“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968 – from his “I have a dream” speech delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
Taka Who? Takafuma Horie, rotund, spiky-haired, young hotshot with a silver-blue Ferrari, a bikini model girlfriend, and founder of Livedoor Company, has either run afoul of the Japanese business establishment that he holds in high finger disdain or taken Japanese investors for a bundle of yen. Prosecutors, suspecting a giant fraud, raided Livedoor’s offices sending shivers down the spines of mom and pop investors and sending the Nikkei into a 1000 point (roughly 6%) tumble. Livedoor’s stock has plummeted from pre-raid ¥696 to ¥137 ($6 to $1.20), 80% in any language.
Government Googles Google’s Googlers? The Bush administration is trying to get Google to cough up dope on its Googlers to find out whether or not they’re surfing for porn. This puts anyone who enters the Internet on a regular basis at risk of being whisked away, under cover of darkness, to Guantanamo for inadvertently, by following an e-mail link, or purposefully, as in researching nudist colonies say, visiting a porn site.
Dead Happy The Supreme Court told Oregonians that it could proceed with physician-assisted suicide, tossing out former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s bullying attempt to bury Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act.
Questions of the Week
1. Will Alito ever be confirmed?
2. Why, with a capital J Jerk like Manmoud Ahmadinejad sitting in the president’s tent, does the White House want to avoid anti-Western resentment in Iran? Too late, it’s already there, and isn’t Manmoud, with his fiery rhetoric, every bit as dangerous as Saddam?
3. What if federal government lobbyists simply posted all payments, gifts, etc., and contacts like some thirty plus states require? Wouldn’t that solve the problem of guys like Black Jack Abramoff, super evil lobbyist?
American Hypocrisy? Bushies halted free-trade negotiations with Egypt to protest Egypt’s harsh imprisonment of a political dissident. Is there some type of national schizophrenia running amok that I don’t know about?
Our Friends in Washington Update
1. Rice stirring the pot. Condi is setting up a new office whose denizens will report to her and keep tabs on $19 billion ladled out to foreign aid. Maybe someone in Washington should set up a new office to keep tabs on the billions of dollars spent on new offices to keep track of the billions of dollars being spent.
Sponge Bob Gets Squeezed Peed of parents, tired of Viacom and Kellogg using Sponge Bob and other happy hookers to hawk unhealthy cereals, are suing.
Stirrings In The Corporate Anthill
1. Long-term Marlboro smokers filed suit against Philip Morris hoping to force the company to pay for low-dose CT scans that detect early-stage lung cancer. Sounds like a great idea, but will PM’s legal permit de facto admission of product liability?
2. Did the supervisory board chairman of DamilerChrysler give the chief executive of Deutsche bank insider information? Some in der fadder land think so.
3. Is Bruce Wasserstein, king of Lazards, seriously interested in Time Warner? If he is, he’ll likely get it. But will he break it up? Yes, or course, if breaking it up makes $en$e.
4. Omnicare, a provider of drugs and services to the healthcare industry has received administrative subpoenas from federal authorities who suspect something more than Omnicare’s patients are sick.
Corporate Crook Update
1. Unscrupulous Scrushy: this guy wins gold for gall. A writer for The Birmingham Times (you remember Birmingham where Scrushy was found not guilty on all 36 counts of looting and pillaging of HealthSouth) and fellow genuflector from Believers Temple Church has disclosed that Scrushy paid her $10 thousand for and then edited articles favorable to him that were published during his trial. He also purchased a $1 thousand computer for the reporter, who now says she wasn’t paid nearly what was originally offered, the amount of the shortfall described only as significant. Nothing like shortchanging a church lady to find the worms hiding under the collection plate. The father of the owner of the paper wasn’t available for comment because it was his golfing day. Ya just gotta love it.
2. Prosecutors, in keeping with their newfound KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy lest they addle what they deem the lesser minds of jurors, will go after Joseph Nacchio, former top corn chip at Qwest, for insider trading rather than the complex issues of accounting and several other frauds, lying, cheating, looting and pillaging. Nacchio pocketed $100 million plus or minus by selling Qwest stock ahead of public pronouncements of pending doom. Shame on him.
Finger Fraud, The Sequel The couple who tried to purloin Wendy’s with phake proctology is off to the slammer for nine years where they may get their own proctology purloining.
Katie Couric’s Pay If the SEC has its way, we may soon know how many millions the all-American girl and other senior executives are paid. How much do you want to bet that batteries of lawyers are already creating loopholes? We will probably see a sharp decline in executive titles or the definition of senior executive will change. This year, our top mail room employee, the executive vice president in charge of string, earned $30 thousand and received ten shares of company stock.
Religious Wars Religious leaders in Ohio are irked that two large churches are campaigning on behalf of a conservative governor wannabe Republican. God moves in mysterious ways.
Poll Queens
African: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Harvard-educated banker, but we won’t hold that against her, took the oath of office of president of Liberia. Let’s all pray, or hope if prayer isn’t part of your daily bread, that she makes a huge, positive difference.
Chilean: Ditto for Michelle Bachelet, agnostic, guitar-strumming hippie, physician, former U.S. resident and new president of Chile.
Germany: And don’t forget Chancellor Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany.
United States: ?
“Zheng He” Day We may have to change the second Monday in October from Columbus Day to Zheng He Day if the Chinese prove that, in 1421, Mr. Zheng sailed his Asian Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria up the Hudson and plopped a chow mein noodle on Manhattan Island or anywhere else in North America. Of course, that doesn’t solve the audacious claims of the Norse who say they landed along the eastern seaboard of Canada and United States millions of years ago, or at least around 1000 AD.
