Why? Few Clues From Afghan Attack Suspect's Home

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the U.S. soldier alleged to have killed 16 Afghan civilians, was described by a former platoon leader Saturday as an "awesome" soldier.

"He always got the job done," said Cpt. Christopher Alexander, who led Bales on his second tour in Iraq. "You give this guy a task — it could be menial, it could be dangerous — either way, you never had to worry about whether he'd get it done and get it done well."

Alexander said he and other former members of the company found out Monday that Bales had been linked to the massacre. They kept it quiet until his name was leaked by government officials Friday. He said everyone who knows Bales from that time is mystified, and guesses this might be a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I would be surprised, though, if we haven't been told everything," he said. "There's just a lot about this story that doesn't make sense."

Bales has not yet been charged. He was flown back to the U.S. from Kuwait and arrived Friday evening at a military detention center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Read more.....

In Sit-Down Restaurants, an Economic Indicator

HAVE you been eating more at restaurants with waiters rather than fast-food joints?

If so, you are not alone, and that in fact is an indication that the American economy is improving.

Over the 12 months through January, sales at what the government calls full-service restaurants were 8.7 percent higher than in the previous 12 months. That was the fastest pace of growth since the late 1990s, when the economy was booming. Moreover, as is seen in the accompanying charts, that rate was much greater than the rate of growth in sales at limited-service restaurants.

Since those numbers became available 20 years ago, that difference has been a reliable indicator of how the economy is going. When times get tough, people may still eat out, but they cut back.

Full-service restaurants may or may not be expensive. Le Bernardin in Manhattan qualifies, but so does Red Lobster. The range at limited service places is not nearly as wide. Read more.......

The Tale of the $100 Bill

By now we’ve probably all been forwarded a version of the tale of the $100 bill that single handedly wiped out lots of debt. In case some readers haven’t seen it yet, it goes something like this:

A bald-headed bearded stranger stopped in town and went into an small old hotel to check in. He asked to go check out the rooms first so, in good faith, he left a $100 bill—a deposit of sorts—with the hotel owner. The hotel owner immediately ran next door to pay his grocery bill. The grocer ran it across the street to pay one of his suppliers. The supplier used it to pay off his co-op bill. The co-op guy ran it back across the street to pay the local hooker who had taken up residence in the aforementioned hotel. The hooker ran it downstairs to pay her hotel bill just ahead of the returning traveler, who picked the $100 bill off the desk and left saying that the rooms were not satisfactory.

Someone asked the hotel owner, “Who was that stranger?” The owner said, “I don’t know, but he sure looked a lot like Ben Bernanke.” Read more......

Fed Profits

The Fed announced yesterday that it turned over $76.9 billion of its earnings to the Treasury (and the taxpayer) during 2011. This was near the record $79.3 billion transferred during 2010. It is about three times the amount transferred during more normal times. For example, the transfers averaged $21.5 billion from 2002 through 2005.

While total Fed earnings include fees for services like check clearing and wire transfers provided to depository institutions, the bulk of the earnings come from interest on loans and securities acquired as a by-product of its monetary policy. The sharp increase in recent years resulted from the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet associated with so-called quantitative easing.

Past experience suggests that this announcement will do nothing to dispel the false notion that the Fed uses taxpayer funds in its operations rather than contributes to the pool of taxpayer funds. Its earnings contributions have made the fiscal situation less-worse than it otherwise would have been. That is a side benefit, of course, rather than a reason to expand its balance sheet. Read more.....

In Protest, Democrats Zero In On Men's Reproductive Health

Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, a Democrat, has introduced legislation that would regulated men's use of reproductive health services.

Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University.

Some would prohibit men from getting vasectomies, such as Georgia's House Bill 1116, which states:

"Thousands of children are deprived of birth in this state every year because of the lack of state regulation over vasectomies."

Others, like an amendment proposed by Oklahoma State Sen. Constance Johnson, restrict where a man can ejaculate, effectively outlawing all manner of sexual acts. The amendment says:

"Any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman's vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child."

And Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner recently put forward legislation that would require men seeking drugs like Viagra to first get a cardiac stress test to ensure their heart is ready for sexual activity. Oh, and they would also have to obtain certification from one of their recent sexual partners that they are indeed experiencing problems with erectile dysfunction. And they would be required to see a sex therapist before getting a prescription. Read more.......

Why postgrads are taking New York law schools to court

Are law schools misleading potential students about the value of a JD (professional doctorate in law)? That's the argument that a handful of New York-based law grads from New York Law School, Hofstra and Brooklyn Law are making in a New York state court. They claim that the schools fudge postgraduate employment rates. They cite one school claiming that 90% of students are employed after graduation, when according to the complaints, only 40% have jobs that require a law degree and a number of students work in temporary jobs at the law school itself, which boots employment numbers.

The truth is that law school, if you don't go to a top one such as Harvard or Yale, is a gamble (especially in a bad economy). Students at top-tier schools are able to find jobs relatively easily, but students at other schools – New York Law, Hostra and Brooklyn among them – have to be at the top of their class to secure steady employment easily. It's easy to say that students should have known better, and that instead of filing a lawsuit they should take personal responsibility for their decisions. After all, if you're smart enough to go to law school, you should be smart enough to read employment data, right? And it's hard to feel sympathy for wannabe lawyers, who can come across as some of the most entitled people on the planet by seeming to say, "I went to law school, now give me a six-figure salary," when the unemployment rate in the US, though falling, is still more than 8%. Read more.....

Ulster Unionist Race is a Two-Man Contest

I was wrong--or at least premature--when I said in my last post that the Ulster Unionist Party leadership contest would be a three-man race involving Danny Kennedy, Mike Nesbitt, and John McCallister. Kennedy announced on Friday that he would not be filing nomination papers for the position and would instead be backing Mike Nesbitt. Nominations for the race closed yesterday with only McCallister and Nesbitt having filed. The former UTV anchor/presenter has emerged as the establishment choice for the leadership with backing by three out of four UUP lairds (UUP members elevated to the House of Lords) including former liberal faction leader Ken Maginnis, now Lord Maginnis, and former Good Friday Agreement skeptic John Taylor, now Lord Kilclooney. Because former party leader David Trimble is now a Conservative peer, he is not among the four lairds. Nesbitt has also been endorsed by the Belfast Telegraph, the paper of the unionist establishment. 

Kennedy's main aim was to protect his ministerial position in the Executive, which was threatened by McCallister's call for the UUP to form the opposition. Kennedy is not a personality who relishes confrontation and so was happy to make an implicit deal with Nesbitt, after having been approached by a number of party figures, under which he will keep his ministry and Nesbitt will get the leadership. Had Kennedy remained in the race he would have risked splitting the non-liberal vote within the party and throwing the election to McCallister and thereby losing his ministerial position in the long run.

This is reminiscent of the 1825 "corrupt bargain" in which Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams made an implicit but unwritten bargain. Both despised Andrew Jackson--whose father had emigrated from Ulster shortly before Jackson was born, the third rival in a four-man presidential contest at a point when the United States effectively had a single political party. Because no single candidate had a majority of electoral votes the election went to the House of Representatives to decide the election with each state's House delegation casting a single vote. Clay, who had come in fourth behind Jackson and Adams and a Georgia Treasury secretary was eliminated from consideration. So Clay threw his considerable support in the House behind Adams who won the presidency even though he had received fewer popular and electoral votes than Jackson. Adams rewarded Clay by appointing him as his secretary of state, which in the early nineteenth century was considered to be the stepping stone to the presidency. Jackson made a major issue of this "corrupt bargain" in the 1828 presidential election that laid the foundation for America's two-party system.  Jackson won and became one of the great presidents of American history while Adams entered into a second career in the House during which he opposed slavery from 1835 until his death in early 1848. 

As I indicated in my previous post, liberals do not generally win UUP leadership elections. There have only been two UUP leaders who could be classified as liberals: Ken Andrews from 1940 to 1943 and Terence O'Neill from 1963 to 1969. Both were before the trauma of The Troubles and the competition with the DUP. In January 1974 when UUP leader Brian Faulkner adopted an uncharacteristic liberal persona by supporting power sharing with the nationalist SDLP party he was forced out of the leadership and forced to resign from the party.

The leadership election will be on March 31 in an as yet unnamed Belfast hotel.