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Posted by Harkavy at 6:05 PM, May 12, 2008
Another paper falls to journalism know-nothings.
Jim Dolan makes Rupert Murdoch seem like Jesus H. Christ. And that's why Cablevision's apparently successful attempt to swallow up Newsday is making us gag.
Blessed with the huge cash flow of a monopoly cable company (thanks only to cities long ago giving up a public utility to private companies), the Dolan family has enough gelt to spend $650 million to buy the behemoth Long Island newspaper. For a while, it looked as though Murdoch was going to land the whale, but call me Ishmael if the Dolans didn't sink their hooks in deeper.
No matter that the Dolans (Jim's rich daddy is Chuck) have no experience in the news business — Cablevision's News 12 operation doesn't count. At least Murdoch knows the business. When he owned the Voice years ago, he was too smart to turn it into a right-wing rag. The Dolans will further blandify Newsday.
Wall Street's not exactly enthusiastic about the match, which makes about as much sense as the Dolan-owned New York Knicks spending a fortune to hire as coach Mike D'Antoni, who can't coach defense and inherits a roster ill-suited to his run-and-gun style.
Jim Dolan is the slack-jawed yokel who has screwed up the Knicks with his meddling into things he doesn't know about. His only experience with journalism is to squelch it. Colleagues have reminded me that the Knicks' policy toward reporters is unusually repressive and controlling.
When there's bad news brewing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, Jim Dolan and crew make sure to clamp down hard to keep any of it from leaking out. Sure, every company does that, even newspaper companies, but the Knicks' operation is particularly harsh toward journalists.
Yes, these are the hard-hitting, courageous people we want running our newspapers.
You have to feel sorry for Newsday editor John Mancini (whom I used to work for at a now-defunct paper) and the other fine journalists who still have jobs there. That's because the Dolans' operations are relentlessly mediocre.
As a I said before, Wall Street's not particularly gung-ho. A story earlier this month in Newsday noted:
Louis Ureneck, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University, said bringing Newsday reporting into the mix at Cablevision's news channel certainly will add appeal, but he added, "The question is how do they monetize the strategy? Is there enough here to justify the kind of price they're offering?"
Wall Street doesn't appear to think so.
"The company needs to stick to its core business and not go out on entrepreneurial pursuits that are far away from its core expertise," said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research in Manhattan.
David Joyce, who tracks Cablevision for Miller Taback & Co. in Manhattan, said he thinks Newsday is better-matched to Murdoch and his News Corp.
"Murdoch knows newspapers," Joyce said. "The Dolan family does not."
No matter. The newspaper business may be ailing, as its owners all over America keep moaning, but the New York Times pointed out yesterday that Newsday produced more than $80 million last year in profits on $500 million in revenue.
The Dolans will now have two cash cows, even if one of them is relatively sickly from eating too much newsprint.
The question is: What changed aging Chuck Dolan's mind? As Newsday's own Thomas Maier wrote Saturday:
Over the years, Charles Dolan, the billionaire founder of Cablevision Systems Corp., always seemed a bit coy when asked about the possibility that one day he might own Newsday.
"I have often thought it," Dolan told Newsday in 2006. "I thought it would be a wonderful thing to do, but I've also been smart enough not to try it."
Son Jim apparently isn't smart enough. But that's no surprise.
Posted by Harkavy at 5:54 PM, March 31, 2008
But real money for those of us in the bottom 90 percent of incomes? Forget it.
If "change" is this presidential campaign's catchword, then let me ask: Can you spare any?
I'm not asking for myself, because I'm one of the lucky ones. But I am a member of the bottom 90 percent of Americans in income. In other words, I make less than $105,000 a year.
Income disparity in the U.S. is shocking not because it exists but because it's getting worse. How about some newly released factoids from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a serious and respectable D.C. think tank? From the CBPP's March 27 report by Aviva Aron-Dine on income concentration:
• Between 2005 and 2006, the average income (before taxes) of the top 1 percent of households increased by $73,000 (or 7 percent), after adjusting for inflation, while the average income of the bottom 90 percent of households increased by just $20 (or 0.1 percent). (In 2006, the top 1 percent of households were those with incomes above about $375,000.)
• 2006 marked the fourth straight year in which income gains at the top outpaced those among the rest of the population. Since 2002, the average income of the top 1 percent of households has risen 44 percent, or $335,000, after adjusting for inflation. The average income of the bottom 90 percent of households has risen about 3 percent, or about $1,000.
• The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent has increased sharply, rising from 15.8 percent in 2002 to 20.3 percent in 2006. Not since 1928, just before the Great Depression, has the top 1 percent held such a large share of the nation’s income. In 2000, at the peak of the 1990s boom, the top 1 percent received 19.3 percent of total income in the nation. And let's get even more personal with these fun facts churned out the same day in another report by the CBPP's Aron-Dine:
New Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data show that the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the very highest incomes pay only 18 percent of their income, on average, in federal individual income taxes. . . . While the incomes of those at the top have skyrocketed, their tax rates have fallen significantly, with the largest reductions occurring after the capital gains tax cuts of 1997 and 2003.
This ain't the America in which the baby-boom generation grew up. Today's economy, run to hell by the all-growed-up baby-boom generation, holds out little hope to today's whippersnapper. Just another reason not to trust people over 30. Or under 30, for that matter.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:46 AM, February 11, 2008
Bulked-up right-hander grabs a bat to square off against crafty lefty
It's hard not to get pumped up about Wednesday's hearing on Capitol Hill about the baseball steroids scandal. Go ahead and hoot when California congressman Henry Waxman mispronounces the names of players, but the bespectacled little lefty will likely stand in strong against Roger Clemens's high hard ones.
Last week Clemens toured the grandstand — congressional offices — to glad-hand. Such brazen lobbying hasn't been seen since the last AIPAC national conference and schmoozefest.
Baseball's Mr. (Suspiciously) Big is still making his rounds, rubbing the bellies of various Congress members. Waxman, however, is not the kind to roll over to be petted into submission.
He injected himself into the steroids scandal three years ago, summoning pecs' bad boys in March 2005 for a round of what turned out to be Mark McGwire's most musclebound moment.
Tune in Wednesday when Clemens trudges up the Hill to throw out his first bitch, but while you're at it, see what else Waxman is up to. Go to the California congressman's site, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and you'll see that he's not shirking his other duties.
Remember the Iraq War?
Last Friday, Waxman subpoenaed documents on the colossal Baghdad embassy project. In case you've forgotten, this is what Waxman's panel uncovered last October:
Documents obtained by the Oversight Committee depict widespread defects in fire detection systems, fire service mains, fire sprinklers, fire-proof construction materials, and electrical wiring throughout the Embassy complex. Other documents implicate the Managing Partner of First Kuwaiti, the prime contractor, in an illegal kickback scheme to obtain subcontracts under the Army’s multi-billion logistical support contract.
Telegenic Waxman isn't, and that's too bad, because he's been the most consistent gadfly since the start of the Bush-Cheney regime's reign of error.
He's likely to get more press out of this steroids probe than from the more serious issues he's probed. So use this as an excuse to probe what else Waxman is probing.
Posted by Harkavy at 10:33 AM, January 23, 2008
That's GM's former boss, "Engine Charlie" Wilson. And we're the victims.
"What's good for General Motors is good for the country." OK, so GM's big boss in the '50s, "Engine Charlie" Wilson, was quoted somewhat out of context when he said something like that during his confirmation hearings as Ike's Secretary of Defense in 1953.
As it turns out more than 50 years later, as GM goes down the tubes, so is the rest of the U.S. economy. So Wilson was actually right, whether or not he was misquoted.
Witness the Fed's panicky interest-rate reduction. Are we headed toward a recession? Probably not. It may well be a depression.
Only a few months ago, I would have given good odds that I would fall into another one of my major depressions before the country did. But my mental health seems to be stronger than the country's economic health. Believe me, that should cause great concern among all Americans.
Apparently, "Engine Charlie" Wilson was asked back in '53 whether he could make decisions as the war secretary that would be bad for GM, and he replied that such a situation was unthinkable "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." Reporters picked up on part of his quote, turned it around and mis-recorded it for posterity.
No matter, really. What was once unthinkable last century is now a 21st century reality: The long-ailing auto giant has taken another step toward oblivion.
Word is just out that GM has lost his long, long grip as the world's largest automaker. Agence France-Presse reports this morning:
General Motors Corp., which has reigned for 76 years as the world's top automaker, ended 2007 in a virtual tie with Japanese rival Toyota Motor Corp., sales figures from the US giant showed Wednesday.
GM, which has faced a steady loss of market share in its key home market, reported global sales of 9,369,524. Toyota earlier this month reported it sold 9.370 million vehicles for the year.
The Detroit firm's sales grew three percent in 2007 while Toyota sales increased six percent.
GM has been the world's best-selling automaker since 1931 with an all-time record of selling 9.55 million vehicles in 1978.
For a comprehensive look at GM's woes, check out Carol Loomis's February 2006 Fortune piece "The Tragedy of General Motors."
She blames GM's bloated pension plans for helping drag down the company. Actually, it's the insane investment games played by the trustees of the pension fund that may be more to blame. But she's a damned good writer and is known for being prescient. As Loomis pointed out then, the company was on a seemingly inexorable path toward bankruptcy:
Bankruptcy isn't going to occur next week. But down the road — say, past 2006 — its probability is high.
And two years later, it's higher than ever. Meanwhile, the Fed's interest-rate cut, prompted by a panic in the Asian markets, means that you'll be able to get even more credit cards at lower rates. You'd be crazy to assume more debt, of course. But going crazy is what descending into a major depression is all about.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:49 AM, January 18, 2008
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Bush isn't checking his e-mails. Or maybe he is.
White House
Terrier strike on America: Bush and Barney show plenty of drive while on vacation in Crawford.
While George W. Bush has spent a record amount of time vacationing at his ranch, he hasn't been checking his e-mail. Or maybe his stooges did check it — in the sense of a hockey player checking an opponent by slamming him into the boards and destroying him — and thus prevented that flood of messages from ever seeing the light of day.
The numbers game for America's numbest president are eerie: A report released by watchdog congressman Henry Waxman — judging by his performance, Waxman works 24/7 — reveals that 473 days of White House e-mail are missing. At the same time, Bush is on pace to have spent 499 days on vacation during his two terms. Most of it has been spent hunkering down in his Crawford, Texas, bunker.
The Washington Post's Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson report this morning:
The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.
The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).
Now go back to Julie Mason's story in the August 9, 2007, Houston Post:
President Bush tries to set an example for Americans whenever he can, in terms of physical fitness, faith, optimism and a certain overall moral rectitude. He also sets an excellent example on taking vacation.
Bush left [on August 9] for a weekend in Kennebunkport, Maine, and his family's summer compound, Walker's Point. On Monday, he heads to his Crawford retreat, where he has spent all or part of 418 days of his presidency, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS News White House correspondent and meticulous record-keeper.
Mason's smart story notes Bush's record-breaking non-performance:
The presidential vacation-time record holder is the late Ronald Reagan, who tallied 436 days in his two terms. At 418 days, and with 17 months to go in his presidency, Bush is going to beat that easily.
Even so, this year's August vacation for Bush is a contrast to previous years such as 2005, when he dragged out vacation in Texas to five weeks. That was also the year Bush remained on vacation immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit.
Do the math: Bush had taken 418 days of vacation in his first 6.7 years in office. That works out to 62.4 vacation days a year — a little more than 12 work weeks, which is probably slightly more vacation time than you get. On the other hand, think how much more damage Bush could have done if he hadn't taken so much vacation.
Anyway, multiply 62.4 days a year by eight and you get 499 total days of vacation.
Compare that with the 473 days of e-mail missing. All Bush's handlers have to do to keep pace is destroy 26 more days of e-mails. They can probably handle that.
Posted by Harkavy at 4:03 PM, January 16, 2008
World Bank's "institutional integrity" chief Folsom overstayed her unwelcome.
In a move as overdue as a Citigroup payment to its debtors, Suzanne Rich Folsom, a crony of deposed prexy Paul Wolfowitz, finally bounced at the World Bank. Under pressure, she quit.
To the best of my knowledge, it was I who broke the news in November 2005 that Wolfowitz had tapped Folsom, already working at the bank, to be the head of its Institutional Integrity department. It was ludicrous because she was also was officially Wolfowitz's "Counselor." She did nothing, of course, when people complained about Wolfie's impropriety with Shaha Ali Riza, who worked under him not only at the bank but as his gal pal.
As I noted back in the fall of 2005:
Not that he doesn't need someone full-time on "institutional integrity." After all, he has brought with him from the Bush White House the disgraced and embarrassed Robin Cleveland, a figure in the Pentagon's Boeing scandal that cost Air Force Secretary James Roche his job. Folsom was the wrong person for the job of keeping an eye on the internal integrity of the World Bank. In April 2007, while Wolfie was vainly fighting to keep his job, I wrote that Folsom was rumored in the flood of staff e-mails about Wolfie to have hosted a Republican fundraiser. She wouldn't respond to my queries at the time, but her flack denied that she had done so. It wouldn't have been a surprise, because her GOP ties run deep. She's married to George Folsom, former president of the International Republican Institute. And I reported in January 2006 that she hired Allison Brigati, the daughter of America's leading lobbyist for the gambling industry, Frank Fahrenkopf, to help her probe corruption within the bank. Hoo-hah.
Did I mention that Fahrenkopf is a former national chairman of the GOP?
Like Wolfowitz, she had no business being in charge of anything at the World Bank. See the extensive coverage of Wolfie by the watchdog Government Accountability Project, which notes today:
Ms. Folsom’s departure comes after increasing criticism of her own integrity and effectiveness from a variety of sources, including an independent review prepared by the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a Bank commissioned report from a panel headed by Paul Volcker, and a rising tide of dissatisfaction among her staff.
The best story on Folsom's skedaddle is from the excellent Bank Information Center, a sober watchdog on international finance institutions. Its piece today points out that Folsom's internal anti-corruption unit was "fraught with weak management and a conflict of interest at its upper management." She continued to be Counselor to Wolfie's successor, Bob Zoellick.
Posted by Harkavy at 2:24 PM, January 8, 2008
The mainstream press can marginalize Ron Paul all it wants, but that there Texas maverick Libertarian is virtually the best presidential candidate online, especially of the Republicans.
No matter what happens to Paul's candidacy — and it's scary to see how many otherwise progressive kids are supporting his partially wack ideas — Paul has set the standard among the current candidates for Web savvy and pointed the way for the even more intense use of the Web for future races. Check out the figures at techpresident.com.
What's more of a sure sign of our flawed democracy: the anachronistic 18th century Electoral College or the 21st century Facebook/My Space "friends" personality contest?
Both are absurd, but they're not as scary as the dreams of Bill Gates. If Ron Paul is the bottom-up small-D democratic standard bearer of technology, Gates continues to be the top-down daddy of totalitarian IT.
As Computerworld's Elizabeth Montalbano wrote yesterday of Gates's Sunday night star turn at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas:
The Microsoft Corp. chairman fictionally portrayed his last day of full-time work in a video at CES that had everyone from presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to The Daily Show host Jon Stewart turning him down for a job, and music mogul Jay-Z and film actor Matthew McConaughey patiently enduring his painful attempts at new extracurricular activities — rapping and hitting the gym.
Even less funny — in fact, downright scary — was what happened later in Gates's shtick:
Toward the end of Gates's keynote, he and Microsoft President Robbie Bach demonstrated a prototype device from Microsoft Research that seemed to represent the culmination of the company's connected-device strategy. The device used visual recognition to identify people and places in its line of "sight," and remind a user of events related to them. For example, when Gates aimed the device at Bach, the device identified him and reminded Gates that Bach owed him US$20. However, information neither Gates nor Bach could provide was how long it would take for such a device to be fully developed and released.
Yeah, we can't wait for Microsoft to develop this. That's all we need: a tool that the government and corporations and cops and marketers can use to track us in line of sight and peddle shit about us and to us.
Gates is obsessed with this top-down approach to the future. Creepshow stuff, and no doubt the code will be kept proprietary instead of open source, so the general public of geeks will have a tougher time combatting such intrusions on our privacy.
Let's see: In future presidential campaigns, the candidates' staffs will aim their devices at us to see who we support or what we've read lately. And such a device would really come in handy for cops to use during protests.
If we're lucky, though, this new tool will also come with the usual Microsoft Blue Screen of Death.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:00 AM, November 20, 2007
The grimmest scenario from the WEF.
The U.S. launches a military strike on Iran's nuclear plants in 2009. Iran's counterattack on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf countries ruins the oil bidness and causes a global recession. Oh, and terrorist attacks step up around the rest of the globe.
I'm not the only one imagining pre-emptive attacks on Iran by the U.S. or Israel or both.
That's the "Sandstorm" scenario for the so-called Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE). Such grim scenarios are emerging from behind the scenes at World Economic Forum headquarters.
Bomb a nuclear plant or two and you'll see what mass destruction looks like. We'll all be tuned in to the Weather Channel to track the radioactive cloud drifting around the planet.
Don't pay attention to what's said at the forum's gatherings of bigwigs (the next main one is in late January in Switzerland), but read the reports (HTML, PDF), which of course are grossly underplayed in the Western press.
These aren't the reports manufactured by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who may yet go down in history — if there are any historians left on Earth to write about them — as Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy.
Colin Powell was being a good soldier for the Bush-Cheney regime in February 2003 when he spread the administration's lies at the U.N. about Iraq's WMD.
Now that he's out of the administration, he's just being a good soldier by telling what he really thinks is the truth about the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.
At least we hope so, because Powell is dismissing the idea that Iran is a nuclear threat. The AP, reporting Sunday from a Kuwait confab:
"I think Iran is a long way from having anything that could be anything like a nuclear weapon," Powell told a gathering of bankers, businessmen and diplomats.
Tehran rejects claims by the United States and some European Union countries that its nuclear program is aimed at secretly producing weapons and insists it is for peaceful purposes only.
"I think the Iranians are being very foolish," Powell said. "When I look at Iran, I see the needs they have. They have not globalized, they have not come up in the international economic community. They are faced with 40 percent unemployment."
Lucky for us that all of our domestic problems are in good enough shape for us to launch another war.
Posted by Harkavy at 6:57 AM, October 29, 2007
Merrill's Stan O'Neal wasn't ready for subprime time, but he was a record-setting fundraiser for Bush
 Merrill Lynch's ouster of CEO E. Stanley O'Neal is good timing for the financial behemoth, but it comes a few years too late for America and for thousands of Merrill employees.
He's being driven out for his reckless bundling of subprime mortgages into shaky securities that Merrill aggressively peddled and that are now shaking Wall Street's foundations. Yes, these big financial institutions play funny money with your monthly payments, making millions while you don't see a dime from their monopoly tactics.
Not that this is anything new. The explosion in subprime mortgages is caused in large part by predatory lending practices, which are particularly aimed at black people (O'Neal used to be one of those) and other minorities.
More on O'Neal in a minute, but as I wrote in April 2001 about this financiopathic scheme — "From the Subprime to the Ridiculous" — when the War of Terror was still being waged almost entirely on the domestic front by banks and companies like Merrill:
A guerrilla war that has dealt serious defeats to predatory lenders has spread from states like North Carolina and Massachusetts to big cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, which recently passed ordinances aimed at ending unfair banking practices. So why hasn't the fight against what some have called "financial apartheid" spread to the biggest city of all?
State regulators in Albany adopted new restrictions on finance companies late last year, but activists say the victims of those profiteers still lack meaningful protection—help that could come from city officials. In New York, Mayor Giuliani has taken no action against predatory lending, say community organizers, and the City Council has done practically nothing.
But the big banks are worried about Giuliani's potential successors. Citigroup has already laid big cash on the campaign coffers of prominent Democrats. …
Public Advocate Mark Green can say he probably was the first of the four Democratic mayoral candidates to make a big splash about the serious problem of blacks, Latinos, and the elderly being targeted by abusive lending practices. But neither he nor the other three Democrats have taken strong action to protect the poor from signing their lives away in unfairly structured loans.
Green saw it coming back in 1993, when his Consumer Affairs Office released a report pointing out a growing number of predatory loans in the city. Since then, Wall Street has financed a huge surge in the so-called subprime market, and more people than ever are being seduced into high-cost refinancing plans and shady home-improvement loans that are sending them toward bankruptcy. … Green isn't eager to enact new regulations.
In those days, Stan O'Neal, while firing thousands of Merrill employees, was recklessly expanding Merrill's subprime bidness.
In 2003, as I previously noted, O'Neal, the highest-ranking black man on Wall Street, was a reckless bundler in another way: He set a fundraising record for George W. Bush's campaign by sending out a letter that generated $279,750 from other rich people in less than three weeks' time, the most in such a such a short period.
O'Neal, one of the nine Bush "Rangers" on Wall Street, was a prime bundler before the term hit its current vogue.
As this moneychanger is being driven from the temple, he'll be dragging along a big bag of cash. Details of that aren't immediately known, but, like most CEOs, he had one helluva deal. For instance, as the New York Times's Eric Dash noted this past April, O'Neal had a particularly sweet clause in his Merrill deal just in case the big company wobbled so much that it fell under the control of another big company:
E. Stanley O’Neal could walk away with $251.4 million if a merger sets off a change-in-control payout.
Hell, that was incentive for him to be reckless enough take Merrill into the toilet. If he had stayed around long enough to really ruin the company to the extent that some other behemoth would take control, he would have gotten a quarter of a billion.
Now O'Neal joins the ranks of former Merrill employees. He probably won't be asked to join them for commiseration drinks. He fired more than 25,000 of them during his tenure.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:39 AM, October 24, 2007
The convergence of America's pastimes — religious crackpotism, fast food, and immigration — on America's former pastime
Greeley Tribune Future spiritual godfather of radical Muslims Sayyid Qutb (with Hitlerian mustache) poses in Greeley, Colorado, with college prexy William R. Ross in 1949.
Just wait until the World Series, which opens tonight in Boston, shifts to Denver on Saturday. That's when Jesus and Muhammad — and Sayyid Qutb, the spiritual godfather of Al Qaeda — will join the millions of other viewers.
Colorado's a great setting for what used to be America's pastime. Our country's real manias about fast food, religion, and immigration have strong roots there.
South of Denver lies Colorado Springs, headquarters of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the godfather of America's religious right-wingers. (See my 1997 story "King James's Version.")
North of Denver is Greeley, the slaughterhouse capital for the fast-food industry. Colorado Rockies owner Charlie Monfort owes his good fortune to his daddy's massive abattoirs in Greeley. The family's cattle feedlots are also the stamping grounds for immigrants brought in to deal with the muck and death. (For inhumane treatment of animals, see this. For inhumane treatment of immigrants who perform this inhumane treatment of animals, see this.)
And in a weird confluence of human and animal slaughter philosophies, Greeley is the town where Sayyid Qutb lived in 1949, where he learned to hate Americans' "immoral" behavior before he returned to the Middle East and became the most influential 20th century thinker for radical schnooks like Osama bin Laden. (See Mike Peters's 2002 Greeley Tribune story "Roots of Terrorism Reach to 1949 Greeley" and Daniel Brogan's 2003 story "Al Qaeda’s Greeley Roots" in the Denver magazine 5280.)
Not that all the strange confluences in Colorado are bad. Northern Colorado is also the home of the amazing Temple Grandin, an ingenious autistic person made famous by Oliver Sacks. Grandin, more attuned to animals than people, revolutionized cattle feedlots by at least making the treatment of cattle more humane before they're slaughtered. Her life story is fascinating — especially the "Squeeze Machine" she invented for herself.
You can't make this shit up — except for Charlie Monfort and his family's cattle feedlots. As Eric Schlosser wrote in Fast Food Nation:
You can smell Greeley, Colorado, long before you can see it. The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food. The smell is worst during the summer months, blanketing Greeley day and night like an invisible fog. Many people who live there no longer notice the smell; it recedes into the background, present but not present, like the sound of traffic for New Yorkers. Others can't stop thinking about the smell, even after years; it permeates everything, gives them headaches, makes them nauseous, interferes with their sleep.
The money from Greeley's feedlots wafted down to Denver, enabling Charlie Monfort and his family to buy the Rockies and feed campaign contributions to right-wing religious wackos like Rick Santorum and Tom Tancredo.
As for the Rockies' players themselves, Denver Westword's Michael Roberts pleads, "Please, Don't Play the Jesus Card, Rockies."
Today's timid New York Times article reminds the nation that the Rockies are a Christian team by intelligent design: Monfort is born-again, and General Manager Dan O'Dowd is not only a dedicated Christian but purposely recruits other Christians to be his players.
Bob Nightengale (a former colleague of mine years ago at the Arizona Republic) broke that story nationally in a piece last summer for USA Today. The Times's Ben Shpigel begins his story today with a denial by a Jewish Rockie that the team's Christianity is forced down his throat. Shpigel, in a typical Times skin-back, then notes:
The role of religion within the Rockies’ organization first entered the public sphere in May 2006, when an article published in USA Today described the organization as adhering to a "Christian-based code of conduct" and the clubhouse as a place where Bibles were read and men’s magazines, like Maxim or Playboy, were banned.
The article included interviews with several players and front office members, but team players and officials interviewed this week said it unfairly implied that the Rockies were intent on constructing a roster consisting in large part of players with a strong Christian faith. Asked how his own Christian faith affected his decision-making, General Manager Dan O’Dowd acknowledged it came into play, but not in a religious way. He said it guided him to find players with integrity and strong moral values, regardless of their religious preference.
Yeah, right.
In any case, I hope the Rockies slaughter the Red Sox — religious nuts like Qutb and Dobson notwithstanding.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:38 AM, October 8, 2007
Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.
Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.
As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,
With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers can legally be brought into the country.
The effort, urgently underway at the departments of Homeland Security, State and Labor, is meant to rescue farm owners caught in a vise between a complex process to hire legal guest workers and stepped-up enforcement that has reduced the number of illegal planters, pickers and middle managers crossing the border.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.
Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:
The embassy, which will be the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, was budgeted at $592 million. The core project was supposed to have been completed by last month, but the timetable has slipped so much that the State Department has sought and received permission from the Iraqi government to allow about 2,000 non-Iraqi construction employees to stay in the country until March.
As I wrote on August 8:
Shanghaied to build to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Working on the construction site without safety equipment — or even shoes. The story of the alleged kidnapping of Filipino workers who thought they were going to Dubai but instead were flown to Baghdad to help build the $500 million embassy is stunning.
That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:
Because of allegations of labour trafficking and other abuses, First Kuwaiti is also being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, an action precipitated by U.S. citizens claiming that company workers loaded onto planes in Kuwait were handed boarding passes for Dubai before flying directly to Baghdad. The passengers were mostly low-wage Asian migrant labourers earning as little as 250 dollars a month.
Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:
The agreement also lays out salary: 346 dollars a month for eight-hour days, seven days a week, plus 104 dollars a month for mandatory two hours overtime every day.
Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."
The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:
"It is important for the farm sector to have access to labor to stay competitive," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. "As the southern border has tightened, some producers have a more difficult time finding a workforce, and that is a factor of what is going on today."
The push to speedily rewrite the regulations is also the Bush administration's attempt to step into a breach left when Congress did not pass an immigration overhaul in June that might have helped American farms.
These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:
The administration has pursued the project discreetly. The issue of immigration has generated friction between President Bush and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has strongly opposed many of the initiatives that Bush has pursued.
Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.
Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:04 AM, October 2, 2007
Bad karma: Pitcher's wife gave cash to Bush campaign.
After the worst performance of his career personally guaranteed the worst collapse by a team in baseball history, New York Mets pitcher Tom Glavine was practically blasé — he talked about "we" this and "we" that.
Glavine told the Bergen (N.J.) Record's Steve Popper:
"Where do you want to start? You can point a finger at everything and anything really."
His refusal to stand up and personally take at least some of the blame is reminiscent of George W. Bush's well-known refusal to personally admit mistakes, even in light of the Iraq debacle.
Why be so oxymoronic as to bring up Bush? Back in 2004, Glavine's wife, Christine, gave $500 to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Federal records show that it's the couple's only contribution to any candidate.
That's nothing but bad karma.
Yankee fans had better beware. Alex Rodriguez is another Bush supporter. Records show that star third-baseman A-Rod gave the Bush-Cheney campaign $2,000 in August 2003.
We'll see whether A-Rod comes through in the playoffs and, if not, whether he'll take the heat.
We already know that Glavine, like Bush, is not a stand-up guy. As the Record's Bob Klapisch wrote:
The [Mets'] front office was appalled at Tom Glavine's attitude after the shellacking he took from the Marlins on Sunday. Despite allowing seven runs in one-third of an inning, dooming the season, the veteran left-hander all but ended his Met career when he refused to say he was devastated.
Instead, Glavine prattled on about moving on and learning from the experience, as if he'd just pitched in a mid-July game against the Pirates. "It was an incredibly stupid thing to say. Everyone was shocked to hear that from him," said one member of the organization. [General Manager Omar] Minaya said he would huddle with Glavine in the near future, setting the stage for the left-hander's inevitable return to the [Atlanta] Braves in 2008.
Contrast Glavine's reaction to that of San Diego Padres relief pitcher Trevor Hoffman, also a sure-fire Hall of Famer, whose miserable performance Monday night gave a playoff spot to the Colorado Rockies. Hoffman was all over the news this morning, saying:
"You can't really point to any other factor than my performance tonight."
Mets manager Willie Randolph, whose job is now in jeopardy, had no problem standing up, as the Record's Popper noted:
"I'm the manager of the team," said Randolph, who has spent nearly his entire life in New York, a market that he knows can be demanding. "I'm a big boy. I take full responsibility. I have no problem with that."
Glavine, though, had already cleaned out his locker on Sunday night and was headed home to his mansion in Alpharetta, Georgia — Atlanta's most exclusive suburb — where he's protected in the gated community of Country Club of the South. (His celeb neighbors in Alpharetta have included Jeff Foxworthy, Usher, Morris Day, Greg Maddux, and Damon Stoudamire.)
Glavine won his historic 300th game this season. Mission accomplished. An avid golfer, he'll stroke himself all winter and then possibly return to the Braves, with whom he spent his entire career before joining the Mets a few seasons ago as an aging baseball mercenary.
But it's up to Glavine. He was paid $7.5 million this season and has an option to return to the Mets for $9 million in 2008 — yes, that's a 20 percent raise after pitching the worst inning of his career in the biggest game of the season.
We New Yorkers have probably seen the last of Glavine's TV commercials on behalf of union workers. A leader of baseball's players union last decade, Glavine has earned lavish praise by the AFL-CIO for standing up for his union brothers in other, less glamorous, trades.
At some point, at least, Glavine was a stand-up millionaire guy.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:37 AM, September 28, 2007
Cuba's not a dead issue in the nutty debate over health care for poor kids.
Americans owe thanks this morning to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi for clarifying how different our health-care system is from Cuba's.
During heated debate in the Senate yesterday, Enzi zoomed in on a crucial point of George W. Bush's threatened veto of funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal-state partnership that provides coverage to about 6 million poor children.
The Senate passed a pretty good compromise to help out those kids. Bush, while asking for an increase of more than $40 billion for the Iraq war, has said he won't spend more than $30 billion on this children's health program. The Senate disagreed — even some of its rock-hard conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch and Pat Roberts — and passed a bill. Roberts, a hardline Kansas conservative, pointed out that Bush is misinformed. You think?
But Mike Enzi is tagging right along with Bush, telling his fellow senators:
"We shouldn't create a new federal entitlement and we shouldn't be laying the foundation for Castro-style healthcare, which Americans don't want."
Our kids should be so lucky — rather, our babies should live so long. Enzi and the other senators didn't bring this up, so I will:
Cuba's infant-mortality rate is lower than the U.S.'s, according to widely accepted stats from the UN's World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision.
The number of infant deaths per thousand live births in the period 2000 to 2005 was 6.1 in Cuba. It was 6.8 in the U.S. In deaths under the age of 5, Cuba's rate is 7.7, and the U.S.'s rate is 8.4
When it comes to overall death rates, Americans have it even worse.
The CIA's World Factbook reveals that the estimated overall death rate in the U.S. in 2007, per thousand people, is 8.26. Cuba's death rate is 7.14.
African kids have it worse than anyone else on the planet. But the U.S. is an anomaly among other developed nations. It has a higher overall death rate than the rates of most of those countries, like France, Sweden, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. overall death rate is higher than the rates in the following countries (this is a partial list):
Cambodia, Bangladesh, Kiribati, Yemen, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Maldives, Paulu, Nauru, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Iran.
Yes, according to the CIA, the U.S. death rate is higher than the death rates in Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.
If you really want to understand this current problem of health care for poor kids in the U.S., go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where you can read a readable analysis of the bill and a breakdown of Bush's wrong analysis of the issue.
As for Enzi, a 63-year-old former Eagle Scout, shoe salesman and accountant, let's just say that his personal financial disclosure for 2006 shows that he ranks only 82nd in the Senate in net worth: His is $190,039 to $853,000. But 94 percent of his investments are in oil and gas, plus he does have at least $50,000 in his Senate credit union account — and the time to spend that cash: His tardiness rate is twice as high as the average senator's.
More to the point, he got no campaign money from Cuba, but the health-care industry poured $259,591 into Enzi's campaign coffers last year, second only to the support he got from big finance. And the health-care industry hates federal health care programs unless the money goes directly to the industry.
Enzi's PAC, Making Business Excel — get it? Michael B. Enzi, Making Business Excel? MBE, MBE? — raked in an additional $646,567 last year.
And no surprise here: Enzi gets more campaign money from D.C.-area operatives than he gets from the home folks in Wyoming.
Who cares about death rates when our political system is running so smoothly?
Posted by Harkavy at 9:32 AM, September 21, 2007
This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.
Cold War, warm feelings: Reagan chats with the Taliban in the White House in 1983.
New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.
Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?
Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."
Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?
On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.
So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.
After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:
"You've got to go where the oil is. I don't worry about it a lot."
Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:
"To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson - that there are things in this world worth defending.
"To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors."
That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.
The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.
At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:
After a meal of specially prepared halal meat, rice and Coca-Cola, the hardline fundamentalists — who have banned women from working and girls from going to school — asked Mr Miller about his Christmas tree.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:52 AM, September 20, 2007
While we're being run out of Iraq, we're running out of money and heading for a recession.
 The world has started foreclosure proceedings on the U.S. It's finally happening, much to the detriment of your children and their children.
Bad news out of Saudi Arabia: The archaic but wealthy kingdom is so scared of our imminent recession that it's abandoning our shaky dollar.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph (U.K.) explains this morning:
Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.
This stuff is really complicated, and I'm oversimplifying, and many rich schnooks are the ones making the decisions. (Read this good overview of Wall Street's subprime greed by David Ignatius in Beirut's Daily Star.)
The fact is that, no matter how much money the hedge funds and private-equity people are raking in, a recession looms in the U.S. The rest of the planet is a coalition of the unwilling to be dragged down with us.
This attack by the Saudis on our economy may prove to be more damaging to the U.S. in the long run than the mostly Saudi hijackers' attack on the World Trade Center, which, though horrible and deadly, was an attack on only the symbol of our economy. There was no justification for the 9/11 attack. But this economic attack is justified, because of the greedy schmucks and costly war that have helped send our economy spinning out of control.
Here's the rub: Our rich are getting richer, but foreign investors and governments own most of our debt. As the dollar collapses, they are pulling their money out — can't a brother get a dime?! World investors are looking elsewhere; many have a yen for Japan's strong economy.
We're Number Something-Other-Than-1!
Just one example of how relatively poor we are and how this crisis has been building for a long time: In April, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal demanded that Citigroup make "Draconian" cuts in its budget, and 17,000 people lost their jobs. Who cares what some Saudi prince says? Well, he's the huge bank's biggest individual shareholder.
Here's more from the Telegraph on the recent move by Saudi royals:
As a close ally of the US, Riyadh has so far tried to stick to the peg [of the dollar], but the link is now destabilising its own economy.
The Fed's dramatic half point cut to 4.75 percent yesterday has already caused a plunge in the world dollar index to a fifteen-year low, touching with the weakest level ever against the mighty euro at just under $1.40.
There is now a growing danger that global investors will start to shun the US bond markets. The latest US government data on foreign holdings released this week show a collapse in purchases of US bonds from $97 billion to just $19 billion in July, with outright net sales of US Treasuries.
The danger is that this could now accelerate as the yield gap between the United States and the rest of the world narrows rapidly, leaving America starved of foreign capital flows needed to cover its current account deficit — expected to reach $850 billion this year, or 6.5 percent of GDP.
Our money woes are killing us:
[Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas] said foreign investors have been gradually pulling out of the long-term US debt markets, leaving the dollar dependent on short-term funding. Foreigners have funded 25 percent to 30 percent of America's credit and short-term paper markets over the last two years.
"They were willing to provide the money when rates were paying nicely, but why bear the risk in these dramatically changed circumstances? We think that a fall in dollar to $1.50 against the euro is not out of the question at all by the first quarter of 2008," he said.
"This is nothing like the situation in 1998 when the crisis was in Asia, but the US was booming. This time the US itself is the problem," he said.
Are the Democrats really sure they want to take over the White House? They will inherit an economy heading south and an unwinnable, tragic war.
We can't afford to keep fighting in Iraq, but we can't afford not to as long as we can't get some sort of international alliance to help calm things down over there.
Mercenaries like Blackwater may have to do all the fighting for us, but we won't be able to pay for them. As for our own soldiers: When we finally bring them home, there may be a full-blown recession and no jobs for them.
This is all tied to our mortgage-market crisis, which is caused by our money men playing dangerous games with the dough you homeowners send to the bank every month.
Here's even more from the Telegraph that warns of an even deeper crisis with the mortgage mess:
Jim Rogers, the commodity king and former partner of George Soros, said the Federal Reserve was playing with fire by cutting rates so aggressively at a time when the dollar was already under pressure.
The risk is that flight from US bonds could push up the long-term yields that form the base price of credit for most mortgages, thus driving the property market into even deeper crisis.
"If Ben Bernanke starts running those printing presses even faster than he's already doing, we are going to have a serious recession. The dollar's going to collapse, the bond market's going to collapse. There's going to be a lot of problems," he said.
The Federal Reserve, however, clearly calculates the risk of a sudden downturn is now so great that the it outweighs dangers of a dollar slide.
Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan said this week that house prices may fall by "double digits" as the subprime crisis bites harder, prompting households to cut back sharply on spending.
That's easy for him to say. He's got a new book to peddle.
Posted by Harkavy at 2:49 PM, September 19, 2007
Still secret: Corruption in the White House.
Over at Secrecy News, the indefatigable Steven Aftergood has posted a heretofore secret study of Iraqi government corruption.
Even though the Nation's David Corn already wrote about the study, I can't say it would be much of a surprise anyway: The investigating agency, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, knows a lot about corruption.
Anyway, the report notes:
The Prime Minister’s Office has demonstrated an open hostility to the concept of an independent agency to investigate or prosecute corruption cases.
Sounds like the White House. U.S. congressmen and various public-interest groups got nowhere when they tried to probe Dick Cheney's "energy task force" early in the Bush regime.
And the White House has continually tried to call a halt to the excellent investigative work by Stuart Bowen on corruption in Iraq.
It took a British NGO, Christian Aid, to break the news a few years ago that Jerry Bremer, the Barney Fife of Baghdad, couldn't explain why $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue was missing.
Besides that oil-for-slush scandal, we're still waiting to see those millions of White House e-mails the regime is withholding that relate to various scandals. Then there are the missing-weapons scandal and the various KBR scandals — you get the picture.
In any case, this new report on corruption inside Iraq's puppet government is still worth reading. It turns out that we really have planted a seed of our own form of democracy over there.
Posted by Harkavy at 11:59 AM, September 19, 2007
$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.
While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."
In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.
Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.
Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:
ARINC already has a wealth of hands-on experience supporting just this type of program. We now expect to play a key role developing and fielding new solutions at the cutting edge of drug interdiction.
Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:
The contract, worth up to $15 billion over the next five years, illustrates the extent to which the Defense Department is relying on contractors to perform critical missions while combat forces are stretched thin by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In response to specific task orders issued under the indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract, companies will develop and deploy new surveillance technologies, train and equip foreign security forces and provide key administrative, logistical and operational support to Defense and other agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to the work statement provided to bidders, the vast majority of the drive will be conducted overseas.
Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.
It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:54 AM, August 14, 2007
Harkavy
Monument to failure: DeLay and Abramoff are long gone. Now Rove is almost gone, and only Cheney (right) is left.
George W. Bush nicknamed Karl Rove "The Architect," but the POTUS isn't much of a reader, so we need a better definition of the guy who always relished his role as Rasputin.
My dictionary says "rove" is the past tense of "rive":
1. To tear apart or in pieces by pulling or tugging; to rend or lacerate with the hands, claws, etc.; to pull asunder.
(Yes, I know that "My dictionary says …" is a hackneyed device, but my dictionary is the OED on CD-ROM, and Rove himself is a hackneyed device, so do me a favor and keep reading.)
The fact is that Rove is definitely not past tense on Capitol Hill, as I noted early yesterday. Later in the day, New York senator Chuck Schumer spoke the obligatory words:
Karl Rove's resignation will not stop our inquiry into the firings of the U.S. attorneys. He has every bit as much of a legal obligation to reveal the truth once he steps down as he does today.
That ship has sailed. As a verb by its intransitive lonesome, "rove" takes on another meaning:
To practise piracy; to sail as pirates.
Unfortunately, this political plunderer's shredder is probably overheating right now. We already know that thousands of juicy e-mails describing his plots are out there. But shredding is Rove's name, if you believe the OED, and I do:
To tear up (a letter, document, etc.), so as to destroy or cancel.
For the sake of history, though, Rove is "rove" in a broader sense:
To commit spoliation or robbery; to reave; to take away from. Now dial.
What's the use. Rove's already in transit out of D.C. If issues make you reach for tissues, this definition (of "rive" and thus "rove") is for you:
To rend (the heart, soul, etc.) with painful thoughts or feelings.
Whether or not he's ever called back from Texas to testify — and it would probably take a stint at Gitmo to get him to do it — Rove could very well end up as a memorable, if improper, noun. This 15th century usage fits, but it's obsolete:
1. a. A scabby, scaly, or scurfy condition of the skin. b. A scab; the scaly crust of a healed or healing wound.
No, forget "architect," scabs, and all other nouns. To me, Rove will always be a verb, especially in this sense:
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