As the civil war worsens in Haiti, Daniel Drezner and Tyler Cowan point to Haiti Pundit, a blog about news and views on Haitian politics and culture. With American armed forces entering Haiti today, this is a good source of current information on the Haitian situation.
“Rumsfeld’s War” is a new book by Rowan Scarborough, defense reporter for The Washington Times. Today’s Times contains the first excerpt of a series from the book.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s efforts to transform the Pentagon have an interesting background that stretches back several decades. Author Robert Coram compellingly presents this interesting story in his book, “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.” Suffice it to say that appearances are deceiving with regard to the Pentagon, the special interests that attempt to control it, and the elected officials that attempt to lead it. This is not a story that the mainstream media has covered well, so Mr. Coram’s book and a few others that deal with this interesting story are essential to a sound understanding of the key issues confronting the United States Armed Forces in the context of modern warfare.
The Wall Street Journal ($) reports that Martha Stewart‘s legal team is seriously considering not putting Martha on the stand during her defense of the criminal case against her. The Stewart defense team apparently thinks that the prosecution’s laborious month long presentation of its case against Martha chloroformed the jury. Accordingly, the defense team is considering a minimalist defense that could be done by the end of the week.
Although understandable given the prosecution’s apparent mishandling of this case, not putting Martha on the stand is a risky strategy. Particularly in white collar prosecutions, jurors want to hear from the defendant. If the case is a closer call than what it appears, then Martha’s failure to defend herself on the stand could tilt jurors against her.
According to this refreshing piece, it appears that O.J. Simpson may have a bit of trouble collecting his fee for appearing at an autograph show in St. Louis.
Ethan Bronner, deputy foreign editor of the NY Times, has a review in today’s New York Times Book Review on several recent books that share a central theme — i.e., that the War on Terror combined with Attorney General John Ashcroft, as one book put it, ”are responsible for some of the most egregious civil liberties violations in the history of our nation.” Mr. Bronner is much more measured than that statement, and the entire article is well worth reading. Here are a couple of tidbits:
If you believe these changes are eroding the liberties that make this nation great, these books are for you. They will give texture and sharpness to your rage. You can pick from among them based on your level of concern. If you are incensed, go for the Brown essay collection, ”Lost Liberties.” In it, Aryeh Neier says, ”We are at risk of entering another of those dark periods of American history when the country abandons its proud tradition of respect for civil liberties.” And Nancy Chang of the Center for Constitutional Rights says that executive measures taken in the wake of the Patriot Act ”are responsible for some of the most egregious civil liberties violations in the history of our nation.” Given the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the Palmer raids in World War I and the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, both of these statements seem to me hard to defend.
Of course, one legitimate complaint that Ashcroft and many others could lodge against nearly all these books is that they fail to spend any time on the threat to liberty not from Ashcroft but from Al Qaeda. Liberty is meaningless without security, as Viet Dinh, the former assistant attorney general who wrote much of the Patriot Act, has often said. Stuart Taylor Jr., a legal journalist, put it this way in The National Journal in December 2002: ”Should we eschew fishing expeditions through Ryder truck rental records and fertilizer purchases? Not if we want to prevent terrorist mass murders. And I, for one, am a lot less worried about the government snooping through my credit card bills and psychiatric records than about being anthraxed in the subway or killed by a nuclear explosion in my downtown Washington office.” While this strikes me as too far in the other direction, such words are useful to keep in mind while reading of Ashcroft’s sins.
President Bush announced that Dr. Mark B. McClellan, the food and drug commissioner, will be named to run Medicare and Medicaid, the health insurance programs for more than 70 million Americans. Dr. McClellan, 40, is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, the brother of the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, and a son of the Texas comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who has been carrying on a public spat with Governor Perry and has hinted that she might run against Governor Perry in the 2006 Republican Primary.
The NY Times has a couple of interesting articles in its Sunday business section. In this one, Times business reporter Ken Gilpin notes that the stock market has moved steadily higher since last summer, even though insider stock sales have far outnumbered purchases. Mr. Gilpin interviews Jonathan Moreland, a money manager and the director of research at InsiderInsights.com, as to the reason for this apparent contradiction.
Another Times article reports on a recent academic study that challenges the popular reason for not worrying about the high price-to-earnings ratio in the stock market today — i.e., the idea that the ratios should be high when interest rates are low. According to the traditional Fed Model, stock earnings growth should be slower when Treasury note rates are high and faster when those rates are low. However, that has not been the case historically, according to the new study, “Inflation Illusion and Stock Prices,” by Harvard finance professors John Y. Campbell and Tuomo Vuolteenaho. According to the study, the stock market has tended to become significantly undervalued in times of high inflation and overvalued in times of low inflation. As a result, the situation in the market today may be the mirror opposite of what prevailed in the late 1970’s — that is, stocks may be as overvalued today as they were undervalued then.
This new book — Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS by former 12 year IRS agent, Richard Yancey — looks potentially interesting. Mr. Yancey describes his 12 years with the IRS in which he relates everything from his General Patton-type trainer who wished he could carry a gun to his own development into someone who could close down a four-person woodworking shop for failure to pay payroll taxes and seize homes of the tax delinquent without losing sleep.
Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle does a good job in this article summarizing the structure of Enron‘s plan of reorganization that is scheduled for a confirmation hearing in the New York Bankruptcy Court in April.
I’m been quite involved in the Enron case, initially representing a suitor of Enron’s online trading business, and then representing a former high-level Enron executive in several civil litigation matters and advising another former Enron executive and a former Arthur Andersen partner in regard to matters relating to the case. So, I’ve got a pretty good sense of what’s going on in the case. Inasmuch as Enron’s most recent Disclosure Statement — the document that a chapter 11 debtor distributes to creditors to provide them adequate information on which to make an informed judgment on the reorganization plan — was nearly 2000 pages, summarizing the plan in the context of a short newspaper article is no small feat. So, kudos to Mr. Berger.
One small nit, though. Eric, that’s “substantive” consolidation, not “substantial.”
A savvy businessman once told me that there is an inverse relationship between the independence of a board of directors and the level of perks that the board approves for management. This NY Times article details some of the absurd perks that were paid to some of the corporate executives who are defendants in ongoing criminal cases. Not a pretty picture.