• A group of 1,000 physicians in Dallas-Fort Worth proved no match for FTC lawyers, who forced the doctors to disavow their right to seek greater compensation from health plans.
• Two San Diego physician groups tried to work together in search of fairer compensation from a local hospital. The FTC decided to make a federal case out of this, scuttling the physicians' negotiations and imposing sanctions to ensure they wouldn't try it again.
• The FTC's war on physician rights continues in New Mexico, where a local physician group is facing dissolution for collectively negotiating with health insurance companies.
• Scotch tape giant 3M was sued by a competitor who claimed they couldn't fairly compete with 3M's superior line of office products. A Philadelphia jury decided 3M's market success should be punished to the tune of more than $68 million. Following a defeat in its first appeal, 3M now heads to the Supreme Court.
• Weyerhaeuser beat its competitors in the lumber market. The competitors fought back with an antitrust lawsuit, and won a jury award of more than $78 million. Weyerhaeuser isn't giving up though, and vows to continue fighting for their rights to succeed in the marketplace.
• Seven years ago, the Federal Trade Commission forced Boston Scientific to share its patented catheter technology with a competitor. When that competitor later decided to exit the market, the FTC claimed it was Boston Scientific's fault, and convinced a federal judge to fine the company a record $7,040,000.
• The federal government is looking to undo an already-completed merger in order to protect Kentucky's schoolchildren from the threat of higher school milk prices.

PARIS - France and the United States are engaged in relationship of dialogue and trust, French President Jacques Chirac told business leaders from the French-American Business Council on Friday. Before dozens of major U.S. and French corporate heads, Chirac said Paris and Washington had a period of "discord about how to disarm Iraq the president's spokeswoman Catherine Colonna quoted Chirac as saying. The two countries spoke frankly to one another but will "continue to be faithful allies," Colonna quoted Chirac as saying. Relations between the two countries are strong and have been forged by history and "took root in the same values: respect for liberty, human dignity, justice and peace," Chirac said.

So that's what the French Revolution was about. And all this time I thought the French opposed the war because they wanted to Saddam to pay for all those arms they sold them, and to maintain their oil contracts with Saddam.

From Cox and Forkum:

Sam Waksal's criminal sentencing to seven years and a multi-million dollar fine, and Martha Stewart's status in judicial purgatory, indicted for "lying" about her innocence, demonstrates that America has turned 180 degrees away from its founding principles. The laws under which these two have been charged and persecuted are precisely the kinds of laws--general warrants and writs of assistance--that were debated and declared unconstitutional not only in many pre-Revolutionary colonial courts, but by Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, who was chief justice of Britain's Court of Common Pleas, in 1765!

When our own Constitution was being framed some 20 years later, general warrants, which allowed the government to arrest someone without specifying charges, and writs of assistance, which allowed government agents to search one's property on mere suspicion of violating a commercial or fiat law, and who were indemnified against any suits for damages, were not incorporated anywhere in the Constitution by the Founders, who abhorred them. These extralegal powers constituted one of the reasons Americans began a revolution!

A short conflict that used fewer missiles, sparked fewer oil field fires and created fewer refugees than anticipated produced a lower-than-expected financial cost for the major combat in Iraq...

...A detailed account of expenses won't be complete for months, but senior administration officials say the cost of deployment and combat will be just less than the $62.6 billion Congress approved in March as emergency funding for Operation Iraqi Freedom. It is the first time officials have offered a tally. [USA Today, "Short conflict, less ammo kept war cost down", June 13, 2003]

Some other interesting points from the article:

The price for the combat phase is about $220 per American. The Persian Gulf War in 1991 cost $76 billion in today's dollars...

Planners budgeted $593 million to care for as many as 2 million refugees, a problem avoided when urban combat was less extensive than expected. The refugee count was less than 100,000...

...$200 million was earmarked for emergency food supplies for Iraqis, but no major shortages occurred. [USA Today]

Monday's paper contained an unsigned editorial praising Hillary Clinton for saying that she has relied on prayer as her "primary source of help":

[T]he moment that struck us most --and that probably did the most to help Mrs. Clinton win over the independent, middle-American voters that she will need to get elected president in 2008--was when Ms. Walters asked Mrs. Clinton about her faith and how it helped her during her difficult times....

[I]t is an amazing thing to see a liberal icon such as Mrs. Clinton speak so publicly, and in such a positive way, about her religion.... Yet if Mrs. Clinton keeps challenging the liberal conventions on prayer and finds some other issues with which she can pleasantly surprise sensible, centrist voters, she may just make some inroads in 2008. [June 9, 2003, New York Sun]

and an even worse lead editorial defending providing public facilities for religious purposes:

On Friday,a three-judge panel of its judges held, two-to-one, that New York City cannot lock out the Bronx Household of Faith Church from public school facilities used by other groups because such an action would constitute "viewpoint discrimination." In doing so, the circuit court reversed its own decision of 1997, to conform with Supreme Court precedent from the intervening years....

There is a holdout, however, in Judge Roger Miner, who issued a dissent that smacked of hostility and defiance....

Judge Miner's churlishness, we suppose, is of little consequence given the outcome of the case. America sided with the Bronx Household of Faith in a brief filed by the Department of Justice.... Meanwhile, the people of the Bronx and the rest of New York have won a famous victory--one that will enable the religious persons among us to stand on a more equal footing with others in access to our public spaces. [June 9, 2003, New York Sun]

I had the following letter published Wednesday in response:

There is no relevant difference between forcing an individual to contribute more to a candidate than he would voluntarily offer, and forcing an individual to contribute more to a religion than he would voluntarily provide ["Faith of the Bronx," June 9]. Both are violations of free speech. That the coercion is accomplished through taxation, or that the money supports all positions equally, make the action no more voluntary.

There is no "viewpoint discrimination" here: The state has no business providing public facilities or tax money to promote any system of ideas--atheistic, religious, communist, capitalist, democratic, or fascist. Cognition never results from coercion. Law, and the police power of the state, are properly concerned only with people's actions, not with their ideas. [New York Sun]

President Bush's new plan to improve elementary and secondary education will fail for the same reason that all previous plans have failed: the way to improve education is not more government involvement but less--much less.
 
In fact, education in America will substantially improve only when the government's virtual monopoly on education is replaced by a free market, where bad schools go out of business, incompetent teachers are fired, and worthless curriculums are dumped.
 
As long as schools and teachers are not accountable to parents but to the government, students will be trapped in our current educational system, with little hope of getting the knowledge and thinking skills they need to succeed in life.

After this week's suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus that killed at least sixteen and wounded many more, it is worth asking again: How many more Israelis have to be murdered before President Bush wakes up to the reality that only a total war against Palestinian terrorists will stop these attacks?
 
President Bush should stop acting as if the Israeli government and the Palestinian regime were morally equal. The Israeli government represents a free country, which protects (to a large extent) the individual rights of its citizens, and acts only in self-defense to eliminate the terrorists that threaten its people. The Palestinian regime, in sharp contrast, is a collection of terrorists and supporters of terrorism put together by the father of international terrorism, Yasir Arafat; it's a regime that has no respect for the individual rights of its own people, and whose main goal is the destruction of Israel.
 
Thus the road map President Bush is trying--and succeeding--to shove down Israel's throat was doomed to failure from the start. It is past time for President Bush to abandon such misguided moral relativism and choose sides: he is either with Israel or with the terrorists.

"Martha Stewart is being attacked out of hatred of the good for being the good. She is being made an example of--which is the utilitarian theory of justice--because she is 'too perfect.' Note that she was not charged with insider trading--the government doesn't have evidence to support that. Nor is she being charged with perjury: she made no testimony under oath. Essentially, she is being charged with protesting her innocence! Such protests, the government claims, is "stock manipulation." They claim that proclaiming her innocence constituted wrongly trying to keep her own stock in her own company from falling--by denying the unprovable government assertions!" [June 10, 2003, HBL]

Something is wrong with a process in which President Bush's spokesman is insisting to the American people that, as far as President Bush is concerned, Yasser Arafat is not involved--while at the same time, Mr. Abbas is telling the Palestinian Arab people that Mr. Arafat is involved. This is a simple question of checkable fact, after all. Either Mr. Arafat is involved or he is not. The reality of his involvement shouldn't depend on whether you're George W. Bush or Mahmoud Abbas.... If the White House is willing to turn a blind eye to Mr. Arafat's involvement, who is to say that it won't turn a blind eye to terrorist activity by the "new" Palestinian leadership? [June 10, 2003, NY Sun]

At her Web site, Stewart and her lawyers adamantly deny wrongdoing on her part....She claims she was simply responding to a call from her stockbroker when she sold shares of biotech company ImClone right before news on a setback in approval of a cancer drug sent the company's shares reeling. "I am confident I will be exonerated of these baseless charges, but a trial unfortunately won't take place for months," Stewart writes.

At least one fund manager who holds shares in the company uses some compelling logic to reach the same conclusion. "Everyone knows (that) if she settles the stock goes up," says the fund manager. "Since she owns 30 million shares, the amount she would make on the stock going up would be far more than any penalties she would have to pay. But this woman is not settling because she believes she did nothing wrong. I think this is going to blow up in the government's face."

Good thing the fund manager remained unnamed in the story--we wouldn't want him investigated for speaking against the government.

...the SEC's complaint effectively refutes both its own charges and those of the government. The SEC says, "Stewart asked Faneuil for the current market price of ImClone shares and was given a quote of approximately $58 a share. Stewart then instructed Faneuil to sell." That is exactly why Stewart said she sold ImClone that day -- the price was falling fast. Faneuil's now claims he told her that the Waksal family was selling, but not why (Waksal did not say). But the SEC refutes Faneuil's new story too by saying, "Stewart then immediately called Waksal [after selling her ImClone shares], and left the following message: "Martha Stewart [called] something is going on with ImClone and she wants to know what." The fact that she had to ask that question proves Martha Stewart did not know what was going on with ImClone after talking to Faneuil and selling her shares. End of story. Case closed...

...It took the government a year to fabricate three new offences, all of which amount to the same charge of giving a supposedly misleading explanation for a perfectly legal stock sale. This newly refabricated case is not about illegal lying at all: Martha Stewart has not been charged with perjury. Perjury is one of the fabled "nine counts" that is not hers, but her broker's. In a more important sense, however, this case has always been about lying. There was Congressional lying a year ago about Martha Stewart's alleged tip from Sam [Waksal]. And what little remains of that discarded case is now based entirely on the testimony of a proven liar, Douglas Faneuil. He says he was lying before (when he supported Stewart's recollection) but has converted to telling the truth now (when he supports the government's story). Yet this is a fellow who admits his past testimony has been for sale, and any gift Mr. Faneuil may have gotten from his boss was token change compared to being offered only a misdemeanor wrist slap and let off without even a dollar fine. [National Post, "The Sleazy Political Persecution of Martha", Alan Reynolds, June 6, 2003]

And from the WSJ:

Prosecutors didn't see fit to bring a criminal charge of insider trading (perhaps because there's no case) over her sale of ImClone shares. Instead, the U.S. Attorney relies on a securities fraud charge to give the appearance of added heft to the alleged wrongdoing. The claim is that because her own company is so dependent on "Martha" the brand name, her alleged lies about the motive for her ImClone sale amount to a material misleading of the shareholders of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia...So all of her "crimes" arise from her fear of prosecution over something that wasn't a crime (her ImClone sale). ["Mayhem Over Martha", June 5, 2003, WSJ]

The op-ed also makes an excellent observation on "insider trading":

...Insider trading traditionally presumed the culprit was violating a duty of confidentiality to a client or employer. The SEC has gradually overthrown this clear-headed definition in favor of one in which the market itself is "wronged" if somebody trades for the "wrong" reason, defined as somebody having information that she was supposed to know she wasn't supposed to have. Presumably a scrap of paper could blow into your pocket and if it contained material nonpublic information, you could be charged with insider trading for acting on it. ["Mayhem Over Martha", June 5, 2003, WSJ]

U.N. member states continue to insist that blowing up Israelis is one thing, terrorism another. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution on April 14 of this year, which affirmed the legitimacy of suicide-bombing -- or in U.N.-speak "all available means including armed struggle" to resist "foreign occupation and for self-determination." All European Union members of the Commission including Britain and France, with the only exception being Germany, refused to vote against the resolution and merely abstained.     
 
So when Egypt's President Mubarak said this past Tuesday, on behalf of Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority, "We will continue to fight the scourge of terrorism against humanity and reject the culture of extremism and violence in any form or shape -- from whatever source or place, regardless of justifications or motives," his language was deliberate sophistry. The Arab Terrorism Convention stipulates their real views, repeated by Saudi officials to the 2003 UN Commission on Human Rights: "We should distinguish between the phenomenon of terrorism and the right of peoples to achieve self-determination." [Anne Bayefsky, "Letting the United Nations Steer," June 9, 2003, NY Sun]

[T]he military historian Max Hastings spelt [it] out: "The Prime Minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit." Sir Max's thesis is that Mr. Blair and his American masters lied to the world about Saddam's arsenal in order to justify an invasion that would prove no such arsenal existed and that they were a bunch of liars. [Mark Steyn, "Bush and Blair's War Fates," June 9, 2003, NY Sun]

...the fact of the matter is that [Israeli] settlements are not an "obstacle to peace." If the Palestinians are committed to peaceful coexistence with Israel, why should they demand that their nascent state be Judenrein...? 

On Tuesday, The International Herald Tribune provided the answer to this question. It did so by publishing the results of a Pew Global Attitudes Project opinion poll taken last month of 15,000 citizens of eight Arab and Muslim countries Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nigeria and Morocco and the Palestinian Authority. These results show what the real obstacle to peace is.  Eighty percent of Palestinians agreed with the statement: "The rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the State of Israel exists." Ninety percent of Moroccans, 85% of Jordanians and 72% of Kuwaitis also agreed with the statement, as did solid majorities in Lebanon, Pakistan and Indonesia. 

As well, the three most trusted world leaders for these Arab and Muslim societies are Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Finally, 80% of Jordanians and 90% of Palestinians expressed deep hatred not simply for American policy but for Americans as people. At the same time, 99% of Jordanians and 98% of Palestinians claim to have an unfavorable view of America as do a majority of those questioned in the other countries polled. [Caroline Glick, "The Outposts," June 9, 2003, NY Sun]