Stories I’d like to see

1. Printing drachmas?

What actually will happen if Greece leaves the euro zone and goes back to its own currency? How would that work? Is there a printing press somewhere busily churning out drachmas just in case? Or did they keep the old ones in storage? How will Greeks get new drachmas? Will they exchange their euros for them? How will the exchange rates be determined? How will all the software for cash registers and credit card and e-commerce transactions be reprogrammed?

2. Searching for Jimmy Hoffa’s assassins:

We’re approaching, in two months, the 37th anniversary of the disappearance of Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa. I wrote a book about the union three years after his disappearance that pinpointed how he was murdered and who did it. Although the FBI spelled out in an internal memo and in various affidavits seeking search warrants pretty much the same scenario and suspects that I reported, the feds were never able to make a case because no one would talk and Hoffa’s body was never found. (It was probably incinerated in a mob-connected sanitation plant near Detroit.)

However, the case is still officially open. In fact, I’m told there is at least one FBI agent still assigned to it. With almost all of the people involved in taking out Hoffa now dead, what does that agent do all day? A great story commemorating the anniversary would not only spend a few days with that agent but also check in on Hoffa’s son, James, who is now the Teamsters president. Portrayed in my book as a completely clean lawyer who did some union-related legal work, James took over his father’s old job in 1999. When I spent time with him in the years just after his father’s murder he was seethingly bitter about how the mob element that controlled the union in partnership with his father had turned on the elder Hoffa. But he was also understandably afraid to say much about it publicly. What’s he got to say all these years later?

3. Are gift cards the new currency?

Last month’s mammoth takedown in the New York Times of Wal-Mart’s alleged cover-up of allegations of corporate bribery in Mexico reported that one alleged method of spreading payments to local Mexican officials was by giving them Wal-Mart gift cards. That got me wondering how that kind of accounting was handled.

It’s one thing to disguise a bribe by recording it as a fee paid to a lawyer or other middleman, who passes it on to the corrupt official. But how would depleting the gift card inventory that way be explained? Or are controls on gift cards so lax that this can be done routinely? What about gift cards at other large retailers? Do they hand them out to “friends” this way? Again, this seems like an easier way to dispense illicit corporate funds than cutting a check or creating a cash stash.

And while we’re on the subject of gift cards and accounting, with the cards now proliferating so widely I’d love to see a story on how companies account for them when it comes to reporting profit and loss. If I give a corporation $50, the company counts that revenue against the cost of what I just bought for that $50 But if I buy a gift card, it has no costs to count it against, which should mean that until someone redeems my gift card by taking $50 worth of merchandise, under basic accounting theory the company should not record the revenue because it hasn’t earned it by supplying any merchandise. Is that the way it works uniformly? And if so, what happens if my giftee never redeems the card or never redeems it fully? When can the money paid for unredeemed cards be counted as revenue?

How much of a profit center have such unredeemed gift cards become? And what are the regulations governing how long someone has to redeem the cards?

4. If JPMorgan lost, who won?

Aside from this article in Reuters, which pieced together part of the mystery, as far as I can tell, with all that’s been reported about JPMorgan’s trading loss of more than $2 billion, there’s one part of the story that’s not been fully covered: If one party loses billions in a trade, another party – or, as seems to be the case here, many parties have to have made those billions.

So far, the most public reference to that side of the story I’ve seen is an offhand comment made by a politician who’s always looking at things from a business angle. According to the Wall Street Journal, when he was asked last week about the JPMorgan fiasco, Mitt Romney told a radio interviewer: “That’s the way … America works. Some people experienced a loss in this case because of a bad decision. By the way, there was someone who made a gain…” To be sure, if the Reuters piece is correct, this seems to be the way the world, not America, works: Those on the other side of the trade so far seem to include London-based hedge funds.

So who are the lucky winners? Does JPMorgan even know? What about the fact that the Reuters piece notes that at least two of the winners used to be traders at JPMorgan? And what more can we find out about the drama unfolding right now as these traders decide whether to push for more winnings against JPMorgan or take their money off the table? How does this poker game work?

PHOTO: A man makes his way past a replica of a one drachma coin outside the Athens Town Hall May 21, 2012.  REUTERS/Yorgos Karahalis

1. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner: How much for charity?

Two Sundays ago, Tom Brokaw used an appearance on Meet the Press to attack the increasingly over-the-top annual gathering of press, politicians and Hollywood stars and hangers-on known as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Brokaw called it “an event that separates the press from the people that they’re supposed to serve. It is time to re-think it.” Incoming correspondents’ association president Ed Henry of Fox News quickly tweeted back that the dinner, which featured among other celebs Kim Kardashian, “raises TON of $ for needy kids who might not get into journalism w/out help.”

Really? The association’s website lists just $78,000 for 15 scholarships in 2012, plus one scholarship whose amount is not listed. Assuming it’s about $6,000 (a bit above the average for the other 15 scholarships), that would be $84,000 in scholarships. Plus, there’s a $30,000 grant listed for a high school mentoring program. Yet this year’s dinner, according to an association board member, sold “nearly” 2,700 seats at $250 each to various media companies. That would raise over $650,000 for the dinner, compared with what, again, looks like $84,000 for scholarships and $30,000 for mentoring. That’s a total of $114,000.

Moreover, on the page where the website lists the scholarships, the correspondents’ association names 18 donors who are thanked for their “generosity.” The donors include Bloomberg, Time Inc and Thomson Reuters, and they seem to have given to the scholarship fund apart from buying dinner tables, or at least the website makes it appear that way. If so, wouldn’t these deep pockets have already come up with some or all of that $114,000 “TON of $” before the dinner was even held? That’s only a donation of about $6,000 each. Which would mean that the revenue from the dinner had little or nothing to do with the scholarships.

There could be lots of explanations for this, such as the possibility that this year’s dinner will pay for an expanded array of scholarships next year. But the numbers suggest that someone ought to look at exactly how much the party actually helps Ed Henry’s “needy kids.”

2. Dateline China

I’ve noticed that stories like this one in the New York Times reporting on the dramatic events surrounding the travails of Chen Guangcheng, the dissident blind lawyer, have multiple bylines as well as multiple names listed at the end of the story of Times people who contributed to the article. Which makes me wonder about the ins and outs of reporting and getting stories like this out of China. Who did which reporting among the 10 people credited with working on this story, and how did they do it? With some working from Beijing, others in Washington and one even in Portsmouth, Virginia, how does this all get put together?

More generally, what are the special challenges of getting news like this out? Assuming Chinese security people follow Western journalists, what do the reporters do to give them the slip? How successful are the authorities at monitoring reporters’ emails and phone conversations, and what steps do journalists take to evade them? Are communications ever blocked completely? What special measures must the reporters take to protect sources? Is anything ever self-censored out of fear for the journalists’ or sources’ safety? Do reporters from competing news organizations cooperate more and develop greater camaraderie under these trying conditions, or do they compete even harder?

Major news organizations have done a great job bringing this story (and that of the scandal around the fall of former Chongqing province mayor Bo Xilai and his wife) to the world. Their work seems far faster and more complete than what emerged in the immediate weeks following Tiananmen Square in 1989. Sure, there’s been a revolution in digital communications since then, but the police state’s own technology apparatus has similarly upped its game. It would be great to see the story behind what is probably the digital age’s most compelling cat-and-mouse contest.

3. Testing the testers

This story last week in the Wall Street Journal recounted how a slew of obvious, even hilarious, errors in the questions posed on English and math tests given to students in the third through eighth grades in New York State has “eroded trust in the statewide exams.” In one case, a now-infamous passage about a pineapple and a hare intended to test reading comprehension was so nonsensical that Gawker posted it and dared readers to answer the questions about it posed to eighth graders. If you want to see a great story begging to be written, click here and read the passage and the questions about it.

The company that wrote this test is Pearson, which is also a major force in text books, as well as the publisher of the Financial Times and co-owner of the Economist. Who at Pearson wrote this gibberish? (I’m assuming they didn’t borrow people from the FT or the Economist.) What’s the overall test creation process? One would have thought it would be quite elaborate given that this was part of a $32 million contract Pearson won from New York State to write the tests. What’s the profit margin on work like this? How many layers of approval did that reading passage go through? Who in the state school system vetted the tests and missed this and so many other screwups? Can the state get its money back? If not, why not? What did Pearson promise to get the testing contract in the first place?

For an ambitious news organization (I’d love to see it on 60 Minutes), all of this, in all its delicious detail, would be a lead-in to a broad-gauge overview of testing quality and the testing industry. At a time when the linchpin of the education reform movement sweeping the country is the push to use student progress on tests as an ingredient in evaluating teacher effectiveness, the quality of the tests – and their cost – has never been more important.

PHOTO: Actress Lindsay Lohan stands on the red carpet as she arrives for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, April 28, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

1. Protecting the Homeland….in New Zealand

Is Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano completely on the sidelines? And has she not gotten the memo about limiting government travel? How else to explain that on May 2 she began a trip to New Zealand and Australia? May 2 was the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, when we were supposedly on high alert for possible al Qaeda attacks; and it was also when the prostitution scandal involving the Secret Service – which is part of Napolitano’s department – was raging. A Department of Homeland Security press release described the trip this way:

In Wellington [New Zealand], Secretary Napolitano will meet with Prime Minister John Key, and participate in bilateral meetings with New Zealand counterparts to discuss a variety of issues including information sharing, combating transnational crime and human trafficking.

In Australia, Secretary Napolitano will lead the Presidential delegation to the 70th Anniversary Commemoration of the Battle of the Coral Sea, the World War II battle that marked the start of the U.S.-Australia security partnership. While in Canberra and Brisbane, Secretary Napolitano will deliver remarks on security, privacy, and strong international partnerships at the Australian National University, and meet with Australian counterparts to discuss the ongoing partnerships to combat transnational crime, counter violent extremism, enhance information sharing, and work to ensure a more safe, secure, and resilient global supply chain.

Sure, some of this sounds vaguely relevant to her job, though it’s difficult to put the “Commemoration of the Battle of the Coral Sea” in that category. And while human trafficking is an important issue, as with a recent trip Napolitano took to Miami Beach to participate in a panel on the dangers of online dating, it’s probably not what comes to mind when most Americans think of the mission of the person running the country’s third-largest cabinet agency – the one that is supposed to be focused on protecting us from terrorism.

What did this New Zealand-Australia sojourn cost us? (Probably a lot, if she had to take a government plane equipped with secure communications. Did she?) How much has her travel cost us in the last year? What about overall travel and conferences for her and her agency this year? And can’t somebody demand a log of her schedule and tell us how many days in the last year she’s been out of town and what those trips tell us about how much she’s engaged in the job we hired her for?

2. De-routinizing the filibuster:

I wish someone would do a piece explaining that the most prominent artifact of today’s Washington gridlock – the 60 Senate votes now routinely required for anything to pass because it has to overcome a filibuster – wasn’t always routine. I remember how in the ’60s a filibuster was an extraordinary event, replete with photos of senators having to bring cots on to the Senate floor, because to prevent a cutoff of debate, some senator or another had to stay on his feet and keep debating, while the others had to be present for a potential vote to cut off debate.

In 1975, the rules were changed to reduce the number of votes necessary to cut off debate from 67 to 60, but the requirement that debate actually continue was also scrapped. Democrats made some encouraging noises about filibuster reform in late 2010 and early 2011, but those efforts fizzled.

At a time when it’s clear that politics are so polarized as to make it impossible for 60, let alone 67, senators to agree on anything, someone should ask the Democrats, as well as those Republicans who would like to restore the Senate to a working body, why they don’t want to ditch the cloture threshold altogether, or at least insist on that talk-till-you drop spectacle to dramatize the gridlock?

With that in mind, when bills now fail to pass because they do not get the 60 votes necessary for a real vote on the merits, the press should stop reporting that the bill “failed 58-42.” That’s not only confusing but also distorts what happened – which is that 42 senators voted not even to allow a vote and, therefore, to subvert the legislative process as it was originally intended by the founders. After all, the only voting rule embedded in the constitution says that bills pass in the Senate by a majority vote.

3. Does Big Labor own Big Management?

This report about the California state teachers retirement pension fund bringing a shareholders’ suit against Wal-Mart for the damage its executives did to Wal-Mart shareholders’ interests by allegedly bribing Mexican public officials reminds me of a story I’ve been expecting to see for a while. Unions, particularly teachers’ unions, are a bastion of the political left, and Wal-Mart is, of course, well known for its support of conservative causes, especially anti-union labor laws. Yet, according to news reports, this teachers’ union pension fund owns about $300 million in Wal-Mart stock.

Similarly, a flood of television advertising from Big Oil’s American Petroleum Institute has been reminding us lately that it’s the little guy – through pension funds and mutual funds – who actually owns Big Oil. As the organization’s website explains: “Contrary to popular belief, America’s oil and natural gas companies aren’t owned by a small group of insiders. Only 2.8 percent of industry shares are owned by corporate management. The rest is owned by regular Americans, many of them middle class, such as teachers, police officers and firefighters.”

Beyond being a reminder of how out of whack corporate governance is, given that those 2.8 percent in “corporate management” seem to be calling the shots, juxtapose this irony or conflict or whatever else you want to call it with the fire hose of corporate money now going into lobbying, political advocacy and super PACs favored by that 2.8 percent. A slew of intriguing questions become obvious: The California teachers clearly don’t, but do any union pension funds have rules against holding stock in companies whose political positions are glaringly adverse to those of their members? Have any union funds that are invested in companies like Wal-Mart or Big Oil tried to use shareholder votes or investor meetings to get the managers who supposedly work for them to toe a different line?

How aware are union workers that the value of their pensions may depend on the success of entities, like Big Oil or Wal-Mart, they do not typically consider to be their friends?

Conversely, does awareness of their stake in corporate America’s biggest players, to the extent they are aware, moderate any of the workers’ political views, or give a persuasive talking point to politicians who want to take the side of big business – which is something that the Petroleum Institute’s ads are clearly attempting?

PHOTO: U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano speaks at a public lecture at the Australian National University in Canberra, May 3, 2012.  REUTERS/Andrew Taylor

1. The $5 billion moving bill:

Reports last week that the U.S. had agreed with Japan to transfer 9,000 of its 19,000 troops out of Okinawa stated matter-of-factly that the move will cost $8.6 billion – that’s billion, or $955,000 per service member. Even with Japan paying $3.1 billion of the bill, that leaves the U.S. with $5.5 billion of the tab.

Someone please explain to us taxpayers how moving even that many troops can cost us $5.5 billion, which is more than the entire appropriation for President Obama’s much-celebrated four-year Race to the Top education reform program? (It’s also close to the cost being argued over this week for cutting all student loan interest rates in half.) And what are the profit margins of the defense contractors that are going to get the work involved?

2. Can you insure against a bad arm?

When the New York Yankees traded in the off-season for Michael Pineda, Seattle’s rookie fireballing pitcher, it seemed like a good deal even though they had to give up their most promising minor league hitting prospect, Jesus Montero. Now, one month into the season, the deal has become a disaster: Pineda, who showed up for spring training mysteriously bereft of his fastball, has had to undergo shoulder surgery and will be out for the season if not forever.

But is this the Yankees’ loss, or is some insurance company holding the bag? A quick Internet search yields this 2008 article from Sports Business Daily, generally summarizing the availability of insurance for teams wanting to hedge these kinds of bets on their superstars. However, the story refers to insurance that would cover losses from an injury that sidelines a player who had a long-term, multimillion-dollar contract – in this case Albert Belle of the Baltimore Orioles. Here the Yankees’ loss isn’t big dollars paid to Pineda while he sits on the sidelines but the loss of swapping the prized Montero for someone who turns out to be lame.

How about a story examining how or if teams can insure against these kinds of disasters? Does the market differ across the various sports? And how do insurers set their rates? Do they examine the players? In the case of a pitcher, do they have experts look at how he throws to see if his delivery might carry extra risks of elbow or shoulder injury?

And, as with the Orioles’ Belle, is the player always protected in these contracts? Or can an injury – especially one sustained off the field, such as Yankee Joba Chamberlain’s possibly season-ending trampoline accident while playing with his son – free the team of its obligation to pay the sidelined player?

3. Who could be against…curbing government travel?

One way to come up with great stories is to ask yourself: “Who could be against that?” The answer not only ferrets out the other side of an argument, when another side might not be apparent, but it also casts fresh, tangible light on how our democracy has become dominated by special interests of all kinds that will rise up to stop initiatives that seem in the public interest.

A great example playing out this week has to do with congressional efforts in the wake of the GSA travel scandal to limit the tens of millions the government wastes on conferences. Members of the Senate and House have each tacked on amendments to pending bills that would, among other things, limit what the government spends next year on conferences to 80 percent of what it spent in fiscal 2012; cap spending on any one conference at $500,000; and require all agencies to report all conference expenses, such as food and hotel bills, on the Internet.

With the government going broke and the GSA abuses suggesting, to put it mildly, that there’s room for economizing, who could be against that?

How about U.S. Travel – the D.C.-based travel-industry trade association that bills itself as promoting “industry-wide initiatives to grow and sustain travel and ensure the freedom to travel. Through our efforts, travel is better understood by opinion leaders, policymakers and media as essential to the economy, security, image and well-being of the U.S. and travelers.”

Last Friday, U.S. Travel CEO and President Roger Dow sent an email to his members sounding the alarm: “Needless to say,” Dow declared, after describing the looming threats, “these developments could have a significant impact on the federal government’s ability to host and participate in conferences. In addition, these amendments could impact private sector conferences that include government speakers or attendees, and discourage necessary dialogues between the public and private sectors.”

“We are working with all relevant Congressional offices in hopes the amendments can be revised as these bills move through the legislative process,” the email alert continued. “While supporters of the legislation argue the amendments on government conferences could save millions of dollars, this broad-brush approach to government meetings and conferences casts unjustified skepticism toward the value of all government travel. At the same time, the millions of travel employees who support meetings and events would undoubtedly be affected by the possible cutbacks.”

So who’s doing this lobbying, and what are their best arguments about what Dow’s email calls “the value of meetings, conferences and government travel”? Who are the go-to members of the Senate and House who are most sympathetic to the industry? (Dow’s email hints at one: Nevada Democratic Representative and Senate candidate Shelley Berkley, who, he reports, has introduced a bill to “ensure that Las Vegas is not blacklisted for future meetings and conferences,” whatever that means.)

And while we’re on the subject, the same email reported that U.S. Travel was partnering in its lobbying efforts with one group called the Society of Government Travel Professionals and another called the Society of Government Meeting Planners. What are their conferences like? And just finding out how many members they have (and which vendors, if any, buy sponsorships of their meetings) might also be a fun story.

PHOTO: New York Yankees starter Michael Pineda pitches during the first inning of a spring training baseball game against the Detroit Tigers in Tampa, Florida March 25, 2012. REUTERS/Steve Nesius

1. Where is Citi’s board?

In the wake of the shareholders’ stunning 55 percent vote against the 2011 compensation packages approved by the Citigroup Board of Directors for CEO Vikram Pandit ($14.9 million) and other top executives, why hasn’t anyone put a microphone in front of Citi’s blue-chip board members – who include former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, Rockefeller Foundation President and former University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin, and former Stanford business school dean Robert Joss – asking them to explain their decisions? Although the shareholder vote (which came because a provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law required it) is only advisory, it was meant to encourage exactly that kind of accountability for decisions made by board members, who in this case earned $225,000 to $612,500 last year, depending on their committee assignments. So far it seems that only outgoing Citigroup Chairman (and former Time Warner CEO) Richard Parsons has been put on the spot by the press.

2. What happened to boxing?

The New York Times has recently been doing a series of jaw-dropping enterprise stories related to sports (such as this one about horse racing) written by reporters from the paper’s sports and other departments (in this case the investigations unit, I think). I happened to read one of them the same night last week that I was watching a rerun of one of the old Rocky movies, and that’s when it hit me: Why doesn’t a team from the Times or from another major news outlet tackle an epic sports story that is obvious to anyone who remembers Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Floyd Patterson, and then tries to name the current heavyweight champion. (Is it one of the Klitschko brothers or someone else I wouldn’t recognize if he passed me on the street?) Why haven’t we read the definitive tale of “The Decline of Boxing”?

Sure, Muhammad Ali was, and is, one of a kind. And some could argue that future Philippine presidential contender Manny Pacquiao, and maybe Floyd Mayweather, have star power in the lower weight classes that compares to that of Tommy Hearns, Marvin Hagler or Sugar Ray Leonard. But there’s no doubt that boxing occupies nowhere near the center ring in American or world sports that it once did. There’s no Norman Mailer or David Remnick writing about boxers, no large swath of the population awaiting the next big match.

How come? What changed in our culture? What changed in the business of boxing? Did wars between competing boxing leagues with different titles to award shred the sport? Did advances like pay-per-view at home drain the drama and spectacle out of hundreds of thousands of people going to arenas to watch a closed-circuit video feed? Has the generation of celebrated trainers and promoters – fictionalized in the Rocky series but true to life in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – not been replaced? Was it lousy regulation of the sport, or overregulation? What can be done about it? Or should nothing be done, because it’s a dangerous, dehumanizing sport anyway?

3. What’s happening at the Peace Corps?

I recently had the chance to read a moving email that a family friend sent to his friends recounting how he and fellow Peace Corps volunteers had to leave Mali in an emergency evacuation following the recent coup there. “My heart is shattered,” he began, before describing the work he had done in a small village among people who lack the “opportunities that we take for granted in the West,” and then explaining how devastated he was to have to leave a country where “the coup completed the perfect storm, as it came in conjunction with a civil war that Mali has been fighting in the north.”

I haven’t read much about the Peace Corps lately. Its work in an increasingly troubled and interconnected world should be worth lots of attention, especially because it has just celebrated its 50th anniversary.

What kinds of jobs do the volunteers do? How has it changed? Are applications up or down lately? Have the enrollment demographics shifted? Is the work more dangerous in the post-9/11 world? And has the Corps been able to escape the polarization of domestic politics in the U.S. that has undercut other government programs?

4. Three follow-ups from the GSA road-trip scandal:

As more information emerges about the federal General Services Agency’s $800,000 boondoggle conference near Las Vegas, three related stories come to mind.

First, there’s the casual way the scandal was handled. According to the uncontested timeline that has now come to light, the lavish trip occurred in October, 2010, and the GSA civil servant who first raised questions about it did so in February, 2011. But it took the GSA inspector general until May, 2011 to issue an interim report about the expenditures. What took three months, especially given that there was a GSA internal website that contained obvious evidence, including videos, of the scandal?

More important, given that the interim report had most of the gory details about the expenditures, why didn’t anyone get fired last May?

Then it took until the following January – seven more months – for the resort to provide the inspector general’s office with all the bills and other documents related to the “conference.” How come? And if these were GSA’s own bills, why did the inspector general have to get them from the resort?

Finally, the inspector general drafted his report and sent it to GSA Administrator Martha Johnson for comment on Feb. 12, 2012, but it took GSA’s Johnson until Apr. 2 to respond, before which the inspector general could not release his report publicly. Why did that take so long?

Second, now that we’ve seen anew how important inspectors general can be in ferreting out government waste and misconduct, someone ought to hunt out the strongest and weakest among them across the government. The jobs and independence of the inspectors general in each federal agency were legislated by Congress as a post-Watergate reform in 1978. Who’s the bane of some Cabinet officer’s existence? And who are the lapdogs?

Third, the Washington Post reported last Thursday that Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has introduced a bill that would, among other provisions, prohibit federal agencies “from paying bonuses to employees or supervisors under investigation by an agency inspector general or equivalent official, to those who have been found to have failed to follow contracting regulations or laws in awarding a contract, or to employees or supervisors who have taken, directed or supervised actions that led to fraud, waste or abuse of taxpayer dollars.” Is the Senator grandstanding, or does this kind of bonus abuse actually happen? Did it happen in the GSA case? Where else? If it does, someone ought to ask the Cabinet officer who’s responsible why federal legislation is necessary to prevent this kind of basic management incompetence in his or her shop.

5. Media hypocrisy:

Finally, because there’s nothing better than exposing self-interested hypocrisy, here’s a story I wish I had thought of.

Editor’s note: The Mar. 20 installment of this column asked for greater scrutiny of the unusual asylum request from the Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun, made at a U.S. consulate. Last week several remarkable details emerged, including in this New York Times piece.

PHOTO: Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citigroup, speaks during the 2011 spring membership meeting organised by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) in New Delhi March 4, 2011. REUTERS/B Mathur

1. Who gives out hearts?

In exploring whether former Vice-President Cheney might have received preferential treatment when he got a heart transplant recently, many of the reporters covering the story referred to what the New York Times called “a national system that tracks donors and recipients by medical criteria.” Two doctors were then quoted as saying, as one put it: “It is not possible to game the system.”

Fair enough, but who runs the system? Who sets the criteria, and who signs off on who has met the criteria? Who decides close calls? Is there a form that gets signed by a majority of some committee, or is there one king of hearts? And are actual names attached to the patients, so that whoever was making the decision could have seen that Vice-President Cheney was an applicant for the heart in question?

Because transplants are done urgently once a donor becomes available – often after his or her sudden death in an accident, when apparently there are only hours to spare before the heart is no longer viable – is there some kind of operations center, where these decisions are signed off on and coordinated? Can’t some reporter take us there and have us meet the people playing God?

A few days after the Cheney operation, the New York Times shed some light on how transplants of another type of organ – kidneys – are decided. The Times reported on a controversy brewing over whether to establish a single registry to oversee matching kidney donors with recipients. But I’d still like to see a story on who’s making these life-and-death decisions and how. Ditto liver transplants. And, again, not just the processes but the people in charge as well as those on the front lines.

As the science around these transplants continues to advance, and as more patients continue to live longer and seek new hearts, livers or kidneys because they have survived other maladies, the rules and the people involved in these decisions are only going to get that much more important.

2. CVS and privacy:

Often you can get a good story idea just by being in the right place at the right time.

Last Saturday morning, I picked up the phone at home only to hear the beginning of one of those annoying robocall pitches. But this one was a shocker. It wasn’t a pollster or a reminder of an auto maintenance appointment. It was the local CVS drugstore (at least I think it was the local outlet) asking me to press “1” if I was actually “John Smith” so that I could get information about a prescription that was scheduled for a refill. (The robo-voice used another name, which I’m not repeating here, but it was not my name or that of anyone in my family.) I assume that if I had then pressed “1”, the voice would have told me what drug I was scheduled to get more of. I am guessing Mr. Smith would rather that outsiders not know the medication he’s taking.

There are multiple paths for a reporter to pursue here, starting with the privacy issue. Something obviously went awry, since I am not John Smith but got his phone call and presumably could have then gotten the information related to his use of some drug just by pressing “1.” Is this true? What safeguards does CVS have in place, if any, to protect against that. Why did they apparently fail, and how often do they fail? How many complaints have they gotten? Have any regulatory authorities received any complaints? Does anything about CVS’s robo-calling violate the provisions of HIPAA, the federal law that is meant to ensure the privacy of healthcare records?

Then there’s the issue of drugstores pushing prescription refills on people who might not need them. Is this a good service because it reminds people to keep taking meds that a doctor has prescribed, or is it another case of healthcare giants unnecessarily adding to the nation’s soaring medical bill? Are there any laws or regulations about this?

Does CVS Caremark (the company’s formal name) now do this kind of robo-selling (or robo-reminding, depending on your point of view) across the country? And, since CVS Caremark is also paid by insurance companies to administer insurance claims for prescription drugs (that’s the Caremark half of the company), is this outbound sales effort a conflict, since the insurance companies would obviously rather that people not refill prescriptions that they then have to pay for? What do the insurance companies think about that? And what does CVS Caremark CEO Larry Merlo have to say about all this?

3. Wal-Mart and guns:

A recent editorial in the New York Times mentioned that the Stand Your Ground laws, which have been promoted by the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun-rights groups and have become controversial in the wake of the Florida shooting of Trayvon Martin, have been “fostered by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, with heavyweight business supporters like Walmart, a major gun retailer.”

In recent years Wal-Mart has softened a hard-right image resulting from its strong anti-union stance by becoming a leader in corporate environmental issues. Is the $400 billion retailer also a force behind the gun-rights movement and laws that have set off a new polarizing fight in the wake of the Florida shooting? Do its activities and lobbying extend beyond support for the American Legislative Exchange Council? Does it lobby and spend campaign contribution money on gun issues in Washington and in various state capitals? And how closely, if at all, does Wal-Mart work with the NRA? After all, at least one of the NRA’s ongoing fights – preventing any limits on sales at private gun shows – must conflict with Wal-Mart’s obvious interest in confining sales of anything to established retailers.

PHOTO: Former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, are pictured at home in this family photograph taken and released on April 3, 2012. Reuters/Photo courtesy of Cheney family/Handout

1. Hoop academics:

What’s one year of classes at the University of Kentucky really like for basketball stars?

Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by Taylor Branch’s fabulous NCAA article in the Atlantic last fall entitled “The Shame of College Sports” and by Joe Nocera’s compelling Op-Ed columns in the New York Times arguing that the NCAA is all about money and nothing about education. And I admit I’m drafting this after watching the feel-good NCAA ads profiling the teams’ scholar-athletes during the March basketball tournament. But now that the Final Four have come and gone and we know that all five starters on the University of Kentucky’s winning team are quitting to join the NBA after just one or two years at school, I’m wondering what a reporter will find if he or she digs into the education these freshman and sophomores actually received.

What courses did they take? How rigorous were they? What do the players’ professors and fellow students have to say about their participation in class? Did the players do the work? Did they lag or excel?

How many hours did departing superstar freshman Anthony Davis actually spend in class in his first and only year at college? What papers did he write? What tests did he take? If he and others were serious students who got a real college education, however abbreviated, that would puncture a stereotype, and one definition of a good story is that it surprises people. If he or others on the team were completely divorced from anything approaching academics – perhaps by taking comically unacademic classes or rarely showing up, or both, or not going to class altogether once the season ended – that would add more indelible specifics to what Branch and Nocera have been writing about. (Update: Justin Peters got the ball rolling by doing a Slate piece on the majors of nearly all the players in the NCAA tournament.)

2. GSA: Beyond the Vegas boondoggle

I’ve been thinking about the hilarious, or maddening, story that broke last week about 300 employees from the federal General Services Administration spending more than $800,000 of taxpayer money on a “conference” at a plush resort near Las Vegas. The details, as disclosed by the GSA’s inspector general, included gourmet banquets, a $3,200 mind reader, $44-per-person breakfasts and $75,000 spent on a training exercise to build a bicycle. There was also a $136,000 tab for travel and meals just to conduct “dry run” planning sessions at the Nevada resort. The impact of all this was amplified by the inspector general giving a congressional committee a spoof video, recorded during the event, that was then released to the press

All great stuff, but I think the press may be missing the forest for the trees by not following up with more important questions.

Buried in the inspector general’s report is the simple statement that this biannual conference of GSA employees from four different GSA regions in the West had been going on for years. Its stated purpose, according to the inspector general, is to offer “training in job skills; an exchange of ideas between ‘higher-ups’ in the four regions; and a combination of those things.” Huh?

Anyone who goes to conferences like these knows that most are fun getaways whose only work-related purpose is usually for the participants to network their way into better jobs. So why, when our government is broke, do we pay for these “conferences”? Suppose the conference had only cost $200,000 or $300,000, which, when you tally up the inspector general’s list of overpayments, seems what the total should have been? Why would we routinely spend all that money, not to mention waste all that employee time?

So someone ought to scan all the federal agency press releases for, say, the last three months and tally up the number of “conferences,” “training sessions,” or “seminars” that were held. Then give us a sampling of the agendas and estimate the total costs. Then, go find the conferences sponsored by others that boatloads of government officials from all departments attend – on our dime. (I’m on the Department of Homeland Security press release list, and I bet I see at least one such event a week listed just for that department, including one in Miami Beach on “Online Dating” that I mentioned in my January 24 column.)

This brings me to one of my favorite gripes with the Washington press. There is an endless supply of fun, important stories about the nitty-gritty of government that are not covered because reporters have to go find them instead of waiting for some inspector general or congressional committee to discover them and serve them up. Some reporters, such as Robert O’Harrow of the Washington Post, do this kind of work, but not many. The same is true for how the press covers or doesn’t cover most state and municipal governments.

As an example of what else might be out there, take the aforementioned GSA.

The GSA is the equivalent of the people who manage everything in your office, from the building’s lease and services to the photocopying machines to basic cleaning and supplies. In the federal government that means an agency with 12,000 people and a fleet of 190,000 vehicles that oversees $66 billion in annual spending for products, services and facilities. Its budget for its own people and the facilities it builds or maintains is over $600 million. (In fact, just the GSA Office of Inspector General has 338 people in 14 locations scattered around the country and spends $62 million a year.)

One good story might ask whether we need a GSA at all, given that just about every agency of the federal government has its own facilities and procurement offices. It’s a question I couldn’t help asking myself when I noticed that one of GSA’s three “strategic goals” listed in the introduction to its 260-page annual budget request to Congress is:

Customer Intimacy. GSA will seek an intimate understanding of and resonance with its customers in order to serve with integrity, creativity, and responsibility. GSA will develop strategic partnerships with industry and with other Federal agencies to develop new and innovative tools for a more effective Government.

Cherry-picking this kind of bureaucratic drivel out of a massive document is easy and unfair without more reporting. GSA could be an unsung engine of cutting-edge management efficiency. Either way, it’s worth a look.

Even if GSA passes that overall legitimacy test, there are all kinds of questions lurking in that budget document that are potentially as interesting, and more important in terms of dollars, than the Vegas jaunt. For example:

GSA is spending $36 million dollars to fix up a border crossing in Dunseith, North Dakota. I was at that border crossing in conjunction with a book I did about the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that seems like a lot of money; as I recall, Dunseith is the least busy of the three full-service border crossings in North Dakota. Who’s getting all that money? How could it possibly cost $36 million for this small facility? Is there a congressional pork story behind this? Or has Denseith, population 713, become an as-yet-unheralded terrorist crossroads that needs almost 50 percent more than the federal money North Dakota got this year in aid for the Head Start early childhood education program?

There’s lots more, page by page, in turgid budget documents like the GSA’s – from the $145 million to redo and consolidate the FBI’s office in San Juan to the $7 million to improve on “wellness and fitness programs” in government buildings.

Put simply, there’s no reason the DC press corps has to wait for an inspector general to generate its own scoops.

3. What are the “Cuban medical brigades”?

Here’s a sentence buried in the amazing New York Times story last week recounting how a team of U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal seems to have caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake:

At first, Doctors Without Borders and the Cuban medical brigades, both self-financed, handled the overwhelming majority of cases.

What are “the Cuban medical brigades?” A Google search took me to a Wikipedia entry entitled “Cuban Medical Internationalism,” which says that “Cuba provides more medical personnel to the developing world than all the G8 countries combined, although this comparison does not take into account G8 development aid spent on developing world healthcare … It is widely believed that medical workers are Cuba’s most important export commodity.”

Cuba has long been known for making healthcare a priority and for exporting health workers. But with medical care such a hot topic in the United States, this story out of Cuba could be an eye-opener.

4. Is Mexico also ahead of us on healthcare?

Which reminds me: In the joint press conference last week held at the White House by President Obama with Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderón, Calderón had this to say when asked about healthcare:

We’re getting close to reaching universal coverage of health care – full, free health care coverage for all people up to 18 years of age, including cancer coverage. Of the 112 million Mexicans, 106 million will have efficient, effective universal health care coverage.

Really? We know about Canada’s universal coverage, but is Mexico also ahead of the U.S. in providing healthcare to its citizens?

PHOTO: Members of the Kentucky Wildcats celebrate defeating the Kansas Jayhawks to win the men’s NCAA Final Four championship college basketball game in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 2, 2012. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

1. Disclosure on cable news shows:

When talking heads come on the cable-TV news shows to support their causes and attack the opposition, are there any standards imposed by their host networks for disclosing conflicts of interest?

Here’s an excerpt from a statement put out by the conservative Koch Industries the week before last complaining about MSNBC:

On March 23, while guest hosting the Martin Bashir program, Karen Finney accused Koch of a connection with the tragic circumstances surrounding the Trayvon Martin matter. ”Who was the Typhoid Mary for this horrible outbreak,” Finney asked. She then stated, ”It’s the usual suspects the Koch brothers … the same people who stymied gun regulation at every point who funded and ghost write these laws.” Because we saw this dishonest story line developing and were concerned other extremists would pick it up, we put out a public statement the day before Ms. Finney’s rant explaining that this story line was totally false and irresponsible. First, Koch has had no involvement in this legislation … You should also be aware that on March 26, Ms. Finney signed and sent a letter on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee soliciting political contributions. Yet, she is presented to viewers as a “political analyst” and not as a paid fundraising operative for the Democratic party, as would be accurate.

Is this accurate? Was Finney paid to send the fundraising letter, or is she on the Democratic Party payroll? If so, should she be identified on air as a paid Democratic Party fundraiser the way sister channel CNBC identifies stock commentators who hold interests in the stocks they are talking about?

What are the cable news channels’ policies about all this, whether it’s Al Sharpton (also MSNBC), James Carville (CNN) or Karl Rove (Fox) who are the talking heads?

Sure, we know all about Rove’s or Carville’s political leanings, but wouldn’t it add to the disclosure to have a message underneath the talking heads reminding viewers, whenever it’s the case, that they are currently getting paid by those with a direct interest in what they’re saying? For example, we know generally that Sharpton is a civil rights activist, but when he’s talking about education reform, wouldn’t it help to know that his main organization, the National Action Network, got $165,000 last year in contributions from Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, while its sister union, the National Education Association, chipped in $40,000?

So what are the news networks’ standards? Do they ask their talking heads about conflicts? And in what circumstances will they disclose them?

2. BlackBerry’s demise:

I may have missed it, but I still haven’t seen one of the more obvious business stories out there begging for a full-bore narrative: How did Research In Motion, which produces the BlackBerry, get away with a lagging product offering and obviously unworkable corporate governance for so long? Newly installed CEO Thorstein Heins conceded last week that “substantial change” on multiple fronts was now needed, but what took so long? Why did the board and shareholders sit by while customer base and market share eroded and service outages persisted? At what point should management or the board have woken up and pulled a fire alarm? Who were the stock analysts who made the right call on RIMM while its stock rose to untenable levels, and who was going along for the ride?

3. Candidates’ health insurance:

Amid the debate over health insurance, it would be great to see an article detailing how each presidential candidate, including President Obama, is insured. We know that Mitt Romney’s wife and Rick Santorum’s daughter have faced severe health issues. Without delving into the details of their illnesses and care, let’s find out how well they were covered. For example, does Santorum’s Senate service give him lifetime coverage under the congressional health plan, and, if so, what are the deductibles, the co-pays and the caps, if any? How has Romneycare in Massachusetts affected Romney’s own family, if at all? And let’s compare the candidates’ coverage to those of, say, three American families in different economic classes.

4. How did China’s millionaires make it?

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the prospects for private jet sales in China estimated that China had 3 million people worth over $1 million and 8,000 worth over $30 million. I’d love a story explaining who these people typically are and how they made their money. We know generally that China’s ruling Communist Party is all about political dominance rather than economic orthodoxy, but I suspect I’m not the only one who is otherwise ignorant when it comes to how free markets and entrepreneurship coexist in a country with so much state control and so many state-owned enterprises. It can’t all be about the Communist bosses doling out the spoils to its cronies. Or is it?

PHOTO: Reverend Al Sharpton speaks out against Senate Bill 1070 at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church before marching with demonstrators to Arizona’s State Capitol to protest against the state’s controversial immigration law in Phoenix May 5, 2010. REUTERS/Joshua Lott

1. Are Diane Sawyer, Scott Pelley and Brian Williams hooked on Cymbalta?

Every time I suffer through the (simultaneously timed) commercial breaks on one of the network evening news shows I wish I could read a story about prescription drug advertising on television. I’ll bet these ads now account for two-thirds or more of revenues for the network news shows, whose viewer demographics are apparently perfect targets for drugs directed at older people with erectile dysfunction, withering bones, dry eyes, insomnia, lung malfunction (as illustrated by an elephant sitting on some guy’s chest), incontinence, and whatever it is that is cured by something called Cymbalta, whose ads I think I saw on all three shows the other night.

To what extent does the federal government’s decision to allow, beginning in the mid-1990s, such direct-to-consumer ads keep these once-revered nightly news shows afloat? (A sidebar should also cover how these ads boost the economics of struggling magazines, in large part because the rules require a page of small print detail about dosage and side effects following the glitzy image ad.) At a time when healthcare costs are a national crisis, does the American policy of allowing these ads, which most countries prohibit, create unnecessary demand and needless expense? Or do they give patients important information? Does telling me I might have a disease that I had never heard of help me address a malady before it gets worse, or does it make me a prescription-guzzling hypochondriac? How does the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates such advertising, evaluate all that, and what kind of lobbying do the networks and drug companies do to influence that debate? Or is there no longer a debate?

And what are the rules governing the hilarious recitations of possible side effects? How fast is the announcer allowed to breeze through describing the risk of suicide, hives, sleepwalking, backache, swelling of the tongue, depression, migraines, miscarriage or four-day (or is it four-hour?) erections?

2. Will the U.S. education secretary help determine control of the Senate?

There’s a showdown looming this fall over President Obama’s most highly touted domestic policy initiative, and it could end up deciding a Senate race in Hawaii – and perhaps even control of the Senate.

Some pundits scoping out the 2012 Senate races have started to look at Hawaii, where the retirement of three-term Democrat Daniel Akaka has created an open seat. Former two-term Republican Governor Linda Lingle is likely to win her primary in August and face either Democratic congresswoman Mazie Hirono or former Democratic congressman Ed Case, who are competing in their party’s primary. Current polls suggest that Lingle, who was more popular than Neil Abercrombie, the Democrat who has replaced her, has at least a fighting chance to buck Hawaii’s tradition as a Democratic stronghold and become only the second Republican senator Hawaii has ever elected.

But there’s an extra angle to the Hawaii race that someone ought to look at: In the summer of 2010, Hawaii was one of 11 states (along with the District of Columbia) chosen as a winner of President Obama’s Race to the Top education grant program. The winners were meant to be those states that presented the best plans to reform their K-12 education systems by enacting the kinds of teacher evaluation and accountability programs that teachers’ unions – which are the base of the Democratic Party – have traditionally opposed. Despite the unions’ opposition, President Obama pushed Race to the Top through Congress. Still more surprising to the pols, policy wonks and lobbyists who follow education in Washington, the Obama administration then wrote regulations that gave the program real teeth.

The outside experts chosen to vet each state’s reform proposals were instructed to award points according to painstakingly specific criteria, and they were charged with doing so based not only on what each state promised but also on how likely it was that the state could and would actually deliver.

The problem, as I reported in a book (Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools) published last summer, was that to avoid charges of conflicts or favoritism, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his staff chose a group of mostly academic vetters, rather than experts experienced in education reform, to evaluate the states’ 500-to-800-page proposals. This may have made the process above reproach, but it also resulted in having many vetters who were clueless about the practical issues involved in implementing reform.

Thus, some of the evaluators’ winning picks, such as New York and Ohio, and some of their rejections, particularly Colorado and Louisiana, were hotly debated in education circles, with critics arguing that these were emblematic misfires in an evaluation process in which the vetters had been bamboozled by the applicants’ promises of reform. But the $75 million award to Hawaii – where the teachers’ union is the state’s most powerful Democratic interest group and where the state’s promises in its application had been filled with gaping loopholes – wasn’t really debated at all. No one outside of Hawaii tried to defend it. It was broadly dismissed as a fiasco. In fact, Duncan and his staff couldn’t believe it when they saw Hawaii on the winners list.

However, when I asked Duncan just after Hawaii got the nod what he would do if states failed to keep their promises, he vowed he would cut off the money, which is to be awarded in eight increments over four years – or even sue to get money back where checks had already been written.

Twenty months later, the Hawaii state teachers’ union has refused to agree to the evaluation and accountability reforms that were the core of the state’s winning application. And so far, Hawaii has requested 31 amendments to its application, all involving delays in its promised schedule or a watering down of its promises. Duncan’s office has approved 27 of them, but he has reiterated his vow to hold Hawaii accountable. He has even formally placed Hawaii on “high risk” status, meaning he might revoke its funding if he doesn’t see progress soon.

Crunch time on fulfilling many of the Race to the Top promises should be early this fall. That will mark the second anniversary of the original award and would supposedly mark the half-way point in the four-year program. Yet it’s likely that Hawaii will have done little, if anything, even to begin implementing the key reforms it promised.

Duncan has been a straight arrow when it comes to keeping politics out of the Race to the Top contest. Then again, the $75 million Hawaii grant is lot of money for a state this small, and the failure of Governor Abercrombie to deliver on his state’s reform promises has gotten a fair amount of local press. So, if there’s a tight Senate race in Hawaii this fall that might even determine control of the U.S. Senate, will Duncan stick to his guns and undercut the Democratic candidate, not to mention embarrass the Democratic governor, by lowering the boom?

3. Who’s getting what at the oil pump?

With all the frenzy over oil prices, I’d like to see a simple but definitive story that takes a gallon of the gasoline Americans buy and breaks down exactly who gets how much of the $4.00 (or whatever the price is), starting with owners of the oil fields and including drillers, shippers, refiners, distributors, retailers, and, of course, the tax collectors. And which of these parties benefits the most when the price goes up?

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks next to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about providing states flexibility under No Child Left Behind in exchange for reform at the White House in Washington February 9, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

1. The Afghan massacre and the insanity defense:

Beginning late last week we began to see the outlines of a possible defense for Robert Bales, the army sergeant who allegedly massacred 16 Afghan civilians earlier this month: insanity or diminished capacity. “When it all comes out, it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues — he just snapped,” a “senior American official” told the New York Times. So, it’s time for a general review of the tough-to-pull-off insanity or diminished capacity defenses, along with a focus on the even higher hurdles involved in using either in a court-martial. (An insanity defense is a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity; diminished capacity means the defendant does not contest guilt but seeks to be convicted of a lesser offense or get a more lenient sentence.) That story should also tell us how much Bales’s defense lawyer might be able to turn the case into a trial over increasingly controversial Pentagon policies related to multiple redeployments, the treatment of traumatic head injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Good sidebars would tell us whether Afghanistan, whose Parliament is still demanding that Bales be tried in Afghan courts, even allows an insanity defense, and how open the trial is likely to be, including to cameras.

Years ago, I wrote a piece for Psychology Today about the insanity defense that was keyed to the case of John Hinckley, whose lawyers used it successfully after he tried to kill President Reagan. It presents a fascinating legal dilemma, which in its oversimplified version is: The more outrageous your crime, the better your argument that you had to be insane to do it, but the more likely it is that jurors will be so angry that they’ll want to hang you for it anyway.

2. The numbers behind MSNBC’s weekend sleaze-fests:

Can one of the media trade publications or a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Reuters media reporter please do a story explaining why it makes sense for MSNBC to do a series of sleazy shows — Lockup, Sex Slaves, Caught on Camera — during the evening and in prime time on weekends? Last Saturday night, while CNN was doing a riveting, important report entitled, 72 Hours Under Fire, about the massacre of dissidents in Syria as witnessed by its gutsy reporting team, MSNBC was broadcasting Lockup: Boston, one of its stable of Lockup shows depicting life inside prisons that has all the journalistic value of rubbernecking at a car accident.

Do the ratings justify undercutting the much-promoted MSNBC brand — “The Place for Politics” — this way, especially during a time when there is all kinds of news breaking out over the weekends related to the Republican primaries and conflicts in the Middle East? How do the expense and revenue numbers add up? Why wouldn’t running shows akin to MSNBC’s new crop of weekend morning political shows, with Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris Perry, make more sense? Why do advertisers like Liberty Mutual run spots on this Lockup garbage? What does Brian Roberts, the chairman and CEO of Comcast, which now owns MSNBC, have to say about all of this? It’s not simply a matter of the taste and civic values associated with a news organization, though I’d love to hear Roberts and his colleagues discuss that. I’m also curious about the simple cost-benefit analysis of undercutting a brand this way; it could be a good window on the economics of cable-TV news.

3. Sue the oil cartel?

I’ve always wondered what’s prevented the attorney general or some ambitious plaintiffs’ lawyer from bringing the mother of antitrust suits — against OPEC, the self-proclaimed oil cartel, which routinely and unabashedly controls prices by agreeing on production quotas. The oil ministers conduct their price-fixing meetings outside the United States, but offshore price-fixing conspiracies involving various products from chemical food additives to steel tubing have been successfully busted before.

An American law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act generally protects sovereign countries from being sued in our courts, and in this case the price-fixers are ostensibly their countries’ oil ministers acting in their official capacities. (OPEC is an acronym for Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.) But I’d love to see a piece exploring: whether a case can be made that when governments act as commercial entities to fix prices in the marketplace, they are within the jurisdiction of American law and squarely within the intent of antitrust law — and outside the protection of sovereign immunity; whether the oil companies that participate in, or at least benefit from, the cartel can be sued even if the countries can’t; and, most important, why our president and his attorney general haven’t raced up to Capitol Hill demanding that the sovereign immunity law be changed to clear an easy path for suits against OPEC. After all, it’s just a statute. Why would any member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, be against amending it for this narrow but enormously significant purpose?

That kind of amendment to the sovereign immunities law was actually passed by the House of Representatives in 2008, and the idea of suing OPEC became popular at the time among some law professors and editorial writers. But the bill was killed by Republicans in the Senate because Bush administration officials opposed it, saying they feared it would lead the OPEC countries to reduce supplies to U.S. oil refiners. But why wouldn’t that kind of cartel retaliation simply lead to more damages being assessed against those countries by an American court, which would likely be able to assert jurisdiction over OPEC country assets in the United States, a jurisdiction that could be used to collect those damages?

Does the Obama administration, in the midst of an election battle in which the price at the pump has become a major issue, have the same position as the Bush team did four years ago? Would Republicans still oppose it? Someone ought to ask.

4. China mystery:

Here’s a pregnant paragraph from a New York Times story last week about that fall of Bo Xila, the mayor of the Chinese city of Chongqing and a high-profile corruption-fighter who had been touted as likely to become one of the seven members of the country’s ruling Politburo until his police chief became enmeshed in a scandal:

Mr. Bo’s troubles began last month when his handpicked police chief, Wang Lijun, sought refuge in the United States Consulate in Chengdu, about 210 miles from Chongqing. Mr. Wang, who had come under scrutiny in a corruption inquiry, spent the night in the consulate before being escorted to Beijing by security officials. He was also removed from his post, according to state media.

Did the police chief change his mind about seeking asylum? If so, what happened inside the American consulate that encouraged him to do so? Or did we turn him over to the Chinese? How did the State Department handle this situation, and who was involved in these decisions?

PHOTO: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (L) is seen during an exercise at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, in this August 23, 2011 DVIDS handout photo. REUTERS/Department of Defense/Spc. Ryan Hallock/Handout