Miró, Miró on the Wall

Delight doesn't begin to describe THE SCRAPBOOK's pleasure upon hearing that Linda Douglass, the former correspondent for ABC and CBS News will be joining the Barack Obama campaign as a strategist and spokesperson. "I have spent my lifetime sitting on the sidelines watching people attempt to make change. I just decided that I can't sit on the sidelines anymore," Douglass told her National Journal colleague Marc Ambinder, who broke the news in his blog for the Atlantic.

Douglass was being modest. She has sat on the sidelines the way Bobby Knight used to sit on the sidelines--hectoring the refs, sidling onto the floor, and throwing the occasional chair, metaphorically speaking of course. During the Clinton years, she had to navigate a minefield of conflicts in her TV reporting, because of her close friendships with Mickey Kantor, the Clintons' trade representative and then secretary of commerce, and with Webb Hubbell, the number three man in the Clinton Justice Department until he was found to have bilked clients of the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, where he and Hillary Clinton had both been partners.

Speaking of Hubbell, our delight at Douglass's new job has nothing to do with the undoubtedly excellent work she will do for Obama. It has rather to do with the fact that we now have an excuse to dredge up the story of Webb Hubbell's art collection and how it ended up in Douglass's hands--one of the most colorful episodes of the Clinton carnival that kept Washington entertained for a large part of the 1990s.

As recounted by Byron York in the May 1998 American Spectator ("Linda & John & Webb & Suzy"), Douglass and her husband, superlawyer John Phillips, were among the friends who came through for Hubbell when he was down and out, having resigned his job at the Justice Department in 1994 with legal bills mounting and under increasing scrutiny from independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

A foundation Phillips had helped to set up--the Consumer Support and Education Fund--named Hubbell "its first-ever Distinguished Public Service Fellow," York reported. For "an article or series of articles on the subject of public service," which would enhance "the image in which public service is held," Hubbell received $45,000 from the foundation. Between his conviction for fraud and tax evasion and his time in federal prison, though, Hubbell never completed the articles, which the chairman of the fund had hoped would help "dispel unfounded cynicism about public life." So Phillips paid back the $45,000 owed to the fund by its incarcerated public service fellow.

"Not long after that," York reported, "Suzy Hubbell pledged to repay Phillips. In January 1996, she wrote him a $10,000 check as a partial payment; she agreed to pay the rest by the end of March 1996. But according to Phillips's testimony, that agreement was thrown out when the Hubbells came up with a plan to repay the rest by turning over some works of art to Phillips.

"Hubbell had a fairly extensive collection. According to an appraisal sheet given to the [House Government Reform and Oversight Committee], it included twenty-one lithographs and paintings. The most valuable was a signed 1937 lithograph by American artist Grant Wood, valued at $5,000. The collection also included works by Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, and Thomas Hart Benton. The total value of the collection--as determined by Hubbell's appraiser--was $39,450. Suzy Hubbell and Phillips reached an agreement under which Phillips would hold a lien on the art. Much of it stayed in the Hubbells' possession, but Douglass and Phillips also visited the Hubbell home and picked out some of their favorites, which they took and hung in their own home."

How do you suppose that went? Would you unhang a Thomas Hart Benton over cocktails? Here's hoping that Douglass's public service is far more distinguished than Hubbell's.

No Honor Among Earmarkers

Early in its career, THE SCRAPBOOK did some work for a "nonprofit" organization that shall remain nameless. To borrow a line from our friend Joseph Epstein, the work was dull but the pay was low. Years later, we came to find out that our hourly wage had been paid for out of the proceeds of a grant from a charitable foundation. Interestingly those wages--including benefits (like there were any) and retirement (ha!)--were substantially less than half of the grant. The "administrative overhead" retained by our employer was somewhere north of 60 percent. Thus we learned the valuable lesson that "nonprofit" is a term of art in the tax code and not a business strategy.

Thus also, our inability to summon any outrage at the news reported by the New York Times last week: "Not All Earmarks Are Paid in Full, and a Senator Wants to Know Why." Ben Nelson, the Nebraska senator in question, is exercised over the fact that the plunder .  .  . sorry, the appropriation he has secured for his clients .  .  . sorry, his constituents, was not paid in full. As the Times's Ron Nixon reports:

Officials from the University of Nebraska told him that they had not received all of a $1 million medical research earmark he had secured for them. The Department of Defense, the agency controlling the money, was withholding 12 percent of the total to oversee the project.  .  .  . Mr. Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, later found out that the Department of Agriculture had also withheld about 10 percent of a $222,000 earmark to the university for drought research. While many of his questions remain unanswered, Mr. Nelson says that federal agencies have been taking a cut from earmarked funds for years, some for unrelated purposes as varied as staff salaries and postage stamps. Mr. Nelson calls the practice "earmark skimming," and lately he has become increasingly vocal over what he describes as unaccountable federal bureaucrats diverting millions of dollars into agency "slush funds."

Okay, first of all, "earmarks" are what it's called when congressmen skim the taxpayers' money. Second, chances are extremely good that the University of Nebraska itself skims 10 to 15 percent before passing the money along to its researchers. The lead researcher no doubt skims some more, and somewhere all the work is being done by a grad student on a subsistence stipend. So as the old song goes, Senator Nelson, here's a dime, call someone who cares.

Give Peace a Chance

The Institute for Economics and Peace released its 2008 Global Peace Index last week, in which it ranks 140 countries by their relative states of peace. Using 24 quasi-quantitative indicators--such as "estimated number of deaths from organized conflict," "military expenditures as a percentage of GDP," and "number of jailed population per 100,000 people"--the GPI produces a number of surprises.

It's not a surprise that Iceland leads the list as the most peaceful nation on the planet. And it's probably not even really a surprise that the United States ranks 97th--our "state of peace" is categorized as "low," the next-to-worst level. After all, what kind of a peace study would it be that didn't portray America as a bastion of war and conflict?

But what is surprising is who is rated as more pacific than us: Libya and Cuba are 61st and 62nd, respectively. Score two for the tin-pot dictators. The major-league dictators in China rank 67th. Syria and Rwanda clock in at 75th and 76th--not great, but still making them more peaceable kingdoms than AmeriKKKa. Iraq is ranked dead last--presumably because George W. Bush had the temerity to liberate it. Meanwhile Israel, a bustling, First World country, is rated 136th out of 140.

On second thought, there are no surprises here at all. The Cold War is over, but "peace" is still a Stalinist word.