Before I break for my winter hibernation, I am pleased to present you with the exciting, all-new 2005 edition. Please feel free to sing along:
Fade up on the TV studio set of a snowy Washington DC: twinkling lights, a festively decorated Christmas tree, an all-Caucasian nativity scene, Laura Bush with a tumbler of vodka — the White House.
The back wall of the studio is a blue cyclorama of a repeated pattern that says: "Christmas under attack."
CEOs of the US defense and oil industries (not under oath) enter.
God Rest Ye Merry Neocons
Sung by the US defense and oil industries to the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"
God rest ye merry, neocons, Let nothing you dismay. Remember Ahmed Chalabi Has yet his hell to pay For setting up America Which Cheney led astray. O tax cuts of comfort and joy, Comfort and joy, O tax cuts of comfort and joy.
Enter Bush Senior and Scowcroft.
What Son Is This?
Sung by George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft to the tune of "What Child Is This?"
What son is this, Who laid to rest On Cheney’s lap is sleeping? And who conspires With anthems sweet while Halliburton’s reaping?
This, this the New York Times That justifies the White House crimes. Waste, waste the blood of men For Bush, the son of Nixon.
Enter readers of the New York Times.
New York Times
Sung by readers of the The New York Times to the tune of "We Three Kings"
New York Times, this lady is gray, Acting in the Pentagon’s play. Cheney’s minting Lies they’re printing. What will you print today?
Oh, Judy Miller lied to me. Told us of the W-M-D. Such misleading Lies you’re feeding, Guide us to your Chalabi.
Enter Seymour Hersh carrying a copy of The New Yorker.
O Abu Ghraib
A solo sung by Seymour Hersh to the tune of "O Tannenbaum" (i.e., "O Christmas Tree" for those who speak only Amurcan)
O Abu Ghraib, O Abu Ghraib, How Christian are your tortures? O Abu Ghraib, O Abu Ghraib, How Christian are your tortures?
The sight of broken detainees Reveals a neocon disease. O Abu Ghraib, O Abu Ghraib, How Christian are your tortures?
Enter Harriet Miers with a big box of Kleenex.
Harriet Miers
Tearfully sung by Harriet Miers to the tune of "Silent Night"
Harriet Miers, Harriet Miers, Lost among Louts and liars. Such a kissass sycophant, So unqualified, wingnuts did rant. Sleep forgotten in peace, Sleep forgotten in peace.
Enter Jenna Bush with a vodka tonic and an enormous bong.
I’ll Be High in Crawford
Sung by Jenna Bush to the tune of "I’ll Be Home for Christmas"
I’ll be high in Crawford, You can count on me. Things to smoke And lines of coke For our whole family.
Christmas Eve will find me Drinking quarts of wine. I’ll be high in Crawford Until 2009!
Enter American television viewers.
Pundits We Have Heard on High
Sung by American television viewers to the tune of "Angels We Have Heard on High"
Pundits we have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er the air. Cable poohbahs wonder why Pat Fitzgerald’s waiting there.
Mo - o - o - o - o - re of these Indictments are coming. Mo - o - o - o - o - re of these Indictments are coming.
Enter a glaze-eyed Skimble, holding a television remote control.
O’Reilly Night
Sung by Skimble on the sofa to the tune of "O Holy Night"
O’Reilly night, His lips are brightly lying. These are the lies that will lose minds and hearts. Can’t find the truth In spin and error frying, So we rely on falafel and farts.
That background noise is whining wingnut voices, A Yellow Terror threat is on the crawl…
Find your remotes! Oh, hear O’Reilly lying! Oh, Fox, it bites. Oh, night when I was bored. Oh, Fox, it bites. Oh, Fox, Oh, Fox, it bites.
Enter the brightly attired Secular Humanism Christmas Holiday Chorale.
Joy to the World: Evolution Edition
Sung by the Secular Humanism Christmas Holiday Chorale to the tune of "Joy to the World"
Joy to the world, This duck is lame. Let Darwin do his thing! Let every state Know where to place the blame, And heav’n and nature sing, And heav’n and nature sing, And heav’n and nature sing!
Joy to the world, The madness wanes. Let Reason cheer as well! While fields and floods, Rocks, hills and plains Let Kansas go to hell, Let Kansas go to hell, Let Kansas go to hell!
Ken Lay declared his innocence, demonized his accusers and asked ex-employee "truth sayers" to rally around him for his trial, in a Tuesday speech.
Just a month before his Jan. 17 federal trial on seven conspiracy and fraud charges, the former Enron chairman drew polite applause with his luncheon address titled "Guilty, until proven innocent," in part a call to arms to Enron employees to defend the honor of the company and Lay himself.
Lay quoted Winston Churchill, saying, "Truth is the great rock," and in his case, prosecutors have submerged it in a "wave of terror."
Is there no end to the whining and pretentious self-pity of Republicans in positions of power?
...the bottom 80 percent of households would receive 15.8 percent of the House tax cuts' benefit. The top 20 percent would receive 84.2 percent of the benefit. Households earning more than $1 million a year would get 40 percent of the tax cuts, or an average reduction of nearly $51,000.
Think of the Treasury as a piggy bank for the very rich. The mathematics involved are actually fairly simple, but they require a generous use of negative numbers: Subtract hundreds of billions in war costs while subtracting hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. Pretty soon there are no pennies left in the piggy bank for healthcare or levees or pensions or roads or schools.
The question must be asked: Is our representatives learning?
Cheney arrived at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe on Monday [December 8, 2003] to do some hunting at the Rolling Rock Club and Game Preserve -- a private club with farm-raised pheasants; but some say it was no hunt -- it was a slaughter.
"Your average hunter may shoot more than three pheasants a day; Vice President Cheney shot more than 70 -- and an untold number of mallards... We're appalled that so many animals were killed for target practice essentially."-- Wayne Pacelle, V.P.- Humane Society of the US
Five-hundred pheasants were released in front of Cheney and his men; and the ten-man hunting party killed 417 of the birds. Vice President Cheney alone shot over 70 pheasants.
The birds were then plucked and vacuum-packed in time for Cheney's afternoon flight back to Washington, DC.
This is entirely consistent behavior for a hawk who had "other priorities" during Vietnam and who sanctions torture now — that is to say, a craven coward.
Art, Truth and Politics. Harold Pinter's outstanding Nobel lecture: "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable."
The potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling state officials as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with standards for the machines' reliability.
Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders or other ills.
These are not theoretical problems -- in some states they have led to lost or miscounted votes.
[...]
In North Carolina, more stringent requirements -- which include placing the machines' software code in escrow for examination in case of a problem -- have led one supplier, Diebold Inc., to say it will withdraw from the state, where about 20 counties use Diebold voting machines.
A different type of showdown is brewing in California, where Secretary of State Bruce McPherson says he might force makers of the machines to prove their systems can withstand attacks from a hacker. One such test on a Diebold system -- Diebold machines were blamed for voting disruptions in a 2004 California primary -- is planned.
The state has been negotiating details with Harri Hursti, a security expert from Finland who uncovered severe flaws in a Diebold system used in Leon County, Fla. (He demonstrated how vote results could be changed, then made screens flash "Are we having fun yet?")
The simple fact that Diebold withdraws from a state that wants to place its code in escrow reveal its total unreliability. And the simple fact of our high tolerance for voting unreliability exposes American democracy as a sham. And, finally, given the evidently flimsy foundation of American democracy, all the White House rhetoric about spreading democracy around the world amounts to nothing but a lethal pack of lies.
Thanks to Cryptome, we can see the property, the realtor's listing, and all kind of other interesting information, such as the permanently restricted airspace that newly surrounds the tree-lined estate where will he soon write his Kissingeresque war-criminal memoirs.
So here's the new Cheney crib, just down the road from another brand new war-criminal neighbor, Secretary of Offense Donald Rumsfeld:
Nine acres, very private. Tree lined drive off private road. Separate 3-bay garage with office. New 150 foot dock. Extensive gardens and ornamental pools. Fantastic waterfront property.
In an era when Disney engineers an explicitly Christian marketing campaign for a movie as covertly and religiously coded as any Bush speech, it's important to let sellers understand that post-Enlightenment buyers will not always roll over and play dead.
Let your everyday purchases do your fighting for you — check out BuyBlue.org.
Jan. 12: The New York Stock Exchange fines Morgan Stanley $19 million for failing to supervise two rogue brokers and deliver stock prospectuses to 141,000 clients.
Jan. 25: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each agree to pay $40 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that they artificially stimulated demand for certain high-tech initial public offerings in the aftermarket.
FEBRUARY
Feb. 14: The NYSE fines JPMorgan Securities $2.1 million for failing to retain e-mails arising out of the research-analyst conflict case.
Feb. 14: AIG says the New York Attorney General and the SEC have served it with subpoenas pertaining to the accounting of certain reinsurance policies.
MARCH
March 2: Citigroup reaches settlement in Global Crossing class action litigation. It settles the suit for $75 million.
March 3: Bank of America settles WorldCom suit and agrees to pay $460 million in restitution in the securities fraud class action.
March 4: Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., Credit Suisse First Boston and UBS agree to pay a combined $100 million to settle with former shareholders and bondholders of WorldCom. The four firms led a May 2000 bond offering by the telecom company.
March 7: AIG reveals that its chairman, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, has received a subpoena from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
March 8: The NYSE fines Merrill Lynch $13.5 million for failing to supervise a group of brokers at its Fort Lee, N.J., branch. They allegedly engaged in improper market timing of mutual funds.
March 15: Former WorldCom CEO Bernard J. Ebbers is convicted of conspiracy and securities fraud that resulted in investor losses of $2 billion and the bankruptcy of the company.
March 21: Time Warner agrees to pay a $300 million penalty for overstating online advertising revenue and the number of its Internet subscribers, and for failing to consolidate the financial results of AOL Europe in its financial statements.
APRIL
April 12: The SEC charges the NYSE with failing to police specialists who allegedly engaged in unlawful proprietary trading on the floor. In a related move, the NYSE also charges 17 former specialists with securities fraud for trading ahead of customer orders.
April 25: Cable operator Adelphia Communications will pay $715 million and set up a victim compensation fund for the accounting fraud. Founder John J. Rigas later gets 15 years in prison and his family agrees to forfeit 95% of its holdings in the company.
April 27: The NASD fines Raymond James $750,000 for fee-based account violations. The firm is also required to pay $138,000 in restitution to customers.
MAY
May 31: Citigroup agrees to pay about $208 million to settle the SEC's accusations about improper arrangements among certain Smith Barney mutual funds, an affiliated transfer agent and an unaffiliated sub-transfer agent.
JUNE
June 2: President Bush nominates Christopher Cox to replace Donaldson as chairman. The nomination of Cox, a conservative former congressman, is seen as slowing the pace of regulatory moves.
June 10: Citigroup and JPMorgan agree to settle claims of Enron-related damages for a combined $4.2 billion.
JULY
July 13: Former WorldCom CEO Bernard J. Ebbers is sentenced by a federal judge in New York to a 25-year prison term for the $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom.
AUGUST
Aug. 2: The NASD orders Morgan Stanley to pay more than $6.1 million for fee-based account violations. Of that amount, $1.5 million is fines and $4.6 million is restitution for more than 3,500 customers.
Aug. 2: Toronto-based Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce agrees to pay $2.4 billion to shareholders of Enron as part of a legal settlement. It becomes the third major bank to settle claims involving the former energy-trading company.
Aug. 15: The NYSE fines Merrill Lynch $10 million for failing to deliver customer prospectuses and other supervisory and operational failures.
SEPTEMBER
Sept. 14: Northwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines both file for bankruptcy protection as the airline industry continues to suffer.
Sept. 15: An SEC judge hits Raymond James with a $6.9 million fine for failing to supervise broker Dennis Herula.
Sept. 19: Former Tyco International CEO and founder Dennis Kozlowski and ex-CFO Mark Swartz receive prison terms of eight to 25 years for looting more than $150 million from the company. Kozlowski is also ordered to pay $167 million in fines and Swartz $70 million.
OCTOBER
Oct. 10: The NASD hits eight firms with directed brokerage violations and imposes fines of more than $7.75 million. Hit with the heaviest fines were INVEST Financial Corp. ($1.52 million), Commonwealth Financial Network ($1.4 million), National Planning Corp. ($1.3 million), Mutual Service Corp. ($1.3 million) and Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp. ($950,000).
Oct. 12: Phillip Bennett, CEO of commodities trading firm Refco, is arrested and charged with a $430 million accounting fraud approximately two months after the firm went public in August.
Oct. 17: In the largest bankruptcy so far for the year, Refco files for Chapter 11 protection to reorganize $48.6 billion in liabilities. Refco's filing, in the wake of Bennett's arrest, wipes out $924 million in market value. One day later, the company is delisted by the NYSE.
CSI: Wall Street is one of the most boring shows around but, man, is it expensive to produce. If I got fined for the way I park my car the way Wall Street gets fined for its indiscretions, my car would be booted pronto.
Although Bush won't serve this time, his Democratic rival in the 2004 election served on a Massachusetts jury last month. Kerry not only served, but was elected foreman of the Suffolk Superior Court jury, which rejected a claim by two men who sued the city of Boston for injuries suffered in a car accident involving a school principal.
I wish this were funnier or more ironic, but there you go.
You'd think from all the noise that self-appointed religiously oppressed Republicans make that Christmas doesn't exist in secular Blue State cities like Chicago. Not so. Let's take a look at selections from the December calendar at the Chicago Cultural Center, a municipal institution that is funded with my approval by my secular humanist, atheistic, exorbitant property taxes:
Protégé Philharmonic Sunday, December 11, 3pm Preston Bradley Hall The Protégé Philharmonic present a Christmas Holiday Concert with classical orchestra, popular Christmas selections and a Christmas carol sing-a-long.
The Rose Ensemble: Celebremos el Niño: A Mexican Baroque Christmas Thursday, December 15, 6:30pm Preston Bradley Hall Join this engaging group of singers for an evening of joyful Mexican music - a celebration featuring over two centuries of festive Christmas dances, ballads and villancicos. Accompanied by viola da gamba, vihuela da mano and several percussion instruments (including African drums), solos and choruses burst forth in this holiday program that's anything but predictable.
Ohm series: Holiday Xmix Party Thursday, December 15, 7pm Randolph Cafe This digital holiday celebration features local DJs and laptop artists performing original remixes of classic holiday tunes. Snowbot (aka Brobot) gives a special live performance leading audience members brave enough to join the robotic karaoke sing-along to digital versions of seasonal songs. The evening also showcases the release of Christmas Remixed 2 from Six Degrees Records, which features top-notch producers, DJs, turntablists and remix artists in a second vibrant collection of joyfully twisted takes on holiday tunes.
500 Clown (sings) Christmas Carol(s) November 16, 2005 - January 7, 2006 Storefront Theater Thursdays - Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 3pm Additional Christmas performances: December 19 - 21 at 7:30pm No shows on November 24, December 24, 25, 31 and January 1 Tickets: $15, $10 for students and seniors with valid ID This raucous Christmas celebration features three clowns as Dickensian rock stars, performing A Christmas Carol-based songs by John Fournier. Think Dickens plus a live band plus 500 Clown's signature blend of circus arts, improvisation, and action-based performance. We'll have even the tiniest Tim dancing in the aisles. For tickets, visit www.storefronttheater.org or call 312-742-TIXS.
But please note: "The Chicago Cultural Center will be closed in observance of Christmas Day."
Liberals aren't scared of Christianity, but Republican Christians are scared to death of pluralism. They are social agoraphobics who can't bear the sight of anyone who doesn't look and behave exactly like them — narrow-minded, fearful, greedy, and provincially Caucasian at heart.
The younger brother of the president of the United States, seeking to establish himself independently of his more successful sibling, visits a small country in the company of a ne'er do well business partner. Their arrival sends law enforcement, government officials and local reporters into a tizzy, but the First Sibling emerges unfazed and news of his trip goes unnoticed back at home.
But this is no script.
In September, Neil Bush, brother of President George W. Bush, visited Latvia with Boris Berezovsky, a fugitive Russian tycoon who made millions in the violent scramble for control of Russian government assets after the fall of communism. Their mission, according to the Baltic Times, was educational -- promoting teaching software created by Bush's Texas-based firm, Ignite Learning.
The visit to the former Soviet republic earned lots of media attention in Eastern Europe and provoked an international incident. "Much controversy surrounded the meeting, since Berezovsky is wanted for arrest in Russia, and the scandalous Russian businessman, who now lives in London, met with a relative of the U.S. president," said the Baltic Times in its report.
Chalabi, Abramoff, Cunningham, Safavian... the list of known criminals with whom the Bush administration associates (or is related to) just keeps metastasizing.
...Cheney has given 23 speeches to think tanks and trade organizations and 16 at academic institutions since 2001 -- apparently all at taxpayers' expense.
"[I]t appears that his office labels them 'official travel,' " the [Center for Public Integrity] said. "As a result . . . the public is kept largely unaware of where he and his staff are traveling, with whom they are meeting and how much it costs, even though tax dollars are covering the bill."
"Largely unaware" is an almost complimentary way to describe the borderline catatonic American public.
Faced with growing numbers of retirees, pension plans are pouring billions into hedge funds, the secretive and lightly regulated investment partnerships that once managed money only for wealthy investors.
The plans and other large institutions are expected to invest as much as $300 billion in hedge funds by 2008, up from just $5 billion a decade ago, according to a study by the Bank of New York and Casey, Quirk & Associates, a consulting firm. Pension funds account for roughly 40 percent of all institutional money.
[...]
Pension officials who have been shaken by market downturns and persistent deficits are attracted by hedge funds' promise of richer, or more consistent, returns. But the trend has caused some consultants and academics to voice cautions. They question whether hedge funds, with risks that are hard to measure, are appropriate for pension funds, whose sole purpose, by law, is to pay out predetermined benefits to retired workers.
Those benefits are considered so crucial that they are guaranteed: corporate pension failures are covered by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation [PBGC], a federal agency, while pension failures by state and local governments are covered by taxpayers. Given that the benefits are paid out on a set schedule, critics wonder whether it makes sense to rely on investments whose returns are hard to predict, managed by private partnerships that disclose little about their operations and charge some of the highest fees on Wall Street.
"It's very inappropriate when the company is offering a pension plan that is guaranteed by the federal government," said Zvi Bodie, a professor of finance and economics at Boston University who is enthusiastic about hedge funds in other contexts.
The investment industry is based on credibility and trust. Considering the spectacular failures of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the Republican fraudsters behind Bayou Funds this year, why should American taxpayers offer multibillion dollar guarantees to cover the misdeeds of crony capitalists with a seriously tainted track record?
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a horse -- a black-maned steed he named "Montana" -- when he visited this visually stunning nation of desert steppes in October. Such gift horses aren't actually taken home; instead, they are kept around but not ridden, in anticipation of the next visit.
But White House aides say Mr. Bush was worried about the obligations of ownership. Would taxpayers be on the hook for upkeep? Was there any way to guarantee the horse's well-being down the road? The question occupied not one but several meetings at the National Security Council in the days leading up to Mr. Bush's trip, one participant said.
Eventually Mr. Bush's aides gently persuaded the Mongolians not to proffer a horse. What Mr. Bush wasn't able to avoid was a sip of the local specialty -- fermented mare's milk -- even though he's a teetotaler.
If there's any truth to the rumors emerging from his bubble, Bush's teetotaler reputation may not be intact much longer.
A businessman who posed as religious communications mogul, driving a $350,000 Bentley and flying in a corporate jet, was sentenced to more than 5 years in prison Monday for bilking creditors out of $13.3 million.
Rodney Dixon, 41, had told lenders that his company, Lacrad International Inc., in Oakbrook Terrace, sold religious recordings and music from offices around the world in the late 1990s and had annual revenues of more than $100 million.
But prosecutors said that was a carefully crafted illusion, built on fake bank statements, phony invoices and "elaborately false tax returns." They said his annual revenue never exceeded $100,000.
We've noticed Rodney Dixon and his Satanic behavior before.
I think the simple fact of being Christian (or believing someone in authority is Christian) makes people susceptible to this sort of nonsense. After all, if you bought a book that was written by a bunch of shepherds two thousand years ago, why wouldn't you also buy whatever crap they're peddling today?
The Christianization of American politics has gone too far. It's nice that Christians have a belief system that makes some of the harder "moral" choices for them so they don't ever have to think too hard, but it enables the Rodney Dixons and the Pat Robertsons and the Jerry Falwells and the George Bushes and the Dick Cheneys and the Leo Wells of the world to prey upon their utter lack of rational skepticism.
The GOP is now a party with two distinct tiers: one layer of predatory capitalism (party leadership) and a much larger layer of hapless suckers (Republican voters).
Her first defense should be a presentation of the list of sexually active Popes, whose illegitimate children probably number in the dozens. Because if a sperm is wasted, God gets so irate.
An American businessman living overseas paid at least $630,000 in kickbacks to U.S. occupation authority officials to win reconstruction contracts in Iraq, according to a federal affidavit made public Wednesday.
Philip H. Bloom, a U.S. citizen who has lived in Romania for many years, was arrested recently at Newark International Airport in New Jersey. He made a brief appearance Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington and remains in federal custody.
[...]
A government affidavit alleges that Mr. Bloom conspired with officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority and U.S. military to rig bids for contracts in Al-Hillah and Karbala, two cities 50 miles to 60 miles south of Baghdad. In some cases, Mr. Bloom's companies performed no work, Patrick McKenna Jr., an investigator in the IG's office, said in the affidavit.
Mr. Bloom or companies he controls made bank deposits of $353,000 on behalf of at least two CPA officials and bought them real estate in North Carolina as well as vehicles and jewelry worth more than $280,000 in 2004 and 2005, Mr. McKenna said.
[...]
At one point, Mr. Bloom allegedly was paying at least $200,000 a month to CPA officials and others, although the affidavit does not say for how long.
Projects won by Mr. Bloom's companies included a new police academy for Al-Hillah and renovation of the public library in Karbala.
The affidavit did not include the entire value of all contracts awarded to Mr. Bloom's companies but said he received at least $3.5 million between January and June of last year.
Cash, vehicles, and real estate are bad enough, but jewelry? Someone from the Coalition Provisional Authority will have to explain the bling to the families of the 2,175 American military dead.
While we're on the subject of freedom and democracy, it must have been a liberating feeling for a fraudster like Mr. Bloom to operate with such impunity, just as it continues to be for his thieving plutocratic clients in the Bush administration.
But, if the teachings of Jesus have any meaning at all, not for much longer. Mr. Bloom and his CPA camel are working their way through the eye of a needle.
Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.
Naumoff began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"
After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."
"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the person teaching the course."
The floodgates were opened and the other UNC professors at the dinner began sharing their own dispiriting stories about the troubling state of curiosity on campus. Their experiences echoed the complaints voiced by many of my book reviewers who teach at some of the nation's best schools.
All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."
Exactly. It's not the ignorance but the pride in the ignorance that is so depressing to those of us who still value old-fashioned knickknacks like facts and knowledge.
Incurious George's actions, however, are a strange mixture of the truly ignorant and the willfully deceitful. The lack of normal curiosity, combined with a calculated disregard for the truth, suggests the foundation of a criminal mind. In the old days we would have recognized such ignorant/deceitful behavior as a sign of severe intellectual underdevelopment and described it as juvenile deliquency.
Except in Dubya's case, thanks to being the most powerful person on earth, his incuriosity may kill a lot more than the cat.
A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.
The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.
[...]
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who posed the question about the task force, said he will ask the Justice Department today to investigate. "The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force," Lautenberg said.
Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on the document. She said that the courts have upheld "the constitutional right of the president and vice president to obtain information in confidentiality."
The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.
[...]
The person familiar with the task force's work, who requested anonymity out of concern about retribution, said the document was based on records kept by the Secret Service of people admitted to the White House complex. This person said most meetings were with Andrew Lundquist, the task force's executive director, and Cheney aide Karen Y. Knutson.
As an aside, here's a wrong-headed memo from Haley Barbour during that same blissful period (pre-9/11) when he reminded Dick Cheney that "Clinton-Gore policies meant less energy and more expensive energy. Most Americans thought Bush-Cheney would mean more energy and less expensive energy."
Oil companies operating in the U.S. typically pay taxes at or above the 35% rate on corporate profits. But for about one in four big oil companies, tax rates have fallen recently, even as profits have soared.
Of the 87 publicly traded oil companies with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion, the effective tax rates of 21 companies fell in the most recent quarter compared with average rates paid over the trailing 12 months, Reuters data show.
Royal Dutch Shell PLC's tax rate fell to 37% in the third quarter from 41%, BP PLC's declined to about 27% from more than 30% and Burlington Resources Inc.'s dropped to about 33% from 37%. The rates were derived by dividing the amount of income tax paid by taxable income.
A Shell spokesman said the company wouldn't discuss why its tax rate changed because the information was "commercially sensitive."
For the corporatist spinners of the Bush Junior era, the phrase "commercially sensitive" is a new euphemism that means "secretly screwing the working taxpayer."
In that way it is a close cousin of Nixon's "limited incursion" (meaning "invasion") or facts that "are at variance with certain of my previous statements" — a euphemism for the fact that he had lied repeatedly.
Neither Bush Senior nor Ronald Reagan is Dubya's political father — his historical legacy will endure as the spawn of Nixon.
Better hold your nose. When insiders sell, the markets get that nasty Enron smell.
Extra Credit Question: Before he became CEO of Halliburton, who was Lesar's former employer? None other than Arthur Andersen, the auditor of both Enron on Lay/Skilling's watch and Halliburton on Cheney's watch. Happy Veterans' Day!
25b. Which of the following comes closer to what you think about this investigation and indictment?
Lewis Libby is the only person in the Bush administration who may have acted illegally........ 8
Others in the Bush administration may have acted illegally as well............................ 78
Not sure........................................... 14
[...]
30a. Do you think that President Bush gave the country the most accurate information he had before going to war with Iraq, or do you think that President Bush deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq?
[11/05* | 6/04+ | 3/04+]
Gave the most accurate information he had.... 35 44 53
Deliberately misled people to make the case for war..................... 57 47 41
Not sure...................................... 8 9 6
* Asked of one-half the respondents (FORM A). + Results shown reflect responses among registered voters.
Meanwhile, the US military death toll under Bush-Cheney-Rove climbs to 2,175.
Americans for an unobstructed voting booth.Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL): "I am introducing the Deceptive Election Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2005 to provide voters with real protection from deceptive practices that aim to keep them away from the polls on Election Day."
And if this report is true, Susan Ralston is scheduled to appear again before Patrick Fitzgerald.
It would be nice if Abramoff himself figured somehow into the current investigation. Thanks to the hyperpoliticization of policy, which is the real takeaway of Plamegate, Abramoff belongs in this investigation far more than Monica did in the so-called Whitewater investigation.
Turning back stiff opposition from scientist and teacher groups, the Kansas state board of education adopted science standards that question evolution and open the classroom to what some proponents describe as nontraditional explanations for scientific phenomena.
Antievolution initiatives in Kansas and some other states have been pushed by advocates of "intelligent design," many of whom are conservative Christians. The moves come at a time when U.S. high-school students lag behind their counterparts in other developed countries in math and science. Critics of the board's decision, adopted by a 6-4 vote, believe the new standards will put Kansas' students at greater disadvantage.
The six stupid members of the Kansas state board of education are themselves proof that life evolves — because they haven't.
Private partnerships, real-estate investment trusts and other financial investors are snapping up millions of acres of forest land -- not just in America but in New Zealand, Uruguay, Brazil and beyond. They are buying from giant paper companies such as International Paper Co., which are under pressure from restless shareholders to boost their profits by cashing in on forest land that for decades has just sat there.
The result is an enormous land transfer now under way. The paper companies long were the nation's largest private owners of large tracts of standing timber. "For 100 years, the industrial users owned this land. A 1980 map of landowners in Maine would be almost the same as the 1900 map," says William Ginn, an official of the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group.
Now the national map changes almost monthly. It's a phenomenon that has financial ramifications as well as environmental ones, such as the possibility that financial investors who get in a bind might over-log or overdevelop the land.
Today, nearly $30 billion of American forest land is in the hands of financial investors, according to Hancock Timber Resource Group, a large timberland investment manager. That's six times what such investors' timberland holdings were in 1994, Hancock Timber estimates. And these investors have poured billions of dollars more into forests abroad.
Western society, which irrationally prides itself on rationality, consistently puts its fate in the hands of financial speculators whose interests are counter-societal and extremely narrow.
Communism failed and capitalism will too, but for totally different reasons. Capitalistic economies of scale are rapidly becoming tyrranies. We need a new economic system that rewards the work and innovation of individuals and groups over the legal entitlements of fictitious entities like corporations.
This week, pale brown envelopes will appear in the mailboxes of 400 Texans, containing a juror questionnaire and marking the beginning of a race for control of the courtroom and public opinion in a trial that defines an era of corporate wrongdoing.
Inside each envelope is a document that could be key to the outcome of the fraud trial of former Enron Corp. leaders Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, who will stand trial in January with former accounting chief Richard A. Causey on charges that they conspired to mislead the public about the financial health of Enron, once ranked as the country's seventh-biggest publicly traded company.
Enron's 2001 collapse was the first in a series of corporate disasters that resulted in record-breaking bankruptcies, pinstriped perp walks and lost investor confidence. It wreaked havoc in Houston and beyond, costing thousands of employees and investors their retirement savings. The Justice Department created a special prosecutorial task force to deal with the fallout after the entire Houston U.S. attorney's office removed itself from the investigation because so many of its lawyers had financial or family ties to the company.
How a Texas jury assesses the evidence against Enron's former leaders will determine its answers to key questions, including just how much executives are expected to know about their company's finances -- and whether the final chapter of an era of financial scandals will close with a bang or a whimper.
Jury selection is a key step for both sides as they try to bend the process in their favor. "Attitudes toward what jurors regard as corporate greed have an impact on the way they hear evidence," said George Washington University law professor and former prosecutor Stephen A. Saltzburg.
Defense lawyers already have gained one advantage by putting more than four years between the bankruptcy and the trial, scheduled to begin with jury selection Jan. 17. But public opinion suggests that the memory of corporate scandals has not faded. Almost half of respondents to a Pew Research Center poll last month said they felt unfavorably toward U.S. companies -- a 20-point rise from March 2001, nine months before Enron filed for bankruptcy protection.
What's significant about the four years that occurred between the bankruptcy and the trial? It happens to be the length of a presidential term, the same one that was bought with the generous assistance of Enron.
As Patrick Fitzgerald pointed out in presenting the initial results of his grand jury investigation, we could have been here a year sooner if we hadn't been stymied. Yesterday Harry Reid made the same argument with his closed session of the Senate to provoke the similarly stymied pre-war intelligence investigation. That too could have happened a year ago.
Everything that exposes the necrotic gangrene of this administration was timed to hit the air this year and not last year. Thanks for your vigilance, CBS, The New York Times, and the whole press corps!
A pastor in Texas has been killed by an electric shock after grabbing a microphone while performing a baptism in water.
The Rev Kyle Lake, 33, was partly submerged at University Baptist Church in Waco — only 14 miles from President Bush’s Crawford ranch — while baptising a woman in front of 800 people. He reached out to adjust a microphone when he was killed.
The church, co-founded by David Crowder, one of the biggest “rock stars” of Christian music, is popular with students from nearby Baylor University, the oldest higher-education institution in Texas and the largest Baptist university in the world.
“He was grabbing the microphone so everyone could hear,” Jamie Dudley, a church business administrator, said. “It’s the only way you can be loud enough.”
Doctors in the congregation rushed to help Mr Lake, who collapsed after being struck by the fatal jolt of electricity. An emergency medical crew tried to revive him. He was taken by ambulance to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Centre, where he was pronounced dead.
One of Kyle's followers said, “I think we all gravitated to him because he looked cooler than all of us, but he was really smart."
One potentially hot-button case was a 2001 opinion joined by Judge Alito that set aside Environmental Protection Agency orders to clean up ammonia from a fertilizer plant that polluted drinking-water wells in Lansing, Mich. In that case, the majority found the agency lacked a "rational basis" for the remediation it required of W.R. Grace & Co., the fertilizer-plant operator.
A dissenting judge wrote that while EPA's order may have suffered from "poor draftsmanship,' judges are not "expert environmental toxicologists" and should defer to the agency. Yesterday, the advocacy group Earthjustice issued a statement claiming Judge Alito repeatedly has sought to scale back congressional power "to enact laws that protect our health and environment."
No matter how thrillingly pro-business Alito's record is to the Bush base, they will never be able to turn him into anything but Bush's second choice. The untethered Bush selected his sycophantic nanny Harriet Miers to take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat. It was only when fanatical Christians put Bush's thumbs in the screws that they got their dream date: Scalito.
Incompetence is a form of pollution, and with Bush we get it both ways: in the water and in the White House. And therein lies the problem of Republicans — even when his followers come to sip from the fountain of Bush, there will always be ammonia in the water.
UPDATE: A side note about ethnicity. I too am Italian-American, and dispute the GOP talking point that the term "Scalito" is an anti-Italian-American slur. It isn't. It is a purely anti-conservative slur. Italian-Americans didn't put George W Bush in the White House in 2000 — Scalia did.
Conversely, the nomination of Scalito, given his lack of a uterus, could be viewed as a slur against American women.
At the same time Miers was twisting in the wind, Bush created a parallel situation at the Export-Import Bank that is the talk of the bureaucracy and Capitol Hill. The three-year term as the bank's CEO for Philip Merrill, an experienced government official and businessman, expired Jan. 20 and was extended six months to July 20. The post has been vacant since then because Bush's choice, April Foley, has had difficulties getting through the clearance process and has yet to be formally nominated.
Foley is a former Ex-Im director, but her resume shows no executive experience, either corporate or governmental. Her last available campaign contribution disclosure form, in 2002, lists her as "housewife." But she was one of George W. Bush's girlfriends when they both attended Harvard Business School.
Does this mean Bush must have dated Michael Brown at some point?
We first noticed April Foley back in April 2003, when it was already clear that Bush's teeny-tiny social circle was defining the character, or lack thereof, of his administration.
Oil-field services giant Halliburton Co. said Monday that its quarterly earnings jumped as energy companies ramped up oil and natural gas exploration and production activities.
Net income in the third quarter was $499 million, or 95 cents a share, compared with a loss of $44 million, or 9 cents a share, a year ago when the Houston-based company took a large charge related to its now-settled asbestos liability.
[...]
Analysts had expected the company to post earnings per share of 82 cents, according to Reuters Estimates.
Five hundred million dollars of profit in a single quarter is, as they say, real money. How much is Halliburton squeezing out of US taxpayers? To put it into perspective, Halliburton's profits (not revenues, but profits) since June of this year break out as follows:
$ 166,333,333 per month $ 38,384,615 per week $ 4,101,369 per day $ 170,890 per hour, every hour, 24 hours a day
Was the debacle of the entire Bush Junior administration really just a form of Cheney payback to Halliburton for his "asbestos liability" errors of management while he was CEO? After all, "...he orchestrated Halliburton's purchase of Dresser Industries in 1998. Few people connect this problem with Cheney, but they should, given that he was in charge at the time and got a raise as a result of buying Dresser."
As the above post by Tom Kirkendall states, "It is standard operating procedure in white collar criminal cases for the defense attorney to advise the defendant not to make public statements prior to trial so as not to risk making a statement that the prosecution could discover and use against the defendant during the trial."
It is also standard operating procedure for CEOs not to publicly pump up their companies' stock while simultaneously selling it and buying bankruptcy-immune annuities and Aspen real estate. (Not to mention secretly setting energy policy with Halliburton's ex-CEO Dick Cheney.) Enron was different in so many ways.
A woman who authorities said was hearing voices tossed her three young children off a pier into San Francisco Bay. Rescuers had found one body, and the other two children were feared dead.
Later, on Aug. 31, [FEMA regional director Marty] Bahamonde frantically e-mailed [then-FEMA director] Brown to tell him that thousands are [Katrina] evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that "estimates are many will die within hours."
"Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical," Bahamonde wrote.
Less than three hours later, however, Brown's press secretary wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. "He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes," wrote Brown aide Sharon Worthy.
"We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you."
The crony's name is "Brown" and the lackey's name is "Worthy." What is this, Dickens?
One of the best bits of Fitzgerald's Chicago tenure suggests that manwhore Jeff Gannon might even have the potential to make a guest appearance in the Plame investigation:
Patrick Fitzgerald may have arrived in [Chicago] as the new U.S. attorney in August 2001, but he didn’t really arrive until April 2, 2002, when he stood before the television cameras and announced the stunning news: Gov. George Ryan’s three-decades-old campaign committee was being charged as a “criminal enterprise” whose thirst for money had led to the ever-widening driver’s-licenses-for-bribes scandal.
In a meaty 80-page indictment, Fitzgerald alleged “a pervasive pattern of fraud and corruption,” with schemes that stretched from secretly paying off state employees for campaign work to arranging prostitutes in Costa Rica for Scott Fawell, Ryan’s chief of staff when he was secretary of state.
The link to Jeff Gannon could be more than blogospherical wishful thinking because Jeff Gannon (James Guckert to his mom) was among the two dozen journalists (the term is loosely applied here) appearing in the subpoenaed White House records.
It's Eliot Ness redux. Chicago Magazine link via Gaper's Block (8/2/05).
The government added 10 defendants to its indictment in the KPMG LLP tax-shelter investigation, including the Big Four accounting firm's former chief financial officer, bringing the number of people charged in the case to 19.
In a superseding indictment that is believed to be the largest criminal tax case ever filed, a federal grand jury in New York yesterday charged each of the 19 defendants with at least 39 counts of tax evasion and a single count of conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. Additionally, it charged three of the defendants with obstructing government investigations, and one with evading his personal income taxes.
Seventeen of the 19 defendants are former KPMG tax professionals. The 10 newly added defendants include Richard Rosenthal, 49 years old, a former KPMG chief financial officer; Steven Gremminger, 55, a former KPMG associate general counsel; Larry DeLap, 62, formerly the partner in charge of KPMG's department of professional practice for tax; and Gregg Ritchie 48, a former division head in KPMG's tax practice.
[...]
The case centers on four types of allegedly fraudulent tax shelters that KPMG sold from 1996 to 2002 to about 600 wealthy individuals; the shelters generated about $2.5 billion in tax savings.
In this context, "$2.5 billion in tax savings" is a euphemism for "$2.5 billion stolen from the US Treasury."
But there's another politically charged part of the Journal's story that is missing: that one of the KPMG's "wealthy individual" clients for these abusive tax shelters was Bill Frist: "For every $1 KPMG collected for its 'bogus' shelters for Frist and Co., an extra $11 was taken from your pocket in the form of taxes deflected to the middle class."
Because of HCA, the corporation to which they're all connected and because of which Frist is currently being investigated, it appears that the illegal KPMG tax shelters will probably turn out to be a significant corollary — as additional evidence of the Frists being conniving, thieving bastards if nothing else.
Assuming little is done to slow the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Houston in 2100 would be a less comfortable place to live, one computer model suggests.
Instead of two or three weeks of 95-plus degree days a year, Houston could expect about 50 days that warm each summer, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Purdue University and lead author of a paper outlining one simulation in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Rainfall would also increase somewhat in Diffenbaugh's simulation, but here's the kicker: Houston would receive more of its wet stuff during "extreme rain events," and would actually have about 30 fewer rainy days per year. That likely means more flooding and droughts.
"I have a hard time imagining what it would feel like to live in a Texas with that climate," Diffenbaugh said. "I can't imagine it would be that pleasant."
Unpleasant weather, of course, doesn't mean much to the true believers if the Rapture sucks them all out of their manmade Texan hell.
Meanwhile, the price of a Hummer just went up by a few trillion dollars.
I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.
Harold Pinter Playwright
You can imagine what a shitstorm this would arouse in Wingnuttia if they weren't so focused on their "political capital" being flushed down Cheney's, Rove's, DeLay's and Frist's toilets.
But Michelle Malkin managed to notice, citing the opinion of Laura Bush's aspiring luncheon companion Roger Kimball.
There's only one problem with their arguments: his political opinions aside for the moment, Pinter made a contribution to literature, and they didn't. On the contrary, their entire output and agenda consist of a politics of exclusion that is based on nothing but their opinions. Kimball's predictable rhapsodizing should be considered not art or even criticism but propaganda.
Conclusion: The Nobel Committee did its job admirably.
The President's new 'tax reform' is the ultimate expression of his values. We don't know all of the details, but we know that people who inherit hundreds of millions will pay nothing; firemen and waitresses and working people will pay everything. And we know his plan will take away the most important incentive for the single most important form of ownership: it will eliminate entirely the tax deduction for home mortgage interest.
Meanwhile, snug under the cover of "faith," Pat Robertson's vast enterprises pay no taxes. Paris Hilton gets a free pass on her inheritance. And Cheney's dividend income is tax-free. In fact, if George W Bush is lucky enough for his father to die in 2010, he will receive his own dynastic inheritance without paying a nickel in estate taxes.
In Bushworld, the Ownership Society no longer applies to non-decamillionaires. Sadly, Kerry-Edwards called it right, and the blinkered press corps is discovering what a fool they promoted for over five years now that the damage is already done.
[Harriet Miers's] demure exterior, however, cloaks a tough will and an uncommonly close relationship with Bush. In the Oval Office and on the road, Miers has spent more time with him than perhaps any aide except Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. On Sept. 11, 2001, she was flying on Air Force One as it sped the president to the Midwest and back after the terrorist attacks.
In June 2003, when Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq, Miers was part of a nucleus of aides who stayed overnight with him on the aircraft carrier. She is with him often at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., and is a regular weekend visitor to the presidential retreat at Camp David.
So on 9/11/01, after Bush was finished reading The Pet Goat, Miers was right there to minister to his needs while ricocheting around the United States. That was probably the day he made the most momentous decision of his presidency: to link those events to Iraq.
And Miers was there! So she must be qualified. QED.
Theodore Roosevelt Heller, 88, loving father of Charles (Joann) Heller; dear brother of the late Sonya (the late Jack) Steinberg. Ted was discharged from the U.S. Army during WWII due to service related injuries, and then forced his way back into the Illinois National Guard insisting no one tells him when to serve his country. Graveside services Tuesday 11 a.m. at Waldheim Jewish Cemetery (Ziditshover section), 1700 S. Harlem Ave., Chicago. In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans.
Chief Warrant Officer William Howell was a 15-year Army Special Forces veteran who had seen combat duty all over the world. Sgt. 1st Class Andre McDaniel was a military accountant. Spc. Jeremy Wilson repaired electronics.
They had little in common, other than having served in Iraq with the 10th Special Forces Group based at Fort Carson, Colo. They did not know each other, and they had vastly different duties.
Each, however, committed suicide shortly after returning home, all within about a 17-month period.
[...]
Laura Howell said she blamed Lariam, an Army-issued anti-malaria drug, for her husband's suicide. The drug's manufacturer, Roche Pharmaceuticals, says side effects can include anxiety, paranoia, depression, hallucinations and psychotic behavior.
Lariam is an unbelievably irresponsible drug to prescribe to people with weapons. We can only hope that Roche's Lariam gets half the bad press that Merck's Vioxx got — the risks are so much higher with Lariam.
Another Bush ancestor recognized "the features of a personal enemy poking from a pile of severed heads after a battle, snatched up the rotting flesh and tore it with his teeth in a 'hideous frenzy.'"
The National Guard and Reserves are suffering a strikingly higher share of U.S. casualties in Iraq, their portion of total American military deaths nearly doubling since last year.
Reservists have accounted for one-quarter of all U.S. deaths since the Iraq war began, but the proportion has grown over time. It was 10 percent for the five weeks it took to topple Baghdad in the spring of 2003, and 20 percent for 2004 as a whole.
The trend accelerated this year. For the first nine months of 2005, reservists accounted for 36 percent of U.S. deaths, and for August and September, it was 56 percent, according to Pentagon figures.
The Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve accounted for more than half of all U.S. deaths in August and in September — the first time that has happened in consecutive months.
Dubya's daddy problem will be the true lasting legacy of his reign. Junior's obsession with Saddam trumped everything else about his administration, costing hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. It's difficult to recall the faux-outrage over Saddam's "rape rooms" after Abu Ghraib and especially now that the proportion of all military deaths experienced by the Guard and Reserves has more than quintupled in just two years.
