This arrangement might have been more complicated. There were two companies — Poseidon Books and Poseidon Press. Poseidon Books is a vanity press, which charges authors to publish their own manuscripts.

If you run a Google search for “Poseidon Books” “Poseidon Press” you will find that many books have been published by both publishers. Apparently if a book published as a vanity product by Poseidon Books showed significant potential, the book then was published by as a non-vanity product by Poseidon Press (i.e. by Simon & Schuster).

So, was the $125,000 advance paid to Obama by Poseidon Press (i.e. by Simon & Schuster), or was it paid by someone else who had contracted with Poseidon Books to initiate Obama’s book as a vanity project?

Here’s how this project might have been arranged. In 1990 some unknown initiator wanted to pay law student Barack Obama $125,000 to begin writing a book about race relations. For some reason, however, the initiator did not want to give Obama the money directly but rather indirectly through an intermediary, so that the initiator’s role remained concealed. Therefore the initiator gave the money to a book agent, who wrote a book contract advancing $125,000 to Obama for the future book. The book agent then would have paid a standard vanity-press fee to Poseidon Books so that the contract named a real publisher. The initiator would have paid that vanity-press fee and also some money to the agent, so the initiator’s total expense would have exceeded $125,000.

Three years later, Obama still had not finished the book, but no book publisher was economically harmed and concerned. Only the unknown initiator had paid any money for the unfinished manuscript, and if he wasn’t complaining, then there was no problem.

In 1993 Simon & Schuster dissolved Poseidon Press and therefore dissolved its indirect relationship with Poseidon Books. Those dissolutions freed Obama to re-sell his book project to Times Books, a part of Random Press, which gave him a new $40,000 advance for a manuscript, written by Ayers, that was almost ready for publication.

I thought the reference was to the internal rhythm of *cults* which AQ is, according to the “all camel no turbin” theory.

They say success is where preparation meets opportunity. It is not unreasonable to assume that, given a minimum degree of complexity, “success” has a meta-rhythm that fits a statistical distribution describing the likelihood of two conditions being present at the same time.

http://www.routledge.com/books/Handbook-of-Social-Justice-in-Education-isbn9780805859287

“if O hires a whole bunch of ex-Clintonites, who do you suppose they might be reporting inner-circle secrets to after they get home?”

If Obama hires ex-Cintonites then we can breath a sigh of relief (it’ll mean that Obama is under Democratic party control and he’ll probably time-out harmlessly after 4 years). However if Obama loads his staff up with 1970s radicals, wealthy liberals and/or left-wing academics from outside Washington then we maybe in serious trouble.

That will be his first milestone. The economy is really outside of his control but the noises that he makes about the economy will be of interest.

Eventually the Islamic fascists, Putin or the Chinese government will test Obama and that will be his moment to shine or seriously fail.

This could be fun. I think we should encourage the appointment of entities such as Gorlick, Madeline Albright, Janet Reno, Warren Christopher … Monica Lewinsky.