So what made up those 162,000 jobs we did get? Well you can thank Uncle Sam for a lot of them, about 29.6% of them to be exact.

“Employment in federal government was up over the month, reflecting the hiring of 48,000 temporary workers for the decennial census.”

But those are all temporary workers. What happens when the census is over? We’ve been hiring a lot of these census workers, it isn’t limited to March’s report. When those workers hit the streets again, it may make 9.7% unemployment look pretty good. Looking at census hires is only part of the picture, however. While America’s private sector has struggled, our public sector has escaped the economic turbulence, thanks to you – the taxpayer. Since one year ago, the Feds have hired 170,000. Were it not for the postal service letting some folks go, the Federal government would have taken on 51.3 thousand last month alone. If you take out the census workers that’s still 3,300 new Federal jobs in one month.

I was recently criticized in a post online for suggesting that Congress is paid too much. I was instigating “class warfare”, they said…plus the idea of making Federal officials earn market rate for their services was just “stupid” according to one participant. Perhaps that individual and other like-minded people would reconsider that position given the growing scope of Federal employment. It isn’t class warfare to wish for a Federal government that eat, sleeps, and works like its citizens do, but it might be unrealistic. No one in Washington wants to rock the boat of the ruling class that makes, on average, 45% more than us losers in the private sector.

So we are hiring more and more Federal workers, and paying them increasingly gaudy sums of money. The worst part is, that we keep electing politicians to keep it this way. For my friends who think Congress ought to keep getting regular raises because their jobs are so tough, I ask this: Why not let those people go find work in the private sector that provides those kinds of benefits? Some may succeed in doing so, some may become vastly richer working in the private sector, even. I say, let ‘em, at least we won’t be financing them.

When listening to liberals discuss the free market, emotions usually give way to falsehoods. Some are driven by malice found in popular media, while others are founded only in ignorance of the free market system. Since failure to make a family’s budget stretch to end of the month can have disastrous results, the subject naturally becomes heated. That’s one reason politicians latch on to a natural human tendency to blame others for our own problems.

In critical industries, politicians will explain, we need to have some special circumstances. Whenever you hear a politician bellyaching about price gouging, unfair practices, etc., eye such statements with extreme scrutiny. In principle there is no industry or sector which has such greatly different economic conditions that is require separate and increased government oversight. If grocers can successfully make sure everyone has a loaf of bread to buy, then health care can make sure every paying customer gets to see a doctor.

In reality, most of these claims from politicians are a power grab. It gives people a nice warm and fuzzy when a politician tells you they’ve reigned in some evil corporation and put the extra dollars they were “stealing” into your pocket. It might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling at the time, but it should have made you queasy. Government can only make things worse, if history is any indicator.

Other times, politicians’ populist claims make no sense at all, but they are supposed to make you feel better anyway. For instance, we recently created a health care law that says, in essence: Insurance companies are evil, so we will force all of you to buy a policy from them; but at the same time, we’re raising your taxes to buy even more people an insurance policy. It’s the subject of another article to debate the government’s intentions with this bill, but suffice to say it’s double-minded to say you want to reign in insurance companies, but also force people to buy from them.

In the free market, people engage in commerce with minimal interference. That means you can buy and sell products and services at a mutually acceptable price. When we shop, we’re acting as buyers. At work, we’re just acting as sellers of our own services. There is no difference between selling bread at a grocery store and selling your services to an employer. In a free market you can ask any price you like for your good or service, and any potential customer is free to agree to it…or not. When you try to ask too high of a price, customers will naturally seek out other sources of the same product or service for a lower price.

Despite claims by politicians to the contrary, free markets have no inherent evil personality. In fact, they have no personality at all; The market is just a system. While greed is often cited as the driver of free market economies, that’s usually the wrong way of describing the markets. A better way to phrase it is “self-preservation”. Just like you are constantly trying to make the same amount of money as yesterday (or more), companies also try to maintain and grow profits. Unsurprisingly, they do it for the very same reasons as you: They want to maintain a safety cushion for rainy days, and give themselves room for future growth.

The free market is, in essence, the only true economic system. Every other system is an attempt to pervert, guide, interfere with, or overtly control otherwise free markets…but free market principles still exist underneath it all, just in a severely contorted fashion. In our next article in the series, we’ll discuss how the buyer and seller interact.

We’re all buyers and sellers at various points in time. Since free markets rely on competition to work, it’s understood that multiple sellers of comparable products will generally exist. It’s also fair to assume that multiple buyers with varying needs will exist. The basic premise of the buyer/seller relationship is that the buyer has something they want less than the product or service a seller has. If the grocer charges $2.00 for bread, and I really need to eat, my $2.00 becomes less valuable than the loaf of bread so I make the trade. You can think of every single trade between parties in the free market this way. With this in mind, the phrase “that’s gotten too expensive” really means “my money is now worth more to me than that product”.

As buyers we’re provided a chance to shop anywhere we like, so we generally get a wide variety of products and prices. These prices tend to always be at the lowest possible level because sellers will try and compete with each other. If an existing company’s prices are “too high”, a would-be competitor will see that money is being “left on the table” because that would-be competitor believes he could provide the same product or service at a lower price. The new competitor is encouraged to enter the market because he knows buyers will want to buy from him, at his reduced price. Of course, that’s just theory. In reality we don’t have perfectly low prices, because companies have operating expenses and also have an obligation to their owners to make a profit.

There exists a concept in pricing called “perfect competition“. Under this theory (that doesn’t exist in the real world), every seller makes just enough profit to exist, with absolutely no extra profit. In the real world, no market is “perfect” and companies do make more profit than strictly required, but the theory is true to the extent that prices are generally pushed downwards. Some politicians would like us to live under “perfect competition”, but it simply doesn’t permit any innovation. If our primary concern is to ensure that every just barely breaks even, then who will have any capital to create new products?

In our jobs we act as sellers of services. For those in small businesses, we are selling services directly to a buyer. If you have an employer, you’re still selling to a direct buyer, just in a more structured, long-term arrangement. Companies don’t have any built-in desire to hurt employees anymore than you, as a buyer, have built-in desire to hurt the grocery store you buy from, or the gas station where you fill up. Just the opposite is true; Training employees is expensive and no one wants to lose their investment.

As a seller of your own services, you are naturally looking to “increase sales” constantly. In small business that’s pretty straightforward to explain; you try and take on new customers. You do it as an employee though, too, by marketing yourself through your resume and networking. If a new job with better pay and better benefits comes along, it establishes a new market rate for your services. If your current employer isn’t willing to pay the new rate, they do without your services and you move on to your new job.

To put this relationship in context, we shouldn’t bash a company for having high prices (except that you can and should choose not to do business with that company, if you feel that way). To bash them is to bash yourself for wanting a good paycheck. Almost no one would opt to receive less pay than the market will bear (at least not permanently), and likewise, no company would choose to make less money than it potentially could.

When we continue with part three in the series, we’ll take on some specific common misconceptions heard in the media and elsewhere.

Readers might also remember that shortly after that legislation passed, the credit card companies abruptly raised interest rates on consumers of all stripes. While this was much less reported in the media, it affected far more people than the legislation was designed to help. People who don’t pay their bills are a minority. People that do pay are, of course, the overwhelming majority. Yet, Congress’ law said that credit card companies have to offer someone the same interest rate for the life of the purchase. That meant that even consumers who do not pay their bills are insulated from the consequences of their actions. So where did those costs get shifted to? The responsible payers, of course.

Legislators are free to try and impose their personal wills on companies, but they can’t really control the revenues companies need to survive. Laws can say who a company can and cannot raise rates on, but the effect is always like the chest of drawers in a Three Stooges Episode; as soon as you push one drawer in another one pops out.

Utility companies are more or less government controlled organizations, yet we’ve seen energy costs go up tremendously over the past 15 years. Weren’t oversight and price controls designed to make price hikes a thing of the past? While it’s true that utilities need to go to various regional advisory boards to seek permission to raise rates, but they always get that permission. At the end of the day, these regional board succumb to the pressure to keep utilities from having to ration service, and they opt to let the companies raise rates. Yet, because utilities aren’t free to work in the open market we’ve seen breathtaking lack of innovation. Ten years after everyone on the planet accepted credit cards, many utilities still don’t. As every bank worth doing business at offers online banking, many utilities don’t have online facilities for managing and paying your account. With all that oversight, there simply isn’t enough money to innovate.

March 21st marked a solemn occasion in America. With sweeping health insurance regulation, we have again expanded our reach into the inner workings of private industry. When government pretends it knows business better than businesses do, we can expect the stories above to play out again and again. Some liberal voters might get a warm and fuzzy feeling when companies are “cut down to size”, but inevitably those same voters complain again later when rates continue to climb. It’s easy to wonder how high prices need to go before consumers realize government is the problem, not the answer.

To justify tax hikes in a time period where there has been virtually no inflation, lawmakers are trotting out tired fear tactics. They claim if we don’t hike taxes, we’ll have to cut schools. So what if we do have to cut schools? Teachers’ unions have negotiated for themselves pay hike after pay hike, while test grades have stagnated.

It seems like massive cuts to education would just be the harsh economic realities of bad job performance coming home to roost. Unions collude to make sure we can’t fire bad teachers and that they all get generous pay raises. The downside is that since we can’t fire the under-performing teachers, we’ll have to fire lots of undeserving educators along with the derelicts. That’s the downside of being a union shop, and taxpayers shouldn’t feel guilty about the cuts.

Obama’s plans for No Child Left Behind involve removing many of the measurable goals schools need to achieve. That’s typical since liberals prefer intangible education goals like “learning climate”. That effectively makes sure schools will never be held accountable for poor performance, at least not with to Federal funding. That’s a shame because there’s a lot of poor performance in the schools and all tax payers are helping to fund it. Once again, liberal ideology defies common sense the rest of us live by.

Instead of discussing how social spending could be cut or how tough negotiations could happen between unions and the State, we’re told to accept inevitable tax hikes required to keep the kids in school. After all, isn’t America’s future important enough that we can buck up a few extra dollars? Or try this one on for size: “We can’t make our State’s dedicated teachers and future generations of children pay the price for our inaction”. It gets old.

When politicians had the chance to negotiate pensions that were responsible they failed. When they had a chance to say no to raise after raise, they failed. When they knew about all the waste in State budgets and did nothing for fear of losing a vote or two from special interests, they failed. Now career politicians would like to turn on the very people who put them in office and blame them for schools failing if they don’t accept one more tax hike.

After endless debate over a 2 trillion dollar health reform bill and passage of countless other multi-trillion dollar packages; the real question is: why do we only have a measly 15 billion for “jobs”? It seems like Obama would want to create the appearance of caring about job creation. He is free to continue to fail on the economy but we’d assume he wants to look like he cares. No such luck.

Instead, on a jobs package that actually has a small amount of bipartisan support, we give it the Congressional equivalent of a spare nickel. For what we spent on the auto bailout alone we could have had several jobs bills. Don’t get me wrong. Any jobs bill will have only marginal impact, but one that focuses on sustained broad tax cuts would definitely do more than the State bailout package (a.k.a. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).

We put every progressive spending bill above the economy. We continue the same monetary printing press mentality that has indirectly or directly led to every boom and bust cycle we’ve had – The same boom and bust cycle Obama repeatedly condemns on the 2012 campaign trail. Even if Obama’s sick fascination with environmentally friendly stimulus programs were to succeed, only the smallest fraction of workers could benefit. Even then, a recent look at Spain’s green jobs efforts shows what the true costs of these programs are to the workforce as a whole.

Since Obama’s in campaign mode he might want to worry less about building monuments to himself and come to the realization that his throne will be up for re-election in about 2.5 years. A health care bill we’re paying for and getting nothing from and unemployment that’s still twice what it was under Bush will simply open the door for a Reagan/Carter moment at the debates: “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?”.

It is almost as if Obama can read our minds, and has trained himself to say the exact opposite of what we need to hear. Good ideas abound: Cutting marginal tax rates, eliminating capital gains taxes (at least temporarily), a promise not to sign any law that raise taxes on business, to name a few. Obama delivered none of these.

Hiring people is a long term decision. Companies spending a lot of money simply training new hires, and though Obama most likely doesn’t believe it; most companies still don’t want to hire people only to be forced to fire them a couple months later. In light of this, businesses need stability before they will want to hire. They need to know that the regulatory and tax environment is unlikely to change significantly in the near term. For businesses that rely on imports and exports, the value of our dollar is key. We can provide some degree of assurance on this in the form of spending cuts and debt reduction.

Instead, the President misses the mark completely. His new focus on jobs: More handouts for banks (“small” banks this time), “targeted” tax cuts for businesses Obama deems worthy, and more social spending. No wonder his popularity is falling. Americans simply don’t take him seriously anymore.

The reason the Fed wants to slow down lending is to get money off the street. In so doing, there are fewer dollars chasing the same number of goods, and it generally slows or halts inflation.

While the conservative generally sees this as a good thing, it’s a shame that the Fed has this much control in the first place. The Fed is a private corporation with very loose accountability to Congress or anyone else. No single group should have that type of power. If they can halt inflation, can they not also cause inflation?

Having said that, the increased rates are a good thing to the extent that they make bank-to-bank loans not have an artificially low interest rate that is only possible because of the Fed’s grab-bag.

On a completely unrelated note: Yesterday we celebrated one year of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus plan).

(this post was edited to correct the statement that unemployment numbers this week were 40k more than expected, they were simply ‘more than expected’)

Now, I’m not a scientist, I can’t really say if the planet is getting hotter or not, or whether carbon parts per million have a anything to do with it, if it is. The good news for me is that it doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s one of those mysteries like what would we find on a moon mission in 2011. We’ll never know, but it doesn’t really affect my life.

Al Gore tells us we’ll be burned alive in 6 years, but that doesn’t stop him from jet setting around the world to ignore anyone daring to ask about his “research”. Now, Howard Dean says Republicans (since 30 years ago) don’t believe in science. Well, if he means that Republicans aren’t scientists, then he’s right. Of course, neither are Democrats. Then there’s the previously tolerable Bill Nye, the ex-science guy. Evidently, disagreeing with anyone means you are “unpatriotic”, according to Bill.

This is an exclusively political discussion now, so the differences come down to this: Are you willing to cripple the world economy, possibly forever, over something neither you nor you opponent understands?

Since everyone like shocking stats on global warming, I have created some shocking stats Americans actually DO care about:

- The national debt ceiling is up 34% since Obama took over.
- The latest budget contains 42% deficit spending.

No wonder most Americans are more worried about surviving the next 3 years than the next 20 or so. I recommend we cut to the chase with the leftists: tell them you very much believe in global warming with all your heart, but that you just don’t care. For extra credit, tell them the coasts will get buried first if the snow caps melt and that will really help all the science-hating Republicans in the elections.

Next, sit back and watch their heads explode, Scanners style.

John is the former co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20, and now hosts Stossel on Fox Business.

John is one of those rare birds that turned around from his old liberal ways. He’s no Republican shill. At one point, he even offered some strong words to an audience of mostly Republicans. He’s concerned about Republicans trying to scare people from Health Reform by talking about Medicare cuts. In John’s mind these cuts are actually necessary. Don’t fear, he’s against the health reform plans in near totality, but when it comes to Medicare cuts, John says Republicans get it wrong. I couldn’t agree with him more.

When he anchored 20/20 on ABC there were originally 30 million viewers for the program. By the time he left, that number was down to 5 million. Now Stossel works on Fox Business and considerably fewer viewers than that. But to Stossel there is something much bigger in play. He can speak his mind, educate an interested audience and be support by a culture that wants him and his message to succeed.

One other note: John started a charity years ago, Stossel In The Classroom. This charity purchases John’s own episodes and gives them away to teachers to show them in the classroom. He’s reached 100,000 teachers representing 12 million students getting an education on how to keep our free markets strong, at no cost.

ABC made his charity buy his own programs back before they could be given away. Another benefit to John’s move, Fox’s Roger Ailes gives them to Stossel’s charity, free of charge.

Check out John’s always thought provoking blog at stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com, and check out “Stossel” on Fox Business Network.

The story can really be distilled this way. The EU has been placing increased pressure on Greece to lower its debt load. There’s a humorous story buried in that, too. What’s the EU doing telling Greece what to do? Well, if Cap and Trade passes, America will get to find out how that works, too. Back to the main story here. Greece is socialist, and as such everyone is struggling to get their “fair share” of the government’s honey pot. Well, in a sagging global economy with a failed system of government, honey is a little bit short in supply.

That never stops a good union though. When automakers were facing bankruptcy, unions still wanted more and more here in America. In the end, they won. They now have a bigger ownership stake in the “good” GM and the “good” Chrysler while Americans paid the automakers’ debts. Sounds nice doesn’t it?

Greece is no different. Money is tight, and lawmakers have decided they have to cut costs to meet the EU’s demands (and probably to stay viable at all). Unions put the matter like this:

“Demonstrators said they refused to be the ones bearing the burden of getting Greece out of its fiscal mess.

The government has unveiled a series of measures, including a hike on fuel tax, a 10 percent cut in social security spending and hikes on tobacco, alcohol and real estate taxes.

“Why should we make sacrifices? We are not the ones responsible for this crisis,” said high-school teacher Mihalis Exintarakos, sipping his espresso at a cafe after taking a break from the march. “It’s always the little guys who pay.”"

“It’s always the little guys who pay.” No, it’s the residents of a country with a failed economic system that pay. Americans are learning that the hard way, too.

Let’s get real – when you take out a loan, there is a trust relationship between you and the lender. Sadly, misguided policies from Barney Frank, and others in Congress, allowed lenders to distort their side of the equation and offer loans that some folks were not qualified for. The real responsibility, however, is on people who take bigger loans than they came realistically pay back. In the 90′s I was offered over 2 times what I could afford when I purchased a home. Those less responsible would take the bank up on it.

When banks or individuals make bad decisions there have to be consequences. Bankruptcy (possibly for both parties) is one of them. The TARP bail out distorts this basic reality under the guise of keeping our system from collapse.

When companies fail due to bad decision making, failure is not only an option…it’s the right one. People who don’t pay bills file bankruptcy and aren’t allowed to borrow for many years. That’s a good thing, because it keeps untrustworthy risks out of the credit market and protects low credit prices (interest rates) for those of us who do pay our bills. Similarly, when failed banks are allowed to actually fail, we are stronger for it. Mistakes are learned from, the market gets more cautious and the remaining companies get additional market share because they have earned it. This all happens quite naturally without government intervention.

Given the amazing “success” of TARP I, Congress is going to do it again, with TARP II. I’m against it. It’s more government picking of winners and losers and more needless interference in a system that isn’t broken. This time it’s small banks. If any bank isn’t lending, the decision is up to them. If the bank doesn’t feel the credit risk is reasonable, they have every right to not make the loan. Why would we want to pressure them to do otherwise? Did we not learn our lesson yet?

In case it’s not clear, I’ll repeat: When businesses and individuals are permitted to succeed *and* fail on their own merits, the system is showing that it works.

As is typical with any financially irresponsible family, excuses are made for needing the credit line to be raised. Those familiar with families struggling with money management know the story all too well: The person in charge of the cash goes out and blows the whole paycheck on lottery tickets, dinners out, and a huge TV. Then when groceries need to be purchased, they will claim they “must” use the credit card because groceries are non-negotiable. Its the oldest trick in the book for the financially foolish.

This exact trick was employed last year when Congress blew threw $827billion for stimulus and about $825 billion between the bank bail out and the auto bailout. Unsurprisingly, that adds up to just under the new “credit line increase”. As expected, we blew money on things we didn’t need and won’t work, before we spent money on things we *do* need like paying our bills and protecting our land.

If every man, woman and child in the country paid an even share of the $14.3 trillion debt, we’d all pay $40,141.11 Considering that not everyone in the country is able to work, that number gets much worse.

Stated a different way; there are roughly 138.5 million people in the US work force. If you have a calculator that handles trillions, you can figure out how much we’ll have to pay to get out of this. It works out to a little over $89,000 per worker.  $89,000!  Think about that.

The median American salary as of 2007 stood at $50,233. That means if every US worker used every paycheck for the next 1.77 years and didn’t keep one dime for themselves, we’d be able paid off our back debt.  Well, even that isn’t totally true, because the budget for FY2011 is $3.68 trillion.  So over the 1.77 years you were busy paying our back debt, you would have racked up $3.68 trillion in more debt to pay.  It’s a cycle that never ends, and sounds a lot like the situation a family is in right before they are forced to declare bankruptcy.

The news gets worse. While Obama has paid lip service to the idea of *deficit* reduction, via a 3 year freeze on certain discretionary non-defense spending, he hasn’t even announced a plan for reducing the debt. Keep in mind that even if we balanced the budget (a la Newt’s Contract with America), we still wouldn’t have done anything about the debt.

The way it out is horribly painful for almost everyone, and politically improbable. It will require massive social security and medicare cuts, and keeping tax rates right where they are. Trying to fix our national debt by freezing 17% of the budget is really ignoring the elephant in the room.

This is really not an optional process. We have only two legitimate choices: 1) The spending reforms outlined above, or 2) Wide scale monetizing of the debt, which will lead to abrupt, massive inflation. The scale of the problem dictates the scale of the solution. We can’t fix a debt problem equal to over 7 years of government revenues by tweaking a little here and there.

US debt has risen over the last 30 years

As a percentage of GDP (the total economic output of the country, of which Uncle Sam gets only a portion), the debt has taken a startling turn in the last year.  The other obvious bump in the graphs happens during World War II.  However, World War II was followed by a massive economic boom.  There is no such boom on the horizon now, not even in Obama’s analysis, which expects a modest 4% growth over the next several years.

If giving banks a bail out is “like a root canal”, I wonder what colorful terms our President would use to describe the changes we need to reduce our debt. The good news for him, and the bad news for us and our children, is that he’d never do it.

There’s a way to reconcile these two realities.  We could suppose that we’ve added almost 2 million jobs last month, and that’s why the net loss is so small.  That doesn’t seem very likely, though.  More likely is that the same accounting “anomalies” that made Arthur Andersen famous have been employed here.

But all of this is supposed to be irrelevant, because you’re not supposed to care about these numbers.  You were supposed to wake up today and see the shiny new 9.7% unemployment number and say “Wow, good work Obama!”.  I guess no one in the administration thought that someone may ask how in the world we piled on 20,000 more job losses and yet managed to actually lower the joblessness rate.

I don’t know how this whole situation will work out, but I bet my bottom dollar that the solution will involve Obama spending some time on television screens.

That’s not nearly enough and everyone knows it. This would be like telling your wife you’re going to fix your family’s financial woes by freezing your spending on toothpicks.

However, this proposed spending freeze, while woefully inadequate, is an important first step. Followed by an 86% freeze on spending, we’d be heading the right direction.

Why can’t Congress support this? It’s good for the jackass and the GOP. For the jackass they get to support their guy for something that isn’t doling out our cash (thus helping in November). The GOP gets to make the best of a bad situation, and getting us unburied is really all the country cares about.

Of course, the reason is obvious. We hire politicians based on how much of the Federal pork barrel they bring home. Build your town a new prison/courthouse/post office/whatever and you’ve got yourself a second term. This has to end.

When we stop voting for people to bring us ‘our fair share’ of the Fed’s grab bag, and start voting for people that care if this country can survive another ten years, we will be in excellent shape. Primary season is upon us, get out there and vote!

The only problem with the class was its teacher. Call me cynical, just one of those bitter people that go to church, if you will, but I just don’t buy it.

Since national security always seems to strike up emotions, let’s use that as an example. We could try the 911 thugs for maybe a million bucks in Gitmo. As John Stossel points out, that kind of number is just a rounding error in Washington. Instead, our team of national security gurus has been shopping the KSM show to various cities around the country at a cost of maybe 200 million, if you trust Mayor Bloomberg and his police Chief’s estimate.

Doing that sort of expensive thing doesn’t give Americans much faith in your ability to pinch pennies when times are tough.

Spending money is like crack to a Washington politi-thug. However much money got them high yesterday won’t be anout today. Let’s go to the highlight reel:

- The bank bailout (no it wasn’t needed, don’t even try that), $700 billion big ones.
- The AIG bailout, up to $180 billion now.
- The union auto bailout, that cost $75-$125 billion.
- The union cash for clunkers program…wait scratch that, that was a Japanese stimulus plan. That cost $3 billion.
- An $827 billion stimulus plan (don’t forget, it works!)
- A plane ride over NYC for a photo-op.  Yeah this one wasn’t *too* expensive, maybe only half a million, but it’s the thought that counts.
- Flying lots of congress people to Copenhagen for no good reason (at 2200 bucks per night per person for the hotel), $1.1 million.  Personally, I find that figure a little low.
Now this is a ton of waste, and I haven’t even listed all of them, just the most expensive or divisive ones.  However, I do have an idea for the KSM trial, and I think its going to be a win-win for everyone: Let NBC hold the trial, I hear they’ve got some programming holes these days, maybe around 10pm ET? As an added advantage, when the terrorists blow up NBC during the trial, no one will notice. Win-win!