Bricks and mortar may break the ardor

For Amazon.com, hope its competitors (notably Bed, Bath and Beyond and Best Buy), according the the Wall Street Journal;

The price competition is another sign of the multi-front battle between Amazon and the giants of American retail. Some, like Best BuyBBY +9.01%, have introduced price match guarantees promising customers to meet any Amazon price for items in their stores. Others, including Wal-Mart, are putting an increasing focus on their online operations, and using their networks of physical stores as distributed delivery points.

Don't forget Mom and Pop!

It’s not just physical retailers putting Amazon in their sights — online competitors also seem focused on matching the company’s low prices. Today online retailer Overstock announced it would match all Amazon prices on books, in a move coming just a month after the company said it would undercut Amazon by 10% in the book market — a discount Amazon quickly matched.

“Last month we started a book pricing war with Amazon,” said Patrick Byrne, Overstock.’s chairman, in a statement announcing the price matching. “We’re hoping to continue that battle, in a way that lessens any harm to the mom-and-pop booksellers we consider our comrades in arms.” 

Imagine if this power could be harnessed in health care markets.

Axis of Grown-ups

When you've lost Saudi Arabia to Israel, that's some diplomatic coup for Barack Obama and John Kerry (we have never doubted their ability);

The U.S.'s closest Middle East allies are undercutting American policy in Egypt, encouraging the military to confront the Muslim Brotherhood rather than reconcile, U.S. and Arab officials said.

The parallel efforts by Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have blunted U.S. influence with Egypt's military leadership and underscored how the chaos there has pulled Israel into ever-closer alignment with those Gulf states, officials said.

A senior Israeli official called the anti-Muslim Brotherhood nations "the axis of reason."

Making the Obama Administration persona non grata?

I'll never forget what's his name

With a Presidential election coming soon, will Chileans count their blessings;

Despite cooling down in a handful of key sectors, the Chilean economy continued to grow this winter.

....The growth rate for 2013 now stands at 4.3 percent — taking into account a newly calculated 4.5 percent growth rate for 2013’s first quarter.
Still, 2012 averaged 5.45 percent growth and it is largely seen as unlikely that Chile will maintain this standard in 2013. 

Joseph Ramos, an economics professor at the Universidad de Chile, says the country should not be satisfied with anything below a 5 percent growth rate. 

“A 4.1 growth rate is not a good growth rate,” Ramos told The Santiago Times. “The Chilean economy presumably … has the capacity to grow 5 percent per year, and if that's not taking place, notwithstanding fairly strong investment, then something is amiss. It would call for action, rather than complacency, in my estimation.”

Compared to what?, is always the question that ought to be asked. In this case, 40 years ago.

Diamond-water-liver paradox?

237 years behind on your reading? Then this article by AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard might baffle you;

Where you live can affect your chances of getting a liver transplant, and your risk of dying while waiting. The nation's transplant network says it's time to make the system fairer — and it may take a cue from how politicians redraw voting maps.

"Gerrymandering for the public good" is how Johns Hopkins University transplant surgeon Dr. Dorry Segev describes a proposal to change the map that governs how donated livers are distributed around the country.

The problem: Some areas have fewer donated organs, and higher demand for them, than others. The sickest patients go to the top of the waiting list. But the geographic variation means that someone in California, among the toughest places to get a new liver, waits longer and is a lot sicker before getting transplanted than someone in Ohio or Florida — if they survive long enough.

"This should not be happening," Segev said.

No, it should not...and wouldn't if the price mechanism was allowed to work. Which is does if you're rich enough;

Desperate patients sometimes travel across the country to get on a shorter waiting list, if they can afford it or even know it's possible. The best-known example is the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who lived in California but in 2009 had a transplant in Memphis, Tenn., which at the time had one of the shortest waits. That's harder for the less wealthy to do. 

 If an actual market for organs was allowed, more livers might mysteriously (as if led by an invisible hand) find their way to those in need of them. Eliminating this problem;

One big challenge will be turf wars, as transplant centers with shorter waits understandably don't want them to lengthen, said committee chairman Dr. David Mulligan of the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix.

"Every doctor wants the best for their patients. The issue becomes stepping back and looking at the big picture and thinking about all the patients," said Mulligan, who hopes to have a proposal ready for public comment within two years. "Yes, your patient waits a little longer, but they can wait a little longer."

Smaller disparities exist for some other transplants, including kidneys, but the transplant network is focusing first on livers. It wouldn't be a problem if there were more organ donors, Mulligan noted, encouraging people to register: "It's the last chance we have to be a hero in our lives."

Dismal...science...but, unavoidable.

Displayed next to Angela Corey's bar exam?

We missed this piece of Americana from August 1;

A director at the Smithsonian Institution wants to stock a new addition to the national museum complex with a controversial piece of recent US history — Trayvon Martin’s hoodie.

Lonnie Bunch said that once the legal case plays out, he’d love to have the gray hooded sweat shirt the unarmed 17-year-old was wearing the night he was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla.

....“It became the symbolic way to talk [about] the Trayvon Martin case. It’s rare that you get one artifact that really becomes the symbol,” Bunch said.

“Because it’s such a symbol, it would allow you to talk about race in the age of Obama.”

Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, now under construction in Washington, DC, has assembled other controversial pieces about race relations throughout US history.

The WaPo Style section is down with it;

Prosecutors displayed the dark gray sweatshirt that Martin wore on the last night of his life in an enormous, rectangular, thickly three-dimensional frame. The hoodie lay suspended between clear plastic sheets with its arms spread wide inside a cross-shaped cutout, set starkly apart from the brilliant white of the matting. It might easily have been mistaken for a religious relic, even as it became a singularly evocative entry in a long inventory of indelible courtroom artifacts from O.J. Simpson’s ill-fitting gloves to Lorena Bobbitt’s emasculating kitchen knife. Prosecutors lifted the framed hoodie awkwardly, teetering toward the jury.

“I get goose bumps just thinking about it,” says Michael Skolnik, who sat next to Martin’s parents on that morning, the day before the Fourth of July. Skolnik, the political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and a member of the Trayvon Martin Foundation board, felt as if he were in the presence of something as consequential and iconic as Babe Ruth’s bat or the Declaration of Independence. “It’s like this mythical garment,” he says.

Is there a museum devoted to keeping homophobia alive?

ценные вещи

Things of value, to Russians (at least that's what Google Translate tells us), used to buy off American Communists by the Russians. But later to embarrass a Canadian academic, as told by John Earl Haynes in this 2000 C-Span video (about 9 minutes in).  So strong were the prejudices at work that the Canadian just knew that Haynes and his collaborator Harvey Klehr must have mis-translated a word...even though the Canadian, himself had never set eyes on the Russian language document: He literally didn't know what he was talking about.

At the very end of the video, Haynes can be heard lamenting that, while he understands politicians not wanting to admit to anything that might put them at a disadvantage in electoral politics--and this March 1950 press conference of Harry Truman, dishonestly denying that Senator Joseph McCarthy's Wheeling, W. Virginia speech of a few weeks earlier, had been accurate, is a perfect example--it is terrible when historians do the same thing. Haynes expresses the hope that in the coming years, as political passions cool, that will change.

So far, not so good though, if the recent brouhaha over Diana West's book, American Betrayal is an indication. About which; the most interesting part of the nearly two hour C-Span2 panel discussion linked to above, is from (the just recently deceased, RIP) Herbert Romerstein (the third speaker). Particularly what he had to say about Leon Trotsky wanting to accept an invitation by the Dies Committee in 1940, to testify to what he knew about Soviet penetration of the U.S. government. He didn't get a visa to do so, because the State Department had finally found a Communist they wanted to deny entry to the U.S.

Romerstein, during the Q&A, is asked a specific question about Harry Hopkins--FDR's most trusted adviser. Romerstein clearly states that he believes that Hopkins was a Soviet agent (based on the recollections of of defector Oleg Gordievsky, who had been told Hopkins was the most important agent the USSR had had during WWII, during his KGB training). John Earl Haynes does not object to this statement.

Now, thirteen years later, he and longtime collaborator Harvey Klehr do at the Front Page. It's a very effective presentation that the mention of Agent 19 in a Venona cable is not Harry Hopkins, but was instead friend of Edward R. Murrow, Laurence Duggan. Very scholarly, and totally unlike the approach of Ronald Radosh in the same publication. What it isn't though, is a refutation of Hopkins as a Soviet agent.

Not that it matters, really, what appellation is pinned on Hopkins, though Klehr and Haynes try to make it seem that it does;

But, even if he did not have a covert link to Soviet intelligence, why would Hopkins alert the Soviets to what the FBI had learned?  It was likely yet another example of the exaggerated lengths to which not merely Hopkins but other leading officials in the Roosevelt administration, including the president himself, went in attempting to win the Soviets’ trust and make them into working partners with the United States in winning the war and in constructing the peace to follow.  To give another example, in late 1944 the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) obtained from Finnish intelligence officers a Soviet code book (or a collection of Soviet code and cipher material, the record is not entirely clear).  Secretary of State Stettinius learned of the matter, and in what is in retrospect a remarkably naive act, successfully urged President Roosevelt to order the OSS to hand the material over to the Soviets as a gesture of good will.  So far as is known, the OSS did not even keep a copy.^[20]

Likely Hopkins’ 1943 act was a similar gesture of good will and a friendly warning to the Soviet ambassador to keep the intelligence officers on his staff under control.  Like virtually all such gestures to the Soviets, it went unreciprocated and was treated as a sign of American weakness.  It was both reckless and destructive, but not evidence that Hopkins was a Soviet agent.

It's better to have been stupid, than to have been a spy AND an agent of influence?

We shall return to this controversy, anon.

It's getting to be a habit with Ron

Yet another round of of Priesthood v. Apostasy, and Brad DeLong is reliably on the side of the Inquisition, though oddly he's on the side of Front Page's David Horowitz too;

Rather than responding to Ronald Radosh’s Frontpage review of American Betrayal, as a reasonable author might, Diana West has launched a series of personal attacks not only on Radosh but on the editors of Frontpage, calling us “hypocrites,” “totalitarians,” “ossified totalitarians,” commissars” and liars (“If Frontpage Will Lie about This, What Won’t They Lie About?”) and claiming we “suppressed” — also “purged” – a favorable review of her book because its opinions were “incorrect,” clearly implying that they were politically incorrect. ....Readers of American Betrayal will find this kind of paranoid fantasy all too familiar.

Though, in this case, the paranoids have real enemies;

I am solely responsible for the decision to remove the positive review of her book that originally appeared on Frontpage on which she builds her anti-Frontpage case.

Which would seem to be, on its face, good reason for Ms West to be upset! Nor is Horowitz helping himself with the further specifics;

Here is what happened. When the Frontpage review of American Betrayal appeared I received an email from Ron Radosh whom I have known for more than sixty years, and whose work as a historian is respected not only by me but by every conservative academic historian with whom I am familiar. Radosh is a pioneer in documenting the guilt of the Rosenbergs, in analyzing the Amerasia spy case, in dissecting the Communist infiltration of Hollywood, and in being one of a small group of conservative historians who have resisted the minimizing of the Communist threat by progressives and the whitewashing of traitors like Alger Hiss. 

So, Horowitz's buddy had his nose out of joint, and David catered to his fit of pique. How could have Diana West  overlooked this perfectly reasonable explanation? No political correctness here at all. Just see how sweetly reasonable er, rigorously logical Radosh was being (from the e-mail of Radosh):

“It amounts to a Birch Society type conspiracy history theory of Communism and the Cold War, with half truths built to unwarranted conclusions, a failure to comprehend history in context, as well as great errors of fact that undermine her thesis.

“For one thing Harry Hopkins was NOT Agent 19 [as West claims]. That was Larry Duggan. It makes a big difference.

“She misuses Klehr and Haynes throughout the book, and when they actually draw opposite conclusions than she does, based on evidence, she simply says they are wrong without bothering to prove her point. This is not a difference of opinion; it is a failure to use evidence correctly in order to spin her conspiracy theories….

This is as important an issue. Do we really want conservatives to rewrite history based on an ideological view, while ignoring context, evidence and reality? That is what she does.” (emphasis added)

(The woman is disagreeing with my friends and my interpretations of the evidence, I tell you.this can't be tolerated!

(Start accumulating the kindling, meanwhile, take down the review that sided with her apostasy. I'll get back to you.)

Which Radosh did to the tune of over 7,000 words. Which has to be read in all its self-absorbed glory to be believed. It's a self-parody; the Appeal to One's Own Authority. Unfortunately titled, McCarthy on Steroids.

Unfortunately, we say, because this isn't the first time Ronald Radosh has pulled this stunt. The last time he did, circa 2008, it was a self-promoting 'review' of M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History (which the editors at National Review Online seem to have been sufficiently embarrassed by that they--he who lives by suppressing reviews...--have removed from their website). Which managed to even charge Evans with plagiarism.

That was not going to stand for long, with a guy like Stan Evans, and Ann Coulter allowed him to use her column space to set the record straight;

Radosh writes, “Evans tries hard to make it appear the [Amerasia] cover-up [of John Stewart Service's espionage] was something he discovered.” (No evidence is presented for this snide assertion, nor could it be, for none exists.) Even worse, in referring to a book he and Prof. Harvey Klehr published on the Amerasia case in 1996, Radosh parenthetically says this was “a book from which Evans takes virtually all of his material and which he does not acknowledge.” This vicious statement is an astounding, and outrageous, lie. My documentation of the Amerasia fix, cover-up, grand-jury rigging, wiretapping, and so on is derived from the files of the FBI here in Washington, several thousand pages of which I have in my possession, accumulated over a span of years. It owes nothing to the Klehr-Radosh book, as may readily be seen by scanning my end-notes and comparing these to their annotations, which are based on an entirely different indexing system, so that one isn’t transposable to the other. 

.... I derived none of my FBI documentation from it, provide material that isn’t featured in it, and conversely don’t cover matters that it covers because my materials differed in form and content from those collected at Emory University, which has its own archive of FBI files pertaining to Amerasia, a main source of the Klehr-Radosh data. 

And it isn't standing with Diana West either, as she's now having some similar fun with Radosh's bizarre idea that he can get away with claiming that her book contains anecdotes that it does not;

For example, Radosh writes: “Instead of weighing these fears, West turns to another anecdote telling how George Elsey found confidential files in the Map Room that showed FDR naively thinking he could trust Stalin, and instructed Hopkins to tell Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front in 1942.”

There’s one problem with Radosh’s scholarship here. This anecdote about George Elsey, confidential files and the Map Room isn’t in my book. Anywhere. ….Radosh wrote a retort headlined: “Diana West’s Attempt to Respond.” ….

In his retort, Radosh writes: “Maybe she couldn’t find the anecdote. But it is there in three different places where she writes how FDR told Hopkins to go into Molotov’s bedroom while he was staying in the White House so that he could meet with the President, and at that meeting, Hopkins told Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front.”

Now we have another problem. The brand new anecdote isn’t in my book, either.

Well, what does that matter to a historian?

Finally, David Horowitz isn't much of a logician either, as he chimes in on the 'second front' (FDR's attempt to convince Churchill that an immediate cross channel invasion of France--in 1942--was needed to relieve the pressure on Stalin in the east) mentioned above, with;

If, as she claims, the Kremlin determined the strategy of D-Day--the opening of a second front in 1944 in France--why was Stalin unable to get a second front opened in 1942...[?]

Gee, David, maybe because the Allies didn't have the resources in 1942 that they did in 1944. Or, rather than take our word for it, you might see what Winston Churchill had to say about it in his WWII volume (The Hinge of Fate, Chapter XVIII). He reproduces the conversation he had with Harry Hopkins and George C. Marshall in the Spring of 1942 when they proposed the idea to him. It's a classic political response.