Bye bye until late March. I'm off to visit the Third World.

I've got my malaria pills. I've had my shots. I've been admonished up to here about the water, ("Don't drink it. Don't even brush your teeth with it.")

I also know not to walk barefoot outdoors, not that I'd ever think to. ("They've got a worm that enters through the soles of your feet, crawls up the inside of your leg and...") Yecch! I get it.

So what with watching out for killer worms, staying wary of malaria-bearing mosquitos, avoiding cholera, polio, dysentary, and sorting out what's real from what's pop medicine, ("The international public health people gave you what kind of pills for Malaria Country? Don't you know about the side effects?")...

...With all that, I'm going to be too busy to blog. Or to moderate. Not to mention too far from a computer most of the time. Feel free to try posting here, but understand that your posts won't go up on The New York Crank until I crank my way back to New York.

See ya late March, possibly with some interesting tales to tell.

I hope not too interesting.

Associated Press reporter gets lost, can't find where he's reporting from

In an article datelined Danville, Calif., an Associated Press reporter today told the story of a couple who won a house in nearby Marin County, after the family breadwinner had lost his job.

And then the intrepid AP reporter revealed:

The house is in upscale Marin County, just north of San Francisco. The couple already own a home in Danville, a suburb south of San Francisco...

Small detail: Danville is a suburb east, not south of San Francisco. Check it out on the map.

Which raises some interesting questions such as:

• Did the reporter know where he or she was while reporting from Danville?

• Assuming the reporter is based at AP's San Francisco bureau, how did he or she get to Danville in the first place? Maybe while sleeping in the back of a helicopter?

• Is the AP fudging around here and actually reporting from San Francisco, doing its interviews via phone, and only pretending (tch tch) to be reporting directly from Danville?

My own theory is that the AP isn't lying about datelines. Its reporter somehow got to Danville, but now is hopelessly lost there and can't find his way home. Well, if he camps out on the streets, there's a terrific farmers' market there on Saturdays. Great produce!

This is an example of the sloppy reporting and editing you get when the news business, under pressure, pares down its staffing so severely that its "reporters" and the people who edit their copy don't have a clue where they're reporting from.

This time it's only a warm-your-heart feature story about a family that lost its source of income but won a$2 million house. Imagine what the AP is missing — or getting wrong — in Washington.

"Too big to fail" is too big, period!

Before Republicans and a few Democrats began deregulating the United States economy to hell, we had the financial and business equivalent of traffic cops who actually did their job. And we had laws with teeth that gave financial cops the authority to do that job.

Their job was to keep the equivalent of drunk drivers at the heads of corporations like Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, General Motors and others from letting their companies get so big that their intemperate greed and dunderheaded incompetence could sink the entire nation.

It’s time to bust up the banks,
the brokerage companies, the car makers
big drugs and big nationwide utilities

When we had the Glass-Steagall Act, financial institutions had to make a choice. They could be in the investment banking business, the savings bank and mortgage loan business, or the checking account and business loan business. Pick one.

That ended, under the Democratic Clinton Adminstration I’m ashamed to say, but under fierce pressure from a then-Republican Congress. It’s time to restore Glass-Steagall. But that's just for starters.

There was a time when every bank had 50 choices of the state where it wanted to do business. But every bank could only do business in one state. That kept banks local and fairly responsive to the needs of their local constituencies.

The town banker knew the town merchants. The savings bank knew their mortgage customers. Any local bank that began handing out fly-by-night loans would self-destruct, the banker would get driven out of town on a rail, the depositors would get paid off by FDIC insurance, the taxpayers would be in the hole but only for chump change relative to the mess we’re in now, and that would be that.

Strictly local banks were never too big to fail. But most of them were too smart to fail — because they were smaller, more agile, and more aware of what was going on their markets. It’s time to revert to local banking. Let Bank of America, and Chase, and Wells Fargo, and what’s left of the mess that’s Citibank each pick a state, any state, and do business there. And then get the hell out of the other 49 states.

Shrink banks and you'll shrink
bonuses and credit card interest

That one move will eliminate greed-driven bank managements because there simply won’t be enough money there most of the time for double-digit million dollar bonuses. It will eliminate the probability of massive bailouts of banks too big to fail. It will simplify the audits that state and federal bank examiners ought to be conducting every year. And it will keep banks out of the stock market, and vice-versa.

Oh, and by the way, it will bring credit card interest rates and penalties back under the control of the states, which in many states will mean the end of outrageous 30% credit card interest rates and heads-you-lose, tails-you-lose “terms and conditions.”

Give General Motors
a general bustup

General Motors? It would be a lot less of a threat to the economy if instead of General Motors we had a Chevvy Motors, a Buick Motors, a Cadillac Motors and a Saturn Motors, each with its own board of directors and its own more agile management to respond to its own market. If we did that to each of the “way-too-big three,” you can bet that, for example, Ram Motors would be doing okay now, even as Chrysler Car Motors sank like a shot, its market quickly taken over by somebody who wants to build an electric hybrid instead of a soused-on-petroleum SUV.

We still have a Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Breaking up the Big Three automakers is the sort of thing it was designed to do. Mr. Obama , get out that Sherman hatchet and start chopping up car companies.

The Sherman anti-trust act was used against AT&T back in 1982. Suddenly, instead of a single sleepy telephone monopoly, we had lots of little regional phone companies competing. Before you could hiccup we had cell phone networks, phone companies competing with cable companies, cable companies competing with phone companies, and rate wars. But then guess what happened?

Laissez-faire economics is what happened. The so-called “Baby Bells” starting merging. Rates went up. And now the cell phone innovations are happening at Apple, not New York Telephone. No wait, New York Telephone became part of Bell Atlantic. No wait, Bell Atlantic got swallowed up by NYNEX. It’s time to start un-merging them again — and the cable companies along with them.

Big Pharma? It’s a few corporate behemoths, their huge, powerful hands maintaining a choke hold around the necks of Congressmen and Senators that are keeping drug prices in the stratosphere. Break the bastards into a thousand little pieces. We’ll get smaller, smarter, faster-moving, more innovative pharmaceutical companies — and better drug prices while we’re at it.

Demand an end to
Socialism for corporations

Breaking up big business, regulating it into behaving as if it belongs in a civil society, detoxifying it so it can’t poison the economy and steal your job — that isn’t Socialism. On the contrary, it would be the end of a bigger evil, Corporate Socialism.

Small business that’s small enough to fail is capitalism. Let’s demand some capitalism for America, despite what those conservative Republican Socialists say.

Are you listening, Mr. President? And what about you, Congress?

How I pegged R. Allen Stanford for a phony four years ago

As some of my more faithful readers know, I’m an ad guy. Around 2005 I was doing work for a small Manhattan ad agency. I’m sure management there will be relieved a to know I’m not going embarrass them with the folly I saw there by mentioning the agency’s name.

They were pitching a new client. For a rather small agency, he was big business. I mean BIG.

“He’s gonna spend at least five million bucks with us the first year,” gushed an account management guy, who turned out to be painfully wrong.

“He,” was R. Allen Stanford, a Texas (of course) investment banker who now turns out to be a second string Bernie Madoff.

You gotta start off
cach day with a lie

Stanford told some agency people he was closely related to the founder of Stanford University. He evidently has told other people, too. (Not true, the University insists, turning around and launching a law suit against good ole boy R. Allen for trademark infringement.)

When R. Allen showed up at the agency, he ordered the entire staff lined up for him to meet. No, not a hand-shaking kind of thing. More of an inquisition.

“What do you do here?” he asked, glaring at a terrified looking woman. “And you, what do you do?” he demanded of another victim.

He didn’t ask everybody. He didn’t seem much interested in the answers, either. Instead, he seemed hellbent on impressing on everybody that he wanted respect, damnit. Groveling, bootlicking, kiss-his-butt respect.

Proud of terrifying a hotel

Stanford told us that he puts on a conference every year in New York, , using space at a particular Manhattan Hotel. “I spend $300,000 a year there, so I think I’m entitled to have everybody who works there know my name,” he said. He seemed to me to be impressed with himself. And proud.

Evidently, the entire hotel staff was briefed by their panicked management. Hundreds of people, including frequent repeat customers, come and go. But that guy with the doofy mustasche, whenever you see him, it had better be “Good morning, Mr. Stanford.” Or “Good evening Mr. Stanford.” Or else.

So one day good ole R. Allen walked into the news shop in the hotel lobby. The clerk there didn’t say, “Good morning, Mr. Stanford, Sir.” She just hands him the newspaper he asked for.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked her.

“Nope,” she said with a shrug.

Explosion! R. Allen Stanford, nearly in meltdown state, went to the management of the hotel and demanded to know why the clerk in the news shop didn’t know his name.

“The shop isn’t part of the hotel,” the manager explained. “They just rent the space from us.”

That was no excuse for R. Allen Stanford, who wanted things changed fast or there was going to be a $300,000 annual loss of business to pay.

Mind you, R. Allen Stanford told this story on himself, to a roomful of strangers.

Phony financier launches
Madison Avenue madness

Well, the ad agency set to work doing all kinds of things for Stanford's organization, starting with advising on what kind of “exhibits” he should put in some kind of weird “observation tower,” about four or five stories tall, that he built in Antigua.

He seemed to have a penchant for erecting tall things. (So does Donald Trump. What is it with ego-driven bullies and phallic symbols?)

Later that year, on vacation in Ecuador, I discovered another Stanford "tall thing" installation — an amusement park on a mountainside, high above Quito. You had to get there by paying to board a cable car. When you arrived, high up on a mountain, you found restaurants and souvenir shops. All of them were pretty much empty. Quito is a fairly poor town. How many people want to pay good money for a cable car ride before they sneak into the USA looking for work? This, Stanford investors, may be where your money went.

If you don’t come in Saturday,
don’t come in Sunday, either

Stanford also had a way of intruding on peoples’ lives. He’d call the little New York ad agency and say, “I want to see what you people are doing for me. I’ll be in to see a presentation, on Saturday.”

Saturday? Effin’ Saturday? The entire agency staff killed their weekend to come in Saturday. They came in at nine and stayed until 6 PM, waiting for R. Allen Stanford who never showed up. Then he called and said, “I got tied up. Come in Sunday.”

Clearly the guy was on a power trip. What it boils down to was, he was a refined schoolyard bully.

He wanted an ad campaign that was all about his integrity and reliability. When a financial guy tells you that integrity is the message he wants to get across, reach for your wallet and hold on to it tight.

Money burned, careers ruined

The New York agency went through all kinds of intensive and money-burning gyrations to come up with a campaign Stanford liked, and, on his insistence, getting it produced on the cheap. After all that, Stanford walked away from the agency and began airing ads, created at his own company, that he had been running before he connected with the gulled ad guys. The ad agency, and at least one other corporate entity, got left holding the financial bag.

The agency TV producer had been forced to twist so many arms at commercial production houses to get a cheap price, and the production houses had laid out so much money that they never got back, that the producer’s career was wiped out. Nobody will work with him again, which is death to a producer. He’s now running some kind of statistical information business. Every time I run into him he looks more depressed and disheveled than before.

The power to beat on people

All the while I kept telling anybody I could at the ad agency — the account management guy, the creative director, the producer — that this guy was a colossal phony. “He doesn’t want ads,” I told somebody, “He wants to beat up on agency people and show them he’s boss.”

Nobody listened. For the top guys, the issue was how to get Stanford’s $5 million budget. For the little guys, it was how to keep their jobs.

I moved on. I had better things to do.

Now, I understand, Stanford is a fugitive on the lam.* Well, good. His company's assets have been frozen by the Feds. He has evidently screwed so many people in Texas that he doesn’t want to be found there. Not in a state where lots of people seem to be packing heat, if not around their waists at least in the glove compartments of their cars, or on the rack over the rear window of the pickup truck.

If I were Stanford, I wouldn’t show up in New York, either.

P.S. The New York Times this morning ran a story saying Stanford had been, uh, found by the FBI and — get this — served with a civil summons. Ya gotta love it! Bernie Madoff, who ripped off $50 billion, is free on bail to hang out in his Upper East Side penthouse under luxurious "house arrest." R. Allen Stanford, who seems to have scammed only to the tune of $8 billion, is free to walk around anywhere without bail, so long as he shows up for his summons. But swipe a six-pack of Coke from your local convenience store and watch what happens to you.

Ageist bastards! American businesses (especially Madison Avenue) all but beat, stomp and throw their old out into the snow.

If you’re 49 years old today, you’ll have to wait 18 years before you can collect your full Social Security retirement benefit.

But if you’re 49 years old today and in the advertising agency business, your career is just about over, unless you’re either president of the company or own the agency outright. In fact, unless you’re very lucky, you may already be out in the Madison Avenue cold forever even if you're barely older than 40.

That may be why ads aimed at the 50-plus crowd seem so ridiculous and obnoxious to the very people they're aimed at. Kids young enough to be our grandchildren, kids who haven't got a clue, are trying to sell us a bill of goods. Piet Verbeck, an advertising colleague who like me has figured out how to live past age 50 on the crumbs that fall off big advertising agency tables, is quick to point out:

The advertising business seems to be way out of touch with one of the fastest growing and certainly the richest market of all: 65-plus. The reason could be that there is nearly no one in the agency business even remotely close to that age.

He said that in AdWeek magazine, where you can bet every last reader, just about, is nodding in agreement. Business is ageist in general. Advertising agency staffing policies are outrageously, disgustingly, repulsively ageist.

Baloney from Maloney

More than a decade ago, I started writing to Carolyn Maloney, my unresponsive Congresswoman, pointing out that if you need to keep increasing the Social Security retirement age, you have to keep raising the government protection for people below that age as well.

I made a proposal to her which I make again today to all of congress:

The United States needs a law that would would establish de facto age discrimination at any company whose employees in each department between the age of 50 and 65-plus don't bear some reasonable resemblance to the proportion of people that age in the general population.

I got back blithering crap from Maloney — a letter that said of course she opposed all forms of age discrimination as well as other forms of gender and racial discrimination, and always had. Yadda yadda yadda, with not a word about my proposal.

So I fired off a second later, an angry one this time, demanding a response, even a simple no, to my proposal. And I did get a response, of sorts. Some young male assistant (he sounded in his 20s) asked me what it was I wanted again. I explained it again. He seemed to be very much interested and sounded as if he was taking copious notes.

Never heard from him again. Nor from Carolyn Maloney.

Hey, need a cause? Remember,
you'll be in your 60s some day, too.

So now I’m putting it out there for you progressive activists to run with. It you’re going to raise the Social Security age, you’d better damn well protect workers from ages 50 to 68. And punish those employers who fire them. Or who don't replace them with workers of similar age.

Anybody in the Senate or House want to champion this one? I’m waiting for a show of hands.

Still waiting….

Terminated: 9% of California employees’ pay. Evidence that if you vote for a Republican, you'll get a ton of collateral damage. Guaranteed.

Broke as a shoeless drunk on skid row, California has begun furloughing its civil service employees two days a month. This amounts to roughly a nine percent wage cut.

The “furlough” became official after the state’s employee unions challenged this "governator"-mandated slap in the face in court and lost. The Los Angeles Times reported:

"This state is in a huge mess . . . the scope of which is unprecedented," Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette said in a courtroom packed with government workers. His ruling called the governor's order "reasonable and necessary under the circumstances."

He acknowledged that his decision could have "devastating" financial consequences for some workers, but said state law and union contracts provide the governor with the authority to cut the payroll during an emergency.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the screwing of public servants applies to:

“Engineers, scientists, nurses, Department of Motor Vehicles clerks, pharmacists, Caltrans maintenance workers, dietitians, psychologists, social workers, computer programmers, unemployment caseworkers, full-time state commissioners and attorneys not working for the state attorney general...”

Ironically, the pay-cut-by-furlough does not apply to the state’s legislators, who could solve the problem by increasing the taxes on upper income earners. You know, bankers, movie producers, and other fat cats who contributed to legislative and gubernatorial campaigns.

Fat chance you’ll see that tax increase happen! Better to whack a struggling $40,000 a year civil servant with a nine percent pay cut than to make a billionaire cut back on his personal use of private jets.

Governor “Ahhnold” Schwarzenegger might have stood up to the big money interests and defended the little guys who work for him. But it turns out that when you get down to where the rubber hits the road, he’s just another girly-man.

California taxpayers are getting a raw deal, too. They voted for Republicans to get their taxes lowered. Now they’re not even getting their tax refunds back. Instead, taxpayers who are due refunds are getting “IOUs” from the state. Live long enough, you might even see the money.

A source in California informs me that he has the solution to this mess: “Put a proposition on the ballot that says when civil service workers get their pay cut, the legislators and governor’s staff get the same percentage cut. That’ll fix the problem fast.”

I agree. But I fear you’ll wait until Judgment Day to see that happen. The proposition will meet a wall of opposition from rich Republicans, who are perfectly happy to hear the change in their pockets jingle all the way, while California collapses around them.

Thanks to failed Republican gubernatorial administration and leadership, and to bad legislative judgment, California’s macho mood has stopped pumping iron and started sucking air.

Vote for a Republican and End of Days is what you get.

News bulletin! (Clouds With Silver Linings Department)

The economy is more than halfway down the toilet, with Republican legislative troublemakers competing to see which of them yanks the flush handle first.

If only they can lower taxes (which helped get us into this mess over the past eight years) instead of stimulating the economy.

If only they can keep money away from infrastructure, education, healthcare and technology projects, then maybe the entire United States of America will go up in smoke. Then it will be time for The Rapture. Or The Rupture. Or whatever it is they think will put them forever in Paradise with 72 Republican virgins.

Well, never mind that. The bad economy brings this joyous news for those who’ve ever felt besieged by junk mail from banks.

Pissed off groundhog takes a bite out of Bloomberg: an anthropological, meteorological and political explanation for my foreign readership

This piece is solely for the edification of my foreign readers. Please don’t read it if you’re a U.S. citizen and most especially if you’re a New Yorker. Mind your own business.
I want to explain to you, dear foreign readers, a curious American folk custom called Groundhog Day.

The “groundhog,” also known as a “woodchuck,” (M. monax) is a North American rodent about the size of what you Europeans and Latin Americans call a “football.”

It lives in the forests of the northeastern United States where it busies itself burrowing holes to sleep in and munching on nuts and other forest flora.

Death on four wheels

Like its fellow North American forest occupants such as the squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), the raccoon (Procyon lotor), and the possum (Didelphis marsupialis), the groundhog’s most threatening natural predator is the automobile. (Automobilis horriblis.)

This is because the groundhog likes to cross roads. If in the course of crossing a road it sees an automobile speeding toward it, the groundhog assumes that if it stands very still, the automobile won’t notice it and will kill something else instead. Unfortunately for the groundhog, it is only half correct. Squish!

This may lead you to conclude that groundhogs are not very bright. However, everything is relative. For example, Americans believe you can use groundhogs to predict the arrival of spring weather.

Rodent long-range
weather forecasts

According to a popular myth, if the groundhog emerges from his burrow on February 2nd and sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter. On the other hand, if he doesn’t see his shadow, spring is, umm…well, closer than six weeks away, regardless of the calendar.

Americans believe this myth because we are stupid.

Well, let’s face it. We really are. Mine is the nation that allowed George W. Bush to become president not once but twice, correct? I rest my case.

Belief in the ability of groundhogs to predict weather has led to a ceremony in a little town in Pennsylvania called Punxsutawney. Every year, the Punxsutawney town fathers dress up in top hats and frock coats. While the press watches and cameras roll, the bewildered groundhog gets yanked out of a box that serves as his man-made burrow. He is held up for all to see. Miraculously, he almost always sees his shadow, even if the rest of us can’t.

There are loud cheers, which scare the hell out of the poor rodent. Then all of us go back to work, relieved to know that winter will last another six weeks. And the groundhog can sleep off this horrible moment in the public eye until next year.

The groundhog’s name is always Punxsutawney Phil. I say “always” because this annual ceremony has been going on since 1887. The groundhog you see on TV cannot possibly be the groundhog they started with. All the same, there never seems to be a Phil Jr., or more likely a Phil the Fiftieth or Phil the Hundred-And-Twenty-Second.

Mayor Bloomberg’s New York
grows jealous of Punxsutawney 

Groundhog Day brings a lot of prosperity to rural Punxsutawney, population 6271. The press come and overwhelm the local diner’s capacity to brew coffee. The town gets lots of free publicity. So naturally, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, population somewhere between seven and eight million, grew jealous.

Consequently, we now have a Groundhog Day celebration in New York, starring a groundhog named Staten Island Chuck. Well, it doesn’t happen in the center of New York. If we had this ceremony in Manhattan, too many people would stand in line overnight just to jeer.

Instead, Groundhog Day gets celebrated in a remote zoo in our remotest borough, Staten Island. Only a Staten Islander could tell you how to get there. Not that New Yorkers are all that knowledgeable about getting around their city in any case. If any of us knows how to get to JFK airport by subway, we probably learned it from a French tourist.

This Groundhog Day, Mayor Michael Bloomberg schlepped out to Staten Island, one assumes by limo, to check out Chuck (the groundhog, not New York Senator Chuck Schumer) and see if Chuck’s meterological prediction agreed with Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction.

A furry critter in a foul mood
foils the whole PR thing

Unfortunately, Staten Island Chuck was in a foul mood that morning and didn’t want to come out of his box.

Equally unfortunately, this mayor doesn’t tolerate those who don’t cooperate with his public relations efforts. For example, his cops went out and illegally busted demonstrators, most especially bicyclists, in police state raids against protestors during the 2004 Republican convention.

And when he can’t bully them, the Mayor, who on his own is wealthy enough to bail out a bank, finds a way to buy what he wants.

He has in effect bought elections by drowning the opposition in advertising they can’t possibly afford to match. And he has in effect bribed his own city council into overturning a law twice mandated by voters for term limits on elected officials. He did this by encouraging the Council members to overturn their own term limits as well. But back to Staten Island Chuck…

Irritated critter disses mayor.
I say, “Good for you, Chuck!”

Staten Island Chuck was having none of this photo-op. If the mayor woke you up at 7:30 am so that he could aggrandize himself by having paparazzi fire off strobe lights in your face, you’d be disagreeable, too.

Bloomberg then tried the same tactic he used with his City Council. Bribery. He left about half an ear of corn in front of the entrance to Chuck’s box to coax him out. No fool that Chuck. He grabbed the corn and backed into his box with it. I’d rather have breakfast in bed, too.

So the mayor, who wants what he wants — citizens and ground hogs be damned — reached into Chuck’s box to yank Chuck out by the neck. And that’s when Chuck bit Bloomberg, as you'll see in this video.

Well, no real damage done. From what I hear, the Mayor required no more medical attention than a Band-Aid.

All the same, given the fact that a lot of New Yorkers are madder than a pissed off woodchuck about the mayor’s usurping of their term limits mandate, I’d get a tetanus shot if I were Michael Bloomberg.

And now for the weather…

For whatever it’s worth, Staten Island Chuck didn’t see his shadow. Which means, if you believe in this crap, that spring will come very early to New York this year, even if it doesn’t come early in not-so-far-away Punxsutawney. Well, that’s meteorology for you.

Okay, American readers, you can come back in now. Especially if you live in New York. In fact, for your own good, you’d better. As I write this, it’s snowing hard outside.

Is this bill for insurance not purchased an AARP ripoff? A United Healthcare ripoff? Or just "a mistake?" You decide.

There are reasons I'm a cranky old fart. Consider this one:

After Congress invented the ridiculous and unnecessarily complicated "doughnut hole" prescription drug plan a few years ago, I signed up for it with AARP. I figured, what could be wrong with an AARP plan? They're there simply to represent the needs of older Americans, right?

Whoops! I forgot that AARP is first and foremost a sales agent for various insurance and travel businesses. "Lobbying" on behalf of senior citizens is largely a way of sucking us into their sales machine.

When old farts like me buy United Healthcare health insurance through AARP, those wonderful folks at AARP get a piece of the action. That may be why AARP never protested on behalf of the people it supposedly "represents" — as they should have — that the doughnut hole Prescription Drug Plan was outrageous and the financial benefit pathetic.

Last November, I found a cheaper prescription drug plan that gives me essentially the same benefits as the AARP plan. I notified Medicare via its website, did all the paperwork, and in due course found myself enrolled in somebody else's inadequate-but-cheaper drug plan, beginning January 1 of this year.

Cancellation of the AARP plan was unnecessary, according to the government's own website. (Root around here if you must, and try not to go blind.)

You'd think that would be the end of it. You'd be thinking wrong.

United Healthcare/AARP
duns me for money anyway

A couple of days ago I received an invoice from the AARP Medicare RX plan. (Note that in the letterhead above, United Healthcare's and AARP's logos both appear.)

It was a dunning letter for money I didn't owe them. To quote part of the letter above (from which I've redacted my name, address and other information for obvious reasons):

Our records indicate there is a balance due of $59.60 on your AARP MedicareRX Preferred account. The balance represents premium owed for 01-31-2009.

Please remit this amount by 01-31-2009 in the enclosed envelope to bring your account up to date. Be sure to include your member ID number on you check or money order. Please be advised, all payments made by you will be posted to the oldest outstanding balance on your account...

Is this a billing fraud?

Where I come from, sending people bills for services they haven't purchased is considered fraud. When the fraud is committed against the elderly — many of them vulnerable because of poor eyesight, problems concentrating, and in some cases confusion caused by dementia — it's not just a fraud. It's an execrably vicious fraud.

So I called AARP to complain. After the usual pushbutton hell exercise you go through calling any corporate bureaucracy these days, I got through to a real person. And he wanted something: my former member ID number and my mailing address. Fair enough. I gave it to him.

"Don't let 'em go until you
capture their private information
for your marketing database"

Then he wanted my telephone number. Why? He wouldn't say, other than he couldn't deal with whatever it was I wanted until he had my phone number.

Outrageous! But okay, I gave him my phone number.

"E-mail address?" he asked.

"What do you need that for?"

He kept insisting he wanted my e-mail address. But he never gave me a reason why he needed it.

I believe I can tell you why he needed it. He needed it so that AARP and United Healthcare can refine their marketing databases. And perhaps so that they can sell my information (and your information if you call them, too) to other direct marketers.

Finally I started to yell into the telephone. Maybe I scared him. He finally told me that the bill "was a mistake" and that I could ignore it.

Mistake? A mistake times how many tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands among the millions of AARP members who may have renewed their insurance with another company? And how much could this fraudulent billing enrich AARP and United Healthcare at $59.60 a pop?

Maybe you believe it was a mistake. Personally, I'd sooner believe in the Tooth Fairy.

What good is freedom of the press when you have no press?

Below, one day's worth of headlines (Friday January 30th) from an e-mail sent to me five times a week by MediaBistro.com, a journalism and communications website.

For full details and a lot of pain, go here and click on any story:

Disney Finally Makes Its Cuts: 200 Fired at ABC, 200 at ESPN (AllThingsDigital)
ABC is firing 200 people and leaving another 200 positions vacant, which amounts to an overall workforce reduction of five percent. Meanwhile cable powerhouse ESPN is cutting 200 jobs of its own. There's little detail about who was cut where. TVNewser: ABC News is cutting 35-40 staffers as part of the larger cuts at Disney-ABC Television.

LAT Kills Local News Section (LA Observed)
LA Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein has ordered the California section killed. The publisher decided to fold local news inside the front section -- which will be reconfigured to downplay national and foreign news -- despite the unanimous and vocal objections of senior editors.

Page Six Magazine Goes Quarterly (FishbowlNY)
The entire staff of Page Six Magazine will be packing up their desks on the heels of yesterday's announcement that the weekly New York Post insert would move to a quarterly publication schedule. The only full-time employee left will be editor-in-chief Margi Conklin.

Cuts Coming Next Week at WSJ (Portfolio)
When Gerard Baker starts his new job as The Wall Street Journal's new deputy EIC next Wednesday, he'll have a lot of names to learn. But not quite as many as if he'd started sooner. Multiple sources say the newsroom is due to undergo another round of personnel cuts late next week.

Baltimore Examiner Can't Find Buyer, Will Close (Baltimore Sun)
Less than three years after its debut, the Baltimore Examiner free newspaper will cease publication next month. The decision comes after months of unsuccessful attempts to find a buyer for the paper and failed efforts to package ads with a sister publication in Washington.

Slate Editor Sends Staffers on Sabbaticals (NYO)
In a season of media cutbacks, thus far the staffers at Slate have escaped the scythe. Editor David Plotz has made no layoffs. Even more remarkably, Plotz is sending his writers out of the office to go work from home and pull together a big project and all the while still get paid for it.

Metro Shuts Spanish Edition (Guardian)
Freesheet group Metro International has closed its operations in Spain, in a sign of the chill wind blowing through the global newspaper industry. Metro said it would no longer publish in seven Spanish cities in the face of "unsustainable" losses.

And also at the MediaBistro web site last Friday:

Analyst Downgrades News Corp Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield downgraded News Corp to sell from buy. His reasons include decreased earnings per share estimates; the possibility that COO Peter Chernin may not renew his contract; and a suspicion that Rupert Murdoch is without a strategy for the company's core businesses.

Recession Rocks Hollywood's Showbiz Papers (Reuters)
For more than 75 years, Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have battled to be the movie industry's top newspaper, but recent layoffs due to the recession and competition from Internet blogs has Hollywood wondering if it will soon become a one paper town.

Hell Week for Print Media (The Wrap)
Slate's Jack Shafer tries to view the death of newspapers with optimism: "I love newspapers, and at the same time, their dying makes me a mortician -- it gives me a lot of work," he said. "I still think the newspaper has a long way to go before it's taken the dirt nap."

LA Shakeup at People (P6)
Tongues were wagging this week when People's top editor, Larry Hackett, sent Manhattan-based assistant managing editor J.D. Heyman to run the LA bureau, a job formerly held by LA bureau chief Liz Leonard. "It's kind of embarrassing for Liz," said one source.

Note to the last reporter out the door: Don't bother turning out the lights. Just burn the building down before they turn it into more loft residences for Wall Street bankers. I hear lots of them are looking for digs to invest in with their government-sponsored bailout bonuses.

What Republican cooperation? Maybe, President Obama, you should abandon “bipartisan” appeasement and try some fiercer tactics.

Not one — not a single, solitary one! — of the House Republicans voted in favor of President Obama’s bailout package.

The Republicans got some compromises from the Democrats. More tax cutting than common sense calls for. Less money plowed directly into some projects and segments of the economy than common sense would seem to demand. All because Republicans said they wanted it that way and the President was encouraging a conciliatory mood.

And then the Republicans turned around and stabbed President Obama, and the electorate, in the back.

The President’s a good guy. But it’s time to get away from the good guy bi-partisan approach. Instead of appeasing Republicans, President Obama should do what the voters asked for when they elected him. He should roll right over them and start undoing the last eight years of Bush incompetence, idiocy and thuggery.

This is about much more than pouring money into the economy. The taxpayers need to make certain the money they’ve poured into banks and automobile manufacturers produces a return, not executive bonuses for the greedy thugs who run the banks.

If that means temporary seizure of some of the banks, then seize the damn things. And while we're at it, break 'em up into smaller banks so that no bank will be "too big to fail" in the future.

We also need investigations and, if warranted, prosecutions for torture, civil rights violations and corruption and cronyism under the Bush Administration. We need them not only to punish the guilty, but to show the world and our own citizens that the United States will no longer conduct or condone such behavior, or accept the damage that it does to constitutional law, America's reputation abroad, or the health and safety of our citizens.

Hell, when laissez-faire government gets all the way down to allowing disease-carrying peanut butter into the food chain, we know the right wing has raised hell with the life and health of Americans. Justice demands a powerful precedent to discourage such behavior.

The time to start is now. We’ve just seen that cooperating with the right wing gets you nothing but a finger in the eye.

Turn the dogs loose on ‘em.

Bonehead

The presidential election didn’t stop the conservative crazies. They’re coming out of the woodwork again.

Congressman John Boehner — formerly an upholder of the Bush borrow-and-spend program that helped run the United States into the ground — is now criticizing Obama for a borrow-and-spend program.

This is just when, thanks to the previous administration, we have no other choice if we ever want to dig ourselves out of the financial mess we're in.

And since tax-cuts for the rich were great for the rich but ultimately didn’t do much for the economy — just look where we were before Bush got elected and where we are now, after the Bush tax cuts — bonehead Boehner is avocating…well, you almost guessed it!

Boehner wants tax cuts that would lower tax rates while essentially giving nothing to the poor and unemployed. Yet it's the poor and jobless who would have no choice but to pour their money into the economy as fast as more comfortable citizens have shunted their tax refunds to the banks in the past.

I’m not wildly enamored of the currently evolving Obama program either. It tries to make nice to too many uncooperative forces, including the likes of economic obstructionists like Congressman Boehner.

On the other hand, at least the Obama tax cuts and credits for the struggling middle class and poor will quickly inject some money into the economy, as will a program of infrastructure repair. However…

Here's what we need most

We’ve got to start thinking long term. Highway repairs are just another temporary palliative.

Yes, we need to repair infrastructure. Desperately. But we also need the equivalent of the space program of the 1960s and the Manhattan Project in the 1940s to create new American technological advances, prosperity and new industries. Otherwise, 20 nears from now, in our ever-weakening “service economy,” we’ll all still be grubbing a living by taking in our neighbors' laundry and flipping each others’ hamburgers.

Parts of this got talked about during the election campaign. Why, oh why, has it almost gone away?

We need programs to fund nonprofit laboratories in universities and governmental facilities, from which the technologies (and the technical innovators) of the future will emerge.

We need to educate the engineers and architects who can build not only the cars and transportation systems of the future, but also the homes and offices and (let us pray) factories of the future.

Let America become the world’s leader in developing and manufacturing wind turbines rather than coal plants.

Let’s be innovators in making power-generating light cells rather than buzz-generating celebrity gossip.

Let’s pioneer more energy-efficient and less toxic ways to dispose of waste.

Instead of developing new and improved anthrax strains for germ warfare, how about putting government scientists to work on anti-malarial drugs to replace the ones that are losing effectiveness against new strains of the disease? Let’s have a government push to create a truly effective an AIDS vaccine. And better (and cheaper) anti-cancer drugs.

Now that we can begin thinking seriously about stem cell research again, how about a government-funded push at universities to become stem cell innovators?

Better teachers, free college tuition

How about a government-funded program to train and pay for a legion of well-paid and inspirational science teachers —a program that will not only increase employment in the near future, but also supply well-trained Americans to develop new technologies? If we attract the most innovative minds to education, not only will education in this nation become better but fewer people will spend their time devising arcane and mischievous financial derivative training programs.

How about a free — yes, that’s free — college tuition program. It’s outrageous, for example, that a Ph.D or M.D. finishes his or her education carrying a debt big enough to mortgage a McMansion. Little wonder some of the smartest young graduates have been headed to Wall Street where they were able to pay back these crushing debts quickly — and ultimately at the expense of the nation.

Free (and all right, dirt cheap) city and state colleges helped make the United States the 20th Century’s most innovative nation. Then, late last century, we started charging more and more for tuition and insisting that more and more students borrow the money to get their degrees. Now we’re a nation of increasingly desperate, debt-ridden money-grubbers.

Yes, fix the roads. Yes, fix all the infrastructure. We need to do that. But listen up: all that won’t really fix the economy until we also fix our thinking.

It wasn’t the “umm” that killed Caroline Kennedy’s Senate candidacy. It was the lack of, umm, anything else.

If you read The New York Crank with any regularity, you know that I’ve supported Caroline Kennedy’s now-abandoned candidacy for Senator against the right-wing blogomaniacs who trashed the truth in order to trash Caroline.

They declared she lived in a townhouse (an outright albeit petty lie) to make her seem somehow over-privileged and unworthy of the job.

Alas, what really finished Caroline’s candidacy wasn’t the non-existent townhouse. Nor was it her seeming inability to finish an English sentence without saying “umm” at least once, and often two or three or more times — even though this conversational tic opened her to ridicule. Here’s an example.

Nope. I kept quiet about what it really was. But inside, I despaired.

What killed the Kennedy Senate candidacy was her complete lack of any stated vision, or any apparent willingness to disclose the kind of information about her finances that every public politician must reveal.

A family “tradition of public service” is not enough reason to demand anybody’s vote, most especially not in these particularly perilous economic times. Not to mention that these are also deeply troubled diplomatic times. Not also to mention that the Bush family has given political dynasties a bad name.

Who let that poor woman declare her candidacy without coaching her in the most basic elements of political discourse and rules of the game?
The truth is, Caroline Kennedy was doing a Sarah Palin, but with a New York accent. She refused to disclose. She limited her press accessibility. She wasn't prepared for interviews.

I don’t know what she thought she was up to, but the end result was to shoot herself in the foot. Ultimately, as Gertrude Stein said, there was no there there.

I like Caroline Kennedy as a person, but I’m glad she resigned. She simply wasn’t ready for prime time. At least not yet.

Class vs. No class: The words of Barack Obama and those of far right "Conservative" J.R. Dieckmann

Recently J.R. Dieckmann, a Conservative blogger, resigned from the Republican Party. You might say, he left in a purple snit.

And today, President Obama gave the greatest inauguration address I have heard since John F. Kennedy took the oath of office almost half a century ago.

I thought it might be interesting to contrast the classy language of Obama during his inauguration speech with the no-class language of Dieckmann in his resignation letter. Here goes.

Classy Obama:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

No-class Dieckmann:

[This is] the first time in history that a majority of American voters have not only elected a black man to POTUS, but also elected an unqualified, no résumé, unaccomplished, radical left, and likely illegal alien, without ever demanding personal history, educational records, health records, military records, or proof of citizenship from this man. He is an absolute zero on qualifications for POTUS.

Classy Obama:

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

No-class Dieckmann:

You and your Democrat-Lite candidate, John McCain…allowed this illegitimate candidate to usurp the office of the president. McCain’s campaign was pitiful and failed to bring up even the most basic issues of the Obama candidacy. Issues not only of his citizenship, but his dark associations with radicals (other than Bill Ayres, which was a non starter), his empathy with Islamics, his complete lack of understanding of the Constitution, the free marketplace, American history other than black separa

Classy Obama:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

No-class Dieckmann:

Why was George Allen forced out? For daring to call a liberal agitator “macaca” (monkey)? Why have Republicans caved to the liberal agenda of political correctness and the global warming fraud? America used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. You have simply allowed this America to be trashed by your liberal counterparts with little or no resistance.

Classy Obama:

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

No-class Dieckmann:

You have allowed liberals to pull the entire country into a socialist cesspool of immorality, atheism, socialist indoctrination masquerading as education, welfare handouts, infanticide, environmental extremism, government dependence, and lack of personal responsibility. These are the very opposites of the American foundation. We expected the Republican party to defend the American experiment, not hand it over to the communists.

Classy Obama:

The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

No-Class Dieckmann:

There can be no compromise between the two opposing forces of liberalism and conservatism; of socialism and capitalism. You have lost sight of what it means to be Republican. You have allowed the socialists to take over the country without a fight.

Classy Obama:

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.

No-class Dieckmann:

In fact, if you would simply promote conservative American principles, you wouldn’t have to reach out to anyone. They would be reaching out to you. Show some pride in conservatism. That is how it should be, but you just don‘t get it, do you?

Classy Obama:

Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

No-class Dieckmann:

If you really want to rebuild the Republican party, I would suggest to go to the Heritage Foundation and read what Reagan would do. That would be a good start. The course you have chosen now leads to nowhere and it‘s time to abandon ship.

Moral: Trust noble aspirations over mean-spirited aspersions. Trust truth over baseless rumor mongering and outright falsehoods. Trust calls to greatness over calls for pettiness. In short, trust class every time.

Is waterboarding “torture?” A modest proposal for YOU, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Michael Mukasey, and George Bush.

I know, I know. It’s not “torture.” It’s merely “enhanced interrogation.”

Sounds lovely, sort of like “enhanced perfume” or “enhanced natural sweetness” — a way to improve and expand upon the wonderful quality of the experience.

In fact, Dickey Cheney, you recently said:

I think there were a total of about 33 who were subjected to enhanced interrogation; only three of those who were subjected to waterboarding…Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture. We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice, legal opinion out of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where you go for those kinds of opinions, from the Department of Justice as to where the red lines were out there in terms of this you can do, this you can't do. The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately.

So I have a life-enhancing experience for you, Dick, and your buddies who defended “enhanced interrogation,” such as John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, your mutual boss George W. Bush, and I’ll in throw Attorney General (for the next few days) Michael Mukasey, for saying he isn’t sure whether waterboarding is torture or not.

Here’s what we’ll do

I propose that the Fox TV network introduce a new TV reality show called, “That’s Not Torture, That’s Enhancement.”

During each episode of the show, one of you will be strapped to a board and subjected to "enhanced interrogation," consisting of tightly covering your faces with a cloth and pouring a steady and powerful stream of water on the cloth to create the feeling of getting enhanced.

If you put up with this continuously for the hour the show is on air, you win and get awarded a free resort hotel room in beautiful Guantanamo-by-the-Sea, Cuba, yours to enjoy for the next, oh, 20 or 30 years.

However, if you find the enhancement so disagreeable that you want it to stop instantly, you may make that happen by admitting that

A) Waterboarding is torture
B) That you raped and strangled 50 prostitutes in the Washington DC area and that
C) You ate their corpses and picked your teeth with their bones

Since waterboarding is such a reliable means of obtaining useful intelligence, the world will instantly know it is true that you have done these things and you will be arrested and put on trial for your lives.

However, since by your own admission waterboarding is not torture, I am confident that after a half hour you will have admitted to nothing that that you will feel vindicated and enhanced beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Gentlemen, America
is waiting for you

All you need to do, Dick, John, Alberto, George and Michael is step forward and volunteer to be a subject in this televised experiment demonstrating that waterboarding is not torture but merely a charming way to enhance an interrogation.

I’m waiting, guys.

C’mon, c’mon, which of you is going to step forward and volunteer to enjoy an enhanced interrogation experience?

I’m still waiting.

Nobody?

But I’m still waiting.

I’m waiting.

I’m still waiting….

FBI TO CRANK: You’ve got a mass forger red-handed, with documentary evidence? All we have to do his pick him up What?!?! And ruin our nap?

Dear President-elect Obama,

I know you have more than enough to do, what with saving the economy, providing universal healthcare, extracting our soldiers from Iraq and catching Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Or is it Pakistan?

All the same, I wish you’d take just one morning off to fly up to New York FBI Headquarters on Federal Plaza in Manhattan with a great big bucket of ice water. Give that ice water your most athletic toss. Dump icy gallons of it on all the special agents who surely must be sleeping under their desks.

Tell ‘em,”Wake up guys! This means you. NOW!”

What makes me think they’re asleep? Well, President-elect Obama, here’s my story.

Mystery shopper scammer tries to
snare the Crank’s beautiful girlfriend

Some time back in December, the New York Crank’s beautiful girlfriend received an e-mail solicitation asking her to make money in her spare time doing mystery shopping right in her own neighborhood.

Right, you guessed it, Mr. Obama. This is becoming one of the most shopworn scams in the book, with Internet warnings about it posted everywhere from hither to yon.

Nevertheless the beautiful girlfriend figured, “What the hey. On the outside chance it’s legitimate, I’ve got another excuse to go shopping on my lunch hour.” So she shot back a return e-mail saying okay, she wanted to mystery shop.

A few days later, the forgery arrived in the mail.

Forged check for $2,800 comes complete
with step-by-step self-scamming instructions

The Crank’s beautiful girlfriend received the forged check shown above (I’ve crossed out her name and address for obvious reasons). It came in a USPS confirmed delivery envelope (also above) showing it had been mailed from a post office in Massachusetts.

Enclosed with the check, evidently home made on somebody’s computer graphics program and drawn on a non-existent account on a bank in Arkansas, was a note that said in part:

Accompanied with this letter are the funds you will use to carry out your Mystery Shopping duties. As soon as you receive the funds, I want you to send a confirmatory e-mail to your supervisor; he in turn will provide you with instructions and guidelines on how you are about to go about your Mystery Shopping duties…It is important to note that you are to wait for his instructions before you carry out your Mystery Shopping Duties…

And that in turn, President-elect Obama, was soon followed up, by an e-mail demanding that the Crank’s beautiful girlfriend go to the bank, cash her check, take the money to a Wal-Mart in Secaucus, NJ, buy $100 worth of “any” electronics equipment, and hold out $500 for herself. The remaining “change” of $2,200 was to be converted into a MoneyGram and sent to an address in Katy, TX.

How many desperate Americans
have been suckered?

Wow, Mr. President-elect! Can you imagine how many out-of-work, desperate and financially-marginal Americans have been suckered out of $2,200 by these scammers? Because by the time the victims deposit the forged checks in their own accounts and the checks bounce, the con artist will have picked up and cashed his MoneyGram in Texas and moved on.

These check forgers must be the Poor Man’s Bernie Madoff, doing to those who are starving for work what Madoff did fto those who were thirsty for outrageous investment returns.

Some anti-scam websites advise people who’ve gotten this far simply to tear up the check and forget about it. But not us, Mr. Obama. We figured, “Whoa! Some naïve person who’s teetering on the edge of poverty and home loss is going to fall for this and tumble into the abyss. Or maybe lots of naïve people will fall for it. This is mass forgery, mass deception, mass theft. And we’ve got a way to stop it.”

That way was to play along and pretend the beautiful girlfriend had cashed the check and ordered the MoneyGram. Then all the FBI would have to do was send a couple of guys from the Houston office over to Katy, TX. And when the scammer showed up to pick up his MoneyGram, they could slap the cuffs on him and haul him off to the pokey on charges of interstate fraud, wire fraud, check forgery and using really, really bad punctuation in his e-mail instructions.

All we needed was to get the FBI to tell us when to tell the scammer that his MoneyGram was on the way.

Does “Carlton Your Doorman” now
eat Qualuudes and work for the FBI?

So here’s what I did, Mr. Obama: the next morning, check, e-mail printouts, and USPS-franked envelope in my briefcase, I went to my office and called my local FBI office. When the automated system picked up, I pressed the right buttons to speak to a live person.

Well, maybe “live” person is too strong a word to use for the individual I spoke to. Remember “Carlton Your Doorman” from the old “Rhoda” TV show and later from a TV cartoon show built directly around the doorman character?

Well, the FBI person sounded exactly like slow-speaking, sleepy-voiced, super-mellow Carlton Your Doorman, only more so. It was as if I had reached Carlton your Doorman at FBI Headquarters only to discover he was strung out on qualuudes.

I told Carlton Your Doorman Of The FBI exactly what was going on and what I had in mind. I asked if he wanted me to bring the evidence in that same day, if the FBI wanted to come and get it, or…

“You can just mail it in,” he said, slowly and sleepily. He sounded perhaps a trifle bored.

“No no, I think we have to act fast,” I said. “The guy keeps bombarding my beautiful girlfriend with e-mails asking if she’s cashed the check yet. If he doesn’t hear from her, he may decide something’s wrong and pull up stakes…”

“Well, where are you?” asked Carlton Your Doorman Of The FBI.

I told him I was in my office on West 36th Street.

“Oh, it only takes a day for the mail to reach us from there. Just mail it in,” said Carlton.

Case, ummm, forgotten

President-elect Obama, I mailed the documents some 60 minutes later, pausing only to scan a copy of the documents for myself and to write a cover note entitled:

RE: Apparent interstate fraud, check fraud and Internet fraud, and a short-term opportunity to catch those who are responsible for it.

And among the things I said in the cover note were:

…somebody may be showing up in Katy to claim the funds, and this might be an opportunity to catch some of the people involved in this scam. Please also note that that the envelope in which the check came has a USPS delivery confirm number on it, which, if genuine, means that there is a record of someone checking to see whether [Crank’s girlfriend’s name redacted] has received the check. I’ve enclosed everything we have concerning this including the check, the envelope it arrived in, a note enclosed with the check, and various e-mail correspondence. If someone would be kind enough to contact either me at either of the telephone numbers above, or [Name Redacted] at [telephone number redacted] — or by mail — to let us know what happened as a consequence of this correspondence, we would greatly appreciate it. I am sending this by mail (despite a rather tight window for finding the person or persons involved in Katy, Texas before he/she/they disappear) on the insistence of the FBI operator that the way to do this was by mail.

And guess what, Mr. Obama?

I never heard from the FBI again. Although I bet plenty of financially desperate victims have heard from the scammer since then.

Do you need to expand the FBI budget?
Mr. President elect, I wonder if the problem is a personnel shortage at the FBI. I’m willing to bet that FBI you get is the FBI you pay taxes for. Your predecessor was such a tax cutter that he may have cut personnel at the nation’s leading law encorcement agency just to make up the income shortfall.

Or maybe your predecessor had ordered the Department of Justice to put so many special agents on Osama bin Laden that they don’t have time any more to track down domestic criminals — except maybe for Muslim families who wonder aloud where the safest seat on the airplane is.

But hey, if you don’t get the FBI — or somebody — cracking on interstate crime, there’s going to be a whole lot more of it. And posting Carlton Your Doorman to answer the FBI’s phone won’t solve anything. Mr. Obama, you need get up to New York with that big pail of ice water.

Crankily yours,
The New York Crank

Hey, you nincompoop right wing copycat bloggers: Does this really look like a townhouse to you? Or will you simply repeat any lie to smear a Kennedy?

Look at the building in the photograph. Does it look like a “townhouse” to you?

Me neither.

In fact, it’s a generic Manhattan co-op apartment building, about the size that typically holds 50 or so separate tenants. It happens to be the one where one of the tenants is Caroline Kennedy . (While the street address is a matter of public record, I won’t reproduce it here. Given all the right wing lunatics in America, I don’t see the need to equip Ms. Kennedy's frothing-at-the-mouth stalkers with information they can misuse.)

So what, you’re probably asking yourself, if Caroline Kennedy lives in that nondescript Manhattan apartment building? Here's what.
Why this matters

Some weeks ago, a fast-and-loose-with-the-facts slimeball blogger named Victor Davis Hanson laced into Caroline Kennedy for putting her name forth as a Senate replacement for Hillary Clinton . As evidence of the wrongness of Ms. Kennedy’s cause, Hanson wrote on the Pajamas Media blog.

Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha’s Vineyard.

Where did Hanson get the townhouse from? Is he lying in an attempt to ignite some of the “class warfare” that Republicans were railing against only — was it something like 15 seconds ago? And how come right wing opponents to what they were calling “the death tax” suddenly resent a “hereditary estate” — whatever "hereditary estate" turns out to mean in terms of a tangible asset?

Beats me. All I know is, suddenly that exact Hansonian lie suddenly began popping up on what seemed like every third right-wing blog in the universe. Word for word.

Right wing lie spreads
like a metastasizing cancer

It was repeated verbatim on No Pasaran.

The same defamatory sentence also popped spontaneously into the head of whoever pens a blog called The Doc Is In, which bills itself, somewhat incongruously, as “a lively current events blog.”

Ed’s blog, also was inspired to pick up the magical sentence. The blog’s author also says his blog is “a look into the sights, sounds and smells of me.” Well, that’s for sure, Ed. And incidentally, the “information” you’re spreading around stinks.

Who else is spreading  lies about Caroline Kennedy? Well, among them there’s Conservative Women for Truth, who evidently wouldn’t recognize the truth if it jumped up and bit them on their conservative asses.

And there’s the History News Network, which probably ought to take a few lessons in historical sourcing. Or at least learn how to use Google Earth to check out what a townhouse doesn’t look like.

Are they ventroliquists' dummies?
Or just plain dummies? Or worse?

What is it with these lie-propagating, falsehood-huckstering, uncritical right wing idiots?

Are they all ventriloquists’ dummies? Or battery-powered robot clones?

Can you walk up to any one of them, yank the string coming out of the back of their necks, and hear them mouth the identical lie, “Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha’s Vineyard?”

Are they mostly incapable of coming up with original ideas? Or even original smears? Or are they just too stupid to know the difference between a townhouse and a 50-tenant apartment building?

I don’t know the answer. But I can tell you this: I came back from vacation the other day with a hacking cough and a cold. Despite my illness, I had to go out in the pouring rain this morning just to take a picture of the apartment building where Ms. Kennedy lives to refute you right wing idiots.

Now my cough feels worse. So at this point, it’s not even a matter of politics or fact checking any more. At this point, you lying bastards, it’s personal and gets more so with every cough and sneeze!

This blog is taking a very short vacation

I just don't feel mean enough. Or nasty enough. Or cranky enough.

So I'm taking a short vacation. Blowing town. 86-ing the routine.

I'll be back sometime the week of January 7th. Crankier, I hope, than ever.

Now retailers ask for a bailout, disguised as a tax holiday. I hope Obama tells 'em, "No!" You should, too.

Look, I favored the bank bailout, although not the kind it turned into — with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen overseeing a blind giveaway.

He's dumping taxpayer money into banks without controls or tracking to determine how the money is used. Consequently hard-earned taxpayer money is not being used to finances homes or businesses. Instead, it's being used to let banks go on an acquisition spree and give big bonuses to greedy bank executives.

That's reverse income distribution

Paulsen is aiding and abetting the process of stealing from the squeezed middle class and the poor to make the rich richer. Some ambitious prosecutor ought to find a way to slam Paulsen in the pokey for betraying America's trust.

I also favor the automobile industry bailout, although I'm waiting to see if President Elect Obama ties a sufficient number of strings to every buck — strings with the other end tied to pollution controls, electric cars, hybrid cars, exciting new designs, and to limits on the building of SUVs.

Now retailers try to
jump on the gravy train

Now retailers have begun yelling, "Me too! Me too!" That's an outrage. I'd rather see money invested in American manufacturing than in the sale — at retail stores — of foreign-made goods. The American economy has to come first. Sure the retailers are hurting. We're all hurting. But the retailer demand is just an attempt to grab taxpayer money.

The bailout is disguised as a "tax holiday." According to "gimme money too" plan proposed by the National Retail Foundation, states would forget about their own sales taxes at specific times and then...

...the federal government would reimburse the 45 states that have sales taxes for the lost revenue, and would provide the five states without a sales tax (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon) with revenue approximating the sales tax reimbursement that would be received by states with similar population.

The money may go to the states (with a windfall for states that have no sales taxes) but it all boils down to a giant gift to Wal-Mart and other chain retailers. Those are those wonderful folks who squeeze the few American manufacturers who remain to the breaking point, and contribute to the trend of exporting American manufacturing jobs to cheap labor nations like Pakistan, China and India.

Ask your Senator and Congressional Representative to tell the NRF to stuff their greedy idea in their cash registers and choke on it.

Is it time for U.S. tax policy gently to encourage a little bit of population control?

You’re looking at not-the-most-recent photograph of Jim Bob Duggar and his family, of Arkansas.

It’s out-of-date because since this photograph was taken last year, the Duggar’s have given birth to yet another child. So now they have 18 kids in all.

I became aware of the family while watching The Today Show on December 22. I have to admit, I really like the kids. They were polite, bright, friendly, positive, enthusiastic and organized. I can’t help but wish them well.

That said, I’d like to take the Duggar parents on a tour of the damage that overpopulation is doing to our planet and our nation.

For example:

According to the World Bank and the United Nations, from 1 to 2 billion humans are now malnourished, indicating a combination of insufficient food, low incomes, and inadequate distribution of food. This is the largest number of hungry humans ever recorded in history

Based on their evaluations of available natural resources, scientists of the Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have issued a joint statement reinforcing the concern about the growing imbalance between the world's population and the resources that support human lives…

The continued production of an adequate food supply is directly dependent on ample fertile land, fresh water, energy, plus the maintenance of biodiversity. As the human population grows, the requirements for these resources also grow. Even if these resources are never depleted, on a per capita basis they will decline significantly because they must be divided among more people…

Big deal, you might say. The Dugars are not hungry. They live in a large, debt-free home. They haven’t even made an impact on their local school system, since they’re all home-schooled.

Wait until you see this family’s
carbon footprint and water consumption

But wait a second. Want to think about energy and water consumption alone? According to MSNBC, one of the many media organizations that has done admiring feature stories about the family…

The family estimates it has used 90,000 diapers and launders 200 loads of clothes each month in a row of industrial-size washers and dryers….Transportation is facilitated by nine vehicles, led by a 21-passenger bus.

Beginning to get the picture?

When should Americans say,
“not on my tax dollar?”

This country, as well it ought, has encouraged stable families through its tax policies — with child tax credits and other tax deductions for dependents. I’m for that in general. I’m even for increasing the tax deduction for families, most especially struggling families with low incomes — up to a point.

That point is reached when people start having more than “replacement children” — the two kids needed eventually to replace their parents. After that, the government ought to be saying, “Listen, the number of children you want to drop on this planet is your business, at least for now, but we refuse to let you make it ours. Reproduce all you want, but don’t ask your fellow citizens to help finance this irresponsible behavior of yours.”

If we fail to do that, future generations might eventually have to start placing a “birth tax” on each child after the second one. That, or responsible citizens will have to starve along with the irresponsible ones.

Incidentally, the Duggar family’s website states that Jim Bob and his wife make their living as “licensed real estate brokers.” In addition, Jim Bob is a former Representative in the Arkansas House of Representatives and former candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Except for one little, uh, anomaly.

Uh oh, it’s one of those
“real estate seminar” things

Surf around a little bit further and you discover that Jim Bob is in the tape and seminar business in a big way, too.

To quote from his sales pitch:

Order DVD Set & Seminar Manual Value Pack! $129 NOW ONLY $109
>> Order Men's Manual Vol. II (Manual Only) $30

But wait, there's more!
Say hallelujah!

Keep digging into this stuff and following links and you discover that the “DVD Set & Seminar Manual Value Pack” are, umm, “faith based” as is the Duggar family’s home schooling setup.

To quote from the home school organization which sells its curricumlum to the Duggars:

We believe Adam was directly created in innocence and in the image of God and did not evolve from preexisting forms of life. By voluntary transgression, he fell; and thus the whole human race is now sinful by nature and practice and, therefore, under just condemnation to eternal separation from God…

Funny, I didn’t learn any of this stuff on the NBC report.

Anyway, I somehow doubt that this is on the required reading list of the kids’ home schooling.