Category: News and Opinion

“Born On The First of April”–A Film By Oliver Stone

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JIM “GATEMOUTH” GARRISON (played by his look-a-like, Kevin Costner):  A career speaks a thousand words. Yet sometimes the truth is too simple for some… Arlen Specter thinks he had an open and shut case: a career built on a stubborn dedication to principle over party – but in reality, it is a case of dedication to the principal over party and principles. But, something happened that made that case virtually impossible to prove: the actual trajectory of Specter’s career. The time frame of 45 years since Specter entered politics leaves no possibility of some higher set of values. We are expected to believe that Arlen Specter’s life in politics is like a single bullet which accounts for all the phases of his career. Rather than admit to evidence of this inconsistency, or investigate further, the Press chooses to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counsellor, turned jaded elderly Senator, Arlen Specter. One of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people, we've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet" theory.

The Magic Bullet called young Arlen Specter had Democratic politics and a legal resume so impressive that Bobby Kennedy asked him to work in the Justice Department on his own pet project, the Jimmy Hoffa investigation, but Specter demurred saying he "wanted to get to Washington on my own steam…not as someone’s bureaucrat." Eventually becoming a top assistant to the Philadelphia DA, the Magic Bullet took a detour to go to Washington as someone else’s bureaucrat, creating from whole cloth the Warren Report’s “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination.

POst Mistakes & My Mistake

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I was mistaken in my report yesterday about the New York Post. They did print a correction for their ridiculous mistake of confusing the Governor of Alaska, who the paper endorsed for Vice President of the United States with an unknown free lance journalist. Somehow I missed the correction, which was on page 22, above a half=page ad for dental implants and near another ad for sexual enhancement treatments.

Local Area Personal Income Data for 2007: Killing Off the State’s Tax Base

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The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released Local Area Personal Income data for 2007. I might look into it more deeply once it is available in disk form, allowing more detailed information for more places to be downloaded in one shot. But the most important finding hasn’t changed — New York State’s economic base and tax base are concentrated overwhelmingly in Manhattan. A place that is what it is, and attracts economic activity despite high taxes, wages and real estate costs, only because it sits at the center of a mass transit system that allows two million workers from a metropolitan area of 18 million to concentrate in one place. Without it, Manhattan is Milwaukee and New York State is Michigan or worse. And because of the seeming compulsion of those in charge of our public and private institutions, particularly the state of New York, to extract every ounce of vitality from the future of those institutions and leave them in ruins, that is where we are heading. As this information is not new, if you have been reading posts and downloading the associated spreadsheets I’ve put up here for three years, there is no need to read further. For those who want more details, a summary follows.

NY POST AND MISTAKES

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Sunday’s NY Post published a list of what they said was 100 mistakes in 100 days by the Obama Administration.

Putting aside the fact that a policy that the Post editors might disagree with (releasing the torture memos, for example) is not necessarily a mistake, some of what the Post lists is not a mistake by any definition.

Here is some of what the Post calls mistakes –

Politically speaking: Are Charles Barron and Michael Bloomberg birds of a feather?

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Politics makes for strange bedfellows they say, and maybe they are right. During the past few weeks I did find two politicians -Charles Barron and Mayor Michael Bloomberg- apparently sleeping in the same bed (politically speaking, of course), and pensively it was a mini-orgy of sorts; one of convenient morality, one lacking in common sense, an immolation of political principles, a flagellation of standards, a confusingly strange devaluation of ethics for self-serving reasons, an unnecessary questioning of professed values, and of course too many meaningless words for radio, television and newspaper reporters -willing be manipulated (and unrepentant too). 

Leaving His Marchi

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Back in September 2006, I published an analysis of the Republican primary in the 24th Senate District, which said, in part:

“The retiring incumbent is named John Marchi, and he was a giant. Marchi was elected to the Senate in 1956, before most of us were born; he was the Republican mayoral candidate in 1969 (beating a sitting Mayor in the primary), and again in 1973. In the late seventies, as the Chair of the Senate’s Finance Committee, he helped save the City from bankruptcy. Although I'm pro-choice, I admire Marchi as practically the only genuine right-to-lifer in the NYS legislature: he opposes both abortion AND capital punishment (hardly a popular stance on his island, and one which nearly lost him re-election in 1978). Whether you agree with him or not (and I don't), his opposition to the McBride Principles was courageous in an area with so many Irish-Americans, especially since it conveyed him no political advantage whatsoever. The same holds true with his public pronouncements against the Italian-American Civil Rights League for its mob connections. Once the Island spread into a second seat, Marchi was always generously helpful to whichever Democrat represented the North Shore, and Marchi usually had the decency to distance himself from the worst of the mobsters (some in every sense of the word) running the local Republican Party.”

Boards, Trustees and Actuaries

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Here's an interesting take on the looting of New Jersey's pension funds, and who is to blame. Despite all the past beneficiaries of current costs, the author blames the pension fund trustees — which is the equivalent of blaming the MTA's board for the MTA’s current financial problems. I'm not sure I agree. After all, who appoints the boards, trustees and actuaries, and what sort of people get the job? And what happened to the MTA when it tried to invest some money in the future? It was accused by all and sundry of having “hidden billions” that never existed, with every interest seeking to grab surpluses that also didn’t exist – the agency was going deeper into debt every year. I blame the Governors, particularly Pataki, and the legislators, particularly the leadership, for similar problems of past benefits and current and future pain in New York. And the interests that backed them and benefited from their deals and non-decisions. Appointing boards, trustees and actuaries doesn’t insulate government decision making from politics, it helps to insulate politics from accountability. Something to think about as alternatives to Mayoral control of the schools are debated.

 

Mark Penn – Still Cooking The Books?

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Mark Penn, fresh after his brilliant performance in the Clinton campaign had an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal about bloggers.

At the beginning of the article, Penn made some observations that just didn’t smell right to this blogger.

Penn wrote:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.

I wondered about those studies but the Journal was nice enough to link to them on-line. So I clicked on them and here is what I found out what the studies actually reported