Sen. John McCain talking up the importance of staying the course in Iraq while wooing campaign contributors at the River Oaks home of Mica and Bob Mosbacher. In the mix — Patty and James Huffines of Austin, Kelly Day, Louise and Dr. Denton Cooley, Kristen and John Perry and Kathi Mosbacher with fiance Mike Wheeler.
One of the last times we saw a gathering like this was in 2004 when Mica and Bob Mosbacher and Nancy and Rich Kinder (former Enron prez) held back-to-back house parties for Bush-41's 80th birthday, attended by Dick and Lynne Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, Prince Bandar, and James A. Baker III (whose Iraq Study Group will forever remain an insignificant historial footnote).
With friends like this, you can almost smell McCain's desperation.
These same subprime mortgages are predicted to take down the markets. ("Subprime will bring down mortgage lending, housing and, in turn, the economy and the market," says Sy Jacobs, Founder and Investment Manager, Jacobs Asset Management, in Barron's.)
And when Merrill Lynch's contribution to the coming Subprime Mortgage Crisis becomes this year's version of yet another Republican-engineered financial crisis (cf. Enron California energy crisis, Poppy's and Neil's S&L crisis, the near-privatization of Social Security, consecutive record federal deficits of Bush 41 and 43, etc.), guess who stands to benefit?
Why, Merrill Lynch's CEO Stanley O'Neal, that's who. This Bush Pioneer stands to personally reap $241 million from his carefully engineered failure, while another government bailout program will have to be devised to counterbalance his brilliant management.
UPDATE: John Aravosis of AMERICABlog is missing the bigger picture when he asks, "Why should I feel bad that you gambled on a mortgage and lost?" The bailout will benefit not the borrowers who were both insanely optimistic and relatively clueless, but the lenders who knew exactly what they were doing all along. For the borrowers, subprime was a gamble. For the lenders, it was a windfall to be followed by a government bailout. For Stanley O'Neal, it's a quarter-billion-dollar bonus.
If Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. chief executive Stanley O'Neal were to resign or be fired from the world's largest brokerage firm, he would take home a $251.4 million pay package.
Stanley O'Neal, Bush Pioneer, has a good chance of making his big payday.
Today: "Kenneth Starr asked the Supreme Court to carve out an exception to the First Amendment, allowing school authorities to suppress student speech if they think it undermines official antidrug messages."
Next week: "Kenneth Starr asked the Supreme Court to carve out an exception to the First Amendment, allowing school authorities to suppress student speech if they think it undermines Executive Branch messages."
Next month: "Kenneth Starr asked the Supreme Court to carve out an exception to the First Amendment, allowing school authorities to suppress student speech if they think it undermines the whims of the Attorney General."
Next year: "Kenneth Starr asked the Supreme Court to carve out an exception to the First Amendment, allowing school authorities to suppress student speech if they think it undermines Fortune 500 messages."
As I wrote in yesterday's column, Tuesday's document dump -- which initiated from the Justice Department, not the White House -- includes e-mails from J. Scott Jennings, Karl Rove's deputy at the White House, coming from an e-mail address at gwb43.com. That's a domain owned by the Republican National Committee.
This raises all sorts of questions. I put four of them to a White House spokesman yesterday, but haven't gotten a response.
The questions:
1) Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses for official White House business? Does it prohibit it? What is the policy?
2) Would these e-mails be treated any differently from official White House e-mails when it comes to archiving or subpoena purposes?
3) Does it create either impropriety or the appearance of impropriety that gwb43.com is a domain owned by the Republican National Committee?
[...]
Ironically, this would appear to be the flipside of the issue that arose during the Clinton administration, when Vice President Al Gore improperly made fund-raising calls from his White House office. Here, rather than having party business being conducted using official resources, you have official business being conducted using party resources.
Perhaps some of my colleagues in the press can raise these questions at a White House briefing.
Here's the WHOIS data on gwb43.com, confirming its ownership by the RNC.
"If Iran's allies prevailed, the regime and Tehran's own designs for the Middle East would be advanced, and the threat to our friends in the region would only be magnified," Cheney told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) yesterday.
Cheney and his Halliburtonesque friends are the real threat to the region.
"President Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers on Monday to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor." The nomination took place in October 2005, eight months after her suggestion to fire all U.S. attorneys.
Former President George H.W. Bush was treated at a California hospital for dehydration and released Monday morning after collapsing during a Sunday afternoon golf game in Palm Springs.
Jean Becker, Bush's chief of staff, told The Associated Press that Bush fainted while playing golf with friends in 94-degree heat.
In 2010, all of Poppy's money goes to Barbara and the kids tax-free. So it's important to keep Poppy on the right schedule. How else will George and Laura pay for Jenna's upkeep at the ranch in Paraguay?
FORA BUSH! For pictures of the Brazilian protests against Bush, see ndrC!'s photos.
Nice to know Little Lord Georgie and his crony-based wars are creating such goodwill for America around the world, while our soldiers die and are maimed in Baghdad or simply suffer at Walter Reed.
(I think "Fora Bush" means "Bush Out!" in Portuguese.)
The private sector added 57,000 jobs in February, a poor showing that fell far below economists’ expectations, according to a study released today.
The Automated Data Processing Inc. National Employment Report’s numbers contrasted sharply with the increase of 100,000 jobs economists surveyed by Reuters had forecasted.
It was the weakest job growth since July 2003, according to Marketwatch.
July 2003 was shortly after George's Great Baghdad Adventure had begun, when the bleeding of the US Treasury via crony-based leeches was in full swing.
It was a strange remark even then. Why, at that particular moment, did Bush single Poland out of all the incredible countries in his "coalition"? Why would Poland be foremost on his mind, such as it is?
On Friday, July 11, 2003 Cooper called Karl Rove. "Don't get too far out on Joe Wilson," said Rove. "Some info will be coming out. Like his wife. She worked on WMD for the Agency. I've already said too much."
(That was also the day that Delia and Kate each said, "Why are we trying Libby? Where are Rove and Armitage?")
[...]
Novak risked his scoop by telling his friend Rick Holt about Mrs. Wilson three days before his story was printed. And Holt is...? A lobbyist about town who "talks to a lot of people about a lot of things." Novak "assumed [Holt] would not share it with anyone but that was not an agreement between us."
Typical Republican smear — lobbyists knew what was going down long before the public.
If Cheney dies before his term is up, Scooter will become a victim of Dubya's microscopic attention span and will go to prison. And for what? Protecting Rove and Cheney?
U.S. stocks tumbled again Friday as traders fretted about the possibility of a prolonged period of weakness in equities.
Major indexes are now about 5% below their recent closing highs. They declined gradually throughout the day, while still bouncing around with the volatility that has been ubiquitous this week, and made a final, sharp downturn in the closing minutes.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 120.24 to 12114.10, down seven of the past eight sessions. The Dow suffered its biggest weekly percentage drop – 4.2% -- since the week ended March 28, 2003. The S&P 500 lost 16 to 1387.17. It declined 4.4% on the week, its biggest fall since the week ended Jan. 24, 2003. The Nasdaq Composite Index was off 36.21, or 1.5%, to 2368, ending at its lowest level of the day. It absorbed its biggest weekly percentage drop since Aug. 6, 2004. [...]
Meanwhile, traders digested more troubling economic data. The University of Michigan's final reading on consumer confidence for February fell to 91.3 from 96.9 at the end of January, further than previously estimated, reaching a five-month low as concerns over incomes and jobs in a slowing economy weighed on confidence.
This news brought to you by the same people who wanted to privatize your Social Security assets, which would be about 5% less in the two months since the start of this year — if they had gotten their way.
I feel like I've missed out on life. I grew up on "the mission field" in a conservative Christian home where "gosh" and "heck" were bad words. I was home-schooled for most of my life, and when I got back to North America, I enrolled in a Christian university. After years of dealing with the crap fundamentalists dish out to their young, I finally became an atheist, and a year later, I'm still going strong.
My problem is that after spending my whole life immersed in the evangelical culture, I have no idea how to function in the real world. I've never had a girlfriend, never had sex, never kissed a girl. I'm a fairly attractive, healthy, well-adjusted young man, but the only women I know are Christians, and starting a relationship with one of them would be pointless. I read stories about people in college hooking up and getting laid like nobody's business, but I never had the chance to get involved in anything like that. I've gone to bars and clubs, but I just have no idea what I'm supposed to do or how to meet people.
Former Fundie
My point is this: there is an entire generation of evangelically-raised youth out there that craves something more like a normal young adulthood. That is, one with at least reasonable experiments in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. One in which some degree of self-discovery and self-definition (as opposed to scriptural or authoritarian definitions of one's self) is possible.
These identity crises are going to worsen as the country reverts itself back to something resembling common sense. The kids of American evangelicals have been living under a purposefully rotten and deceptive illusion — constant reassurances throughout their youth that they were right and everyone else was wrong. Except guess what? Their parents got it backwards.
Dan's answer to this sheltered young man is a bit more glib than it needs to be. A missed opportunity, for sure, but there will be millions of others. Hopefully next time he will respect the earnestness of this struggle instead of churning out a reflex response.
