Month: February 2009

Stupid Americans, Believing In Constitutional Principles

by dday

The standard line from the Village is that we cannot have investigations of Bush Administration officials for crimes like torture or illegal wiretapping because that would take the country through a painful cycle and tear the very fabric of the nation apart and this would be just too mortal a blow to a nation that needs to bind up its wounds. If you actually ask those people these brave Villagers are trying to protect, however, they’d say “Yeah, we’re cool with it.”

Even as Americans struggle with two wars and an economy in tatters, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds majorities in favor of investigating some of the thorniest unfinished business from the Bush administration: Whether its tactics in the “war on terror” broke the law.

Close to two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants. Almost four in 10 favor criminal investigations and about a quarter want investigations without criminal charges. One-third said they want nothing to be done.

Even more people want action on alleged attempts by the Bush team to use the Justice Department for political purposes. Four in 10 favored a criminal probe, three in 10 an independent panel, and 25% neither.

Apparently the delicate sensibilities of “the people,” as distilled by those in Washington, are not quite so delicate. The porcelain ones are actually the Villagers themselves, who don’t want to see the facade of their own complicity smashed in a series of hearings and investigations. Anyway, these war criminals are their friends. The men and women they see at the supermarket. They’re good people and they don’t deserve the simply horrible abuse.

The real problem, of course, is the education system. We teach children the preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, tell them to remember that all men are created equal and that no man is above the law, and then they actually start to BELIEVE THAT? Somebody change out the textbooks.

If you’re part of this nation composed of 2/3 dirty hippies, you might want to take action at Patrick Leahy’s new site Bush Truth Commission. A truth and reconciliation commission is really the very least we can do to get the full extent of the crimes out into the light of day. If the President believes the Villager pressure that this will rip the nation asunder and be just a terrible distraction, there’s no reason the Congress has to follow. You can watch Sen. Leahy’s remarks at Georgetown University in favor of a Truth Commission here.

UPDATE: Jack Reed is on board.

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What Do They Know?

by digby

I wrote a while back that I wished we could clone Paul Krugman and Dean Baker (I should have added James Galbraith, who is awesome) so that they could go on TV and explain economics to the dolts who were chattering ignorantly about it. (And I say that as someone who is hardly an expert, but who has been stunned — once again — by the audacity of the know-nothings who arrogantly populate the airwaves speaking complete gibberish that even a layperson like myself can recognize as crap.)

If one of the duties of journalism is to educate the public about complicated issues, you would think during a crisis like this they would have a stable of economists rather than political hitmen and village gossips discussing the issue. But, they don’t.

A Media Matters study of Sunday talk shows and 12 cable news programs from January 25 through February 8 found that few economists have been given time on television to talk about the economic recovery plan. During 139 1/2 hours of programming in which the economic recovery legislation was discussed, economists made 25 guest appearances out of a total of 460 — only 5 percent.

I know it’s boring stuff. But it’s important. And it’s more important for both the public and the villagers to hear from people who at least speak in the proper terms than it is to hear from gasbags like Alex Castellanos and Michele Bernard.

Here’s the saddest part:

The show that featured the most guest appearances by economists was Fox News’ Glenn Beck, which featured seven: Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (who appeared twice), Barry Ritholtz, Amity Shlaes, Thomas Sowell, and Ben Stein:

With the exception of Barry Ritholz, they are all discredited hacks. Naturally, they are getting airtime.

Cable channels
Program	Economist guest appearances in which stimulus was discussed	%	Total guest appearances in which stimulus was discussed	Hours of programming in which stimulus was discussed
The Situation Room	3	4%	73	30
Lou Dobbs Tonight	1	4%	27	10
Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull	0	0%	26	8
Anderson Cooper 360 (10 p.m. ET hour only)	0	0%	31	9
Your World with Neil Cavuto	2	4%	53	10
Glenn Beck	7	33%	21	9
The O’Reilly Factor	1	7%	15	7
Hannity	0	0%	44	10
Hardball with Chris Matthews (5 p.m. ET hour only)	1	2%	46	10
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue	1	3%	37	9
Countdown with Keith Olbermann	1	7%	15	9
The Rachel Maddow Show	1	9%	11	8

Among the Sunday shows, ABC’s This Week was the only one to feature at least one economist on each broadcast:

Sunday shows
Program	Economist guest appearances in which stimulus was discussed	%	Total guest appearances in which stimulus was discussed	Number of broadcasts in which stimulus was discussed
This Week	3	15%	20	3
Face the Nation	1	14%	7	3
Meet the Press	2	14%	14	3
Fox News Sunday	1	5%	20	3

The following is a list of all the guest appearances by economists coded in the study:

Date	Network	Show	Guest
1/28/2009	MSNBC	Hardball with Chris Matthews	Armey, Dick
2/5/2009	CNN	Lou Dobbs Tonight	Ferguson, Niall
2/4/2009	MSNBC	Countdown with Keith Olbermann	Huffington, Arianna
1/25/2009	ABC	This Week	Krugman, Paul
2/4/2009	MSNBC	The Rachel Maddow Show	Krugman, Paul
1/28/2009	FNC	Glenn Beck	Laffer, Arthur
1/28/2009	FNC	Glenn Beck	Moore, Stephen
2/2/2009	FNC	Glenn Beck	Moore, Stephen
1/27/2009	MSNBC	1600 Pennsylvania Avenue	Orszag, Peter
2/5/2009	CNN	The Situation Room	Orszag, Peter
2/5/2009	FNC	Your World with Neil Cavuto	Orszag, Peter
2/8/2009	ABC	This Week	Reich, Robert
2/3/2009	FNC	Glenn Beck	Ritholtz, Barry
1/30/2009	CNN	The Situation Room	Rivlin, Alice
2/8/2009	CBS	Face the Nation	Romer, Christina
1/26/2009	FNC	Glenn Beck	Shlaes, Amity
1/30/2009	FNC	Glenn Beck	Sowell, Thomas
1/30/2009	FNC	Glenn Beck	Stein, Ben
2/6/2009	FNC	The O’Reilly Factor	Stein, Ben
1/25/2009	NBC	Meet the Press	Summers, Larry
2/8/2009	ABC	This Week	Summers, Larry
2/8/2009	FNC	Fox News Sunday	Summers, Larry
1/30/2009	FNC	Your World with Neil Cavuto	Wheelan, Charles
2/1/2009	NBC	Meet the Press	Zandi, Mark
2/6/2009	CNN	The Situation Room	Zandi, Mark

A list of all the guests who discussed the recovery plan classified as either economists or non-economists is available here.

(I didn’t know Arianna Huffington was an economist, but you learn something new every day…)

The entire discussion of the stimulus package was a muddle and I’m fairly certain that people were more confused at the end of the debate than they were before it began. Which, of course, played into the Republicans’ hands. Confusion helps them because they have a bunch of tired bumper stickers people can fall back on whenever it all seems too much.

Ian Welsh has written a concise rundown of Krugman’s keynote yesterday at the Thinking Big conference yesterday, here. (You will be able to see the video sometime today, at the second link.) The word is that the wingnuts are on a tear calling their Reps, shrieking incoherently about how the stimulus plan is going to kill them by taking away their health care. So, if you have time to call yours and give a rational view, it would be helpful. Click here.

Update: Michael Hirsch at Newsweek has a good column today about one of the central questions nobody ever seems to ask: what are we going to do about this “too big to fail” moral hazard, which is one of the main factors at the heart of he banking crisis. Common sense should have told us that these international financial behemoths were trouble.

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Happy Birthday, Charles and Abe!

by tristero

To celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial, here is one of my favorite passages from his autobiography

[O]ne day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

…I was introduced to entomology by my second cousin, W. Darwin Fox, a clever and most pleasant man, who was then at Christ’s College, and with whom I became extremely intimate. Afterwards I became well acquainted, and went out collecting, with Albert Way of Trinity, who in after years became a well-known archæologist; also with H. Thompson of the same College, afterwards a leading agriculturist, chairman of a great railway, and Member of Parliament. It seems therefore that a taste for collecting beetles is some indication of future success in life!

Needless to say, this became a movement in The Origin, sung to sublime perfection by KITKA, the female Balkan vocal ensemble that portrays Darwin in my piece. (And yes, I’m trying to get a little more posted for you to hear!).

As for dear Lincoln, a passion of mine since I was a kid, let me suggest, especially if you don’t know it, his pivotal Cooper Union Address (if you click the link, you’ll get both the text and a reading by Sam Waterson).

Special note to the inevitable spoilsports: To say one loves Lincoln or Darwin is inevitably to be drawn into discussions of their various faults by those who conveniently forget their own far greater oens. “Well,” As Joe E. Brown memorably said to Jack Lemmon, in a somewhat different context, “Nobody’s perfect.”

Enjoy!

Pulling Our Legs

by digby

Here’s The Hill on Rahm’s super strategy to get the stimulus bill passed, which apparently was to promise the Blue Dogs that he’d help them destroy social security and cripple all future spending with Pay-Go and then capitulating to presidents Collins and Nelson once the administration had so badly mangled the public strategy the plan started losing altitude in the polls. Heckuva job. And apparently, everybody in town loves him for it.

And according to Ben Smith at Politico “the left” is giving the administration the go-ahead to “reform entitlements.” And perhaps we are. I know I certainly get plenty of flack for not “trusting Obama” or failing to understand that his masterful Machiavellian jiu-jitsu is always 27 moves ahead of what my meager mind can comprehend.

President Barack Obama plans a busy February. The new administration hopes to have a stimulus package passed by Congress, a new plan in place to shore up ailing banks and, by month’s end, to hold a “fiscal responsibility” summit.

If the stimulus and banking bailout weren’t controversial enough, the summit fills some entitlement reform critics with dread, as they fear it could speed calls for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Strikingly, however, Obama appears to be getting unusual room to maneuver on entitlements by most of his liberal allies. On the subject of entitlement reform, in fact, Obama’s honeymoon continues — at least in the unlikely precincts of the Democratic left, a counterintuitive development that has buoyed the spirits of reformers who would like to see drastic changes in the way Social Security works.

Opponents of significant changes to Social Security benefits were jarred in January, when the then-president-elect echoed George W. Bush’s claim of an entitlement “crisis,” warning of “red ink as far as the eye can see” in Social Security and Medicare. Obama promised that those programs would be a “central part” of his plan to reduce the federal deficit.

Social Security defenders were surprised again last week, when Obama named a leading voice for reining in entitlement spending, New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, to his Cabinet.

But despite some grumbling in the ranks, the powerful, organized movement that effectively defended the Social Security status quo from Bush’s ambitious reform effort in 2005 has been one of the key dogs that haven’t yet barked at Obama.

The relative silence of liberal activists who smashed Bush’s hopes of slowing entitlement spending is a mark of the deep trust Obama enjoys from the left of his party — and it’s also giving hope to those who would like to see major shifts in the way Social Security and other programs are funded and managed.

Obama is “in a honeymoon phase, and many liberals are afraid to express concerns,” said Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat and deficit hawk who sees the current eonomic crisis as an opportunity to reform entitlement spending.

[…]

When Obama said last month that “discussion around entitlements will be a part, a central part” of his economic agenda, liberal columnist David Sirota warned: “That’s coded politicalspeak for an effort to ‘reform’ Social Security and Medicare, which history has shown is often itself politicalspeak for cuts to those programs.”

The Gregg appointment caused another ripple of concern.

“I’m not pleased to see anything strengthen those voices within the administration,” said Lawrence Michel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Michel added that he’s concerned that the summit planned for later this month also could reinforce calls for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. “Why undercut the strongest pillar of retirement security?” he asked.

[…]

For now, most liberals are confident enough in Obama’s rhetoric to stifle any concerns about his policy views.

“The question is, whose leg is he pulling?” said [Dean] Baker. “I’d like to think it’s theirs when he says [to deficit hawks], ‘I share your concerns.’ But I guess it’s conceivable that it’s mine.”

If it’s true that most people on the left trust Obama to get together with the Blue Dogs and the Republicans and muck around in social security then they are failing to play their proper role. They should agitate to take it completely off the table, whetheror not Rahm promised the Blue Dogs the store or Obama thinks he can magically finesse it. It’s political dynamite in the middle of a very serious crisis and I can’t believe any liberal is playing these kinds of games right now.

If the point is to solve some problem that doesn’t exist just because the villagers will have a simultaneous orgasm, well to hell with that. If the point is to keep the Blue Dogs on the team, the price is too high. If it’s that they have a super-duper, multi level chess game planned, they probably should wait until the second term. After watching Rahm’s crack legislative strategy on the stimulus, I think they might need a little bit more practice before they try to outmaneuver the Republicans on something this important.

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Good Reads

by digby

Brad Delong has written a very interesting post explaining how Milton Friedman cleverly figured out how monetary policy could be the road back into the mainstream for the laissez faire crowd after that embarrassing little problem in the 1930s. Unfortunately,as we are finding out now, it doesn’t always work.

And this article in Harper’s by Luke Mitchell about why we just can’t have single payer health care is so profoundly disorienting I could barely get through it. But it’s important to understand the strange dynamics of this twisted system. (Subscription unfortunately required, but go buy the magazine or read it at the library. It’s worth it.)

Finally, check out Jane Hamsher’s piece from today about the relationship between the Obama administration and the press.I wish I could say that this would be positive for progressivism, but I doubt it. We don’t need a media that kisses up to power or operated on the basis of how much they want to have a beer with the president. They need to do their jobs, period.

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Cry Babies

by digby

Tapper:

In front of a gaggle of reporters today, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois known for bipartisanship and candor, was asked if his former GOP colleagues will likely vote for the bill now that a deal has been struck between the House and Senate.

“If I was selected by the president to try to get more votes my job will probably not last very long,” LaHood said. “I haven’t been too successful so far. I’ve talked to my friends and former colleagues in the house and they know the importance of this. You know what their answer is, they have been concerned about the process and the way the bill was put together. But I’ve not heard one criticism from my friends on the Republican side about the fact that this piece of it, they all like it. And they all know that people will go to work. They are concerned about other issues.”

After the gaggle, ABC News asked Mr. LaHood if he would comment on why every single one of his former colleagues on that side of the aisle voted against the bill.

“The ones that I talked to I think they were concerned about the process and that, you know, they weren’t involved in the process,” LaHood said. “And as I said earlier I think when they talked about the transportation part of the stimulus I have not heard one word of criticism about it.”

LaHood said he spoke to 11 Republican congressmen today and “not one of them said they were concerned by what we were trying to do on the transportation side of things. But, you know, they like to be in the room when these things are put together. And they haven’t been. And so I think they were a bit offended by that.”

So the Republicans liked the legislation but voted against it because their feelings were hurt.

What else is new?

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How Dare You Hand Me $25 Billion Dollars!

by dday

There was a House hearing with CEOs of the top banks today, where the banksters took a mostly conciliatory tone.

The banking executives said they were aware of the ill will that surrounded them.

“It is abundantly clear that we are here amidst broad public anger at our industry,” said Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief of Goldman Sachs. “Many people believe — and, in many cases, justifiably so — that Wall Street lost sight of its larger public obligations.”

Lawmakers brought up the overarching question of the day. “What did you do with the new money?” asked Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, who said it seemed to him that the banks were not loaning out the funds they received from government.

Each of the bankers outlined the ways in which they had used the government capital. Goldman, for instance, increased its financing to clients like Sallie Mae and Verizon Wireless. Morgan Stanley said it had made $10.6 billion in new commercial loans and $650 million in loan commitments to consumers.

And the bankers were emphatic that they were continuing to make loans.

“We have every incentive to lend,” said Kenneth D. Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America. “And despite the recessionary headwinds, we are lending.”

The claim is that the credit crunch is the fault of the secondary market and not the banks, which is actually plausible. But this is the part that gets me.

At the House Financial Services Committee hearing minutes ago, Rep. Joe Baca (D-CA-43) asked the following question:

“How do you feel about the bailout? Do you feel that the bailout was necessary?”

I thought that was just about the biggest softball I’d ever heard. Imagine my surprise!

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, Goldman Sachs:

“I don’t necessarily think it was necessary at the time, but — and this was said at the time — they were looking ahead at an emerging recession that was going to get worse, and for prudential reasons, it was necessary for the systemic safety and soundness. And as subsequent events have borne out, I think it has provided safety and soundness, and taken some of the risk away from the system.”

Ken Lewis, CEO, Bank of America:

“I actually agree. I know at the time we did not feel like we needed the 15 billion. But I think in light of the severity of the recession, and in light of the speed at which the economy deteriorated, I think we have lent more money because we had the TARP funds and that level of capital.”

Like we did these people a favor for paying them off after they nearly sunk the global economy. And this isn’t the first time the banksters have grumbled about all that money they were being handed. In fact, today’s New York Times quotes executives who want to return the money and get the government off their backs:

Even before the government announced its latest efforts to fix the troubled banking industry on Tuesday, executives at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley said they wanted to repay the money quickly. Both banks received $10 billion under the first rescue plan last fall.

Paying back all those funds would be difficult in this tough economic environment. But banking executives worry that the government may intrude further into their businesses as long as they are beholden to Washington.

“We just think that operating our business without the government capital would be an easier thing to do,” said David A. Viniar, the chief financial officer of Goldman. “We’d be under less scrutiny, and under less pressure. Not that we’d be out of the public eye; we’re still going to be in the public eye.”

Please. There is no way a bunch of insolvent banks can even make it without government help. If there was, the loans would be repaid tomorrow. They can’t raise the equity that needs to be offered to taxpayers in place of their money. And let’s get to what this is really about – banksters want to save their precious bonuses, the ones they’ve been handing out to their employees without even hesitating, despite playing with taxpayer money. The claim in the House session today was that TARP money didn’t go toward bonuses, which makes no sense whatsoever since money in the hands of the bank is money in the hands of the bank no matter where it came from. They and their friends in the Republican caucus are indignant that they can be told how much to earn (Republicans had no problem telling union auto workers how much they could earn, by the way). They want to be free to reward their friends and colleagues with bonuses… I mean retention payments:

Two Wall Street firms that received at least $60 billion in government bailout funds will be rewarding their financial advisers with controversial retention payments, the terms of which one senior executive described as “very generous” in audio obtained by the Huffington Post.

The soon-to-be-merged financial giants — Morgan Stanley and Citigroup’s Smith Barney — announced the payments during an internal conference call last week, but warned advisers against describing them in terms that would cause PR headaches.

“There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus,” said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. “It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration.”

Banksters are indignant that they actually have to be accountable to anyone. They’d rather have to lay off entire floors of office workers than have to give back their precious penthouses. It’s a very elite perspective.

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Bargaining With Political Sociopaths

by digby

Listening to Harry Reid extol the patriotism of the three remaining Republican “moderates,” makes me wonder what he would have said if these so-called centrists had truly defied their leadership and simply voted to pass a decent stimulus without turning it into an circus sideshow, thus blunting the effect and giving the Republican wrecking crew the ongoing ability to hold this economy hostage for purely political reasons.

Just as a point of contrast, in 2001, Bush stole the election and right out of the box proposed massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Here’s how that went down:

BROWNSTEIN: April 2001, George Bush comes in $1.6 trillion tax cut. The House passes it, exactly as written. Senate cuts it $450 billion. He gets half of it back in conference.

Granted, that was a Republican free money plan for rich contributors, so there was bipartisan support. But, it shows that a president with very shaky popularity who didn’t even win the popular vote and had a scant one vote majority in the Senate, can dominate the process even when there isn’t an emergency. Bush went on to turn the congress into his loveslave after 9/11.

I think the Obama administration believed that his major victory, the failure of Bush’s policies and the sheer magnitude of the crisis would necessitate the kind of lockstep cooperation that Bush had after 9/11 when they passed the Patriot Act nearly unanimously or at least have the kind of bipartisan support that Bush’s free money plan got after this dubious election victory. But if the shoe had been on the other foot, and the rightful president Al Gore had been in office, the first act of business wouldn’t have been to gather around him, they would have immediately instituted impeachment proceedings. That’s who they are.

But he really didn’t seem to understand that he’s not dealing with a sane opposition party, much less one that is cowed by crisis or the popularity of the president. I hope they’ve learned that even if the Republicans want to pass a bill (which I suspect was the case with this one) they will publicly oppose it for political reasons, weaken it as much as possible and then deny Obama his “bipartisan” win.

The only way to get real bipartisan support is to pass conservative proposals. I have no doubt that they’ll get some GOP cross over to continue to bail out the banks despite grassroots anger at the financial elites. There are always a few designated conservatives who will do what it takes to protect the aristocrats and there will be some vote trading among those who need to vote against it in order to keep their seats with those who stand no danger of losing theirs. It’s the NAFTA process, whereby both parties want to service the elites, but have to pretend to care about the rubes.

But the real problem will be made manifest down the road when the adminisgtration starts “negotiating” on progressive initiatives. If they believe that they have to do this one from column a and one from column b approach, then they are going to get taken to the cleaners over and over again, much as Clinton was. (Only Clinton had peace and a big, fat bubble to prop him up and give him a second term.)

Likewise, if they think they can make a fiscal responsibility Grand Bargain with a bunch of tax cutting thugs, they are engaging in wishful thinking. It’s clear that the Republicans have no intention of ever engaging in bipartisanship that isn’t a phony compromise that favors — Republicans. That’swhy even talking about entitlement reform in the middle of this crisis is a bad decision. They should be talking about “health care” reform period, which people understand to be an expansion of benefits and a lowering of costs, not a cutback.

Obama will make a huge mistake mistake if he even thinks about bargaining away social security in order to get health care just as the baby boomers are retiring. They have been paying double into social security since 1986, most of their working lives, on the understanding that their cohort was gigantic and needed extra money to pay for the program. They have just lost a huge chunk of their retirement savings in the stock and housing markets, right on the cusp of their retirement, something they were assured could not happen. Even if he tries to sell social security “reform” as the price for saving medicare, it won’t matter. If Obama wants to see a generational uprising, wait until he gets a load of the aging boomers, pissed off and freaked out. No matter how much he reassures them that he only means to screw younger workers, they will not stand still for it. (And a few of them may even love their kids.)

Obama does not have to tackle every single problem he sees on the distant horizon during his first term, especially one that doesn’t exist. If he puts social security in the mix with health care under the rubric of “entitlement reform” he will weaken the first and destroy his chances of enacting the second. There are no Grand Bargains with political sociopaths. All you do is give them the opportunity to kill your agenda.

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Keeping The Record

by digby

In case you ever wonder whether blogs are useful, I would point you to this post by Gavin over at Sadly No. He took the time to track the deluded scribblings of Donald Luskin over the course of the past year, thus proving once and for all that Luskin is living in another dimension. And he does it in the most entertaining way possible. (Of course, you could just read the very serious Washington Post, where much of this drivel was published, but seeing all the utter idiocy together is what makes it so powerful.)

I don’t think blogs are the sine qua non of the political system, but keeping track of the wingnuts is an invaluable service. Hats off to Gavin for wading through that decaying pile of nonsense so we don’t have to.

And I ask again: why are we supposed to listen to these people?

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Yay Deal.

by dday

It looks like we have a deal on a $790 billion dollar recovery package from the conference committee, and you read that right, that is less than what the House and the Senate passed. However, it looks like some of the right things are going back in and the wrong things going out, albeit in token sizes. Only $5 billion of the $40 billion cut from the Fiscal Stabilization Fund will be restored in conference. The school repair funding will be restored to about $6 billion from $16 billion. Obama’s middle-class tax cut is getting a 20% haircut, and the tax breaks for home-buyers and auto-buyers are being reduced.

At Calitics I ran the numbers in terms of what it means for budget-weary California, and it’s probably a $5-$6 billion dollar shortfall from where the House bill was at. Which, of course, is a small price to pay to keep a smile on Presidents Collins and Nelson’s faces.

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