy at your own risk, and then all these private organization develop. Competition is what enforces that.

O'Reilly: Yeah, well, I don't believe that. I think competition can drive the prices down, but it cannot make an insurance company honest. Only a federal oversight committee that says if you don't do it, we fine you.

Coulter: Yes it can. Yes it can. Otherwise, what about the SEC with Bernie Madoff?

O'Reilly: No, Bernie Madoff got away with it because the SEC, under a Republican, Christopher Cox, simply wouldn't investigate him. That's why he got away with it.

Coulter: That's the government regulation! Why do you keep thinking a different regulator will be better? Government regulation does not solve these problems, competition does.

Because if I belonged to a health-insurance company that threw me off when I got sick, people would hear about it. There would be magazine articles. And I don't mean to be me, I mean people --

She's really been drinking the Randian capitalist kool-aid, hasn't she? Hell, people get thrown off their insurance when they get sick all the freaking time and there sure as hell aren't magazine articles about it.

But the Madoff analogy really takes the cake. O'Reilly, as we noted, is sensible about this: The SEC failed in its regulatory capacity precisely because it was under the guidance of a Republican who didn't believe in regulatory oversight!

Coulter subscribes to a philosophy which argues that less government regulation makes for better competition which in turn enforces honesty and ethical behavior. But when in fact it's demonstrated that such governance produces outrageously (not to mention criminally) dishonest behavior, she blames not the practitioners who gutted that oversight for its then-predictable failures, but rather the entire concept of oversight itself.

It's a classic tautology: Let's gut government oversight so that when it fails, we can blame it, thereby creating an excuse to do away with it altogether.

It's also, of course, the kind of completely insane thinking that has dominated movement conservatism in recent years. And a large part of the reason we have Bernie Madoffs and AIGs in the first damned place.

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Mark Levin is happy now that he's got a bestseller decrying the tyranny certain to descend upon America under liberal rule, which Sean Hannity touted on his Fox News show last night. The appearance produced some plum bon mots fresh from Planet Wingnuttia:

Levin: What's going on in this country is really anti-liberty. The president is -- you know, they just put Bernie Madoff away for life. The president's policies are Bernie Madoff times a thousand. He is taking a wrecking ball to this society.

Levin evidently seems to have conveniently forgotten that Bernie Madoff was an exemplar of the laissez-faire capitalism practiced by Republicans generally and George W. Bush particularly. This is essentially accusing the person in charge of cleaning up after a demolition with having wielded the wrecking ball in the first place.

Levin also keeps referring throughout to Obama and his policies as "something foreign" and claims that he's undermining the Constitution.

Levin also claims that Obama "wants to destroy the health-care system that most of us like."

Oh really? That must be so, if your definition of "most of us" is "less than 15 percent of the population".

I suspect "us" for Levin and Hannity is their little claque of right-wing pundits and wealthy Republicans, as well as Levin's perfervid readers who've been just as eagerly drinking the Limbaugh/Beck Kool Aid.

He wraps up with this classic bit of wingnuttery:

Levin: This president has some very bizarre and alien viewpoints, ah, that were -- that, that were, you know, he was indoctrinated with, and now that I believe that he really believes in, and advances. He is a -- he is about as left wing and about as radical as anybody ever to be in the Oval Office.

Hoo boy. Talk about bizarre and alien. It must be quite the interesting view, out there on Planet Wingnuttia.

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Bernie Madoff got hauled off to jail today for the rest of his life:

The disgraced financier Bernard L. Madoff was immediately handcuffed and led off to jail on Thursday after a hearing in which he pleaded guilty to running a vast Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of billions of dollars.

Rather than letting Mr. Madoff remain free on bail and return to his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court ordered Mr. Madoff remanded as he awaited sentencing.

I think John Cole has it right:

[I]sn’t the more important aspect of the Madoff case the number of people involved in the conspiracy? This wasn’t just one guy. There were all the pople in his office, all the people he did business with, all the bankers who held the funds and got their cut for every transaction, the accountants who didn’t notice anything. When does that get discussed and investigated.

Or do we send Madoff off to jail, pay out the victims though the government insurance fund (my bad, SIPC is not government), and just pretend it was one guy who did all this?

I'm glad to hear this investigation is widening, because you just don't steal that much money without someone else knowing about it:

Two days before Bernard Madoff enters an 11-count guilty plea in Manhattan federal court, the investigation into his giant Ponzi scheme has broadened to include a number of suspected co-conspirators, according to federal officials involved in the case. Madoff’s lawyer told a judge today that there was no “deal” connected to Madoff’s confessing to money laundering, mail fraud, and other counts that will likely result in a life sentence.

Ruth Madoff, who was considered “innocent at first,” is believed to have received at least $70 million from her husband and is now therefore an object of the investigation.

That tallies with the revelation, from another source involved in the probe, that Madoff has not been cooperating in good faith with investigators. “He is not reliable. He’s jerking everyone around,” said the source. “Every day he changes his tune about where the money went and where it is. He’s trying to protect his family.”

A source close to the Madoff defense team agreed that Madoff’s main concern was to preserve as much assets as possible for his wife and children and to keep them from legal entanglements. “The US attorney’s office is still trying to resolve what is tainted or clean money, what real property in the US is appropriate for the Madofffs to keep,” the source said.

That may prove difficult. Sources say new information has surfaced that suggests several members of Madoff’s inner circle transferred assets to their wives, transactions thought to be laundered through an English bank.

Ruth Madoff, who was considered “innocent at first,” according to this source, is believed to have received at least $70 million from her husband and is now therefore an object of the investigation. That is one reason why she recently decided to retain her own lawyer, leaving Ira Sorkin, who has represented both of the Madoffs since December, when the Ponzi scheme was revealed.

Investigators are focusing their attention on three groups of possible co-conspirators. “There should be at least 20 indictments, between the three groups, if the feds are doing their jobs,” said one highly placed lawyer involved in the case. “Some will be conspiracy, the ones who were deep into it with Madoff, and others will be civil cases sent to the SEC for prosecution.”

(Lawyers and prosecutors who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article declined to go on the record, citing their legal involvement in the case.)

Because the rich are so very different from you and me:

NEW YORK (CBS) ― Bernie Madoff is accused of fleecing his clients out of billions, but he said Monday he shouldn't be forced into the poorhouse.

His lawyers are arguing that Madoff should be entitled to keep the $7 million apartment he's currently being held in while under house arrest and $62 million, including $45 million in municipal bonds.

Court papers filed on Monday state that Madoff and his lawyer say the Manhattan penthouse and the millions held in accounts of Madoff's wife, Ruth, are not subject to seizure.

The court papers say Madoff claims the apartment and the money are unrelated to a $50 billion fraud Madoff has been accused of carrying out.

David Sirota on yesterday's hearing about Bernie Madoff:

At a contentious Financial Services Committee hearing today about the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to prevent the Bernie Madoff scandal, the SEC's General Counsel cited executive privilege as reason that he and the SEC's enforcement branch were refusing to answer congressional inquiries. You can watch the video here - the executive privilege issue comes at about 5 minutes and 15 seconds into the clip.

As you'll see, SEC officials refuse to answer the committee's basic questions about the Madoff scandal, and the agency's acting general counsel, Andy Vollmer (a Bush holdover and maxed-out donor to John McCain's presidential campaign) explicitly cites executive privilege as his legal rationale for refusing to provide basic information to federal lawmakers.

Congress has a constitutional obligation to engage in basic fact finding, both in order to legislate reforms at the SEC and to publicly expose how our economy was destroyed by sharks like Madoff. Now, Bush holdovers at the SEC are using executive powers - powers that are now President Obama's - to prevent Democratic lawmakers from doing their job.

Our leaders have framed the problem as a “crisis of confidence” but what they actually seem to mean is “please pay no attention to the problems we are failing to address.” - Michael Lewis

In today's New York Times, Michael Lewis, author of "Liar's Poker" and "Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity", looks at the systemic intertwined interests (like the don't-rock-the-boat SEC) that kept Wall St. embroiled in such questionable and risky practices. As just one example among many, he points to the man who tried to stop Bernie Madoff for years:

... Consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 — more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed — but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff — he wasn’t an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff’s failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.’s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud.

Of course, Madoff was a relatively small part of the culture:

The American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Electric and the municipal bond guarantors Ambac Financial and MBIA all had triple-A ratings. (G.E. still does!) Large investment banks like Lehman and Merrill Lynch all had solid investment grade ratings. It’s almost as if the higher the rating of a financial institution, the more likely it was to contribute to financial catastrophe. But of course all these big financial companies fueled the creation of the credit products that in turn fueled the revenues of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it.

This is a fascinating piece, with lots of advice about what needs to be fixed to restore confidence in the financial system. (As you may have guessed, nothing substantive has been done yet.) Go read the rest.

Here's an interesting piece to the Madoff statue story I missed the first time around:

The copper statue was reported stolen from Madoff's $9.2 million mansion on Dec. 22 - about a week after the Wall Street money man was accused of scamming investors in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

The statue does not appear to have any damage, and police are continuing to investigate the incident.

Frick said he was not aware of the 2004 German movie The Edukators, in which anti-capitalist activists break into the homes of rich people, move furniture around and leave notes that say "the days of plenty are over."

The activists kidnap a rich businessman, have ideological discussions about money and politics, and then let him go, possibly teaching him a lesson on ethics and morality.

"Interesting," Frick said when told of the film.

I see the potential for a lot of very interesting political theater in this new era...