Stories I’d like to see

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