Vice President Cheney appeared in a promotional video for Arthur Andersen in 1996, when he was CEO of Halliburton. There are some prophetic quotes:
“I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we’re doing business and how we’re operating over and above the just sort of normal by-the-book auditing arrangement,” Mr Cheney says in a short section of the video.
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Great column by Arianna.
To the ever-growing mountain of evidence that corporate kingpins live in an entirely different world from the rest of us, we can add the latest revelations about the gargantuan loans CEOs receive from their companies: the $408 million WorldCom loaned to former boss Bernie Ebbers a month before thousands of employees began getting their pink slips, the $3.1 billion Adelphia Communications loaned to John Rigas and his kin, the $162 million Conseco loaned to Stephen Hilbert, the $88 million Tyco loaned to Dennis Kozlowski and the millions upon millions in less ostentatious — but no less outrageous — raids on company coffers by senior executives across the corporate landscape.
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WorldCom — which defaulted on $4.2 billion of its own loans yesterday — is charging Ebbers 2.3% on the $408 million he owes.
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Professional stand-up comedians know that Sept. 11 jokes are radioactive. Not even the bravest have tried to turn the deaths of some 3,000 people into a laughing matter. But President Bush has forged ahead anyway. Bush has now been telling the same, spectacularly tasteless joke to a variety of mostly Republican audiences as part of his stock stump speech for the better part of four months now.
This is its basic telling:
“You know, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream weÂ’d get the trifecta.”
According to the transcripts, this joke usually elicits laughter from the mostly GOP crowds to whom Bush tells it.
Not only is the joke tasteless — lucky me we got 3,000 Americans killed — it’s not even true. The president never mentioned those conditions in his campaign, or while pushing his huge tax cuts.
Bush was already facing the certainty of deficit spending at the end of the summer of 2001, well before the attacks of Sept. 11. Some $4 trillion worth of budget surplus vanished over the spring and summer that year, and budget experts sounded the alarm about looming deficits then. The Congressional Budget Office warned Bush on Aug. 29 that Social Security funds would be needed to balance the books, forcing him to abandon a campaign promise not to use the retirement fund for other government spending.
His tax cuts are the reason for the deficit, and most of them haven’t taken effect yet.
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I see sites like these: Media Whores Online, or (on a smaller scale) leftyblog; which seem to think of themselves as the left side of the political spectrum, but what they really stand for is the Democratic party. By the standards of any real politics, the Democrats are a centrist party. In most western countries, many of their positions are center-right:
These people think the Green Party and Ralph Nader are the enemy as much as the GOP. After what I’ve seen in the last couple of years, I’m not sure I can vote for the Democratic politicians that “represent” me. In the last presidential election, I got to watch Joseph Lieberman state, “the Constitution promises freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. We are after all not just another nation, but ‘one nation under God.’ ” He also said that morality was impossible without religion. These are not the statements of a “liberal” political party — they are those of a religious party.
I see Richard Gephardt saying that, with the new threat of global terrorism, the United States must be “ready to strike, not just deter.”
I see the USA Patriot Act pass 356-66 in the House, and 98-1 in the Senate.
I see the Senate unanimously approve a resolution sponsored by its Democratic and Republican leaders that expressed support for the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance. The statement by the DNC chairman says: “Today’s decision by the Federal Appeals Court is unfortunate. The pledge of allegiance is a reflection of the values of America and have been an important, patriotic tradition for more than a century. I trust that the judicial process will ultimately overturn this wrong-headed decision.”
I see the Democratic party support the failure that is the War on Drugs.
I see the Democratic party support abortion, but not public funding. They believe the “right to choose” is for those who can afford such a right. They don’t seem to have a problem with my tax dollars going for plenty of things I don’t approve of.
As a gay man, I find it laughable that anyone could vote for the Republican party, but “they’re not as bad as the GOP” is not a good enough reason for me to vote for the Democrats. They must earn my vote — they do not have a “right” to it. Given the ways the party has acquiesced as the Bush administration has shredded the Bill of Rights since 9/11, I will not vote for a Democratic candidate again unless I see a fundamental change in their behavior.
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Washington Post article:
The FBI is visiting libraries nationwide and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties to terrorists or plotting an attack, library officials say.
The FBI effort, authorized by the antiterrorism law enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks, is the first broad government check of library records since the 1970s when prosecutors reined in the practice for fear of abuses.
Note that it is illegal under the Patriot Act for a librarian to state that they have turned over records to the FBI. The FBI has to obtain a search warrant from a secret court and must only “show it has reason to suspect that a person is involved with a terrorist or a terrorist plot – far less difficult than meeting the tougher legal standards of probable cause, required for traditional search warrants or reasonable doubt, required for convictions.”
This country is becoming a police state.
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After a court ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance containing the phrase “under God” (added in 1954) is unconstitutional, our elected leaders all rushed to proclaim their support for God:
House members gathered on the front steps of the Capitol to recite the Pledge of Allegiance en masse. The Senate unanimously approved a resolution sponsored by its Democratic and Republican leaders that expressed support for the reference to God in the pledge, and instructed the Senate’s legal counsel to intervene in the case. The vote was 99 to 0, with Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) absent.
Unanimous.
When the phrase “Under God” was added in 1954, Eisenhower said the change was being made “to recognize a Supreme Being” and advance religion at a time “when the government was publicly inveighing against atheistic communism”.
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Handy chart of the Bush administration’s corporate connections.
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