Starving the States April 22, 2003February 23, 2017 Debra: ‘You’ve changed my life by recommending Audible.com. My total daily commute time with walking to the station and waiting for and riding the train is on average three hours a day. Most of that time it is impossible to read because I am either in motion or the train is so crowded I can’t even scratch my own nose. Now I am listening to books on my Otis player! Fabulous!’ ☞ Great to hear (so to speak). Micah: ‘With the fuss over giving out an email address (yesterday’s column), I thought you might suggest to your readers that they maintain an email address specifically for registering for things that they really don’t want to. It’s easy enough to create an address at yahoo or hotmail that you can use only for such cases (such as this message to you :). ☞ Several others recommended just putting in a bogus e-address. Jonathan Betz: ‘For your readers who don’t want to give away their email address: The SneakEmail service gives you a way to create email addresses that get forwarded to your real email address, so you never have to give out the real address. If you’re registering with a web site you don’t trust, you just ask SneakEmail for a new address. You give that address to the web site, and then anything they send gets forwarded to your real email account. If you decide you don’t want to receive mail from them any longer, you can disable the address through SneakEmail, and the mail stops coming.’ Dave Neal: ‘I’m sure you read Timothy Egan’s column about states budgets. I can’t believe what bush told the governors: ‘It’s because we went through a recession and we’re at war…’ that the federal government can’t come to states’ aid. What about his tax cuts? Heaven help us.’
You Paid for It – Enjoy! A Gateway to US Government Resources April 21, 2003January 22, 2017 But first . . . Mary Black: ‘I filled in the quiz but don’t know how I did. I refuse to get on another list. I know, I know: there was box for ‘do not send,’ but I don’t believe it. I don’t want to give personal information to take a quiz, Democrat or Republican.’ ☞ Quite a few of you reacted this way – as I might well have myself. (The truth is, I forgot when I suggested this quiz Friday that it requires an e-mail.) But let me get up on my high horse – never a good perch, but still – and suggest that freedom and democracy do not come cheap. Some of our ancestors paid with their lives, others with severe privation (‘Posterity, who are to reap the blessings, will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors,’ Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John) . . . so if one of our sacrifices is to risk the occasional unsolicited political e-mail, well, I’d rather that than have to spend the winter with neither shoes nor family at Valley Forge. Toby G: ‘Not everyone wants to register to read web pages, so [your links to Paul Krugman in the New York Times] are not ‘available’ to me. But there’s good news. Someone maintains pkarchive.org, which offers Krugman’s columns in a timely fashion to all, unhindered by registration.’ ☞ With a mighty thunder of hooves and a resounding thud as I land back in the saddle . . . is the New York Times not something that we would like to see succeed? Is it not deal enough that we get to read it for free? But Krugman’s columns are so good and important, for the most part, I would encourage you to read them any way you want. And now . . . Click here for a remarkable resource I had somehow never seen before. (No registration required.) It covers everything from the current water temperature at the nation’s beaches to zip codes for any address. One of my favorites is its Inflation link. Want to know what the $400,000 in stock option profits I came this close to cashing in at age 22 in 1970 would have been worth in 2003 dollars? Or any other inflation calculation? Click here. (The whole thing went kerplooey and the stock dropped from $140 to $5. But if I had been able to cash in, it would have been the equivalent of $1,898,970 today.) Enjoy.
Take the Quiz! April 18, 2003March 25, 2012 There are 14 questions on this multiple-choice quiz. Sharp as you are, I’ll bet you don’t get them all right. (The rhetoric may be a little annoying to some of you in places – I might have changed ‘scheme’ to ‘plan’ – but facts is facts.)
More Price Grabbin’ April 17, 2003January 22, 2017 Chip Ellis: ‘For those who don’t want to order on-line, PriceGrabber is also great to use at stores that guarantee they will meet the lowest price.’ ☞ So I guess you just print out the page and bring it in to the store. It will make them crazy, but could work. (It is a great era for consumers and bargain hunters; a tough era, perhaps, for profits and investors.) Jacki Stirn: ‘Your Pricegrabber column was very timely for me. I was in the process of buying a digital video camera and had a price quote. Using pricegrabber, I negotiated $25 off a price that was reasonably good to start with. I also learned a little about some of the ridiculously low prices (not authorized dealers).’ Brenda Boswell: ‘You can use PriceGrabber much more easily via Watson, a Macintosh OS X utility that looks it all up for you! Plus flight times, stock quotes, weather, movie start times, and much more! (And no, I don’t work for them –I just respect a really well designed product.)’ Pieter: ‘WARNING: I’ve been using PriceGrabber for years and find it a valuable tool. However, your readers should be aware that the best PriceGrabber price is often not a real one. In some areas (e.g. cameras), vendors with gross misrepresentation will always make the top of the list with “unbelievable” low prices. some of the sneaky things they do (but won’t tell you) to get such a good price: Selling ‘gray market’ (import) instead of USA model – good luck getting warranty service! Removing EVERYTHING that comes w/ camera and selling it as add-ons. Pumping up the shipping. Pressuring you to buy extras and if you refuse, the item you’re buying is suddenly ‘out of stock.” ☞ Pieter says you can’t entirely trust the seller ratings, either. ‘The reviews for the terrible vendors are mainly written by the vendor themselves! It’s obvious to spot – the detailed authentic reviews are 1-star, followed by many vague, I-presume-bogus 5-star reviews praising specific employees.’ FOREPLAY John Seiffer: ‘All this time (when it took 18 months to find the right car – and three years to find the right living room furniture) my fiancée has accused me of procrastinating and I was actually engaged in foreplay. Who knew?’
Become an eCaptain? April 16, 2003January 22, 2017 If you disagree with the thrust of Paul Krugman’s column yesterday, I would love to understand why. If you agree with it, I would suggest that you email it to everyone you know and ask that they do the same. And sign up at the DNC website to become an eCaptain. (Al Hunt had a similar piece called ‘Unshared Sacrifice’ in the April 10 Wall Street Journal. He noted that the President’s tax cut would save Citicorp CEO Sandy Weill more than $7 million a year and contrasted that with the sacrifices others will be making as a result of these devastating tax cuts. ‘The economic downturn has squeezed state budgets,’ Hunt wrote, ‘forcing many to slash basic services such as Medicaid coverage. The White House says it’s too costly for the federal government to provide short-term assistance to these hard-pressed states – although it would provide a real economic stimulus. . . . Anne Picone, a 62-year-old Wakefield, Mass., widow and retired dental assistant, has osteoporosis and high blood pressure. She takes care of her bed-ridden 85-year-old mother who’s incontinent and suffers from chronic diarrhea. . . . Almost half their monthly income goes to utility bills and property taxes . . . so Ms. Picone was devastated recently when the state said it no longer was going to pay her $275-a-month prescription drug bills. . . . Rose Spears, of Portland, Ore., is losing coverage for her diabetic insulin refills and other drugs; Brenda Haffer, a St. Louis single mother, doesn’t get child support and cannot afford health insurance, so worries about her ability to continue to support her four-year-old asthmatic daughter; and Jim Gibson, a food services cashier at the University of Montana, who has cerebral palsy, frets whether he can maintain independent living if the state strips funding for his the 14-hour-a-week personal-care assistant. . . .’ And so it goes. Truly, it is a grand time to be rich and powerful in America. For everyone else, it may be time to become an eCaptain.) Tomorrow: More Price Grabbin’
How Come You All Know So Much about Vlad the Impaler? April 15, 2003February 23, 2017 Hey: Don’t forget to file your taxes. The President has filed his. President Bush reported $856,056 in adjusted gross income for last year (probably about the same as you), and paid $268,719, or a staggering, confiscatory 31 percent, in federal income taxes. After the tax grab, the Bushes had not even $600,000 to live on. According to an estimate by the Bloomberg News Service, his latest tax cut proposal would have eased his and the First Lady’s taxes by $44,500, which would go a long way toward making the tax burden more equitable. (Fortunately, the $44,500 would come out of thin air and not added to the national debt.) Bloomberg estimated that Vice President and Lynne Cheney would save $327,000 a year from the cuts. (‘Most of the tax reductions go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder,’ said then candidate Bush of his tax proposals in the second televised Presidential debate. It was such a gross misstatement – it would be unseemly to call it something worse – that it just boggles the mind.) And now . . . Kevin Clark: ‘You write, ‘Religious faith has led to more needless slaughter than perhaps any other cause.’ I believe Marxism wins that contest hands down with well over 100 million dead. Thank goodness Queen Isabella didn’t have WMD.’ ☞ Oops. Good point. I blew this one. Mike Lynott: ‘As both an avid reader of your writings and a Christian, I’d like to mildly chastise you for your comments about religion as the source of many wars and calamities in the world. There is an excellent study of this area that I commend to you and to your readers: When Religion Becomes Evil by Charles Kimball. Just as the ‘accounting’ of Enron and others was not true accounting, Queen Isabella’s religious opinions do not reflect true Christianity.’ ☞ I totally agree. But somehow she and her clerical advisors didn’t see it that way. Noah: ‘Joel Margolis listed the following [non-religious scourges]: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler. But Genghis Khan considered himself to be heaven’s chosen. And according to this, Vlad saw himself as a Crusader against the Turks.’ Russell Turpin: ‘Lenin and Stalin did not believe in a personal god. But they believed in something that served much the same role: Destiny as described by Marx’s dialectic. Like traditional religion, it prescribes a higher estate (communism) that is man’s utopian future, it gives a purpose to the individual (solidarity), it justifies authority (dictatorship of the proletariat), it claims higher knowledge (Marx’s dialectic), and it requires a large dose of faith. To the rational and secular individual, communism is a modern religion.’ Jonathan Edwards: ‘According to this, Vlad the Impaler ‘was a member of The Order of the Dragon (a position from which he derived his surname, Dracul). The Order of the Dragon was a group of Slavic rulers and warlords who were sworn to uphold the Christian faith by fighting off the advancing Turks of the Ottoman Empire.” Bob Novick: ‘Just in case you were not being sarcastic about Vlad’s ‘bad rap’ . . . ‘By 1462, when he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people, possibly more. He killed merchants who cheated their customers. He killed women who had affairs. Supposedly he had one woman impaled because her husband’s shirt was too short. He didn’t mind impaling children, either. Afterwards he would display the corpses in public so everyone would learn a lesson. It’s said that there were over 20,000 bodies hanging outside his capital city. Of course, the stories about Dracula’s cruelty might have been exaggerated by his enemies. Despite all this, Dracula’s subjects respected him for fighting the Turks and being a strong ruler. He’s remembered today as a patriotic hero who stood up to Turkey and Hungary. He was so scornful of other nations that when two foreign ambassadors refused to doff their hats to him, he had the hats nailed to their heads . . .” ☞ There is a connection someplace to be made here to hats of meat, but I can’t find it. Need to file for a four-month extension to file your tax return (though not an extension on paying an estimate of what is due)? You can now do it by phone, toll free – 888-796-1074 – provided only that you filed a return for 2001 or 2000. VOLUNTEER HELP WANTED Are you good at making web pages? Maybe with java applets and flash animation? Am I even saying this right? Does applet have two p’s? Me-Mail me.
Price Grabber April 14, 2003January 22, 2017 Have you tried PriceGrabber.com? It seems like a good site to visit before making a significant purchase. The range of prices on the amazing Casio Exilim EX-M2 digital camera – which can attach sound to your photos and short videos and play Beethoven’s Ninth – is a low of $309 to a high of $399. The prices on a 42-inch Panasonic Plasma TV – which I gotta tell you I am dying one day to own – ranged from $4,999 to $3,526 after allowing for tax and shipping to my zip code. The mini-countertop portable dishwasher that Office Depot delivers to your door for $296.79 is yours, delivered, for $189.48 from Wal-Mart. Remember when you actually had to let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages? And, before that, actually walk? We didn’t realize it at the time, but life was hell. Comparison shopping could take all day. (All that said, remember that the cheapest plasma TV of all is not to buy one. That’s my brand. I know you only live once, but I have always believed in pacing myself. An annoying young man once wrote, ‘Pace yourself! Tease yourself with anticipation. Ease the fingers of your aspiration up the inner thigh of your cupidity. Tickle your fancy.’ ‘Of course money buys happiness!’ he concluded. ‘But both will last longer if you remember the importance of foreplay.’ So I’m waiting a few months more. As to countertop dishwashers – would it kill you to rinse your fork and plate in the sink and then wipe them clean on your shirt sleeve?) Tomorrow: How Come You All Know So Much about Vlad the Impaler?
Vlad the Impaler; Soros Redux April 11, 2003February 23, 2017 But first . . . Breaking News from the Borowitz Report: IRAQIS TOPPLE GIANT STATUE OF SADDAM LOOK-ALIKE ‘Just to be Sure,’ Jubilant but Cautious Iraqis Say [Shipping any minute: Who Moved My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison, by Andy Borowitz.] And now . . . BAD VLAD Joel Margolis: ‘Those of us who are not part of the secular left will have to take responsibility for all of those individuals who did things in the name of religion which violate the commandments. But at least we know that there are plenty of people in the world (some of whom appear to be your heroes – e.g., Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King, Jr.) who did good things based on their religion. Let’s see who you have on your side – Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler. I guess their actions, in your view, are more deserving of honor and recognition.’ ☞ Now, Joel. In the first place, I think Vlad the Impaler gets a bad rap. But leaving that aside – and understanding that you obviously don’t think I really was saying that people of faith are ‘responsible for all of those individuals who did things in the name of religion which violate the commandments’ – I guess what I am saying is that I hope people of faith will pray for the wisdom and strength to do the right thing . . . but determine what is right based on logic and common human decency. Most people of faith have these qualities in abundance. Some, though, can come to feel they are on a divine mission, and that feeling can sometimes – despite what in their minds are the purest and most devout of intentions – lead to illogical actions that go very badly wrong. No? (And of course I’m kidding about Vlad the Impaler. I am embarrassed to say I have only the vaguest idea who he was, and he wasn’t very nice.) GEORGE SOROS REDUX In light of the wonderful news coming out of Iraq – and it is wonderful, particularly compared to what might have been – celebrants would be well advised to re-read this piece by George Soros. Basically it might be summarized: Right war, wrong way – watch out. Have a great weekend.
Hurry! Hoorah! HooIRA! April 10, 2003January 22, 2017 IRAs Don’t forget you have until April 15 (but only until April 15) to make your IRA – or Roth IRA – contribution for 2002, and even to set one up if you haven’t already done so. TIAA-CREF accepts enrollments on-line. If you’re flush (though who is ever flush?), you could make two contributions while you’re at it – one, in time’s nick, for 2002, and one, nice and early, for 2003. BAPTISMS Magda: ‘I have several problems with the baptism story. First, those are our tax dollars at work: they paid for the soldiers’ time, the water, and the salary of the Chaplain. So much for the separation of church and state. Second, it would be a simple humanitarian gesture for anyone to make the water available to hot, tired soldiers – without any strings. Are we going to see the military withholding water from the Iraqis pending conversion? Third, this is a severe abuse of his role as chaplain. My godfather (a rabbi) was a navy chaplain. It is their job to provide comfort and lend an ear, to play confessor when needed, and to either provide the religious services or arrange for the religious services needed by the troops. It is not okay for an individual chaplain to misuse his post to evangelize his own religious convictions to the troops. He is there to serve, not to convert. And certainly not to withhold anything that could be for the good of the troops, in order to serve his personal agenda.’ ☞ Well, of course, I agree. I thought the story was sufficiently loony that people would recognize I was not being entirely serious when I said, ‘makes sense to me.’ Duncan: ‘You write: ‘I do not begrudge [the President] his faith in any way. But I would like our foreign policy to be entirely logic, rather than even a little faith, based.’ In other words, the President is free to believe anything he wants, but when it’s time to make the really important decisions, he should ignore his deeply-held convictions and instead rely on ‘logic.’ Wouldn’t that be rather hypocritical of him? Not to mention the implication that faith and logic are somehow incompatible, an idea that religious people from across the political spectrum might question. Secular people in government all have beliefs that inform the decisions they make on behalf of the public. These beliefs may or may not seem ‘logical’ to those who do not share them. Nevertheless, we do not suggest that they abandon their beliefs before performing their public duties. Let’s not require religious people to do so either.’ ☞ Religious faith has led to more needless slaughter than perhaps any other cause. (‘I have caused great calamities. I have depopulated provinces and kingdoms. But I did it for the love of Christ and his Holy Mother.’ – Queen Isabella of Spain) Sometimes war is necessary and just – but that’s something, in my view, not to take ‘on faith,’ but only when facts and logic lead to this conclusion. Just my opinion.
Of Soapy Baptisms and Budget Deficits April 9, 2003February 23, 2017 >>>>>>>> JUST WOKE UP TO SEE THE GOOD NEWS! A huge thank you and deep bow to our Armed Forces for their courage and care in Iraq, in what now appears to be the successful liberation of the Iraqi people – and no small measure of appreciation on their part. For all the challenges and hazards that remain, and all the sadness over the lives lost, and all the frustration that we somehow alienated so much of the world in the way we went about it, this is still a day to give our men and women in uniform an even sharper salute than usual. And now (anti-climactically) back to what I posted last night: CORRECTION Steven Noble: ‘On April 2 you referenced an item from ‘ABC News.’ This reference is to the ‘Australian Broadcasting Corporation.’ They certainly have every right to call themselves ABC, but when referencing them this should perhaps be clarified.’ ☞ Right you are. I saw ABC and just assumed it was ‘our’ ABC. But the Australians are not exactly from another planet, even though they do all live upside down. That item was headlined: US soldiers in Iraq asked to pray for Bush and began, ‘They may be the ones facing danger on the battlefield, but US soldiers in Iraq are being asked to pray for President George W Bush.’ So now comes this item from the Miami Herald, which may or may not be as reliable as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, headlined Army chaplain offers baptisms, baths and begins, ‘In this dry desert world . . . there’s an oasis of sorts: a 500-gallon pool of pristine, cool water. It belongs to Army chaplain Josh Llano of Houston, who sees the water shortage, which has kept thousands of filthy soldiers from bathing for weeks, as an opportunity. ‘It’s simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized,’ he said. And agree they do. Every day, soldiers take the plunge for the Lord and come up clean for the first time in weeks. . . . First, though, the soldiers have to go to one of Llano’s hour-and-a-half sermons in his dirt-floor tent. Then the baptism takes an hour of quoting from the Bible. ‘Regardless of their motives,’ Llano said, ‘I get the chance to take them closer to the Lord.” Makes sense to me. Or if not sense, at least it doesn’t worry me as much as the prayers that begin each of our nation’s Cabinet meetings, and the suggestion that our President believes his foreign policy is a divine calling. I do not begrudge him his faith in any way. But I would like our foreign policy to be entirely logic, rather than even a little faith, based. AMPLIFICATION Frank Alejano: ‘In the interest of fairness, how did the Clinton administration handle the reporting of the Social Security surplus [that you decried Monday]? Did they treat it as spendable revenue, as Bush is doing it, or did they actually set it aside as reserves for future obligations, as promised?’ ☞ Great question, and one that several of you asked. I now kick myself for not including the answer in Monday’s column. I originally did have it in (“In fairness … ” that little section began), but it was interrupting the flow of an already dense column and I decided to snip it out. Not my best decision. Anyway, the short answer is that Clinton/Gore used the same accounting gimmick as Bush (and previous administrations) until near the end of their term, when they began at least to point out that the budget wasn’t really in surplus if the Social Security surplus had to be treated as revenue in order to get it there. (Even with that, the budget went into real surplus in the last year or two of Clinton/Gore.) I can’t remember how explicit this acknowledgement was – probably not explicit enough – but the oft-repeated shorthand for it was: “Don’t squander the surplus; save Social Security first.” This mantra was more than lip service for Clinton/Gore and Gore/Lieberman. Bush/Cheney promised a “a lockbox” as well, but canned that once they were elected, cutting taxes for the very best off instead. (And no, kids, you are not in the top 1% unless your taxable income is well in excess of $300,000 a year.) Bill: “I registered Democrat for the first time ever this year (after registering Republican since 1984).” Michael Irwin: “Uh-oh.”