1-16-2004
Guess Who's Coming To Dinar

My poker buddies groan whenever I say (for the umpteenth-hundred time) "Well, the book says..." And though I fancy myself a pretty good poker player, the statistics don't lie, and over the last five years I'm down an average of about $5 a night.

My football buddies marvel at how often I'll say something right before the TV analysts say the exact same thing. And my football betting buddies have heard my rules of betting the NFL like the stock market over and over and over. The HINDU, the three-time-zone factor, the three-game streak tendency. And last weekend, when the book said you had an 82 percent chance of winning, at $100 a game for four NFL games, I'd have lost $400.

The moral in all of this? Even when odds are good, it's still gambling. There are still things beyond your control.

The flipside of this, of course, is the more things you can control, the better your odds of winning. And that's why there have been financial speculators for centuries -- all that corner the market, get in early kind of stuff.

Not being a member of the investor class, my bets on financial matters are usually hypothetical. I know people call it investing, but in my mind-set, any situation where you put money up before you get money back qualifies as a gamble.

Which brings me to the Iraqi dinar.

***

Say what you will about the Great Satan, but plenty of folks in Iraq were more than willing to hand someone a million dinars for $500 American. Ecoonomists will tell you that is not unusual, that there have been war-shattered economies based on cigarettes, chocolate or nylon stockings.

Now here's what makes the dinar so interesting. First, it's the old rule of real estate (you only make money when you buy) and this currency is currently cheap. Secondly, the dinar was quite solid in the past and is backed by big-time oil reserves (not to mention governing authorities and all that stuff, but hey, I'm not writing a prospectus here).

Old dinars (the ones with Saddam's face) were officially outlawed on January 15th as the occupying powers had been phasing in new money for months. The Saddam dollars you can find on eBay as curiosities. It's the new money, the dinars people are counting on to be worth something eventually, that are attracting attention, and therefore climbing in price.

Don't take my word for it, look at the Day Star Trading Iraqi dinar site. In rough math, the dinar has moved from being worth about a penny to being worth more than two cents in a matter of days. I don't remember the targets, and I'm not a shill-type anyway, but the upside (based on past prices) ranged from something like 30 cents to more than $3. And look at it this way; how often do you get to say something was worth a nickel while in the process of doubling your money?

As I said earlier, all my financial speculations are hypothetical, and my big fear here would be counterfeiting. Way I understand it, the new Iraqi currency is being printed in England and the coalition provisional authority is as worried about counterfeiting as I am, so maybe I'm just cautious by nature.

Thing is, while I'm pretty neutral on whether the dinar is a good investment, I'm quite intrigued as to how you could market it. It's literally a chance to put your money where your beliefs are , and make a profit while doing it. Now how Republican is that?

To be clear, I'm totally against the U.S. occupation. I'm totally against running up a $200 billion credit card debt -- not to mention 500+ lives of American soldiers and thousands+ numbers of Iraqi civilians -- in some vain attempt to instill a democracy in a place where a democracy hasn't popped up in six thousand years.

But that doesn't mean I should be opposed to making some money.

-30-

1-15-2004
Why Howard Dean Needs Me
(It's The Myth, Stupid)

James Carville, of Democratic political fame, was an unemployed 47-year-old when he hitched up with Bill Clinton. I was a semi-employed 40-something when I was asked if I was thinking about going to work for Howard Dean. And that was 13 months ago, probably a full year before anybody had ever heard of him.

Truth be told, modern political consulting, and Gov. Dean M.D.'s situation in particular, really boils down to a few simple principles.

-- Asserted reality. If you are the front-runner, always act as the front runner. People who stay above the trifling learn there's a cumulative quality to class.

-- Turn necessities into virtues. It may be necessary to respond to being the pin cushion, but that does not necessarily mean one should start throwing pins. Thank people for sticking with you and humorously respond to all the attacks.

A classic example of this approach came when John McCain and some other U.S. Senators held a news conference to confirm a Weekly World News report that they were indeed space aliens. Self-deprecation, in the short-term, earns laughs. In the long-term, it builds empathy (Wow, those folks keep beating on him).

-- Stay on principle. Do not waste energy aggressively refuting arguments. Spend your time aggressively reframing arguments. Classic example: Ronald Reagan's tax cuts did not stimulate the economy; his $2 trillion in borrowed money stimulated the economy.

-- Stay on message. Democrats need to learn the message discipline of Republicans. What makes Dean special isn't what he says, it's how he says it. Don't deny being angry, spin to admitting being frustrated. People understand frustration; Hell, frustration is something voters would have in common with the candidate.

Dr. Dean, laugh off your mistakes and keep saying you're getting better. You don't have to be perfect; you have to be earnest.

-- Stay upbeat. Democrats should know by now that mallaise doesn't sell. More importantly, Democrats need to remember that "Bush Sucks" is not synonomous with "Vote For Me." It is one thing to make the case that Bush deserves to go; he won't go anywhere if there's nobody better to take his place.

As Carville famously declared, "It's the economy, stupid." My 2004 Democratic mantra would be "There she is, Myth America."

If Republican ideals matched Republican reality, everybody would be a Republican. This race is not about Republican ideals, it's about exposing the fact that those ideals are a smokescreen. The sound bites don't match the facts.

-- The dominant history of the last 25 years isn't tax-and-spend Democrats, it's borrow-and-spend Republicans. The GOP has the rep for being good with government money, but the record is awful. You'd think Republicans would understand money above all else, but the dollar has been dropping like a stone against the euro. The euro, for Chrissakes.

-- The GOP wins the polls on best for national security, but in truth, the U.S. spent 500+ lives and $100+ Billion dollars on an Iraq that first chance it gets will become just like Iran. Not to mention all that effort being a diversion from nabbing Osama bin Laden, murderer of 3,000.

-- The GOP touts compassionate conservatism and support for the hard-working little guy who can work his way to the top. Reality says the GOP is opposing minimum wage increases, trying to eliminate overtime pay, and floating a plan to let three million foreign workers take their jobs.

The final principle may be the most important of all. Greatness comes from wisdom, not the conventional wisdom.

Democrats are done now that Saddam Hussein has been captured? Hardly: Saddam is Dubya's running mate. Democrats are sunk because the economy is improving? Not if it's on borrowed money.

Despite the hand-wringing of the establishment Democrat insiders, and the pundits, and the monied classes so willing to participate in the current money-versus-votes political process, despite the reporters looking for a horse race instead of a study of horses, here's a cold fact. If Jay Leno did a "Jaywalking" segment with a picture of Howard Dean, 60 or 70 percent of the folks wouldn't know his name.

Any candidate who can bring back the politically alienated deserves respect -- especially when the math says he could also win by successfully doing so. There's plenty of time between now and November for middle America to learn that Dean's record was more mainstream than the leftist, angry spin that currently dominates the media

Establishment Democrats, in the past few weeks, have managed to take their best chance of a new apprach to politics and beat him way down. And maybe that's why establishment Democrats spend a lot of time on the outside looking in.

-30-

Mr. Marshall, ostensibly an eco-Marxist Republican, knows the GOP will never have anything to do with a Libertarian-Pantheist like himself, so he often finds himself speaking out against the tyranny of petty political labels.