Supply Your Own N.R.A. Joke February 13, 2006January 16, 2017 You SO should subscribe to Times Select, so you can read columns like this one by Maureen Dowd (emphasis added): February 11, 2006 Op-Ed Columnist Smoking Dutch Cleanser By Maureen Dowd Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he’s doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic. President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage. The White House says it has done everything possible to protect the homeland. Unless, of course, it hasn’t. Then it can lie to hide the callous portrait of Incurious George in Crawford as New Orleans drowned. The attorney general can claim that torture and warrantless wiretapping are legal, and can mislead Congress. Unless, of course, enough Republicans stand up and say, as Arlen Specter told The Washington Post, that if that lickspittle lawyer thinks all this is legal, “he’s smoking Dutch Cleanser.” The president doesn’t know the Indian Taker Jack Abramoff. Unless, of course, W. has met with him a dozen times, invited him to Crawford and joked with him about his kids. The Bushies can continue to claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to our security. Unless, of course, he wasn’t, and the Cheney cabal was simply abusing the trust of Americans to push a wild-eyed political scheme. . . . Instead of just going after the 9/11 fiends, as W. promised with his bullhorn, the president and Vice President Strangelove have cynically played the terror card to accrue power and sidestep blame. They have twisted our values, mismanaged crises, fueled fundamentalist successes and violence around the world, and magnified a clash of civilizations. It used to take an Israeli incursion to inflame the Arab world. Now all it takes is a cartoon in Denmark. W. and Vice have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, turning Iraq into a terrorist training ground, leaving the 9/11 villains at large, and letting cronies and losers botch the job of homeland security. . . . In the new Foreign Affairs, Paul Pillar, who was a senior C.I.A. official overseeing Middle East intelligence assessments until October, says the obvious conclusion that should have been drawn from the intelligence on Iraq was that war was unnecessary. He says the White House “went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.” . . . A final absurd junction of dysfunction was reached on Wednesday, when Republican Party leaders awarded Tom DeLay with a seat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is investigating Jack Abramoff, including his connections to Tom DeLay. Perfect. ☞ Well, if not perfect, pretty darn close. COLLATERAL DAMAGE: SUPPLY YOUR OWN NRA JOKE HERE If Dick Cheney shoots his own friends . . . NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL GETTING A LITTLE EXERCISE Jim Brenner: ‘Miami may have Hip-Hop and Reggaeton, but Dvinsk (‘dveensk’) has ‘Le Parkour.” ☞ Click here to watch it (amazing), and here to find our what the heck it is. Tomorrow: Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People
But Let’s Get Back to Self Interest (I'm All For It, In Moderation) February 10, 2006March 3, 2017 $57,000 PEN Roberta Taussig: ‘In case you have $57,000 left over after buying that watch, and your Bic is running out of ink, check this out. After all, Valentines Day is less than a week away.’ THE TOP REPUBLICAN PRIORITY: TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH It sounds wildly partisan, but a review of the past five years suggests – to me at least – that it is true. For those making millions of dollars a year, this has been a grand time indeed to have the Republican Party controlling everything. ANOTHER WAY TO MEASURE PROGRESS ‘The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.’ – Franklin D. Roosevelt So why do the Republicans fight so hard to get rid of the estate tax, which impacts only the rich (instead of, say, the sales taxes that also ‘double tax’ the money you’ve earned)? ONE WISE BILLIONAIRE’S VIEW Jeff Bauer: ‘Warren Buffett meets with many student groups each year. Here’s one of the responses from a University of Kansas MBA student last December.’ Question: Could you discuss your views on [the estate tax] and how you will allocate your wealth to your children? Buffett: It really reflects my views on how a rich society should behave. If it weren’t for this society, I wouldn’t be rich. It wasn’t all me. Imagine if you were one of a pair of identical twins and a genie came along and allowed you to bid on where you could be born. The money that you bid is how much you had to agree to give back to society, and the one who bids the most gets to be born in the US and the other in Bangladesh. You would bid a lot. It is a huge advantage to be born here. There should be no divine right of the womb. My kids wouldn’t go off and do nothing if I give them a lot of money, but if they did, that would be a tragedy. $30 billion will be generated from estate taxes, which will go to help pay for the war in Iraq and other things. If you take away the estate tax, that money will have to come from somewhere else. If not from estate taxes then you inherently get it from poorer citizens. Less than 2% of estates will pay the estate tax. They would still have $50 million left over on average. I think those that get the lucky tickets should pay the most to the common causes of society. I believe in a big redistribution. Wealth is a bunch of claim checks that I can turn in for houses, etc. To pass those claim checks down to the next generation is the wrong approach. But for those that think I am perpetuating the welfare state, consider if you are born to a rich parent. You get a whole bunch of stocks right at the beginning of your life, and thus you are sort of on a welfare state of support from your rich parents from the beginning. What’s the difference? The idea of bidding on where you are born becomes even more compelling to me if the genie allows you to bid based not in absolute dollars, which would be hard, but in percentages. Would you offer up 39.6% of all your ordinary income beyond the first $250,000 or so . . . and 20% of all your long-term capital gains . . . and half the estate you eventually amassed (above the first $5 million, say) to be born in the U.S. instead of Bangladash or Botswana? If so, consider that this is in effect all your country was asking of you under the Clinton/Gore tax regime — money you would willingly have offered to be born here instead of there. (So stop griping?) ARE YOU YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY? But let’s get back to self-interest – I’m all for it, in moderation. Here is the transcript of a wise and engaging lecture by UC Berkeley Professor Terrance Odean that – if you pick stocks yourself – should be well worth your time. Men, particularly, need to read this (because men, the data show, suffer more than women from overconfidence).
Girlawhirl And Don't Sell Your Puts February 9, 2006March 3, 2017 I know most of you come here for the fashion tips, so here’s one from yesterday’s Newsday: FRESH PRINCE: What a welcome return to the runway for Charles Nolan, who sent a savvy, fresh collection of strong day and night looks down his runway yesterday afternoon. He says that he wants “women to tell me they love wearing my clothes.” Trust us, they will. Superb jackets, sweaters and skirts with a slight equestrian flavor read fashion forward but not fashion victim. – Anne Bratskeir Or perhaps you’re more the Girlawhirl type: Girlawhirl’s heart was singing when the first few models headed down the runway of the Charles Nolan show. It was like the best of Audrey Hepburn, with a little bit of ‘That Girl’ thrown in, and then completely modernized for today’s world. One after another, outfits passed in front of her that she was mentally categorizing, providing a fabulous base for her fall wardrobe… Or want to see the photos. This is all very confusing to me, because it’s freezing in New York, the Spring collection is on sale, and these are the Fall clothes everyone is raving about. It’s like 1997, when Kramer went to store balloons – all blown up – in Jerry’s apartment for the Millennium party he was planning. It’s also ironic, inasmuch as I spent the first 45 years of my life trying desperately to know as little as possible about women’s clothing – and now here I am linking you to Girlawhirl. Eight hundred members of the international press and assorted friends, family, high-end customers and celebs gathered in the Big Tent behind the New York Public Library. Paul Hackett, the Iraq War vet running for Senate from Ohio, was there, “60 Minutes’” Lesley Stahl was there, Vanity Fair’s Marie Brenner, Parade’s Lisa Birnbach, Diana Lichtenstein, Diane Levinson, Peggy Kerry . . . My role was to write up an interview to go into the packet on everybody’s seat. You can’t possibly have time to read this yourself – you are not stuck waiting half an hour for the lights to dim and the show to start – so skip this ill-concealed advertisement for the family business and head straight for the BiDil prescription stats at the end of the page. But, just for the record, here it is . . . CHARLES NOLAN: The Interview By Andrew Tobias Q: You want me to interview you? A: You’re the writer. You’ve interviewed lots of people. Why not. Q: I don’t know anything about women’s clothes. A: That doesn’t matter. It will save us money to have you do it. Q: Ah. [The interviewer, an investor in CHARLES NOLAN, LLC, brightens.] A: The idea is you doing what you do, helping me explain and brand what I do. Q: You make people cry. A: I do not make people cry! Q: Charles. A: We’re Irish. We’ve always been comfortable expressing ourselves freely. In eleven years, have I ever made you cry? Q: No. But I have cowered. A: All right. Start asking questions. Q: Why are you a fashion designer? A: I don’t really know. I have always loved to make clothes. I love the whole process of choosing the cloth and then letting it tell you what it wants to be. I’ve always wanted to do this but I’m not sure I’ll ever quite know why. Q: The cloth tells you what it wants to be? A: You know what I mean. It’s a bit cliché, but my mom had terrific style. She loved clothes and the whole ritual of dressing. Q: Do you have a philosophy when it comes to your work? Do you come out of a particular “school”? Other than F.I.T. A: That’s a good question. I love making clothes . . . the whole process . . . but it’s important to me that they work for the wearer. I think I’m a very practical guy. (I know you don’t think so.) The basic idea is to make something as simple as possible while making the cut and construction as interesting as possible. Q: Tetrahedrons? A: Simple, clean lines. The period that really impacted me was 1960 to 1965. It was such a time of change. All the fins came off the car. The simpler dress was always on the leading lady. It was all about neat and pretty and sleek. It was still fun and young in a very sophisticated way. You had this reaction to Fifties groupthink that led to the idea of self-exploration . . . and by the end of the Sixties it’s all about “do your own thing.” Q: You were three in 1960. How could this period have impacted you? A: [Interviewee rolls eyes, mutters something about “the 4:30 Movie every day after school” . . . inaudible . . . continues:] “Darling,” the 1965 movie with Julie Christie, completely captures that moment. All the characters make completely selfish choices. The aesthetic is great. It is so fresh. Still romantic, but it’s easy. Q: Did the cloth tell you to say this? A: You really have no feel for this, do you? Q: None. A: It’s all about the fabric. And the fit. And finding that element of serendipity that adds a spark. I drive people crazy over the fit because that’s the absolutely most important thing. I want women to tell me they love wearing my clothes; that they feel comfortable. But I also want them to get compliments. Q: What about the serendipity? Is this why you were baking a dress in our oven? A: That was a pleated skirt from last Fall’s collection. It’s an ancient way of creating a pleat – you wet it, twist it really tight into a ball and knot it, and then slowly bake it just enough to set the pleat. But the serendipity, or the spark, or whatever you want to call it, can come from anywhere. It’s what draws the customer’s eye to buy the garment – I hope – and then gets her the compliments when she wears it. Q: What about big feathers? I’ve never seen you use big feathers. Wouldn’t that be great? A: I used feathers last Fall and you don’t even remember? I made a turkey feather skirt. Do you even see the clothes? You’re really just trying to annoy me, aren’t you? Q: [Cowers, slightly.] A: I’ve always shied away from pieces with too much fuss and excess decoration. I like to keep decoration very simple – but if you’re going to do it, it should be strong. And all this while never losing sight of the fit. No matter what the fashion or the season or who I’m designing for, one thing never changes: the clothes have to be comfortable. Q: Is being a designer a choice, or were you born this way? A: [Interviewee rolls eyes.] Q: I seem to remember from writing FIRE AND ICE that Norman Norell was really Norman Levinson from Indiana, and that Halston and Bill Blass grew up in Indiana, too – and my sense was that they must have escaped from the heartland, dissolved all family ties, and become . . . NORELL! And HALSTON! And BILL BLASS! Did you grow up in Indiana? Tell us your real name. A: This is my real name. I grew up on Long Island, the fifth of nine kids, and moved into the City when I was 16. We are a very tight-knit family, as you well know, having become enmeshed in it. My brother Kenneth is also a designer and my closest advisor. My Sister Carola helps run my shop. My 11-year-old niece Emma accompanied my mother out on the runway of our Spring show, and then your mother walked down the runway – Q: – the first runway show she’d been in since modeling for Judy & Jill at $75 a pop in 1939 – A: – and I regularly enlist the rest of my four sisters and four brothers, and their kids, as well. We sometimes drive each other crazy, but we’re a very close family. Q: What was the very first thing you remember designing? Where were you? How old were you? A: I’m sure it was costumes for a play. When we were kids we were always putting on plays and revues for our parents who would sit through them and pretend to enjoy it. Q: You once designed a ball gown for Arianna Huffington out of table cloths and a roll of aluminum foil. Tell that story. A: You know that story. You made me do it. Q: Tell it anyway. A: It was hardly a ball gown. Arianna was supposed to be the Queen of England in front of 1,000 people in an impromptu New Year’s Eve skit. You all gave me three hours to make her costume. I had to work with what I had. Q: She looked great. What about Tipper? A: I had more time for that. I got to design the dress she wore the night Al Gore was nominated in Los Angeles and gave her that famous kiss. That was cool. Q: And Queen Rania? A: I’ve never made clothes for Rania. You hear me talk about her because she champions a group I support – FINCA. A really great organization that does micro-lending to women in the Third World. For me it’s all about empowering women. Men have had their turn and screwed it up. But now look at Germany. Look at Chile. Look at Liberia. Look at Geena Davis. It’s the women’s turn. Q: How much is this show costing us? A: We’re done. DON’T SELL YOUR PUTS Nitromed had a presentation for Merrill Lynch yesterday morning that you can listen to here. I missed it, but the stock closed down 66 cents for the day at $11.78. The 7-day rolling average of BiDil prescriptions written for the week ending Monday climbed to 263. We don’t know how many were written under the company’s super-discounted “voucher” program for the uninsured. Assuming none were, you have annualized sales of $16 million or so – against annual expenses projected at $95 million. One curious thing is that about two-thirds of the prescriptions always seem to be new prescriptions, typically for a 30-day supply. On its face, that would seem to be good – the more new BiDil customers, the faster sales can ramp up. But, one wonders: if only 90 or so of the daily prescriptions these days are refills for existing patients . . . what happened to all the new patients from August, September, October, November, December and early January? If things are going well, shouldn’t that pool of once-new patients not require more than 90 refills a day? Anything is possible; but with NTMD currently valued at $360 million – for a company whose sole product simply combines two widely prescribed generics readily available at a small fraction of the price – I say: don’t sell your puts.
That List of 14 Criteria – Again February 8, 2006March 3, 2017 WHY I DON’T ANSWER YOUR E-MAIL ‘Lack of time’ is sometimes the answer, but all too often it’s because . . . drum roll . . . you don’t enter, or mis-enter, your e-mail address. So I can’t. This is particularly frustrating when you’ve written something I want to thank you for, or have a quick question I actually (rare!) know the answer to. SO YOU WANT TO WATCH A LITTLE MONGOLIAN TV? Or TV from anywhere else in the world? Click here. (Thanks, Alan.) QUOTE OF THE MONTH As you know, Democrats who question our policies in Iraq or with warrantless wiretapping* have been accused by the Administration of having a ‘pre-9/11’ view of the world. *Everyone favors court-approved wiretapping, and would allow that approval to be obtained retroactively. ‘The real problem,’ said Senator Russ Feingold at the Alberto Gonzales hearing Monday, ‘is that the president seems to have a pre-1776 view of the world.’ King George. It is the view of the current Administration that the President is above the law in times of war. And the war on terror, President Bush has told us, may never end. From the American Progress Action Fund: The Washington Post writes, “Fortunately, a bipartisan group of senators expressed the view that the warrantless surveillance is either legally or politically untenable as currently practiced. While agreeing that intelligence agencies should have the authority to monitor suspected al Qaeda communications both in and outside the United States, Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Sens. Mike DeWine (R-OH), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), among others, pressed Mr. Gonzales to consider reforms.” Specter told Gonzales, “You think you’re right, but there are a lot of people who think you’re wrong,” adding later that the administration’s position “defies logic and plain English.” Graham called the administration’s legal argument “very dangerous in terms of its application for the future.” Graham added that the danger of the spying program is that there seems to be “no boundaries when it comes to executive decisions in a time of war.” ‘Now, by the way,’ the President told America in 2004, ‘any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way.’ One might conclude he was lying (which he’s allowed to do because we’re at war), or he was telling the truth and wiretaps do require a court order (but he’s allowed to break that law because we’re at war). During the hearing Monday, Senator Feingold confronted Gonzales about his own misstatements to the committee in January 2005, when he dismissed the warrantless wiretapping authority of the president as a ‘hypothetical situation.’ In fact, Gonzales was authorizing the use of the program at the time. There will be those – not, apparently including Republican Senators Specter, DeWine, Brownback and Graham – who would just as soon we expanded the powers of the Leader at the expense of Congress and the courts. But there will be those who, when they first encountered this list of 14 criteria, thought it was silly even to consider . . . yet who now wonder whether it isn’t a list worth reviewing periodically, lest we tilt too far. Click on the list and decide for yourself – if you can pull yourself away from Mongolian Idol.
Every Steeler Got a $57,500 Watch February 7, 2006January 16, 2017 DETROIT Miriam Paschetto: ‘You have probably already received quite a few emails about today’s column; but just in case you haven’t, I thought I’d straighten you out regarding the Super Bowl yesterday. It was played at Ford Field which is located in Detroit but the teams playing were Pittsburgh and Seattle. So you don’t have to feel bad for Detroit – the city probably attracted a fair amount of business from the Super Bowl attendees and they didn’t lose any game. (P.S. I feel I should admit that the only reason *I* know who was playing is that I am an engineer who worked on reviewing the stadium roof to see if it had enough capacity to safely sustain the equipment the Rolling Stones wished to use in their halftime show. My husband, Will Galway, and I spent the afternoon in an Himalayan art museum in NYC – and he probably still doesn’t know who played in the Super Bowl.) ☞ Well, the footnote was meant to suggest I actually sort of knew that. But you’re right: I got a ton of emails wanting to make sure. BROKEBACK Jesse Kornbluth: The review of BROKEBACK you WANT to quote: The New York Review of Books: An Affair to Remember. . . . The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they’re not really homosexual-that they’re more like the heart of America than like “gay people”-you’re pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed. THE $57,500 WATCH James Ooi: ‘Do you think people didn’t buy $57,500 watches during Democratic administrations? Why is it that the same people who tend to be so outraged at the government’s desire to regulate a woman’s right to choose or to put wiretaps on its citizens are so enthusiastic about having the government decide what to do with our personal property? This second question is not rhetorical. I really want to understand why personal property rights are not respected by typical ‘liberals.” ☞ Thanks, James (who went on to say some nice stuff) – but you are arguing against a point I didn’t make (and against which I’d join you in arguing). People should have the right to freely spend anything they want on a watch – $57 million if they want to. My general point was that when we go to a society where the top-paid make 500 times what the average Joe makes instead of 60 times (say), we need not compound that by then greatly reducing their tax rate as well – which is what the Republicans chose to do instead of, say, funding the education bill or reducing the deficit. The balance of good fortune, I should have thought, was already pretty favorably skewed to the best off. But now, those earning $1 million a year can buy an extra $57,500 watch each year with their tax saving. TXCO [Dept. of Full Disclosure] Suggested here at $4.50 two years ago, TXCO closed at $11.11 last night and I sold most of the rest of my shares – not because I know or suspect anything negative about the company’s prospects, but because I wanted to buy a watch. (Well, an acre or two in Costa Rica, actually.) I kept just enough so that, if it hits $30 one day, I will not feel compelled to hurl myself off a roof.
Pretty February 6, 2006March 3, 2017 I don’t usually follow football, but given the mess at Ford and GM – largely management’s fault, not the fault of the workers – I was rooting for Detroit last night. When I got back from dinner, I was sad to hear that Pittsburgh had won. Poor Detroit! So I just wanted to say I hope Ford and GM license the Chorus motor and, one day, leapfrog Toyota, so we won’t have to feel bad when they lose.* *Okay. I know. But barely. PRETTY SCARY If democracy is your thing, you will want elections that can’t be hacked by eighth graders. This should be true regardless of your politics. Click here for one assessment of the seriousness of the problem. And ask your Congressperson to support their colleague Rush Holt’s efforts in this regard. PRETTY WOMEN Click here to see Charles in the Washington Post (crows his proud partner), or here to see his Spring collection, or here to shop for his clothes at SAKS on-line . . . PRETTY INTENSE . . . unless, that is, it’s your view Charles and I will go to hell for being partners, or that (more to the point) you will go to hell for wishing us well. I raise that for having just read this fervently well-intentioned but wildly flawed review of ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ (Oh, and by the way – if you’ve been avoiding ‘Match Point’ because ‘it’s a Woody Allen movie’ and you don’t like those, trust me: it’s not a Woody Allen movie [even though it is] and you will like it. Maybe even more than ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ which for all its strong points, I found kinda slow.) ‘Brokeback Mountain’: Rape of the Marlboro Man Editor’s note: Recently, WND Managing Editor David Kupelian, author of the best-selling book, “The Marketing of Evil,” was widely quoted in the news media for his criticism of the new film “Brokeback Mountain.” Here, Kupelian explains how and why the controversial movie is one of the most powerful homosexual propaganda films of our time. “Brokeback Mountain,” the controversial “gay cowboy” film that has garnered seven Golden Globe nominations and breathless media reviews – and has now emerged as a front-runner for the Oscars – is a brilliant propaganda film, reportedly causing viewers to change the way they feel about homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage. And how do the movie-makers pull off such a dazzling feat? Simple. They do it by raping the “Marlboro Man,” that revered American symbol of rugged individualism and masculinity. We all know the Marlboro Man. In “The Marketing of Evil,” I show how the Philip Morris Company made marketing history by taking one of the most positive American images of all time – the cowboy – and attaching it to a negative, death-oriented product – cigarettes. Hit the pause button for a moment so this idea can completely sink in: Cigarette marketers cleverly attached, in the public’s mind, two utterly unrelated things: 1) the American cowboy, with all of the powerful feelings that image evokes in us, of independence, self-confidence, wide-open spaces and authentic Americanism, and 2) cigarettes, a stinky, health-destroying waste of money. This legendary advertising campaign targeting men succeeded in transforming market underdog Marlboro (up until then, sold as a women’s cigarette with the slogan “Mild as May”) into the world’s best-selling cigarette. It was all part of the modern marketing revolution, which meant that, instead of touting a product’s actual benefits, marketers instead would psychologically manipulate the public by associating their product with the fulfillment of people’s deepest, unconscious needs and desires. (Want to sell liquor? Put a seductive woman in the ad.) Obviously, the marketers could never actually deliver on that promise – but emotional manipulation sure is an effective way to sell a lot of products. The “Marlboro Man” campaign launched 50 years ago. Today, the powerful cowboy image is being used to sell us on another self-destructive product: homosexual sex and “gay” marriage. In “Brokeback Mountain,” a film adaptation of the 1997 New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx two 19-year-old ranchers named Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) have been hired to guard sheep on a rugged mountain in 1963 Wyoming. One night, the bitter cold drives Ennis into Jack’s tent so they can keep each other warm. As they lie there, suddenly and almost without warning, these two young men – both of whom later insist they’re not “queer” – jump out of the sack and awkwardly and violently engage in anal sex. Too embarrassed the next morning even to talk about it, Ennis and Jack dismiss their sexual encounter as a “one-shot deal” and part company at the end of the sheepherding job. Ennis marries his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams, Ledger’s real-life girlfriend) while Jack marries female rodeo rider and prom queen Lureen (Anne Hathaway). Each family has children. Four years later, Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he’s coming to town for a visit. When the moment finally arrives, Ennis, barely able to contain his anticipation, rushes outside to meet Jack and the two men passionately embrace and kiss. Ennis’s wife sadly witnesses everything through the screen door. (Since this is one of the film’s sadder moments, I wasn’t quite sure why the audience in the Portland, Oregon, theater burst out in laughter at Alma’s heartbreaking realization.) From that point on, over the next two decades Ennis and Jack take off together on periodic “fishing trips” at Brokeback Mountain, where no fishing actually takes place. During these adulterous homosexual affairs, Jack suggests they buy a ranch where the two can live happily ever after, presumably abandoning their wives and children. Ennis, however, is afraid, haunted by a traumatic childhood memory: It seems his father had tried to inoculate him against homosexuality by taking him to see the brutalized, castrated, dead body of a rancher who had lived together with another man – until murderous, bigoted neighbors committed the gruesome hate crime. Eventually, life with Ennis becomes intolerable and Alma divorces him, while Lureen, absorbed with the family business, only suspects Jack’s secret as they drift further and further apart. When, toward the end of the story, Jack dies in a freak accident (his wife tells Ennis a tire blew up while Jack was changing it, propelling the hubcap into his face and killing him), Ennis wonders whether Jack actually met the same brutal fate as the castrated “gay” cowboy of his youth. Ultimately, Ennis ends up alone, with nothing, living in a small, secluded trailer, having lost both his family and his homosexual partner. He’s comforted only by his most precious possession – Jack’s shirt – which he pitifully embraces, almost in a slow dance, his aching loneliness masterfully projected into the audience via the film’s artistry. Yes, the talents of Hollywood’s finest are brought together in a successful attempt at making us experience Ennis’s suffering, supposedly inflicted by a homophobic society. Heath Ledger’s performance is brilliant and devastating. We do indeed leave the theater feeling Ennis’s pain. Mission accomplished. Lost in all of this, however, are towering, life-and-death realities concerning sex and morality and the sanctity of marriage and the preciousness of children and the direction of our civilization itself. So please, you moviemakers, how about easing off that tight camera shot of Ennis’s suffering and doing a slow pan over the massive wreckage all around him? What about the years of silent anguish and loneliness Alma stoically endures for the sake of keeping her family together, or the terrible betrayal, suffering and tears of the children, bereft of a father? None of this merits more than a brief acknowledgment in “Brokeback Mountain.” What is important to the moviemakers, rather, is that the viewer be made to feel, and feel, and feel again as deeply as possible the exquisitely painful loneliness and heartache of the homosexual cowboys – denied their truest happiness because of an ignorant and homophobic society. Thus are the Judeo-Christian moral values that formed the very foundation and substance of Western culture for the past three millennia all swept away on a delicious tide of manufactured emotion. And believe me, skilled directors and actors can manufacture emotion by the truckload. It’s what they do for a living. Co-star Jake Gyllenhaal realized the movie’s power to transform audiences in Toronto, where, according to Entertainment magazine, “he was approached by festival-goers proclaiming that their preconceptions had been shattered by the film’s insistence on humanizing gay love.” “Brokeback Mountain,” said Gyllenhaal, “is that pure place you take someone that’s free of judgment. These guys were scared. What they feared was not each other but what was outside of each other. What was so sad was that it didn’t have to happen like that.” But then, said the article, Gyllenhaal jumped to his feel and exclaimed triumphantly: “I mean, people’s minds have been changed. That’s amazing.” Changed indeed. And that’s the goal. Film is, by its very nature, highly propagandistic. That is, when you read a book, if you detect you’re being lied to or manipulated, you can always stop reading, close the book momentarily and say, “Wait just a minute, there’s something wrong here!” You can’t do that in a film: You’re bombarded with sound and images, all expertly crafted to give you selected information and to stimulate certain feelings, and you can’t stop the barrage, not in a theater anyway. The visuals and sound and music – and along with them, the underlying agenda of the filmmakers – pursue you relentlessly, overwhelming your emotions and senses. And when you leave the theater, unless you’re really objective to what you’ve experienced, you’ve been changed – even if just a little bit. Want to know how easily your feelings can be manipulated? Let’s take the smallest, most seemingly insignificant example and see. Sit down at a piano and play a song, any song – even “Mary Had a Little Lamb” – as long as it’s in a major key. Then, play the same song, but change from a major to a minor key; just lower the third step of the scale by a half-step so the melody and harmony become minor. If you watch carefully, you’ll note this one tiny change makes the minor-key version sound a bit melancholy and sad, while the normal, major-key version sounds bright and happy. (As the expression goes, “Major glad, minor sad.”) Now take this principle and apply it to a feature film by expanding it a million-fold. A movie’s musical score has one overriding function – to make the viewer feel a certain way at strategic points during the story. And music is just one of dozens of factors and techniques used to influence audiences in the deepest way possible. Everything from the script to the directing to the camera work to the acting, which in “Brokeback Mountain” is brilliant, serve the purpose of making the movie-makers’ vision seem like reality – even if it’s twisted and perverse. Do we understand that Hollywood could easily produce a similar movie to “Brokeback Mountain,” only this time glorifying an incest relationship, or even an adult-child sexual relationship? Like “Brokeback,” it too would serve to desensitize us to the immoral and destructive reality of what we’re seeing, while fervently coaxing us into embracing that which we once rightly shunned. All the filmmakers would need to do is skillfully make viewers experience the actors’ powerful emotions of loneliness and emptiness – juxtaposed with feelings of joy and fulfillment when the two “lovers” are together – to bring us to a new level of “understanding” for any forbidden “love.” Alongside this, of course, they would necessarily portray those opposed to this unorthodox “love” as Nazis or thugs. Thus, many of us would let go of our “old-fashioned” biblical ideas of morality in light of what seems like the more imminent and undeniable reality of human love in all its diverse forms. A “Brokeback”-type movie could easily be made, for instance, to portray a female school teacher’s affair with a 14-year-old student as “a magnificent love story.” And I’m not talking about the 2000 made-for-TV potboiler, “All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story,” about the Seattle school teacher who seduced a sixth-grade student, went to prison for statutory rape, and later married the boy having had two children by him. I’m talking about a big-budget, big-name Hollywood masterpiece aimed at transforming America through film, just as Hitler relied on master filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make propaganda films to manipulate the emotions of an entire nation. In place of “Brokeback Mountain’s” scene with the castrated homosexual, the “adult-child love story” could have a similar scene in which, as a young girl, the future teacher’s mother took her to see the body of a woman who had fallen in consensual “love” with a 14-year-old boy, only to be brutalized, her breasts cut off, and bludgeoned to death – all by Nazi-like bigoted neighbors. (So that’s why she couldn’t be honest and open about her later relationship with her student.) Inevitably, such a film would make us doubt our former condemnation of adult-child sex, or at least reduce our outrage as we gained more “understanding” and sympathy for the participants. It would cause us to ask the same question one reviewer asked after seeing “Brokeback Mountain”: “In an age when the fight over gay marriage still rages, ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ the tale of two men who are scarcely even allowed to imagine being together, asks, through the very purity with which it touches us: When it comes to love, what sort of world do we really want?” OK, I’ll bite. Let’s talk about love. The critics call “Brokeback Mountain” a “pure” and “magnificent” love story. Do we really want to call such an obsession – especially one that destroys marriages and is based on constant lies, deceit and neglect of one’s children – “love”? What if I were a heroin addict and told you I loved my drug dealer? What if I told you he always makes me feel good, and that I have a hard time living without him, and that I think about him all the time with warm feelings of anticipation and inner completion? And that whenever we get together, it’s the only time I feel truly happy and at peace with myself? Oh, you don’t approve of my “love”? You dare to criticize it, telling me my relationship with my drug dealer is not real love, but just an unhealthy addiction? What if I respond to you by saying, “Oh shut up, you hater. How dare you impose your sick, narrow-minded, oppressive values on me? Who are you, you pinch-faced, moralistic hypocrite, to define for me what real love is?” Don’t laugh. I guarantee Hollywood could make a movie about a man and his drug dealer, or an adult-child sexual relationship, that would pull on our emotions and create some level of sympathy for the characters. Furthermore, in at least some cases, it would make us doubt our conscience – a gift directly from God, the perception of right and wrong that he puts in each one of us – our inner knowing that this was a totally unhealthy and self-destructive relationship. Ultimately, propaganda works because it washes over us, overwhelming our senses, confusing us, upsetting or emotionalizing us, and thereby making us doubt what we once knew. Listen to what actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Jack, told the reporter for Entertainment magazine about doing the “love” scenes with Heath Ledger: “I was super uncomfortable … [but] what made me most courageous was that I realized I had to try to let go of that stereotype I had in my mind, that bit of homophobia, and try for a second to be vulnerable and sensitive. It was f—in’ hard, man. I succeeded only for milliseconds.” Gyllenhaal thinks he was “super uncomfortable” while being filmed having simulated homosexual sex because of his own “homophobia.” Could it be, rather, that his conflict resulted from putting himself in a position, having agreed to do the film, where he was required to violate his own conscience? As so often happens, he was tricked into pushing past invisible internal barriers – crossing a line he wasn’t meant to cross. It’s called seduction. This is how the “marketers of evil” work on all of us. They transform our attitudes by making us feel as though our “super uncomfortable” feelings toward embracing unnatural or corrupt behavior of whatever sort – a discomfort literally put into us by a loving God, for our protection – somehow represent ignorance or bigotry or weakness. I wrote “The Marketing of Evil” to expose these people, and especially to reveal the hidden techniques they’ve been using for decades to confuse us, to manipulate our feelings and get us to doubt and turn our backs on the truth we once knew and loved. Indeed, whether they’re outright lying to us, or ridiculing us for our traditional beliefs, or trying to make us feel guilty over some supposed bigotry on our part, the “marketers of evil” can prevail simply by intimidating or emotionally stirring us up in one way or another. Once that happens, we can easily become confused and lose the inborn understanding God gave us. We all need that inner understanding or common sense, because it’s our primary protection from all the evil influences in this world. As I said at the outset, Hollywood has now raped the Marlboro Man. It has taken a revered symbol of America – the cowboy – with all the powerful emotions and associations that are rooted deep down in the pioneering American soul, and grafted onto it a self-destructive lifestyle it wants to force down Americans’ throats. The result is a brazen propaganda vehicle designed to replace the reservations most Americans still have toward homosexuality with powerful feelings of sympathy, guilt over past “homophobia” – and ultimately the complete and utter acceptance of homosexuality as equivalent in every way to heterosexuality. If and when that day comes, America will have totally abandoned its core biblical principles – as well as the Author of those principles. The radical secularists will have gotten their wish, and this nation – like the traditional cowboy characters corrupted in “Brokeback Mountain” – will have stumbled down a sad, self-destructive and ultimately disastrous road. ☞ Let’s start by applauding the author’s anti-Marlboro efforts. He and I share that much. But smoking causes cancer (among other rotten things), and second-hand smoke does, too. A loving, supportive relationship between two men or two women causes no harm to anyone. Indeed, by discouraging promiscuity and promoting interdependence, it makes society stronger. (And let’s not forget that for the two people in question it facilitates the pursuit of happiness.) Mr. Kupelian rightly notes the trauma often wrought on families when husband leaves wife and children for a man. But neither Charles nor I are in danger of doing that because we’re gay and so didn’t marry women and have children in the first place (we have spectacular nieces and nephews), as Jack and Ennis felt they had to do. When they fall in love, neither one was married or had kids. If people like Mr. Kupelian hadn’t pressured them, the damage he rightly recoils from would not have happened in the first place. If they had had kids together – as many gay couples now successfully do – they’d have been no more likely to split up and cause the trauma of divorce than heterosexual couples occasionally do. Perhaps Mr. Kupelian should fix the straight divorce problem before trying to find a way to force gay men and lesbians to live unhappy lies. He doesn’t come out and say it, but Mr. Kupelian seems to believe that being gay is a choice – and perhaps for him it was. But most of us, I think, don’t have much choice over whom we fall for. So . . . much of the harm he fears from the society’s increasing acceptance of gay unions is unfounded. (The real concern here may be those men – often those most threatened by homosexuality – who are straight enough to make traditional family work, but wishing they could be with men instead. This is a problem. But I would suggest, first, that it’s mainly a problem for them to work out themselves, not for Mr. Kupelian to supervise . . . and, second, that the chances of their being thrown together on a cold night in a pup tent with someone looking like Jack Twist – let alone with the attraction being mutual – well, I’m not sure this kind of temptation is likely to come along often enough to threaten civilization.) And, yes, you probably could make a movie that left the audience feeling empathy for an adult having an affair with a child. But as with cigarettes – and unlike a relationship between two adults – adult-child relationships are objectively harmful. Adults – most insidiously parents or uncles, but any adults, obviously – should not molest children. What does that have to do with “Brokeback Mountain?”
The State of Your Stem Cells February 3, 2006March 3, 2017 A friend writes: ‘On page 2 in today’s Times Tourneau has an ad for a watch (not a house) with prices starting at $57,500. What happens if you want a second hand?’ ☞ Another friend just paid $800 for his watch . . . to be cleaned. It is a grand time to be rich and powerful in America. But never fear: Extending and deepening the tax cuts for the wealthy will allow the purchase of more $57,500 watches . . . which will boost the economy of Switzerland . . . which will enable the Swiss to buy more American movies . . . which will boost employment in California . . . which will have ripple effects throughout our economy. See how well this works? Eliminating the estate tax – as the President hopes ‘Congress will act responsibly’ and do (by making permanent the tax cut that currently eliminates it for only one year) – is the next great thing that cries out to be done to help the average American family. The short-sighted will see this as a sharp shift in favor of the mega-wealthy. But whatever student aid and health care needs to be cut back to make up for the lost revenue, think of all the $57,500 Swiss watches will be sold, and how that will ultimately benefit you. GAS GUZZLING You heard the President commit to reducing our dependence on foreign oil by aggressively funding alternative energy research programs. Soon his spokesfolks were back-pedaling – not least because . . . From yesterday’s New York Times: The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget. A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation’s oil imports. . . . And from today’s Times, Paul Krugman: There’s a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. … I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.” In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That’s why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It’s why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it’s why the state of the union – the thing itself, not the speech – is so grim. ☞ It’s deeper than the current Administration. The leadership of the Republican Party – some moderates notwithstanding (and not part of the leadership) – believes government is the problem. Other than protecting their property, and stepping in to try to overturn certain state laws, like Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act (twice passed by referendum), government has no constructive role to play. Social Security, Medicare, mine safety regulation . . . real men don’t need stuff like that. Only ‘bureaucrats’ (spit the word) care about things like global climate change. And tobacco regulation? Tom DeLay’s replacement as Republican Majority Leader is best known for having passed out tobacco lobbyist checks to his colleagues right there on the House floor. Meanwhile . . . STEM CELLS ‘Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research – human cloning in all its forms – creating or implanting embryos for experiments – creating animal-human hybrids – and buying, selling or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator, and that life should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale.’ – 2006 State of the Union Address Bernie Siegel: ‘Translated, that means the White House supports the ‘Brownback Bill,’ named after the Kansas senator, which calls for criminalization of SCNT, a form of stem cell research that would create patient-matched stem cell lines. That bill is an assault on public health. If a researcher makes a stem cell line using this technique, he would be subject to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine. If YOU arrange to send your sick nephew overseas to get an injection of these stem cells for treatment of diabetes or other medical condition, YOU would be subject to the same penalty. ‘The ‘creating’ of embryos, to which the President refers, is taking a patient’s single body cell (we have 100 trillion cells in our bodies) and placing it inside a donated human egg with its nucleus removed. While in the Petri dish, the microscopic embryo is subjected to an electrical current and is transformed from a body cell into an embryonic stem cell that can then differentiate into any type of tissue in the human body, matching the donor’s own genetic make-up. No sperm involved, no pregnancy, only treatments and cures. ‘Could the potential cure for all diseases be banned in the United States? The President has his pen in hand waiting to sign the ban into law. ‘Prohibiting the creation animal-human hybrids could be interpreted as preventing the placement human cells in mice or other animals needed to make treatments safe for human beings. My Uncle Oscar walks around with a pig valve in his chest. Should we ban this, too? ‘Telling us we can’t discard embryos is tantamount to saying 400,000 frozen embryos, surplus from InVitroFertilization treatments, should remain in cold storage forever. The fact is that they will be eventually discarded or disintegrate. If donated to medical science, those cells in a dish would not go to waste. ‘Bush’s exaltation of the embryo is really a veiled threat to regulate IVF medicine out of existence and drive such infertility treatments off-shore, a situation which has already occurred in Italy. ‘At least Bush was honest about his motives. Unlike most foes of embryonic stem cell research who resort to ‘false alternative’ arguments, misrepresenting the potential of adult stem cell research (something every legitimate scientist knows not to be a reason to delay research on embryonic cells), the President invokes the views of the Creator to justify his position. Of course, it is HIS view of the Creator’s intent. ‘But I remember the words of Nina Brown, a stem cell activist from Houston battling Parkinson’s, who has another view. She told a meeting of stem cell activists last June, ‘I believe God has given us this window of opportunity before cells begin to differentiate, as His gift to sustain life and relieve human suffering.’ ‘A father, whose daughter has diabetes, wrote the President: ‘These fertilized eggs do not have a brain, or a spine, or a heart…they do not have a soul or a conscience…they do not feel pain… they are not human beings, but rather potential human beings. But they will never realize their potential, because they will be discarded. It is heart wrenching to think that rather than discarding these embryos who will never reach their potential, our government will not fund research that would possibly help my child reach her potential. For she does have a brain, and a soul, and a heart…and does feel pain.’ ‘Where time is measured in human suffering and death, the politicians holding back funding for embryonic stem cell research and demonizing other potentially life-saving research should be held morally responsible.’ DEFINING CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT Michael Fang: ‘Having to wade through your political views to get to your financial ones?’
A Bummer for Your Hummer February 2, 2006January 16, 2017 ALITO – THE COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE VIEW Michael K.: ‘Death from being shot while snatching a purse is 100% preventable by merely choosing to not break the law and physically and emotionally endanger old ladies by grabbing their purses. You are wealthy; you can pretty well see to it that street crime does not affect you. This is not true for many others.’ ☞ This is what makes horse races. Given your view, you are right to vote Republican. (Any thoughts on what the founders meant by ‘cruel and unusual punishment?’) FACT CHECKING Mark W. Budwig: ‘In his State of the Union address, President Bush stated, ‘On September 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country.’ A glance at an atlas shows that Afghanistan is much farther than 7,000 miles from our east coast. So what state did the president mean? Saudi Arabia? Or was he yet again tying 9/11 to Saddam Hussein?’ ☞ Maybe he was calculating the distance as the drill bit travels, direct thru the Earth? But no . . . actually, you are wrong and he was right: the City Distance Tool shows Kabul 6,740 miles from New York. Although, as the hijackers were Saudi and not Afghani, who knows what he meant? EJECTING Whatever you think of Cindy Sheehan, there’s a separate question: what do you think of her being ejected from the State of the Union? (As was the wife of a Republican Congressman – for wearing a ‘support our troops T-shirt,’ no less.) Here‘s how Sheehan herself describes the experience. DISSAVING I would be doing you a disservice if I failed to note that consumers are dissaving – spending more than they’re earning . . . and worse, as has been widely reported of late, than at any time since 1933. We are getting poorer on both a micro level (families dipping into savings to heat their homes, take their vacations, buy their iPods) and a macro level (by the time the President leaves office, our accumulated National Debt will be $10 trillion – roughly $8 trillion of it racked up by just three presidents: Reagan, Bush, and Bush). Some of us, of course, are getting richer . . . CEO pay climbs smartly year after year. And many, after inflation, are getting poorer . . . the Republican Congress has kept the minimum wage frozen for nine years now. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The Republicans scored a close victory yesterday when they succeeded in squeezing student loans and health care for poor children, while leaving their dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy untouched. As announced Tuesday night, it is the President’s goal to further cut taxes on the wealthy (he did not phrase it quite that way) – reducing the maximum tax rate on multi-billion-dollar estates, for example, from the 55% it was when he took office to . . . 0%. It’s well known that the President’s favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ. He and his party have not been shy about using religion to win votes. But at least a few Christians are beginning to wonder if they were sold a bill of goods. ‘Last week‘ [it was reported a couple of months ago], ‘leaders of five Christian denominations in the US jointly sent a letter to President Bush, reiterating their horrified view of his 2006 budget priorities.’ INVESTING Pete: Yesterday, you linked back to your February 4, 2004 column where you mention Stephen Leeb’s book, The Oil Factor. I know that your general advice for the average investor is to buy and hold low-expense index (or index-like) funds. Given the potential shock wave high energy prices may send through the global economy, which may be in an already precarious position (overvalued housing sector, etc.), would it be wise, in your opinion, for an average investor to read Stephen Leeb’s book and reallocate some of his retirement portfolio away from an index buy and hold strategy? Is an index buy and hold strategy still relevant in today’s economic climate?’ ☞ It would have been even wiser to read his book in February, 2004. I worry we have some tough times ahead. But I also worry it may be late to be buying oil stocks. It seems as if they can only keep going up (and I’m not selling mine, for the most part); but when it’s obvious something can only go in one direction (how could the dollar not keep falling last year?), it sometimes goes into reverse (the dollar actually gained ground). To your question: A lot depends on your age and circumstances. If you’re 30, just keep investing that $200 a month (or whatever) forever . . . though not only in U.S. funds – it’s a big world. (And consider reading The Little Book that Beats the Market and using that strategy instead of the index funds, as suggested here a couple of months back. I owe you a lot of comments back and forth on that book, by the way . . . they’re in queue.) If you’re 60, I wouldn’t be fully invested in index funds. (Where else to put it? Well, the simplest alternative could be – don’t gasp – a bank? A money market fund? Every so often, ‘cash is king.’ And even if such a time does not arise in the next year or two or three – as I hope it won’t – there are a lot dumber things to do with a chunk of money than keeping it someplace safe and liquid, earning a little interest to boot.) GAS GUZZLING Steve Baker: ‘I would be a little less skeptical of what this president says about the energy crisis if during the first month of his presidency he hadn’t relaxed the CAFE standards. The recent scheduled increase in them didn’t even take them back to where they were in 2000.’ ☞ His first budget also proposed halving alternative energy research. And what a terrific tax break he gave purchasers of the Hummer.
The Responsible Thing to Do Is to Borrow More February 1, 2006January 16, 2017 Nice to see that TXCO, the little oil company mentioned here at $4.50 a couple of years ago, closed at $10.26 last night. Our Anadarko Petroleum has about doubled, also. Whatever the state of the Union, the state of the Oil Men – like you and me, through our shares in TXCO and APC, and President Bush and Bandar Bush and Vice President Cheney, who have oil in their blood – is exceptionally flush. There is so much to say about the rest, let’s leave it at just two lines: ‘Hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy.’ (‘So please don’t criticize me for cutting short my summer vacation and flying back to Washington to save Terry Schiavo but not when I learned ‘Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside US” or that a Force Five hurricane was headed for one of my cities. With Terry Schiavo, I was relying on Majority Leader Bill Frist’s tele-diagnosis that she was not brain dead. With Bin Laden, all I had to go on was the CIA, and with Katrina, the chicken-little global warming types – like NASA’s top climate researcher we’ve been trying to muzzle.’) ‘I urge the Congress to act responsibly and make the tax cuts permanent.’ (‘I know Reagan, my Dad, and I will have racked up $8 trillion in debt by the time I leave office, and that even now the interest on the debt is equivalent to 40% of all the personal income taxes paid each year. But the responsible thing is to make the cuts for the wealthy permanent, because I’m the president and I can tell you up is down or down is up or ‘we don’t torture’ and what are you going to do about it? Heh, heh, heh.’) SLINGBOX – II The estimable Bryan Norcross (who owns no stock in Slingbox, either): ‘Actually, the Slingbox doesn’t need to be connected to a TV . . . just to a cable or antenna connection. If you want all the channels you’ll have to get a cable or satellite box for it, but if it’s mostly ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/etc. you want… all you need is a splitter off your cable. Also . . . you will soon be able to watch it on your Windows PDA phone… like the Treo 700w or the Samsung 730i… if you get the high-speed internet service from Verizon, Sprint, or Cingular. And… the software for Macs will be out soon as well.’ IT’S A REPUBLICAN – AND A MEDIA – SCANDAL I made the case Monday that the Abramoff thing is a Republican, not a bipartisan, scandal. As it happens, Paul Krugman made the case much better. You need Times Select to read it, but why not pay a dollar a week for the Times? Krugman makes it much clearer than I did that this is a Republican scandal . . . and wonders why the supposedly liberal media has such trouble admitting that. It’s scary to see what a weak job NBC and so much of the press has come to do . . . how CNN has shifted sharply to the right . . . how the House has gone hard right, the Senate, the White House, the Court, the K Street lobbyist establishment. For all its promise – which I believe will ultimately prevail – the state of our Union, if you ask me, is precarious.