Speak the vocabulary of consumer protection

AUSTIN, Texas -- In the Most Chilling Quote category, consider this gem from Mitchell Daniels, director of the office of Management and Budget, concerning the administration's ongoing campaign to deregulate everything in sight: "We must learn to speak the vocabulary of consumer protection."

Oooo, Grandma, what big teeth you have! The Wall Street Journal did an admiring profile this week of the "regulatory czar," John D. Graham, who works for Mitchell. Graham, you may recall, was the subject of a peppy confirmation fight on account of he founded Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis. The center is heavily funded by business and industry groups and by individual businesses. You will be amazed to learn that the center often criticizes regulations disliked by the very people who give it money! Graham once claimed that government regulations kill 60,000 Americans a year, a figure that turned out to be ... evanescent.

Graham said in a recent speech: "There is no grandiose plot to roll back safeguards. This administration is pursuing an agenda of smarter regulation." Ah, smarter regulation; well, that's different. The Journal

Texas state Republican convention

DALLAS -- The world will little note nor long remember what was said at the Republican state convention last weekend. Nevertheless, the shindig had its moments. (I first saw the Lincoln quote applied to some political event in the Boston Globe a while back, but I can no longer remember who wrote it.)

A supremely nostalgic moment occurred during the convention's recognition of Sen. Phil Gramm for Lifetime Achievement. Gramm responded graciously, as befits a retiring pol making his final appearance, thanking all and sundry, giving us his fondest memories of public service: "I had the honor to be a storm trooper in the Reagan Revolution," he declared. But then, he couldn't help himself. The old pit bull dropped the statesman pose and went for the Democrats' jugular. He started in politics as an attack dog and finished that way, too -- in its way, a glorious moment.

Unfortunately, the attack was a trifle off. Gramm appeared to be in a state of high indignation because two Democratic contenders for the gubernatorial nomination had held a debate in Spanish. "Anybody who

Guinea Pigs in Freedom's Cause

No one with even a passing knowledge about the history of chemical and biological warfare in the United States should be in the least surprised about recent disclosures regarding the testing of nerve gas upon unsuspecting members of the U.S. military back in the 1960s. (If you're looking for these historical data, best not look under the file marked "war on terror.") In the late 1970s, the CIA made the mistake of responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Scientologists by contemptuously sending them a railroad car of shredded documents.

The Scientologists patiently pieced enough of the millions of scraps of paper together to figure out that in 1951, the U.S. Army had secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type of bacterium was chosen because blacks were believed to be more susceptible than whites.

The towns of Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., were targets of repeated army bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the

Nuclear Weapons and Media Fog


"Even one military move by either of these nuclear-armed neighbors," USA Today's front page reported in big type, "could set off an unstoppable chain reaction that could lead to the holocaust the world has feared since the atomic bomb was developed." The June 10 edition of Newsweek includes a George Will column with a chilling present-day reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis: "The world may be closer to a nuclear war than it was at any time during the Cold War -- even October 1962."

Yet when it comes to nuclear weapons, the mainstream American press has scant emotional range or professional zeal to scrutinize the progression of atomic perils. From the start of the nuclear era, each

Cheney-Halliburton connection

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating Halliburton -- the company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney -- for accounting irregularities. What took so long?

Dick Cheney's record at Halliburton is one of the most under-covered stories of the past three years. When you consider all the time and ink spent on Whitewater, the neglect of the Cheney-Halliburton story is unfathomable.

The proximate cause of the SEC investigation is an "aggressive accounting practice" at Halliburton approved by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen -- a little matter of counting revenue that had not yet been received, $100 million worth. The New York Times reports two former executives of Dresser Industries, which merged with Halliburton in 1998, say Halliburton used the accounting sham to cover up its losses. Dresser may have thought it got a bad deal in that merger because of that $100 million "anticipation" on the credit line, but the deal turned out to be much more sour for Halliburton.

Cheney bought himself a former Dresser subsidiary facing 292,000

Connect the dots

AUSTIN, Texas -- It's time to connect the dots. If you think the government is having a connection problem on the national security side, you should take a look at the starburst of dots on the economic side for a really stunning scandal. When you start to connect the dots on the business side, you will notice that we're being stolen blind.

One of the best interviews I've read in a long time is in the current issue of The Texas Observer with Bill Black, a name that will bring back fond memories for those who followed the S&L scandals closely.

Black is now an assistant professor of public affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He is a lawyer, an economist and former litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board -- which is to say, the man who went after the S&L crooks. After he left government, he got a Ph.D. in criminology. His greatest claim to fame is that Charles Keating, that noted thief, once wrote a memo to his top lobbyist that said: "Highest priority -- Get Black. GOOD GRIEF -- If you can't get (Jim) Wright and Congress to get Black -- kill him dead -- you ought to retire."

Greens as "Spoilers," Already

Are the Greens running against Democrats ... and maybe giving Republicans the edge? Anyone who thinks we'll have to wait till the Bush-Gore rematch in 2004 to get into that can of worms had better look at Minnesota this year. Here's Senator Paul Wellstone bidding for a third term, with the tiny Democratic majority in the Senate as the stake. Writing in The Nation, John Nichols sets the bar even higher. "His race," Nichols wrote tremulously this spring, "is being read as a measure of the potency of progressive politics in America."

Wellstone's opponent is Norm Coleman, who is the former mayor of St. Paul, Minn., and enjoying all the endorsements and swag the RNC can throw in his direction. The odds are against Wellstone. Coleman is a lot tougher than the senile Rudy Boschwitz, whom Wellstone beat in 1996, and many Minnesotans aren't enchanted about his breach of a pledge that year to hold himself to two terms. But ignoring Wellstone's dubious future, liberals are now screaming about "the spoiler," who takes the form of Ed McGaa, a Sioux born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a Marine Corps vet of the wars in

Global Warming

AUSTIN, Texas -- Throwing around words like "fantastic" and "stupefying" is considered bad form outside the tabloid press. But I'm damned if I know what else to say about the news that the Bush administration has decided that global warming is indeed taking place and they are planning to do exactly nothing about it.

Here we are in the middle of wallowing in this, "What didn't they know and why didn't they know it?" debate -- this maddening, haunting and probably useless exercise in "Why didn't somebody do something?" Sept. 11 left quite a bit of spilt milk on the floor, but even that disaster will pale against the consequences of unchecked global warming. Yet here is the Bush government announcing right here and now that it knows this disaster is coming but it will not do anything to stop it. They will not even do anything to slow it down or soften its impact. What can you call that except fantastically irresponsible?

According to The New York Times, the United States has reported to the United Nations that that global warming will substantially alter our

'War on Terrorism' Winking at Nuclear Terror

Two countries -- each with dozens of atomic bombs -- are threatening to make war on each other. Large numbers of troops have mobilized. Deadly cross-border clashes are intense. And people in charge of both governments have become more bellicose by the day.

Maybe you think this situation calls for U.S. officials and American media outlets to focus on ways of preventing the outbreak of a war that could quickly turn into a nuclear conflagration. If so, your mode of thinking is distinctly out of step with the "war on terrorism."

You see, as the summer of 2002 begins, what matters most is the Pentagon's determination to kill as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible. Some of them are located in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps also Kashmir, the region that's under bitter dispute by India and Pakistan.

Since the leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad have their fingers on nuclear buttons, their escalating threats ought to concentrate our minds on the very real perils of the situation. An attack with a single 10-kiloton atomic warhead could cause immediate deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands. For starters. "American

I told you so

AUSTIN, Texas -- Those of the populist persuasion are struggling against what is perhaps the most irresistible of all temptations -- the urge to say, "I told you so."

It is raining evidence these days. The newspaper business sections are turning into the Daily Fraud Update. Deloitte & Touche is now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for its role in the unpleasant doings at Adelphia, energy CEOs keep biting the dust -- first at CMS, then at Dynegy -- the Arthur Andersen trial in Houston gets more depressing by the day, and corporate evildoers are suddenly ubiquitous.

OK, I promise that I'm only going to do this once, but ... we did tell you so. Three years ago, I wrote a column explaining why I thought the high-tech market made Las Vegas casinos look good. One reader was so amused by this ludicrous display of ignorance he sent me an enormous flower arrangement -- the thing had to have cost a couple hundred bucks -- saying I'd given him the best laugh he'd had in years. I bring this up because I think it's important to remember the degree of triumphalism that raged among

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