nutshells

Romney and Gingrich are a world apart, from the rest of us

2012-01-24T06:13:00.000-10:00

In January 2012 we are in the midst of finding a Republican challenger to President Obama for the election cycle of 2012. What we know from the most recent revelations of the two front running Republican candidates, who both released their tax returns to public scrutiny is that the two men leading the Republican race to become a Presidential candidate now live in a world that is essentially and practically removed from the reality of life for more than 99% of their fellow American citizens. The income of the much poorer candidate, former U.S. House Speaker "Newt" Gingrinch was $3.1 million last year. The richer candidate, "Mitt" Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts, and former President of Bain Capital Company, had an income of about $4.7 million last year and $6 million the year before.

The average family of four in the United States has taxable income of about $47,000. The top ten percent of incomes in the United States begin at about $114,000 a year and the top 1% of stated income in the United States begins at about $380,000 a year. The poorer of the current top two Republican candidates has a stated income of nearly ten times as much as it takes to get into the top 1% of all American income earners this year.

Neither of the two richest people seeking the Republican nomination for President has, since gaining an income even close to theirs, had to worry about feeding their family, taking care of an ailing family member or friend, buying a car, paying their basic mortgage, borrowing enough money to help a child go to school, or finding a way to help a grown child go into business.

Mr. Romney has had an income on the level he reports now for about twenty years. Mr. Gingrich, who had a position of extraordinary power in Washington, D.C. as Speaker of the House of Representatives, only recently began to cash in his position for money, and his level of income did not rise into the millions until a few years ago.

The rest of us might make the kind of money these gentlemen make in one year over our entire working life, and none of us who earn an average American income will ever get to keep any of the money, except, perhaps in the form of a house and several cars along the way. The money these men have been paid is sufficient to meet most of their wildest expectations with plenty to spare for saving to spend on some future rainy day. They are, of course, welcome to their money, and, unless they got it through illegal means, are entitled to do anything they want with the money. Their success is lauded by us all, and we all hope to have the same kind of monetary success they have had. I am sure they have worked very hard to get where they are.

They are not, however, Americans in any real sense that the other 99.5% of us are. They are exceptional. The gulf that separates them from us is one that defies our commoner's understanding. We will have to wait until the election season is over to find out just what that means to the American people who do not share the wealth these men now take for granted. We have elected many of our rulers from their ranks before. We have done so out of a deep seated belief that if they have that much money, they won't need to steal what little we have. Let us all hope that belief has some basis in fact.

2011-10-19T09:09:00.002-10:00

Why Occupy Wall Street will fail

12:01 AM ET 10/19/11 | Marketwatch

RELATED QUOTES

BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- The public has every reason to be angry at what's going on in this country, and every reason to protest. But will the Occupy Wall Street crowd succeed in changing anything?

Don't count on it.

Here are four reasons why I think these protests are doomed to fail.

1. They are in the wrong place.

Why are they down in Lower Manhattan? Do they think that's where the power -- and the money -- really is? Folks: When people talk about "Wall Street," it's just a figure of speech.

Even in the days of J.P. Morgan Sr., the real action didn't take place in the company offices at 60 Wall Street. It took place in the old man's library, uptown.

These days the real movers and shakers aren't near Zuccotti Park. They're out in places like Greenwich, Conn., home of the hedge-fund honchos.

I called the town offices there to see if they'd had any protests.

"Oh, no," said the polite young man who answered the phone, his tone somewhat surprised. "There's been nothing like that here."

In Boston, the protesters have formed a tent city right outside South Station. Because, you know, all those super-rich tycoons who secretly control America come in to the city to work each morning. By subway.

It's hopeless. You'd think these people would be occupying wealthy suburbs out west.

Or they'd be moving down south to "Occupy Palm Beach" for the winter. Instead they're in the wrong place.

2. They don't have an agenda.

And they can't. Talk about a herd of cats. Occupy Boston is a camp of about 100 tents, and on a brief walk through I noticed posters, placards and stickers for 911 "truthers," anarchist-communists, "Jewish Labor," "stop the marijuana laws," "stop the U.S. war against Islam," and so on. One sign denounced a new school project in Wilmington.

Tough to rope all this into a 10-point plan. Or a 100-point plan. Sorry, but it's reminding me of the days watching the old University Left crowd. Right down to the bad sweaters and the vegan cooking.

In Boston one man sat on a deck chair with a sign that simply declared, "Financial markets always make bubbles and crashes." Is this the Minskyist front? For all I know, he was a money manager on a lunch break. Famed Boston investor Jeremy Grantham, who's been making the same point about bubbles and crashes for years, has his offices about 100 yards away.

You want to group these people into an agenda? How?

3. The weather's going to turn.

It's been unseasonably warm and dry out there. Wait until the temperature drops and the rain comes. Wait till the first frost.

According to weather.com, the average lows drop to 42 degrees for the month of November and 32 in December. Good luck with that.

These protesters made a couple of big strategic errors.

The first is that they started over the summer, leaving themselves just a couple of months till the cold weather turns. They should have started in the spring.

They've been lucky so far, but it won't last. <="" internet="">

The second is that they made it an outside camping event. I still don't understand it. You can hold a protest march at any time. People can show up, protest, and then go home for a hot meal, a shower and a good night's sleep in their own bed. Net result: Lots of people can take part. But how many people can -- or want to -- camp out in downtown Manhattan for three months?

Especially after Halloween.

When the cold and rain comes, a lot of people are going home. And then the opponents of Occupy Wall Street will declare victory.

4. Money talks.

Actually, these days it shouts, and it will drown out whatever anyone else says. The 2010 Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling has opened the floodgates to unlimited spending on elections by anybody, anytime, including, of course, any corporation.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, there are now 156 Super Political Action Committees that have taken advantage of the ruling. Political operative Mark McKinnon told me last week that he expects them to raise about a billion dollars, mostly anonymously.

The amount of corporate spending, he said, was "absolutely pornographic." (This, I might add, was from someone who worked for the Bush-Cheney campaigns of 2000 and 2004)

So many optimists believe the new media world of the Internet and Facebook and Twitter puts more power in the hands of "the people." I'm afraid I am a deep pessimist. I think instead we've created a world of mass attention-deficit disorder, and easy distraction -- and the real power now lies in the hands of propagandists of every stripe.

According to the U.S. Labor Department, there are now 226,000 public relations "specialists" in America. That's five spin doctors for every professional reporter still employed. I can't think of a statistic that depresses me more.

But here's the good news. If you really think the banks have a free hand to make money at the expense of the rest of us, you can just go out and buy their stocks and make a fortune.

After all, they've collapsed. Bank of America (BAC) has halved since the start of the year. At $6.70, the shares are trading at a third of book value (says FactSet), about where they were at the absolute lows in March 2009. (Bank of America just reported $6.2 billion net income in the third quarter, returns on average equity of 22%, and Tier One capital -- a measure of balance sheet strength -- up to a decent 11.5%. Make of it what you will).

Citigroup (C) has lost a third of its value this year.

Even the vampire squid itself has covered its stockholders in red ink. Goldman Sachs (GS) stock has lost a third of its value this year. It's trading below book value.

Contrarians, ho! According to the most recent surveys, big institutional money managers are massively underweight bank stocks. They won't touch them with a 10-foot pole. They're terrified. This is often a contrarian buying indicator. Not always, but often. If you really do think these guys have the government in their pocket, it should be a one-way bet.

How to Take Away the American Dream

2011-03-11T03:38:00.000-10:00

12:01 AM ET 3/11/11 | Marketwatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- This country is a mess: Twenty million people can't find a decent job. Twenty million live in a home that's worth less than what they owe on it. Forty-three million can't afford to eat without handouts from the government. Health care is increasingly expensive and humiliating. Retirement is out of reach. Our bridges and roads are crumbling. Our children aren't learning.

But there's one group that's doing just fine: the capitalists, you know, the people who own just about everything, the people we work for, shop for, die for.

Things look pretty good from where they sit, which is on a mountain of cash. The stock market is way up. Profits are soaring. Their incomes and wealth took a hit from the Great Recession, but they've weathered the storm pretty well.

Best of all, the capitalists -- and the corporations they own and run -- have captured our governments, and are bending our public institutions to their will.

You see it everywhere, from Washington to Madison, where so-called fiscal conservatives are mounting a highly visible attack on government spending. I say "so-called fiscal conservatives" because it's increasingly clear that their attacks have little to do with balancing budgets and a whole lot to do with weakening federal, state and local governments and turning them into wholly-controlled subsidiaries of the corporations.

We know they aren't serious about balancing budgets, because every time they have a chance to vote for lower taxes, they take it, regardless of the impact on the budget.

It's blindingly obvious in Wisconsin, where Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans in the Legislature have dropped the sham argument that busting public unions is necessary to save money. By pulling the union-busting provisions out of the budget fix bill and passing a stand-alone bill, Walker and his allies have admitted that destroying the unions isn't a budget issue, but a political one.

Unions are some of the few institutions left that can counter the power of corporations in the workplace or in the political sphere. Therefore, they must be eliminated. Stamping out unions is just one more skirmish in the class war that the capitalists, the corporations and their allies in both parties have been waging for 30 years.

It's not just Madison. Here in Washington, corporations have been getting their way for years. They haven't won every battle, but they've come out on top more often than not.

For example, the financial companies lobbied hard to get Congress to deregulate their industry. And then, when that deregulation helped cause the greatest financial crisis in 100 years, the banks and shadow banks lobbied hard to get Congress to bail them out. They made sure that the public paid for the crisis, and that the banks, their top executives and their owners suffered as little discomfort as possible.

And when it came time to re-regulate Wall Street, those same industries made sure the Dodd-Frank Act was as weak as possible. The big banks could have been broken up and made safe. But they weren't. They are still too big to fail, and when they inevitably pull the same stupid stunts again that will imperil the global economy, they'll be bailed out again.

The few provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act that could cause the banks some pain -- such as the Volcker rule on derivative trading, or the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- are going to be impotent by the time the lobbyists write the rules.

Which brings me back to the faux budget cuts being championed by the Republicans in Congress. Sprinkled in among the cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Planned Parenthood are deep reductions in agencies that watch over corporations and make sure they don't get away with murder.

The Republicans' bill hacks away at funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the USDA's food inspection unit, and the Food and Drug Administration.

Does anyone honestly believe that we spend too much money preventing fraud on Wall Street or keeping contaminated food off the grocery shelves?

The amount of money being saved by gutting these programs is a pittance when viewed in the context of a $3 trillion budget, but it's a huge present to the corporations for whom maximizing profits is the only thing that matters.

Corporations don't just want to be free from regulations; they also want to profit by taking over the provision of public services.

Republican governors are pushing to sell as much of the government apparatus as they can to their corporate friends. Public roads, prisons, parks, schools, welfare agencies, water systems, and power plants are being privatized to raise cash, regardless of the long-term costs to the public.

In Washington, capitalists run Congress, the Fed, the independent agencies, and much of the executive branch. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has more to say at the Supreme Court than Justice Clarence Thomas does. And corporate control of our national government will only expand after the Citizens United decision that allows almost unlimited corporate money to dominate our elections.

Don't get me wrong: I think capitalists and corporations have a vital role to play in our economy, I just don't think they should have complete control over all aspects of our lives. Without the countervailing power of unions or democratically-elected governments, corporations will be able to keep us docile, powerless and divided.

Then the corporations will have achieved their goal of the perfect banana republic, where everyone's duty is to the corporate bottom line. And if that bottom line says you must lose your job, or burden yourself with debt, or choke on toxic air? In the immortal words of John Boehner, "so be it."

The Health Care Summit

2010-02-26T13:30:00.000-10:00

The always pretentious Lamar Alexander, once Governor of Tennessee, now a Republican Senator from there, told us in his most polite and smarmy, 'I can get along with everyone because I am an two faced lying sack of shit voice', that there is basically little chance of coming to an agreement between Democrats and Republicans on a health care package, because Republicans want to make incremental changes to a perfectly good health care system we already have, and Democrats want to create a massive new Communist monolith controlled by a ravening set of government bureaucrats, and we already proved that wouldn't work because "we fail at the big things", like Social Security and School Lunches....

The show went on for hours, and it was a great treat to watch President Obama sit attentively listening as if interested to the legion of Republican critics and the horde of Democratic cheerleaders. With few exceptions, everyone sounded kind of reasonable, if you ignore the Senator Coburn from Oklahoma comments about 17% of the 30% of health care costs that are government controlled medicine spending, that is Medicaid and Medicare, being wasted through fraud. And his contention that half of the tests given by medical practitioners are not done to help along the process of healing but to avoid predatorial lawsuits by mass tort attorneys.

At the end, Senator Mitch McConnel of Kentucky, the richest guy in the US Senate, told reporters outside the White House that this was not a waste of time, then repeated exactly what he had said going into the White House in the morning -- The American People don't want health care reform, don't want a public option and now, they don't want anything done in the US Senate through the "little known" procedure called "reconciliation" --- so little known is that procedure that he was able to tell us that exactly 53% of the American people don't want it...

Economics of a Hopeful Land...by "Innocent Bystander"

2009-10-04T15:38:00.000-10:00

t is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted.

It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town.

He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.

The Butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower.

The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with hope and equanimity...

Pretention and an apology

2009-09-26T07:06:00.000-10:00

I got an anonymous fan mail in June on this blog. It said, "What a pretentious puke you are. Have you ever worked for a living?"

The comment about pretension was pretty clear, and certainly warranted. I at least sound stilted most of the time, even if I try not to. I think it is English as a second language syndrome, but maybe it is just affectedness and pretension.

What I did not understand was the comment about work. I work my ass off, but I work also at not displaying how hard I work. I think a lot of people in America might do this, since so many make their work seem effortless to others.

I am sorry, truly, to seem or be pretentious, for I certainly have nothing about which to pretend, or whatever the proper verb for that may be.

I don't make anonymous posts on other people's blogs, so my pretension may be slightly better than your cowardice.

Pointing out a small problem with your policy...

2009-05-16T07:49:00.000-10:00

February 27, 2009 03:28 PM
Subject: Re: Account terms (fees, APR, etc.)
Message: Dear Mr. Williams,

Thanks for contacting us about your Capital One account. Currently, it’s
our policy not to lower annual percentage rates (APRs), so we’re unable
to grant your request.

We determine the different fees and rates for each of our products
depending on the services we include and the markets where we offer
them. We continually review our rates to assess their competitiveness.
If we determine in the future that a change is appropriate, we’ll let
you know.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Sincerely,

Capital One Services, LLC.

Original Message Follows:
------------------------
Account ending in: 1919

Your interest rates are usurious, even if you can get away with them.

-----------------------------------

Overcompensation. When too much is just incomprehensible.

2009-04-05T18:00:00.000-10:00

I want to believe that President Obama has a chance of righting the economic vessel that overturned during the past administration's watch, but the officers in charge of controlling his salvage operations seem to be the same guys that created the problems...

Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council (a former President of Harvard University whose quaint but widely misquoted notion that women are not genetically suited for math and science lost him that job), and Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury (a former New York Federal Reserve Bank President willing to pay his back taxes to get the job at Treasury, unless they happen to be excused by the statute of limitations) will be responsible for determining whether certain Wall Street and banking industry executives keep their job, and whether others are being overpaid for their jobs.

Lawrence Summers received about $5.2 million over the past year in salary and other compensation from being a partner at hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

The firms that paid Summers speaking fees include J.P. Morgan Chase.
That bank offered the former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary $67,500 for a February 1, 2008 engagement.
J.P. Morgan Chase has received $25 billion in government bailout funds.

Citigroup paid Summers $45,000 for a speech in March 2008 and another $54,000 for a speech that May.
Citigroup has received $50 billion in taxpayer help.

Goldman Sachs paid Summers $135,000 for a speech on April 16, 2008 and another $67,500 for a speech on June 18, 2008.
Goldman Sachs has received $10 billion in bailout funds.

Mr. Summers was a very busy private speaker last year:
Here is a list of his speaking engagements and the fees he was paid:

Itinera Institute, $62,876 (1/8/2008)
Skagen Funds, $60,300, (1/9/2008)
Skagen Funds, $60,300, (1/10/2008)
Skagen Funds, $59,400, (1/11/2008)

JP Morgan, $67,500, (2/1/2008)

Citigroup, $45,000 (3/3/2008)

Associon de Bancos de Mexico, $90,000, (4/3/2008)
Goldman Sachs Co., $135,000, (4/16/2008)
Lehman Brothers, $67,500, (4/17/2008)
State Street Corporation, $45,000, (4/18/2008)

American Express, $67,500 (5/7/2008)
Siguler Guff & Company, $67,500, (5/7/2008)
Hudson Institute, $10,000, (05/28/2008)
Citigroup, $54,000, (5/30/2008)

Investec Bank, $157,500, (6/13/2008)
Goldman Sachs, $67,500, (6/18/2008)

Lehman Brothers, $67,500, (7/30/2008)

Pricewaterhouse Coopers, $67,500 (9/9/2008)
Tata Consultance Services, $67,500, (9/21/2008)

State Street Corporation, $112,500, (10/2/2008)
American Chamber of Commerce In Argentina, $135,000 (10/7/2008)
McKinsey and Company, $135,000, (10/19/2008)

Charles River Ventures LLC, $67,500, (11/112008)

Presidential Memorandum of March 20, 2009

Section 2 Avoiding Funding of Imprudent Projects ...(e) Funds under the Recovery Act....may not be used by any State of local government, or any private entity for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool...

I would like to add, "or speeches from Lawrence H. Summers".

At least someone who makes $67,500 twice in a day for making speeches must certainly understand what "unreasonable compensation" means.

A sobering view of college life in the nation's capital

2008-11-27T16:12:00.000-10:00

The harsh realities of student life in the nation's capital...

George Washington University Alcohol Violations

Academic year 2007 August-December 2007

source Amy D'onofrio Staff Writer The Hatchet

The University Police Department crime log lists 252 liquor law violations since the beginning of the academic year. This is up from 142 such violations in fall 2006.
12/6/2007 The Hatchet Amy D'Onofrio

Profitcafe. So many Gondwana Nuts: a few days in the past couple of months

2008-05-25T14:28:00.000-10:00

Profitcafe. So many Gondwana Nuts: a few days in the past couple of months

Benefits of Being a Public Servant

2008-05-02T05:43:00.002-10:00

This week, the New York Times ran an article outlining a perquisite of being a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives or a U.S. Senator: the taxpayers will
pay for the lease and fuel tax for a motor vehicle, so that you can drive around your
district, or to and from work.

Benefits of being a Public Servant

2008-03-06T00:28:00.001-10:00

New York City and why it might be difficult for you to find a parking space...

About 59,000 police and auxiliary officers and civilian employees are eligible to receive New York City parking placards, and the Police Department has issued about 50,000 of them.
An inventory has found that the city has given out at least 142,000 free parking permits to public employees and others.

Base line for evaluating government: Is the water drinkable?

2007-12-05T18:08:00.000-10:00

Where death by water is part of daily life

Drive to improve sanitation is the key to educational and economic progress

- Larry Elliott, economics editor
- The Guardian,
- Monday November 26 2007

Charles Dickens would have felt at home in the streets of Dhaka. The barefoot children waiting for their mothers and sisters to come home from the textile mills; the chimneys of the brick factories, like a throwback to the pages of Bleak House, vaguely visible in the smog. And the stench.

Like Victorian London, the shanty towns of Bangladesh's capital reek of excrement dropped from makeshift hanging toilets perched precariously on bamboo stilts a couple of metres above the mire. Bangladesh is the object of the world's pity this week as it deals with the cyclone that killed more than 3,000 people. Yet when the TV appeals are over, when attention has switched to another country stricken by flood, famine or earthquake, the stench of raw sewage will remain. And it will still be the second biggest killer of children after respiratory illnesses: 200 perish every hour as a result of living conditions that would cause an outcry if they occurred in the west and should cause an outcry because they are allowed to happen anywhere.

With our flushing toilets and mains drainage, it's hard to recall that London was once Dhaka when it came to sanitation. The Great Wen, the fast-growing metropolis that was the hub of the British empire in the mid-19th century, could not cope with the pace of urbanisation. Cesspits overflowed into the homes of the poor and the Thames ran sluggishly with raw sewage.

In 1858, a particularly hot summer, MPs got a whiff of the problem as the Great Stench, as it was called, wafted through the mother of parliaments. In less than three weeks, the government had commissioned Sir Joseph Bazalgette to develop a new sewage system that prevented toilet waste from going into the river or accumulating near homes.

The results were instant. People stopped dying of cholera and typhoid, and when there was an even larger investment in sanitation in the 1890s it produced the biggest drop in infant mortality ever seen in Britain. That was then. Last week, the United Nations launched its year of sanitation to mark the fact that 2.6 billion people - almost half the world's population - still live in insanitary conditions considered repugnant and intolerable by the Victorians.

Yet perhaps because we in the west take clean water and sanitation for granted, providing septic tanks and u-bends have never quite had the emotional appeal of starving babies, HIV/Aids patients and children desperate to go to school.

Sanitation is such a low priority that when the UN drew up its list of millennium development goals to be achieved by 2015, ensuring that the children of slum dwellers in Dhaka could go to the toilet without endangering their lives did not feature among them.

After pressure from charities such as WaterAid, the UN later agreed to set a target for halving the number of people without access to clean water and sanitation, but on current trends the target will not be achieved until more than half a century later. Rich countries have promised to double assistance by 2010 but have yet to deliver - spending on water and sanitation has actually fallen.

WaterAid says much of the extra spending on education will be wasted if children with diarrhoea are too sick to go to school or if girls take one week off in a month because there are no facilities for them to menstruate with modesty. Every dollar spent on sanitation leads to $9 of returns in health - a stupendous return on investment.

Shift in attitudes

Britain is one of the few countries to make a priority of water and sanitation and has supported the military-backed government in Bangladesh in its attempt to provide 100% access to sanitation not by 2015 but by 2010. It's a real challenge, not out in the rural areas, but in Dhaka, where the pressures of being one of the world's fastest growing cities push the slums further and further out each year

Abul Barkat, economics professor at the University of Dhaka, says what is happening in the city is not so much urbanisation as slumisation; he is sceptical about official figures showing that sanitation coverage has increased from 33% in 2003 to 84% today.

Paul Edwards, who works for Unicef in Bangladesh, agrees, noting that not all the toilets would qualify as providing decent sanitation, since many lack a seal between the pit and the external environment. "But I'm fairly confident that there has been a shift in attitudes. People want to own their own toilets."

The government's first attempt at increasing coverage for sanitation was a failure; it committed scarce resources from its budget, bought the sanitary hardware, delivered it across the country, and then saw nothing happen.

Things only started to change once power was devolved to a lower level, raising awareness of the benefits of sanitation at a community level and obliging every family, no matter how poor they were, to make a contribution, perhaps through free labour, to the installation of their own toilet. Richer families subsidised poor ones, and children were mobilised to put pressure on anybody who decided that the new-fangled latrines were no match for defecating in the open. In a village close to Jamalpur, a five-hour drive from Dhaka, there is now 100% sanitation coverage. Women, in particular, say having their own toilets has given them privacy, safety and better health for their children. Laily Begum, a mother of three, says: "The children used to suffer badly with diarrhoea. Now there is no diarrhoea, no sickness. In the past many of us were frightened to go out when it was dark for fear of being attacked."

In the cities, the scale of the task is much more daunting. Dhaka has only one reticulated sewage treatment plant covering a quarter of the city's estimated 12 million population. Chittagong, with the same size population as Chicago, doesn't have one at all.

Expertise

The ever-present danger is of water supply being contaminated by human waste, particularly since the country is vulnerable to weather patterns associated with climate change.

Jan Moller Hansen, of the Danish embassy, said: "Dhaka is expanding faster than the ability of the city to cope. But it's not a lack of technical expertise, it's a question of policies, institutions and financial resources."

In Britain, action was speeded up by demands from the private sector, but Mohammed Sabur, WaterAid's director in Bangladesh, said: "In Britain, the factory owners wanted healthy workers. Here, if 100 workers are sick there are 200 to take their place. The only company likely to exert pressure for better sanitation here is Unilever, so that they can sell more soap."

That vacuum needs to be filled - by western governments and by aid organisations - and not just for Bangladesh but for all the even poorer countries in sub-Saharan Africa where sanitation is not a government priority. The alternative is to hold our noses and pretend it isn't happening.

larry.elliott@guardian.co.uk

Dirty facts

2.6bn The number of people worldwide who live in insanitary conditions

200 The number of children killed every hour from water-borne diseases

12m Number of people in Dhaka served by one reticulated sewage plant

84% Official figures of sanitation coverage in Bangladesh todayA countr

Insurance companies want tort reform

2007-11-19T17:36:00.000-10:00

The hue and cry to limit damage awards in tort cases is so compelling sometimes...especially when silly awards like that one where the old lady got $2.9 million dollars for spilling a cup of McDonald's coffee in her lap...

so, why doesn't Walter Winchell tell us, the rest of the story about that?

By Jason M. Kroot, Winter 2007

The McDonald’s coffee case is arguably the most often cited example of a “frivolous lawsuit.” Most recall the lawsuit involved a women who spilled hot coffee on her lap and was awarded $2.9 million dollars, which made headlines around the world. This case is the poster child of the tort reform movement. Proponents argue this case demonstrates how a frivolous lawsuit resulted in an outrageously runaway jury verdict. However, what makes this case fascinating is what the media failed to report — information which may paint a very different picture.

On February 27, 1992, seventy-nine year old Stella Liebeck ordered a cup of coffee at a local McDonald’s drive thru. After placing the cup off coffee between her legs, she attempted to remove the lid to add some cream and sugar. While doing so, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap, including the groin area between her legs. Because of her location in a car seat, she sat in a puddle of scalding hot liquid for over 90 seconds. Stella was taken to the hospital with third degree burns between her thighs, on her groin, and between her buttocks. She remained in the hospital for eight days which included painful skin grafts involving the most private parts of her body.

After suit was filed, Stella’s attorney learned McDonald’s heated its coffee at 180 to 190 degrees. The boiling part of water is 212 degrees. Evidence was presented that lowering coffee temperature just 20 degrees lower would have prevented Stella’s third degree burns. Evidence was also presented that McDonald’s was aware of over 700 prior reports of people being burnt with their coffee for which had resulted in prior settlements. Initially, Stella only sought $20,000 to cover her medical expenses which was promptly rejected by McDonalds.

After listening to all the evidence, the jury found McDonald’s was 80% responsible for the incident and that Stella was 20% at fault. The jury ultimately awarded Stella $160,000 in compensatory damages. The jury also awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages based on the McDonald’s prior knowledge of the dangers surrounding its 180 degree plus coffee and its failure to provide sufficient warning to consumers.

Perhaps most notably, the reduced the jury’s award to $480,000 in punitive damages. Accordingly, the ultimate award against McDonald’s was never $2.9 million. Instead, the ultimate award in the McDonald’s coffee case was $640,000. Nevertheless, most of us simply recall that some women was given $2.9 million dollars for spilling coffee on her lap. For those advocating tort reform, it is ironic this case is the most cite example of why “tort reform” is needed to “fix our civil justice system.”

Public Service Announcement from U.S. Treasury Department

2007-11-07T14:25:00.000-10:00

The following advisory is directly quoted November 7, 2007 from the website of the United States Department of the Treasury website:

CUBA TRAVEL ADVISORY
WARNING: TOUR PACKAGES FOR SCUBA DIVING,
BICYCLING, HUNTING, FISHING, HIKING OR
OTHER TOURIST TRAVEL IN CUBA ARE ILLEGAL

It has come to the attention of the Office of Foreign Assets
Control (“OFAC”) that certain specialty tours to Cuba that are
offered by travel agencies in third countries are marketed to
U.S travelers as being in compliance with the prohibitions of
the U.S. embargo against Cuba. These trips are usually designed
for individuals with an interest in outdoor activities, such as
scuba diving, bicycling, hunting or fishing. The sales material
often maintains that because the traveler prepays the third
country travel agency for expenses that otherwise would be paid
by the traveler while within Cuba, such as hotels, meals, ground
transportation, equipment rental and services, etc., this type
of trip is in compliance with the applicable U.S. regulations on
travel-related transactions involving Cuba that apply to persons
subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
This advisory is to alert U.S. travelers who participate in such
trips that engaging in prepaid arrangements for travel
expenditures otherwise prohibited by the Cuba Assets Control
Regulations, 31 CFR Part 515 (the “Regulations”), will expose
travelers to the possibility of civil monetary penalties from
OFAC. [Return to the OFAC directory and click on the button
marked LEGAL to see a copy of the Regulations.]
A Cuban vacation package that is prepaid by U.S travelers
through a travel agency located in a third country does not
qualify as “fully-hosted” travel as described in the
Regulations. This is true regardless of the type of currency
that is used to purchase the package tour. This type of trip is
simply an “all-inclusive” vacation package similar to ones
available at most resort and vacation destinations anywhere in
the world. The Regulations prohibit all transactions relating
to travel-related tourist transactions in Cuba including
prepayment in third countries for Cuba-related expenses.

Perils of Internet Dating in China -- Newspaper report

2007-09-18T00:11:00.000-10:00

Wife's handy solution

A Chinese wife has cut off her husband's right hand because of his internet addiction. Jiang Ming of Chengdu city promised his wife, He Ling, that he would not go on the internet anymore, and would instead spend more time at home to take care of their newborn son. But after a short time he started to sneak into nearby internet cafes again to have video chats with girls. "I was on the internet, and suddenly felt a numbness in my right hand. The arrow on the screen stopped moving," says Jiang Ming. "Then I found that my right hand was on the mouse pad, and blood was shooting out." In court, the husband pleaded with the judge to release his wife, since he was to blame for breaking his promise. The court has adjourned and will announce its verdict on another date, reports Chongqing Evening News.

War in Iraq looking back

2007-08-23T03:16:00.000-10:00

This is an article taken completely from the website of former hedge fuind manager, commentator, and "Adventure Capitalist", Jim Rogers.....
He is one of the few who got it right.

BY JIM ROGERS
War Is Not a Good Idea
'The event corresponds less to expectations in war than in any other case whatever.' -- Livy
"War Involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end." -- Thomas Paine

“The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” -- Winston Churchill

Looking for cheap stocks? Forget the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. Try the Baghdad stock exchange. It's a small exchange that trades a handful of inexpensively priced companies. Once the U.S. cleans house, pours in aid, and helps it exploit its oil reserves -- the second largest in the world -- Iraq could be the next Chile or China.
Don't laugh. That's the kind of logic coming from Washington D.C., these days. If we follow lock step with the party line from the White House, the war we're supposedly about to enter (we may even be in it by the time this is printed) will be a quick fix, something like the last time we marched into Iraq. During the 1991 Gulf War, American and Allied forces swept in and took care of business in a matter of months. The financial markets swelled with enthusiasm: On Jan. 17, 1991, the first day of the war, the NYSE soared 4.6 percent.
It won't be the same this time. Attacking Iraq would be madness. We've all heard the obvious reasons: Last time, we had the support of most of the world, but this time even our "staunch ally" Britain is wavering. Prime Minister Tony Blair, usually the U.S. government's running dog, says he supports the U.S.'s decision, but polls show the British don't. Europe and Asia also have not jumped on the bandwagon.
If we're really going to attack, we'll also need places from which to do so, and the options appear to be drying up. Jordan doesn't want us. Syria never wants us. Qatar, a tiny pro-West country on a peninsula in the Persian Gulf, has given us an air base, Al-Udeid, but now opposes an attack on Iraq. Qatar is about half the size of Connecticut, bordered on three sides by water and on the other by Saudi Arabia. If the "evildoers" of the region have the destructive muscle the White House says, it isn't the safest place for our troops to be.
The media has hashed out everyone of these perfectly valid points. But much larger reasons loom for why the U.S. should not start a war. And the roots of those reasons are planted firmly in the streets of the Middle East; those are roots of the deepest, and most dangerous, kind.
If we attack Iraq, then, win or lose, we risk destabilizing several other countries and placing power in the region in the hands of far more anti-American fundamentalist regimes. The result will have profound economic and political implications to Americans thousands of miles away not to mention Israel, which is in the middle of things. I cannot imagine a friend of Israel would support such an undertaking.
Take Egypt, for example. In late August, President Hosni Mubarak voiced his opposition to a military attack. Mubarak is largely viewed as a lackey of the U.S. Egypt, after all, is the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, pulling in about $2 billion in civil and military support each year. The bigwigs who get a piece of that pie love their monthly check.
That's not most Egyptians. Distaste for Mubarak is growing among the citizenry. Should we engage Iraq, he'll be forced to show his true colors, either continuing to drink at the spigot of aid or standing alongside those who oppose a military action. Any decision Mubarak makes could lead to riots in the streets. Even his overthrow is not inconceivable. It wouldn't be the first time a strong dictator with military support has been ousted. Remember Egypt's last leader, Sadat.
The same uncertainty exists in Pakistan. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, no one wanted to have anything to do with what was considered a repressive, backward society. Its government had to beg Bill Clinton to visit while on his trip to India toward the end of his presidency. He agreed only to stop at the airport.
When I was there last year I was shocked at the poverty, the sad disrepair of the infrastructure, and the unhappiness of large parts of the population. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, was a textbook pariah from the U.S. State Department's perspective: He runs a repressive regime, threatens neighbors with weapons of mass destruction and has openly supported Islamic terrorism. Sounds a little like someone else, no? There are a lot of "evil" leaders in the world - some of whom we support.
Since 9/11, Pakistan would appear to be our best friend. And yet the tensions between various segments of Pakistani society -- fundamentalists, military, landed gentry, to name a few -- have only worsened. Pakistan, remember, is a remnant of British colonialism, a mishmash of cultures forced into arbitrary borders. Musharraf faces growing opposition and an attack in the region could further undermine the country's stability.
Perhaps the most pivotal country is Saudi Arabia. Until now, our relationship with this strict fundamentalist nation has been good, but not great. Economically, it's an important ally: Saudi Arabia has the world's largest oil supplies, roughly 26 percent of all known petroleum reserves. And it's clearly important strategically: We have troops based there. That's angered many people who don't want Christian troops in the land of the holiest sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina. I can't understand why we don't use Muslim troops from Turkey or Morocco there instead. A U.S.-led attack on Iraq will most likely only fuel distrust of our policy making at a time when Saudi Arabia is on edge already.
The country is a mix of two worlds, old and new. Half of its population is under the age of 25, yet it's run by a bunch of guys who are around 80 years old and completely out of touch with the thoughts and desires of the 15-year-old girl in the shopping mall or the 18-year-old boy in the mosque. (That's all you see driving through the country: mosques and shopping malls). Thousands of members of the royal family get paid every month while a large part of the population gets nothing. As a result, the monarchy is under attack and popular dissension is growing.
When President Bush goes on television and says certain cultures hate us for our democracy and freedom, he's just wrong. Everywhere I went in the Middle East, everyone told me how much they loved America and Americans; the hatred is directed at American policy. Guess what was the favorite country of young Arabs and Muslims, according to a study conducted by the British Council after the terrorist attacks on the U.S.A. Yes, the U.S.A.
Why not build on that reservoir of goodwill rather than cause a backlash that will last a generation? Patience and smarter tactics paid off in South Africa, Russia, Poland, and China, countries where the United States now is loved.
Our deep cry for justice and to send a warning to madmen is justifiable and understandable, but we have to be aware of the outside world. The bottom line is this is not a war we want to get into. We can win the battle of Iraq, but that is not the war. It's not a war that can be won in the traditional sense. If we succeed in ousting Saddam Hussein, what then? Who is going to run Iraq afterwards? We cannot do it. The country is a mish mash of factions who hate each other. Suppose they elect an Islamic fundamentalist leader? Then there would be a long arc of fundamentalists covering thousands of miles. Saddam was anti-fundamentalist, but the radicals may attract more followers once he is gone. Even if we kill everybody in Iraq, it only makes the situation worse. Occupy another Muslim country? We will be fueling more terrorism and more sympathy for anti-Americanism. Don't forget that Egypt; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia represent 230 million people and I have not even gotten to the effects action might have in Turkey.
What if it takes longer than expected? Morale in the military is already low especially among the reservists, and we would be leaving our troops in an exceedingly hostile part of the globe. What do we do about the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey who want their own nation? What happens if another region heats up like, say, Israel? Look at a map and see how vulnerable our ally Israel would be if more surrounding nations become anti-American.
Can we wage war in many places? I'm not sure, especially if this turns into a 1914 kind of situation. A horrible terrorist act then led to a high-minded crusade and serious "preventive" bumbling and a disaster which no one could even explain, much less defend, a few years later. Closer to home, our own "Best and Brightest" stumbled onto the quagmire of Viet Nam with terrible results. And remember how our "Intelligence" got Iran and Somalia so hopelessly wrong?
There's all this talk about our winning the war in Afghanistan? I'd like to know exactly how we define "winning." So far all we have done is throw out the Taliban and gain control of a couple of airports and a few hundred square miles. Now we are stuck there trying to prop up yet another unpopular leader. We do not have the necessary manpower or equipment if things heat up elsewhere. We only have 12 aircraft carriers now; our ships are nearly all old as are our planes and much of our equipment. Besides the magnificent fighter planes we have may be of limited use in these kinds of wars.
Let’s think this through. What if we continue making enemies at an accelerating rate? Then one of their madmen explodes a nuclear suitcase bomb in Washington D.C. We immediately destroy Baghdad and all of Iraq. What if a second madman does the same thing in San Francisco? What do we do then since there is no one else to bomb, but millions of madmen still are furious at our policies?
There has to be a better way to save the U.S., Israel, the Middle East and the world.
Economically, you just can't get around many of the facts: We are the world's largest debtor nation and this war could be very expensive. The economy is already incredibly vulnerable. The Gulf War in 1990-1991 threw our then-strong economy into recession and it was a short, simple war at a time when the rest of the world was growing - the opposite of today. I'm concerned about the stability of the U.S. dollar. Many nations appear to be pulling their money out for fear the dollar will continue to stumble or the U.S. government will freeze foreign assets, even those of our allies. Suppose this leads to a run on the U.S. dollar? Remember we have to attract $1.7 billion of foreign capital every working day just to finance this year's trade deficit.
The need to service our previous deficits makes it even more. Next year will be worse - not better.
Hey, we've done it before. As is often the case, this action against Iraq appears driven by hubris more than thoughtful consideration. The risks are clear; I'm really not sure what we gain even if things work exactly as Washington hopes.
And remember U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson's famous warning: The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Axis of Evil

2007-07-27T11:27:00.000-10:00

We were in Amsterdam last week and bought finger puppets at a novelty store on the Prinzengracht. They are called "Axis of Evil" and there are four puppets,
Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Ayatollah Khomenei.

One Bag - leisure and business travel packing list - travel light!

2007-06-24T17:38:00.000-10:00

One Bag - leisure and business travel packing list - travel light!

The gist of it on a checklist to be printed on both sides of a piece of paper, folded and carried along...

polar bears are eating their young?

2007-01-03T08:28:00.000-10:00

The polar bears are dying, eating their young, their icebergs are melting.

The miserable driving conditions we experienced late last night coming from the Denver International Airport home to Boulder reminded me that winter is coming. Turning off the lights in the car, using only the fog lamps in the Land Rover, was the best of a number of bad choices for coping with the wind driven snow. Any other light illuminated the diagonal stream of snow flakes in such a way as to confuse me into believing I was standing still and the snow was doing all the moving. More light made matters worse. I could barely follow the line of white painted stripes on the road even as I straddled them with my left front wheel, and I could rarely see more than three or four stripes in front of me, so I was always worried I would lose the line of paint entirely and have to adjust too quickly to maintain control of the car.

The Land Rover is a beast one drives. I have a GMC Yukon that seems to drive itself. Ilon and I just drove it from Boulder to Washington, D.C., 26 hours of driving, all on Interstate Highways, much of it through rain, and the entire trip had less stress than the hour it took us to drive Gemma’s Land Rover through the maelstrom of Friday, October 20.

This morning, a half day later, it is 8:10 a.m., as I look out my office window. The sky is Colorado crystal blue and all is calm, with just a hint of last night’s snow on leaves of trees and grass.

The sun is about to climb over my nearest neighbor’s rooftop. The heat is on in my house. Outside, I haven’t been there, looks like the kind of day that starts out clear and cold, and by the middle of it calls for boating and riding bikes, or motorcycles. My motorcycles are in the garage. I hear them calling. My bicycle has a flat tire. I neglect it. If the tire is flat, I can justify riding the motorcycles, even for short trips.

My mother died in 1997. My mother came to Minneapolis last night from Iceland. It is October 21, 2006. I am in Boulder, Colorado. My mother died in Boulder, Colorado. My mother is upstairs in my house, sleeping in my son, Thysson’s bed.

My mother was cremated and I spread her ashes, and those of my father, over an Icelandic lava field. My mother tells me the trees she planted where my parents’ ashes were thrown are still thriving, and that there is a tree there now for my brother. My brother and sister in law flew to Minneapolis with my mother last night, and then went on to Las Vegas, while my mother stayed with me at the Minneapolis Airport to wait for an airplane to Denver. We waited several hours for the plane to leave at 9:45 p.m.

When we got to Denver, my daughter picked us up at the airport and I drove home through a ferocious snow storm. My daughter teaches snowboarding at a Colorado ski resort. She is delighted that Vail with open November 17 and Beaver Creek will open November 26, and that Arapahoe Basin and Loveland are already open for skiing. I looked at the snow that was falling and thought about how I could get on another airplane and go to Maui. We have a house on Maui. Last week there was a series of earthquakes on the neighboring island of Hawaii, one as large as 6.8 on the Richter scale, a dangerous earthquake, and many smaller ones. Many properties were damaged.

I want to see if our house is damaged. The raccoons have eaten holes in the roof of our house in Boulder. My mother is sleeping upstairs in Thysson’s room. My neice, who was named after my mother, Hulda, is a surgical resident at Yale. She has two five day vacations a year. Instead of flying to Iceland to visit her grandmother, Hulda, we flew her grandmother here to Boulder. Dr. Hulda Einarsdottir is coming to the Denver International Airport this evening.

Her grandmother, Hulda Petursdottir, sleeps upstairs in Thysson Williams’s bedroom. My brother Einar Thorhallsson is also Hulda’s son and Hulda’s father. My mother, Sigridur Petursdottir, adopted me many years ago, from my mother, her sister, Hulda Petursdottir. Sigridur and her husband, George, my father, died in 1987. Their ashes, along with those of my brother, Jon Williams, were scattered by the wind that blows over an Icelandic lava field between Reykjavik and Keflavik. My father, Thorhallur Einarson, stayed in Iceland while my mother, Hulda, came to visit here in Boulder.

Much of the story is lost in the crevices, like ashes thrown over a lava field. There are no polar bears in Iceland. There may be some in Greenland, but I always think of those animals as being on the floating icefields that I watch below the airplane as we fly south of Greenland into Canada. No reason the polar bears have to be on those ice floes, but that is how I always pictured it, until I found out the polar bears were eating their own young and they were starving, and their icebergs are melting. And that it is probably my fault.

The polar bears will save us. At last there is something too gruesome for us to bear, that idea of their eating their young.

We will stop what we were doing, and we will work to make it right. The polar bears are too important. We could ignore the problem if it was only that we were going to kill all the people and drown the coastal cities and create a future of more vicious storms and end Colorado winter as we know it. It will take the polar bears to teach us when it was already past the time to stop. Thanks for telling us.

Here is something more about polar bears:

Scientific Name: Ursus maritimus
Home: All around the North Pole on sea ice, islands, and coasts
Description: White-furred, long-legged, huge, one-ton bear

Chertoff Grinch of Christmas Present

2006-12-14T08:44:00.000-10:00

This week, 1000 or so agents from the Homeland Security Department ICE division, the unit that used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service, conducted a long planned raid on several meat packing facilities owned by Swift, the third largest U.S. meat processing company.

In the raid, agents arrested some 1800 people, charging them with various violations of U.S. immigration and naturalizations statutes and regulations.

The obstensible purpose of the raid, carried out in a sort of commando style with helicopters and drawn weaponry, was to put a big dent in the illegal trafficking of names -- identity theft.

Yet, when Homeland Secretary Chertoff started to reel off the numbers of those arrested, he only came up with 62 out of the 1800 who were charged with anything having anything to do with identity theft, the rest of the arrests seemingly taking off the Swift payroll and off the streets, and, probably, out of America, about 1750 "garden variety" undocumented aliens.

It brings back to mind an old Woody Guthrie song, about Jesus and Maria, all they will call you will be "deportees"...the means used to achieve the end of finding 62 people who were using social security numbers not their own is draconian, inefficient, grandstanding and, if it were not so wasteful and disruptive, would be funny.

The Visions of Reverend Haggard

2006-11-14T09:19:00.000-10:00

The trouble with visions and listening to God talking to you and being passionate about your beliefs and spreading the word through the world may not all be the same problem but they may all stem from the same self righteous pigheadedness that let this man rule lives from the pulpit of New Life Church while himself being unable live with the life he was preaching others had to live or face hell trying...

Reality stems from pastor's Vision

Reprinted from the Colorado Springs Gazette (www.gazette.com)

By ERIC GORSKI

Ted Haggard sees things other people don't.

He's seen angels and demons and blood on his hands.

Sometimes, he sees things before they happen.

While fasting and praying 18 years ago on the side of Pikes Peak, Haggard envisioned the church that would become the largest in Colorado, where believers speak in tongues and do cartwheels because they love the Lord so much -- a place Haggard says he'll never leave.

Haggard believes God showed him these things and gave him New Life Church because God has a plan for Colorado Springs.

The plan involved calling Haggard, the sandy-haired son of an Indiana veterinarian, to become a pastor.

Haggard got this calling over a bowl of cereal when he was 19. He's followed it ever since -- to the mission fields in dozens of countries, to a Louisiana megachurch where he met his mentor, and to Colorado Springs, where he's played a central role in the city's rise as a capital of evangelical Christianity.

Haggard's mark in the city runs deep. His church, which boasts a $12 million budget and 140 employees, is imitated and envied.

While most churches will celebrate Christmas Eve quietly Tuesday, New Life Church is renting the World Arena and inviting the entire city.

Next summer, New Life will get bigger when it begins construction on a 6,400-seat, $19 million sanctuary the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Haggard's influence reaches beyond Colorado Springs. In 1996, Christianity Today magazine named him one of 50 up-and-coming evangelical leaders younger than 40.

Now 46, Haggard has the ear of prominent evangelicals such as Pat Robertson and Bill Bright. The Bush administration asked him to join other religious leaders in crafting a plan to provide social services through faith groups.

Haggard's profile will grow next year when he becomes chairman of the National Association of Evangelicals, which politicians consult to measure the concerns of conservative Christians.

To some extent, Haggard's success has to do with good timing. His church has grown with the city.

His chosen faith, charismatic Christianity, ranks among the world's fastest growing, winning converts with conservative Bible teaching and lively worship that makes people feel connected to God and each other.

Other charismatic pastors have come to Colorado Springs, but no one remembers them.

Haggard clearly has something, lots of things: a regular-guy personality, a conversational preaching style, an ad executive's marketing savvy, a drive that pushes him to pray at dawn and the kind of smile seen in a toothpaste commercial.

Haggard said he founded New Life Church in 1985 on the belief people want "purpose in their lives, answers to their problems and ways to keep their families together." He is a zealot in promoting the simplest act of being a Christian: prayer. Haggard believes prayer can drive away evil, cure the sick -- even reduce crime.

He invests heavily in youth programs, promotes mission work as a way for people to see beyond themselves and connects those who might feel lost in his 9,000-member church through "small groups" that bond over shared interests such as dog training and snowboarding.

Above all, friends and colleagues say, Haggard is a visionary. He sees beyond New Life Church to the city of Colorado Springs, and far beyond that.

Haggard's vision as a pastor is grounded in his first memories of church, sitting in Delphi United Presbyterian Church with his three older brothers. The boys wore dark jackets, white shirts and clip-on ties.

Their mother, Rachel, used to count the days to Sunday, building excitement in her children.

But it was the boys' father, Marcus Haggard, whose religious experience would change their lives -- one life, especially.

The pig farmer's son

A place of rolling hills and woods, Delphi is a small town on the Wabash River in Indiana that once called itself the "junior pork-packing center of the West."

Marcus and Rachel Haggard fell in love with it while driving through on their honeymoon. It's where the young veterinarian and his wife started a family.

The boys came first: Johnny, Danny, Timmy and Teddy. The girls later: Mary Lois and Rachel.

Marcus Haggard, in addition to being the town veterinarian, owned pig farms.

In his folksy manner, Ted Haggard often refers to himself as the son of a pig farmer. But Marcus Haggard was more than that.

He started a farm equipment company. He helped create Gaines Burgers, the dog food. He owned a bakery. He helped Hitachi develop cassette tapes. He gave talks on how to be successful in sales, recorded the talks on cassettes and sold them.

"We grew up hearing the message we could be successful," said Dan Haggard, who develops teacher-training programs for New Mexico.

The Haggards grew up knowing Sundays meant church.

Ted Haggard remembers being proud of his church's giant stones, stained-glass windows and towering ceilings.

Marcus Haggard was a presbyter, or elder, and Sunday school teacher.

The family attended church for a simple reason: They were Christians.

When Ted Haggard was in seventh grade, his father started having back problems. Marcus Haggard was forced to sell farm assets and equipment. He went broke.

While hurt, he watched a Billy Graham crusade on TV and first heard the term "born again."

"He was flat on his back and had all this time," Dan Haggard said. "He started calling well-known evangelists. He read the Bible over and over and over again. That really changed our family. That was very new and different."

Eventually, the Haggards moved across the state to a bigger city, Yorktown, where Marcus Haggard started a small veterinary practice.

By then, his religious conversion was under way.

Ted Haggard described his father's rebirth like this: "He was a good man, serving a good church, but it was a cultural commitment. He had no personal relationship with God. My father, he came alive with this personal relationship. That's when we started going to a born-again church, with the Bible as authority."

In 1972, Ted Haggard had a born-again experience as a high school sophomore hearing evangelist Bill Bright speak in Dallas.

Haggard wanted to attend journalism school. His father wanted him to go to a Christian college.

Marcus Haggard offered his son a deal: Go to Oral Roberts University, and I'll buy you a car.

That fall, Ted Haggard drove off to Tulsa, Okla., in a black Monte Carlo with a T-top and eight-track tape player.

The next summer, Haggard returned home. One night about 1 a.m., he was watching late-night TV.

He went to the kitchen.

He poured a bowl of Cheerios.

Suddenly, the Lord called him to become a pastor.

"It was so vivid it arrested me," Haggard said. "It wasn't a thought. It was a vivid, dramatic encounter."

Haggard said he didn't hear a voice. When God talks to him, it's a quiet whisper in his head. He gets an idea, and he knows it's not his.

He's had visions -- of angels in Africa, for example. He said he senses them sometimes, "sees them in his spirit."

Haggard was licensed for ministry that summer at Yorktown Baptist Church.

He was Pastor Ted.

A young pastor finds his way

Haggard went to work as youth pastor at Phoenix Avenue Baptist Church near the college campus when he returned to Oral Roberts. Pastor Curry Juneau put him up in a two-bedroom house furnished with beanbag chairs.

When Juneau left for another job, Haggard took over as senior pastor temporarily. He was 21.

"The big thing about Ted is he's focused," said Juneau, now leading an evangelical church in Missouri City, Texas. "He's stubborn as a little bulldog. Ted pretty much knows where he is, what he believes, where he's going."

Two events at Oral Roberts reshaped the pastor's view of Christianity.

One was his embrace of charismatic Christianity.

Charismatics believe "spiritual gifts" described in the Bible -- prophecy, speaking in tongues, healing -- exist today. Most mainline Protestants and many evangelicals reject that view.

Haggard prayed for the gift of tongues. He said he received his "prayer language" sitting in a parked car listening to a Bible tape with a friend.

He said he kept repeating a phrase, something having to do with glorifying God. He said it lasted a few minutes and felt like a baptism of fire.

Haggard came to inhabit a spiritual world where prophets and apostles still exist, where demons are real and can be dispatched with holy oil, where visions and messages are a part of everyday life, if only you listen hard enough.

The second revelation at Oral Roberts involved missions.

Haggard enrolled in "Evangelicals in Communist Countries." He learned about "unreached" people in other nations who never had heard of Christianity because of restrictions on evangelism, the dominance of other religions and other factors.

"These big ideas began swirling in my head," Haggard said. They are ideas that still shape his view of church.

He thinks this is the first generation capable of fulfilling Jesus' "Great Commission" -- to make the Gospel available everywhere. Haggard and other evangelicals believe this must be accomplished before Jesus returns.

"With some people, you can see their view of the world is pretty narrow," said Ted Whaley, a college roommate of Haggard who is a New Life associate pastor. "They don't see beyond their own lives. With Ted, he sees way beyond his own life. His view of the world is really big."

At the start of his senior year, Haggard met Gayle Alcorn, a junior and the daughter of an Air Force colonel. They married in 1978 after Haggard graduated.

Haggard took a job with a West German missions group but quit after a year to join the staff of Bethany Baptist Church outside Baton Rouge, La.

Roy Stockstill, or "Brother Roy," headed the church. In him, Haggard found a mentor, someone able to make a local church care about global missions.

Stockstill gave Haggard a choice of jobs, and he picked youth pastor.

At the time, some churches viewed youth ministry as an administrative burden. Haggard viewed it as critical, in part because many people decide to become Christians during their teens.

In 1984, five years after starting at Bethany, Ted and Gayle Haggard visited Colorado Springs, where Gayle's father had retired and was leading a small church.

Alone, Ted Haggard took a pup tent, a gallon of water, Scripture cassettes and his Bible to the flank of Pikes Peak. He prayed and fasted for three days.

Four visions came to him on the mountain: a stadium full of men worshipping God, a place where people could pray and fast for revival, a center for global prayer and "a church where people could freely worship God and study the Scripture with no strings attached."

Haggard had experienced a vision in high school after he was born again.

He said he saw demons hovering over newborn babies at a hospital, waiting to instill in them negative character traits such as hatred, greed, drug use and masturbation.

These were the kind of spirits Haggard knew he had to fight. Haggard said he never thought of leading his own church.

The vision on the mountain told him otherwise.

He was to start a church, and it would be in Colorado Springs.

The grand experiment

On Jan. 6, 1985, 25 people met in Ted Haggard's cold, unfinished basement in north Colorado Springs. Haggard stacked three 5-gallon buckets on top of each other for a pulpit. Visitors sat on lawn chairs.

Haggard used his father-in-law's church to advertise his first meeting.

Haggard named his fledgling congregation for a passage from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians: "... if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old had gone, the new has come!" He figured the church might grow to 250 people.

The few charismatic churches in the city were small and weren't getting larger. The big Protestant churches were First Presbyterian Church downtown and Village Seven Presbyterian Church.

Haggard offered something different: a place that was laid back and serious. New Life was strict in its Bible and moral teachings while giving people freedom to worship how they wanted.

That atmosphere inspired experimentation. An early member drove around town anointing major intersections with cooking oil, using a 5-gallon bucket and a garden hose.

The worship was unscripted and exuberant.

A woman danced with a violin. People did cartwheels. A trumpeter started the service.

At the center of it all was Haggard, the ringmaster, the teacher, the visionary. He called New Life Church "a grand experiment."

"He's just one of those one-in-a-million people," said Delroy Johnson, an original member. "When you talk to him, something clicks. You know something's going to happen. You can't ignore him."

Haggard encouraged New Life members to think of Colorado Springs as their Jerusalem.

He cut names from the phone book and had people pray over them. He urged people to pray while walking through neighborhoods, paying special attention to properties for sale. He thinks these efforts helped reduce crime and bring major Christian ministries to Colorado Springs.

New Life employees arrived at work to find the morning's obituaries on their desks with a photocopied note attached:

"Today from Colorado Springs, people will go to heaven, and people will go to hell. The percentage of people going to heaven and the percentage of people going to hell today is determined by how well you did your job yesterday. If you remember heaven today, it will help someone else avoid hell tomorrow."

One day, Haggard rented a hotel room to pray and fast. Worship music was playing. He felt as if his hands were dirty. He wrung them, but they wouldn't come clean.

Suddenly, Haggard said, he realized it was the blood of other people's lives on his hands.

"The Lord was apparently showing me that I did not have the privilege of just reading my Bible, praying nice prayers and pastoring a pleasant little church," Haggard wrote in his first book, "Primary Purpose: Making It Hard for People to Go to Hell from Your City," published in 1995. "I had to help rescue a lot of people from impending eternal disaster."

New Life Church occupied three storefronts during the late 1980s before it bought 35 acres on U.S. Highway 83, land that was affordable and in the path of Colorado Springs' growth.

New Life Church put up a concrete building that looks like a giant Lego. Haggard rejected the symbols of his boyhood church. There were no crucifixes, no stained glass.

"There's an old saying: Architecture defines a church," said the Rev. Gerald Trigg, the retired minister at First United Methodist Church. "Ted has addressed a generation that grew up out of the church, whose parents were from the rebellious '60s and '70s. (The building) symbolizes, in no small way, `We are for everyone, come on in.'"

Patton Dodd checked out the church in the early 1990s during his senior year of high school. He wasn't religious.

He liked that the church hadn't spent a lot of money on a building. He liked the big crowds, where he could become invisible and figure things out for himself. But he found the church "big, outrageous and scary."

"A guy dancing in the aisle told me Jesus loved me, gave me a big hug and freaked me out," said Dodd, who eventually joined New Life as the staff writer and Haggard's editor. "Over the course of time, what was scary became attractive and infectious. They had something I didn't."

The thrust of New Life always has been one of outreach to nonbelievers. Haggard is a genius marketer. To reach a society steeped in pop culture, New Life stages an Easter passion play with a cast of hundreds, strobe lights, fireworks, fog machines and Romans on horseback.

Billboards across the city this month advertise New Life's free Christmas Eve service at the 7,500-seat World Arena. The program includes a stage fashioned into a log cabin, caroling, special effects and ice skaters from the Broadmoor Skating Club.

Members of the church's 1,000-member youth group started student-led Christian clubs in more than 10 public high schools, hopeful for hallway conversions.

For adult members, there's day care, personal finance classes, a coffee shop and more.

Once Haggard gets people in the door, he starts instilling his vision of the church as something bigger than itself.

He teaches that Christians, as responsible citizens, should get involved in political issues. He's spoken out against homosexuality and abortion.

At the same time, he warns against "politicizing the Gospel" and letting one issue dominate the agenda.

He does not endorse candidates but has given a strong indication of his political leanings by saying from the pulpit he "votes a straight ticket."

Like most megachurches, New Life experimented with "small groups" in the 1990s, putting church members in small settings to discuss Haggard's sermons.

The approach failed, Haggard believes, because it arbitrarily grouped people together. So he let members come up with their own reasons to meet.

The church has 800 groups meeting over hobbies, such as quilting or rock climbing, or shared life experiences, such as living as an interracial couple.

The system makes each church member a minister.

A leader of a small group focused on dog training might share her Christian testimony with a nonbeliever once the person's dog learns how to sit.

Haggard's vision stretches beyond small groups, beyond youth ministry, beyond Colorado Springs.

He's hung the flags of every nation from the ceiling pipes of New Life Church to remind worshippers of their responsibility to think globally.

Sunday school instructors provide children with maps and globes. High school students carry their passports to get them in the mission frame of mind.

The global focus broadened in 1998 with the opening of the $5.5 million World Prayer Center on the New Life campus.

New Life began a Web page this month through which registered users can submit prayer requests and become part of a network that will answer other people's prayers.

With the launch of www.worldprayerteam.org, all four of Haggard's Pikes Peak visions have come to pass.

The church he saw was New Life Church.

The gathering of men he saw was Promise Keepers, which former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney founded.

The global prayer center is the World Prayer Center.

The prayer and fasting center is Praise Mountain, a 110-acre spread near Florissant where Haggard goes four times a year to listen for God, to seek new visions.

The visionary looks forward

When Haggard arrives at work each morning, he sees a church that's special, that's more than he ever envisioned.

New Life is the 62nd-largest non-Catholic church in the country and the 14th-largest charismatic church, said John Vaughan, who heads the Megachurch Research Center in Bolivar, Mo.

New Life has ranked in the top 1 percent nationally in annual growth for several years, Vaughan said.

The flags, boisterous worship and prayer emphasis give New Life Church a strong sense of identity that's critical for independent churches that aren't connected to easily identifiable institutions, Vaughan said.

"I don't know of any church in the country that does a better job communicating their missions focus," he said.

"You could be deaf, walk into that church and know what it's about."

Other Colorado Springs churches tried to mimic New Life, with mixed success.

Trigg, the Methodist minister, said he knows of one Methodist church that removed its organ in an attempt to stop members from fleeing for New Life.

Haggard routinely suggests people attend other churches that might be better fits. He received an e-mail once from a longtime member who left because he thought Haggard paid too much attention to evangelizing and not enough to Bible teaching. Haggard couldn't disagree.

The Rev. John Stevens, senior minister of First Presbyterian Church, said Haggard and other visionary pastors "get beyond themselves and think in bigger terms of what God wants to do, not so much for them, but through them."

"It's really pretty hard not to like Ted Haggard," Stevens said. "You can not like some of the things he does, or some of the things he might say on occasion, but it's pretty hard not to like him personally."

Haggard often says there are better senior pastors in town. But does he agree with his friend and colleagues, who consider him a visionary?

He pauses. Then he says, "Yeah."

"I think I see potential," he said. "I always think the best in people in situations until they prove me wrong.

"I don't see myself as `the guy.' I see myself as a guy that cooperates in the plan."

Haggard is not sure if God will give him visions as grand as the ones he received on Pikes Peak. But he has plans.

He will continue to speak harshly about Islam. The public appearance of Islam "seems to be inciting hate, killing your enemy and using the poor," he said earlier this year.

Arshad Yousufi, a lay leader with the Islamic Society of Colorado Springs, criticized him for talking about reaching out to Muslims but never visiting the local mosque.

"He has responsibility proportionate to his position in the Christian church in this community to make sure he knows what he's talking about," Yousufi said. "He has the potential to stir things up."

Haggard said he's visited mosques in larger communities. But he won't back off his views.

He's working on a book examining globalization from a Christian perspective.

He hopes to use his influential position with the National Association of Evangelicals to give greater voice to independent megachurches similar to his own.

He expects the Web-based prayer team to become "a mammoth ministry," with leaders in every nation in the world within five years and, in the United States, prayer organizers in every city of 30,000 people or more.

Haggard doesn't talk or write about demons as much. But he believes the spiritual world is real.

Haggard believes New Life Church will reach 20,000 members, probably in about a decade.

But New Life could be entering a challenging time.

Some megachurches stop growing after 20 years. Others struggle after reaching 10,000 members because people get aggravated with traffic and finding a seat, said Scott Thumma, a megachurch researcher at Hartford Seminary.

With those issues in mind, New Life is raising money for a 6,000-seat auditorium to be built next to its existing sanctuary, which would be turned into a youth chapel.

The new, horseshoe-shaped hall with stadium seats is expected to open in two years, making New Life the state's biggest worship space. In the interim, New Life will put up a temporary building in March for the youth program.

Some scholars think megachurches are a baby boomer-driven trend that will pass as younger generations mature.

But Thumma and most religion scholars think megachurches will continue to flourish.

"As long as people feel comfortable in malls and big institutions, we'll have megachurches," Thumma said.

Haggard believes he never will leave New Life Church.

He doesn't need to. He can write books, travel to Nigeria, connect the world in prayer and continue to deliver sermons, perform weddings and conduct funerals.

He can do it all from here, his Jerusalem, from the church he saw on the mountain.

Do they fear and loathe us out there?

2006-05-22T13:48:00.000-10:00

The online political news service called "U.S. Politics Today" is edited by a very bright and able longtime journalist and political operative named Joe Rothstein. On May 17, he wrote an article that appeared in "U.S. Politics Today" that may alert us to a really serious problem developing around the world for those of us who love the America we grew up in, the America that made us proud to be here, in the world's best place...

These are Joe Rothstein's observations, taken, without his permission, from "U.S. Politics Today", a Journal for Political Professionals, May 17, 2006:

Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes this month have released the results of 91,000 personal surveys taken in 50 countries from 2002-2005. Their work is packaged in a book whose title says it all: America Against The World...How We Are Different And Why We Are Disliked. The study was conducted under the auspices of the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project.

Their conclusions:

1) In all corners of the globe, since 9/11 there has been a "startling" and "precipitous" rise in anti-Americanism.
2) The anti-American feeling is now directed at the American people, as well as its government.
3) They see the U.S. as the world's dominant military power---a condition that they fear rather than appreciate.

The Kohut-Stokes findings confirm a new PIPA-BBC World Service study completed in January which shows that far more people consider China a positive influence in world affairs than the U.S.

Imagine it! China! A country with minimal freedoms and few rights for workers, is seen positively by people in 20 of the 30 nations surveyed. On the familiar positive/negative scale, China scores a 45-27. Meanwhile, the U.S. is seen positively by a majority or plurality in only 13 nations, and negatively in 18. Our favorable/unfavorable score is 40-41.

Here's a sampling of the countries that view the U.S. negatively: Canada (60%), Great Britain (57%), Mexico (55%), Australia (60%). In other words, our neighbors and long time allies.

Another recent PIPA-BBC survey found that people in 33 of 35 countries (41,856 people in all) believe the invasion of Iraq has increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks worldwide.

We all want to be loved, or at least liked and respected. But this is more than a matter of losing a popularity contest. Given the fact that terrorist cells are at work everywhere, fighting global terrorism successfully requires a high degree of international cooperation. It doesn't help that the majorities of the populations of Jordan, Morocco and other nations tell survey-takers they support terrorist actions against the U.S.

After Bush's election in 2004 a survey found that a majority in 18 of 21 nations felt that another four years of Bush in the White House was a negative development for world peace and security. In most of those nations, that opinion was virtually unanimous: 82% in Turkey, 78% in Brazil, 67% in Canada.

Since that survey was taken we've had Abu Ghraib, rendition, illegal U.S. surveillance, saber rattling about using nuclear weapons in Iran and a litany of other developments....making an edgy world a lot more nervous about what seems to be the out-of-control 800-pound guerilla in their midst.

After his second inaugural George Bush said he had just earned a lot of political capital and he intended to spend it. He was referring to his abortive plan to turn social security into a private accounts system. He quickly spent whatever personal capital he had, and wasted it. But he also spent U.S.leadership capital that might have been used to lead a world coalition to fight off deadly enemies and to march toward positive goals.

Instead he's got the world hunkered down in deep anxiety, counting the days until he leaves office and hoping that 59 million Americans won't be so dumb next time.

Electing the Elected neglects Colorado tradition

2006-04-19T02:17:00.000-10:00

In Colorado, we have a Governor who was going to run for President as a Republican until his staff got him in trouble. He impregnated an aide, just about the same time the Governor of New Jersey came out of the closet and lost his job. The Republicans of Colorado, not known for their open mindedness, witness Tancredo and Dobson if you need an example, were easy on Governor Owens, and their collective silence was almost deafening. The Governor was allowed to finish his term, but he won't darken the halls of Congress anytime soon, and we were spared his presence in the upcoming race for President.

Colorado politics has long been a thing of beauty for its openness. In Colorado, there is a tradition of coming to office from the outside. It is a Jeffersonian Farmer Patriot sort of ideal, very Norman Rockwell and altogether a good thing, it seems to me. This time, it was different, and the process of finding a successor to Governor Owens was disturbing and rank with the odor of smoky back rooms and the trotting out of only the usual suspects.

We, in this wide open place, seemed incapable of coming up with any candidate who was not already a seated politician. In a state noted as a hotbed of entrepreneurial talent, one with a seasoned and able agglomeration of executive talent, much of which has come here from elsewhere, Colorado limited its search for a new Governor to a handful of politicians, as if that was the only place to look for someone to run our state government.

Granted, one of the politicians has recently been appointed President of the University of Denver, another was a practicing Attorney General, someone who actually runs something, and another came from a background of having started and run a banking company, but these fine attributes were peripheral and almost irrelevant to their being considered for elevation to the office of Chief Executive of the State of Colorado.

The selection process stopped at the end of the list of elected Congressmen, Senators, and other elected officials. No one else wanted to play badly enough to get seriously in the game, with the exception of one rich guy with the unfortunate name of Rutt, who is apparently so enamored with the process of politics that he runs for everything.

It is sad to see that the process of selecting someone to run this important part of so many people's lives, a vast organization which directly effects each one of the millions of people who live in the state, has become the province of so few.

Our last gubenatorial election saw a lopsided race between the incumbent, a longtime Republican politician with little else to recommend him for public office other than that he had been in public office for a long time, and a former CEO of a large Colorado company. The CEO lost badly, but maybe because he came from a company more known for suits brought against it by sufferers from asbestos poisoning than for the insulation the company provided many homeowners. The politician won.

This time, no one else showed up at the starting line. Only politicians were considered by the news media. Maybe no one in the business of actually running an organization today can afford to run for office. It is too much of an imposition. It does not pay well enough. It has no golden pot of options, nor a golden parachute in the event of termination. It is publicly humiliating to run for office, any office in the United States today. There is nothing to gain for those outside politics, so only politicians need apply for the top jobs. Maybe it is proper and, certainly, it is traditional, but it is also the close of an openness and the end of a welcome Colorado held out as a shining example to the rest of the country.

The weather here is great, and it is fun to play in the mountains, but I think the openness of Colorado society and political life is one of the really important reasons so many of us came from places with closed and cloistered politics and life back east and in the Midwest and south to this wide open space. Maybe too many of us came, and we closed it down.

2006-03-23T11:58:00.000-10:00

Ilon and Petur

Arrogating power to Presidents

2006-01-26T06:44:00.000-10:00

A little quote from Slate magazine, an excerpt about the novelty of President George Bush's position on warrantless wiretapping...electronic eavesdropping, domestic spying:

"Even if one assumes that every unknown instance of warrant-less spying by the NSA were justified on security grounds, the arguments issuing from the White House threaten the concept of checks and balances as it has been understood in America for the last 218 years. Simply put, Bush and his lawyers contend that the president's national security powers are unlimited. And since the war on terror is currently scheduled to run indefinitely, the executive supremacy they're asserting won't be a temporary condition."

The FISA law requiring a visit by federal agents to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court is a rather minor hurdle to clear. Of 19,000 applications to that Court since its inception, there have been less than 10 denials of the surveillance requests.

The National Security Agency's restrictions on domestic spying have long been easy to circumvent by using the spy agencies of our allies to spy on Americans in exchange for our spying on their citizens, according to various urban legends that have long been circulated among the conspiracy theorists.

The arrogance of our current President and his administration is staggering. Their disdain for government make them unable to take its strictures seriously, and, it seems, makes them poor stewards of its complexities.

Public Service

2006-01-26T03:53:00.000-10:00

A civil servant. I heard one of the Congressmen talk about what a leader he is, and I wondered about the others out there, holding our public offices and believing that, thinking someone wanted them to lead us somewhere.

That is not the idea. Look it up in Jefferson or The Federalist Papers, or just look around: Serve and Protect. We do the leading. You are public servants. You work for us, to do the public's bidding. I know it is difficult to hear our voices. There are so many of us. That does not mean you are the leader. It means you should listen more. Work harder to serve each and every one who asks for help. Please forget the idea of leading us anywhere. That is not why you were elected.

There are few things the police have gotten better than their slogan. We are disgusted as a people when the police officer does not live up to the billing. The job is sacred and given with the utmost confidence and trust in the candidate's desire and ability to do what the slogan tells us. Otherwise, there is no reason to give her the power and the glory and the gun.

Here is to the politicians, to the holders of offices everywhere in America: We don't want leaders. We are Americans. We can lead ourselves. We want public servants. Serve or get out of the way.

observing a plea bargain, knowing Jack.

2006-01-05T07:17:00.000-10:00

While Jack Abramoff trundles through the morning rain in a hat and black trenchcoat from courthouse to courthouse proclaiming his guilt and willingness to help us ferret out the bad guys who helped him corrupt American politics over the past ten or twenty years, I watch from Hawaii.

It is a far place, for us, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, since we have a couple of thousand miles of ocean buffer and time zone differences and a culture far removed from mainland concerns, but we all know Jack.

Jack and his friends get together to decide who runs our country club and the homeowners association, and they get slightly better tee times, and their lawn is mowed a bit more carefully or often or cheaply than ours.

College Republican National Chairman, Jack. A fabulous multitasker, who is always willing to help, and only calls you when he needs, something. And he needs something, all the time.

Jack is a crowd pleaser, in every way the life of the party. The Grand Old Party, and the new one, too.

While most people find it their biggest fear to speak in public, Jack is comfortable in front of a crowd, leading, talking. His biggest fear is being alone, forgotten, or intimate. He loves the roar of the crowd and works the room famously. He never stands alone, for long.

He will drag everyone he knows with him. This will be a truly enlightening display of rectitude and apology. Everyone knows you have to say you are sorry, as many times as you can, to get back into the game. They will forgive you, Jack, the American people. Their memory is short and they are just there to manipulate, anyway. Multitask, you and your many friends who run the place. Run faster, start earlier. You can do Jack.

Almost forty years ago, we left high school

2005-12-08T21:23:00.000-10:00

in a much simpler day, with a war just a few years raging in Southeast Asia, at least for this country a few years, my class left high school, the young men having picked up draft lottery numbers, most headed off to college, a few to die in rice paddies. 1966 and we were off into the world, where it would be two more years before Lyndon Johnson abdicated his Presidency and Bobby Kennedy got killed on the brink of his Presidency, and another six or seven years before some collective wisdom and a countrywide youth protest would convince Nixon and Kissinger that Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos just weren't worth the hassle anymore. Maybe it won't take quite so long to convince the current warmongers that they are solving nothing and marching down a road that never gets brighter or wider or easier to travel. We need our troops to come home now. This is our time to declare victory and leave Iraq to its own devices. Doesn't it seem like deja vu all over again?

rescind the invitation to Judge Alito, please

2005-11-01T10:51:00.000-10:00

http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/

The link is to the blogspot.com site, "Lawyers, Guns and Money" about the new nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

I think these guys have done an excellent job of describing why it is that this nominee should be much more carefully scrutinized than was Judge Roberts, and that this nominee should be required to answer, rather than evade, questions as to his personal beliefs about the scope of government's power to intrude upon the lives of people.

Mr. Bush, please withdraw this nomination is what I say, before you incite the middle of the American body politic to rise up in protest of your kowtowing to the Evangelical Right Wing of the Republican Party.

no, it just seems like it

2005-10-28T10:21:00.000-10:00

From "Our Picture of the Universe" by Stephen W. Hawking: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, said the old lady, "But it's turtles all the way down."

An horrific imbalance

2005-09-12T17:48:00.000-10:00

My former next door neighbor, a friend of mine, I can say, since he's now going into legendary status, started a craze, a fad, a shoe company that went viral, spreading its closed cell resinous soles rapidly around the world. Three years after selling his first prototype shoe, an ugly little Dutch clog looking contrivance with remarkable gripping powers, Scott, his two fellow founders, and the small band of local visionaries who believed in the idea strongly enough to invest in it, have all gotten fabulous early returns on their investment, and now they are positioning the company to make a public offering that will vastly increase their wealth.

They give the shoes away. That is how they are sold. Give someone a pair of "Crocs"
these now ubiquitous little sandals, and the grateful recipient will be a repeat buying true believer and proselytizer for the brand for the foreseeable future. Brilliant. They give them away. People like that. It is really fun to be in a company that gives its products away.
There is another guy in town here that did this, I am now reminded. His name is Jared Polis, and he gave away his mother's line of greeting cards over the internet, and then some huge company thought they could make a great fortune by selling the same cards, and they gave him a fortune, then they almost went broke trying to sell the same cards he had been giving away, but they made him rich. There may be something to this idea, giving stuff away.

Now the greedheads have come into the little shoe company. There is a former vice president of some big electronics company who runs the company now, and he has hired his entire family to help him. They are now in charge I guess, and they almost need wheelbarrows to haul away all the money they are being paid to make the company work, and there are a lot of people who now have jobs making and selling the little multicolored plastic shoes, and everyone will be wearing them, I suppose, someday soon, and all the company vice presidents and directors of this or that will be rich.

And this happens everyday, here in America, and, with increasing frequency, elsewhere.

And along came Katrina and wiped out all the little houses on the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama, and Louisiana. Many of the shoes we gave away a couple years ago at Jazz Fest are gone now. Some of the people we saw there are gone, too.

We're rich and living on the high ground. Justice Roberts is just around the corner, and we have George Bush as our President, at a really scary time, as all times are, but this one seems really scary when you look at who is running the circus.

It's not that he's stupid like everybody seems to think, but that he did not bother to get a passport before he got to be a middle aged man, and that his friends really think those people in the bayous should just move someplace else, and they should take care of this thing themselves, with a little help, maybe from the church, but surely not from us taxpayers. What the hell were they doing living in those godforsaken places anyway, right in the way of the water comin' down? No, no, not Trent Lott, I don't mean guys who can afford to rebuild, you know, the rest of those people -- they should have known better, and we told them there was going to be a storm and they should leave, anyway, didn't we? What do you mean they couldn't get out? We did. Just got in the Hummer/Lexus/Denali/Mercedes/Prevost, and got out. What are they complainin' about, it's us that s gonna have to pay for this mess...

"A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money." That was said by some Senator, some time ago, who really knew ...
$82 billion and $82 billion for Iraq in funds we know about, and tax cuts, and then the $62 billion we just appropriated for Katrina, and I sure hope Halliburton and those Balckwater guys and The Carlyle Group know what they are doing as they spend our way out of this one...

Time spent away from home

2005-06-13T10:54:00.000-10:00

I am on Maui. Two days ago I was in Boulder, Colorado. Six days ago I was on Maui. Thirteen days ago I was in Boulder, Colorado. I have been away from whatever home is, intermittently, more than half of the past two years, riding in airplanes, cars or cruise ships, staying in hotels, motels and rental houses, so often I am not sure where I live, or why I live there anymore. There must be more to say about this, but I have to leave now. 22 Hoku Place, Paia, HI 96779. From there, I depart to an acupuncture appointment, my first in twenty years. That changes where I go next. I am not the one who knows the after that.

Are they Calvinists who believe in Predestination?

letter to my daughter for her high school reunion 25 years from now

2005-05-27T10:55:00.000-10:00

Use sunscreen. That was Vonnegut's great suggestion to a graduating class a few years ago, or advice he got credit for. My daughter graduates from Seabury Hall, a high school on the slopes of Maui's Haleakala volcano, this week. Parents are supposed to write a letter to their sons or daughters that today's graduates will read at their twenty fifth reunion, in 2030.

I suggested to Gemma that I hoped she had teleported to her reuinon, because I still have the science fiction fantasy in my mind that the world will continually progress to higher and higher speeds and greater complexity. Now I find myself hoping I am wrong. I want the world to get slower and slower and to progress to more simplicity. Would that she would take a boat from the Mainland of whatever continent she then calls home, to visit her old friends, who will be about 43 year olds in 2030, and that Maui is, by then, a self sustaining and sustainable island culture, utilizing the bio diesel, wind, solar, and thermal energy processes that we now see are possible; growing enough food on the island to feed its population, and setting an example for the world about making life work among a diverse ethnic and socioeconomic mix of people.

In 1968, many of us thought Gene McCarthy should be President. Instead, he was right.

2004-12-23T14:02:00.000-10:00

Dec. 23, 2004 from hillnews.com

Publisher impressed by McCarthy’s writings

Samuel Scinta wasn’t even born when then-Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) mounted the anti-Vietnam War crusade in 1968 that forced President Johnson from office and hastened the end of American involvement in that war.

But when Scinta, who heads Fulcrum Press of Golden, Colo., read a New Yorker magazine article last January that said major newspapers and magazines refused to publish the 87-year-old McCarthy’s writings, he wrote him and offered to collaborate with him on a book.

“I was amazed that here is one of the great intellectual politicians of the 20th century who had no forum to say what he wants to say,” Scinta, 35, said yesterday.

The result is the most comprehensive collection of McCarthy’s writings, which Fulcrum Press will publish in late December under the title Parting Shots from my Brittle Bow. The 200-page book’s title comes from a McCarthy poem that was inspired by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

“What impressed me, going back through all his writings,” Scinta said, “was how fresh most of it is and how prescient he was. That’s the mark of a great political writer.”

McCarthy, who now lives in a retirement home in Georgetown, has written more than 20 books.

That having been said, there were a few others who should have been listened to much more carefully since about that time...One is Ramsey Clark, who spent a good deal of time tilting at windmills himself, and, now, still speaks up from time to time:

On or about
Monday, May 12, 2003, a former U.S. Attorney General, the son of a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, made a luncheon appearance to speak in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club.

Mr. Clark resigned from his position as Attorney
General due to disagreements he had with his own adminisration, that of Lyndon Johnson. Now, as before, he has fundamental disagreements with the course of the administration's policies, both foreign and domestic.

He now makes a strong case for the necessity to ask the U.S. Congress to bring a bill of impeachment against current administration members who may or may not have engaged in an illegal war against Iraq under the principles of international law since January, 2003.

12:30 PM Ramsey Clark (NPC Luncheon)

Description: Washington, April 30--

“U.S. Militarism Threatens the Destiny of Humanity” is the title of an address by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark which is scheduled to be delivered to a National Press Club luncheon on Monday May 12.

Mr. Clark, Attorney General in the administration of Viet Nam War President Lyndon Johnson, is expected to argue that U.S. threats and use of devastating force against Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries has created “unprecedented fear and hostility towards the U.S.”

Now a steadfast opponent and outspoken leader against the use of U.S. military force, Mr. Clark charges that despite the popularity of President George W. Bush’s leadership, the President has “committed the highest crimes against peace--wars of aggression--as defined in the Nuremberg Charter.” He makes the case that the American people should therefore exercise their Constitutional power by impeaching the chief executive.

Mr. Clark is founding chairman of the International Action Center in New York, which organized several anti-war protest demonstrations in Washington during the last 12 months.

Those demonstrations attracted hundreds of thousands of protestors. He also made several controversial trips to Iraq, and helped arrange deposed President Saddam Hussein’s face-to-face interview with CBS News anchor Dan Rather earlier this year.

Sponsored by: National
Press Club
Location: Ballroom

Our country has picked different spokesmen for this time and age, and that seems a shame.

2004-11-14T18:31:00.000-10:00

a comment from a law student about those who go to law school and drop out:

Nov. 11 ,2004 from a blogger called Buffs at an e blog site called Buff Law:

"An interesting observation: I really dislike people who drop out of law school. I especially dislike people who drop out of exceptionally good law schools. My irrational reasoning is this: If you did any research whatsoever about law school, you pretty much knew what was coming. It was going to be hard, unpleasant, and fruitless. And yet every year some 8 1Ls drop out of CU, or some 5%-7% of the class. I suppose this is about average for all law schools. So every year 5%-7% of all law students at all law schools were so thoroughly uninformed/intimidated that they threw in the towel. Some 5%-7% of the class at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. Anyway, I acknowledge this is an irrational if not plain stupid. It's just a gut reaction. Maybe I'm jealous people don't feel obligated to submit themselves to the pain of law school.

I came to this realization reading Jeremy Blachman's blog ... Jeremy's a Harvard 3L and blogs quite a bit. He wrote this post about how he's not going to be a lawyer, how the law's not for him, how he turned down a law firm offer after graduation, and how he wants to be a "writer." This post really pissed me off--my rationale was "This little fuck has a money law degree that tons of people would kill for, and he's just pocketing it. Fuck him for taking that spot at Harvard away from a person who would use that degree and get something really great out of it. Go to Chico State Law or wherever if you don't care about being a lawyer." So I guess I dislike everyone who wastes a good opportunity--those who go to Harvard and become writers, and those who go to Harvard, take a seat away from someone else, and then drop out. All this is pretty irrational, I know, but it is what it is. I dislike people who go to Harvard and drop out ... I dislike people who go to Harvard and turn down firm offers to write."

The reference is to the following blog on Blachman's site:

http://jeremyblachman.blogspot.com/2004/11/post-1.html

Until I read this comment, it never occurred to me quite how selfish it is of anyone given the opportunity to study at a select academic institution to squander that opportunity. I guess I agree with the commentator.

2004-08-02T10:38:00.000-10:00

Summer came and summer's going quickly. August 2 marks the end of the swim season for Gemma Williams, who set a new team breast stroke record this season, but missed a league record by two tenths of a second.

Thysson, who took two trips to Europe this summer, found time in his busy schedule to work full time for Crocs, the new Boulder shoe company that is blasting off nationwide, worldwide. Thysson is credited by the company's founders with having been the first to know how to sell Crocs. He gave them away to his swim team and other friends, which started the buzz that started the company rolling. Now, Thysson is an official youth advisor to the company, and is assistant to the sales director.

The end of swim season means we pack up and go to Holland. This time, the trip will be very short, since we have to be there on the fifth of August for a hearing, then we have to be back in Colorado to leave for Sturgis and its Bike Week on August 8. We also have to be in Hawaii soon, since Gemma starts her school year at Maui's Seabury Hall on August 23. Find us a house on the north shore of Maui, please.

2004-05-08T13:31:00.000-10:00

My wife, a gentle woman who despises the treatment women endure under the rule of Muslim men, sees the torture inflicted by American troops on prisoners in Iraq and says, "So what. The Iraqi's capture us and kill us, then drag us through the streets, and they treat their own women worse. Why capture them at all. Kill them."

This war is making us into the barbarians we thought lived elsewhere.