Friday, July 15, 2005

Rove, Rove, Rove your boat So who’s lying? Rove? Surely not. Not a person in W’s White House.
Rename D.C.? From District of Columbia to Deceit Capital
Questions of the Week
1. Why does the FTC have authority over ads to adults but not to children?
2. Should US investment firms be dumping money into China’s failing banks while China’s failing banks provide preferential financing to Chinese firms making non-financial foreign acquisitions in the US, as in the proposed purchase of Unocal?
3. Who should be responsible for identity theft?
4. Does the Muslim community view its terrorists as its first line of defense?
Weekly Citizens’ Award To Queen Elizabeth II for invoking fond memories of her mother and father visiting casualties of WW II by herself visiting hospitals to talk to those injured in last week’s cowardly terrorist bombs of Muslim extremists.
Weekly Wimp Award Corn Cob Bob, Canada’s renewable fuel org mascot, for not taking a big bite out of Shell Canada’s ass and screaming his knobby head off when Shell Canada invoked a clause in its Canada Day show sponsorship and made Corn Cob Bob retire to the sidelines.
Weekly Chutzpah Award First, Allied Capital (NYSE – ALD, $29.05) blamed short sellers for unloosing a criminal investigation. Then it added a Bush campaign hotshot to its board, gave investors the big finger by saying that financial information will henceforth be like Waldo, and takes on a high-powered SEC connected lobbyist whose job it is to gun down anyone who gets too curious. Enron, anyone?
Weekly Lottery Award Goes to co-President Stephen Crawford of Morgan Stanley, not on the A-list of new CEO Johnny Mack, who was offered $32 million if he quit by August. He quit.
Secretary of Silicon Colin Powell is hooking up with a Kleiner Perkins, a Silicon Valley venture capital group of Yahoo and Google fame whose investments are increasingly global, hopefully not WMD related.
Bad Dream Works Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen, top ogres at Dream Works, warn of lower profits, something to do with disappointing DVD sales. Hey, with their talent and easy access to big bucks, I’m not looking over their shoulders.
Viagra Conundrum You take it so you can see your master regain its mastery and then go blind. Pfizer’s adding a blindness caution label that hopefully will also say: ‘Read before taking pill,’ or include a Braille version.
Really? Really? Writers Guild of America is accusing Reality TV producers and broadcasters of slave labor tactics: no OT, health or pension bennies, unlike scripted TV. That might explain why there are so damn many stupid, disgusting, lame, abysmal, inane, god awful, lousy, rotten, airhead, brainless, wasteful, dumb, abhorrent, vacuous, etc, Reality TV shows.
All expense paid trip to get an…Endoscope? The medical profession, in yet another way to get its hands on Washington largess, entices immigrants not familiar with the health care system and apparently not familiar either with citizenship requirements with all-expenses-paid-trips to surgery centers for unneeded endoscopies, colonoscopies, pap smears, free or sale priced plastic surgery, etc. Estimated cost to you and me: $500 million; estimated total medical fraud: $100 to $150 million per day.
Corporate Crooks Update Bernie from WorldCom snagged twenty-five years, down from the eighty-five it could have been, but at his long-in-the-tooth sixty-three years, what’s a decade or six? King Maurice from AIG ran a white flag about a third of the way up the pole and asked for a meeting with the SEC. I’m still pissed that Scrushy isn’t pounding rocks.
National Hokey League So the strike is over and we’ll have a season next year. Ho bloody hum! What they need to do is contract to the original six teams, eliminate head whacking, and drink from the Stanley Cup no later than April 30th.