How'd you sleep last night?

Did the stock market keep you awake last night?

You'd be sleeping like a baby if you took the advice of The Granville Guys and dollar-cost averaged your money into a no-load mutual fund.

It's not too late. In fact, it's a good time to start. Get rid of the dark circles under your eyes and read some legitimately good, absolutely free, nobody's-making-money-off-you-here investment advice at www.ExtremeInk.com/granvill.htm.

Sweet dreams!

Copyright 2007

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Hillary Clinton changes the subject

A funny thing happened while Hillary Clinton was denouncing the "politics of personal destruction" this week.

Senator Clinton was in high dudgeon over the refusal of Senator Barack Obama to apologize for some remarks by David Geffen, the Hollywood mega-donor who supports him for president over Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Geffen told Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd, "Everybody in politics lies, but (the Clintons) do it with such ease, it's troubling."

"I want to run a very positive campaign," Senator Clinton said Wednesday at a Nevada candidates' forum, "and I sure don't want Democrats or the supporters of Democrats to be engaging in the politics of personal destruction."

Rising to the bait like yipping puppies, reporters and political commentators launched into a tedious and time-filling debate about negative campaigning.

Nobody discussed the substance of the charge--made by a former backer--that the Clintons lie "with such ease, it's troubling."

Nobody, that is, except the former Solicitor General for the Clinton administration, Walter E. Dellinger III, who was participating in a panel discussion on congressional oversight and executive privilege Thursday afternoon in Washington, televised live on C-SPAN2.

Mr. Dellinger was discussing the extraordinary breadth of an executive privilege claim made by President Clinton early in his administration in connection with the firing of the White House travel office employees. Instead of claiming privilege for specific documents, as previous presidents had done, President Clinton asserted executive privilege over two thousand pages of documents related to the firing.

There was no question, Mr. Dellinger said, that the travel office workers could be fired by the president. The problem was the suggestion by the FBI that the workers were under criminal investigation, "which they were not," he said, and the extent to which executive branch pressure might have led to that suggestion.

Mr. Dellinger said he found that troubling and cited it as an example of an executive privilege claim that was less defensible than some others.

Return with me now to October 18, 2000--seven years after the travel office workers were fired and smeared with false allegations of criminal conduct--and read the news account of Independent Counsel Robert Ray's final report in the matter of the White House Travel Office:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Independent Counsel Robert Ray's final report on the White House travel office case found first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's testimony in the matter was "factually false," but concluded there were no grounds to prosecute her.

The special prosecutor determined the first lady did play a role in the 1993 dismissal of the travel office's staff, contrary to her testimony in the matter. But Ray said he would not prosecute Clinton for those false statements because "the evidence was insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that she knew her statements were false or understood that they may have prompted the firings.

In this context, an unprecedented executive privilege claim for two thousand documents looks an awful lot like an effort to make sure "the evidence was insufficient."

And now that Mrs. Clinton is a candidate for president, the claim that she didn't know or understand what she was saying is not much of a selling point.

When Bill Clinton was under investigation for perjury and obstruction of justice, he successfully changed the subject to the impropriety of harassing a sitting president about his sex life. Gone were the questions about the chief law enforcement officer of the United States lying to investigators or tampering with witnesses. Instead it was all about sex, and it was all about spending fifty million dollars to investigate something that was nobody's business.

Now Hillary Clinton wants to change the subject. She doesn't want reporters to ask why a former backer has called her a liar. She wants them to ask about the "politics of personal destruction" and the evils of negative campaigning. If she can avoid responding to all serious charges by denouncing the people who make them, she can probably sail through the primaries and win the nomination.

If the Democrats want to take back the White House, they shouldn't fall for it again.


Copyright 2007

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Las Vegas diary

America Wants To Know has just wrapped up a five-day visit to Las Vegas, where the International Brotherhood of Street Gangs was holding its annual convention at all the major hotels and sometimes in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, and we briefly ducked into the Aladdin Hotel to get out of the line of fire and happened to have the opportunity to see The Fab Four show.

As you might know or guess, it's a Beatles impersonation show performed by four musicians, along with two go-go dancers and a comedian who plays Ed Sullivan.

The musical performances were really remarkable, especially the Sgt. Pepper-era songs that re-created in a live show all the elements that took months to put together in a studio.

It was so realistic that halfway through the production, the singer playing Paul McCartney arm-wrestled a naked Japanese woman for top billing on Yesterday.

No kidding, if you get a chance to see these guys, take advantage of it. You can find their upcoming appearances listed on their web site, www.thefabfour.com.


Copyright 2007

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Bad news for the War on Drugs

Just in time for the 2008 election campaign comes word from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA that marijuana does not cause cancer.

Dr. Donald Tashkin, a UCLA pulmonologist with twenty years experience in the field of marijuana research, just completed the largest study of its kind (if you don't count Grateful Dead tours) and concluded, to his surprise, that smoking marijuana heavily for years does not lead to lung cancer.

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," Dr. Tashkin said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

This is more bad news for the Bush administration, because federal health and drug enforcement officials have used Dr. Tashkin's research in the past as evidence that marijuana is dangerous.

Dr. Tashkin said he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful.

Well, everybody should believe in something.

I believe the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states the power to decide whether it is a crime to grow, distribute or use marijuana within state borders.

You might believe it, too, if you read "Marijuana, Prohibition and the Tenth Amendment" at www.SusanShelley.com.


Copyright 2007

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The secret of the energy task force records

What's in the records of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force?

Vice President Cheney said last month that the White House will "try to accommodate" requests for information from the new Democratic House and Senate chairmen, "when there is a legitimate need for those documents to be presented to the Congress, and they have a legitimate constitutional or statutory reason to have access to them."

"Sometimes requests have been made that clearly fall outside the boundaries," the vice president explained, "clearly trying to get into an area, for example, that is preserved and protected for the president--the president's ability to consult, for example, with people in private without having to publicize or tell the Congress who he's talking to. We took that case on my energy task force, for example, all the way to the Supreme Court and won on a 7-2 decision."

Vice President Cheney was referring to the Supreme Court's 2004 ruling that there is a "paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation."

However, litigation is a completely different organism from a congressional subpoena, and if the vice president doesn't know that, he should read Raoul Berger's 1974 book, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth.

President Bush apparently does know it, as you can see in the earlier posts, "Senate Republicans fire the big gun" and "Rep. Heather Wilson pries open the White House."

If the Democrats subpoena the records of the energy task force, how damaging might they be to the administration?

Here at America Wants to Know, where we have been tracking the vice president's every move with a fortune-telling Gypsy woman, a psychic, a petroleum geologist, two dowsers and Lieutenant Columbo, we think we might know.

And if we're right, the Democrats had better be careful what they wish for.

Testimony in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has made it clear that the vice president made an extraordinary effort to prevent news organizations from reporting that he had to have known that the story of Saddam Hussein trying to buy uranium in Niger was baseless, because former ambassador Joe Wilson had been sent to Niger to check it out and had found it to be without foundation.

We also know the vice president made multiple trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the Iraq war, visits that can be interpreted as pressure to make the intelligence support the administration's view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

And now we have the report by the acting inspector general of the Pentagon stating that a special Pentagon unit run by Doug Feith -- a team praised by Vice President Cheney as the "best source" for information on Saddam's terrorist connections--criticized the CIA's intelligence and tried to piece together little fragments of intelligence to suggest, falsely, that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda.

Taken together, these things support the hypothesis that Vice President Dick Cheney wanted Saddam Hussein removed from power and fought tooth and nail to make sure the case he made for an invasion of Iraq was not challenged.

But why? Why was it so important to remove Saddam Hussein from power if he didn't have an active nuclear program, stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, or an alliance with al-Qaeda?

America Wants to Know would like to pause here to say that we believe the United States has a legitimate national interest in maintaining secure and reliable sources of oil. We understand that secure and reliable oil supplies are vital to the economy of the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. We are not among those who enjoy the benefits of an advanced and thriving economy, denounce the companies that deliver the oil that makes it possible, and then quiet their cognitive dissonance by overpaying for hybrid cars and harsh lightbulbs.

That said, it would look really bad if there was a statement anywhere in the records of the vice president's energy task force, which met during the first half of 2001, about certain geopolitical factors in the Middle East presenting threats to the security and reliability of oil supplies.

It would look really, really bad if there was a presentation, or even a remark, about how much better things would be if Saddam Hussein was driven from power.

What might have been a routine observation at the time would look today like the start of a pre-meditated plot that was put into action as soon as the September 11th attacks provided a plausible rationale.

Without the September 11th attacks, the plot might have had to wait until Saddam got off a lucky shot and downed a U.S. plane patrolling the no-fly zone.

But thanks to the Global War on Terrorism, the vice president was able to lead a parade of What-If horrors right down Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol and make the argument that anything less than a ground invasion of Iraq would be a congressional permission slip for a nuclear attack on a U.S. city.

That would explain why the vice president was so obsessed with the MSNBC program "Hardball" and its bulldog host, Chris Matthews. Mr. Matthews, who before this is over will have a place in the history books next to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would not stop asking questions about the vice president's knowledge that the Niger uranium claim was bogus. (It was in a telephone call to NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert to complain about Chris Matthews that Scooter Libby claimed to have first heard that Ambassador Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.)

It would also explain the ferocious secrecy about the energy task force records.

Without question, the Democratic House and Senate committee chairmen have the constitutional authority to see what's in those records. That's because the Constitution gives the Congress the power to impeach the president, the vice president, and all civil officers of the United States. Implicit in the power to impeach is the power to inquire. The executive branch officials who are the subject of the inquiry cannot have an unwritten constitutional privilege against the exercise of a constitutional power that is written in plain English.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment is "off the table." If subpoenas go out for those energy task force records, she might find it on the floor.


Copyright 2007

Source note: The late Harvard law professor Raoul Berger is the author of Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth (1974, Harvard University Press) and Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (1974, Harvard University Press)

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Dick Cheney Mystery Theater."

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Former president spanks desperate housewife

Just when former President George H. W. Bush was starting to get some respect for his good judgment, he goes and gets caught on camera smacking actress Teri Hatcher's bottom in a Beverly Hills parking lot.

I know, you don't believe me. See for yourself:



That's right, the former president swatted the backside of a woman half his age and not his wife, and he did it in Beverly Hills, where everyone has a cell phone camera and everyone wants to direct.

There can only be one explanation.

The Republicans are tired of waiting for the FCC to crack down on indecency and they've sent their elder statesman to Hollywood to start spanking actresses.

Prince must be so disappointed that Mark Foley was kicked out of Congress before his Super Bowl halftime silhouette stunt was broadcast.


Copyright 2007

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Boston police terrorize city

You would think a city that has Ted Kennedy and John Kerry for its senators would have a little more tolerance for cartoons.

On Wednesday the Boston police terrorized the local population after an electric advertising sign was misidentified as a suspicious package.

It does not appear that anyone involved with Cartoon Network's advertising campaign made a hoax threat or called police to report a suspicious package. At this point, it looks like the police spotted the sign and went into Heightened Alert Autopilot.

Police established quickly that the device was not an explosive and not dangerous in any way.

Then more of the signs were spotted around town.

That's the official moment, if you're marking down these times for the record books, when the terrorists won.

The fact that the first device was a harmless advertising sign could have led police to judge that identical devices around the city were equally harmless.

But nobody wanted to take responsibility for that decision.

Instead, the police went down the list of terrorist scenarios conjured up in the fevered imaginations of people who want to listen to your phone calls and follow you around on the Internet.

Maybe the first wave of devices was harmless in order to pull resources in one direction, while the second wave of devices contained the real bombs.

Maybe the terrorists were watching from the shadows and timing the response of the bomb squad for a future attack.

Maybe Homeland Security Department officials missed something in the terrorist chatter that takes place in a language none of them speak.

Maybe everybody should just calm down.

This would be a different story if the advertising signs were disguised to look like bombs, or were deliberately pointed out as suspicious in order to stir up media coverage. But that does not appear to be the case. Boston police and city officials made a mistake, and rather than admit that they panicked the city over nothing, they are self-righteously blaming Turner Broadcasting and its employees for terrorizing Boston, when the company is really guilty of nothing more than posting billboards without a permit.

[Adult Swim] forever.


Copyright 2007

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Another Clinton, another cigar

Let's clear up a misconception.

Hillary Clinton did not make a joke about her husband last Sunday in Iowa.

The audience made up its own joke.

Senator Clinton repeated a question from a man in the audience, because the man didn't have a microphone and not everyone could hear him.

"Question was," the senator said, "What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?"

The audience erupted in laughter, and Hillary Clinton laughed with them. And this wasn't just a laugh. This was a roaring, rolling, pound-on-the-floor laugh for a full thirty seconds. The longer the audience thought about it, the funnier they thought it was.

George Burns once explained the secret of his unsurpassed comedy timing by holding up his cigar. "When they laugh, I smoke," he said. "When they stop laughing, I talk."

Thank goodness Hillary Clinton didn't have a cigar or that audience might have ruptured something.

This is not the first time an audience has made up its own joke about Bill Clinton. The former president was recently a guest on the Ellen DeGeneres show, where he made an innocent comment about wanting to watch Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith on Dancing with the Stars. "I'm always interested in people who can multi-task," he said.

The studio audience burst into giggles.

But Ellen DeGeneres didn't leave the former president hanging out there while the audience laughed at him. She slipped in one quick line ("Well, you certainly do that") and then talked over the audience laughter, bringing the giggles to a premature halt.

Mrs. Clinton certainly didn't do that.

If audiences want to roar with laughter at the mental image of Bill Clinton in the Oval Office without his pants, it's okay with her.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You can see the video here on YouTube; at this link it's about 1:54 into the clip. You might also be interested in the earlier post, "Ellen DeGeneres lets Bill Clinton live."

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