Stories I’d like to see

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

1. International, Afghan and American law surrounding the accused soldier-murderer:

With the Afghan Parliament demanding yesterday that the American soldier accused of killing 16 civilians there be put on trial locally rather than be tried by American military courts, I’m betting that the office of State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh and others in Washington are working overtime to frame a response. How will they decide whether our army turns him over? What could their arguments be against that? What are prevailing international law and military law precedents, and how much will they matter? What are the likely ramifications for the presidential election? What position will the Republican candidates take? All parts of an important, urgent story likely to play out this week.

2. Putin’s billion-dollar palace?

Check out these two sentences embedded in a recent New York Times story about how various cronies of Russian prime minister and now president-elect Vladimir Putin have all become billionaires:

Mr. Putin has repeatedly denied any involvement in the enrichment of these and other acquaintances, and he has forcefully dismissed assertions made by his political opponents that he himself is a secret beneficiary of these enterprises and has amassed tens of billions of dollars in bank accounts outside Russia.

Mr. Putin’s spokesman has also denied any connection to a sprawling resort complex that some of Mr. Putin’s St. Petersburg acquaintances were said to be building for him as a “palace” on the Black Sea at a cost of as much as $1 billion.

I assume the Times is working overtime to find out more about that billion-dollar “palace” and get some good pictures of it, assuming it exists. I hope FT, Reuters, Businessweek, AP and others, including any Russian media people brave enough to try, are on the case, too, and working all the sources they can to find out about those bank accounts. This story — if true and proved, especially with pictures and records that go viral — could set off a Russian Spring.

3. Edwards trial curtain-raiser:

Former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards is scheduled to go on trial in April for campaign finance corruption, and there’s a great story to be done about the murky legal issues — juxtaposed against the obvious personal melodrama — surrounding his case.

Edwards is about as sympathetic a figure as Charles Manson. But what he’s actually been indicted for merits a thoughtful look at whether prosecutors are trying to turn being an awful husband and overall vile human being into a crime. The charges boil down to this: When Edwards got two campaign supporters to chip in more than $925,000 to support and hide his mistress and their baby during his 2008 campaign, he had actually taken illegal campaign contributions — because the money contributed by the two supporters was over the limits governing individual donors and was never reported to the Federal Election Commission. The prosecutors’ reasoning is that because the hush money kept the Edwards scandal a secret, therefore enabling him to stay in the presidential race, it was money spent to support the campaign.

What if a candidate has a facelift, or buys a new wardrobe, or takes Spanish lessons, and someone pays for those image-enhancers? What about a kidney transplant that keeps a candidate alive, thereby keeping his candidacy alive? Or a college or law school education paid for by a parent or an uncle that dresses up the resume of someone who has vowed since he became a teenager that he was going to run for senator or president? Are these all campaign contributions that are subject to limits and to the FEC’s reporting requirements?

Conversely, if Edwards had done what the prosecution seems to be saying he should have done to stay within the law — used legally raised and reported campaign donations to pay off his mistress and support their baby — wouldn’t that have been a diversion of campaign funds for personal use, which is explicitly against FEC regulations?

The lawyer for Edwards, Gregory Craig (a star litigator who was President Obama’s first White House counsel), put it this way when Edwards was indicted: “In the history of the federal election campaign law, no one has ever been charged, either civilly or criminally, with the claims that have been brought against Senator Edwards … No one would have known or should have known or could have been expected to know that these payments would be treated or should be considered as campaign contributions … He has broken no law.”

Beyond getting lots of color and expert opinion about that defense, as well as previewing the two sides’ strategies for using and countering it, there’s another thing any reporter working this story on Edwards must do: Stick a microphone in his face and ask the multimillionaire former trial lawyer why he didn’t just pay the hush money himself instead of persuading his two top supporters to pony up. That would have been unquestionably legal and remained a completely private matter. I can’t wait to hear his answer. Maybe he’ll stay in his new contrition mode and say that, among his other sins, he’s also cheap and perennially entitled.

Author’s note: I’ve just learned that in January Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter did this comprehensive story that, while because of its early timing wasn’t a curtain raiser for the trial that included a preview of trial strategy, covered exactly the issues I have suggested related to the legitimacy of the charges against Edwards. In fact, Alter even used a version of one of the hypotheticals I spun – paying for college tuition – to illustrate the point.

4. Low-wage, long-distance trade economics:

The various stories recently about Foxconn raising wages for the workers who make Apple, Dell and lots of other high-tech products, as well as the possible return of manufacturing jobs to the United States because wages elsewhere are gradually rising, reminded me of a shopping experience I had last Christmas: My wife and I bought a few small but elaborately decorated candle sconces (at Kohl’s, I think) for a party and marveled at the $2.99 price. We then noticed, as best I can remember, that the wax and wick for the candles had been imported from Sri Lanka (or it might have been Vietnam), while the sconce holding it had come from another Asian country, whereupon the product had been assembled in China. A three-country production process to ship something to the East Coast of the United States to be sold for $2.99. How could all that coordination and shipping possibly be profitable?

So, I’d like to see an article that takes various products now produced overseas and spells out why it makes sense economically to do so, and how much the wage gap would have to narrow for that work to come home. For those candles, I’m guessing that paying slave wages is what offsets the various shipping and assembly costs (which now makes me wonder how guilty I should feel about having bought the stuff). But I’d still like to see how the economics stack up.

The CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley recently did a terrific story about higher-level manufacturing jobs, profiling a woman who runs a Canton, Ohio plant that manufactures space heaters. She had figured out how to streamline the process in a way that enabled her company to move operations back from China. Television being television, the CBS report didn’t have the numbers and other important data — wage differentials, availability of materials, shipping costs and differences in available skilled or unskilled labor. I’d like to see those details in a story covering a whole variety of products, but one that doesn’t lose the people elements that CBS captured so well.

5. Hats off to the Washington Post:

For journalists, the best definition of a good story may be that as soon as you see it, your reaction is: “Why didn’t I think of that?” Here’s one that appeared in the Washington Post on Saturday that’s so good it deserves a special hat tip.

PHOTO: Afghan National Army soldiers keep watch as Afghans gather outside a U.S. base in Panjwai district Kandahar province, March 11, 2012. Coalition forces killed 15 civilians in a shooting spree in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province on Sunday, the defence ministry said, in an incident likely to deepen the growing divide between Washington and Kabul. REUTERS/Ahmad Nadeem

1. An underground economy in the Gulf?

I was interested to read these paragraphs in a recent New York Times story about the processing of claims being made by victims of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; pay special attention to the part I have underlined:

Glenn Poche, a shrimper, said he had lost 90 percent of his retail business. Despite official assurances that seafood pulled from the Gulf of Mexico is safe, many of his customers “want to wait a couple more years” to be sure….

Diane Poche, Glenn Poche’s wife, said she had received $30,000 from the fund — “just a little drop in the bucket of what we’ve lost” — but her claims for more had been refused, she said, her voice rising. “I sent in paperwork over two inches thick!”

In his response, Mr. Feinberg [the celebrated arbitrator hired by British Petroleum to process the claims] said that the Poches’ claim was for more than twice the annual gross income Mr. Poche had reported before the oil spill and that Mrs. Poche was listed as a housewife, not a business partner, on the family’s tax forms. Mr. Feinberg has said that thousands of claims have been rejected because of inadequate documentation.

So, here’s the possible story: Without drawing any conclusions from this brief description of the Poche family’s dispute with Mr. Feinberg, it may be that much of the economy in the Gulf — small-business shrimping and other fishing, chartering boats, waiting on tables in restaurants, small retailing — is a cash economy, in which some people may make more money than they report to the IRS.

Comparing claims about lost earnings with what people tell the tax man they earned — which could probably be done on a macro basis using government data about the Gulf economy — might be an eye-opener, as would asking people about possible differences in their claims of lost income versus their reported earnings. So would checking with the IRS to see if it ever compares claims for lost income in tort suits (which are public) with plaintiffs’ tax filings.

With that in mind, maybe Times reporter John Schwartz, who wrote this otherwise comprehensive piece, could go back to the Poches and ask them to comment on Mr. Feinberg’s response: that he found a 100% difference between what the Poches claim they lost and what he says they told the IRS.

2. Romney’s prior returns:

Why haven’t reporters pushed Mitt Romney to release more than his most recent two years of tax returns? Or at least asked him if he paid more or less than the combined 13.8% he reported paying for those two years when he released his 2010 return? Wouldn’t he have released returns for those earlier years if the rate had been higher? Which means that it was likely lower — perhaps much lower — for years when he wasn’t thinking about running for president and was probably making more money and taking advantage of the tax breaks available to people with his sources of income.

3. Patent wars:

It seems that every day we read another story about patent litigation threatening to upset some company’s marketing of a key product. The most ubiquitous of these stories involve patent wars being fought around the world by heavy hitters like Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon and Microsoft. But as this story from Paidcontent illustrates, there is patent litigation surrounding almost every high-tech product we use; and, as this article highlights, the plaintiffs are now often investment firms that have been formed for the sole purpose of buying up relatively obscure patents and then suing deep pockets (in this case, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile) for infringing them.

I vaguely remember from law school that you can be sued successfully for infringing a patent even if you didn’t know about it, let alone copied it. And I remember that when my partners and I sold our technology company (Press+) last year, the biggest legal hang-up in an otherwise quick and simple deal was over whether we would promise to pay the buyer’s legal fees and damages if they were ever sued, even unsuccessfully, for patent infringement. I thought that shouldn’t be a problem, because I knew how we had created what we created, but our lawyers told us we couldn’t agree to something that broad because they were so many “patent trolls” out there ready to sue anybody for almost anything, especially once a company had succeeded and developed those deep pockets.

So I’d like to see a definitive article surveying the landscape and identifying the key players in what seems to have become this era’s most destructive business litigation.

Has patent trolling become the most lucrative lawyering out there? Who’s making a killing? Who are the richest intellectual property lawyers on the plaintiffs’ and defense sides? How did they get to the top? What about those investment funds that finance the litigation?

What exactly are the rules, and have they produced the kind of monster monkey wrench when it comes to commerce, innovation and deal flow that I suspect they have? Are companies like Apple or Google destined to pay millions for litigation no matter what they do, while smaller companies get smothered by the same forces once they start to succeed? And how much did recent patent reform legislation change things in the U.S.?

In tort law, which in the United States is generally governed by state laws, several states with especially accommodating statutes and sympathetic juries became known during the 1980s as plaintiffs’ paradises. (At the American Lawyer, we did a story with exactly that title.) Are there countries around the world that now enjoy that distinction when it comes to fights over intellectual property?

PHOTO: A shrimp boat trawls near healthy marsh, bayous and waterways east of the mouth of the Atchafalaya River near Morgan City, Louisiana, April 20, 2011. REUTERS/Sean Gardner

1. The business of super PACs:

With super PACS having altered the dynamics of federal campaigns, it’s time for a look at how they’ve changed the fortunes of political consultants, pollsters and others who feed off of campaign money. With the cash flow this Republican primary season shifting from political organizations run by the candidate to independent — or at least ostensibly independent — entities, giving them much more money than the campaigns themselves, has the talent followed the dollars? Wouldn’t pollsters or ad-makers rather work for an organization with $100 million to spend than one with $10 million? And how do the people who run these super PACs get paid? How do the IRS rules governing the finances of non-profit entities apply to super PACs? Can someone like Karl Rove take a cut of the tens of millions he’s raised and dispensed for America’s Crossroads the way private equity funds take management fees? Who decides how much Rove or other super PAC executives or staffers make? Articles like the one in Sunday’s New York Times have pointed out the overlaps among staffers. So who ferrets out conflicts if, for example, someone running a super PAC steers business to his or her ad agency or consulting or polling firm?

2. Rick Santorum’s father and a Mexican laborer: A tale of two immigrants

I doubt that I’m the only one who doesn’t know the basics of America’s immigration laws and rules, despite the fact they have become a staple of current political debate. For example, whenever I hear Rick Santorum talk about how his father, Aldo, was an immigrant from Italy who came to the United States in 1930, I wonder if he came in legally and, if so, under what rules. I assume Aldo Santorum couldn’t simply pick up and come here today from Italy, right? (I wondered the same thing about Rudy Giuliani when he ran for president in 2008.)

My curiosity was piqued by a recent editorial in the Washington Post that took President Obama and all of his would-be Republican opponents to task for saying that illegal immigrants should “get to the back of the line” in applying for citizenship. In fact, the Post pointed out, when it comes to most illegal immigrants, there is no line — and no possibility of applying for citizenship. As the Post explained, “a large majority of the 11 million illegal immigrants are unskilled or low-skilled Mexicans [who] have no relatives over age 18 who are either U.S. citizens or permanent residents in possession of green cards,” and that would make them ineligible for visas, let alone citizenship status.

So what exactly are the rules? Which countries and what kinds of people get preference, and who gets no chance at all of “getting on the line” to pursue the American dream? How come? And what were the rules when the parents or grandparents of the politicians who rail the most about closing our borders came here?

3. Textbooks and money:

A recent editorial in the “Bloomberg View” section of Bloomberg Businessweek described the Neanderthal state of the American textbook market: high prices, little innovation and market domination by a few big companies. All this adds up to an industry in which prices have doubled the pace of inflation since 1986 and kids still lug brickloads of print books in their backpacks. The opinion piece keys off of the recently announced entry of Apple’s iPad into the market. But as it glumly concludes, Apple’s announcement that it is working with the incumbent publishers on a pricing model that is not likely to save anyone any money means that “Apple seems less intent on disrupting the textbook cartel than on joining it.” That’s because Apple seems set on partnering with the incumbents to publish their digital products only through the Apple store and have them be readable only on Apple’s expensive iPads.

The essay then offers up the idea that digital texts should instead be published only on open platforms so they can be read on all devices. The federal government, it suggests, could force this by threatening to cut off crucial education aid to states that don’t require those open platforms.

Beyond the obvious political obstacles with that kind of heavy-handed regulation, Bloomberg missed a bigger story. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have now agreed to begin implementing what’s called “Common Core” curriculum standards — partly because of being pushed to do so by President Obama’s Race to the Top education grant program. In a country with 13,000 turf-conscious local school districts, this common-sense approach to setting strong national standards to meet the challenge of global competition is revolutionary. It also promises a potential revolution in the textbook industry, both print and digital. A textbook that becomes a favorite of education officials charged with implementing the Common Core standards could achieve unheard-of scale and sales volumes. The same is true for high-tech teaching products, which is why venture capitalists are starting to warm to an industry they once shunned because sales had to be made one by one to states or even school districts in a highly politicized process.

The emergence of digital publishing combined with the adoption of the Common Core is going to upend a big, important industry. The right story would take us inside the jockeying among traditional publishers and startup entrepreneurs to get in on the potential Common Core gold rush. Which bureaucrats are making the Common Core decisions about which learning products to adopt? What kind of lobbying and political pressure has been unleashed at what levels to influence these choices? Apple stories have glitzy appeal, but what’s going on behind closed doors to determine how and what our kids will learn when the revolutionary Common Core is implemented is the real story.

4. Businessweek’s revival:

Although I wasn’t keen on that Bloomberg View essay in the Feb. 6 issue of Businessweek, I was stunned in reading this issue, as I have been repeatedly in reading other recent issues, at how terrific the magazine has become under its new Bloomberg owners and editor Josh Tyrangiel. I second Jack Shafer’s December appraisal: It has become, for my money, the best business magazine published today and one of the two or three best magazines, period. If anything, its fault is that, because it’s a weekly, there’s so much good stuff in each issue that it leaves the reader feeling guilty he didn’t get to it all (though there are smart bottom-line summaries at the end of each piece to help deal with that).

The cover story of that Feb. 6 issue was an exquisite blow-by-blow account of how hard it is to merge two giant airlines (Continental and United) because there are thousands of surprisingly complicated decisions to be made — such as whose coffee and uniforms to keep or figuring out how to cut over to common reservations and flight-information systems while still operating 24/7 around the world. Reporter Drake Bennett made the important but mundane come to life in a way that reminded me of the quote attributed to McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc celebrating “the kind of mind that can see beauty in a hamburger bun.”

Inside the same issue there were at least a dozen other stories I wanted to read, from the “wild battle to overpay for the bankrupt Los Angeles Dodgers” to “So Long, Wal-Mart Greeter.”

This kind of transformation doesn’t just happen. Someone needs to do as thorough and as page-turning a piece on the magazine’s resurgence as Businessweek itself would do. There is a lot more to remaking a magazine than investing in talent. It takes attitude, discipline and a constant visualization of the reader — a relentless focus on whom you’re writing for and what you’re trying to deliver.

How did Tyrangiel put all that together in an age when print is supposed to be dying? And is his reborn product making money? Are advertisers ponying up? Are circulation revenues on the rise? How is the magazine keeping itself from being victimized by the Web — or is it? How does its progress compare with a parallel effort to beef up Bloomberg’s long-suffering cable-TV network? What’s the difference? And how does all of this fit into the larger strategy of the Bloomberg company?

PHOTO: A pedestrian walks into the border station to cross into the United States from Mexico in San Ysidro, California September 27, 2011. REUTERS/Mike Blake

1. When health insurers say no:

Like probably every other family in America, ours regularly has claims we submit to our health insurer rejected — with little or no explanation and no recourse from the company’s always-on-hold telephone hot line. Yet lately I’ve been seeing ads from health insurers projecting friendly, caring images. My favorite is the television and print campaign from United HealthCare featuring a girl who develops asthma but is shown swimming and even surfing because United, which sells insurance under the Oxford and other brands, has gotten her “specialists, lots of doctors, lots of advice…that help her pediatrician coordinate your child’s care and make sure all doctors are on the same page….” The ad trumpets United’s “more than 78,000 people looking out for 70 million Americans. That’s HEALTH IN NUMBERS,” the ad concludes.

Speaking of numbers, what percentage of customer claims for medical care or prescription drugs does United HealthCare reject? How does that compare with its competitors? Why can’t some reporters ask?

A cursory search on Google turns up little more than a 2009 Huffington Post piece reporting that: “Data on how often insurance claims are denied — and for what reasons — is collected and analyzed by the insurance companies themselves. But except in California, the companies aren’t required to provide those records to any state or federal agency.” The article quotes Karen Pollitz, a professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, as saying: “The number is knowable, but not known by regulators or policy makers or patients.”

For starters, I’d like to see a story describing what must have been the ferocious lobbying to prevent the Obamacare legislation from requiring that this information be made public. Which members of Congress were pivotal in keeping this basic consumer information suppressed? Don’t they believe that free, competitive markets work best when consumers have this kind of data? It would seem that the Republicans who say they want to strengthen the private health insurance industry would be leaders in ensuring that this market information is available to their constituents.

Second, there should be more stories like this one from the Los Angeles Times in 2009, which reported the numbers that California requires be made public.

Most important, reporters should ask the insurance companies for their acceptance and rejection numbers and report which insurers provide them and which won’t. (They might as well start by pestering United HealthCare, the most aggressive feel-good advertiser.)  Assuming most or all won’t reveal the rejection stats, why not use social media or an online survey tool to gather estimates of rejection percentages for the largest insurers? Or an ambitious, resource-rich news organization like Reuters or Bloomberg could even hire pollsters to use statistically valid sampling to come up with rejection rates for each company. If the companies then dispute them, ask them to supply their numbers in some kind of verifiable form.

2. Super PACs and the law:

We’ve read everywhere that super PACs aren’t allowed to collaborate on strategy, messages, or anything else with the candidates they’re supporting. But what happens if they break the rules? Mitt Romney said during an MSNBC interview that if he crossed the line he could “go to the big house.” But that was quickly dismissed as drastic overstatement of the actual consequences. Someone needs to talk to the right lawyers and report whether the penalties are, in fact, limited to the small, after-the-fact civil fines that the relatively toothless Federal Election Commission can levy. Or do campaigns and the super PACs have to file any documents with the FEC or anyone else attesting or otherwise claiming or implying that they do not collaborate? If so, and if those statements are found to be false, could there be criminal prosecutions for fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud?

3. Mainstream media’s screwup on super PACs and the law:

While we’re on the subject of super PACs and the law, my friend and former Court TV colleague Dan Abrams has just written a long-overdue piece on his Mediaite website about how the mainstream media — he singles out the New York Times, Washington Post,  and MSNBC — regularly and routinely misstate the meaning and impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on campaign finance rules. They and other media, Abrams points out, repeatedly refer to Citizens United as having enabled people like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to become Newt Gingrich’s multimillion-dollar sugar daddy. In fact, as Abrams explains, Citizens United only had to do with freeing corporations and unions to contribute unlimited amounts to supposedly independent PACs; individuals like Adelson have had a right to do so long before Citizens United, as demonstrated by the way in which a bunch of rich donors swift-boated John Kerry six years before Citizens United was decided.

This basic misreading of an easy-to-read Supreme Court decision is so egregious — and fits so nicely into a political riff that holds the Roberts Supreme Court responsible for elections gone wild — that I’d like to see more on this than Abrams’s blog post. Someone needs to ask the reporters involved — Chris Matthews at MSNBC or Dana Milbank of the Washington Post are among those whose bald misstatements Abrams documents — how it is that they and their colleagues keep making this obvious mistake and why no one has corrected it. And what does Adam Liptak, the highly regarded New York Times Supreme Court reporter, think about all this? Has he tried to get his paper to correct itself? Someone needs to shove a microphone or pad and pencil in front of a bunch of people who are usually the ones asking the gotcha questions. Let’s play hardball, Chris.

PHOTO: Patricia Relling shows what her new monthly rate for medical insurance with Anthem would have been after her insurance was canceled following her breast cancer diagnosis, at her home in Louisville, Kentucky, April 21, 2010. REUTERS/John Sommers II

1. Tracking Romney’s ad buys:

Look at the remaining Republican primary calendar dates and the candidates’ respective strengths and do the math: There are certain states where Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich seem to have the best chance later this winter and spring (assuming one or both stay in the race) of winning enough delegates to deny Mitt Romney the majority he needs to lock up the nomination before the convention. These include Georgia (76 delegates, Super Tuesday – Mar. 6), Ohio (66 delegates, Super Tuesday) Tennessee (58 delegates, Super Tuesday), Alabama (50 delegates on Mar. 13), Texas (a huge 155 delegates on Apr. 3), Pennsylvania (72 delegates on Apr. 24), and California (an enormous 172 delegates on June 5).

Here’s an angle on these contests that could provide not only a heads-up on where the most dramatic showdowns might occur but also another dimension to the story of how outside money and negative ads have pretty much taken over the process: Some smart political reporting unit should be bird-dogging the ad sales people for local television stations in markets in those states, looking to find out if the Romney campaign and allied super PAC are buying enough ad time right now to carry out against Santorum or Gingrich the same kind of carpet bombing they did in Florida, where a reported $15.3 million ad buy buried Gingrich.

Following the scare produced by the loss in South Carolina, the Romney team proved in Florida that it could and would spend whatever it takes to snuff out the strongest not-Romney contender. To take one example of what it would mean for Romney to use that formula in upcoming contests, it costs more to blanket Texas with ads than it does Florida, and there is a longer run-up to that race than there was between South Carolina and Florida. That could translate into an ad spend of $40 million or $50 million across the Lone Star State.

Buying that much time in a compressed period takes lots of planning and purchase orders in multiple media markets, and it completely upends the advertising and media business in these locales. Which means that if it’s happening, a good reporter should be able to get ad sales people in various Texas markets to talk about it. Local advertisers and ad agencies, which will see their own rates and schedules affected, will also be good sources. Ditto local media markets across Georgia, Pennsylvania or any of these other battlegrounds.

In fact, because delegates are often awarded in large part on a winner-take-all basis by congressional district, as opposed to statewide, and because the Romney people are organized enough to be focused on these kinds of details, the best place to look for Romney saturation buys aimed at creating delegate-sensitive firewalls would be in media markets in congressional districts in states such as California or Georgia that are rated as toss-ups.

2. Inside the Komen PR firestorm:

An article in last week’s Advertising Age casually mentioned that former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who now has a “sports communications strategy” firm, was involved in advising the Susan G. Komen Foundation in picking a new vice-president for communications last December — which is when the foundation cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. That’s just one of the tidbits I’d like to read more about in a behind-the-scenes “tick tock” about how Komen created and dealt with the firestorm in the 72 hours from when its suspension of funding for Planned Parenthood became public via an Associated Press story to when it reversed the decision (with several contradictory explanations for the original decision offered by Komen officials in between).

In the wake of the resignation on Feb. 7 of Komen Vice-President for Public Policy Karen Handel, there has been much speculation on how the foundation blundered so badly — much of it centering on the role played by Handel, an anti-abortion former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia. But what really happened is still largely a mystery, especially when the denial by Komen Chief Executive Officer Nancy Brinker that Handel played a significant role in the December decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood is juxtaposed against Handel’s statement when she resigned that, “I openly acknowledge my role in the matter.”

Who really was calling the shots? Which of Komen’s many corporate sponsors, if any, were consulted beforehand? Which, if any, applied pressure to cut off Planned Parenthood? And was that because anti-family-planning or anti-choice groups exerted pressure on them?

Did anyone at Komen think about the political consequences back in December when the decision was made? Maybe it’s my mainstream media bias showing, but what seems particularly curious to me is that a group whose support is based on its standing as a champion of women’s health really thought its credibility and fundraising would be enhanced by picking a fight with Planned Parenthood.

Who thought that the rationale of denying money to any organization that is under any kind of “investigation” — including the typically politicized “investigations” carried out by some congressional subcommittee chairmen — would survive more than a few hours before being discredited?

Who are the people who now run Komen? Who are the most powerful people on the board, and what are their political leanings? How much do the top executives get paid? Who are the biggest contributors? (Partial answers to the last two questions should be available in the foundation’s IRS Form 990 filing, which is public.) Does this fiasco say something about the dangers of small, idealistic charities becoming too rich and too big?

Finally, how was the social media tsunami that rose up monitored, and who led the push for Komen’s about-face in response to it?

3. The book on Foxconn:

Now that the New York Times has published a landmark article on working conditions at the Chinese companies, particularly the Foxconn manufacturing behemoth, in Apple’s supply chain (which followed a public radio This American Life report last month), I’m hoping there is a book editor out there thinking about The Jungle.

That’s Upton Sinclair’s 1906 opus about conditions in American meatpacking factories. Some envelope-pushing editor and publishing house should try to figure out how to get an undercover reporter-writer into Foxconn for at least a few months to give us the fuller story in a rich, detailed narrative. That’s a lot easier said than done. In fact, it could be an assignment where the reporter ends up in a Chinese prison, or worse. But whoever figures this out — and does it the right way, by reporting all the ups and downs of daily life producing iPhones and iPads through the eyes of his or her fellow workers – is going to have one of this age’s most successful and important books. Editor’s note: On March 16, This American Life retracted its Foxconn report, saying that it had been “partially fabricated.”

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivers remarks at the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, February 10, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst