LAS VEGAS By GLENN COLLINS
IN the late, lamented boom, waiters at luxury restaurants here could make $150,000 a year and more thanks to the electrifying arrival of high rollers renowned as “the whales.”
Robert Martinez, a 33-year-old waiter at Rao’s in Caesars Palace, said these heavyweights “had wads of $100 bills and gave them to everyone on the staff, and tipped generously on $12,000 to $15,000 checks.”
But now, said Kevin Carter, a 49-year-old waiter at Craftsteak in the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, “the whales have migrated.”
Last year, a fourth of the country’s highest-grossing restaurants were in Las Vegas. But the feast has transitioned to famine. Fewer revelers are arriving, and they are spending less. With the economy reeling, more than 5,000 food and restaurant workers are unemployed here.
“We look out and we see every jet coming and going,” said Michael N. Baker, 50, a waiter for eight years at the Top of the World restaurant in the Stratosphere Casino Hotel tower. “They used to be stacked up all day long,” he added. “Then there was nothing out there. That was scary.”
Many of the town’s 2,900 restaurants are beset by fabulousness fatigue.
“It was gold, and suddenly it became fool’s gold,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads a restaurant consulting firm that bears his name.
Bill Lerner, a principal of Union Gaming, a research company, said that there were “too many five-star restaurants, shows, spas — too many celebrity chefs.”
On the Strip, near Circus Circus, is the yawning emptiness of the $4.8 billion, 87-acre Echelon project, halted last August along with its 12 to 15 new restaurants, including those of chefs such as David Chang of Momofuku Ko in Manhattan.
The unfinished, mirrored blue eyesore of the $2.9 billion 3,815-room Fontainebleau tower across from Circus Circus looms over the city like a prophecy. It went bankrupt and took 6,000 jobs with it.
But in the desert restaurant universe, a mirage has now arisen that could mean either salvation or doom: the $8.5 billion CityCenter project.
Bristling with construction cranes and gleaming in the 100-degree sun, the CityCenter casino, hotel, convention center, mall, residential and entertainment metropolis looks like a hallucinogenic 67-acre Red Grooms parody of the Las Vegas Strip. The development spans a quarter-mile, from the Bellagio to the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino, and is scheduled to open in December.
Some 30 restaurants are to inhabit the jumble of seven buildings — from tapered towers to crystalline shards — designed by eight celebrity architects, including Sir Norman Foster and Daniel Libeskind. On display, and on trial, will be the concepts of lionized chefs, among them Pierre Gagnaire, Michael Mina, Masayoshi Takayama, Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
For some, CityCenter, developed by MGM Mirage and Dubai World, will offer treasures that transcend buzz and hype: 4,000 food and restaurant jobs, a third of the complex’s 12,000 new jobs.
But if it cannibalizes existing restaurants it could further wound this once-sleepy railroad watering stop beset by a sere immensity of sand.
Already sin city has become a sandbox of incentives, discounts and promotions, where even luxury properties like the Bellagio are offering free hotel nights, plus gambling, food and drink coupons to their club-card customers.
Some economizing tourists are fleeing their casinos to dine off-Strip. But neighborhood restaurants are under growing pressure from the Strip, since residents are being courted as never before by casinos with “staycation packages” that include restaurant meals.
And so, amid the hawkers and escort-service card-flippers, a dizzying profusion of bargain-eats signs are competing. They include giant come-ons for the “$5.99 New York Steak N Eggs” at Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall & Saloon; the mammoth billboard at the Tropicana Casino & Resort vaunting its “Legendary Lobster Special $19.95,” and the ultimate deal, the Siegel Suites billboards proclaiming “Live Here Eat Free.”
On the high end, there is a desert fiesta of advertised “summer tasting menus” at the MGM Grand ($60 at Craftsteak, $59 at Shibuya, $45 at SeaBlue, $39 at Nobhill Tavern). At Aureole and Mix in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, there are new prix fixe menus. Also offering deals are Mario Batali and David Burke in the Venetian, Wolfgang Puck at Spago in Caesars Palace and reduced-price “Taste of Wynn” promotions (including $36 menus at Society Café Encore and Daniel Boulud Brasserie).
Steve Wynn, the chairman of Wynn Resorts, said that his customers “aren’t buying that bottle of Margaux, and they aren’t ordering as much — but they are here.” His Wynn and Encore, like several properties at the high end, have 90 percent occupancy.
Mr. Wynn said he is encouraged that “each month the booking window is getting longer — it used to be 90 days, then 30 last fall, now it’s coming back — and bookings are up as well.”
Last year, “the sky was falling, and people were terrified,” said Elizabeth Blau, a restaurant consultant. “Now things have stabilized.”
But for many Las Vegas restaurateurs, flat is still the new up, and for some, “being down 10 percent, that’s the new flat,” said Joseph Bastianich, Mario Batali’s partner in three restaurants at the Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino.
Mr. Bastianich said his Carnevino Italian Steakhouse in the Palazzo at the Venetian was projecting $18 million in revenues this year but now “we expect to do $13 million to $14 million.”
Sirio Maccioni, a Las Vegas fine-dining pioneer with his restaurants Le Cirque and Osteria del Circo at the Bellagio, cautioned that “it will take a very long time for it to come back to the way it was.” He noted that recently revenues from his restaurants have been down 5 to 10 percent, and last year were off 25 percent.
Waiters at high-end properties have suffered a reduction in tips from 20 to 50 percent. “Our membership has declined 10 or 11 percent since last year,” said D. Taylor, the secretary treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 50,000 food and beverage workers and other employees in hotels and casinos.
Mr. Martinez of Rao’s said the staff had agreed to a reduction in the workweek from 5 days to 4, and in the workday from 8 hours to 6, just to save all their jobs. He estimated the average check cost for his tables was down $30, to $50.
And a grim recession game of musical-chair seniority has commenced. Francisco Rufino, a 33-year-old fry cook at the Paris Las Vegas casino hotel for the last nine years, was bumped down to a cafe there because of cutbacks at a higher-end casino restaurant. “In turn, I displaced another cook — who was laid off,” he said.
Nevertheless, many still have hopes. Mr. Bastianich is planning a restaurant at the Venetian, tentatively titled Nancy’s Luncheonette, offering the food of Nancy Silverton, his Los Angeles partner in Osteria Mozza with Mr. Batali.
Mr. Maccioni, who said he is 75, has not been deterred from opening a Tuscan-themed restaurant in CityCenter — “with 175 seats and a beautiful bar,” he said — to be called Sirio.
The city’s restaurateurs have hardly stopped rising to astounding levels in offering luxury to refined palates. The 300-seat Carnevino offers source-verified grass-fed beef, dry-aged for seven weeks in its own Las Vegas aging facility where computer chips control air flow and humidity.
And the 230-seat Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare in the Wynn flies in a ton of seafood every week from the Mediterranean, including soft-shell crabs from Venice and imperial red shrimp from Morocco. Some of the fish is delivered live, and all of it is transported “on passenger airliners that would be flying whether my fish is on them or not,” said Paul Bartolotta, 48, who once trained at Taillevent in Paris and cooked at Spiaggia in Chicago.
Rick Moonen at RM Seafood in the Mandalay Bay offers three kinds of East Coast oysters, as well as live Dungeness crabs and Maine lobsters. “You have to be crazy to want to offer sustainable seafood in the middle of the desert,” said Mr. Moonen, who was awarded three stars from The New York Times in 2002 for his work at RM Seafood in Manhattan, and now, like Mr. Bartolotta, lives out here.
But Mr. Moonen and others are finding that luxury can only take them so far these days. At his sleek $6 million nautically themed restaurant, volume is up, he said, but the check average, which used to be $65 to $70, is now “in the 40s.” Three months ago, Mr. Moonen had to close his 80-seat fine-dining restaurant, RM Seafood Upstairs, where the average check was $120. “It was a terrible day,” he said, “but we’ll reopen in the fall.”
Alessandro Stratta said his casual restaurant at Wynn Las Vegas, Stratta, with its average check cost of $60, “is 30 percent busier this year than it was last year.” But his high-end restaurant, Alex, with an average $320 check per person, is down 15 percent in revenues, and is now open four days instead of five.
In this economy, said David McIntyre, vice president for food and beverage at the MGM Grand, “it’s not enough to just come out with a prix fixe menu, you have to redefine your product.”
So the casino’s Nobhill Tavern reconceived its menu boards and now “there is a 40 percent decline per check,” Mr. McIntyre said. “But now we’re up 60 percent in total volume.”
And though the 66-seat Joël Robuchon still offers a 16-course $385 menu dégustation, it now serves two courses for $89.
Therefore, the arrival of competing restaurants at CityCenter is not universally awaited.
“I don’t wish ill to anyone,” Mr. Bartolotta said, “but do we need 20 more restaurants? No. Now, everyone is vying for a part of a shrinking pie.”
But Bart Mahoney, vice president for food and beverage of the CityCenter partner MGM Mirage, said that “We hope to grow the market.”
Robert Goldstein, the 54-year-old president of a competitor, the Venetian, sounded sanguine about CityCenter as he sat in his second-floor office overlooking the casino’s signature 90-percent-scale replicas of the Campanile and the Bridge of Sighs. “It’s not going to be the end of the world, and it’s not going to restart tourism in Las Vegas,” he said. “It’s just another project opening in a tough time.”
He referred to a Life magazine cover article of June 20, 1955, that he had framed, depicting casino cancan dancers and proclaiming: “Las Vegas — Is Boom Overextended?”
He added: “Las Vegas is down a bit now, and right now the town is overbuilt. But do you really think all of this is going to fade away and go to black?”
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Obama wants Senate health bill quickly
DAVID ESPO and ERICA WERNER
Associated Press
House Democrats are moving ahead with sweeping health care legislation as President Barack Obama prods a Senate committee chairman to take faster action on a companion measure.
Moving forcefully on his top domestic priority, Obama told Sen. Max Baucus he wants legislation ready by week's end in the Finance Committee that Baucus chairs, according to numerous Democratic officials.
These officials said Obama made his wishes known directly to Baucus, D-Mont., at a White House meeting Monday attended by administration officials and senior Democratic lawmakers.
The virtual deadline underscored Obama's determination to push legislation through both houses of Congress before lawmakers go home for their August summer break.
"Don't bet against us. We are going to make this thing happen," the president told reporters earlier Monday, fresh from an overseas trip during which the momentum behind his health care agenda slipped.
The officials who described the private meeting did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss private meetings.
Scott Mulhauser, a spokesman for Baucus, said the senior Democrat has stressed that his committee will be ready when it has completed a proposal "that can ensure quality, affordable care for every American, lower costs — and pass the Senate."
Despite objections from conservative and moderate Democrats in the House, prospects for quick action are better there than in the Senate.
Majority House Democrats expect to introduce legislation Tuesday that would prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher premiums on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.
The measure would spend billions of dollars subsidizing lower-income individuals and families who cannot afford coverage in an attempt to cut dramatically into the ranks of the uninsured.
Its total price tag remains unknown, but to comply with another presidential priority, it would rely on cuts in Medicare and Medicaid to begin slowing the rate of growth in health care spending overall.
The measure is expected to impose a fee on large companies that fail to offer insurance, and individuals also would have to pay a penalty if they refused to purchase affordable insurance.
A new income tax on the wealthy, estimated to raise more than $500 billion over the next decade, would help pay for the bill.
Efforts at completing the measure have been slowed in recent days by criticism from a group of moderate and conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dog Coalition. Obama met with a Blue Dog delegation on Monday evening, and Rep. Henry Waxman of California, one of the committee chairmen involved in drafting the House bill, sat down with them separately.
Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., head of the Blue Dogs' health care task force, said later that some of the group's concerns were being addressed — but not enough so they could support the House measure without further improvements.
Ross noted that more than a half-dozen members of the group have seats on the committee that Waxman chairs, enough to hold up passage.
He said that in one concession to the Blue Dogs, Democratic leaders have indicated that they're increasing the size of the exemption for small businesses from a requirement for employers to provide health care to their employees. The exemption is expected to increase from businesses with payrolls of $100,000 to those with payrolls of $250,000, Ross said, which he characterized as "probably not enough."
The group still has concerns about Medicare payments to doctors and other health care providers, rural health and other issues.
In the Finance Committee some highly controversial issues remain unresolved, including how to pay for the bill and a Democratic demand for the government to sell insurance in competition with private industry, a proposal Republicans oppose strongly. Unlike the other congressional committees working on health care, Finance members have been laboring to produce a bipartisan bill.
A second Senate committee, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, was pushing to complete work Tuesday on a partisan bill that would create a government-run health plan to compete with private insurers and require employers to provide coverage — but probably could attract little or no Republican support.
Associated Press
House Democrats are moving ahead with sweeping health care legislation as President Barack Obama prods a Senate committee chairman to take faster action on a companion measure.
Moving forcefully on his top domestic priority, Obama told Sen. Max Baucus he wants legislation ready by week's end in the Finance Committee that Baucus chairs, according to numerous Democratic officials.
These officials said Obama made his wishes known directly to Baucus, D-Mont., at a White House meeting Monday attended by administration officials and senior Democratic lawmakers.
The virtual deadline underscored Obama's determination to push legislation through both houses of Congress before lawmakers go home for their August summer break.
"Don't bet against us. We are going to make this thing happen," the president told reporters earlier Monday, fresh from an overseas trip during which the momentum behind his health care agenda slipped.
The officials who described the private meeting did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss private meetings.
Scott Mulhauser, a spokesman for Baucus, said the senior Democrat has stressed that his committee will be ready when it has completed a proposal "that can ensure quality, affordable care for every American, lower costs — and pass the Senate."
Despite objections from conservative and moderate Democrats in the House, prospects for quick action are better there than in the Senate.
Majority House Democrats expect to introduce legislation Tuesday that would prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher premiums on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.
The measure would spend billions of dollars subsidizing lower-income individuals and families who cannot afford coverage in an attempt to cut dramatically into the ranks of the uninsured.
Its total price tag remains unknown, but to comply with another presidential priority, it would rely on cuts in Medicare and Medicaid to begin slowing the rate of growth in health care spending overall.
The measure is expected to impose a fee on large companies that fail to offer insurance, and individuals also would have to pay a penalty if they refused to purchase affordable insurance.
A new income tax on the wealthy, estimated to raise more than $500 billion over the next decade, would help pay for the bill.
Efforts at completing the measure have been slowed in recent days by criticism from a group of moderate and conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dog Coalition. Obama met with a Blue Dog delegation on Monday evening, and Rep. Henry Waxman of California, one of the committee chairmen involved in drafting the House bill, sat down with them separately.
Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., head of the Blue Dogs' health care task force, said later that some of the group's concerns were being addressed — but not enough so they could support the House measure without further improvements.
Ross noted that more than a half-dozen members of the group have seats on the committee that Waxman chairs, enough to hold up passage.
He said that in one concession to the Blue Dogs, Democratic leaders have indicated that they're increasing the size of the exemption for small businesses from a requirement for employers to provide health care to their employees. The exemption is expected to increase from businesses with payrolls of $100,000 to those with payrolls of $250,000, Ross said, which he characterized as "probably not enough."
The group still has concerns about Medicare payments to doctors and other health care providers, rural health and other issues.
In the Finance Committee some highly controversial issues remain unresolved, including how to pay for the bill and a Democratic demand for the government to sell insurance in competition with private industry, a proposal Republicans oppose strongly. Unlike the other congressional committees working on health care, Finance members have been laboring to produce a bipartisan bill.
A second Senate committee, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, was pushing to complete work Tuesday on a partisan bill that would create a government-run health plan to compete with private insurers and require employers to provide coverage — but probably could attract little or no Republican support.
Monday, July 13, 2009
'Socialized Medicine? Bring It On
Richard Cohen WahingtonPost
When I was in the Army and known to my friends as "Combat Cohen," I could not get over the fact that, during an era of almost universal military service, the American public supported high Pentagon spending despite firsthand knowledge of astounding waste and theft. I cite, for instance, the well-known and frequently witnessed pillaging of food by mess sergeants. From tasting their stuff, I can say that theft is what they did best.
Now I am similarly perplexed. Many, if not most, Americans have some experience with our nation's mostly private health-care system. Yet they still fall prey to the scare tactic that nothing -- but nothing -- could be worse than a government takeover of the system. How things could be worse than they are now, I cannot imagine.
In the past two months, I have spent many hours accompanying a loved one to hospital emergency rooms -- all of them privately operated. The rap on what is sometimes called socialized medicine is that if the government ran the system, the wait would be interminable. Well, I am here to tell you that even when the government does not run the system, the wait can be interminable.
And uncomfortable. In one hospital there was not enough space in the emergency room for all those seeking treatment. My friend got moved from a bed -- where she was relatively comfortable -- to a wheelchair in the hallway. There she sat, in agony, for about six hours. Something similar happened at another emergency room, though this time she was given a cot. The wait, though, was just as long.
The emergency room has become the equivalent of the family doctor. It is where you go if you don't have a family doctor or if you do have a family doctor -- and it's after hours or the weekend. It is also where you sometimes have to go in order to be admitted to a hospital. The staff is mostly courteous, sometimes wonderfully solicitous, but the constant triaging of new people can put you on a treadmill to nowhere. The emergency room is the great leveler of American life. Everyone gets miserable treatment.
On Friday, Bill Moyers interviewed Wendell Potter about health care and such matters. Potter is the former head of corporate communications for Cigna, the nation's fourth-largest health insurer. By his own characterization, he is one of those insurance executives who flew from meeting to meeting in private planes and hardly ever touched ground to meet real people. One day he did. He went to an outdoor health clinic over the Virginia border from his home town in Tennessee. This is what he told Moyers:
"What I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents to care for people. . . . And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee -- all over the region."
Thank God we don't have socialized medicine.
Into this debate about the role of government in medical care, I come jaded by experience. In addition to having been Combat Cohen, I was also Cohen of Claims when I worked for an insurance company. This means that whenever someone says something about "government bureaucrats," I smile because I was once a non-government bureaucrat. It is not government bureaucrats who say that certain treatments will not be covered, and it is not the government that purges insurance rolls of the sick or the old, and it is not the government that makes money -- lots of money -- on health insurance. It is private enterprise.
But as Potter points out, the insurance industry sets out to spook the public with talk of "socialized medicine," "government bureaucrats" and "government-run health care." My loved one recently had to return to the emergency room because she was dehydrated. Her insurance company listed the reasons someone could return, and dehydration was one of them. They still denied her claim. The government had nothing to do with it.
The ongoing health-care debate is complex -- not as interesting as Michael Jackson or Sarah Palin. But in deciding what to do and who to support in the current attempt to reform health care, don't rely on insurance industry propaganda, but on your own experience. Recall the last time you went to the emergency room and ask yourself whether the government could possibly do a worse job. If the answer is yes, you might need medical attention more than you realize.
When I was in the Army and known to my friends as "Combat Cohen," I could not get over the fact that, during an era of almost universal military service, the American public supported high Pentagon spending despite firsthand knowledge of astounding waste and theft. I cite, for instance, the well-known and frequently witnessed pillaging of food by mess sergeants. From tasting their stuff, I can say that theft is what they did best.
Now I am similarly perplexed. Many, if not most, Americans have some experience with our nation's mostly private health-care system. Yet they still fall prey to the scare tactic that nothing -- but nothing -- could be worse than a government takeover of the system. How things could be worse than they are now, I cannot imagine.
In the past two months, I have spent many hours accompanying a loved one to hospital emergency rooms -- all of them privately operated. The rap on what is sometimes called socialized medicine is that if the government ran the system, the wait would be interminable. Well, I am here to tell you that even when the government does not run the system, the wait can be interminable.
And uncomfortable. In one hospital there was not enough space in the emergency room for all those seeking treatment. My friend got moved from a bed -- where she was relatively comfortable -- to a wheelchair in the hallway. There she sat, in agony, for about six hours. Something similar happened at another emergency room, though this time she was given a cot. The wait, though, was just as long.
The emergency room has become the equivalent of the family doctor. It is where you go if you don't have a family doctor or if you do have a family doctor -- and it's after hours or the weekend. It is also where you sometimes have to go in order to be admitted to a hospital. The staff is mostly courteous, sometimes wonderfully solicitous, but the constant triaging of new people can put you on a treadmill to nowhere. The emergency room is the great leveler of American life. Everyone gets miserable treatment.
On Friday, Bill Moyers interviewed Wendell Potter about health care and such matters. Potter is the former head of corporate communications for Cigna, the nation's fourth-largest health insurer. By his own characterization, he is one of those insurance executives who flew from meeting to meeting in private planes and hardly ever touched ground to meet real people. One day he did. He went to an outdoor health clinic over the Virginia border from his home town in Tennessee. This is what he told Moyers:
"What I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents to care for people. . . . And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee -- all over the region."
Thank God we don't have socialized medicine.
Into this debate about the role of government in medical care, I come jaded by experience. In addition to having been Combat Cohen, I was also Cohen of Claims when I worked for an insurance company. This means that whenever someone says something about "government bureaucrats," I smile because I was once a non-government bureaucrat. It is not government bureaucrats who say that certain treatments will not be covered, and it is not the government that purges insurance rolls of the sick or the old, and it is not the government that makes money -- lots of money -- on health insurance. It is private enterprise.
But as Potter points out, the insurance industry sets out to spook the public with talk of "socialized medicine," "government bureaucrats" and "government-run health care." My loved one recently had to return to the emergency room because she was dehydrated. Her insurance company listed the reasons someone could return, and dehydration was one of them. They still denied her claim. The government had nothing to do with it.
The ongoing health-care debate is complex -- not as interesting as Michael Jackson or Sarah Palin. But in deciding what to do and who to support in the current attempt to reform health care, don't rely on insurance industry propaganda, but on your own experience. Recall the last time you went to the emergency room and ask yourself whether the government could possibly do a worse job. If the answer is yes, you might need medical attention more than you realize.
Chutzpah on Steroids BOB HERBERT
NY Times Washington
What is up with the banks and the rest of the financial industry? The people running this system remind me of gangsters who manage to walk out of the courthouse with a suspended sentence and can’t wait to get back to their nefarious activities.
These malefactors of great wealth (thank you, Teddy) developed hideously destructive credit policies and took insane risks that hurt millions of American families and nearly wrecked the economy. Then they were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, money that came from the very people victimized by the industry’s outlandish practices.
Now the industry is fighting against creation of an agency that would protect taxpayers and ordinary consumers from a similarly devastating onslaught in the future. And at the same time they are scrambling to raise credit card interest rates and all manner of exploitive fees to build a brand new superstructure of questionable profits on the backs of the taxpayers who came to their rescue.
We’re reaching a whole new level of chutzpah here.
The Obama administration wants to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would shield individuals and families from deceptive practices and outright fraud by banks and other businesses offering credit cards, mortgages, home loans and other forms of consumer finance.
Everything we’ve learned in this recession tells us we need such an agency. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner described it, “This agency will have only one mission: to protect consumers.”
Protecting the consumer is, of course, anathema to the industry. So it’s preparing for war. The Times’s Edmund Andrews neatly summed up the matter when he wrote that “banks and mortgage lenders are placing top priority on killing” the president’s proposal.
The proposed agency developed from an idea offered some time ago by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who currently chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel, which has been monitoring the financial industry bailouts. She is a strong contender to lead the proposed new agency.
Ms. Warren told a Congressional committee last month about the stark difference between the warm and fuzzy advertising approach used by lenders competing for consumer dollars and the treachery that is so often hidden in the fine print.
“Giant lenders compete for business by talking about nominal interest rates, free gifts and warm feelings,” she said, “but the fine print hides the things that really rake in the cash. Today’s business model is about making money through tricks and traps.”
It should be clear by now that it is often the goal of financial institutions to see that the consumer is not well informed. “In the early-1980s,” said Professor Warren, the average credit card contract was about a page long. “Today, it is more than 30 pages. ... I am a contract law professor, and I cannot make out some of the fine print.”
She added, “Study after study shows that credit products are designed in ways that obscure the meaning and trick customers.”
There is nothing free or fair about a market in which one side uses double talk and mumbo jumbo to obscure important information and deliberately dupe the other side into making decisions against its own interests.
When I think of the banking industry fighting to kill this proposed agency, it brings to mind the decades in which tobacco companies insisted that cigarettes were safe, and those days long ago when the auto companies fought against seat belts, and all the dopey arguments that were made against protecting the public from unsafe drugs and kitchen appliances that might burst into flames, and so on.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has concluded that Americans spend approximately $55 billion each year on closing costs that they don’t fully understand. As Ms. Warren noted, “Mortgage lenders furnish reams of unreadable documents shortly before closing, often leaving people with no practical option but to take whatever terms the lender has filled in.”
The family home is the largest purchase most Americans ever make. Paying it off can take much of a lifetime. Everything about that contract should be crystal clear to the buyer.
I had a breakfast interview with Ms. Warren on a variety of subjects last week. On the day of the meeting, USA Today had a front-page article that began: “Even as regulators crack down on abusive mortgage and credit card practices, another type of lending threatens to mire consumers in a credit trap.”
The article detailed the ways in which banks are wringing huge profits from overdraft fees that often are sky high and in many cases are handled in ways that are exploitive, if not predatory.
The malefactors of great wealth view an informed consumer as Public Enemy No. 1. The last thing in the world that they want is a fair marketplace, which is why the Consumer Financial Protection Agency can’t come fast enough.
What is up with the banks and the rest of the financial industry? The people running this system remind me of gangsters who manage to walk out of the courthouse with a suspended sentence and can’t wait to get back to their nefarious activities.
These malefactors of great wealth (thank you, Teddy) developed hideously destructive credit policies and took insane risks that hurt millions of American families and nearly wrecked the economy. Then they were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, money that came from the very people victimized by the industry’s outlandish practices.
Now the industry is fighting against creation of an agency that would protect taxpayers and ordinary consumers from a similarly devastating onslaught in the future. And at the same time they are scrambling to raise credit card interest rates and all manner of exploitive fees to build a brand new superstructure of questionable profits on the backs of the taxpayers who came to their rescue.
We’re reaching a whole new level of chutzpah here.
The Obama administration wants to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would shield individuals and families from deceptive practices and outright fraud by banks and other businesses offering credit cards, mortgages, home loans and other forms of consumer finance.
Everything we’ve learned in this recession tells us we need such an agency. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner described it, “This agency will have only one mission: to protect consumers.”
Protecting the consumer is, of course, anathema to the industry. So it’s preparing for war. The Times’s Edmund Andrews neatly summed up the matter when he wrote that “banks and mortgage lenders are placing top priority on killing” the president’s proposal.
The proposed agency developed from an idea offered some time ago by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who currently chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel, which has been monitoring the financial industry bailouts. She is a strong contender to lead the proposed new agency.
Ms. Warren told a Congressional committee last month about the stark difference between the warm and fuzzy advertising approach used by lenders competing for consumer dollars and the treachery that is so often hidden in the fine print.
“Giant lenders compete for business by talking about nominal interest rates, free gifts and warm feelings,” she said, “but the fine print hides the things that really rake in the cash. Today’s business model is about making money through tricks and traps.”
It should be clear by now that it is often the goal of financial institutions to see that the consumer is not well informed. “In the early-1980s,” said Professor Warren, the average credit card contract was about a page long. “Today, it is more than 30 pages. ... I am a contract law professor, and I cannot make out some of the fine print.”
She added, “Study after study shows that credit products are designed in ways that obscure the meaning and trick customers.”
There is nothing free or fair about a market in which one side uses double talk and mumbo jumbo to obscure important information and deliberately dupe the other side into making decisions against its own interests.
When I think of the banking industry fighting to kill this proposed agency, it brings to mind the decades in which tobacco companies insisted that cigarettes were safe, and those days long ago when the auto companies fought against seat belts, and all the dopey arguments that were made against protecting the public from unsafe drugs and kitchen appliances that might burst into flames, and so on.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has concluded that Americans spend approximately $55 billion each year on closing costs that they don’t fully understand. As Ms. Warren noted, “Mortgage lenders furnish reams of unreadable documents shortly before closing, often leaving people with no practical option but to take whatever terms the lender has filled in.”
The family home is the largest purchase most Americans ever make. Paying it off can take much of a lifetime. Everything about that contract should be crystal clear to the buyer.
I had a breakfast interview with Ms. Warren on a variety of subjects last week. On the day of the meeting, USA Today had a front-page article that began: “Even as regulators crack down on abusive mortgage and credit card practices, another type of lending threatens to mire consumers in a credit trap.”
The article detailed the ways in which banks are wringing huge profits from overdraft fees that often are sky high and in many cases are handled in ways that are exploitive, if not predatory.
The malefactors of great wealth view an informed consumer as Public Enemy No. 1. The last thing in the world that they want is a fair marketplace, which is why the Consumer Financial Protection Agency can’t come fast enough.
Collect Now, or Later?
Collect Now, or Later? Timing Your Social Security Benefits
TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
Collecting Social Security as soon as you are eligible is a tempting proposition — but experts agree you should try to resist if you can.
The majority of people don’t follow that advice, choosing instead to start benefits early. Why wait to collect what is rightfully yours?
That logic may sound reasonable now. But in reality, the bigger risk is that you will live to a ripe old age. You can claim Social Security any time from age 62 to 70, but the longer you wait, the larger your monthly check. And many people come out ahead if they wait at least until their full retirement age, which is different from the day you stop working for good. For people born 1943 to 1954, full retirement age is 66, and it creeps up for younger people.
What do you stand to lose by taking benefits early? Take those who are set to receive $1,000 a month at their full retirement age. If they sign up for benefits at age 62, they will collect only $750. But if they wait until 70, they will earn extra credit and receive up to $1,320 a month — nearly a third more.
At first glance, it seems that everyone should wait until they are 70. But that is not the case. The answer depends on many factors, including when you stop working, how much you have in savings, whether you are healthy, whether you are married or single and whether your spouse earns more — or less.
It may be impossible for some households to wait because the breadwinner has lost a job or is no longer able to work. And planners agree that it is smarter to collect earlier if it will prevent you from accumulating debt.
But if you can wait, think of the money you aren’t receiving during that period as a payment of sorts for an annuity that will pay a higher, guaranteed stream of income later, if you live a long time (or at least longer than your savings last), financial experts say.
“You can’t buy an inflation-adjusted annuity for anywhere near the cost of delaying Social Security,” said Henry Hebeler, a retired Boeing executive who created AnalyzeNow.com, a Web site that offers retirement advice and calculators.
For people who choose to defer benefits until age 66, it generally takes about 12 more years to collect as much as if you started getting checks at 62. So you break even, so to speak, about age 78, according to Avram Sacks, a Social Security law analyst for CCH, a tax and accounting information service. “If you are in good health, and you expect to live to 78 or longer, then the advantage goes to the person who waits,” he says. “But that’s assuming we’re all prophets and we know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and we don’t all know.”
And that is why financial advisers recommend planning for a long life. Here are some strategies to consider before signing up.
SINGLES Figuring out when to collect is easier when you do not have to worry about how your actions will affect a spouse. It usually pays to wait until your full retirement age if you can support yourself until then. (This obviously does not apply to people who are already in poor health and probably won’t live past 78, give or take a couple of years. People who are still working should also defer.)
Though many experts will tell you to delay as long as you can, waiting from 66 until 70 may not be optimal for some singles. “The reason is that they will have consumed too much of their savings in those extra four years to be able to offset the savings loss with higher Social Security payments within their lifetime,” said Mr. Hebeler, who has also written three books on retirement. “It’s surprising, but that’s what the analysis shows.”
Consider a single person with $200,000 in savings returning 5 percent a year. Instead of taking Social Security at age 62, she withdraws $19,000 annually until she turns 66. Her savings will last until age 94, but she will still have $21,000 a year in Social Security benefits. If she claimed at 62, her savings would run out at age 87 and she would be left with only $16,000 a year in Social Security.
For people with significant savings who expect to live well into their 80s, it may make sense to wait until 70, Mr. Hebeler added.
If you have already started receiving benefits, but wish you had waited, you are allowed to give it all back and start over. But this gets complicated. You will probably have to pay back more than what you actually received each month, since Medicare premiums and income taxes may have been deducted. Married people can do this, too, but some advisers caution against it.
MARRIED COUPLES Planning is more complex for married couples because there are age differences, varying retirement dates and earnings and other factors to consider. In many cases, the higher-earning spouse should delay his or her benefits until age 70, while the lower earner begins to collect at age 62. This ensures that the surviving spouse will end up with the maximum amount of benefits for the rest of his or her life. Even if the higher earner died before age 70, the survivor’s benefits would be bumped up to what the deceased spouse would have gotten, said Lesley J. Brey, a fee-only financial planner in Honolulu.
But once the higher earner hits full retirement age, there is a way for the lower earner to potentially get a bigger check by qualifying for spousal benefits. The higher earner can “file and suspend,” or file for benefits but immediately suspend them — it is perfectly legal and allows the lower-earning spouse to get up to half the higher earner’s benefits, while the higher earner’s benefits continue to accrue.
“This is the way to get the most out of the system without jeopardizing the longevity insurance aspect, which is the most important component,” Ms. Brey said. “You want the last survivor to have the highest possible payment. However, you get cash flow, which reduces the amount you have to withdraw from other sources and you don’t have to guess when anyone is going to die.”
But if the couple can afford it, should the lower earner wait until full retirement age? “It doesn’t matter because the goal is to get the most money for the person who lives the longest,” Ms. Brey said.
Married people with similar earnings may also consider another strategy. Here, one person claims spousal benefits at full retirement age and switches to his or her own, and presumably higher, benefits later, said Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
To get a more precise idea about how to maximize your benefits, go to the Social Security’s retirement estimator, which uses your actual earnings record in its calculation. (Click on “create scenarios” to how retiring at different ages affects benefits). AnalyzeNow.com offers calculators that will help determine the best time for singles and couples to take Social Security.
If figuring it all out on your own proves too difficult, have a fee-only financial planner run the analysis for you. “It is worth it,” Mr. Hebeler said, “to spend the money.”
TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
Collecting Social Security as soon as you are eligible is a tempting proposition — but experts agree you should try to resist if you can.
The majority of people don’t follow that advice, choosing instead to start benefits early. Why wait to collect what is rightfully yours?
That logic may sound reasonable now. But in reality, the bigger risk is that you will live to a ripe old age. You can claim Social Security any time from age 62 to 70, but the longer you wait, the larger your monthly check. And many people come out ahead if they wait at least until their full retirement age, which is different from the day you stop working for good. For people born 1943 to 1954, full retirement age is 66, and it creeps up for younger people.
What do you stand to lose by taking benefits early? Take those who are set to receive $1,000 a month at their full retirement age. If they sign up for benefits at age 62, they will collect only $750. But if they wait until 70, they will earn extra credit and receive up to $1,320 a month — nearly a third more.
At first glance, it seems that everyone should wait until they are 70. But that is not the case. The answer depends on many factors, including when you stop working, how much you have in savings, whether you are healthy, whether you are married or single and whether your spouse earns more — or less.
It may be impossible for some households to wait because the breadwinner has lost a job or is no longer able to work. And planners agree that it is smarter to collect earlier if it will prevent you from accumulating debt.
But if you can wait, think of the money you aren’t receiving during that period as a payment of sorts for an annuity that will pay a higher, guaranteed stream of income later, if you live a long time (or at least longer than your savings last), financial experts say.
“You can’t buy an inflation-adjusted annuity for anywhere near the cost of delaying Social Security,” said Henry Hebeler, a retired Boeing executive who created AnalyzeNow.com, a Web site that offers retirement advice and calculators.
For people who choose to defer benefits until age 66, it generally takes about 12 more years to collect as much as if you started getting checks at 62. So you break even, so to speak, about age 78, according to Avram Sacks, a Social Security law analyst for CCH, a tax and accounting information service. “If you are in good health, and you expect to live to 78 or longer, then the advantage goes to the person who waits,” he says. “But that’s assuming we’re all prophets and we know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and we don’t all know.”
And that is why financial advisers recommend planning for a long life. Here are some strategies to consider before signing up.
SINGLES Figuring out when to collect is easier when you do not have to worry about how your actions will affect a spouse. It usually pays to wait until your full retirement age if you can support yourself until then. (This obviously does not apply to people who are already in poor health and probably won’t live past 78, give or take a couple of years. People who are still working should also defer.)
Though many experts will tell you to delay as long as you can, waiting from 66 until 70 may not be optimal for some singles. “The reason is that they will have consumed too much of their savings in those extra four years to be able to offset the savings loss with higher Social Security payments within their lifetime,” said Mr. Hebeler, who has also written three books on retirement. “It’s surprising, but that’s what the analysis shows.”
Consider a single person with $200,000 in savings returning 5 percent a year. Instead of taking Social Security at age 62, she withdraws $19,000 annually until she turns 66. Her savings will last until age 94, but she will still have $21,000 a year in Social Security benefits. If she claimed at 62, her savings would run out at age 87 and she would be left with only $16,000 a year in Social Security.
For people with significant savings who expect to live well into their 80s, it may make sense to wait until 70, Mr. Hebeler added.
If you have already started receiving benefits, but wish you had waited, you are allowed to give it all back and start over. But this gets complicated. You will probably have to pay back more than what you actually received each month, since Medicare premiums and income taxes may have been deducted. Married people can do this, too, but some advisers caution against it.
MARRIED COUPLES Planning is more complex for married couples because there are age differences, varying retirement dates and earnings and other factors to consider. In many cases, the higher-earning spouse should delay his or her benefits until age 70, while the lower earner begins to collect at age 62. This ensures that the surviving spouse will end up with the maximum amount of benefits for the rest of his or her life. Even if the higher earner died before age 70, the survivor’s benefits would be bumped up to what the deceased spouse would have gotten, said Lesley J. Brey, a fee-only financial planner in Honolulu.
But once the higher earner hits full retirement age, there is a way for the lower earner to potentially get a bigger check by qualifying for spousal benefits. The higher earner can “file and suspend,” or file for benefits but immediately suspend them — it is perfectly legal and allows the lower-earning spouse to get up to half the higher earner’s benefits, while the higher earner’s benefits continue to accrue.
“This is the way to get the most out of the system without jeopardizing the longevity insurance aspect, which is the most important component,” Ms. Brey said. “You want the last survivor to have the highest possible payment. However, you get cash flow, which reduces the amount you have to withdraw from other sources and you don’t have to guess when anyone is going to die.”
But if the couple can afford it, should the lower earner wait until full retirement age? “It doesn’t matter because the goal is to get the most money for the person who lives the longest,” Ms. Brey said.
Married people with similar earnings may also consider another strategy. Here, one person claims spousal benefits at full retirement age and switches to his or her own, and presumably higher, benefits later, said Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
To get a more precise idea about how to maximize your benefits, go to the Social Security’s retirement estimator, which uses your actual earnings record in its calculation. (Click on “create scenarios” to how retiring at different ages affects benefits). AnalyzeNow.com offers calculators that will help determine the best time for singles and couples to take Social Security.
If figuring it all out on your own proves too difficult, have a fee-only financial planner run the analysis for you. “It is worth it,” Mr. Hebeler said, “to spend the money.”
Poll: Americans want health-care bill, but not cost
Susan Page - USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Most Americans want a big health care bill passed this year, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, but they are less enthusiastic about paying for it.
And while a majority of respondents say controlling costs should be the legislation's top goal, more than 9 in 10 oppose limits on getting whatever tests or treatments they and their doctor think are necessary.
The findings underscore the difficult path ahead for the White House and Congress as the health care debate enters crunch time. President Obama, who has called for the House and Senate to pass bills within the next few weeks, was meeting Monday afternoon with two key congressional chairmen to try to hammer out financing for the $1 trillion-plus legislation.
"For those naysayers and cynics who think that this is not going to happen, don't bet against us," Obama said earlier in the day as he announced the appointment of Regina Benjamin as U.S. surgeon general. "We are going to make this thing happen because the American people desperately need it."
One advantage for the president: A third of those surveyed say they trust him and congressional Democrats most when it comes to changing health care; 10% choose congressional Republicans. Doctors and hospitals are trusted the most, by 45%. Just 4% choose insurance companies.
The poll of 3,026 adults, surveyed Friday through Sunday by landline and cellphone, has a margin of error of +/— 2 percentage points. Some of the questions, asked of half the sample, have an error margin of +/— 3 points.
By 56%-33%, those surveyed endorse the idea of enacting major health care reform this year. Half call it extremely or very important to them personally; just 1 in 4 say it's not important.
Ask about proposals to help pay the costs, though, and there are sharper divisions — and potential openings for critics who may oppose the final bill.
Six of 10 favor the idea of requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay a fee to the government instead. The idea of increasing income taxes on upper-income Americans, an approach backed by House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, is backed by 58%. Just over half support taxing sugary soft drinks.
However, by 53%-43% most oppose taxing health care benefits above a certain level — Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus had been floating that idea — and even more are against cutting Medicare costs. Savings in Medicare are part of both House and Senate versions of health care bills.
Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at Harvard, says the results show the friction between competing goals of the health care bills.
"The dilemma is that Congress is trying to solve two problems simultaneously: Save money and insure more people," Blendon says. In the USA TODAY poll, 52% choose controlling costs as more important; 42% expanding coverage. Those focused on costs are likely to have little tolerance for paying higher taxes to cover the uninsured, he says.
More than 8 in 10 of those surveyed say it's extremely or very important that the legislation make health insurance more affordable, but they also express strong resistance to some steps that might help control costs. Ninety-three percent want their health care plan to cover any medical test or treatment that they and their doctor think is needed, and 88% want to be able to choose any doctor or hospital they like.
WASHINGTON — Most Americans want a big health care bill passed this year, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, but they are less enthusiastic about paying for it.
And while a majority of respondents say controlling costs should be the legislation's top goal, more than 9 in 10 oppose limits on getting whatever tests or treatments they and their doctor think are necessary.
The findings underscore the difficult path ahead for the White House and Congress as the health care debate enters crunch time. President Obama, who has called for the House and Senate to pass bills within the next few weeks, was meeting Monday afternoon with two key congressional chairmen to try to hammer out financing for the $1 trillion-plus legislation.
"For those naysayers and cynics who think that this is not going to happen, don't bet against us," Obama said earlier in the day as he announced the appointment of Regina Benjamin as U.S. surgeon general. "We are going to make this thing happen because the American people desperately need it."
One advantage for the president: A third of those surveyed say they trust him and congressional Democrats most when it comes to changing health care; 10% choose congressional Republicans. Doctors and hospitals are trusted the most, by 45%. Just 4% choose insurance companies.
The poll of 3,026 adults, surveyed Friday through Sunday by landline and cellphone, has a margin of error of +/— 2 percentage points. Some of the questions, asked of half the sample, have an error margin of +/— 3 points.
By 56%-33%, those surveyed endorse the idea of enacting major health care reform this year. Half call it extremely or very important to them personally; just 1 in 4 say it's not important.
Ask about proposals to help pay the costs, though, and there are sharper divisions — and potential openings for critics who may oppose the final bill.
Six of 10 favor the idea of requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay a fee to the government instead. The idea of increasing income taxes on upper-income Americans, an approach backed by House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, is backed by 58%. Just over half support taxing sugary soft drinks.
However, by 53%-43% most oppose taxing health care benefits above a certain level — Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus had been floating that idea — and even more are against cutting Medicare costs. Savings in Medicare are part of both House and Senate versions of health care bills.
Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at Harvard, says the results show the friction between competing goals of the health care bills.
"The dilemma is that Congress is trying to solve two problems simultaneously: Save money and insure more people," Blendon says. In the USA TODAY poll, 52% choose controlling costs as more important; 42% expanding coverage. Those focused on costs are likely to have little tolerance for paying higher taxes to cover the uninsured, he says.
More than 8 in 10 of those surveyed say it's extremely or very important that the legislation make health insurance more affordable, but they also express strong resistance to some steps that might help control costs. Ninety-three percent want their health care plan to cover any medical test or treatment that they and their doctor think is needed, and 88% want to be able to choose any doctor or hospital they like.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
MEDIA MATTERS sets the record straight!
Media Matters: Did you hear the one about the sleazy Obama photo? Don't buy it.
At 2:45 p.m. on Thursday, a member of the right-wing message board Free Republic posted a Reuters photo that the news wire captioned as "U.S. President Barack Obama (C) and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) take their places with junior G8 delegates for a family photo at the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy." The Free Republic member invited other members to submit alternative captions for the photo, resulting in dozens of sexually suggestive replies, some using racist epithets.
Thirty minutes later, Internet gossip Matt Drudge promoted the same photo with the headline "Mr. President!" Drudge later revised his headline to read "Second Stimulus Package!"
About two hours later, at 5:12 p.m., the Fox News website The Fox Nation posted the picture along with the headline "Another Stimulus?" It later revised the title to read "Busted?"
Just minutes after Fox Nation's mocking of the photo, ABC News' Jake Tapper posted the photo with the headline "When In Rome...?"
Around 4 a.m., almost 12 hours after he first posted the photo, Tapper posted this message on Twitter: "that foto of POTUS seeming to be sneaking a leer is misleading, im told - video shows the moment was completely innocent." He also updated his blog post by adding "Actually, not so much" to the headline and including video of the incident. Tapper wrote in the updated post, "On first glance, the snapshot appears to show President Obama caught in a moment of less than lofty analysis. But upon looking at the video, the moment might seem to appear quite innocent -- one of those times when a picture can be misleading. The president was on a higher step and was stepping down -- so he looked down to assure his footing as the woman was walking up the stairs." He concluded: "Although: not everyone agrees. Judge for yourself."
Drudge subsequently included a link to Tapper's blog post with the headline "ABCNEWS: NO HE DIDN'T ..."
A classic example of how the right-wing noise machine works was unfolding before the American people. A non-story starts on a right-wing website and works its way into the mainstream. It usually involves Drudge, the fedora-wearing boy who cries wolf (almost daily) on the Internet, and mainstream news outlets follow his lead, offering up under-researched and factually inaccurate story lines.
Had the mainstream media done their job -- you know, checking the video to get the context from which the photo was taken -- they would have clearly seen that Obama was attempting to navigate high steps, while reaching back to help someone behind him do so as well. As Fox News host Greta Van Susteren said after airing video of the event, "Yes, a still picture can lie. And this one does."
Of course, the next morning after Van Susteren's show, the Fox & Friends crew went right back to trashing the president with lascivious speculation that was contradicted by easily accessible fact.
News segments that set the record straight are unfortunately the exception and not the rule. Fox's Van Susteren, ABC's Good Morning America, and MSNBC Live should be commended for pushing back in segments about the faux controversy. Perhaps their colleagues could learn a thing or two from their example. After all, journalists and news outlets checking the facts before running with a "story" is the least we should expect.
Other major stories this week:
Looks like these networks need to gather better intelligence
Eight weeks ago, a controversy erupted after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed during a press conference that the CIA did not inform her and other members of Congress of its past use of waterboarding. Her statement was purportedly contradicted by CIA Director Leon Panetta, who later issued a statement that said, "It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress."
In the days that followed, Pelosi was attacked repeatedly in the press as having besmirched the integrity of the agency in order to defend herself politically, with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough leading the charge. Pelosi was "lying" and "changing her story," he said on May 15, adding, "You don't accuse the CIA of lying. Especially when they're not lying." Three days later, he was even more vocal: The speaker had "been caught in a lie, and I think she really, for the sake of herself and her political future -- she needs to shut up."
The situation changed this week after Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) released a letter on July 7 stating that Panetta admitted in a closed hearing that the CIA had not fully informed Congress on other classified matters. But rather than apologize for his earlier remarks, Scarborough seemed to pretend they had never happened, saying simply that Pelosi, whom he called "a friend of mine from Congress" had "caught a lot of grief." Soon enough, however, MSNBC national security analyst Roger Cressey began the cycle of recrimination again, accusing Democrats of "refighting issues from five years ago."
Economic coverage could have been stimulated by the facts
This week, the economic stimulus bill -- signed by Obama as the first major act of his administration -- failed. At least, according to the obituary it received in the press.
The trouble started when Vice President Joe Biden commented during an interview that the administration had "misread how bad the economy was." The statement, which lent itself to exaggeration, was immediately pounced on by CNBC's Larry Kudlow and Fox's Sean Hannity and Van Susteren, who declared the stimulus "a misreading of the solution to the economy," a "screw-up," and "based on a house of cards," respectively.
Scarborough and CNBC's Maria Bartiromo soon rang further alarm bells about the national debt, in the process falsely claiming that the administration had justified its spending policies by predicting an economic growth rate of 4 percent "over the next decade." In fact, the administration's plans were not based on such a prediction; instead, it assumed a growth rate of 3.2 percent growth in 2010 and 2.6 percent from 2015 through 2019.
The dubious analysis continued when Stephen Moore claimed the following day, "The one thing this administration won't do is cut taxes." Though Moore is "senior economics writer" for The Wall Street Journal, he somehow missed that the stimulus included $288 billion in tax cuts. Van Susteren didn't correct him, although ABC's Claire Shipman at least tried to politely set the record straight the next day on Hannity. She almost got a second sentence in before being drowned out by misinformation.
On this particular issue, however, Fox was to be outdone. MSNBC's Contessa Brewer was shocked -- shocked -- that the government was taking action to address the economy. Her impartial, journalistic assessment deserves to be quoted in full:
Ah, the nagging problem of a faltering economy and millions of out-of-work Americans. And the government's solution? First, taxpayers shell out $700 billion in TARP funds. And then, a sweeping stimulus that costs $787 billion. Oh, and then there's the minimum trillion-dollar health reform in the works. And now talk of another stimulus bill? What?
Contessa Brewer: this week's winner of the Rick Santelli Award for Sage Financial Analysis.
While Fox's Andrew Napolitano raged against the very idea of more stimulus funds -- which he deceptively referred to as a "third bailout" -- both Hannity and CNN's Kiran Chetry were busy suggesting that the contents of the first bill had been doled out as political favors. As proof, they both cited a USA Today article that had actually said the opposite. Specifically, it stated: "Investigators who track the stimulus are skeptical that political considerations could be at work." Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Fox & Friends felt comfortable reporting on an alleged connection between a campaign contribution to Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and a stimulus-funded contract -- without noting that Hoyer's office had already denied any involvement in the awarding of the money.
But it was MSNBC's Mike Barnicle who best illustrated what's wrong with the overwhelming majority of current economic punditry. On Wednesday, he asked his Morning Joe co-hosts incredulously, "What are they doing with the [stimulus] money?" Then on Thursday, he reflected on the detrimental nature of America's "amazingly impatient culture" where people can't stop asking, "Where's the money?" Simply put, this kind of schizophrenic analysis is still overwhelming logical thought, much to the detriment of the viewing public.
At 2:45 p.m. on Thursday, a member of the right-wing message board Free Republic posted a Reuters photo that the news wire captioned as "U.S. President Barack Obama (C) and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) take their places with junior G8 delegates for a family photo at the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy." The Free Republic member invited other members to submit alternative captions for the photo, resulting in dozens of sexually suggestive replies, some using racist epithets.
Thirty minutes later, Internet gossip Matt Drudge promoted the same photo with the headline "Mr. President!" Drudge later revised his headline to read "Second Stimulus Package!"
About two hours later, at 5:12 p.m., the Fox News website The Fox Nation posted the picture along with the headline "Another Stimulus?" It later revised the title to read "Busted?"
Just minutes after Fox Nation's mocking of the photo, ABC News' Jake Tapper posted the photo with the headline "When In Rome...?"
Around 4 a.m., almost 12 hours after he first posted the photo, Tapper posted this message on Twitter: "that foto of POTUS seeming to be sneaking a leer is misleading, im told - video shows the moment was completely innocent." He also updated his blog post by adding "Actually, not so much" to the headline and including video of the incident. Tapper wrote in the updated post, "On first glance, the snapshot appears to show President Obama caught in a moment of less than lofty analysis. But upon looking at the video, the moment might seem to appear quite innocent -- one of those times when a picture can be misleading. The president was on a higher step and was stepping down -- so he looked down to assure his footing as the woman was walking up the stairs." He concluded: "Although: not everyone agrees. Judge for yourself."
Drudge subsequently included a link to Tapper's blog post with the headline "ABCNEWS: NO HE DIDN'T ..."
A classic example of how the right-wing noise machine works was unfolding before the American people. A non-story starts on a right-wing website and works its way into the mainstream. It usually involves Drudge, the fedora-wearing boy who cries wolf (almost daily) on the Internet, and mainstream news outlets follow his lead, offering up under-researched and factually inaccurate story lines.
Had the mainstream media done their job -- you know, checking the video to get the context from which the photo was taken -- they would have clearly seen that Obama was attempting to navigate high steps, while reaching back to help someone behind him do so as well. As Fox News host Greta Van Susteren said after airing video of the event, "Yes, a still picture can lie. And this one does."
Of course, the next morning after Van Susteren's show, the Fox & Friends crew went right back to trashing the president with lascivious speculation that was contradicted by easily accessible fact.
News segments that set the record straight are unfortunately the exception and not the rule. Fox's Van Susteren, ABC's Good Morning America, and MSNBC Live should be commended for pushing back in segments about the faux controversy. Perhaps their colleagues could learn a thing or two from their example. After all, journalists and news outlets checking the facts before running with a "story" is the least we should expect.
Other major stories this week:
Looks like these networks need to gather better intelligence
Eight weeks ago, a controversy erupted after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed during a press conference that the CIA did not inform her and other members of Congress of its past use of waterboarding. Her statement was purportedly contradicted by CIA Director Leon Panetta, who later issued a statement that said, "It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress."
In the days that followed, Pelosi was attacked repeatedly in the press as having besmirched the integrity of the agency in order to defend herself politically, with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough leading the charge. Pelosi was "lying" and "changing her story," he said on May 15, adding, "You don't accuse the CIA of lying. Especially when they're not lying." Three days later, he was even more vocal: The speaker had "been caught in a lie, and I think she really, for the sake of herself and her political future -- she needs to shut up."
The situation changed this week after Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) released a letter on July 7 stating that Panetta admitted in a closed hearing that the CIA had not fully informed Congress on other classified matters. But rather than apologize for his earlier remarks, Scarborough seemed to pretend they had never happened, saying simply that Pelosi, whom he called "a friend of mine from Congress" had "caught a lot of grief." Soon enough, however, MSNBC national security analyst Roger Cressey began the cycle of recrimination again, accusing Democrats of "refighting issues from five years ago."
Economic coverage could have been stimulated by the facts
This week, the economic stimulus bill -- signed by Obama as the first major act of his administration -- failed. At least, according to the obituary it received in the press.
The trouble started when Vice President Joe Biden commented during an interview that the administration had "misread how bad the economy was." The statement, which lent itself to exaggeration, was immediately pounced on by CNBC's Larry Kudlow and Fox's Sean Hannity and Van Susteren, who declared the stimulus "a misreading of the solution to the economy," a "screw-up," and "based on a house of cards," respectively.
Scarborough and CNBC's Maria Bartiromo soon rang further alarm bells about the national debt, in the process falsely claiming that the administration had justified its spending policies by predicting an economic growth rate of 4 percent "over the next decade." In fact, the administration's plans were not based on such a prediction; instead, it assumed a growth rate of 3.2 percent growth in 2010 and 2.6 percent from 2015 through 2019.
The dubious analysis continued when Stephen Moore claimed the following day, "The one thing this administration won't do is cut taxes." Though Moore is "senior economics writer" for The Wall Street Journal, he somehow missed that the stimulus included $288 billion in tax cuts. Van Susteren didn't correct him, although ABC's Claire Shipman at least tried to politely set the record straight the next day on Hannity. She almost got a second sentence in before being drowned out by misinformation.
On this particular issue, however, Fox was to be outdone. MSNBC's Contessa Brewer was shocked -- shocked -- that the government was taking action to address the economy. Her impartial, journalistic assessment deserves to be quoted in full:
Ah, the nagging problem of a faltering economy and millions of out-of-work Americans. And the government's solution? First, taxpayers shell out $700 billion in TARP funds. And then, a sweeping stimulus that costs $787 billion. Oh, and then there's the minimum trillion-dollar health reform in the works. And now talk of another stimulus bill? What?
Contessa Brewer: this week's winner of the Rick Santelli Award for Sage Financial Analysis.
While Fox's Andrew Napolitano raged against the very idea of more stimulus funds -- which he deceptively referred to as a "third bailout" -- both Hannity and CNN's Kiran Chetry were busy suggesting that the contents of the first bill had been doled out as political favors. As proof, they both cited a USA Today article that had actually said the opposite. Specifically, it stated: "Investigators who track the stimulus are skeptical that political considerations could be at work." Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Fox & Friends felt comfortable reporting on an alleged connection between a campaign contribution to Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and a stimulus-funded contract -- without noting that Hoyer's office had already denied any involvement in the awarding of the money.
But it was MSNBC's Mike Barnicle who best illustrated what's wrong with the overwhelming majority of current economic punditry. On Wednesday, he asked his Morning Joe co-hosts incredulously, "What are they doing with the [stimulus] money?" Then on Thursday, he reflected on the detrimental nature of America's "amazingly impatient culture" where people can't stop asking, "Where's the money?" Simply put, this kind of schizophrenic analysis is still overwhelming logical thought, much to the detriment of the viewing public.
BOB HERBERT The Human Equation
NYTimes
Vice President Joe Biden told us this week that the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration.
Puh-leeze. Mr. Biden and President Obama won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Mr. Obama tried to clean up the vice president’s remarks by saying his team hadn’t misread what was happening, but rather “we had incomplete information.”
That doesn’t hold water, either. The president has got the second coming of the best and the brightest working for him down there in Washington (think of Larry Summers as the latter-day Robert McNamara), and they’re crunching numbers every which way they can. They’ve got more than enough data. They understand the theories and the formulas as well as anyone. But they’re not coming up with the right answers because they’re missing the same thing that McNamara and his fellow technocrats were missing back in the 1960s: the human equation.
The crisis staring America in its face and threatening to bring it to its knees is unemployment. Joblessness. Why it is taking so long — seemingly forever — for our government officials to recognize the scope of this crisis and confront it directly is beyond me.
There are now five unemployed workers for every job opening in the U.S. The official unemployment rate is 9.5 percent, but that doesn’t begin to tell the true story of the economic suffering. The roof is caving in on struggling American families that have already seen the value of their homes and retirement accounts put to the torch.
At the present rate, upwards of seven million homes can be expected to fall into foreclosure this year and next. Welfare rolls are rising, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal. The National Employment Law Project has pointed out that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers will begin losing their jobless benefits, just about the only thing keeping them above water, by the end of the summer.
Virtually all of the job growth since the start of the 21st century (which was nothing to crow about) has vanished. If you include the men and women who are now working part time but would like to work full time, and those who have become so discouraged that they’ve stopped actively searching for work, you’ll find that 16.5 percent of Americans are jobless or underemployed. Nearly everyone who is fortunate enough to have a job has a spouse or a parent or an in-law or a close friend who is desperate for employment.
Anyone who believes that the Obama stimulus package will turn this jobs crisis around is deluded. It was too small, too weakened by tax cuts and not nearly focused enough on creating jobs. It’s like trying to turn a battleship around with a canoe. Even if it were working perfectly, the stimulus would not come close to stemming the cascade of joblessness unleashed by this megarecession.
I’d like to see the president go on television and, in a dramatic demonstration of real leadership, announce a plan geared toward increasing employment that is both big and visionary — something on the scale of the Manhattan Project, or the interstate highway program or the Apollo spaceflight initiative.
My choice would be a “Rebuild America” campaign that would put men and women to work repairing, maintaining, designing and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure in the broadest sense — everything from roads and schools and the electrical power grid to innovative environmental initiatives and a sparkling new mass transportation network, including high-speed rail systems.
One of the ways of financing such an effort would be through the creation of a national infrastructure bank, which would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage additional private investment.
There was a time when Americans could think on such a scale and get it done. We used to be better than any other nation on the planet at getting things done. It would be tragic if the 21st century turns out to be the time when that extraordinary can-do spirit disappears and we’re left with nothing more meaningful and exciting than lusting after tax cuts and trying to pay off credit card debt.
The joblessness the nation is experiencing is crushing any hope of a real economic recovery. With so many Americans maxed out on their credit cards and with the value of their homes deep in the tank, the only money available to spend in most cases is from paychecks. The best and the brightest in Washington may have a theory about how to get the economy booming without dealing with the employment crisis, but I’d like to see that theory work in the real world.
Vice President Joe Biden told us this week that the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration.
Puh-leeze. Mr. Biden and President Obama won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Mr. Obama tried to clean up the vice president’s remarks by saying his team hadn’t misread what was happening, but rather “we had incomplete information.”
That doesn’t hold water, either. The president has got the second coming of the best and the brightest working for him down there in Washington (think of Larry Summers as the latter-day Robert McNamara), and they’re crunching numbers every which way they can. They’ve got more than enough data. They understand the theories and the formulas as well as anyone. But they’re not coming up with the right answers because they’re missing the same thing that McNamara and his fellow technocrats were missing back in the 1960s: the human equation.
The crisis staring America in its face and threatening to bring it to its knees is unemployment. Joblessness. Why it is taking so long — seemingly forever — for our government officials to recognize the scope of this crisis and confront it directly is beyond me.
There are now five unemployed workers for every job opening in the U.S. The official unemployment rate is 9.5 percent, but that doesn’t begin to tell the true story of the economic suffering. The roof is caving in on struggling American families that have already seen the value of their homes and retirement accounts put to the torch.
At the present rate, upwards of seven million homes can be expected to fall into foreclosure this year and next. Welfare rolls are rising, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal. The National Employment Law Project has pointed out that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers will begin losing their jobless benefits, just about the only thing keeping them above water, by the end of the summer.
Virtually all of the job growth since the start of the 21st century (which was nothing to crow about) has vanished. If you include the men and women who are now working part time but would like to work full time, and those who have become so discouraged that they’ve stopped actively searching for work, you’ll find that 16.5 percent of Americans are jobless or underemployed. Nearly everyone who is fortunate enough to have a job has a spouse or a parent or an in-law or a close friend who is desperate for employment.
Anyone who believes that the Obama stimulus package will turn this jobs crisis around is deluded. It was too small, too weakened by tax cuts and not nearly focused enough on creating jobs. It’s like trying to turn a battleship around with a canoe. Even if it were working perfectly, the stimulus would not come close to stemming the cascade of joblessness unleashed by this megarecession.
I’d like to see the president go on television and, in a dramatic demonstration of real leadership, announce a plan geared toward increasing employment that is both big and visionary — something on the scale of the Manhattan Project, or the interstate highway program or the Apollo spaceflight initiative.
My choice would be a “Rebuild America” campaign that would put men and women to work repairing, maintaining, designing and rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure in the broadest sense — everything from roads and schools and the electrical power grid to innovative environmental initiatives and a sparkling new mass transportation network, including high-speed rail systems.
One of the ways of financing such an effort would be through the creation of a national infrastructure bank, which would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage additional private investment.
There was a time when Americans could think on such a scale and get it done. We used to be better than any other nation on the planet at getting things done. It would be tragic if the 21st century turns out to be the time when that extraordinary can-do spirit disappears and we’re left with nothing more meaningful and exciting than lusting after tax cuts and trying to pay off credit card debt.
The joblessness the nation is experiencing is crushing any hope of a real economic recovery. With so many Americans maxed out on their credit cards and with the value of their homes deep in the tank, the only money available to spend in most cases is from paychecks. The best and the brightest in Washington may have a theory about how to get the economy booming without dealing with the employment crisis, but I’d like to see that theory work in the real world.
PAUL KRUGMAN NYTimes 'Stimulus Progress'
The Stimulus Trap
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan — this was before Inauguration Day — some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration’s economic stewardship. There’s now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap.
I’ll talk about that trap, and how he can escape it, in a moment. First, however, let me step back and ask how concerned citizens should be reacting to the disappointing economic news. Should we be patient and give the Obama plan time to work? Should we call for bigger, bolder actions? Or should we declare the plan a failure and demand that the administration call the whole thing off?
Before you answer, consider what happens in normal times.
When there’s an ordinary, garden-variety recession, the job of fighting that recession is assigned to the Federal Reserve. The Fed responds by cutting interest rates in an incremental fashion. Reducing rates a bit at a time, it keeps cutting until the economy turns around. At times it pauses to assess the effects of its work; if the economy is still weak, the cutting resumes.
During the last recession, the Fed repeatedly cut rates as the slump deepened — 11 times over the course of 2001. Then, amid early signs of recovery, it paused, giving the rate cuts time to work. When it became clear that the economy still wasn’t growing fast enough to create jobs, more rate cuts followed.
Normally, then, we expect policy makers to respond to bad job numbers with a combination of patience and resolve. They should give existing policies time to work, but they should also consider making those policies stronger.
And that’s what the Obama administration should be doing right now with its fiscal stimulus. (It’s important to remember that the stimulus was necessary because the Fed, having cut rates all the way to zero, has run out of ammunition to fight this slump.) That is, policy makers should stay calm in the face of disappointing early results, recognizing that the plan will take time to deliver its full benefit. But they should also be prepared to add to the stimulus now that it’s clear that the first round wasn’t big enough.
Unfortunately, the politics of fiscal policy are very different from the politics of monetary policy. For the past 30 years, we’ve been told that government spending is bad, and conservative opposition to fiscal stimulus (which might make people think better of government) has been bitter and unrelenting even in the face of the worst slump since the Great Depression. Predictably, then, Republicans — and some Democrats — have treated any bad news as evidence of failure, rather than as a reason to make the policy stronger.
Hence the danger that the Obama administration will find itself caught in a political-economic trap, in which the very weakness of the economy undermines the administration’s ability to respond effectively.
As I said, I was afraid this would happen. But that’s water under the bridge. The question is what the president and his economic team should do now.
It’s perfectly O.K. for the administration to defend what it’s done so far. It’s fine to have Vice President Joseph Biden touring the country, highlighting the many good things the stimulus money is doing.
It’s also reasonable for administration economists to call for patience, and point out, correctly, that the stimulus was never expected to have its full impact this summer, or even this year.
But there’s a difference between defending what you’ve done so far and being defensive. It was disturbing when President Obama walked back Mr. Biden’s admission that the administration “misread” the economy, declaring that “there’s nothing we would have done differently.” There was a whiff of the Bush infallibility complex in that remark, a hint that the current administration might share some of its predecessor’s inability to admit mistakes. And that’s an attitude neither Mr. Obama nor the country can afford.
What Mr. Obama needs to do is level with the American people. He needs to admit that he may not have done enough on the first try. He needs to remind the country that he’s trying to steer the country through a severe economic storm, and that some course adjustments — including, quite possibly, another round of stimulus — may be necessary.
What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan — this was before Inauguration Day — some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration’s economic stewardship. There’s now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap.
I’ll talk about that trap, and how he can escape it, in a moment. First, however, let me step back and ask how concerned citizens should be reacting to the disappointing economic news. Should we be patient and give the Obama plan time to work? Should we call for bigger, bolder actions? Or should we declare the plan a failure and demand that the administration call the whole thing off?
Before you answer, consider what happens in normal times.
When there’s an ordinary, garden-variety recession, the job of fighting that recession is assigned to the Federal Reserve. The Fed responds by cutting interest rates in an incremental fashion. Reducing rates a bit at a time, it keeps cutting until the economy turns around. At times it pauses to assess the effects of its work; if the economy is still weak, the cutting resumes.
During the last recession, the Fed repeatedly cut rates as the slump deepened — 11 times over the course of 2001. Then, amid early signs of recovery, it paused, giving the rate cuts time to work. When it became clear that the economy still wasn’t growing fast enough to create jobs, more rate cuts followed.
Normally, then, we expect policy makers to respond to bad job numbers with a combination of patience and resolve. They should give existing policies time to work, but they should also consider making those policies stronger.
And that’s what the Obama administration should be doing right now with its fiscal stimulus. (It’s important to remember that the stimulus was necessary because the Fed, having cut rates all the way to zero, has run out of ammunition to fight this slump.) That is, policy makers should stay calm in the face of disappointing early results, recognizing that the plan will take time to deliver its full benefit. But they should also be prepared to add to the stimulus now that it’s clear that the first round wasn’t big enough.
Unfortunately, the politics of fiscal policy are very different from the politics of monetary policy. For the past 30 years, we’ve been told that government spending is bad, and conservative opposition to fiscal stimulus (which might make people think better of government) has been bitter and unrelenting even in the face of the worst slump since the Great Depression. Predictably, then, Republicans — and some Democrats — have treated any bad news as evidence of failure, rather than as a reason to make the policy stronger.
Hence the danger that the Obama administration will find itself caught in a political-economic trap, in which the very weakness of the economy undermines the administration’s ability to respond effectively.
As I said, I was afraid this would happen. But that’s water under the bridge. The question is what the president and his economic team should do now.
It’s perfectly O.K. for the administration to defend what it’s done so far. It’s fine to have Vice President Joseph Biden touring the country, highlighting the many good things the stimulus money is doing.
It’s also reasonable for administration economists to call for patience, and point out, correctly, that the stimulus was never expected to have its full impact this summer, or even this year.
But there’s a difference between defending what you’ve done so far and being defensive. It was disturbing when President Obama walked back Mr. Biden’s admission that the administration “misread” the economy, declaring that “there’s nothing we would have done differently.” There was a whiff of the Bush infallibility complex in that remark, a hint that the current administration might share some of its predecessor’s inability to admit mistakes. And that’s an attitude neither Mr. Obama nor the country can afford.
What Mr. Obama needs to do is level with the American people. He needs to admit that he may not have done enough on the first try. He needs to remind the country that he’s trying to steer the country through a severe economic storm, and that some course adjustments — including, quite possibly, another round of stimulus — may be necessary.
What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.
What Happened in Vegas
NY TIMES - GAIL COLLINS
The reason the Republicans lost so many Senate seats last November is now becoming clear. No one had any time to think about the campaign. They were too busy worrying about Senator John Ensign’s sex life.
Last month Ensign, a Nevada Republican, called a press conference to confess that he had had an affair with a former staff member. That was when we learned, to general surprise, that Ensign had been widely regarded as a possible future presidential candidate. Also, that he is currently the only veterinarian in the U.S. Senate.
Nobody paid a great deal of attention. Really, there are only so many randy Republicans we can keep track of at once. But lately, the Ensign saga has become more and more fascinating. Every social conservative in Washington seems to have been involved.
Most of the juicy details have been supplied by Doug Hampton, Ensign’s former chief of staff, who says his wife, Cindy, a bookkeeper for Ensign’s political action committees, was seduced by the senator while they were guests at the Ensign home over the Christmas holidays in 2007. Hampton, 47, gave a long TV interview in Las Vegas this week — a disjointed account of betrayal in which he concluded at one point: “All of those tentacles were birthed because John needed things to go down like this.”
It’s actually a good thing that adultery knocked Ensign out of the presidential contest because it appears that he would not be the kind of leader who surrounds himself with the best and the brightest.
The senator says the affair went on until August 2008. Doug Hampton’s version is that it lasted only a few months, followed by a long period of complicated drama in which the remorseful Cindy was pursued by the Love Veterinarian.
Ensign was, at the time, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which was supposed to be working to elect candidates in 2008. In Washington, he lived with some other conservative Christian lawmakers in a building known as the “Prayer House.” Both members of the N.R.S.C. and residents of the Prayer House were brought into the drama. Hampton, in his version of events, seems to remember Ensign’s friends as being particularly concerned with making sure that the cuckolded aide got generous compensation for his suffering.
One of Ensign’s roommates, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was described by Hampton as being particularly vocal about the importance of cash contributions to “make these folks whole.” Coburn denies this, although he won’t say exactly what advice he gave to his erring colleague. Coburn told Roll Call that he talked to Ensign as a “physician and as an ordained deacon” and that he will therefore have the right to keep mum even if he’s dragged into court or a Senate committee hearing.
This makes me sort of hope that some kind of investigation takes place just so Coburn, who’s an obstetrician, can explain how exactly doctor-patient confidentiality figures into this.
Hampton says Ensign’s friends convinced the senator to write Cindy a good-bye letter, then bundled him off to the FedEx office to make sure it got mailed. Then, he claimed, Ensign called Cindy and said: “The letter’s coming. ‘Doug’s ratted me out. Don’t pay attention to the letter.’ ”
Let’s hope this part of the story isn’t true. I’d hate to think that a person who says things like “Doug’s ratted me out” is in the U.S. Senate. Or even giving rabies shots to beagles in Las Vegas.
We hardly need to point out that Ensign was one of the people who demanded that President Bill Clinton resign over the Lewinsky affair, that he votes against financing for education and contraception services to combat teenage pregnancy and that he supports a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In the world of politics, hypocrisy is a hard market to corner, but lately the Republicans have been making a Microsoft-like effort to do it.
Both of the Hamptons lost their jobs, and Doug was shuttled off to a Las Vegas-based airline, run by a friend of Ensign’s, where he is now vice president of government affairs. Unappeased, he hired a lawyer to demand that Ensign make financial amends for “evil and completely unjustifiable acts by one of our country’s top leaders.” He also tried to leak the story of the affair to Fox News, apparently under the theory that out of all the media, Fox would be most excited by the opportunity to humiliate a powerful conservative Republican senator.
While Ensign refused to respond to what small and negative minds might regard as blackmail, the senator’s parents gave the Hamptons $96,000. Ensign’s father is a retired casino mogul, and the senator’s lawyer said the money was given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time. The gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others.”
Truly, this puts a whole new spin on the term “family values.”
The reason the Republicans lost so many Senate seats last November is now becoming clear. No one had any time to think about the campaign. They were too busy worrying about Senator John Ensign’s sex life.
Last month Ensign, a Nevada Republican, called a press conference to confess that he had had an affair with a former staff member. That was when we learned, to general surprise, that Ensign had been widely regarded as a possible future presidential candidate. Also, that he is currently the only veterinarian in the U.S. Senate.
Nobody paid a great deal of attention. Really, there are only so many randy Republicans we can keep track of at once. But lately, the Ensign saga has become more and more fascinating. Every social conservative in Washington seems to have been involved.
Most of the juicy details have been supplied by Doug Hampton, Ensign’s former chief of staff, who says his wife, Cindy, a bookkeeper for Ensign’s political action committees, was seduced by the senator while they were guests at the Ensign home over the Christmas holidays in 2007. Hampton, 47, gave a long TV interview in Las Vegas this week — a disjointed account of betrayal in which he concluded at one point: “All of those tentacles were birthed because John needed things to go down like this.”
It’s actually a good thing that adultery knocked Ensign out of the presidential contest because it appears that he would not be the kind of leader who surrounds himself with the best and the brightest.
The senator says the affair went on until August 2008. Doug Hampton’s version is that it lasted only a few months, followed by a long period of complicated drama in which the remorseful Cindy was pursued by the Love Veterinarian.
Ensign was, at the time, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which was supposed to be working to elect candidates in 2008. In Washington, he lived with some other conservative Christian lawmakers in a building known as the “Prayer House.” Both members of the N.R.S.C. and residents of the Prayer House were brought into the drama. Hampton, in his version of events, seems to remember Ensign’s friends as being particularly concerned with making sure that the cuckolded aide got generous compensation for his suffering.
One of Ensign’s roommates, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was described by Hampton as being particularly vocal about the importance of cash contributions to “make these folks whole.” Coburn denies this, although he won’t say exactly what advice he gave to his erring colleague. Coburn told Roll Call that he talked to Ensign as a “physician and as an ordained deacon” and that he will therefore have the right to keep mum even if he’s dragged into court or a Senate committee hearing.
This makes me sort of hope that some kind of investigation takes place just so Coburn, who’s an obstetrician, can explain how exactly doctor-patient confidentiality figures into this.
Hampton says Ensign’s friends convinced the senator to write Cindy a good-bye letter, then bundled him off to the FedEx office to make sure it got mailed. Then, he claimed, Ensign called Cindy and said: “The letter’s coming. ‘Doug’s ratted me out. Don’t pay attention to the letter.’ ”
Let’s hope this part of the story isn’t true. I’d hate to think that a person who says things like “Doug’s ratted me out” is in the U.S. Senate. Or even giving rabies shots to beagles in Las Vegas.
We hardly need to point out that Ensign was one of the people who demanded that President Bill Clinton resign over the Lewinsky affair, that he votes against financing for education and contraception services to combat teenage pregnancy and that he supports a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In the world of politics, hypocrisy is a hard market to corner, but lately the Republicans have been making a Microsoft-like effort to do it.
Both of the Hamptons lost their jobs, and Doug was shuttled off to a Las Vegas-based airline, run by a friend of Ensign’s, where he is now vice president of government affairs. Unappeased, he hired a lawyer to demand that Ensign make financial amends for “evil and completely unjustifiable acts by one of our country’s top leaders.” He also tried to leak the story of the affair to Fox News, apparently under the theory that out of all the media, Fox would be most excited by the opportunity to humiliate a powerful conservative Republican senator.
While Ensign refused to respond to what small and negative minds might regard as blackmail, the senator’s parents gave the Hamptons $96,000. Ensign’s father is a retired casino mogul, and the senator’s lawyer said the money was given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time. The gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others.”
Truly, this puts a whole new spin on the term “family values.”
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