Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Today's Political Rant

The terrorist actions in Spain and Baghdad are, of course, terrible tragedies. And it bothers me more than it probably should that as I surfed the Internet, the overriding discussion points for those two horrible incidents seemed to be how they could be used in our current presidential election. You have articles that say what happened in Spain makes the case for the defeat of George Bush and you have articles claiming that it proves we should not elect John Kerry. And in discussion groups on both sides, there's a lot of talk of how their guy can use this to get votes. It's going to be a long time 'til November, people.

• Posted at 5:21 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

I can't recall a stupider proposal than a bill that was recently introduced to give Congress a veto power over Supreme Court decisions. Can't think of one less likely to ever become the law of the land, either. Here's Dahlia Lithwick with just some of what's wrong with this idea.

• Posted at 5:21 PM · LINK

Political Commercial

The folks at moveon.org took a lot of heat over a pretty trivial matter...the fact that two of something like a thousand proposed political commercials in a contest they ran compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Neither spot was ever even a finalist but in today's political climate, if your opponents give you even the teensiest lapse which you can inflate and use to hammer them, you do so. This is practiced by all sides.

Now, moveon.org has come up with one of the most powerful political commercials I've ever seen, and it's one that they actually endorse and are putting money behind. I can't wait to see the ways in which Republicans will try to discredit this one. Here it is.

• Posted at 1:33 PM · LINK

More on Martha

Larry Boocker sent me this e-mail which advances another point-o'-view on the matter of Martha Stewart's conviction...

A lot of people seem confused about the nature of Martha Stewart's crime and more generally, the reason why insider trading is illegal. They think it's a victimless crime or a trivial crime or a "technicality" crime. Let's start with the immediate victims. Those are the people who bought her shares of Imclone stock when she knew with certainty that their value would drop sharply. Well, that's just her good luck and the buyers' bad luck, right? Kind of like when a gambler puts money on 17 red at a roulette wheel and the casino knows for sure that that number won't hit this time around. Isn't that equally fair?

And that's what this is all about, protecting the integrity of the game. How many people will go to a casino if they suspect the games are fixed? How many people will put their money into the stock market if they suspect it's rigged so that a small number of insiders can make money and everybody else loses. Regulation of the stock market goes back to the New Deal. There were a lot of shady practices before the 1929 crash. When people lost a lot of money in the market, they also lost confidence in the fairness of the market. For years, they were afraid to put their money back in. This was bad for our economy and for our country. So the SEC was created, not to protect investors, although that's the claim. It was created to protect the stock market, to convince people it's safe to put their money there. Insider trading is illegal, not to protect investors, but to protect the reputation of the market.

Yes, Martha wasn't directly convicted of insider trading. Kind of like when Al Capone was convicted of failing to pay taxes on his illegal income rather than the illegality of his income. Wasn't that a terrible injustice? I don't think so.

So we had all these business scandals involving Enron and Worldcom and investors got hurt by their shady dealings. (Their employees took a double hit since many of them were invested in their employer.) The government needed to do something to restore confidence in the integrity of the stock market. So they went after Martha. Is this fair? I think so. I've never been impressed by criminals who argue that they weren't the only ones doing the crime or that others were doing worse.

I don't see any reason to chortle over her conviction. I certainly hope that the Enron and Worldcom guys get punished more severely. But I don't think any injustice was done to Martha.

This is not something about which I feel that strongly, but my inclination is in a different direction. I'm not one of those disputing that insider trading is and should be illegal...but Martha wasn't convicted of insider trading. They couldn't prove that, and it's not like they couldn't prove it for the same reasons that prosecutors couldn't prove Al Capone was bootlegging. Capone was having witnesses killed or threatened. He was bribing cops and judges and juries. He had erected an elaborate series of front companies that masked his involvement with the rackets. No one has suggested they couldn't convict Martha Stewart of insider trading because she had a couple of stockbrokers bumped off. In Capone's case, the one weakness in his shield from illegal activities was that he had received the money...so they prosecuted him for that. That, at least, was an actual crime.

Looking back for a famous precedent, the Martha Stewart conviction might in some ways remind me of what Jim Garrison tried to pull after Clay Shaw was acquitted of charges that he conspired to murder John F. Kennedy. The acquittal was swift and total, and rather than accept that, Garrison spent the next year or two trying to charge Shaw with all sorts of niggling little technicialities...finding the slightest discrepancy in the man's testimony, for example, and trying to frame it as perjury. There was a very powerful attitude of, "We'll be embarrassed if we don't convict this guy of something" and I fear that kind of thing happens more in our justice system than it ought to. I don't have one handy but I used to casually track cases where the prosecutors couldn't prove the reason they arrested or targeted a subject, and it then became a matter of plea bargaining — "Plead guilty to this one thing or we'll keep this investigation going forever" — or convicting them on some trivial ancillary detail. (Just thought of one: The McMartin Pre-School fiasco. They charged those people with 208 counts of child molestation and couldn't prove one, but they kept it going for years, hoping someone would crumble and plead guilty to something so the D.A.'s office wouldn't look completely inept. Which in this case, it was.)

I'm not convinced that kind of thing occurred with Ms. Stewart but I'm also not prepared to accept that she was the equivalent of Al Capone so we should rejoice that she was convicted of something, even if it might have been the wrong thing. You're right that it's no justification for wrongdoing to say that others did worse. But it also won't be right, if the Ken Lays of the world get away with their crimes, for prosecutors to say, "What do you mean we didn't nail the big guys committing stock fraud? We got Martha Stewart, didn't we?"

As I said, I'm not set in my view of this, so I appreciate the discussion. I'm just leaning in the direction of something here not being right.

• Posted at 10:58 AM · LINK

Your Challenge

Can you pass a third grade Geography test? Can you identify the 48 states that make up the continental United States? Well, here's your chance to prove it.

• Posted at 9:38 AM · LINK

Database of Dubious Declarations

Henry Waxman, who happens to be my Congressman, has set up an online database of faulty statements made by Bush administration officials about the war in Iraq. It's called Iraq on the Record.

I happen to think Democrats are making too great an effort to take every statement that turned out to be untrue (or even possibly untrue) and portray it as a deliberate, premeditated lie. Much of America is not going to buy that grown men and women in the White House conspired to be so inaccurate. They will, however, accept that all these predictions and unsupported facts show some sort of massive screw-up; that this country went to war with its leaders believing and acting upon a shocking amount of bad intelligence, and ignoring an awful lot that turned out to be accurate. If I were Kerry, I'd be talking a lot less about lying and a lot more about good, old-fashioned incompetence.

• Posted at 9:16 AM · LINK

Martha

Stephen Beals sent me this e-mail this morning and I thought it was worth sharing...

Like you, I don't get the animosity towards Martha Stewart. True, I'm not really into decorating and all that, so it's not like I've been paying attention, but I really don't understand where the flat-out hatred is coming from. The same goes for Kathie Lee. Like most public personalities, their behavior in their private lives really doesn't mean much to me. I suppose somebody can remind me of a mean boss I've had, or something, but I try and be objective.

I work in advertising and get a lot of daily newspapers here at my office. I'm just amazed at some of these articles. It's obvious that a lot of people who are angry at Martha, apparently just for being Martha, are now allowed to poke at her.

One Associated Press story interviewed previous inmates at the prison Martha will be going to and focuses on the drab concrete which she cannot decorate and the thread count of the blankets that she will have to use. The article goes on to say that her website directs customers to high thread count blankets, but she won't have that option. It points out that the (once again) drab concrete walls cannot be decorated and that she will have no choice about what to wear.

Couldn't this kind of anger be useful if it was applied to something more socially important? As a whole, I guess our country gets passionate about Martha Stewart and not about the boring things in life. Like Education.

Just had to get that off my chest. Thanks!

There are a lot of folks out there who are unhappy with their stations in life and this unhappiness manifests itself in schadenfreude, especially towards someone who seems snooty and above us. I can understand that, I guess. And I suppose I can also understand making the leap from "I don't like this person" to "she must be guilty," though I think that's also intellectually dishonest. I can even understand and agree with those who are happy because a blow was dealt to the premise — too often true in this country — that you can never be convicted of anything if you can afford a good-enough lawyer. Even on this one though, I wish I were more convinced that Ms. Stewart had committed a "real" crime instead of some technicality. The way the counts read, it's almost like they knew they couldn't nail her on a crime so they nailed her on conspiracy to commit that crime and lying to conceal that crime. It reminds me of my old complaint about accusing someone of "the appearance of impropriety" because you can't find a real impropriety to accuse them of.

Oh, well. If this is a warm-up to going after more of the Ken Lays of the world then, assuming Martha actually committed a crime, maybe it will make more sense. If it turns out to be a diversion, then I'll really think she got railroaded on a prosecution that served no purpose other than to "get" someone famous. Thanks for the comment, Stephen.

• Posted at 1:42 AM · LINK