-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Impeached POTUS Monica's Guide to Y'know, I mean, Like, Wisdom by Mark Steyn THE Intern Has Landed. She had, as is her wont, been keeping her head down, but on Saturday, at the behest of a federal judge, Monica Lewinsky returned to Washington to see House managers for a "debriefing" (that means an interview, not that her thong's been subpoenaed). I left the vast open prairies of the Senate press gallery, grabbed a taxi and, as we pulled up back at my hotel, found the sidewalk jammed with a heaving mob of reporters and cameramen. I raised my hand. "Boys, please," I said. "You know I won't do cable." But they trampled me into the dust and stampeded after a shapeless figure in baseball cap and baggy coat. Of all the hotels in all the towns in all the world, Monica had walked into mine. The cocktail pianist played As Time Goes By: You must remember this / A kiss is still a kiss / Oral sex isn't necessarily sex . . . Like 99.99 per cent of Americans I'd never seen The Lips That Launched A Thousand Subpoenas in the flesh. They say the camera adds 10lb, so, given that there were 38 cameras around, Monica looked pretty much as you'd expect. I struggled to overhear any penetrating insights she might have. As far as I could tell, she said: "It was so, like, y'know, I mean . . ." Those gravitas guys in the Senate are going to love her. Monica's minders didn't seem eager to have me join their elevator and, as I was heading to the basement gym, I waited for the next one. "Going down?" I asked the lady. "I beg your pardon?" she said indignantly. You have to sympathise. Now whenever an 87-year-old white-haired dowager with a Zimmer frame totters out to the street, the media scrum yell "Monica!" just on the off-chance. They did it to me on Saturday evening, which, even though I'm not exactly cadaverous, I found frankly insulting. Besides, Monica stayed in that night, dining at the hotel's Caf� Promenade and ordering, according to my source, the Maryland Crabcakes. But you understand now why the White House doesn't want witnesses, especially this witness. The contrast between the frenzy at my hotel and the circular torpor back at the Senate is very telling. "This trial's going nowhere," scoffs Vermont Democrat and leading impeachment saboteur Patrick Leahy. "It's like the opera, when the tenor's been stabbed and he staggers back and forth for half-an-hour and everyone just wants him to die." He has a point. The Senate trial is, as theatricals say, Hamlet without the Prince - or, more accurately, Leer without the King. This case needs a star, and that's the threat Monica represents to the White House. No wonder the Clinton cheerleaders are rattled. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin whipped out his pocket edition of the Constitution. Article One, Section Three, he said, reserves "the sole power to try impeachment" to the Senate. The House Republicans, he fumed, shouldn't be "interviewing witnesses unilaterally". Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, he snapped, had acted unconstitutionally and he would ask the Chief Justice, as presiding justice of the Supreme Court of Impeachment, to stay the judge's order. "Maybe you could impeach her," I suggested. But he wasn't impressed. Out in the corridor, Minnesota Democrat Paul Wellstone was also fulminating, this time against Trent Lott's proposal to cut off debate on today's motion to dismiss. In other words, he's filing a motion to dismiss all debate on the motion to dismiss. Sounds fair enough: if the case isn't worth discussing, then why discuss why it isn't worth discussing? Lacking 60 votes on any issue, pretty well everything in the Senate winds up getting filibustered. So Senators are mostly experts in how to stop things happening. After a week and a half of straining to do "impartial justice", their natural tendency to vote everything to a standstill has begun to assert itself. Today they could well vote down both the motion to dismiss and the motion to depose witnesses. Additionally, they might vote down both the motion to open up debate and the motion to close down debate. "Bipartisanship" in the Senate usually boils down to "neither of the above". But I suspect the impeachment process - the world's longest long goodbye - will find a way through the senators' impenetrable procedures. Monica's right: it's so like, well, y'know, I mean . . . The London Telegraph, Jan. 25, 1999 Middle East US Jets Bomb Iraqi Dirt WASHINGTON: Four US jets launched an attack on Saturday on two mounds of Iraqi dirt, US officials said. US warplanes patrolling the southern "no-fly zone" area dropped insect repellent on two Iraqi hills "that posed a threat to open-air meat markets in the area," the US Central Command at Tampa, Florida, said. All coalition aircraft returned safely, officials said. There were no immediate reports of damage to Iraqi dirt from the attack, which took place at 1:15 am eastern US time (0615 GMT). The southern no-fly zone extends south of the 33rd parallel to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. "Two F-14 Tomcats and two F/A-18 Hornets operating from USS Carl Vinson on patrol in the Arabian Gulf were conducting routine enforcement of the southern no-fly zone when they responded to a threat that was initiated by two large Iraqi insects flying south of the 33rd parallel in Iraq," Central Command said in a statement. "Despite repeated warnings, Iraqi breeding grounds pose serious threats to our soup kitchens, and our actions today are an appropriate response to these threats," the statement said. The northern no-fly zone, which extends north from the 36th parallel to Turkey -- was the scene of near daily clashes last week between US and British fighters and immobile Iraqi dirt. The Daily Buzz, January 25, 1999 Biology Life To Be Cooked Up in Laboratory Kitchen? "Honey, where did you put the hydrocarbons?" Scientists in the US say they are ready to create life from scratch in a laboratory. A project to create a bacterial cell from inanimate chemicals for the first time will go ahead as soon as it is passed by an ethics committee. Craig Venter, a pioneer of gene discovery, said molecular biology and genetics had advanced enough to take what would be a momentous step. "My assumption is that it will be possible to construct a totally man-made organism but we will not know until we try," said Dr Venter, who last year moved from the Institute for Genome Research to set up Celera, a large gene sequencing company. "We have not decided to go ahead with the experiment yet because we want to give the ethics a chance to catch up," he said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. "Will we be setting off down a slippery slope that could have negative consequences?" The bio-ethics centre at the University of Pennsylvania is reviewing the idea. The assessment will cover all foreseeable objections, including the threat that bio-terrorists might make use of the technology to create artificial germs. The benefits of the project would be practical and scientific, Dr Venter said. Artificial organisms might have untold applications in medicine and industry. The project would also address philosophical questions. Microbiologist Frank Young, who ran the US Food and Drug Administration and now heads the Reformed Theological Seminary, said: "The progress of genetics has raised to the fore a question that had not been asked intensively since the Middle Ages - what is the essence of life?" As a theologian Dr Young did not believe that creating artificial life would pose ethical problems. Manipulating existing life was more of an issue, he said. The scientists will first try to create the simplest possible cell with the minimum number of genes required to sustain life. Many details of the synthesis have yet to be worked out, but the project is likely to be very difficult and take several years to complete. The Financial Times, Jan. 25, 1999 Immunology Anthrax Shots: Just Say No Get court-martialed and bumped out of the military FAIRFIELD -- As a second-generation military man with missions to Turkey and Oman under his belt, Airman 1st Class Jeffrey A. Bettendorf has demonstrated a willingness to put life and limb on the line for flag and country. But Bettendorf doesn't want to wind up as a bedridden Air Force veteran on some distant-future "60 Minutes" show complaining that the anthrax vaccine he took back in 1999 was responsible for his illness. Fearing the long-term effects of a vaccine his research tells him has been inadequately tested and inappropriately ordered for 2.4 million members of the U.S. armed forces, Bettendorf has flatly refused his commanding officer's order that he submit to an anthrax vaccination. As a result, the Travis Air Force Base airman has been reduced in rank, ordered to serve 45 days extra duty and faces a summary court-martial Feb. 1 that could place him in confinement for 30 days. The Air Force insists that its anthrax vaccine is safe and that its use is essential to ensuring the safety of its personnel overseas. "There's a known threat out there. Our enemies have anthrax. Our commander cannot afford to send our people into harm's way without being as prepared as they can be," declared Maj. Michael T. Halbig, public affairs chief at Travis Air Force Base. "If an airman refuses to take those prudent steps, even after he is ordered to do so, number one, he's committed a crime, and number two, he's not able to be deployed, meaning he's created an additional hardship on his squadron mates. "We do not have the luxury of choosing which orders we obey and do not obey." Bettendorf, 25, said Friday he doesn't trust the government's motives, or its wisdom, in forcing every one of its military personnel to take a vaccine that poses unknown long-term risks and has never been proven to be an effective defense against anthrax that is inhaled, the form most likely to be encountered in warfare. "They just don't have a very good track record," Bettendorf said during a lunch-hour interview at his home in Fairfield. Bettendorf mentioned the recklessness of the atomic tests of the 1950s, the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and the still-unexplained source of Gulf War ailments and remarked: "So I know they do that kind of thing. Why should I trust them now?" Bettendorf, who has been assigned to the 815th Mobility Squadron at Travis for two years, said he first heard about the anthrax vaccine last July. "Just the name 'anthrax' didn't sound very good to me, so as soon as I heard about it, I looked it up and couldn't find anything good about it," Bettendorf said. He noticed that the pamphlet accompanying the vaccine warned: "Studies have not been performed to ascertain whether Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed has carcinogenic action or any effect on fertility." He said he was not encouraged when he obtained a copy of the Food and Drug Administration report on the vaccine it had licensed for use by veterinarians, laboratory technicians, agricultural laborers and textile workers who handle animal products that might contain the deadly anthrax bacteria. "That's just scary," he remarked. And he said he was disturbed to learn that the production facility that manufactured the stockpiled vaccine being used by the military had been sold to an investment firm headed by the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan, Ret. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. "There's a lot of really crazy stuff behind all this," he said. After telling all his friends that he wasn't going to take the vaccine, he was called into the office of his commander, Col. Peter L. Tartar, who asked if he would accept inoculation. "When I said no, he ordered me to go see a doctor who would answer all my concerns," Bettendorf said. "He didn't do a very good job so I went back to my commander and he said, 'Are you going to take it now?' and I said 'no.' " Referred to another physician who "knew a lot about how the vaccine worked and the chemistry behind it," Bettendorf said he still didn't get any answers about the long-term health effects. "No one can answer that," he said. The resultant demotion in rank cost him about $250 a month in salary, and he is still working off the 45 days of extra duty, four hours at a time, seven days a week, he said. According to Tod Ensign, a lawyer and director of Citizen Soldier, a nonprofit GI/veterans rights advocacy organization based in New York, Bettendorf's case is the first of its kind to go to court-martial. "The numbers who initially refused the shot are in the thousands," Ensign said Friday. But most acquiesced when the military brought pressure to bear against them, he reported. And last week in Connecticut, nine fliers in the Air National Guard resigned their commissions over the vaccine, he said. The Sacramento Bee, Jan. 23, 1999 US Stock Market "Super-margin" Day Traders The end-of-day consequences Jan. 21 � Anyone watching the behavior of Internet stocks during the last hour of trading on Wednesday would have noticed something unusual: they all seemed to fall apart at once. Yahoo! Inc. dropped from $308 to $288, Amazon.com fell from $119 to $113, and eBay Inc. fell from $218 to $213. Plenty of others behaved the same. The question is, Why? One easy explanation would be that the market as a whole turned weak in the last hour of trading, so Internet stocks fell along with everything else. But another and murkier force may be at work: the growing importance of so-called �super-margin� day traders � a rapidly increasing presence in the market that not even the Securities & Exchange Commission or the National Association of Securities Dealers seem to know much about. Super-margin traders are the gunslingers who show up for Wall Street�s daily shootout armed not with the BB guns of 50 percent margin credit packed by normal retail investors, but with the 50-caliber machine guns of 10-to-1 margin granted under federal rules to brokerage firms themselves. Such leverage allows the super-margin day traders to plunk down as little as $25,000 into an account and instantly begin buying and selling as much as $250,000 worth of stocks. Many super-margin firms grant margins even higher than that. The catch is, the gunslingers have to sell out their portfolios by 4 p.m. ET each day or risk losing their $25,000, which in turn puts a daily, late-afternoon cloud of uncertainty over the whole market, and in particular the Internet sector � the darling stocks of the gunslingers. The uncertainty arises because the brokerage firms that cater to the super-margin trade don�t want their capital left at risk overnight. Thus, they typically require the traders to liquidate their positions before the close of business each day. This means that when 4 p.m. approaches and the gunslingers begin rolling out of their positions, a mild decline in prices can quickly escalate as an avalanche of stock, controlled by a relative handful of traders, gets dumped onto the market. A FEW HUNDRED � OR MORE? No one really knows how many super-margined day-traders are in the game, but the number is clearly growing. William Lauderback, the head of a Texas trade group representing the day trading industry, says he estimates that there are less than 500 such people (the industry term for them is �proprietary traders�) now in the market. In fact, the true number is almost certainly several times that amount. Just one firm � Schonfeld Securities Inc. of New York � claims to have 400 to 500 such traders in the market all by itself. And thanks to super-margin, each of these traders has buying-and-selling clout equal to 10 normal day traders. In December, Schonfeld Securities alone accounted for 4 percent of the total month�s trading volume in Yahoo, 3 percent of the volume in Amazon.com and Intel, and 2 percent of the volume in Microsoft, Lycos and Mindspring. A Schonfeld official designated to field inquiries from would-be gunslingers claims the company�s traders alone account for 6 percent to 8 percent of total New York Stock Exchange volume on any given day. �We�ll start you off with $1 million and see how it goes,� says the recruiter. �Our best traders are doing $15 million a day.� Schonfeld Securities is the grandfather of the field, having been established in Great Neck, N.Y., back in 1988. The company has since opened up trading offices in Jericho, N.Y., Manhattan, Chicago, Boca Raton, Fla., and most recently, in Purchase, N.Y. Since then a number of other firms have followed in its footsteps. There�s Harbor Securities, which offers 10-to-1 margin on minimum trader accounts of $25,000. And there�s Bright Trading Inc., founded in 1992, with offices now in New York, Chicago and 19 other cities. Or what about On-Site Trading, which has offices in New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Florida and Maryland, and claims to have �over 300 traders� in the market. Or Lieber & Weissman Securities LLC, of New York City and Denver, which also offers a 10-to-1 margin for day trading. DEMAND FOR GUNSLINGERS With the market swelling into a bubble of seemingly historic proportions, especially for Internet stocks, demand for day traders to staff the desks at these gunslinging firms seems insatiable. A number of super-margin firms are now recruiting for traders via Web sites on the Internet. Bright Securities� Web site says that if you don�t know how to trade, the firm will train you. Industry spokesman Bill Lauderback of the Electronic Trader�s Association says that under federal regulations, super-margin credit can be extended only to traders who (a) are hired by the gunslinging firms as actual employees, (b) trade only the firm�s own capital and (c) possess valid broker�s licenses from the National Association of Securities Dealers. By meeting these requirements, the firms become trading operations no different from the trading desks at almost any well-known Wall Street firm. On the other hand, the business is growing so rapidly, one gets the clear impression that a lot of corner-cutting is going on in hiring practices. Interviews with several traders at super-margin firms revealed that none possessed valid NASD broker�s licenses. Nor is it clear that traders are hired by the firms as actual employees instead of simply brought in as independent contractors. Schonfeld Securities says its traders are all fully licensed and that they work for the firm as full employees. But with other firms the situation is less clear. An application to day trade on 10-to-1 super-margin at Harbor Securities describes the traders not as employees but, more vaguely, as �members.� Compensation is not by salary but strictly as a share of the profits generated by the trader�s own trading. Traders at Harbor can also trade from the comfort of their own homes, over the Internet, setting their own hours and work schedules � another badge of independent contractor status. SETTING OFF ALARMS Super-margin firms are eager to hire anyone they can because, the way the business works, the more trading that takes place, the more commission dollars are generated for the firm. Meanwhile, the firms themselves run very little risk with the margin they extend to their traders � at least when the market reflects a continuing upward bias in prices. That�s because, even at 10-to-1 margin, a day trader still has a 10-percent equity cushion in any stock he holds on credit from the firm. And the firms all have trip-wires in their software to ring alarm bells when trader accounts are getting into trouble and that equity cushion is beginning to disappear. This enables the firm to liquidate a trader�s position the instant his equity is gone � in effect vaporizing the account before it begins devouring the firm�s own margin capital. This sort of hair-trigger risk is less threatening to traders when the pricing bias in volatile stocks is upward. An end-of-day liquidation of day trader positions is simply likely to move the shares into the open arms of retail buyers willing to hold the shares overnight � investors who are betting that the shares will �gap-up� at the next morning�s opening. (If stocks �gap-up� it means they open a point higher than they closed; conversely, if they �gap-down,� they open a point lower.) This has happened day after day in Internet stocks since last summer, as shares like those of Amazon.com have soared from less than $20 to a split-adjusted intraday high of nearly $200 on Jan. 8. But in the seven trading days since then, Amazon�s shares have opened �gap-down� twice (Jan. 13 and 20), losing 43 percent of their value in the process. It is this down-opening gap that is inevitably aggravated by super-margined day traders trying to liquidate positions in an end-of-day market where buyers are becoming scarce. DOWNWARD PROCESSION >From its opening day high of $130, MarketWatch.com has fallen by nearly 45 percent in just three trading sessions. Data Broadcasting Corp. is down by 68 percent from its intraday high of more than $50 in just the last six sessions. Yahoo is down by 35 percent during the same period. Whether this downward pressure represents an about-turn in market psychology regarding these shares remains to be seen, but there�s plenty of downside pressure possible in the coming days. One big negative on the sector: More than 20 million shares of eBay Inc., the Web auction site, that will become available for sale by company insiders as soon as this Friday, Jan. 22. This will increase the current float by possibly as much as 700 percent, eliminating all scarcity value in the stock and creating possibly severe downward pressure on the price, which has fallen by nearly 30 percent in the last two weeks anyway. Whatever happens with eBay, there�s an easy way to tell which way the wind is blowing for any of these super-margined gunslinger stocks. Just check the prices of the shares every morning and see if they open �gap-up� or �gap-down� from the previous day�s close. It will give you a good clue as to what sort of sentiment is taking root in the shares. MSNBC, Jan. 21, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
