K Marx The Spot

Catch-29

The Internal Revenue Code is full of odd provisions, but none is odder in practice that Section 29, the Credit for producing fuel from a nonconventional source. While it has noble beginnings—attempts in the late 1970s to create a market for synthetic fuels—its primary use for the last decade has been to allow clever corporations to spray liquids on coal and claim—abracadabra—that a new fuel, worthy of a generous tax credit, has someone been created. It is hardly a secret that Section 29 credits are subsidizing thoroughly useless activities, to the tune of bill\ions of dollars per year. (We wrote about this subject in 2004.)

One of the few wholly good things about high oil prices was that they would eliminate, by statute, the subsidy that these tax credits create. But not anymore, thanks to stalwart conservatives Rick Santorum and Orrin Hatch. These two intrepid watchdogs against government waste were instrumental in sneaking language into the 2005 Tax Relief Act that pretended that the subsidy was still needed. As a Time magazine report notes, the fake energy industry has some dear friends in Washington.

[A] select group of investors and companies will walk away with billions of dollars in tax subsidies, not from oil but from the marketing of a dubious concoction of synthetic fuel produced from coal and dependent on government tax credits tied to the price of oil.

From 2003 through 2005, TIME estimates, the synfuel industry raked in $9 billion in tax credits. That means the lucky few collectively cut their tax bills by that amount, which would be enough to cover a year's worth of federal taxes for 20 million Americans who make less than $20,000 a year and pay income taxes. How important is the tax credit to synfuel producers? In its latest annual report, Headwaters Inc., a Utah-based purveyor of synfuel processes and substances, says flatly, "Headwaters does not believe that production of synthetic fuel will be profitable absent the tax credits."...

The coal can look and burn like regular coal. The IRS rule for transforming coal into synfuel—and getting the tax credit—requires only that the substance be chemically altered in some way. The alchemy that satisfies the IRS is a simple process: some plants spray newly mined coal with diesel fuel, pine-tar resin, limestone, acid or other substances—a practice that industry critics call "spray and pray." Other operators mix coal-mining waste with chemicals, coat it with latex and blend it with untreated coal to form briquettes....

Today about 55 such plants around the U.S. process 125 million tons of coal or, in many cases, coal waste from an earlier mining era. For owners and operators, the whole point isn't creating a profitable new energy resource for the U.S.; it's about collecting the tax subsidy. Progress Energy Inc. of Raleigh, N.C., which owns electric utilities that serve portions of the Carolinas and Florida, reported in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that in 2002-04 its synfuel-production losses added up to $400 million. No problem: the company claimed $852 million in tax credits, magically transforming a money-losing operation into a money-making business with $452 million in profits—courtesy of the American taxpayer. And that's not all. Like other synfuel producers, Progress Energy can't immediately use all the tax credits it mines because of tax-law limitations. As of Dec. 31, 2004, it was sitting on $745 million in deferred credits that it can write off against future earnings for years to come. And Progress Energy is not alone. Plants run by DTE Energy Co. of Detroit generated $1.2 billion in tax credits during the same years....

Asked again by TIME to identify the author [of the amendment], the Senate Finance aide later wrote in an e-mail, "the provision originated as an amendment from Sen. [Rick] Santorum [a Pennsylvania Republican]. Sen. [Gordon] Smith [an Oregon Republican] had a similar amendment co-sponsored by several other Senators, Republicans and Democrats. Chairman Grassley accepted the Santorum amendment ... It's routine for him to accept non-controversial provisions that way rather than have the committee vote on each amendment ... So now the Santorum amendment is in the bill." When contacted by TIME, Santorum's staff had no comment.

The bill is now part of Congress's budget-reconciliation process. But there is no synfuel amendment in the House bill, meaning that it cannot become law unless the House conferees agree to the Senate provision. Bill Thomas, the California Republican who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, by some accounts is not in favor of the synfuel provision, but whether he will actively oppose it remains to be seen. There are already major differences between the House and Senate reconciliation bills on much larger issues like Medicare, so the odds are that synfuel may slip through again.

Another Senate supporter of the credit is Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee. An aide said Hatch believes the new provision in the Senate bill "helps make the current credit work better." Utah-based Headwaters Inc., one of the synfuel industry's most active companies, licenses its technology as well as sells materials to synfuel producers. "If the tax credits under Section 29 of the Internal Revenue Code are repealed or adversely modified," the company said in its latest annual report, "Headwaters Energy Services' profitability will be severely affected."

Cabinet Level

I always thought that the reason that the Bush administration put the Coast Guard under the Department of Homeland Security was to ensure that its concerns would be the concerns of an administration at least ready to pay lip service to the notion of, well, security of the homeland. Apparently lip service means less than it used to.

The Coast Guard warned in December that the proposed takeover of some U.S. port operations by a state-owned company in the United Arab Emirates raised "intelligence gaps" that made it difficult to assess the deal's possible threat to national security.

Its cautions, however, didn't trigger a 45-day investigation into the transaction, which would have been required if a Cabinet-level agency had raised such concerns. The Coast Guard is a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee released the unclassified Coast Guard document Monday. It came one day after the Bush administration accepted an invitation from Dubai Ports World to pursue a new inquiry into the national security implications of its deal to acquire terminals at six major U.S. ports when it purchases a British firm, Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

On one hand, I should not be surprised, because President Bush is a former CEO of a public company—and if the last few years have told observers anything, it is that CEOs would rather delegate, duck, and deny responsibility for any decision that one might think they ought to have made themselves.

On the other hand, this debacle has provided at least three instances of pure, unmitigated irony. First, the president who has yet to veto a single measure passed by Congress threatened to veto any action by Congress to block the transaction.

Second, the selfsame Republicans who claimed that "9/11 changed everything" now claim that globalization must go ahead as planned, regardless of ties to terrorists or longstanding hatred of our key ally in the Middle East.

Finally, the nominal conservatives in the Bush administration are trying to grease the skids of commerce so a state-owned company can take over a private firm. Who knew we had such proponents of nationalized industry?

Tour de Pants

My intellect say that Bush and his minions do such a horrible job running the government because they are both convinced that government is good at helping the citizenry and philosophically opposed to improving how it helps the citizenry.

My nastier impulses say that they are just plain incompetent at managing anything remotely complex.

In support of the second idea, here is prima facie evidence that Bush cannot do two things at once (and kids, you should be able to try this at home).

Scotland on Sunday has obtained remarkable details of one of the most memorably bizarre episodes of the Bush presidency: the day he crashed into a Scottish police constable while cycling in the grounds of Gleneagles Hotel....

The official police incident report states: "[The unit] was requested to cover the road junction on the Auchterarder to Braco Road as the President of the USA, George Bush, was cycling through." The report goes on: "[At] about 1800 hours the President approached the junction at speed on the bicycle. The road was damp at the time. As the President passed the junction at speed he raised his left arm from the handlebars to wave to the police officers present while shouting 'thanks, you guys, for coming'.

"As he did this he lost control of the cycle, falling to the ground, causing both himself and his bicycle to strike [the officer] on the lower legs. [The officer] fell to the ground, striking his head. The President continued along the ground for approximately five metres, causing himself a number of abrasions. The officers... then assisted both injured parties."...

Details of precisely how the crash unfolded have until now been kept under wraps for fear of embarrassing both Bush and the injured constable. But the new disclosures are certain to raise eyebrows on Washington's Capitol Hill....

In Scotland, an accident such as the one at Gleneagles could have led to police action. Earlier this year, Strathclyde Police issued three fixed penalty notices to errant cyclists as part of a crack-down on rogue riders. Legal experts also suggested lesser mortals could have ended up with a fixed penalty fine, prosecution, or at least a good ticking-off from officers.

Worst. Bicyclist. Ever.

A Page from the Nixon Playbook

One of the hallmarks of the Nixon administration was its penchant for auditing the tax returns of its political enemies. Apparently, Republicans in Washington liked the idea so much that they are slightly modifying it, auditing instead the non-profit status of grouyps that cause them trouble.

The Internal Revenue Service recently audited the books of a Texas nonprofit group that was critical of campaign spending by former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) after receiving a request for the audit from one of DeLay's political allies in the House.

The lawmaker, House Ways and Means Committee member Sam Johnson (R-Tex.), was in turn responding to a complaint about the group, Texans for Public Justice, from Barnaby W. Zall, a Washington lawyer close to DeLay and his fundraising apparatus, according to IRS documents....

The IRS sent two auditors last year to comb the 2003 books of Texans for Public Justice and an affiliated foundation that collected donations for the organization. No tax violations were found, according to a letter the IRS sent the group.

But the circumstances behind the effort—which were uncovered by the group's director and founder, Craig L. McDonald, using the Freedom of Information Act—prompted him to allege that the audit was an abuse of the IRS's mandate. He said there was no evidence of wrongdoing in the complaints.

"This audit was political retaliation by Tom DeLay's cronies to intimidate us for blowing the whistle on DeLay's abuses," McDonald said. "Enlisting the IRS to intimidate critics is a dirty trick reminiscent of Richard Nixon. . . . It is not a crime to report a crime, as we did with DeLay."...

Steven T. Miller, the senior IRS official in charge of tax-exempt organizations, said that though he could not address how Johnson's request was handled, referrals related to improper political activity generally must be judged reasonable by two career employees before an audit can proceed.

I should remind our dozens of readers that charitable organizations that are exempt from taxation under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3) can indeed have ideological axes to grind, but they must generally be charitable, educational, or scientific endeavors. Surely by now even the political appointees at the IRS are a bit embarrassed at their fairly blatant political targeting of Texans for Public Justice. Perhaps they might even be in the mood for some actual auditing of soi-disant charitable groups that have absolutely no educational or charitable merit whatsoever. I humbly offer these fine establishments for the perusal of anyone at the tax-exempt/governmental entities division eager for uncovering some actual skullduggery.

Guns Don't Kill People

But idiots with guns do kill people. And, fortunately for Harry Whittington, getting shot at close range with a shotgun landed him only in intensive care, not the morgue.

And now that Whittington is out of intensive care and presumably out of immediate danger, Americans should ask whether Dick Cheney ought to be in any position of responsibility, since he failed one of the basic tests that millions of hunter pass every year—that of not maiming one's companions.

It is certainly good that the press is asking the sorts of questions that ought to be asked here—Was Dick Cheney impaired when he shot his friend? Was he questioned by the local sheriff? If not, why not? It is certainly amusing to consider that Dick Cheney and Aaron Burr are the only vice presidents to shoot someone while in office (and Burr did his deed against someone expecting to be a target). But what is not being asked are questions about the deeper problems of the Bush-Cheney regime. Why did Bush and Cheney push so hard for war in 2001? And why did the American press go so meekly along?

Oh, the Humanity!

The second unintentionally funny story from the Boston Globe on Thursday dealt with the underreported but ever so real plight of the poor souls who have built huge houses and find themselves at a loss to furnish them. No, really.

It happens all the time. A couple buys an estate-size home with multiple rooms and lavish amenities. Two-story fireplaces. Palatial entryways with formal staircases. Soaring coffered ceilings. Arched floor-to-ceiling windows....

Decorating a big house is a challenge being faced by an increasing number of homeowners, given the proliferation of suburban residences of the sort variously referred to as "McMansions," "starter castles," or "new construction," to use the more discreet phrasing of the real estate world.

Whether they are 5,000-square-foot faux Tudors in suburban developments or 10,000-square-foot showplaces on rural cul-de-sacs befitting the pages of Architectural Digest, supersize homes come with a host of supersized decorating concerns.

Such as: How do you muffle the echo in a massive two-story foyer? Where do you get knickknacks to fill up a gazillion built-in shelves, let alone furniture that doesn't seem Lilliputian beneath a 20-foot ceiling? What do you hang on the walls when your living room runs the length of a bowling alley? Not to mention: How do you pay for all this stuff after you've broken the bank on the house?

Oh the humanity! This is the worst housing dilemma in human history!

Our dozens of readers will have to click the link to read about the new manse in Concord that is so big that even the dog has its own room, complete with shower and radiant heating in the floor. No, really.

Reading about this, in what passes for the liberal media, almost makes one yearn for a nasty real estate crash.

Think Before You Act

The first of two unintentionally funny articles from Thursday's Boston Globe was this one about the town manager of Stoughton, Massachusetts. It seems that he decided to show his solidarity with an iconoclastic Danish newspaper, and is only catching flak for it.

[I]n a small act of solidarity with Denmark and of support for free speech, Mark Stankiewicz bought two Danish flags on Monday and raised one of the red-and-white banners outside the Town Hall that morning, flying it on the pole beneath the US flag.

The symbolic gesture was short-lived, as Stankiewicz lowered the flag the next afternoon after a local veteran complained that it was improper to fly the flags of two countries on one pole. He declined to release the name of the veteran.

But many people in town saw the foreign flag display as insensitive and inflammatory. Several town employees told Stankiewicz they did not agree with his decision and worried the flag could provoke violence against Town Hall in light of the attacks against Danish and other European embassies throughout the Middle East.

Now what could have impelled Stankiewicz to do something to get him in hot water with two groups at once?

Stankiewicz said he had closely followed reports of the Islamic protests. But it was a op-ed column written by Jeff Jacoby in Sunday's Boston Globe, headlined "We Are All Danes Now," that persuaded him to show his support publicly.

That explains it! A word to any other town officials thinking of making big political statements: if Jeff Jacoby writes something, particularly with overblown rhetoric and passion, you should remember foremost that it is still Jeff Jacoby writing it. And therefore the politics behind it are solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish.

The Greatest Deliberative Body in the World

Welcome to legislating, Republican-style.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert engineered a backroom legislative maneuver to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits, say witnesses to the pre-Christmas power play.

The language was tucked into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of a House-Senate conference committee, say several witnesses, including a top Republican staff member....

The legislation, called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, allows the secretary of Health and Human Services to declare a public health emergency, which then provides immunity for companies that develop vaccines and other "countermeasures."

Beyond the issue of vaccine liability protection, some say going around the longstanding practice of bipartisan House-Senate conference committees' working out compromises on legislation is a dangerous power grab by Republican congressional leaders that subverts democracy.

"It is a travesty of the legislative process," said Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"It vests enormous power in the hands of congressional leaders and private interests, minimizes transparency and denies legitimate opportunities for all interested parties, in Congress and outside, to weigh in on important policy questions."

And it is not just highfalutin scholars at think tanks who are upset about this sort of shenanigan. At least one of the critics is a member of the Dear Leaders' own party.

At issue is what happened Dec. 18 as Congress scrambled to finish its business and head home for the Christmas holiday.

That day, a conference committee made up of 38 senators and House members met several times to work out differences on the 2006 Defense Department appropriations bill.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the ranking minority House member on the conference committee, said he asked Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, the conference chairman, whether the vaccine liability language was in the massive bill or would be placed in it.

Obey and four others at the meeting said Stevens told him no. Committee members signed off on the bill and the conference broke up.

A spokeswoman for Stevens, Courtney Boone, said last week that the vaccine liability language was in the bill when conferees approved it. Stevens was not made available for comment.

During a January interview, Frist agreed. Asked about the claim that the vaccine language was inserted after the conference members signed off on the bill, he replied: "To my knowledge, that is incorrect. It was my understanding, you'd have to sort of confirm, that the vaccine liability which had been signed off by leaders of the conference, signed off by the leadership in the United States Senate, signed off by the leadership of the House, it was my understanding throughout that that was part of that conference report."

But Keith Kennedy, who works for Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., as staff director for the Senate Appropriations Committee, said at a seminar for reporters last month that the language was inserted by Frist and Hastert, R-Ill., after the conference committee ended its work.

"There should be no dispute. That was an absolute travesty," Kennedy said at a videotaped Washington, D.C., forum sponsored by the Center on Congress at Indiana University.

"It was added after the conference had concluded. It was added at the specific direction of the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate. The conferees did not vote on it. It's a true travesty of the process."

There are several disturbing things about this whole mess. First, the clear implication of this report is that the House and Senate are relying far, far too much on conference committees to do the actual work of crafting legislation. (Both chambers have to accept the report of the conference committee, but those approvals are virtually automatic nowadays.)

Second, the leaders of the Republicans in the House and Senate have shown themselves to be not all that unlike their man in the White House—thoroughly unconcerned with the niceties of small-d democratic behaviors.

Third, the Republican modus operandi in the House and Senate has been, for several years now, to pass important bills in a flurry of frantic votes, amendments, and conference committees. Rare is the important bill that is read—nay, could be read by the time that the chamber votes on it. And why bother reading it if the conference committee, never mind the House speaker and the Senate majority leader, are going to ruin whatever good work managed to get done?

Fourth, it is clear that someone in the Senate needs to do what Howard Metzenbaum used to do in the 1980s for the Democrats—refuse to go along in the Senate until the Republicans start playing by the rules. Metzenbaum would not have relied on someone's say-so that a provision was not in the bill: his staff would have ensured that Senate business got held up, vacation or no vacation, until they could check.

Now I Get It

Now I understand with Ariel Sharon was so eager to start his own, more moderate party and leave Likud, after so many years of being so involved with Likud and its conservative party. It is because Benjamin Netanyahu, the present leader of Likud—and, by extension, his followers—does not mind being seen as either knavish or insane.

While stumping in Netanya on Sunday, Likud Chairman MK Benjamin Netanyahu compared Hamas' victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections last week to the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s.

"A few days ago, a new foe arose," Netanyahu said at a campaign stop at the Park Hotel. "When Hitler rose to power, it was said that ruling would moderate him, and it was also said in regard to the Ayatollah's regime and the Taliban. There are urgent warning signs that [scream] out a lust for murder and destruction."

"The Likud will not continue transferring territory, [we] need to stop giving them money—neither ours nor the world's—and [we] must prevent them from establishing an army any which way possible," Netanyahu said, adding that the Likud will derail Hamas' continuing ascent.

Yes, conciliatory actions towards those entities long sworn to your destruction never work: please ignore the pesky fact that Israel and Egypt have been at peace for almost 30 years.

And it is now official: Likud's leader has essentially decided that it is not enough that fanatics in Hamas want to destroy Israel, but that the converse must be true.

The Television Market Gets One Right

Our dozens of readers surely know that we have an instinctive distrust of the wisdom of the marketplace for making decent decisions. But sometimes even the market gets something dead right.

In September 2004, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), after heavy lobbying from its Republican overseers at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, began feeding a new show called the "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" to its member stations. Why Americans needed their tax dollars spent on a new right-wing commentary show at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time was not an issue. But the corporation for Public Broadcasting satraps were sure that Americans needed were the politics of "Firing Line" with a bigger budget and better production values.

The Wall Street Journal, as Brad DeLong astutely points out when events warrant, is really two newspapers in one—a thorough and mainly evenhanded news section with a heavy emphasis on news about business, and a thoroughly slipshod and underhanded editorial page with a heavy emphasis on conservative talking points.

And the "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" had little to do with the news section of the paper and a lot to do with its editorial staff. (Ironically, many PBS stations would have welcomed a straightforward business news show to replace the post-Louis Rukeyser version of "Wall Street Week.")

After 15 short months, alas, the conservative Republican overseers were licking their wounds, having been a little too overt and partisan in their overt partisanship, and the Journal Editorial Board took its business private.

And in January 2006, the "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" made its triumphant return to television, on a network that would favor its politics and reward it with a time slot that reflected its importance to the American public. Yes, the show now appears on Fox News at the stellar hour of 11:00 p.m. on Saturdays (Eastern time) and 6:00 a.m. on Sundays. Gentle readers, The Tony Danza Show gets better time slots than that: those time slots shout pity, not respect.

Now That's Rich

Every so often the mainstream press has an article so permeated with unintentional irony and humor that the publishers ought to be recognized for their unconscious foresight in vetting it for publication.

This week, the honor for the K Marx the Spot Prize for funniest assertion in a serious article about personal finance goes to Business Week for this Toddi Gutner article on self-directed IRAs:

Until nine months ago, Hal Fong had a fairly typical individual retirement account (IRA) with all the usual vehicles: mutual funds, stocks, and bonds. Then he finally got tired of the so-so returns. So using a "self-directed IRA," he directed 20%, about $125,000, into a private-equity deal, Pan Pacific Bank, a Fremont (Calif.) startup. Fong, a 51-year-old logistics manager at Home Depot in Northern California, expects the bank to be bought, merged, or taken public within three years, earning a 30% average annual return for his IRA.

The funny part is not the idea that a bank in Northern California is going to double in value in the next three years—while a flat or inverted yield curve is not good for banks because they borrow short and lend long, the next three years might well prove good for the Bay Area economy.

No, the problem are the assertions in that lead paragraph that Fong has a "typical" IRA, that the IRA has a balance of roughly $625,000, and that he has earned "so-so returns." Until quite recently, the limit on contributions to an IRA was $2,000 per year. If Fong started his IRA in 1976 (when he was 21), and always contributed $2,000 per year to it, then a 13% per annum return—hardly so-so (the Standard and Poor's 500 gained only 12.6% per year by comparison). If Fong started his IRA later, or skipped one or more years, then his compounded return has been even better.

Statistics show that the average American worker in 2003 had an IRA with a balance of not quite $30,000. More detailed 1999 statistics from the Internal Revenue Service pegged the traditional IRA assets of taxpayers between 45 and 54 years as having a mean of $56,377 and a median of $20,987. Now, several years have passed between 1999 and 2006, but they have not been good years for the stock market, the main beneficiary of IRA contributions. Half of all taxpayers in Fong's age cohort had IRA assets in 1999 of less than $21,000. And certainly far more than half have less than $625,000 today!

Yes, in a state of communism, the retirement security that today only a bountiful retirement account can bring may indeed by typical. But for now, only the atypically affluent will have anything like that.

Now That's Political Correctness

If there is one thing that unites the right wing, from Christian Reconstructionists to neo-monarchists to neo-conservatives, it is the notion that academia is utterly teeming with "politically correct" leftists who want to quash any glimmer of conservative thought.

It is somehow not reassuring to the right wing that even in the supposed bastions of left-wing dogmatism that conservatives regularly and infamously pop up. Somehow Harvey Mansfield at Harvard manages to teach government and be a conservative—and he somehow missed the all-school meeting where every member of the faculty of arts and sciences had to pay fealty to atheism. Somehow Donald Kagan at Yale got tenure teaching history without having to swear to teach only the Leninist version of historical materialism. (And, yes, somehow David Gerlenter managed to get tenure as well!)

Yes, amazingly enough, there is no such thing as a loyalty oath at even the most liberal and most elite of the liberal elite universities. Indeed, even at departments as heterodox as the University of Massachusetts economics department—an actual hotbed of Marxian thought—actual conservatives have earned, are earning, and will earn tenure.

If conservatives are allowed at liberal universities and colleges, is the converse true? Not on your life.

Take, for example, Wheaton College in Illinois. An assistant professor of philosophy was fired from Wheaton for the crime against academic propriety of converting to Catholicism.

Faculty members at the west suburban evangelical Protestant college must sign a faith statement that the Bible is the final authority. Catholics follow the authority of Scripture and the pope.

Joshua Hochschild, an assistant professor of philosophy at Wheaton College for four years, became a Catholic on Easter 2004. He was dismissed last spring.

"I was sad to be leaving my colleagues and students and an institution I valued very highly," said Hochschild, 33. "But I support in principle the right of the institution to have exclusive hiring policies. Not every institution is a liberal democracy. We both agreed that Wheaton has a right to exclude Catholics if it wants to. We both agree there are significant differences between what a Catholic believes and what a Protestant believes. Our significant difference was over whether the statement of faith was an effective way of implementing a policy of excluding Catholics."

Wheaton's own president proclaims on its web site that the college accepts one and only one point of view from its faculty:

When I came to Wheaton I inherited a long-standing policy which specified that all employees must be able to affirm the College's Statement of Faith....One can be enrolled as a student at Wheaton without ever affirming this Statement of Faith, but the team of people who are gathered to serve our students is to be drawn from those whose convictions square with the theological stance of the College....The Wheaton College you and I know, then, is the historical and theological product of American evangelical Protestantism, and its constituency is almost entirely Protestant. This identity is no accident of history but is rather a matter of conviction. In virtually every one of the Reformation/Catholic or Reformation/Orthodox differences, the College by conviction will be found standing on the Reformation side. We need not be anti-Catholic or anti-Orthodox, but neither are we willing to say that the more substantial differences do not matter.

This is what passes for higher education in hundreds of cases across the United States. The all-encompasses nature of right-wing political correctness on campus has literally no parallel on the left. Anyone not toeing the religious and ideological line of these right-wing bastions of "learning" need not apply. Who needs a Little Red Book when the Thick Black Book will do?

The Scum Always Rises

He's back! The man who made millions of dollars claiming that coral calcium would cure all ills has a new product to peddle. In 2004, the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with Trudeau that would supposedly keep him out of the infomercial business. Alas, the settlement did not keep Trudeau from peddling anything on infomercials, because he could still make "truthful infomercials for informational publications."

Trudeau and his lawyers interpreted that as allowing him to peddle a book of miracle cures.

Now that at least some cable and television outlets are onto Trudeau's book as being full of manure, he has started now to peddle cosmetics—the FTC settlement does not cover cosmetics. (Look for an infomercial designed to look like a talk show set with a fellow named Kevin (sitting on the right hand side of the set) as the co-host.)

Chances are that the sales staff was willing to take Trudeau's filthy money but that the management does not want to be tainted by it—that is the impression that I got from New England Cable News, which informed me that it will no longer run Trudeau's latest infomercial.

I just want to know whether television and cable outlets pay the slightest attention to the garbage that they allow to run when they think that only dupes are watching.

Wicked Liberal

To its credit, the Boston Globe did have a front-page story about today's federal election in Canada.

The article analyzed--correctly, it turned out--the likely Conservative victory. But it did not address that the Conservatives were unlikely to form a majority government. And it had an even more glaring problem. The party that will receive the third most votes today was not even mentioned.

The graphic at the start of the story is exemplary (and not in a good way):

Recent polling:
Liberal 27%; Conservative 37%; Quebecois 12%; Others 24%
2004 Results:
Liberal 43.8%; Conservative 32.1%; Quebecois 17.5%; Others 6.6%

After the jump, a detailed chart outlines the various policies of only the three parties mentioned in the first table—yet the third party (the Bloc Quebecois) does not contest seats outside Quebec. In fact, most of the "others" represents the New Democrats. The first graphic shows that the Liberals have lost a lot of support between 2004 and today—alas, the numbers are junk and bear little relation to the actual results from 2004 when the Liberals led the Conservatives 37% to 30%, with the NDP at 16% and the Bloc at 12%.

Anyone reading the Canadian press would know that the NDP was important in this election, and not just because disaffected Liberal voters might swing to the left instead of the right. The current Liberal government depended on tacit NDP support in Parliament, and NDP support, whether part of a formal coalition or not, might be important in the next government as well.

But you would not learn an iota of that by reading New England's supposedly liberal paper.

But That's Impossible!

How could this be so? How could Vladimir Putin be politically autocratic and fiscally corrupt?

The most outspoken of President Vladimir V. Putin's senior advisers abruptly resigned today, warning that Russia's nascent political freedoms have been lost and the Kremlin's economic choices have been poor. He also said that he had no more ability to influence the government's course.

The official, Andrei N. Illarionov, 44, had been an economic adviser to the Kremlin since shortly after Mr. Putin took office nearly six years ago. His tenure in recent years had turned publicly rocky, and he had become an occasional but memorable critic of Kremlin policy.

We know that this cannot be true, because our own Dear Leader told us so in November 2001

And the more I get to know President Putin, the more I get to see his heart and soul, and the more I know we can work together in a positive way

and even more clearly in June 2001

I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.

If he were not President of the United States, then it might be amusing to see who is more often right: the Weekly World News or George W. Bush.

Thanks for the Gumdrop, Bill

This is just peachy keen: the renditions policy that is hallmark of the Bush Doctrine was the bastard child of the Clinton administration.

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, has told Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.

"President Clinton, his national security adviser Sandy Berger and his terrorism adviser Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al Qaeda," Mr Scheuer said.

"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."

Mr Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, says he developed and led the "renditions" program.

One of the things that Americans are justifiably proud of their country is its respect for the law. And one of the things that Americans should be least proud about is the frequency that its leaders decide to foul that respect with completely reprehensible actions. Leaders who "do what it takes" regardless of what the law says, or leave up to other countries what to do with prisoners, have lost whatever moral authority they pretend to have.

And, of course, allowing the CIA to start a renditions program makes it ever so difficult to stop that program later. Serious students of history are supposed to learn how not to encourage the CIA, wherever its knackered ideas take its misguided minions.

War on Holidays

A good part of me wants Fix to take its self-important War on Christmas fixation to its logical extreme. While it is certainly true that when retailers wish shoppers "Happy Holidays," it is done in the spirit of both inclusiveness and maximization of revenue, it would be certainly instructive to see the Christmas police take an in-depth look into Christmas, particular as celebrated in the United States.

Why did the New England Puritans ban Christmas celebrations? Why is it celebrated so close to the traditional Roman holiday of Saturnalia? Who came up with the Christmas tree and which god (or gods) did they actually worship?

But perhaps it is too much to ask Fox News, or even any other mainstream news channel to do all that. But perhaps we could ask Fox News to take the War On Christmas same approach to other holidays.

If it is so important to wish everyone a Merry Christmas because of the tale of the birth of Jesus and all that means to Christians, why not take the same approach to other holidays? I fully expect that in last August 2006, Bill O'Reilly will be asking Americans to consider the role of organized labor in curbing the voracious appetites of industrialists in the late 1800s by demanding shorter hours, weekends off, and paid holidays. Yes, everything that the Labor Day weekend means to even the most conservative of Americans depends on the advances of industrial unionism.

On 19 January, several Southern states will celebrate Robert E. Lee's birthday. On the last Monday in April, four Southern states will celebrate Confederate Memorial Day. And six other states celebrate either Jefferson Davis's birthday or Confederate Memorial Day on the last Monday in May or the first Monday in June. Some of these states are trying to hide the heritage on these holidays by combining them with other celebrations—Martin Luther King Day for Lee's birthday; or Memorial Day for Davis's birthday. O'Reilly should be outraged: how can these states honestly say that they are celebrating the true meaning of these holidays by hiding them under the federal umbrella. If states are too afraid to celebrate the great traitors of the past and the grand tradition of chattel slavery with their own state holidays, then something is horribly wrong with this country.