White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Misnamed, Misdiagnosed, Misunderstood

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What's in a name? A great deal, if you suffer from one of the most awful long-term diseases that is widespread: chronic fatigue syndrome.

That name infuriates the patients, maybe 1 million in the United States and 17 million worldwide. It also infuriates the small but dedicated cadre of doctors and researchers who have made the disease and its casualties their concern.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta picked the CFS moniker in 1988, although the term myalgic encephalomyelitis (M.E.) is still in use in Europe and elsewhere, and is favored by patients.

The new name fast became despised because “it trivializes the disease and misleads people,” in the words of Leonard Jason, professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago. Certainly it brings to mind chronic whiners and everyone's everyday fatigue.

Part of the misleading, as Jason and numerous other medical professionals have claimed, is that the name has allowed governments and psychiatrists, especially in Britain, to sweep a plethora of psychological diagnoses into the tent. This, it is alleged, obscures the central unsolved mystery of CFC and its AIDS-like misery. And it hugely diverts government funding away from serious biomedical research. Jason and his colleagues believe that the most promising lines of investigation — pathogens, including a retrovirus called XMRV — are being under-researched in the process.

Although it has been around for centuries, and variously labeled, the modern concern with the disease dates to a major outbreak at London's Royal Free Hospital in 1955. That outbreak was big enough — nearly 300 — to worry public-health officials.

Its appearance in a cluster at the hospital suggested that it was contagious. Then, as now, there was no treatment and no clue as to the path of the contagion: Was it airborne or food-borne? How about contaminated surfaces? Were bodily fluids involved? Was there a genetic link?

None of those questions have been answered. What is known is that the disease appears in clusters and, more often, in isolated cases. It has spread in families, making it frightening; but the spread is occasional, not automatic.

The next major event to get the attention of health professionals was in Nevada at Incline Village, a resort on Lake Tahoe, in 1985. At over 300 cases, it proved too big to ignore, finally attracting attention from the CDC as well as state public-health authorities.

The CDC sent two young epidemiologists to investigate the outbreak—Gary Holmes and Jon Kaplan. They estimated sufferers at perhaps 20,000 throughout the United States, a majority women of whom were women.

In the same year, a second outbreak occurred in Lyndonville, a farming and manufacturing village in the northwest corner of New York state, with 216 cases out of a population of fewer than 900. Lyndonville only had one doctor, David Bell. He has followed the disease's progress tirelessly, becoming somewhat of a Nelson Mandela in the field.

Over the years, the disease kept on popping up around the country, attracting distinguished researchers in its wake. In 1987, Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Anthony Komaroff published a report about increasingly significant numbers in his Boston practice — the first evidence of what is now a quarter century of his CFS research. Dr. Nancy Klimas, an immunologist and AIDS expert at the University of Miami, found her clinic flooded with sufferers from the new disease and soon found their immune systems showed strange characteristics.

The numbers were clearly overflowing the CDC's estimate, but no one yet realized the extent.

Then entered Jason and his team of researchers at DePaul University. They studied the disease in society from a psychological point of view and found in 1990 that there were about 1 million sufferers in the United States.

They also found that the disease was caused by an unknown pathogen but was not psychological in nature, and that the cure rate was extremely low. Additionally, they and other researchers found that one of the prevailing symptoms was immune system suppression.

For most patients, CFS is a one-way ticket to hell. The affliction is acute and mostly incurable. Horrifically, it takes away even life's littlest pleasures.

According to many interviews and hundreds of e-mails I have received since first covering the disease, sufferers are hit first with symptoms of what seems to be flu. Sometimes there is a short, deceptive remission — sometimes two or three. Then the pattern emerges of collapse after every exertion, especially exercise. Finally, it is full onset: There are no more normal days, only different degrees of weakness, pain and other symptoms. Doctors term the disease relapsing and remitting. That means you might have weeks, months or years of slightly better days, and then stretches — often years, sometimes decades — of almost total helplessness. It is goodbye to the life you have known; to work, to hobbies, to lovers and spouses, to everything short of hope.


Deborah Waroff, a gifted New York author and securities analyst, is typical in the devastation of her life. Before Waroff was a skier, a sailor, a passionate squash and tennis player. Now the aloneness of the disease weighs her down. Very old friends — some from her days at Harvard, a few from childhood, a handful from work — sustain her with telephone calls, when she can answer the phone, and some come by. Nonetheless, the brutal loneliness is always there.

Waroff was first felled at the end of July 1989. Her engagement calendar grew full of forlorn cancellations for dinners, parties and meetings. One day in 1991, a bad headache arrived that lasted three days; after that, it came again and again.

Gradually, with help from a caring doctor, Waroff began to find medications and methods that would allow her to work a few hours a day. Pushing herself with sheer willpower to complete a chore would exaggerate her symptoms — more mixed-up speech, stumbles and almost falls, dizziness, rising fevers. Afterward, she would be immobilized for days.

Then things got worse.

In September 2003, Waroff woke up to find that she was too weak to fill out a simple form — just to renew library books – and fax it. That was the beginning of month after month of near-death incapacity. “I was as weak as you can imagine. I lay on the couch, its high back and sides making me think how much this was like being in a coffin, inert, my consciousness flattened by illness. I was too weak to read and often too weak to watch television. I would turn my back to the screen and let the sound wash over me, not taking it in.”

CFS, like AIDS, suppresses the immune system. Typical symptoms include tremendous fatigue that is unrelieved by sleep, as well as flare-ups of herpes- family diseases (like HHV-6 and Epstein-Barr), swelling of the lymph nodes, muscle ache and other pain, dysphasia (the inability to use the right words) and general cognitive failure, nausea and faintness.


Elisabeth Tova Bailey, once a professional gardener in Maine, was felled by CFS. Unable to leave her bed for more than a year, she filled her days by watching a single snail in a terrarium make its fascinating way though life.

When she was feeling somewhat better, Bailey studied the snail through the wonderful work of the 19th-century naturalists — that special breed of romantics who studied by watching, rather than by dissecting in the lab. The result is the well-reviewed and sweet book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.”

The most famous person to have CFS, and to have managed in great adversity to be productive, is Laura Hillenbrand who has over time written two incontrovertible bestsellers, “Seabiscuit: An American Legend” and “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival.”

Hillenbrand's achievement is Herculean. She seldom is able to leave her home in Washington, D.C. In a recent interview, she told the story of how she had to leave her own wedding because she was so sick.

Statistically two-thirds more women are afflicted than men. But I have heard from a lot of men, including a medical doctor and a young man, who was thrown out by his father who accused him of malingering, being lazy and not wanting to work. His plight is terrible, as is the plight of other people who do not have the intellectual capital or financial resources to do anything but suffer in isolation. Insurance companies drop coverage routinely, and many doctors misdiagnose or are influenced by psychiatric arguments.

Recovery, like that of DePaul's Leonard Jason, is rare. If it does not occur within the first two years, it is unlikely to occur at all. Usually only the young and well-supported socially are able to regain a good part of the health they once had.

The beacon of hope in this wasteland of human wreckage is a private institute in Reno, Nev. Affiliated with the University of Nevada, it is called The Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI). It was founded and funded by Harvey Whittemore and his wife, Annette. Their 33-year-old daughter, Andrea Whittemore Goad, has been a CFS sufferer since she was 11.

The medical establishment has been cool to WPI; and NIH turned down all six research grant applications it made last year. But 1 million very sick Americans are cheering for this frontal attack on CFS, which they prefer to call M.E./CFS in deference to the older, less trivializing name.

While these things are argued, the life in limbo that so many endure is described by Waroff this way: “You know the trouble with this disease? All this time goes by with nothing in it. You don't get a chance to put anything in it. It's just empty time.”

Squabbling Experts, Suffering Patients

As with other investigative science, the search for a cure for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is riddled with controversy, accusations and suspicion. The patient community believes, with seeming unanimity, that the medical institutions have failed them globally – namely America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) They argue that the CDC discredited the disease, following the first big U.S. outbreak by giving it a misleading new name, chronic fatigue syndrome, and then shirking on research.

Among the alleged perfidy, the CDC first under-counted the number of U.S. sufferers at 20,000 and then over-counted them at 4 million. The count is crucial because when it was too low, resources were starved. And once it was set too high, test results became skewed because the CDC was including legions of clinically depressed people and others with psychological ailments, probably none of whom had CFS.

Nowhere is the counting more important than trying to establish whether it is the retrovirus XMRV that is the guilty pathogen in CFS. If the count is wrong and the patient cohort include people who have been misdiagnosed, the studies become a nonsense.

That is partially the case in Britain, where the NHS has been predisposed to treat CFS as a psychological disease and to dismiss studies which find XMRV in patients as contaminated, in particular by mouse DNA, which is present in the air of many laboratories that use mice in tests.

But the privately funded Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in Reno, Nev. claims that they have never used mice and have guarded carefully against this possibility. Among the numerous test methods they used to thwart contamination, they hunted down antibodies to XMRV in patient blood, which cannot possibly have any connection to contamination. As WPI president Annette Whittemore points out, the real lab work includes finding genuine patients and extracting the elusive markers such as XMRV antibodies, making the work conclusive.

A recent article in the distinguished British medical journal, The Lancet, advocated cognitive therapy for CFS, such as improved diet and regular, paced exercise. The Internet lit up with denunciation. The consensus was that this was therapy for people who suffered from depression, not CFS.

The bottom line: This kind of commonsense therapy may help some, says Dr. David Bell, who has had more hands-on experience with CFS patients than any other medical professional, but it is not a cure or a breakthrough. What little is known is that different therapies work temporarily for different people: Deborah Waroff in New York has had some relief with ozone blood therapy; others, like Andrea Whittemore Goad in Reno, with Ampligen, an experimental drug; and still others with various immune-system boosters.

Those and other issues were debated at a NIH-sponsored conference, entitled “State of the Science,” on April 7-8. — Llewellyn King

This article was previously published by RealClearPolitics.

The Next Big Idea: An Infrastructure Bank

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The late, great senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to lament that Americans had lost the courage for big projects like the one he championed for the lower West Side of Manhattan, Westway. He wondered what had happened to the civic courage that allowed the building of the Erie Canal, the Hoover Dam (a giant jobs project), the transcontinental railroads and the Interstate Highway System.

And his lament was when we could still afford to build big things.

Civic timorousness has now been joined by fiscal constraint. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has canceled a project to build a much-needed new tunnel from his state into Manhattan. A station on a new subway line between Dulles Airport in Virginia and Washington, D.C. hangs in the balance, as local jurisdictions throw up their hands at the cost. The issue is whether a less-costly station above ground should replace a planned, underground station in the airport terminal. High speed rail was rejected in Florida ostensibly over cost fears.

But it is the lack of big projects, in a time of financial crisis, that are beginning to threaten the competitiveness of America’s future.

Our infrastructure — once the envy of the world — is in deplorable shape, and declining faster than it is being rejuvenated: airports, bridges, canals, passenger rail, ports, roads, sewage and water systems are all falling apart.

In short, America seems broken. And those things that are not yet broken, like the air traffic control system and the electric grid, are showing signs of mortal strain.

An additional blow to infrastructure has been the zeal of Congress in getting rid of earmarks; a funding device that, at its best, when done openly, directed some miniscule parts of the federal budget to places where the infrastructure was strained to breaking, or simply did not exist.

Because it was abused in the middle of the night, with dollars going to dubious projects and firms, Congress has, to quote Sen. John Kerry (D –Mass,) “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”

Against this background of impotence, brought on by budget paralysis, there is a stirring in Washington among academics, some politicians (particularly Kerry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) who have introduced a bill), the think-tanks, the craft unions and the columnists — in short, the establishment — that there should be an infrastructure bank, a public-private partnership bank, devoted to the long-term (up to 45 years) financing of infrastructure projects.

The idea, as espoused by panelists at a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, representing interests from the construction contractors, financiers like The Carlyle Group, to the AFL-CIO, is that the bank would make direct loans, guarantee private-sector loans, and verify the creditworthiness of projects that could be financed by the private sector on favorable terms with guarantees from the bank against default. Robert Dove of The Carlyle Group beamed when he described a model project of public-private cooperation along highways in Connecticut.

Although it is very unpopular to say in Washington that anything in Europe works, the model for an American bank might well be the highly successful European Investment Bank with a nod to the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a successful public-private financial partnership.

Whether the bank is the institution proposed by Kerry and Hutchison, talk of an infrastructure bank that would create jobs and help reverse years of infrastructure decay will be coming to a town hall near you soon.

The concept of “infrastructure” is vague, but the word “jobs” is a powerful political opiate. And there are plenty of sound-bite-friendly statistics, such as one from the American Society of Civil Engineers that says that it will take $2 trillion over five years to restore the U.S. infrastructure, or that we spend less than 2 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on fixing up the country while China is spending 9 percent.

No wonder Kerry gets misty-eyed when he talks about the shame he feels at riding the fastest train in the world in China or of sliding from London to Paris in two hours and 15 minutes with his cell phone and computer plugged in. 

— For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to Get Web Television Presence

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A new Web-based television program aims to shine a light on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, sometimes referred to by patients as “the living death” disease. The disease also is known by its old name — and the one favored by many patients — myalgic encephalomyelitis.

The program is called “M.E./CFS Alert” and can be accessed on the You Tube Channel ME CFSAlert. The program will soon be accessible at www.whchronicle.com, the Web site of the weekly news and public affairs television program “White House Chronicle.”

The program was conceived by Llewellyn King, a Washington columnist and executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” and Deborah Waroff, a New York writer and security analyst, who has suffered from the disease for 22 years.

“This is a terrible, debilitating and essentially lifelong disease which, like AIDS, suppresses the immune system. Our program has three objectives: to comfort the suffering; to change attitudes among physicians and medical institutions, and to implore the government to provide critically needed research funds,” Waroff said.

An estimated 1 million Americans are so severely impacted by the disease that for months and years they are house-bound. Worldwide some 17 million have lost the ability to lead normal lives and work.

Often those who have suffered total physical collapse are ostracized because of bigotry and ignorance. Institutions, like Britain's National Health Service, treat M.E./CFS as a psychiatric disease, even though patients are in great physical pain.

The disease knows no economic, geographic or social boundaries. Author Laura Hillenbrand is the best-known American victim.

“In more than 50 years of reporting, I've never experienced so many people so misunderstood and abandoned by society and many doctors. I've worked on three continents and reported from around the world, but never have I had a response like the one I've had from writing about M.E./CFS,” King said.

The first program is an interview with pioneering M.E./CFS doctor Derek Enlander.

Merkel Finds German Engineering not Good Enough for Nuclear

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Question: What is Germany most famous for these days? Answer: engineering.

In light of the worldwide respect for German engineering, precision and management, why has Chancellor Angela Merkel taken up arms against her most admired national talents?

For that is what she has done in turning Germany against its nuclear future — a future she endorsed last fall. She has closed seven reactors permanently and has the 10 others set to cease operating sequentially by 2022.

Ostensibly, she has taken this draconian action in light of the Fukushima-Dai-ichi crisis in Japan; but more especially because her conservative-led Christian Democratic Union party and its coalition members have taken a drumming from the Green party in local elections.

Since the Japanese crisis, the German Greens have mobilized large anti-nuclear demonstrations throughout Germany. Indeed, the party was formed immediately after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Since then it has been a force to be reckoned with in German politics — always there, but sometimes more vocal than others.

To German commentators, Merkel’s about-face speaks of just one thing: opportunism. Fearing the dissolution of her fragile coalition, she gave the Greens what they wanted: complete surrender on the nuclear issue.

While buying a political-life extension, Merkel has cast a shadow over Germany’s future as the economic engine of Europe. Without nuclear, Germany will face severe economic and even environmental challenges ahead.

Merkel says that the nuclear slack will be taken up by boosting its renewable energy sources – wind, solar and hydro — from 17 percent of the mix today to double that. Nuclear has been providing 25 percent of German electricity. It would take about 20,000 windmills alone to replace that.

Also, Merkel says, electricity consumption will be cut by 10 percent.

Quite how any of this will be achieved is uncertain. Already, conservation is a high priority in Germany and alternative energy has been a high priority for years.

Most likely there will be electricity shortages in parts of the country, mostly in the south; there will be more brown coal burned; and Russia will further extend its energy hegemony over Northern and Eastern Europe by upping the amount of gas provided to Germany for electricity production. Another ironic likelihood is that as Germany will have to import more electricity and it will have to do so from countries with a large nuclear base like France.

The three German utilities that own various nuclear plants are in a state of shock, even disbelief. One, Eon, already is talking about billions of euros of compensation for loss of business and capital goods. The others are likely to follow suit. There is likely to be litigation in the German and the European courts.

Early polls show that while the German people do not want nuclear, they also see the Merkel move as political and cynical. One poll found that 70 percent of the electorate found the chancellor’s actions to be opportunistic.

First calculations, not denied by Merkel’s administration, expect electricity prices – already among the highest in Europe – to bound by nearly 20 percent.

The untold damage is to the concept of the invulnerability of German engineering – that something special that has made German cars the gold standard of the world. If Germany does not believe that it can engineer its reactors to levels of safety and manage them with Prussian zeal, then what has happened to the German ethic?

Brown coal — the dirtiest there is, being somewhere between bituminous coal and peat in its makeup — is the default position in German energy. Dirty to burn but plentiful, it may now make a comeback with severe environmental consequences for Germany and its neighbors.

When Merkel talks about alternatives, she is really talking about wind and at thousands more turbines will now have to be added in a country with limited land area for diffuse energy sources.

Although the Germans have been more successful than thought possible with solar, it remains a cold, gray northern country that requires a lot of reliable affordable electricity to keep its place in the global economy. Merkel appears to have put her own future above that of her country. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Natural Gas Is not Exactly Environmentally Clean

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If you live in the United States — almost anywhere in the U.S. — there may be a gas well coming to a site near you. Even on property you think you own, a gas well may be on its way.

Then there is the problem of how much air and water pollution that neighborhood gas well will bring with it. So far pollution has brought the most public outcry, largely because it is the issue that environmentalists are concerned with.

The new abundance of natural gas is a bonanza, but it is not a free lunch. Gas wells near or in your backyard are dividing communities, particularly in rural areas, and could eventually divide the environmental movement.

For decades natural gas has been the benign fuel without the pollution of coal, the geopolitical ramifications of oil, or the politics of nuclear. In fact, natural gas is almost too good to be true — or it has been until this latest chapter in its history opened. New supplies and new ways of liberating them are tarnishing the image of gas as the best energy available.

Traditionally, drilling for gas was like drilling for oil. A hole went deep into the ground until it penetrated a big cavern of gas with tributaries, which would yield more gas if the rock there was broken up. This rock-breaking was called hydraulic fracturing, and this was accomplished by injecting various liquids including water, chemicals and gas that had seeped to the surface outside of the piping.

Fifty years ago, there were even two experimental programs to use nuclear detonations for fracking gas. That method didn't go forward.

Since then, things have come a long way in the search for more gas and new technologies have evolved. Chief among these are seismic mapping and horizontal drilling. The former gives geologists a very exact picture of what is underground, and the latter makes the collection of it much more efficient.

Horizontal drilling finds the lock and fracking turns the key. Whereas once drillers put down one straw and sucked, now they put down one straw and then send out others horizontally in many directions.

Thus enabled, gas can now be exploited where it was previously unreachable — in shale rock. But to get the rock to give up its harvest, fracking is essential. With it come problems, and gas — if you will — loses its innocence.

Fracking is environmentally contaminating:

a. The fracking agent along with the methane could seep into drinking water and alarm farmers and communities.

b. Methane tends to escape around the well and is a major greenhouse gas.

c. A gas well using fracking demands millions of gallons of water. Many pollutants, like mercury and nitrates, are borne to the surface with the discharged water, which is then held in leach ponds.

This negates the big environmental virtue of gas that it burns with half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal and none of the nitrous oxides. The lunch tab has gone from nearly free to quite pricey.

The problem for the environmental movement is that it has favored natural gas for electricity production over its bete noirs: nuclear and coal.

The problem of an unwanted gas well landing on land you thought you owned is an historical one which recognizes "split estates." This was a concept in law that the land had two values: the surface and the oil and gas contained under the surface.

These two estates could be split and a landowner could sell the rights to the subterranean estate. Historically, many have done so. Now with the value of shale gas rising in 30 or more states, homeowners are finding that grandpa or a previous owner may have tried to capitalize too early by selling the underground rights.

As Amy Mall of the Natural Resources Defense Council told a meeting on fracking in Washington this week, the law's results can be devastating. A family in Wise County, Texas, lost all value in their 10-acre holding when a gas company, which leased the mineral rights from neighbors who had bought them earlier, set up a rig and occupied five acres of land for their operations.

This is part of the back story on the new bonanza of natural gas that is giving so many so much hope for our energy future. The new gas is not your father's gas and while it is a boon, it is not all blessing.  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

What Ails the Press? It Ails Itself

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It was Thomas Carlyle who told us that Edmund Burke, in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening of press coverage of the House of Commons, declared, “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

In the context of Parliament, the other three estates would have been the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons.

Burke's phrase stuck. More than two centuries later, the Fourth Estate is preserved, but is it powerful?

Here in Washington, it is losing respect rapidly. Today Burke, who was praising the independence of the reporters in ushering over two centuries of media standing up to authority, might wonder if he had overstated their zeal. Three and a Half Estates he might have decided.

The crisis in the media, as some of us believe, is not in the decline of newspapers, the shrinking of viewership for traditional television news, or the growth of partisan cable news, but rather in two other unrelated but dangerously coincidental trends.

The first of these is that the establishment in Washington now believes it doesn't need the media in the way that the media was believed to be needed traditionally. No longer do those hoping to influence Congress begin by selling their point of view to the media by lunching reporters, persuading editorial boards and courting columnists. Instead lobbyists go straight to Congress, where the game is to buy the votes they need with campaign contributions. Who needs the media to stir up popular support when the deed can be done with silver?

Gerald Cassidy, maybe the most successful K Street lobbyist of them all, lamented this change to me at lunch about 10 years ago. It has simply gotten worse.

Cassidy worried about the lack of public support for major legislation passed under lobby pressure. He also lamented how little time a lobbyist got with a member — how little time to dwell on the merits of a course of action.

Cassidy became a very wealthy man lobbying, but he yearned for a fair fight. The old-fashioned way, if you will.

This new state of affairs can be felt in the decline of interest in the general media by public relations firms who used to court every reporter in Washington. Now they “counsel” their clients; offer “strategic planning” and — oddly, as they take little notice of the media — a strange hybrid called “media training.” What media? Their other big new product is to keep reporters away from influential people: the people reporters need to talk to.

In case you think this is peculiarly a Washington phenomenon, it is not. At a recent meeting of the Association of European journalists in Maastricht, the Netherlands, speaker after speaker from country after country complained about those who allegedly are paid to facilitate press access in business and in government and instead wall off their masters.

The second downward trend is a pervasive pusillanimity that has gripped the media in the last several years. We allow ourselves to be segregated, corralled and de facto licensed.

At the White House, the press briefings are like feeding time for the dolphins at Sea World. We, the correspondents, sit around waiting for the keeper, press secretary Jay Carney, to bring in the dead fish. He throws most of it to the network correspondents, sitting grandly in the first two rows where they engage him in long conversations. Finally, Carney tosses some squid to the print reporters in the back of the room and an occasional minnow to the foreign press.

The problem is not that Carney does that but that we take it.

Likewise we can't walk without an escort to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, as we used to and a minder sits in on our interviews. And we take it.

The press conferences are rigged. Regular correspondents don't get to ask questions, just a predictable few — yes, those with the fishy breath from the front row.

Some old timers spoke up and lambasted the press at a meeting in Washington this week. Former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson said, “It's all very stale, very structured, very pale.” Sid Davis, a former NBC bureau chief, said the press conferences look as though the correspondents are watching a funeral service.

And longtime NBC and ABC correspondent Sander Vanocur said, “You want to know what's wrong with the press? The press is what's wrong with the press.” — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Twitter Rides to the Aid of Britain’s Gossip Press

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A mighty battle is shaping up between the British government and the American-controlled social networking sites, primarily Twitter and Facebook.

The government of Prime Minister David Cameron is committed to extending the harsh libel and privacy laws, with which it attempts to control the notorious tabloids, to social networking sites. The sites not only carry salacious gossip, but also provide tools for circumventing laws on the books for newspapers.

This state of hostilities between the government and the social media is a new front in a war that has raged in Britain since the first tabloids appeared in the 1920s.

The appetite for gossip in Britain is at the heart of the government's schemes to discipline the media, or at least hold it accountable, for the violation of the privacy of the famous, infamous and titled. Notwithstanding Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Aniston and assorted American glitterati adorning the supermarket tabloids, the British passion for the sex lives of the rich and famous dwarfs its American equivalents by orders of magnitude.

In turn the energy, resourcefulness, deceit and intrusion of the British tabloids is appalling. No electronic device, trick or bribe is overlooked in the endless campaigns to shame the famous, embarrass the wayward and, in general, romp around their boudoirs and places of assignation.

The tradition of paying informants – maids, butlers, nurses and old lovers –handsomely for lurid details (or anything that can be made to sound lurid) means that the prominent love at their own risk. Yes, it is sex, far more than money or corruption, that sells the British tabloids; and sales push up the revenues. The ability with modern technology to eavesdrop on private conversations has made things worse.

Despite the toughness of British libel law, the battle rages, led by two of a bunch of tabloids, the daily Sun and the weekly News of the World, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the parent company of Fox and The Wall Street Journal in the United States.

It is not that these two are more amoral than the rest, but rather they are better at the game than their competitors. They pay more to informants and the paparazzi than the rest.

For these scoundrels, the United Kingdom in general and England in particular, are target-rich. It starts at the top with the monarchy. Yes, the tabloids cheered the royal wedding but they are ready – indeed, anxious – for the first hint of an indiscretion, domestic discord or even wardrobe malfunction. Then there are the aristocrats, often ignored, but center stage at the suggestion of sexual impropriety.

On to the rest, the footballers, the television personalities, the movie stars. Know what “bonking” is? It is the word favored by the tabloids for sex, as in footballer Y is bonking actress X.

No detail is too private or sick-making not to be rushed to millions of breakfast tables. To keep things spiced up, The Sun has a young, busty woman, naked to the waist on Page Three most days. Helps the corn flakes go down.

To protect the private lives of public figures, the British courts enjoin newspapers from publishing specific reports, if the victim is forewarned — and the preemptive “gagging” orders are feared and loathed in the media. They are so restrictive that it is illegal even to say that one has been taken out. But these themselves may have rebounded against the government the courts and the celebrities.

Frustrated journalists and gossip lovers have taken to Twitter and sometimes Facebook to list, often erroneously, which celebrities are hiding behind preemptive injunctions. The implication of such outing is that there are dark goings on.

Now celebrities are taking to the Internet to deny that they have taken out restraining orders or have a need to. So the government is ham-fistedly going after the social networks. It wants them to reveal the names of the Twitter and Facebook account holders.

As with a lot of regulation, the government and courts have made things worse. But if it goes after the American firms that provide Internet services in American courts, they will run into the First Amendment.

Even the European Court has sided in the past with the press. Generally governments are suspected of wanting to curb political speech and investigation, not tales from the bedchamber. Britain rules the sheets, apparently. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

The Joy of Natural Gas, It’s Here Aplenty

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Tired of high gasoline pump prices? Wondering why, with our fearsome energy hunger, all the energy seems to be in the Middle East?

That was yesterday's story.

Almost overnight — well, in a few short years — the energy picture has been changing. We are not energy beggars anymore. We have energy bounty — and that does not include the energy from wind and sun, or the controversial energy from the atom.

Now we have plenty of the most versatile of the hydrocarbons — more versatile than coal, and oil. It is natural gas; and it is going to change the face of America remarkably quickly, whether it is used to make electricity for electric cars or is burned directly in cars.

Natural gas is the new oil, maybe the new gold, and certainly the most exciting energy development in a long time.

Indeed, it is a Cinderella story: a hopeless orphan who is now the belle of the ball. Originally, natural gas was found in conjunction with oil and was regarded as something of a nuisance. It was mostly cursed and “flared” or burned at the well; and it is still flared when there is no way of moving it to market, either in a pipe or as a liquid. Cities favored a low-grade gas made from coal for lamps and heating because coal could be transported by rail.

But natural gas turned out to be a wonderful feedstock for fertilizers and many other manufactures and chemicals. It also demonstrated its superiority over coal gas for heating and cooking, and a network of pipelines spread across the nation.

Even as the usefulness of natural gas spread, so did the political desire to control it. The Federal Power Commission, the predecessor of today's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, issued what became known infamously as the Permian Basin decision. It said that natural gas in interstate commerce had to have the price regulated by the federal government.

The result was two classes of gas, interstate and intrastate. It was a disaster, coming as the demand for gas was rising.

Then came the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, which meant that gas was wanted for things oil had been used for up until then. Growing gas demand coincided with severe shortage not only in the pipelines, but also in proven reserves in the ground — low regulated prices had cut into exploration. The outlook for gas was bleak.

By 1977, the Carter administration had declared natural gas a “depleted resource.” There was panic. Newspapers listed all the good things we got from natural gas. Congress decided it was too useful to be burned, and it passed the Fuel Use Act.

Henceforth, gas was to be husbanded. Pilot lights on domestic cooking stoves were banned, as were all decorative uses of flames. Even the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery was nearly extinguished.

In 1987 natural gas was deregulated, and the companies started exploring and drilling again. The gas shortage transformed itself into a “gas bubble.” When I told a meeting of Wall Street analysts in the early-1980s that natural gas would again be used for electric generation they were disbelieving. As I left the building, one analyst said to another, “Very droll, but he doesn't know what he's talking about.”

But it did happen, and in a big way; not only was more natural gas being sought, but technology was set to change the amount of gas available and the way it could be used.

The first technological advance was a very efficient, gas-burning machine for utilities, the aeroderivitive turbine. Then came horizontal drilling, which allows a single gas or oil well to stretch out tentacles for miles in every direction. This drilling technology opened up old gas and oil fields for further exploitation and made new ones very profitable.

The final jewel in the natural gas crown was the ability of drillers to start breaking up rocks in the shale band — between 6,000 and 9,000 feet below the surface — in areas that were not before thought to contain gas. The Marcellus field, extending through Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio, may turn out to be the largest shale field currently being developed.

El Dorado enow — except for environmental concern about the chemicals used to break the rock, in a process called fracking. Also, groundwater has been affected in many locations; and there is video of tap water burning.

But proponents of natural gas point out that it has half the greenhouse emissions of coal, and few or no nitrous oxides. Natural gas is set to do for the United States what North Sea oil has done for Britain and Norway.  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

How Fear, Greed Factor into the Price of Gasoline

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The fate of the Obama presidency hangs not on a birth certificate or the red ink on the federal budget but by the hose nozzle of your local gas station.

Electoral discontent is measured by the price of a gallon of gasoline. Heading past $4 toward $5, that is a lethal trajectory for President Obama.

Enter the demagogues, especially the clown-in-a-business-suit, Donald Trump. Unfettered by the gravity that goes with facts, Trump says that he would fix the oil price — now around $110 a barrel — by facing down the producers, particularly the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). He told an interviewer on television that he would call OPEC and tell them to pump more or face the consequences. The latter, he did not specify. War? Against whom?

In a compelling book by Leah McGrath Goodman, "The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World’s Oil Market," the author lays out the ugly fact that often — in fact, more often as not — the price of oil is set not in Vienna at the headquarters of OPEC, but in downtown Manhattan at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).

Tens of thousands of future contracts are traded in nanoseconds at the NYMEX, and the price of oil is set. This price affects not only the price that will be paid when these contracts expire and delivery takes place, but also, according to Goodman, the all-important over-the-counter market, where sellers trade more directly with buyers without government oversight.

Goodman contends that there is little oversight of the NYMEX because the agency charged with the role is the weak and ineffectual Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where many staff and commissioners are busy burnishing their resumes so they can cash in later as market executives.

The over-the-counter market is not regulated at all because of a pernicious interference from Congress known as the “Enron Loophole.” How did it get into law? It is one of those pieces of special-interest protection that owes its existence to legislative immaculate conception. It was not in the committee version of the bill; it slipped in along the way without parenthood, but is largely believed to be the work of former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, whose wife, Wendy, was chair of the CFTC.

In classic theory, a market is where a willing buyer and a willing seller strike a price. In the world of traders, it is something else: It is where volatility is rewarded and myths hold sway.

Today there is no actual shortage of crude oil. Supply and demand, according to those who monitor these things, is in balance. But fear stalks the trading floors because fear is good for traders; and fear is a critical part of the oil price.

Wars and rumors of wars are relished in trading pits. They raise the specter of coming shortage and introduce the instability the traders love. During the electricity shortage in California in 2001, traders, particularly at Enron, sought not only to capitalize on fears of shortage, but also to guarantee shortage by taking generating equipment off line.

Of course, reality must eventually catch up with speculation. The production of oil must meet demand and the price will briefly reach real world equilibrium. This happened in 1986, when the price collapsed because Saudi Arabia opened its spigots after the volatility of the 1970s. Many traders were wiped out and speculative billions were lost.

Some oil industry observers believe that the market is trading on a “fear premium” of about $1 per gallon of gasoline, spooked by the uncertainty in the Middle East and traders exploiting that fear.

Good for Obama. Time for the president to engage in a little market manipulation of his own.

The nation has about eight months of supply of crude oil saved in salt domes, in what is called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. There is more oil available in the Naval Petroleum Reserve, a set-aside of oil in the ground. Obama needs to say that we are going to start using this oil as soon as it can reach the refineries.

He has to go the whole hog — to set the machinery of using our special reserves in motion. That will humble the traders.

However, any new wars in the Middle East, and all bets are off. Poltergeists would stalk lower Manhattan. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate





More White Mischief

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From the Romans on, wise men, including American humorist Mark Twain and French humanist Michel de Montaigne, have advised: Don't lie unless you have a good memory. This could be updated for conspiracy theorists this way: Don't spout theories of conspiracy unless you have the mind of an historian. Take note, Donald Trump.

Now back to Aug. 4, 1961 and the birth of Barack Hussein Obama in a faraway place, Kenya Colony in East Africa. It is a part of the British Empire that knows that its days as a playground for the English upper class — and often aristocratic playboys and playgirls – is limited. A year and a half earlier, their life in the sun was challenged and the future revealed when Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament on Feb. 3 that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa.

The settlers on the famous “White Highlands” of Kenya Colony had survived the scandals of the 1930s and early 1940s, when the lover of a particularly beautiful woman, Lady Diana Broughton, was believed to have been murdered by her husband, Sir John Broughton, 30 years her senior. The murder of Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, took the cover off the aristocrats cavorting in Happy Valley and the famous Muthaiga Club in the capital, Nairobi.

Back in England, where the dark days of World War II were raging, the fun-in-the-sun frolickers were pilloried as a dissolute lot with servants, booze, drugs and a penchant for wife-swapping.

In the 1950s, the brutal Mau Mau uprising by Kenya's Kikuyu led to a loss of faith in the future in all of colonial Africa, including Southern Rhodesia, another British colony with a small white population. Unlike Kenya, which was governed from London, Southern Rhodesia had a greater degree of self- government and was less a playground for wild exiles.

The tone of life in Kenya was summed up by the title of a book about the colony's most famous murder, “White Mischief,” later a movie. Anyway by the time Obama was born, things in Kenya were getting tense.

So in this environment of racial sensitivity, imagine a white American giving birth to a child fathered by an African. The local newspaper, The East African Standard, would have been aghast. Blimpy club men would have sputtered over their Scotch and sodas and their wives would have spilled their tea and moved forward the hour for their evening cocktails, known as sundowners.

The settlers in Kenya may have lived fast but, as in Southern Rhodesia, no issue was more sensitive than white women and black men. In 1957 there was a celebrated case in Southern Rhodesia of a black man, Patrick Matimba, who, while studying in England, had married a white woman from the Netherlands and took her to live in his homeland. The white Southern Rhodesians were enraged. While there might have been many white men who were coupling with black women, the reverse was not tolerated. It terrified the settlers.

Uncomfortably the Matimbas set up house in the only place that they were allowed to, church property in the farming hamlet of Rusape. When Mrs. Matimba suffered a miscarriage, her husband could not visit her in the local white hospital. Around this time a white widow, Mrs. Fletcher Lowe, who had an affair with her African servant, was imprisoned. I covered both stories and knew the players well.

So to those of us who grew up in colonial Africa, it is inconceivable that Obama's mother gave birth to him in Nairobi and that his step-grandmother watched the birth.

More intriguing is how birthers believe that not one but two birth notices were placed in Honolulu newspapers within nine days of Obama's birth. How could that be done without credit cards; the Internet; or in the probability that outside of the American Embassy, not too many people in Kenya knew anything about Hawaii? After all, Hawaii had only been a state for two years and the people of Kenya had other things on their minds, let alone how to post birth notices across two oceans.

No, Donald Trump. The kind of disinformation pedaled by the birthers had a name in Kenya: white mischief.  – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate