Jews on satellite radio...

Now that Sirius is showcasing Howard Stern, and XM is launching Dylan, I wonder which one will pick up Alan Greenspan?

What will the antisemites say? Not to mention paranoid folks...

But seriously (and I'm not a subscriber nor investor, and have no axe to grind here), Dylan's best when he's cryptically mumbling. That's good radio? Randi Rhodes is good radio. Mike Feder is good radio. But Dylan?

We are still so screwed....

And I can't actually blame Bush for this:

About 43% of people who received a retirement-plan distribution from a workplace plan through 2003 rolled their money into another tax-qualified plan, such as an individual retirement account or another employer plan -- thus avoiding an immediate tax hit -- up from 19% who did so 10 years earlier, according to a new report by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group.

Meanwhile, 15% of savers cashed-out their lump sum to buy consumer goods such as a new car or to pay for everyday expenses, down from about 23% of savers who did that with their distributions through 1993, the study found.

It's likely that savers understand their retirement plans better, said Craig Copeland, a senior research associate with EBRI and author of the report. But companies have also gotten better at marketing rollover products, he noted...

The report covers workers with defined-contribution plans such as 401(k)s, as well as those who are able to take lump-sum distributions from a traditional pension.

Even as more savers rolled money into tax-qualified plans, there was a very slight decline in people stashing the money in a savings account or using it to invest: About 6% did that with distributions through 2003, compared with 8% who did that with distributions through 1993.

Meanwhile, a greater portion of savers used their retirement funds to pay off debts, buy a home or start a business: About 22% of those who received a distribution through 2003 did that versus about 18% who did that through 1993.

Really, pensions are being gutted, everything's on shaky ground, but 15% of all folks who can roll-over to an IRA spend it and 6% put it into a savings account?

The IRA rules need to be relaxed to allow short selling, but otherwise, it's kind of stupid that some 20% or so people are killing what is their retirement money. Especially with Republicans eyeing pensions and Social Security.

Today's reason why the NY Times is not a left of center paper:

"Bush 'Confident' of Agreement with McCain on Interrogation"

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - President Bush said Monday that he was "confident" that he could reach an agreement with Senator John McCain over legislative restrictions on American interrogations of captives in the fight against global terrorism.

Mr. Bush added that "we want to make sure we're in a position to be able to interrogate without torture" because there are "people who still want to hurt us."

I want you to focus on the lie here: George Bush wants to "make sure" we're "in a position" to be able to "interrogate without torture."

Is there any question that we're in a position to interrogate without torture? Is John McCain forcing us to interrogate with torture?

The New York Times goes on to "explain":

Mr. Bush's remarks, in an interview with NBC News, hinted at what appear to be the White House objectives in the talks that started with Vice President Dick Cheney's demand that intelligence agents be exempted from Mr. McCain's measure. For Mr. Cheney, this is also part of a broader struggle with Congress to reassert presidential prerogatives.

Ummm... that looks like they want to be able to interrogate with torture.

Really this crap reads worse than Pravda ever did or the North Korean media does today. It least in the latter case, the language is so gushing and flowery that you know it's every bit as true as Weekly World News.

This writing ain't even that good.

"You do what you have to do," Mr. McCain told Newsweek last month when asked what a president would do if such treatment was needed to extract information about coming attacks.

I've said before that the "ticking time bomb" scenario is bullshit, mostly from the "they're fanatics who plan well" perspective.

But I might as well pass along this bit by Arthur Silber destroying Krauthammer, that I came across yesterday. Silber quotes one Darius Rejali:

With regard to the "ticking time bomb" scenario, so beloved of torture's advocates [and which I discussed in Part I of this series, where I pointed out its fundamental errors], Rejali writes:

"What if time is short, as with a 'ticking bomb'? Does torture offer a shortcut? Real torture -- not the stuff of television -- takes days, if not weeks. Even torturers know this. There are three things that limit torture's value in this context."

Those "three things" are the medical limit, the resource limit, and the psychological limit. Consult the article for details.

This is a perspective I hadn't even considered; but yeah, it takes a lot longer than most ticking time bombs tick to be able to do anything "useful" under torture.

NY Dread...

I'm supposed to be going to NY for the holidays, or at least one of them. But, it's already snowed in NY, and it usually doesn't seriously do that until January, and now they're talking a transit strike?

Even though there has not been a transit strike since 1980, even though state law bars such walkouts and even though union and management say a strike is unlikely, a strike is always possible, and this year the chances appear higher than usual.

"A settlement is the rational thing, but people don't always behave in a rational manner," said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University Graduate Center.

The potential for irrationality - others use the words intransigence or hotheadedness - seems slightly higher in this December's negotiations than in the transit talks three years ago, when the two sides stopped the clock and then announced a settlement 19 hours after the strike deadline.

This time around, the bargaining stew seems somewhat more volatile because the transportation authority is demanding sizable concessions on pensions and health coverage, saying that it needs to worry about future deficits even though it has a budget surplus of nearly $1 billion. Many transit workers believe the authority is sitting on a pile of money, and they are looking for generosity from the authority, not demands for givebacks.

The family I can deal with. Snow can be survived. Transit strikes are horrible. Simply horrible.

I'd wish I'd done that...

Link

TOKYO -- Toru Nashimoto, a trim 36-year-old with nary a coin in the pockets of his slick pinstripe suit, confidently strode toward the cashier at a bustling sushi bar to settle his $45 lunch tab. He whipped out a thin electronic card and placed it above a scanner that quickly blinked neon blue before emitting a computerized ka-ching.

It was the telltale sound of Japan's new electronic money. In seconds, Nashimoto had paid for his meal of sea urchin, eel and raw fish and was hustling back to work. No change from the cash register, no waiting for confirmation, no pin code to enter. "Who needs to carry real money?" said the commercial real estate manager. "I often don't even carry a wallet with me anymore."

Nashimoto is part of the latest trend in Japan, where society is rethinking commerce by doing away with the increasingly arcane concept of cash.

Technology analysts say the use of electronic money amounts to a leap forward in commerce and shopping. Using cell phones that transmit infrared signals -- or, as in Nashimoto's case, a smart card that doubles as a set of electronic keys and lets him earn airline miles with each use -- Japanese consumers are whisking through checkout lines, buying everything from sushi to furniture without ever yanking out their wallets.

But if you try to do anything remotely similar in the US, you'll find a maze of different standards all over the place, and user fees that would make it prohibitive.

Still, if you consider it, it's kind of crude that the cash you have in your wallet could have been handled by millions of people.

Re: North Korea: Washington Times- you left something out

They publish a piece on North Korea...

Apart from the impressive subsidy -- $2.6 billion -- donated by South Korea, North Korea's other significant source of foreign income is an especially well-crafted "super" U.S. $100 bill produced at two factories in downtown Pyongyang.
My visit was timed to coincide with the Arirang, or mass performances, to celebrate the founding of North Korea's Communist Party. Some 100,000 performers danced, marched, tumbled, while masses of children held up snap cards that formed gargantuan pictures of great battles, and insistent images of Eternal President Kim Il-sung (the "Great Leader") and the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong-il. These "games" were like a Stalinist version of a Busby Berkeley 1930s Hollywood spectacle and part George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."
The "Dear Leader" was supposed to have shown up at the Arirang performance as he did when then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attended a similar event five years ago. Indeed, North Korean TV broadcasts that night showed Mr. Kim seated somewhere near our VIP boxes. But like much else in North Korea, it was fiction. Mr. Kim was not there, really; on TV, there he was in the box, two over from where I sat. He was there, but virtually.
The leadership's self-proclaimed near-divinity has elements of real absurdity. The North Korean papers claim, for instance, Mr. Kim shot 38 -- for 18 holes -- the first and last time he ever played golf. It is part of the weird miracles, lies and mass adulation the regime hopes will strengthen its grip on power.

As the American Prospect noted a few months back...

Several years ago, the communist dictator of North Korea decided to send a birthday gift to a special friend. The gift was a rare ginseng root, and the recipient, given the ideology of the sender, may seem at first blush to be a surprise: the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah and proud owner of Washington’s flagship right-wing newspaper, The Washington Times.

Their relationship, in fact, is based on more than the exchange of baubles. Moon once claimed that Kim Jong-Il has extended an invitation to reside permanently in his totalitarian paradise. “He tells me,” Moon once recalled in a sermon about Kim, “‘I will give you a comfortable place if you come here, and the people will appreciate you more here.’” ...

The Washington Times has played an essential role in Moon’s relations with the Kim dynasty, although the tone of its coverage alternates between promotional and hostile. Ironically, while Times editorial-page editor (and TV personality) Tony Blankley has published recent op-ed columns attacking the Clinton administration’s “perverse policy of appeasement” for giving “enticements and sweetheart deals” to North Korea, a secretive organization housed just one floor above the very office where he writes his editorials serves as the headquarters for Moon’s emissaries. However harshly The Washington Times may denounce North Korea, those emissaries and Moon himself have been providing attractive “enticements” and “deals” to Pyongyang for almost 15 years.

Indeed, Moon’s relationship with the North Korean regime continues to expand today. He maintains a deluxe hotel in Pyongyang and is pursuing other ventures. Although he lost a long and costly bidding war with Hyundai to develop tourism in North Korea, the South Korea–based car company ceded to Moon’s people the right to build an automobile factory in Nampo, a city outside the capital where he has invested $55 million so far. He has also mounted an advertising campaign that has placed the first commercial billboards on North Korean soil.

So the Moon empire is providing substantial assistance to what may well be the most dangerous and unstable regime in President Bush’s “axis of evil” -- and a government that many on the right consider an irreconcilable enemy of the United States -- while simultaneously attacking elected officials (almost exclusively Democrats) who question the president’s policies as weak and unpatriotic.

And that, as they say, is the rest of the story.

Really, a mouthpiece of a culty self-proclaimed Korean messiah reporting on another culty self-proclaimed Korean messiah.

You can't make this stuff up.

Yet more bilge from the NY Times

The Week in Review section publishes a love letter to Charles Krauthammer, fan of torture, and can't bring itself to highlight the argument, that for decades the US has found torture useless for extracting information, and in fact simply provided misinformation which was used as "disinformation" to go into Iraq.

And no, torture did not work on John McCain.

Another "new" Microsoft?

A reporter says, more or less, that their threatened by Google in the Times, but to me it looks like what they're going to do is simply charge for all those annoying update-and-reboot-your computer-in-the-middle of work interruptions.

Wonderful. I can only hope that somebody puts together a model of software that "just works" without the cost and annoyance of Microsoft software, and puts them out of business once and for all.

Moreover - flaws and all- Google Earth is the best thing since sliced bread.

Yet again the Catholic League misses the point...

From the actual press release by the Catholic League, on this week's episode of "South Park":

“A ‘South Park’ character gets a DWI and is ordered to attend AA meetings. Told about the 12-step program, he concludes that he needs a miracle to cure him. The plot then focuses on a statue of the Virgin Mary who is ‘bleeding out her ass.’ The Vatican dispatches a cardinal to investigate and he is sprayed with blood when he walks behind the statue. He then declares this to be a miracle, which draws even more people. The alcoholic, now in a wheelchair, is also sprayed with blood: he then claims he is cured and jumps out of his seat.

“Pope Benedict XVI goes to investigate. He, too, is sprayed with blood when he walks behind the statue. A reporter says, ‘The pope investigated further and determined that the statue was not bleeding out its ass, but its vagina.’ To which the pope replies: ‘A chick bleeding out her vagina is no miracle. Chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time.’

I've said at other times that one of the purposes of such graphic detail coming from religious right folks is to combine titilation with "outrage."

The program in question actually was more a righteous bashing of the "powerlessness" philosophy of those in AA and the denial of the necessity of "discipline."

Stan, the kid whose father gets the DUI gets it right in the episode: if his father gave up drinking, his life would be defined by not drinking, which would be the same as excess.

That message outweighs any faux outrage coming from bleeding statues and locker-room humor. Yes, bash Buddhism if you want; it's your right, and besides, the idea of Buddhism, and its ritual pales in importance to its day-to-day everyday practice, which is all about discipline. I agree with Stan. Cultivation of discipline, and being skillful is more important than sacred cows - or statues.

Is this what our lives are for?

Link

With more than 100 million people worldwide logging on every month to play interactive computer games, game companies are already generating revenues of $3.6 billion a year from subscriptions, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the computer gaming market.

For the Chinese in game-playing factories like these, though, it is not all fun and games. These workers have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections to thrash online trolls, gnomes and ogres.

As they grind through the games, they accumulate virtual currency that is valuable to game players around the world. The games allow players to trade currency to other players, who can then use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Internet is now filled with classified advertisements from small companies - many of them here in China - auctioning for real money their powerful figures, called avatars. These ventures join individual gamers who started marketing such virtual weapons and wares a few years ago to help support their hobby.

"I'm selling an account with a level-60 Shaman," says one ad from a player code-named Silver Fire, who uses QQ, the popular Chinese instant messaging service here in China. "If you want to know more details, let's chat on QQ."

This virtual economy is blurring the line between fantasy and reality. A few years ago, online subscribers started competing with other players from around the world. And before long, many casual gamers started asking other people to baby-sit for their accounts, or play while they were away.

That has spawned the creation of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of online gaming factories here in China. By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, toiling away in dark Internet cafes, abandoned warehouses, small offices and private homes.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these "virtual sweatshops."

"It's unimaginable how big this is," says Chen Yu, 27, who employs 20 full-time gamers here in Fuzhou. "They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers."

So now leisure activities are outsourced?

I've never played one of these games, but if this ain't samsara, I don't know what is.

Watch your P's and E's

Mark Hulbert passes on some advice from Clifford Asness and Anne Casscells:

To understand Asness' and Casscells' argument, consider the following statement. It, or its functional equivalent, is repeated so often by investment newsletters and on Wall Street that we're likely to accept it as a legitimate argument, even though its reasoning is faulty.

The statement goes: "Based on analyst estimates for 2006, earnings on the S&P 500 next year are likely to total $X, which results in a P/E ratio of Y. That's right in line with that ratio's historical average of about 15."

Did you catch the sleight of hand inherent in it?

According to Asness and Casscells, the problem with this reasoning is that it compares a P/E ratio calculated using forward earnings with past P/E ratios calculated using trailing earnings. Since analysts invariably project earnings to grow, P/Es based on forward earnings will always be lower than those based on trailing earnings.

A legitimate historical comparison therefore requires comparing current and past P/Es that are all calculated using trailing earnings - or comparing today's with historical ratios when all are calculated based on forward earnings.

Consider first the ratio calculated using trailing earnings. For the trailing four quarters, according to Standard & Poor's, reported earnings per share for the S&P 500 have totaled $67, which results in a current P/E ratio of 18.7. Between 1871 and 2003, according to Asness and Cascells, the median of P/E ratios calculated in this way is 13.7.

Based on trailing earnings, therefore, the stock market's current P/E suggests that the market is 36% overvalued.

Consider next the ratio calculated using forward earnings. According to S&P, analysts are projecting total operating earnings per share for 2006 to be $88.59, which yields a P/E ratio of 14.2. The median of comparably-calculated P/E ratios for the 1871-2003 period is around 11, according to estimates from Asness and Casscells.

So according to this approach to calculating P/E ratios, the market is 29% overvalued.

I do intend to be out of large cap stocks before the end of the year.

More details and bad writing on the shooting of the passenger in FLA...

Thanks to the NY Times...

Relatives said the couple had been returning from a stressful vacation. Mr. Alpizar's wife, Anne Buechner, had been robbed in Peru, losing her wallet, passport, laptop computer and cellphone, said her sister-in-law, Kelley Buechner of Milwaukee.

"That really upset Rigo," Ms. Buechner said in an interview at her home, using the family's nickname for Mr. Alpizar, a Costa Rica native who became an American citizen a few years ago. "Anne was robbed in Peru, and it was very unsettling to them both."

Mr. Tirpak, flying home from a business trip, said that as the couple waited to board Mr. Alpizar had begun singing the refrain from the old spiritual, "Let My People Go."

I have said - I've been known to feel stressed on flights myself, but not anywhere near this- that one of the most important things flights can do for security is to actually make people feel comfortable and relaxed.

And they generally don't. But I have found that we, ourselves, can do very much to help out others in this situation. Next time you're in an airport, here's an interesting meditative exercise: look at the looks on other people's faces. Just watch their looks. If this doesn't induce at least a smidgen of compassion - even out of the absurdity into which these people have been cast- well, I can't imagine it wouldn't. But watch what goes on in your mind as you watch these other people. That should unstress most folks, unless they're off their meds...

Chief Willie Marshall, who leads the Miami-Dade criminal investigations unit, said Mr. Alpizar had run off the plane and, while on the passageway, reached into a bag that was "strapped to his chest." That was when both air marshals opened fire with multiple shots, he said.

Chief Marshall said that homicide detectives had interviewed Ms. Buechner throughout the night and that she had told them her husband had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder roughly a decade ago. "She provided us some very valuable information and insight about what was going on with her husband," he said. "She told us he had not taken his medication recently."

I had to read the above 2 paragraphs twice - maybe it's 'cause it's late at night- to figure out that Chief Willie Marshall was investigating marshals, and therefore, it was a quirk of fate that a Marshall was investigating marshals, and not that Willie Marshall was in fact a marshal.

Though Chief Marshall said the couple had been on a vacation, a neighbor described it as a missionary trip and said both were frequent churchgoers.

I do hope this guy didn't put away his meds because of some religious thing.

Oh, so that's why...

The Washington Post solemnly weighs in against emerging markets, claiming they're either really disguised commodities plays or benefit from the ridiculously cheap money policies in the US.

Therein lie the makings of future disasters, in the view of many economists, market veterans and policymakers. Having pumped large sums into emerging markets at a time of low interest rates and high prices for the commodities that many developing countries produce, investors may well bolt when conditions deteriorate, with the sudden outflow of cash devastating economies and plunging governments into default.

"I worry that there's this perfect storm coming for emerging markets," said Kristin J. Forbes, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who served until early this year on President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

To hear professional investors tell it, their current bullishness is based on the vastly more prudent economic policies that emerging-market nations have adopted. They cite the higher ratings bestowed by credit agencies such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's on countries that only a few years ago were plagued by defaults and currency devaluations. For example, government bonds issued by Mexico, Russia and Poland now qualify as "investment grade."

"Those ratings have come from fundamental improvements in monetary and fiscal policy," said Dario Pedrajo, senior portfolio manager at Biscayne Americas Advisors. "Deficit spending has declined considerably in emerging-market countries."

But skeptics contend that the main reason for the boom is the paltry level of interest rates in the United States, Europe and Japan, which prompts money managers flush with cash to scour the globe for investments providing at least slightly better returns. "There's just a huge amount of money sloshing around looking for a place to go," said Desmond Lachman, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute who, as a Wall Street research analyst, was one of the first to predict doom for Argentina well before its 2001 default.

It may be true that this is a bubble; I have largely left the emerging markets thing, after a nice run-up of EWZ, AEMGX, and the Korean ETF.

But all these markets are definitely not the same, which the WaPo article blithely neglects to point out; funds investing in Thailand have been downright sucky this year, though you could have made 10% or so on them if you'd timed it right.

Congress raiding pensions...

See here, and here.

The pension mess can be fixed in ways that don't rip off workers who have them.

Rip off? Right. Can you, in your 401(k) invest in hedge funds? ETFs? Trade actively?

If not, you're getting less of a return than someone with a pension that is funded from a fund being managed by someone managing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Peace on earth...

and goodwill to men...and have a happy Bodhi Day tomorrow, and yeah, Merry Christmas on Dec. 25.

Mel Sembler, youth gulag meister, is running Scooter Libby's defense fund?

Josh Marshall flagged the Sembler Libby connection; does he know how shady Sembler really is?

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome.

"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul." She told AlterNet that she was committed at 12, in 1980, for nothing more than being caught with a mini-bar-sized liquor bottle, handed out by a classmate whose mother was a flight attendant. Samantha's mother suspected more, and a STRAIGHT expert reassured her fears. The small blonde junior high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her mother, told by counselors that her daughter was a liar, was encouraged to trick the girl for her own good.

Overcome by dread in the lobby, Samantha tried to run but was hauled into the back by older girls. Inside, as was standard operating procedure, she began the atonement process that cost over $12,000 a year: all-day re-education rituals in which flapping the arms ("motivating") and chanting signaled submission to "staying straight." She was coerced, she says, into confessing to being a "druggie whore" who went down on truckers for drugs. "You're forced to confess crimes you never committed." (Some survivors call it extortion.)

Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our Man In Rome -- he also served under the first Bush as Ambassador to Australia. Were Monroe's story unique, his STRAIGHT clinics might still be in business. Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends, closed under a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by 1993, ranging from sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.

Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment. As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP fundraisers, Sembler has received the honor of living during the George W. Bush presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the largest private garden in Rome. One night in May at "The Magic Kingdom" (as Mel and Betty call it), the dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the ambassador entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage -- until Betty complained that the old friends were stinking up "my house," the Washington Post reported.

He's come home, but still wafting across national drug policy is the influence of his STRAIGHT, which has legally changed its identity to the Drug Free America Foundation (director Calvina Fay denies it's the same organization but the name change is listed in Florida corporate filings). Subsidized by tax dollars, it lobbies for severe narcotics policies and workplace drug testing, with an advisory board that includes the like of Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife Columba, and Homeland Security Director of Public Safety Christy McCampbell. A more pressing issue is that former overseers of Sembler's company, true believers in the STRAIGHT model, are still running spin-off businesses that treat teens with the old methods...


Taking in new kids without much discrimination -- many addiction-free -- STRAIGHT staff assured parents that a variety of troubled teens could benefit from their brand of discipline.

Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would enter the care of a "host home" overseen, at night, by the same counselors up in her face by day. Over the months, patients like Samantha Monroe earned back basic privileges like speaking or, in the distant future, going to the bathroom alone, without an ever-present minder's thumb in the belt loop -- literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT kids, who had been molded into drug warriors in the heat of humiliation. They'd learned to play along and join the winning side, becoming the hall monitors and the muscle that enforced the rules.

From the outset, STRAIGHT's method was on thin ice with regulators. The underpinnings had long struck critics as more Pyongyang than Pinellas County. Sembler took his blueprint from another St. Petersburg program, The Seed, in which his son had enrolled in the 1970s. The Senate was less impressed than Sembler with The Seed. Senator Sam Ervin, who'd brought down Richard Nixon, killed the program's federal subsidies for funding a method "similar to the highly refined 'brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans." Ervin's 1974 probe into the rise of treatment abuse articulated an admirable American ideal: that "if our society is to remain free, one man must not be empowered to change another's personality and dictate the values, thoughts and feelings of another." Sembler had other ideals in mind, as hundreds of STRAIGHT victims would later attest.

Finally, one by one, the 12 clinics, which had once formed a nine-state empire, went dark. Much of the money was lost in settlements, but jury verdicts offered a peek into the regularity of the abuses. Florida patient Karen Norton was awarded $721,000 by a jury after being thrown against a wall in 1982 by the Semblers' treatment guru of choice: Dr. Miller Newton, whose unaccredited Ph.D was in public administration, but was tapped by the Semblers as STRAIGHT National Clinical Director. He's emblematic of how the creature Sembler built just won't stop sprouting heads, having personally launched spinoff businesses with names like KIDS. As a result, Newton has paid out over $12 million to his victims. Having moved back to Florida, he now calls himself "Friar Cassian," a priest in the non-Catholic Antiochian Orthodox church.

But just last month, Betty Sembler testified in a case against a STRAIGHT critic that Miller Newton, the dark cleric of rehab, is "a very close and dear friend and a valued one," and an "outstanding individual." Had he committed outrageous acts? "Absolutely not," she said, adding that it was incomprehensible that ex-STRAIGHT teen Richard Bradbury was picketing Newton. Thanks to her judgment of character, Newton has been given a voice in national drug policy, listed as a participant in a Drug Free America Foundation "International Scientific and Medical Forum."

From the beginning, critics were shocked to find that the keepers freely acknowledged many of the tactics -- yet insisted they were necessary. Mel Sembler even seems to have been emboldened by painful questions about his clinics. "We've got nothing to hide -- we're saving lives," he said in 1977 after six directors quit over practices that included kicking a restrained youth. He remained closely involved in personnel management. Almost two decades later, recalling how the ACLU was furious about STRAIGHT's practices, Sembler told Florida Trend Magazine in 1997 -- "with a grin," the reporter wrote -- that "it just shows that we must have been doing things right."

And rather than clean up Florida's program, he apparently leaned on health inspectors in 1989 to go easy on it. Reports of a cover-up wouldn't emerge for four more years -- long years, for the teenagers committed to a program that wouldn't lose its license until 1993. STRAIGHT foe Bradbury, believing he'd been "brainwashed" into becoming an abusive counselor, brought the clinics to the attention of the state after years of protest. Inspector Lowell Clary of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services found that reports of illegally restrained and stomped-on teens had been swept under the rug, likely with help from Republican state senators, who went unnamed, but made phone calls urging the clinic stayed open. A "persistent foul odor" hung over this use of power, said a St. Petersburg Times Op-Ed applauding the death of STRAIGHT.

Americans have these people in high positions, thanks to the Republican party.

Memo to Washington Post: the people are ahead of you on this...

The Washington Post thinks "Democrats" "fear" a "backlash at the polls" because Steny H. Hoyer, Rahm Emmanuel, and a guy from Georgia think John Murtha's plan - which isn't exactly a quick pull out entirely- remember the "over the horizon" phrase? - is unpopular.

They're wrong.

Anybody who saw that House session the other night knows quite well that Murtha's plan -or something similar to it- is pretty potent stuff, and far stronger than anything offered by the current regime right now, which won't even set up milestones for progress.

Yet another reason why we don't have much faith in the "liberal" media.

Sami al-Arian acquitted, hung jury....

From the Washington Post:

A federal jury acquitted former Florida professor Sami al-Arian yesterday of conspiring to aid a Palestinian group in killing Israelis through suicide bombings, dealing the U.S. government a setback in its efforts to use secretly gathered intelligence in criminal cases against terrorism suspects.

The trial was a crucial test of government power under the USA Patriot Act, which lowered barriers that had prevented intelligence agencies from sharing secretly monitored communications with prosecutors. The case was the first criminal terrorism prosecution to rely mainly on vast amounts of materials gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), whose standards for searches and surveillance are less restrictive than those set by criminal courts.

Al-Arian, 47, was found not guilty on eight of 17 counts, including conspiracy to maim or murder. Jurors deadlocked on the rest of the charges, including ones that he aided terrorists...

A male juror told the Associated Press he perceived al-Arian's acquittal not as a First Amendment issue but as a failure of the government to prove its case.

"I didn't see the evidence," said the man, who declined to give his name. The court kept jurors' identities secret...

The case became pivotal in last year's Florida Senate race. Former housing secretary Mel Martinez (R) defeated former university president Betty Castor (D) after charging that she did not do enough to sever al-Arian's ties to the school. Castor noted that al-Arian campaigned for President Bush in 2000 and met with White House adviser Karl Rove in 2001 on religion-based initiatives.

This guy said- said- some pretty unsavory things. But this looked fishy from the start, and - in my mind - was clearly undone by folks like Bill O'Reilly:

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, all four media giants, eagerly tapping into the country's mood of vengeance and fear, latched onto the Al-Arian story, fudging the facts and ignoring the most rudimentary tenets of journalism in their haste to better tell a sinister story about lurking Middle Eastern dangers here at home.

The story went national when Al-Arian was invited on the Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor" show back on Sept. 26. Host Bill O'Reilly revived inflammatory charges against Al-Arian dating back, in some cases, 15 years. Those charges were that a now-defunct Islamic think tank Al-Arian founded and ran in conjunction with USF operated as a sort of home away from home for radical Palestinians and terrorists. The charges had been thoroughly investigated and rejected by USF, and an immigration judge; the FBI has been looking for years and has never filed any charges.

Not even his harshest critics suggest Al-Arian has done anything in the last five years that could be even remotely construed as aiding terrorist organizations. The entire controversy sprang from the fact that viewers became enraged after old allegations were re-aired, albeit often in mangled form, by O'Reilly.

O'Reilly's accusatory and hectoring interrogation of Al-Arian, filled with false statements and McCarthy-like smears, climaxed in a chilling parting shot in which the host repeatedly told his stammering guest that if he were with the CIA, "I'd follow you wherever you went" -- clearly implying that he believed Al-Arian was a terrorist. Not surprisingly in the fearful and hysterical climate after Sept. 11, the show resulted in a torrent of angry calls, including death threats against al-Arian, to USF.

Before firing him, USF placed Al-Arian on paid leave, saying his presence made the campus unsafe and pointing to an avalanche of hate mail and death threats.

But the Gulf Coast hysteria was entirely created by the media. Without the Tampa Tribune, which undertook a dubious seven-year crusade against al-Arian, there would have been no story to begin with. Without "The O'Reilly Factor" -- a showcase for noisy right-wing ranting whose producers apparently didn't even know that Al-Arian had been cleared of charges before they handed him over to their equally ignorant hanging-judge host -- the controversy would never have been revived. Without incendiary, know-nothing Clear Channel radio jocks, led by a gentleman named Bubba the Love Sponge, there would almost certainly have been far fewer USF death threats. And without NBC's sloppy work on "Dateline" there would probably have been no firing.

I think that it's pretty clear the government really did not have much of a case, if any at all. I do wonder if they intend to press further, to go jury shopping.

I wouldn't want this to happen to Fred Phelps or James Dobson, unless there was reasonable evidence that they in fact committed crimes.

Where's Michelle Malkin

she who is quick to claim it's "liberals" who are "angry" when some guy gets pummeled by creationists?

Forget about the nasty, bad stuff about Alito...

like how he only told people what they wanted to hear to get jobs, whether he intended to keep commitments or not, or like he was against one person, one vote (which could be yours) or how he had no problem with police shooting to kill unarmed teenagers who were no threat...

He's for Christmas!

"This is going to be the dominant theme on the Alito nomination until the end of the year-the convergence of a Supreme Court nomination, the Christmas season, and a judge who has a well-staked-out position on support for religious expression," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the Christian conservative American Center for Law and Justice and an adviser tapped by the White House to coordinate support for its nominees.

Really, this is sick.