The NYTimes tries to discuss the phenomenon of Page Six. They don’t do a very good job, but it’s better than the Times’ half-assed attempt at its own gossip column.
The L word
George Will blasts the GOP (collaterally damaging the Dems) with his apolcalyptic column about the move to restrict “527” political donations:
David Dreier (R-Calif.) explained, sort of. He said he voted against McCain-Feingold because “dictating who could give how much to whom” violated the First Amendment, but now he favors dictating to 527 contributors because McCain-Feingold is not violating the First Amendment enough: It is not “working as it was intended.” That is, it is not sufficiently restricting the money financing political advocacy.
[. . .] Oh, so that is what the First Amendment means: Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech unless speech annoys politicians.
That “L word” I mentioned? It comes up in the conclusion of Will’s column.
“Being iconic is getting harder all the time.”
Here’s a beautiful slideshow about our Golden Age of Skyscrapers, by Slate’s Witold Rybczynski. Except for the Gehry design for the NYTimes building. I hated that.
You can’t fire me, I quit!
Fawaz Turki explains “How To Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper”
What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government. The other two? Bringing up Islam as an issue and criticizing, by name, political leaders in the Arab or Islamic world for their brazen excesses, dismal failures and blatant abuses.
[. . .] My first provocation was — horror of horrors — to criticize Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after he cracked down on human rights activists several years ago. My second occurred soon after the failure of the Camp David accords when I called for the resignation of Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority.My last was to write about the atrocities Indonesia had committed during its occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999. For that transgression, my Saudi paper showed no mercy. I was out the door. No questions asked, no explanations given. You don’t write about atrocities committed by an Islamic government — even when they’re already documented in the history books — and hope to get away with it.
In other depressing news from the Islamic world, it appears my buddy the Brooding Persian is pulling the plug on his blog. I hope that’s not the case; while his posts could get insanely overlong, he offered me a vitally important perspective on life, politics and religion in Iran and on earth. And he also reminded me of the importance of The Iliad.
BIO followup
As I wrote, the BIO conference was “a singles bar for CEOs and venture capitalists.” Just add governors.
New toy
Get set up on Google Calendar.
More on Job Destruction
Last July, I wrote about the nuttiness of the American Jobs Creation Act, a one-time tax break for companies bringing overseas profits back to the U.S. (the tax rate on such earnings drops from about 38% to about 5%). Michelle Leder at Slate just wrote about the subject, calling it an “absurd provision of a law designed to create jobs.”
It’s a good piece, but she makes a “numbers in a vacuum” argument about Pfizer, which leads me to wonder if she’s not being fair toward the other companies, which are in fields that I don’t cover. She writes,
At Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that announced the single largest repatriationâ€â€$37 billionâ€â€the one-time windfall works out to approximately $11 billion. That kind of tax savings buys a lot of $600-an-hour lobbyists, though not, apparently, many scientists and salespeople. In its annual report, Pfizer doesn’t list employees by region. But the company’s total head count dropped to 106,000 at the end of 2005, about 8 percent fewer jobs than at the end of 2004.
Thing is, those layoffs weren’t at all related to Pfizer’s overseas profits. They were a result of Pfizer acquiring Pharmacia and Warner-Lambert, along with a raft of smaller companies. Those acquisitions basically guaranteed layoffs in the thousands; this is what’s known as “generating efficiencies by combining operations.” So those layoffs were in the works long before the AJCA was passed in 2004.
Now, you can argue that the acquisitions were foolhardy or unlucky (especially the Pharmacia one, which pivoted on the Celebrex/Bextra franchise), but complaining that the company should have kept ‘redundant’ employees on because it had this one-time tax refund coming is flat-out stupid.
Um, Happy Easter?
Okay, probably not, if you read this column by Christopher Hitchens about that “Lost Gospel of Judas” controversy.
Since I don’t have a horse in this race, my opinion shouldn’t count for much, but if you’re dealing with the earthly incarnation of an ominpotent, omniscient divinity, then it’d be awful tough to betray him, since he’d know in advance what you were going to do. As such, I’ve always figured that Judas had his role to serve in the story, and that it didn’t exactly make him damnation-worthy.
But Hitchens explores that issue better than I could.
No double-whammy, no double-whammy!
The City Journal’s Steven Malanga explains why my home state sucks:
But today New Jersey is a cautionary example of how to cripple a thriving state. Increasingly muscular public-sector unions have won billions in outlandish benefits and wages from compliant officeholders. A powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making Jersey among the nation’s biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags. Inept, often corrupt, politicians have squandered yet more billions wrung from suburban taxpayers, supposedly to uplift the poor in the state’s troubled cities, which have nevertheless continued to crumble despite the record spending. To fund this extravagance, the state has relentlessly raised taxes on both residents and businesses, while localities have jacked up property taxes furiously. Jersey’s cost advantage over its free-spending neighbors has vanished: it is now among the nation’s most heavily taxed places. And despite the extra levies, new governor Jon Corzine faces a $4.5 billion deficit and a stagnant economy during a national boom.
While over at the New York Times, we find out that my hometown is about to be put back on the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list:
Contractors hired by Ford dumped tons of paint sludge laced with toxic chemicals and other polluted debris in a remote area of Ringwood around two Revolutionary War-era iron mines. Some local residents, most of them members of the Ramapough Mountain Indian Tribe, have serious illnesses, including certain cancers and skin diseases that have been linked to the toxins. They also have leukemia rates that are twice the statewide average, according to a lawsuit they filed against Ford in January.
The Passed Over & the Elite
Greeted Passover on a flight home from Chicago. I haven’t held or been to a seder in a few years. The last one was the time I ended up meeting the Zionist Conspiracy To Get Me Married To A Nice Jewish Girl. It’s nice to see that the Jewish lobby isn’t as effective as Drs. Mearshimer and Walt think it is.
But I made it in safe and sound, with a little in-flight bumpiness and traffic delay. Just about finished Geek Love, which I’m enjoying a bunch. I sorta disagree with Dunn’s use of an X-Men-like character in the midst of an otherwise believable world of a really demented sideshow freak family.
The BIO conference went well; I had some good interviews and got a lot of good anecdotes & bits of intel about various aspects of the industry. I also got to meet several people with whom I’ve been in work-e-mail contact for years. That usually helps facilitate the working relationship, except when one of the two parties doesn’t remember having met the other face-to-face at a previous conference.
Anyway, the conference was described to me as “a singles club for CEOs and VCs,” and it’s true that a lot of the conversation was about funding, in-licensing developmental products (as in, a big company looking to buy the rights to a smaller company’s drug that’s currently in clinical trials). The conference is also filled with regional economic development councils for various states or countries (like that Malaysia group I mentioned a while back). They work hard to get companies to choose their regions for R&D or manufacturing facilities, and I like hearing them explain their virtues. The Maine pavilion had a slogan on one of its displays that read (paraphrasing): “Bangor: more metropolitan than you think!”
Well, duh.
Anyway, one of the funnier moments of the last day occurred as we were getting ready to board the plane back to Newark. It was one of the first Continental flights after show’s end, and the gate area was filled. The clerk called for all Elite Access passengers to board. None of us stepped back to make room. Turns out, when you have a conference that’s as money-centric as BIO, with so many attendees who constantly travel, everyone has Elite status.
Except my associate editor, who felt that her non-Elite status was a badge of honor.