Maybe Sherry can handle it, with a littlel help from her union goons. 
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Nothing beats the personal touch of hired goons.
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You have your history wrong.  The companies hired goons.  Unions have members who fight for decent working conditions.  Big difference.
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Who said anything about history?
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I was thinking more in terms of campaign tactics in recent years.
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I was thinking more in terms of campaign tactics in recent years.
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I'd put my money on a democratic steelworker against a republican stock market trader any day.  No hiring needed.
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I'd put my money on a democratic steelworker against a republican stock market trader any day.  No hiring needed.
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How about Human Ills against Soros?
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I love George Soros, I'll run a block for him against ills.
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Attack the working man? That just ain't right.
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What about left versus right authoritarians?
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I wonder if they'll hold Frist as accountable as they did Martha.  He knew what was in his "blind" trust and had his shares sold, right before the price fell.

  Now is that a coincidence or was it insider trading.  That is the question.  I think he should get the same treatment as the rest of the insiders who landed in jail for lengthy sentences. 

  But, because of his political position, he may get off with nothing.

  The WP has a good case against him today.

SEC, Justice Investigate Frist's Sale of Stock

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 24, 2005; Page A01

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is facing questions from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission about his sale of stock in his family's hospital company one month before its price fell sharply.

The Tennessee lawmaker, who is the Senate's top Republican and a likely candidate for president in 2008, ordered his portfolio managers in June to sell his family's shares in HCA Inc., the nation's largest hospital chain, which was founded by Frist's father and brother.

A month later, the stock's price dropped 9 percent in a single day because of a warning from the company about weakening earnings. Stockholders are not permitted to trade stock based on inside information; whether Frist possessed any appears to be at the heart of the probes.

A spokesman said Frist's office has been contacted by both the SEC and the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan about his divestiture of the stock. HCA disclosed separately that it was subpoenaed by the same U.S. attorney's office for documents that were related to Frist's sale. Frist and HCA said they are cooperating.

Historians said they cannot recall any other congressional leaders who have faced federal inquiries into stock sales. Frist has denied any wrongdoing.

On Thursday, a Frist spokeswoman said the senator had not discussed the stock sale in advance with any HCA executives. On Friday, in a statement from Frist's office, the issue was couched a little differently. It said the senator "had no information about the company or its performance that was not available to the public when he directed the trustees to sell the HCA stock. His only objective in selling the stock was to eliminate the appearance of a conflict of interest."

According to Frist's office, the senator decided to sell all his HCA stock -- held in blind trusts managed by two companies for him, his wife and his children -- on June 13. Under the rules of the trusteeships, Frist had no control over the timing of the sale, Frist spokeswoman Amy Call said.

When the company disclosed that its second-quarter earnings would fall short of Wall Street expectations a month later, the stock price slid steeply. By that time, Frist's shares had been divested. The managers of one of the trusts told the senator on July 1 that his holdings had all been sold; the other trust managers said the shares were gone on July 8.

Frist's financial disclosure statement earlier this year placed the value of his blind trusts at between $7 million and $25 million.

Separately, documents unearthed yesterday by the Associated Press showed that Frist was told about stock trades in his blind trust. In documents filed with the Senate, trustee M. Kirk Scobey Jr. told Frist in 2002 that HCA stock had been transferred to his trust. Scobey, reached by phone last night, declined to comment.

The AP said that the documents disclosed that HCA stock worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was placed into Frist's blind trusts several other times in 2002 as well. Frist maintained in a television interview in 2003 that he did not know how much HCA stock he owned, if any. Spokesmen for Frist did not return phone messages last night.

HCA was founded in 1968 by Frist's father, Thomas Frist, his brother, Thomas Frist Jr., and Jack Massey, the former owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Frist's brother Thomas is a director and a former HCA chairman. The senator himself is a surgeon."

  For the rest of the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5092301811.html
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Authoritarians can be working people, but I wouldn't want one to run the country any more than you would.
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Sucks vrs blows?
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I don't think most lefties here think left authoritarianism really exists. But those big social spending programs don't get funded with donations.
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I don't feel threatened. I haven't ran into as much as a sobriety checkpoint.  I hear about authoritarianism, but I sure don't see much.
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Op-Ed Columnist
  Bring Back Warren Harding
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 25, 2005
THERE are no coincidences. On Monday, as L. Dennis Kozlowski was slapped with 8 to 25 years in jail for looting Tyco International of some $150 million, the feds were making their first arrest of a high-ranking member of the Bush administration. The official was David Safavian, the chief of White House federal procurement policy who once worked for Jack Abramoff, the sleazy Republican lobbyist whose disreputable client list, in another noncoincidence, included Tyco. While it's an accident of timing that Mr. Safavian was collared at his suburban Virginia home just as Mr. Kozlowski was sent to the slammer in New York, the two events could not better bracket a corrupt era worthy of the Gilded Age.

Ours will be remembered as the Enron era. Enron itself is a distant memory - much like all that circa 2000 talk of a smoothly efficient C.E.O. presidency led by a Harvard M.B.A. and a former chief executive of Halliburton. But even as American business has since been purged by prosecutions and reforms, the mutant Enron version of the C.E.O. culture still rules in Washington: uninhibited cronyism, cooked books, special-favors networks, the banishment of whistle-blowers and accountability. More than ideology, this ethos has sabotaged even the best of American intentions, whether in Iraq or New Orleans. Unchecked, it promises greater disasters to come.

As recently as 10 days ago, when he resigned before his arrest, Mr. Safavian was the man who set purchasing policy for the entire federal government, including that related to Hurricane Katrina relief. The White House might as well have appointed a contestant from "The Apprentice." Before entering public service, Mr. Safavian's main claim to fame was as a lobbyist whose clients included Indian gaming interests and thuggish African regimes. Mr. Safavian now faces charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff, the Tom DeLay-Ralph Reed-Grover Norquist pal who is being investigated by more agencies than looked into 9/11. Mr. Abramoff's greasy K Street influence-peddling network makes the Warren Harding gang, which operated out of its own infamous "little green house on K Street," look like selfless stewards of the public good.

You know that the arrest of Mr. Safavian, one of three known Abramoff alumni to migrate into the administration, is the start of something big. Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department announced it only after Mr. Safavian had appeared in court and had been released without bail. The gambit was clearly intended to keep the story off television, and it worked.

It won't for long. The Enron odor emanating from Mr. Safavian is of a piece with the rest of the cronyism in the Katrina preparedness package. The handing off of FEMA from President Bush's 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to Mr. Allbaugh's even less qualified buddy, Michael Brown, in 2003 is now notorious. (The two men have been friends for 25 years but were not college roommates, as I wrote here last week.) But that's only the beginning: the placement of hacks like "Brownie" and Mr. Safavian in crucial jobs hasn't been slowed one whit by what went down on their watch in New Orleans.

Witness the nomination of Julie Myers as the new head of immigration and customs enforcement at the Homeland Security Department. Though the White House attacked the diplomat Joseph Wilson for nepotism because he undertook a single pro bono intelligence mission while his wife was at the C.I.A., it thought nothing of handing this huge job to a nepotistic twofer: Ms. Myers is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers and has just married the chief of staff for the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff. Her qualifications for running an agency with more than 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget include serving as an associate counsel under Kenneth Starr; in that job, she helped mastermind the costly and doomed prosecution of Susan McDougal, and was outwitted at every turn by the defense lawyer Mark Geragos.

Ms. Myers is only the latest example of Mr. Chertoff's rolling the dice with Americans' safety during his brief tenure in Homeland Security. After the bombings in London in July, he vowed to maximize his department's "finite human and financial capital to attain the optimal state of preparedness." Yet the very same day, the president nominated Tracy Henke as Homeland Security's new executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. Ms. Henke, a John Ashcroft political appointee at the Justice Department, has since been unmasked as an Enron-style spinner of numbers. As Eric Lichtblau of The Times reported in August, it was she who ordered the highly regarded nonpartisan head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Lawrence Greenfeld, to delete a reference to politically embarrassing data in a government press release for a report on racial profiling. When Mr. Greenfeld complained, he was demoted.

Imagine Ms. Henke, in her Homeland Security job, having sway over press releases about our disaster readiness. There is likely to be nothing but good news until it's too late. But if the hiring of the likes of Ms. Henke, Ms. Myers and Mr. Safavian is half of the equation in Enron governance, the other half is the punishing of veteran civil servants like Mr. Greenfeld for doing their jobs honestly. Even as it fills its ranks with Abramoff golf-junket partners, political flunkies and underemployed relatives, the administration silences those who, like Sherron Watkins at Enron, might blow the whistle on any Kozlowski or Ebbers or Rigas fleecing or betraying the taxpayers. Three weeks before Mr. Safavian's arrest, the Army Corps of Engineers demoted another procurement official, Bunnatine Greenhouse, who was a 20-year veteran in her field. Her crime was not obstructing justice but pursuing it by vehemently questioning irregularities in the awarding of some $7 billion worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root.

Ms. Greenhouse and Mr. Greenfeld are only two of the many whistle-blowers done in by this administration so far. (Congressman Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, lists nine on his Web site.) Even top government officials who are not whistle-blowers, merely truth-tellers, are axed. Lawrence Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, was pushed out after he accurately projected the cost of the Iraq war at $100 billion to $200 billion. Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, was shunted aside after he accurately estimated the number of required troops ("several hundred thousand") for securing Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, who presented rosy scenarios of getting the job done with Iraqi oil income and low troop deployments, stayed on to bungle the war.

Their errors were compounded when the administration staffed the post-Saddam American occupation with exactly the same kind of appointees it would later bring to homeland security: the two heads of "private sector development" in Iraq were a former Bush fund-raiser in Connecticut and a venture capitalist who just happened to be Ari Fleischer's brother. As The Washington Post reported last year, major roles in the L. Paul Bremer regime were given to 20-somethings with no foreign service experience or knowledge of Arabic simply because they had posted their résumés at the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank where Mr. Bremer had chaired a task force.

The damage done to the mission in Iraq and homeland security alike by Enron governance is immeasurable. Administration apologists who now claim that hurricane relief will bring still more examples of innovative, C.E.O.-style governmental enterprise (Mr. Bush's "Gulf Opportunity Zone," for instance) conveniently sidestep the harsh truth that such schemes are destined to be as empty and corrupt as Andrew Fastow's Raptor partnerships at Enron once they're staffed from the apparently infinite crony talent pool.

YET it's not only the administration that is to blame, any more than it is only the executives who are at fault when a corporation rots. Culpability also belongs to the board that rubber-stamps the shenanigans - to wit, Congress. Republicans in the Senate are led by Bill Frist, who, in the grandest Enron manner, claimed last week that it was to avoid a conflict of interest that his supposed "blind trust" unloaded all of his holdings in a Frist family-founded company just before its stock tanked. (Federal prosecutors and the S.E.C. are investigating.) As for the Democrats, they are nonpareil at posturing about the unstoppable nomination of John Roberts - a conservative, to be sure, but the rare Bush nominee who seems both qualified for his job and unsullied by ethical blemishes. Yet when David Safavian was up for a job involving hundreds of billions of dollars, and much of his dubious résumé was fully known, he was approved by the ranking Democrat, Joe Lieberman, and all his colleagues of both parties on the Governmental Affairs Committee.

Which is to say that the rest of us, the individual shareholders in government who have voted in our Enron-era politicians, are responsible, too.

This administration is on track to be the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States. The history books won't be kind to Mr. Bush. Good thing he doesn't care. He got his.
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I saved that column to word. I have quitwe a collection on these felons.
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Friends
by Noam Scheiber
 
Post date 09.19.05 | Issue date 09.26.05 
ill no one defend George W. Bush? Amid revelations that fema has been overrun by incompetents, commentators have rushed to blame Bush administration cronyism. This is not only the unsurprising conclusion of New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. It's also the conclusion of many principled conservatives. As Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, "[T]o place a complete hack in charge of response to a national emergency is criminal negligence."

The implication from Dowd and Sullivan is that, while cronyism is a constant feature of presidential politics--both cite Bill Clinton specifically--Bush has practiced a particularly egregious version. Krugman blames the pervasiveness of cronyism in the Bush administration on its lack of intellectual seriousness. But all of this may be a little too hard on Bush, if such a thing is possible. The problem may have less to do with the current president than with conservatism itself.

Let's first distinguish between two very different types of cronyism. The first kind is what you might call "inner-circle cronyism": Pretty much every president has dragged a small collection of cronies with him into the West Wing. Whereas Bush brought Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and Karen Hughes, Clinton had Bruce Lindsey and Mack McLarty. The reason for this phenomenon, as John F. Kennedy once explained, is that the White House is a lousy place to start making friends. Presidents need advisers they can trust unconditionally, and longtime friends and associates are often the only ones who fit the bill. If Bush is exceptional in this case, it's only because he so values loyalty that he refuses to fire these people even after they've proved themselves incompetent.

It's the second kind of cronyism--call it "outer-circle cronyism"--that's truly destructive. The focus here isn't so much on handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates--that is, to one's own cronies. It's on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, which increases the scale of the cronyism exponentially. The Clinton administration was relatively free of this pestilence. (Clinton's appointments were largely meritocratic even when they involved people in his extended social network.) The Bush administration is infested with it.

Mike Brown, the former fema director, is a college friend of Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh. Treasury employs former political hands but few top economists. The Coalition Provisional Authority, the agency tasked with governing and rebuilding Iraq, was largely a dumping ground for low-level Bush campaign officials. Meanwhile, as my colleague Spencer Ackerman has reported, the Bush administration insisted in 2002 that the Department of Homeland Security be exempt from having to stock its upper ranks largely with members of the Senior Executive Service--the elite cadre of civil servants who make the government's machinery run smoothly--in order to give it more political appointments.

As it happens, this strain of cronyism was also a prominent feature of Ronald Reagan's administration--the last bona fide conservative one to occupy the White House. Reagan had his share of inner-circle cronies--Ed Meese, William French Smith. But, as with Bush, what distinguishes the Reagan administration is that it was teeming with outer-circle cronies. The Reagan White House was constantly putting out fires caused by hacks in bureaucracies like the U.S. Information Agency (run by the husband of Nancy Reagan's best friend, who secretly taped conversations with top officials in hopes of cashing in on a memoir) and the Environmental Protection Agency (a former toxic-waste cleanup official was convicted of lying to Congress about favoring her ex-employer). According to The Washington Post, Reagan's personnel office, which was charged with staffing the federal bureaucracy, was "a study in cronyism," run by a crony of Reagan crony Meese. In 1987, Democratic Senator John Glenn released a report documenting the Reagan administration's efforts to gut the Senior Executive Service, a move that anticipated Bush's. Even conservative commentators like Bill Safire made cronyism a constant theme of their Reagan-era coverage.

Why do conservative administrations specialize in outer-circle cronyism? The answer has to do with the fact that conservatism doesn't hold bureaucracy in very high regard. (I refer mostly to federal bureaucracy. Conservatives are more sympathetic to local government.) Conservatives believe that bureaucracy is inherently bumbling, inefficient, and, well, dumb. "[T]he brutal fact is, government tends toward bureaucracy, which means elaborate paper flow but ineffective action," as David Brooks wrote on Sunday. Even Bush himself couldn't resist a jab at bureaucracy in a press conference shortly after Katrina. "[B]ureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people," the president announced. (In fact, as Daniel Franklin showed in a devastating Washington Monthly piece in 1995, one reason bureaucracies work badly when they're full of incompetents is that such people are scared to make mistakes and therefore cling to the letter of bureaucratic rules. Competent people usually know when breaking the rules is justified.)

On top of that, as my colleague Franklin Foer has pointed out, conservatives don't place much faith in experts--the people who, since the Progressive era, have largely manned bureaucracies. Modern conservatism tends to see social science as an attempt to couch liberal views in the language of objectivity.

Now, if you happen to think bureaucracies are structurally incapable of improving people's lives, and if you have contempt for the kinds of people who reside in them, then you have two choices: You can either slash the bureaucracy and refund taxpayers' money, or you can reconcile yourself to the existence of bureaucracy and run it as a patronage operation. (If, by definition, a bureaucracy can't get any less competent, you might as well make appointments that benefit you personally or politically.)

But, in reality, it's just not politically feasible to cut bureaucracy very much. Despite conservatives' best efforts, government grew under Reagan, under a GOP congress, and it has grown by leaps and bounds under Bush. Instead, conservatives have generally opted for choice B--reconciliation. About the worst thing you can say about Bush is that he's more reconciled than most.

Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at TNR.

Interesting article on cronyism.
Now I've seen everything.

Noam Scheiber defending Bush?


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I guess you don't Noam.
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Apparently you haven't been on a plane lately.


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Thankfully no. But lefties demanded all sorts of security and blamed Bush for airline security so I don't have a lot of sympathy.

When I was flying a lot there was reasonable security, but nobody really expected hijackers to use planes as weapons (Monday morning conspiracy theorizing aside), so they were mostly looking for lethal weapons.
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I'd guess not.
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It was a lame joke, but tomorrow is      MONDAY, and any laugh is a good one because I have horrible meetings most of the day.
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It was a lame joke, but tomorrow is      MONDAY, and any laugh is a good one because I have horrible meetings most of the day.
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Well, nobody except the CIA. It was brought up as a possibility in a 1999 report on terrorism.

I can fetch it and cite the relevant page number if you don't believe me.
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I'm sure we've all seen it repeatedly. But you know full well the CIA has a million scenarios in likely as many reports. Still, no passengers were expecting that mere boxcutters would be used to kill them.

I assure you if I know you're going to use a boxcutter to kill everyone as opposed to fly to Havana I'm going to fight like hell to keep you away from the controls. And if you tell everyone Terrorists are going that route, terrorists WILL change plans.

One old report means nothing in the real world, as changing one thing changes everything else. It's just more Monday morning QB action.
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Meetings bite.

I always bring a paper sack full of Tootsie Pops to mine. It works wonders. I have found that people simply can't be jerks with Tootsie Pops in their mouths.



Thinking 'outside' the box.
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I agree, but they did take the plane scenario seriously enough when Bush went to Greece, so it's inaccurate to state "they didn't expect it."
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A possibility is different than "expecting it". If there were scads of warnings and memos I might agree they were expecting it. Don't know exactly what they might have done outside of using what you call authoritarian measures years ago.

Maybe in 1999?
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Is clearing airspace and having airforce patrol that airspace authoritarian? I don't think so, unless it was permanent. It wasn't. Just precautionary.

Giants made it close. wow. Well see how the Swami does. I hate nail-biters.


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A Frist spokeswoman told reporters the senator “did not have any conversations with HCA executives about HCA stock when he was making the decision to divest.” Wordsmiths ought to study that quote. It will likely come up again. Incidentally, Stewart was never convicted of insider trading, just lying.

The AP said that the documents disclosed that HCA stock worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was placed into Frist's blind trusts several other times in 2002 as well. Frist maintained in a television interview in 2003 that he did not know how much HCA stock he owned, if any. Spokesmen for Frist did not return phone messages last night.

Meetings bite.

I always bring a paper sack full of Tootsie Pops to mine. It works wonders. I have found that people simply can't be jerks with Tootsie Pops in their mouths.



Thinking 'outside' the box.
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I bet.

Crony capitalism isn't Capitalism.

What is remarkable is why anyone bothers to defend it.
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Snippet from a column I mostly don't agree with:
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/n...on/12733876.htm


I'm withholding judgment about this thing till I hear more details, but I too was struck with the odd narrow of that disclaimer. I notice that it doesn't cover conversations with his brother the HCA board member, and doesn't cover general discussions about the state of HCA.
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Interesting article on cronyism.
Now I've seen everything.

Noam Scheiber defending Bush?


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"In accordance with the rules of the House Republican Conference, I will temporarily step aside as floor leader in order to win exoneration from these baseless charges," DeLay told reporters shortly after the indictment was announced.

"This morning, in an act of blatant political partisanship, a rogue district attorney in Travis County, Texas, named Ronnie Earle charged me with one count of criminal conspiracy: a reckless charge wholly unsupported by the facts," DeLay said, reading from a prepared statement. "This is one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history. It's a sham and Mr. Earle knows it."

He went on to call Earle a "partisan fanatic" who was conducting a "vengeful investigation" as part of a "coordinated, premeditated campaign of political retribution."

DeLay said, "I have done nothing wrong. I have violated no law, no regulation, no rule of the House. I have done nothing unlawful, unethical or, I might add, unprecedented. . . . My defense in this case will not be technical or legalistic; it will be categorical and absolute. I am innocent. Mr. Earle and his staff know it. And I will prove it." DeLay did not answer questions at the end of his six-minute statement.