Monthly Archives: March 2004

Anyone who reads this page knows I hope George W. Bush does not win the election this November. But if he does, I really hope he wins a clean victory and not one that winds up going to the Supreme Court.

As you may have heard, Justice Antonin Scalia today declined to recuse himself in the matter of the Sierra Club's suit against Dick Cheney. Even to a legal layman, his 21-page memorandum [Adobe Reader required] has to raise some eyebrows. He claims, for instance, that if Justices recuse themselves, there can too easily be 4-4 tie decisions. Okay, fine…but isn't a tie preferable to a 5-4 decision that will widely be perceived as dishonest or tainted? More to the point, when a Justice retires or dies, we always go through a long period where we have eight members on the High Court. If an even number of Justices is so undesirable, why has no one proposed whatever legislation would be necessary to hasten the confirmation process and get us back to nine? And of course, during those long periods of eight Justices, one recusing him or herself eliminates the possibility of a tie, so recusal doesn't always result in judicial gridlock.

The following passage also struck me as flailing about to find some way to argue his side…

…while friendship is a ground for recusal of a Justice where the personal fortune or the personal freedom of the friend is at issue, it has traditionally not been a ground for recusal where official action is at issue, no matter how important the official action was to the ambitions or the reputation of the Government officer.

Perhaps there are few (if any) precedents but I don't see the distinction here. If Dick Cheney loses this case and is forced to reveal that which he has fought to keep hidden, he could suffer enormous personal embarrassment. He could be sued or even lose his job. What the heck difference does it make to argue that — well, technically — it's his official action not his personal fortune. One could also make a pretty good case that Cheney's personal fortune has been enhanced in huge amounts by his official actions. Wait 'til later, when it's too late for Bush to drop him from the ticket and the Democrats begin unleashing the "war profiteering" accusations. At some point, we're going to hear Democrats saying things like, "Dick Cheney isn't really that interested in a second term. He wants to hurry back to Halliburton and collect his commission on the war."

In any case, it seems to me that recusal is not about the technicalities of a conflict of interest but about making sure that the court's decisions are above suspicion. Is there anyone today who feels, in light of Scalia's attitude, America is more likely to embrace the next 5-4 decision that favors the Bush administration with Scalia among the five?

The terrorist actions in Spain and Baghdad are, of course, terrible tragedies. And it bothers me more than it probably should that as I surfed the Internet, the overriding discussion points for those two horrible incidents seemed to be how they could be used in our current presidential election. You have articles that say what happened in Spain makes the case for the defeat of George Bush and you have articles claiming that it proves we should not elect John Kerry. And in discussion groups on both sides, there's a lot of talk of how their guy can use this to get votes. It's going to be a long time 'til November, people.

I can't recall a stupider proposal than a bill that was recently introduced to give Congress a veto power over Supreme Court decisions. Can't think of one less likely to ever become the law of the land, either. Here's Dahlia Lithwick with just some of what's wrong with this idea.

The folks at moveon.org took a lot of heat over a pretty trivial matter…the fact that two of something like a thousand proposed political commercials in a contest they ran compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Neither spot was ever even a finalist but in today's political climate, if your opponents give you even the teensiest lapse which you can inflate and use to hammer them, you do so. This is practiced by all sides.

Now, moveon.org has come up with one of the most powerful political commercials I've ever seen, and it's one that they actually endorse and are putting money behind. I can't wait to see the ways in which Republicans will try to discredit this one. Here it is.

Larry Boocker sent me this e-mail which advances another point-o'-view on the matter of Martha Stewart's conviction…

A lot of people seem confused about the nature of Martha Stewart's crime and more generally, the reason why insider trading is illegal. They think it's a victimless crime or a trivial crime or a "technicality" crime. Let's start with the immediate victims. Those are the people who bought her shares of Imclone stock when she knew with certainty that their value would drop sharply. Well, that's just her good luck and the buyers' bad luck, right? Kind of like when a gambler puts money on 17 red at a roulette wheel and the casino knows for sure that that number won't hit this time around. Isn't that equally fair?

And that's what this is all about, protecting the integrity of the game. How many people will go to a casino if they suspect the games are fixed? How many people will put their money into the stock market if they suspect it's rigged so that a small number of insiders can make money and everybody else loses. Regulation of the stock market goes back to the New Deal. There were a lot of shady practices before the 1929 crash. When people lost a lot of money in the market, they also lost confidence in the fairness of the market. For years, they were
afraid to put their money back in. This was bad for our economy and for our country. So the SEC was created, not to protect investors, although that's the claim. It was created to protect the stock market, to convince people it's safe to put their money there. Insider trading is
illegal, not to protect investors, but to protect the reputation of the market.

Yes, Martha wasn't directly convicted of insider trading. Kind of like when Al Capone was convicted of failing to pay taxes on his illegal income rather than the illegality of his income. Wasn't that a terrible injustice? I don't think so.

So we had all these business scandals involving Enron and Worldcom and investors got hurt by their shady dealings. (Their employees took a double hit since many of them were invested in their employer.) The government needed to do something to restore confidence in the integrity of the stock market. So they went after Martha. Is this fair? I think so. I've never been impressed by criminals who argue that they weren't the only ones doing the crime or that others were doing worse.

I don't see any reason to chortle over her conviction. I certainly hope that the Enron and Worldcom guys get punished more severely. But I don't think any injustice was done to Martha.

This is not something about which I feel that strongly, but my inclination is in a different direction. I'm not one of those disputing that insider trading is and should be illegal…but Martha wasn't convicted of insider trading. They couldn't prove that, and it's not like they couldn't prove it for the same reasons that prosecutors couldn't prove Al Capone was bootlegging. Capone was having witnesses killed or threatened. He was bribing cops and judges and juries. He had erected an elaborate series of front companies that masked his involvement with the rackets. No one has suggested they couldn't convict Martha Stewart of insider trading because she had a couple of stockbrokers bumped off. In Capone's case, the one weakness in his shield from illegal activities was that he had received the money…so they prosecuted him for that. That, at least, was an actual crime.

Looking back for a famous precedent, the Martha Stewart conviction might in some ways remind me of what Jim Garrison tried to pull after Clay Shaw was acquitted of charges that he conspired to murder John F. Kennedy. The acquittal was swift and total, and rather than accept that, Garrison spent the next year or two trying to charge Shaw with all sorts of niggling little technicialities…finding the slightest discrepancy in the man's testimony, for example, and trying to frame it as perjury. There was a very powerful attitude of, "We'll be embarrassed if we don't convict this guy of something" and I fear that kind of thing happens more in our justice system than it ought to. I don't have one handy but I used to casually track cases where the prosecutors couldn't prove the reason they arrested or targeted a subject, and it then became a matter of plea bargaining — "Plead guilty to this one thing or we'll keep this investigation going forever" — or convicting them on some trivial ancillary detail. (Just thought of one: The McMartin Pre-School fiasco. They charged those people with 208 counts of child molestation and couldn't prove one, but they kept it going for years, hoping someone would crumble and plead guilty to something so the D.A.'s office wouldn't look completely inept. Which in this case, it was.)

I'm not convinced that kind of thing occurred with Ms. Stewart but I'm also not prepared to accept that she was the equivalent of Al Capone so we should rejoice that she was convicted of something, even if it might have been the wrong thing. You're right that it's no justification for wrongdoing to say that others did worse. But it also won't be right, if the Ken Lays of the world get away with their crimes, for prosecutors to say, "What do you mean we didn't nail the big guys committing stock fraud? We got Martha Stewart, didn't we?"

As I said, I'm not set in my view of this, so I appreciate the discussion. I'm just leaning in the direction of something here not being right.

Can you pass a third grade Geography test? Can you identify the 48 states that make up the continental United States? Well, here's your chance to prove it.

Henry Waxman, who happens to be my Congressman, has set up an online database of faulty statements made by Bush administration officials about the war in Iraq. It's called Iraq on the Record.

I happen to think Democrats are making too great an effort to take every statement that turned out to be untrue (or even possibly untrue) and portray it as a deliberate, premeditated lie. Much of America is not going to buy that grown men and women in the White House conspired to be so inaccurate. They will, however, accept that all these predictions and unsupported facts show some sort of massive screw-up; that this country went to war with its leaders believing and acting upon a shocking amount of bad intelligence, and ignoring an awful lot that turned out to be accurate. If I were Kerry, I'd be talking a lot less about lying and a lot more about good, old-fashioned incompetence.

Stephen Beals sent me this e-mail this morning and I thought it was worth sharing…

Like you, I don't get the animosity towards Martha Stewart. True, I'm not really into decorating and all that, so it's not like I've been paying attention, but I really don't understand where the flat-out hatred is coming from. The same goes for Kathie Lee. Like most public personalities, their behavior in their private lives really doesn't mean much to me. I suppose somebody can remind me of a mean boss I've had, or something, but I try and be objective.

I work in advertising and get a lot of daily newspapers here at my office. I'm just amazed at some of these articles. It's obvious that a lot of people who are angry at Martha, apparently just for being Martha, are now allowed to poke at her.

One Associated Press story interviewed previous inmates at the prison Martha will be going to and focuses on the drab concrete which she cannot decorate and the thread count of the blankets that she will have to use. The article goes on to say that her website directs customers to high thread count blankets, but she won't have that option. It points out that the (once again) drab concrete walls cannot be decorated and that she will have no choice about what to wear.

Couldn't this kind of anger be useful if it was applied to something more socially important? As a whole, I guess our country gets passionate about Martha Stewart and not about the boring things in life. Like Education.

Just had to get that off my chest. Thanks!

There are a lot of folks out there who are unhappy with their stations in life and this unhappiness manifests itself in schadenfreude, especially towards someone who seems snooty and above us. I can understand that, I guess. And I suppose I can also understand making the leap from "I don't like this person" to "she must be guilty," though I think that's also intellectually dishonest. I can even understand and agree with those who are happy because a blow was dealt to the premise — too often true in this country — that you can never be convicted of anything if you can afford a good-enough lawyer. Even on this one though, I wish I were more convinced that Ms. Stewart had committed a "real" crime instead of some technicality. The way the counts read, it's almost like they knew they couldn't nail her on a crime so they nailed her on conspiracy to commit that crime and lying to conceal that crime. It reminds me of my old complaint about accusing someone of "the appearance of impropriety" because you can't find a real impropriety to accuse them of.

Oh, well. If this is a warm-up to going after more of the Ken Lays of the world then, assuming Martha actually committed a crime, maybe it will make more sense. If it turns out to be a diversion, then I'll really think she got railroaded on a prosecution that served no purpose other than to "get" someone famous. Thanks for the comment, Stephen.

Jonathan Weisman tells us that there is no cause-and-effect connection between employment levels and the raising or lowering of taxes.

I'm looking to hire someone a few days a week for a while…someone who lives in Los Angeles and needs work badly enough to accept low pay for many hours of running errands, sorting books, entering data into a computer and aiding me with lugging and restacking boxes. If you are such a person, drop me a line.

That's right: I'm doing my part to help the economy by using my Bush tax cut to create new jobs. Well, new job (singular) but it's a start.

Congressguy Ron Paul is a Libertarian and I often (not always) find myself in agreement with him, most often on matters of Civil Rights. I agree with most (not all) of this speech on the ongoing attempts by folks of all stripes to have government control Free Speech in this country.

If we are to believe Matthew Yglesias, the Bush administration has done a lot less in the "War on Terror" than most people think.

Every Monday through Friday, my longtime chum Scott Shaw! (he spells it with the "!") posts some bizarre funnybook on his Oddball Columns page along with suitably bizarre commentary. This Friday, he will showcase his 1000th Oddball Comic and I, for one, am eager to know what it will be. Could it possibly be odder than this issue of a 1950 comic devoted to the man who was then becoming known as Mr. Television? (By the way, I've never actually read an issue of Uncle Milty but I'd be delighted to find out that its writer stayed true to the spirit of Milton Berle by dressing in drag while he wrote it, stealing all his jokes from other comics and sneaking in occasional references to his genitalia.) Could the comic Scott has selected as #1000 possibly be oddballer — that's a new word I just made up — than an issue of Manuel Pacifico, Tuna Fisherman? Than Frank Luther's Silly Pilly Comics? Than Slick Chick or The Story of Johnny Surge or even Woody Woodpecker in Chevrolet Wonderland? Scott hasn't told me what he's picked but I have a hunch. And if it's what I think it is, it's a fitting choice. Let's both find out Friday and in the meantime, drop by his site and see all that had led up to this moment.

Today's Prince Valiant strip is the last by John Cullen Murphy, who has been drawing the venerable feature since the early seventies when its creator, Hal Foster, retired. Murphy had been drawing his own newspaper strip, Big Ben Bolt, and I guess sensed that its demise was near. (He handed it off to assistants in 1975 and it ended in 1978.) Around 1970, hearing Foster needed a hand, Murphy approached him and found that the veteran illustrator, at age 78, was thinking of handing the main illustration chores off to another. Other artists subsequently sought the job so a practical audition was held with the three best applicants each hired to draw one Sunday page over Foster's rough layouts. Gray Morrow, Wally Wood and Murphy each did one, and Murphy got the job.

Foster wrote and did increasingly-loose layouts for him until 1980. By that time, Murphy's son Cullen had begun to assist with the writing, as had author Bill Crouch. When Foster retired in full in '80, Cullen took over the writing, which he has done to this day and which he will continue to do with his father's successor, Gary Gianni.

For those of you scoring at home: Prince Valiant strips are numbered sequentially. Foster did #1-1756 before he began filtering in the tryout strips by Morrow, Wood and Murphy. Thereafter, Foster did some strips, Murphy did some over his layouts and there were at least three by another artist who has never been identified by historians. Murphy's audition was #1760 and then he did more and more. Foster last did finished art on #2000 and ceased his involvement with the layouts as of #2244. Murphy's last, the strip that runs today, is #3451 so he seems to have done around 1,657 Prince Valiant strips as opposed to Foster's estimated total of 1,789. Two amazing achievements.

Here's a new site for animation buffs to bookmark. Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi have joined forces to set up Cartoon Brew, a weblog covering the art form. Jerry and Amid are both wise about all things animated and well-connected to the industry and intelligentsia. So go there often.