The Planet’s New Leader December 13, 2000March 25, 2012 It’s hard to know what to say, so — assuming there’s no last-minute surprise of some kind (like, this has all just been some terrible practical joke) — let’s all wish the most important man in the world good luck . . . and hope he proves to be the compassionate uniter he has told us he will be. That would be a welcome surprise indeed.
xgshfjg December 12, 2000March 25, 2012 Do you know how hard it is to type with all your fingers crossed? Even this little bit has taken me half an hour. Please, guys and dolls: let’s look at the ballots the machines couldn’t read and see what they say. The ones that show no clear intent should not count. The ones that do, should. End of case.
Two Reasons This Is a Great Country December 11, 2000February 17, 2017 1. You know how all the stuff you’re getting these days comes with a power converter? The reasons for that are beyond me — the only thing that amazes me more than electricity is the way radio waves can travel through walls — but the practical problem is that power converters are too fat to fit in our power strips. You’ve got a 5-plug power strip, but room for just two or three plug-ins, no matter how you try to arrange them. (‘What if you put the big one there, Sweetie?’ ‘No, Honey, that doesn’t work either.’) Seriously: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. (Someone has to. I’m also working on getting the Post Office to accept your old first-class stamps even after they go up a penny.) Well, what do I find at Costco this weekend but power strips specifically designed for this problem – ‘includes two extra-wide positions for power converters.’ Adam Smith, shake invisible hands with whoever invented the fat power converter. 2.However the Supreme Court rules, we will all accept it. Grumbling, some of us, depending on the outcome — but we will accept it.
Closed-End Funds – III December 8, 2000February 17, 2017 Dennis Matecun: Enjoyed your article on closed end funds, but think you made an error in calculating discounts. You wrote: “If GM is worth $50 a share, wouldn’t GM’s performance-minus-1%-per-year be worth only $45, if that?” But $50 minus 1% would be $49.50 per share, yes? ☞ No. I knew I should have written this more clearly. Sorry. Here’s what I meant (and even if you knew what I meant, keep reading, because there’s something that might actually make you some money, as you get into this): Say you knew that GM, between its dividend and the appreciation of its stock, would average a 9% return over the next 20 years. Heck of a lot better than a 5% savings account! So maybe you go ahead and pay $50 a share. (None of this has anything to do with GM, I am just using it as an example.) Now along comes a closed-end fund that owns, let’s say, nothing but GM. (Of course, it would own lots of other stocks as well, but I’m trying to keep this simple.) For its management, it charges a 1% annual fee. Some closed-ends charge less, some more. The site I suggested Monday — http://www.cefa.com/celeadrsdis.htm (at the suggestion of the estimable Joe Cherner, by the way, which I forget to mention) – will show you what different closed-end funds charge. So now, the GM shares you paid $50 for that will enrich you at the rate of 9% a year can enrich you, instead, within the closed-end fund, at the rate of 8% a year. Namely, GM’s 9% less 1% in fund fees. My point was: if you’d pay $50 for a 9% return, how much would you pay for an 8% return? Maybe you’d be willing to pay only eight-ninths as much — $45, if that. The overall point was: closed-end funds should generally sell at a discount to their net asset value, because they are siphoning off their management fee from the return you could get if you owned the underlying stocks directly. But should these funds be selling at 30% discounts, as some of them are? Or even a 45% discount, as in the case today of the meVC Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund I (symbol: MVC, traded on the New York Stock Exchange). Some of them probably should, but there are some interesting factors to consider here. First, according to closed-end guru Thomas J. Herzfeld, who has been plying these waters a long time, tax-selling frequently drives up the discounts in closed-end share prices this time of year by 5% or 6%, with a snap back in January. A fund that sells at a 15% discount all year might dip to a 20% discount under the pressure of tax selling – and then fairly quickly return to a 15% discount. Second, if people get scared and want out of the market, because it seems to be tanking, they may sell regardless of the discount, driving it down further. Third, some fund managers defy the odds and manage pretty consistently to do even worse than average in picking stocks, so that far from adding value that might be enough to justify their fees (in which case a discount would not be rational), they may subtract value by their stock-picking exploits. Such a manager would deserve a very hefty discount – part to compensate for the drag of the fees, and part for the drag on performance. But 45%? I bought some MVC today at 10¼ because it looks as if it could be an interesting speculation. Basically, it’s a venture capital fund that started moments ago — March 31 — just as the dot-coms were about to collapse. So far, it has invested 38% of the capital it raised, with the balance — $11.72 per share – remaining in cash. So the good news is that for $10.25, I got $11.72 in cash, plus my tiny proportional stake in 18 private investments the fund has made so far, which it values at a further $7.18 a share. (The fund says the investments are valued conservatively, but who knows what they’re worth? Only time will tell.) The bad news is that MVC could quickly invest its remaining cash, and that all these deals could then go to hell in a hand basket. If AT&T can fall by two-thirds in a few months, imagine what a basket of illiquid little start-ups can do! The further bad news is that, because this is a venture capital fund, it charges the normal VERY HIGH fees – 2.5% a year, plus a 20% share in of any gains it is able to make. (Some venture managers charge “2 plus 20,” some, like this one, “2½ plus 20.”) I am loath to pay high fees and would not have bought into this fund at the IPO eight months ago at 100 cents on the dollar. But to buy it at 55 cents on the dollar improves the odds – especially now that we’ve gone from a seller’s market, when any 18-year-old with an idea could command a $100 million valuation, to a buyer’s market, where even the best ventures have to cut attractive deals to stay afloat. Cash is king, and my new fund has $11.72 of it per share. MVC is a special case, and may turn out to be nothing more than my latest folly. Many of the other closed-ends you’ll find selling at the steepest discounts are “country funds,” like the Morgan Stanley India Fund, at a 31% discount to Net Asset Value. These entail their own extra currency risk. India might do well, and the stocks Morgan Stanley chooses for this fund might do even better. But if the rupee loses ground to the dollar, it will be a drag on your investment. Then again, the dollar might weaken or Morgan Stanley might decide to narrow the fund’s discount by using the fund’s own cash to purchase its own shares on the open market. Or it could narrow with no help from Morgan Stanley, once tax-selling season is over, or if India ever returns to fund fashion. Have a good weekend. And remember: It’s not too late to buy bumper stickers! “New low prices” announces GoreGear.com – and, yes, well, I should think so! I’m not trying to change your vote at this stage, and I don’t think the DNC gets any money from this. What amused me, when Bob Cole pointed it out, is that you can buy 50 bumper stickers at 99 cents each — $49.50 — or buy twice as many – 100 of them – for ten bucks less. They pay you ten bucks to take the extra 50. Yard signs, buttons, coffee mugs, T-shirts – 200 years from now, this stuff will be really, really valuable.
Source Code! Source Code! December 7, 2000February 17, 2017 Have you read this, from the Guardian? (Why have the British covered this better than, say, our own television networks?) The article alleges that 700,000 Floridians with criminal pasts were denied the right to vote. Here’s an excerpt: When he was 23, Wallace McDonald fell asleep on a bench in Tampa waiting for a bus. He was arrested for vagrancy and obliged to pay for his misdemeanour by working on a municipal rubbish truck. Disgusted with his sentence, the young McDonald walked off the job, an offence for which he was fined $30. That was in 1959. Forty-one years on, Mr McDonald received a letter from the Hillsborough County election supervisor, Pam Iorio, informing him that as an ex-felon his name had been removed from the voters’ roll. “I could not believe it, after voting for all these years since the 50s, without a problem,” he said, pointing out that even by Florida’s harsh standards his offence did not amount to a felony. “I knew something was unfair about that. To be able to vote all your life then to have somebody reach in a bag and take some technicality that you can’t vote,” Mr McDonald said. “Why now? Something’s wrong.” He is in good company. The Rev Willie Dixon . . . Not covered in this piece, but of related concern, are all the NON-citizens who WERE permitted to vote. Like my friend’s Cuban maid, who is a legal resident alien, but not a citizen, and who voted for George W. Bush. It might not have been a difficult matter to check the voter registration files against the list of Green Card holders. But at least in Miami-Dade, this was not done. According to the Guardian, here’s is what was done: Under the banner of an anti-fraud campaign, Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of the Republican presidential candidate, and his now-famous secretary of state, Katherine Harris, implemented a series of administrative steps which may well prove to have swung the election. In June, the division of elections in Ms Harris’s office drew up a list of more than 700,000 Floridians permanently disqualified from voting — more than any other state — because of a criminal past, and sent it to county election supervisors. The idea was to enforce strictly an 1868 law disqualifying felons and ex-felons from voting for life. The law was originally part of the southern backlash against voter registration among freed slaves after the civil war, and was based on the assumption that black residents got in trouble with the law more often than their white counterparts. That assumption holds true today, in a state where African Americans make up 13% of the general population but 55% of prison inmates. According to Human Rights Watch, around a third of African American men in the state were disqualified from voting because of a past conviction, mostly resulting from the “war on drugs” that has been raging in urban America for two decades. But Ms Harris’s list went further than simply upholding a 19th-century law. It included several thousand people who should not have been disqualified, either because they had gone through the arduous process of having their rights restored or because they had never been convicted of a felony in the first place . . . Meanwhile, have you seen this, from Carl Bernstein, on Voter.com? You remember Bernstein – Dustin Hoffman played him in All the President’s Men. To repeat: If Bush wins, we should all wish him well and work to find common ground. (Silver linings abound – auto insurance reform!) But those who feel the Democrats are making contentious mountains out of molehills really should step back and cast their eye upon the landscape. It is positively alpine.
Closed-End Funds II December 6, 2000February 17, 2017 ‘I look forward to the day when you are able to discuss something other than the election (though I fear you will suffer from severe Post-Partisan Depression).’ — the estimable Less Antman Yesterday, I pointed you here for a very handy site on closed-end funds, promising to tell you today what they are and some of their pros and cons. Maybe the best way to start is with a related question one of you asked: ‘How do you buy shares of closed-end funds selling at a discount? Why would they be selling at a discount? I thought that closed funds meant that you can’t get into them.’ Mmmmm . . . no. You’re confusing two very different things. Some regular mutual funds do close their doors temporarily (or permanently) to new investors — but they are not what’s meant by closed-end funds. To redeem your shares, you still send them to the mutual fund company and get 100% of their then net asset value. And if you already own shares and want to buy some more, you mail a check to the mutual fund. A closed-end fund, by contrast – also known as a ‘publicly traded fund’ — is sold to the public through brokers, just like a new stock. Typically, it will debut at $10 a share. (Never buy closed-end funds on the initial public offering, because once the underwriter takes his fee, you are in effect paying $10 for what may be only $9.50 in assets.) After the initial public offering — perhaps 20 million shares are sold at $10 each — the only way to buy the shares is in the open market from someone who already owns them and wants to sell. And the only way to sell them is on the open market to someone who wants to buy. (I.e., you can’t redeem them with the fund company.) If a lot of people want to get in and not too many are keen on getting out, the price goes up — sometimes to a premium far above the value of the underlying assets of the fund. More often, they sell at a discount, especially in a bear market. (So there you have a double whammy: the underlying value of the fund has dropped with the bear market, and the discount has widened, to boot.) Typically, they sell at a discount for several reasons. One is that most money managers can’t beat the averages — so why pay 100 cents on the dollar for assets out of which is typically taken 1% a year in management fees? If GM is worth $50 a share, wouldn’t GM’s performance-minus-1%-a-year be worth only $45, if that? Well, a closed-end fund may own GM and 50 other stocks, and the same reasoning applies to the whole batch. (The site I linked you to yesterday shows the expense ratios and discounts for virtually all closed-end funds.) If you think this money manager can out perform the market by 1%, thus covering his fee and matching the market, then the fund should sell at 100 cents on the dollar. If you think she can not just beat the market by enough to pay her own fee but add an extra 1% or 2% or 5% of performance to boot — as few can — then you might reasonably pay a premium. Another reason closed-ends typically sell for a discount is that people know they do, expect them to — and thus resist bidding them up to full value. Or look at it this way. They know closed-ends rarely sell at a premium but can drop to 90% or 80% or in a bad market perhaps even to 70% or 65% of net asset value. (Some, of course, will do better than others.) Knowing that, why risk paying 100 cents on the dollar? You expect a bit of a bargain to induce you to take this extra risk. Theoretically, closed-end managers could end the discount and enrich their owners by going ‘open-end’ — i.e., offering to redeem whatever shares were tendered at net asset value. Suddenly, each $1 of assets would be redeemable for $1, so the fund would sell for about 100% of its value. But that could mean less money under management and, in turn, less money for the fund manager. So instead they often do the opposite. Rather than offer to redeem your existing shares, they ‘force’ you to buy more. How? By offering you and all the other shareholders the ‘right’ to buy additional shares at 5% or more ‘off’ the going market price. You’re not literally forced to buy, of course; but if you don’t, your own shares become a little diluted in value by the discount given those who do accept the offer. (Closed-ends know many shareholders don’t like these rights offerings, but make them anyway to expand the pool of capital they have under management, from which they can take fees.) In short, closed-ends can offer great value. Or not. Only buy them when they do.
Closed-End Funds December 5, 2000February 17, 2017 Want to buy $1 worth of assets for 75 cents? Click here for a most useful site. If you don’t know what closed-end funds are, or why they may from time to time represent exceptional value, come back tomorrow. Also tomorrow: caveats, before you rush in. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. (From here on, I’m going to try to remember to put political stuff in color, so you can skip it. I’ll keep financial stuff in the black.) Nancy Brenner: ‘Are you aware that the GOP has asked for a hand recount in New Mexico saying that it is the only way to guarantee an accurate tally? It’s in Sunday’s New York Times.’ Bryan Norcross: ‘In the 1940s movie, Key Largo, Edward G. Robinson, playing the gangster, makes an interesting speech to Humphrey Bogart: ”Let me tell you about Florida politicians. I make them. I make them out a whole cloth just like a tailor makes a suit. I get their name in the newspaper, I get them some publicity and get them on the ballot. Then after the election we count the votes and if they don’t turn out right, we re-count them and re-count them again until they do.” David Scheim, a writer who is no friend of the Bush clan, points us to this web site, for a summary of the Seminole County situation (the numbered footnotes refer to sources you can link to on that site): At the invitation of Seminole elections supervisor Sandra Goard, two GOP operatives camped out in elections offices for 15 days, unsupervised, with access to files and a computer terminal.1 Goard’s staff separated out incomplete GOP absentee ballot requests from similar incomplete Democratic and independent absentee ballot requests.2 GOP operatives added voter identification numbers to 2,132 absentee ballot requests that yielded 1,936 actual votes, 95% for Bush.3 More than 550 similar Democratic ballot requests with missing information ended up in a discard box, rejected.4 Goard told two Democratic campaign workers5 and stated in a radio interview broadcast while GOP workers were filling in voter IDs6 that she would honor no absentee ballot requests that were missing this ID number. She “emphasized that this was required by Florida state law.”7 Goard later denied the Seminole Democratic party the same opportunity to fix incomplete Democratic absentee ballot requests.8 Goard admitted she had never before allowed such activity to fix incomplete absentee ballot requests in her 23 years as county elections supervisor.9 Finally, should the Florida Supreme Court overturn Judge Sauls’ decision yesterday about the recount, or should some other court intervene on one of these matters, the Bush campaign might re-read this column by Anthony Lewis before commenting on the result.
Count or Concede! December 4, 2000February 17, 2017 Governor Bush lost the popular vote but hangs on tenaciously to his hoped-for victory in Florida. There is no shame in winning the Presidency by winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. There would be shame in winning the Presidency by losing the popular vote and blocking a count that would later show Governor Bush to have lost Florida as well. The Miami Herald reports on yesterday’s front page the results of an independent analysis it commissioned that showed Gore winning Florida by 23,000 votes if all the uncounted ballots were counted. This does not include the ballots mistakenly cast for Buchanan, or the African-American voters turned away if they lacked three forms of photo ID, or the disputed 4,700 ballots in Seminole County, and so on. So if I were the rowdy type, I would hop a plane to Austin and start chanting, ‘Count or concede!’ With the election essentially a tie, both nationwide and in Florida, either man could find grounds right now to graciously concede. (And, incidentally, spare himself what promises to be a tough four years.) What is ungracious is for Secretary Cheney to tell the Vice President and the American people that ‘it is time’ for the Vice President to concede. The Republican team has done a fantastic job of making it seem as if, once the TV networks, led by a close Bush family member at Fox, ‘called it’ for Bush, any further discussion was carping. Clearly, in hindsight, the networks should all have reported that this election was simply too close to call. Indeed, they should be calling that even to this moment. Ballots are the currency of democracy. It is crucial to Governor Bush’s success that not all the Florida ballots be considered. The Bush team argues that ballots that cannot be read by a machine must be considered counterfeit. That, his team argues, is the test of valid currency. In effect, if your dollar bill is repeatedly rejected by a Coke machine, it is not a valid dollar bill and should be burned as counterfeit. Greg Dermond: ‘I don’t think the dollar bill in a Coke machine is a good analogy….if the dollar does not go through, WE have the common sense to put a different dollar in…..thus people have the responsibility also to READ instructions and to make sure their ballot was punched through correctly.’ Ah, but with a Coke machine, we know our dollar was rejected, both because it comes rolling back out and because we didn’t get our Coke. With a punch card ballot, it’s easy not to know for sure whether your ballot was cast properly. There is no great philosophical issue here. It is simply that machines are not yet as able to do some things as humans. One is speech recognition — you are better able than a computer to make out speech. Another is handwriting recognition. You are better able than a computer to decipher a note from your doctor. Would you throw out all prescriptions that cannot be accurately read by a machine? Or fill the prescription with arsenic instead of aspirin if that’s what the machine reads, even though a human might read it differently? I am hopeful the courts will count the disputed ballots, in a manner they consider fair, so we can find out who won and move on, supporting whichever man becomes President. Meanwhile, if Governor Bush wins, the Senate will be split 50 / 50. You may have seen Senator McConnell of Kentucky facing off with Senator Feinstein of California on TV yesterday morning. It is the contention of some that, with the Senate split 50 / 50, a bipartisan form of power-sharing should be adopted. Senator McConnell said no, the leadership of the Senate, and all the committee chairmanships, should rightly be Republican, because with a 50 / 50 split and a Republican Vice President to break ties (after the first two weeks, when Vice President Gore would still be the tie-breaker), control of the Senate would rightly reside with the Republicans. After all, he implied, it was the will of the people, nearly as many of whom voted Bush/Cheney as for Gore/Lieberman. The vote may have been 50 / 50, but 100% of the control should go to the Republicans. The heartening thing about all this is that we will get through it all fine. And conceivably, we will be surprised on the upside, as the better angels of our respective natures rise to the challenge. That’s not a prediction, but I do believe it is a possibility. For now, I’m going out to find some orange ribbon.
Count or Concede December 3, 2000February 17, 2017 Governor Bush lost the popular vote but hangs on tenaciously to his hoped-for victory in Florida. There is no shame in winning the Presidency by winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. There would be shame in winning the Presidency by losing the popular vote and blocking a count that would later show Governor Bush to have lost Florida as well. The Miami Herald reports on yesterday’s front page the results of an independent analysis it commissioned that showed Gore winning Florida by 23,000 votes if all the uncounted ballots were counted. This does not include the ballots mistakenly cast for Buchanan, or the African-American voters turned away if they lacked three forms of photo ID, or the disputed 4,700 ballots in Seminole County, and so on. So if I were the rowdy type, I would hop a plane to Austin and start chanting, ‘Count or concede!’ With the election essentially a tie, both nationwide and in Florida, either man could find grounds right now to graciously concede. (And, incidentally, spare himself what promises to be a tough four years.) What is ungracious is for Secretary Cheney to tell the Vice President and the American people that ‘it is time’ for the Vice President to concede. The Republican team has done a fantastic job of making it seem as if, once the TV networks, led by a close Bush family member at Fox, ‘called it’ for Bush, any further discussion was carping. Clearly, in hindsight, the networks should all have reported that this election was simply too close to call. Indeed, they should be calling that even to this moment. Ballots are the currency of democracy. It is crucial to Governor Bush’s success that not all the Florida ballots be considered. The Bush team argues that ballots that cannot be read by a machine must be considered counterfeit. That, his team argues, is the test of valid currency. In effect, if your dollar bill is repeatedly rejected by a Coke machine, it is not a valid dollar bill and should be burned as counterfeit. Greg Dermond: ‘I don’t think the dollar bill in a Coke machine is a good analogy….if the dollar does not go through, WE have the common sense to put a different dollar in…..thus people have the responsibility also to READ instructions and to make sure their ballot was punched through correctly.’ Ah, but with a Coke machine, we know our dollar was rejected, both because it comes rolling back out and because we didn’t get our Coke. With a punch card ballot, it’s easy not to know for sure whether your ballot was cast properly. There is no great philosophical issue here. It is simply that machines are not yet as able to do some things as humans. One is speech recognition — you are better able than a computer to make out speech. Another is handwriting recognition. You are better able than a computer to decipher a note from your doctor. Would you throw out all prescriptions that cannot be accurately read by a machine? Or fill the prescription with arsenic instead of aspirin if that’s what the machine reads, even though a human might read it differently? I am hopeful the courts will count the disputed ballots, in a manner they consider fair, so we can find out who won and move on, supporting whichever man becomes President. Meanwhile, if Governor Bush wins, the Senate will be split 50 / 50. You may have seen Senator McConnell of Kentucky facing off with Senator Feinstein of California on TV yesterday morning. It is the contention of some that, with the Senate split 50 / 50, a bipartisan form of power-sharing should be adopted. Senator McConnell said no, the leadership of the Senate, and all the committee chairmanships, should rightly be Republican, because with a 50 / 50 split and a Republican Vice President to break ties (after the first two weeks, when Vice President Gore would still be the tie-breaker), control of the Senate would rightly reside with the Republicans. After all, he implied, it was the will of the people, nearly as many of whom voted Bush/Cheney as for Gore/Lieberman. The vote may have been 50 / 50, but 100% of the control should go to the Republicans. The heartening thing about all this is that we will get through it all fine. And conceivably, we will be surprised on the upside, as the better angels of our respective natures rise to the challenge. That’s not a prediction, but I do believe it is a possibility. For now, I’m going out to find some orange ribbon.
Crashing Stocks, Hamlet, and More December 1, 2000February 17, 2017 Have you noticed the stock market getting a bit . . . rocky lately? The way it normally works, the market oscillates pretty wildly around underlying ‘value,’ hard as that is to pin down. For a while, with a specific stock — or stocks in general — prices may be a mere fraction of what a sensible, hard-headed businessman might pay, based on prospective earnings. Then the price may trend up to that reasonable range – and keep going, a little or a lot past that range. And then, sooner or later, fall back to the reasonable range, and back past that reasonable range. A complete cycle can take decades. Of course, it’s never quite so simple as this, and, in any event, the ‘reasonable range’ may change over the years, as the company’s (or the market’s) prospects improve or deteriorate, and as the general level of interest rates (read: competing investments) rises or falls. And none of this is very precise. But when good companies like Dell rise to seemingly absurd prices – on February 3, 1999, I pointed out that Dell was valued by Wall Street at ‘more than General Motors, Ford and United Airlines combined’ – they tend to fall back. Since late Spring, Dell stock has fallen by two-thirds. And when iffy companies like Priceline or Amazon, that have a lot of promise but are unproven as moneymakers, reach crazy heights – 113 for AMZN and 105 for PCLN – they, fall back even further. Today, Amazon is down to 24 and PCLN to 2½. And then, typically, they fall past their reasonable valuations, as people grow disillusioned with the market and their unreasoning euphoria gradually turns to unreasoning despair. I’m not sure we’re there yet with a lot of stocks. (Dell is still valued at $50 billion, more than either Ford or GM, and 29 times its trailing earnings.) But when we do get there, bargains will become irresistible – and, with time, highly rewarding. Some of today’s stocks may get a nice bounce after tax-selling pressure lets up. Others may have a ways further to fall, and still others – quite a lot of them — may disappear altogether. Martin dellaValle: “Note to Rulison Evans — There is nothing uniquely American about clean tap water. Open a faucet pretty much anywhere in Western and Northern Europe, and not only is the water perfectly healthy, it also tastes better than what you can get anywhere here. There is, however, something uniquely American about the assumption that all good things, from clean water to democracy, are uniquely American.” Dozens of You: “I hate to be picky, but when Ben Franklin said “neither a borrower nor lender be,” he was actually quoting Shakespeare’s Polonius, in Hamlet: “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For a loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all; to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not be false to any man.” ☞ You’re right, of course. What’s a little scary is that I made this same mistake, and the same subsequent apology, three years ago. Who says you only live once? Scott Flanagan: “Maybe you pronounce forte as ‘fort,’ but do you describe certain foods as healthful? If so, good for you. Otherwise, if you refer to ‘healthy foods’ I hope you mean food that isn’t sick. It is true that hamburger isn’t a healthy food, but only from the cow’s point of view. On the other hand, that light salad isn’t healthy, it is healthful, unless you are talking about those healthy lettuce plants in your garden.” Kevin Clark: “‘Every vote should be counted.’ (Except for absentee military votes, which I’m fighting to exclude.) ‘There are thousands of ballots which have never been counted.’ (Except for a couple times by the normal (machine) vote counting procedure.) Care to retract your column(s) about how Gore’s tendency to lie is all a Republican myth?” ☞ Huh? What has this got to do with lying? It’s like saying “Bush lies in matters of life and death!” because he said Cheney was in good health when he had had a heart attack. Ridiculous. Can we please stop accusing these men of lying? As to your two examples: << “Every vote should be counted.” (Except for absentee military votes, which I’m fighting to exclude.) >> Don’t you think a store that accepts checks “from everyone” should nonetheless not be required to accept checks that are unsigned? I guess you can argue that a soldier’s unsigned, unpostmarked ballot should count, even though the law says it should not, and even though someone could easily fill out a phony ballot and/or mailed it after the election. That would be an honest difference of opinion. Let’s let the court decide without charging hypocrisy or dishonesty. If you disagree, I’m going to ask you to start accepting unsigned checks. << “There are thousands of ballots which have never been counted.” (Except for a couple times by the normal (machine) vote counting procedure.) >> Say you have a dollar bill that is constantly rejected by the Coke machine. Are you really comfortable with my saying it is worthless? That may be your position, but surely you would agree we are entitled to believe that such a dollar is still worth $1, even if you have to look at it to know. And that we are neither hypocritical nor liars for believing this – no? Have a great weekend.