President Bush, left, plays a guitar presented to him by Country singer Mark Wills, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. AP Photo.
So, listen up, cable TV pundits: next time you feel the urge to say "death tax," say "Leona's dog tax" instead. You may surprised at how many of your viewers would welcome the change and not mind taking a few million dollars away from Trouble.
Shareholders of an unusual real-estate investment fund are suing the fund's founder, claiming that the fund failed to disclose a takeover offer, and instead paid $175 million for a group of companies he controlled.
Under the terms of the takeover offer, shareholders would have received higher payouts if the fund didn't buy the companies from the founder.
Leo Wells III, the 63-year-old founder of Wells Real Estate Funds, based in Norcross, Ga., personally received roughly $161 million of the $175 million purchase price as the predominant owner of the companies, which had been paid millions in management fees by the fund, Wells Real Estate Investment Trust.
Shareholders were informed about the "internal" purchase, but they were tricked: "What Wells REIT directors didn't disclose was that at least one potential suitor offered to buy Wells REIT, and the offer would have been more lucrative to Wells shareholders if the fund didn't buy Mr. Wells's management companies."
Foreclosure filings across the nation jumped 9% between June and July and rose precipitously by 93% compared to the same period last year.
There were 179,599 foreclosures last month, according to RealtyTrac, a marketplace for foreclosed properties — one filing for every 693 households.
Some 43 states reported year-over-year increases in foreclosures, with Nevada leading the way: one filing for every 199 households. [...]
California, Florida and Ohio, along with Michigan and Georgia, made up nearly half of the total foreclosure filings.
In the last nine months, about 120 mortgage lenders have shut or declared bankruptcy. Naturally this does not account for the tens or even hundreds of thousands of personal bankruptcies yet to appear from the subprime credit mess — an unforced catastrophic error that was generated by managerial hubris and a power structure out of control. (Sound familiar?)
The GOP's beloved Ownership Society has become its own bastard child: the Bankruptcy Society.
When [Ashton Kutcher's] friend Matt spotted Jenna and Barbara Bush, Matt graphically described his amorous intent, oblivious to the glares of the Secret Service agents: "I'd fucking nail the shit out of that bitch!"
"My God, he was not shutting up," says Kutcher. Nevertheless, Ashton met the twins, who asked what he was doing after the party. Everyone ended up going back to Kutcher's house, although he insisted the Secret Service stay outside. "So we're hanging out," Kutcher says. "The Bushes were underage-drinking at my house. When I checked outside, one of the Secret Service guys asked me if they'd be spending the night. I said no. And then I go upstairs to see another friend and I can smell the green wafting out under his door. I open the door, and there he is smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah."
The next morning, Kutcher picked up his phone -- and didn't get a dial tone. He assumes that ever since the Bushes' visit, the Secret Service has had his phone tapped.
So now Lil Jenna's all grown up and stuff — getting all engaged.
By planning to marry a nice Republican boy, Drunk'n'Spliffy Girl follows Coke Daddy's example and shows the world she's capable of pretending to clean up her act.
Meanwhile, the White House is going to fucking nail the shit out of Jenna's wedding for all it's worth.
And there you have what will be remembered Dubya's legacy in a nutshell — a big 2008 White House wedding for Drunk'n'Spliffy Girl, all calculated to goose Coke Daddy's record-breaking abysmal poll numbers before he's gone for the good of the whole world.
The Bush administration formally weighed in on the side of business in a closely watched Supreme Court case, finalizing the battle lines in a case that has big implications for Wall Street.
The administration's position is largely at odds with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which earlier this year took the side of the shareholder plaintiffs. The case centers on whether shareholders can sue to hold third parties accountable for their company's fraud. [...]
In a "friend of the court" brief, the Justice Department said finding for the plaintiffs would "considerably widen the pool of deep-pocketed defendants that could be sued for the misrepresentations of issuers."
God knows we don't want the rabble getting their hands in those deep pockets.
A similar case is being fought by Enron shareholders against Merrill Lynch & Co. who doctored Enron's financial image to appear healthier than it was. The Bush administration, contrary to the logic of ownership, does not want Merrill Lynch to be held accountable for its role in the Enron fraud. Enron shareholders should just shut up and take their losses, despite having been generated by a Republican cabal composed of Bush contributors at the tops of Enron, Merrill Lynch, and the defunct Arthur Andersen (Halliburton's auditor under Cheney).
The glory of ownership, often phrased by the GOP as the Ownership Society, is its blanket excuse for such ideas as the privatization of Social Security. But now they have proved that not only do they want all your money in the US Treasury, they also want all the money in your 401(k) and brokerage accounts.
You would think that a property-revering Republican would want to enforce accountability among his properties. But that's because the Republican party is no longer the party of property — such sacred cows are old school. Under Bush's son it has become the party of outright fraud.
“For all the years he was president,” Dick Armey told me, “Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we’d do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn’t like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president’s autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it.”
Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. “Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, ‘It would probably wind up on eBay,’” Armey continued. “Do I give a damn? No. But can you imagine refusing a simple request like that with an insult? It’s stupid. From the point of view of your own self-interest, it’s stupid. I was from Texas, and I was the majority leader. If my expectations of civility and collegiality were disappointed, what do you think it was like for the rest of the congressmen they dealt with? The Bush White House was tone-deaf to the normal courtesies of the office.”
How many men's rooms must Bob Allen walk down Before you call him a man? Yes, 'n' how many black guys must he meet in the park before he's statistically canned Yes, 'n' how many GOP scandals break out before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' mmm mmm hmm The answer is blowin' mmm mmm hmmmmmmm
What makes him a Republican? Democrats generally don't give $50,000 to the RNC.
UPDATE: According to the account of the prosecution in the WSJ, Reyes didn't backdate options to enrich himself but rather to "to recruit and retain employees, and then repeatedly falsified meeting minutes to hide the practice from accountants and ultimately investors." And "Mr. Reyes is the latest in a series of white-collar defendants to be convicted of fraud after arguing they were too busy and had too many responsibilities to realize what they were doing wrong."
Very amusing defense, especially when you consider that Reyes "sold at least $380 million of shares he received before the company went public in 1999." For someone who, via intentionally and secretly backdating stock options, was illegally creating recruitment signing bonuses out of thin air, that line of logic sure sounds like the height of faux naiveté.
No matter how you slice it, he's still a Republican crook.
Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union. [...]
If California does what No. 07-0032 calls for while everybody else is still going with winner take all by state, the real-world result will be to give Party B (in this case the Republicans) an unearned, Ohio-size gift of electoral votes. In a narrow sense, that’s good if you like Party B, but not so good if you like Party A (in this case the Democrats). Or if you think that in a democracy everybody ought to play by roughly the same rules. [...]
The California initiative flunks even the categorical-imperative test. Imagine, as a thought experiment, that all the states were to adopt this “reform” at once. Electoral votes would still be winner take all, only by congressional district rather than by state. Instead of ten battleground states and forty spectator states, we’d have thirty-five battleground districts and four hundred spectator districts. The red-blue map would be more mottled, and in some states more people might get to see campaign commercials, because media markets usually take in more than one district. But congressional districts are as gerrymandered as human ingenuity and computer power can make them. The electoral-vote result in ninety per cent of the country would still be a foregone conclusion, no matter how close the race.
California Initiative No. 07-0032 is an audacious power play packaged as a step forward for democratic fairness. It’s the lotusland equivalent of Tom DeLay’s 2003 midterm redistricting in Texas, except with a sweeter smell, a better disguise, and larger stakes. And the only way Californians will reject it is if they have a chance to think about it first.
Read the whole thing. And weep.
Who's the perp behind the nefariousness? Thomas W. Hiltachk of Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, the law firm for the California Republican Party. He is the firm’s managing partner and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal lawyer for election matters.
Yes, he's Arnold's manservant, but does he have any real election credibility? Mr. Hiltachk served as an official U.S. election observer for the 1996 Russian presidential election. Wow! From Yeltsin to Schwarzenegger.
Optical scan voting devices slated to be used presidential primary elections in Florida next year are significantly flawed and could compromise the outcome of the contest, according to a report released Tuesday by Secretary of State Kurt Browning.
The report was compiled by researchers at Florida State University, who were hired by Browning in May to conduct an independent review of optical scan and touch-screen devices made by Diebold Election Systems, one of the largest voting machine vendors in the country and a major supplier of gear to Florida.
The report cited a number of security gaps in the Diebold systems.
For example, it said, Diebold's Accuvote OS optical scan machine is vulnerable to vote manipulation by illicitly inserting a pre-programmed memory card into a voting terminal. The card, the report said, could be coded to flip votes from one candidate to another without detection.
