Monday, July 22, 2002

Wow. An incredible breakthrough Hamas says that it will stop the martyrdom operations if Israel will leave -- the occupied cities. Not leave Palestine. Not leave the West Bank. Just the currently occupied cities. I almost don't believe it. 7:37:35 AM    Something to add? Click here []

Friday, July 12, 2002

Friday Notes Do we need an office of Homeland Accounting? Arguably, the accounting scandals thus far (and there have been fewer than 10, and fully half of those have direct links to people employed by the current administration) have cost investors as much as 9/11. And the administration is notably less active in pursuing the accounting problem than the terrorism problem. It's probably just more comfortable using the tools for the latter than the former. --- The administration announces another upward revision in the deficit for the current fiscal year, but promises that we'll be back in balance by 2005. Increasingly, It’s not this administration’s  fiscal deficit that I’m concerned about. --- Some market commentators have been intimating that the slide in the market can be partially attributed to the prospect of Democrats picking up a majority in the house and a bigger majority in the Senate, as a result of the continuing business scandals.  I think that this is a time when the markets themselves, to say nothing of the voters, would welcome more regulation to return confidence to American business. There can be no greater indication of that than to watch the action in the markets during and after Bush's speech on Tuesday. During the speech, the market was flat, but directly after it finished -- as it sunk in that, unlike TR, Bush chose to talk loudly and brandish a small stick-- the market tanked. For days. Verdict rendered, the market has spoken.   11:29:18 AM    Something to add? Click here []

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Free Cable or the Right To Vote We had some friends -- who don't own a TV -- over last night to watch the All Star Game. The only TV that's watched in our house is zooboomafoo, zoom and crocodile hunter, so we're a little naive about the current state of commercial television. Sitting through the commercials was like being jackhammered. The volume, the intensity of the images, the rapidity of the editing made our heads swim. But this is what a good percentage of the American public spends a good percentage of their time watching. This is how they know their world. And I idly wondered, how many people, if asked to choose to between free cable tv and the right to vote, would make each choice? I'm not talking about access to cable, just whether or not they would have to pay for it. It's probabaly a $500/year issue for folks. Is that worth the right to vote? For those who choose the free cable, one could argue that we'd be getting some, um, interesting voters off the rolls. But that, of course, is BAD BAD thinking.... :) 10:55:49 AM    Something to add? Click here [] From Sex to Money Which one would you rather your president was lying to you about? Bush was elected on a promise to end the contradiction between presidential rhetoric and presidential rationalization. So far, all he’s done is change the subject from sex to money. From Slate.   10:50:03 AM    Something to add? Click here []

Tuesday, July 09, 2002

The real definition of "Bully Pulpit" Frank Rich used to be the theater reviewer for the NYTimes, and a roundly feared reviewer he was. He didn't like a great deal of theater, and when he didn't like a show, it generally closed pretty quickly. He was also well known for the particularly venomous tone of his writing, holding the producers, writers and actors to an incredibly high standard and slapping them unmercifully when they failed to measure up. Fortunately for the theater and for the rest of us, he's now writing about politics for the New York Times, where last Sunday he wrote about "All the President's Enrons." A few selections to whet your appetite for an article you should read in it's entirety. Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Richard Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, tossed out a range of 1 to 15 as the rough count of corporate culprits, "in comparison to more than 10,000 publicly traded corporations." The fact remains that so far at least five members of that theoretically tiny club have direct ties to the Bush administration: Enron, Halliburton, Andersen, KMPG and Merrill Lynch — the last three all former clients of the president's choice as Wall Street's top cop, the S.E.C. chairman Harvey Pitt. Five for 15: Mr. Bush could have used a batting average that high when he ran the Texas Rangers. and: It is Mr. Bush who is C.E.O. If he doesn't bring zero tolerance of corporate cheating to his own White House, it's hard to imagine Americans rushing back into the market trusting that his administration will enforce it anywhere else. Didn't he and Dick make a big deal out of integrity in 2000?   3:31:33 PM    Something to add? Click here []

Friday, June 28, 2002

Enron and Worldcom and Xerox are what Deregulation looks like Minority Leader Gebhardt: "It is, I think, telling that in 1995, when the Republican leadership came in, both Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay made statements that the main goal of their effort was to try to deregulate corporate America. Well, they did a lot of that in the last years, and now we see some of the results of that." From a fine piece in the NYTimes about how the democrats are gaining political advanatge against the most corporate administration in a generation. W Humour “You know, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta.” Except, apparently, he never said that when he was running for president, was still predicting surpluses as little as a month before 9/11, and now he's using thedisaster for political cover. Klassy. Just another example of how this administraiton is willing to be crassly opportunistic in pursuit of it's goals. And they criticize Bill Clinton.... 8:46:39 AM    Something to add? Click here []

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