O’Roadbed, O’Smartgrid, Ohare And O’Hara There's No One As Irish As Barack O'Bama March 17, 2010March 17, 2017 Yesterday we wondered how the U.S. will compete with (say) South Korea, when their broadband infrastructure runs rings around ours. Today, something broader than broadband: our failing infrastructure, generally. But first . . . Marge Wright: “On March 17th could you repeat the clip of people singing ‘There’s No One As Irish As Barack O’Bama?’ We all have a different energy level than the giddiness of a year ago. I don’t know about you, but I’m almost holding my breath I want health care to pass so much. Of course, I’m also phoning and writing. But still, the mood is different. The relentless cruelty (and KnowNothingNess) of the right wing are astounding, and wearing on all of us. We need a good song to bring us together. So…could you repeat the song? And, this time <smile>, the good version? I love this version because it was recorded in Berkeley, led by a wonderful native Irish traditional singer, and this is the way we sing it here.” ☞ Note the old Chinese man singing in the front row. Oh, my. And now . . . INFRASTRUCTURE Europe invests 5% of its GDP in infrastructure; China, 9%; the U.S., just 2.4%. I think you will find this site, and its succession of short videos, well worth a visit. Infrastructure is what we need to fund, not tax cuts.
ANOTHER Gay Column? Torture! March 16, 2010March 17, 2017 But first . . . HOW WILL WE COMPETE WITH SEOUL? Yesterday‘s F.C.C. item and broadband test provoked this from James Musters: ‘The government test reports speeds in Kbps, which makes it look fast because the numbers are big. I get 3000 download and 300 upload. If it was reported in MBPS, the results would look paltry – 3 Mbps for download and 0.3 Mbps for upload. We are ‘thinking’ about moving our broadband connections to high speed Internet; meanwhile, South Korea has an average Internet connection speed of 100Mbps nationwide, a network that is currently being upgraded to 1Gbps by 2012. South Korea is implementing a system that is almost 300 times faster than what we get, ten times faster than what we plan to get. ‘Some say this blazing fast internet is only possible because they are a dense population and in America we are more spread out. But on the other side of the world, in the more rural Tasmania, the Australians are rolling out 100Mbps fiber connections to just about everyone, with the switching capacity to be opened up to 400 Mbps in the next couple of years. As NPR reported this morning, most of the modern world pays about one-fifth the price for Internet that we do, and it runs much faster. That is because we have a system where the phone and cable companies have a monopoly and no one else is allowed to sell high speed connections on their propriety networks. You get to pick the phone company or the cable company, and both, when delivering their top home internet package, are much slower than most of the rest of the modern internet nations. As NPR pointed out, we are even being outperformed by Eastern Slovakia. ‘Having not optimized the bandwidth they have now, either in terms of speed or cost, the current consolidated internet giants want the FCC to give them more radio spectrum so they can own all the possible ways of delivering Internet. (Resellers who buy blocks of time and resell at a discount rate are not really competing, they are just reselling in different packaging.) Listen to the NPR report. This ain’t news, we have been in the internet slow lane, paying far too much for service for years. Here is a random article I pulled up from 2007 from the Bush years that said the same thing. ‘Why are other nations leaping ahead by such huge strides in throughput? One answer is fiber-optics, we are still using copper connections. We are using horses and carts when they are using jet planes. How are other nations offering services at one-third to one-sixth the cost? Because they have a national fiber optic communication system on which they allow real competition by independent vendors, not just resellers who only repackage the monopoly services. ‘The FCC is owned by the big media boys, whose solution to their failings is to make a grab for more spectrum. Remember when the cell spectrum came up a few years ago and the computer makers wanted bandwidth but the phone companies got it? So now the wireless internet is not through wireless computers but through a cell sim card and you need a monthly phone company account to log on. ‘With computer companies, where there is real and diverse competition, we see prices driven down and performance up, which just does not seem to happen in the tel-com or cable business. In the US, a years worth of internet access costs more than the entire computer!’ And now . . . BOYCOTT VIRGINIA Barb Duel: ‘I have sent the following message to the Governor of Virginia: ‘My partner and I had planned a trip to Virginia this spring. As a result of your recent executive decisions which are gay hostile, we will not be staying in or spending any money in Virginia. We will be advising all our family and friends to do the same.’ ‘ DON’T BOYCOTT VIRGINIA Joel Grow: Boycott Virginia? Where my wife – who works to promote tourism for our tiny rural county – canvassed door-to-door for Obama in tough, conservative areas where she was physically threatened? I know your call for boycott was mainly symbolic, but it would be better, I think, for you to call for money to be sent to Democratic candidates in Virginia than to try to damage the livelihood of many struggling, wonderful citizens in Virginia.‘ ☞ Fair enough. And – thanks to many fine Virginians like Joel and his wife – the Governor has largely backed off, recognizing that the Constitution requires equal treatment under the law. Sure, he’s signaled his base that, if he had his druthers, gays and lesbians would be excluded from the state’s anti-discrimination protections. But this is progress, nonetheless. YOUR THOUGHTS ON TORTURE Last week, I linked to a newly released description of what exactly it is we were doing. ‘You decide’ whether it’s torture, I suggested. An Employee of the Church of Christ: ‘I look forward to your equally graphic description of how Al Qaeda treats their prisoners during interrogations.’ Craig D.: ‘That poor little terrorist Muslim with water up his nose who might have a one in a million chance of dying from some obscure condition, but might also say something that will save countless American lives, I can live with that. Since fanatical Muslims would kill you and me in a heartbeat and have cut off countless heads in the process I can live with them gagging on water.’ ☞ Listen, I like ’24’ as much as the next guy, but a couple of points: First, we all agree Al Qaeda is evil incarnate and does engage in horrific, barbaric inexcusable behavior. There is no controversy there. The controversy is over whether waterboarding is torture – Cheney says not – and whether we should do it – Cheney says we should. Neither correspondent having addressed the first question, I will take that as tacit agreement that what we were doing was torture. On the second question, of whether if it’s torture we should do it, Craig, at least, says, ‘Hell, yes.’ But a lot of red-blooded patriots like John McCain have suggested that our taking the low road, whether with waterboarding or Abu Ghraib – apart from perhaps not being what Jesus would have done – is actually not in our own self-interest. It undercuts our moral authority; it helps Al Qaeda recruit new terrorists; it legitimizes torture by our enemies, should any of us or our allies fall into enemy hands; and, according to many, it is in the main less effective and reliable than lawful, professional interrogation. NEXT FALL ‘Next Fall,’ which opened on Broadway last week, is, according to the New York Times, ‘the funniest heartbreaker in town.’ (Full disclosure: Charles and I got ‘free’ tickets for having invested in it.)
Fall Back, Spring Forward, Beware the Ides, Stock Up on Green Beer And Now That We Have All THAT Out of the Way . . . March 15, 2010March 17, 2017 CHANGE WE NEED The F.C.C. is proposing a 10-year plan to make the Internet our dominant communication network – and 25 times as fast as what most of us now have. The New York Times sees ‘a shift at the F.C.C., which under the [prior] administration gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.’ In the meantime, the F.C.C. has set up a site that lets you test your broadband speed. MORE CHANGE WE NEED Education is our future. So take heart, per this New Yorker profile, that the President chose an Education Secretary who is close to him (a long-time basketball buddy) . . . who is firmly in the camp of innovation and ‘market forces’ . . . and who has been armed with orders of magnitude more resources than previous Secretaries have had. ‘Stunning,’ writes the tough-minded group, Democrats for Education Reform, of the progress made to date. ‘We don’t know how else to put it.’ WE HAVE HOT WATER! If you need a little cheering up . . . and who among us from time to time does not? . . . this account of life above the Arctic Circle just might do the trick. It comes to us via a fellow long-suffering BOREF shareholder, Nicholas Altenbernd, who writes: ‘This may help explain why it’s taking a long time for our mine to develop.’ Indeed. Tomorrow: DON’T Boycott Virginia
Entrance . . . Entrance . . . Exit March 12, 2010March 17, 2017 Awkward entrance. Awesome entrance. This time, Ferris Bueller really has left the building. Enjoy your weekend!
How To Invest Your Last $10,000 March 11, 2010March 17, 2017 Yesterday, I mentioned an article I had written about Robert Redford’s height. One of you – thanks, Jim Leff – wrote to say he had found it on-line. Well, I had no idea it was there. So I clicked around and found this one, too: “How to Invest Your Last $10,000.” Oh, how the world has changed in 35 years! And not. And now, with apologies for the abrupt shift of focus . . . the manual on waterboarding. “IT’S NOT TORTURE” Really? Whatever it is, Dick and Liz Cheney are still for it. You decide. The estimable James Musters summarized Salon’s recent article: Recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees… and was administered with meticulous cruelty. These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects, using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The CIA’s waterboarding was “different” from training for elite soldiers, according to the Justice Department document released last month. “The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed,” the document notes. In soldier training, “The interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier’s face) in a controlled manner,” DOJ wrote. “By contrast, the agency interrogator … continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. An interrogator was also allowed to force the water down a detainee’s mouth and nose using his hands. One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood. “The CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia.” The agency used so much water there was also another risk: pneumonia resulting from detainees inhaling the fluid. Saline, the CIA argued, might reduce the risk of pneumonia when this occurred. “The detainee might aspirate some of the water, and the resulting water in the lungs might lead to pneumonia,” Bradbury noted in the same memo. “To mitigate this risk, a potable saline solution is used in the procedure.” To keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing. Should a prisoner stop breathing during the procedure, the documents instructed interrogators “If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose, and nasopharynx,” Bradbury wrote. “The gurney used for administering this technique is specially designed so that this can be accomplished very quickly if necessary.” The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. “In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks,” the CIA’s Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. “Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness.” It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows: “NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.” ☞ James goes on to note: “It seems to me they were drowning them, just not intending to take it all the way to death, but if they did die (stop breathing), they then brought them back to life so they could do it again. Is it just murder, or attempted murder if you torture someone to death and then bring them back to life so you can do it again? As the writer points out, ‘It should be noted, though, that six human rights groups in 2007 released a report showing that 39 people who appeared to have gone into the CIA’s secret prison network haven’t shown up since.’ ”
As If You HAD Any Money Left You Could Truly Afford To Lose March 10, 2010March 17, 2017 But I digress. THE HANDSOME MEN’S CLUB When I wrote for New York Magazine, way back when (ATMs had not yet been invented much less credit default swaps), I did my best to alternate serious pieces – like one on ‘bank capital adequacy’ (we called it, ‘How Solid Are the Banks?’) – with more playful ones. (‘How Tall Is Robert Redford Really?’ was my favorite. You’d be surprised how hard it was to find out.) I thought of that as I posted yesterday’s rather serious video on financial reform. It seemed to me somehow important to follow it with this 10-minute video. You’re welcome. NAQ UPDATE Last August I offered this update: There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that, if this deal is approved, our NRDC warrants get an extra three years to run, way out until October 23, 2014. Just in time for my 100th birthday! (I really have to change the photograph on this page.) The bad news is that the strike price at which they are exercisable will rise from $7.50 to $12 (though the price at which conversion can be forced will rise from $14.25 to $18.75). If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just as well. If you’d like a refresher, here‘s a recap of the various SPACs we have dabbled in as they looked 15 months ago. But if you do own the warrants, here’s the deal: The stock closed yesterday at $10.02. The warrants will now give you the right to buy it at $12 any time until October 23, 2014. If the stock should rise to, say, 60% in that time, to $16 (and assuming this deal is approved), the right to buy a $16 stock for just $12 would be worth approximately $4 – a nice gain on today’s 27-cent warrant price. But if the stock appreciated less than 20% – let alone fell – the warrants would expire worthless. And so, here in Casablanca, we wait. And wait. And wait. ☞ So here’s a further update: The deal did get done, I still haven’t changed the photo on this page, the stock and warrant symbols have changed to ROIC and ROICW (now known as Retail Opportunity Investments Corp.), the stock remains around $10 but the warrants are up four-fold, and a very smart real estate guy I know recently paid that much to buy some, $1.02, because he thinks the folks running ROIC are also very smart – and have $400 million in cash to play with, unburdened by any troubled real estate assets – and that with some not-too-crazy financing might assemble $1 billion or so in real estate at today’s distressed prices . . . so, who knows? The stock actually could be significantly higher by the time the warrants expire four and a half years from now, which could make for a further double or quadruple in the warrants. This has released in me all the usual self-destructive psychological juices – my remorse over not having bought even more warrants at 27 cents (and not having more volubly urged you to do likewise) . . . my fear of hanging on only to see the stock never rise above $12 (if it even gets that high) and our quadruple morph into total loss . . . my irrational inability to buy more of something after it has quadrupled . . . my embarrassment over that irrationality . . . my dread at the prospect this rant may encourage you to pay $1 – albeit with money you can truly afford to lose – only to lose it, as I lost you money on FMD and WaMoops and several others. (Google puts! What was I thinking!) Indeed, it’s a wonder readers of this column have any money left that they can truly afford to lose. In short: my smart friend’s casual remark that he had been buying ROIC warrants at $1.02 – while initially reaffirming – has thrown me into whatever would be the very manly (not to say hypermasculine) equivalent of ‘a tizzy.’ For now, my greed and fear have reached stalemate: holding on to my warrants for a big score (oink, oink), afraid to buy more (pi-kaw! pi-kaw!). # Oh. Redford’s ‘about five nine.’
Get Angry March 9, 2010March 17, 2017 FINANCIAL REGULATION – LESSONS FROM ICELAND Dean Baker: . . . [Iceland’s experience] makes a mockery of anyone who claims to support leaving financial activities to the market. In almost all cases, actors in financial markets assume that governments will stand behind banks at the end of the day. Therefore when they say want the government to leave things to the market they are lying. They just want to be able to take risks with taxpayers money, without being fettered by regulations limiting the extent of these risks. In short, the finance boys want a free lunch, not a free market. FINANCIAL REGULATION – PEOPLE WORTH LISTENING TO The Roosevelt Institute last week put together a remarkable day of discussion of our financial markets. Here is your portal to that high-level thinking. It includes this half-hour video. (Spoiler alert: George Soros strongly supports the need for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency – and agrees with Barney Frank that the “compromise” the Senate may adopt to water down the House bill is “a joke.” Jim Chanos wonders why massive criminality has gone unprosecuted. Peter Solomon says people need to get mad. Stanley Sporkin clearly is mad and says regulatory agencies are worthless without strong regulators.) (Not on that particular stage but very much in the league of those who were: my friend Bob Pozen, who chairs a firm that looks after $150 billion for 5 million investors – perhaps you, among them – and whose book, Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System, is filled with well-thought-out prescriptions.)
An Important Difference March 8, 2010March 17, 2017 ACORN – THOSE UNDERCOVER TAPES WERE DOCTORED Here, belatedly, is the story of how ACORN got Swiftboated. One weeps for democracy reading it. This is not to say ACORN is perfect – anymore than, say, the Republican Party is perfect. But it is a measure of the right’s effectiveness that so many people actually think ACORN stole the last election. Fifty-two percent of Republicans think this, according to one poll, which is as completely false as the notion that Iraq attacked us on 9/11. (Seventy percent of Bush re-elect voters believed that.) And it is a measure of the right’s effectiveness that ACORN’s 40 years of good work on behalf of the least among us could be blown up this way – just like John Kerry’s courageous military service. Now comes news that the last straw in what had been an eight-year campaign against ACORN – those ‘pimp/prostitute’ sting tapes made by the fellow later arrested for wiretapping a senator’s office – was not quite what it appeared: Brooklyn prosecutors on Monday cleared ACORN of criminal wrongdoing after a four-month probe that began when undercover conservative activists filmed workers giving what appeared to be illegal advice on how to hide money. While the video by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles seemed to show three ACORN workers advising a prostitute how to hide ill-gotten gains, the unedited version was not as clear, according to a law enforcement source. “They edited the tape to meet their agenda,” said the source . . . ☞ Again, this is not to say that every ACORN worker does his or her job well. But as Fox News, et al, relentlessly failed to acknowledge, when it came to cases of bogus voter registrations, it was ACORN itself that found and reported the lapses – and in real time, before any damage was done. If only that were true of over-zealous Republican operatives, like Allen Raymond, author of How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative (2008): ‘If you could find two of us Republican operatives who could still tell the difference between politics and crime, you could probably have rubbed us together for fire as well.’ Or like the estimable David Brock, long-since reformed and doing terrific work, but who began his Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (2003): ‘This is a terrible book. It is about lies told and reputations ruined. It is about what the conservative movement did, and what I did, as we plotted in the shadows, disregarded the law, and abused power to win even greater power.’ The difference is that the ACORN employees who may have given faux prostitutes inappropriate tax advice were at the bottom of the organizational pyramid, or (in the case of the paid registration gatherers), not even employees; whereas those Republican operatives were near, or (in the case of Karl Rove) at, the top. To my mind, it’s an important difference. Please share it with your friends. BOYCOTT VIRGINIA Last month, the newly elected Republican governor went out of his way to rescind Virginia’s nondiscrimination policy against gays and lesbians. Last week, his newly appointed attorney general asked Virginia colleges to do likewise. Read it here. DEPO OK, so with the stock closing Friday at $3.16, we have our 27% – well, 33%, actually. That part was the ‘chip shot’ suggested here. And earning a low-risk 33% in two weeks is the best this column can do. DEPO now comes off the ‘chip shot’ list (sorry: I have nothing else on that list) and goes back into the ‘speculative basket.’ Loving few things more than an attractive speculation, I’m holding most of mine. # PS – For those who thought I took Friday off, it turns out that Ferris – realizing he was no longer in high school – posted a column after all.
Which Would You Hire: An Inferior Man or A Superior Woman? McPeak'll Take The Man Every Time March 5, 2010March 17, 2017 But first . . . GOP LAWMAKER DEMANDS RECALL OF CAR THAT DROVE HIM TO GAY CLUB Andy Borowitz is a riot. GIVE THE PRESIDENT 5 MINUTES OF YOUR TIME This video was made specifically for OFA supporters. But even if you’re not yet one of them, watch it anyway? Health insurance reform is so close to being done – and so worth doing. (Not least those four Republican-inspired additions to the mix, like “sending investigators disguised as patients to uncover fraud and waste.” Bravo.) And now . . . ASK/TELL The New York Times yesterday published an op-ed by former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak favoring the current Don’t Ask / Don’t Tell policy. For my money, his argument is demolished in this response by the Palm Center’s Aaron Belkin. In part: Gen. McPeak claims that “advocates for gays in the service have by and large avoided a discussion of unit cohesion” which ought to be the main focus of the debate. This is simply false. There are at least twenty studies from the last fifty years, many written by the military’s own researchers, which find that gay and lesbian troops do not harm cohesion. As an article published by the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concludes, “there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if homosexuals serve openly.” Gen. McPeak also claims there is no evidence that troops will fight more effectively when the gay ban is repealed. In fact, research shows that the ban itself undermines cohesion and readiness. A bipartisan study group of Flag and General Officers which took a year to assess all of the evidence on “don’t ask, don’t tell” found that commanders in Iraq are ignoring the policy and choosing to keep their teams together rather than firing loyal gay troops. A recent Military Times poll confirms that many commanders know of gays and lesbians serving in their units, but choose not to discharge them, suggesting that these leaders believe that known gays help rather than hurt the force. Finally, Gen. McPeak has acknowledged publicly that when there is a tradeoff between pursuing moral values and military effectiveness, he prefers the former, even at the expense of the latter. He opposed women in combat in the 1990s, saying he had “personal prejudices” against expanding combat roles for women, “even though logic tells us” that women can conduct combat operations just as well as men. He actually told Congress that he would choose an inferior male flight instructor over a superior female one even if it made for a “militarily less effective situation.” “I admit it doesn’t make much sense,” he said, “but that’s the way I feel about it.” Elsewhere he repeated that his position did not meet “strict evidence standards for logic,” but that that did not change his position, a direct contradiction to his claim that he seeks to engage in an enlightened debate. Under the guise of protecting unit cohesion, defenders of the gay exclusion rule would have us believe that they are simply looking out for the nation’s defense. What they are actually doing is using government policy to express moral animus. The reason to be disappointed by Gen. Merrill McPeak and others sharing his strategy is that their views have little to do with unit cohesion, and everything to do with an effort to encode prejudice into law and make the public believe that there is a national security rationale for doing so. That is a dangerous precedent. The Palm Center is a think tank at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1998, the Center has been a leader in commissioning and disseminating research in the areas of gender, sexuality, and the military. For more information visit www.palmcenter.ucsb.edu. ☞ Have a great weekend. Ferris decided not to take the day off, after all.
$285 March 4, 2010March 17, 2017 CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION We need a real Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Putting it inside the Fed, as some senators now propose, would be “a joke.” Or so say both Barney Frank and George Soros. (The Republicans would prefer to kill it altogether, just as they would kill health insurance reform, embryonic stem cell research, the bipartisan deficit reduction commission, any restrictions on assault weapons sold at gun shows – and on and on and on and on.) NO REPUBLICANS? NOT ONE? Eleven senators introduced legislation yesterday to repeal “Don’t Ask / Don’t Tell.” One Independent, ten Democrats. The Secretary of Defense, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Joint Chiefs Chairs Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili all have now called for repeal. But not one Republican senator so far. “‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is an unjust and discriminatory measure that hampers our national security and violates the civil rights of some of the bravest, most heroic Americans,” said Senator Gillibrand. “The bottom line is that we have a volunteer military,” said Senator Lieberman. “If Americans want to serve, they ought to have the right to be considered for that service regardless of characteristics such as race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Repealing the current policy will allow more patriotic Americans to defend our national security and live up to our nation’s founding values of freedom and opportunity.” “I did not find the arguments used to justify ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ convincing when it took effect in 1993, and they are less so now,” said Senator Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This legislation will do what other armies have already done – without having an adverse effect on good order and discipline or unit cohesion. Gays are serving successfully in our military right now – this legislation would allow them to serve with integrity.” “‘You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.’ Those were the words of Barry Goldwater, a combat veteran and unflinching advocate for national defense. And you certainly don’t have to be straight to recognize who the enemy is,” said Senator Udall. “This is an issue of military effectiveness. I have soldiers and airmen in my home state of Colorado who are being asked to serve five tours of duty or more. We need all the qualified service members we have to fight – we shouldn’t be dismissing them just because they’re gay.” “For too long, gay and lesbian service members have been forced to conceal their sexual orientation in order to dutifully serve their country,” said Senator Burris. “With this bill, we will end this discriminatory policy that grossly undermines the strength of our fighting men and women at home and abroad. This legislation will ensure that all gay and lesbian soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines can serve their country openly and proudly without the threat of prejudice or discharge.” “The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy never made sense. In the nearly two decades since it was begun, our military has lost the valuable services of too many patriotic Americans. The time has come to end this broken policy,” said Senator Bingaman. “I look forward to ending the discriminatory Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy as soon as possible,” said Senator Boxer. “We cannot afford to lose the service of dedicated and honorable military personnel, which is happening right now.” “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was bad for our country and our national security when I voted against it 17 years ago, and I’m glad to be part of the team working to repeal it today,” said Senator Wyden. “Under this bill, the military can stop discharging qualified servicemembers because of who they love and instead focus its energy where it belongs – on the nation’s defense.” “This will help ensure that we have a defense force that reflects our commitment to the fundamental principles upon which the country was founded,” said Senator Leahy. “We ask our troops to protect freedom in places around the globe. It is time to protect their basic freedoms and equal rights here at home.” “I am pleased to join my colleagues, the Commander-in-Chief and Pentagon leadership in working to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’“ said Senator Specter. “We must end discrimination against those who choose to proudly serve our country.” “The men and women who honor our nation by serving in the armed forces deserve our utmost respect and support,” said Senator Merkley. “The very strongest fighting force demands that we recruit and retain those who have the skills and knowledge to fulfill their missions. Their private lives should have no bearing on their willingness or ability to serve.” “The time has come to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ It is the right thing to do. Every American should have the opportunity to serve their country, regardless of race, sex, creed, or sexual orientation,” said Senator Feinstein. “The criteria for serving one’s country should be competence, courage and willingness to serve. When we deny people the chance to serve because of their sexual orientation, we deprive them of their rights of citizenship, and we deprive our armed forces the service of willing and capable Americans.” “I’ve been on seven USO tours – four to Iraq and Afghanistan – and I recently returned from a trip to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region as Senator,” said Senator Franken. “Over the years I’ve seen tremendous movement on this issue within the military. They’re ready for it and we’re ready for it. We need to end a policy that forces patriotic Americans to lie in order to defend their country.” Republican co-sponsors welcome! DNDN PUTS DNDN is up from a low of $2.55 this year to $33.62 last night. The whole world seems to think Dendreon will soon get FDA approval for its prostate cancer drug. My guru thinks it won’t. So – with money I can truly afford to lose – I’ve bought puts. He’s either going to be wrong or right. If wrong, I lose my whole $1,000 (or whatever I bet*). If right, I make perhaps $4,000. I own some of the August 22 puts (for example), which last sold for $285 each (a put on 100 shares, , giving me the right to ‘put’ them to someone at $22 each). If the stock stays above 22, say good-bye to my $285. If it falls to $5, each one is worth $1,700 (22 minus 5 times 100). If one figures my guru is as likely to be wrong as right – even though he’s usually right – that’s “heads I win $1,700, tails I lose $285.” But I really, really, really may lose that $285, so don’t tell Charles. And don’t, don’t, don’t, make this speculation with money you can’t truly afford to lose. Because, being human, my guru is sometimes wrong. *Actually, I have so many of these puts, at various strike prices and expiration dates, I could open a put store.