Some would-be spectators hoping to attend Vice President Dick Cheney's rally in Rio Rancho [New Mexico] this weekend walked out of a Republican campaign office miffed and ticketless Thursday after getting this news:
Unless you sign an endorsement for President George W. Bush, you're not getting any passes.
The Albuquerque Bush-Cheney Victory office in charge of doling out the tickets to Saturday's event was requiring the endorsement forms from people it could not verify as supporters.
[...]
An endorsement form provided to the [Albuquerque] Journal by Random says: "I, (full name) ... do herby [sic] endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States." It later adds that, "In signing the above endorsement you are consenting to use and release of your name by Bush-Cheney as an endorser of President Bush."
The Republicans don't need one or two isolated MoveOn contestants to point out the Nazi parallels when their party comes up with creepy shit like this all by themselves.
Over at PBS, some 7.7 million viewers tuned in during its Tuesday night coverage, a greater audience than the combined 6 million viewers watching CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to Nielsen stats.
The "conventional wisdom" churned out daily by the so-called mainstream cable news media titans turns out to be peripheral. When the audiences of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC combined can't approach the audience drawn to PBS's broadcast of an unmediated political convention, the nature of the cable networks' position as the radical fringe of ultramediated American discourse becomes obvious.
An aside. Why I blog: Because I don't give a flying fuck about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jackson or Scott Peterson or whoever the perp du jour is. This is an attempt to retain a teacup of sanity against the tidal wave of dross known as the American media universe.
And Ross is justified in his boredom with Elvis Costello who despite his brilliance destroys everything he touches outside his pop-rock milieu, notably the career of his wife Diana Krall whose latest CD (thanks to his contributions) lays there stripped of all the sophisticated sheen she brought to her earlier recordings.
Tubb [Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician] prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.
“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
Suddenly Ken Lay is in a better position than even the child-emperor he helped install into Washington.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld a 1998 Alabama law banning the sale of sex toys in the state, ruling the Constitution doesn't include a right to sexual privacy.
In a 2-1 decision overturning a lower court, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the state has a right to police the sale of devices that can be sexually stimulating.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented merchants and users who sued to overturn the law, asked the appeals court to rule that the Constitution included a right to sexual privacy that the ban on sex toy sales would violate. The court declined, indicating such a decision could lead down other paths.
In other news, Log Cabin Republicans commit mass suicide.
MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- A computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines, raising again the specter of election troubles in Florida, where the new technology was supposed to put an end to such problems.
The crashes occurred in May and November of 2003, erasing information from the September 2002 gubernatorial primaries and other elections, elections officials said Tuesday.
The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.
Yes, but what is Plan B when the Supreme Court, just like a touchscreen voting machine, malfunctions? What will the Democratic legal strategy be?
Shouldn't other countries, civilized countries like France or Germany, be called upon to supervise our elections?
Bush offered a glimpse of his new pastime to an Associated Press reporter Monday, roaming the dirt roads and far-flung pastures of his 1,600-acre ranch. About halfway through, he sailed over the handlebars during a dangerous descent, but dusted himself off, picked up his $3,100 bicycle and kept riding.
Bush, who was wearing a helmet and a mouth guard, escaped injury other than a small cut on his knee. But he conceded he was a little shaken up, riding tentatively as he descended the rest of the downhill.
Crashing is a routine part of mountain biking, a sport in which riders roll over loose dirt, rocks and other obstacles. Nevertheless, the president said, it's easier on his body than jogging, which was grinding his knees.
"This is like running except I don't feel bad afterward," he said Monday after burning about 1,200 calories over an 18-mile ride that lasted an hour and 20 minutes.
"You can cover a lot more, and you can go very fast on a bike," Bush said. Most important, he gets his heart rate up. "At my age, you're more concerned about the cardiovascular" benefits of a workout, the 58-year-old president said.
Would it be too much to use a stationary bike and get briefed by Condi Rice on Al Qaeda counterterrorism efforts? Oh, right...
"You can go very fast on a bike." This is an observation we can expect from My Pet Goat.
And what's all this yakking about cardiovascular benefits?
First Command, last resort. The editorial geniuses at National Review Online have published an article by a certain Patrick A. Swan, "a former First Command agent and current First Command client" who -- surprise! -- is unhappy with the New York Times's portrayal of First Command Financial Planning as less than salutary.
Ken Lay, former Enron officer, is unhappy with what's said about Enron, too. That doesn't mean what's said is wrong.
What's really at stake, a point Mr. Swan neglects, is the financial health of our soldiers. First Command and its predatory practices are unethical -- if not in law, than in the spirit of taking thoroughly discredited forms of fifty percent loads (sales commissions) from Americans who are willing to make a sacrifice of their lives in the service of their country. The financial abuse of soldiers held captive by First Command was noted in the mainstream personal financial press, notably in Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine last year.
The fake patriotism of the political right wing has never been so threadbare. NRO should be ashamed to publish the words of someone who approves of bilking US soldiers out of their savings with punitively high sales commissions.
Idiots, each and all. Why did they kowtow to Eastwood and his piece of shit? Perhaps we'll never know.
All the scenery-chewing (note especially Sean Penn and Tim Robbins), based on the fraudulent deck-stacking of the script and direction, added up to nothing because there were no characters in the movie, only Pavlovian responses to a barrage of directorial manipulations. Kevin Bacon is "seething"? No, he's drawing a blank because the director was too lazy to give him a part to play that resembled anything approaching a human being. Off and on for two hours Bacon's "character" speaks on his cell phone to a pair of lips that are supposed to represent his damaged emotional life. What the lips represented instead was Eastwood's utter inability to direct a scene.
Bad, bad, bad. Any critic who suggests that this lazy-ass, inept filmmaking is anything but ignorable would have been killed off in a better murder mystery.
Willfully deaf. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, 9-11-01 was not a "failure of imagination" so much as willful deafness on the part of those in decision-making capacity. It was a failure of responsibility and accountability and a triumph of privilege and complacency, as has been its aftermath.
Bush and his principal advisers had all received briefings on terrorism, including Bin Ladin. In early September 2000, Acting Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin led a team to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and gave him a wide-ranging, four-hour review of sensitive information. Ben Bonk, deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, used one of the four hours to deal with terrorism.To highlight the danger of terrorists obtaining chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons, Bonk brought along a mock-up suitcase to evoke the way the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult had spread deadly sarin nerve agent on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Bonk told Bush that Americans would die from terrorism during the next four years.156 During the long contest after election day, the CIA set up an office in Crawford to pass intelligence to Bush and some of his key advisers.157 Tenet, accompanied by his deputy director for operations, James Pavitt, briefed President-elect Bush at Blair House during the transition. President Bush told us he asked Tenet whether the CIA could kill Bin Ladin, and Tenet replied that killing Bin Ladin would have an effect but would not end the threat. President Bush told us Tenet said to him that the CIA had all the authority it needed.158
In December, Bush met with Clinton for a two-hour, one-on-one discussion of national security and foreign policy challenges. Clinton recalled saying to Bush,"I think you will find that by far your biggest threat is Bin Ladin and the al Qaeda." Clinton told us that he also said,"One of the great regrets of my presidency is that I didn’t get him [Bin Ladin] for you, because I tried to."159 Bush told the Commission that he felt sure President Clinton had mentioned terrorism,but did not remember much being said about al Qaeda. Bush recalled that Clinton had emphasized other issues such as North Korea and the Israeli- Palestinian peace process.160
In early January, Clarke briefed Rice on terrorism. He gave similar presentations —describing al Qaeda as both an adaptable global network of jihadist organizations and a lethal core terrorist organization—to Vice President–elect Cheney,Hadley, and Secretary of State–designate Powell. One line in the briefing slides said that al Qaeda had sleeper cells in more than 40 countries, including the United States.161 Berger told us that he made a point of dropping in on Clarke’s briefing of Rice to emphasize the importance of the issue. Later the same day, Berger met with Rice. He says that he told her the Bush administration would spend more time on terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular than on anything else. Rice’s recollection was that Berger told her she would be surprised at how much more time she was going to spend on terrorism than she expected,but that the bulk of their conversation dealt with the faltering Middle East peace process and North Korea. Clarke said that the new team,having been out of government for eight years, had a steep learning curve to understand al Qaeda and the new transnational terrorist threat.162
"Another product heavily promoted to military people is a type of mutual fund in which 50 percent of the first-year contributions are consumed as fees, a deal considered so expensive that such funds all but disappeared from the civilian market almost 20 years ago," a tragedy we posted about here 11 months ago, the last time the former governor of Texas took his month-long vacation. I wrote at the time, "These are our soldiers they are bilking. The words 'unfair,' 'severely tilted playing field,' and 'lying, scheming scoundrels' come to mind."
It almost goes without saying that First Command, like Halliburton and Enron, is a Texas company.
With the U.S. economy expanding and the labor market improving, it isn't clear how well the Democrats' message of a divided America will resonate with voters this fall. But many economists believe the economic recovery has indeed taken two tracks....
Upper-income families, who pay the most in taxes and reaped the largest gains from the tax cuts President Bush championed, drove a surge of consumer spending a year ago that helped to rev up the recovery. Wealthier households also have been big beneficiaries of the stronger stock market, higher corporate profits, bigger dividend payments and the boom in housing.
Lower- and middle-income households have benefited from some of these trends, but not nearly as much. For them, paychecks and day-to-day living expenses have a much bigger effect. Many have been squeezed, with wages under pressure and with gasoline and food prices higher. The resulting two-tier recovery is showing up in vivid detail in the way Americans are spending money.
[...]
At high-end Bulgari stores, meanwhile, consumers are gobbling up $5,000 Astrale gold and diamond "cocktail" rings made for the right hand, a spokeswoman says. The Italian company's U.S. revenue was up 22% in the first quarter. Neiman Marcus Group Inc., flourishing on sales of pricey items like $500 Manolo Blahnik shoes, had a 13.5% year-over-year sales rise at stores open at least a year.
By contrast, such "same store" sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., retailer for the masses, were up just 2.2% in June. Wal-Mart believes higher gasoline costs are pinching its customers. At Payless ShoeSource Inc., which sells items like $10.99 pumps, June same-store sales were 1% below a year earlier.
[...]
"To date, the [recovery's] primary beneficiaries have been upper-income households," concludes Dean Maki, a J.P. Morgan Chase (and former Federal Reserve) economist who has studied the ways that changes in wealth affect spending. In research he sent to clients this month, Mr. Maki said, "Two of the main factors supporting spending over the past year, tax cuts and increases in [stock] wealth, have sharply benefited upper income households relative to others."
[...]
Mr. Maki of J.P. Morgan Chase estimates that in terms of dollars saved, the top 20% of households by income got 77% of the benefit of the 2003 tax cuts, and roughly 50% of the 2001 tax cuts. And of stocks held by households, roughly 75% are owned by the top 20% of those households. That made them prime beneficiaries of last year's stock-market rally, although also big sufferers from the stock carnage from 2000 to 2002.
The affluent also benefit more from stock dividends, on which the federal income-tax rate was cut last year retroactive to the start of 2003. Total dividend payments have risen 11% to $3 billion since the end of 2002, estimates Berkeley's Mr. Saez. Higher-income households also are larger beneficiaries of the surge in corporate earnings, which helps to drive dividend and stock returns. The level of corporate profits has risen 42% since the last recession, which ended in the final quarter of 2001. Wage and salary income is up just 6.3% in that time. Meanwhile, housing values have appreciated fastest in the most affluent regions during the past three years, according to research by Fiserv CSW Inc., which tracks home prices.
Many economists say the lopsided recovery is now at a critical juncture. The impetus from new tax cuts has largely passed, and the stock market has lost momentum, two factors that could slow the pace of higher-income people's spending in the months ahead. As a result, the time has come for the recovery either to broaden out to more-modest income groups -- or possibly lose momentum.
[...]
Many in this [lower- and middle-income] group are also getting squeezed as health-care costs rise and companies seek to shift the burden to workers. From 2000 to 2003, employees' average annual out-of-pocket expenses for family medical premiums rose 49% to $2,412, according to an employer survey by Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Menlo Park, Calif.
A 49 percent increase in average family medical premiums from 2000 to 2003, at the same time the uppermost income tier received 50 to 77 percent of the tax "relief"?
I am not anticapitalist, but these statistics are rooted in punitive policies. Why is the American upper class punishing the lower classes for having less?
Riggs National Corp., facing regulatory and political assault for dealings at its once-venerable embassy-banking division, agreed to sell itself to PNC Financial Services Group Inc. for $779 million in stock and cash.
The deal marks the fate of a storied institution whose roots stretch back 165 years. Known as the bank of U.S. presidents, it financed the Mexican-American War and the purchase of Alaska. Under Joe L. Allbritton, a Washington billionaire and [Bush family pal*] power broker whose family controlled Riggs, the bank cornered the market for diplomatic banking, servicing most of the embassies in the nation's capital.
But the diplomatic business, which became the bank's calling card, turned out to be its undoing. Regulators earlier this year fined Riggs $25 million, a near record, for a range of money-laundering violations related to its oversight of accounts held by diplomats and foreign leaders. And this week, a Senate panel blasted the bank for turning "a blind eye" to evidence of extensive corruption involving U.S. oil companies and the president of Equatorial Guinea. The bank allegedly also helped former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet hide millions of dollars from U.S. and European authorities.
[...]
May 13 [2004]: Federal banking agencies impose $25 million fine on Riggs for money-laundering violations related to accounts held by diplomats in Saudi Arabia.
For the uncle part of the story, unreported in the Journal, we rely instead on links provided by Holden at Atrios.
There we see that Uncle Jonathan Bush was President, Chief Executive Officer, and a Director of Riggs Bank.
*When George W. Bush's inaugural parade passed the Riggs branch on Pennsylvania Avenue, he spotted [Joe] Allbritton and said, "Hey Joe, how are you doing?"
Check this out too: "Inside safe deposit boxes at Riggs Bank is more than $710 million in cashier's checks that Riggs doesn't want. Neither does any other bank. The stash, once in checking accounts held by the embassies of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea, is likely to grow."
"...I don't think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso - close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states - something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso's biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby's, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars"
"...it is ridiculous that some of them should have the amount of influence they do merely because the tax laws enable them to use museums as megaphones for their own sometimes-debatable taste."
"It's not clear which is sadder: The fact that George W. Bush hates to read because he never took book-learning seriously, or the fact that [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] Rice doesn't read for pleasure because her parents made her read so much growing up that reading is a chore." Fiona Morgan in Salon.
[Criminal sycophant LARRY] KING: How did they, since it wasn't you, how did they pull this off? Was it Mr. Fastow? Was he a genius?
[Former Enron CEO/Chairman KEN] LAY: I don't think anybody has questioned Andy's intelligence. Andy is a very intelligent individual.
KING: He's going to testify. He's one of the government witness against you.
LAY: I'm sure he'll be in the trial...
KING: His wife went to jail.
LAY: Which is very sad, Larry...
KING: Did you like her?
LAY: Well, as far as like individuals, they're both God's children. Just like we all are and they're lovely people and, I mean, as far as the context of just the individuals, but they have small children. It's just an enormous tragedy on that family.
I'm so glad I missed this interview. The nausea this induces is truly profound.
The Fastows, according to Kenny Boy Lay, are "God's children." But the Enron employees who bought Enron stock for their 401(k) plans when Ken said "Buy" (but secretly sold $90 million worth), well, they must be something far less than the children of God -- they're the children of Enron.
Instead of a postponement of the November election, why don't we all just agree now that if there's a major terrorist attack we should insist on a reversal of the last election?
Why is Ken Lay smiling? mmw at bad things rightly points out that I have a tendency to vanish whenever my pet bugaboo, the Enron scandal, heats up. I'm afraid I don't have much to add now that Kenny Boy has been indicted, except that no matter what happens to him beyond this point it was all worth it for him.
For the small sum of a half-million dollars he managed to help get a man into the White House who now avoids even a mention of him as if it were some rare form of Texan cancer, but who allowed Lay to secretly dictate energy policy with the avid cooperation of Dick Cheney.
Lay's indictment and the handcuffs are a piece of theatre designed for mass media consumption. Lay's little stroll was about the smilingest perp walk I've ever seen.
And the money. Oh, the money. The highest estimate I've seen so far is that he could be fined as much as $5 million. Even if he had to pay the maximum fine, by my calculations, that would still earn him a 1800% return on his investment (i.e., the fine, relative to the $90 million he stole from Enron shareholders). Seems generous, especially compared to what your savings account offers these days. That is, if you have any money left, as so few former Enron employees appear to do.
Supposedly he has less than $20 million left of the original $90 million he stole, but that's because he was given three years to hide $70 million. Don't you think you could do that with a combination of offshore accounts and annuities that pay you income for life (but without the messy accountability of being able to be seized by legitimate creditors, even by court order)?
Why is this man smiling? Because he got away with it. Even if they fine him the maximum, he got away with it.
John Emerson at Seeing the Forest provides a nice compendium of handy Enron links for your amusement or outrage as the case may be.
Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.
It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.
The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.
The dissenting views regarding Iraq's weapons programs in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and the cautionary notes sounded by intelligence analysts at the Energy and State departments regarding nuclear matters, and the Air Force's concern regarding Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicle program all fell on willfully deaf ears. In contrast, the CIA's analysis of terrorism, which found only weak connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, elicited considerable questioning from policymakers. Undoubtedly, this was because the administration's decision to invade Iraq had already been made.
[...]
The responsibility for problems related to prewar intelligence regarding Iraq should not be confined to intelligence analysts at the CIA but should extend to policymakers as well -- particularly those at the Defense and State departments, the National Security Council, and the White House.
Likewise, the same parties must be held accountable for the color-coded, duct-tape fakery behind the terrorism alerts that Tom Ridge is told to trot out whenever it's politically expedient.
