How to Talk Funny in Chicago

I answered 25 questions about what I call things and how I pronounce them, and the NY Times guessed I was from Newark.

My "hometown" is just 20 miles north of there.

Give it a try. And a tip of the hat to Paul Krugman (also "from" Newark; or Yonkers; or New York).

The alternate cities for me were Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

A Seasonal Item

How "It's a Wonderful Life" would be marketed today:

What did Chris Christie know, and when did he know it?

By now you've heard of Bridgegate, the New Jersey scandal in which a Christie appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey closed down several lanes to the George Washington Bridge, ostensibly as a "traffic study," but obviously – let's face it – to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing Christie for reelection to governor. The lane closings resulted in 4-hour traffic jams. So the mayor of Fort Lee was not the only one being punished.

The guy who ordered the lane closings, David Wildstein, was a childhood friend of Christie's, but still ...  it is hard to believe that Christie himself would be involved in something so stupid.

Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less hard to believe as time goes by. This can't be good for Christie.

Imagine you are governor of New Jersey. Before you slash your wrists, think about what your reaction would be to learning – after the fact – that one of your political appointees had done something this stupid, punishing your own constituents. What would you do? Would you fire him? Would you demand full disclosure? I would. In a New Jersey minute.

Now compare that to Christie's reaction.

Mark Kleiman has this take on it:

The Wall Street Journal reports that both David Wildstein and Bill Baroni [another Christie appointee to Port Authority] have now “lawyered up.” If you’re Christie, that’s bad. The Journal also reports that they’ve both hired criminal defense lawyers. If you’re Christie, that’s worse.

Wildstein’s lawyer’s previous clients include Sharpe James, the appallingly corrupt Mayor of Newark replaced by Cory Booker, who wound up spending 18 months in a federal penitentiary. If you’re Christie, that’s just awful; Wildstein didn’t hire a top corruption-defense lawyer just to advise him on how to respond to subpoenas. He clearly thinks he’s in deep doo-doo, and probably in deep Federal doo-doo at that.

But the worst news – if you’re Christie – is that Baroni’s lawyer is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Jersey named Michael Himmel.

In 2009, Mr. Himmel also represented Solomon Dwek, a former real estate investor who pleaded guilty to bank fraud and money laundering charges. Mr. Dwek became an FBI informant in a case brought by Mr. Christie that implicated dozens of elected officials in a widespread corruption investigation.

So not only does Baroni think he needs serious criminal defense, he’s hired someone with a history of making deals in which his client gets a break in return for implicating everyone else in sight. (The technical term is “cooperation.”) And the only person above Baroni in the pecking order – the only one Baroni can hope to save himself by snitching on – is Gov. Soprano himself.

 So it's time to pull out the "Watergate Warning" for Governor Christie, a former U.S. Attorney:

It's not the crime they get you for; it's the cover-up. Be careful.

When Chicago Was Chicago

I got this back in 1977, and have carried it with me since then. In Chicago, you never know when you're going to need it. I understand it can be used as voter identification.

By the way, this is the whole receipt. Nothing has been clipped off.

Sempringham, Through His Teacher's Eyes

Mr. Hartman had me pegged – right from the beginning of the 6th grade.

Omo Child

Warning: This is a plea for money.

A few days ago I pointed you to a NY Times article about the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, a telemarketing scheme devised by a Harvard Law graduate that raised $100 million and gave almost none of it to Navy Veterans. They were good at what they did; unfortunately, what they did was fraud, theft, and money laundering.

Keep that number in your head: $100 million raised, and almost none of it went anywhere good.

Now let me tell you about another charity: Omo Child.

It is hard to find an inhabited area of the world that is more remote than the Omo River Valley in southwest Ethiopia. A National Geographic article called it Africa's Last Frontier.

I stole this excellent National Geographic map from the Omo Child web site. I just couldn't find another nearly as good. Click on it for a better view.

The Omo Valley is home to several tribes, including (as you can see) the Mursi, Kara, and Hamar. Among some Omo tribes there is an unfortunate practice called Mingi. Simply stated, Mingi is the designation of some children as a curse on the tribe, children whose presence provokes evil spirits to withhold rain, cause illness or death, or otherwise wreak havoc on the tribe.

A child can be declared Mingi if his/her top teeth come in before the bottom teeth. Or if the child is born out of wedlock, or pregnancy occurs without the elders' consent, or if the child is a twin.

To remove the curse on the tribe, the Mingi child is killed, either by drowning starvation or by exposure.

Omo Child takes as its mission the rescue of these children, and "to provide a safe, nurturing home and quality education for Mingi children. Our hope is that these children will become future leaders in their tribes and communities." In addition, Omo Child is trying to end the practice of Mingi in the Omo Valley tribes. So far, they have been successful with one tribe, the Kara, who ended the practice a year ago.

Omo Child was founded by a member of the Kara tribe, Lale Labuko (the first of his tribe to receive an education), and an American businessman and photographer, John Rowe. Labuko is the man on the scene, and he and the organization's work are spotlighted in the December 2013 issue of National Geographic.

So far Omo Child has rescued 37 children. The children are being raised in a three-room house. They have loving nannies and the older children go to school.

Please explore the Omo Child website for more information.

Now, do you recall that number I asked you to remember?  It was how much money a sorry excuse for a human being stole from people who were trying to be helpful to others.

Right: it was $100 million.

In 2011, Omo Child had total revenues of $109,000.  Take a look at their financials. There is no fat there. There are no professional directors pulling in $500,000+ salaries.

Food for one child costs $42 a month. Nanny care for one child costs $38/mo. Sending a child to school costs $34/mo. There are other expenses, but you get the picture. It's pretty simple: a moderate contribution has a real impact because it goes to the kid.

If you're looking to get some bang for your charitable dollar, it's hard to see how you could do better than Omo Child. And the potential of these children to have a real impact on their communities and country some 20 years down the road is incredible. More bang!

Omo Child is currently conducting a year-end fundraising campaign. They are hoping to raise $30,000. Can you help them?

"It is not what we say or feel that makes us who we are. It is what we do; or fail to do."

U.S. Navy Veterans Association

My brother, Mike – a Navy Vietnam veteran – wrote me of his own experience with the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, a telemarketing scam of which I wrote here.

Back in 2010 I was contacted by phone by someone representing himself as a member of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association. He knew all the right buttons to press and also told me that he was a retired Navy vet and that the association had done so many good things for he and his wife that he had given up his good civilian job to go work for the association. He said he was a Viet Nam vet and told a pretty convincing story about some incidents in DaNang of which I had some knowledge. In short he convinced me to make a donation.

After the call I started thinking about everything he had told me and became suspicious so I looked them up on Google and became aware of the less generous portions of the organization, as told by former sailors and civilians who felt they had been hoodwinked. I suspect that this is when the two reporters in Florida got wind of the story.

In short, I decided not to donate. Imagine my surprise when I got a call several weeks later asking me if I had forgotten about my promised donation. I started relaying some of the info I had uncovered to which the reply was that "there are always some dissatisfied people and that these stories were untrue" and the association's president was soon to expose the whole lot of them. I told him I would wait for the exposé before donating a penny to the association. I'm still waiting. Seems like they caught the ringleader.  For once no egg on my face but sadness for the Navy vets who lost out because of this bastard.

There is NO SUCH THING as a "Tactical Nuclear Weapon"

Congressman Duncan D. Hunter, whose dad was Congressman Duncan L. Hunter, has opined that we could use a "tactical nuclear device" in Iran. This clown was born in 1976, so he doesn't remember when Barry Goldwater wanted to use "tactical nuclear weapons" in Vietnam.

Congressman Duncan Doofus Hunter
(yes, it's really his picture)

Somebody needs to sit this boy down an' larn him some things.

You can create a nuclear "device" that will take out a block, say, or a neighborhood, and you can say that because it's impact is thus limited it is therefore a "tactical" weapon. You can say that if you want, Congressman Duncan D. Hunter, but you'd be an idiot if you did.

The United States is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon on an enemy. It's always interesting to argue whether we should have, or whether we could have impressed Japan sufficiently by destroying some offshore island. It's a game of "what if ...", but the fact is that we used it.

We obliterated two Japanese cities. According to the unimpeachable Wikipedia: "Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day."

Surprisingly, this episode seems to have made an impression on the world, because in the nearly 70 years since, despite the Korean War, despite the Cold War, despite the Vietnamese War, despite the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and all the wars that other countries have fought that we've managed to stay out of, nobody has used a nuclear weapon again (although several countries went out and got themselves one).

And maybe that's the sad gift of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that because of what happened to them, the world has seen the horror and for 70 years has had no stomach to repeat it. So all the thousands of nuclear weapons built by the United States and the USSR have mostly become disposal problems.

Now comes Congressman Duncan D. Hunter, who thinks we could use a nuclear "device" as though it were just some field weapon.

What Congressman Dum-Dum doesn't understand is that using a nuclear weapon of ANY size would have consequences far beyond the battlefield where it was employed. It would be a game changer. The BIG game! The STRATEGIC game. Pandora's Box would blow wide open and the furies would be released.

Other countries, seeing that the United States had legitimated the use of nuclear weapons for non-existential tasks, would feel quite justified to employ them in their own disputes. Who could tell them not to? Certainly not the United States. Things would fall apart pretty quickly.

Nobody knows where the dust would settle, or if it ever would.

A nuclear weapon, regardless of how limited or "tactical" its physical effect, is a strategic weapon of the first order. Handle with care.

"The Third Way," Indeed!

If you're a political junkie, you're probably familiar with The Third Way, an allegedly "centrist" group of alleged Democrats.

There's been a hoopla in the past few days about a Third Way op-ed in the hallowed opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, a place where the opinions of Suzanne Somers on the Affordable Care Act are considered worthy of publishing.

The op-ed, which you can read here,  is your basic sky is falling piece about Social Security. In 1980 or 1981 I debated a John Birch Society member on a Christian radio station about the exact same subject. The numbers proved, if I remember her correctly, that Social Security wouldn't be around in 10 years. Today it's not the wacko right I'd have to debate, it's the wacko centrists.

But who are these guys, really?

The most left-wing web site I visit is something called Daily Kos. They did the work, so we don't have to.

Cautionary Tales

First, a story about a "charity," from the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — BY all outward indications, the U.S. Navy Veterans Association was a leader in the charitable community. Founded in 2002 to provide support to Navy veterans in need, the charity recorded astonishing financial success. In its first eight years, it raised around $100 million in charitable contributions, almost all of it through a direct marketing campaign. The organization, headed by Jack L. Nimitz, boasted of 41 state chapters and some 66,000 members.  [My emphasis]

This would be a great story of charitable success, except for the fact that virtually everything about the association turned out to be false: no state chapters, no members, no leader with the name redolent of naval history. Instead, there was one guy: a man calling himself Bobby Thompson who worked from a duplex across the street from the Cuesta-Rey cigar factory in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa.

...[T]he money raised was real enough ... [b]ut little ever made it to the intended beneficiaries. In 2010, the scheme was unwound by two reporters for what is now The Tampa Bay Times, but not before Mr. Thompson had fled the state of Florida.

From June 2010, Mr. Thompson was on the run, the search for him hamstrung by the fact that no one had any real idea of who he was. Finally, on April 30, 2012, federal marshals tracked him down in Portland, Ore., finding him with a card to a storage unit containing $981,650 in cash and almost two dozen fake identity cards.

Earlier this month in Ohio, where the charity’s registration documents had been filed, the man arrested as Bobby Thompson was convicted on 23 felony counts, including fraud, theft and money laundering. Authorities have identified him as John Donald Cody, a former Army intelligence officer and Harvard Law graduate.

Read the whole story here. It's fascinating. Did you know there are about 59,000 charities in the country with the word "veteran" in its name?

If you're looking for a good charity where your bucks can make a real difference, consider Omo Child, about which I will write another time.

On another subject, via Kevin Drum I came across what I consider a pretty devastating piece about an outfit called GoldieBlox, by Felix Salmon of Reuters.

The company first came to public attention in September of last year, when it launched a highly-successful Kickstarter campaign which ultimately raised $285,881. Like all successful Kickstarter campaigns, there was a viral video; this one featured a highly-photogenic CEO called Debbie, a recent graduate of — you probably don’t need me to tell you this — Stanford University. And yes, before the Kickstarter campaign, there was “a seed round from friends, family and angel investors”. When the viral video kept on generating pre-orders even after the Kickstarter campaign ended, GoldieBlox looked like a classic Silicon Valley startup: young, exciting, fast-growing, and — of course — disruptive.

Not wanting to mess with a proven formula, GoldieBlox kept on producing those viral videos: “GoldieBlox Breaks into Toys R Us” was based on Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, and got over a million views. But that was nothing compared to their latest video, uploaded only a week ago, and already well on its way to getting ten times that figure. This one was based on an early Beastie Boys song, “Girls”, and deliciously subverted it to turn it into an empowering anthem.

Under what Paul Carr has diagnosed as the rules of the Cult of Disruption, GoldieBlox neither sought nor received permission to create these videos: it never licensed the music it used from the artists who wrote it. That wouldn’t be the Silicon Valley way. First you make your own rules — and then, if anybody tries to slap you down, you don’t apologize, you fight. For your right. To parody.

In a complete inversion of what you might expect to happen in this case, it is GoldieBlox which is suing the Beastie Boys. And they’re doing so in the most aggressive way possible. There’s no respect, here, for the merits of the song which has helped their video go massively viral and which is surely helping to sell a huge number of toys. Instead, there’s just sneering antagonism ....

I smell libertarians.

A Gleaning

Andrew Tobias relates this story, which he admits may be apocryphal:

Shortly after assuming the papacy — or perhaps as he was headed to the swearing in — the Pope was given a tour. A Vatican steward, [sic on that comma, Andy] opened the double doors of an enormous closet and gestured grandly to show his Holiness the raiments he would wear for the various holidays and occasions.  To which the Pope allegedly responded: “Close it up.  Take it away.  The circus is over.”

The Rest of the Story?

Remember the video of the Central Florida sheriff who had a press conference where he shared the names and photos of two early teen girls he charged with cyberbullying a young girl who had jumped off the town water tower?

Polk County prosecutors decided to drop felony charges against two girls in a September cyberbullying case that the police said contributed to the death of 12-year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick, who jumped from a cement plant tower two months ago.

The decision was made by the Polk County state attorney’s office after weeks of investigation and an analysis of thousands of Facebook messages failed to turn up enough evidence to charge the girls, one 14 and the other 12.

While the messages revealed that the 14-year-old had insulted Rebecca and called her ugly names, the kind of bullying that some children could find emotionally crushing, the posts did not rise to the level of a crime, lawyers for the two girls said.

The rest of the NY Times story is here.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

I'm currently reading Don't Count on It! by John C. Bogle (see sidebar), one of the inventors of the index mutual fund.

The introduction has a quote I really like from a Rudyard Kipling poem. I hope I am not insulting you by mentioning that a copybook was a notebook used to teach penmanship in the 19th century. The student might copy important passages and quotations from classical literature to demonstrate his/her handwriting skills.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through relevant fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place ...
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

 I'm not sure what "relevant fingers" are, but anyone with pretensions of valuing the study of history can understand where Kipling is coming from.

Pufferfish

The real political junkies out there shouldn't miss The Hunt for Pufferfish, the story of the Romney campaign's vice presidential candidate decision-making. Pufferfish was the campaign's code name for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Based on their junk-food-saturated vetting diet, they called their undertaking Project Goldfish (after the crackers)—ultimately giving each of the VP finalists an aquatic code name. Myers’ plan was to have Project Goldfish completed by Memorial Day. In April she presented Romney with a list of two dozen names, which he whittled down to 11: Kelly Ayotte, John Cornyn, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Bill Frist, Mike Huckabee, Bob McDonnell, Tim Pawlenty, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. 

Within a month, the vetters had assembled preliminary research books on the 11, which Romney perused and then rendered his short list: Christie (Pufferfish), Pawlenty (Lakefish), Portman (Filet o Fish), Rubio (Pescado) and Ryan (Fishconsin).

In the nine months since Christie’s endorsement of Romney in October 2011, Boston had formed a mixed view of the governor who George W. Bush had once nicknamed Big Boy.

Hate to say it (no, really, I do) but, if true, the code name thing is a pretty good indication of a low level of professionalism on Romney's staff.  Surprise, surprise.

Turns out Christie has a lot of baggage.

Worth Repeating

Krugman:

Has anyone else noticed how much the GOP position on Obamacare resembles the classic borscht belt joke about the two ladies at a Catskills resort? Lady #1: “The food here is so terrible, it’s inedible!” Lady #2: “And the portions are so small!” Republican #1: “Obamacare is slavery!” Republican #2: “And it’s so hard to sign up!”

Give 'Em Hell, Bill

Well, Obama seems to have cashed out on his second term. All his life he's been a compromiser, and the times call for a fighter. It's not bad to be a compromiser, but it's the wrong time, wrong place.

There are some people who understand this. One of them is a Congressman from New Jersey (!), Bill Pascrell, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. His district covers a good part of Bergen County (Teaneck and Tenafly, but not Bergenfield or Hackensack), and parts of Passaic and Hudson Counties.

Yesterday he ripped a new one in the House Republicans:



I like this guy!

Why isn't Obama talking like this? [Obvious answer: "Because he's not from New Jersey."]

Reparations

God, I love the New York Times.

Today there's an op-ed piece called "Confronting the Legacies of Slavery," in which the author, a history professor at Duke, advocates providing reparations to Haiti and the Caribbean islands for the effects of slavery on those nations.

Now, this is a delicate issue, and "the right thing to do" is far from obvious, from my point of view. Whatever the merits for the Caribbean, the discussion obviously leads to the question of reparations for slavery in the United States. I was impressed with the thoughtfulness of many responses to the article, and the wide range of opinions. Some examples:

Oddly, the article never gets around to revealing how much Haiti actually paid France [to compensate slave holders for the loss of their "property"]. It was 90 million francs. While Haiti was paying France its 90 million francs, the international banking community was loaning Haiti billions of dollars, much of which the Duvaliers stole. In addition to the loans, Haiti has consumed billions in foreign aid over the past three decades. The United States has been servicing Haiti’s IDB debt since 2005. The world has contributed $2.4 billion of aid to Haiti since the 2010 earthquake.
------------

You don't hear the Jews asking for reparations from the Egyptians, but Holocaust survivors and their children have demanded and received various forms of reparations from Germany. The fact that expropriation of Jewish property was legal under the Nazis doesn't mean that it was "rewriting history" for the Jews to demand it back. And slavery in the Caribbean is much closer in time to the Holocaust than it is to slavery in ancient Egypt or Rome.
 ------------

Should the Romans pay the Brits because they took over the Isles way back when? How far back are you willing to go? People have misbehaved for centuries... should Germany start paying reparations to Israel, to the French, to the Russians,to... the Italians? Should the mostly black slavers in Africa pay reparations? Should Japan pay reparations to China? What about the European nations, and the US, that fought over China at the end of the 19th century.... The historical ledger can never be made even. Sometimes it's better to face the future. I agree Haiti needs help, but let's base it on today's world.
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Most Germans would agree that paying reparations to Israel, as the representative of the murdered Jewish people, was good for Germany. It could not erase the crimes, of course. But an attempt at their recognition was made, an attempt at penance and at a symbolic reconstitution of what was destroyed.

Of course money cannot restore a life taken, whether taken by murder or taken by slavery. But to pay it, and acknowledge and shoulder the guilt or responsibility (in the case of later generations), is the first step towards alleviation.
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I think the Caribbean slavery issue comes up because it is the closest chronologically to our current time, where we have the moral and economic space to consider the issue of reparations. This wasn't a conversation that would have been possible, or even contemplated, in any previous era.

So it's progress in a way that this issue is taken seriously; which ever way it falls out, I doubt it's going to materially hurt or help any of the countries in question.
------------

This all occurred a very long time ago. Isn't it time to let it go? Dredging up this sad situation constantly only deepens the wound and supports the hurt. In addition to exacerbating the problem it deepens the rift between races creating an us and them mentality. When will we realize that our ancestors all did reprehensible things and acted in their own best interest. I would hope we have grown from their examples and applied these lessons.

Obviously Not! Someone somewhere is bent on perpetuation of this stain on our history. Where will it stop? Even if every black in these "slave" states received a million dollars, it would be in the hands of the slick carpetbaggers in a matter of a few month. Things would return to the present state - only worse for the loss of that money.
------------

The reparations argument never goes anywhere because it's intellectually incoherent. The claims are ridiculously time-barred, to begin with. They are also hopelessly remote. Caribbean descendants of slaves shouldn't get reparations for the same reason Americans of Irish descent, or of Korean descent, shouldn't. The slowly evolving norms of a society are not the same as a compensable injury.

Dr. Dubois' argument about "undoing the divisions created by colonialism" and "ending racial discrimination" are especially ironic since none of her supposed "victims" are actually indigenous to the Caribbean. Whether African or European or Asian, the human beings living in the Caribbean today are newcomers. The native people were wiped out -- they're the ones who have a claim, if anyone does. This is just a terrible fact of history. But if you start awarding reparations to one group or another for their injuries, then you necessarily bring this fact into contemporary light. 

An Expert is Anybody Who Agrees with ME!

Guess who the Wall Street Journal considers an expert in health care policy!

Here's a hint for those old enough to remember:

Don't miss the "Corrections and Amplifications" at the end of the article.

Har, har, har! Har, har, har!

I'd say that about does it for the WSJ, now to be called the Wall Street Fox News. [Or is it the Wall Street Onion?]

Rupert Murdoch, take your bow.

Well, This is Unexpected ...

A recent poll in Kansas shows Governor Sam Brownback losing to Democratic challenger Paul Davis, 43 percent to 39 percent.

Of those who voted for Brownback when he ran for Governor in 2010, just 59% stick with him in 2014, and 25% defect to the Democrats. Though today Brownback leads 2:1 among Republicans, he trails 11:1 among Democrats. Independents split. Northeast and Southeast Kansas both favor the Democratic ticket; Western Kansas favors the Republican ticket.

Of those voting for Brownback today, 65% say their mind is made up, compared to 29% who say they may change their mind. Of those voting for Davis today, 69% say their mind is made up, compared to 26% who say they may change their mind.

Okay, the election is still a year off, and that's a long, long time in politics. But this is Kansas!

Addendum:

Though there have been lots of stories about future Tea Party challenges to Republican Congressmen who voted to end the shut-down, don't miss the stories about how the folks back home in Tea Party Congressional districts are disgusted with their Congressional representatives.

Don't Cry for JPMorgan

Jon Stewart – the best news analyst in America today – covers the JPMorgan settlement.