Haben Zie Ein Seinfeld, Por Favor? January 31, 2006January 16, 2017 So we’re a little closer to being a country where it’s OK to shoot an unarmed 110-pound eighth grader in the back of the head when, fleeing with a snatched purse, he refuses to HALT on command. The Republican senators overwhelmingly support this nominee, the Democratic senators overwhelmingly oppose him . . . so there is a real difference here . . . but not a wide enough majority of Democrats supported filibuster to avoid cloture. I’m glad we tried. IF YOU LIVE – OR TRAVEL – ABROAD How cool is this? I am sitting in my hotel room in Europe watching – and controlling – my TV in the bedroom back home. And because it’s hooked up to my TiVo, I can actually watch ANYTHING any time I want . . . pause it, ‘rewind’ it, fast forward through the parts I don’t want to see . . . schedule new programs to record – the works. Think of me as having a mechanical arm 4,000 miles long. Eyeballs that bulge out on transAtlantic springs. Not working for you? Okay: Think of me as having a Slingbox (noted here some months ago) and a friend smart enough to hook it all up for me (thank you, Bryan). There are downsides: You need to watch on your laptop. The picture quality is so-so. It gets less-so as you enlarge it. And the response time of the controls is sluggish. You click ‘play’ or change the channel and it takes a couple of seconds to play or for the channel to change. But with a reasonable broadband connection, you’re basically watching a small color TV set just fine. It sure beats watching Scrubs with the voices dubbed in German. If you have friends or relatives living abroad, how about letting them hook up a Slingbox to the TV in your guestroom, maybe even with the TiVo you let them buy you? Voila, monsieur! Jon Stewart every night of the week. Or how about this for a business? TiVo should offer this service to the millions of citizens of the world who might want to have the full range of American TV choices available to them. TiVo would provide you, the overseas subscriber, your own TiVo – picture huge farms of them – complete with cable or satellite subscription and your own Slingbox. OK, so it’s pretty kludgy. And in twenty years, any affluent citizen anywhere on the planet will be able to turn to his wall and say “show me the ‘Bizarro Jerry’ episode” and there, seconds later, will be Bizarro Seinfeld, large as life, on the TV wall. But in the meantime, this is really cool.
Abramoff and Alito January 30, 2006March 3, 2017 ABRAMOFF The Republican response to the Abramoff scandal has been that, well, it’s a bipartisan scandal. Nuh-uh. ‘No matter how hard the Republicans try to muddy the waters on their ethics problems, the truth is the Abramoff scandal is a Republican scandal. The facts are clear, only Republicans have been indicted, only Republicans have pled guilty, and only Republicans are under investigation because only Republicans have engaged in an extensive pay-to-play system where political money was exchanged for policy outcomes.’ Or so says Governor Howard Dean, Chairman of the DNC. (Full disclosure for new readers: I am treasurer of the DNC.) For an analysis by an independent firm reported in the American Prospect, click here. The essence of it: although President Bush told Fox News it seemed to him Abramoff was ‘an equal money dispenser . . . giving money to people in both political parties’ the truth turns out to be – I don’t mean to shock you – quite different. Abramoff, the analysis concluded, did not personally give to any Democrats. And Abramoff’s Indian tribe clients cut their traditional giving to Democrats while greatly increasing their giving to Republicans. Stay tuned; indictments to follow. ALITO The United States is 230 years old. I, it shocks me to realize (could this math be right?), have been around for more than a quarter of it. So the notion that things will ‘always’ turn out right in America because they ‘always do’ (except for, say, little hiccups like the Civil War), is really not a given. We have to make them turn out right. I believe we will; but in order to do so, we need to learn to get along and to find common ground. Having a fourth rightwing Supreme Court Justice is not a step in the correct direction. This is not to say Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito are not all charming, well-intentioned Federalist Society enthusiasts (I think Justice Kennedy may be a Federalist Society enthusiast as well) . . . merely to say that tilting the Court sharply from the center to the right – as replacing a moderate conservative like Sandra Day O’Connor with a hard-right conservative like Samuel Alito would do – would be a mistake. And one we would have to live with for decades. In that context, I would urge you to call your Senator and ask him or her to support a filibuster – 202-225-3121 (or Google his or her name, then call the phone number listed for one of his or her offices in your state – where the switchboard might not be so jammed). We can be a society that shoots fleeing 15-year-old purse snatchers in the back of the head when they refuse to HALT! Or we can be a society that does not. This is among the things the Alito nomination is about. Your kids should not have to live with an Alito / Scalia / Thomas / Roberts court for the next 30 years. Here are some of the reasons why: [Excerpts of] Remarks by John Kerry on the floor of the Senate . . . the reason we are here with this decision is not because of a choice we have made. It is because of a choice the President has made. It is because that’s the direction the President wants to move in. We have had countless opportunities in the Senate where we have had votes on nominees which have garnered 100 votes, 98 votes, 95, 90. Anyone who is watching this understands that the Senate is divided on this nominee. At this pivotal moment in our country’s history with the issues we face, that is not the way to tip the balance of the Court or to move the Court in an ideological direction. . . . These are not small issues to be expedited away by some kind of a symbolic timetable, a State of the Union Message. . . . This is a fight over two very fundamentally different views about what defines us, what is appropriate in the relationship between government and citizen, and the right of our citizens to be free from unlawful government action. These are not just words. This is not something we just casually throw out there. ‘Unlawful government action’ is part of what motivated people to come here in the first place and to fight for what we love and cherish. I used to be a prosecutor, and I worked closely with police. I loved my work with the police. I respect the police. They do unbelievably dangerous work on behalf of our country every single day. They may walk into a home, into a dark corner, not knowing who is there or what evil awaits them. I understand that. I also understand when you assume that responsibility, you assume a responsibility to uphold the law, to uphold the Constitution, and to help protect people. That is part of the risk, part of what you take on. What about the right to equal justice under the law? I heard one Senator the other day come to the Senate and say it isn’t the job of a Supreme Court Justice to protect the downtrodden or the disenfranchised, it is their job to interpret the law. On countless occasions we all know the weight that comes to bear in that decision-making process between powerful interests and those who do not have a voice. That is also part of what defines us. What makes America different from every country on the face of the Earth is that the average citizen can go into a courthouse in America and hold the most powerful corporation to account for their safety, for their livelihood, for their welfare. These are rights that Americans care about deeply. . . . Professor Goodwin Liu of the University of Berkeley Law School concluded after analyzing [Alito’s decisions]: Judge Alito ‘is less concerned about the government overreaching than Federal appeals judges nationwide, less concerned than Republican-appointed appeals judges nationwide, and less concerned than his Republican-appointed colleagues on the Third Circuit.’ . . . In 1984, for example, Judge Alito wrote a Justice Department memorandum concluding that the use of deadly force against a fleeing unarmed suspect did not violate the fourth amendment. The victim was a 15-year-old African American. He was 5 foot 4. He weighed 100 to 110 pounds. This unarmed eighth grader was attempting to jump a fence with a stolen purse containing $10 when he was shot in the back of the head in order to prevent escape. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found the shooting unconstitutional because deadly force can only be used when there is ‘probable cause that the suspect poses a threat to the safety of the officers or a danger to the community if left at large.’ That is what we teach law enforcement officials. But Judge Alito disagreed. Judge Alito said: No, he believed the shooting was reasonable because ‘the State is justified in using whatever force is necessary to enforce its laws’ – even deadly force. That is his conclusion. That is the standard that is going to go to the Supreme Court if ratified. It is OK to shoot a 15-year-old, 110 pounds, a 5-foot-4-inch kid who is trying to get over a fence with a purse, shoot him in the back of the head. Otherwise, Judge Alito believed that any suspect could evade arrest by making the State choose between killing them or letting them escape. That is the conclusion. Think about that. Judge Alito believed that the State could use whatever force was necessary to enforce its laws regardless of whether the suspect was armed or dangerous. Does the Chair believe that? Do the other Senators believe that? I don’t think so. Do mainstream Americans believe that? Lucky for us, we did not have to answer that question. Why? Because in 1985, Justice White rejected Judge Alito’s position, and the court held that deadly force is not justified ‘where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others.’ The court stated unequivocally, ‘a police officer may not seize an unarmed, non-dangerous suspect by shooting him dead.’ . . . In Baker v. Monroe Township, over a dozen local and Federal narcotics agents raided the apartment of Clement Griffin, just as his mother and her three children were arriving for a family dinner. Officers forced the family down to the ground, pointed guns at them, handcuffed and searched them. Two Reagan appointees to the court held that a jury should decide whether excessive force was used, but Judge Alito disagreed. He agreed that the search was ‘terrifying’ and ‘most unfortunate.’ But he did not believe that the family had a right to make their case to a jury in court. He would have denied those American citizens, terrified as they were, their day in court. Judge Alito, I regret to say, often goes out of his way to justify excessive government actions . . . . . . Judge Alito’s minimalist view of the fourth amendment’s right to privacy is not limited to claims of excessive force. In United States v. Lee, he upheld the FBI’s installation of a video and audio surveillance device in a hotel room in order to record conversations between the target of a bribery sting and a police informant. The FBI conducted the surveillance without a warrant, arguing, first, that the target had no expectation of privacy in a hotel room, and, second, that the device was turned on only when the informant was in the room. Judge Alito accepted the FBI’s argument, and found no constitutional violation. His eagerness to buy the FBI’s arguments, particularly in light of the Supreme Court decisions to the contrary, raises serious questions about how he would approach serious constitutional violations to the National Security Agency’s program of domestic eavesdropping. Americans across the board are concerned about the violation of the law with respect to what we passed in the Congress overwhelmingly. After all, with the eavesdropping in Lee and the eavesdropping being conducted now, we see some startling similarity. Both are defended on the basis of Executive discretion and self-restraint. The fourth amendment is not defined that way. It is defined by judicial restraint itself, not the Executive restraint, and by judicial review. . . Now, if his judicial opinions and legal memoranda do not convince you . . . you can take a look at the speech he gave to the Federalist Society in which, as a sitting judge, he ‘preached the gospel’ of the Reagan Justice Department nearly 15 years after he left it; a speech in which he announced his support of the ‘unitary executive theory’ on the grounds that it ‘best captures the meaning of the Constitution’s text and structure.’ . . . The phrase is also used to embrace expansive interpretations of the President’s substantive powers, and strong limits on the Legislative and Judicial branches. This is the apparent meaning of the phrase in many of this Administration’s signing statements. Now, most recently, one of those signing statements was used to preserve the President’s right to just outright ignore the ban on torture that was passed overwhelmingly by the Congress . . . ☞ It was a substantially longer speech than that, and the filibuster, if there is one, would be longer still. But a great deal as at stake. And while winning slightly more of the vote than his opponent absolutely gives the President the right to nominate whomever he wants, it does not give the Senate the obligation to confirm him.
Tidbits January 27, 2006January 16, 2017 A HIGHER AUTHORITY It seems to me, if a word is in the King James Bible multiple times – ‘He adorneth the humble with salvation’ – it should be allowed in Scrabble. Discuss. FREE TEXT MESSAGING Mark Langenderfer: ‘Did you know you can email a text message to any cell phone with the www.teleflip.com free service? Just email to a cell phone ten digit number, (example: 2125551212@teleflip.com), to text that cell phone.’ TIMES SELECT Carl: ‘Better than subscribing to the New York Times on-line, subscribe to Audible.com. For as little as $14.95 per month, you get one audible book per month, plus a free NYT digest every weekday. It’s great …. there are 2 or 3 stories from each of the major sections (Front Page, Business, Sports, etc.), plus of course, Krugman’s column. It’s about an hour if you listen to the whole thing, but each story is on a separate track, making it easy to skip past the ones of no interest.’ GETTING ALONG (Continued) Matt Ball: ‘Often, people like David D yesterday like to adopt the ‘pox on both your houses’ pose, to imply that everyone is equally complicit. It has been good for BushCo – that everything is always presented as ‘he said / she said,’ ‘Oh, the Democrats are just being negative.’ No matter how corrupt, no matter how incompetent, no matter how dishonest, they are always seen as just one side of a debate in which there can’t possibly be a right or wrong answer – where reality and facts have no place. Meanwhile, the deficit continues to expand, as does poverty, as does chronic joblessness, hatred of the U.S., abortions, etc. And the market remains flat to down for another year.’ NTMD Steve Stermer: ‘Do you typically buy in or out of the money puts? I guess the out-of-money ones are cheaper, but you have a better chance of losing it ALL, while the in-the-money puts are more like selling short, but with less capital at risk, right? What do you typically prefer? When do the Sep puts come out?’ ☞ The September puts are out, and I own a bunch. You have sussed this out correctly. Every situation is different (and usually, puts and calls are not such a great idea), but with NTMD I have been buying mostly way-in-the-money puts. Because they’re way-in-the-money, there is almost no ‘time premium’ to pay, and it really is much like being short the stock, but without having to worry that some nutty irrational thing might drive the price sky high, if only temporarily, and wreck your life. If I were more worried that the stock would run back up by September – it might, of course, but I doubt it – I might have gone the other way and bought out-of-the-money puts (e.g., the September 10s, which don’t yet have any intrinsic value because the stock is above 10). The easiest way to get a feel for the tradeoffs is just to do the math. (Well, it’s not even math – it’s arithmetic.) Pretend you have $3,000 to play with, and then run the numbers to see how you’d make out with puts of different strike prices (the September 10s, the 15s, and so on) depending on what happened with the underlying stock. Monday (I hope): TransAmerica, Berkeley and Yale
Singing Nuns January 26, 2006January 16, 2017 NO, WE CAN’T ALL JUST GET ALONG Or so says the Science section of yesterday’s New York Times. For those of us with a strong point of view on one side or the other, reports the Times, some of this seems to be almost hard wired into our little brains. We immediately dismiss anything we don’t want to hear. Then again, the freshman class of Colorado state legislators is making a good try of it – click here for that story. David D’Antonio: ‘You seemed to miss the point of the Nation Journal article you quoted. While not as extreme as some of the other commentators, you do many of the same things, to the point that it starts to get repetitive and shrill. I’m tired of seeing Republican-bashing in your column; it doesn’t do much to give me a good feeling about the Democrats.’ ☞ I try to be thoughtful and not to attack people personally. But I am surely guilty of repetition. The only thing worse than my constant bashing of the Republican Leadership, I think, is what I am bashing them for. The bashing isn’t appealing, but neither is the $8 trillion of National Debt Reagan, Bush and Bush will have placed on our shoulders or the effort to ban embryonic stem cell research or to teach Intelligent Design in science class or . . . well, here I go repeating myself again. Joe Devney: ‘Your column addressed the issue of civil discourse. I’d like to put in a good word for public radio. I get most of my news from the local NPR affiliates, and according to a poll a couple of years ago, that puts me among the best-informed news consumers in America. NPR doesn’t achieve ‘balance’ by parroting the official messages of both the Republicans and Democrats. They give the news context and background. Sometimes, to avoid the ‘food fights,’ they will air interviews with people representing opposing sides on successive days. They also often find more than two sides to a story. And they interview people across the political and economic spectra. For important, complex stories – like the recent Alito hearings – they broadcast the proceedings with minimal commentary. I get to hear the raw material in context, instead of having to rely on the few highlights chosen for me by a corporate news director. One of my favorite radio programs is ‘Forum,’ produced locally by KQED-FM in San Francisco. The host, Michael Krasny, covers a wide variety of topics, and treats all his guests with respect. Before elections, he often hosts a panel of third-party candidates, one of the few places it is possible to hear their views in depth. (And speaking of civil discourse, Krasny’s guests have shown that Libertarians and Greens can be more civil to each other than some Republicans and Democrats. [Yes – but that may be partly because they know they have no chance of winning. – A.T.] So three cheers to NPR and local public stations for working to maintain an informed citizenry.’ ☞ Make it four. NUNSENSE When I linked to ‘Nunsense’ a week ago, I failed to make it clear what heavenly pleasure awaits on that site. Click here to listen – free – to a sampling. I don’t know what you’ll make of these songs if you’ve never seen the show. But for those who have seen it, I predict wide smiles as you reacquaint with, for example, ‘Just a Coupl’a Sisters’ or ‘I Just Want to Be a Star.’ (‘I don’t care / If I’m ever rich or famous,’ croons Sister Robert Anne – ‘I just want to be a star . . .’) NTMD With the stock trading around $11, down from $22 in July, where we started this saga, JP Morgan and another Wall Street firm, Thomas Weisel, somehow persuaded some institutional clients to buy 6.1 million new shares at $10.25 each, it was announced yesterday. This sale of new shares gives Nitromed another $58.6 million in working capital (after paying $4 million to JP Morgan and Thomas Weisel) to either (a) burn through before crashing or (b) bridge the gap between here and what will ultimately be big profits. My guess is (a), but I sold most of my near-term puts, replacing about half of them with September puts instead. If NTMD goes straight down from here, swell. If the stock gets a boost from this (it closed up two cents on the day vat $11.50), I would replace the rest of my puts at an even better price. Remember that the options game is ordinarily a terrible idea for most investors, and that even when it’s not, as here, you must only play with money you can truly afford to lose, because you truly may. But the fundamentals in betting against NTMD seem awfully strong: a one-product company whose one product is targeted at a small niche market and whose generic ingredients are readily available and widely prescribed at about one-sixth the price. There will be the natural tendency to think that if professionals ponied up $10.25 a share to invest in NTMD, it must be worth more than $10.25. (They are professionals! Investing serious money!) If you think this, you are . . . oh gosh, how to put this? . . . very sweet.
Can’t We All Just Get Along? January 25, 2006January 16, 2017 BROKEBACK Annie Proulx: I think this country is hungry for this story. Associated Press: Why? Proulx: Because it’s a love story and there’s hardly much love around these days. I think people are sick of divisiveness, hate-mongering, disasters, war, loss and need and want a reminder that sometimes love comes along that is strong and permanent, and that it can happen to anyone. INDEED . . . CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? Uncivil Discourse By Charlie Cook, National Journal I am deeply troubled by the tenor of current political discourse in this country. More and more Republicans don’t just disagree with Democrats, they despise them — and vice versa. People don’t just challenge someone’s views — they challenge the other person’s integrity. Enjoyable, informative, and civil discussions between people with different points of view are becoming rare. The most recent episode to deeply offend me occurred after Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s wife left the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in tears. An Alito opponent soon asked on a popular liberal Web site, “Do we want a judge who would marry such a weak-willed bitch?” On the same day, I happened to watch The War Room, a documentary about the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. In one scene, Clinton strategist James Carville fielded reporters’ questions arising from allegations by conservatives that Clinton had been brainwashed or recruited as a Soviet agent while he backpacked across Europe during college. There may well be plenty of reasons to oppose Alito’s confirmation or to have opposed Clinton’s candidacy, but aren’t these attacks out of bounds for a civil society? Of course, playing politics has never been a game of patty-cake. Politics junkies have all heard that a House member from the South beat an anti-slavery senator unconscious in 1856 and that the 1884 campaign chant against Grover Cleveland, who was accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, was “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.” But an unreasonable share of today’s political conversation is venomous and lacking any effort at accuracy or fairness. I blame this problem first on the rise of political food-fight shows on cable television, on radio talk shows, and most recently on the Internet, where political discourse has become the Wild West. Although televised left-right sparring matches go way back — at least to the 60 Minutes segment of the 1970s pitting conservative James Kilpatrick against liberal Shana Alexander — the bounds of decency were respected as the other side’s views were attacked. But talk radio erased those boundaries. Talk radio is tailored for like-minded people, and the host’s goal is to promote outrage among listeners. The clear purpose is to inflame, not inform. Fans of talk radio are quick to argue that its growth is due to a liberal and pro-Democratic bias among the mainstream media, a charge that is not completely without merit. It is certainly a plausible theory that the Newt Gingrich-led Republican sweep of the House and Senate in 1994 was powered largely by conservative talk-show hosts, most notably Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh and others tapped into a stream of outrage among alienated conservatives, and whipped their audiences into a frenzy that helped lead to the first Republican-controlled Congress in 40 years. The Internet has simply taken the hostilities to new heights. Despite being one of the most amazing technological developments of the past 100 years, it is also an electronic version of the inside door of a public bathroom stall. Libelous accusations can be posted anonymously. And information that is inaccurate or taken totally out of context can get widely disseminated instantaneously. What makes all of this so corrosive is that fewer people are reading, watching, or listening to political coverage that is balanced and fair. This results in hair-trigger reactions to any perceived misdeed by anyone in the opposite party, while partisans ignore comparable mistakes in their own party. It all makes me nostalgic for my days as a high school debater. For one hour, we would have to argue the affirmative side of a proposal. During the next hour, we would have to make the case in opposition just as strenuously. Before long, most of us reached the conclusion that the truth was rarely found exclusively on a single side and that there are very legitimate arguments on each side of just about every important policy question. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer Americans share that view. If there is a solution to the degeneration of our political debate, I haven’t found it. But I certainly hope someone finds it soon. ☞ The only nit I would pick with this is the other unfortunate tendency of the media, to lean over backwards to give both sides of the story as if they always have equal validity. Some say the Holocaust occurred, others say it didn’t, let’s give each side four minutes to make its case and then let the viewer decide. (I exaggerate to make the point, but you know what I mean.) If you have a minute, read this (excerpted below). With Democrats shut out of the process, the Republicans handed $22 billion of taxpayer money to the health insurance industry. It’s just one example of how the Republican Party runs your government – but it’s a good one. From the front page of yesterday Washington Post: The Senate version would have targeted private HMOs participating in Medicare by changing the formula that governs their reimbursement, lowering payments $26 billion over the next decade. But after lobbying by the health insurance industry, the final version made a critical change that had the effect of eliminating all but $4 billion of the projected savings, according to CBO and other health policy experts. . . . Makes yesterday‘s $700 million giveaway to the natural gas industry seem like small potatoes. It is a grand time to be rich and powerful in America. (Another example: according to NBC, both Louisiana and Mississippi requested 40,000 FEMA trailers. Thus far, Mississippi, whose governor chaired the Republican Party, has gotten 33,000, while Louisiana, whose governor is a Democrat, has gotten 2,000 or so. These decisions aren’t based on merit, they’re based on power.) (Oh, and remember the California energy crisis that suddenly appeared, sending billions and billions of dollars from California to Houston – and which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made the conscious decision not to stanch with emergency controls designed for just that purpose? Does anyone seriously think that if the flow of dollars had been from Texas to California, the administration would have failed to act?) (And how about relaxing the rules on emergency air shafts in coal mines, in place since 1969?) (Or the billions wasted on botched Iraqi reconstruction? Why didn’t we pay much of that money to Iraqis rather than Halliburton et al?) (Or the Medicare Part D program designed by K Street lobbyists that Paul Krugman wrote about.) Even if you’d be less comfortable having a beer with our next Presidential candidate than theirs – and I hope that won’t be the case – please consider voting for competence and a set of priorities that takes into account the well-being of Americans who aren’t rich and powerful. RELATIVE WORTH Jim Johnson: ‘You have a CEO friend who makes $150,000,000 per year. If I make $100/hour (I don’t) and work 2000 hours a year for 50 years, I would make $10,000,000. So your friend (working every day of the year) makes my lifetime earnings in just under 25 days. Is three and half weeks of his time really worth a lifetime of mine?’ (And did he really need a big tax cut?) ☞ Well, he’s a very nice guy.
Bad January 24, 2006January 16, 2017 CARS – BAD MANAGEMENT How could the executives at GM and Ford have failed to see that oil might rise sharply – not necessarily this year, but some year – and that a major R&D effort on fuel efficiency was in their shareholders’ (and our national) interest? Toyota saw it. We even saw them see it. How could we have allowed this to happen again, as it did when the first oil shock hit, in the Seventies? A tragedy for our team. GAS – BAD GOVERNMENT The New York Times reported yesterday that, though natural gas prices have sky-rocketed, American taxpayers – who own much of the land from which the gas comes – have seen their royalties go up almost not at all. The discrepancy? About $700 million. From 1998 to 2001, a dozen major companies, while admitting no wrongdoing, paid a total of $438 million to settle charges that they had fraudulently understated their sale prices for oil. Since then, the government has tightened its rules for oil payments. But with natural gas, the Bush administration recently loosened the rules and eased its audits intended to uncover cheating. ☞ Aye, ’tis a grand time to be rich and powerful in America! Vote Republican! SHANGHAI – BAD KARMA Click here for the Los Angeles Times‘ tale of a real estate bust that surely couldn’t happen here, because . . well, hmmm. The top line: American homeowners wondering what follows a housing bubble can look to China’s largest city. Once one of the hottest markets in the world, sales of homes have virtually halted in some areas of Shanghai, prompting developers to slash prices and real estate brokerages to shutter thousands of offices. For the first time, homeowners here are learning what it means to have an upside-down mortgage — when the value of a home falls below the amount of debt on the property. Recent home buyers are suing to get their money back. Banks are fretting about a wave of default loans. “The entire industry is scaling back,” said Mu Wijie, a regional manager at Century 21 China, who estimated that 3,000 brokerage offices had closed since spring. Real estate agents, whose phones wouldn’t stop ringing a year ago, say their incomes have plunged by two-thirds. Shanghai‘s housing slump is only going to worsen and imperil a significant part of the Chinese economy, says Andy Xie, Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist in Hong Kong. ☞ I’m not exactly predicting this for America’s hottest real estate markets, but I do think it’s an awfully good time to be cautious. NTMD – BAD SCRIPS BiDil prescriptions written for the week ending January 13 were 1,206, a new high. If all of them are for full price pills (vs. the company’s subsidized voucher program), that’s 90 pills per prescription times $1.80 per pill times 1,206 prescriptions times 52 weeks a year = $10 million a year in sales . . . against projected expenses of about $100 million, for a loss of $90 million. Presumably, the prescription rate will continue to build (and the average number of pills per prescription may rise), making for a smaller loss, perhaps just $70 million or $80 million. The stock is now $11, down from $22 when we started this thread last July. Don’t sell your puts. NEW YORK TIMES SELECT – NOT BAD AT ALL Rachel: ‘OK, you’re right … I subscribed.’ Gary Konecky: ‘Apparently you get a different version of the Times from the one I get. The one I get tells Bush administration lies about WMDs in Iraq. The one I get tells how Israel is always picking fights with their peace-loving Arab neighbors. The one I get used to be extremely homophobic. Sorry to tell you, but my dog is past puppy training and I no longer need the New York Times, despite Paul Krugman (the only thing in it worth reading).’ ☞ Oh, my. I did say the Times was ‘surely not perfect’ . . . but obviously you think it’s a lot less perfect than that. On the homophobia piece, at least, can’t we agree to welcome the enlightenment of the past decade-plus rather than bear a grudge? And Krugman? Yes, he alone is worth that $1 a week. (And Frank Rich! And Floyd Norris! And so much more!)
Medicare Part K January 23, 2006January 16, 2017 Is it just me, or are spray-can valves getting better? I don’t want to jinx it, but you know how sometimes you’d reach for a brand new can of deodorant or shaving cream and press down and – nothing? And there was just no way to get at the precious contents inside? That hasn’t happened to me in a very long time. Have I just been lucky or have you experienced the same thing? (Sure the cost of living keeps rising – but have they taken this into account?) ANGRY CHIHUAHUAS Cyrus Ginwala: ‘About a year go, Men’s Health rated Fremont, California, the #1 place to live. We noticed because we were moving there at the time. After the Chihuahua incident you referenced Friday, I’m sure their rating will drop. We may consider moving. Or wearing ankle guards.’ Karen T.: ‘I read a book by a professional burglar about protecting your home. He kept a pack of seven or eight toy poodles. Cheap to feed, noisy, and impossible to kill all at the same time, so even if the bad guy knocked out one or two, there would still be several to raise the alarm. And small dogs rouse more easily than big ones – my Maltese and Chihuahua are my detonator dogs, setting off the pack and then retreating. (Another suggestion: Put a ‘Beware of Snake’ sign on the door. I used to live way out in the country, and that worked VERY well. Almost couldn’t get the furnace repair team inside when they saw that on the door.’ ☞ Detonator dogs? Fake adders? This is a woman with whom you’d best not mess. INTERNET COUPONS Wendy Caster: ‘I saw Gary Diehl’s tip last week – that if the ‘check out’ page asks for a coupon when you’re ordering something on-line, you should do a Google search for that coupon. After about 10 seconds of effort, I got $5 off my New Yorker renewal. I should always get paid so well for my time!’ ☞ It’s a great tip. KRUGMAN In a world trying to navigate tricky waters for the general good of its 6.6 billion inhabitants (five more born just since you began reading this sentence), with their myriad conflicting beliefs and interests, the New York Times – while surely not perfect – is one of our most precious assets. Instead of focusing on how to avoid paying anything to read it, why not click here to sign up for the full run of the paper on-line? It’s a tremendous resource, and you’ll be tossing in a dollar a week to support a crucial voice in the national debate. As a paid up Times Select subscriber, you’d be whisked straight to Paul Krugman’s latest column if you clicked here. Because I know you to be a person of great integrity and good will, I will cut and paste that column below, for your convenience, but only on the condition that, if you read it and think it’s important, you’ll indeed sign up for Times Select. January 20, 2006 Op-Ed Columnist The K Street Prescription By PAUL KRUGMAN The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled, but that they aren’t on the list for the new program. More than two dozen states have taken emergency action. At first, federal officials were oblivious. “This is going very well,” a Medicare spokesman declared a few days into the disaster. Then officials started making excuses. Some conservatives even insist that the debacle vindicates their ideology: see, government can’t do anything right. But government works when it’s run by people who take public policy seriously. As Jonathan Cohn points out in The New Republic, when Medicare began 40 years ago, things went remarkably smoothly from the start. But this time the people putting together a new federal program had one foot out the revolving door: this was a drug bill written by and for lobbyists. Consider the career trajectories of the two men who played the most important role in putting together the Medicare legislation. Thomas Scully was a hospital industry lobbyist before President Bush appointed him to run Medicare. In that job, Mr. Scully famously threatened to fire his chief actuary if he told Congress the truth about cost projections for the Medicare drug program. Mr. Scully had good reasons not to let anything stand in the way of the drug bill. He had received a special ethics waiver from his superiors allowing him to negotiate for future jobs with lobbying and investment firms – firms that had a strong financial stake in the form of the bill – while still in public office. He left public service, if that’s what it was, almost as soon as the bill was passed, and is once again a lobbyist, now for drug companies. Meanwhile, Representative Billy Tauzin, the bill’s point man on Capitol Hill, quickly left Congress once the bill was passed to become president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the powerful drug industry lobby. Surely both men’s decisions while in office were influenced by the desire to please their potential future employers. And that undue influence explains why the drug legislation is such a mess. The most important problem with the drug bill is that it doesn’t offer direct coverage from Medicare. Instead, people must sign up with private plans offered by insurance companies. This has three bad effects. First, the elderly face wildly confusing choices. Second, costs are high, because the bill creates an extra, unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Finally, the fragmentation into private plans prevents Medicare from using bulk purchasing to reduce drug prices. It’s all bad, from the public’s point of view. But it’s good for insurance companies, which get extra business even though they serve no useful function, and it’s even better for drug companies, which are able to charge premium prices. So whose interests do you think Mr. Scully and Mr. Tauzin represented? Which brings us to the larger question of cronyism and corruption. Thanks to Jack Abramoff, the K Street project orchestrated by Tom DeLay is finally getting some serious attention in the news media. Mr. DeLay and his allies have sought, with great success, to ensure that lobbying firms hire only Republicans. But most reports on the project still miss the main point by emphasizing the effect on campaign contributions. The more important effect of the K Street project is that it allows the party machine to offer lavish personal rewards to the faithful. For a congressman, toeing the line on legislation brought free meals in Jack Abramoff’s restaurant, invitations to his sky box, golf trips to Scotland, cushy jobs for family members and a lavish salary after leaving office. The same kinds of rewards are there for loyal members of the administration, especially given the Bush administration’s practice of appointing lobbyists to key positions. I don’t want to overstate Mr. Abramoff’s role: although he was an important player in this system, he wasn’t the only one. In particular, he doesn’t seem to have been involved in the Medicare drug deal. It’s interesting, though, that Scott McClellan has announced that the White House, contrary to earlier promises, won’t provide any specific information about contacts between Mr. Abramoff and staff members. So I have a question for my colleagues in the news media: Why isn’t the decision by the White House to stonewall on the largest corruption scandal since Warren Harding considered major news? ☞ Kudos, by the way, to one of your fellow readers, Dr. Daniel Stone, whose op-ed on Medicare Part D, published in the Los Angeles Times Saturday, corroborates Krugman’s criticism. It begins: AS A GERIATRIC medicine specialist, I am confronted daily by the chaos and confusion of Medicare’s Part D drug benefit. The program should reflect President Bush’s ideals of “compassionate conservatism.” Compassion would mean user-friendliness and easy access to affordable drugs. And a conservative plan would maximize “bang for the buck.” Instead, the priorities of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies have trumped these objectives. . . . ☞ And to the Miami Herald for noting: In the last seven years, the pharmaceuticals and health-products industries spent $800 million on lobbying and campaign contributions, according to the Center for Public Integrity. ☞ Eight hundred million is a lot of money. The rest of the Herald story, much broader than pharmaceuticals, is well worth reading if you have time, too.
Attack of the Angry Chihuahuas And NTMD, APC, BOREF, GORE January 20, 2006March 3, 2017 Okay. Lots to cover today. Let’s start with money . . . NTMD Down to $12 from $22 where we started. The seven-day rolling average for BiDil prescriptions was 133.1 on January 17, versus 187.3 the day before. This is a sales rate of about $10 million a year. If the prescription rate triples – and it’s not at all clear that it will – this little company will lose in the ballpark of $75 million this year and be close to bankruptcy. If you bought them with money you can truly afford to lose, don’t sell your puts. OIL APC, suggested here at $56.50, closed last night at $107.85. That’s not quite double, but getting awfully close. Likewise, TXCO, suggested in 2004. I can’t bring myself to buy more oil stocks at these levels, but I’m not selling, either. Yes, Iceland is well on its way to going entirely geothermal, and the rest of the world will begin trying in earnest to wean itself off fossil fuels. But getting from here to there over the next half century will be a challenge. Don’t sell your oil stocks. BOREF Well, you know what I think about this one. Here‘s the latest, from yesterday’s Electronics Weekly. (‘Innovative motor powers aircraft landing wheels.’) If you bought it with money you can truly afford to lose, don’t sell your Borealis. And move to funny . . . FREMONT, CALIFORNIA, CRIME WAVE Kathi Derevan: ‘I don’t know why, but I just thought you NEEDED to see this.’ FREMONT, Calif. (AP) – A pack of angry Chihuahuas attacked a police officer who was escorting a teenager home following a traffic stop, authorities said. The officer suffered minor injuries including bites to his ankle on Thursday when the five Chihuahuas escaped the 17-year-old boy’s home and rushed the officer in the doorway, said Fremont detective Bill Veteran. The teenager had been detained after the traffic incident, Veteran said. The officer was treated at a local hospital and returned to work less than two hours later, Veteran said. It was the third time this month a Fremont officer was bitten by a dog while on duty. Neither of the other officers were seriously injured. And it was the second bizarre incident in as many hours for the Fremont Police Department. Two hours earlier, a homeowner in Niles reported that an intruder broke into her home and added pornography to her computer. The woman said she woke up and was startled to see a stranger typing away on her computer. The intruder fled, but left behind an altered screen saver that featured images of “erotic Indian art,” Veteran said. Nothing was reported stolen, and neither the woman nor her nine-year-old daughter was hurt, he said. ‘Cause this part’s not sunny . . . BUT IT’S IMPORTANT I’ve posted Al Gore’s speech below, but before you dismiss it (speaking here to my esteemed readers who think I’m an idiot), consider this from Paul Craig Roberts, who was an Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration, who was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (and who, five years ago, wrote Gore Crosses the Rubicon, excoriating Democrats). I like to think this is unduly alarmist. It probably is. (Roberts seems to have a thing about the Rubicon.) But it’s worth thinking about: Bush Has Crossed the Rubicon by Paul Craig Roberts Dictatorships seldom appear full-fledged but emerge piecemeal. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one Roman legion he broke the tradition that protected the civilian government from victorious generals and launched the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Fearing that Caesar would become a king, the Senate assassinated him. From the civil wars that followed, Caesar’s grandnephew, Octavian, emerged as the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. Two thousand years later in Germany, Adolf Hitler’s rise to dictator from his appointment as chancellor was rapid. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to create an atmosphere of crisis. Both the judicial and legislative branches of government collapsed, and Hitler’s decrees became law. The Decree for the Protection of People and State (Feb. 28, 1933) suspended guarantees of personal liberty and permitted arrest and incarceration without trial. The Enabling Act (March 23, 1933) transferred legislative power to Hitler, permitting him to decree laws, laws moreover that “may deviate from the Constitution.” The dictatorship of the Roman emperors was not based on an ideology. The Nazis had an ideology of sorts, but Hitler’s dictatorship was largely personal and agenda-based. The dictatorship that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution was based in ideology. Lenin declared that the Communist Party’s dictatorship over the Russian people rests “directly on force, not limited by anything, not restricted by any laws, nor any absolute rules.” Stalin’s dictatorship over the Communist Party was based on coercion alone, unrestrained by any limitations or inhibitions. In this first decade of the 21st century, the United States regards itself as a land of democracy and civil liberty but, in fact, is an incipient dictatorship. Ideology plays only a limited role in the emerging dictatorship. The demise of American democracy is largely the result of historical developments. Lincoln was the first American tyrant. Lincoln justified his tyranny in the name of preserving the Union. His extralegal, extra-constitutional methods were tolerated in order to suppress Northern opposition to Lincoln’s war against the Southern secession. The first major lasting assault on the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers, which is the basis for our political system, came with the response of the Roosevelt administration to the crisis of the Great Depression. The New Deal resulted in Congress delegating its legislative powers to the executive branch. Today when Congress passes a statute, it is little more than an authorization for an executive agency to make the law by writing the regulations that implement it. Prior to the New Deal, legislation was tightly written to minimize any executive branch interpretation. Only in this way can law be accountable to the people. If the executive branch that enforces the law also writes the law, “all legislative powers” are no longer vested in elected representatives in Congress. The Constitution is violated, and the separation of powers is breached. The principle that power delegated to Congress by the people cannot be delegated by Congress to the executive branch is the mainstay of our political system. Until President Roosevelt overturned this principle by threatening to pack the Supreme Court, the executive branch had no role in interpreting the law. As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote: “That Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the president is a principle universally recognized as vital to the integrity and maintenance of the system of government ordained by the Constitution.” Despite seven decades of an imperial presidency that has risen from the New Deal’s breach of the separation of powers, Republican attorneys, who constitute the membership of the quarter-century-old Federalist Society, the candidate group for Republican nominees to federal judgeships, write tracts about the Imperial Congress and the Imperial Judiciary that are briefs for concentrating more power in the executive. Federalist Society members pretend that Congress and the judiciary have stolen all the power and run away with it. The Republican interest in strengthening executive power has its origin in agenda frustration from the constraints placed on Republican administrations by Democratic congresses. The thrust to enlarge the president’s powers predates the Bush administration but is being furthered to a dangerous extent during Bush’s second term. The confirmation of Bush’s nominee, Samuel Alito, a member of the Federalist Society, to the Supreme Court will provide five votes in favor of enlarged presidential powers. President Bush has used “signing statements” hundreds of times to vitiate the meaning of statutes passed by Congress. In effect, Bush is vetoing the bills he signs into law by asserting unilateral authority as commander in chief to bypass or set aside the laws he signs. For example, Bush has asserted that he has the power to ignore the McCain amendment against torture, to ignore the law that requires a warrant to spy on Americans, to ignore the prohibition against indefinite detention without charges or trial, and to ignore the Geneva Conventions to which the U.S. is signatory. In effect, Bush is asserting the powers that accrued to Hitler in 1933. His Federalist Society apologists and Department of Justice appointees claim that President Bush has the same power to interpret the Constitution as the Supreme Court. An Alito Court is likely to agree with this false claim. Bush Justice Department official and Berkeley law professor John Yoo argues that no law can restrict the president in his role as commander in chief. Thus, once the president is at war – even a vague, open-ended “war on terror” – Bush’s Justice Department says the president is free to undertake any action in pursuit of war, including the torture of children and the indefinite detention of American citizens. The commander in chief role is probably sufficiently elastic to expand to any crisis, whether real or fabricated. Thus has the U.S. arrived at the verge of dictatorship. This development has little to do with Bush, who is unlikely to be aware that the Constitution is experiencing its final rending on his watch. America’s descent into dictatorship is the result of historical developments and of old political battles dating back to President Nixon being driven from office by a Democratic Congress. There is today no constitutional party. Both political parties, most constitutional lawyers, and the bar associations are willing to set aside the Constitution whenever it interferes with their agendas. Americans have forgotten the prerequisites for freedom, and those pursuing power have forgotten what it means when it falls into other hands. Americans are very close to losing their constitutional system and civil liberties. It is paradoxical that American democracy is the likely casualty of a “war on terror” that is being justified in the name of the expansion of democracy. ☞ Okay? Now just before you read or skim Al Gore’s speech, which I’ve pasted below, take a minute to read this from the blog of my friend and classmate Jesse Kornbluth: This is a President who would like to frame the limits of dissent. Last week he said, “So I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account, and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy — not comfort to our adversaries.” You grasp that last phrase is code. Wikipedia tells us: Article Three [of the Constitution] defines treason as only levying war against the United States or “in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort,” and requires the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or a confession in open court for conviction. The President is not a sloppy speaker. I mean, he is – but only when speaking impromptu. This was scripted. Was he threatening to indict those who color outside his lines as traitors? ☞ Okay? As the New York Times editorialized last Sunday (‘The Imperial Presidency at Work’): The administration’s behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush’s expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade. ☞ Okay? So now watch or listen to Al Gore’s speech here or read it below. It’s long. If you’re inclined to blow it off, at least skip way down to the parts in red and perhaps you’ll change your mind – or skim a little more assiduously: By Al Gore January 15, 2006 Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens – Democrats and Republicans alike – to express our shared concern that America’s Constitution is in grave danger. In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power. As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses. It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored. So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved. It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people. On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped – one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period. The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide. This campaign continued until Dr. King’s murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King’s life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping. The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue. Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.” During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place. But surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end. At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently. A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.” An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America’s alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that “the law is king.” Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint. The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power. A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable. The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm. Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable. Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws. The President’s men have minced words about America’s laws. The Attorney General openly conceded that the “kind of surveillance” we now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th. This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically – and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically. When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: “To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress.” This is precisely the “disrespect” for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case. It is this same disrespect for America’s Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties. For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer – even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person. The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned. At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world. Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges. This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then – until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture. The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture. Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan – one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons – registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: “This material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.” Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do? The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch’s claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.” The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance. For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it. Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens. A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive Branch’s handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle “at substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts.” As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America’s representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized. These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation. For more than two centuries, America’s freedoms have been preserved in part by our founders’ wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other two. On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled “constitutional crises.” These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live under the rule of law. The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed. It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime. There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents. When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: “[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation… [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.” Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others. But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret. There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, “The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.” A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to “last for the rest of our lives.” So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity. Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These technologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound. Don’t misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not. But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government. There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended. This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president’s powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President’s authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine. This effort to rework America’s carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America’s foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world. The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control. This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees. For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases. Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover’s view that Dr. King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about King’s innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. “It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street…. The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. … so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in.” The Constitution’s framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “a power over a man’s support is a power over his will.” (Federalist No. 73) Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet’s CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq. In the words of George Orwell: “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.” Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded. Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration’s eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers. Tragically, he apparently still doesn’t know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people. It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has. Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President’s attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible. The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress. In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands – notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process — by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch. The President’s decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed. The President’s judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive – a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not – and I do not – we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking. And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President’s judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn. But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power. I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971. The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch. Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials. There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don’t really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70’s and 80’s, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire – no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today. The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it. Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration of legislation. In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the “greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?” In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435. And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization. So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch. The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress’ role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power. Look for example at the Congressional role in “overseeing” this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe. Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program. Moreover, in the Congress as a whole – both House and Senate – the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption. The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government. It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system. I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re supposed to be. But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system. We the people are – collectively – still the key to the survival of America’s democracy. We – as Lincoln put it, “[e]ven we here” – must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson said: “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.” The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: “All just power is derived from the consent of the governed.” The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia. Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people – in their various States – that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification. And it is “We the people” who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television – a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates. Lincoln’s memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements. And the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages. The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people. The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can’t check an abuse of power if they don’t know it is happening. For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President. Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing – all over the country – with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out. To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming. One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, “Any who act as if freedom’s defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.” Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.” The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk. Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights. Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously? It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same. We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens’ right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President’s apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law. I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, “The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will.” A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws. Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President. Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing — especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security. Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive – and not just superficial – hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads. Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed. Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens. Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy. It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it. I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall. As Dr. King once said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.” ☞ Okay? To fax your senator re the Alito nomination, click here. Have a great weekend (whatever little is left of it).
Gather Round My Luxury Sub Nuns: All Aboard! January 19, 2006March 3, 2017 YOUR OWN LUXURY SUB Bad weather? Simply close the hatch and dive, cruising effortlessly far below the waves in air conditioned comfort. The submarines’ battery capacity and life support systems allow you to stay submerged for days at a time. Talk about getting away from it all! Click here. Thanks, Jon Frater. GATHER ROUND I did not buy a sub – even the itty-bitty version – because the next thing you know you’re stuck on an underwater ridge off the coast of North Korea with 27 hours of oxygen left, relying on Geena Davis to make a deal with the Chinese to rescue you without touching off nuclear war (and what kind of Internet connection are you likely to be able to get when submersed?). But, as you know, I did buy a tiny slice of the company that promises to slow my slide into senility (or my money back, less postage and handling); and I did buy a tiny slice of Honest Tea, the company that promises to quench my thirst without high fructose corn syrup or phosphoric acid; and (as really long-time readers know) I did buy a tiny slice of Nunsense two decades ago (can it be?), the off-Broadway smash-hit musical comedy about 52 dead nuns. And now I have bought a tiny slice of Gather. I tell you this not to brag. Generally, I lose everything with these adventures. (Did I ever tell you about my oil wells in . . . Ohio?) I just don’t think it’s right to tout something I have an interest in – even if, as with Gather, it’s free – if I don’t disclose my interest. That said, here is the story of gather.com, as published last night on gather.com by one of its 10,000 members, CEO Tom Gerace: . . . Gather members live in all fifty states and more than a dozen different countries. Our publishing rate, commenting rate, and invitation rates are climbing each day. The content on the site increases in breadth, depth, and quality with each new member that publishes. And members are connecting with people that share their passions every day. In short, Gather has come alive. . . . And here is the story as told by the Boston Globe: . . . A new Boston website aims to bring order to the tens of millions of weblogs proliferating online and provide one-stop shopping for overwhelmed Internet surfers. In the process, it could put some cash in the pockets of Internet scribes pecking away in obscurity. . . I have no idea whether, at the end of the day, this concept will work. But, still in beta, Gather’s membership is doubling every month. In 16 months, every living human will have gathered – I just hope not all in one place, or the Earth could get wobbly. Check it out to see if you want to be one of them.
And You Think YOU Have Problems (Why Didn't I Think of This!) January 18, 2006March 3, 2017 Imagine you’ve just spent $200 million on a new yacht and find – what’s this? – you have no place to park it! According to the Times last week . . . Many megayachts have grown so big – sometimes as long as a football field – that their very size rules out docking at most marinas, which don’t have large enough slips to accommodate them. . . . More and more, limitations like these are frustrating the growing megayacht crowd. In recent years, the production of these nautical behemoths, which range from 80 feet to more than 200 feet and can easily cost as much as $200 million, has been outpacing the availability of dockage long enough or deep enough to accommodate them. There are an estimated 7,000 motor yachts over 80 feet long in use, said Jill Bobrow, editor in chief of ShowBoats International, a yachting magazine. That’s up from about 4,000 a decade ago. “Boats are getting bigger and bigger,” Ms. Bobrow said. “It used to be that 200 feet was big. Now the largest boats are 400 feet.” Contracts for motor yachts 150 feet and larger increased 15 percent, to 118 from 103, in 2005, according to ShowBoats International. Of those 118, 33 percent are more than 200 feet. The rich-poor gap grows ever wider, as taxes are slashed for the rich . . . tax credits withheld from the poor (see: Thursday) . . . cost-of-living adjustments perpetually denied for the minimum wage . . . bankruptcy laws tightened for victims of catastrophic illness (among others) . . . and on and on. It is a grand time to be rich and powerful in America. BLOOMBERG’S TAKE Click here for Bloomberg.com on a piece of this growing gap. In part: American workers have rarely taken home a smaller share of the nation’s prosperity . . . After 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth, pay is rising at a slower rate than in any similar expansion since the end of World War II. Companies are paying less of their cash gains in the form of wages and salaries than at any time since the Great Depression, according to government figures. But never fear: CEO pay was up 12% last year. One CEO I know made north of $150 million. It really is a grand time to be rich and powerful in America. They used to say, ‘What this country needs is a good five cent cigar.’ Now, with the health hazards of tobacco widely known, I think we can say, ‘What this country needs is a bigger tax break for the mega-rich, paid for by more debt.’ Vote Republican! YOUR BRAIN Judy: ‘Re: the ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ video, I can attest from personal experience that the brain can actually create new pathways. I’m a cerebral aneurysm survivor (28 years) and had severe brain damage. I relearned to walk, talk, write, brush my teeth . . . practically everything. No one told me I couldn’t to something and I’m tenacious enough to keep trying until it’s accomplished. The NY Times crossword puzzle was invaluable for the cognitive stuff. This program sounds terrific.’ Kathi Derevan: ‘You are reading my 56-year-old mind. After a recent Time Magazine article on the subject, then yesterday’s Sunday Morning show, I was all but ready to find the home version and buy it. And now with your recommendation, not to mention $100, I’m in.’ ☞ Enjoy your workouts, Kathi. WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THIS! Gary Diehl: ‘Your promotional coupon code for $100 off the Brain Fitness Program [gn0604a] reminded me: Many sites these days have a place in their checkout for a coupon code. Whenever I see one of these I immediately tab over to Google and look for one using the company name and ‘coupon’ to search. Almost always find one. I’ve found codes worth up to a $100 off an item or service I had already decided to buy.‘