Category Archives: Ranting

The Money Chronicles: Volume I

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I recently read a book about everyday finances called Stop Getting Ripped Off: Why Consumers Get Screwed, and How You Can Always Get a Fair Deal by Bob Sullivan that has me thinking. The premise of the book is that many of us don’t know much about simple arithmetic and we get ripped off by people who take advantage of that. I’m calling this series “The Money Chronicles” in the hopes that this will (like the Justice Chronicles) will become a recurring theme.

Virtually everyone I know borrows money in some form, be it a mortgage, a car loan, or a credit card. Very few people are going to let you use their money for free, and it makes sense to charge interest. If you borrow $100.00 at 10% interest and pay it back in a year, you’ll pay $110. Easy, right?

Well… It is, but like most debt it isn’t that clear cut. Because we’ve gotten used to phrases like “annual percentage rate” (APR), “revolving credit,” and “compounding interest,” we tend to sign up for a loan, pay the bill each month, and let somebody else do the math. In a world where everyone is virtuous that would be fine. I’m blogging about this because we don’t live in such a world and there are armies of people out there who are happy to advantage of us, and take our money.

I’m going to start with the place that most people first run into trouble: credit cards. I can’t tell you how many offers I get over the course of a year that promise me all sorts of stuff if I sign up for their card. They do everything they can to tell you that by signing this line you can enter a world of free money. Let’s see what happens with this card.

I’m going to use my current American Express bill as an example. My current balance is $1319.19, the interest rate (annual percentage rate or APR) is 15.24% and the minimum amount due is $28.00. If I pay off the entire balance (as I intend to), I pay no interest. As long as I do this, I’ll never pay a penny of interest.

But if I pay only the $28.00 and continue to pay only the minimum, and never use the card for new purchases it will take 12 years to pay it off and I’ll have ended up paying $2677.00. Better than that, if I make the payment even one day late I’ll be charged an additional $39.00 late fee.

If I spend the next 12 years paying off the card, I’ll be 61 years old when I’m done. In fairness I’ll have gotten the benefit of whatever I bought for the $1319.19, but the rest? The rest of the money ($1357.81) does nothing but make the credit card companies wealthier. And frankly, the 15.24% isn’t too bad. If my interest rate were 20%, I would need 23 years to pay it off and the total payoff amount would be $3722.00. In 23 years I’ll be 72 and will probably have no memory of what I bought in 2010.

There’s lots more, but there’s one thing I encourage you to do: buy Bob Sullivan’s book. One eye opener for me was how the credit cards use average daily balance and how you can save money by making large purchases toward the end of the month. If you do nothing else, read pages 84 to 89.

A La Jolla Couple Had a Close Call Yesterday as an Asteroid Passed Within 50,000,000 Miles Of Earth

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OK, I’ve been thinking about this post for several weeks, and recent events have pushed me to write this:

It’s time to stop listening to fearmongerers and get better at assessing risk.

As much as I can, I avoid watching local news as it seems to be the worst offender, but yesterday I couldn’t. I was at a nursing home writing up my note on one of my patients and the local news was on in the background. It seems that the night before, somebody (or somebodies) set fire to the teacher’s lounge at an elementary school in Carlsbad. You can read about it here.

It’s a fairly simple story, and as it plays out it will probably be some neighborhood kids who wanted a day off from school (which didn’t happen, by the way). But the local news played it like it was 9/11 all over again. They sent a camera crew who set up base on a hill near the school (higher ground is always a good visual) to report this case of terrorist arson. They talked about how it could have been worse (the fire alarm alerted the authorities who extinguished it in 10 minutes): Imagine if there was no fire alarm? Imagine if the fire spread to somewhere where there was flammable liquids? Imagine if it happened when there were students in the school. Imagine if … You get the picture.

This story goes against the backdrop of the whole Toyota scare. I have a 2006 Prius so I have some interest in this. A few months ago we heard there was a possibility that the floor mats could slide under the gas pedal and cause it to stick and make the car hard to stop. It was the cause of a fatal accident here in San Diego. On my next tune up I asked and they put something under the mat to make sure it didn’t slide. That may or may not have solved the problem for some Toyotas (though not mine). Toyota is trying figure out what’s causing the problem; that makes sense. Yesterday Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said that anyone driving one of these cars should immediately stop driving them until they get them fixed.

The reality is that the risk of a bad outcome is pretty remote. Nevertheless all sorts of news organizations are sending out crews to stake out minivans, asking suburban moms if they are afraid for their children. Nobody wants to sound like they don’t care about their kids so there are miles of film of suburban moms talking about how scared they are. The reality is that there are much greater risks than this.

We are not good at understanding risk.

We are also very susceptible to voices that tell us to be afraid of something we can’t control. A large percentage of us are afraid to fly when in reality the drive to the airport is much riskier. We worry about being robbed when identity theft is much greater (and we are fairly cavalier about giving out personal information).

We obsess over the Dow Jones stock average when most of us don’t contribute enough to our 401(k).

There are many other examples, but the point is clear: news organizations make money by telling us about things we can’t control but can harm us. We are more than willing to hear these stories and make bad decisions based on them. Catastrophic events can do great harm to us, but the chances of them actually happening are remote.

Let’s all understand that there is risk in most of what we do, but ignore those people and organizations who profit from making us afraid.

Here’s a Health Care Idea: Stop Trying to Live to Be 100

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Working for hospice for the past 12 years I’ve had the opportunity to see how we age in this country, and I keep coming back to a disturbing thought: in many ways our health care system is intended to keep people alive forever and in many cases we sacrifice quality of life for quantity of life.

Now, before you start making unkind comparisons between me and Jack Kevorkian let me assure you that I’m not talking about death panels and assisted suicide. I’m also willing to concede that long life sometimes goes hand in hand with good quality of life (my 91 year old father in law who still drives, sits on several boards, and plays bridge every Thursday is a case in point).

I’m also aware that average life expectancy in this country has grown from 46 years in 1900 to 76 years now. Vaccines, clean water, antibiotics and many other avenues of health care have given us this gift.

But we also see improved health care can cause us to live longer, but live sicker and we accept this because we are obsessed with living as long as we can. Look how much we cheer the centenarians that Willard Scott brings us on the Today Show. I love Willard but he shows these people looking good and talks about how everybody loves them. Just once I’d like to see him celebrate someone who has advanced dementia or has been bedridden for the past 5 years. Those centenarians never seem to get on the show.

I’m guessing that this obsession for living to be 100 is rooted in our fear of death. On one level that makes sense and we are often guided by fear more than anything else. But on another level, we need to stop fooling ourselves. The oldest documented person in the world was Jeanne Calment (1875-1997) who lived to be 122. And the death rate for all of us is the same: one per person.

The harsh truth is that no matter what we do, if we eat healthy, eschew alcohol and tobacco, exercise, moderate fat intake, whatever, we’re going to die. We can’t control that. We can, however, control how we live given the finite nature of our lives.

I think we need to rethink our goal. Instead of trying to live forever, or at least as long as we can, we should think about living well for the time we have. That sounds easy, but it’s not what we do. It means we have to acknowledge the point where it’s not working. For my part, here’s what I’ve decided:

  • I’m currently 49. On May 11th I turn 50. I acknowledge that I probably have more yesterdays than tomorrows.
  • If I make it to 80 I will have outlived half of my grandparents. At that point I will have ice cream for breakfast and stop caring what I eat.
  • I hope to retire at an age where we can enjoy our retirement. I don’t know if this is possible but if it is, I will accept the fact that I will have to live on a fixed budget for the rest of my life
  • I hope to travel but will accept that this may not be possible. If I never see Paris or Mongolia before I die, I will live with that fact.
  • I don’t want to spend my last years in a nursing home, but if it happens, I will make the best of it.
  • If the last years of my life are centered on caring for someone at the expense of my fulfillment, I accept that fact with grace and gratitude
  • None of us chooses the disease that takes our life. I pray that it is not ALS (Lou Geherig’s disease) or Alzheimer’s, but I accept that it may be a disease I wouldn’t choose.
  • I accept that at the end of my life I may need someone to do personal care for me. That means when I can no longer bathe or toilet myself, someone else will help me. I pray for the ability to accept this help without shame or embarrassment
  • I don’t want to live to be 100 unless I am reasonably healthy. If I am diagnosed with advanced cancer at age 90 I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in the hospital. If I choose not to undergo chemotherapy or radiation I hope my family can accept this.
  • Finally, I pray for the opportunity to die well: I hope my death will cause those who survive me to to find my death peaceful enough to not fear their own death. I hope my funeral is a joyful one where people can laugh and celebrate my life.

I can only imagine how strange this posts looks for most people, but accept it for what it is.

Is Air Travel Ever Going To Not Suck?

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They tell me that there was a golden age of air travel. There was a time when air passengers were treated like kings and queens and the idea of flying somewhere came with a sense of elegance. It’s hard to imagine what those days were like.

I flew for the first time in the early 1970s, going to visit my grandparents; it was a quick flight from Washington DC to Boston and I remember that people dressed up to fly. It was almost like going to church. The good news back then was that we were treated well; the bad news is that flying was so expensive that it was beyond the reach of most people. That changed in 1978 when the airlines were deregulated. It made air travel cheap, but much more complicated as there were more airlines, more routes, more choices, and more variables.

It all changed for the worse on September 11, 2001. Virtually everything we believed about air travel changed. There was a flurry of hijackings in the early 1970s and we learned to get used to screenings before we boarded a plane. But we also learned that the hijackers expected to survive the incident and we were better off cooperating with the hijackers and allowing the negotiators on the ground to fix the problem. Finding out that hijackers were now suicide bombers told us that we needed to be aware of the people we sit next to.

This new awareness benefited us; in 2002 the shoe bomber was unable to blow up the plane because of the quick thinking of those around him.

It also benefited us on Christmas Day, 2009, when a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit landed safely despite the efforts of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He boarded the plane with the intent to destroy the plane and kill everyone on it. He had, hidden in his underwear, a chemical called PETN; it’s related to TNT and he intended to detonate it by lighting it on fire. It’s a compound that’s easy to get past security but hard to detonate. Passengers around him noticed that he was attempting to light something and stopped him. There’s been no end to the gnashing of teeth about how he was allowed to get this far, and the Obama administration conceded that their security failed.

I disagree. If we’ve learned anything from September 11th, it’s that the last line of defense are the seatmates of the suicide bomber. I agree that it’s scary to think that the bomber got that close to success, but the fact that the plane landed safely and nobody died indicates that the system worked.

Unfortunately this has led to the “we have to do something” syndrome and it’s started in spades. Camera crews in seeming every major city were dispatched to seemingly every airport to see what changes the airlines made and to ask random travelers if they felt safer. This was not the best way to cover the story and it certainly wasn’t the best way to figure out how to make air travel safer.

One suggested (kneejerk) change was that passengers not be allowed to have anything in their laps for the last hour of the flight. This came out of the fact that the bomber waited until the flight was nearly over before attempting the detonation. This appears foolish because a bomber who knows this will simply detonate the bomb before the last hour. This is my best example of a change that makes us feel better but doesn’t make us safer.

There is also a hue and cry to use body scans before passengers are allowed on planes. The only real concern I’ve heard is about privacy. That argument normally appeals to me, but I have different concerns about these scans. My primary concern is the radiation used; from what I can read they use T-Rays instead of X-Rays which are not as dangerous, but I’m not convinced. We already know of a link between overuse of X-Rays and cancer, and we know that there are lots of people who fly lots of miles. Do we know there is not a cumulative, bad outcome to being scanned? I hope I’m wrong.

The other problem is that while it will detect a weapon that is wedged between skin and clothing, it will not detect anything hidden in folds of skin (either body cavities or skin folds in overweight people). Simply put, it’s easy to circumvent.

Clearly we need to do a better job screening people before they get on a plane but that story does not report well. This most recent bomber paid cash for a one way ticket from Lagos, Nigeria to Amsterdam to Detroit. His father warned us that he might be trouble. We need to improve screening so someone like him doesn’t get on the plane to begin with.

The hysteria over this reached a crescendo on Sunday, January 3rd. A man at Newark (N.J.) Airport walked past the TSA screening and made it into a secure area without being screened. The terminal was essentially shut down and no flights were allowed to take off; flights that landed were left on the tarmac and not allowed to get to the gates. This went on for the better part of six hours. The man who breached security apparently left the airport 20 minutes later and has not been identified. We’re approaching the point where a trip to the airport (or connecting flights) needs to include the contingency of finding a place to stay if the airport gets shut down. That’s right: if you’re elderly, if you have health troubles, if you’re an unaccompanied minor, or you’re too poor to afford a hotel room near the airport, you may well spend the night sleeping on the floor with your suitcase as a pillow. I don’t want to travel like that.

We need to be honest about the steps that really will make air travel safer. We need to be better at screening people before they get on the plane. We need to be willing to say that my 78 year old father with an artificial hip is not the same security risk as someone from Yemen who pays cash for a one way ticket to the U.S. the day before the flight. And we need to continue to be as vigilant as the passengers on the flight to Detroit were on Christmas Day.

I've Elected to Have No Opinion

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OK this goes against the very grain of writing a blog, but here goes: I have decided on some issues to have absolutely, completely, entirely no opinion. I hope this doesn’t put my American citizenship in peril.

There are certainly many issues where I will continue to have strong opinions and this is far from a decision to stop blogging. But I’ve noticed that I’m oftentimes asked to weigh in on an issue and I have a hard time either deciding on the issue or caring about it. I’m now electing to vocally have no opinion.

I’ve often used the 24 hour news channels as a scapegoat and will do so here. My problem with networks like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC is that every 24 hours they need to find 24 hours of content. One of the ways they fill this content is to pit pundits against each other and argue; they also bring viewers in to participate through real time emails and phone calls. This results in all of us feeling not that we have a right to an opinion, but that we have a duty to an opinion. I’ve decided to just say no to this duty. Here are some of the areas where I have chosen to have no opinion:

  • The Mt. Soledad Cross: There is a war memorial cross on a hill in La Jolla. For the last several years there have been lawsuits going back and forth regarding the appropriateness of having a religious symbol on public land. I’ve decided to have no opinion.
  • Every year at Christmas the level of moral outrage appears to spike up. Public displays of manger scenes (Christian) menorahs (Jewish) and the like provoke heat seemingly every year. Some complain that wishing a non-Christian “Merry Christmas” is offensive while others are offended with “Happy Holidays” and feel they are not allowed to say “Merry Christmas.” I’ve elected to have no opinion.
  • Last week I was listening to National Public Radio and they ran a story on chocolate milk in schools. It seems that some groups (like the dairy industry) like having chocolate milk in schools because more children will drink milk. They’ve outlined their arguments at a web page called Raise Your Hand For Milk. The other side argues that the added sugar in the chocolate makes it no better than sugared soda. They are led by Chef Ann Cooper who calls herself the “renegade lunch lady.” I’ve elected to have no opinion.

There will no doubt be other issues and I’ll keep the blog posted.

Another Health Care Post

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The current Health Care Debate answers one of the critical needs in this country: how to provide protection to everyone (or nearly everyone). But there is another need: how to contain costs and make health care more efficient. We’re hearing more about how to provide health care to some of the 47 million people in this country without health insurance, but very little about how to make the system more efficient. Let me tackle these two separate issues one at a time.

The figure of 47 million without insurance comes from the census department and is from 2008. That translates to 20% of the US population under 65. There is nearly universal coverage for the population over 65 because of Medicare. Most Americans get health insurance from their work, or the work of someone in their household. Unfortunately that excludes people who are under 65 and not working, people who own their own business, and people who are not eligible to receive health insurance from their employers. These people daily live with the awareness that an accident or serious illness can have catastrophic effects. It’s true that if you are uninsured and are injured, the emergency room of any hospital is required to treat you regardless of ability to pay, but that’s a long way away from being cured. According to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) the hospital is required to treat a life threatening emergency until you are stable or can be transported somewhere else you can be treated. They are not required to treat a serious, but not life threatening, emergency and can “release” you once you are stable even if you life was in danger when you came in.

Now, whenever we liberals talk about expanding health coverage conservatives scream that government run health care would be a disaster. But the funny thing is that since 1966 we’ve had virtually universal, government run health care for those 65 or older. It’s called Medicare. I work with the elderly and to a person they like how Medicare is run. When you turn 65 you are eligible to enroll in Medicare, but not required. You are free to not enroll and find health insurance on your own. Funny that I don’t know anybody who has done that. It’s also funny that we have universal health care for the elderly (who vote in high numbers) but not children (who can’t vote).

But this misses my main point. We are not dealing with is the outrageous cost of health care and how poorly we ration it. Do not be fooled: we currently ration health care but we do it by coverage. If two 40 year old men are diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes (formally called “Adult Onset Diabetes”) and only one of them has health insurance, their lives will become dramatically different. The one with health insurance almost certainly has access to medication (either oral or injectable), counseling to change your lifestyle, and methods to monitor your blood sugar level. The one without has none of this. The one without health insurance is looking at a dramatically shorter lifespan with the added benefits of possible blindness and gangrene in your feet.

The hard, cold reality is this: no matter what we do, we won’t ever be able to have everything we want as we want it as soon as we want it. We as a nation have to decide who will not receive all they want. Currently we ration by ability to pay (either privately or through insurance). I don’t believe this is the best way.

The further hard, cold reality is that no matter what we do, the death rate is still the same: one per person. We are all going to die one day and all the health care in the world isn’t going to stop that. The purpose of health care is not to allow us to live forever, but to allow us to live a good quality of life for as long as is practical. That said, there really does come a point where additional health care dollars are not doing that. For example, if a 95 year old man with terminal prostate cancer wishes to have aggressive chemotherapy treatment it probably doesn’t make sense. The chemo is likely to be unsuccessful, and even if it does stop the cancer, he is likely to be much sicker from the chemo. Even if the chemo is successful and doesn’t lead to additional bad side effects, he is still a 95 year old man who will likely die of something else within the next few years.

Under the current system, if he (or his family) demands aggressive treatment he will likely get it. His primary doctor can refuse to allow the chemotherapy but most doctors will go along with the patient or family if they are insistent enough. Also, if his heart stops beating (for any reason) the local paramedics will try through CPR to get it going again. Essentially there is little in the current system that will tell him it’s time to go. These are resources that are not being used to help people who will. The chemotherapy the 95 year old man receives takes away from the ability to provide preventative medicine for children and the poor. Unfortunately at this time there is nobody who is able to say no to the 95 year old man.

This isn’t about death panels. It is about recognizing that limited health care resources need to be allocated where they will do the most good for the most people. My father in law is 90 years old and is in good health. Recently I overhead a conversation he was having with a few friends. He was explaining that if there was a procedure that he needed and a 30 year old man needed the same procedure, the younger man should get it even if the younger man cannot pay for it. His friends were astonished and basically said that the 90 year old is entitled to whatever he can afford, and if the younger man can’t afford it, well that’s life. Frankly, I hope when I’m 90 I’ll have the same insight as my father in law.

At some point this discussion has to be part of our health care debate.

The Health Care Debate is Making Me Sick

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This is no surprise but when Barack Obama was elected President I was one of the people who was heartened. I believed (and still believe) that our country can once again be one that cares about all of its people, not just the ones with oil wells. His decision to tackle health care makes me feel that this may be the time we have real reform.

It’s cliché but true to say that our current health care system is broken. Most of us have health insurance and if we’re under 65 years old we get it from our employer (or the employer of the head of our household). Employer provided health insurance started as just another perk to attract good employees, but it’s become a huge problem. It’s a problem for a couple of reasons:

  • This is the easiest problem to understand, but if you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. At the time when you’re awash in worries about how to pay your bills, you now have to worry about getting sick or injured. It’s true that many people can take advantage of COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) but that means you need to pay the entire cost of the policy (where before your employer paid most of it) and it expires 1 1/2 years (18 months) after it starts.
  • If you work for someone who doesn’t offer health insurance, it can be difficult to get it. Your employer is not required to offer it, though most large employers do for full time employees. But if you’re part time, if you work for a small company, or if your boss is a cheap bastard, you’re out of luck. You need to find insurance on your own.

I’ll admit to this, but I don’t have much sympathy for the insurance companies. They have to negotiate with large companies for big volume, but if you’re looking for individual coverage you have no way to negotiate. Not only do you pay big bucks for limited coverage, they can drop you for just about anything. And they can do it retroactively (this is called “recision”). Don’t believe me? Ask Robin Beaton. She is a retired nurse who was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2008 and needed a double mastectomy. Her insurer, Blue Cross approved the surgery, but days before the surgery they informed her that they weren’t going to pay for the surgery because she had a preexisting condition that she hadn’t disclosed. Turns out she had seen a dermatologist for acne and Blue Cross interpreted this as precancerous (teens all over the world may panic now). Since she “already had cancer” they weren’t going to pay for the mastectomy. Through the intervention of her congressman she was able to have the surgery 4 months later when the size of the tumor increased 2 to 3 centimeters. You can read more about this at Salon.com and CNN.

I knew when President Obama started talking about health care there would be some pushback from the Republicans but I can’t believe what I’m hearing. To quote Lily Tomlin, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.” Here are some highlights:

  • Sarah Palin: Seniors and the disabled “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
  • The Club for Growth: The health care reform plan would set limits similar to the “socialized” system in Britain, where people are allowed to die if their treatment would cost more than $22,000.
  • Rush Limbaugh (7 August 2009): It’s right out of Adolph Hitler’s playbook.

There’s more but this gives you a flavor. The reality is that President Obama, and many of us, simply wish to provide adequate health care to all Americans. We don’t wish to devalue or decrease the health care of people who already benefit, but expand it to those who don’t. In the 1960s these same forces opposed Medicare calling it “socialized medicine,” but today it would be hard to find someone on Medicare who thinks he’d be better off without it.

Stop believing the lies of those who want to nothing else but to scare you.

Caperton v. Massey: How Could Four Justices Side with Massey?

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OK, I’ll confess a bias: When I was in high school I dreamed of being a lawyer. I liked the idea of argumentation and found that I think like a lawyer. I was cured of this desire when I joined the debate team at George Mason University. I learned that very little time is actually spent in argumentation: most time is spent in libraries going through endless articles and most argumentation is not finding the best argument but rather in burying your opponent in tons of words (with little regard to efficacy).

In any case I still enjoy following how courts rule on different issues and I confess to a dream of someday meeting NPR’s Nina Totenberg. A few days ago I was listening to NPR about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the case of Caperton v. Massey. Here are the facts of the case:

  • In 1998 Hugh Caperton (President of Harman Coal Company) sued the Massey Energy in West Virginia, claiming they were using fraudulent business practices to run him out of business. In 2002 a jury in Boone County, West Virginia agreed and awarded Caperton the sum of $50 million.
  • Not surprisingly, Massey Energy appealed and the case began to wend its way up through the courts. During this time (in 2004) West Virginia Judge Warren McGraw was running for reelection as a judge in the West Virginia State Court of Appeals. Massey’s CEO was Don Blankenship and he began to campaign against Judge McGraw. I’ve been reading articles on this case and I can’t find any previous relationship between Don Blankenship and Judge Warren McGraw.
  • In any case, Don Blankenship began to back another candidate, Brent Benjamin, for the office. In fairness, Blankenship had given money to political campaigns before, but the sums were small. With Benjamin running for office, however, he donated $3 million
  • The campaign against McGraw turned ugly: a web page called …and for the sake of the kids accused McGraw of voting “to let a child-rapist out of prison, and court records show the plan called for the rapist to work at a local school.” Not surprisingly, Brent Benjamin wins the election and gains a seat on the West Virginia Court of Apppeals.
  • Drum roll everyone: the case of Caperton v. Massey came before the court. The lawyers for Hugh Caperton asked Judge Benjamin to recuse himself as his position was due in large part to the generosity of the defendant, Don Blankenship. He refuses.
  • Another drum roll: The court reversed the decision by a 3-2 vote with Judge Benjamin voting for the majority.
  • Final drum roll: Hugh Caperton continues to appeal, arguing that Judge Benjamin is biased and should have recused himself. Eventually it reaches the Supreme Court who agrees to accept the case.

Now it becomes news. The Supreme Court finds that there is always going to be a fuzzy line with elected judges, but wherever the line falls, this is way beyond it. In the 5-4 majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy ruled that Justice Benjamin should have recused himself: “Just as no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, similar fears of bias can arise when — without the consent of the other parties — a man chooses the judge in his own cause.” The opinion recognized that there may some fuzziness and there may need to be other rulings but this case was too far over the line.

The minority opinion used what I call the “Pandora’s Box” rational. Chief Justice John Roberts based his opinion on the fear of where this might go. Would Justice Benjamin have to recuse himself if the contributions were smaller? etc.

This clearly will begin an increase in litigation over judicial bias but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. The election of judges opens the door to all sorts of questions and the fact that it can’t be settled in one case doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

Manny Ramirez: How I'll Spend My Summer Vacation

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As many of you know, I am part of a mixed marriage: I root for the San Diego Padres while my wife Nancy is a lifelong fanatic for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The news this week for the Dodgers has not been good: their star player Manny Ramirez has been suspended for 50 games for using a banned substance. Manny released this announcement when the results were known:

Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me. Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility. I have been advised not to say anything more for now. I do want to say one other thing; I’ve taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons. I want to apologize to Mr. McCourt, Mrs. McCourt, Mr. Torre, my teammates, the Dodger organization, and to the Dodger fans. LA is a special place to me and I know everybody is disappointed. So am I. I’m sorry about this whole situation.

OK, now for some facts.

First, I’m not impressed with the fact that he passed about 15 drug tests; we expect the players to pass all their drug tests, not 15 out of 16. Many people in this country who don’t play baseball (myself included) work for companies that do drug testing and none of us could imagine defending ourselves by claiming that we’re usually clean.

Second, he tries to distance himself from this by claiming that he went to a physician for a “personal health issue.” I’m not sure what this issue is, but the team physicians on all teams tell players not to take anything they haven’t approved. They are the MD’s who know what is allowed and not allowed and even if Manny felt the need to seek medical treatment outside the team, he could at least have shown the medication to the team MD and asked if it was allowed.

Finally, this medication is not something you’d expect a healthy 36 year old man to take. It’s called human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG. This is normally taken by women who are trying to conceive and it’s also used as an early pregnancy test. Manny is probably not trying to get pregnant but it’s also used to mask the use of artificial testosterone which was also found. You can read an excellent article on ESPN; it states that a test during spring training showed an elevated level of testosterone. Further tests showed the testosterone came from an artificial source, and there was other evidence of hCG use. This gave MLB the justification for the suspension.

The worst of this is that the Dodgers were doing so well. They are currently 21-9 and until just recently were undefeated at home. They are still a good team and I expect they will win the NL West this year but there’s no way around the fact that Manny has let down his teammates, his team, and the fans in Los Angeles. His bat will be silent for the next 50 games and this was because he made a poor choice.

I hope he spends the next 50 games looking for ways to pay back the fans of Los Angeles.

Baltimore: It's No Hawaii

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It’s the beginning of May and that means it’s time for Nancy’s annual PAS meeting. Last year was in Hawaii and we knew it would be hard to beat. While Nancy goes to meetings, I get to explore the city and do some genealogy research. Or at least I could if it weren’t raining the whole time. We’re planning to leave today and it’s been raining nonstop since we arrived.

Baltimore may appear to be a strange place to do family tree research, but there is a connection. Some of my ancestors were Acadians who inhabited present day Nova Scotia (I was called “Acadia” then). In 1763 the British deported them. My ancestors went to New Brunswick, many went to New Orleans (where they became Cajuns) and a few went to Baltimore. One of these was my 2nd cousin, 6 times removed, Daniel LeBlanc (1729-1810) who died in Baltimore. The chance of finding his tombstone is essentially nil (the original cemetery was abandoned and the bodies moved with the stone. Stones at that point were marble and would not have survived 200 years and a move) but perhaps there were some descendants I could trace. Alas, the idea of taking a bus halfway across town and tramping around a cemetery in the pouring rain didn’t sound very appealing and I’ll have to wait until my next trip to Baltimore for this.

The good news department is that we leave today for Virginia. My nephew Nathan is graduating from Old Dominion University on May 9th and I’ll be able to be there for that. I just hope the weather breaks.