The Atkins diet is under fire from all sides this week, it seems. Mayor Bloomberg chose to question the honesty of the some his own state's M.E.s by suggesting that Dr. Atkins actually died from his diet instead of a blow to the head from falling on an icy sidewalk. Veronica Atkins is demanding a public apology. Last time I saw Bloomberg on TV (New Year's Eve), he looked like he could use a bit of dieting himself.

Earlier in the week, the New York Times took it upon themselves to declare that Atkins had changed it's recommendations about the consumption of saturated fat. The Atkins folks are righteously pissed as they said nothing of the kind.

We are all faced with (and probably sick of) alarming articles about how Americans are so fat and our children are so fat and obesity is so expensive, and the British are so fat and yet a popular diet with many happy adherants is just not acceptable. Oh, and we need the government to impose regulation upon the food industry because it's not *our* fault that we're fat, of course.

Why the conflict? Because the media *needs* conflict. Tino predicts that there will soon be a media backlash against the anti-Atkins people. It will be real or imagined since it matters not which. Conflict is news and they need news. In any case, I wouldn't take a bet against Tino on this one.

The people who think they have all the answers have so much invested in being right that they seem to have forgotten that science is an ever-evolving thing. Human metabolism is, sadly, not as well understood as these folks would have you believe. If it were not so complex, we'd probably have more effective drug-based treatments or perhaps even gene therapy for obesity. Until the magic bullet arrives, we must all do it the hard way by changing diet and lifestyle.

Atkins is clearly an effective tool for some people, and certainly, the diabetes epidemic indicates that eating less sugar, trans-fat and highly processed grains is clearly a good thing for Americans. As I read all the smear campaigns against Atkins, it just reminds me that people who are that defensive often have the most to hide.

Recently, I was able to purchase from the Apple iTunes store an old favorite of mine, Alice Cooper's _Elected_. After listening to that repeatedly, I started to think about a mix tape of rock and roll songs I could find that are about politics, but not about Viet Nam or the USSR or any other settled issue. I'd love to put _Bonzo Goes to Bitburg_ on the list, for instance, but that's directly about Reagan and a single foreign policy trip. Great song, doesn't fit.

It sure isn't as many as I expected. Damn near the entire catalog of The Clash and Billy Bragg are political, of course, but I'm not familiar enough with either to pick out the tunes that seem to fit in 2004. Actually I hate The Clash -- but that's a rant for another day.

Now that I've narrowed it down a bit, my nominees for the "Songs for an Election Year" CD are (roughly in order by age):

Alice Cooper "Elected" from Billion Dollar Babies
Stiff Little Fingers "Suspect Device" from Inflammable Material
Iggy Pop "I'm a Conservative" from Soldier (clip is a different song!)
Husker Du "In a Free Land" from Everything Falls Apart (clip here)
Public Enemy "Fight the Power" from Fear of a Black Planet (clip here)
Fishbone "Subliminal Fascism" from Truth and Soul (no clip)
Radiohead "Electioneering" from OK Computer (no clip)
Rage Against the Machine "Guerrilla Radio" from The Battle of Los Angeles

Obviously, this isn't enough for a CD, so maybe y'all might have some ideas for me.

-Nicole

The new Medicare legislation actually provides a giant subsidy to Corporate America: "Some companies with many retired workers are expected to post big earnings gains for 2003 or 2004, thanks to accounting guidelines for subsidies under the federal prescription-drug program." That gets right down to it. Of course there's more:

...if an employer and a retiree each pay $1,000 toward the retiree's medical costs, the employer's subsidy is calculated on the full $2,000, bringing the company a total subsidy of $490, rather than the $210 that it would get if it received a subsidy only on its share. [paragraph break] As a result, when combined with tax and accounting rules, the program allows employers in some cases to use the subsidy to erase the entire cost of prescription drugs for retirees, or even turn a profit from a drug plan.

It's as if it didn't occur to the right lobbyists that congress just vacuumed money away from us to give to big corporations. I hope this gets more play that just the Wall Street Journal. That's something you have to pay to read, and most people aren't subscribers.

I was already angry over the Medicare drug bill, and I was aware that some retirees would lose their coverage simply because their employers didn't want to pay for something the Feds would cover...but I didn't quite turn it upside down and make the connection that I'm now paying for a giant corporate subsidy when that money is taken out of my paycheck. Now that corporations will have a little extra money in the benefit area, maybe they'll use it to shore up their defined-benefit pension plans.

Yeah, right.

In this Barron's article, Hugh Hendry briefly explains what happens when you print too much currency. He uses the classic example -- John Law's French fiat currency disaster.

He pulls no punches:

The response to the crash since March 2000 has been to create even more money. Just as it was 300 years ago. We've created a tidal wave of liquidity, with the Dow back at 10,000. But in doing so, strange things have happened. Gold has broken its 25-year downtrend and has now established an uptrend. The CRB index is at a nine-year high. Oil prices didn't come down after the Iraq war concluded. Strange things are going on in the world at large. But not strange to a citizen of Paris in 1720.

He feels that our government has "broken it's trust" with us and that this unnaturally easy monetary policy will eventually destroy all the assets of the middle class. "Middle-class society preserves its wealth in paper assets and the honesty of the paper asset is that the central banks will not dilute your financial assets by printing too much money." I tend to agree.

No matter how smart Greenspan is, our continuation of the ludicrously low interest rates amid such incredible inflation in asset prices is, at best, a wild experiment involving the fortunes of 250 million Americans.

Hendry also has some interesting things to say about the effect of GSE's like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The interesting part about that is that his description of the effect matches that of an abstract of a Federal Reserve Board paper that came out this week. That can be found here