Are you following me around?
Is there anyway my post can be taken seriously after I totally fell victim to your baiting last week without it seem like I am baiting you?
Seriously, though I am not sure I understand your point. I am either too tired, your post was confusing, or I am a dope. Maybe a combination of these 3.
Are you following me around?
Is there anyway my post can be taken seriously after I totally fell victim to your baiting last week without it seem like I am baiting you?
Seriously, though I am not sure I understand your point. I am either too tired, your post was confusing, or I am a dope. Maybe a combination of these 3.[/quote]
What on earth are you talking about?
I am not sure. Long week. Need sleep.
I will attempt to resume this discussion tomorrow. Please ignore my last post as it was obviously the nonsensical ramblings of a dufus.
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/07/12/harken/index_np.html
‘When President Bush sold more than 200,000 shares in Harken Energy Corp. in June 1990, he said he did not know the company was in bad financial shape. But memos from the company show in great detail that he was apprised of how badly the company’s fortunes were failing before he sold his stock – and that he was warned by company lawyers against selling stock based on insider information.’
Batten down the scandal hatches, rough sailin’ up ahead.
Well, a scandal among all three of the people that subscribe to Salon Premium… ;)
Does it matter? We’re all alive, isnt that what matters? Golly G.
etc
Here’s a LA Times article ( http://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-aloha12jul12.story) on Harken’s Aloha deal featuring Bush on the auditing oversight committee. It’s got everything including references to Enron and defensive quotes from the Palestinian rep of the Saudi’s that owned 13% of the company.
There are times you just smell blood in the water. September 11th and Enron. How unrelated can things be? In the case of America’s corporate run foreign policy - not very. I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceburg here. Bush is more of a joyrider and stooge than villian but Cheney’s Haliburton was a big profiteer from both the war and oil industries - combine that with some Arthur Andersen magic and voila!
Here’s the beauty - we’ll never be able to do anything meaningful about the influence of corporate money in politics because the politicians are just as addicted to the money as the corporations are to cheap oil and deregulation. Even the Democratic party, which has some claim as the real reform party, is looking for ways around finance reform.
We are screwed. Have a nice day.
…and people thought the corruption model in Civ 3 democracies were unrealistic! I think Sid realized after so and so years in the business that capitalism is as much a haven for corruption as communism!!! maybe not…
etc
Well, a scandal among all three of the people that subscribe to Salon Premium… ;)
I am one of the three 
. Stuff like this is why I like the site.
This subject is drawing the interest of the mainstream media. They were peppering him with questions the other day at his news conference. It probably won’t last long but it is good to see the press pay attention to heavier topics than Bush working out or giving a tour of the White House.
-DavidCPA
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2002/07/17/bush_comments/index.html
With Bush’s assessment of Chaney’s chances of coming clear on the Haliburton investigation, it is my professional opinion that Chaney will be forced to resign in 9-12 months.
-DavidCPA
It’s certain that Cheney profited much more from Haliburton than the Clintons did from Whitewater. If there’s a hint of a scandal, it is incumbent upon Congress to investigate. Cheney’s just a heartbeat away from being the President.
Instead of $70 million and seven years, how about just $40 million and four years to investigate Cheney? Hey, if he’s clean he has nothing to worry about, right?
Honestly, I know that it’s really easy for reasonable political inquiries (Whitewater, way, way back; like maybe the first month, after which it pretty obvious nothing untoward happened, was perfectly justifiable) to take on a life of their own and become a community-destroying cancer on politics. Maybe Democrats should refuse to play the game on the principle of being slimy, even though they have Bush dead to rights on Harken - it’s a perfect example to point out that the adminstration’s interests relating to the market, taxes, capital formation, and disclosure run counter to those of the vast majority of the country.
Then again, that’s a recipe for losing, over and over and over, as the right manages to twist themselves into whatever necessary ideological contortions to be shockingly offended by whatever the hell a powerful Democrat may or may not have did or created the appearence of impropriety in doing, while tittering behind their hands at the sucker Democrats refusing to throw the comparable sucker punch out of high-road distaste.
Clinton beat the elder Bush because he was willing to play by the game of Lee Atwater: demagogue the hell out of everything. However, Democrats, by and large I think, tend to pick much more intellectually defensible positions when it comes to slime politics and scandal - look at Clinton’s 92 campaign. I don’t recall defamation and insults from Clinton; just repeating as effectively as possible how bad Bush’s economic policies were for the country.
Clinton did all sorts of mean things to Bush, but they were on the issues. By contrast, Bush spent most of the election repeating that Clinton was a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, moral relativist who renounced his US citizenship on a college-era trip to the USRR. He had the whore of Babylon for a wife, favored kindergarten indoctrination of children into homosexuality, and…horror of horrors…cheated on his wife. He’s Slick Willie, the no-good, black-loving literal incarnation of the dark side of Elvis Presley, with the transferred power of black sexuality to lure your daughters into miscegenation and lesbianism. He has slicked-back hair, won’t shut up about Woodstock, and is going to confiscate your property and ship it to inner city parasites.
Sure, the Democrat do the same thing: crude racebaiting and ludicrous Nazi comparisions come to mind. I think they’re an order of magnitude less common, though, and they aren’t used as the mainstream approach to forwarding your political agenda, as in the GOP. If you don’t believe me, look at any given day over on the National Review’s website, or search for that memo Gingrich handed out in the early 1990s which directed candidates in the use of perjorative terms to describe Democrats and their policies. I can’t find it online; I’ll post bits when I get home.
Republicans intentionally try to drive down voter turnout in elections. They opposed the moter voter bill because it would make the registration of people more likely to be Democratic voters easier. The GOP party brass sent their congressional staff down to Florida to stage a protest that shimmied right up to the edge of political violence (pounding on windows, encircling counters), in hopes of forcing the vote recounters to shut down their operations. John Fund of the WSJ praised this completely craven act of political intimidation as a “bourgeosie riot.” John Stockman, Reagan’s OMB director, stated in a famed (among policy types) interview in Reagan’s first term that the reason the administration was running massive deficits was to starve government and force unpopular cuts: rather than convince the public why it should eliminate any federal programs, they planned to force the government into fiscal crisis and use it as an backdoor to shove unpopular spending cuts down the public’s throat. In 1994, Gingrich and company attempted the process all over again through shutting down the government.
In just about every way I can think of, the GOP exhibits a overriding contempt for democracy, thinking the public too clueless and in thrall to the conspiracy of corporate-owned centrist media to understand the obvious superiority of their positions. They need to be defeated at the polls, and I honestly don’t care anymore how it’s done. To use a line from a particularly bad Tom Clancy novel, after reading David Brock’s confessional, and then seeing him subsequently smeared as “having been committed to a mental ward” with unsourced comments and sneering hackwork discrediation by Jonah Goldberg, Matt Drudge, and the rest of the echo-chamber conservative press, the gloves are fucking off. It’s time for the Democrats to do all they can, legally (in contrast to quite a bit the GOP has done), to get them the hell out of office.
Whew. Oh, the Clancy thing:
I cannot describe how bad the book is.
Oh, a non-Bush related followup: AOL lied, lied lied about their earnings.
Read that AOL article. Someone needs to put a stop to that kind of book juggling.
Robert Pittman, the main AOL executive mentioned in the Post article, resigned today. Of course that probably means he has a golden parachute the size of Texas to console him in this most disheartening situation.
-DavidCPA