The Dallas Morning News, on financial reform: Over a week ago, Mervyn King, Britain's equivalent of Federal Reserve chairman, delivered a scathing speech calling for radical reform of the British financial system. Among his recommendations: break up the "too big to fail" banks and separate risk-taking investment banks from meat-and-potatoes commercial banking.

That's hardly Ben Bernanke's view. In fact, the only financial player in Washington who publicly agrees with King is Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman advising President Barack Obama ... Reports, however, indicate that Volcker is mostly ignored within the Obama administration, where financial policy is largely guided by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and senior economic adviser Larry Summers, both highly sympathetic to Wall Street.

The Volcker position would resurrect the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting commercial banks from engaging in brokerage activities. Why the ban? Because losses from the risky securities business could be covered by drawing from federally insured deposits. This gives high-rolling bankers incentive to behave recklessly, confident the feds would save them if they crapped out. ...

Wall Street may be rebounding, but Main Street is still in a world of hurt. It's not mindless populism to expect that high-flying bankers will find their wings clipped lest they soar too close to the sun and take us all down with them. ...

Albay (N.Y.) Times Union, on Afghanistan and Sen. John Kerry:

Suddenly the quagmire known as Afghanistan is slightly less hopeless. For that, thank the perseverance of the rather unlikely diplomat Sen. John Kerry and the stubborn Afghan President Hamid Karzai's bow to reality -- in that order, too.

Mr. Karzai emerged from five days of high-pressure talks with Mr. Kerry last Tuesday to accept that he now has to compete in a run-off election next month.

Yes, the August election, in which Mr. Karzai had initially claimed a resounding re-election victory, was that fraudulent. ...

It's a notable victory, though, for Mr. Kerry. The past five years have had him lose the bitterly close 2004 presidential election after deciding not to formally challenge the contested results in Ohio, where he was defeated by just 118,000 votes, and see the job of secretary of state that he coveted in the Obama administration go instead to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"We may have just averted a crisis of government in Afghanistan. This may be the biggest thing that Kerry has done, other than run for president," says Ralph Carter, a professor at Texas Christian University who has co-written a book on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Mr. Kerry now chairs.

Mr. Kerry also has emerged as an influential and articulate critic of a war where the parallels to the one he first fought in and then fought against in Vietnam some four decades ago are eerily similar. ...

The Daily Telegraph, London, on the prospect of Tony Blair becoming European Council president:

He is a highly effective British politician with a global profile, the goodwill of the United States and a peerless array of international contacts. For all these reasons, Tony Blair is unlikely to emerge as the first full-time President of the European Council. The 27 heads of government who will gather in Brussels tomorrow find it hard to agree on anything. But leaders like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who would be a strutting emperor if this were not ruled out by his physique, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the obscure prime ministers of Europe's smaller countries will probably unite around one proposition: they will not wish to be overshadowed by a President Blair.

For once, we rejoice in the small-mindedness of Europe's leaders. When they eventually come to select the luminary who will chair the European Council of presidents and prime ministers and this may not happen until December they would do us all a favor if they spurned Mr. Blair. ... The case against Mr. Blair is twofold: as our prime minister, he broke his promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which creates the very post he apparently aspires to hold. ...

The second objection is still more important. The powers of this new post are exceedingly vague. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the president will chair the European Council and attend G8 and G20 summits. In theory, he will be a delegate of the 27 EU leaders, conveying their views to the world....

(Nov. 3, 2009)