Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Et Tu, Bill?

Apparently favored blogosphere whipping children Dowd and Krugman are not the only regular contributors mailing it in to the NYT Op-Ed pages these days. Distinctly Dowd-ish.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Phar-Phetched Physiognomy

"What does Colin Powell say when you tell him this?" The diplomat then did an imitation of Mr. Powell raising his eyebrows as if to say, " `You know what I believe, and you know I can't do anything about it with the crazies in this administration.' "

So let me get this straight: This is Thomas Friedman interpreting a gesture made by an unnamed "European Diplomat" imitating The Times' hero Colin Powell. Remind me not to challenge Friedman and his well-placed pals to a friendly game of charades.

The other day I was talking to an "Editor at the Times." I asked him about how William Safire felt about the columnists keeping him company on the Op-Ed page. He seemed to imitate Safire taking a deep breath as if to say "you know Dowd's gone batty and Krugman is a tabloid economist at best, but what can I do with nuts like Howell Raines running the show?"

Later in the day I lunched with a "Congressional Aide" who knows Pat Moynihan well. I asked him what Pat thought about the Democratic Party's prospects. He did what I thought was an imitation of Moynihan falling to the ground and grasping his throat, as if to say "There are some smart Democrats, but the party has its head so completely up the arses of the tort bar and other members of the cult of victimology there's little hope."

Then I realized he was choking on a piece of tortilla chip and performed the Heimlich Maneuver. Still, it was a pretty convincing Moynihan.

Over dinner I interviewed a "Palestinian Diplomat." I asked him what Chairman Arafat really felt about all these suicide bombings. He did an imitation of the Chairman giving a big thumbs up as if to say "Hey, how else can I keep all these bozos from figuring out who's responsible for the majority of their suffering and stringing me up by the toes?"

Politicians and diplomats are such wonderful mimics!

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Lew's words from dead-tree Harper's

Thanks to 2blowhards, I can now provide Lewis Lapham's actual words deplored by yours truly in this post:

When asked by worried friends and acquaintances whether the President was borrowing his geopolitical theory from the diaries of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, I assured them that the President didn’t have the patience to read more than two or three pages of a Tom Clancy novel.

As Friedrich advises:

Some of your arguments, are, well—I don’t know how else to put this, darling—a bit shrill....It seems like you still might be a bit, well, peeved about the Florida situation. Maybe it’s time you moved on, dear.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Lewis Lapham succumbs to Godwin's Law

I picked up a copy of Harper's to read on the plane this week. The issue on Newstands features .article by Lewis Lapham against the war in Iraq. (The preceding link is only a summary - you can't read the article on-line yet).

I thought I might be exposed to some intelligent anti-war discourse.

I was wrong.

Basically, Lewis Lapham assumes that Iraq poses no threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests (using the now familiar "no new evidence" ellipsis). Here's the summary:

"I had assumed that not even the Bush Administration was so stupid as to take up arms against a figment of its own imagination," writes Harper's Magazine editor Lewis H. Lapham in an essay arguing against the impending invasion of Iraq. Even though there are no links evident between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and scant intelligence as to the extent of his arsenal, Bush's threats to depose the Iraqi leader betray "the character of a government in the state of decadence." Turning to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Lapham finds similarities between Athens and the United States, both once great democracies corrupted by a lust for global domination.

It's even worse than that sounds. Early in the article Lapham likens Bush to Hitler and Stalin, with his only saving grace that Bush is too stupid to be a real Hitler or Stalin. Jeez.

(UPDATE: I found the quote.)

Not only does Lapham assume away any defensive interest, he assumes away any benefit to the Iraqis of potential liberation. Once you've done that, an anti-war stance kind of has to seem pretty rational.

You could also assume away altitude and step out of a plane without a parachute. I don't recommend it.

Unfortunately, I left my marked up copy in the seat pocket, so some passenger on a subsequent flight will get a sense of my ink-spilling reaction, and I can't type in quotations here. Perhaps I'll pick up another copy on the way home to expose the true horror of Lapham's lament.

Once again, I tried in good faith to round out my sources but ended up sadder and no wiser.

UPDATE: Please excuse the now-corrected "Godwyn". If I'd bothered to add a link I might have spelled it right. Sheesh.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Dowd Virus Contagious

Paul Krugman's been sitting next to Maureen for too long and started imitating the "Poppy & Jr." thing. Go ahead, have a look. I'll wait.

Now, have a look this graph of unemployment trends from the BEA. Notice that what Krugman calls "increasingly dismal" is two full percentage points better than the peak unemployment rate a full year and a half into the recovery in late 1992. That's right, employment tends to lag in recovery as excess capacity is used up first.

Krugman fudges this by saying lots of people have "given up" looking for work. Did this not happen in other recessions? Can he back it up? We know Canada's numbers are terribly polluted by this phenomenon, but there's no case that our unmeasured unemployment is any worse now than in 1991 or any other recession. Dreck is tempted to observe that Krugman's assertions about how bad it "feels" may have to do with the massive layoffs made by Merrill Lynch in his hometown, or just the generally depressed feeling on West 43rd Street. Perhaps he and Maureen should go out for a run.

Now look at this table of macroeconomic indicators across five recessions. Scan your eye across the table. Isn't the real story is why this last recession was so mild compared to the others? Isn't it amazing that consumption actually grew? How has economic volatility been dampened so? (I have had some thoughts on this).

Krugman would rather forecast a double-dip (with qualifications - "I could be wrong") and then blast the administration about it.

Now head over to "Truth Squad", who point out that Krugman today is sharply at odds with his 1996 incarnation.

I'd be interested in your comments (more on the "real story" than Krugman, even the hard-core Dems at my company have resigned themselves to the fact that he's playing a monotonous tune in his Times Op-Ed columns). In the meantime, I'm off traveling for a week, and I'll post when I can.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Blogger Left Speechless, no details at 11

The Madness of Queen MoDo:

Karl Rove is building a Republican empire. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby are building an ideological empire. Dick Cheney is building a unilateral empire. And Donald Rumsfeld is building a military empire.

That's a lot of empires. This is, hands-down, the loopiest column I've ever read.

......?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A body not in MoDotion

I think Andrew Ferguson wrote the column Maureen Dowd meant to write when she scratched out this garbage - ably dissected by Stuart Buck.

And I say that not as an occasional Bush supporter, but as a runner. The full interview and some other features are posted at the Runner's World site:

On Sundays if I’m at Camp David, I’ll go for a hard, morning run—these days about 20:30 to 20:45 for 3 miles on a tough course—and then I’ll go walk 2 to 4 miles with Laura {the First Lady} afterward.

gee thanks for that {hint} about Ms. Bush - whoda known?

The President is in good shape. He apparently runs those kind of times six times a week. If you can run a given pace six times a week without injury, your "race pace" is going to be significantly faster. The President's race pace might be another minute faster. Three miles in well under 20 minutes is excellent for a guy in his 50s. I'm 38 and run regularly (generally longer and slower than Bush). With those times the President can probably take me in a 5k.

I'm mystified at the way Dowd (and others) make so much of the time Bush takes for personal health and family. Especially after all the arguments made by the same parties about certain illegitimate uses of the Oval Office and executive...um..persuasion of his predecessor. It isn't just catty and trivial, it's snobby and backwards.

Bush openly admits in the interview MoDo cites that running was an important part of reforming his lifestyle. Most of us who run (or bike, or row, or what-have-you) recognize the therapeutic value of exercise. A few years ago, I learned that runnning keeps me from getting depressed. It's hard to underestimate the importance of not being depressed to your functioning with your family and at work. I recognize all the qualities cited by Bush in running:

• "helps me sleep at night"
  
• "keeps me disciplined"
  
• "breaks up my day and allows me to recharge my batteries"
  
• "has helped me in times of enormous stress
  

Anyone who thinks the President is lazy should look again. The guy is squeezing his exercise into a long day:

Running is just a part of my routine. I go to work a little before 7 a.m. and I expect everybody to show up on time when I have a meeting. I make time to run or exercise every day. There’s never a question in my mind that I’ll exercise. Even when I travel, there’s always a treadmill in my room. I have a treadmill on Air Force One. On long trips—for example, when I went to Europe recently—I ran for an hour on the flight over there. When I came back from China, I ran on the flight.

Furthermore. he's sounding positively Clintonesque about others doing the same:

Exercise is so important that corporate America should help their employees make time. Offer flex time. There should be flex time for families and there should be flex time for exercise. A healthy work force is a more productive work force. We have got to do a better job of encouraging that in America.

I realize that Dowd is complaining about the President not making the case for war. But her criticism is akin to us saying MoDo's column isn't better because she couldn't fit the quality writing time in around a doctor visit.

It sounds to me like she isn't that familiar with having a fitness regimen. That may explain a lot - the peculiar mindset giving rise to her uneven recent work and, in turn, perhaps even that guy problem about which her friend fibbed so gently. She should get out and have a run. It would clear her head.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A Huge Conceit

In a desperate bid to seem important, Stanley Fish is continuing his defense of postmodernism:

With that ominous echo of McCarthyism, Stanley Fish, postmodern provocateur and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, begins his defense of postmodernism in a symposium in the summer issue of The Responsive Community (www.gwu.edu/~ccps), a quarterly political journal edited by Amitai Etzioni.

Clearly, Mr. Fish continues, no one has yet threatened to treat postmodernists like traitorous Communists, but "it's only a matter of time," he says. A new version of "America, love it or leave it!" is in the making, he claims, "and the drumbeat is growing louder." A "few professors of literature, history, and sociology," he asserts, are now being told that they are directly responsible for "the weakening of the nation's moral fiber" and that they are indirectly responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Responsible? Please. Bloggers have been among the most outspoken critics of the confused crew of counter-tribalists Fish seeks to defend. Nowhere have I seen a suggestion that they are "responsible" for 9/11.

Get over yourself.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The New Aristrockracy

This Steyn column appeared in Yesterday's New York Sun. It had me giggling like a 6th grader at a school dance:

Rock stars aren't a welcome break with the old hidebound aristocracy, they're the new hidebound aristocracy. Over the years, I've met her majesty, and I've met a lot of rock stars, and I can tell you the rockers are a lot queenlier than the queen. They're far more hung up on protocol than your average prince or duchess...

...It's fashionable to bemoan the way celebrity has contaminated every aspect of public life, but, happily, a growing number of celebrities now behave with the decorum and restrained formality previously associated with the royal family. Even Sir Elton, whose country house in Berkshire was once full of glitterballs, strobe lighting, amyl nitrate, cocaine, and louche young men, has signed up for the New Gentility.

"I've never seen so much porcelain," bemoaned Mick Jagger after a recent visit. "If I see another piece of f---ing porcelain, I'll go bonkers."

A few months ago, Sir Elton and his male partner were invited by the queen to join her for tea in the Royal Enclosure at the Ascot races. On another occasion, her majesty gamely escorted Elt onto the floor and whirled daintily around to "Rock Around the Clock," dancing queen to queen, while Prince Philip, displaying a visible reluctance to get with the program, was obliged to stand at the side and make small talk with Elt's boyfriend.

How far will it go? Prince William and Britney were rumored to be an item awhile back, and I can't be the only one who wondered what might have been when Streisand let it be known a few years ago that she'd once been sweet on the Prince of Wales. He could, it seems, have married a genuine Jewish American Princess instead of the manipulative bulimic neurotic he wound up with. Barbra is a model of regal dignity: She issues Christmas messages to the peoples of the world, just like the queen and the pope do; at the Democratic Convention, she sings "Happy Days Are Here Again" so butt-numbingly slowly it sounds far more like a national anthem than "God Save The Queen" or "The Star-Spangled Banner." Incidentally, I'm not sure if Bono and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have danced together on their extensive African tour, but, like the queen and Sir Elton, they make a lovely couple, especially in that exotic native sleepwear they were pictured in the other week. Nothing but good can come of sober rockers like Bono lending their deep sense of duty and public service and commitment to good causes to a decadent ruling class of chaps like O'Neill who otherwise would be spending their days nailing chicks, trashing hotel rooms and driving their Rolls into the swimming pool.

When I looked at that picture of O'Neill and Bono I kept wanting to draw a thought balloon in next to the fellow in the middle background - "I'm glad my wife didn't let me throw those away!". Or maybe some direct dialogue - "Are you guys gonna buy something or just stand around?"

At any rate, read the whole Steyn, it's hysterical.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Why, It's Just That Kind of Place!

And the award for best non-Arab America hater goes to -

A young man from Minnesota was arrested recently in connection with a number of pipe bombs placed in rural mailboxes across America's Heartland. According to reports, his ambitious and imaginative plan included leaving bombs in the pattern of a gigantic, multi-state smiley face, presumably as observed from outer space. He left messages along with his bombs, messages containing the delusional ramblings one associates with anti-government residents of remote compounds stocked with automatic weapons, ammo, and freeze-dried rations.

Having grown up in the region, this richly-nuanced bit of Heartland Americana just naturally set me reminiscing.

John Chuckman of Yellowtimes.org. and he's just getting started. First, his experiences with an unfortunate church school:

There were the hot summer nights spent in a cinder-block chapel at Camp Sycamore (not its real name). Here, every night, an evangelist with greasy, swept-back hairdo and heavy black-rimmed glasses, a la Buddy Holly, shouted and sputtered, spewing beads of sweat and saliva visibly into the stage-lighting, trying his hardest to scare a bunch of thirteen-year olds half to death in an effort to win souls for Jesus....

The experience at least taught an observant young man a good deal about the methods and purposes of tyranny. It was a few years later, after reading Allan Bullock on Hitler, that I realized that the Buddy-Holly preacher at Camp Sycamore had more in common with Adolf than Jesus. And all that panic-laden, nuclear-attack stuff at school owed more to Goebbels than concern for public safety. Still later, I understood that there is a connection between the fundamentalist obsession over the destruction of the world and Hitler's Götterdämmerung-destruction of Germany when his bid to rule Europe had failed. Nihilism is a common thread.

Ah, the good old days, when the evangelist would wearily shuffle the kids into the gas chamber, or plan an invasion of Poland...

When Timothy McVeigh put Oklahoma City on the map by trying to erase it, there were many editorials and columns opining how such a terrible thing could happen in the Heartland. The Heartland: that mythical place of cherry pie, gingham dresses, honesty, and big-hearted neighbors. Dorothy's Kansas. Little House on the Prairie. I detected a certain feebleness of insight in these pieces. There was nothing to be surprised about....

The fact is that the Midwest has always been more accurately pictured by the brutality of bloody Kansas just before the Civil War than by the schmaltz of Dorothy's Kansas, for even though the "Wizard of Oz" is a parable about American politics, its popularity has nothing to do with that fact. Crazed gangs, violent racist attitudes, and a dedication to choking your views down the throats of others are just some of the cultural landmarks that never make it into sugary television shows or Hollywood movies about the place.

Don't think your home will be spared, he's got a few more:

Buffalo, while not properly part of the Midwest, is definitely a close spiritual relative. Not just in its treasury of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan buildings, Frederick Law Olmsted parks, and location on a Great Lake, but right down to its flat-vowel, nasally accent and many colorful cultural attitudes....

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, grew up and got his start maiming and killing around Chicago. He moved on to pursue the greater part of his career from a remote cabin out West, a fact which may reflect the early formative influence of a place like Camp Sycamore.

Chuckman and Kaczynski - don't blame them, blame their upbringing!

Recently, the remarkable English journalist Robert Fisk wrote a piece on why Hollywood actor John Malkovitch wants to kill him, something the actor, upset over Fisk's reporting from the Mideast, apparently ranted about in a speech on a visit to England. But I think Fisk is likely unaware that Malkovitch comes from the Midwest, actually the Chicago area, or he would not think there is anything unusual in his behavior. People do threaten to kill people there because they don't like their views or their color. It's just that kind of place...

Yes, the Heartland is full of unusual stories. It is a mysterious, fascinating place, one that leaves an intoxicating spell on you many years afterward. Of course, I remind myself, it could have been worse. I could have grown up in the South.

There's a hidden genius in this guy's style. He peels off cities and states like James Brown in concert, whipping up the crowd -

Detroit! Jackboots exploit! jump back!

Texas! All enmeshed in David Koresh! uh-huh!

New York! Thank you M'am, meet Son-of-Sam! Pow!

It's just that kind of place!..

Imagine if you just substituted random African cities in for the U.S. locales above? How would our Mr. Chuckman sound? A bit Nazi-like himself, I think.

By the way, sorry Damian, Mark, David, and others, this fellow exported himself North. He's one of yours now.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Web's role in 9/11?

Thomas Friedman writes about a sort of new humility in Silicon Valley about the potential uses of the 'net and information technology.

Ever since I learned that Mohamed Atta made his reservation for Sept. 11 using his laptop and the American Airlines Web site, and that several of his colleagues used Travelocity.com, I've been wondering how the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley were looking at the 9/11 tragedy — whether it was giving them any pause about the wired world they've been building and the assumptions they are building it upon.

I have heard and can understand how the flow of information in general may make a 9/11 attack more effective. Certainly, we all were able to watch it and discuss it immediately, including critical Al Qaeda audiences in the Middle East. But this article suggests that the internet (or Mr. Atta's laptop) enabled the attacks.

There is no doubt that Al Qaeda used the internet for communication and some e-commerce. But the entire operation was possible in the pre-internet age. Telegrams and coded phone calls would have done the trick. No Al Qaeda terrorists hacked into security systems to disable them. To my knowledge, no electronic identity theft faciliated the highjackings. In addition, Atta was allowed to do everything he needed to do - as Mohammed Atta.

Friedman gets a few Silicon Valley types to (sort of) agree with him -

John Doerr, the venture capitalist, said, "Culturally, the Valley was already maturing before 9/11, but since then it's definitely developed a deeper respect for leaders and government institutions."

At Travelocity, Mr. Hornthal noted, whether the customer was Mohamed Atta or Bill Gates, "our only responsibility was to authenticate your financial ability to pay. Did your name and credit card match your billing address? It was not our responsibility, nor did we have the ability, to authenticate your intent with that ticket, which requires a much deeper sense of identification. It may be, though, that this is where technology will have to go — to allow a deeper sense of identification."

Will Doerr and Hornthal start writing about Gray Goo soon?

Well, what would you say if contacted for this column? "nah, it has nothing to do with us"?

Not bloody likely.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Drain the Swamp

Maureen Dowd quotes a European reporter in her column today:

A German reporter advised the president to "look beyond Iraq" and see that "Syria, too, in U.S. terminology, is a state sponsor of terrorism" and that "Saudi Arabia is anything but a democratic pluralistic society."

As a European ambassador to NATO said about Bush's fixation with Saddam, "You Americans want to kill the crocodile, and we think it's safer to drain the swamp."

OK, that sounds constructive. How do we drain the swamp? Sanctions? U.N. resolutions? Turning the other cheek? I'll be the first one to jump on the Anti-Syria bandwagon, but what do you propose we do? Aren't they on the security council? (thanks guys!).

The problem is the swamp is already drained and the crocs are roaming around.

The rest is the ususal Dowd "Fast Chinese Restaurant Punditry" - combine #2 meat and #4 sauce to make "spectacular paradise punditry" entree #19!

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Persistently Irrelevant

It's a sorry turn of events when work takes you from breakfast through dinner and beyond but it happens to me often enough. I am also packing tonight for another three-city tour, which will keep me away from the keyboard until the weekend.

I'm just going to have to leave it to the rest of you to pick through the fresh vomit on Common Dreams. Here's a precious quote from Richard Gwyn:

As one example of the kind of rethinks that have become possible, if many incomes are the product of greed and the use of inside information rather than of entrepreneurship and risk-taking, why cut taxes as incentives for entrepreneurship and risk-taking?

If people aren't taking risks, why should we encourage them to take risks? Whoa, your train of logic kind of skipped the tracks in your "rethink" there Gwyn, although I'm glad you acknowledge tax cuts are an incentive. This column is a strange bit of socialist dogma disguised with a smattering of market terms.

Speaking of dogma, here's Jimmy Reid on the subject:

But in this New (post-Cold War) World, dogmatism and its blood brother, religious fundamentalism, are thriving as never before. Islamic and Jewish fundamentalisms are tearing the Middle East apart. In America, Christian Fundamentalists are turning the clock back to the Middle Ages by teaching in state schools that the origin of the Earth is as described in the book of Genesis .

George Bush’s response to September 11, when analyzed, is absolutist and dogmatic. Those that disagree with him are wimps or spineless liberals. He has repudiated the treaty that founded the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal because it might lead to the prosecution of US servicemen and officials.

It's just one big Enron-Bush-Taliban-fest! What on earth could the administration have against selective prosecution by elites while thugocrats get a free pass?

Fisking this stuff is just feels so....last October.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Panned by Curmudgeons of All Ages

It has been uncomfortable for me to read the relentlessly negative reviews of "American Son" by my college classmate Rich Blow. Thomas Mallon ripped it to shreds in The Atlantic this month, and today Russ Smith took it apart in The New York Sun:

Ultimately, "American Son" is a mere footnote in the canons of kennedy iconography, not only because Mr. Blow is a dull writer, but also for the sad fact that John F. Kennedy Jr. will be remembered more for the salute he gave at this father's funeral than anything else he accomplished in his short life.

Here's a more intriguing part of the same review:

The single most fascinating nugget in "American Son" is Mr. Blow's recollection of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd panning the first issue of George (Blow was Senior Editor of George). Incensed, Mr. Blow wrote her a note and received the following response: "Don't be mad at me, I'm paid to be a baby curmudgeon, and it's no fun. I'd go back to reporting in a minute. I've subscribed and I promise only plugs from now on."

What a strange response. Is she being sarcastic, or does she really "hate" her prime real estate on the Op-Ed? It would explain a lot.

UPDATE: Here's Jonah Goldberg's take on "American Son":

...for all of Mr. Blow's milking of his relationship with Kennedy, the portrait in "American Son" rarely gets richer than skim.

Ouch.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Fromages a Krugman

I have rarely seen so many column-inches devoted to a European election as today. The WSJ and Times each have several editorials and news columns devoted to the French Election results, and even USA Today is giving it full coverage.

If there weren't as many varieties of leftism in France as there are cheeses, this wouldn't have happened. plus ca change...

In one of the more moldy columns on the subject, Paul Krugman tries his hand at equating Republicans with Le Pen, starting with the "guess who I'm describing" cliche used by fulminating didacts everywhere:

A slightly left-of-center candidate runs for president. In a rational world he would win easily. After all, his party has been running the country, with great success: unemployment is down, economic growth has accelerated, the sense of malaise that prevailed under the previous administration has evaporated.

But everything goes wrong. His moderation becomes a liability; denouncing the candidate's pro-market stance, left-wing candidates — who have no chance of winning, but are engaged in politics as theater — draw off crucial support. The candidate, though by every indication a very good human being, is not a natural campaigner; he has, say critics, "a professorial style" that seems "condescending and humorless" to many voters.

Hmmm. How about a re-write:

A slightly left-of-center economist seeks to win the Nobel Prize by making grand macroeconomic predictions. In a world he would describe as rational he would have won long ago. After all, his predictions have had great success: Japan deflated, Argentina has devalued and the sense of malaise that prevailed among the non supply-siders had significantly abated. He moves to Princeton to mingle with other laureates.

But everything goes wrong. His partisan anger over a close election becomes a liability; he tries his hand at re-writing elections results, slandering administration appointees and engaging in pseudo-economic punditry as theater, drawing off crucial support. Still no Nobel prize, and now, no Pulitzer either.

The candidate, though by every indication a very good human being, is not a natural political writer; he has, say critics, "a professorial style" that seems "condescending and humorless" to his remaining readers. And he has spent little time actually learning about politics, administration bios or, for that matter the proper application of monetary policy in an oil shock....

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The New York Sun

Unlike Asparagirl and Susanna, I was able to purchase a copy of The Sun yesterday morning in Jersey City. I also saw several copies available at Pier 11 on my way home.

What a treat! A newspaper made for me: Caroline Baum on economics, Ira Stoll on the front page and Glenn Reynolds as a featured columnist. I especially liked the concluding assessment of Justice White from Glenn:

The principal that laws should make sense is , in fact, a radical one. While is has a long way to go before it has occupied the field, it has made great strides since Justice White began championing it. Like White himself, it will produce decisions that sometimes look conservative and sometimes look liberal. But it is really a species of muscular skepticism that - like White himself - is not made for ideological pigeonholes.

We need a Byron White in the regulatory world, then maybe we could get some regulations that made sense.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Oh How Marvelously Quirky and Quixotic!

My great uncle and godfather had a way of praising with faint damn, to mix up the old cliche. Once, when he was staying with me and working on a book, he noticed that I was not shod. "Oh, I think it's wonderful how informal you two are, wearing your bare feet around the house!" You didn't have to be a mind-reader to see just how "wonderful" he considered my exposed hobbit-feet.

Felicity Barringer achieves a similar tone covering the launching of the New York Sun for the New York Times. Since the Sun's managing editor is the well-known creator of Smartertimes, Ira Stoll, and the Sun's editorial voice will certainly stand in contrast to the Gray Lady, I can imagine the deafening harrumphing of old farts at the Times as the Sun's first issue goes to press.

Paper and Editor to Tilt at Liberal Windmills

reads the headline. Not too subtle. Pretenses of objectivity be damned!

On the business side, he and his circulation director hope his new newspaper, The New York Sun, will pick up 1,000 paying customers a month in a city whose English-language dailies have lost an average of 600 daily newspaper customers a month in the past decade.

If it succeeds, The Sun, which will make its first appearance next Tuesday, will have a paid circulation of 8,000 by the end of the year, with more to come. At 8,000, it would have the same circulation as another city daily, American Metal Market.

How pathetic, how small! How..amusing. But they have dug up some dirt on publisher Seth Lipsky:

Mr. Goldberg, who succeeded Mr. Lipsky as editor of The Forward in May 2000, when the heirs of the socialist founders dismissed Mr. Lipsky, said that "the accusation against him here from both the ownership and most of the readership was that a slim factoid would be made into a major debate."

Mr. Goldberg continued, "It would say `Jewish Community Divided' when one person objected to something."

But, he said, Mr. Lipsky's "Pickwickian charm, his oddballness" disarm his natural antagonists.

"Pickwickian", "oddballness", how charming!

With something like 1,300 charter subscribers, according to The Sun's circulation director, profitability will take "several years," Mr. Lipsky said.

Other observers are less optimistic. "It's going to lose a lot of money for a long time," said Mr. Stern. "Forever. But guess what? I don't think that's the defining issue. Lipsky will put out one terrific product. Which may be the dividend his investors really want."

In other words, it's a money-pit motivated by marginalized, yet entertaining ideologues. Nice objective reportage, Ms. Barringer! I'm surprised I haven't seen a missive on this from Ira Stoll.

Who is this model of probity "Mr. Stern"? He appears nowhere else in the article. Is it a pseudonym for the paternal judgement of the Times, or is he a real person? I'd ask the Times to edit their own work better but that might be pickwickian or quixotic of me. Anyway,I think all these oddball lapses in objectivity and small editorial mistakes are so charming and...winsome.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Keller Pegs the President

Bill Keller takes on President's character today in the Times today. First he deals with his smarts:

...to put it generously, Mr. Bush is not himself an intellectual. The sometimes skillful work of his speechwriters, which he sometimes delivers with conviction, cannot disguise the fact that he is not a deep thinker, a student of ideas, or even a very curious man. For all the spoon-fed portraits of the president exuding new gravitas since the war began, President Bush is still an easy man to take lightly.

Contrast this with Andrew Sullivan who is taking on the topic in his book club:

Some of the questions about Bush's intelligence arose from what can, I think, justly be called his poor brain-to-mouth coordination, and from his relative inelegance or simplicity in talking about policy. That's a yardstick that gets used, and it's probably a shallow one. But there are so many other yardsticks -- knowledge of one's own strengths and weaknesses, the ability to make accurate visceral judgments about people, the mental discipline it takes to keep an eye on the forest without getting distracted by the trees, a good and accurate sense of the atmosphere around you at a given time. And by these yardsticks, which are also incomplete and probably insufficient, Bush fares much better, I think.

Conclude what you will. I also found Bush came across as an imbecile during the campaign, but a flair for public speaking and ad-libbing really is only one form of intelligence. Any business person will tell you that many who are not smooth public speakers are extremely effective leaders within organizations.

Whether you like Reagan or not, he was an effective leader, and my memory of him as a speaker was actually similar to Bush. I often found it hard to pay attention to the "Great Communicator".

Clinton was great unscripted, but his speeches were horrible (and interminable). As a manager or leader, I always thought Clinton might have been taking on too much. Good leaders have a few clear priorities. Running around addressing every wrong, as demanded by the Times editorial pages, is a recipe for making no progress on many things. This is one of the great humiliations for those of us educated in elite Northeastern institutions. Our ability to juggle contrary ideas and B.S. our way through any confrontation is of little use, most of the time, in actually getting things done. It is salesmanship, not execution. At the risk of being criticized for your simplisme sometimes you have to hammer on a select few things, at the expense of others, in order to make them happen. That steel tariffs should even audition for that short list is a big disappointment.

Incidentally, one of the best public speakers I ever saw was Newt Gingrich. He had an amazing command of facts and a wonderful ability to use history in lively analogies. He is also very fast on his feet, and would not be tripped up in debates or press conferences. Much like Clinton, his most severe challenges came from his on flaws.

Keller's agenda, however, is not only to re-cast the standard "stupid W" line, but to extend it into something horribly sinister. By the end of this editorial, he has painted Bush as Senator Greg Stillson, the moralistic warmonger (played by Martin Sheen, of course) whose quest for the White House (and Armeggedon) is thwarted by the supernaturally prescient Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone:

"On tactics, he may be listening to Colin Powell," said Norman Podhoretz, the influential conservative editor and author. "But he's very clear as to his strategic objectives — not just to clean up Al Qaeda cells but to effect regime changes in six or seven countries and to create conditions which would lead to internal reform and modernization in the Islamic world."

Whether the president will, in the end, take us to a multitude of wars in the cause of liberating the world from evil, or whether the mission will lose some of its energy when the cost (literal and political) grows, I can't tell. But I think Mr. Podhoretz correctly reads the president's heart.

If you were hoping for the right-of-center moderate Mr. Bush campaigned as, or if you shared the patronizing view of the president as a good-natured boob tugged along by avuncular ideologues, this may strike you as chilling. But have no doubt, it is très sérieux.

A bit of ominous French at the end, non?. Forgive me for putting words in Keller's mouth, but I'm hearing "He has rope-a-doped us. He is capable of a master plan, and it is hegemony through warfare."

This is not an analytical piece, it's a trial balloon for the next characterization the Democrats will try to foist on the President, and it reminds me of the intentionally frightening behavioral extrapolation used to turn a philandering and dissembling President into some master criminal or "freedom's greatest enemy". All's fair in campaigns, I suppose, but why can't Keller let Terry McAuliffe come up with this stuff instead of using the NYT Op-Ed pages? And if he thinks Bush is an unbalanced and dangerous crusader, why won't he just say so, instead of leaving it hanging in the air? Perhaps because he doesn't really believe it himself.

There is, however, some interesting material in the article about "libertarian conservatives" becoming disenchanted with Bush over free trade, military tribunals, etc. Enough, in fact, to make me wonder if Keller has been dabbling in the blogosphere.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Estrogenron

Maureen Dowd penned the following yesterday:

A monsoon of sickening stories lately illustrates how twisted societies become when women are either never seen, dismissed as second-class citizens or occluded by testosterone: the church subsidizing pedophilia; the Afghan warlords' resumption of pedophilia; the Taliban obliteration of women; the brotherhood of Al Qaeda and Mohamed Atta's mysogynistic funeral instructions; the implosion of the macho Enron Ponzi scheme; the repression of women, even American servicewomen, by our allies the Saudis. (emphasis mine)

Regarding the civilizing and fraud-preventing influence of women on business, Maureen Dowd, may I introduce you to the story of Warnaco?

Do we really need to characterize women as all-powerful agents for good in order to condemn discrimination against them? That's a bit of a setup, don't you think?

When I was adding the italics tags around the phrase about Enron, I actually typed "/enron" in the second tag. The NYTimes pundits need an "enron" tag, so they can insert the overheated Enron analogy into their thrice weekly columns with a bit less strain on their worried fingers. It will make holding the frappacinos easier.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

'Bias' Refuted; dogs and cats, etc.

On Fresh Air today, Geoff Nunberg debunked the label usage allegations in Bias. Specifically, he has run Nexis searches that demonstrate a bias towards using the "Liberal" label MORE often than "conservative".

He has posted his results in a web page, available here.

I said when I read Goldberg's book that it was amusing but lacked substance. Unfortunately, it has come to stand for many broader concerns about the major newspapers and networks, and its lack of substance has become a liability. Bias will now be the straw man to avert any discussion about the major papers' leanings - even their editorial biases, I'm afraid.

UPDATE: Richard Bennett recalls Patrick Ruffini's similar research on the terms "right wing" and "left wing" with a very different conclusion. Unfortunately, people's perceptions of which terms are loaded are different, so no amount of statistics will prove or disprove the point. However, Bias looks bad either way because Goldberg didn't even attempt Nunberg or Ruffini's level of analysis.

Since Bias is the poster boy for the argument now, we will be hearing the term "discredited" within five words of "Bernard Goldberg" or arguments of "Liberal Bias". Run that Nexis search in a few weeks, guys.

SECOND UPDATE: A commenter introduced me to his analysis on Free Republic, backing Goldberg. There are many more. For instance, Erin Shosteck for National Journal, Robert McFarland and Allan Levite. These latter studies focus on words like "extremism" and "attack" connected to party or left-right labels.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

How to Look Stupid by Not Really Trying

When I see mainstream reporters perpetuate myths about money management like this, I wonder how many other businesses they fail to understand.

Ben White, of the Washington Post, heads the above-mentioned article with the following:

Why the Rich Get Richer: Exotic and complicated investments, unavailable to the rest of us, help explain . . .

Perhaps there's more to it than exotic and complicated. If exotic and complicated investments make you rich, Enron should have been the best buy of all time.

show up with $50 million and you can toss the humdrum out the window and sit down in a cozy dining room with Chris Wolfe, chief equity strategist at the J.P. Morgan Private Bank on Park Avenue. Sport that kind of cash and you can order filet mignon from a tuxedoed waiter and chat about going long on the Norwegian kroner and short on the yen.

So far, I only see things that make you poorer. Does an equity strategist really advise people to make currency plays? Not in the universe I inhabit.

Long on the kroner. Short on the yen. Of course! It seems so obvious now. But maybe you want a few more details. So you drop by to see Laurie Cameron, global currency strategist at the Morgan private bank. But you will have to wait. She's on the line to Geneva, speaking fluent French. When she's free, she'll tell you that going long on the kroner and shorting the yen was a hot trade. Like three weeks ago. Now it's tired.

"Everybody is already into that," she'll say. The really smart money got in when the price of oil spiked (Norway exports oil).

So now the equity trader was not only giving advice out of his field, but he was three weeks out-of-date?

Look. Take it from me, unless you are a currency dealer or have a spare bilion, don't trade currencies. The currency markets are the only market in the world where it is legal and common practice to use your knowledge of order flow. Banks and brokerages have customers buying and selling large orders, so they know where the next trade is coming from. You don't, so stay away from second-guessing them. I strongly suspect that the institution White is profiling doesn't recommend speculative currency trades for their high net worth clients on a regular basis.

The article goes on to mention a number of specific strategies, that e hedge fund or mutual fund might employ. The investor willing to use derivatives or leverage, i.e. the hedge fund investor, can execute the strategy more precisely. That, if anything, is the benefit of "complexity". But all these strategies are broad, macro-economic bets. Where is the company research, where are the strategies exploiting structural market inefficiencies? That's where the "rocket scientists" add real value.

White is playing into the industry's hands, implying that the purveyors of pricy services to the rich have some inside track on stupid macro/directional transactions that most institutions wouldn't even let their trading floors execute in size. Then he turns his dithering gaze on hedge funds.

By now you probably know all you care to about hedge funds, the clubby, regulation-lite limited partnerships open mainly to "high-net-worth individuals," generally those with at least $1 million in investment capital. You know that some hedgies, most notably billionaire financier-turned-philanthropist George Soros, drove their funds to astronomical returns, beating the markets by factors of 400 percent or more and making some people very, scarily, rich. You probably also know that overall, the 6,000 or so hedge funds thought to exist (no one really knows how many there are, since they don't have to register with the SEC) have not, over the long run, beaten the market.

Well, that would probably be because a huge chunk of the hedge funds market is "absolute return" or "market neutral". Take for example, the "long-short" fund. These hedge funds will buy certain stocks and sell short others, leaving themselves exposed primarily to the difference between the two stocks, not the level of the market. So these funds don't beat the market, but they tend not to go up and down with it either. Many funds aren't trying to beat the market.

If an investor wants to link his hedge fund returns to the market, he can add the hedge fund's return to the index by buying index futures (a technique called "equitizing") or buy an existing equitized fund (a number of long-short shops offer an equitized and non-equitized fund). This is a technique called "portable alpha" and its one of the real reasons the rich get richer. If White spent a little time talking to actual money managers he might learn about portable alpha, which allows you to find excess returns in inefficient, out-of-the-way asset classes or techniques and graft that excess return on to that of an efficient asset class like the S&P; 500. Why do all that research, though, eh Ben?

Hedge funds that specialize in stocks of financial services firms performed best in 2001, returning 16 percent on invested capital, in part on shrewd bets that firms with large loan exposure, such as J.P. Morgan Chase, would suffer.

Which proves my point. They were short the lending banks and long the service providers.

I love it when journalists or business pundits think that the way to get rich is to make huge macro bets on currency or economic trends. It's funny, also, that the industry tends to encourage the public to think that's what they do. It's not. Good professional money managers pay a lot of attention to risk management, and often run trades so as to eliminate broad market directional risks and concentrate on the exposure on which they have a view. In fact, one of the most productive uses of leverage and/or derivatives is to shed the parts of a bet you don't want - usually the dumb macro/directional stuff.

Let's return to the long-short technique. If a hedge fund manager thinks that XYZ Bank will outperform ABC Bank, he places two similarly sized bets. He might buy $100,000 of XYZ Bank and sell short $100,000 of ABC Bank. He profits if XYZ goes up, and profits if ABC goes down. If the market (or the banking sector) goes down, affecting both stocks equally, he profits on ABC and loses on XYZ coming out even. If the market goes up, he loses on ABC and profits on XYZ, again coming out about even. The real exposure is the relative movement of XYZ and ABC Banks' stocks. If XYZ does better he profits, if it underperforms ABC he loses. The market's direction is irrelevant.

What this trade tells you is the trader only has an opinion on the relative merits of the two companies, not the market as a whole. This is the opposite of a market directional bet. And this is the type of bet that good traders can make money on consistently, because they can actually research the two companies and develop unusual or counter-consensus insight, a requirement for outperforming the market. The Kroner/Yen bets have too much noise from international events, domestic policy, and unpredictable international capital flows.

Sophisticated investors, like the Harvard and Yale endowments, focus most of their active equity management on long-short techniques. They are usually long the equity markets, to take advantage of the upward direction of the market over long time periods, but their excess return over the market (or "alpha") usually comes from long-short positions.

Long-short is just one example. There are certainly hedge funds that find opportunities in fixed income and currency markets. generally, however, their bets are as focused and non-directional as those made by long-short funds. If you look at Harvard's or Yale's asset allocations, you will see no capital explicitly dedicated to currency or macro strategies. In fact, If you do want to see what the world's most sophisticated investors are doing, these two endowments are a good place to start. David Swensen, director of the Yale Endowment, even wrote a book about it.

Journalists like White want to tell you that the best investors get rich through "have a hunch, bet a bunch" machismo. "Nothing could be further from the truth" (OK, last time I use that phrase, Rand). The business has its share of lucky fools, but the consistently successful don't play roulette. In a casino, you head for the craps table to get the best odds. In money management, you look for hidden and inefficient places where your research can provide reliable and profitable insight.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Most Loathsome Award Reviewed

I have had some reaction on my "Loathsome" post below. I continue to be offended by folks who blithely assume that businesspeople spend their days in search of slave labor, but I understand some of the objections to my outrage.

Especially in light of the existence of this abomination by Ted Rall and these disgusting thoughts posted on Indymedia.

That Ted Rall could actually create and release a cartoon making fun of WTC widows is really beyond comprehension. Just look and wonder at how someone who purports to offer a moral message can peddle this crap. How sorely my commitment to free speech is tested today.

Thank you Damian Penny (I guess..) for pointing these out and creating a hard knot of anger in my stomach that won't go away for another five months.

If I may pass along the "top blog" honor bestowed on me by the overly kind Iain Murray, Damian gets my vote today for pointing out the deep, evil darkness of these folks' souls.

And I'm aware this is another non-value added post (at least from my end). I promise to do something about that as soon as I can make the time.

Right now I need to go outside and scream out loud for a few minutes.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Most Loathsome "Teaser" Ever Written

And the winner is....Tina Rosenberg, for the lead-in to a piece about a business man who gasp has actually helped liberate a few Chinese prisoners.

In China, American business has always assumed that human rights and corporate profits are mutually exclusive. Does this have to be the case?

Would that include property rights? The right to the "pursuit of happiness" by being paid for a job? How would you like it, Tina & Editor, if I started a newspaper and ran the following teasers:

Among journalists, the truth has always been subordinated to petty envy and fictionalized morality tales. Does this have to be the case?

Writers for the New York Times Magazine have been known for putting babies on spikes. We take a hard look at their record of brutality.

Journalists for the major papers have always sympathized with known terrorists. There are occasional exceptions.

The consensus has always been that Tina Rosenberg and her editor don't have the brains of a mosquito between them. Is it possible we will need an electron microscope to find out how small their minds are?

Oh, yeah. There's no bias at the Times. I didn't think Goldberg's book was particularly good, but he might as well write Q.E.D. under this article and go home. Game over. Except the bias isn't so much left as anti-corporate.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson of Bloomberg.com writes good columns on the war and international affairs. The linked column celebrates Pat Buchanan's poor prognosis.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Olympics Spared Despite Patriotism

We are reliably informed by The NYTimes that:

the exuberant American patriotism that might have soured the Olympics did not appear to do so.

Phew, that was close.

For a reading experience chock full of similar bromides, such as:

it is hard to say whether the Salt Lake City version of the Winter Olympic Games ended an era or began one.

and

That protest reminded everyone that the Olympics remain games among nations as well as among athletes.

read the whole thing.

I can just hear the editors: "Somebody slap something together about the olympics - didn't they end yesterday?"

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Reviews Are In

Mark Lilla writes in the New York Times today:

The reviews are in, and they are bad. President Bush's characterization of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil" has been met by our allies' puzzled annoyance and by massive rallies in Iran that only strengthened hard-line elements there. How, one wonders, did the president and his speech writers blunder into this mess?

Apart from objecting to the idea that the only "reviewers" of this speech are timid Eurocrats and Mullahs (althought this fits with the general politics=hollywood theme on today's op-ed - see Dowd), I want to remind Mr. Lilla of the description of his own book, Intellectuals in Politics:

How can intellectuals, who should be most alert to the evils of tyranny, betray the liberal ideals of freedom and independent inquiry? How can they take political positions that, implicitly or not, endorse oppression and human suffering on a vast scale? In profiles of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexander Kojève, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Mark Lilla demonstrates how the convulsions of the twentieth century shaped the political sensibilities of important thinkers who were so deluded by the ideologies of the time that they closed their eyes to brutality, coercion, and state terror.

Along with a conclusing (sic) essay, "The Lure of Syracuse," these case studies show how the classical problem of the relation between philosophy and politics—which found its most profound exploration in Plato's writings on tryanny (sic)—is still with us. Mark Lilla's portraits illustrate how intellectuals who fail to master their passions can be mastered by them instead, and be driven into a political sphere they scarcely understand, with momentous results for our intellectual and political lives.

In the editorial, one of Lilla's points is that the Evil Empire remarks of Ronald Reagan were appropriate because the USSR was indeed an empire, yet the "Axis of Evil" is inappropriate for today's situation because Iran, Iraq and North Korea have few formal ties. A distinction without a difference, I say. These three regimes have a lot in common, including "tyranny, betrayal of liberal ideals of freedom and independent inquiry and oppression and human suffering on a vast scale."

His other point is that Reagan referred to an elite sclerotic bureaucracy in Moscow, while he deems today's and tomorrow's adversaries "networks" (but not "axes").

Our rhetorical response to these new adversaries must therefore be fresh — not least because some future adversaries may turn out to be not states, but transnational networks of disaffected people with global aspirations. To the extent that they represent anyone, it is not a state; it is "the street."

Perhaps so, but they need states to fund and base their operations.

Easy to criticize the speech, Mr. Lilla. What would you have said?

UPDATE: On the topic of "the street", Alex Knapp chooses this Michael Kelly "quote of the day":

"The 'street' in any given Arab country consists of 278 state-sanctioned mullahs already preaching death to the Americans and Jews, five state-controlled newspaper opinion columnists preaching ditto, 577,000 state security officers making sure nobody says anything to the contrary, and 73 million people who would very much like to be living in New Jersey."

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The WSJ Steps in It

Yes, I'm back. I have no air travel stories to tell other than my return flight was delayed by some sort of dispute between a woman in first class wearing a shaggy purple overcoat and her granddaughter in coach (way back) sporting spiky purple hair and multiple face piercings. I got a good look at the latter because she flounced (I love that word) up and down the aisle several times to respond to her grandmother, who commandeered the plane's public address system. It was just as well that the grandmother refused to enter the coach section. I surely would have had a sneezing attack if she brought that purple angora abomination anywhere near my aisle seat.

Enough of that. I return to find that Yesterday's Wall Street Journal has done a Krugmanesque hatchet job on two huge financial institutions. In an article entitled Fannie Mae Enron, the Journal takes on its pet peeve, GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises). In essence, the article is a long Ad Enronum attack on "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac", huge financial entities that make markets in mortgages and were originally created by federal charter.

Readers of this blog will know that I cast a suspicious eye on public enterprises and government guaranties (or, in this case, the appearance of a guaranty). However, it does not logically follow that that any entity with public support is automatically evil. Government control or subsidy creates hazards, the entities in question may or may not fall into these hazards.

The editorial makes several assertions about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among them:

1) "The taxpayers are on the hook" for their debt
2) They borrow, between them, $2.6 Trillion
3) They have such a poor handle on their derivatives borrowing they had to restate their net worth by over $7 billion.
4) Their financial disclosure is sub-standard
5) They have been cutting back on credit insurance
6) They do not disclose the counterparties of their derivatives trade (in addition to the price risk in a derivative their is a risk that the entity on the other side of the contract defaults)
7) They operate under opaque yet lenient risk-based capital rules

The WSJ even suggests congressional hearings on the basis of the above.

The first three of the above arguments are just false. The next four don't stand up very well to scrutiny.

1) There is no government guaranty. There is a perception in the market that the government would support these entities if necessary (probably true) but there is nor formal government guaranty of their debt. The appearance of the guaranty conveys an enormous business advantage to them but doesn't put taxpayers on the hook any more than they are for Citibank.

2) The total debt of FNMA and FRE is $1.3 Trillion, not $2.6 Trillion. If the Journal has used a new method to measure leverage or define debt, they do not describe it.

3) The derivative restatement was a result of adopting new accounting standards (FAS 133). These new standards are, to say the least, controversial, but the comparison between last year's and this year's accounting methods conveys no suggestion of a deterioration in the derivatives positions of either entity.

4) Disclosure levels are a subjective matter. More is always better. Generally speaking, however, analysts view FNMA's disclosure as better than most of the corporate world.

5) There does not appear to be any evidence of a change in credit insurance policy.

6) Few, if any, companies disclose derivative counterparties (generally, those counterparties object to the idea of other traders getting a sense of their book - it ruins the poker game). FNMA discloses the credit rating of all their counterparties by dollar value. Again, pretty good disclosure.

7) Risk-Based Capital Rules attempt to reduce total risk to a few parameters and are therefore easy to criticize. There are plenty of analysts who feel that FNMA and FRE operate under stricter rules than banks, given the demonstrably lower credit risk in their balance sheet.

There is more to criticize on technical grounds, but I think you get the idea.

So most of Wall Street is busy sending out faxes and research reports demonstrating how factually-challenged the editorial is. The Chairman of FNMA even took the unprecedented step of sending out an open letter to analysts and market makers pointing out the above inaccuracies and criticizing the tone of the editorial (I'd link to it, but it's not on their website for some reason). In fact, while this topic will no doubt be a snoozer in blogdom, the WSJ has enraged thousands of inhabitants of its namesake neighborhood.

I'm with my neighbors. This appears to be every bit as bad as the Times' constant Enronization of everything corporate or Republican.

There are many legitimate reasons to question the advantages that GSEs enjoy in the marketplace, as the Journal does every election season. Congress must debate our implicit support of these enormous market players. This attack, however, was not only unnecessary and ill-formed, but unwelcome in an environment of wobbling investor confidence.

UPDATE: Two news stories describing the Chairman's response:
Reuters
CBS Marketwatch

'NOTHER UPDATE: The editorial uses the phrase "lots of leverage and snarkily hedged risk". How does one hedge "snarkily"? Is there such a thing as an "Acerbic Swap"? Was the usual editor on vacation?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Blog Breaks New Mathematical Ground

Sophismata has invented the seventh kind of mathematical proof (previously there were thought to be only six)- the disproof:

..where one tries to prove X but in fact proves NOT X.

Lots of good new stuff here, including an inflation-adjusted list of bankruptcies by size and the perverse logic of seasonal adjustments

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

"Long-Bond" Bob Gets the Hoover Treatment

Have you ever had a milkshake so thick, that when you attempted to pull some up through the straw you felt like your uvula was headed down into the cup, with the rest of your head turning inside out to follow it?

That's what JOSEPH KAHN and ALESSANDRA STANLEY of New York Times must have felt like writing this fawning puff piece on Robert Rubin. It starts out as if it might address his call to the White House about Enron:

Mr. Rubin's call inadvertently gave comfort to the White House and to some conservative commentators, who said it was evidence that it was a prominent Democrat, not Republicans, who backed a government rescue — even though Republicans received most campaign contributions.

But, dagnab it, we just looooove this guy too much!

Mr. Rubin calmly ate a bowl of plain blueberries during a long breakfast interview in his red-and- beige office. Among fly-fishing trophies and official photos, Mr. Rubin hung an engraved chart of all the Treasury secretaries he had reproduced from the original at the Treasury Department. Wearing his customary charcoal suit and white shirt, he is youthfully trim but gives little evidence of overt vanity.

Mr. Rubin — who carries the title at Citigroup of chairman of the executive committee — masks an overpowering intellect behind verbal modesty, hedging his views with a courtier's self-effacement ("Maybe I'm wrong," and "this is just my opinion, for what it is worth," or "this could be a bad idea") in a way that disarms bosses and opponents.

We must also remember that "Long-Bond Bob" is the sensei of the just:

In a year-plus of the Bush administration, his involvement has only intensified as he perceives a threat to the Clinton legacy of fiscal discipline. Seen by some as the wise man of his party, he runs a nonstop tutorial on economic policy, coaching Senator Daschle and other leaders on ways to debunk Bush military spending and tax cuts.

Robert Rubin is in the private sector. He uses his public sector connections to pursue his company's interests (see the bit about his supposedly harmless hobnobbing with Zhu Rongji as well his now famous phone call), attempts to preserve what he regards as his public sector legacy, and pursues his personal beliefs. Until I read this article, I thought that that sort of conduct was evidence of a crime in the Times' view.

Oh, whoops, that's only when you aren't one of the Times Illuminati.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Some Things to Think About; "If We Don't Take It, At Least We Must Control It"

NOTE: Sometimes you realize you buried the lede. The best part of this post, reflecting the most outrageous comment made by pols who don't think they are socialists, is in the last paragraph. Sorry.

I'm off to the in-laws and will not post until Sunday night. Here are some things I think are worth reading, if you haven't already:

1) A new cross-atlantic blog has been established and it looks promising.

2) Glenn Reynold's readers have sent in some excellent letters on who's got the most lopsided pension plan

3) In yesterday's WSJ, there were two articles nearly side-by-side that deal articulately with some of the regulation issues I discussed on Thursday:

Daniel Henninger on Judgement vs. rules

Review & Outlook (link requires subscription):

[the Boxer-Corzine Bill] is paternalism masquerading as investor protection. Millions of employees choose to invest their own money in company stock, and many have become rich doing it. Any Microsoft employee would have lost big by dumping his Microsoft shares for, say, a balanced stock fund. The Boxer-Corzine cap would deprive workers of a chance to profit when times were good and substitute political judgment for employee choice.

Liberal politicians have spent decades telling us that workers should share in corporate ownership. But now after one big bankruptcy they want to tell those same workers they can only own so much. Their idea of the perfect pension system is Social Security, in which politicians decide all of the rules, including what you'll pay in and what you'll get out.

But 401(k)s have flourished in part because Americans are hungry for more retirement choices. The answer to Enron is to give investors more choices, and more information to choose wisely.

Corzine's quotes in the Times today are precious. Here's an important thing to think about - Sometimes the company stock gets to be more than 20% of the plan through market appreciation rather than additional purchases or grants. This is a bad thing? If you have a $1000 401k, and it has 20 $10 shares of company stock, should you have to sell if the company stock goes up a $1? Corzine talks about the elementary principle of diversification, but ignores equally elementary concepts of rebalancing and transaction costs. This is a proposal that will disproportionately hurt smaller plans and younger people. Elitist.

The other rationale for this plan is that since the government "subsidizes" 401k plans, they should be able to tell you what to do with it. Corzine and others have parroted this ridiculous line:

"I believe subsidizing savings to promote retirement security is a good thing," Mr. Corzine said. "But subsidizing risky investments is not. If people want to risk all their investment dollars by placing all their investment in their employer, fine. But they should do it on their own dime, not the taxpayers.' "

Alicia H. Munnell, an economics professor at Boston College, has proposed denying employees the option of buying company stock in 401(k) plans in which the companies' matching contribution is in employer stock. She said, "If employees want to make imprudent investments, they should have to do it outside of the subsidized pension system."

By which they mean to say, "if we don't take your money by force (i.e. tax it), that gives us the right to tell you what to do with it." This is a disgustingly statist sentiment that flies in the face of property rights. Reject it, and its authors, in the name of all that is reasonable.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Hit Referrer Smackdown - Final

Here are two counts from Gostats, which gives me a count by referrer. To be fair, this probably undercounts Mondo guy because Gostats was down for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon. But that just makes reporting it more fun:

5328 http://instapundit.blogspot.com/
11 http://www.antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html

Interpolating from Sitemeter, I think the latter number should probably be in the 60s or so, upper limit 100. My original estimate of a 50X "advantage:Instapundit" was pretty good.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Whose hits are bigger?

I remember when that Mondo guy wrote about "the warbloggers" and challenged Glenn Reynolds to some sort of hit-measuring contest (mine bigger than yours..). I've now been linked by both (and the last instapundit link was ages ago - probably about 10K per day in Glenn's increasing traffic), and I can tell you for a fact that being linked by instapundit creates about 50 times the hits.

What does it all mean? I dunno. My own hits are puny compared to just about anyone, but I make enough new acquaintances to make this strange hobby fun for me - and I don't have to worry about bandwidth. Shoot, I did this for a month without a hit counter and didn't think anyone was looking. Then, all of a sudden, Matt Welch, whom I check in on regularly, mentioned me out of the blue, and I did some time as a "link-slut".

I might as well go on record on the "importance of blogs" issue here while I'm on the subject. Individually blogs are totally unimportant, this one in particular. Cumulatively, I think this is an interesting phenomenon that will begin to change the News Media and, perhaps, media in general. The bloggers I see represent the most avid consumers of news media, and blogging is a change in how they consume. It is a much more interactive way of consuming media. News media will see this change in their marketplace and begin to change how they deliver information - more hard information linked together in one place, more information that can be downloaded and inspected, the talkbacks and news "forums" you already see springing up on the sites of major newspapers. And, of course, we will see the occasional desperate aspiring pundit trolling furiously for whatever hits he/she can get, taking poorly-conceived potshots in the hopes that he/she can build that heretofore elusive audience by becoming the "anti-Sullivan", "antiKaus " or "anti-Postrel".

In sum:

Blogging as a news consumer phenomenon=will spur innovation in news media

Individual blogs like this = not much More Than Zero. Just "For the love of the game..."

UPDATE: Yup, still true. Maybe 75 times as many. Actually, I can only see 10 or so of the last 100 hits that aren't instapundit. Thank you, Glenn, for making MTZ drink from the hit-firehose one more time.

2nd Update: for a visual of the difference, remember the "Behind the Deadlines" link was Wednesday (2/6) morning and Instapundit Thursday (2/7) afternoon, now click here.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Game Theory Addendum

I have some visitors today due to a link from antiwar.com. I have added the following addendum to my game theory post, just to clarify that analysis and morality are two different things, and to make sure that readers understand that the author inserted some thoughts that are not attributable to me....

ADDENDUM - Feb. 6: And here's a note for those of you who are here due to my recent "antiwar" link:

You'll notice several items in the screed you just read that aren't in quotes. That would be because I didn't say them (!). For instance:

1) "there's no real need to worry". There's lots of reason to worry, both because these terrorist states have us in their sights, and because addressing the threat they pose is necessarily a high risk, high stakes game. As some of my articulate correspondents have noted, there are times threats have worked (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and times they have been reduced to meaningless bluster. Hopefully, this time is not one of the latter.

2) "Declaration of war" - there was no declaration of war - at least from our side..

Whether you like it or not, Game theory is a legitimate way to examine geopolitics, taught in graduate schools and discussed in Foreign Affairs and such. Because it is merely an analytical framework, however, it renders no judgement on the actions of the players. It merely attempts to analyze the conditions that lead to success or failure (as determined by each player advancing their own interests) The analysis is amoral, which appears to be what has driven the author to distraction, and he has projected that amorality onto yours truly.

We use tools like this all the time. When one looks at the cost of a social program, or a medical treatment, it is necessary to specify how many lives are saved or improved vs. the cost. In most cases, saving the last life or addressing the last grievance is prohibitively expensive. That doesn't make the analysis moral or immoral, it just means that there is a moral decision to be made once the analysis is done. But it is important to measure the chances of success as well as examine our method of achieving it. History is full of examples of success in advancing interests achieved by immoral means.

If you are interested, another source of power in game theory is coalition-building. Our coalition-building power appears to have been insufficient thus far to combat terrorism and neutralize the threat power advantage of terrorists and terror-sponsoring regimes.

The comparison to Ali and Tyson was made only to illustrate the concept of changing threat power. I can find some agreement with Mr. Raimondo that, in the sphere of international relations, we should not behave like boxers preparing for a fight.

Finally, my reaction to this:

Well, put this in an analytical framework, Andreas – and you too, Ms. Postrel: because Americans do care about their lives, their things, their families, their conventions (otherwise known as morality), public opinion – and their constitutional form of government. Which is why this "crazy man" strategic perspective can only be deployed by a terrorist or a totalitarian.

That's exactly my point, thank you for making it again. These terrorists and thugocracies have one primary source of power - they can live with many awful consequences of their actions and we by definition cannot. A successful war on terrorism would ramp up the cost in their cost/benefit analysis to the point where at least those with some semblance of rationality would choose to pursue their objectives in some other way. We need to experiment and innovate to neutralize the terrorists' advantage.

There are many levers to push in an attempt to increase the perceived costs of aggression against us and our allies, such as sanctions, financial isolation and international pressure. But one cannot deny that the perception that we are willing to use force quickly, and suffer significant costs to ourselves in doing so is one of those levers. We must both threaten and use force with discretion.

A threat that one does not have to make good on is called a "deterrent". I hope we will find deterrents that are both successful and moral in the coming months and years. This is a risky business, fraught with worry - and it was so long before the State of the Union.

One thing about deterrents - if they are successful it's not obvious. I happen to believe the horrible prospect of mutual assured destruction was a net contributor to stability in the latter half of the twentieth century. Since it can only be compared to a hypothetical alternative, and since it is a behavioral theory (like game theory)we cannot prove that.

We will never construct a society or set of rules such that it is no longer necessary to consider how to advance our interests. There is no final state, only progress. However, a dynamic system of free, wealth-generating democracies advancing their interests, can improve everyone's lot.

Also - one quick word defending libertarianism from the antiwar interpretation: Libertarianism allows for limited government. One of government's legitimate roles is to defend our citizens and advance our sovereign interests. I don't see an inconsistency in a libertarian examining and possibly supporting this legitimate role of government. We aren't "antigovernment" (or dare I say "antigovernment.com") we're in favor of limited government.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Labeling Watch

NPR ran a "focus group" segment on the State of the Union. Of all the participants, a group of "voters" from Indiana, the only one that got "labeled" by NPR was dubbed a "Libertarian Republican".

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A goody from the archives

This letter to Matt Welch is a classic:

What should we do about a repressive regime?

Option 1) Military Aid. Obviously wrong. We are providing the weapons that kill the innocent. See Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Reagan-era Iraq, etc.

Option 2) Economic Aid. Wrong. We are financially propping up the regime. See Egypt, Indonesia, etc.

Option 3) Humanitarian Aid. Still Wrong. By relieving the regime of its financial duty to feed its people, we free up their money for military uses. See Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban by providing $43 million in humanitarian aid in exchange for the Taliban not exporting Heroin, thus sacrificing 12 million women to the alter of the failed War on Drugs.

Option 4) Trade / Constructive Engagement. Wrong. This is merely an excuse for US corporations to profit off of the regime's repression of its own people. See China and Reagan-era South Africa.

Option 5) Economic Sanctions. Wrong. The economic sanctions in Iraq have killed 6,000 people a month for the past 11 years, or nearly 800,000 victims of US foreign policy.

Option 6) Military Attack. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! See every military conflict that the United States has every engaged in. (Caveat: There may be a possible exception for the US Civil War, which will be considered obviously justified if you are talking to any white person born in the former Confederacy.)

Option 7) The Prime Directive. Wrong. It is intolerable for the most powerful nation in history to sit by and do nothing while thousands die. It probably stems from a racist lack of concern for people of color of persons of other religions. See Rwanda, Bosnia (not to be confused with Kosovo, which falls under Option 6, above).

Must be Option 8 - Exploit the lack of reasonable alternatives by writing articles for the Gaurdependent and getting interviewed by the Digital Freedom Network.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Krugman and Enron

Andrew Sullivan and Virginia Postrel are going back and forth about Paul Krugman's position at Enron, in light of the positions he's taken in articles like this.

Virginia is right to point out that the New York Times' rules, if applied consistently, will imperil Mr. Krugman's column.

I haven't had time to read the 1999 Krugman piece Andrew Sullivan dug up. But my conclusion is pretty simple. It doesn't mean Krugman's corrupt, it means his judgement is easily clouded. Which, as you all know, is my big problem with him. Krugman obviously understands (understood?) economics, but he too often throws well-supported economic theory out the window if it doesn't serve his partisan pundit agenda.

One other thing - he should have disclosed his involvement in this Op-Ed, although it certainly didn't stop him from criticizing his benefactors.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Economics, punditry and the "blog instinct" meet

Here's another interesting Book Review by David Brooks (of Posner's Public Intellectuals). I was struck, as I read the following, that it seems to throw all my recent blogging topics into a...well a pile, like dirty laundry:

A founder of the theory of law and economics, Posner conceives the world of the commentariat as a market and tries to uncover what economic flaw explains our lousy product. He constructs a supply-and-demand chart as it applies to intellectuals, and helpfully explains:

''Line S represents the supply of that work. It slopes upward to indicate that the cost of supplying public-intellectual services increases with the quantity supplied. The intersection of D and S determines the quantity of public-intellectual services produced (q) and the 'price' (p) in money and other (call it psychic) income that the producers receive.''

This allows him to point out:

''The reduction in the cost of supplying public-intellectual services could be shown in Figure 2.1 by rotating S downward from its intersection with the vertical axis. When this is done, S intersects D at a lower point, implying a lower market price and a greater output.''

In other words, there's an abundance of punditry and it ain't worth shit. Brooks has some fun with that. I especially like Brooks' ending:

In the end Posner is his own best refutation. He is not motivated by any impulse that can be captured through the reasoning of law and economics. No rational actor writes a sloppy book accusing the entire universe of American intellectuals of sloppiness; it's an act of reputational suicide. Posner wrote it, it seems, for the same reason the rest of the public intellectuals write their stuff: because human beings are social creatures who feel compelled to express their ideas. You might as well try to build an economic model to explain prayer. We express ourselves because of who we are, whether we do it on TV or in print or over dinner. Some are good at expressing ideas, some are not so good, and almost all of us, like Richard A. Posner, make asses of ourselves some of the time. Or at least we should.

Call it the "Blog Instinct". Readers of MTZ know they don't have to look far to affirm my agreement on that last point.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Journalistic Ethics Dilemma:Whatd'ya Give This to Me For?

Ron Rosenbaum reviews Adventures With Extremists in the NY Times Book Review today. This is a book I will add to my wish list.

He makes some interesting accusations about how author Jon Ronson may have been used by the nuts he researched to spin their image. One of those nuts was London-based bin Laden sympathizer Omar Bakri, who has called for Tony Blair's assassination (seriously, not like the political assassination desired by the ailing Iain Murray). The extent of the author's involvement with his subject becomes an interesting choice at the end:

Ronson and one of Omar's aides are on the way to deposit money Omar has collected (a serious sum, more than $7,000) on behalf of Hamas, the organization that sponsors suicide bombers who blow up Israelis. Ronson ends the chapter by describing what followed when he was left alone at one point with the money -- implicitly inviting the reader to judge his choice.

''What the hell was I doing, guarding money that would be used to kill the Jews? And then I understood that I had to take the money . . . and make a run for it.'' (Note Woody Allen allusion.) ''How many lives might that save?'' he asks himself. And then he concludes: ''But I didn't do it, of course. I just stood there. And then . . . Omar returned, thanked me for my help and took the money to the bank.''

Ugh. What would you have done?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Another voice on T, G & H.

Matt Welch tips us off to the blog of Harvard Independent editor, Matthew Yglesias, who also noticed the Keller column:

PARTISANSHIP IS BACK -- BIG TIME as the usually dull Bill Keller slams retiring Senate Republicans Thurmond, Gramm, and Helms. I don't have any sympathy for these guys either and I'm glad to see them taken down a notch, but there doesn't seem to be any peg for the story whatsoever. Keller also trots out the "Taliban wing" of the Republican party line that had been gaining popularity in liberal circles before the 11th. The opportunist in me is glad to see it back...

....I strongly considered sending this in to Andrew Sullivan as a Begala Award Nominee, but at the end of the day, I just agree with Keller too much to do it.

Yeah. That's about right, except he forgot to become overwrought about that one sentence that makes an erroneous assumption about regulatory oversight...

Mr. Yglesias is now ad-free by the way. I hope I was first this time. I think it's pretty large for a Yalie to step up for someone from...that place.

Incidentally, I posted on Keller before.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A Meaner, Rougher Times Editorial

In Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H., Bill Keller has provided us with a down-and-dirty anti-eulogy. I'm a little surprised to see a sub-warblog level takedown of Senators Gramm, Thurmond and Helms on the top column of the NYT Op-Ed page:

I'd like to begin the new year by bidding farewell to three men whose departure will raise the median decency of the United States Senate....They will leave behind an institution they have helped appreciably to debase.

OK. I'm all for being direct, and at least two of these three are worthy of ridicule. But Keller doesn't start well:

Senators Helms, Gramm and Thurmond have in common the fact that they harnessed their collective century of seniority to the Taliban wing of the American right. Point to an act of cultural division, bullying unilateralism or anti-government populism committed in the Senate during their decades there and you will usually find these three men among the sponsors.

Ad Talibanum isn't enough, apparently. Towards the end of the argument he commits what I'll call Ad Sopranum:

As the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the past 15 years, and as the mentor of a right-wing mafia within the Republican Party, he (Helms) has been an author of much of what makes the world resentful of America..

Keller's problems with Thurmond are his age and that he's a leering groper who "made congress ridiculous". According to Keller, he's a kind of Sensei of the Packwood/Clinton/Condit school of..er.."swordsmen".

..Senator Thurmond did not invent the role of Washington lecher, but he helped cultivate the men's-club chauvinism in which Bob Packwood and Bill Clinton and Gary Condit operated.

I'll go along with the "ridiculous" part, but I hold the others responsible for their own actions. I didn't see Clinton studying under Thurmond. I did see Thurmond beg a hug from Hilary, which would bother any husband, but that was long after Clinton joined the club.

Keller saves his most dubious accusations for Gramm, pinning the Enron scandal on him before we have any evidence distinguishing Gramm from the rest of the congress.

One of Senator Gramm's most generous benefactors was Enron, which lavished money on his campaigns and paid his wife handsomely as a corporate director. Senator Gramm, in turn, had a hand in legislation that exempted Enron's explosive energy derivatives business from government regulation and oversight. How big a hand, and whether that legislation enabled the secret funny business that led to the company's collapse, may emerge in one of the many investigations under way. Enron's business was built on the premise that just about anything could be turned into a commodity and bought and sold. The beleaguered little taxpayers who lost their jobs and pensions in the Enron fiasco will be interested to know whether that included their senator.

Well, they'd also be interested to know if Bill Keller was involved, but don't you think it's a bit premature? For that matter, does deregulating an industry automatically convey approval of fraud? That's a bit of a stretch Bill, don't you think?

Oh, right, I forgot. It's the private sector. They're all criminals by definition. So every financial company starts scheming to rob us blind the minute the government stops warehousing a brand new set of "examiners" in their offices for a month every year and then sending them the bill. (Yes folks, that's how it works, ask an insurance executive).

Whatever the Times paid Keller for that article, it was too much. A shame, too, because Thurmond and Helms provide pretty rich material. Get yourself a Blogger account, Bill, and try to compete.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

German Bloggers

Thomas Nephew'sNewsrack Blog is reviewing the world of German Weblogs. He uncovers an unfortunate proto-warblogger who gets gazumped by the mainstream press.

Thomas also keeps an excellent list of links on Iraq Sanctions (Matt).

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The End of "The End of"

Proclaiming "the end of" things is an occupational hazard for professional pundits. I guess it makes them more exciting to read, and easier for us to call them out as Pollyannas or Chicken Littles. Consider these two columns, which appear on the same day on the conservative forum "Town Hall":

Mark Tapscott - Is Media Bias Headed for the Ash Heap of History?:

By itself, Goldberg’s fascinating book might not mean much beyond a season of frequently heated interviews of its author by former colleagues and perhaps a bit of fleeting newsroom soul-searching. Viewed in conjunction with recent events and trends, however, Bias could be another sign of a revolution that is reshaping America’s newscape. Put another way, the end of the Liberal Media Establishment could be right around the corner.

Paul Craig Roberts - Daschle assaults majority rule:

The United States is on the verge of one party rule. Democrats believe fervently in their agenda and are willing to take risks in its behalf. Republicans believe in scarcely anything but compromise. Obviously, the stronger will of the Democrats gives them the edge. Republicans are willing to stand up to Democrats only when Republicans have supermajorities behind them.

Republicans will never again have a supermajority. The Democrats have imported an electorate that supports them. Our country has been flooded with tens of millions of poor uneducated immigrants from Third World countries who vote Democrat because of the income support programs the party champions. Republicans represent taxpayers who are now outvoted by poor immigrants and special interest groups dependent on tax revenues.

Republicans stood aside for 35 years while Democrats used immigration to refurbish their political base for class warfare. Only next time around, the warfare will be much nastier -- as the class differences are now racial differences.

Republicans will collapse, because whites have been demonized. In the demonology of Cultural Marxists who dictate the agenda of the Democratic Party, the "white race" is the real world equivalent to the Dark Lord Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings."

Both columns make excellent points. Tapscott is convincing about market pressures on mainstream media, and Roberts points out the underreported extremism (althought the Times would call it "bipartisan") of Daschle's novel interpretation of the constitution.

Those points aside, is it necessary or wise to predict the end of the world as we know it? Let a little time pass, and pointing out that these guys' predictions were as wrong-headed as, say, Arthur Schlesinger's, will be like shooting fish in a barrel.

NOTE ON DASCHLE: Chicken Little aside, Roberts is right on target about Daschle. How anyone can refer to Republican initiatives as extremist and partisan, and not cry "foul" at Daschle's new supermajority requirement is totally beyond me. Go read it. And thanks Kevin Whited, for pointing out a National Review article on the same subject.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Quoting Quindlen in a Querilous Daze

Anna Quindlen's remembrance of the World Trade Center is over the top. She seems to think that living through this event makes boomers like us the Greatest Generation:

The Twin Towers were as much creatures of the baby boom as we, conceived in hubris in the halcyon days after World War II, developed during the optimistic ’60s, launched in the ’70s, bigger, better, more. The children whose progress mirrored the towers’ own were forever young, a generation who had neither the tests of mettle of their predecessors, who knew about war shortages and bread lines, nor even the shadowed existence of their own children. The last generation of kids to ride bikes without helmets or pagers, we had childhoods before crime and sex before AIDS. We believed drugs could be recreational and drinking social and the great formative trauma for those who evaded Vietnam was waiting in long lines for gas. What a charmed, deluded life we led!

"Conceived in hubris in the halcyon days." Don't you love it?

No misanthropy in this column, but a whole lot of strange and atmospheric babbling, and way too many one-word sentence/inventories:

Gone: that is what death is. Disappeared. Erased. In its usual places the beloved object cannot be found. Rector Street. West Street. Park Place. The skyscrapers all around make the vast hole seem larger and more unnatural. Without the behemoths at their center they seem strangely denuded and vulnerable, or perhaps that is only projection on my part. The spire of Trinity Church seems taller now without the Trade Center as its foil. The rounded headstones in the old churchyard behind its iron fence, worn and blurred by the passage of time, are instructive.

Boring. That's what uninteresting is. Not holding interest. Reading column. No point. Depressed. Metaphors and similes compare things to other things. How young I was before I started reading this column....sigh.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Jacobs on Klein

Joanne Jacobs, who still eschews permanent links, slams Naomi Klein.

Bjoern Staerk unearthed an odd column by Naomi Klein, who seems to think everything -- the Cold War, Islamic terrorism, computers -- is about shopping. Which --unlike evil -- is evil.

In her world, nobody wants a new sweater without ineptly darned holes in it. No, we sheeplike consumers go to the mall in search of mythical grandeur, ideological victory, metaphor and meaning. Not a navy blue crew neck on sale.

During the Cold War, consumption in the U.S. wasn't only about personal gratification; it was the economic front of the great battle. When Americans went shopping, they were participating in the lifestyle that the Commies supposedly wanted to crush. When kaleidoscopic outlet malls were contrasted with Moscow's grey and barren shops, the point wasn't just that we in the West had easy access to Levi's 501s. In this narrative, our malls stood for freedom and democracy, while their empty shelves were metaphors for control and repression.

But when the Cold War ended and this ideological backdrop was yanked away, the grander meaning behind the shopping evaporated.

Leaving us with a wide choice of goods at affordable prices.