Weekly Quiz What product was once sold on Longevity Lane in Liuzhou, China? (Answer at bottom)

Passing Gas Here’s the problem: right now, the senate and congress are full of gas so there’s all this farting going on. So the Senate hauls these five really rich guys in and wants to know why they’re getting richer and the rest of the country is getting poorer and the really rich guys who are going to die rich and therefore don’t really care what the Senate thinks pretty much gave them the finger. Alas, none of the poor people who have given up food and other luxuries in order to buy gasoline and home heating fuels were in the room—they were sitting around wondering when the Senate and their other so-called elected representatives were going to get smart enough to free themselves from the clutches of the five wicked and ugly stepsisters and all their wonderful PAC money and aggressively and intelligently promote the development of alternative fuels. Alas, alas, once our dearly elected representatives pass gas and their stomach pain subsides, they’ll forget all about excessive oil company profits and constituents freezing their asses off in stalled SUV’s until the old gas pain comes back. Then the farting starts all over again.

Crackberry Pie The hundreds of thousands of Blackberry users in the U.S. may have to thumb something else if Research In Motion (RIM) in Waterloo, Ontario and NTP in Arlington, VA can’t reach agreement on the three-year-old patent infringement suit lodged by NTP. Doesn’t RIM realize that the CIA is based in Arlington? It seems shareholders are milling about the exits, but haven’t hit the panic bar: @ $78, the stock is $16 above its 52 week low, though down from $128, its 52 week high. I don’t know how much of an unfavorable NTP ruling is factored into the $78, but its my guess everyone still holding expects an equitable settlement.

Questions of the Week
1. What is the personal cost to me, my friends, and my neighbors if the world negotiates a meaningful, global trade agreement next month in Hong Kong?
2. How old will your grandchildren or great grandchildren be when tax reform becomes a reality?

What In Hall Is Going On At Halliburton Every time I turn around, Halliburton is getting its knuckles wrapped for some misdeed, the latest being improperly charging worker pension plans with executive pension and bonus plans. I think it’s a company run by crooks and gangsters who don’t give a damn about we, the people. Oh, isn’t Halliburton where VP Cheney used to be CEO? Yes, I believe it is.

Immy’s And the award this year goes to sixteen-year-old Mary Sue for baring her breasts the most times in one week and iCasting her accomplishment to iPod users around the world. NATAS, the Emmy people, has created a category for original video content for computers, cellphones and other handhelds like iPod.

I Say Nothing This from the NY Times in a November 8th article about Wall Street bonuses : The big winners could be traders involved in commodities and energy, in particular, proprietary traders who deal in those two high-octane growth areas. They could receive pay increases of 40 percent to 50 percent, with some walking away with $15 million to $20 million each, according to one investment banking executive who is prohibited from commenting on compensation issues. Just so you don’t feel too badly about your Christmas turkey, you’ll be heartened to know that the mid-level schlubs will only get $1.2 million to $1.8 million. How do they live?

Corporate Crook Update
1. You gotta love this guy: Richard (I think we should call him Jesus) Scrushy. Turns out his son-in-law, Michael Plaia, married to daughter Christa (had he been a son, would his name be Christ?), invested $3 mil in a cable station in Birmingham while Richie boy was on trial there for laundering, conspiracy and securities fraud so Richie and frau Leslie could host a religious TV show to the good jurors in Bible belt Birmingham. Guess what? Son-in-law Mikie has done it again. He’s acquired a cable TV station in Montgomery where Richie boy is being charged with bribing a former governor of Alabama. How much you want to bet that Richie and frau Leslie will soon be hosting a reprise of their Birmingham program so the good jurors from the Montgomery pool will know what a grand Christian he really is. He’s already taken three men of the cloth to court to pray with him and frau out in front of the courtroom after he pled not guilty. Maybe he is Jesus. It’s for sure a miracle he’s not pounding rocks.

Judy, Judy, Judy Cary Grant never said it, but the Gray Lady did, giving Judith Miller of 85 days in the slammer fame the boot after 28 years of Times toil. Judy says she needs some quiet time after her ordeal, which will apparently be spent in the solitude of the lecture circuit. Will we ever get to the bottom of the Libby/Miller relationship? How deep does it go?

Our Friends in Washington Update
1. Scooter Libby has started a legal defense fund. I wonder if he’s assigning future book royalties to secure repayment.

Evolution Evolves The Intelligent Design octet in Dover, PA got the heave-ho by the voters. Skirmishes got nasty and there may be some over-the-shoulder glancing, but so far no one has been killed. Praise the uh, Darwin.

Corporate Speak Answer: “Forgetting the business logic and the price, there will be options down the road there, I would answer your question about capable and that we weren’t really quite capable yet because our army was doing all the other stuff we had to do, particularly the systems conversions. “The army will be capable to do other stuff sometime next year, which is reasonable. Doesn’t mean we will.” What was the question? Question: Does J.P. Morgan Chase have plans for a potential merger? Responder: James Dimon, chief executive-designate. Ah, that’s the problem: he’s only the CEO-designate.

Non-Surprise Of The Week Blockbuster loses $491 million in its third quarter. CEO Antioco says Blockbuster will cut costs and become more dominant as the industry consolidates. Does that mean bigger losses? Not much logic need be expended to realize these guys are riding a dinosaur.

Greedy Bastards Update
1. In 2003, indicted power lobbyist fast Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay’s good friend, wanted leading human rights abuser Gabon to pay him $9 million to set up a meeting with W. In what the White House describes as a routine meeting and nothing to do with Abramoff, Bongo, President of Gabon, met with W in 2004, ten months after fast Jack’s pitch. Odd that one of fast Jack’s accounts, the one to which Gabon was directed to pay the $9 mil, had millions in cash flow right around that time.

Not Too Corny About $22.7 billion is the projected corn subsidy for 2005, up from $13.3 billion in 2004. Let’s see, at $4 a bag for movie popcorn, that’s equal to 5.7 billion bags. There’s the problem: we’re not eating enough movie popcorn so cut out the farm subsidy and give it to the movie goers so they can buy more popcorn.

Weekly Quiz Answer Cedar coffins, the sale of which is now banned in this city.

WE REMEMBER, LEST WE FORGET

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO MY READING

Prince Charles and Camilla grace us with their presence. Would that some of their grace and elegance remain when they leave.

Out, Damn Spot, Out: Giving the boot to the feisty GOP, those pesky Dem’s took control of the Senate in a move to get to determine the extent to which the Whitehouse went to manufacture reasons for the war in Iraq.

Questions of the Week
1. Is FOK (Friend of Karl as in Rove) ousted Public Broadcasting Board member and Ex-Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson (the Y stands for Young) guilty of promoting more conservative programming? (Hint: FOK)
2. Will conservative (thank God he’s at least got credentials even if he isn’t female, Jewish, and black) Supreme Court appointee Samuel Antonin Alito Jr survive the public caning?
3. Do you believe the CIA has secret Al Quaeda torture prisons in Romania and Poland?
4. Do we really want the federal government to be the supply source for vaccine in the case of bird or any other flu epidemic? (Interesting Aside: In a Cambodian village where scrawny chickens a truly free range, a woman, a newcomer, was assassinated because it was believed she was the cause of bird flu.)
5. Where have decency and honesty gone?

6. Is Cheney a Libby co-conspirator?


Weekly Citizens’ Award To Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm, for her inspiring speech at Rosa Park’s funeral. http://www.michigan.gov/gov/0,1607,7-168--129614--,00.html

Uncle Saddam Wants You The Iraqi government is calling Saddam’s old army for recruits, hoping to lure them away from insurgency forces. Former senior officers need not apply. So, this means the Saddam’s old army, the Sunnis, who killed the Shiites under Saddam, will now work for the Shiites to kill the Sunni insurgents. Excuse me, is that plane leaving for the U.S.?

Can’t Nobody Here Run A Prison? Omar al-Faruq, one of Osama’s pals, escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan in July, though he might be a CIA operative, so the question is: did he escape or did we let him go. How much you wanna bet we’ll never know the truth.

A+, A- Rising star Anderson Cooper, whom you may not recognize unless he’s standing in a hurricane, takes over ousted Aaron Brown’s slot at CNN. It seems laid-back Aaron should, like peppy Anderson, have braved the winds.

Corporate Crook Update
1. Hallelujah! Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth CEO acquitted four months ago by a bunch of bible-punching bigots of federal accounting fraud, now faces federal bribery and mail fraud charges. After pleading not guilty (what else), he prayed outside the courtroom with his wife and three ministers he’d brought along. Is this guy scary or what? But wait, there’s more: he interrupted his lawyers, who declined to comment on specifics, to declare his innocence and say, “I take my hat off to sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ I was a Boy Scout, but I am broken right now, because I am seeing things that are wrong.” I do hope he was looking in a mirror.
2. It seems Mercury Interactive (NASDAQ $27, down about $9 bucks Wednesday) CEO, Ammon Landon, and a couple of his henchmen (actually, one is a henchwoman) got the boot for dicking around with options pricing dates that gave them more pocket money and not being forthcoming about a $1 million loan to the CEO.
3. Jamie Olis of Dynegy may have his 24 year term for accounting fraud reduced to something more in keeping with that of other white-collar crooks. Maybe it would be more equitable if the others were extended.

War-Mart? The news that Wal-Mart has a war room staffed by high-powered political advisers and wannabees inside its corporate headquarters is scary. Will Wal-Mart’s CEO one day split his time between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Bentonville, Ark?

Our Friends in Washington Update
1. I. (Irve, Irv, Irving, or just an initial; depends on who you ask, the latter being Libby’s choice) Lewis (Scooter) Libby Jr. pleaded not guilty to lying to a lot of people. This could be a long trial since no one in Washington really knows what lying is. Libby attributes ‘Scooter’ to a childhood comparison to Phil Rizzuto, former Yankee great, or from his father commenting on how quickly he scooted across his crib. There may be other attributions in the making.
2. Tom DeLay’s trial de-Lay-ed. Seems judges in Texas are elected so this may never get to trial in the Lone Star State. New York anyone?
3. Rove continues to tread water, wondering if the anchor tied to his ankle will drop.

A Case For AOL? Steve Case, the most hated man on the Board of Time Warner, finally resigned to avoid any potential conflicts of interest. Pardon? Dummying up AOL’s financials and almost destroying Time Warner wasn’t a conflict? That aside, since Time Warner says it isn’t shopping AOL around, which means it is, can Steve be thinking of buying it back?

Fill In The Blank “It is the strangest thing that __________ introduces figures who are totally unknown.” No, not George W. Bush on his selection of Supreme Court nominees, but Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (yes, the same asshole who called for Israel to “be wiped off the map”) on his selection of Oil Minister nominees. The comment was made by a member of Iran’s Energy Commission.

Not Seeing Is Believing If astronomers succeed in taking a picture of a black hole, and invisible darkness surrounded by light, how will we know? Will it look like D.C. or Ottawa?

Greedy Bastards Update A NY state judge said he would deny a motion by former NYSE head Richard A. Grasso to limit a lawsuit that seeks return of $100 million (+). To think this guy still believes he deserved the money he paid himself, maybe he should revert to an insanity plea.

The Hindenburg Complex? A California couple (who else?) is testing a hydrogen-cell SUV by Honda (who else?). But, will what happened in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 be a mental obstacle to hydrogen fuel cell advancement? I shouldn’t think so, but it’s being mentioned. Interesting that no mention is made of the hundreds of millions of lives endangered by harmful emissions from carbon fuels powered vehicles, let alone the human and dollar cost of oil wars like Iraq.

Drug Cartel Update Frederick Humeston, an ex-postal worker with weight problems and repeated clashes with his supervisors, lost his case against Merck’s Vioxx. Good for Merck, bad for Humeston’s ex-postal supervisors who are doubtless seeking 24/7 protection.

Scariest Headline of the Week: NYT 10/28/05 “A Long, Rocky Road With 39 Months to Go” This is going to be a long, scary thirty-nine months for we, the people.

Questions of the Week
1. Are you happier that Harriet withdrew or are you sadder that she was nominated?
2. What’s that foul odor NYT reporter, Judith Miller, seems to emitting?
3. What’s the deal with American tourists stranded in post Wilma Mexico. With a million (+-) Mexicans annually sneaking into the US, surely we can figure out how to get a few American honeymooners and vacationers north of the Rio Grande.
4. Did (Are) Florida’s Wilma victims fare (faring) any better than Louisiana’s Katrina victims?
5. Why does the Cheney White House want the CIA exempted from prisoner abuse ban? (Hanoi Hilton McCain told them where to stick that idea.)

Weekly Lottery Award No surprise here…To the oil companies. ExxonMobil’s third quarter earnings (how much do you think they’ve hidden from public view?) rang in at the old gas pump at a whopping $9.9 billion, up 75% from last year’s $5.7 billion. Quarterly revenues were $100 billion. Of course they’ll be quick to say that other companies earn more by any number of measures, BUT NONE EARNED $9.9 BILLION. My comparison: Microsoft, another behemoth that people love to hate or hate to love, a dependency for living thing, had fiscal 2006 first quarter earnings of $3.1 billion on revenues of $9.7 billion.

Yawn Greenspan’s replacement has been announced. The big question: Will Washington confuse a bearded Fed Chairman for that beloved ho-ho-ho chap.?

Citizen of the Week Award To Rosa Parks, a great American, who died Tuesday at age 92. The exchange between her and the Montgomery, Alabama bus driver when she wouldn’t give up her seat to a white man strikes me as quietly determined and marvelously elegant: Bus Driver, “Well, I'm going to have you arrested."
Mrs. Parks: “You may go on and do so."
So does her later statement: "I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home."
Many busses of inequity remain; I hope we have enough Rosa Parks for each one.

Speak Loudly and Carry a Big Stick When she told them to stop whining about the billions owed by the US on lumber tariffs, Condi pissed off the Canadians about the same way she pisses off everyone else. She told the Canadians to stop “speaking in apocalyptic language…” I guess that’s her job.

Conspiracy Theory of the Week Award To me and others with warped minds, for suggesting that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created the avian flu pandemic, real or imagined, because he owns shares in Gilead, the company that owns the patent on the antiviral agent Tamiflu. Gilead is the company where he served as chairman before partnering with Cheney in declaring war on Iraq. No one seems to know exactly how many shares of Gilead Donnie owns and rather than speculate, its enough that rather than sell, he has recused himself from government decisions concerning medications to prevent or treat the big bad bird flu bug. Gilead’s stock has increased 31% from $35 to $46 since we last sipped champagne and watched Dick Clarke’s ball drop so if Rummy owns even a paltry 10 million shares, his profit this year has been $110 million, and only about five humans in the world have so far gotten sick. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling ill, and it ain’t bird flu.

Thanks, WalMart - Unhealthy Need Not Apply WalMart proposes to hold down spending on health care by discouraging unhealthy people from applying for work. They will do this by building a physical activity requirement into all jobs. Maybe they’d be further ahead if they built a mental activity requirement into management jobs.

Big McHeart Attack Now you’ll know how fast you’re going to die. New labeling will tell victims how many calories, fat grams, protein, carbs, and sodium are in each product, kind of like a hit man telling you the caliber of the bullet he’s planning on pumping into your brain.

Dumb Ass of the Week Award To President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran for saying, "The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor [that would be us] against the Islamic world. As the Imam said, 'Israel must be wiped off the map'… The Islamic world will not let its historic enemy live in its heartland."

Nothing’s up to date in Kansas City might be the name Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famous lines from ‘Oklahoma’ if they wrote them now. It seems the conservative majority of the Kansas Board of Education, to the chagrin of chimpanzees everywhere, is hell bent on making sure that anyone attending schools in that state will be taught evolution as a controversial theory. What’s next…outlawing evolution?

Our Friends in Government Update
1. I wonder what the aides are doing tonight…the Rove/Libby drama continues. Though it not be a bride but an Irish prosecutor they await with trepidation, the Lerner & Loewe song from Camelot has many apt phrases…“He's wishing he were in Scotland fishing tonight!...searching high and low for someplace to hide…he’s numb, he shakes, he quails, he quakes”
2. A W Pentagon nominee for chief spokesman, J. Dorrance Smith, is under attack for saying that American TV networks aided terrorists by televising Al Jazerra’s (Al Jazerra is a large Arab news channel) videotape. Now doesn’t he sound special?
3. Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, said, “I did not go into this for pats on the back.” Michael baby, you got that right.

What’s missing from this Carl Rove picture?

WARNING: OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. (Photo: NY Times 10/28/05 )

Corporate Crook Update
1. Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt, a Saddam buddy, was indicted for paying millions in kickbacks to help Saddam’s boys sell Iraqi oil under the UN program. Wyatt’s been stepping over and around and on people for a long time. I guess he finally pissed off the wrong ones.

The W Wave Is there a ‘Presidential Wave’ school?

Corporate Double Speak Award To Condé Nast who said, after axing Andrew Krucoff, a freelancer, who leaked internal information to a web site, that he wasn’t technically fired because he wasn’t an employee. As for company policy on leaking information to outsiders, Condé Nast added that “As a privately held company, we don’t discuss our employee or freelance policies.” It seems fairly clear, at least for freelancers—that they don’t technically get fired.

If Not Them, Whom Can We Trust? Now we’re doubting the Saudi’s (you remember them – the king and W were holding hands last April) assurances on expanding oil production capacity…is nothing sacred?

Sickening, Disgusting New abuse charges against American soldiers, this time for burning in Afghanistan two dead Taliban soldiers’ bodies (the Muslim faith prohibits cremation), facing them west as an affront to the Muslim requirement for facing Mecca during prayers, and using them to taunt the enemy. Forget about violating Islamic faith and forget about violating the Geneva convention, what about violating human decency, what about violating common sense? Where is our leadership?

Questions of the Week
1. Is Bush’s foreign policy run by a Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal, as charged by Colin Powell’s former chief of staff?
2. Is Bush Supreme Court nominee Miers a Red Herring?
3. Which will come first: Saddam’s verdict or American troop withdrawal from Iraq?
4. Are Intelligent Design and Creationism the same?
5. So what do you think of the Iraqi Constitution vote so far?

Corporate Dumb Speak Award Beer pong promotes beer drinking—that’s why it was invented, that’s why it exists. Bud Pong, Budweiser’s eponymous look alike doesn’t because, according to Budweiser, official rules call for water to be used, not beer. C’mon, even if you owned a water company, not even chug-a-lugging a dozen cool ones sells us on that line of B.S.

Weekly Misspeak Award To W, who said, “But the American people expect me to do my job, and I’m going to.” And the start date is…

Weekly Chutzpah Award To Donald Rumsfeld for lecturing the Chinese on their expanding missile forces, particularly those that can bomb the shit out of anyone beyond the Pacific region. I wonder how our Pacific region allies feel about Rummy’s concerns.

Dumb Ass of the Week Award To Neil French, WPP worldwide creative director, for saying women “don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to.” In his past, French has fought bulls. I would expect he’d now find that rather tame.

Boogle This Reality check: even at $6 per share, Google trades at over 50 times earnings.

Our Friends in Government Update
1. Rove and Libby are hanging by a thread on the CIA leakathon. Charges could include perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statement. We, the people, call that lying.
2. Tom DeLay got mugged, printed, and released on $10,000 bail. God I hope he skips.
3. Fernando’ Hideaway might be the best spot for Big Apple mayoral candidate Ferrer, who each day steps closer to a landslide loss.

Brown Eats while New Orleans Floods Marty Bahamonde, FEMA’s man in New Orleans, cries for help. An aide to Bush’s ‘Good Job Brownie’ told Bahamonde to find a good restaurant in Baton Rouge. This is a quote from the e-mail: “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner.”

Corporate Crook Update
1. Seventeen KPMG, as in accounting big, partners have been indicted for trying to screw the IRS. One, David Greenberg, is considered a flight risk and is being held without bail.
2. Refco insiders, mainly Phillip Bennett, former CEO and Tone Grant, CEO before Bennett, took $1.1 billion from the till before declaring bankruptcy. This is getting good.
3. Ex-Merrill Lynch energy trading head, Daniel Gordon, gets three and a half years in the slammer for making off with $43 million of Merrill’s honestly earned dollars. Gordon agreed to give the money back and pay a measly $100,000 fine. I mean, couldn’t they at least whacked him for 1%?

BANG! If you get wounded or shot dead, don’t be looking to firearms manufacturers or gun dealers for restitution. Congress caved to NPR pressure and passed a shield law that Bush, his Bic poised, is frothing at the mouth to sign. In Brazil, where 40,000 citizens are annually popped off, a nationwide ban is being considered. Is that what it takes?

Beware CEO’s Bearing Gifts Robert Miller, CEO of bankrupt Delphi, who asks hourly workers to accept deep wage cuts, slashed his own salary to $1 from $1.5 million. Oh, but he’s keeping the $3 million signing bonus. Hey, give hourly workers a signing bonus of twice their annual salary and they’ll take a buck a year too.

Your Purse, or Mine? In a NYT front page photo of Supreme Court wannabe, Harriet Miers, in Senator Charles Schumer’s office, there appears to be two women’s purses on Charlie’s desk. Which is yours, Charlie?

This here’s my brother Jeb Florida (other states are in a ‘wait and see’ mode) gets fast approval from brother George’s boys in D.C. for outsourcing Medicare—now the greedy healthcare industry rife with financial scandal will dictate what is good and necessary treatment. This is scary. Can disenfranchisement of the poor be far behind?

This Lawyer and Broke Guy Go Into a Bar… Now it seems the D.C. Pointy Heads have come up with this brainwave that says before we, the people, can declare bankruptcy, we have to go to an unregulated (and not known and loved universally as couth) credit counselor who makes money by talking us into repaying our debt. Huh! Worse, credit card issuers have ponied up $10 million for this beloved group. No conflict there. William Binzel from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling compared it to a medical briefing before surgery. What analogy was he trying to make: castration?

DRAMIT! Samsung is coughing up a $300 million hairball for participating in a global conspiracy (that’s a big mother of conspiracy – what will they be called when we populate Mars?) to fix DRAM prices. Hynix of Korea and Ifineon of Germany (they make it global) took their knuckle rapping earlier, Hynix last April and Infineon a year ago. See what happens when you piss off the Americans like Dell, Compaq, HP, Apple, IBM, and Gateway. Price fixing is their responsibility.

Questions of the Week
1. Did Carl Rove and Scooter Libby leak Valerie Plame’s name to the press? Did they have sex with that woman? Did Judith Miller conspire? Did Robert Novack, defrocked Inside Politics antagonist of the thinking people, the only one who seems to have written the Plame story, have sex with anyone? Is this getting really good, or what?
2. Should vehicle driving activities like fixing hair, breast feeding, arguing, reading maps or reading anything, playing poker or cards of any type, sex, smoking, hollering at kids or spouse, letting dog or cat drive, letting kid drive, nose picking, checking teeth in rearview mirror, or fishing a beer from the six-pack in the back seat be banned like talking on the cellphone, and if so, what constitutes fixing hair?
3. Why don’t laptops have a REAL built-in mouse that can slide around on all that space where touch pads and other disjointing crap that should be declared illegal resides, and regardless of color, shouldn’t funky pencil-eraser type nubs sticking out of the keyboard also be outlawed?
4. What is Time Warner’s love affair with AOL? Why don’t they dump it like the bastard stepchild that it is and stop treating it like the first born?
5. Has Harriet been stalking W? Is that why he wants her on the big bench?
6. Will Canada and Denmark go to war over Hans Island, a NY studio-sized speck of land up where it’s too damn cold for most humans? What right do Canada and Denmark have to go to war anyway? Who do they think they are: us?

Weekly Dumb Ass Award To banks, which, despite eternal cycles, never seem to realize that higher interest rates or declining housing values will kick their real estate portfolios in the balls. Banks are supposed to know this stuff; they shouldn’t need the Fed to tell them and then run around in a state of utter dismay.

Worst Staged Event of the Year Award W talking to our soldiers in Iraq about the desires of the Iraqi people for a new constitution and the capabilities of the Iraqi soldiers to defend voters against terrorism.

Weekly Chump Award To my team, my heroes, the NY Yankees. Boo hoo!

Weekly Chutzpah Award To the Los Angeles Archdiocese for the hiding sexual abuse of children by 126 clergymen over seventy-five years. What is an appropriate penalty for betraying, in the most horrific way, these children? What is the appropriate penalty for betraying their followers? What is the appropriate penalty for betraying believers of every faith?

10% Equals 98%? Wood River Capital Management, a hedge fund with two to three-hundred million (reportedly – which means no one knows for sure) under management stuck 98% of one of its funds into an unprofitable startup. Forget about everything but the 98%: ex-DLJ banker John H. Whittier (a high WASP name if ever there was one) promised he’d not dick around with any more than 10% (that’s 10% John, not 98% - there is a difference) of his portfolio bet on one loser. It seems John also lied about getting audited, but he may have told the truth when he told a client that he might go to jail.

DeLay Update
1. Tom and his daughter’s phone records were subpoenaed by his nemesis, Ronnie Earle, a Texas state prosecutor. In turn, DeLay’s attorneys have subpoenaed Ronnie to have him explain his conduct with grand jurors. Wouldn’t that be part of the court record, or are they talking off-the-record hanky-panky?
2. According to those in the know, Tom’s still the go-to-guy for Republicans. They’d better be careful or they might not need a go-to-guy.

Corporate Crook Update
1. Like rats jumping a sinking ship, (and they usually know when to jump) institutions (customers) are fleeing Refco, one of the bigs in futures and commodities brokering as Phillip R. Bennett, CEO, and Santo C. Maggio, Capital Markets Group head, take indefinite leave. Bennett has since been arrested and charged with securities fraud, and that’s not good. It seems he hid hundreds of millions in related-party transactions and Refco’s financial statements for the last couple of years can’t be relied upon. (Don’t you just hate it when that happens?) Looks like Refco’s 9% 2012 bonds are taking the worst beating: $40, down from $108 last week.

Drivers Wanted VW’s head of personnel, caught giving pleasure trips and other favors to employees in return for support for company policy, is under what the Germans call formal judicial investigation. Ooooh and tsk! Soon it will be illegal for companies to pay their employees lest it be proven that it entices them to work.

A Sequel to end all Sequels If Warrant Beatty and Rob Reiner end up in opposition to the Governator, as some rumor (remember, this is Hollywood, rumors are fact) they may, what will it be called: The Terminator meets Tracy (as in Dick) and Bunker (as in Archie)?

Law & Disorder
1. Gilbert, Heintz & Randolph, seem to want it from both sides, advising Congoleum, the floor covering people up to their asses in asbestos class actions, and also representing claimants, either directly or indirectly. What is the world coming to—if you can’t trust your lawyer…?
2. A Merck (you remember, the Vioxx people) defense attorney (sex-female) got into a shouting match with a judge (sex-female), the one you don’t shout at particularly when she is overseeing 2400 Vioxx-related suits, and only settled down when the judge offered to have her ass hauled out of court. Good theater. Does Merck know how much is at stake? Does Merck realize that pharmaceutical companies aren’t on Santa’s two big C lists, Christmas and Chanukah? Does Merck know that law isn’t going to win its case, lawyers are?

Take my IPod, Please Jobs, in one of his famous black t-shirt and back-drop presentations peppered with humility rolled out Apples’ new video IPod. I had hoped they’d fix the problems with the audio version first. In our tiny household, we’re on our third in nine months.

Irony of the Week. Congress is worried about the $11 million a day to house displaced Katrinaites. Why? In Iraq war dollars, we’ve got fifty years.

Not Your Father’s Bud Cuvée du Cent Cinquantenaire, (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it) is Grand Marnier’s new $225-a-bottle vintage liqueur, and here we’d just learned how to say Grand Marnier (no, it isn’t Grand as in the ancient Mariner).

Payola Clear Channel, the big of radio, canned two execs and smacked a few others around for keeping pay-to-play arrangements (dubbed payola in 1960 for those of you who remember that vintage) with Sony BMG secret. Sony agreed to tighten its anti-payola policies and donate $10 mill to music education, which is about like you and I buying a postage stamp, well I mean before the went up from fifteen cents in 1980.

What Goes Up Must Come Down Elevator companies controlled by the Americans, the Swiss, the Finns, and the Germans, are about to be charged with global price fixing. Remember that the next time you punch a button.

Uh-oh Remember what happened when CPA firms switched from being dull, boring, honest auditors to CONSULTANTS with fancy names like Accenture and fancy slogans like “Now it gets interesting.” It got interesting all right: remember Arthur Andersen, the Adam and Eve of Accenture and, before being forced out of business, auditors for such stellar names like Enron, WorldCom, Sunbeam, and Waste Management? Well, now the lawyers are getting into the game, consulting clients on outsourcing, i.e. paying someone to run part of the business. Let me see, would that include fraud decisions. That way, Kenny Boy and Stilling, (the only thing still in Stilling is that he is still awaiting trial) could blame some guy hiding in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we know how hard it is to find anyone there.

Great Canadian Pumpkin! It took most of Canada’s parliament, but Martha and that’s a good thing Stewart got her special visa, the ones issued to hardened criminals who want to venture across the 49th and wreak untold havoc amongst the natives, to enter the pumpkin rowing contest in Windsor, NS. Alas, the weatherman grounded her in Maine where the rain stayed mainly on the plane.

And finally, we pause to remember fellow passengers on this tiny spaceship we call Earth, passengers who are suffering the loss of loved ones.

FLOCK! Feeling Flu-ey? Thank our feathered friends. They’re about to seek revenge for all the turkey and duck and chicken dinners we’ve been slurping and burping. This one’s bad. Millions may die if this little bugger, H5N1, mutates into a form that we, the people, transmit, and we don’t damn soon find a way to blast it out of the sky. Alas, vaccine efficacy and availability are currently big time problematic.

Questions of the Week
1. Is the White House trying to get us to REFOCUS on terror or DISFOCUS on screw-ups?
2. How much different from ours will Iraq’s ‘new democracy’ be?
3. Should ‘Assisted Suicide Law’ be changed to ‘Dignified Death Law?’
4. Was Afghanistan’s voter fraud greater than ours?

DUH! to W for insisting over and over and over that his supreme court nominee, Harriet Miers, knows the law. Double Duh!

Weekly Chutzpah Award To Tom DeLay, deposed House majority leader, for saying that “Ronnie Earle has stooped to a new low with his brand of prosecutorial abuse” referring to the District Attorney of Travis County, the county where the new money laundering charge and the previous conspiracy charge were brought. (Italics mine)

Weekly Lottery Award
1. To Judy Miller, jailed NY Times reporter who goes to jail for eight-six days and comes out with a book deal rumored at $1.2 million. That’s $14,000 per day. Beats hell out of reporting.
2. To Anderson Cooper, (Gloria Vanderbilt’s son and intrepid CNN newsman) who goes to New Orleans, bravely stands in Katrina’s mighty wind for a few days, and gets a book deal that may exceed $1 million. That’s about $300,000 per day. As I said, beats hell out of reporting.

Scam Sham Don’t you get pissed when a perfectly good scammer gets scammed? Victor Kozeny sold certificates to rich American investors who expected to own a piece of Socar, Azerbajan’s oil company. From the proceeds, Kozeny paid $11 million in bribes to the Azerbajanis to get an allotment of Socar shares. Instead, he got the Azerbajani finger; Socar didn’t go public, but the bribed officials kept the money. And poor old Kozeny got indicted because he didn’t return the excess. This on top of the $182 million he stands accused of previously stealing from U.S. investors. For shame!

Corporate Crook Update
1. A judge denied bail for Kozlowski and Swartz, ex bigs at Tyco and each facing 8 (+) to 25 years on the rock pile. They weren’t smiling.
2. Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth, who dodged a cannon ball by convincing an Alabama black jury that he was not a crook but a ‘God-fearing, friendly-to-blacks’ man, might have his story made into a movie starring Christopher Walken. Careful Richard, the rest of the country might be watching. In typical Scrushy hubris, he said he wanted “a nice-looking fellow” to play him. O.J. Simpson was one suggestion received, probably not from a Scrushy or O.J. supporter.



Demic, Epi or Pan? Epi: think local; Pan, think global. The Birds, no, not Hitchcock, the Avian flu variety, will be pandemic.




Rove IV Will there be a sequel? Will Carl Rove, W’s chief of staff, be indicted as a consequence of his fourth appearance before the grand jury?

Bacrolist? Bacronym: the reverse of acronym, i.e., assigning words to letters that suggested words previously existed, but didn’t. Bacrolist: the reverse of list, i.e. making up a list to match a number suggesting a list existed, but didn’t; e.g., when W says the U.S. disrupted 10 serious terrorist plots, White House staffers had to hurriedly construct a list of ten serious terrorist plots that were disrupted.

Central INSULATION Agency Do you ever get the feeling that the CIA is more interested in protecting its own than protecting ‘we the people?’ Master Spy, Tenet, didn’t get fired for incompetence; he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a big pension. This week, Porter Goss gave the finger to Congress when he said no disciplinary action would be taken as a result of the Inspector General’s report. Why do I keep thinking that this smells like an old spy agency from another country?

FISS An inventory system otherwise known as First In, Screw Shareholders. Delphi, an auto parts company, NYSE $2.20 10/20/05, to fictitiously inflate prior years profits and cash flow, apparently recorded $440 million in sales for problematic (scrap?) inventory that it promised to reacquire at a later date. Margins were likely pretty good. A group of pension and investment funds is suing the company, nine investment banks, an accounting firm (poor old accountants, they can’t buy a break), six former or current Delphi executives, fifteen former or current directors and two other companies. With a cast like this, can an opera be far behind?

New Majority Rules?? Consider this hypothesis: a President of the United States may be elected only if he/she garners votes equal to a number greater than half the registered voters, not greater than half the ballots cast. Based on 11/04 numbers, the successful candidate would have had to receive in excess of 71.035 million votes; W got 62.041 million (forgetting about the agony of de count). Don’t like it? Neither did the Sunni’s when the Shiites and Turks tried to sneak similar provisions into the rules governing passage of their new constitution (mark the date: 10/15/05), rules effectively neutralizing the Sunni’s ability to meaningful dissent. The UN (U.S.) thankfully squelched this attempted skullduggery.

Bad Breath! Some are making a big to-do about Altoids, the ‘curiously strong’ mint, moving from Wales to Tennessee. Why? Is a Tennessee mint less effective than a Welsh mint? Is CZJ of Hollywood less effective than CZJ of Wales. I think not; she’s still a tasty mint, and I think Altoids will do as nicely. Does anyone care?

Not My Job So, did you like ex-FEMA director Brown better when he took responsibility for the Katrina mess or when he tried to blame everyone else (provided they were Democrats), as he did this week in his House committee testimony?

We, The People I’ve never seen a Senator or Congressman/Congresswoman indicted for representing the interests of the people. Maybe we should stop saying ‘we put them in power’ and start saying ‘we put them there to work for us.’ They don’t have power. This is a democracy; we, the people, have the power. Why don’t they understand this basic tenet?

Dream On/Off NBC and DreamWorks, SKG (Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen) couldn’t get together on price. It probably wasn't so much the $100 million plus NBC wanted to knock from its original $1.5 billion offer, but the paltry $100 million per picture budget that it wanted to stick the Dream Team with...can you imagine?

Questions of the Week
1. To prevent hurricane affected citizens from getting ripped-off by fly-by-night crooks, can’t local or state or federal governments quickly certify contractors and others seeking to help restore destroyed lives? Is this so difficult?
2. Why did the head of the FDA, you know, the agency that approves what we stick in our bodies like drugs, food, and body parts, take a powder? This one could be really, really interesting.
3. Is the Army ever going to convince us that it’s coming clean on prisoner abuse?

Weekly Citizens’ Award To departing Corinthian Colleges director Michael P. Berry for his kick-ass four-page letter of resignation from the board. We need more directors like Michael P. Berry. Maybe we need an annual awards show like the Oscars; we can call them the Berries, where awards are given to best director of a corporation, best director of a charity, best director…the list is endless. At the same time, DingleBerries could be awarded, likely in absentia, to the worst director in each category.

Duh! Ask a seven-year-old child how American citizens can use less gas? Compare the answer with that of our the leader of the most powerful country in the free world. (Drive less.) We needed to be told this?

Weekly Chutzpah Award To Tom DeLay for his sophomoric response to his indictment. You are not above the law, sir. Treat it with respect, or it will bite your ass.

Stuff that in your Burka! After getting the finger in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, how many more Middle East trips will Under Secretary Karen Hughes make to convince those uncivilized heathens that truth, justice, and the American way is the only way?

Calling Willard Scott E=mc2 joins centenarian ranks this month. What is it? Correct: Einstein’s theory of relativity. What is the translation? Hmmm. What does it mean? Um, er, huh? Intelligent design?

Free At Last Judith Miller, after 12 weeks in the slammer for refusing to name names, walks among us and will testify before the grand jury. Her confidential source, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, not only gave her a waiver saying she was no longer bound by any pledge of confidentiality to him, but that he genuinely wanted her to testify. What’s wrong with this picture?


Holy Bat Shit! Don’t want SARS virus? Then don’t eat Chinese horseshoe bats (ugly little buggers, aren't they) or guano. Yeah, you read it right, guano! Many Asians eat bats or use bat shit in medicine.



Corporate Crook Update
1. Sammy Israel and Danny Marino, masterminds of the $450 million Bayou fraud, surrendered after two months on the lam.
2. Bernie's lawyers are trying to get his sentence reduced to something less than twenty-five years. I don't think he got a fair shake compared with his corporate crook kith and kin, but we're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope; let's increase the sentences of the other scoundrels rather than reduce Bernie's.

Take My Stuff Please Hurricane looted businesses may be ahead of the game: they will collect theft insurance; the wind/water question might disallow claims.

Law & Disorder
1. New Orleans :: Police Department; a new oxymoron?
2. Did power lobbyist Abramoff (you know, the guy with close ties to a whole bunch of power Republicans including Ton DeLay) have a business antagonist, who tried to stab Abramoff’s partner with a pen, whacked by paid hit men with mob ties? Stay tuned.

Halliburton for President? If Halliburton Oil simply took over the country, we wouldn’t have to waste time worrying about the billions in non-compete contracts it gets almost as a daily diet and Cheney can publicly reassume the job of CEO. He can also officially name himself President of the United States.

Irony of the Week. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main guys responsible for getting America mired in the cesspool known as Iraq with his rosy projections of how little it would cost and how few troops would be required, is now charging over the plains on a new white steed. As president of the World Bank, he wants a bunch of really rich countries like the United States to forgive $18 billion in debt owed by a bunch of really poor countries, much to the chagrin of his old Washington pals. I say ‘good for you Paul,’ now if you can just figure out how to pay for the war…

Corporate Screw-up of the Week Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought IBM’s Think division, forgot to remove I.B.M. logos from the new crop of Lenovo Think Pad Z-Series laptops. How do you say 'Shit Happens' in Chinese.

Readin’ Ritin’ and Rotten Former Roslyn (Long Island) schools superintendent, Frank A. Tassone, pleased guilty to stealing $2 million of school district loot. His pals pocketed another $9 million. And here we were, worried about our kids getting into grade four.

Accountants, we don’t need no Stinkin’ Accountants! The mere suggestion that the SEC Chairman could face pressure to weaken the auditing standard that directs how auditors review companies’ internal financial controls is absurd. Change them to be more effective: YES; weaken them: NEVER. Good God, Enron’s body isn’t even cold; Skilling and Kenny Boy have yet to have their asses hauled into court.

Roberts Rules A lot has been made of how new Chief Justice John G. Roberts will shape the future of the court. We, and he, should be as concerned about how history will reflect on his tenure.

Memo to Demogrunts and Repulsivans Stop politicking and run the country. So maybe Bush screwed up, but there’s probably a ton of Dems glad they aren’t in the big chair and if not, there are tons of we, the people glad they aren’t. Let’s for a change look after the part of America outside D.C.

Oxymoron: OPEC Largess Funny how with oil prices at record levels OPEC has decided to support the Saudis, you may know them better as Bush’s Middle-Eastern pals, and sell as much oil as consumers want.

Frist First Senator Bill Frist, Senate majority leader, sold some HCA stock (Frist’s family founded HCA) at its peak, just before it nose-dived on bum results. Doest this stink of insider trading or what? I mean, hasn’t he been reading the papers? A lot of his contributors are heading for the slammer for pulling the same trick. Think Martha, Bill—it’s not a good thing.

Questions of the Week
1. If America were Iraq, which of its two political parties would most resemble the Sunnis? Is this a war between our Sunnis and their Sunnis?
2. How is a powerful Iraqi Shiite cleric telling millions of his followers how to vote different from the Religious Right in America telling millions of its followers how to vote, or is it?
3. Memo to Alan Greenspan: Is raising interest rates inflationary?
4. Should French Fries (not because of the name, but because they are increasingly dangerous to our health) be banned or is a warning good enough?

Weekly Citizens’ Award To captain and crew of Jet Blue 292, for giving the world something to cheer.

Weekly Wimp Award Sony, for cutting ten thousand jobs over a paltry $90 million loss. This from a company that says in its 2005 annual report that it “will continue to work to inspire and delight…employees...” Some inspiration; some delight.

Weekly Chutzpah Award To the Catholic church for banning homosexuals from the priesthood.

Don’t Screw With Analysts Glad to see the SEC is warming up to kick Altera’s ass for retaliating against analysts who didn’t roar like bull over the company’s shares. I hope they drop kick them into the next big class action lawsuit, and then we’ll see who roars like bull.

Oh No! Talking Authors? The big O is tired of talking to dead authors. She is now going to interview authors of contemporary works, thus assuring huge sales. So now we have to write and talk? Will an excellent talker with a shitty book get the nod over a shitty talker with an excellent book?

New York Flush - Not so fast. The Spanish, I guess because of their uncommon interest in things scatological, have been picked to provide comfort stations on Manhattan streets, but they don’t seem to have a handle on how to pull it off. Their progress in other countries hasn’t been without stink.

Corporate & Government Crooks Update
1. Three cheers! Tyco’s Kozlowski and Schwartz got eight to twenty-five in a state prison not of their choosing, which means that rather than tennis and golf and intellectual endeavors like conversation with their fellow crooks, they will be toiling at menial tasks like scraping shit from latrines for $1.25 per day. But more significant, they have to pay $240 million in restitution and fines. I hope it ain’t comin’ from the buck-twenty-five per day.
2. For ratting on Lord Black, David Radler will probably get 29 months in a Canadian prison rather than a U.S. prison and pay $250,000 for his part in Hollinger International’s $32 million fraud. Not much of a penalty, but prosecutors better move quickly; Lord Black is sixty-one—he has to have a chance to live out his prison time, not outlive the time it takes to get him there.

Ahh, Monopoly Despite its problems, Amtrak says it hasn’t lost riders. Where did it expect them to go?

Black Mark on White House David Safavian who, until his resignation last week, was a senior White House budget guy, got arrested for lying and obstruction in connection with the FBI’s full court press to nail toppled power broker Jack Abramoff, House majority leader Tom DeLay’s good bud. This whole mess swirling around ‘Lobbyist A,’ as FBI affidavit refers to the unnamed lobbyist (com on, ‘Lobbyist A,’ give me a break), is going to get real sticky and nasty.

Black on Black Critics of the French for pelting the U.S. on its Katrina response seem to be saying that the French believe the U.S. doesn’t care about its black citizens more than France doesn’t care about its black citizens. Cut the crap. This is not color tragedy, this is human tragedy—if one citizen dies because of government failure then government has failed all its citizens.

Private Pension Pirates Opportunistic investors (sharks) in troubled companies are dumping pension obligations on the government and then, absent the burden, selling for huge profits. If you don’t like it, you’d better say something or your kids will have another giant tax bill to pay. My guess: by the year 2,000, the U.S. will have the highest tax rate in the world, except for the rich, the cheats, and the manipulators, who might be indistinguishable.

Bush’s Iraqatrina As president, Bush makes a good droning Baptist minister in a small church attended by a diminishing flock of true believers. Let’s face it: he’s screwed up Iraq, he’s screwed up Katrina, he’s screwed up about everything else he decided needed fixing like social security, medicare, and education. One thing he hasn’t screwed up is making the rich a whole hell of a lot richer. Bottom line: he makes a lousy chief executive of anything, let alone ‘our country, tis of thee.’

Spam Spam Holy double spam, Batman, Microsoft’s MSN and Time Warner’s AOL might merge. How many elongated penis messages can we stand in one mailbox?

Questions of the Week
1. How long will Katrina be blamed for all the dumb decisions made by government and business?
2. Was Bush’s Brownie really to blame for the preventable consequences of Katrina? A CEO of any company who didn’t personally respond to the largest disaster in the company’s history would have his ass summarily booted out the door.
3. Should people with $79.95 be able to get an airport security pass from a private company? Steve Brill is starting just such a company. I say if citizen one gets a pass, it should be available to all citizens who want to pass muster, FOR FREE!!! This is just more discrimination against the poor.
4. Anyone seen or heard from Karl Rove since Katrina?
5. Why weren’t any poor, black Katrina survivors at Washington National Cathedral for the day of prayer?
6. Could Justice Roberts make it to Quaoar and back on all the Senate gas he got this week?

Weekly Bullshit Award
Background: Lawrence Ellison, the chief oracle at Oracle, gets sued for insider trading by Oracle shareholders who want the money he made by dumping Oracle stock before missed sales results nosedived share price. Without admitting he did anything wrong (what, you expected more?), Ellison gets to donate $100 million in Oracle’s name (big of him) to a charity of his choosing (The Oracle of Oracle Church?), Oracle’s lawyers get $24 million paid by, yep, you guessed it, Oracle.
Here comes the bullshit so lift your feet. Now here’s where the lawyers really earn their money: When asked how the settlement benefited Oracle’s shareholders, a partner in Oracle’s crack legal team said something like: Oracle benefits because its chief executive will no longer be distracted by the lawsuit, and by donating $100 million, Oracle is fulfilling its obligations as a good corporate citizen by giving money to charity, an act that will enhance its reputation and improve shareholder value. This guy is certain to end up a Senator.

100 Blades? Gillette’s new shaving machine, Fusion, has five blades. What happened to four blades? They can’t jump from three to five…can they? And don’t they know that shaving with a blade is like waxing? Come on already, screw Fusion, it’s time for Lazr Shave. (For royalty’s sake, remember where and when you heard it).

Sooo Yesterday Newsflash Sony, Walkman isn’t an IPod killer. You need a new, catchy name, like TriPod or IWalk or ModWalk, short of Module Walkman. (See above item for royalty info)

Corporate Crook Update
1. Tyco’s Kozlowski and Schwartz learn their fates on Monday. They could get thirty years. I say they get ten, out in five. More interesting: How much cash do they have to disgorge? I hope it’s a ton because that’s what really po’s these greedy bastards.

The Jesus Seminar? Robert W. Funk, noted religion scholar, died September 3rd. I mention him here only because he deserves huge accolades for the name: The Jesus Seminar. My God, talk about a great name for a seminar. Of the 100,000 seminars, big and small, going on weekly around the country, and the fifty or so that each of us has attended in our dull work-a-day existence, who can remember the name of even one? Not I, but if I’d attended THE JESUS SEMINAR, I’d damn sure remember.

Law & Disorder
1. Hear the one about the judge who reprimanded the lawyer for badmouthing lawyers within earshot of jurors? Merck’s lead lawyer in the second Vioxx case got her ass kicked for saying the plaintiff had been surrounded by lawyers who presented evidence that smacked not of science, but of “lawyering, lawyering, lawyering.” Isn’t that a bit like the madam accusing her girls of screwing her clients?

Irony of the Week. Law firms hiring imaging firms? Rather than pay hundreds of thousands for a group of mollycoddlers, why not give it to me? I’ll just design a larger, more twenty-first-century looking screw.

Headstones Eastern, PanAm, TWA, Laker…Delta?...Northwest? The graveyard is filling up fast, boys. Time to check for cause of death.

Put This in Your Fig Newton Kraft, the friendly food people, are baking Fig Newton’s and Chips Ahoy with whole grain flour, not that terrible white stuff that everyone really likes but that is contaminated with such horrors as…oh well, the important thing is that each three-cookie serving of Chips Ahoy now has 150 calories, ten fewer than before, and twice as many grams of fiber, two instead of one. WOW! Interesting that Kraft’s announcement was made at that oxymoronic nutrition and obesity conference timed to show parents that Kraft cares about the obesity of its children (of course it does, how do you think they got that way) and doubly interesting that the new cookies are not healthy enough to pass muster with California’s new school guidelines and triply interesting that Kraft didn’t put out any dope on the number of calories in the new Fig Newton vs. the old.

Big Oil, Big Water, Big Wind So the big oil brains (bob’s) design o&g platforms built to survive a 100-year-storm, no definition given. Then along comes Ivan, which they, the bob’s, refer to as an anomaly, a 2500-year-storm, but he was just the warning shot: A year later, Katrina roared in, ready to kick serious ass. So much for the 100-year-storm idea. The bob’s need to spend a little time with CNN where they’d learn that global warming is making for bigger storms: big warm water, the fuel for big wind, is getting warmer—it’s a simple energy equation boys and girls; get with it.

Waltze Mart Why, when WalMart gets accused of sucky labor practices like kickings and beatings and incarcerations in its third-world plants, is it so quick to say that its accusers are notorious for factualizing fiction but that it needs time to study the allegations? To me, that suggests that the facts might not be as fictionalized as WalMart would have us believe.

Nasté! Condé Nast is sinking $100 million (I guess nobody there ever read ‘The Fanciest Dive’) into a bus mag start-up to challenge the two F words, Forbes and Fortune, and the B word, Business Week. Just what the world needs: another dull business magazine. So, here’s my idea: Call it ‘Nasté,’ pay me a huge royalty for the idea, incorporate my Extra Wry column in return for gross riches, and give the audience a business and government exposé. Hard to draw advertisers though, hoisting them on their ‘own petard,’ as old Bill Shakespeare was wont to say.

Islamic Law of Investment Take all the infidels’ money, use that money to invest in (buy) their companies. It seems Middle-Eastern investors are flush with cash—what a surprise, and are plopping down a billion here and a billion there for shares in publicly traded companies. How is that different from any other investment company? Oh, I forgot. The Middle-Easterners all the money.

Et tu Katrina? Bad enough we had to deal with the oil giants. What price gas?

Weekly Wimp Award To Bush, the befuddled, and all the other non-leaders in D.C. who didn’t get off their asses and put heavy duty assets to work in New Orleans. If a million residents of the Big Easy could pull up stakes and leave livelihoods and homes behind, surely the government could have responded in kind with a thousand helicopters, ten thousand troops, and scores of amphibious vehicles, barges, and whatever else it takes to provide a dignified, safe existence to those left behind.

Weekly Broken Finger Award KPMG put its middle finger, the one it had been giving the IRS for a number of years, back in its grovel pocket and shelled out $456 million to keep Uncle Sam from putting a padlock on the door. Some former partners are being thrown to the wolves and will face criminal charges. Some years ago, when Manufacturers Hanover was a bank, its annual report, one of the really expensive glossies, referred to its Certified “Pubic” Accountants. Maybe they weren’t far off.

Vene, Vidi, Ipod Apple and Motorola are sticking a bunch of technology together that will result in an IPod cellphone. Think of the vast array of personalized rings in existence today and multiply by a billion or two and think of the vast array of people yakking on cellphones when you wish they wouldn’t and multiply by a billion or two. ICry.

Follow The Bouncing Ball
1. In Hong Kong, Robert Kissel, a senior Merrill Lynch investment banker gets whacked by Nancy Ann, his society wife, who bashes his head in with a lead ornament and sticks him in moving boxes; she pleads self defense, something about a baseball bat, but that doesn’t fly and she’s found guilty.
2. Their three children are deposited with the husband’s brother, Andrew, in New York, a real estate wheeler-dealer who is being prosecuted for multi-million dollar real estate fraud. He claims stress from his brother’s murder and sister-in-law’s trial. How many times have we heard that one? P.S. Robert’s estate is worth $18 million. How close did Andrew come to getting his mitts on the kids money?
3. Hayley Wolff, society wife of Andrew, says I’m out and files for divorce.
4. P.S. It seems Nancy Ann had a go with the stereo repair man while vacationing in Vermont, and I didn’t even know they had stereo in Vermont.

Blue Bayou? No not Roy Orbison, but Bayou investments. Why did it have to pick this week to hit the papers with its multi-million dollar fraud. Like Louisiana didn’t have enough trouble of its own. It seems Sammy Israel III, sole owner of Bayou, dicked off with a bunch of his investors’ money. I’m so happy to see my bank, JP Morgan Chase, listed as one of the investors.

Chinese Puzzle Q: What did KL, a Palm Beach-based hedge fund lose besides $81 million of investors’ money. A: It seems it has also lost its owners, Won Sok Lee and Yung Bae Kim, who have taken a powder. They didn’t even have the courtesy of hiring an American lawyer or any other lawyer to tell us all how Messrs Lee and Kim will be fully exonerated once the truth comes out in the courts.

IPodre Reverend Mark Batterson (yeah, Batterson, not Patterson—I thought it a peculiar name for a pastor too) of National Community Church, podcasts (the good reverend calls them Godcasts, what else?) his sermons so the good Christian sinners among his flock who would sooner do a Sunday morning eighteen holer, won’t miss the word of God. Soon, not even snoring will keep the pastors company as they deliver their pulpit pith.

Irony of the Week. I see The Forty-Year-Old Virgin has sold over $50 million in movie tickets proving once again that fantasy sells.

Bing and Bogey The two worms responsible for the Zotob worm that crippled a host of big computers came from Morocco (remember Bogey in Casablanca) and Turkey (remember Bing singing "It's Istanbul, Mot Constantinople?"

Talk About The Gas Pipe Up The Ass: $3.00 a gallon and climbing. 200 billion gallons of gas per year multiplied by $3 equals $600 billion going from your and my pockets into big oil, big government, and OPEC (mostly Middle East) pockets.

Corporate Boards, Like Depreciation, Should Be Sued For Non-Support: Disney’s directors were kicked in the ass for the hiring and $140 million firing of Michael Ovitz, but were not held liable; Krispy Kreme’s directors stood by with their fingers up their doughnuts as the company crashed and burned, but are not considered liable; NYSE directors likely won’t be held liable for cue ball Grasso’s giant compensation and severance package, etc., etc., etc.

Questions of the Week
1. Do we really need the drug companies to provide more details on risks, as Pfizer agreed to do this week? Already, each drug advertised seems to carry a range of risks from limp dick to vaginal frigidity to crotch rot to gut explosion to acne. What they need to do is lower prices, stop spending gazillions to get their favorite ‘bribees’ elected, and stop pouring gazillions into advertising—hey, if we like it and need it and can afford it, we will come.
2. Should we, the people, have a food reward/control chip implanted? That way, the thins could eat all the good stuff they want and the fats couldn’t, until they got thin. Voila! Food could still taste good and America would no longer be a nation of the obese.

Weekly Citizens’ Award: To our Discovery Astronauts Eileen, Steve, Andy Wendy Charlie, Soichi, and James, Welcome Home! Whew!

Calling Superman: Dana Reeve, Christopher’s widow, has lung cancer. It ain’t fair.

The World is Emptier: We mourn the passing of Peter Jennings, one of America’s great newsmen.

Four Step Plan To Untold Riches: 1. Join Government, 2. Deregulate Industry, 3. Quit Government, 4. Join Investment Bank Specializing In Deregulated Industry. Meet Michael K. Powell, former FCC chief, who is now senior adviser with Providence Equity Partners with $9 billion in media and telecommunications companies.

Corporate Crook Update
1. WorldCom’s #2, Scotty Sullivan, got beamed up for five, twenty less that Bernie and, in my opinion, ten less than he should have gotten. A rat’s reward or time off for coming clean? I know the column Bernie would check.
2. KPMG’s tax shelter scam bites its first co-conspirator. Domenick DeGiorgio, a former co-head of HVB’s (one of Germany’s largest banks) financial group could face 45 years in the slammer for false docs, hiding bucks from the IRS and stealing bucks from HVB. KPMG faces a raft of possible ass kickings and as much as $500 million in fines.

More Bits Than Alpha: General Mills screwed around with its AlphaBits formula, trying to put in more whole grains and less sugar so the parents, if not the kids, would be happier. It seems the end result is illegible letters that easily crumble. Tate & Lyle, a world sugar conglomerate, says it is working on a solution. Hmmmm. More sugar perhaps?

Fuggedaboutit! When your computer doesn’t work and you end up speaking to an outsourcer in India, you may get dissed in a familiar argot—it seems more and more college level Yanks spending their summers in India working for outsourcers. There can be nothing that is considered sacred any longer.

I'm Bankrupt, Fly Me: This isn’t difficult. According to the US Census Bureau, each year 612 million people fly an average of 1,046 miles. Hmmmm. 612 million multiplied by 1,046 = 640 billion (+) total miles flown. A one cent per mile surcharge, or $10.46 per trip on average, would produce additional annual revenue of $6.4 billion. If the airlines can’t make it stick, let the government make the charge and fund revenue shortfalls, but please, let’s not make the poor people on the bus pay by increasing their taxes.

That’s Not A Good Thing Martha went to the slammer and now has to wear a not stylish at all ankle bracelet for dumping or lying about dumping or something having to do with dumping ImClone stock after receiving inside clinical trial info from its CEO. Now it seems those ferocious guardians of feel good might be implicated for accepting money to talk to analysts and investors about confidential clinical trial results—will our friendly neighborhood GPs soon be sporting Martha anklets?

Figure Fun: Google Market Cap $79 billion or about $260 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. or $61 for every man, woman, and child in China; Baidu Market Cap $4 billion or about $3 for every man, woman and child in China or $13 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. What does this mean? Absolutely nothing except that both are extreeeeeeeeeeemely overpriced and Google Baidu will end up being a bad word in either language.

Google This: Google won’t talk to CNET for a year because CNET Googled Eric E. Schmidt and wrote about what it found. For shame Google—how soon the mighty forget from whence they came.

Atkins Carbs Out Atkins filed for bankruptcy protection, citing a declining interest in low-carb products, the fuel that drove the company’s profit engine about as fast as it peeled inches from America’s waste land. What they don’t tell you about is the strain and drain of $300 million in August ‘03 debt piled on when Goldman Sachs and Parthenon Capital bought majority control for $450 million. If it’s a typical restructuring, the debt holders will end up with a paltry amount of stock, percentage-wise, and if the company manages to stagger from the ropes for a win or even a draw, the majority holders will line their pockets—actually, when you think about it, bankruptcy isn’t a bad exit strategy step on their part. And to the fat people who caused this mess, buy some donut stocks and eat your hearts out.

Questions of the Week
1. Why are world leaders focused on war when they should be focused on humanity? Shouldn’t every starving person on this planet be fed before one single dollar is spent on war? Is this a difficult concept?
2. Why can’t we relocate all U.S. prisons, including corporate country clubs for the white collar gang, to Niger, Sudan, and other locations so desperately in need of help? Wouldn't the be a good way for people who have taken from society to pay something back?

Weekly Wimp Award Bush on Bolton.—a strong leader wouldn’t sidestep the US Senate. Now we have to hope that Bolton, contrary to opposition fears, does a good job both for the UN and for rebuilding the reputation of the US in the international community.

Mega M&M’s: Mars is introducing Mega M&M’s that are 55 percent larger.
1. Q: Does that mean we’ll now get six and two-thirds per bag instead of ten? A: No, because historically M&M’s has been a sharing brand used for big gatherings and Mega M&M’s will be sold in large packages that are intended to be passed around. Hmmm, I wonder which large gatherings those would be.
2. Q: Will kids get 55 percent larger? A: No. Mega M&M’s are aimed at larger-mouthed adults. Hmmm. A 55 percent larger M&M is three-quarters of an inch wide—what kids will this deter?

King Maurice Declares War Maurice Greenberg’s legal army shoots a wad of paper at the AIG investigation. For ammunition: a challenge to the rationale for the $4 billion income restatement that led to King M’s dethronement. This promises to be a long conflict.

Can The Chrysler S-D Model Be Far Behind? S-D, as in Snoop Dogg, Chrysler’s new pitch man who partners with retired Chrysler Top Dog Lee Iacoccoa (or Mocha Cocca in Snoop lingo). Now if Iacoccoa can learn to say Fo shizzle, I kazzizle with the same aplomb as Snoop, they’ll truly be a dynamic Dodge duo.

Corporate Crook Update
1. Kirk Shelton, former vice chairman of Cendant, gets ten years at Club Crook for his role in a $19 billion fraud discovered in 1998. Now get this: he was ordered to pay back $3.3 billion, $15 million in October and the balance at $2,000 per month for 125,000 years, and that’s without interest. Where is the logic in this nonsense? On top of everything else, Shelton pleaded for leniency and had a parade of witnesses testify as to his generosity and sterling character (for $3.3 billion who couldn’t get a parade of adulating testifiers) prompting the judge to say Shelton had lived an exemplary life a great majority of the time. Hello Judge, are we putting these people on trial for what they did right, or for what they did wrong.
2. Martha, Martha, Martha! In what surely must be a ‘more free PR’ gambit, Martha’s ankle bracelet will remain three weeks longer than originally adjudicated. It seems she’s been seen doing the nasty, endangering shareholder values and the morals of America’s youth by riding around her estate on a 4WD and worst of all, dropping in on a yoga class.
3. Kozlowski and Schwartz will remain free on bail pending their September 19th sentencing. Prosecutors tried to ball and chain them for fear they might flee the country. Why should this even be arguable? Throw them in the slammer and knock the requisite number of days off at the end. How much more are we going to let these people’s legal shenanigans drain from society?

Money First, Grieve Later One of Merck’s legal hit men (in this case a woman) pointed out that plaintiff contacted a lawyer about a possible law suit against Merck three months after her husband’s death but didn’t visit a grief counselor for nine months after. A better question might have been: What took the lawyers so long?

1+1+1+3+1+2-1=4 No, you’re not crazy, it’s Murdoch as in News Corp math. Now, pay attention! Rupert and his first wife have one child (1+1), his second, three (1+3), his third, two (1+2) and one of the three from the second has just quit the business (-1). The four oldest don’t want the two youngest to have a voting or active role in the $6.1 billion trust (=4). There you have it. P.S. Wives 2 and 3 are reportedly friendly, they often see each other at family gatherings, and 2’s grandchildren play with 3’s children. Now isn’t that special.

You’ve Got @#%*&%@$# Mail Time Warner coughs up a $3 billion hairball to settle shareholder and employee lawsuits, thanks to the You’ve Got Mail people who duped them big time way back in 2000. Small potatoes when you consider that $220 billion in market cap vanished between merger day and now. Why didn’t someone go to jail? Because, dear taxpaying friend, you and I are paying the freight, and we can’t seem to find anyone who’ll admit to any wrongdoing. Of course, we were the only constituency not represented at the trial, but what else is new?

Just Do It – To Them Adidas and Reebok tied a $3.8 billion sneaker knot in an attempt to stay in the same race as arch-rival Nike that continues to surge ahead of all comers like a runner on steroids. Q: Can the merged company come up with a good name?

Then There’s The one About These Three Canadians Who Went Into A Texas Bar CIBC, one of Canada’s largest banks—they only have two or three, admitted no wrong when it ponied up $2.4 billion to settle its part in the Enron debacle. It looks to me like the Molson’s Canadian boys from the north gulped way too much longhorn lager, and doesn’t $2.4 billion seem a high price to pay for doing no wrong?

Miracle on 34th Street Coming next year to a street near you, Macy’s. When the Federated/May merger is complete, such well-known names as Famous-Barr, Filene’s, Foley’s, Hecht’s, Jones Store, Kaufmann’s, L.S. Ayres, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Strawbridge’s will, to the unending joy of kids everywhere, take the name of their better-known sibling—what would Christmas and Kris Kringle be with neither a Macy’s nor a Gimbel’s. Sadly, Gimbel’s bit the dust in the late 80’s.

Questions of the Week
1. Is Christopher Cox, SEC chairman in waiting, rather than becoming a trusted regulator, part of the white-collar crime problem? Check the internet for anything you can find on his representation of a slick bandito—well, since he’s doing ten, maybe not so slick—by the name of William Edward Cooper.
2. Do rich countries really give a shit about the world’s starving nations? Oxfam American doesn’t think so and will run a series of magazine ads this fall featuring a handful of little known and splattered celebs by the unlikely names of Driver, Firth, Banderas, Bono, Coldplay’s Martin, R.E.M.’s Stipe, Morrissette, and Radiohead’s Yorke.
3. Who in the White House ordered the EPA to delay its car fuel efficiency report and should we care?
4. What’s really behind the full court press to get CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) passed? You can bet it ain’t bananas and coffee beans.

Weekly Chutzpah Award Altera Corporation for stopping communication with a veteran technical analyst who criticized its share buyback program that the analyst said improperly enriched management and employee option holders at the expense of regular shareholders. ALTERA (NasdaqALTR) last trade $21.95, 52 Wk High/Low $24.26/$17.50. Altera has since apologized to the analyst and investor community at large. For some reason that scares me more than the possible rip-off.

Squawk! A Merrill Lynch compliance officer will have up to ten years to contemplate his navel for encouraging an employee not to squawk about a squawk box scheme that gave day traders access to inside information.

No Yen for You! Mitsubishi is going after seven former execs for 1.15 billion yen (divide by 110 to get approximate US $ equivalent) for hiding complaints leading to a two million vehicle recall, the worst in the company’s history.

Dirty Underwear Thomas M. Coughlin, a former vice chairman at Wal-Mart, has been accused of dipping into corporate funds to the tune of $500,000. Apparently good ole boy Tommy used the money for underwear and other personal goodies like accessories for his truck and Bloody Mary mix. No six packs for this redneck who once said thieving employees “ought to be shot.” Hmmm.

Corporate Crook Update Scott Sullivan, former CFO (Chief Finagling Officer) of WorldCom, sadly had to dump his Florida retirement villa, a little place of 30,000 square feet where he’d hoped to put his feet up and hide behind the Florida Homestead Law. I think he got a sudden case of more dime, less time when the reality of twenty-five years housed with corporate scumbags just like him started to sink in.

Cafe avec Données Besides taking up all the available tables, are hackers with their laptops sitting in a Starbucks tapping into wireless signals from careless merchants and stealing your credit card data? Investigators think so, and the epicenter is Miami south, the data theft capital of the world. And here you and I thought it was the big I-net.

Law & Disorder
1. Merck is trying to prevent experts, a cardiologist and the coroner who performed the autopsy, from testifying in the Vioxx trial . The judge told them to get real.
2. Fidelity Investments might get summoned to the principal’s office to find out if its employees improperly accepted gifts or entertainment from brokers.
3. RenaissanceRE Holdings (you gotta love the name) is doing its part to keep the industry scandal alive. The CEO said he may soon face a civil complaint (‘may soon face’ in corporate speak means that he will). Appropriately named Michael W. Cash, a senior vice president, resigned on 7/11 after refusing to accept a subpoena.

Bitch Blog If you want to kick your employer’s big fat dumb ass every hour or every day or every week or every month, don’t bitch blog or you’ll be starting a lot of conversations with, “I used to work for…”

Irony of the Week The FDA approving a new sleeping pill.

Vista, yet another word from Windows that means Bastards Yep, you guessed it, Vista is the name Microsoft has chosen to call its ’06 attack against sanity.

Leaky Boat? China may have floated the Yuan, but the good people at The Bank of China aren’t about to fill the tub.
Questions of the Week
1. Do you ever get the feeling that Earth is one of the Creator’s earlier attempts?
2. Would we feel better if Supreme Court nominee John Roberts was a black Latino woman?
3. Why don’t Rove and Libby resign?
Weekly Citizens’ Award To J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter.
Weekly Wimp Award Sadly, to our Pres for not kicking a whole lot of ass on the Plame affair.
Weekly Chutzpah Award To Merck, the Vioxx people, for creating an in-house training game for Vioxx sales reps dubbed Dodge Ball in which reps could only win by providing Merck approved answers to possible doctors’ questions about the drug’s safety or by dodging such questions all together. Merck countered by noting that participants couldn’t win by dodging all the questions. Oh.
Weekly Lottery Award To financial consultant Hydie Sumner for successfully suing Merrill Lynch for $2.2 Million in a sex discrimination case then demanding through arbitration that she be rehired at a higher level. She won that also. Apparently she always wanted to work at the ‘Bullshit on America’ firm and pointed out that she brings improved negotiation skills to the table. Amen to that, sister bull. Well done!
Gee, Sure You Can Afford It? The oil industry agreed to pony up $2 billion to clean up its MTBE mess provided it receives protection from dozens of ‘fouled groundwater’ lawsuits. Harmed municipalities put the cost closer to $20 billion. That totally non-partisan group known as the American Petroleum Institute estimates the cost at closer to $1.5 billion. FYI, Exxon Mobil alone earned $25 billion in 2004.
Truth, Justice, and the Wal-Mart Way In documents released last week in connection with a former employer’s whistle-blowing lawsuit, Wal-Mart, the kindler, gentler people, called Jared Bowen “a liar, a thief and a fraud.” This from the company whose Number One basic, founding belief is respect for the individual. Wal-Mart said he was fired because he abetted the fraud he reported, not because of whistle-blowing, and a Wal-Mart spokeswoman said, “We defend our reputation by simply disclosing the truth about Mr. Bowen’s termination.”
Broken Heart? Guidant, the pacemaker people, might have to replace some of the 28,000 older model pacemakers still implanted in people because a degrading seal (O-Ring?) problem might cause failure leading to serious health complications. Gee, you think? And where are those that aren’t still implanted in people?
I Can See! I Can See! In a study, Genetech’s experimental drug, Lucentis, has restored patients’ vision by an average of seven letters on a standard eye chart. Now all they have to do is cross-market to all those smiling, horny Viagra users who, as a consequence of their never-ending pursuit of EF (Erectile Function), can’t even see the chart.
Where’s The Beef? Mooing on south, it seems. Canadian cows that get their passports in order will start crossing the border as early as next week.

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.

WE MOURN, WE REMEMBER London, July 7, 2005 – 50 killed, 700 injured; Madrid, March 11, 2004 – 191 killed, 1500 injured; New York and Washington DC, September 11, 2001 – 3000 killed, 2300 injured; Iraq, 22,000 civilians killed, 41,000 civilians injured; Afghanistan, 3,500 civilians killed, 6,300 civilians injured; in the streets and alleys and trenches of the Mid-East war, 2,300 U.S. and coalition troops killed, 8,000 seriously injured; Africa, innocent millions are dying from starvation and disease and war. When does the madness stop?
Questions of the Week
1. Are we really and truly facing an ideological war that was going to happen regardless of Iraq?
2. Why is no publishing executive sitting in jail with Judith Miller?
3. Unemployed Germans have to work to get full unemployment insurance benefits—paint a building, make lunches, clean public areas, etc. Is this bad?
4. Should movies be available for download or purchase on day of theatrical release? Is it time to short movie chain and popcorn stock?
5. How innocent are the moaning investors who lost money on scam tax shelters designed for the sole purpose of screwing the IRS?
Weekly Citizens’ Award to Judith Miller of the Times, jailed for standing on an important principle. Maybe while cooling her heels in her ten by ten concrete room, she can write: ‘The Gulag Archipelago and the First Amendment.’
Weekly Wimp Award On the opposite side of the same principle that landed Judith Miller in the slammer, Time wimped out big time. I cancelled my subscription a hundred years ago, and now I know why. Also, where are our senators and congressmen who should be hollering bloody murder? And everyone who hasn’t cancelled his Time subscription is complicit in this sad day, the day that accelerated the race to end free speech.
Weekly Chutzpah Award goes to Richard Scrushy, canned CEO of HealthSouth and mastermind of a $3 billion fraud who, if there were any justice at all, should be spending the next thousand years in the coop (I’m still pissed that his Bible-punching brethren let him off) said of his prosecutors, “I forgive them.” Eeeeeeeyyyyyyyuuuuuuukkkkkkk!
Hooters, the Family Restaurant? Chow, a food mag, reports that 30% of Hooters diners are women and 10% of the tables have children present. If you ask me, and you didn’t, it’s time to dump the T-shirts and get back to serving their d.o.m. (dirty old men) target market.
Once Upon a Time The News & Record, a local daily in Greensboro, NC, starting next week, will give unhappy readers the ability to go online and offer their own version of stories they don’t like. This is so not new. This is what got defrocked journalists the big boot. This is what governments of the world, including our own, do every day.
Night and Day, You are the One No, not Cole Porter, but Sandra Day O’Connor, whose resignation threw special interest groups into a frothy dither as they busily cranked up their dirt machines, hoping to ensure that anyone opposed to their ideological views gets ‘Borked’ and anyone in agreement with their ideological views gets ‘Thomassed.’
Deposit Money Here, Deposit Body There .ABN Amro, one of the world’s largest banks, bought a chain of rehab centers and health clinics well known to celebrities suffering addictions or breakdowns. Let me see: I give you my money, name you as my trustee, and then you have me committed. No, there’s no conflict here, of course I’m higher than a kite and about to collapse into a month of uncontrolled sobbing.
Favorite Politician – No, not Oxymoronic James Stockdale died this week. He was Perot’s ’92 running mate, a Medal of Honor recipient, a true American hero, and a gentleman who, in his opening Gore, Quale, Stockdale Vice Presidential debate remarks, humbly asked two questions that every politician should humbly ask: “Who am I?” and ”Why am I here?”
Get Less If Deutsch Telekom sells its Lagging T-Mobile unit, as is rumored, does their pitchwoman, Catherine Zeta Jones, the world’s sexiest lady, go with it. Whatever users T-Mobile has, CZJ is the single reason. Without her, T-Mobile is not only lagging, it’s a zero.
Smell Soap? The world-wide housing bubble is showing definite bursting signs. Australia is leveling off after a six year run of 15% compounded growth. Remember, for every spec winner, there’s a spec loser, so don’t get caught with your specs down.
Fat Food Fight Thinking of suing your favorite hamburger emporium because your waist blocks your view of your feet, think again. Thanks to the good folks at National Restaurant Association, twenty states now have laws banning ‘you made me a fat bastard’ suits, and eleven more have bills pending. Of course that still leaves nineteen states, including California where only leaves and grass are eaten or smoked, to cash in on your God-given right to get rich the old-fashioned American way.
Take an Aspirin and Hold it Tightly Between Your Knees More giant healthcare oligopolies are being created at ever increasing prices. This week UnitedHealth said it would acquire PacifiCare Health for $8.14 billion, or $2,500 per enrollee. Last year, WellPoint and Anthem merged in a $16.5 billion deal, or $1,260 per member, about half the UnitedHealth/PacifiCare deal. That wrenching pain in your ass isn’t hemorrhoids or the proctologist’s practiced pointer, it’s the cash being sucked out of your system.
Ay! Taco Grandé! By some estimates, 20 billion American’s will cross the Rio Grande this year. That’s dollars, my friend, gringo greenbacks earned by Mexicans in this country that flow to Mexico, its second largest source of foreign exchange after oil exports.
Volkswagen Bugs Not the beloved Beatle, but cockroaches, the two-legged kind. Apparently two former VW executives skimmed the corporate treasury to fund a network of fake companies and paid bribes to keep their dirty little secret, well, secret. Corporate greed knows no boundaries, it seems.
Fickle Footsie of Fate Boo on the money that left the London Stock Exchange on word of yesterday’s bombings. I think we should list the cowards who ran for cover and prevent them from ever again using the stock markets of the free world.
Social Sescrewity You’ll be happy to know that the ousted CEO of Morgan Stanley is departing with $113 million stuffed into his pockets. Johnny Mack, his replacement, gets only $25 million a year, but at least he has a job.
Corporate Crooks Update Richard Scrushy faces a ton of civil suits and the SEC wants his other nut. Prince Eliot is gong after Bank of America’s Theodore C. Sihpol, III on the four of thirty-three counts that the jury left in limbo. Daniel Bayly, former Merrill Lynch investment banking head who ‘floated’ Nigerian barges for Enron, goes to the slammer on July 14th for two-and-a-half years.

HAPPY CANADA DAY! HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

Look Out Ole Mack He’s Back After a four year absence, Johnny Mack is back at Morgan Stanley taking over from the ousted guy who gave him the axe. God, how many of us live for that.

Corporate Crooks Update Scrushy from HealthSouth made a clean getaway. The bible belt jurors couldn’t risk sticking a born again into the slammer. Too bad a northern court didn’t get their hands on him. Ebbers didn’t find Jesus and wasn’t smart enough stay in the bible belt. He’s surrendering most of his assets, about $40 million, to investors who lost three billion (+-), about a penny a dollar, and then he’s off to the lockup for a whole bunch of years.

A WalMart In Every Garage The Supreme Court rules that eminent domain, a principle that says an individuals property may be usurped for the larger good, extends not only to the needs of government but to commercial ventures as well. Not much new here, but it puts the cards on the table and the deck is loaded in favor of the bigs.

Poop on the Poor Is it just me or is there something akin to class discrimination in Procter and Gamble ’s new super cheap toilet paper, Charmin Basic, for the frugal shopper. It’s less squeezably soft and God only knows what other critical toilet paper elements are lacking. Next they’ll offer rolled up used catalogs and newspapers for the poor.

Hory Herr! (Holy Hell) China National Offshore Oil Corp. bid $18.5 billion for Unocal. That’s two billion more than Chevron wants to pay. If you think three dollar a gallon gas sounds bad, how does 24 yuan sound? And when those five billion Chinese cars need gas, you can bet your sweet yuan that Unocal will be the first to run dry.
Hory Herr II The Haier Group, a Chinese manufacturing colossus is trying to acquire Maytag Corp. by outbidding an investor group, Ripplewood Holdings, by $200 million. If the Chinese win, the days of the Maytag repairman sitting on his ass are over. (Note: In April, the Beijing-based Lenovo purchased IBM's personal computer division or $1.75 billion. Chinese as a second language, anyone?)
Second Oldest Profession The accounting industry is trying hard to replace prostitution as the second oldest profession. KPMG seems about to go the way of Arthur Andersen if it can't its act together over scam tax shelters it developed and help sell in the late 1990’s. Clients who got screwed are lining up civil suits of $195 million.
Doughnut Holes Krispy Kreme, continuing to trim the bad cholesterol from its operation, fired six executives.
Big Popcorn AMC, number two movie chain, and Loews, number three movie chain, are merging. That will give the combined operation 5,900 screens compared with Regal’s 6,200. Now maybe Hollywood will churn out a few decent movies to go along with $10 tickets and $10 popcorn.
Republican Republican Republican…You can bet Bush and the boys will be rethinking cloning big time. A group of scientists thinks politics might be genetic. Boys of Brazil?
Corporate Crooks Update Kozlowski and Schwartz found guilty. Expect yet another trial. John Rigas from Adelphia communications is getting 15 years and his son, Timothy Rigas, twenty years for their part in ripping off their shareholders to the tune of hundreds of millions. Timothy pleaded for leniency saying their intentions were good; he didn’t say for whom.
PP Surely the Wall Street Journal could have picked a code name for its new Saturday edition whose acronym wasn’t PP, or maybe that's thier way of saying we're #1. Apart from that, a paper that allows people to relax aimed at a target market of people who don’t relax, ever, seems folly.
Revolution Brewing Steve Case, the ex-AOL guy who duped Time Warner big-time, has formed a new company called Revolution aimed at the healthcare market. Healthcare needs a lot aimed in its direction, I’m just not sure Steve Case is the guy I want holding the gun.