If you haven’t been reading MANzine lately, here’s what you’ve missed:

Features:

• Fixing College Football (James Joyner) –   Most of the first weekend’s college football games are a joke that make a mockery of sportsmanship and competition.

• Manliness in the Modern Age (Alex Knapp) – I’ve never understood why so many of my male peers have so much trouble with what it means to be a man.

• Why I Love College Football (Alex Massie) – How a lad from Scotland came to love America’s greatest sporting spectacle.

• NFL Preview 2009 (Jon Stonger) – After months in the football-less darkness of spring and summer, the NFL season is finally upon us.

• 2009 Big XII Preview (Jon Stonger) – I don’t know what’s going to happen in the Big XII this year. That doesn’t stop me from writing about it.

• Men, Women & Porn: A Love Story (Rick Moran) – The fastest growing segment of porn consumers are females – single, married, involved – and the younger the woman, the more likely they are to have their own porn collection stashed away at home.

• Four From The Dalmore (Alex Knapp) – We review four wonderful single malts from The Dalmore.

• Hail the Home Made Burger (Scott Payne) – Extolling the virtues of the home made burger.

• iLove My iPhone (Steven Taylor) – A little phonevolution: from the standard cell to true iPhone love.

• A Damn Fine Chicken Parmigiana (Stephen Green) – A classic Italian dish you can make at home. And an excuse to drink a fine Chianti.

Shorts:

• Michael Crabtree: Dumbest Man of the Year?

• Mad Men Jumping the Shark?

• The Opposite of Manning Up? (SCU@Florida)

• A Look at NFL QBs

• Tip of the Day: Spare Tie

• Better Fitting Pants That Don’t Fit

• Making Gmail Even Better

• Fathers and Daughters

• Army’s New Parachute

This is just awesome:

The Internet has taken a lot of the paperwork out of banking, but there is no avoiding paper when someone gives you a check. Now one bank wants to let customers deposit checks immediately — through their phones.

USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the check deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the check with the phone’s camera.

“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.

Customers will not have to mail the check to the bank later; the deposit will be handled entirely electronically, and the bank suggests voiding the check and filing or discarding it. But to reduce the potential for fraud, only customers who are eligible for credit and have some type of insurance through USAA will be permitted to use the deposit feature. Mr. Peacock said that about 60 percent of the bank’s customers qualify.

It’s amazing that someone hasn’t implemented this before now, actually.  Digital cameras have become so ubiquitous that most of us have them with our mobile phones.  And it’s got to be cheaper for the bank than processing paper checks or dealing personally with customers.

I’ve been insuring my cars with USAA since 1988 and have had a bank account (for purposes of obtaining a credit card) since 1991.  This might make it worth actually using them as my primary bank once it extends beyond iPhone users.

via Lifehacker

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Daniel Indiviglio argues that “We like bad customer service.”

Actually, though, while he states it, he doesn’t really argue that at all.  Rather, he argues that we’re not willing to pay more for good customer service and thus provide no incentive to companies to provide it.

Let’s say you have two options for a flight from New York to Miami. Everything about the two flights is identical except for two things: One airline has poor customer service, but offers you a ticket for $50 cheaper. Do you take the more expensive flight in order to secure the better customer service at a higher price?

Most people, in fact, buy by price.  Which partly explains why airlines have had a race to the bottom in customer service and flying is now only slightly more pleasant than taking a Greyhound bus full of winos.

Then again, there’s not much way of knowing when you buy a ticket which of the two carriers will provide a better experience.   Few of us fly enough to have an informed basis for forming a judgment and I’m not aware of any really good independent comparison mechanism.  For that matter, carriers known for providing a pleasant experience, like JetBlue, do in fact inspire a certain degree of loyalty; but since they also tend to be cheap, it’s hard to disaggregate the effects.

This illustrates an important point: through consumer demand, we ultimately control customer service. If poor customer service was really bothered us, then we could boycott the worst of the perpetrators. I happen to be one of the few people who sticks to a boycott when I’ve been terribly wronged, but I think I’m in the minority. (For example, I haven’t eaten Taco Bell in more than 10 years after swearing it off due to an exceptionally bad experience.) Most people have a very short memory when it comes to bad customer service, especially when low prices entice them return to the company where they experienced annoyance last time.

Most of us, I think, will quickly stop going to restaurants that serve lousy food or treat us rudely.  There are plenty of ready substitutes, after all.  It’s harder, though, for other things.  For example, I refuse to shop at the local Wal-Mart, despite it being conveniently located and typically lower prices, because the shopping experience is so bloody awful.  But it took repeated frustration with the store to instill that because the alternatives are a Target store that’s much nicer but farther away or numerous stops at specialty stores.

This is especially problematic with chain stores.  If I’m treated poorly by at a sole proprietorship, I can assume that this will be the norm and discontinue shopping there.  But one’s experience at a 7-11 really tells you very little about your next trip to that 7-11, let alone how other 7-11s operate.

Regardless, Indiviglio’s larger point is true.  For example, hatred of automated customer service systems (For assistance with installing applications on your iPhone, please press 17) is universal.  Yet they’re now the norm.  They’re obviously cheaper than giving customers what they want — a real, live operator instantly –and customers put up with it.

Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman camped out overnight in front of a Washington, DC Apple store in order to be among the first to get one of the new iPhones.  Megan assures us that this is a mere sociological exercise for her: “I feel no desperate urge to get my hands on one of the VERY FIRST 3G IPHONES, but I can’t resist a spectacle.”

My own belated foray into microblogging, mostly to finally see if I could figure out what all the fuss was about, revealed quite a frenzy among those I’m following on Twitter and FriendFeed on the subject.  Many are proclaiming the death of the BlackBerry and extolling the joys of the various applications one can now buy for the iPhone.

As to myself, Meh.  I basically want a smartphone to do three things, in this order:

1. Efficiently check and send e-mail
2. Render Web sites quickly and with as much similarity to a computer browser as possible
3. Perform basic telephone functions.

My BlackBerry Curve does 1 and 3 perfectly well and is pretty lousy at 2.  I gather than the iPhone is only slightly better at 2 and much worse at 1, owing to a non-tactile keyboard.

What am I missing?  And why would someone not reporting on the phenomenon camp out overnight to pay full price for a phone that will almost certainly be much cheaper three months from now?

UPDATE: Late afternoon now and all everybody is Twittering about is how poorly Apple did at setting up the infrastructure for all this.  Apparently, after all the waiting to get the phone, people are now having trouble getting their phones activated so that they can actually, you know, use them.  Ironically, the people who get them, say, Monday may wind up having usable phones at roughly the same time as the overnight campers, minus the aggravation.

Quite a few commenters are accusing John McCain of flip-flopping because he favored privatization of Social security in 2004 and now adamantly rejects the insinuation that he supports it now:

This is a clumsy rhetorical game rather than a policy shift. Then and now, McCain’s position is that Social Security would remain as a government program but that younger workers should be allowed the option of placing part of the money they would have been required to remit to FICA into a private retirement account in return for reduced future government benefits. Sometime during the 2004 campaign, though, Republican learned in focus groups that “privatization” was an unpopular label for this policy and started talking instead about “reforming” or “strengthening” Social Security instead.

Hilzoy makes a more interesting, related argument, which she illustrates with a clever cartoon:

McCain talks as though letting younger workers put some of their FICA taxes into private accounts would help fix the Social Security shortfall. This is not true. Private accounts would make the Social Security shortfall much worse.

Recall the way Social Security works. I pay Social Security taxes. My taxes are used to pay the benefits of today’s retirees. When I retire, my benefits will be paid by the taxes of the generation behind me, and so on. Suppose that we start allowing people to put some of their FICA tax dollars into personal accounts. That means that I will be paying not for the generation of workers who are now retired, but for me.

As it turns out, she and McCain are both right; they’re just talking about different things. McCain’s point is that we’re trapped in an unsustainable cycle. As the number of retirees increases while the number of workers decreases, this generational transfer won’t work. Getting young people off the merry-go-round, at least partly, helps solve the problem long term.

But, yes, the short-term impact is that there are fewer dollars going into the kitty to pay for the retirees who were fed the lie all along that they were actually paying into a “trust fund” for their “own retirement.” Considering that we all agree — and McCain emphasizes — that we’re morally obligated to pay current and future retires whose potential savings we siphoned off into a Ponzi scheme, Hilzoy concludes:

That means one of three things. Either it will come from the Social Security Trust Fund, in which case it will make the Trust Fund’s solvency problems worse; or else it will come from Our Tax Dollars, which doesn’t sound very pleasant, or else it will come from the Fiscal Fairy, who makes our numbers add up by magic.

That last option is the most favored by Democrats and Republicans alike, especially during campaign season. In reality, of course, Option 1 and Option 3 are identical given that neither fairies nor the Social Security Trust Fund actually exist. Social Security payments will therefore continue to come from our tax dollars, unpleasant though it may be.

Regardless, substantial privatization of Social Security in the near future is a dead letter. The Baby Boomers are incredibly powerful politically, the Democrats will control the Congress regardless of who wins the presidency, and confidence in the stock market is lower now than it was four years ago. The debate is, therefore, almost entirely academic.

As I wrote nearly four years ago, our alternatives are rather bleak:

• The status quo. This is unsustainable without a massive influx of young people into the system willing to shell out an increasing share of their income to comparatively wealthy elderly folks retiring at what is now a relatively young age.

• A sustantial increase in the retirement age. When FDR established this program in 1932, 65 was very old. Indeed, it was past the expected lifespan. Now, people who reach 65 can expect to live another 15-20 years. We’ve already gradually increased this for the out years. But raising it to, say, 75 will be incredibly difficulty politically and doesn’t take into account the fact that even 65 is relatively old for those in more labor intensive occupations.

The “massive influx of young people” caveat is actually more plausible than I thought at the time, if we’re willing to have this happen through immigration. We’d need to do it on the books, though, so that we’re actually collecting FICA taxes. The “guest worker” option, wherein we collect FICA taxes but then send them from whence they came before they can collect benefits would be even better from a fiscal standpoint but has the drawback of being horribly immoral.

Reggie Love was a standout wide receiver and basketball player at Duke that the Dallas Cowboys, for some odd reason, unsuccessfully tried to turn into a pro linebacker. Love was occasionally flat on his back in his college days. He’s landed on his feet, working as the body man for the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Ashley Parker has an interesting feature story on Love and his relationship with Barack Obama in today’s NYT.

Mr. Love now knows that when it comes to food, Senator Obama “eats pretty much anything, from chicken wings and barbecue and ribs to grilled fish and steamed broccoli.” But when he is campaigning in a small town with limited options, a cheeseburger is always a good bet. (“Cheddar is the cheese of choice,” Mr. Love added.) He knows that “the boss,” as he calls Mr. Obama, likes MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He keeps a supply of both on hand.

Except for the cheeseburger, those are some very elitist eating habits.

And he has learned that all campaigns have their superstitions — Senator John McCain has a penchant for heads-up coins — and that Mr. Obama is no exception. That means that Mr. Love and Mr. Obama, for luck, play basketball every primary day.

Mr. Love, 26, is Mr. Obama’s body man, the personal aide who shadows the senator and anticipates everything he needs — and everything he does not need. He is not a bodyguard (security is provided by the Secret Service), but rather the ultimate assistant, rarely more than a body length away from the candidate.

One wonders how this will go over with white working class voters?

Young, eager campaign aides are stock characters in movies and on television, but few have quite the élan of Mr. Love, who, at 6-foot-5, is about three inches taller than the tall candidate, fitter than the fit candidate (he can bench press more than 350 pounds) and cooler than the cool candidate. “There’s no doubt that Reggie is cooler than I am,” Mr. Obama said, laughing, in a phone interview. “I am living vicariously through Reggie.”

But Hillary Clinton is cooler than Reggie. Much cooler. Which is why she should be the nominee.

What a body man does depends on the politician. Senator John Kerry’s aide for his presidential race in 2004 was dubbed “part butler, part buddy.” Bill Clinton’s aide when he was president said their relationship sometimes felt more like that of an old married couple. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has a body woman, the efficient and glamorous Huma Abedin. On NBC’s “The West Wing,” President Josiah Bartlet treated his body man, Charlie Young, like a son.

Mr. Obama said he regarded “my guy, Reggie,” as the kid brother he never had. “But maybe I’m saying that just because he technically could be my son,” the Illinois senator said. “I don’t want to admit my age.”

Mr. Love said he had been hired with “no job description whatsoever.” “It was just like, ‘You just go out there and — Take. Care. Of. Stuff,’ ” Mr. Love said, taking his time with each word. Some of the “stuff” Mr. Love takes care of: When Mr. Obama makes calls to woo superdelegates, Mr. Love is at his side with a briefing book, dialing the numbers. When an outdoor speech ended on a windy day in Noblesville, Ind., he appeared behind Mr. Obama as he shook hands on the rope line. “Jacket?” he asked, a coat draped at the ready over his arm.

When Mr. Obama dropped food on his tie while eating in the car between stops, Mr. Love was ready with a Tide pen. He always carries one, along with ballpoint pens, and has turned himself into a walking dispensary of Sharpies, stationery, protein bars, throat lozenges, water, tea, Advil, Tylenol, Purell and emergency Nicorette, not to mention his ever-present iPhone, BlackBerry and Canon Rebel XT digital camera. (Mr. Love keeps a photo journal of the campaign, and has more than 10,000 pictures so far.)

Compared with the even-tempered and self-controlled Mr. Obama, Mr. Love is raffish, always joking with the Secret Service, offering closed-fist high-fives to members of the news media and making frequent appearances in the daily pool reports. At a V.F.W. hall in Indiana, he helped out when the senator did not want a second Budweiser, taking it off Mr. Obama’s hands.

Somehow, that’s not surprising.

When Mr. Obama hits a rough patch in the campaign, Mr. Love is sympathetic. In college, embarrassing pictures of an inebriated Mr. Love from a fraternity house party surfaced on the Internet. “You make mistakes and you learn from them, and you try to use them to make you a better person,” he said. After graduating with a degree in political science and public policy, Mr. Love had summer try-outs with the Green Bay Packers in 2004 and the Dallas Cowboys in 2005 before being cut.

Which is how, in 2006, after applying for an internship on Capitol Hill, Mr. Love ended up interviewing with Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s communications director, for a position in Mr. Obama’s Senate office. “It’s the only time I’ve ever interviewed somebody whose work experience included the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Indeed. It sounds like a good fit. In some ways, it’s strange to go from star athlete at a prestigious university to 26-year-old gopher. But the job’s really about a lot more than that. It’s a stressful, high pressure gig and the spotlight of college athletics is as good a preparation as any.

Los Angeles County has strengthened its law against taco trucks and other mobile food vendors at the insistence of brick-and-mortar restaurant owners, Jonathan Gold reports.

Last week, led by Gloria Molina, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors passed a law basically outlawing taco trucks, making it a crime for them to linger at one location for more than an hour, punishable by a $1,000 fine or up to six months in prison. (An old law directed trucks to move every half-hour, but the fine was low and the law largely ignored.) Taco trucks, at least the better-known ones, tend to be anchored to a specific location, often outside a nightclub. (If you are on Lexington at Western, you are eating at El Matador; if on Eagle Rock south of York, probably at Rambo’s Tacos.) Owners of brick-and-mortar restaurants are always complaining about unfair competition from vendors with lower overhead and fewer taxes to pay, although most of the really successful trucks seem to flourish in neighborhoods without many restaurants: on industrial strips, along stretches dominated by auto shops, light manufacturing and discount upholsterers. California has seen squabbles like this before — it took extensive legal action to get taco trucks back on the streets of Salinas after restaurant owners there managed to get them banned.

One would think that people seeking to have a nice, sit-down meal are unlikely to be siphoned off by the lure of mobile tacos and that, conversely, those seeking a quick, cheap bite to eat are unlikely customers for a full service restaurant. Presumably, though, fast food restaurants would feel the pinch.

I’m not a fan of rent seeking of this sort but can at least understand why tax paying restaurateurs would organize against competitors who are given relatively preferential treatment by the state. It would seem, though, that the construction of this law is too broad. Why not simply require comparable licensing for “permanent” mobile establishments and stationary restaurants? Or restrict the application of the law as currently written only to trucks operating within, say, a half mile of a fixed facility?

Via Craig Newmark via Chris Lawrence’s shared RSS.

Via the LAT: The risk for iPhone users: They know too much

When she whipped out her iPhone, Erica Sadum could feel her husband’s eyes roll. But she had a point to prove. And in less than a minute, she was able to report to the skeptics around the dinner table that Menno Simons, whose followers are known as Mennonites, was in fact born in 1496.

[...]

“It’s turned me from a really annoying know-it-all into an incredibly annoying know-it-all, with the Internet to back me up,” said Sadum, a technology writer in Denver. “It’s not a social advantage.”

Sort of blogging as performance art, I guess.

Weekend Caption Jam Linkfest. . .

• Rodney seldom hears a discouraging word.
• Wizbang has the diabolic duo.
• Wyatt Earp previews the next hot toy item for X-mas.
• Public Pondering has the Koran in 3-D.
• Cowboy Blob thinks some assembly is required.
• Right Pundits interviews Gunga Din.
• The Gone Rick Motel is honoring local customs and garb.
• Blonde Sagacity visits the DNC sperm bank.
• Brainfuel thinks iEgg will beat the iPhone.

Other Humor:

• Icanhascheezburger welcomes you to the kitteh cult.
• V the K always has the best pictures at Caption This!

To join in, start a Caption Contest at your blog, edit it to add a link to this post, and then send a TrackBack. If your blog doesn’t automatically generate one, use the Send TrackBack feature below. For more information, see this post.

Apple has dropped the price of its 8GB iPhone from $599 to $399, making many people happy but generating “hundreds of emails” from angry early adopters. CEO Steve Jobs explains that, “It benefits both Apple and every iPhone user to get as many new customers as possible in the iPhone ‘tent’.” Moreover,

[T]he technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you’ll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon. The good news is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, like Apple tries to do, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service from them even as newer models are introduced.

Still, realizing that people are upset, “we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store.”

The store credit idea is smart business on a number of levels. The idea that Apple somehow “owes” it to people who joined the mad rush to be the first on their block to have an iPhone something, though, is rather silly.

Jobs is right: Those who wait can just about always get the same product cheaper or a better product for the same price. Today’s hot new computer is tomorrow’s loss leader and next week’s obsolete junk. Last year’s $1000 digital camera is this year’s $300 entry level model. And, certainly, Apple customers should know this. A smaller, cheaper iPod with a larger hard drive seems to come out every couple of months.

This also points to the economic irrationality most of us have. Either an iPhone is worth $599 to you or it isn’t. If you were thrilled to have this gadget Tuesday, why should the fact that the price dropped Wednesday make any difference?

via Memeorandum

To over-40 types like Kevin Drum and myself, the primary function of a telephone is self-evident: Talking to other people. Young whippersnapper Matt Yglesias reminds us, though, that mindset is so 20th Century:

Personally, I don’t like talking on the phone very much. My old Razr’s primary function was sending and receiving SMS messages. My new iPhone’s primary function is probably as an MP3 player, with SMSing as the key secondary function. Beyond that, I use the Web browser and the Google Maps function a lot.

I don’t like talking on the phone much, either, but that’s mostly what I use mine for. I was a ridiculously late adopter of the cell phone and still don’t have a camera or MP3 player built into mine; nor do I want one. For that matter, I don’t use SMS and don’t see the appeal. The handful of text messages I get are mostly spam. And, as I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t get Twitter and its variants.

I finally broke down and got a Blackberry a couple months ago to check email and do the occasional Web search, both of which are handy since I spend most of my waking hours online. The technology is still sufficiently antiquated (it doesn’t handle javascript or render multi-column pages properly) and my eyes degrading fast enough that surfing on a tiny screen is mostly a utility rather than a pastime, though.

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo notes the fight of one brave lawmaker to end the impossible tyranny of Apple and AT&T over the Must Have Gadget of the Century, the indispensable iPhone.

Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the committee, began the affair by holding up the phone and hailing its “sheer brilliance and wizardry,” noting that “undoubtedly consumers will cherish this device as though it is a part of their family.”

But the iPhone, Markey said, “highlights both the promise and the problems of the wireless industry today.” The phone sells for full price, yet owners get essentially no rights over how to use it; the phone forces you to sign a two-year contract with poorly ranked AT&T service, at pain of a $175 early-termination fee. “Many consumers feel trapped having bought an expensive device or having been locked into a long-term contract with significant penalties for switching,” Markey said. And it’s not just iPhone owners. Nobody likes their cell provider; people are sick of the fees, they’re sick of the stringent contracts, they’re sick of the bad cell signal. But what are you going to do? There are four large cell carriers in the U.S. — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint — and none has customers who are particularly happy.

Ezra Klein remarks, “It’s really rather remarkable how totally we let cell phone companies screw us over.”

Truly, this is a national tragedy. If only — if only — there were some way to escape this abuse at the hands of our corporate overlords.

Now, some of you are probably thinking, “But, James, you don’t have to sign a long-term contract with AT&T. And you don’t have to get an iPhone. Generations of Americans have gotten along without them. And, if nobody buys one, Apple will change their business model.”

Now you’re just talking nonsense. Didn’t you read what Markey said about “sheer brilliance and wizardry”?! Plus, as Manjoo points out, AT&T has a veritable gun to your head, forcing you to give up your rights to chose other companies:

Many people might consider this a good trade; get a free phone, sign a long-term contract. But as Chris Murray, an attorney at Consumers Union, pointed out at the House hearing last week, wireless companies don’t give customers a choice over whether they want to take this deal. You can’t offer to pay full price for a handset in exchange for a reduced early-termination fee and an unlocked phone — no major firm will let you do that. Indeed, in some instances carriers will charge you a fee even when they don’t offer you any break on the price of the phone. The iPhone is the primary exhibit: AT&T doesn’t subsidize the price of the phone, but you’re still locked to a single provider.

So, you see, if you don’t enter into a contract with them, agreeing to do some stuff you’d rather not do, they won’t enter into a contract with you and give you the stuff you want from them.

That’s pretty harsh. It reminds me of when I was 15 and joined the Columbia House Record Club. They sent me 13 albums for a penny. Then, they had the audacity to expect me to buy six more albums from them — at prices higher than Wal-Mart charges for them — over the next three years plus pay shipping and handling. Sure, I knew that going into the deal but all I could see was “13 albums for a penny.” The rest of the deal was not to my liking. Boy, was I steamed.

Now, sure, I could get the really cool phone and cough up the extra $175 and break the contract with AT&T so that I could get the far, far better cell phone service offered by other companies — where they let you transmit not only voice but also text via “satellite signals.” But, sheesh, who wants to do that? There oughta be a law!

UPDATE: Triumph thinks the last option unavailable because Apple has “locked” the phone to protect the exclusivity given AT&T. While not part of Markey’s discussion, Manjoo notes that issue later in his piece. Apparently, there are numerous ways around it.

Still, I’m not sure how this is different than the “proprietary” game that Sony played unsuccessfully with BetaMax and Apple has played very successfully with the iPod. Ultimately, people buy the product under the terms it’s being offered or they don’t. If the product is good enough, people will put up with it. If a suitable substitute exists, they don’t.

For the record: I don’t own an iPhone and have no plans to buy one anytime soon. I have had cell service with AT&T (mostly, under the Cingular name) for years. My two year contract is actually up and I’m going month-to-month for now.

WaPo fronts a seeming non-story: Now that Plan B is available over-the-counter rather than requiring a prescription, its sales are up. Shocking, that. Next they’ll tell me that sales of iPhones are way up over this time last year.

More interesting is the reaction.

“This is exactly what we hoped would happen,” said Susan F. Wood of the George Washington University School of Public Health. As assistant commissioner for women’s health and director of the Office of Women’s Health at the FDA, Wood pushed for the switch. “What we’re seeing is women who needed this product now finally having access to it. For a woman in that position, it can make a real difference in her life.”

I’m not sure whether someone can be said to “need” a product that terminates pregnancies in the early stages but, yes, the availability of products often results in more people using them.

But conservative groups that fought the change say they are disturbed by the surging use.

Right . . .

“This is very concerning,” said Charmaine Yoest of the Family Research Council, which is among several groups suing the FDA to reverse the decision. “We think this is putting women’s health at risk.”

Well, it’s interesting that the FRC thinks that. Are they right? What evidence do they have?

The story doesn’t say.

UPDATE: Charmaine’s husband, Jack, promises answers tonight. Maybe.

This week has been a tough one for Chinese imports. Early in the week there was a recall of truck and SUV tires made in China. The tires were made without gum strips—the thingummies that keep the strips of tire together. We import more tires from China than anywhere else (32% of our imports of tires) and the recall may involve as many as one million defective tires. Thursday an import ban was placed on a number of Chinese seafood products. The products cannot be imported unless their supplier produces an independent confirmation that they are free of certain unapproved antibiotics, antifungals, and other chemicals. Much of the farm-raised seafood that we import is from China—they’re the largest producers in the world. That suggests to me that we may be looking at higher prices at the grocery store in the very near future. And we might be prudent to be on the lookout that the banned seafood doesn’t return in the form of fish powder, fish extract, or some other ingredient subject to less scrutiny.

Yesterday an import ban was placed on Chinese rice sticks and vermicelli and rice flour from Hong Kong (as well as a variety of rice products from Thailand) for “filth”, i.e. insect, bird, rodent, and animal droppings.

It’s not only the U. S. that’s concerned: the EU and Japan are also subjecting imports of food from China to closer scrutiny.

On the plus side the iPhone hit the market this week. The iPhone is manufactured by Hon Hai AKA Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that does much of its manufacturing in China.

I’m seeing an increasing number of editorials and op-eds calling for more inspection of Chinese imports or outright bans. I continue to think that this is the wrong tack. China just doesn’t have the infrastructure to carry out and enforce reliable inspections, I can’t imagine what level of government inspection would be required once the products have arrived stateside actually to ensure safety. I continue to favor country-of-origin labelling laws that, in the case of foods, drugs, nutraceuticals, toothpaste, etc. (basically, anything you or your pet put in your mouths) goes down to the ingredient level. Provide incentives.

Of course, ensuring the veracity of such labels becomes a problem in itself.

The editors at the Washington Examiner wonder how it is that politicians who come to office with little money leave it as millionaires. They intimate that it’s good old fashioned bribery, although the examples they give are far afield and rather inconclusive.

They rightly note that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “worries about paying off a $10 million legal bill at the end of Bill’s two terms as chief executive have become a distant memory thanks to his lucrative speaking fees.” They don’t mention her own bestselling autobiography, the advance for which was paid just before she joined the Senate and would have been precluded from accepting it owing to ethics rules. Still, while there may be an argument to be made that it’s unseemly to use the presidency as a launching point for a career as an incredibly well paid public speaker, it doesn’t speak to the thesis; Clinton only got rich after he left office and there’s no indication that his lavish fees are quid pro quo for favors he performed as president. For that matter, while it may be the case that “the potential conflicts of interest boggle the imagination” if Hillary is elected president and Bill has a major public policy voice (and, for that matter, those conflicts exist now, given that Hillary is a powerful Senator) every nickel they both earn is public record; the voters therefore have the information necessary to make that judgment.

And, to borrow from the “but Bill Clinton did it, too” meme, I’d point out that Ronald Reagan was probably the first ex-president to seriously cash in on the lecture circuit.

The other examples are marky.

Consider the case of Sen. Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican whose total assets are valued at between $1.75 million and $2.77 million, according to his latest disclosure form. Lott’s lot has changed since 2001, when Time magazine said he had not “accumulated any significant wealth” during his career.

Since then, he has become famous for championing earmarks, including the biggest one ever, the $700 million “Railroad to Nowhere” last year. Lott’s son was a lobbyist for a Kentucky firm well-positioned to benefit from the project that, though defeated last year, could reappear in a different guise.

The juxtaposition of Lott’s asset holdings and his support of earmarks is troubling and speaks to real problems with the way public monies are allocated. Yet, the insinuation that Lott is somehow personally profiting from those earmarks ought be substantiated by something other than the post hoc ergo propter hoc assumption. Without checking into his financial records, I don’t know how he suddenly became so wealthy. My guess, however, living as I do in the DC Metro area, is that Lott owns a home in the area and its value skyrocketed.

Then there is former House Speaker Denny Hastert, whose net worth when he entered Congress in 1987 reportedly was $170,000. After getting earmarks in 2005 worth more than $200 million for a highway project a couple of miles from real estate he bought the year before, Hastert and a partner realized a profit of $1.8 million by selling to a developer.

I’d have to know more about this sequence of events to render a judgment here. Again, though, whether Hastert did anything improper, the fact that he can use his office to direct monies to specific projects in his district leads to this kind of speculation.

The recent 16-count indictment of Louisiana Democrat Rep. William Jefferson and the continuing probe of the earmark fandangos of Rep. Allan Molohan, D-W.Va., show this is a bipartisan problem.

Well, no, it shows that two Congressmen are likely taking bribes. The antecedent “this” does not fit Lott and Hastert’s cases, at least not with the information provided, let alone Clinton’s.

With more than 32,000 earmark requests pending with the House Appropriations Committee after only five months of the current Congress, it is no surprise that people are putting two and two together and getting four. It seems the ticket is to gain federal office, take advantage of the perks and the deals that can be made because of the position and the opportunities it creates, then watch as the bank account swells.

The Teapot Dome and Credit Mobilier scandals show that using public office for personal gain is not a new story. But at nearly $6,000 a minute for a former president’s speech and earmarks worth hundreds of millions becoming the congressional norm, it could easily be a much bigger story than ever before.

Again, I’d like more evidence that lobbyist money is making it to Congressmen’s private bank accounts. There’s no doubt, though, that millions are pouring into campaign coffers.

A piece in yesterday’s Washington Post Magazine gives a devastating account of how freshmen members hit the ground running for their re-election campaign. New Speaker Nancy Pelosi is making no secret of using massive amounts of earmarks to ensure that these freshman have plenty of pork to pave their way to re-election:

The House Democratic leadership has begun bolstering the stature of [Rep. Joe] Courtney [D, CT] and other new Democratic members: showing them off at events with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, including them as co-sponsors of major pieces of legislation and praising their performance at news conferences. Politics is about nothing if not self-interest and the maintenance of power, and in the past, the self-interest of senior members dictated that House freshmen subserviently wait in line behind them for everything — particularly powerful committee assignments and prime speaking time on the House floor. Not now. During the opening weeks, Courtney and other Democratic freshmen received speaking assignments on the floor during the Democrats’ much-touted “100 Hour Agenda” — a mix of bills addressing high-profile domestic issues such as the minimum wage, Medicare prescription drugs and loan rates on college tuition.

Some older Democratic bulls complained privately that they were being overlooked in favor of the freshmen. Pelosi reminded them that they wouldn’t have their new power in the House but for the many newcomers, whom she calls “Majority Makers.” In a favor seldom bestowed on freshmen in other eras, Courtney and many other new members have received their choice of key committees. Courtney won spots on the Education and Labor Committee and, potentially even more important for him, the influential Armed Services Committee. That body annually examines an important budgetary issue for Courtney: the building of nuclear-powered, attack submarines, which accounts for the jobs of more than 6,000 of his constituents.

The real crime is that all this is perfectly legal. It’s corruption of the highest order, in that it’s institutionalized. None of this is illegal, nor does it indicate that Members are lining their pockets. My guess is that that’s rare, indeed. But hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being siphoned off for dubious projects that are de facto campaign contributions to incumbents.

My guess is that much more pay-for-play action is taking place at the local level. Barbara Hollingsworth’s piece, also in today’s Examiner, about the $5.14 billion (and counting) program aimed at “extending Metrorail through Tysons Corner to Dulles International Airport” that “has become the most expensive transit project in the nation, as well as the largest public works project in Virginia history” is much more persuasive on that score than the op-ed.

The great irony is that the Framers put most of the power at the state and local level on the assumption that people would watch their local leaders much more closely than the folks far away in D.C. That may have been true even half a century ago; it’s not now.