Follow the Rangel

All of those who read Sid Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars" know that in September 1998, Hillary Clinton took a congressional delegation to the Dominican Republic to survey the damage from Hurricane Mitch. Rep. Charles Rangel from Harlem, who joined the mission, told Hillary that he knew who could win the election for Senator Moniyahn's soon-to-be vacated Senate seat. Hillary, Blumenthal relates, asked "Just who might that be?" Rangel responded, "You."

Now, Mark Shields reports that Rangel has become an unlikely ally of Wes Clark.

DSBPI has not drawn any conclusions on this data yet, but as Jack Bauer might say in "24": we're gonna run it through the system and start connecting the dots.

This article claiming that Saddam is negotiating a surrender has DSBPI Market Analyst's finger on the "buy to cover" button regarding the Short QQQ model portfolio recommendation. To date this trade has not worked and could get worse if the Sunday Mirror is on the money.

The dem pack, though still one short of a full football squad, is ready to play ball. And the other side finally has someone to sink their teeth into. The waterboy just went to go wake up the defensive coordinator, K. Rove, who had been day dreaming for the last few weeks about Dr. Dean's ascension. Now that Wes is on the field, Rove can stop playing zone defense and start implementing some double coverage on the former general. And Rove is in good shape, 'cause he has a $200mm budget to play with, while Wes can barely afford new shin pads.

We believe that Wes will be hit hard negative by the conservative talk show circuit. There will be action on Drudge, column inches by Safire and noise on the O'Reilly factor. And it will work to remove Wes' halo, but Rove's spinsters should know that tying the General to the Clintons is not a productive strategy. Al didn't lose because the Bushies connected him to Clinton, Al lost because he didn't tie himself to Clinton (especially in Arkansas). The more the Rovians seek to bundle Wes with the man who gave him his walking papers, the more Wes will seem to be the anointed man. And Rove knows that he'd rather run against the Doctor than the General in '04. (Aside: Can someone get the interns to order some General?)

Meanwhile 19% of polled dems are still waiting for Hill or Al to come riding in on a white "stalking horse." DSBPI does not rule out either of these options, but thinks that Clinton is more likely than Gore to make the play.

Game on.

Although unlikely that Google would have ever sold out to MSFT (Google has too much of a granola-Birkenstock-Linux feel), it is nowclear that Gates and Co. will throw some of its $50b egg nest at the search market; potentially including the functionality in future versions of Windows. DSBPI recommends that Google go public or otherwise cash out ASAP, because Steve Ballmer entering your neighborhood is often as bad a sign as Tony Soprano asking for a private meeting in an underground parking lot.

Did anyone beside for the DSBPI notice that Maureen Dowd used the "hoist on its own petard" (or variation thereof) twice over the past two weeks?

We'll take that as a no.

DSBPI Tech Team has been burning the midnight oil and wonders why email software like Microsoft Outlook does not have the following feature: After you click "Send" a window should pop and say "Are you sure you want to send this email?" If you click "Yes" the email is sent, if you click "No" you go back to editing. With all the damage that email has done to careers (Chung is King, this Skadden summer dude) we think that a moment to confirm your desire to "Reply to All" is warranted.

Another possibility is that after you send an email, it is stored for 15 minutes (adjustable) before sending and can be recalled during that time period. You can set up a filter to say: for emails where I "Reply to All" reserve for X minutes; for emails with the following words (you define) hold for X minutes; for emails to the boss, etc.

Perhaps the DSBPI will incubate a software company that will design such a program. Perhaps it will be called, Over The Line Systems.

Is it just us, or does the Dean for America "September to Remember" pitch sound like one of those NPR membership drives?

DSBPI doesn't need Red Bull anymore to get wired about the presidential elections. With Wesley Clark in the race, the Dem circus just added a third ring.

We are now puzzling through the potential Pres/VP combos, like Clark/Dean, Clark/Lieberman, Kerry/Clark Shwarzenneger/Stalone, etc.

A buzzing in the back of the brain: Despite pledges otherwise, will Bush dump Cheney before the next dance? Would make good sense for the party, and could bring Giuliani back into the spotlight just in time for another run against Hillary.

As hinted to on Tuesday...watch to see if Mark Fabiani pulls Chris Lehane into the Clark camp.

We think that at fancy restaurants there should be a way to get amenu without prices listed. This special menu would be used when taking someone out for dinner as a gift and don't want them to know the exact cost of the present (Just as you remove the price tag from a regular, boxed gift).

Chris Lehane, Kerry's communication director has resigned from the Kerry campaign. The unofficial word is that Lehane thought Kerry ran too cautiously against Dean. The DSBPI thought is that Lehane, Al Gore's press secretary in the 2000 race and former Clinton staffer, may be freeing himself to work for another candidate ... one who has not yet entered the race.

File under: More Side Effects of Cell Phones on Memory.

(Quote from Breifing.com, summarizing Barrons)
Barron's article highlights the speculation being alive and well again on Wall St. given the rally specifically in the semiconductor, Internet, airline and biotechnology stocks this year. However, the article cautions that many of these stocks now trade for lofty multiples of projected 2004 and 2005 profits and anticipate a lot more good news. Bob Marcin, head of Marcin Asset Management suggests, 'We could have a junior crash, a stock-market version of what happened in the Treasury bond market earlier in the summer.' In addition, he suggests major market indexes could fall 10%-15% in the next six weeks, which is typically a seasonally weak period and that speculative stocks could slip by double that amount. The stocks mentioned in the article as hot spots are the following: AMAT, KLAC, BRCM, XLNX, JNPR, AMZN, YHOO, EBAY, AMR, CAL, JBLU, HLT, HOT, ITW, DHR, WMB, DYN, DNA and GENZ.

The coming revolution in input/output devices is what's on the DSBPI Tech Analyst team's mind today. Well, at least we hope there is a coming revolution. The current laptop/tablet PC paradigm, replicated to some extent with the PDA/Blackberry world, will hopefully be replaced by projection technology, so that the keyboard and the monitor will both be virtual.

Laptops are currently constrained by screen and keyboard dimensions -- take a look at the 17" Apple Powerbook -- by necessity, it is ... 17"; and has what seems to be a moat of plastic around the keyboard to make up for all that extra screen space.

But with the growth of companies like IO2 Technology and VKB, along with the ongoing miniaturization of hard drives (think iPod), one can imagine a small box, with two tiny projectors (one for screen and one for keyboard) liberating the CPU from a physical human interface; removing the constraints of liquid crystal and plastic.

This article about senility caused by cell phone use, may explain why the DSBPI has no institutional memory.

Born on this day, Russian physiologist and experimental psychologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. How will Bush's fall in the Zogby poll affect the Supreme Court? Will his statistical dead heat with Al Gore cause some of the conservative members to resign whilst there is still time?

Developing...

Should Yassir Arafat be expelled from Ramallah, dropped off in some "north African" country by an Israeli helicopter? Sure, why not. His latest crime is the undermining of Abbas, his earlier crimes are worse.

But why is US (and Israeli) foreign policy so focused on a handful of individuals: Osama, Saddam, Yassir, Kim, etc.? While it's certainly easier to focus on a single person than a legion of followers, it's not just expediency at play. To be continued after our Friday company lunch. Please comment in the meanwhile.

An article by Yehuda Avner on the Begin, Carter first White House meeting.

Haa'retz reports that Hosni Mubarak says Egypt would accept Arafat if he is expelled, but such a move by Israel would be a `fatal error.' Well THE message has been sent (all the words after the "but" can be ignored). Maybe Mubarak can build a replica of the Muqata in Cairo, like the replica Lubavitch 770 Eastern Parkway HQs.

Another View on Meritocracy

DSBPI Literary Analyst just read the Toby Young paperback "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", a recounting of the author's five years living in New York and his attempts to get past clipboard Nazi's at the Bowery Bar while holding down (or not) a job at Vanity Fair.

Young fancies himself as a modern day Tocqueville, a British writer ambling through America expounding on the dangers and delights of liberal meritocracy. The interesting thing is that Mr. Young's Dad (uh, Mr. Young) was the chap who first coined the word "meritocracy," originally intending it to possess a negative connotation. Meritocracy, goes the argument, gives the powerful cover from the masses insofar as claiming that their success is of their own making (instead of birth, luck, etc.); while aristocrats on the other side of the pond, with no such rhetorical shield, must get by with some level of noblesse oblige.

NYT editorial board jumps on Bush Bashing bandwagon today with scathing screed cutely-entitled "Presidential Character" -- wink wink Bubba.

The entire purpose of creating the position of a PA prime minister was to avoid having to deal with Arafat; now Queri won't take office unless the US deals with Arafat. This does not compute. Now, instead of having one Arafat, we have one Arafat and another person beholden to Arafat. 10 GO TO 20, 20 GO TO 10.

DSBPI Market Analyst is short the QQQs in advance of the October pullback. The model portfolio is still net long, but looking for some cover as the Nas is up 30%+ YTD and up 60%+ from lows, with few good buying opportunities left. Recommendation expires at the end of October or if Saddam/Osama situations are resolved.

CNN reports that:

"Central Command said 101st Airborne Division soldiers uncovered a large cache that included a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, four AK-47s, one 9 mm pistol, one assault rifle, 38 rocket-propelled grenade booster rockets, 500 rounds of machine-gun ammunition, 21 loaded AK-47 magazines, and 12 boxes of 12-gauge shotgun shells."

A large cache? That sounds more like something in the basement of a Crips crib in South Central. Will the UPN be airing "COPS: Special Edition Mosul" this season?

A busy weekend at the DSBPI.

First, W is officially launching his reelection campaign Sunday with an address to the nation about how he is not his dad and how he is president and all those Dems are just little scarecrows running around smoking grassroot. DSBPI wonders that if things are going so well in Baghdad why Rummy had to show up there unanounced and wearing the most conspicuos bullet-proof vest since Christoper Lloyd in "Back to the Future." In any event, W has had great sucess with the Big Speech approach -- as opposed to the little press conference -- and this prime-timer should halt his plunging numbers for the week.

Second, a storm is brewing in the Middle East -- no really, it rained about 17 drops in Tel Aviv on Friday -- but back in Ramallah things are really blustery. With "Our Man in The Muqata" seemingly out for the count (not literally yet) and Sharon activating a decapatation strike on Hamas, the next week in the Holy Land will not be one marked by brotherly love. Abbas may have to run for his life back to Utah overnight before the mountaintop opens up and swallows him inside, ahem.

Third, GE's chief Imelt held a Q&A with some folks at Fidelity. Here is a snippet that underlines the DSBPIs feeling about China -- something you won't here from pols:

Q. What are the important areas of opportunity for GE today?

Immelt: Globalization is extremely important for GE. In order to grow the company today, you've got to be able to go to Europe, you have to be able to go to China, you have to be able to go to Japan, and sell products.
If you look around the world, winning in China, in particular, is extremely important for GE. China is going to spend $300 billion in infrastructure between now and the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Say that out loud, "$300 billion in infrastructure."
They're going to build road and rail systems. They're going to construct 25 new airports between now and 2008. Twenty-five. Compare that to the United States. There's been one new airport built in the United States in the past 25 years.
China is where aircraft engines are going to be sold. It's where medical equipment is going to be sold. It's where gas turbines are going to be sold. It's absolutely going to be staggering what ends up happening in China and how quickly it grows. We think by 2005, GE will have $5 billion in revenue of high tech products around the world.

NOTE: Immelt is not talking about outsourcing jobs to big scary China. He is talking about the opportunity of China as an importer of goods, not a low-cost exporter. This is the difference between China and Mexico. While Mexico was a low-cost producer (losing title now), it could never be a mass importer on the scale of a globalized China. While we need to have rules for fair trade, we need to realize that building another Great Wall around this trading partner would not bring good things to life.

Finally, the Anti-Prison Rape law passed congress this week. DSBPI wonders if this too was a Bush administration kowtow to the Enron and Sam Waskals of the world.

In another sign of the resurgent Arafat, Saeb Erakat is back in charge of negotiations for the PA. Erakat was Yassir's point man for the tuff talk through the last few rounds of peace patter, but was seemingly marginalized during the ascendancy of Abbas. Comfortable with CNN and AL Jazerra, Erakat never really left the inner circle, just the limelight. The limelight has now returned.

Where has the DSBPI been since Aug. 29? In honor of and in respect for Labor day, the DSBPI furloughed its employees and let the gates swing open on its think tanks. We are now back.