All told, it was a fabulous year to be very rich. The magazine counted 587 billionaires around the world, up from 476 in 2003. Their total net worth jumped to $1.9 trillion from $1.4 trillion in 2003.
"After two years of significantly falling fortunes, we really saw an uptick for just about everybody on the list," said Luisa Kroll, an associate editor who oversaw the project.
This, not the 2.8 million jobs lost, is what Bush means when he talks about economic recovery.
NASCAR in the grandstand, champagne in the private club. Is that a Dom Perignon logo on Dale Earnhardt's car?
CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is on a crusade -- and oddly, his target is the U.S. business establishment. Nearly every night for the past year, in a campaign he calls "Exporting America," Mr. Dobbs has railed against companies that move jobs to low-wage countries.
On recent broadcasts of "Lou Dobbs Tonight," he has called for President Bush to fire a top economic adviser who said outsourcing U.S. service jobs is probably good for the economy, and lauded Congress for considering legislation to limit government work from being sent overseas. On his section of CNN's Web site, Mr. Dobbs has compiled a list of more than 200 companies that he says are "either sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor, instead of American workers."
The ferocity of Mr. Dobbs's attack has surprised and even angered some observers used to associating the well-known Republican financial journalist with spirited defenses of capitalism and cozy interviews with America's top chief executives.
"It's really one of the most dramatic shifts of attitude and persona that TV has seen," says David Bernknopf, a media strategist and former CNN vice president. "Lou was always seen by corporate America as a reliable and generally friendly journalist. Now he has shifted 180 degrees and has clearly dedicated his show to criticizing a lot of the way that corporate America does business."
[...]
Mr. Dobbs insists he hasn't dramatically changed his tune, saying he just wants the U.S. government to study the consequences of outsourcing so it can make wise policy decisions. "I am an absolute free market capitalist, but I believe in true free markets and the importance of clear, accurate information to create free markets," he says.
On the air, Mr. Dobbs sometimes takes a caustic tone with guests who disagree with him. "What is it with you people?" Mr. Dobbs asked after Mr. Glassman [James K. Glassman, a conservative commentator who sparred with Mr. Dobbs on the air earlier this month] commented on the benefits of a trade deficit. Later in the same show, Mr. Dobbs told Mr. Glassman: "You talk like a cult member."
Mr. Glassman says the interview was "an amazing experience. I knew he was going to be very argumentative, but I think he sort of lost it." Mr. Dobbs now says his comment was aimed at "the orthodoxy amongst too many economists, too many in business who simply say it's free trade and the hell with the consequences."
It may be premature to label Dobbs a "capitalist against Bush" as we have done for Warren Buffett and Seth Glickenhaus. But the sudden politicization of his ordinarily pro-business approach deserves watching.
Side note: "Mr. Dobbs conducted another crusade two years ago. When federal prosecutors went after the accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP for its role in Enron Corp.'s collapse, Mr. Dobbs repeatedly denounced on-air what he saw as the federal government's effort to destroy 'the livelihoods of most of those 85,000 innocent people' who worked at Andersen."
The observation that 85,000 jobs of innocent Andersen employees were obliterated while Ken Lay roams free and wealthy three years later has been a pet peeve here in Skimbleland as well. We repeat what may not be obvious: Andersen was most likely destroyed by the feds not for being Enron's auditor, but for being Halliburton's auditor during the reign of Cheney. No auditor means no evidence, and Cheney's financial shenanigans are lost to history.
(New York-WABC, February 23, 2004) — As New York City scrambles to cover security costs to protect against another terror attack, Eyewitness News has found millions in taxpayer dollars going to protect some of the nation's wealthiest companies.
[...]
Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano says that's money he could use. He's got numerous high-risk targets including the Indian Point nuclear plant and New York City's reservoirs, yet has only received a couple hundred thousand in direct security grants.
Andrew Spano: "Why the federal government would give us something like $200,000 -- which is what we have gotten -- and they give millions and millions to companies that are making exceptional amounts of money this year is beyond me."
Our analysis of Port Security documents show that some of the nation's most profitable oil companies received $66 million in grants. Money from the Department of Homeland Security to pay for fencing, cameras, and gates around big oil's refineries.
[...]
...only 15 percent of the half billion dollars in grants go to oil companies. Still that's $66 million that could go to those who really need it, like the local police chiefs we spoke with. None of whom say they have received any money from Homeland Security.
[...]
We should note that the nuclear power industry, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its own security, has not received any grants from Homeland Security.
This shows how seriously the Bush administration takes its so-called "War on Terror" — not at all.
Tax credits for the poor to buy health insurance such as those proposed by the Bush administration are unlikely to reduce the rolls of the estimated 43 million U.S. uninsured, a study released on Wednesday said.
The struggling economy and corporate layoffs have pushed record numbers of people off health insurance in recent years. Most Americans get health coverage through employers.
A remedy proposed by President Bush offers tax credits to the needy, who would be required to buy health insurance individually. Past Bush plans were projected to cost taxpayers $89 billion over 10 years.
But these people would have to spend significantly more if they took the tax credit option, according to an analysis of some 8,000 low-income Americans without health insurance.
That would lead few to opt for the credits and so would have little effect on health care coverage nationally, the study found. The grim choices facing the poor among food, shelter and health care are part of the reason for this, the report in the journal Health Affairs said.
[...]
For example, an uninsured family that spent $463 out of pocket on health care in 2001 dollars would have to lay out $2,511 if it chose the tax credit option modeled on one proposed by Bush.
Quintupling what the poor spend of their own limited money on health care — that's the Republican definition of "compassion."
So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn’t know.
The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent — a billion dollars! — by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.
Don't forget the blood of the 571 Americans who died to find nothing at all.
There are also positive reasons for dumping Mr Cheney. Bringing in a fresh face as vice-president would suggest that the second Bush term will be more than just a re-run of the first. It would also allow Mr Bush to add someone to the ticket who has a better chance of attracting swing voters than a retired CEO from a solid Republican state.
Who might that be? Rudy Giuliani might burnish Mr Bush's reputation for fighting terrorism, though he is not known for his ability to play second fiddle. Condoleezza Rice might do something to neutralise the Democrats' traditional advantage among blacks and women. But some Republicans would rather turn to Bill Owens, the governor of Colorado. There are signs that Mr Kerry is planning to write off the South in order to concentrate on loosening the Republicans' hold on the south-west. What better way to check this threat than to add the Republican Party's brightest western star to the ticket?
It hardly needs saying that replacing Mr Cheney would have to be done with the utmost finesse. Otherwise, it might seem that the Bush White House was falling apart. Mr Cheney would have to retire gracefully, blaming his dodgy heart (he has already had four heart attacks) and no doubt accepting a post as senior counsellor from a grief-stricken president. Persuading such a powerful vice-president to step aside will be no easy thing, of course. But the Bushes don't have a reputation as the Corleone family of the Republican Party for nothing. The next time Mr Cheney takes that jet to go duck-shooting, he may well find James Baker slipping into the seat behind him, with “a litl' proposal to discuss for the good of the party”.
I'm betting on Giuliani because the convention will be held in New York and because he, like the entire Bush administration, owes whatever political legacy he might have to 9-11-01.
A prominent Houston lawmaker's campaign fund-raising sweep at Reliant Energy has become part of a growing Travis County grand jury probe into possible criminal misuse of corporate funds to finance a Republican takeover of the Texas House.
Rep. Beverly Woolley, R-Houston, swept through Houston corporate offices on Sept. 9, 2002, raising money for targeted House races as well as for Texans for a Republican Majority, according to an itinerary of her travel obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
Notes on her itinerary indicate she spoke to some donors about what types of legislation they would like.
I hope she was wearing a cute little red-white-and-blue Republican waitress uniform while she was taking orders, writing their legislative preferences on her pad.
How safe will Reliant be from a scandal in the House? Another way of asking this: Is Reliant Energy a good enough tipper?
A few feet away, I could see police officers and orange-vested security agents holding the crowd back. It wasn't long before everyone realized we were being delayed until Bush had completed his entrance into the stadium.
After only a minute's pause, people started grumbling. Soon, they started yelling at the security detail. A few minutes more and they'd turned their ire on the president himself.
"We want to see the race, not Bush!" shouted someone in the crowd.
"Why didn't that SOB stay in Washington?" screamed Doug Shelby, the loudest of the voices.
[...]
Doug Shelby was denouncing Bush's policies -- and drawing agreement from the crowd. "We're $500 billion in debt and it's only getting worse!" he shouted.
Overhead, Lee Greenwood sang "God Bless the USA." The crowd started chanting obscenities.
After LeAnn Rimes sang the national anthem, the crowd above the grandstands started cheering; those below booed.
Then Bush's motorcade drove by. One middle finger went up in the crowd, then another, and soon they were everywhere.
In America, it's where you sit in the stadium that helps determine your ideology. As fewer and fewer people gain entry into the expensive seats and skyboxes and corporate suites, the Democratic base must grow.
[Henry] Bunting [a former employee for Halliburton in Iraq] displayed a towel that was monogrammed with the logo of a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, saying a company manager insisted on ordering the towels for between $4.50 and $5.50 each, instead of $1.60 for cheaper towels.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said the allegations concerning Halliburton were particularly grave, given that some U.S. soldiers couldn't get life-saving protective vests and body armor due to the prohibitively high cost.
Durbin also said he was troubled by the "millions of wasted dollars spent in the name of defense."
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called on Halliburton to disclose if it has been trading with Iran, in violation of U.S. sanctions.
"This week, my staff uncovered documents from the Department of Commerce revealing a flurry of business activities between Halliburton and the Iranian government when Vice President Cheney ran the company," Lautenberg.
"The documents indicate contacts between an Iranian oil company called Kala Ltd. and a subsidiary of Halliburton, Halliburton Products and Services, which has 'offices' in Dubai but is registered in the Cayman Islands," Lautenberg said.
"Despite the possibility that Halliburton - under Vice President Cheney's watch - was deliberately bypassing U.S. sanctions law to conduct business with the terrorist regime in Tehran, this administration, which purports to be waging a global war on terror, has given Halliburton contracts exceeding $9 billion to rebuild Iraq," Lautenberg said.
The New Jersey Senator said he has requested official Senate hearings to investigate billing abuses in Iraq for the last nine months but has so far received no reply from Republicans.
Surely this is getting uncomfortable even for stoic Cheney. This would be a good Rovian opportunity for a carefully-timed vice presidential heart attack.
Rather than picking the best scientists, the White House instead chooses people who are most likely to agree with their own ideological preferences. As the report puts it, "the current administration has repeatedly allowed political considerations to trump scientific qualifications in the appointment process."
The UCS report, which is endorsed by 20 Nobel prize winners, makes clear that it has no problem with arguments over policy. After all, there are usually plenty of facts and arguments on both sides of any policy question.
But suppressing actual research itself simply because you don't want to believe it is another thing entirely. It's hard to think of anything more corrosive to the scientific process, and the extent to which the Bush administration does this is unprecedented. Nixon didn't do it, Reagan didn't do it, and Bush Sr. and Clinton didn't do it. Only the current administration has done this on a regular and sustained basis.
Kevin has written the post I would have wanted to write, but his is only a hundred times better and with much more evidence systematically presented in his trademark manner.
Jeff Skilling, Enron's former CEO and COO, was likely indicted by the Enron grand jury in a sealed indictment today and is expected to surrender to the FBI in Houston early Thursday.
Sources told the Chronicle that the indictment named 50-year-old Skilling, who now becomes the top Enron executive to be accused of a crime in the trading giants stunning downfall.
Skilling has consistently denied any wrongdoing and testified before Congress rather than invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination, as other executives did.
The foreman of the specially formed Enron grand jury told U.S. Magistrate Judge Frances Stacy at about 4:00 p.m. today that he had one sealed indictment from the panel, which met part of Tuesday and most of Wednesday. Enron Task Force prosecutors Sam Buell, Kathryn Ruemmler and Sean Berkowitz asked that the indictment be sealed and the courtroom be cleared of spectators.
The specially formed Enron grand jury that will consider these charges against Skilling is nearly 2 years old and has been working more frequently as this investigation intensifies.
The charges against Skilling by Enron Task Force prosecutors follow the Jan. 21 indictment of ex-Enron Chief Accounting Officer Rick Causey and the Jan. 15 guilty pleas of former company Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and his wife.
Attorneys involved in the Enron criminal cases expect that Fastow, who agreed to serve 10 years in prison for two counts of conspiracy, gave prosecutors information that will add to the case against Skilling.
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration and Citigroup Inc. are proposing a joint $200 million arrangement to finance Iraq's imports, with the bank's revenue from the project guaranteed by Iraq's oil sales.
The plan, led by the federal Overseas Private Investment Corp., has raised some eyebrows inside the administration because it comes just a few months before the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority is to turn over sovereignty to a still-undetermined Iraqi government. It is far from clear whether the trade-finance project would get much done before the scheduled June 30 handover or whether the new Iraqi government would abandon it.
But OPIC officials believe their plan to facilitate letters of credit for Iraqi importers will help the economy recover and modernize. OPIC officials stress the assistance the project would provide to Iraqi private companies and private banks. It is an attempt to "put in the foundations that will achieve economic freedom for the Iraqis," said OPIC President Peter Watson.
The project would work through a series of guarantees for letters of credit, a standard tool used to smooth the flow of trade. Letters of credit guarantee payment to the seller -- say, a German drug company or an American tractor maker -- at the time it delivers the goods. Without such a letter, Iraqi importers -- who are by virtue of the country's situation considered huge credit risks -- would have to put up the cash beforehand and trust that the goods would eventually arrive.
In the case of the OPIC/Citigroup project, a Baghdad bank might issue a letter of credit for a local company's imports. An international bank would confirm the letter, assuming the risk of nonpayment. A separate institution, set up by Citigroup, would then guarantee that the international bank gets paid. Citigroup and OPIC would guarantee that the separate institution -- still nameless -- gets paid. Finally, the coalition would pledge to use Iraqi oil revenue to cover any Citigroup and OPIC losses.
Is it normal to accept letters of credit from invaded nations without governments? The arrangement sure stinks at first sniff.
At least we Americans can sleep better at night knowing Citigroup's revenues are guaranteed by the fruits of our taxes, although the job security, baseline medical coverage, and increasingly privatized retirement savings of our citizens are not.
Q: Did he have to do any community service while he was in the National Guard?
Scott McClellan: Look, Helen, I think the issue here was whether or not the President served in Alabama. Records have documented --
Q: I'm asking you a different question. That's permissible.
Scott McClellan: Can I answer your question? Sure it is. Can I ask you why you're asking it? I'm just -- out of curiosity myself, is that permissible?
Q: Well, I'm interested, of course, in what everybody is interested in. And we have a very --
Scott McClellan: Let me just point out that we've released all the information we have related to this issue, the issue of whether or not he served while in Alabama. Records have documented as false the outrageous --
Q: I asked you whether he had to do any community service while he was in the National Guard.
Scott McClellan: Can I walk through this?
Q: It's a very legitimate question.
Scott McClellan: And I want to back up and walk through this a little bit. Let's talk about the issue that came up, because this issue came up four years ago, it came up four years before that -- or two years before that, it came up four years before that --
Q: Did my question come up four years ago, and was it handled?
Scott McClellan: Helen, if you'll let me finish, I want to back up and talk about this --
Q: Don't dance around, just give us --
Q: It's a straightforward question.
Q: Let's not put too fine a point on it. If I'm not mistaken, you're implying that he had to do community service for criminal action, as a punishment for some crime?
Q: There are rumors around, and I didn't put it in that way. I just --
Q: Could you take that question? I guess apparently that's the question, that he had to take time out to perform community service --
Scott McClellan: That's why I wanted to get to this because --
Q: -- as a sentence for a crime.
Xymphora follows up on this line of questioning with a blunt hypothesis about the evidence for the probable crime of cocaine possession:
Rove is on his game here. By holding back the military records he has made the military records the issue, and has has managed to divert the media from the real issue, which is the community service. If those legal files ever get out, showing that Bush was convicted of a serious drug offence, his political career will be finished. The real reason that Bush went AWOL was that he couldn't afford to take a drug test. The real reason he couldn't afford to take a drug test was that it would have been a condition of his sentencing that he remain clean. If word of the failed drug test had filtered back to the court, he would have gone to jail. His fear of the criminal legal consequences is why he went AWOL, and that's why the community service is the key to understanding what is going on here. By concentrating on the military records, the media is walking right into Rove's trap.
So, you see, kids, drugs are bad. They can make you lose your illegitimate residency in the White House even thirty-odd years after you stopped snorting them.
In the crowd: It must have been some dish served up the other night at PlumpJack Cafe in the Marina.
There, gathered in one place, were billionaire Gordon Getty, his son Billy Getty, downtown tycoon and Democratic rainmaker Walter Shorenstein, mega- attorney and Democratic powerhouse Joe Cotchett and, the guest of honor -- Sharon Bush, soon-to-be ex-wife of Neil Bush, President's Bush's politically radioactive brother.
In case you've missed it, Sharon and hubby Neil have been providing more than their share of tabloid headlines lately with their nasty divorce proceedings.
The juicy disclosures go beyond just adulterous sex and a child possibly born out of wedlock. There's the more sensitive question of whether Neil used his White House ties to land a deal that could be worth millions, consulting for a computer chip company managed in part by the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
As for why Sharon Bush was sharing a table with this Democratic A-team, nobody is talking for the record. But a spy says Cotchett has been advising her on a book deal that could come on the heels of an upcoming piece about her and the "Bush family values'' in Vanity Fair.
Sharon's book could be much more explosive than David Brock's or Ron Suskind/Paul O'Neill's.
Here's the back story on the "child possibly born out of wedlock," and other Neilsie shenanigans.
"What you are refusing to acknowledge, a half trillion dollar current trade deficit. We are importing capital. We are squandering our wealth on a short-term basis, corporate America and U.S. multinationals are shipping jobs for only one reason, not for greater productivity, not for efficiencies, those are purely code words for cheaper labor costs and you know it and you won't admit it."
There's a lot here. Lou's loaded for bear and not backing off.
Every president has characteristic strengths and weaknesses. For better or worse, by the end of his term of office, Bill Clinton's reputation as a truth-teller was in tatters. But that was never his strong suit with voters anyway. The measure of his enduring strength with voters is best gauged in a question pollsters usually frame as 'does candidate X care about/understand the problems that affect people like you.'
Clinton always did very well on that question. It's the politics of empathy -- a topic which, when it comes to Clinton, one could literally write a whole book.
People never warmed to President Bush as a literary critic or a raconteur. And he's usually done okay, but not great, on the 'care about/understand' question. His strong suit has always been honesty and trustworthiness -- that and the closely related quality of 'leadership'. If he loses that, politically speaking, he's finished.
No one enjoys being lied to, particularly the hundreds of families who have lost loved ones to the dishonesty of this administration. Slowly but surely they're waking up to the falseness of the "patriotic" rush to war that has benefited no one but Bechtel, Halliburton and other corporate pals of the White House.
The Halloween presidency may have tricked itself out of a second term.
Recalls Memphian [Bob] Mintz, now 63: “I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with.” But, says Mintz, that “somebody” -- better known to the world now as the president of the United States -- never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a FedEx pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember.
[...]
“There’s no way we wouldn’t have noticed a strange rooster in the henhouse, especially since we were looking for him,” insists Mintz, who has pored over documents relating to the matter now making their way around the Internet. One of these is a piece of correspondence addressed to the 187th’s commanding officer, then Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, concerning Bush’s redeployment.
Mintz remembers a good deal of base scuttlebutt at the time about the letter, which clearly identifies Bush as the transferring party. “It couldn’t be anybody else. No one ever did that again, as far as I know.” In any case, he is certain that nobody else in that time frame, 1972-73, requested such a transfer into Dannelly.
Mintz, who at one time was a registered Republican and in recent years has cast votes in presidential elections for independent Ross Perot and Democrat Al Gore, confesses to “a negative reaction” to what he sees as out-and-out dissembling on President Bush’s part. “You don’t do that as an officer, you don’t do that as a pilot, you don’t do it as an important person, and you don’t do it as a citizen. This guy’s got a lot of nerve.”
Though some accounts reckon the total personnel component of the 187th as consisting of several hundred, the actual flying squadron – that to which Bush was reassigned – number only “25 to 30 pilots,” Mintz said. “There’s no doubt. I would have heard of him, seen him, whatever.” Even if Bush, who was trained on a slightly different aircraft than the F4 Phantom jets flown by the squadron, opted not to fly with the unit, he would have had to encounter the rest of the flying personnel at some point, in non-flying formations or drills. “And if he did any flying at all, on whatever kind of craft, that would have involved a great number of supportive personnel. It takes a lot of people to get a plane into the air. But nobody I can think of remembers him."
[...]
“I never saw hide nor hair of Mr. Bush,” confirms [Paul] Bishop, who now lives in Goldsboro, N.C., is a veteran of Gulf War I and, as a Kalitta pilot, has himself flown frequent supply missions into Iraq and to military facilities at Kuwait. He voted for Bush in 2000 and believes that the Iraq war has served some useful purposes – citing, as the White House does, disarmament actions since pursued by Libyan president Moammar Khadaffi – but he is disgruntled both about aspects of the war and about what he sees as Bush’s lack of truthfulness about his military record.
“I think a commander-in-chief who sends his men off to war ought to be a veteran who has seen the sting of battle,” Bishop says. “In Iraq: we have a bunch of great soldiers, but they are not policemen. I don’t think he [the president] was well advised; right now it’s costing us an American life a day. I’m not a peacenik, but what really bothers me is that of the 500 or so that we’ve lost almost 80 of them were reservists. We’ve got an over-extended Guard and reserve.”
So who has shown the ultimate disrespect for the Guard and Reserves? The Democrats for bringing the issue up, or Bush for sending 80 reservists to their deaths — without managing to find a single weapon of mass destruction?
Two former Halliburton Co. employees are accusing the Houston firm of routinely overcharging American taxpayers for work performed under a military contract, two Democratic lawmakers say.
Halliburton, which as a government contractor is supposed to keep a lid on costs, selected embroidered towels when ordinary ones would have cost a third as much and leased cars, trucks SUVS and vans for up $7,500 a month, the would-be whistleblowers said.
Indeed, the motto at Halliburton was "Don't worry about price. It's cost plus," one of the ex-workers told lawmakers.
That's a reference to a type of government contract in which a company like Halliburton would be reimbursed for the cost of providing a service, plus receive an additional percentage as profit.
One of the former employees, a field buyer named Henry Bunting, stationed in Kuwait, is scheduled to testify Friday before a panel of Senate Democrats.
These latest allegations were made public today by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., both frequent Halliburton critics, in a letter to William Reed, director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.
If the former employees' "accounts are accurate, the company is systematically overcharging the taxpayer on hundreds of routine requisitions every day. While the dollar amounts involved in any single procurement may be small, the cumulative cost to the taxpayer could be enormous," the lawmakers wrote.
Halliburton's subsidiary KBR, formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, builds bases, cooks food, washes clothes, delivers mail and provides other basic services for U.S. troops under a 10-year contract with the Pentagon valued at $3.6 billion.
Embroidered towels? $7,500 a month cars and SUVs?
Who do Pentagon contractors think they are — Tyco?
Neil Bush's involvement in raising money for an HISD charitable foundation to help buy his company's educational software raises serious legal and ethical concerns, experts say.
The head of a national watchdog group described it as "self-dealing" and characterized the agreement as pushing "the border of legality."
[...]
Bush's Austin-based company, Ignite, agreed last summer to provide its eighth-grade U.S. history software to 23 HISD schools at half price this academic year, on the condition that the HISD Foundation, a philanthropic group, would come up with the remainder of the funds. The schools, which have been using the curriculum since August, each paid Ignite $5,000.
Some observers question the role that Bush and his company played in raising the additional money through the philanthropic organization because Bush and other Ignite executives contacted major donors, asking them to make tax-exempt, charitable contributions earmarked for the for-profit business.
[...]
LIST OF DONORS
Donations made to the HISD Foundation for purchasing educational software from Neil Bush's company came from:
• The Friedkin Companies, Inc. $25,000
• Landry's Restaurant Foundation $25,000*
• Wells Fargo Foundation $25,000
• Former Iranian Ambassador and Mrs. Hushang Ansary $25,000
• Astros in Action Foundation $10,000
• Stearns Charitable Fund $5,000
Neil, with his whoring, conniving crony capitalism, represents in many ways a more forthright version of the entire Bush family in microcosm.
*Landry's generous contribution, by the way, represents Chairman and CEO Tilman Fertitta's desire to bet on two horses, given his prior charitable support of Sharon Bush's pet projects and now of her adulterous ex-husband's self-directed charity.
"For the Black Eyed Peas to get on pop radio with a slickly produced but smart and soulful rap that associates the CIA with international terrorism and implies that George Bush is a liar would deserve our attention. That the tune is impossibly catchy, with a boy-pop pinup singing the candy-coated chorus, makes it a subversive cultural milestone." — Rick Mitchell, Pazz & Jop 2003
"Coup of the year: Fountains of Wayne seduce the cool boys of VH1 with a sexy video about MILFs. Safely inside the palace walls, the band then blindsides 'em with an entire album full of sad songs about downsized America with such sunny harmonies that even Mo Rocca has to sing along." — Tim Grierson, Pazz & Jop 2003
The ruling is the first in a series of subpoenas by the U.S. Justice Department seeking the medical records of patients from seven physicians and at least five hospitals, Crain's sister publication Modern Healthcare has learned. Besides Northwestern, Mr. Ashcroft is seeking patient records from University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers in Ann Arbor; Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp.; Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medical Center of New York Presbyterian Hospital both of which are part of the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System; and an unidentified San Francisco-area hospital.
[...]
Northwestern received the subpoena in December, a month after obstetrician/gynecologist Cassing Hammond, a member of Northwestern’s staff and medical school faculty, was served with subpoenas seeking his patient records. Hammond is one of seven doctors and three groups who has challenged the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The American Civil Liberties Union is representing the National Abortion Federation; Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights, which are all filing challenges to the law. A hearing for all of the challenges has been scheduled for March 29 in U.S. District Court in New York.
Dr. Hammond refused comment last week. His case is pending.
You think stuff like this doesn't hit home? That it's some vague privacy-related matter that happens to other people?
It hits home. The doctors of Northwestern’s staff and medical school faculty are my healthcare providers. Disgust is not a strong enough word to express how I feel about Ashcroft's fingers riffling through the same filing cabinets that contain my medical records.
bad things reports on the conversion of Dave Louthan from a "happy slaughterer to a food safety crusader."
In other words, mad cow is still very much with us — and people will die as a result of the twisted, ass-covering, population-endangering logic of the USDA.
I assume it's because military people are looking for alternatives. It's hard to know what to do with your personal investments, but that's the price we all pay as Americans for the privatization of our retirement funding — a cherished Republican ideal that doesn't help those of us without expensive financial advisors.
So let me tell you what I do, because I don't have a financial advisor either, and I don't like the idea of paying huge loads (sales commissions) to financial "planners" whose whole idea of planning is taking your money.
Find some no-load mutual funds that are specifically designed for retirement and put your money there. They are the right mix of stocks and bonds and international and all that stuff you don't want to worry about.
In my case, I use the Fidelity Freedom funds, like the Fidelity Freedom 2020 or Fidelity Freedom 2030 or Fidelity Freedom 2040 funds (the number means the approximate year you expect to retire. Go to fidelity.com or Yahoo Finance and poke around for more information.
If you are in the military and you want more information about investing for retirement, email me and if there are enough of you I'll start an online course right here. Free, of course.
I think it's such a crying shame what they're doing to you. In light of very little evidence justifying our actions, there isn't a day goes by that I'm not grateful for the enormous sacrifices you've made.
...the Bush dynasty differs from other American families that have mixed wealth with political prominence. While the Kennedys and the Rockefellers may have a sense of entitlement, they also display a sense of noblesse oblige—what one might call an urge to repay, with charitable contributions and public service, their good fortune. The Bushes don't have that problem; there are no philanthropists or reformers in the clan. They seek public office but, if anything, they seem to feel that the public is there to serve them.
Phillips sees the activity of the Bush family as a return to the royalist privilege and imperial tendencies of European dynasties: "When Bush took office in 2001, a parallel to Stuart and Bourbon arrogance quickly emerged in the new regime's insistence on ideological conservatism despite the lack of any such national mandate."
It is precisely this arrogance that fuels the hatred of Bush, the hatred that his supporters supposedly find so confounding. The reason is Bush is hated, in contrast to conservatives who are merely opposed, is the sense of entitlement without competence — a Bush trait, not a conservative trait.
The president's supporters cannot see how or why people who believe in actual (as opposed to staged) democracy regard the Bush brand of political maneuvering as disastrous and reprehensible if not criminal. Why not? Because they are royalist courtiers themselves.
Even with Rove's stage-managed ground rules — tape on Saturday, home court advantage, no followup questions allowed — the interview revealed a thoughtless, dodgy, repetitive man who is clearly out of touch with the issues, the American people, and reality itself.
How else could he say that the trouble with Vietnam (which he managed to escape) was "politicians making military decisions"?
The head football coach at the University of Colorado told a former colleague it would be harder to recruit star athletes if the school did not show them a good time and take them to sex parties, according to a deposition released on Friday.
"If recruits aren't being shown these type of activities ... it would be a recruiting disadvantage," Robert Chichester, a former associate athletic director at the university, quoted head coach Gary Barnett as having told him.
[...]
The depositions were taken as part of a lawsuit filed by three women who claim they were raped at or after a December 2001 off-campus recruiting party attended by high school recruits.
One nipple on camera, or an authority-condoned system of rape among minors — which is the right way to feed the voracious, monopolistic football entertainment industry?
DES MOINES, Iowa - In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
[...]
Those served subpoenas include the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House, and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq (news - web sites) in 2002.
They say the subpoenas are intended to stifle dissent.
"This is exactly what people feared would happen," said Brian Terrell of the peace ministry, one of those subpoenaed. "The civil liberties of everyone in this country are in danger. How we handle that here in Iowa is very important on how things are going to happen in this country from now on."
[...]
According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the Drake subpoena asks for records of the request for a meeting room, "all documents indicating the purpose and intended participants in the meeting, and all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting."
It also asks for campus security records "reflecting any observations made of the Nov. 15, 2003, meeting, including any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting."
The focus of the inquiry is on the National Lawyers Guild, an extremely dangerous organization as judged by the aims stated on its subversive website:
• to eliminate racism;
• to safeguard and strengthen the rights of workers, women, farmers and minority groups, upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends;
• to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them;
• to use the law as an instrument for the protection of the people, rather than for their repression.
The federal judge, unnamed in the article, should be asked why we ought to subpoena the Catholic Peace Ministry but not Dick Cheney's energy task force for meeting minutes, or Enron CEOs for their documents, or the White House for 9-11-01 documentation, or John Ashcroft for campaign funding, or the complete military records of George W. Bush.
Catholics are identical to "Islamofascists" in the eyes of these blind cretins. The faith-based favoritism of the Bush administration mysteriously vanishes unless the protesting faith happens to be, ironically, Protestant.
UPDATE: As I was writing the above, Dick Cheney was a few miles away with some comments of his own:
Cheney called on Congress to renew the Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism bill that critics say has curbed civil liberties but Cheney defended as allowing federal law enforcement to share more intelligence information.
"We used these tools to catch embezzlers and drug traffickers and we need these tools as well to hunt terrorists," he said.*
[...]
The fund-raiser at Rosemont's [Illinois] convention center, sponsored by the National Republican Congressional Committee, raised money to help elect Republicans to the U.S. House. Organizers said 187 people paid $1,500 each for lunch and to hear Cheney speak, which means the event raised more than $280,000.
*Note that Dick didn't mention Catholic peace activists or anti-racism legal advocates — although they happen to be among the subpoenaed.
Note also that Dick Cheney did not include himself among the embezzlers for his role in Halliburton bribes totalling $180 million while he was CEO of that company.
Incidentally, has anyone who did not pay at least a thousand dollars ever even seen Dick Cheney? How do we know he exists?
If Terri gets her way on breast exposure and George W Bush gets his on tort reform, Terri and other traumatized tit-viewers could receive billions of dollars while Linda McDougal will receive no more than $250,000.
"The issue here is accountability," says grief-stricken Super Bowl viewer Terri Carlin, asking no more for herself than "gross annual revenues of each defendant [i.e., Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, CBS, MTV, Viacom] for the last three years..."
Terri is of course a fool and charlatan for claiming that "breast exposure" ruined her life and that someone must be held accountable — but so is anyone who under the guise of tort "reform" proposes that $125,000 per breast is adequate compensation for the removal of healthy tissue. That's a sure bet to ruin lives in a non-frivolous way and hold no one accountable beyond the extraction of chump change.
I wish it could be expanded to books beyond the political sphere to see what kinds of fiction or other areas of nonfiction track well with political affinities.
He doesn’t bother to attend secret CIA briefings of his fellow senators because he seldom learns anything he hasn’t read in the newspapers, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is convinced the U.S. will track down the elusive mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks before November.
“Obviously, he’ll be caught between now and the election,” Grassley said Monday when asked if he’s disappointed that Osama bin Laden hasn’t been killed or captured.
“I think they’re on his trail now in a way they haven’t been all year,” Grassley said. “It will happen because we will be able to divert more resources [to hunting down bin Laden].”
Grassley, who’s an overwhelming favorite to win a fifth term in November, declined to say why he’s so confident that bin Laden will be brought to justice.
How will they find bin Laden? My money's on a charred corpse with ostensible "positive" DNA identification performed by vague, unverifiable means.
The corpse is probably already in custody, hence the story above. For political purposes, it's immaterial if the body actually belonged to Osama bin Laden or not — he has already descended to evil-icon status just like Nazis, the stock villains in the B movies of the past sixty years. And the Bush-Cheney War on Terror, with its shock and awe over Baghdad, and "Mission Accomplished" flight suit, and spider-hole Hussein, is very much B movie stagecraft with D-minus effectiveness. It's as if Ronald Reagan starred in Apocalypse Now.
When will they find bin Laden? Grassley already spelled out the timetable: "Before November."
A good guess would be mid to late July, the ideal time for a preemptive action against the protests of shrill New Yorkers sickened by the cremation of their neighbors in lower Manhattan, as well as the subsequent callousness and incompetence of the Afghan, Iraqi and homeland (via the Patriot Acts) invasions. Trotting out any old corpse and calling it bin Laden will be intended to dampen the effect of the passion and outrage that New Yorkers must still feel, and create a gauzy halo of "security" around what matters most to the administration: the Republican convention.
WASHINGTON (AP)--The Justice Department is looking into allegations that a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. (HAL) was involved in payment of $180 million in bribes to win a contract for a natural gas project in Nigeria, officials said Wednesday.
The $4 billion Nigerian Liquified Natural Gas Plant was built in the 1990s by a consortium that included a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, during a time when Vice President Dick Cheney headed Halliburton.
[...]
A French magistrate, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, is also investigating the Nigerian payments and has said in a memo that embezzlement charges could ultimately be filed against Cheney in Paris. Cheney's aides have refused comment on the allegations.
HOUSTON -- In a shuttered J.C. Penney store here, more than 500 job recruits sat at long tables and leafed through packets of information. John Watson, a staffing supervisor for Halliburton Co., welcomed them with a somber introduction.
"I'd like to start out by saying we've already had three deaths on this contract so far," he told the workers, who had signed up to support the U.S. military in Iraq. "If you're getting any pressure from home, if you have any doubt in your mind ... now is the time to tell us. We'll shake hands and get you a plane ticket home."
By the end of that early January week, four of every five recruits would be packing to leave for a one-year stint in Iraq. There, in the largest mobilization of civilians to work in a war zone in U.S. history, they drive trucks, deliver mail, install air conditioners, serve food and cut hair.
[...]
One recruit is Skip Hoehne, a goateed 26-year-old who had been making $12 an hour hauling chickens in Destin, Fla. He had heard about the job from his brother, who was already in Iraq driving trucks for Halliburton. Mr. Hoehne was drawn by the money and a chance to see the world beyond the Florida panhandle.
The civilian wartime duty, hazardous and uncomfortable, offers a hard-to-find opportunity for blue-collar workers such as Mr. Hoehne: a paycheck of $80,000 to $100,000 and a chance to feel they are serving their country.
The Iraq-bound employees aren't adventure-seeking hired guns, there to bolster military strength. They are unemployed and underemployed workers with few opportunities in a U.S. economy that isn't producing many new jobs. They are willing to drive forklifts, install plumbing and wash clothes in a hostile environment for a substantial salary.
Halliburton, which has an open-ended logistics contract with the Army, has 7,000 workers on the ground in Iraq and is bringing another 500 each week to Houston. It posts fliers at truck stops and takes out banner ads on job-listing Web sites. Most recruits come in by word of mouth. So far, Halliburton has plenty of takers.
[...]
All along, officials from Halliburton talk about the dangers and difficult living conditions. The company isn't just being helpful. Halliburton stands to earn a performance bonus if attrition is kept down. Under the contract, Halliburton can bill all legitimate expenses to the military, subject to auditing. When the recruits line up for dinner at an ad hoc buffet in the closed J.C. Penney, they sign their names so the military is billed for an accurate headcount. Halliburton gets a 1% profit margin and can qualify for another 2% in performance awards. So far under the contract, Halliburton has racked up $1.35 billion in revenue.
The desperate jobseekers quoted in the article come from Houston and the Florida panhandle. What these regions have in common are a couple of Bush governors, George and Jeb, who are now evidently content to wage war in central Asia at national expense to recruit the forsaken citizens of the states they mismanaged.
Planned job cuts in January were 26 percent higher than in December as U.S. jobs moved to countries like India, China and the Philippines, and as mergers made some jobs redundant, according to a report on Tuesday.
The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., said post-holiday job cuts reached 117,556 in January surpassing the 100,000 threshold for the first time since last October.
Financial markets were on their toes awaiting January's payrolls report to be issued by the Labor Department on Friday after a disappointing December report that showed an increase of only 1,000 jobs.
Analysts had expected 150,000 new jobs to show up in the data, and the worse-than-expected outcome showed that the U.S. economic recovery has yet to produce sustained jobs growth. Economists again expect a figure of 150,000 new jobs in January.
Poor job creation is a headache for President Bush as he seeks re-election in November. The economy -- specifically job creation -- is expected to be a key issue in the campaign. Since Bush took office, more than 2.3 million non-farm jobs have been lost.
Economists who "expect" 150,000 jobs to be created in January 2004 should revise their expectations to something six digits south of zilch.
From the article linked above: "Unlike anthrax, ricin is not easily absorbed through the skin. Experts say it is not an efficient way of killing large numbers of people. It's estimated that 4 tons of ricin dispersed by aerosol would be needed to kill half of the people within an area of about 40 square miles, versus only 2 pounds of anthrax."
Halliburton Co. allegedly overcharged more than $16 million for meals at a single U.S. military base in Kuwait during the first seven months of last year, according to Pentagon investigators auditing the company's work.
[...]
This dispute focuses on meals served at Camp Arifjan, the huge U.S. military base south of Kuwait City. The e-mail memo that went out Friday said that in July alone, a Saudi subcontractor hired by KBR billed for 42,042 meals a day on average but served only 14,053 meals a day. The difference in cost for that month exceeded $3.5 million, according to Pentagon records. The Pentagon last year paid KBR more than $30 million for meals at the camp from January through July, a tab that included charges for nearly four million meals the government asserts were never served. Pentagon officials couldn't provide an estimate for the total cost of feeding troops in Iraq.
[...]
Instead of formally paying back the money, KBR will deduct the sum from future bills to the U.S. government, a common practice when contractors agree to reimburse overcharges.*
[...]
In television spots that began to appear last month, Halliburton highlighted the work it is doing supporting the U.S. Army under the slogan, "Halliburton, proud to serve our troops." In one ad, a U.S. soldier is shown talking on the phone and blurting out to his fellow soldiers, "It's a girl!"
KBR's troop-catering work falls under the large logistics contract the company won during 2001. Work in Iraq and vicinity tied to that contract has so far amounted to about $3.8 billion. KBR is also doing repair work on Iraq's oil fields and delivering fuel supplies from Kuwait and Turkey, under the Army Corps of Engineers contract that has cost more than $2 billion so far.
*And they get to keep the money! Overcharges are "deducted" from future overcharges. Such a deal for Halliburton — only 543 Americans had to die so far.
Oddly enough, Hallibuton refuses to say how much it cost to have an actor play a soldier and gush, "It's a girl!" in a Halliburton image ad.
Senior Pentagon officials are crafting a major aid package to help money-losing rocket programs at Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., including possibly adding hundreds of millions of dollars to existing government launch contracts.
[...]
Such a contracting change would benefit the two companies, largely because it would cushion their businesses from the recent sharp dropoff in the number of commercial satellite launches.
Defense Department officials didn't disclose the specific size of the aid package under consideration, and they stressed that no final decisions have been made because "the acquisition strategy" for the next round of launches hasn't yet been approved. Nonetheless, their comments amounted to the first official confirmation that both White House and Pentagon leaders are mulling a package to funnel significant funds to rocket programs, over and above the fixed-price contracts for anticipated launches.
[...]
Pentagon officials said they hope to award rocket-launch contracts by the summer, after Boeing is expected to become eligible to bid again. The Chicago aerospace company was handed a suspension last year after Air Force officials determined the company had improperly obtained thousands of pages of proprietary Lockheed Martin documents.
On Friday, Pentagon officials said Boeing's transgressions are projected to eventually cost the Air Force an extra $223 million, to switch launches, underwrite construction of a second West Coast launch facility and complete more engineering work. The Pentagon is expected to try to recover those funds from Boeing.
Boeing's velvet wrist-slap is to have to wait until summer (so long!) for its share of those hundreds of millions of dollars. By then maybe we all will have hopefully forgotten about those purloined Lockheed Martin documents, as well as the crimes of former Air Force procurement officer and Boeing CFO confidante Dragon Lady Darleen Druyun.
This still cracks me up: Michael Sears — the Boeing CFO who hired Dragon Lady Darleen Druyun away from the Air Force after she deviously took Airbus out the running — wrote and was about to publish a business management self-help book called "Soaring through Turbulence" on the theme of ethics in business. Oddly enough for an author, he had no direct experience of such a mythical concept, based on the abysmal example of his own management behavior at Boeing.
Though the 61-year-old Mr. [Ken] Lay was Enron's chief executive for some 15 years, he apparently didn't leave many fingerprints. A recent report by a court-appointed examiner in the Enron bankruptcy case, for example, said that Mr. Lay, as well as Mr. Skilling, was an infrequent user of e-mail and "also apparently did not retain many documents."
"Apparently"? Appearances can be vile and deceitful, particularly when they belong to Enron chief executives.
If you give Lay and Skilling two and a half years to learn how to operate a shredder, you think they're not gonna take it?
By now the money's long offshore, and all the documents are confetti for the afterparty.
