Hungry for fraud? If you're in Houston and you happen to know a member of the Houston Forum, for just $32 you can have lunch with Ken Lay one month before his trial starts.

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.

{ 11:17 AM }

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The voices in their heads. Compare and contrast:

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.

Another man who heard voices in his head said, "God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.'" Iraqi civilians dead so far: 26,661 (minimum). American dead so far: 2,079.

{ 10:44 AM }

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How can we deliver food? We're eating now. Michael Brown is a bad, bad bureaucrat:

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?

Via Talking Points Memo.

{ 12:23 PM }

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Fitzy. Here's a lengthy July 2002 profile of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald that shows his lack of fear in the face of entrenched Republican power, or any power, for that matter.

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).

{ 10:31 AM }

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God help us all: Vice President Condoleezza Rice, who had to be coaxed into appearing before the 9/11 Commission.

{ 2:43 PM }

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$2.5 billion in illegal tax shelters and Bill Frist. The KPMG illegal tax shelter story keeps growing (WSJ):

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."

UPDATE: Forbes reports that the KPMG clients included Thomas F. Frist III, a nephew of Sen. William H. Frist (R-TN), while Bloomberg reports that Thomas Frist III is the brother of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

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.

Martha Stewart went to jail for so much less.

{ 11:36 AM }

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The Grey Lady has fallen and she can't get up.



Make your own sign at Office Sign Generator. Via Paperholic.

{ 9:09 AM }

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Houston: hot or not? It looks like the scientists are betting on hot:

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.

{ 3:20 PM }

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