What Barack Obama could learn from "Bewitched"

President Barack Obama took his wife Michelle out on Saturday night for what they like to call "date night."

They went to dinner and a show.

Dinner in New York City and a Broadway show.

The White House has a movie theater and a bowling alley, but that's only a romantic date if you're seventeen.

So they flew to New York in an Air Force jet, along with two planes carrying the staff and the White House press pool, the Marine One helicopter and the motorcade vehicles, at a cost the White House will not disclose.

Then they flew back to Washington, D.C.

There was no official business that required the president's presence in New York City. He just wanted to take his wife out for a nice evening in Manhattan.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States and if he wakes up in the morning and snaps his fingers for pancakes, there will be pancakes.

He could snap his fingers and say "In Paris!" and the U.S. Air Force would fly him to Paris.

The presidency is cool. It's just like a TV sitcom from the 1960s, "Bewitched" or "I Dream of Jeannie."

And just like a TV sitcom, it can be canceled rather abruptly if the ratings drop.

"Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie" both used the same plot device: one lead character was always trying to stop the other lead character from using her powers.

Did you ever wonder why?

It's because the taxpayers don't want to go a trillion dollars into debt so their political leaders can gallivant around like fictional characters in a 1960s TV sitcom.

Actually, it was because the shows would get pretty tedious pretty quickly if the characters got everything they wanted whenever they wanted it.

But the point is the same.

Tick off the American people at your own peril.


Copyright 2009

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How judges with empathy kept Guantanamo open

On Tuesday, Senate Democrats ran like scared rabbits from President Obama's plan to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. They blocked funds for closing the detention facility, and they voted to prohibit any transfer of the prisoners to U.S. soil.

House Democrats were a week ahead of them.

You don't need a pollster on the payroll to know that the American people have no sympathy for the terror detainees and no interest in hearing about their due process rights in U.S. courts.

In a setting just dripping with irony, the president who has driven his new Dodge pick-ups over the constitutional rights of U.S. investors stood in front of the Constitution in a cavernous room at the National Archives Thursday and tried to explain the importance of adhering to the Constitution when dealing with foreign terror suspects.

Good luck with that.

The irony gets richer when you consider that President Obama's Guantanamo problem was caused by another one of his deeply held beliefs: the idea that Supreme Court justices should have "empathy" and experience with the real-life problems of average people.

Earl Warren was the governor of California when President Eisenhower named him to replace Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 1953. Warren had never been a judge, but he knew enough about 'the real-life problems of average people' to become the first person ever elected three times as governor of California.

At the time of Chief Justice Vinson's death, the Supreme Court was stalling a decision on the school desegregation cases. Vinson had been a vote against overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 "separate, but equal" decision. He argued that the Court did not have the legal authority to ban segregation when Congress was on record as being in favor of the practice. "I don't see how we can get away from the long established acceptance in the District," he told his colleagues. "For 90 years, there have been segregated schools in this city."

The new chief justice saw it differently. "Personally," he told the other justices at their December 12, 1953, conference, "I can't see how today we can justify segregation based solely on race....my instincts and feelings lead me to say that, in these cases, we should abolish the practice of segregation in the public schools--but in a tolerant way."

Segregation, which was deliberately left in place by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, presented unique constitutional and legal problems, and the Warren Court is justly admired for its impatient decision to abandon legal precedent and rescue generations of innocent Americans from second-class citizenship.

However, the Court's empathy didn't stop at segregation.

Chief Justice Warren's instincts and feelings were at work again in 1961, when the Court ruled (6-3) in Mapp v. Ohio that judges must throw out evidence that was illegally obtained, and in 1966, when the Court ruled (6-3) in Miranda v. Arizona that judges must throw out confessions if police had failed to read a suspect his rights.

These decisions, and others like them, were made under the "Incorporation Doctrine," a concept created by the Supreme Court over the course of the 20th century. It holds that some parts of the Bill of Rights are so fundamental to the idea of due process of law that they must apply to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars any state from denying due process of law to any person. Prior to the invention of the Incorporation Doctrine, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states at all.

But while the Supreme Court was writing new rules to throw out evidence and confessions, something unexpected happened.

The public lost confidence in the justice system.

That's why President Obama can't close Guantanamo.

"Are we really going to insist that the jihadist with a suitcase nuke captured in Times Square be read his Miranda rights?" asked Sen. John Cornyn of Texas following President Obama's speech on Thursday, "Embracing a strategy in which the criminal justice paradigm is used to fight terrorism is misguided and reckless."

Reckless.

It's reckless to try a terrorist in a criminal court because he'll get off on some technicality. That's what a lot of Americans believe.

That's what the Bush administration believed.

That's what well-intentioned prosecutors believe when they violate the rules and withhold potentially exculpatory evidence from a defendant's lawyers. They believe they have the right guy in custody, and they believe the system will let him off on a technicality.

That's what a large proportion of the public believed when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder after Judge Lance Ito ruled that the jury could not hear evidence that Nicole Brown Simpson feared her ex-husband was going to kill her, but could hear evidence that Detective Mark Fuhrman had used racist language while working with a screenwriter.

Some of the Guantanamo detainees may be innocent and wrongly accused, but Americans don't have confidence that a courtroom verdict of "not guilty" means the accused was, in fact, not guilty. Instead, they believe the defendant had the help of slick lawyers who knew all the angles and found some paperwork error that let a guilty person walk free.

Judges with empathy are responsible for this.

Ironic, isn't it?

"I believe the decision of the Court represents poor constitutional law and entails harmful consequences for the country at large," wrote Justice John Marshall Harlan in his Miranda dissent. "How serious these consequences may prove to be, only time can tell."


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: Source notes can be found in "How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing," available online at http://www.ExtremeInk.com/appendix.htm. If you're interested in the subject of trade-offs between public safety and Constitutional rights, check out The 37th Amendment: A Novel, available from Amazon.com or by special order at any bookstore.

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Tabloid update: "Suicidal Bush in Therapy!"

This week's Globe tabloid features the continuing saga of the secret separation of George and Laura Bush, with a new twist: "Suicidal Bush in Therapy," the cover yells from the checkstand, "After Telling Laura: I Can't Take Any More!"

Inside there's more evidence that Laura is the Globe's main source for these stories. She's pictured looking salon-perfect and smiling serenely. Her husband, that cad, is shown sitting on a tree stump in torn jeans and work gloves, his face spattered with flecks of dirt, wearing goofy-looking earphones and peering out from under a white cowboy hat with a beady-eyed, paranoid, purse-lipped stare.



He should call them and spill some dirt on Dick Cheney. Maybe they'd give him a better picture.

"Bush begs Laura to take him back!" says the inside headline, "Suicidal George in therapy as he fights to save his life and marriage."

The Globe says it has sources telling the magazine that our former president is "mired in such a deep depression that concerned family and friends fear he'll do something drastic."

Like the old joke says, it's a Depression when you lose your job.

According to the Globe, President Bush has become paranoid and convinced that President Obama is out to get him. That may not be paranoia, like the old joke says.

The Globe reported in April that "an alarmingly distraught Bush made a series of frantic midnight calls" to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but she was unable to "shake him out of it."

That's when, "in a fit of despair," the former president decided to talk to his wife. So he picked up the phone and called Dallas.

That's where she is. Laura's living in the $2 million home that her husband bought for her in Dallas. He's in Crawford. According to the Globe, that was the deal to avoid a public divorce after Laura "got fed up with her husband's out-of-control boozing," not to mention his "suspected" romance with Condoleezza Rice.

"Please take me back!" President Bush begged, according to the Globe's source. "It was just heartwrenching," the source continued, "He didn't know where else to turn. I think he finally realized his life was under control when Laura was there for him -- and he desperately needs that stability now."

The source further reveals that "Laura has never stopped loving him" and she's worried that he has become "a walking time bomb."

No need to waterboard Laura to find out his location, he's in Crawford.

Laura refused to take him back, telling him he "needed to help himself first," and that's why our former president is now seeing a therapist twice a week.

"I know that he's going," says the Globe's insider. "But no one knows exactly who he's seeing, where they're meeting or what sort of therapy he's getting. It's all very closely guarded."

Paging Dr. Melfi. Your two o'clock is here.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: Catch up on your tabloid reading with "Laura Gets $15M Divorce Pay Off!"

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Step right up to see the Amazing Health Care Reform!

If it wasn't so serious, it would really be funny.

Peter R. Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday explaining the urgency of reforming health care in the United States, and how President Obama proposes to move us "toward a high-quality, lower-cost system":

Much of the piece is a number-crunching whine about the unsustainable growth in the cost of Medicare, but the severity of a problem is not an argument for the efficacy of a proposed solution.

The solution proposed by the Obama administration is so offensive, obnoxious and un-American that no amount of whining about the severity of the problem will persuade anybody in the country to support it. The only question now is whether the organized interest groups that have prepared for this match-up will have to play the full nine innings, or whether they'll win on the slaughter rule.

"There are four key steps," Mr. Orszag explains:

1) health information technology, because we can't improve what we don't measure; 2) more research into what works and what doesn't, so doctors don't recommend treatments that don't improve health; 3) prevention and wellness, so that people do the things that keep them healthy and avoid costs associated with health risks such as smoking and obesity; and 4) changes in financial incentives for providers so that they are incentivized rather than penalized for delivering high-quality care.

Let's take these one at a time.

"Health information technology, because we can't improve what we don't measure." What he's talking about is digitizing everyone's medical records and transmitting the information to the U.S. government. Is it private? Is it secure? Is it accessible to snoopy government workers who'd like to pick up some extra money from the National Enquirer? For the sake of argument, let's grant the ridiculous premise that the government solves the problem of security. Do you want the government collecting and reviewing your medical records? Is it any of their business?

"More research into what works and what doesn't, so doctors don't recommend treatments that don't improve health." Unless you believe that people go to medical school to become golfers or murderers, you are probably wondering why a government budget official thinks doctors would recommend treatments that don't improve health. Doctors go through some of the most rigorous training of any profession in the United States. Peter Orszag believes that a government computer that collects everyone's medical records and crunches the numbers to determine the most successful "outcomes" is better suited than your doctor to determine the best course of treatment. Is that what you believe?

"Prevention and wellness, so that people do the things that keep them healthy and avoid costs associated with health risks such as smoking and obesity." This may not trouble the Obama administration, but a lot of Americans will object to the government demonizing them for smoking or wearing plus-size clothes. Is it any of the government's business what you eat or what you smoke or whether you drink or exercise? How much of this nanny-ing will Americans tolerate? Not too much, history suggests. The Republican Congress elected in 1994 began by ending the 55-mph speed limit and ended by banning online poker.

"Changes in financial incentives for providers so that they are incentivized rather than penalized for delivering high-quality care." By this Mr. Orszag appears to refer to the practice of paying doctors per procedure instead of per "outcome." Elsewhere in the piece he writes, "The president's budget also put forward a set of quality-enhancing changes in incentives in Medicare and Medicaid, such as paying hospitals less when they don't get patient treatment right the first time so we can reduce the number of patients who have to endure readmission to a hospital."

This is very disturbing. The premise here is that people are readmitted to a hospital only because the hospital didn't get the treatment right.

But medical treatment is not a right-answer versus wrong-answer question. It's a complicated, difficult task of evaluating competing risks and possible consequences. Patients don't always come into a doctor's office with a clean bill of health and one new problem. They have conditions and risk factors that make medical decision-making an enormous challenge for even the most experienced and skilled professionals. You've heard the lists of side-effects on those prescription drug commercials, right?

What Peter Orszag calls "a set of quality-enhancing changes in incentives" is a destructive, maybe deadly, interference with a doctor's best judgment about the right treatment for the patient in the office at that moment.

No government bureaucrat, no matter how smart, is qualified to dictate treatment decisions to any doctor, no matter how inept.

Then there are the unintended consequences.

One practical effect of paying doctors only for "good" outcomes will be a hideous, horrible medical system that forces seriously ill patients to search in vain for a doctor who will treat them. "Sorry, not taking on any new patients," is the answer that will be thrown in the face of a desperate patient seeking a second opinion or a last chance. If the outcome isn't likely to be "good," a doctor risks his own career and practice by lowering his quality "score" in the government's computers.

Maybe there soon will be more dermatologists and fewer cancer specialists.

Yes, and maybe pink elephants will climb to the top of the Washington Monument. None of this is going to happen because no matter how much the Obama administration insists that this must all be done by August, none of this is going to pass Congress.

And it shouldn't pass Congress. "Hurry, hurry, hurry" is the call of a carnival barker. What you see when you get inside the tent is never as good as it looked on the poster.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Insanity."

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Implausible deniability

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos reported Sunday that John Edwards' campaign staffers had a secret pact to "blow up" his presidential campaign with revelations that he was secretly cheating on his cancer-stricken wife with filmmaker-wannabe Rielle Hunter.

There was a secret "doomsday" plan, unnamed former campaign officials said, to sabotage Edwards by destroying his campaign if it appeared that he was going to win the Democratic party nomination.

"They said they were Democrats first, and if it looked like Edwards was going to become the nominee, they were going to bring down the campaign," Stephanopoulos reported.

So the 2010 campaign, or maybe the 2012 campaign, has begun.

John Edwards' former campaign officials are looking for work.

Everybody involved in this story is too smart to believe any of it.

George Stephanopoulos is helping his future sources redeem their reputation in Democratic circles by dutifully reporting that they never would have allowed an adulterer to become the nominee and then lose the election over character issues.

Because that's what would have happened if John Edwards had been nominated. A presidential candidate who cheats on his wife is reckless. A presidential candidate who cheats on his wife while she travels the country campaigning for him between chemotherapy treatments is a suicide bomber.

Does anybody believe that the campaign officials working for John Edwards would really have brought down his campaign after it was clear he was going to win the nomination?

Nice try, everybody. We've got your resume. We'll call you.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the 2008 post, "Tabloid update: Cover-ups!"


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GM goes Galt

Did you notice anything strange in the news today about General Motors?

First, CNBC reported that the struggling automaker is considering moving its headquarters out of Detroit

Then the news broke that six top GM executives had sold their personal holdings of the company's stock, sending the share price to a 76-year low.

And then Automotive News revealed that General Motors plans to import and sell Chinese-built cars in the United States.

Taken together, these stories paint a picture of a silent, decaying factory, the empty shell of what once was a thriving engine of wealth and progress for investors, customers, and employees.

Have you read Atlas Shrugged yet?

Ayn Rand's original title for the 1957 book was "The Strike." The novel is the story of "the mind on strike," or what happens to a collectivist society when the men of the mind withdraw their services and disappear.

In the book, successful business owners, scientists, artists, and industrialists are secretly persuaded by an inventor named John Galt to walk away, and even to destroy their own companies, rather than have the product of their efforts seized for the "collective good."

At the end of the novel, John Galt tells off the looters and moochers in control of the government, and all the voters who put them there.

"When you failed to give recognition to man's mind and attempted to rule human beings by force," he says, "those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don't submit."

You really ought to read it. Apparently the guys at GM did.


Copyright 2009

The Manny Show

Not since Bob Fosse died has Hollywood seen such sophisticated choreography.

Major League Baseball announced Thursday morning that Los Angeles Dodgers star Manny Ramirez would be suspended for fifty games for failing a test for performance-enhancing drugs.

Manny Ramirez was ready with a statement. "Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me. Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility," the Dodgers star said.

The Dodgers were ready with a statement. "We support the policies of Major League Baseball, and we will welcome Manny back upon his return," the team said.

There will be no appeal, there will be no further investigation, there will be no refunds.

If not for Jose Canseco, we might never have known that everybody knew in advance this was going to happen.

About a month ago, the former Oakland A's and Texas Rangers slugger gave a speech to a half-empty auditorium at the University of Southern California, and Los Angeles Times reporter Kurt Streeter was there to report on it.

Canseco said he thought there was something fishy about Manny Ramirez. He wondered why, during the off-season, it had taken so long to sign one of baseball's premier hitters, and why he was signed to a brief two-year contract. He conjectured that baseball's team owners knew, or suspected, that Ramirez was using performance-enhancing drugs.

Canseco said he thought there was a 90 percent chance that Manny Ramirez's name was on the list of 104 players -- still anonymous -- that failed a drug test in 2003.

Kurt Streeter asked Ramirez for his reaction to Canseco's comments.

"He sat in front of his locker and gave me a deer-in-the-headlights gaze, a sly laugh, and a calm evasion," Streeter wrote on Thursday. "'I got no comment,' he said. 'Nothing to say about that. What can I say? I don't even know the guy.'"

That's not exactly a flat denial, but the reporter didn't press him.

"I wanted to believe," he wrote on Thursday, "We all do."

It's nice to believe, but it's better to know. After the Dodgers signed Manny Ramirez, they inexplicably passed up the chance to trade Juan Pierre. ESPN's fantasy baseball update on May 1 noted that "Juan Pierre may still have plenty of speed, but he's just not going to get to use it as long as he remains in the crowded Dodgers outfield. April marked his fourth consecutive month of fewer than 40 at-bats (20) and no more than two steals (he had one)."

Juan Pierre now takes over for Manny Ramirez in the outfield.

Coincidence? Or did Frank and Jamie McCourt know perfectly well what they were buying?

The Dodgers owners certainly got what they paid for: a surge in season ticket sales, a boost to merchandise sales, a hook for marketing, and a great start on the season.

And in July, when Ramirez is eligible to return to the line-up, the well-rehearsed story about an inadvertant use of a banned substance will let everybody pretend that nothing ever happened.

Let's face it, the owners don't care if Manny Ramirez used steroids.

And neither do the fans.

This is L.A. If drug use were an impediment to employment, even the governor would be out of work.

Baseball's tough new drug policy is nothing but a theatrical production for the benefit of the U.S. Congress, which threatened Major League Baseball with the loss of its anti-trust exemption if the sport failed to crack down on steroid use. (See "Barry Bonds' Big Asterisk")

The anti-trust exemption gives team owners a reprieve from the threat of federal prosecution for the normal business practices inherent in running a sports league. (See "Tackling the NFL.")

U.S. anti-trust laws were described by Ayn Rand in 1962 as "a haphazard accumulation of non-objective laws so vague, complex, contradictory and inconsistent that any business practice can now be construed as illegal, and by complying with one law a businessman opens himself to prosecution under several others."

You might remember that the anti-trust laws were used to charge Microsoft with the crime of giving its customers a free Internet browser.

Baseball team owners would rather spend their money on players than on lawyers, so they treasure that anti-trust exemption like the Hope Diamond.

If Congress wants a very strict steroid-testing program, that's what we're going to have.

"I know everybody is disappointed," Manny Ramirez said in a written statement.

"We share the disappointment," said Dodgers CEO Jamie McCourt.

"The toughest thing for Manny is how he disappointed everybody," said Joe Torre.

Bob Fosse would have won a Tony for this.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "Jose Canseco's interesting threat," "The big leagues of lying," and "Alex Rodriguez and the big hurry."


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Woody Allen's good point

Woody Allen is suing the American Apparel company for $10 million for using his image on its billboards and web site without his permission. The actor-director-writer does not endorse products in the United States and didn't authorize American Apparel to use his image in their advertising, but the company ignored his rights and put his image up on billboards in Hollywood and New York, where they attracted attention for a week before the company took the ads down.

Jury selection in the trial is scheduled to begin on May 18.

Now, get this.

American Apparel, in an attempt to prove to the court that Woody Allen's image isn't worth $10 million, wants to call Mia Farrow and her adopted daughter, also known as Mr. Allen's former longtime companion and current wife, respectively, to the witness stand. The company intends to prove in court, in detail, that Woody Allen's personal life has made him so unattractive to corporate advertisers that they would never in a million years pay him anything close to $10 million.

American Apparel's executives ought to be in jail for this, and their lawyer, Stuart Slotnick, shouldn't be too proud of himself either.

Regardless of what anybody thinks of Woody Allen's personal life, the company thought his image was valuable enough to plaster on their billboards and web site. The particular image they chose was from Mr. Allen's Oscar-winning film, "Annie Hall."

They used his image in their advertising without his permission.

Woody Allen's image is his own property, no one else's, to exploit for commercial purposes. If American Apparel moved into your house while you were out running errands, and you sued them to get it back, would it be a valid defense to tell the court that the house isn't worth as much as your lawsuit seeks? Would it be relevant evidence if pornographic pictures were found hidden in one of the dresser drawers?

No, it would not.

Woody Allen's likeness is his property.

Just like your house is your property.

Property rights matter. Property rights are the foundation of freedom.

If anyone with a whim can take your property from you and then ruin your life with disclosures in court, your freedom isn't worth the parchment it's printed on.

Theft of property ought to be treated as theft of property, and not as the starting point of a protracted negotiation for compensation.

If there's any justice in our justice system, the Manhattan judge hearing Woody Allen's case will tell American Apparel they can't call witnesses with the intention of smearing a man whose image they stole for their own financial advantage.

This kind of thing is dangerous.

It could turn a filmmaker into an Ayn Rand conservative.

By the time this lawsuit is over, Woody Allen might be directing the film version of "Atlas Shrugged."

They could do worse.


Copyright 2009

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Introducing ExtremeInk Books

America Wants To Know is pleased to slip in a plug for ExtremeInk.com's new publishing imprint, ExtremeInk Books. The first title, "How to Make Money and Lose Weight: A simple guide for everyone" by Babe Lincoln, was published in paperback on May 1 and is now available from all online booksellers, or by special order from any bookstore.

We could tell you that this a great book for beginning investors, for teens and young adults, and for anyone who has ever been told lies by a salesperson on commission. We could tell you that this book is both humorous and serious. We could tell you that the chapter on "Why You Yo-Yo" is worth the price of the book, all by itself.

But you would suspect our motives.

So we'll just tell you that excerpts of the book can be read online at this link and that Babe Lincoln's new blog can be found at www.babe-lincoln.net.

And we'll tell you that Babe Lincoln and America Wants To Know have never been seen in the same room at the same time.

But that might be a coincidence.

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