White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

No End to the Cold War’s Expensive Nuclear Legacy

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It was the Cold War, and it was a potential race to Armageddon. The Soviet Union produced an excessive number of nuclear warheads, and we did likewise.

Now another war rages bitterly — but not on the front pages — over what to do with the legacy of cold war: plutonium from the warheads.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in the honeymoon period that followed between Russia and the United States, it was obvious that there were way too many warheads and the number needed to be reduced. In particular the key ingredient, plutonium, had to be contained and, preferably, disposed of.

In 2000, the United States and Russia agreed to dismantle large numbers of nuclear warheads known as “pits.”

But getting rid of plutonium is not easy. It is a transuranic element, made in special reactors and, up to this point in time, with only one purpose: to make hydrogen bombs. It also is possible to use it as a fuel in power reactors, if they are the light water reactors now in service around the world. This can be done by mixing the plutonium with uranium reactor fuel in the proportion of 95 percent uranium to 5 percent plutonium.

This is not a great rate of disposal, but it works.

The French process is the one the Clinton administration committed to using to burn up 34 metric tons of pit plutonium from warheads being dismantled at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

The Russians committed to burning their equivalent excess plutonium in fast reactors. These are reactors with a high-neutron flux — a technology that the United States abandoned during the Carter administration.

To accomplish the U.S. commitment to the Russians and get rid of the plutonium, the Department of Energy commissioned the building of a facility at its huge Savannah River Site nuclear reservation (310 square miles) near Aiken, S.C., on the Georgia border.

The plant — a massive structure with double walls (each 10-feet thick) of the highest grade concrete and with a dense matrix of steel reinforcing — is as close as humans can come, in my view, to building something that will last for thousands of years. It is awesome.

But the plant is troubled.

The DOE wants to halt construction and abandon the idea in favor of mixing the plutonium with a granular substance and burying it in a waste facility in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, which is having its own difficulties after an accident. The process is called “down blending.” It does not get rid of the plutonium which, with a half-life of 240,000 years, is essentially indestructible, unless it is burned in a reactor. It just stabilizes it and makes it hard to retrieve.

The suggested change has exacerbated tensions with Russia at a difficult time in U.S.-Russia relations. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the proposed change of plan, saying, “This is not what we agreed on.”

John MacWilliams, the DOE’s point man on the issue, told me that the root of the problem is money. The South Carolina facility, known as the MOX (mixed oxide fuel) plant, has cost more than anticipated with $5 billion spent and a dispute over how far along construction is.

The DOE maintains that it is only 40 percent complete, and the contractor says it is 70 percent complete. Both have relied on outside consultants for their numbers.

Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, himself a nuclear scientist, told a meeting in Washington on Sept. 13 that the South Carolina plant would cost $50 billion to $60 billion over its life-cycle. He estimated it would cost between $15 billion and $20 billion for the alternative down blending proposal. That is a number that is likely to be challenged in Congress.

The South Carolina congressional delegation and other supporters, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, are passionate in their support for MOX. But Congress is funding the construction at just $350 million a year, less than the $500 million needed to keep to the construction schedule, thus making the whole enterprise more expensive.

One way or another the Cold War is going to keep on costing for a long, long time.

For InsideSources

There Is a Labor Shortage, but Not for Arts Grads

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If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States — which is looking slightly more likely — he will, so to speak, hit the wall.

Yes, he will hit his wall: the beautiful, technological marvel he plans to build along the southern border to keep out people he thinks are going to harm the United States.

Yet the first thing he might have to do is to send recruiters into Mexico and beyond to find craftsmen to build his wall.

Mexico might not pay for the Trump wall, but Mexicans most certainly will build it. The reason: there is a critical labor shortage in the United States of skilled craftsmen and women.

There are still way too many unskilled people arguing over what the minimum wage should be for selling a hamburger and far too few who can swing a hammer, use a spirit level, lay a brick, connect a sewer line or wire a building.

These people, these yeomen in 21st-century society, are in critically short supply. Known as the “crafts,” they are the people who build our bridges, water systems, power plants, submarines and other military materiel, and restore power after a storm.

Whether you are trying to build a new suburban house, a ship or a road, you need the crafts: people who work with tools and their bodies. Their brains, too, for it is not brainless work. Do not ever think it is. The glass sheathing on those super tall, super skinny buildings in New York would not have gotten there, or stayed there, without people with brainpower.

The crafts shortage is not hypothetical: it is affecting new home construction and big projects, like new nuclear plants in South Carolina and Georgia.

Utilities have special programs to train people to climb poles, string lines and become first responders after severe storms. These are secure jobs with benefits and retirement packages. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you get round your local utility hiring office.

The political response to the crafts shortage is predictable. There are demands for trade schools, for special courses, for subsidized apprenticeships. As usual, money will be requested. It is not a money problem. It is a human resource allocation problem.

There is simply too much social, I repeat, social value attached to a university education — an education that often wastes time, while the students learn what they should have learned in high school.

A degree from one of the second- and third-tier universities is increasingly of little value in getting work. How many political scientists, communications executives, and marketing gurus does society need? An arts degree qualifies its recipient in today’s market to be an Uber driver or such.

Societal pressure says if you do not have a university degree, you are inferior. Everyone without a degree butts up against the mortar-board ceiling at some time.

Yet much of what passes for education is, in fact, the ability to pass tests. Test-passers move up the system and seek other test-passers to keep the game going.

But we are happy to entrust air traffic control, policing, ship piloting, EMT response and other life-saving jobs to people with only high school educations. All those welds on ships, nuclear plants and bridges, are the work of high school graduates and dropouts.

I am happy to report that one of my wife’s nephews has told his mother, an Ivy Leaguer no less, that rather than going through the warehouse-as-education system, he is going to be a welder. I hope he works on worthwhile things, like a bridge or a submarine, not on Trump’s silly wall.

Let the Mexicans have that as their jobs program — which we will pay for. Believe me.

For InsideSources

 

Photo credit: Drew Coffman, “Welding” used under Creative Commons license

Clinton and Trump, the Scripted and the Spontaneous

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If you want to rise the heights in politics, get in front of a mirror and start reading aloud from a newspaper, a novel, anything. The proof of this lies before us in the presidential election.

Donald Trump is a natural orator. Brilliant. But when it comes to reading from a teleprompter, he is much less so. The act of reading aloud reduces him, robs him of his ebullience and his tremendous talent at playing an audience.

Hillary Clinton, with or without a teleprompter, is not a great speaker, but she reads her speeches well. Her problem may be in the content of the speeches; they seem, like so much of the Clinton campaign, to be touched by too many hands, massaged by committee.

But she has skill at the teleprompter, seldom looking at the speech in front of her, but looking up to the judiciously placed screens that carry the words that she is reading, looking as though she is saying them, not often going off script.

I believe the ability to sightread may be something we are born with. Most broadcasters have it, but not all. I marvel at the ability of my friend and colleague Tim Farley, host of “The Morning Briefing” on SiriusXM Radio, to read anything faultlessly, even if he has never seen it before.

By contrast the late Tim Russert, a master questioner, often stumbled when reading. I myself am such a stumblebum that I do without a teleprompter, which has its own liabilities.

When Winston Churchill — the man who was to become the greatest orator of the 20th century — gave his first speech in the House of Commons as a 29-year-old, he blew it. He had planned to speak extemporaneously and he froze for three minutes. From that time on, Churchill wrote out his speeches, memorized them and delivered them as though extemporaneously. During World War II, he kept his dental technician handy so that a prosthetic he wore could be adjusted to maintain that distinctive lisp.

George W. Bush was a disaster when trying to speak off the cuff, failing and falling back on platitudes and cliches, but reading effortlessly. Also his speeches were well-written and not bolted together.

I watched Bush stumble through an impromptu session outside the German Parliament, the Bundestag, in May 2002. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, showed off his ability to think on his feet. But inside, Bush carried the day by reading a good speech superbly. I was watching Secretary of State Colin Powell sitting a few feet from me, and he visibly relaxed as Bush found his stride.
Martin Luther King wrote out his great speeches and seemed to have at least half-memorized them, so that when he said, “I have a dream,” it came not from his notes but his heart.

Much as we love to hear speakers who can enthrall without notes, in high-stakes politics, delivery and content need to be written down, so that, if for no other reason, they are accurately reported in the high-speed news cycle.

Trump needs to work on his reading-aloud skills, to get comfortable with the teleprompter. If he should win, he will not, one hopes, wing it when war and peace are in the balance.

Clinton needs fewer props, like the teleprompter. She needs to peak out of the shell of committee-written jargon so the voters can get the measure of her. Press conferences would be a good start. At a press conference, we learn how fast the candidate is on his or her feet, what the blindsides are, and the candidate learns firsthand, perhaps for the first time, what people are asking.

It is a two-way affair, ideas coming and going. That is the test of the unscripted response: the American equivalent of Britain’s revered “Question Time.”

You do not get that on the Sunday-morning talk shows: they lack the spontaneity of a forest of hands with many correspondents vying to ask a question. That is democracy raw.

For Inside Sources

The Future of Energy Storage — ‘Sisyphus Railroad’

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In research there is evolution, revolution and — sometimes — what I call “retro revolution,” which happens when old methods have new applications. All three are in play in the world of electricity, and are affecting storage.

The inability to store electricity has been a challenge since the time of Thomas Edison. Electricity is made and used in real time, putting huge pressure on utilities at particular times of the day. For much of the East Coast in summer, for example, the peak is in the evening, when people come home from work or play, crank up the air conditioning, flip on the lights, the TV and start cooking. In many cities, the subways operate at peak and the electricity supply is stretched.

Traditionally, there have been two ways to deal with this. One is that utilities have some plant on standby, in what is called “spinning reserve,” or they have gas turbines ready to fire up.

Solar and wind power, an increasing source of new generation, have made the need to store and retrieve power quickly more critical. The sun sets too early and the wind blows willy-nilly. Also the quality of the power reaching the grid varies in seconds, necessitating a quick response to ease supply or increase it.

Until now, the best way to store large amounts of electricity — it is never really stored, but has to be generated afresh — is known as “pump storage.” This occurs when water is pumped up a hill during low demand times, at night and early in the morning, and released through generators to make new electricity during peaks.

It has gotten harder and harder to get permission to install new pumped storage because the best locations are often in scenic places. In 1962, Consolidated Edison Co. proposed building a pump storage facility on the Hudson River at Storm King Mountain near Cornwall, N.Y. After 17 years of environmental opposition, it gave up.

Now battery technology has reached a point where utilities are installing banks of lithium-ion batteries to help with peak demand. They also play an important part in smoothing out variable nature of alternative energy.

Batteries are not the only play, but because Mr. Battery, entrepreneur Elon Musk, is a showman, they tend to get more public attention.

Other mechanical methods hold as much promise and some dangers. One is flywheels, which would be wound up at night and would release power when needed. It is an old concept, but one that has new proponents — although there are concerns about when things go wrong and that super-energetic device flies apart.

“What happens if it gets loose and goes to town?” asks a wag.

Another method is compressed air in underground vaults. Natural gas already is compressed routinely for storage. The technology exists, but the compression would have to be many times greater for air, and there are concerns about the impact of this “air bomb.”

Yet another method involves a column of water with a heavy, concrete weight pressing down on it.

My own favorite — and one likely to appeal to many because of its safety and mechanical efficiency — is an electric train that stores energy by running up a track and then down to generate power. A Santa Barbara, Calif. company, Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES), is planning to run a special train 3,000 feet up a mountain track in Pahrump, Nev., and then have the train come down the mountain, making electricity as it does so. They plan to use hopper cars loaded with rock or other heavy objects. The Economist magazine has dubbed it the “Sisyphus Railroad.”

The train will go up or down the track depending on the needs of the California grid to which it will be linked. The developers claim an incredible 85-percent efficiency, according to Francesca Cava, an ARES spokeswoman. “That’s what you get with steel wheels on steel track,” she says.

The company has received Bureau of Land Management approval for its 5.5-mile track, and construction of the energy train starts next year. “All aboard the Voltage Express making stops at Solar Junction, Wind Crossing and Heavy Goods Terminal.”

Choo-choo! Back to the future.

– For Inside Sources

Cover photo courtesy of ARES North America, http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

How John McLaughlin Blew Up Television Talk Shows

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Thirty-four years ago, a former Jesuit priest threw an incendiary device into the world of televised political talk shows. He was John McLaughlin, host of “The McLaughlin Group,” who has died at the age of 89.

Until McLaughlin exploded of the scene, it was all rather sedate. The dominant programs were PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” and “Agronsky & Company,” hosted by veteran broadcaster Martin Agronsky.

In these programs, the host was magisterial and the guests were journalists who answered questions either about what they were covering or what they thought; and their answers were expected to conform to a level of decorum. “Agronsky & Company” — largely because of Agronsky’s own strong personality — had a little more flash than “Washington Week in Review,” but there was a level of earnestness about both programs.

Along came McLaughlin, who was not so much a seeker-of-wisdom- and-truth as a man in pursuit of fun and something watchable. With “The McLaughlin Group,” a window was opened and fresh air gushed in. The conventions were trounced. Shouting and loud dispute on television arrived, all skillfully goaded by McLaughlin.

The program became essential viewing not only for political junkies, but also for much of the nation. At one time, it was carried on nearly 400 PBS stations, although it originated on commercial television in Washington. It was sponsored by the Edison Electric Institute.

It was also commercially successful, so it was able to pay its contributors and to have a large staff — a very large staff for a half-hour show. McLaughlin was not easy to work for, staffers who later worked with me said. Washington television circles are replete with stories of him sending staffers on personal errands and, in one case, ordering a woman to make toast for him.

All I can say is that in our very occasional meetings, he was very encouraging about my own television and radio talk show, “White House Chronicle.”

McLaughlin left nothing to chance: the effect had to be right. So shows were packaged, reworked, and second and third takes were common. There was perfectionism in the riot.

He was the ringmaster, demanding terse answers, switching subjects and making declarative statements. After a “lighting round” of questions, he would opine, “The answer is.”

McLaughlin had the best opinion journalists of the time on his program, including Jack Germond, Robert Novak, Morton Kondracke, Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift and Michael Barone. There were falling outs with some of his stars: Novak is reported to have stormed off the set, and Germond also quit with harsh words.

But there were loyalists and people who loved McLaughlin. They include Clift and Buchanan, whose friendship with McLaughlin dated back to the Nixon White House.

In the past decade, the program fell victim to the “new journalism” it had created. As the cable networks grew, they adopted the aggressive approach to political discussion that McLaughlin had introduced, but often without the finesse or the self-deprecation, which was part of McLaughlin as a broadcaster and as a man.

He loved Dana Carvey’s skewering of the program on “Saturday Night Live.” He would openly joke about a very prudish article of advice to girls about sex that he had written when he was in the priesthood.

McLaughlin, an extraordinary man with an extraordinary legacy, was an ordained Jesuit who left the priesthood and married twice. He ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for the Senate from Rhode Island, became a speechwriter for President Nixon, and editor and columnist for National Review and then, without a background in television, reinvented political talk shows.

If you are tired of journalists shooting off their mouths and shouting at each other 24/7, blame John McLaughlin. He would have loved you for it.

— For InsideSources

The Great Middle Class Awakening and Its Torchbearer

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By Llewellyn King

The middle class has been taking a shellacking for years. It began in the 1970s, when the business and political elites separated from the people and it has been accelerating ever since, according to Hedrick Smith, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and editor, an Emmy award-winning PBS producer and correspondent, and a bestselling author. In short, an establishment figure.

Add to Smith’s establishment credentials schooling at Choate, the private boarding school, a stint at Oxford, and you have the picture of someone with the credentials to join the elite of his choosing. Instead Smith is a one-man think tank, a persuasive voice against the manipulation of the public institutions, like Congress, for money and power.

But Smith is not a polemicist. He uses the reporter’s tools, honed over decades in Moscow and Washington and on big stories, like the civil rights movement and the fall of the Soviet Union, to make his points against the assault on the middle class.

It all began with Smith’s looking into what was happening to American manufacturing, which led to his explosive 2012 book, “Who Stole the American Dream?” Encouraged by the book’s success, he created a Web site, reclaimtheamericandream.org, which now has a substantial following. In the past three years, he has lectured at over 50 universities and other platforms on his big issue: the abandonment of the middle class by corporate America and its corrupted political allies.

Smith documents the end of the implicit contract with workers, where they shared in corporate growth and stability. He outlines how money has vanquished the political voice of the middle class.

Instead, according to Smith, corporations have knelt before the false god of “shareholder value.” This has resulted in the flight of corporate headquarters to tax-friendlier climes, jobs to cheap labor, and a managerial elite indifferent to those who built the companies they manage.

In Smith’s well-researched world it is not only the corporations that have abandoned the workers, but the political establishment is also guilty, bowing to lobbyists and fixing elections through redistricting. Two villains here: money in politics and gerrymandering electoral districts.

The result is a democracy in name only that serves the powerful and perpetuates the power of those who have stolen the system from the voters.

Smith cites the dismal situation in North Carolina, where districts have been drawn ostensibly to ensure black representation in Congress, but also to ensure Republican domination of all the surrounding districts. The two districts that illustrate the mischief are called “the Octopus” and “the Serpent” because of the way they are drawn to identify the voter preference of the inhabitants.

The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are testament to the broken system, says Smith. They are symbolic of the rising up of the middle class against the predations of the elites.

But Smith is hopeful because, he says, the states have taken up arms against the Washington and Wall Street elites. People should “look at the maps,” he says, “They will be surprised to find out that 25 states are engaged in a battle against partisan gerrymandering, or that 700 cities and communities plus 16 states are on record in favor of rolling back ‘Citizens United’ and restoring the power of Congress to regulate campaign funding.”

Smith sees the middle class reclaiming America: a great social revolution that again unites the government with governed, the creators of wealth with the managers of the wealth. Smith is no Man of La Mancha, tilting at windmills, but a torchbearer for a revolution that is underway and overdue.

“My thought is that more people would be emboldened to engage in grassroots civic action if they could just see what other people have already achieved,” he told me.

Smith’s Web site has drawn 82,000 visitors in the past year, and Facebook posts have reached 2.45 million, he says.

Smith cautioned me to write about the Web site and cause and not the man. But the man is unavoidable, and unique. He has as much energy as he had when I first met him in passing in a corridor at the National Press Club in Washington decades ago. At 82, Smith still plays tennis, skis, hikes, swims and dances with his wife, Susan, whom he describes as a “gorgeous dancer.”

At 6 feet 2 1/2 inches, Smith is an imposing figure at the lectern, but his delivery is gentle and collegiate: a reporter astounded and pleased with what he has found in the course of his investigation of the American body politic. — For InsideSources

 

 

Crime, War and Mischief Are the Internet Norms

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By Llewellyn King

The big news coming out of the G7 meeting in Japan will not be about establishing international norms for cybersecurity. That will only get an honorable mention at best. But maybe it should get greater attention: the threat is real and growing.

Consider just these four events of the recent past:

The electric grid in Ukraine was brought down last Dec. 23 by, it is believed, the Russians. Because of its older design, operators were able to restore power with manual overrides of the computer-controlled system.

The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles was ransomed. This crime takes place when a hacker encrypts your data and demands a ransom, often in untraceable bitcoin, to unlock it. The hospital paid $17,000 rather than risk patients and its ability to operate.

While these ransom attacks are fairly common, this is the first one believed to have been launched against a hospital. Previously hospitals had thought patient records and payment details were what hackers would want, not control of the operating systems. Some of the ransoms are as low as $3,000, with the criminals clearly betting that the victims would lose much more by not settling immediately, as did the medical center. The extortionists first asked for $3.6 million.

In a blockbuster heist on the Internet, the Bangladesh central bank was robbed of $81 million. The crooks were able to authorize the Federal Reserve of New York to release the money held in an account there. They would have got away with another $860 million, if it were not for a typing mistake. In this case, the money was wired to fraudulent accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Target, the giant retailer, lost millions of customer records, including credit card details, to an attack in February 2014. Since then, these attacks on retailers to get data have become common. Hackers sell credit card details on what is known as the “black web” to other criminals for big money.

Often the finger is pointed at China, which will not be at the G7. While it may be a perpetrator, it also has victim concerns. There is no reason to think that Chinese commerce is not as vulnerable as that in the West.

China, with the help of the Red Army, is blamed in many attacks, particularly on U.S. government departments. But little is known of attacks Chinese institutions sustain.

Governments want to police the Internet and protect their commerce and citizens, but they are also interested in using it in cyberwar. Additionally, they freely use it in the collection of intelligence and as a tool of war or persuasion. Witness U.S. attempts to impede the operation of the centrifuges in Iran and its acknowledged attacks on the computers of ISIS.

As the Net’s guerilla war intensifies, the U.S. electric utility industry, and those of other countries, is a major source of concern, especially since the Ukraine attack. Scott Aaronson, who heads up the cybersecurity efforts of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for private utilities, says the government’s role is essential, and the electric companies work closely with the government in bracing their own cyber defenses.

Still, opinions differ dramatically about the vulnerability of the electric grid.

These contrasting opinions were on view at a meeting in Boston last month, when two of the top experts on cybersecurity took opposing views of utility vulnerability. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security who now teaches emergency management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said she believed the threat to the electric grid was not severe. But Mourad Debbabi, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who also has had a career in private industry, thinks the grid is vulnerable — and that vulnerability goes all the way down to new “smart meters.”

The fact is that the grid is the battleground for what Aaronson calls “asymmetrical war” where the enemy is varied in skill, purpose and location, while the victims are the equivalent of a standing army, vigilant and vulnerable. No amount of government collaboration will stop criminals and rogue non-state players from hacking out of greed, or malice, or just plain hacker adventurism.

Governments have double standards, exempting themselves when it suits from the norms they are trying to institutionalize. Cyber mischief and defending against it are both big businesses, and the existential threat is always there. — For InsideSources

How the Ghost of Watergate Haunts This Election

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By Llewellyn King

There is a line of reasoning in political circles which says that Barack Obama created the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I aver that Donald Trump is a creation of the post-Watergate media. Collectively we have made running for office so absolutely awful, so fraught for families and careers that only two types of office seekers have the fortitude for public life: the grotesques, who are outside of the norms of the political culture, and the shopworn.

Both are on display as we trudge toward November wondering how in a country of so much talent so little of it has been on the ballot in this primary season.

The rot, I submit, began with Watergate when publishers and editors came to believe that the mission of the media was not only to scrutinize the policy views of elected officials but also to rip down the bedroom door, peer into the piggy bank and examine every word in print or on tape that a candidate has uttered since high school, whether in jest or earnest.

We confused personal rectitude — or rectitude according to the norms of public morality of the day — with sagacity, statesmanship and talent to lead. In the days before Watergate, Jack Kennedy could do with impunity what got Bill Clinton impeached.

Now that Watergate is 44 years behind us, its legacies are many, but two stand out. The first is that journalists in large numbers were suddenly attracted to covering politics in a way that fewer had been previously. The late Arnaud de Borchgrave, who covered 18 wars, noted disapprovingly that young journalists nowadays aspire to cover politics when they used to aspire to be foreign correspondents.

Even in these days of restrained budgets, Capitol Hill, and to a lesser extent the White House, is flooded with journalists, from the national media to the smallest newsletter. Politics is big news and that is good for business. As the incredibly successful Politico editors like to say, “flood the zone.”

But Congress is a deliberative body and moves slowly, so the news maw is fed with gossip. When the secrets of the budget are not clear or hard to get at, there is always the personal conduct of those working on the budget. If a member of Congress goes out to lunch with someone, anyone, a family member, it will be reported somewhere.

Being in public life is now like being on trial day in and day out without knowing what evidence the prosecution has or when it will bring it forward. In fact, being in public life has become God awful and no talented person ought to want to do it.

No wonder no one holding public office wants to stray from the talking points. A few stray words can bring you down, unless you are so outlandish that you have nothing say but stray words in lieu of coherent ones, like Donald Trump.

Watergate washed away unwritten rules under which what political figures did after hours was not fair game. I once saved a cabinet member from a situation with two “ladies” who did not have his best interests at stake. Everyone knew why a certain congressman liked to travel to Mexico — and it was not for tacos. Publicly, it was debated whether the statesman Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan drank too much and no less a person than that public scold, George Will, defended the New York senator by concluding that the great man drank just enough.

Olin “Tiger” Teague, a revered chairman of the House Science Committee, served drinks to his guests at 11 a.m. — and if you wanted an audience, you enjoyed a glass of bourbon with the Texas congressman. Today, you are lucky to get a plastic bottle of water during a Capitol Hill visit.

A Capitol Hill secretary of my acquaintance was proud of the number of congressmen she had bedded, including some in leadership.

The post-Watergate, unwritten rules of scrutiny, which imply that in private conduct there are clues to public greatness, rather than bringing a new morality to politics, only frightened off the talented, the effective and the patriotic and created a space for the outrageous and the shopworn. Look to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and wonder no longer how we got that unappetizing choice to lead the nation. — For InsideSources  Photo Credit: Pete Sousa

Underwear Goes on the Outside for Charity

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By Llewellyn King

Ronald Davis is a respected professor of biochemistry and genetics at Stanford University, and director of its Genome Technology Center. So why is a picture of him wearing his underwear over his pants superhero-style circulating on social media?

Davis is not alone. Others are joining in making themselves look ridiculous every day.

Ron Davis, ME Undies Challenge

Looking silly for a serious cause

The answer is that Davis is a research scientist whose son is severely afflicted with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), better known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — a name that dismisses the severity of this little understood and understudied disease that has devastated the lives of perhaps 1 million Americans, and what are calculated to be 17 million people worldwide.

Taking a selfie with underwear worn over outerwear is a new campaign, “Undies on the Outside,” to raise money — desperately needed money — for research on ME. This money possibly should have come through the government years ago, but the principal medical research arm of the United States, the National Institutes of Health, has been parsimonious in funding ME down through the years. Only $5 million a year is devoted to the affliction.

Yet the sick are almost inevitably sentenced to a lifetime of unspeakable suffering — often being confined to bed for months at a time and sometimes years — in pain and hideous isolation. They tell their story on ME/CFSAlert, the YouTube channel that I co-founded.

ME is an equal-opportunity monster: It strikes all ages and both sexes. Dr. Jose Montoya of the Stanford University Medical Center describes it as ordering a “parallel life.”

One of my close friends, who has suffered from the disease for 25 years, is fairly typical in her adversity. She was an athletic woman with a passion for squash and cycling. She said that when she was afflicted she became “like a car that had run out of gas.” That was on good days.

My friend’s life went from one of accomplishment and fullness in all the ways that a life can go right to one of surviving on the margins. For two years, she was bedridden. Every type of exertion is followed by a kind of unreasonable punishment for just trying to be normal. Recently, we spent a few hours together and had lunch in a restaurant. The price she paid was being so sick for two days that she had to stay in bed.

Normal family life, work and simple enjoyments are prescribed by ME. I have been writing and broadcasting about it for five years, during which I have come to think of those who suffer day in and day out, essentially without hope, as the children of a lesser god, alive but denied the joys of being alive. Suicide rates are high, and my e-mail box is full of e-mails from people who say they wish they could die.

Symptoms vary from a patient who told me her limbs seemed to be exploding to many who suffer mental fog, known as dysphasia, and need hours to write a few simple sentences.

ME Undies Challenge Logo

The “Undies on the Outside” challenge was devised by an Australian woman. It came from a party game of residents at cheetah rescue center in South Africa, who relieved the tedium of an evening by dressing up with their underwear over their outerwear. Years later one of those revelers, Kate Booker, now living in London, suffering from ME for 18 years, and bitterly aware of the paucity of funding globally for the disease, was inspired to work up a challenge to raise money.

Everyone photographed wearing their undies over their clothes is sending $10 to the Open Medicine Foundation in the Los Angeles area, and challenging three other people to do likewise. Booker chose the foundation because it is raising money for pure research into ME and is concentrating initially on finding a biomarker, so that people can be diagnosed and not thrown into medical limbo.

The Open Medicine Foundation is run by Linda Tannenbaum, whose adult daughter has been afflicted since she was a teenager.

It is especially sad that this disease seems only to be known and understood by those who have a family member or close friend who has been, as it were, taken from them while still being there, shuttered away in plain sight. — For InsideSources

Beltway Job Seekers Are Rested and Ready for the New President

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By Llewellyn King

If one of the presidential hopefuls, with the exception of Hillary Clinton, wins the presidency, the first thing he will need is the telephone number of a really good recruitment firm.

“Is this the Manpower company? Yes, well this is the president. I want you to come up with 1,400 top executives and, this is important, they must be able to be confirmed by the United States Senate — no lovers, no drunks, no druggies, and no financial cowboys. All right then, how about 100 smart ones and 1,300 warm ones with nice families?”

The fact is that the president has a job that is not always anticipated: personnel officer in chief. Of those who might get the presidency, the one who will be the least challenged in filling out the 1,400 jobs that require a nod from the Senate, Clinton has the best Rolodex of potential appointees. She should have. She has been around Washington since her husband was president. And that means that every Democratic political retread in the capital, will be petitioning for work.

As first lady, senator and secretary of state, Clinton has had plenty of opportunity to stuff her Rolodex. Less so Bernie Sanders, who was a loner in the Senate and who seems not to have sat in on any discussions on foreign policy. He, like so many politicians, knows people who agree with him, which means he has a good grip on the cost of university education to students, or the way medicine was nationalized in other countries.

Likewise, Ted Cruz can probably lay his hands on a few good tax-cutters and gold-standard adherents, but he may be a bit stretched when it comes to people who know about the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict or the supplies of flu vaccine for 2017.

John Kasich knows people from his time in Washington: people who are biding their time in the think tanks, where they have been holed up since past Republican administrations. Talk about Beltway insiders!

Trump knows people in real estate and people in show business, and he is his own adviser, by his own boast. He, more than the rest, is going to need help in getting help. How do you find people able to renegotiate every treaty on the books, which is the core of his foreign policy?

Let alone staffing a government, Trump will have difficulty in staffing even the transition team, so vital in a smooth transfer of power. So much to learn, which is hard when you are stuck in transmission. Does he know that the U.S. Geological Survey is part of the Interior Department, or the Secret Service part of Treasury? Does Sanders know that sensitive areas need career ambassadors, and cronies and buddies are for safe appointments, like Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

There is a long history of presidents who have been hurt or hindered by who they knew when they were elected. Ronald Reagan knew a lot of people and had less than usual trouble in staffing. But even so, his energy transition chief Michel Halbouty, a wildcatter from Texas, was floored when he heard the Department of Energy made and maintains nuclear weapons. Bill Clinton suffered what might be called the “Arkansas deficit” for the first years of his administration.

In the think tanks, left and right, former office holders and those itching to hold office hang out writing op-eds, making speeches and hoping they are headed for government. The has-beens and never-weres are rested and ready.

Trump, with no contacts where he would need them, would blunder, mistaking businessmen for statesmen. He could fall prey to a right-wing think tank, like the Heritage Foundation. Retired military also have agendas, and are keen to implement them on militarily-challenged new presidents.

Cruz is in danger of being taken in by extreme guys like Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and neocon Elliott Abrams, who urged another neophyte, George W. Bush, into the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Sanders is the man to thrill a bearded-and-sandaled crew from the universities. Maybe some advice from perennial man of the people Ralph Nader.

Hillary will bring out the human equivalent of the best of the political thrift shops: good in their day– yesterday.

The job fair opens Nov. 9.