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Politics : Those Damned Democrat's -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (1086)	5/15/2003 10:22:38 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 1604

California's problem Today, a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) panel is expected to hear arguments on whether or not to allow California's politicians to back out of about $17 billion worth of power contracts. It shouldn't. Allowing politicians to break contracts and short-change power companies would not only be recedent. The problem started at the peak of California's energy crisis, when Gov. Gray Davis was desperate to lock in energy prices cheaper than the $330 per megawatt hour that the state was then paying. Mr. Davis eventually signed about 40 long-term contracts, calling them "the bedrock of a long-term energy solution." For instance, Mr. Davis signed a contract with Allegheny Energy for power priced at $61 per megawatt hour. Now that the power crisis has passed, Allegheny sells power in the $30 range. So the state wants out of what at the moment seem highly overpriced contracts. However, allowing California to abrogate its good-faith agreements would undermine the contract process. Both sides of a deal are expected to live up to the terms they've agreed to. Besides, canceling the contracts would set a terrible precedent. If FERC sides with California now, then will it allow power companies to negotiate for better contracts when prices go up? Probably not. In the meantime, why would companies invest in California with no certainty of an investment return. California claims that the situation is unique, brought about by Enron-style market distortions. However, allowing the state to back out of the contracts would be fair only if the companies with which the state signed long-term contracts were gaming the market and, in doing so, were profiting from the distorted value of the contracts. Yet, it appears that both politicians and power producers were dealing with the same set of market mirages. None of the negotiating parties knew how badly the data points were off, which way the prices would go or when the crisis would pass. Besides, many of those power contracts have been renegotiated. While at one point, about $45 billion was in dispute, now "only" about $17 billion is. Despite its gargantuan deficit, the state should be able to renegotiate the rest to something more palatable to the legislators while being acceptable to the creditors. What California really needs is greater energy production. However, Sen. Dianne Feinstein recently voted against the Republican-backed energy bill, because the bill did "nothing to combat global warming." Her colleague, Sen. Barbara Boxer, supports Sen. Jim Jeffords' costly Clean Power Act of 2003, which would treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. This highlights the fact that California doesn't so much have an energy problem as a political problem, one that won't be ameliorated, much less solved, by allowing California's politicians to escape responsibility for their actions on the energy front. FERC should insist that California's politicians stick to the bargains they made. Doing otherwise would shortchange not just a few companies, but the entire energy contract process. URL:http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20030515-21495250.htm

To: calgal who wrote (1086)	5/15/2003 11:56:06 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 1604

Interesting: Bob Tyrrell URL:http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/tyrrell.html ‘Grey’ turns to grim at Times newsandopinion.com \| The dark times at The New York Times grow darker. Just days after the paper flagellates itself with a front-page story admitting that it repeatedly published fabricated stories full of plagiarism and other journalistic sleight-of-hand from a 27-year-old con-man reporter whom the editors of the Slippery Rock Herald would have apprehended, the indispensable Drudge Report announces that "at least two more NY Times reporters are being investigated for possible journalistic irregularities." Drudge, one of modern American journalism's prodigies (and naturally a fellow objurgated by establishment journalists everywhere), goes on to reproduce a memo from the Times' editors calling all "news room colleagues" to "an open forum." Apparently, the sufferings of The New York Times will continue for a while. CNN.com reports that the newspaper's con-man reporter, Jayson Blair, is under investigation by the U. S. Attorney's Office. Precisely what the corpus delicti might be is still unclear, but CNN reports, "Federal officials publicly criticized a front-page, exclusive article of Blair's that said the U.S. attorney had forced investigators to end their questioning of sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad just as he was ready to confess." Yes, it seems that young Blair was sent down to Washington to cover the delicate prosecution of a very important news story, despite his shoddy record at the newspaper. In its tortured revelations about Blair the other day, the Times admits that over three and a half years his editors had made 50 corrections in his work. Anyone familiar with reporters from the Times knows that they are among the best in the business, and as I noted during the Three Week War, the quality of writing in the paper is often superb. I put the paper's John Burns in a class with World War II's Ernie Pyle. But investigative reporters such as Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta are first-rate also. Imagine how these fine journalists must have suffered working alongside such an obvious fraud as Blair. The real culprits in this scandal are the editors, or at least some of the editors. I have heard of them repeatedly bottling up fine reportage that they did not want revealed to their readers, particularly during the Clinton scandals. Now we know they promoted at least one obvious huckster, and Drudge suggests more will be exposed. Even in its self-flagellatory report on Blair, the Times was disingenuous, suggesting that such misbehavior had not been uncovered before. I have been keeping a file on journalistic (and scholarly) hoaxers and plagiarists for years. The file is several inches thick. This sort of misbehavior is more rampant today than at any time in modern journalism. Moreover, not all the fabricators and plagiarists once caught are exiled from the media as they should be. One still sees the plagiarist Mike Barnicle and fellow plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin figuring prominently in the media. And the Times should have come clean about other instances of fabrication and plagiarism in its pages. I have in hand the February 2002 expose of one Michael Finkel , a contributor to the New York Times Magazine , who fabricated a story about a poor Ivory Coast laborer. Finkel was fired. Then there was the incomparable escapade of the Times star reporter and Boston bureau chief, Fox Butterfield. In 1991, he reported on a speech plagiarized by a Boston University scholar. Amazingly, in reporting the scholar's plagiarism, Butterfield himself plagiarized from the Boston Globe. He was given a one-week suspension. I do look forward to Drudge's further reports on the Times gone bad. Yet there is hope. Earlier this week, I attended the annual dinner of the Phillips Foundation, where that foundation gives fellowships to young journalists intent on doing important journalistic work. Eight fellowships were given. All recipients struck me as capable and promising, and there was one young man from The New York Times. Not only that, but he is the very same age as the fallen Blair, 27. Mike Porath is a producer for The New York Times on the Web. Having traveled the world, backpack slung from his shoulders, reporter's notebook in hand, he returned to these shores with a plan to write about Saudi Arabia and a problem he saw there that breeds terrorism. According to his thesis, Saudi Arabia despite its wealth fails "to prepare its youth for a world in which tolerance and innovation are necessary for economic growth."