Why Sarah Palin quit

Sherlock Holmes dropped by the America Wants To Know office this afternoon. The great detective may appear disinterested in fame and glory, but we have never known him to miss a curtain call.

"You were right," we said.

"Naturally," he replied.

It was September 14, 2008, early on a Sunday morning, when Sherlock Holmes had walked into our office carrying a magnifying glass and a copy of the Sunday New York Times and solved The Case of the Governor's Husband.

"The governor's damage-control effort may well succeed," Holmes said. "By the time the details of the scandal become public, the story of her resignation will be old news. She will point to her record and blame the accusations on the enemies she made by doing what was right for the people of Alaska. She will play the victim. She will talk about the future. It will be over in a week."

"Really?" we asked. "Would you guess that she has a future in politics?"

The flicker of a smile crossed Holmes' face. "I never guess," he said.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "The Case of the Governor's Husband."

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The voice of Speaker Boehner

House Minority Leader John Boehner is on the House floor as this is written, reading highlights from a 300-plus-page amendment to the "American Clean Energy and Security" bill, otherwise known as climate-change cap-and-trade legislation, which was "dropped into the hopper" at three o'clock this morning.

Under the "custom of the House," the Minority Leader's remarks will be heard, regardless of time limitations on the debate.

He may be killing the bill right now. America Wants To Know just telephoned Rep. Brad Sherman's office (we're in his district) and his staffers said he has not yet decided how he will vote. "We're giving him a tally," said the person who answered the phone in the district office.

We called because the House website gave us an error message when we tried to e-mail.

Maybe the climate change bill will die on the floor tonight, never to be revived.

That would be a victory for all Americans, except the ones who make money from corrupt and idiotic government contracts and subsidies.


Copyright 2009

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Copyright 2009


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Mullahs retire from show business

It was evident from Iranian "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Khamenei's public statements after the election that he wanted the world to accept Iran's regime and give it the same deference shown to repressive governments in places like China, Vietnam, and Egypt, just to name a few.

In his speech announcing that after further review, the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would stand, the Ayatollah repeatedly cited the voter turnout in Iran as evidence that the regime is legitimate.

So that was the plan: Hold a sham election in which both candidates had been selected by the "Supreme Leader," and then hold it up to the world as proof that Iran's government is a freely elected, legitimate expression of the will of a majority of the Iranian people.

There's a scene in the first Rocky movie in which Apollo Creed, the boxer who was supposed to defeat Rocky in a sham match and instead finds himself being pounded, complains to his corner man, "He don't know it's a damn show. He thinks it's a damn fight."

So it goes.

The people of Iran have succeeded in destroying the mullahs' plan to use the election as a means of solidifying their power and their international standing. Governments that had intended to find a way to do business with Iran, including ours, will find it very difficult to go forward with their plans.

It won't be easy for elected leaders to shake hands with a man who dropped lye from helicopters to get demonstrators off the streets.

The show's over.



Copyright 2009

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Just kill it

Today's Washington Post reports that the Senate Finance Committee has hit on a compromise proposal for health care reform.

It would "require most people to buy health insurance."

Good luck with that.

Over in the House, they're looking for a trillion dollars to pay for the first ten years of the plan. So far, their favorite options are a "surtax on the rich," an "increase in the payroll tax," new taxes on "sugary drinks and alcohol," and "a national value-added tax" (that's a type of sales tax) of 3 percent.

Good luck with that, too.

How do you like it so far?

Maybe you'll like the Senate's funding idea better. They're leaning toward taxing employer-paid health insurance, meaning you would owe income tax on the cash value of your employer-paid benefits as if you had received that money as cash income.

Some Democrats are opposed to this because it would really hammer union members, whose health plans are excellent and very expensive.

Senator Max Baucus told reporters he's open to the idea of exempting from the tax any health benefits that are provided under a union contract.

Seriously? Non-union employees would have to come up with the money to pay taxes on their health benefits and union employees wouldn't?

Do you feel sick yet?

Have a glass of club soda and relax. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have never exhibited suicidal tendencies. One day you'll open the newspaper (or the iPhone) and there will be a stunning, staggering number in some government economic report, or there will be a stunning, staggering development in some international situation, or there will be a stunning, staggering harvest of vegetables on the White House lawn, and that will suddenly become THE REASON that health care reform must wait until... until... until after the 2010 elections.

Then it will be back where it started, on the campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire, just one more bottle of snake oil in the hands of a charismatic traveling salesman.


Copyright 2009

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Gazing into the future

America Wants To Know brought out the fringed tablecloth and the crystal ball today and summoned our in-house Gypsy fortune-teller to answer a question about health care reform.

"What is it this time?" Madame Lyubitshka asked irritably. Gypsy fortune-tellers hate to be called away on poker night.

"I have an image in my mind," America Wants To Know said, "of Congressman Dan Rostenkowski. I see him surrounded by angry senior citizens who are pounding his car with sticks and umbrellas."

"I see," said the Gypsy.

"Can you track that down?" we asked.

Madame Lyubitshka seated herself at the little round table and passed her hands slowly over the crystal ball. "Yes," she said after a moment. "There he is."

Flickering in the glass was an image of the venerable Illinois congressman in his car, surrounded by a crowd of about a hundred senior citizens. They were jeering. Faintly we could hear shouts of "Liar, liar," "Chicken, chicken," and "We won't forget at election time."

Some of the seniors surrounded the congressman's car and briefly prevented him from driving away, pounding on the hood and the windows in anger.

"Where is he?" we asked.

Madame Lyubitshka peered into the crystal. "The Copernicus Center," she said. "Right in the middle of his district in Chicago. He was meeting privately with six senior-citizen groups and these people were waiting to speak with him. He promised to talk with them after the meeting, but instead he just ran for his car."

"What did they want to speak to him about?"

The Gypsy moved her hand over the crystal ball and stared deeply into the glass. "The new catastrophic care benefit in Medicare," she said. "They are very angry because they were asked to pay something for it. Come, see for yourself."

It was all there in the crystal. It was August, 1989. Congress had passed the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988 to provide insurance for catastrophic illnesses and long-term nursing care. Eligible seniors were asked to pay a premium ranging from $4 per month to $800 per year, depending on income. And all hell broke loose when the government tried to collect.

"Sen. John McCain said he recognized the brewing backlash a year ago--after he got 30,000 responses to a questionnaire in which sentiment ran more than 3-to-1 against a catastrophic-insurance bill that was sailing through Congress with bipartisan support," the Gypsy read from a reflection inside the glass.

"When was this?" we asked.

"September 17, 1989," Madame Lyubitshka read. "This is a story by Dan Balz in the Washington Post."

"Read some more," we urged.

"Other members began to sense something was wrong earlier this year, then wrote off the anger to a few greedy old folks," she read, "But when House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski was surrounded by jeering senior citizens during the August recess, everyone on Capitol Hill knew they had a problem they could not avoid. Chalk up another victory to the power of the elderly."

"Is there more?" we asked.

"You know the rest," Madame Lyubitshka said. "The catastrophic care benefit was repealed by Congress because the people who were eligible for the benefit didn't want to pay for it. They wanted everybody else to pay for it."

"Do you mean to tell me that the health care benefit was actually passed by Congress and signed into law, and then as soon as people found out it was going to cost them money, Congress was forced to repeal it? After all that work and effort? How could that happen?"

Madame Lyubitshka appeared to fall into a trance. "We call Dan Rostenkowski," she wailed in a tremulous voice. She lifted her hand. There was a cell phone in it. "Area code 773-276-5575," she said. "He's out of jail now. He'll explain it to you."


Copyright 2009

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Frauds and Liars

Karma. It's so slow.

That favorite saying of a friend was brought to mind last week as we watched car dealers complain to Congress that they were getting screwed.

The lawmakers listened sympathetically but didn't offer much help. Apparently the Gallup Poll hasn't uncovered any public support for a bailout of car dealers, other than a few dollars to pay for a headstone inscribed, What Goes Around, Comes Around.

In another championship display of prevarication, President Barack Obama devoted his weekly Internet and radio address to an explanation of how he plans to pay for his health care reform proposals.

He plans to pay doctors, hospitals, and drug makers less than they charge for their products and services.

Why didn't we think of that.

The next time you go to the grocery store, tell the manager you're only paying fifty cents a pound for beef, and it had better be sirloin because it's discriminatory to reserve the good stuff for people who can pay more for it. When he laughs at you, tell him he'd better play ball unless he wants to see his supermarket nationalized and his salary cut to a dollar a year.

How many Army divisions does Kroger have?

President Obama must be in real trouble on this health care reform bill because he has already gone to the old, reliable Washington lie: he can find the money to pay for it by "rooting out waste."

He couldn't have picked a worse week to fire Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service, who had the bad taste to root out $400,000 in waste in an AmeriCorps program run by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, an Obama ally and former NBA star.

There's no inspector general in the NBA, which might explain why commissioner David Stern gets away with what looks like the biggest rigging scandal since black-and-white quiz shows.

America Wants To Know became convinced last week that the cat is out of the bag when we heard the women at the hair salon chatting about the Lakers' loss in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, and how everybody knew that "they" weren't going to let the Lakers win four straight games because it would be boring and the ratings would tank.

We always get e-mail from friends who enjoy sports betting whenever there is an egregious call or non-call by an official, like the one in the Mavericks-Nuggets Western Conference Semifinals game on May 9, and whenever a player inexplicably shoots or doesn't shoot an uncontested basket at the end of the game that affects the point spread or the over-under.

This week someone sent us the news story about former NBA referee Tim Donaghy, presently serving a 15-month sentence for conspiracy and wire fraud in connection with sports gambling, being clubbed in the knee by an inmate who claimed to have ties to the New York mob. "Verbally, there was a comment made that they were going to shoot him in the head and break his knee caps," reported Donaghy's representative.

Donaghy, who is scheduled for release on October 24, is said to be writing a tell-all book on "how he picked those winners 70 to 80 percent of the time and about the knowledge of the special relationships that exist between referees, players and coaches."

Donaghy's representative, Pat Zaranek of Executive Prison Consultants, said the former ref's gambling problem should be seen in context. "To understand his addiction, what transpired, you have to understand what led up to it during his 13 years in pro basketball and the whole culture of what he perceived as fraud and manipulation in the NBA," he said.

If NBA commissioner David Stern is rigging the outcome of games, it appears that he's doing it with a sophisticated system of manipulating the officiating to get key players in foul trouble early and at the foul line late.

That would explain the peculiar sequence of events involving Lakers head coach Phil Jackson in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. Jackson gave an interview between the first and second quarters of the game and said there were some "bogus" calls in the first quarter that resulted in two fouls each for the Lakers' Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom and Andrew Bynum.

The NBA fined Phil Jackson $25,000 for that comment. An additional $25,000 fine was assessed against the Lakers organization.

The league had already fined Jackson for comments about the officiating of a playoff game the Lakers lost to the Denver Nuggets, in which the Nuggets shot 49 free throws and the Lakers just 35. "We want the game to be fair and evenly played," Jackson said.

That cost him $25,000.

A reasonable person might think Coach Jackson makes these expensive public statements to let David Stern know that he knows, and that there is a limit to how much he'll play along with it.

Or it all could be theater to make it look good for the fans at home. Maybe everybody's in on it for the financial health of the sport.

In February, the NBA borrowed $175 million to help 15 struggling teams pay their bills. That's in addition to a "$1.7 billion league-wide credit facility," according to the New York Times. "The league uses its lucrative media contracts as collateral to secure loans for its clubs," the Times reported.

Lower ratings would mean less lucrative media contracts, which might lead to a disastrous financial meltdown of the whole wildly-leveraged operation.

That would explain it.

It would also explain this odd report in MediaPost.com last week. "As the NBA looks to get a better handle on its ratings, the league has reached a deal with TiVo to provide it with an analysis of viewing patterns based on second-by-second data," David Goetzl reported. "It's not just how many people watch, but information as to when viewers are likely to tune out during a blowout."

By coincidence, or maybe not by coincidence, Game 4 of the NBA Finals was very close after three key Laker players picked up two fouls each in the first quarter. The game was tied at the end of regulation and the Lakers edged out an overtime victory over the Orlando Magic, one of the teams that needed $10 million of that emergency loan in February.

"After the Game 1 blowout, what a thrilling series this has become," the ABC announcer remarked.

He was not fined by the league for that comment.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "NBA Fines and Finals," "NBA Commissioner caught cheating," and "Pete Rose: Yes I did."

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