Year: 2007

WHY YOUR INTERNET IS SLOW

If you subscribed to Times Select, you’d already have seen Paul Krugman’s column and know the answer. The French are more connected than we – at three times the speed. The Japanese – at twelve times the speed. (Guess what: enlightened regulation matters. We were doing fine until about six years ago.) In small part:

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our ‘high speed’ connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

FARECAST

Predicting the whether to buy your airline ticket now or later. Anyone tried this? Interesting, powerful, potentially money-saving site. (Thanks, Juan!)

A GOOD IDEA

Mark Lefler: ‘A Malaysian teenager I read about [in a Yahoo news clip that has expired] used text messaging on her cell phone to warn her mother there was an intruder, and was saved. How come you cannot just text right to emergency services? Calling is too noisy and could capture the attention of a bad guy. And what if you are wounded and cannot talk? Think of the Virginia Tech massacre. You could at least text ‘help’ and your address. A smart company might just set up a web service where you can register, and anything forwarded to that site gets sent to your local emergency services.’

BOREALIS

Stephen: ‘Finally, good coming from Borealis – just not yours. But this Borealis says its lighting makes compact fluorescents obsolete.’

GLDD

So yesterday was, I think, the last day to exercise your warrants. I can’t imagine they really go from being worth $3.75 or so yesterday to zero today if you failed to exercise them – surely some mercy might be shown? (or your broker exercised them for you, as many automatically exercise expiring options if they’re in the money) – but that is not the point. The point is that the relatively short but wonderfully profitable life of these warrants is now officially over . . . and the much less dramatic, but still possibly profitable, next phase of the common stock begins.

Even with all the selling pressure one imagines there must have been from warrant holders exercising – and then immediately selling the stock to take their profit rather than put up an additional $5 and start the capital gains holding period all over again – even with all that, the stock closed at $8.80. (So if you paid 50 cents for the warrant a few months ago and did put up the $5 to exercise, you have a basis of $5.50 and a stock worth $8.80.)

Anything is possible . . . including another round of selling pressure in a year or so from folks like me who exercised warrants on which their gain was short-term, planning to wait a year and a day to take what would then be a lightly taxed long-term capital gain instead.

But I think the wind could be at this company’s back, so I plan to hold on, perhaps even more than a year and a day. What could be sexier than dredging?

MAD MEN

A new series on AMC. Maybe because my dad was himself an ad man (Mad Men – Madison Avenue men), and maybe because anything set in the Sixties grabs me, I’m hooked. I liked last night’s first episode, repeated frequently in the coming days; Tivo takes care of the rest.

IRAQ

If you subscribed to Times Select, you’d already have seen Tom Friedman’s column from Wednesday:

July 18, 2007
Help Wanted: Peacemaker
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I were the parent of a soldier in Iraq and I had just read that the Iraqi Parliament had decided to go on vacation for August, because, as the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, explained, it’s really hot in Baghdad then – ‘130 degrees.’

I’ve been in Baghdad in the summer and it is really hot. But you know what? It is a lot hotter when you’re in a U.S. military uniform, carrying a rifle and a backpack, sweltering under a steel helmet and worrying that a bomb can be thrown at you from any direction. One soldier told me he lost six pounds in one day. I’m sure the Iraqi Parliament is air-conditioned.

So let’s get this straight: Iraqi parliamentarians, at least those not already boycotting the Parliament, will be on vacation in August so they can be cool, while young American men and women, and Iraqi Army soldiers, will be fighting in the heat in order to create a proper security environment in which Iraqi politicians can come back in September and continue squabbling while their country burns.

Here is what I think of that: I think it’s a travesty – and for the Bush White House to excuse it with a Baghdad weather report shows just how much it has become a hostage to Iraq.

The administration constantly says the surge is necessary, but not sufficient. That’s right. There has to be a political deal. And the latest report card on Iraq showed that a deal is nowhere near completion. So where is the diplomatic surge? What are we waiting for? A cool day in December?

When you read stories in the newspapers every day about Americans who are going to Iraq for their third or even fourth tours and you think that this administration has never sent its best diplomats for even one tour yet – never made one, not one, single serious, big-time, big-tent diplomatic push to resolve this conflict, but instead has put everything on the military, it makes you sick.

Yes, yes, I know, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is going to make one of her quick-in-and-out trips to the Middle East next month to try to enlist support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in the fall. I’m all for Arab-Israeli negotiations, but the place that really needs a peace conference right now is Iraq, and it won’t happen with drive-by diplomacy.

President Bush baffles me. If your whole legacy was riding on Iraq, what would you do? I’d draft the country’s best negotiators – Henry Kissinger, Jim Baker, George Shultz, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross or Richard Holbrooke – and ask one or all of them to go to Baghdad, under a U.N. mandate, with the following orders:

‘I want you to move to the Green Zone, meet with the Iraqi factions and do not come home until you’ve reached one of three conclusions: 1) You have resolved the power- and oil-sharing issues holding up political reconciliation; 2) you have concluded that those obstacles are insurmountable and have sold the Iraqis on a partition plan that could be presented to the U.N. and supervised by an international force; 3) you have concluded that Iraqis are incapable of agreeing on either political reconciliation or a partition plan and told them that, as a result, the U.S. has no choice but to re-deploy its troops to the border and let Iraqis sort this out on their own.’

The last point is crucial. Any lawyer will tell you, if you’re negotiating a contract and the other side thinks you’ll never walk away, you’ve got no leverage. And in Iraq, we’ve never had any leverage. The Iraqis believe that Mr. Bush will never walk away, so they have no incentive to make painful compromises.

That’s why the Iraqi Parliament is on vacation in August and our soldiers are fighting in the heat. Something is wrong with this picture. First, Mr. Bush spends three years denying the reality that we need a surge of more troops to establish security and then, with Iraq spinning totally out of control and militias taking root everywhere, he announces a surge and criticizes others for being impatient.

At the same time, Mr. Bush announces a peace conference for Israelis and Palestinians – but not for Iraqis. He’s like a man trapped in a burning house who calls 911 to put out the brush fire down the street. Hello?

Quitting Iraq would be morally and strategically devastating. But to just drag out the surge, with no road map for a political endgame, with Iraqi lawmakers going on vacation, with no consequences for dithering, would be just as morally and strategically irresponsible.

We owe Iraqis our best military – and diplomatic effort – to avoid the disaster of walking away. But if they won’t take advantage of that, we owe our soldiers a ticket home.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

AND ON THE HOME FRONT . . .

Cheney Suppressed Evidence in California Energy Crisis
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

Thursday 19 July 2007

In-depth investigation shows how Vice President Dick Cheney pressured federal energy regulators to conceal evidence of widespread market manipulation by energy companies during the California electricity crisis in 2001.

In March 2001, while California’s two largest utilities were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and the state’s electricity crisis was spiraling out of control, Vice President Dick Cheney summoned Curt Hebert, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to his office next to the White House for a hastily arranged meeting.

Cheney had just been informed by his longtime friend Thomas Cruikshank, the man who handpicked the vice president to succeed him at Halliburton in the mid-1990s, that federal energy regulators were close to completing an investigation into allegations that Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies and AES Corporation of Arlington, Virginia had created an artificial power shortage in California in April and May of 2000 by shutting down a power plant for more than two weeks.

Cruikshank was a member of Williams’s board of directors, and perhaps more importantly, had been one of many energy industry insiders advising Cheney’s energy task force on a wide-range of policy issues, including deregulation of the nation’s electricity sector, that would benefit Williams financially.

Cruikshank informed the vice president he had learned about the preliminary findings of FERC’s investigation during a Williams board meeting earlier in March 2001. FERC, Cruikshank told Cheney, was in possession of incriminating audio tapes in which a Williams official and an AES power plant operator discussed keeping a Southern California power plant offline so Williams could continue to receive the $750 per megawatt hour premium for emergency power California’s grid operator was forced to procure to keep the lights on in Southern California.

AES was the operator of two power plants in Los Alamitos and Williams marketed the electricity. The power plants were designated by the California Independent System Operator (ISO), the agency that manages the state’s power grid, as crucial in order to ensure a reliable flow of electricity in the Southern part of the state. To stave off the potential for blackouts, the ISO was given the authority to pay top dollar for power if the power plants operated by AES, as well as power plants operated by other companies, were not in operation.

California’s electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers in the state between 2000 and 2001. The crisis resulted in widespread rolling blackouts and forced the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy. California was the first state in the nation to deregulate its power market in an effort to provide consumers with cheaper electricity and the opportunity to choose their own power provider. The results have since proved disastrous. The experiment has cost the state more than $30 billion.

According to a copy of the March 2001 Williams transcript, Rhonda Morgan, a Williams official, told an AES power plant operator “it wouldn’t hurt Williams’s feelings” if the power plant that was down for repairs was kept offline for an extended period of time so the company could continue to be paid the “premium” for its emergency energy supplies from the ISO. In a separate conversation with Eric Pendergraft, a senior AES official, Morgan said, “I don’t wanna do something underhanded, but if there’s work you can continue to do …”

Pendergraft responded to Morgan, saying, “I understand. You don’t have to talk anymore.”

The collusion between Williams and AES allowed Williams to earn an extra $10 million over a period of 15 days and set in motion a series of events that resulted in the California power crisis between 2000 and 2001, a crisis that was based almost entirely on manipulative practices by energy companies.

This story is based on a two-month investigation into Cheney’s energy task force; how the vice president pressured cabinet officials to conceal clear-cut evidence of market manipulation during California’s energy crisis, and how that subsequently led Cheney to exert executive privilege when lawmakers called on him to turn over documents related to his meetings with energy industry officials who helped draft the National Energy Policy and also gamed California’s power market. Truthout spoke with more than a dozen former officials from the Energy Department and FERC as well as current and former energy industry executives all of whom were involved in personal discussions with Cheney relating to the National Energy Policy. . . .

Which, as so much else, brings us back to . . .

IMPEACHMENT

More of your thoughts on this topic Monday.

In the meantime: have you seen SiCKO? It’s playing at a theater near you. Harry Potter has slipped in the audience ratings from 8.1 stars out of 10 to 7.9 . . . but SiCKO remains firm at 8.5, better than anything else out there.

Enjoy!

PAYING FOR THE WAR

I was reading the 1941 budget the other day (more particularly, FDR’s transmittal message, submitted January 3, 1940) – talk about being behind in your reading! – and came across this paragraph, headed National Defense Taxes:

I am convinced that specific tax legislation should be enacted to finance the emergency national defense expenditures. Although these expenditures appear unavoidable, they will not increase the permanent wealth-producing capacity of our citizens. I believe it is the general sense of the country that this type of emergency expenditure be met by a special tax or taxes. Moreover, this course will make for greater assurance that such expenditures will cease when the emergency has passed.

He continues:

. . . I hope that the Congress will follow the accepted principle of good taxation of taxing according to ability to pay and will avoid taxes which decrease consumer buying power.

(On the very same page, he speaks of the $50 million the government spends annually on dredging. You see? Dredging is fundamental to a free and prosperous society! Don’t sell your GLDD – but I am easily distracted and digress.)

He concludes with the thought that the national debt he had racked up over the prior eight years was not a cause for alarm, because it had been used to build the nation’s infrastructure and its productive capacity (along with its morale).

He did not go on to say – but one can hardly read this today without thinking – that, obviously, you would never suffer an increase in the national debt for the purpose of lowering taxes for the rich or starting a war of choice.

On the final page of his message, he hand signs it . . . followed by 1,079 pages of ledgers and small type. I don’t know how many such copies he signed, but I could not resist buying this one.*

HYPOCRISY

Bill Press on Senator Vitter. Here:

Republican Family Values
by Bill Press

Republicans routinely paint themselves as the party of “family values,” without spelling out exactly what values they’re talking about. Well, now we know. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, one of the leading “family values” Republicans and Rudy Giuliani’s Southern regional campaign chairman, is caught keeping company with prostitutes – and fellow Republicans rush to his defense.

Vitter’s is the first politician’s name to appear in the not-so-little black book of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “D.C. Madam.” Charged with running a high-priced prostitution ring in Washington, Palfrey at first offered to sell her phone records to the media but later, unfortunately for Vitter, published her entire list of clients – all 15,000 names and 46 pounds of it – on her Web site.

As we soon learned, this wasn’t Vitter’s first walk on the wild side. Jeanette Maier, known as New Orleans’ “Canal Street Madam,” revealed that Vitter had been one of her regular customers too, beginning in the mid-1990s, paying $300 an hour for services received. And that’s not all. Details also resurfaced, as first reported by The Louisiana Weekly, of Vitter’s twice-weekly visits to a prostitute in the French Quarter in the late 1990s.

Running successfully for Congress in 1999, and again for Senate in 2004, Vitter got away with dismissing allegations of sexual misconduct as nothing but dirty politics. When his name showed up on Palfrey’s client list, however, Vitter had to fess up – and did, sort of. In a written statement, he admitted having committed “a very serious sin,” but he also insisted that was the end of the story. “Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling,” he boldly asserted. “Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there – with God and them.”

Wait a minute. That’s not what Vitter said about Bill Clinton in the fall of 1998. When Clinton made the identical argument about consulting God and wife, after details of his affair with Monica Lewinsky became public, Vitter – then still a state legislator – condemned Clinton as “morally unfit to govern.” If no action were taken against Clinton, Vitter wrote in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “his leadership will only further drain any sense of values left to our political culture.”

By his own standards, then, Vitter should be tossed out of office. Indeed, his offense is worse than Clinton’s, because Vitter also broke the law. Last time I checked, prostitution is not only considered immoral, it’s illegal. Yes, believe it or not, prostitution’s a crime even in New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

As it turns out, Vitter’s not the only one who has a double standard when it comes to sexual hijinks. So does his wife. “I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News Service in 2000, speaking of the Clinton scandal. “If (my husband) does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.” Ouch!

If you think David Vitter’s wife is more forgiving of her husband than of Bill Clinton, hear what his fellow Republican senators had to say. Utah’s Orrin Hatch, who helped lead the charge against Bill Clinton, said of Vitter: “I’ve never judged a human being on those type of issues.” (Does he think our memory’s so short?) North Carolina’s Richard Burr saw no problem: “David has already resolved this with his family and taken responsibility for it.” And South Carolina’s Jim DeMint seemed to suggest he could be next: “We all think that we’re not vulnerable to something like that happening, but the fact is this can be a very lonely and isolating place.”

So why does all this matter? It shouldn’t matter, frankly. Who cares what two consenting adults do behind closed doors, even for a fee? And it wouldn’t matter at all if Vitter weren’t such a hypocrite. But here’s a man who posed as “Mr. Family Values” in public, condemning his political opponents as immoral, while leading his own immoral and illegal life in private. He’s a hypocrite, and so are all those self-righteous Republicans who make excuses for him.

At least a prostitute is honest about who she is.

JED BARTLET ON THE BIBLE

And while we’re bashing the right-wing moralizers, this West Wing clip never gets old.

* More than a Swatch, less than a Rolex. Listen; I never said I was without vices.

DO YOU HAVE A POOL?

At least on an operating basis, if not at resale, you’d be wise – and environmentally correct – to fill it in and grow vegetables or bamboo in it. This is triply true if you’re one of those plutocrats who heats his pool.

But you like your pool and you’re not going to turn it into a cabbage patch (I let Charles turn our hot tub into a planter, but drew the line at the pool), so I want to remind you of the virtues of a solar pool blanket. Basically, a big sheet of bubble wrap that lets the sun’s rays in during the day and keeps heat from escaping at night.

It costs less than $100 delivered to your door (especially if you buy now, while on sale) . . . should last two or three seasons with reasonable care (after which you’ll have an endless supply of shreds to pack your outgoing eBay shipments) . . . and raises the temperature of the pool ten degrees – which means not having to heat it and/or extends the swimmable season by two or three weeks at each end.

NEXT UP FOR ATTACK: IRAN

According to this report in the Guardian, Cheney seems to be gaining ground.

IMPEACHMENT

Oh, not that again.

But before you rule it in or rule it out, you’ll want to watch* or read the transcript of Bill Moyers’ interview with conservative constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who wrote the first article of impeachment against President Clinton. Everybody’s talking about it.

In a society more horrified by sex than violence (you don’t see X ratings for explicit violence), it may make sense that lying about sex is impeachable where lying to start a war is not. But read the transcript and let me know what you think.

*Only the (excellent) Intro shows up from that link. Then click here for Part 1 of the discussion and here for Part 2.

HOW RICH ARE YOU?

Apples, oranges and all that – but I love this site. Click here. (Thanks, Steve!)

HOW SICK ARE YOU?

Click here for a two-minute news clip and decide how much value you think Aetna Insurance added to this guy’s health care and quality of life.

(And what kind of system it is that puts so much time and effort into denying coverage for removal of a tumor. Is the goal not to remove them? Or to force you into bankruptcy as your punishment for growing one?)

With thousands more votes cast, IMDB still has SiCKO beating out all the others. (Three thousand more people have ranked Harry Potter since I last looked – but it still gets 8.1 stars, as before, to SiCKO’s 8.5.)

HOW MUCH DO YOUR KIDS KNOW ABOUT SEX?

Agh! I’m feeling uncomfortable even broaching the question, and I don’t even know your kids. Have you had ‘the talk’ with them? Icky, icky, icky. Does their school provide sex ed? Probably not. Well . . . now comes sexetc.org, written by teenagers for teenagers, with everything from a glossary of terms (oh, my!), to videos, to moderated forums, and more – including a special section for kids in crisis.

There were 2,302 visitors signed on when I checked just now. Some of them were probably parents checking out the site, as you should, before suggesting it to your kids.

SiCKO

Hey, so have you seen the movie?

It’s funny, charming, wonderfully human – and, at the very, very least, thought provoking.

Plus, the facts are right. I don’t know if you’ve followed the CNN flap between Michael Moore and their medical correspondent, but basically, even while saying that Moore fudged some of the facts, he largely agrees with Moore. And the ‘fudge’ turns out to be so trivial, in my view, as to be little more than ‘argumentative’ (as the lawyers would say).

Here’s how the 10 movies playing at my local theater ranked this past weekend – out of a possible 10 stars – based on 123,171 votes by IMDB website visitors nationwide:

Sicko 8.5 / 10 (9,857 votes)

Harry Potter 8.1 / 10 (13,306 votes)

Knocked Up 8.1 / 10 (25,021 votes)

Transformers 8.0 / 10 (45,089 votes)

Talk to Me 7.7 / 10 (232 votes)

Ocean’s Thirteen 7.3 / 10 (19,498 votes)

Evening 7.1 / 10 (869 votes)

A Mighty Heart 6.6 (1,792 votes)

Evan Almighty 6.0 / 10 (5,946 votes)

License to Wed 5.3 / 10 (1,561 votes)

Granted, this sample is biased in favor of bright people who actually use the Internet and care enough about movies to rank them. But you’re a bright person who uses the Internet – so see the frickin’ movie!

BOREF

From the latest weekly Borealis update comes a link to Friday’s AXI press release (‘Advanced Explorations Inc. Drilling Identifies Mineralized Zone of 230 Metres’) in which AXI ‘is pleased to announce that the Company has completed the first three holes of a proposed 15,000m drill program.’

It gets dauntingly specific (and, to the layman, entirely opaque) until you reach, ‘Drilling to date has identified two zones of semi-massive to massive banded iron formation’ – massive sounds good – and:

‘We are very encouraged by the drill results.’

Not to say one expects downbeat press releases from a Canadian mining company. But . . .

Gary Williams P. Geo and VP of Advanced Explorations Inc is the QP within the meaning of 43-101. The geologic information within this release is in part extracted from a qualifying report filed on Sedar (Paul Palmer, et al of Golder Associates Ltd.). The content of this release has been reviewed by the QP who approves the content of this release.

‘QP’ is short for ‘Qualified Person’ and ’43-101′ refers to a Canadian regulation that requires Qualified Persons – engineers who have demonstrated their competence and integrity – to sign off on such things. So I tend to think there may really be a 40-man camp and two drills working away on our behalf up there, and that progress is being made.

Meanwhile, the Roche Bay annual report is now on line – with a cover photo of our barren (not to say Godforsaken) landscape – as are the annual reports of the other Borealis subsidiaries: Chorus Motors (which notes that its revenues derived from sale of shares, not products), Cool Chips (‘We have enormous demand. But we don’t have product.’), Power Chips (‘over the past year, we have been working to explore the limits of the underlying theory’), Faraway (indeed), and Photon Power (‘another year of watching and waiting’).

Also, the latest presentation from Avto Metals (‘It was shown that, ridged geometry of the wall leads to Quantum Interference Depression (QID), or reduction of the density of quantum states for the free electron. Wave-vector density in k space is reduced within the entire Fermi sphere. . . . Recent experiments demonstrated a reduction of work function in thin films of Au, Nb, Cr and SiO2. Experimental results are in good qualitative agreement with the theory.’)

As easy as it is to make fun of all this, I haven’t sold a single share and continue to think that – as speculations go, at $8.50 for each of 5 million shares – this one is as intriguing (and surely as bizarre) as they come. But as with any speculation, there is the very real risk of losing all your money.

But first . . .

LIBBY

David D’Antonio: ‘You wrote: ‘He took the fall. (Except now doesn’t have to.)’ If you don’t consider paying a quarter of a million dollars and having your career and reputation trashed ‘not taking a fall,’ I guess there is no point in further discussion. I disagree with a lot of what the Bush Administration has done, but all the whining, harping and other such finger-pointing you do has certainly turned me off to the Democrats.’

☞ To someone in Libby’s position, and with Libby’s friends, a $250,000 fine is trivial. And his reputation among many of the people he cares about is, if anything, enhanced.

PARTISANSHIP

Richard Theriault: ‘You write: ‘And fourth . . . treading now out onto thin ice but thinking it may actually hold my weight (and welcoming anything icy on a day like this­ even a metaphor) . . . yes, Democrats, certainly from 1993-2000, were generally pretty darn good, and Republicans from election night 2000 on up to the last news reports I read a few minutes ago have been bad.  Not individual Republicans like you, of course; but this Administration?  And the Republican legislators who’ve abetted it?  The worst in the history of our country, with the most disastrous long-reaching consequences.  Just my view, of course, but heartfelt.’  DAMN STRAIGHT! (You should excuse the expression, please.)  It’s not a matter of parties, one good the other bad.  God knows, the Democrats can’t get their act together, and they need to.  But THIS crop of Republicans, who have disgraced the party’s name, could ruin this nation forever.  I’ve been a registered Republican since 1948, when I turned 21. THESE are not Republicans, they are perverters and destroyers, and it gave me the greatest pleasure, though I know it will probably do no good, to sign the petition to impeach Cheney. We cannot impeach Bush (the worst in history) because that would leave us with Cheney, a greater evil – well, actually an evil instead of a mere incompetency.  BTW, loved the Hertzberg New Yorker excerpt.”

BURNING YOUR HOUSE DOWN

Jim Reed:  “I have a friend that also had the fire department ‘practice’ on his house. However, before the big burn he had a ‘prefire sale’ during which people could go through the house and buy anything they wanted, doorknobs, woodtrim, etc. etc.”

Don Stromquist: “In the historic preservation community (nthp.org), we feel the case is very strong that to rehab an old building is almost always a greener option than to tear it down, no matter how environmentally sound the new construction may be. Think of all that material (all that embedded energy) going to the landfill. By burning their house, your friends hit on the least green option of all: all that energy, straight into the sky.”

☞ When a hedge fund manager buys a $2 million tear-down to build an $8 million house, he is under no illusion, I think, that he’s living light on the land.

Stewart Dean: “My wife has a fixation on old houses.  Me, as the guy that has to do the fixing, I loathe them.  I cut my teeth in plumbing and electrical contracting doing maintenance on an old Borscht Belt hotel.  Nothing was clean and tight, everything leaked water or air (cold in the winter, hot in the summer), the electric was a joke, and you couldn’t fix much of it with the now standard materials and methods.  The fixing was endless, much like the human body over 80 – you might as well buy the hospital.  So, if you have a house more than 75 years old and don’t have a mint of money, burning it down and rebuilding clean and tight can save you money and endless aggravation.  Of course if it’s a gorgeous old Victorian (you’ll be paying painting and de-rotting bills forever, but the house pride!) or a stone house…….. Now I have a 25-year-old house, and it’s easy to deal with.”

SiCKO

For your consideration:

SiCKO Spurs Audiences Into Action
By Josh Tyler / Cinema Blend

Long time readers of this site no doubt know that I live in Texas. As everyone knows there’s no more conservative state in the Union than here. And I don’t just live in Texas; I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Dallas isn’t some pocket of hippy-dippy behavior. This isn’t Austin. Dallas is the sort of place where guys in cowboy hats still drive around in giant SUVs with “W” stickers on the back windshield, global warming and Iraq be damned. It’s probably the only spot left in America where you stand a good chance of getting the crap kicked out of you for badmouthing the president.

So when I went to see SiCKO for a second time this afternoon, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the audience. I wasn’t watching it downtown, where the city’s few elitist liberals congregate and drink expensive lattes. I went to a random mall in the mid-cities, where folks were likely to be just folks. As I sat down, right behind me entered an obligatory cowboy hat-wearing redneck in his 50s. He announced his presence by shouting across the theater in a thick Texasdrawl to his already seated wife, “You owe me fer seein this!”

SiCKO started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie… and I listened. The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, SiCKO changed this man’s mind. By the forty-five minute mark, he, along with the rest of the audience were breaking into spontaneous applause.He stopped pooh-poohing the movie and started shouting out hell yeah! at the screen. It was as if the whole world had been flipped upside down. This is Texas, where people support the president and voting democratic is something only done by the terrorists. Michael Moore should be public enemy number one.

By the time the movie was over, public enemy number one had become George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all rolled together. When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how f-cked everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos. The entire SiCKO audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.

The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. If we just see this and do nothing about it, he said, then what’s the point? Something has to change. There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s email, promising to get together and do something… though no one seemed to know quite what. It was as if I’d just stepped into the world’s most bizarre protest rally, except instead of hippies the group was comprised of men and women of every age, skin color, income, and walk of life coming together on something that had shaken them deeply, and to the core.

In my years on this earth, I have never ever seen any movie have this kind of unifying effect on people.  It was like I was standing there, at the birth of a new political movement. Even after 9/11, there was never a reaction like this, at least not in Texas. If SiCKO truly has this sort of power, then Michael Moore has done something beyond amazing. If it can change people, affect people like this in the conservative hotbed of Texas, then SiCKO isn’t just a great movie, seeing it may be one of the most important things you do all year.

And now . . .

SURGE PROTECTORS

Michael Albert: “I know a little bit about surge protectors and lightning.  When two houses close to ours were hit by lightning a few years ago, I installed lightning rods on our house.  The installation included the lightning rods, wiring together all big or long chunks of metal (e.g. bulkhead doors, drain spouts), and an air gap surge arrestor at the power entry.  I also added individual surge protectors on expensive equipment.   Then we were hit by lightning.  First came the loudest crash of thunder I’ve ever heard, and then our burglar alarm immediately went off.  There was no fire: the lightning rods did their job in that respect.  The power stayed on, but the phone wasn’t working (because the lightning had fried the TiVo modem), shorting out the phone line.  After it was all over I discovered that two burglar alarm switches had welded closed, another faulted intermittently, the alarm panel had an intermittent fault in the phone dial-out circuitry, a phone had failed, the TiVo modem had failed, and the power block for my WiFi router was gone.  The TV’s and computers protected by power strips were OK. I fixed the alarm panel and switches myself.  If I hadn’t I would have dumped quite a bit of money fixing the alarm system. Happily TiVos can use an external modem, so I didn’t have to replace the whole thing.  After fixing everything I looked into better protection.  It turns out you should have three levels of power protection: first, an air gap surge arrestor, a cheap, small device that drains off the highest voltages via arcing across an air gap to ground, installed at the power entry by an electrician.  The power meter should already have one built in, but you can add one that fires at a lower voltage to get redundancy and better protection. Second, a transient voltage surge suppressor (TVSS), a more expensive device that also is installed at the power entry by an electrician.  The more money you spend here the better protection you get.  I spent about $200 for this one.  Third, individual surge suppressors installed to protect individual pieces of equipment.  You also need a surge suppressor on the telephone line.  This device is installed where the phone line enters the home.  I installed this one myself.  I’ve got all these now, and happily have yet to test them.  I expect that the next time I get hit, my phone equipment (including my precious TiVos) and power will be OK, but I’ll still have the potential for alarm problems.  I don’t think there’s much to do about that.”

☞ But what are the chances lightning will strike twice?

SERGE PROTECTORS

Most fundamentally, there is the napkin.  You could go a step further and ScotchGuard it, but Charles tells me this is a ridiculous idea and that I shouldn’t try so hard for the pun.  (I don’t know – 3M seems to think it’s not such a bad idea.)

Now . . . go out and see the movie.

LIBBY

As previously mentioned, he’s probably a very nice guy, certainly a very bright guy, who first threw himself into the task of getting a Presidential pardon for his client Marc Rich – now there’s a satisfying use of a year of one’s life on earth – and who until recently was the faithful number two to his ‘client’ Dick Cheney, for whom, many of us believe, he ‘took the fall.’ (Except now doesn’t have to.)

CHENEY

Rick Hertzberg in The New Yorker . . .

. . . for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called ‘the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,’ has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable ‘war on terror.’

More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of ‘cruel,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘degrading’ treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: ‘a no-brainer for me’), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.

The stakes are lower in domestic affairs-if only because fewer lives are directly threatened-but here, too, Cheney’s influence has been invariably baleful. With an avalanche of examples, Gellman and Becker show how Cheney successfully pushed tax cuts for the very rich that went beyond what even the President, wanly clinging to the shards of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ and his economic advisers wanted. They show how Cheney’s stealthy domination of regulatory and environmental policy, driven by ‘unwavering ideological positions’ and always exerted ‘for the benefit of business,’ has resulted in the deterioration of air and water quality, the degradation and commercial exploitation of national parks and forests, the collapse of wild-salmon fisheries, and the curt abandonment of Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge to do something about greenhouse gases. They also reveal that it was Cheney who forced Christine Todd Whitman to resign as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, by dictating a rule that excused refurbished power plants and oil refineries from installing modern pollution controls. ‘I just couldn’t sign it,’ she told them. Turns out she wasn’t so anxious to spend more time with her family after all.

Cheney, Gellman and Becker report, drew up and vetted a list of five appellate judges from which Bush drew his Supreme Court appointments. After naming John Roberts to the Court and then to the Chief Justice’s chair, the President, for once, rebelled: without getting permission from down the hall, he nominated his old retainer Harriet Miers for the second opening. (‘Didn’t have the nerve to tell me himself,’ Cheney muttered to an associate, according to the Post.) But when Cheney’s right-wing allies upended Miers, Bush obediently went back to Cheney’s list and picked Samuel Alito. The result is a Court majority that, last Thursday, ruled that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation.

That unfortunate day in the duck blind wasn’t the only time the Vice-President has seemed more Elmer Fudd than Ernst Blofeld; last week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney’s version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed. So are the powers that, in a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d’état, he has gathered unto himself. The laughter will fade quickly; the current Administration, regrettably, will not. However more politically moribund it may become, its writ still has a year and a half to go. A few weeks ago, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the Vice-President issued threats of war with Iran. A ‘senior American diplomat’ told the Times that Cheney’s speech had not been circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, adding, ‘He kind of runs by his own rules.’ But, too often, his rules rule. The awful climax of ‘Cheney/Bush’ may be yet to come.

LIBBY AGAIN

From Bill Press’s column:

. . . letting Scooter Libby off the hook contradicts both established penalties for obstruction of justice and the affirmed policies of the Bush Justice Department. Of 198 people convicted for obstructing justice in 2006, 154 were sentenced to an average term of six years – yet not one of those sentences did Bush consider “too severe.” In fact, for the last six years, in hundreds of cases, Bush’s Justice Department has consistently argued that federal sentencing guidelines must remain tough and inflexible.

Former baseball great Willie Mays Aikens, for example, has already served 144 months [12 years!] of a 248 month sentence for one offense of dealing crack cocaine. Hall of Famer Cal Ripken is one of many who have urged the Justice Department to acknowledge the excessive severity of Aikens’ sentence and grant him clemency. The Bush administration refuses. Too bad Aikens never worked at the White House. . . .

John: ‘Here we go again . . . It seems with you, there are only two rules to politics: 1. Democrats are good. 2. Republicans are bad. I realize you are have a significant role in the Democratic Party, but seriously, be at least objective about these things. I read your column regularly and never saw you opine concerning the light punishment Sandy Berger received for stealing government documents to protect his and Clinton’s reputation. What Libby did (failure to remember accurately or possibly perjury) pales in comparison to Berger’s crime, yet Libby gets a much harsher punishment. Yet you never once excoriated the light punishment meted out on Berger. Think of the outrage you and other Democrat partisans would have had if Karl Rove had been caught stealing government documents.’

☞ I’m no expert in the Berger case, which may be a little less clear than you think (click here), but apart from joining you in condemning any wrongdoing, I think it’s worth noting a few things.

• First, Berger’s light treatment, if it was that, was a plea bargain negotiated by the Bush Justice Department (during a time when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress). I suppose I could have condemned the Bush Justice Department for going easy on Sandy Berger, but not knowing that he did any more than remove copies of documents and his own notes, I’m not sure how serious this all really was. The Bush Justice Department presumably had a lot better insight into what Berger did and did not do.

• (According to this conservative blog, at least some of the copies he took were of documents that had been faxed to the archives by the Clinton Library itself. Hardly sounds like a Clinton cover-up.)

• Second, whatever Berger did had nothing to do with the ongoing affairs of state. The Clinton Administration of which he had been a part was long out of power, calling no shots, starting no wars, discouraging no stem cell research, endangering no wild salmon fisheries (see the Cheney item, above) – whereas Libby was the active #2 guy to the man largely calling all the shots, in disastrous ways. So the two cases are in my view just orders and orders of magnitude apart in their significance.

• Third, even if they were equivalent in importance (and they absolutely were not), two wrongs really don’t make a right. It shouldn’t be necessary, in decrying the Libby commutation, to have decried the plea bargain the Bush Justice Department struck with Sandy Berger.

• And fourth . . . treading now out onto thin ice but thinking it may actually hold my weight (and welcoming anything icy on a day like this – even a metaphor) . . . yes, Democrats, certainly from 1993-2000, were generally pretty darn good, and Republicans from election night 2000 on up to the last news reports I read a few minutes ago have been bad. Not individual Republicans like you, of course; but this Administration? And the Republican legislators who’ve abetted it? The worst in the history of our country, with the most disastrous long-reaching consequences. Just my view, of course, but heartfelt.

Tomorrow: Lightning Strikes THREE Times

FMD

If a plan like this were enacted, it would hurt or possibly even eliminate the long-term prospects for FMD and others in the private student-loan business – but it seems to me it should be enacted anyway. Basically, instead of Uncle Sam guaranteeing student loans – so the taxpayer picks up the tab if you default and companies like FMD and their partner banks pick up the profits if you don’t – Uncle Sam would lend directly to the student, with post-graduation loan payments tacked on to income tax collection . . . but only in years when the grad’s income were high enough. Take a look. (Free registration required by Forbes to access the article.) Absent something like this, I continue to think FMD should have lots of gains ahead of it. And we all know the odds of bucking vested interests in Washington to enact worthwhile reform – in any area – are low. But because I had so much of it, I’ve sold half my FMD just in case.

FINANCIAL TIPS FOR THE WELL-TO-DO

If your style is more the tear-down than the fixer-upper (well, it’s a great piece of property in a great neighborhood – but who could live in a house like that?!), then my advice to you is: burn your house down. That’s what friends of mine did; and, on consideration, I have to admit it was smart. They bought it; they donated it to the local fire department to use ‘for practice’ (‘what?’ I asked – ‘practice failing to save a burning house?’), the fire department cheerfully burned it to the ground, and my friends got two valuable things: (1) free demolition; (2) a tax-deduction for the value of the house. (Whether the IRS should allow that is another story; apparently, they do for now.)

CLIMATE CHANGE

Barry: ‘I just got through posting on Moveon.org at their request, regarding my favorite candidate to address climate change. I chose Mike Gravel because he’s least likely to win and waste time and effort trying to change the climate. I am all for a CLEAN environment, but as a LIFELONG Democrat, I am dismayed that we think there is much we can do to reduce what is one of the earth’s massive warming cycles. Here and here are some things you might want to look at. Please read all of it, check out the quoted sources, and then, see if you can get the Party to find something else to worry about, something we might actually be able to fix. God knows, we have plenty of problems.’

☞ I have read none of it. But since almost all scientists disagree with you, and since (in my view) it would be worth taking action even if there were only a 10% chance disaster looms, let alone a much larger chance – and since most of the actions will just make us more efficient and prosperous, it seems nuts to me that people would oppose these actions. How would it hurt if your car got 80 miles to the gallon? Or if your lighting bill were cut by 75%?

SiCKER

Scott Nichol: ‘I really want to know how many emergency rooms Michael Moore visited until he found an empty one. It has been my experience that emergency rooms are busy in both the US and Canada.’

☞ Dunno.

Anne Vivino-Hintze: ‘See this from the current BusinessWeek.’

The Doctor Will See You – In Three Months
By Catherine Arnst

The health-care reform debate is in full roar with the arrival of Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, which compares the U.S. system unfavorably with single-payer systems around the world. Critics of the film are quick to trot out a common defense of the American way: For all its problems, they say, U.S. patients at least don’t have to endure the endless waits for medical care endemic to government-run systems. The lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans spells it out in a rebuttal to Sicko: “The American people do not support a government takeover of the entire health-care system because they know that means long waits for rationed care.”

In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems. Take Susan M., a 54-year-old human resources executive in New York City. She faithfully makes an appointment for a mammogram every April, knowing the wait will be at least six weeks. She went in for her routine screening at the end of May, then had another because the first wasn’t clear. That second X-ray showed an abnormality, and the doctor wanted to perform a needle biopsy, an outpatient procedure. His first available date: mid-August. “I completely freaked out,” Susan says. “I couldn’t imagine spending the summer with this hanging over my head.” After many calls to five different facilities, she found a clinic that agreed to read her existing mammograms on June 25 and promised to schedule a follow-up MRI and biopsy if needed within 10 days. A full month had passed since the first suspicious X-rays. Ultimately, she was told the abnormality was nothing to worry about, but she should have another mammogram in six months. Taking no chances, she made an appointment on the spot. “The system is clearly broken,” she laments.

It’s not just broken for breast exams. If you find a suspicious-looking mole and want to see a dermatologist, you can expect an average wait of 38 days in the U.S., and up to 73 days if you live in Boston, according to researchers at the University of California at San Francisco who studied the matter. Got a knee injury? A 2004 survey by medical recruitment firm Merritt, Hawkins & Associates found the average time needed to see an orthopedic surgeon ranges from 8 days in Atlanta to 43 days in Los Angeles. Nationwide, the average is 17 days. “Waiting is definitely a problem in the U.S., especially for basic care,” says Karen Davis, president of the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which studies health-care policy.

All this time spent “queuing,” as other nations call it, stems from too much demand and too little supply. Only one-third of U.S. doctors are general practitioners, compared with half in most European countries. On top of that, only 40% of U.S. doctors have arrangements for after-hours care, vs. 75% in the rest of the industrialized world. Consequently, some 26% of U.S. adults in one survey went to an emergency room in the past two years because they couldn’t get in to see their regular doctor, a significantly higher rate than in other countries.

There is no systemized collection of data on wait times in the U.S. That makes it difficult to draw comparisons with countries that have national health systems, where wait times are not only tracked but made public. However, a 2005 survey by the Commonwealth Fund of sick adults in six nations found that only 47% of U.S. patients could get a same- or next-day appointment for a medical problem, worse than every other country except Canada.

The Commonwealth survey did find that U.S. patients had the second-shortest wait times if they wished to see a specialist or have nonemergency surgery, such as a hip replacement or cataract operation (Germany, which has national health care, came in first on both measures). But Gerard F. Anderson, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, says doctors in countries where there are lengthy queues for elective surgeries put at-risk patients on the list long before their need is critical. “Their wait might be uncomfortable, but it makes very little clinical difference,” he says.

The Commonwealth study did find one area where the U.S. was first by a wide margin: 51% of sick Americans surveyed did not visit a doctor, get a needed test, or fill a prescription within the past two years because of cost. No other country came close.

Few solutions have been proposed for lengthy waits in the U.S., in part, say policy experts, because the problem is rarely acknowledged. But the market is beginning to address the issue with the rise of walk-in medical clinics. Hundreds have sprung up in CVS, Wal-Mart (WMT), Pathmark, (PTMK) and other stores-so many that the American Medical Assn. just adopted a resolution urging state and federal agencies to investigate such clinics as a conflict of interest if housed in stores with pharmacies. These retail clinics promise rapid care for minor medical problems, usually getting patients in and out in 30 minutes. The slogan for CVS’s Minute Clinics says it all: “You’re sick. We’re quick.”

Alan: ‘One issue Michael Moore does not address is how lifestyle choices are affecting our health and health care costs. I’ve taught college for seventeen years now and when I look around a class at the beginning of a semester, young overweight adults have become almost the norm rather than the exception. These kids are all heading for major problems when they reach their 40s and 50s and that is going to be expensive no matter who is paying for it or how.’

Jeff: ‘In 1964, I broke my arm at the elbow. The orthopedic specialist tried to set it but could not, so I spent a month in traction. He visited probably 12 or 15 times, about half of those visits at our house, to make sure the bone was mending correctly. He also set and removed the cast for the two weeks after traction. He charged $100 (albeit $100 1964). I distinctly remember my mother saying we had insurance, but the doctor said, ‘No, that’s all I ever charge.’ I know nothing about solutions, but I do know the level of concern for patients does seem to have changed – along with the doctors’ level of contentment. My strategy for health care is to be rich. Do you have any new buy-and-hold recommendations?’

☞ As a rank speculation . . . a little HAPNW. As what I hope might be a good two or three years, GLDD. But new ones? No more until you’ve seen the movie.