An Update on Your Stocks. But First . . . October 29, 2004February 27, 2017 CBS and BBC reported last night the study from Johns Hopkins estimating 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of the war. I know President Bush feels the war in Iraq is a spectacular success, and that Donald Rumsfeld has done a ‘superb’ job – and in fairness, this is a far, far cry from the 3 million civilian casualties of the Vietnam war that young George strongly supported (stopping short only of fighting in it) – but you have to imagine that for each of the 100,000 Iraqi civilians who have died thus far, a majority of them as a result of American bombs according to the Hopkins study, there must be hundreds of thousands more who have been merely maimed or wounded in some way, including children who will harbor these scars, physical and psychological, for 60 or 70 years . . . along with a great many Iraqis (millions?) who, while neither killed nor wounded, are relatives of those who were. And then of course there are the Iraqi military casualties and the American dead and wounded, and their families. So all in all – even leaving aside the $225 billion I think we’re now up to or shortly will be – you have to wonder whether this hasn’t been a bit of a botch. By way of comparison, Iraqi deaths since the liberation began are already nearly double the American deaths suffered in Vietnam – and this in a country with about a tenth the population of ours. So adjusted for the relative size of the two countries, the Iraqis have already suffered about 20 times as many casualties as we did in Vietnam . . . and the war doesn’t seem to be completely over yet. Indeed, if CIA predictions of a possible civil war should be borne out, it may only have begun. And note that the deaths we suffered in Vietnam were, to some extent, elective. We chose to send troops to Vietnam (even if – with brave exceptions like John Kerry – most of the troops themselves did not choose this). That can’t necessarily be said of the Iraqis. So. Might it have been wiser to continue the inspection process and ‘no fly’ restrictions? To use the authorization of force not as a means to rush in, but as a lever to keep pressure on Saddam and enforce the inspections and no-fly zones? To go to war, as President Bush had promised in seeking that authorization, only as a last resort? To take the time to make a plan for success in case we were not greeted with flowers? (I think that is what is referred to as ‘a contingency plan.’) To keep our Special Forces on the hunt for Bin Laden instead of diverting so many of them so soon to prepare for the as yet undeclared Iraq War? A war that President Bush had apparently envisioned in some form even before 9/11? even before he was elected on his promise of a ‘humble foreign policy?’ If we had done all that, we might still have gone into Iraq, perhaps even just a few months later, but with a more genuine coalition sharing the cost and legitimizing the mission. Flooding the country immediately with enough troops to keep order and ample jobs to get about the business of rebuilding and improving lives – at Iraqi wage scales, not Halliburton wage scales – might actually have made for a success. And with this approach we might have killed Bin Laden long ago, before al-Qaeda had been allowed to metastasize in the way it has. But the Bush team blew it. Not only are there hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars spent – a successful conclusion is not assured! So it’s not even certain what all this will have bought us, except, certainly, the creation of thousands of new terrorists who hate America because they fail to see the purity of our intentions. You see it and I see it. But the children of dead parents might be forgiven if they miss the big picture and are inclined to reach for guns instead of roses. The Bush team blew it and the Bush team has not been honest with us. There are so many important examples, but let’s just leave it at this. One poll shows that fully 70% of likely Bush voters believe Iraq played a meaningful role in attacking us on 9/11. (Versus only 30% of non-Bush voters who believe this.) In fact, of course, Iraq played no such role. How did so many Americans come to believe it did? That’s not a small question. One could argue that hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost because of that misperception. How did it arise? How has it stayed alive? We’ve found no significant role that Iraq played in attacking us, even though President Bush immediately ordered his people to find it anyway. And look at all the other things we haven’t been able to find! Can’t find WMD we were sure were there, can’t find Bin Laden, can’t find 377 tons of high explosives, can’t find the person who blew Valerie Plume’s CIA cover, can’t find anyone who saw Lieutenant bush in Alabama, can’t find enough money for after-school programs, can’t find 58,000 absentee ballots in largely Democratic Broward County . . . And this was going to be a column recapping some of the stocks that have been mentioned in this column! But I am easily set off these days, and likely to remain on edge until at least Wednesday. Even so, let me do a little of that, just so those of you who hate my politics get a little of what you come here for. 1. Google – GOOG – which went public at $85 in a Dutch auction, continues to soar, closing at $193.30 yesterday, bought in great quantity by people who didn’t care to buy it at less than half the price two months ago. (Nearly 15 million shares traded hands yesterday, or nearly $3 billion worth.) The puts I’ve bought are obviously not doing well. One columnist thinks the stock will be $400, or certainly $250. (Thursday?) I will probably buy more puts as it rises higher, thinking, as I’ve said, that as insider shares get released from their lock up, some of those insiders will want to cash in. But this is risky, and the same caveats as always apply. 2. ARC – so far, so bad, as well. Down from just over $14, where I suggested it, to $12.70 last night. If this troubled trailer park real estate investment trust were able to solve its problems and maintain its $1.25 distribution, it would have a phenomenal yield. I’m not tremendously confident, but I’m holding mine. 3. Apple LEAPs. Suggested here last November 25 at around $4 when the stock was just above 20, Apple’s long-term calls (known as LEAPS) are now around $30, with the stock at 50. Stupidly, foolishly, and reprehensibly, I suggested selling half at the end of March, for little more than a double (what was I thinking?), thinking that you would be then be playing ‘with the house’s money’ with the rest. And later, when the LEAPS had tripled, I suggested perhaps selling a like number of out-of-the-money calls to make for what would have been a likely quadruple while you waited for the LEAPS to go long-term. So if you followed these suggestions, you would have long since doubled half your money and quadrupled the other half, but be sitting here like me, rocking back and forth wringing your hands, imagining how sweet life would be if you had just held on. You’d have nearly an octuple on ALL your money. And not even all that long to wait until it went ‘long-term’ to be lightly taxed. Oink, oink. Still, it could have been worse. (Well, like GOOG, for example.) 4. Borealis – BOREF – the great lottery ticket of this column. At $7-ish, it’s about double where I first started suggesting it years ago as the ‘stock that would surely go to zero’ – unless it didn’t, in which case it would go to the moon. But, boy (as I stressed), was this ever too good to be true. Well, as before, there’s a good chance it will be zero. But the upside it so enormous if it’s real, I plan to hold mine (I have a ton of it) until I’m either the envy of my nursing home, and Charles comes to visit me on Sundays in one of our two helicopters . . . or, more likely, until it’s gone to zero and I get to write a funny story about it. 5. CICI was suggested here at 35 cents last December 23. When it hit 90 cents not long after, I suggested selling two-thirds of it. The remaining third got back down close to 35 cents but last night closed at 68 cents, so overall we have better than a double. I plan to hold my remaining third a while. Who knows? 6. Oil stocks have been suggested here from time (February 16) to time (June 14), including TXCO at $4.50 (now only a little higher, at $5.30) . . . APC, suggested at $56.50, now $67.50 . . . and CSPLF, up from $4.30 or so to $6.30 or so. Maybe oil will be $8 a barrel next year, after the Iraqis throw flowers and start pumping in earnest again. But my current plan is to hold all these for some time to come. (Incidentally, say what you will about the ‘middle class squeeze’ and the millions of Americans who’ve fallen below the poverty line, but haven’t the last 4 years been fantastic for Texas oil men and the Saudi Royal Family? People unable to afford heating oil this winter may freeze to death, and there’s no denying that’s sad. But let’s not forget how good the Bush Administration has been to people in the oil business. ‘Bandar Bush’ and his gargantuan extended family in the Kingdom pump more than 10 million barrels a day, don’t they? So with oil up about $25 a barrel, to $50, they’re making an extra quarter billion dollars – a day. So stop your moaning about making ends meet. On average, when you add in the huge tax cuts for the rich and the gigantic profits of Texas oil men, it all evens out.) 7. SYM, suggested here in February a hair below $8 a share is now $10.45, up 30% in six months. I plan to hold on until ‘something happens.’ There is the hope they will sell out and that the value of their real estate handily exceeds the current price. 8. TIPS, PCL and TRF were mentioned here May 4, at $119, $30.20 and $35.70 respectively. (I had suggested them before, at lower prices; this was a progress report.) Half a year later, they closed last night at $127, $36.60 and $41, respectively (plus a little ‘yield’ along the way from the first two). I wouldn’t rush to buy them at these prices, but I might well still own them in 10 years. 9. ILA, CMM were suggested earlier, but on May 10, when one of you asked about them, they were around $3.90 and $10.75, and I said I was holding them. ILA has dropped to $3.15 or so, CMM risen to $16 or so – and I’m still holding them. 10. NTII was suggested August 16 at $2.60, closed last night at $3.65, and I’m holding it, too. All in all, not a bad year. On some kind of blended average maybe up 30%? But that raises all the usual caveats and more. First, if I could do this well consistently, I wouldn’t have to write this column. I got lucky. Second, you don’t find me doing these little recaps when things are bad – by being able to report to you when I want to, not on some fixed schedule, the game is stacked in my favor. Third, when I have done OK, as now, that generally bodes ill. From now on you should probably short all the stocks I suggest, except for the ones I suggest shorting, like Google, which you should buy. Fourth, there is the inadvertent but real tendency to forget to include the clunkers. So if you blame me for some stock I forgot to include here, just me-mail me and I will try to wriggle out of any responsibility for it by blaming my subordinates. Fifth, most people should do the preponderance of their stock market investing – if they should be in the stock market at all – via something as simple and sensible as Vanguard Index Funds. Low expenses and tax exposure all but guarantee you will do better than most of your friends who try harder. Sixth, the stock market is risky. You must promise me to invest only money you won’t need to touch in the next year or three. Because you don’t ever want to be in a position where you’re selling because you have to – only because you want to. Seventh, I think the next few years in the stock market could be challenging. If you’re young, by all means get into the habit, or continue the habit, of investing $500 a month, or whatever you can afford – and be thrilled if the market drops. That just means you can buy new shares ‘on sale.’ But if you’re 70, I sure wouldn’t have all my money in the stock market at today’s levels (or any levels). I’ve seen arguments that the broad market averages are 40% lower than their fair value. But that assumes interest rates will stay low, and other things will go right, and there is some risk in those assumptions. So I have a fair amount in stocks, but a fair amount not in stocks. I am a very fortunate fellow to have enough assets to be able to diversify, and I have a President working hard to try to make me even more fortunate by borrowing money from your children to lower my taxes. PLEASE help me get rid of this guy Tuesday. ‘It was a difficult call, given that we endorsed George Bush in 2000 and supported the war in Iraq. But in the end we felt he has been too incompetent to deserve re-election.’ – Bill Emmott, editor of the Economist (45% of whose readers are American), on their decision to endorse John Kerry
One Curse Down, One To Go October 28, 2004February 27, 2017 I know nothing about baseball, but I know a thing or two about Zeitgeists, and you cannot tell me the Boston Red Sox sweep of the World Series – for the first time since 1918 (not to mention the failure of the Detroit News to endorse a Republican for the first time in 150 years) – doesn’t portend a Kerry win Tuesday. Kerry is going to win, and that’s going to be a good thing for the job market and the stock market, for our place in the world, for the world’s environment, for your health and the health of your loved ones – and these are not small things. (Or easy things. I am not suggesting they will all happen right away; but we will be headed back onto a more positive long-term path.) But the war! The war! Can Democrats lead America in war? Ask the Germans if FDR was a pushover. Ask the Japanese if Truman was weak. Ask the former Soviets if JFK allowed missiles in Cuba. Ask the Vietnamese if LBJ shrank from the fight. (Maybe he should have, but he sure didn’t.) Ask Slobodan Milosovich if Bill Clinton was ineffective in Serbia. So for those of my esteemed readers who think only President Bush can do a good job for us – that the Clinton/Gore years were a trough of despond between the terrific years of Bush 41 and Bush 43 – I say, take heart! John Kerry and the 4,000 people he brings with him to Washington are going to do a good job in challenging times . . . made all the more challenging by some terrible decisions by his predecessor. My knees ache from stepping up onto this soap box so often in recent months. But hang in there – it’s almost over. The fat lady approaches her dressing room door. Meanwhile . . . Bush Stifles Global Warming Evidence, Scientist Alleges By CHUCK SCHOFFNER, AP IOWA CITY, Iowa (Oct. 26) – The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed, a NASA scientist said Tuesday night. “In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now,” James E. Hansen told a University of Iowa audience. Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and has twice briefed a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney on global warming. Hansen said the administration wants to hear only scientific results that “fit predetermined, inflexible positions.” Evidence that would raise concerns about the dangers of climate change is often dismissed as not being of sufficient interest to the public. “This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster.” And the count of newspapers abandoning Bush has now risen to 45, versus just six that have switched from Gore to Bush. The Washington Post notes that the Detroit News has endorsed the Republican candidate in every election since Ulysses S. Grant – but not this year. It notes that the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s editorial board voted 5-2 to endorse Kerry – but that the owner over-ruled the editors, allowing them only to go so far as to endorse neither candidate. The list of lifelong Republicans – like Dwight Eisenhower’s son John – who are publicly resolving to vote Democrat for the first time in their lives is long. BUT KERRY VOTES WRONG ON SO MANY THINGS! No, by and large he doesn’t. The other side just takes it out of context. (The famous $87 billion may be the best example – as discussed here some weeks ago. Of course he and the other senators who voted nay would quickly have righted the situation had the bill failed. Indeed, he voted for it before he voted against it – the famous line. But the ‘against’ vote was when the Bush folks refused to nick rich Americans slightly for part of the cost, choosing instead to borrow the entire sum from our children. That is what he was voting against. As well he should have.) A more recent example from the Bush ads is dealt short shrift in this dispatch from The Daily Mislead: BUSH MISLEADS ON INTELLIGENCE FUNDING In a new campaign advertisement, President Bush accuses Sen. John Kerry, “after the first terrorist attack on America,” of voting to “slash America’s intelligence operations” with cuts “so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses.”1 The accusations made in the ad are false and misleading. First, the vote in question did not occur, as the ad suggests, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The vote took place in 1994, a year after a truck bomb went off in a parking garage beneath one of the World Trade Center towers.2 For several years prior to 9/11, John Kerry supported increases in intelligence funding.3 Also, Kerry never supported “slashing” the intelligence budget. In 1994, as part of an effort to balance the budget, he supported a provision that would have cut the intelligence budget by $5 billion over five years.4 This amounts to about a 3.7 percent reduction. Moreover, the implication that Kerry’s vote disqualifies him from being in charge of intelligence operations is disingenuous. Porter Goss – who Bush appointed to lead the Central Intelligence Agency – supported far more significant reductions in intelligence resources. In 1995, Goss sponsored a bill that would have cut the staff at the CIA by 20 percent over five years.5 Sources: 1“Bush-Cheney ’04 Launches New Television Advertisement, ‘Wolves’,” GeorgeWBush.com, 10/22/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64657. 2“Would Kerry Throw Us To The Wolves?,” FactCheck.org, 10/23/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64658. 3Ibid., http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64658. 4Ibid., http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64658. 5“Goss Backed ’95 Bill to Slash Intelligence,” Washington Post, 08/24/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64659. Not to say we don’t do some of this. But in the words of James Carville, all the way back in 1992, but just as true today (and quoted here more than once): ‘We say 1+1=3. They say 1+1 = 3,000. The press says, ‘They’re both lying.”
John Bogle Knows Value October 27, 2004February 27, 2017 What does it tell you when Warren Buffett, Robert Rubin and John Bogle – perhaps the three best-respected money guys in the country – all favor Kerry? Buffett is the son of a conservative Republican Nebraska congressman. His common sense – and skill at sizing up CEOs – are legend. Rubin, of course, was Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. Bogle, a Republican, founded the exceptionally investor-friendly Vanguard family of funds. From yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘There’s a fine line between boldness and recklessness,’ cautions Bogle, a Republican who intends to vote for John Kerry. Boldness must be tempered by foresight and deliberation, Bogle says. ‘We can’t have a country run by philosophers . . . But a good leader is thoughtful. He seeks the counsel of others and is capable of introspection. Before making a decision, he walks around it and tries to see it from all sides. . . . Commitment is admirable in a leader . . . but there’s no virtue in committing yourself to the wrong idea. Staying the course just to stay the course is folly that invites tragedy.” A FORMER REPUBLICAN SENATOR FOR KERRY Marlow Cook was a Republican senator from Kentucky from 1968-1975. He writes; ‘Frightened to death’ of Bush By Marlow W. Cook Special to The Courier-Journal I shall cast my vote for John Kerry come Nov 2. I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: “This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts.” I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.” First, let’s talk about George Bush’s moral standards. In 2000, to defeat Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. – a man who was shot down in Vietnam and imprisoned for over five years – they used Carl Rove’s “East Texas special.” They started the rumor that he was gay, saying he had spent too much time in the Hanoi Hilton. They said he was crazy. They said his wife was on drugs. Then, to top it off, they spread pictures of his adopted daughter, who was born in Bangladesh and thus dark skinned, to the sons and daughters of the Confederacy in rural South Carolina. To show he was not just picking on Republicans, he went after Sen. Max Cleland from Georgia, a Democrat seeking re-election. Bush henchmen said he wasn’t patriotic because Cleland did not agree 100 percent on how to handle homeland security. They published his picture along with Cuba’s Castro, questioning Cleland’s patriotism and commitment to America’s security. Never mind that his Republican challenger was a Vietnam deferment case and Cleland, who had served in Vietnam, came home in a wheel chair having lost three limbs fighting for his country. Anyone who wants to win an election and control of the legislative body that badly has no moral character at all. We know his father got him in the Texas Air National Guard so he would not have to go to Vietnam. The religious right can have him with those moral standards. We also have Vice President Dick Cheney, who deferred his way out of Vietnam because, as he says, he “had more important things to do.” I have just turned 78. During my lifetime, we have sent 31,377,741 Americans to war, not including whatever will be the final figures for the Iraq fiasco. Of those, 502,722 died and 928,980 came home without legs, arms or what have you. Those wars were to defend freedom throughout the free world from communism, dictators and tyrants. Now Americans are the aggressors – we start the wars, we blow up all the infrastructure in those countries, and then turn around and spend tax dollars denying our nation an excellent education system, medical and drug programs, and the list goes on. … I hope you all have noticed the Bush administration’s style in the campaign so far. All negative, trashing Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards and Democrats in general. Not once have they said what they have done right, what they have done wrong or what they have not done at all. Lyndon Johnson said America could have guns and butter at the same time. This administration says you can have guns, butter and no taxes at the same time. God help us if we are not smart enough to know that is wrong, and we live by it to our peril. We in this nation have a serious problem. It’s almost worse than terrorism: We are broke. Our government is borrowing a billion dollars a day. They are now borrowing from the government pension program, for apparently they have gotten as much out of the Social Security Trust as it can take. Our House and Senate announce weekly grants for every kind of favorite local programs to save legislative seats, and it’s all borrowed money. If you listened to the President confirming the value of our war with Iraq, you heard him say, “If no weapons of mass destruction were found, at least we know we have stopped his future distribution of same to terrorists.” If that is his justification, then, if he is re-elected our next war will be against Iran and at the same time North Korea, for indeed they have weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, which they have readily admitted. Those wars will require a draft of men and women. … I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court. Those of you who are fiscal conservatives and abhor our staggering debt, tell your conservative friends, “Vote for Kerry,” because without Bush to control the Congress, the first thing lawmakers will demand Kerry do is balance the budget. The wonderful thing about this country is its gift of citizenship, then it’s freedom to register as one sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction. If we are indeed the party of Lincoln (I paraphrase his words), a president who deems to have the right to declare war at will without the consent of the Congress is a president who far exceeds his power under our Constitution. I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right path. THINK OF IT AS A MANAGEMENT ISSUE Ian Jacobsen, Certified Management Consultant, offers this in his special edition of IanSights: Issue: Whether or Not to Change Leaders You are a shareholder in a major global enterprise. In early November you will be voting on various issues, including whether to renew the CEO’s contract. The CEO is controversial. Some shareholders are calling for his ouster while others are loyal to him. Though the shareholders’ vote is advisory to the board, they generally follow the shareholders’ directions. Your challenge As a shareholder, you want to do what’s right for the future of the enterprise and for your investment. Here are some issues about the CEO’s performance: He undertook a hostile takeover based on faulty information and assumptions, and with no realistic plan for dealing with the conflict after the takeover. There is no end in sight to the hostilities. They will likely continue for years and are taking a high toll on both enterprises. Brand image has gone from being the highly respected three years ago to being mistrusted and despised by many now. The enterprise has gone from a record surplus to a record deficit in three years with no end in sight. He reduced prices for the richest customers, adding to the deficit. He polarized shareholders instead of uniting them as promised. He curtailed R&D in a new technology for which your enterprise could have become a world leader. He awarded major contracts to cronies without competitive bidding. The CEO is proud of his performance and promises more of the same. There is not a client I have had over the past 21 years that would have kept their CEO under such circumstances. They all have held their CEO to higher standards. While it may be tempting to say, “You got us into this mess, so you get us out,” most CEOs who have incurred major problems are replaced. They are seen as part of the problem. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, the significant problems we face cannot be solved using the thinking that created them. You have probably surmised by now that I am writing about George W. Bush. You are a shareholder in the USA. The board is the Electoral College. On November 2, you will have the opportunity to vote on whether to renew his contract or replace him. Though there are other alternatives, John Kerry is the only candidate with a chance of unseating Bush. Kerry is not perfect (we have never had a perfect president and probably never will), but he offers hope for: Strong moral values Standing up for what he believes in Changing his mind as circumstances change A different view of terrorism and the war More global collaboration Re-establishing respect for and trust in the USA A more robust middle class A more balanced budget I believe that Kerry is the better alternative. ☞ Me, too! And Buffett, Rubin and Bogle! And 31 of the 33 editorial boards that have switched their endorsements from 2000 to 2004. And a raft of conservative columnists! So know you will be welcome with open arms if, for this one election only, you join with everyone from John Eisenhower to Bob Barr and vote for a change in management.
It’s Kerry, 31 to 2 October 26, 2004February 27, 2017 IF YOU’RE A CONSERVATIVE Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, writing in Salon. ‘Serious conservatives should deny their votes to Bush. . . . A Kerry victory would likely be bad for the cause of individual liberty and limited government. But based on the results of his presidency, a Bush victory would be catastrophic. Conservatives should choose principle over power.’ Writes conservative columnist Walter Olson: ‘I’m among those who believe George W. Bush doesn’t merit re-election, though I supported and in fact actively advised his campaign the first time around.’ Writes syndicated columnist Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune: ‘At the age of 50, I get few chances to try something entirely new. Come Nov. 2, I plan to take one of those rare opportunities. I’m going to vote for a Democrat for president. I’ve never done it before, and I hope I never have to do it again. But President Bush has made an irresistible case against his own re-election. His first term has been one of the most dismal and costly failures of any presidency. His second promises to be even worse.‘ Or click here for a whole slew of Republican switching to Kerry, like well-known Texas financier David Bonderman, of the Texas Pacific Group in Fort Worth, who backed Bush last time. Now backing Kerry, he says Bush ‘is turning out to be the worst president since Millard Fillmore – and that’s probably an insult to Millard Fillmore.’ Or look at editorandpublisher.com, which shows that as of Sunday, 31 papers that backed Bush in 2000 have switched to Kerry – versus just two that have switched the other way. Ask your Republican friends (gently) . . . if conservatives feel this way, and if so many editorial boards, having given it considerable thought, feel this way . . . maybe there’s something to it? IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT SECURITY Click here for the story of a man who stowed away in the wheel well of an American Airlines 737 Friday. What if, instead of a 160-pound man, he had been a 160-pound bomb? We know George W. Bush has managed to create thousands of new terrorists abroad and turn much of the world against us. How much safer has he made us here at home? Everyone knows by now that the Bush team forgot to guard an Iraqi warehouse with 350 tons of high explosives – a single pound of which in the wheel well of a 737 could easily bring the plane down. This was more than 700,000 pounds. There is the tendency to forgive Bush anything – giant deficits, millions more in poverty and without health insurance, more assault weapons and fewer cops, the attack on embryonic stem cell research – all because somehow he will keep us safe. But c’mon people. He ignored the urgent warnings about bin Laden nine months before 9/11 . . . he turned most of the world against us after 9/11 . . . he’s got our military stretched thin and our financial strength weakening by the month . . . how is this making us safer? And then there’s this (and I’ll stop): CARL’S EPIPHANY In large part: THE LAST STRAW Carl F. Worden That’s it, I’ve had it. I’ve been a registered Republican since I pulled my first lever in a voting booth, and I’ve voted as a loyal Republican for Republican candidates consistently every year. I am 55 years of age. I am considered a right-wing Christian conservative and strict constitutionist who knows the Framers of the Constitution expected strict adherence to that original document unless and until it is amended. You don’t get much more conservative and constitutionally-minded than I am, and that is why I just cast my Oregon vote-by-mail ballot for Democrat John Kerry as the next president of the United States. So did my wife — and she’s a very independent thinker. I know there are thousands of lifelong Republican/Independent conservatives who are going to do the same thing on November 2nd, because they’ve written and told me so. The absolute last straw for me took place at the Bush rally, held in Central Point, Oregon on October 14th. . . . Three local teachers got tickets to the Bush rally, passed all the security checkpoints and scrutiny and got in. They never created or caused a disturbance, and they were perfectly peaceful members of the audience waiting to hear Bush speak. But before they got to hear Bush, they were expelled from the rally by Bush rally staff who objected to the words printed on the T-shirts they were wearing. No, the words on the T-shirts the ladies were wearing did not disparage Bush, nor did they suggest support for Kerry or any other candidate. The words did not condemn or support the war in Iraq, nor did they slam any Administration policy. No, the T-shirts the three women wore showed an American flag, and under it the words, “Protect Our Civil Liberties”. That was all — I kid you not. That was it. That was the last straw for me. That was the defining moment I’ll never forget. That was my epiphany. Bryan Platt, Chairman of the Jackson County Republican Central Committee, said he stood 100 percent behind the person who made the decision to exclude the women, removing any doubt that one or two individuals exceeded their authority and blew it. No, it was solid, Republican neo-conservative fascist policy on open display, and the Brown Shirts weren’t about to apologize for it. No way. . . . My decision to vote for Kerry was a vote to get Bush and his administration out. I could have voted for a third party candidate who couldn’t possibly win, but that would have translated into a vote for Bush, and I just couldn’t do that. . . This election is different: In this election, we all have to answer the call to vote wisely. Lives depend on it, and God is watching how we vote as well. When an individual sins, God deals with him individually. When a whole nation sins, God deals with the nation nationally. It’s right there in the Bible. The way I see it, the threat Bush presents is just too great. I know what Bush did with his first four years on good behavior, and so do you. What scares the bejeebers out of me is what Bush would do with four more years with nothing to lose — and an assumed mandate from the people for what he did the first four. . . What I do know is that any party that would find the words, “Protect Our Civil Liberties” offensive or even threatening, is a party I won’t belong to anymore. That was the last straw. Carl F. Worden FASCISM ISN’T EASY TO DEFINE Fascism? Did Carl say fascism? Ouch. But what is fascism, anyway? It’s even harder to define than ‘irony.’ Click here for one site’s definition (and be sure to scroll down to the photo).
I Made a Big Mistake Friday October 25, 2004February 27, 2017 SOME CONSERVATIVE TAKES The Financial Times: ‘On the management of fiscal policy, the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum. Watching the world’s economic superpower slowly destroy perhaps the world’s most enviable fiscal position is something to behold.‘ ☞ Matched only by watching us destroy the enormous reservoir of worldwide good will we enjoyed after September 11th. “George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism.” – Scott McConnell, The American Conservative Please vote for John Kerry. He is so, so much better than the Bush smear machine would have you think. Or if you can’t bring yourself to vote our way, but harbor any doubts about the course we’re on – at least stay home? “Senator John F. Kerry is a wise and decent man who has the makings of a fine president. . . . It’s time to see Kerry as the person he is, not as the caricature created in the president’s campaign ads.” – Des Moines Register, endorsing John Kerry yesterday “This president has utterly failed to fulfill our expectations. We turn now to his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, with the belief that he is more likely to meet the hopes we once held for Mr. Bush. Our choice was not dictated by partisanship . . . Indeed, it has been 40 years since the Sentinel endorsed a Democrat for president.” – Orlando Sentinel, endorsing John Kerry yesterday “We had fully expected to stand with Bush, whom we endorsed in 2000 . . . But we are unable to endorse President Bush for re-election because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, his record deficit spending, his assault on open government and his failed promise to be a ‘uniter not a divider’ within the United States and the world.” – Tampa Tribune, which has not endorsed a Democrat for President since 1948, withholding its endorsement from George W. Bush last Sunday “[T]he president who came to office as a ‘compassionate conservative’ has often displayed a narrow partisanship. A bold doctrine of preemption replaced the promise of ‘a more humble foreign policy.’ A stubborn refusal to accept uncomfortable facts and a simplistic approach to complicated issues raise questions of basic governance skills. These grave concerns override mere differences on issues with his challenger, Sen. John Kerry. . . . On the basis of experience, a strong campaign and command of the issues that make this such a crucial election, The Herald recommends JOHN F. KERRY.” – Miami Herald last Sunday, after having endorsed Jeb Bush two years ago THE REAL ESTATE BUBBLE Okay, it may not be a bubble. And the correction, when it comes, may be worst in vacation condos and other second homes. Your own home or industrial mall may be unaffected. But I was just at a home that’s been marked down from $6.2 million to $4.95 million (and still hasn’t sold), and passed by another reduced from $525,000 to $395,000 (that still hasn’t sold), and it feels as if we may have passed the peak. Someday, interest rates might rise (if only because of the aforesaid lunatics destroying our fiscal position). That would be a killer for real estate. And what about this? Membership in the National Association of Realtors has jumped in four years from about 780,000 to about 1 million. Signs of an overheated market? (Or just an interesting comment on the sad state of the job market? Was there actually 28% more work to do – “this is the bathroom, this is the bedroom” – or are all these extra realtors just competing with each other for the same commissions?) GOOGAPUSS Last Tuesday I noted that Google – on which I had bought puts, betting it would go down – had jumped 5 points, to $149 a share. “But the game is far from over,” I wrote, “and if/when GOOG gets up around $160 or $180 (Thursday?), I may buy some more puts, at what would then be a much better price.” Well, it wasn’t Thursday – it was Friday. The stock briefly touched $180 before closing at $173. I bought some March 185 puts at $28.10. It’s important to reiterate how risky this is (as if Friday’s 24-point jump isn’t evidence enough). Then again, if you read my original column, way, way back on October 18 (how time flies when you’re getting creamed), you’ll see my reasoning. And when the stock hits $200 or $210 (Thursday?), I may buy some more puts, at what would then be an even better price. GOOGLE’S GREAT NEW TOOL It’s still in beta, but I imagine millions of us have by now gone to desktop.google.com and downloaded this wonderful new search engine. Free, no less. It’s a quick way to find almost anything on your own computer – and any web pages you’ve viewed. Just because I think the stock may fall once insiders can sell their shares doesn’t mean I am not a huge Google fan. Desktop Google is just the latest reason. BASEBALL I kinda knew the Red Sox were gonna win, and that that was good for Kerry, but – having spent a lifetime trying to know as little as possible about baseball – I would never have ventured to explain why. Here’s why. GORE I made a mistake Friday in thinking the Gore speech was too long to post. The truth is, it is too important not to post. If you care about your country – and I happen to know that you do – you will read it, despite your staunch Republican affiliation. At least the bolded part about aluminum tubes. Monday, October 18 , 2004 at 12:30pm Gaston Hall, Georgetown University Washington, D.C. Text of the speech, as prepared: I have made a series of speeches about the policies of the Bush-Cheney administration – with regard to Iraq, the war on terror, civil liberties, the environment and other issues – beginning more than two years ago with a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco prior to the administration’s decision to invade Iraq. During this series of speeches, I have tried to understand what it is that gives so many Americans the uneasy feeling that something very basic has gone wrong with our democracy. There are many people in both parties who have the uneasy feeling that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, an incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country. One group maligns the President as not being intelligent, or at least, not being smart enough to have a normal curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group is convinced that his religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups. I think he is plenty smart. And while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and that it is an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me and for many of you, most of the President’s frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. But it is crucially important to be precise in describing what it is he believes in so strongly and insulates from any logical challenge or even debate. It is ideology – and not his religious faith – that is the source of his inflexibility. Most of the problems he has caused for this country stem not from his belief in God, but from his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interests of the wealthy and of large corporations over the interests of the American people. Love of power for its own sake is the original sin of this presidency. The surprising dominance of American politics by right-wing politicians whose core beliefs are often wildly at odds with the opinions of the majority of Americans has resulted from the careful building of a coalition of interests that have little in common with each other besides a desire for power devoted to the achievement of a narrow agenda. The two most important blocks of this coalition are the economic royalists, those corporate leaders and high net worth families with vast fortunes at their disposal who are primarily interested in an economic agenda that eliminates as much of their own taxation as possible, and an agenda that removes regulatory obstacles and competition in the marketplace. They provide the bulk of the resources that have financed the now extensive network of foundations, think tanks, political action committees, media companies and front groups capable of simulating grassroots activism. The second of the two pillars of this coalition are social conservatives who want to roll back most of the progressive social changes of the 20 th century, including women’s rights, social integration, the social safety net, the government social programs of the progressive era, the New Deal, the Great Society and others. Their coalition includes a number of powerful special interest groups such as the National Rifle Association, the anti-abortion coalition, and other groups that have agreed to support each other’s agendas in order to obtain their own. You could call it the three hundred musketeers – one for all and all for one. Those who raise more than one hundred thousand dollars are called not musketeers but pioneers. His seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction – when in fact it is this very inflexibility, based on a willful refusal to even consider alternative opinions or conflicting evidence, that poses the most serious danger to the country. And by the same token, the simplicity of his pronouncements, which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, are in fact exactly the opposite — they mark his refusal to even consider complexity. That is a particularly difficult problem in a world where the challenges we face are often quite complex and require rigorous analysis. The essential cruelty of Bush’s game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the citizenry of America and give as much as possible to the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his agenda and say, as Dick Cheney said to Paul O’Neill, “this is our due.” The central elements of Bush’s political – as opposed to religious — belief system are plain to see: The “public interest” is a dangerous myth according to Bush’s ideology – a fiction created by the hated “liberals” who use the notion of “public interest” as an excuse to take away from the wealthy and powerful what they believe is their due. Therefore, government of by and for the people, is bad – except when government can help members of his coalition. Laws and regulations are therefore bad – again, except when they can be used to help members of his coalition. Therefore, whenever laws must be enforced and regulations administered, it is important to assign those responsibilities to individuals who can be depended upon not to fall prey to this dangerous illusion that there is a public interest, and will instead reliably serve the narrow and specific interests of industries or interest groups. This is the reason, for example, that President Bush put the chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, in charge of vetting any appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Enron had already helped the Bush team with such favors as ferrying their rent-a-mob to Florida in 2000 to permanently halt the counting of legally cast ballots. And then Enron went on to bilk the electric rate-payers of California, without the inconvenience of federal regulators protecting citizens against their criminal behavior. Or to take another example, this is why all of the important EPA positions have been filled by lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in their respective industries in order to make sure that they’re not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the laws against excessive pollution. In Bush’s ideology, there is an interweaving of the agendas of large corporations that support him and his own ostensibly public agenda for the government he leads. Their preferences become his policies, and his politics become their business. Any new taxes are of course bad – especially if they add anything to the already unbearable burden placed on the wealthy and powerful. There are exceptions to this rule, however, for new taxes that are paid by lower income Americans, which have the redeeming virtue of simultaneously lifting the burden of paying for government from the wealthy and potentially recruiting those presently considered too poor to pay taxes into the anti-tax bandwagon. In the international arena, treaties and international agreements are bad, because they can interfere with the exercise of power, just as domestic laws can. The Geneva Convention, for example, and the U.S. law prohibiting torture were both described by Bush’s White House Counsel as “quaint.” And even though new information has confirmed that Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in reviewing the specific extreme measures authorized to be used by military interrogators, he has still not been held accountable for the most shameful and humiliating violation of American principles in recent memory. Most dangerous of all, this ideology promotes the making of policy in secret, based on information that is not available to the public and insulated from any meaningful participation by Congress. And when Congress’s approval is required under our current constitution, it is given without meaningful debate. As Bush said to one Republican Senator in a meeting described in Time magazine, “Look, I want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.” At the urging of the Bush White House, Republican leaders in Congress have taken the unprecedented step of routinely barring Democrats from serving on important conference committees and allowing lobbyists for special interests to actually draft new legislative language for conference committees that has not been considered or voted upon in either the House or Senate. It appears to be an important element in Bush’s ideology to never admit a mistake or even a doubt. It also has become common for Bush to rely on special interests for information about the policies important to them and he trusts what they tell him over any contrary view that emerges from public debate. He has, in effect, outsourced the truth. Most disturbing of all, his contempt for the rule of reason and his early successes in persuading the nation that his ideologically based views accurately described the world have tempted him to the hubristic and genuinely dangerous illusion that reality is itself a commodity that can be created with clever public relations and propaganda skills, and where specific controversies are concerned, simply purchased as a turnkey operation from the industries most affected. George Orwell said, “The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” And in one of the speeches a year ago last August, I proposed that one reason why the normal processes of our democracy have seemed dysfunctional is that the nation had a large number of false impressions about the choices before us, including that Saddam Hussein was the person primarily responsible for attacking us on September 11 th 2001 (according to Time magazine, 70 percent thought that in November of 2002); an impression that there was a tight linkage and close partnership and cooperation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist group al Qaeda, which attacked us, and Iraq, which did not; the impression that Saddam had a massive supply of weapons of mass destruction; that he was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, and that he was about to give nuclear weapons to the al Qaeda terrorist group, which would then use them against American cities; that the people of Iraq would welcome our invading army with garlands of flowers; that even though the rest of the world opposed the war, they would quickly fall in line after we won and contribute money and soldiers so that there wasn’t a risk to our taxpayers of footing the whole bill, that there would be more than enough money from the Iraqi oil supplies, which would flow in abundance after the invasion and that we would use that money to offset expenses and we wouldn’t have to pay anything at all; that the size of the force required for this would be relatively small and wouldn’t put a strain on our military or jeopardize other commitment around the world. Of course, every single one of these impressions was wrong. And, unfortunately, the consequences have been catastrophic for our country. And the plague of false impressions seemed to settle on other policy debates as well. For example in considering President Bush’s gigantic tax cut, the country somehow got the impression that, one, the majority of it wouldn’t go disproportionately to the wealthy but to the middle class; two, that it would not lead to large deficits because it would stimulate the economy so much that it would pay for itself; not only there would be no job losses but we would have big increases in employment. But here too, every one of these impressions was wrong. I did not accuse the president of intentionally deceiving the American people, but rather, noted the remarkable coincidence that all of his arguments turned out to be based on falsehoods. But since that time, we have learned that, in virtually every case, the president chose to ignore and indeed often to suppress, studies, reports and facts that were contrary to the false impressions he was giving to the American people. In most every case he chose to reject information that was prepared by objective analysts and rely instead on information that was prepared by sources of questionable reliability who had a private interest in the policy choice he was recommending that conflicted with the public interest. For example, when the President and his team were asserting that Saddam Hussein had aluminum tubes that had been acquired in order to enrich Uranium for atomic bombs, numerous experts at the Department of Energy and elsewhere in the intelligence community were certain that the information being presented by the President was completely wrong. The true experts on Uranium enrichment are at Oak Ridge, in my home state of Tennessee. And they told me early on that in their opinion there was virtually zero possibility whatsoever that the tubes in question were for the purpose of enrichment – and yet they received a directive forbidding them from making any public statement that disagreed with the President’s assertions. In another example, we now know that two months before the war began, Bush received two detailed and comprehensive secret reports warning him that the likely result of an American-led invasion of Iraq would be increased support for Islamic fundamentalism, deep division of Iraqi society with high levels of violent internal conflict and guerilla warfare aimed against U.S. forces. Yet, in spite of these analyses, Bush chose to suppress the warnings and instead convey to the American people the absurdly Polyanna-ish view of highly questionable and obviously biased sources like Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted felon and known swindler, who the Bush administration put on its payroll and gave a seat adjacent to Laura Bush at the State of the Union address. They flew him into Baghdad on a military jet with a private security force, but then decided the following year he was actually a spy for Iran, who had been hoodwinking President Bush all along with phony facts and false predictions. There is a growing tension between President Bush’s portrait of the situation in which we find ourselves and the real facts on the ground. In fact, his entire agenda is collapsing around his ankles: Iraq is in flames, with a growing U.S. casualty rate and a growing prospect of a civil war with the attendant chaos and risk of an Islamic fundamentalist state. America’s moral authority in the world has been severely damaged, and our ability to persuade others to follow our lead has virtually disappeared. Our troops are stretched thin, are undersupplied and are placed in intolerable situations without adequate training or equipment. In the latest U.S.-sponsored public opinion survey of Iraqis only 2% say they view our troops as liberators; more than 90% of Arab Iraqis have a hostile view of what they see as an “occupation.” Our friends in the Middle East – including, most prominently, Israel – have been placed in greater danger because of the policy blunders and the sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon officials have conducted the war. The war in Iraq has become a recruiting bonanza for terrorists who use it as their damning indictment of U.S. policy. The massive casualties suffered by civilians in Iraq and the horrible TV footage of women and children being pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their homes has been a propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden beyond his wildest dreams. America’s honor and reputation has been severely damaged by the President’s decision to authorize policies and legal hair splitting that resulted in widespread torture by U.S. soldiers and contractors of Iraqi citizens and others in facilities stretching from Guantanamo to Afghanistan to Iraq to secret locations in other countries. Astonishingly, and shamefully, investigators also found that more than 90 percent of those tortured and abused were innocent of any crime or wrongdoing whatsoever. The prestigious Jaffe think tank in Israel released a devastating indictment just last week of how the misadventure in Iraq has been a deadly distraction from the crucial war on terror. We now know from Paul Bremer, the person chosen to be in charge of U.S. policy in Iraq immediately following the invasion, that he repeatedly told the White House there were insufficient troops on the ground to make the policy a success. Yet at that time, President Bush was repeatedly asserting to the American people that he was relying on those Americans in Iraq for his confident opinion that we had more than enough troops and no more were needed. We now know from the Central Intelligence Agency that a detailed, comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the likely consequences of an invasion accurately predicted the chaos, popular resentment, and growing likelihood of civil war that would follow a U.S. invasion and that this analysis was presented to the President even as he confidently assured the nation that the aftermath of our invasion would be the speedy establishment of representative democracy and market capitalism by grateful Iraqis. Most Americans have tended to give the Bush-Cheney administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his failure to take any action in advance of 9/11 to prepare the nation for attack. After all, hindsight always casts a harsh light on mistakes that were not nearly as visible at the time they were made. And we all know that. But with the benefit of all the new studies that have been made public it is no longer clear that the administration deserves this act of political grace by the American people. For example, we now know, from the 9/11 Commission that the chief law enforcement office appointed by President Bush to be in charge of counter-terrorism, John Ashcroft, was repeatedly asked to pay attention to the many warning signs being picked up by the FBI. Former FBI acting director Thomas J. Pickard, the man in charge of presenting Ashcroft with the warnings, testified under oath that Aschroft angrily told him “he did not want to hear this information anymore.” That is an affirmative action by the administration that is very different than simple negligence. That is an extremely serious error in judgment that constitutes a reckless disregard for the safety of the American people. It is worth remembering that among the reports the FBI was receiving, that Ashcroft ordered them not to show him, was an expression of alarm in one field office that the nation should immediately check on the possibility that Osama bin Laden was having people trained in commercial flight schools around the U.S. And another, from a separate field office, that a potential terrorist was learning to fly commercial airliners and made it clear he had no interest in learning how to land. It was in this period of recklessly willful ignorance on the part of the Attorney General that the CIA was also picking up unprecedented warnings that an attack on the United States by al Qaeda was imminent. In his famous phrase, George Tenet wrote, the system was blinking red. It was in this context that the President himself was presented with a CIA report with the headline, more alarming and more pointed than any I saw in eight years I saw of daily CIA briefings: “bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.” The only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one given to George Bush was about the so-called Millenium threats predicted for the end of the year 1999 and less-specific warnings about the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. In both cases these warnings in the President’s Daily Briefing were followed, immediately, the same day – by the beginning of urgent daily meetings in the White House of all of the agencies and offices involved in preparing our nation to prevent the threatened attack. By contrast, when President Bush received his fateful and historic warning of 9/11, he did not convene the National Security Council, did not bring together the FBI and CIA and other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation, and apparently did not even ask followup questions about the warning. The bi-partisan 9/11 commission summarized what happened in its unanimous report: “We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 th between the President and his advisors about the possibility of a threat of al Qaeda attack in the United States.” The commissioners went on to report that in spite of all the warnings to different parts of the administration, the nation’s “domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law authorities were not marshaled to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned.” We know from the 9/11 commission that within hours of the attack, Secretary Rumsfeld was attempting to find a way to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11. We know the sworn testimony of the President’s White House head of counter-terrorism Richard Clarke that on September 12 th – the day after the attack: “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this…I said, ‘Mr. President…There’s no connection. He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection…We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts…They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’ …I don’t think he sees memos that he doesn’t– wouldn’t like the answer.” He did not ask about Osama bin Laden. He did not ask about al Qaeda. He did not ask about Saudi Arabia or any country other than Iraq. When Clarke responded to his question by saying that Iraq was not responsible for the attack and that al Qaeda was, the President persisted in focusing on Iraq, and again, asked Clarke to spend his time looking for information linking Saddam Hussein to the attack. Again, this is not hindsight. This is how the President was thinking at the time he was planning America’s response to the attack. This was not an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence, causing a mistaken linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda, this was something else; a willful choice to make the linkage, whether evidence existed or not. Earlier this month, Secretary Rumsfeld, who saw all of the intelligence available to President Bush on the alleged connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, finally admitted, under repeated questioning from reporters, “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.” This is not negligence, this is deception. It is clear that President Bush has absolute faith in a rigid, right-wing ideology. He ignores the warnings of his experts. He forbids any dissent and never tests his assumptions against the best available evidence. He is arrogantly out of touch with reality. He refuses to ever admit mistakes. Which means that as long as he is our President, we are doomed to repeat them. It is beyond incompetence. It is recklessness that risks the safety and security of the American people. We were told that our allies would join in a massive coalition so that we would not bear the burden alone. But as is by now well known, more than 90 percent of the non-Iraqi troops are American, and the second and third largest contingents in the non American group have announced just within this last week their decisions to begin withdrawing their troops soon after the U.S. election. We were told by the President that war was his last choice. It is now clear from the newly available evidence that it was always his first preference. His former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, confirmed that Iraq was Topic A at the very first meeting of the Bush National Security Council, just ten days after the inauguration. “It was about finding a way to do it, that was the tone of the President, saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’” We were told that he would give the international system every opportunity to function, but we now know that he allowed that system to operate only briefly, as a sop to his Secretary of State and for cosmetic reasons. Bush promised that if he took us to war it would be on the basis of the most carefully worked out plans. Instead, we now know he went to war without thought or preparation for the aftermath – an aftermath that has now claimed more than one thousand American lives and many multiples of that among the Iraqis. He now claims that we went to war for humanitarian reasons. But the record shows clearly that he used that argument only after his first public rationale – that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction — completely collapsed. He claimed that he was going to war to deal with an imminent threat to the United States. The evidence shows clearly that there was no such imminent threat and that Bush knew that at the time he stated otherwise. He claimed that gaining dominance of Iraqi oil fields for American producers was never part of his calculation. But we now know, from a document uncovered by the New Yorker and dated just two weeks to the day after Bush’s inauguration, that his National Security Counsel was ordered to “meld” its review of “operational policies toward rogue states” with the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force’s “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” We also know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against that Cheney Task Force by the odd combination of Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club that one of the documents receiving scrutiny by the task force during the same time period was a detailed map of Iraq showing none of the cities or places where people live but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarking blocks for promising exploration – a map which, in the words of a Canadian newspaper, resembled a butcher’s drawing of a steer, with the prime cuts delineated. We know that Cheney himself, while heading Halliburton, did more business with Iraq than any other nation, even though it was under U.N. sanctions, and that Cheney stated in a public speech to the London Petroleum Institute in 1999 that, over the coming decade, the world will need 50 million extra barrels of oil per day. “Where is it going to come from?” Answering his own question, he said, “The middle east, with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.” In the spring of 2001, when Cheney issued the administration’s national energy plan – the one devised in secret by corporations and lobbyist that he still refuses to name – it included a declaration that “the [Persian] Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.” Less than two months later, in one of the more bizarre parts of Bush’s policy process, Richard Perle, before he was forced to resign on conflict of interest charges as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, invited a presentation to the Board by a RAND corporation analyst who recommended that the United States consider militarily seizing Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. The cynical belief by some that oil played an outsized role in Bush’s policy toward Iraq was enhanced when it became clear that the Iraqi oil ministry was the only facility in the country that was secured by American troops following the invasion. The Iraqi national museum, with its priceless archeological treasures depicting the origins of civilization, the electric, water and sewage facilities so crucial to maintaining an acceptable standard of living for Iraqi citizens during the American occupation, schools, hospitals, and ministries of all kinds were left to the looters. An extensive investigation published today in the Knight Ridder newspapers uncovers the astonishing truth that even as the invasion began, there was, quite literally, no plan at all for the post-war period.On the eve of war, when the formal presentation of America’s plan neared its conclusion, the viewgraph describing the Bush plan for the post-war phase was labeled, “to be provided.” It simply did not exist. We also have learned in today’s Washington Post that at the same time Bush was falsely asserting to the American people that he was providing all the equipment and supplies their commanders needed, the top military commander in Iraq was pleading desperately for a response to his repeated request for more equipment, such as body armor, to protect his troops. And that the Army units under his command were “struggling just to maintain…relatively low readiness rates.” Even as late as three months ago, when the growing chaos and violence in Iraq was obvious to anyone watching the television news, Bush went out of his way to demean the significance of a National Intelligence Estimate warning that his policy in Iraq was failing and events were spinning out of control. Bush described this rigorous and formal analysis as just guessing. If that’s all the respect he has for reports given to him by the CIA, then perhaps it explains why he completely ignored the warning he received on August 6 th, 2001, that bin Laden was determined to attack our country. From all appearances, he never gave a second thought on that report until he finished reading My Pet Goat on September 11 th. Iraq is not the only policy where the President has made bold assertions about the need for a dramatic change in American policy, a change that he has said is mandated by controversial assertions that differ radically from accepted views of reality in that particular policy area. And as with Iraq, there are other cases where subsequently available information shows that the President actually had analyses that he was given from reputable sources that were directly contrary what he told the American people. And, in virtually every case, the President, it is now evident, rejected the information that later turned out to be accurate and instead chose to rely upon, and to forcefully present to the American people, information that subsequently turned out to be false. And in every case, the flawed analysis was provided to him from sources that had a direct interest, financial or otherwise, in the radically new policy that the President adopted. And, in those cases where the policy has been implemented, the consequences have been to detriment of the American people, often catastrophically so. In other cases, the consequences still lie in the future but are nonetheless perfectly predictably for anyone who is reasonable. In yet other cases the policies have not yet been implemented but have been clearly designated by the President as priorities for the second term he has asked for from the American people. At the top of this list is the privatization of social security. Indeed, Bush made it clear during his third debate with Senator Kerry that he intends to make privatizing Social Security, a top priority in a second term should he have one. In a lengthy profile of Bush published yesterday, the President was quoted by several top Republican fundraisers as saying to them, in a large but private meeting, that he intends to “come out strong after my swearing in, with…privatizing Social Security.” Bush asserts that – without any corroborating evidence – that the diversion of two trillion dollars worth of payroll taxes presently paid by American working people into the social security trust fund will not result in a need to make up that two trillion dollars from some other source and will not result in cutting Social Security benefits to current retirees. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, run by a Republican appointee, is one of many respected organizations that have concluded that the President is completely wrong in making his assertion. The President has been given facts and figures clearly demonstrating to any reasonable person that the assertion is wrong. And yet he continues to make it. The proposal for diverting money out of the Social Security trust fund into private accounts would generate large fees for financial organizations that have advocated the radical new policy, have provided Bush with the ideologically based arguments in its favor, and have made massive campaign contributions to Bush and Cheney. One of the things willfully ignored by Bush is the certainty of catastrophic consequences for the tens of millions of retirees who depend on Social Security benefits and who might well lose up to 40 percent of their benefits under his proposal. Their expectation for a check each month that enables them to pay their bills is very real. The President’s proposal is reckless. Similarly, the President’s vigorous and relentless advocacy of “medical savings accounts” as a radical change in the Medicare program would – according to all reputable financial analysts – have the same effect on Medicare that his privatization proposal would have on Social Security. It would deprive Medicare of a massive amount of money that it must have in order to continue paying medical bills for Medicare recipients. The President’s ideologically based proposal originated with another large campaign contributor – called Golden Rule — that expects to make a huge amount of money from managing private medical savings accounts. The President has also mangled the Medicare program with another radical new policy, this one prepared for Bush by the major pharmaceutical companies (also huge campaign contributors, of course) which was presented to the country on the basis of information that, again, turns out to have been completely and totally false. Indeed the Bush appointee in charge of Medicare was secretly ordered – we now know – to withhold the truth about the proposal’s real cost from the Congress while they were considering it. Then, when a number of Congressmen balked at supporting the proposal, the President’s henchmen violated the rules of Congress by holding the 15 minute vote open for more than two hours while they brazenly attempted to bribe and intimidate members of Congress who had voted against the proposal to change their votes and support it. The House Ethics Committee, in an all too rare slap on the wrist, took formal action against Tom DeLay for his unethical behavior during this episode. But for the Bush team, it is all part of the same pattern. Lie, intimidate, bully, suppress the truth, present lobbyists memos as the gospel truth and collect money for the next campaign. In the case of the global climate crisis, Bush has publicly demeaned the authors of official reports by scientists in his own administration that underscore the extreme danger confronting the United States and the world and instead prefers a crackpot analysis financed by the largest oil company on the planet, ExxonMobil. He even went so far as to censor elements of an EPA report dealing with global warming and substitute, in the official government report, language from the crackpot ExxonMobil report. The consequences of accepting ExxonMobil’s advice – to do nothing to counter global warming – are almost literally unthinkable. Just in the last few weeks, scientists have reached a new, much stronger consensus that global warming is increasing the destructive power of hurricanes by as much as half of one full category on the one-to-five scale typically used by forecasters. So that a hurricane hitting Florida in the future that would have been a category three and a half, will on average become a category four hurricane. Scientists around the world are also alarmed by what appears to be an increase in the rate of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere – a development which, if confirmed in subsequent years, might signal the beginning of an extremely dangerous “runaway greenhouse” effect. Yet a third scientific group has just reported that the melting of ice in Antarctica, where 95 percent of all the earth’s ice is located, has dramatically accelerated. Yet Bush continues to rely, for his scientific advice about global warming, on the one company that most stands to benefit by delaying a recognition of reality. The same dangerous dynamic has led Bush to reject the recommendations of anti-terrorism experts to increase domestic security, which are opposed by large contributors in the chemical industry, the hazardous materials industry and the nuclear industry. Even though his own Coast Guard recommends increased port security, he has chosen instead to rely on information provided to him by the commercial interests managing the ports who do not want the expense and inconvenience of implementing new security measures. The same pattern that produced America’s catastrophe in Iraq has also produced a catastrophe for our domestic economy. Bush’s distinctive approach and habit of mind is clearly recognizable. He asserted over and over again that his massive tax cut, which certainly appeared to be aimed at the wealthiest Americans, actually would not go disproportionally to the wealthy but instead would primarily benefit middle income Americans and “all tax payers.” He asserted that under no circumstances would it lead to massive budget deficits even though common sense led reasonable people to conclude that it would. Third, he asserted – confidently of course – that it would not lead to job losses but would rather create an unprecedented economic boom. The President relied on high net worth individuals who stood to gain the most from his lopsided tax proposal and chose their obviously biased analysis over that of respectable economists. And as was the case with Iraq policy, his administration actively stopped the publication of facts and figures from his own Treasury Department analysts that contained inconvenient conclusions.” As a result of this pattern, the Congress adopted the President’s tax plan and now the consequences are clear. We have completely dissipated the 5 trillion dollar surplus that had been projected over the next ten years (a surplus that was strategically invaluable to assist the nation in dealing with the impending retirement of the enormous baby boom generation) and instead has produced a projected deficit of three and one half over the same period. Year after year we now have the largest budget deficits ever experienced in America and they coincide with the largest annual trade deficits and current-account deficits ever experienced in America – creating the certainty of an extremely painful financial reckoning that is the financial equivalent for the American economy and the dollar of the military quagmire in Iraq. Indeed, after four years of this policy, which was, after all, implemented with Bush in control of all three branches of government, we can already see the consequences of their economic policy: for the first time since the four-year presidency of Herbert Hoover 1928-1932, our nation has experienced a net loss of jobs. It is true that 9/11 occurred during this period. But it is equally true that reasonable economists quantify its negative economic impact as very small compared with the negative impact compared with Bush’s. Under other Presidents the nation has absorbed the impact of Pearl Harbor, World War II, Vietnam War, Korean war, major financial corrections like that in 1987 and have ended up with a net gain of jobs nonetheless. Only Bush ranks with Hoover. Confronted with this devastating indictment, his treasury secretary, John Snow, said last week in Ohio job loss was “a myth.” This is in keeping with the Bush team’s general contempt for reality as a basis for policy. Unfortunately, the job loss is all too real for the more than two hundred thousand people who lost their jobs in the state where he called the job loss a myth. In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind related a truly startling conversation that he had with a Bush White House official who was angry that Suskind had written an article in the summer of 2002 that the White House didn’t like. This senior advisor to Bush told Suskind that reporters like him lived “in what we call the reality-based community,” and denigrated such people for believing that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality…that’s not the way the world really works anymore…when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” By failing to adjust their policies to unexpected realities, they have made it difficult to carry out any of their policies competently. Indeed, this is the answer to what some have regarded as a mystery: How could a team so skilled in politics be so bumbling and incompetent when it comes to policy? The same insularity and zeal that makes them effective at smashmouth politics makes them terrible at governing. The Bush-Cheney administration is a rarity in American history. It is simultaneously dishonest and incompetent. Not coincidentally, the first audits of the massive sums flowing through the Coalition Provisional Authority, including money appropriated by Congress and funds and revenue from oil, now show that billions of dollars have disappeared with absolutely no record of who they went to, or for what, or when, or why. And charges of massive corruption are now widespread. Just as the appointment of industry lobbyists to key positions in agencies that oversee their former employers has resulted in institutionalized corruption in the abandonment of the enforcement of laws and regulations at home, the outrageous decision to brazenly violate the law in granting sole-source, no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars to Vice President Cheney’s company, Halliburton, which still pays him money every year, has convinced many observers that incompetence, cronyism and corruption have played a significant role in undermining U.S. policy in Iraq. The former four star general in charge of central command, Tony Zinni, who was named by President Bush as his personal emissary to the middle east in 2001, offered this view of the situation in a recent book: “In the lead up to the Iraq war, and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility; at worst lying, incompetence and corruption. False rationales presented as a justification; a flawed strategy; lack of planning; the unnecessary alienation of our allies; the underestimation of the task; the unnecessary distraction from real threats; and the unbearable strain dumped on our over-stretched military. All of these caused me to speak out…I was called a traitor and a turncoat by Pentagon officials.” Massive incompetence? Endemic corruption? Official justification for torture? Wholesale abuse of civil liberties? Arrogance masquerading as principle? These are new, unfamiliar and unpleasant realities for America. We hardly recognize our country when we look in the mirror of what Jefferson called, “the opinion of mankind.” How could we have come to this point? America was founded on the principle that “all just power is derived from the consent of the governed.” And our founders assumed that in the process of giving their consent, the governed would be informed by free and open discussion of the relevant facts in a healthy and robust public forum. But for the Bush-Cheney administration, the will to power has become its own justification. This explains Bush’s lack of reverence for democracy itself. The widespread efforts by Bush’s political allies to suppress voting have reached epidemic proportions. The scandals of Florida four years ago are being repeated in broad daylight even as we meet here today. Harper’s magazine reports in an article published today that tens of thousands of registered voters who were unjustly denied their right to vote four year ago have still not been allowed back on the rolls. An increasing number of Republicans, including veterans of the Reagan White House and even the father of the conservative movement, are now openly expressing dismay over the epic failures of the Bush presidency. Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a veteran of both the Heritage Foundation and the Reagan White House, wrote recently in Salon.com, “Serious conservatives must fear for the country if Bush is re-elected…based on the results of his presidency, a Bush presidency would be catastrophic. Conservatives should choose principles over power.” Bandow seemed most concerned about Bush’s unhealthy habits of mind, saying, “He doesn’t appear to reflect on his actions and seems unable to concede even the slightest mistake. Nor is he willing to hold anyone else responsible for anything. It is a damning combination.” Bandow described Bush’s foreign policy as a “shambles, with Iraq aflame and America increasingly reviled by friend and foe alike.” The conservative co-host of Crossfire, Tucker Carlson, said about Bush’s Iraq policy, “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it.” William F. Buckley, Jr., widely acknowledged as the founder of the modern conservative movement in America, wrote of the Iraq war, “If I knew then, what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.” A former Republican Governor of Minnesota, Elmer Andersen, announced in Minneapolis that for the first time in his life he was abandoning the Republican Party in this election because Bush and Cheney “believe their own spin. Both men spew outright untruths with evangelistic fervor.” Andersen attributed his switch to Bush’s “misguided and blatantly false misrepresentations of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The terror seat was Afghanistan. Iraq had no connection to these acts of terror and was not a serious threat to the United States as this President claimed, and there was no relation, it is now obvious, to any serious weaponry.” Governor Andersen was also offended, he said, by “Bush’s phony posturing as cocksure leader of the free world.” Andersen and many other Republicans are joining with Democrats and millions of Independents this year in proudly supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket. In every way, John Kerry and John Edwards represent an approach to governing that is the opposite of the Bush-Cheney approach. Where Bush remains out of touch, Kerry is a proud member of the “reality based” community. Where Bush will bend to his corporate backers, Kerry stands strong with the public interest. There are now fifteen days left before our country makes this fateful choice – for us and the whole world. And it is particularly crucial for one more reason: The final feature of Bush’s ideology involves ducking accountability for his mistakes. He has neutralized the Congress by intimidating the Republican leadership and transforming them into a true rubber stamp, unlike any that has ever existed in American history. He has appointed right-wing judges who have helped to insulate him from accountability in the courts. And if he wins again, he will likely get to appoint up to four Supreme Court justices. He has ducked accountability by the press with his obsessive secrecy and refusal to conduct the public’s business openly. There is now only one center of power left in our constitution capable of at long last holding George W. Bush accountable, and it is the voters. There are fifteen days left before our country makes this fateful choice – for us and the whole world. Join me on November 2 nd in taking our country back.
Joke, No Joke October 22, 2004February 27, 2017 The fat lady, having yesterday grasped the armrests of her chair, has begun tensing her arm muscles as she begins to pull forward. The Tampa Tribune, which endorsed Bush in 2000, has decided not to endorse in 2004 – the first time in 40 years. Speaks volumes, and with the Miami Herald‘s endorsement of KERRY (remember, they endorsed Jeb Bush in 2002), one more reason we will win Florida. The Associated Press is just out with a poll that has KERRY leading 49-46. The Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll has us down six points. This is great! At the same point in the 2000 race, they had Gore down *13*. That CNN and USA Today continue to associate themselves with Gallup is remarkable. Maybe in 2008 it will be the ‘CNN / USA Today / Sinclair Broadcasting Gallup poll.’ Zogby’s latest has John Kerry tied with George Bush – on LIKABILITY. The voters are beginning to get to know John . . . and to know George all too well. Bush’s approval rating is consistently below 50%. Incumbents do NOT win reelection with approval ratings below 50% Zogby shows Kerry leading 52-38 among newly registered voters – and our side has been registering far more new voters than theirs. Electoral-vote.com now has it 271–257. But if you go to its ‘predicted final results‘ map, which assumes undecided voters will break two-to-one for Kerry (because undecideds generally abandon the incumbent, especially when so many feel the country is on the wrong track), it widens to 301–237. Eleven days is an eternity in politics, but John Kerry finishes strong. JOKE Q. What’s the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War? A. George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War. One is predisposed to dismiss that as a cheap shot . . . but think about it. Despite the clear advice of people like his father (a former CIA chief and President who had done some thinking on this himself – and who had painted a prescient picture of what a US-occupied Iraq would be like), Bush 43 really did invade the country without a plan. With a massive effort and a really good plan, who knows? Enough of the population might have been won over fast enough to make it work, although his father clearly had concluded otherwise.* But we will never know, because – incredibly – we rushed to war without a plan to win the peace. * In case you missed it, this is the oft-quoted passage from President Bush’s 1998 memoir, A World Transformed: Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible…. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq…. There was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. NO JOKE How could we have taken such a fateful step without better judgment and analysis? Without thinking through the consequences? Without having had contingency plans for scenarios other than ‘being greeted with flowers’? The explanation may lie in Al Gore’s latest speech, of which, herewith, a few paragraphs: There are many people in both parties who have the uneasy feeling that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, an incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country. One group maligns the President as not being intelligent, or at least, not being smart enough to have a normal curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group is convinced that his religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups. I think he is plenty smart. And while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and that it is an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me and for many of you, most of the President’s frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. But it is crucially important to be precise in describing what it is he believes in so strongly and insulates from any logical challenge or even debate. It is ideology – and not his religious faith – that is the source of his inflexibility. Most of the problems he has caused for this country stem not from his belief in God, but from his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interests of the wealthy and of large corporations over the interests of the American people. Love of power for its own sake is the original sin of this presidency… His seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction – when in fact it is this very inflexibility, based on a willful refusal to even consider alternative opinions or conflicting evidence, that poses the most serious danger to the country. And by the same token, the simplicity of his pronouncements, which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, are in fact exactly the opposite — they mark his refusal to even consider complexity. That is a particularly difficult problem in a world where the challenges we face are often quite complex and require rigorous analysis. The essential cruelty of Bush’s game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the citizenry of America and give as much as possible to the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his agenda and say, as Dick Cheney said to Paul O’Neill, “this is our due.” ☞ This speech is well worth reading in its entirety. Try to find the time! But – without meaning to swamp you – I wanted to offer one more slab for your weekend, this statement by former Michigan Governor Bill Milliken in Monday’s Traverse City Record Eagle: I have always been proud to be a Republican. My Republican Party is a broad-based party, that seeks to bring a wide spectrum of people under its umbrella and that seeks to protect and provide opportunity for the most vulnerable among us. Sadly, that is not the Republican Party that I see at the national level today. My Republican Party has always been a party that stood for fiscal responsibility. Today, under George W. Bush, we have the largest deficit in the history of our country – a deficit that jeopardizes economic growth that is so desperately needed in a nation that has lost 2.6 million jobs since he took office. To make matters even worse, this president inherited a surplus, but squandered it with huge tax cuts structured primarily to benefit the wealthy and powerful. My Republican Party is the party of Michigan Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg who helped forge a bipartisan foreign policy that served this nation well and produced strong alliances across the globe. This president has, in a highly partisan, unilateral way rushed us into a tragic and unnecessary war that has cost the lives of more than 1,000 of our young men and women. In this arrogant rush to war, he has alienated this nation from much of the world. What’s worse, the basic premises upon which we were taken to war proved to be false. Now, we find ourselves in the midst of an occupation that was largely unplanned and has become a disaster from which we cannot easily extricate ourselves. My Republican Party is the party of Theodore Roosevelt, who fought to preserve our natural resources and environment. This president has pursued policies that will cause irreparable damage to our environmental laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the public lands we share with future generations. My Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, who freed an enslaved people. This president fought in the courts to strike down policies designed to provide opportunity and access to our own University of Michigan for minority students. My Republican Party is the party of Eisenhower, who warned us to beware of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. This president has pursued policies skewed to favor large corporations in the defense and oil industry and has gone so far as to let those industries help write government policies. My Republican Party is a party that respects and works with the men and women of the law enforcement community who put their lives on the line for us every day. This president ignored the pleas of law enforcement agencies across America and failed to lift a finger to renew the assault weapons ban that they strongly supported as an essential safeguard for public safety. My Republican Party is a party that values the pursuit of knowledge. But this president stands in the way of meaningful embryonic stem-cell research that holds so much promise for those who suffer from diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, spinal cord injuries and other conditions. My Republican Party is the party of Gerald R. Ford, Michigan’s only president, who reached across partisan lines to become a unifying force during a time of great turmoil in our nation’s history. This president has pursued policies pandering to the extreme right wing across a wide variety of issues and has exacerbated the polarization and the strident, uncivil tone of much of what passes for political discourse in this country today. Women’s rights, civil liberties, the separation of church and state, the funding of family planning efforts world-wide – all have suffered grievously under this president and his administration. The truth is that President George W. Bush does not speak for me or for many other moderate Republicans on a very broad cross section of issues. Sen. John Kerry, on the other hand, has put forth a coherent, responsible platform of progressive initiatives that I believe would serve this country well. He wants to balance the budget, step up environmental protection efforts, rebuild our international relationships, support stem-cell research, protect choice and pursue a number of other progressive initiatives that moderates from both parties can support. As a result, despite my long record of active involvement in the Republican Party, and my intention still to stay in the Republican Party, when I cast my ballot November 2, I will be voting for John Kerry for President. CORRECTION Mike Peattie: “I’m afraid the link you posted to the Time article Wednesday is very old – October 2002, not 2004 – and Dr. Hager is now on the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs.” ☞ Oops. My error! (But at least he’s not the head of it, as originally envisioned. I guess all the protests had some impact.)
The Fat Lady Has Grasped the Armrests of Her Chair October 21, 2004February 27, 2017 YOUR MONEY John Bakke: ‘Regarding your mention of the stock market doing better under Democrats, I have occasionally used this link with right-leaning friends to make that point. So far none of them have claimed Forbes is a lefty rag with liberal bias.’ ☞ Forbes says, in part: ‘Over the years, several studies have shown that the stock market has fared markedly better under Democrats than Republicans.’ THE POLLS As of 4am, electoral-vote.com had Kerry up 291 to 247, with Iowa having come our way – and New Mexico. (Ohio hasn’t but now looks as if it will.) Of course, we still have 12 days, which is an eternity in politics; and the polls are certainly suspect (suddenly New Mexico, which had had Bush ahead by 1%, has Kerry ahead by 10%). So I remind you, as usual, not to freak out if the map swings the other way temporarily. But the fat lady has grasped the armrests of her chair. At the end of the day, this should work out. The country has decided we are on the wrong track. Time for a fresh start under new management. Indeed, virtually the entire world longs to see this . . . but not everyone here cares what the world thinks. WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHAT THE WORLD THINKS (Some of us, anyway.) Last week, a British newspaper, The Guardian, urged its readers to write letters to U.S. citizens regarding the importance of the US election. ‘Not surprisingly,’ reports my ex-pat friend David Durst from London, ‘there has been a response from the U.S. WHO boy, has there been a response!’ Here are some e-mails The Guardian printed: Have you not noticed that Americans don’t give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies … I don’t give a rat’s ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don’t. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah – and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals. Wading River, NY Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals – Republican to a man – to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys. United States Real Americans aren’t interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions. If you want to save the world, begin with your own worthless corner of it. Texas, USA In fairness, I do think any such letters to Ohio voters – whether from Liverpool or Los Angeles – need to be VERY humble and respectful, both because they should be and because, if they’re not, they surely will backfire. My dear, beloved Brits, I understand the Guardian is sponsoring a service where British citizens write to Americans to advise them on how to vote. Thank heavens! I was adrift in a sea of confusion and you are my beacon of hope! Feel free to respond to this email with your advice. Please keep in mind that I am something of an anglophile, so this is not confrontational. Please remember, too, that I am merely an American. That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate, so please don’t use big, fancy words. Set me straight, folks! Dayton, Ohio THE AMERICAN TAXPAYERS HAVE SPENT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS PROTECTING THE PEOPLES OF THE EU, AND WHAT DO WE GET IN RETURN. BETRAYAL, BETRAYAL, BETRAYAL. I HAVE BEEN TO YOUR COUNTRY, THE COUNTRY OF MY ANCESTORS, AND I KNOW WHY THEY LEFT. MAY YOU HAVE TO HAVE A TOOTH CAPPED. I UNDERSTAND IT TAKES AT LEAST 18 MONTHS FOR YOUR GREAT MEDICAL SERVICES TO GET AROUND TO YOU. HAVE A GREAT DAY. Harlan, Kentucky Keep your noses out of our business. As I recall we kicked your asses out of our country back in 1776. We do not require input from losers and idiots on who we vote for in our own country. F— off and die a—–e!!!!! Knoxville, Iowa I used to visit the UK every year. I love the history and culture of your country. But after I heard about your campaign to influence our elections, I’ve decided that neither myself, nor my family will ever visit again. I’m offended by your campaign and because of it, I’m remembering more of the negative aspects I’ve seen in the UK than the positive ones. Detroit As a US citizen, I want to advise you that you and anyone that participates in subverting the US presidential election can be criminally charged and perhaps even charged as spies. California That last point is in dispute. Clearly, attempts were made in 2000 to subvert the election in Florida (I refer you to yesterday’s video) and are being made again (I refer you to Tuesday night’s ABC Nightline). So far, no criminal charges.
President Kerry and Your Money October 20, 2004February 27, 2017 IF YOU ARE A WOMAN (OR KNOW ANY) Talk about a resume. From Time: A quiet battle is raging over the Bush Administration’s plan to appoint a scantily credentialed doctor, whose writings include a book titled As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now, to head an influential Food and Drug Administration panel on women’s health policy. Sources tell Time that the agency’s choice for the advisory panel is Dr. W. David Hager, an obstetrician-gynecologist who also wrote, with his wife Linda, Stress and the Woman’s Body, which puts “an emphasis on the restorative power of Jesus Christ in one’s life” and recommends specific Scripture readings and prayers for such ailments as headaches and premenstrual syndrome. Though his resume describes Hager as a University of Kentucky professor, a university official says Hager’s appointment is part time and voluntary and involves working with interns at Lexington’s Central Baptist Hospital, not the university itself. In his private practice, two sources familiar with it say, Hager refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. The alarm over this impending appointment has been sounding for a very long time now, but apparently President Bush is ready to proceed. Once again, religion trumps science. THE WAR PRESIDENT Give him this: George W. Bush never had doubts about the Vietnam War and was willing to do everything he could to support it (short of fighting in it himself). He has never had any doubts about the war in Iraq, and is willing to do everything he can to support it (short of paying taxes). His view: Rich folks shouldn’t have to fight in wars or pay for them; it’s enough that they do the ‘hard work’ – ‘it’s hard work!’ ‘the work is hard!’ – of supporting them. (‘Now watch this drive.’) THE WAR PRESIDENT’S MOM ‘Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?’ – Barbara Bush, March 18, 2003 on ‘Good Morning America’ NO TIME TO GET COCKY, BUT . . . ‘If the election were held today, then based on recent state polling, John Kerry would have a 97% probability of winning the election with 51.31% of the popular vote and 313 electoral votes.’ Click here for the analysis. Bush pollster Matthew Dowd has said that incumbent presidents generally ‘finish roughly the same as their job approval numbers.’ The New York Times/CBS poll puts that approval rating at 44%, Zogby/Reuters at 45%. Yesterday, I reported that electoral-vote.com had Kerry up 257-247. Last night it was 284-247, with both New Mexico and Ohio going to Bush – but we are going to win New Mexico, and the latest polls in Ohio are very good, so we may well win Ohio, too (and Iowa, which is tied). That would make it 316-222. Not far off from the 313 prediction above. Yes, one imagines Bush may appear any day now with the head of Bin Laden – perhaps literally, if Karl Rove has found the image would play well. But doing so just days before the election could backfire. Why the extra two and a half years? people will wonder. Either it was disastrous incompetence or – if the capture was in any slowed down for political purposes, as that aircraft carrier was slowed down so the President could fly to it before it reached San Diego – unspeakably manipulative. One thing I forgot to say yesterday in discussing the 45-45 tie that Reuters/Zogby was reporting (and this holds true of all the other ties that are now being reported): The lead President Bush has in some of the red states is even wider than the lead Senator Kerry has in states like Massachusetts and New York. But Bush can only win each of those red states once. The ‘extra’ votes are wasted. When you net them out of the 45-45 dead heat, that puts Kerry well ahead in the contested battleground states. So John Kerry will likely win. How that will affect markets and your money short-term, I can’t say. Generally, both the job and the stock markets do better with a Democrat in the White House than with a Republican. I think the next few years will be challenging no matter who is president. But long-term, we will find ourselves and our children on far more solid footing with John Kerry and the team he will bring to Washington than with Bush and his team. So whatever you may feel about Dr. Hager (above) or about assault weapons or the environment, or about school prayer or my right to visit my partner in the hospital (just an example! he’s fine! his clothes are flying out the door at SAKS!) – or about having plans for attacking Iraq but not for what to do afterwards – whatever you may think of all that, pro or con . . . in terms of your long-term financial security, the likely Kerry win is very good news indeed.
Orwell, Orwell, Orwell October 19, 2004February 27, 2017 WE’RE GONNA WIN Electoral-vote.com has us up 257-247, with Florida tied and New Mexico going to Bush (both will go to Kerry, as argued yesterday). Ignore the Gallup poll – as I think more and more people will come to do after this election is over – and pay more attention to Zogby, which has Kerry trending up: Fourteen days before the presidential election, Senator John Kerry and President Bush are back in a dead-heat race for the White House at 45% apiece, according to a new Reuters/Zogby daily tracking poll. The telephone poll of 1211 likely voters was conducted from Friday through Sunday (October 15-17, 2004). The margin of error is +/- 2.9 percentage points. And notice two things. First, at 45-45, that leaves an awful lot of undecided (and Nader) voters. Well, in swing states, the idealistic, bright Naderites are simply not going to give the world four more years of Bush. And undecided voters break heavily against the incumbent – so what appears to be 45-45 may well be 53-47 or 52-48. Second, this was a poll of likely voters. The turnout among ‘unlikely’ Kerry voters, and newly registered voters, will be huge. That will widen the margin. ORWELL, ORWELL, ORWELL John Kerry said ‘Orwellian’ and 10 million debate viewers, who had read and remembered 1984, watched the reference sail over the heads of 50 million more. But with every Clean Skies Act that dirties the air and each massive tax cut for the rich ‘by far, the vast majority’ of which goes ‘to people at the bottom of the economic ladder,’ it becomes increasingly urgent to find that tattered old copy from high school and re-read it. All this comes to mind as I read this Republican fund-raising appeal. The appeal follows, but first you might want to review this video, which I have posted before, to refresh your memory on just one aspect of the Republican vote-suppression in Florida last time. Remember that in the end Bush was supposed to have won Florida by 537 votes . . . so the 50,000 in the video (not to mention tens of thousands of others) were not trivial to the outcome. [PAUSE WHILE YOU GO VIEW THE KATHERINE HARRIS VIDEO.] OK. Seen the video? Now read this current Republican fundraising appeal: Dear Max, You have probably never heard my name. I’m one of many people who work tirelessly1 behind the scenes on behalf of the President’s campaign. I make sure we carefully follow the law in everything we do. In 2000, I was in Florida for the recount and remember the attacks we had to fend off in order to protect the result of a fair election from the efforts to steal it. If we had not had the support of many, many generous individuals who made contributions to our recount effort, we would not have been successful. We must start now to make sure we have the resources to defend the outcome of this election. Will you help me by making a donation to our General Election Legal and Compliance Account? [LINK TO CONTRIBUTE2] The election of 2000 was difficult not just for the campaigns but for our country. Florida became the center of a battle for our Democracy. This year, I am concerned about similar efforts by those who would try to adjust the outcome of the election after the polls have closed. This year we may face similar fights not just in Florida, but in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico and other critical states. By raising money for our GELAC fund, we will prepare early for any unforeseen events that may affect the outcome of the election. We will ensure that we are able to prevent any attempt to alter the outcome of the vote and any effort to suppress the voice of the voters. [LINK TO CONTRIBUTE2] I have spent many years in politics and have seen efforts to subvert the vote take many forms – from the manipulation of polling locations to the efforts we saw in Florida to make an end run around the state Constitution and the Constitution of the United States. Frankly, I am very tired3, and hope we will not have to fight off more attacks on the people’s will4. The outcome of the election should be decided by voters not lawyers! But I suspect we will see more efforts by those who lost the election to change the rules so they can win. With your help, we will ensure this does not happen. [LINK TO CONTRIBUTE2] I know you have been asked for donations a lot, and I, too, have given again and again. But I’ll be making one more contribution – and I ask you to join me. Give all that you can, so if we have to fight for Florida, or any other state, we will have what we need to win. Thanks, Tom Josefiak General Counsel Bush-Cheney 04, Inc. 1No one in a fundraising appeal, whether Republican or Democrat, ever works anything but tirelessly. 2Altered slightly from the original. 3But this will not stop him from working tirelessly. 4The people’s will? Didn’t half a million more people vote for Gore than for Bush last time? IF YOU ARE A WOMAN, OR LOVE ONE This post by former Clinton White Communications Director Ann Lewis notes how your tax dollars are being spent to help train Iraqi women in democracy – by contracting with a U.S. outfit that opposes women’s rights. GOOGAPUSS Well, people bought more than $1 billion worth of Google stock yesterday, albeit from people who sold more than $1 billion worth . . . and because the buyers felt more urgency to buy than the sellers felt to sell, the stock closed up $5 at $149. I attribute the buying frenzy to my column yesterday. Word is out just how bad I am at shorting stocks. (I’m usually way too early.) But the game is far from over, and if/when GOOG gets up around $160 or $180 (Thursday?), I may buy some more puts, at what would then be a much better price.
Googapuss October 18, 2004December 29, 2016 MIAMI HERALD ENDORSES KERRY One more reason we’re going to win Florida: click here. (And don’t think for a minute the Herald is reflexively Democratic – it endorsed Jeb Bush in 2002.) Last night, electoral-vote.com had it 253-247 Kerry, with Florida up for grabs and New Mexico going to Bush. But we are going to win Florida, so it becomes 280-247 (you need 270 to win). And we are going to win New Mexico. (The poll shows it 47-46-3 Bush-Kerry-Nader. I believe the good people of New Mexico who support Nader will ultimately vote to avoid a repeat of 2000. And, as with the rest of the swing states, I don’t think the polling adequately reflects the new registrations, or the turn-out of ‘unlikely’ Democratic voters.) So that makes 285-242 for Kerry, with Iowa and New Hampshire exactly tied and several other states well within striking distance. TUITION OR RETIREMENT Presumably, one would save for one’s kids educations before saving for retirement, because, well, ‘first things first’ (and because we love our kids more than anything). But the estimable Less Antman has better advice. From his latest newsletter, which anyone interested in personal finance should subscribe to, free: You come first. Make sure your retirement accounts are funded to the extent possible before saving for college. Not only do you not do your kids any favors if they have to worry about you during your later years, but college loans are virtually always available at very low rates (retirement loans are harder to come by: when were you planning to pay them back?). GOOGLE PUTS I first plugged Google in this space four years ago and last year wrote a column saying that Google is everything. Google rules. Google wins! And it is and it does. I could not live without it. It has made my life better and our world more productive. But what is it worth? It came public August 19 at $85 a share and jumped by the end of the day to $100 (which was a truer reflection of supply and demand, because Google had purposely picked a price at which only 74% of the orders were fulfilled, leaving demand for more and the likelihood of a nice first-day bounce). It closed trading Friday at $144, giving the entire enterprise a valuation of $39 billion. What has happened to make the company 44% more valuable than it was at the close of trading 60 days earlier? It’s not as if this was a little-noticed public offering people are only now discovering. I don’t think any public offering has ever attracted more attention. One might actually argue that it was all that attention, and a certain backlash – especially from traditional Wall Street, that had been shut out of the normal underwriting fees – that had talked the initial price down from where it might have been had Goldman Sachs, say, brought it to market. But here’s my point. Whatever Google is worth, there might be some employees and insiders wanting to sell shares to buy a Porsche or a house or a plane. According to Yahoo, 38.5 million shares will be freed from lockup 90 days from the day of the offering – November 19, by my rough calculation – and another 177 million shares 90 days after that (February 19 or so) . . . with some more in between . . . which is why, not meaning to be a Googapuss, and perfectly prepared to lose my entire bet, which one so often does when one speculates with options, I bought some March 155 Google puts Friday afternoon. I paid $2,270 for each one, giving me the right to sell 100 shares of Google at 155 any time between now and March and then, if I have a profit on the deal, split it with Uncle Sam as a short term gain. If the stock is above $155 by then (or even just $155), my puts will expire worthless. (What value is there in the right to sell something for $155 that anybody can sell for $155?) If Google is unchanged at $144, the right to sell 100 shares at $155 will be worth $1,100, or about half my $2,270 bet. And if it’s $132, I break even. But if it’s $95, each of my $2,270 puts is worth $6,000 (before tax). Not a way to get rich by any means. And there are two reasons for you not to do it: You could lose. You could win. Either outcome is bad, the first for obvious reasons, the second because it might well whet your interest and get you playing with puts and calls on a regular basis. Over the long run, if you do that, you are almost sure to lose, because options are a less-than-zero-sum game. Meaning that for each dollar won there is a dollar lost . . . but there are also commissions and taxes, so for each dollar won there is more than a dollar lost. With stocks, by contrast, everyone can, in theory, win, as profits are earned, dividends paid, and values grow. APPLE CALLS Suggested here last November 25 at around $4 when the stock was just above 20, Apple’s long-term calls (known as LEAPS) are now $25, with the stock at 45. Stupidly, foolishly, and reprehensibly, I suggested selling half at the end of March, for little more than a double, suggesting that you would be then be playing “with the house’s money” with the rest. And later, when the LEAPS had tripled, I suggested perhaps selling a like number of out-of-the-money calls to make for what would have been a likely quadruple while you waited for the LEAPS to go long-term. So you may not have enjoyed any profit from AAPL’s latest jump. But if you do still hold some of the LEAPS, you again face a choice: grab your sextuple here and pay short-term capital gains tax thereon . . . or hang on a few more weeks until your LEAPS go long term. I think I’d do that but then sell – not because I doubt Apple has bright future, but because I think the “easy money” has been made, and that at 45, Apple’s exciting prospects may be reasonably well factored into the price. (That is to say: I have no clue where the stock is going, but I wouldn’t want to press my luck.) MARY CHENEY From Earl Smith to the Southwest Florida News-Press: The debate that is currently being waged over John Kerry’s reference to Vice President Cheney’s daughter as a lesbian brings sadness to my heart. Mary Cheney is a hard working young lady who is openly gay. She had worked for the Coors Brewing Company for many years as the liaison to the gay and lesbian community. It was her father who first made reference to having a gay daughter on the campaign trail. I am sad because it appears that Mary’s mother and father are still embarrassed that their daughter is gay. And I understand that, since a huge contingency of Republicans demonize gay Americans calling them evil, sinners and deviants. These misguided and mean-spirited feelings result in thousands of young gay men and women taking their lives every year. I know firsthand the pain that coming to terms with ones sexuality can bring. In 1967 I married. In 1969 I attempted suicide because of my inner conflict. I knew I was gay, but I didn’t know how to live with it. I am compelled at this time to share this private part of my life. For over 30 years I have been a steadfast Republican, and I have never voted for a Democrat at the National level. This year I can not support my president for many reasons. not the least of which is his pandering to those who demonize me and other gay Americans. Shame on you, Mr. President. ### From the estimable Alan Light to the Washington Times: Your editorial “Kerry’s Cheap Shot” was off the mark. Look, Mary Cheney is in her thirties. She’s public about her sexuality. It was brought up in the vice-presidential debate. Mary has made a career of doing gay outreach, first as a gay community liaison for Coors Brewing Company and then for Republicans in various capacities. She served on the board of the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-straight alliance to increase tolerance within the party for gays and lesbians. She currently makes over $100,000 a year as the head of her father’s campaign team. All John Kerry said to President Bush was “I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.” This made the point that sexual orientation crosses political lines, and should not be made into a cultural wedge issue. Lynne Cheney is some parent. She’s silent when Republicans attack gays and lesbians, but outraged when a Democrat speaks of her daughter respectfully. This strikes me as political grandstanding – fake outrage to deflect attention away from the failures of George W. Bush, something Republicans constantly try to do. ### (The Washington Times will not print the word ‘gay’, so in each instance it was replaced with ‘homosexual’ . . . and ‘Mary” was changed to ‘Miss Cheney’ . . . and it was sterilized in a couple of other ways, but the essence of it remained). Tomorrow: Orwell, Orwell, Orwell