Special Assistant for What?

Here's the quick backfill, via Kevin Drum: the K Street Project is not a abstract concept or simply a name for the current Republican graft phenomenon of the day, its organized enough to have its own website. (What's next? The Congressional Logrolling Caucus?)

Anyhow, on that website, via one of Kevin Drum's readers, is the mention of a job opening being filled at the Department of Labor: Special Assistant for Conservative Outreach (take a look at the lower left corner on the KStreet website).

So I just have to ask: is this appropriate? Isn't the whole idea that while its clear that the victorious political party occupies all the positions in government, the party machinery isn't supposed to BECOME the government? There's good reasons for this, beyond formalism. You can straight up hand money to a party, you can't to a government official. Many, if not all the legal and Constitutional barriers that prevent commercial interests, sectarian interests, foreign interests, etc. from improperly influencing government officials do not exist when it comes to political parties. While there is no way to separate government officials from the parties that nominate them and get them elected, you can at least keep them from OFFICIALLY using the instruments of government to aide their party's machinery. Of course, you can't do that if they are allowed to go so far and create government jobs for the express purpose of advancing the interests of their political party. Now, a defender might say, this isn't Republicans, its a discrete "community" of people who share the traits of conservatism. So, if Bill Clinton had created in each cabinet department a Special Assistant's for Advancing the Cause of the Democratic Party, we'd say the difference there is that Democrats just don't have the same sense of community, right?

Match Point, Melinda and Melinda, and Bananas

Off real estate for just a moment.

My wife and I did very little with our New Year's Day weekend. New Year's Eve we got Melinda and Melinda via digital cable's Movies-on-Demand. This is Woody Allen's concept movie of telling very similar stories, but one as comedy and one as tragedy and going back and forth between them. The comedy featured Will Farrell, so my wife and I were sold.

We've both always been Woody Allen fans, but we were both struck by watching this movie how much it revealed of Allen's strengths and weaknesses. His dialogue is just awful, no one talks like Woody Allen's characters talk. Its more unrealistic than the Manhattan apartments in which he portrays them living. Because of that we hated the tragedy portion of Melinda. It was very difficult to care about the characters. But we really liked the comedy. Woody Allen is funny, and when the humor shows through, you can forgive a little stilted dialogue because you're distracted by the neurosis, the pratfalls, and the one-liners.

Which brings me to Match Point, which we saw in the theater the next evening, New Year's Day. Setting it in London with British and Irish characters was a reinvigorating move for Allen, because if the dialogue was just as stilted, as an American I wouldn't notice. I'd be curious to see what an Englishman would say. Nevertheless, I found this movie to be profoundly overrated. Spoiler alert: I can't tell you why without spoiling the movie, at least for Allen fans. Skip to Bananas if that's the case for you and you want to see it. Its the same damn plot as Crimes and Misdemeanors, which was a great movie. But its the same, except it takes longer to get to it. Some of the dialogue was stilted in Crimes and Misdemeanors as well, but that time the plot was more novel and there was a good comedic sideplot interwoven.

Finally, Monday I finally succeeded in talking my wife into watching Bananas, which I had Netflixed months ago because she had never seen. She disagrees with me, but I still think the slapstick of Bananas is where Allen was at his best.

Update to Real Estate Post

Because of the attention my post on the NY Times real estate article got, I went back and took a look at the article again as well other people's critiques. I have to point out that upon reexamining the NY Times methodology, it seems they did control for down payments in their data, so that particular criticism by Elizabeth Warren, which I repeat in the update to my post, probably does not apply. My other criticisms stand and I believe the separate critiques of hers and others do as well.

One other very important critique that Matthew Yglesias raises over at Tapped is that commute times have increased. We've all heard a million times that real estate is about location, location, location. So even if we forgot about all of the other problems with saying that people pay the same for housing today as they used to, shouldn't we be very wary of that proposition if what people are getting for the same share of their income is a commute that is twice as long? [Full disclosure, in my quick search, I couldn't find any data comparing commute times today to 1980, but I think we can all agree they have probably risen significantly.]

Garance Franke-Ruta, another blogger at Tapped who's work I usually admire, argues the flip-side of this by saying that people complain about the rise in real estate costs because they demand premium real estate and refuse options like living in dangerous neighborhoods or longer commutes. I think that's kind of the point, today's generation is either paying more for the same or getting less if they are paying the same. I'm guessing, based on Ms. Ruta's profession, that she doesn't have to endure two hours of commuting a day regardless of where she chooses to live. Nor do I know if she has children, but you'd have to think that a person's willingness to buck up and brave getting mugged would dramatically decrease if they did have kids. Let me combine the two scenarios as well: if you work long hours and have kids, an extra hour of commute time per day means the percentage of your days spent with those kids is sharply reduced.

This is by no means an attempt to get personal with Ms. Franke-Ruta or flame her, I'm simply raising the possibility that she may be blithely placing way too little value on living close to one's workplace and in a safe neighborhood. This value is certainly a function of the shoes you stand in: a sketchy neighborhood or a longer commute is vastly more bearable to the single, low-paid 20-something with good hours than it is to the 30-something parent in a demanding job. Moreover, its usually the 30-something parent in the demanding job who's buying the house. This critique is the demographic flip-side to the not-so-implicit geographic critique of the NY Times article itself that people who live on the coasts are locked into their perception of a rising real estate market that is not the reality elsewhere.

I'd also like to pair my critique with a compliment of Ms. Franke-Ruta on a separate post on this issue where she notes the following:

[T]he fact that different parts of the country face completely different
economic realities has serious political implications. What impact do stagnant
wages have on people's self-assessments of economic well-being if they can also more easily purchase a home and achieve that central part of the American dream?
What do average incomes even mean if the costs of living are so different in
different parts of the nation? A couple earning $70,000 in St. Louis, for
example, can live in a very lovely three-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood,
while a single person earning the same amount in New York City can afford only a
bedroom in a shared apartment in Chelsea.

The NY Times did a very good article a couple years ago on the divergent real estate markets in what is essentially red America and blue America. That, unlike the NY Times article generating discussion here, was a very good, useful, and insightful article. Ms. Franke-Ruta is absolutely right that it has broad and important implications. I wish that the NY Times would pursue that trail rather than engage in what Jack Shafer calls the "bogus trendspotting" that created this man-bites dog story.

Happy New Year and Welcome Slate Readers!

This may be news to my very small group of regular readers, but Balasco and its post on the NY Times real estate article was linked on Slate last week, so we may have some company here on Balasco. Unfortunately, I haven't been very welcoming with my sparse posting over the New Year's holiday. I didn't even know about the link until yesterday. I'll try to pick it up a little here. In the meantime new readers, makes yourselves at home, check out some of my previous posts, and check back in from time to time if you like what you see.

Rising/Falling Cost of Real Estate, NYTimes Style

This front pager from the NY Times strikes me as an example of why people have become so skeptical of journalism as being more fluffy feeling-the-news infotainment than rigourous information and analysis. It appears to fashion a man-bites-dog story by deducing a reverse trend: that despite all the talk of a real estate bubble, the share of income that median families must devote to home ownership is actually lower than it was 20 years ago.

The problem is that you can only perceive this trend by ignoring the 25% of the country that lives in the northeast, south Florida, and California, and more importantly, by making sure that you are comparing what families are paying today to what they were paying in the early '80s, when interest rates were severely spiked upward and the housing market was in the midst of a previous boom. What's amazing is that even with interest rates through the roof in the early '80s and an ongoing boom, home buyers in NY, FL, CA, and DC were still paying a lower percentage of their incomes than they are now.

But more importantly, if the NY Times had bothered to compare what share of income median families paid for their homes in the 1970s, I suspect (without having done my own study) that they would have found that the parents of the current home buying generation paid less. But that's not a man-bites-dog story, so the NY Times didn't go back to the '70s. In addition, they buried another interesting lede in the article, which is that the share of income median families must devote to home ownership is the HIGHEST its been since 1989. Gee, I wonder what happened to the economy after 1989?

UPDATE: Elizabeth Warren over at TPMCafe picks up my point about the NY Times article using the early '80s as its point of comparison. But she makes a far more significant point: in the early '80s, people put 20% down payments on their homes, which is far less common now. Thus, the NY Times data comparison is deeply flawed: they are comparing the cost of median families paying for 80% of their homes in the early '80s with the cost of median families paying for closer to 100% of their homes today. Warren makes another significant point: for most families it now takes two incomes to achieve the median income status that was still more often achieved by one income in the early '80s. So your home may not take a greater share of your family income than it did in the early '80s, but it now takes twice as many people working to keep it that way.

Political Data Mining

This post on Political Animal describes an unbelievably powerful and fascinating political tool that enables pollsters to predict which way a person will vote based on their voting habits. Unfortunately, right now its only in the wrong hands.

Not a Crook- Not in a Bubble

"People have got to know whether or not their President's a crook. Well, I am not a crook." - President Richard Nixon 11/17/73 (http://www.msnbc.com/onair/msnbc/timeandagain/archive/watergate/nov1773.asp)

"I don't feel in a bubble. . . And it's a myth to think that I'm not aware that there [are] opinions that don't agree with mine. Because I'm fully aware of that." - President George W. Bush 12/12/05 (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051213/od_nm/bush_bubble_dc)

Why do [I] feel like this [is] not progress?

But Why Iraq?

I've read the following quote from Steve Schmitt, here and here, and somewhere else I can no longer remember.

We're asking very traditional questions: Was information withheld? Was there
deceit about the information? Those are the familiar Watergate/Iran-contra
questions. But they overlook the Ideology of Information that the administration
created. By this I mean the whole practice of evaluating all information going
into the war not for its truth value, but for whether it promoted or hindered
the administration's goal of being free to go to war. The President could have
been given every bit of intelligence information available, and he and/or Cheney
would have reached the same decision because they would have discarded,
discounted, or disregarded most of it. Information that was Useful to that goal
was put in one box, Not Useful put in another. Entire categories of information
were assigned to the Not Useful box because their source was deemed an opponent
of U.S. military action, or assumed to have some other motive.

It's a great post, making explict what I think a lot us already implicitly understood but haven't clearly articulated.

But it also raises a very important question: if there was never an objective analysis that led to the decision to change the regime in Iraq at any point going back into the '90s, just WHY has this group been so dead set on the policy, a priori, for so long? For all the excellent reporting and explanations I've seen of the behavior of this administration and the neoconservative "cabal" that drove this war, unless I've missed it, no one, anywhere, has every explained just why this group decided in the mid-'90s that all of the national security eggs should go into the Iraq regime change basket.

Some will immediately say oil and Halliburton. I'm sure that's not unrelated, but I don't think, for all their problems, that's what really motivates guys like Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz. And isn't there plenty of money to be made anyway building pipelines in Afghanistan and sucking up to the Saudis?

Was it a recognition that for national or parochial interests we needed to get our troops out of Saudi Arabia? Maybe, but wouldn't it be vastly easier to simply redeploy to Kuwait and react if Saddam started to threaten the Saudis again?

Was it that crazy RAND study that surfaced that saw this as the most convenient beginning of regime changes across the mideast? Maybe, but then why was it crucial to start with Iraq, not Syria, or Libya, or Sudan? For all of their documented hubris, did these very smart guys really believe, going back to the '90s, that they could pull off regime change across the middle east?

Here is my theory: a policy of regime change in Iraq was the only realistic way (if you could call that) that conservatives could hawkishly distinguish the Republican party and former cold war conservatives from Bill Clinton's already hawkish internationalist foreign policy. Here was one hawkish policy they could argue that they would do but Clinton would not- (after all, even they can't handle a war against Iran or North Korea, even though Clinton nearly did go to war with the North Koreans). Moreover, it also enabled them to rekindle and incorporate the time-honored conservative hostility to western Europe (who was softening on Iraq) and lump Clinton and the Democrats in with Western Europe as some how soft on security.

To say that this policy was based on political positioning and not any underlying objective analysis is pretty cynical. But isn't it pretty consistent with everything we've seen so far? As Steve Schmitt says, for these guys objective evidentiary support is just all backfill for what they already want to do. Haven't we heard before about this administration making policy choices in service of good politics that are subsequently justified however possible? Very much like the Bush tax cut that was devised in 1999 to beat Steve Forbes in the NH primary? Very much like what John D'Iulio and Paul O'Neill said about these guys?

And sadly, as you look at the 2002 and 2004 elections, didn't it work?

Why Moderate Republicans Are Useless Vol. 3

Calling all NY area moderate Republican Congressman: Peter King, Chris Shays, Nancy Johnson, Sue Kelly, Rob Simmons, Mike Ferguson, Frank Lobiondo, Rodney Frelinghuysen. Why do we keep you around again? Your party just took $125 million of previously granted 9-11 money from New York. If you vote with a party that's way out of step with your constiuency, has made a mockery of your supposed fiscal rectitude, and you let them screw your constituents with impunity on local appropriations as sensitive as 9-11 funding, what exactly is your purpose in holding elected office again?

Well, Now That I'm Blogging

There's something about the attempt to coopt the Democrats' votes in October 2002 for military force that has bothered me for as long as they have been identified as "votes for the war" in the public discourse.

The votes in October 2002 were to authorize Bush to use force in order to force Saddam to comply with UN inspections. In material respects, Saddam did comply, but Bush used the authority to use force anyway.

Democrats could easily say they didn't vote to use force no matter what, they voted to use force in case Saddam wouldn't comply with inspections (something I think I would still vote for). Bush publicly stated that's what the resolution was about. So now that he criticizes Democrats for voting for the war, is he implicitly saying "hey, you should have known I was lying and was going to war no matter what?" Maybe they did, but isn't ridiculous nonetheless?

Credit where credit is due: this has been covered on Talkingpointsmemo.com here and here.

Very Important

I have aroused myself from lax attention to this blog to alert whatever readers I still have to this NY Times editorial.

Nothing I have read has as succintly and effectively summed up the actions of the Bush administration in the lead up to war and its lame excuses after the fact about its manipulation of prewar intellegence, i.e. that they had the same intelligence as everyone else (Clinton, Democrats in Congress, foreign intelligence) and that they reached the same conclusions. That's plainly false, and the NY Times explains it better than anyone else.

A Bolder Approach

I'm sorry, I know this is a week late, but I feel like I have to say something about this quote by Condeleeza Rice on last week's Meet the Press:

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we
had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and
the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go
after al Qaeda … or we could take a bolder approach.

Say what you will about the decision to invade Iraq, you wouldn't want these people in charge of fixing your car:

The fact of the matter is that when your car broke down last week, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was the transmission system that stopped functioning and therefore have that fixed . . . or we could take a bolder approach, leave the transmission alone and change the engine instead.

So if you are wondering why our mideast policy seems like its on stall . . .

Thought He Outsmarted All Of Us

By now, you're probably familiar with the famous DeLay smiling mugshot. The idea to smile as if its an appearance at a church dinner was really quite clever: it prevents Democrats from using the mugshot in their campaign ads in 2006.

Well, it might have been clever by half, because there's an uncropped photo of that mugshot. Now if I were a Democratic media consultant, I'd cut an ad that had my Republican opponent in a smiling embrace with DeLay, cut to separate pictures of them smiling, and then pan slowly to the right on the uncropped version, finally focusing in on the words "adult inmate." I think I'd like that better than the straight up grimace mugshot.

Bush Approval Ratings

Survey USA has once again come out with a state-by-state break out of Bush's approval ratings. You can check them out for yourself, but here are some of the most shocking ones for my money:

South Carolina 40% Approve, 58% Disapprove
Texas!!! 42% Approve, 54% Disapprove
Kansas 43% Approve, 54% Disapprove

Kurtz Pitiful

I've written before about how lousy the Washington press corps is at doing its job, and specifically how Howard Kurtz, the self-appointed dean of covering and evaluating Washington journalism, is himself a particularly bad journalist.

By way of update, Mickey Kaus provides another excellent example (scroll down to #6 in Kaus's post) of Kurtz falling down on the job. In this particular case, he misstates a fact that a cursory reading of other news accounts would prevent. I genuinely wonder if he went from chatting about the story at the water cooler immediately to writing his column without ever bothering to read the news.

Midterm Democratic Convention

This is a great idea that I've been kicking around since even before Kerry blew it, but I wasn't smart enough to actually post something about it. I guess the 80-something Walter Cronkite is more nimble.

The Democrats badly need to set a clear course for the American people, who judging from opinion polling, are waiting for them to do it. A convention would get great press, because it would be used to decide something, unlike a nominating convention, which hasn't decided anything in a half-century. Part of the routine every four years is for the press to long openly for the good old days of meaningful conventions. Now they'd finally have it. Moreover, I think it would go far to dispel the meme that Democrats are looking to rely solely on the Republican implosion and don't have serious proposals of their own. Nothing could go farther in showing that they are serious than a public investment of party money and time in a process where the party tries to get a unified agenda on the record.

The down-side risk is that the sausage-making effect would hurt the Democrats. If there were large schisms in the party that forced papered over compromises and possible walkouts I think that would be a risk. The reality though is that the ideological differences in the party are wildly overblown and I suspect a convention would serve to unify the party around a set of principles that were heavily publicized and clearly articulated. This would be like going double or nothing on the Contract for America, and my bet is that it would turn up double.

There's Something About Harriet

Before I get to a brief comment on the Miers nomination, I'd just like to note for the record, in light of the last post, that I'm crushed. OK, maybe not in tears like back in '81, but nevertheless, wounded.

Here's the thing about Hariett Miers. I actually think that her lack of qualifications is overplayed a little. Sure, if we're grading on a curve of available lawyers for the Supreme Court, Miers doesn't register very high. But I'm sure she's a smart lady, with a degree in math and a federal clerkship under her belt. Unlike Alberto Gonzales (and Lewis Powell for that matter), she spent her career as a litigator, in addition to having clerked for a federal judge.

Moreover, honestly, I'd rather have a mediocre person on the court who is not out to chip away at my fundamental rights than a brilliant legal mind who is. Maybe that's cynical, but hey, I didn't vote for the guy who nominated her, why should I be responsible for her credentials?

But in the wake of Brownie, there is something distasteful about Bush deciding that the nation is better off with his pal rather than a selection resulting from an objective, far reaching search for a great legal mind. In one sense, its of a piece with the Bush administration's rejection of objectivity and professionalism- that has no value to them, only loyalty to the cause- (and not some abstract ideological cause, just the cause of advancing the power of the Bush administration and its cronies).

But when I read the NY Times account of Harriet Miers correspondence with Bush, I feel like it opened a window into this guy's soul that we all suspected but now have clearly confirmed. The President, with all his insecurity and issues with his father, badly needs a posse to reaffirm his greatness to him constantly. He feels the need to place exclusively sychophants around him in positions of power. Its like he needs to marshall the federal government, with its budget in the trillions of dollars, for the sole purpose of propping up his fragile ego. All of the resources of the American taxpayer are being devoted to providing this guy with ego gratification. To me, and maybe its just me, but this gratification is a lot more costly and difficult to endure than Clinton's, er, pursuit of more worldly gratification.

To Yom Kippur observers: Have a good fast!

Watching the Playoffs: Old School, New School

This post is for old school Yankee fans only, apologies to my other readers, both of them.

The Yanks are off on the right foot, 4-2 over the Angels.

Back in '81, the last time the Yanks were in the postseason during my childhood (as you might guess, it ended in tears)- I remember my Dad watching the game on mute while listening on the radio because he preferred the local radio guys over the national announcers who only called the Yanks in the postseason.

When the Yanks returned to postseason play in '95, many of my friends revived this old school tradition of muting out the national announcers for the local radio guys. The choice seemed even more obvious in the modern dynasty: John Sterling on the radio is an easy call over Tim McCarver and Joe Buck. (Tim McCarver is quite remarkable in his ability to unite Yankees and Red Sox fans on this point: he sucks.)

Anyhow, I found myself in an unusual situation: I wanted to listen to the first playoff game 'old school,' but with only 'new school' technology. Translation, while I have a sweet plasma TV and a great new laptop- I have no radio handy in my living room. Solution: I brought the laptop into the living room and purchased the radio broadcast from MLB.com. Well, partial solution- the delay between radio and TV is excacerbated by the internet. Even if I don't proceed with this plan, its not a total loss since I'm bound to be stuck at work on occasion this month during games, when I can use the $8 season subscription.

As it turned out tonight, I watched Mariano Rivera pop-up Casey Kotchman to end the game, I got up to go to the bathroom before John Sterling called it. Before I got to the door, I heard it "Yankees win! THHHHHHHHEEEEE Yankees Win!" You know, even a minute late, it still felt good to hear.

So I guess the lag isn't all that bad.

The Bill Bennett Thing

So in case you missed it, Bill Bennett got himself in pretty hot water while responding on his radio show to a pro-lifer advancing the argument that aborted babies would pay payroll taxes and therefore keep the system solvent (I guess they would then abort themselves at 67 before actually collecting from the system). Bennett intended to argue, fairly, that you could make the same argument in favor of abortion. He could have used the controversial argument from Steven Levitt's book Freakonomics, which is that aborted babies would be more likely to become criminals and drive up the crime rate if they were not aborted. Alas, Bennett took a disastrous detour, and instead simply said that crime would go down if you aborted all the black babies in America.

Its not that Bennett is advocating aborting all of the black babies in America, he said he wasn't, and while I don't admire him, I take him at his word that he is genuinely pro-life. Its not that he was so insensitive to even suggest the hypothetical, sort of our of thin air, of aborting all the black babies in America. Although that is kind of a problem. Finally, its not that Bennett believes there's a link between crime and abortion, as I mentioned before, whether you agree with the theory or not, Freakonomics makes that old news.

The problem is, Mr. Bennett, why do you take it for granted that the unborn black children of the present will inevitably being a more prone to crime in 15-20 years than the general population?

Does Bennett just believe the situation of the black community is hopeless (despite some significant, steady, and healthy progress in the past half-century)? Or does he think its a genetic thing? Why does Bennett think that black babies are more likely to become criminals even before they get out of the womb? Is anyone in the Washington press corps smart enough to ask him? (Since the White House demand for an apology, courage would not be necessary in this particular instance.)

I think America ought to here Bennett's answers to that one before they keep buying his children's books and books on values.

P.S. Over at TPMCafe, Reed Hundt posts a pretty interesting anecdote about Mr. Bennett unrelated to the controversy at hand.

The Bushmeister, The Bushinator, Bushanopolis . . . Bush

Perhaps you've already come across the list of nicknames that President Bush has conferred on various people in Washington. Read it, its funny (and, if you have a hard time believing it, true). Its not that I think that by and large the people on that list are entitled to more dignity than that which they get from their nickname. But as I read it, I couldn't help but wonder how we elected Richmeister, the photocopy character from Saturday Night Live, to President of the United States. If only that were his biggest problem.

Dude, Do Not Get A Dell

The hard drive on my last laptop irretrievably melted down a couple weeks ago. Laptop gone, data gone (yeah, yeah, I know, I should have backed up). The laptop was a four year old Compaq Presario, the replacement hard drive was a two year installation from Best Buy pursuant to the extended warranty I got with the laptop. I could share what a miserable experience that was (it also involved a loss of data due to Best Buy), but I'll just let you infer from the two year lifespan of the replacement hard drive that Best Buy is also a place to avoid for anything but off-the-shelf, no-service-or-returns necessary purchases. That's not the point of the post though.

I decided to stick with a laptop for the next home computer for a variety of reasons, and I wanted a lightweight laptop at that because why have a laptop if you're never willing to lug it anywhere. On the other hand, I felt a little guilty about the extra cost involved, so I opted to go with a Dell Inspiron 700m.

I was concerned about a possibly cramped keyboard, one that I haven't seen since you can't look at a Dell in a retail store. So my plan (which ended up being quite expensive) was to get the lightweight Dell, but then get an external keyboard, mouse, monitor and dock that I could plug it in and out of. I had some final technical questions I couldn't answer online so I called the Dell number and ended up in a high-pressure sales situation that ended up with me buying everything on their no money down plan.

Flash forward about a week. The system arrives. I start setting it up. The keyboard is borderline ridiculous (for example, the period key, which, you know, you hit everytime you finish a sentence, is half size)- for some reason they don't use over a half inch of space on either side. Its difficult to place disks in the disk drive. The broadband cable requires a large amount of brute force to pull out once I've plugged it in.

Then I set up the monitor. I try plugging it in both ways- nothing but a test screen appears. I call Dell's service line, after 78 minutes on the phone with someone in India (much of that time holding) I get passed on to a second level guy (after a few more minutes of holding). During this time I also tried and failed to get my printer installed and printing correctly. 90 minutes and two Dell tech support people after I called, they're satisfied its a hardware problem. I say great, send me someone to fix it, since, you know, I spent a couple of hundred dollars on your #1 service plan which includes that. Oh, well they didn't know about that, I'd have to speak to a third person about that. At somepoint after the next few minutes of holding I got flat out disconnected.

When I called back, I just wanted to return everything and end the fiasco. That took 35 minutes. The experience came full circle when I ended up in another high pressure negotiation where I had to decline an offer to speak to a hardware expert and another offer to replace the whole system. When I told the woman that I had had enough and just wanted to return it, she told me I'd have to pay for the return shipping. I argued, saying why should I have to pay to ship back a product that didn't work. She said because I rejected their cure, which was a new system. I said, well, that would cure the defective product, but what would cure the horrendous service that I paid hundreds of dollars for? She said, and this shocked me even two hours in, that I "just didn't give it enough time." I wrote that down. I was given a return number to take to a UPS store, who would print return labels and ship the return boxes- at my expense. Naturally, even that was screwed up, as the number only covered two of the three boxes. I guess Dell figured I'd want to just keep the wireless keyboard and mouse and pretend I had a functioning Dell computer.

The happy ending here is that I am currently writing this post from my new Fujitsu Lifebook 6240 and I cannot sing its praises enough. The set up was completely smooth with the software and the externals (which unlike Dell, were not sold as a package). Like the Dell Inspiron 700m, the Fujitsu Lifebook 6240 is 4 pounds, but the keyboard is a decent size (slightly smaller than optimal, but good for a lightweight laptop). The screen is also bigger at 13.3 inches. So no external screen or keyboard necessary. Also, things that I had to pay extra for with Dell, like a weight-saving bay (the Dell saleswoman didn't even know what that was), or the back-up XP installation disk, came free with the Fujitsu. The Fujistu Lifebook is a few hundred dollars more, no doubt, but trust me, either way you get what you pay for.

P.S. As luck would have it, I used to live in the same building as the Dell dude, but he had to move out in search of lower rent after he lost his gig with Dell for his marijuana bust.

UPDATE 10/3/05: Called Dell to get the Return Authorization Number for that last box, it only took 26 minutes. Also, I forgot to mention that for some reason Dell didn't find it necessary to ship the computer or the monitor with a user manual. Great company.