WorldCom says, “Make that $7.1 billion in fraud.”

Scott Rosenberg’s comparison of the Bush administration’s handling of leaks to the Nixon adminstration’s treatment of same seems apt to me.

Salon Premium reports what I already suspected to be true today — which is that despite the amazing level of media coverage of some child kidnappings this summer, the actual number of kidnappings is down. I have heard a number of people expressing amazement at the number of kidnappings this summer, ignoring both the fact that the media only covers a very small percentage of the kidnappings that actually occur, and that they aren’t reporting on the actual statistics at all. Clearly child kidnapping is a huge problem, and we’d be better off if there were none at all, but creating a panic doesn’t serve anyone well.

Last night I took a cab ride with a bitter Indian fellow who was an engineer with Honeywell for about 10 years, got laid off, and has been driving a cab in Boston for the past 9 months. He seemed to blame President Bush for it all.

I’m going to be on the road for the rest of the week. I’ll have the laptop with me and could even be updating, but if you’re expecting email from me or even interesting links, you may be out of luck until the weekend.

Today, Slate runs an article explaining that the S&P 500 is managed by incompetents. The warning signs have been around for awhile, I remember reading an article awhile back about the fact that the S&P 500 was doing too much trading and replacing too many companies. Sadly a big chunk of my 401k is tied up in an S&P 500 index fund, so I’ve really taken a beating there. Even so, I prefer it to a standard managed fund. All things considered, though, I wish my employer offered this fund.

Salon has a story today about efforts to reform New York’s absurd drug laws. One of the main reform activists got a mandatory 15 year sentence for taking $500 to deliver some drugs from an informant working for the police. The fact that our system enables the government to pay people to become criminals strictly for the purposes of sending them to jail is baffling to me.

This weekend Tivo recorded a movie called The Candidate from 1972 for my viewing pleasure. The movie stars Robert Redford as a crusading legal assistance attorney who’s recruited by a political consultant (played by Peter Boyle) to run for Senator in California. The conceit is that Redford doesn’t want to compromise his principles in order to win, but events beyond his control wind up turning him into the politician he doesn’t want to be. The key here is that his father is the former governor of California and is a seasoned veteran of machine-style politics. The three term incumbent is a Republican who’s a political dead ringer for Bill O’Reilly, 30 years ahead of time.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the movie is that it hits all of the themes that still plague us thirty years down the road. Attack ads, poll driven campaigning, and the pervasiveness of sound bite politics are all held up as problems with the political system circa 1972. There’s even mention of problems with voting machines. For some reason I find the idea that things never change to be strangely comforting. If you do too, I highly recommend this film.

The New York Times ran a great article today covering the breadth of civil rights issues that have arisen out of the various terrorism-related arrests and detainments since 9/11.

Chalk this one up as a loss for the secret police. US District Judge Gladys Kessler has ruled that the names of the people detained after 9/11 must be released within 15 days. Given that the post-9/11 detainments have produce no terrorism charges whatsoever, it’s pretty obvious that the roundup was ineffective as well as anti-American.