Howard Dean

[Django]

I'm starting this thread to discuss the front-running Democratic candidate Howard Dean--the popular opinion about him, his stand on the issues (esp. the Iraq war), what he means for America, his chances of winning the November 2004 election, etc. Howard Dean made the news recently when he won Al Gore's endorsement, turning from a marginal figure into the front-running Democratic candidate, much to the chagrin, one imagines, of Gore's vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, who claims that Dean's policies constitute a divergence from those of Clinton, which Lieberman supposedly represents. Anyway, here is the news article about Gore's endorsement of Dean, which contains Gore's speech:


Al Gore Endorses Dean for President
Former vice president praises grassroots campaign
December 9, 2003

NEW YORK--During a breakfast here today, former Vice President Al Gore endorsed Democratic presidential candidate former Governor Howard Dean, M.D., citing his vision for the country and the Democratic party, as well as his grassroots-based quest to take back the White House.

Speaking at the National Black Theater's Institute for Action Arts in Harlem this morning, Gore praised Governor Dean's grassroots-based campaign and the broad coalition that Dean is building to help Democrats retake the White House in 2004. Following is an edited transcript of Gore's remarks and Governor Dean's remarks:

"...Howard Dean really is the only candidate who has been able to inspire at the grassroots level all over this country the kind of passion and enthusiasm for democracy and change and transformation of America that we need in this country. We need to remake the Democratic Party; we need to remake America; we need to take it back on behalf of the people of this country. So I'm very proud and honored to endorse Howard Dean to be the next president of the United States of America," Gore began.

"Democracy is a team sport. And I want to do everything I can to convince the -- anybody that is interested in my judgment about who, among these candidates has the best chance to win and the best chance to lead our country in the right direction. I want to do everything I can to convince you to get behind Howard Dean and let's make this a successful campaign as a group. It is about all of us and all of us need to get behind the strongest candidate. Now I respect the prerogative of the voters and the caucuses and the primaries. I'm just one person, but I'm offering my judgment and I'm also going to say one other thing here," Gore continued.

"Years ago, former president Ronald Reagan said in the Republican Party that there ought to be an 11th commandment, speak no ill of another Republican. We're Democrats and we may not find that kind of commandment as accessible, but to the extent that we can recognize the stakes in America today, I would urge all of the other candidates and campaigns to keep their eyes on the prize. Here we are in Harlem. We need to keep our eyes on the prize. This nation cannot afford to have four more years of a Bush-Cheney administration. We can't afford to be divided among ourselves to the point that we lose sight of how important it is for America. What is going on in this Bush White House today is bad for our country. And it's slowly beginning to sink into more and more people out there. And we don't have the luxury of fighting among ourselves to the point where we seriously damage our ability to win on behalf of the American people this time around," Gore said.

"Now, one other thing, I've spent a long time thinking about national security and national defense. And I've heard a lot of folks who, in my opinion, made a judgment about the Iraq war that was just plain wrong, saying that Howard Dean's decision to oppose the Iraq war calls his judgment on foreign policy into question. Excuse me. He was the only major candidate who made the correct judgment about the Iraq war. And he had the insight and the courage to say and do the right thing. And that's important," Gore said.

"Because those judgments, that basic common sense is what you want in a president. Our country has been weakened in our ability to fight the war against terror because of the catastrophic mistake that the Bush administration made in taking us into war in Iraq. It was Osama bin Laden that attacked us, not Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is a bad guy and he's better off not in power, we're all better off, but it was a mistake to get us into a quagmire over there, so don't tell me that because Howard Dean was the only major candidate who was right about that war, that that somehow calls his judgment into question on foreign policy, so whether it is inspiring enthusiasm at the grassroots and promising to remake the Democratic Party as a force for justice and progress and good in America, whether it is a domestic agenda that gets our nation back on track or whether it is protecting us against terrorists and strengthening our nation in the world, I have come to the conclusion that in a field of great candidates, one candidate clearly now stands out, and so I'm asking all of you to join in this grassroots movement to elect Howard Dean President of the United States," Gore said.

Governor Dean thanked Gore for his endorsement:

"Mr. Vice President, I want to thank you for your generous and thoughtful words.... I thank Al Gore for his extraordinary leadership in this party in the last couple of years. I told him, I say what I think, for better or worse, I told him the two best speeches in this campaign were given by somebody who is not running for president and that was his March and September speech about the war and about foreign policy.

"We have needed a strong, steady hand in this party, and I appreciate Al's willingness to stand up and be one. This campaign is not about Howard Dean going to the White House. This campaign is about us going to the White House, all of us, and I look forward to the day on January 20th, 2005, when we do what Andrew Jackson, another great Tennessean did, we will open the doors to the White House and let the American people back in," Governor Dean concluded.

Gore, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee and two-term vice president under President Clinton, was the Democratic nominee for president and won the popular vote in 2000.

Following this morning's breakfast, the two men will travel to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for a rally before Dean heads to Durham, New Hampshire, for tonight's candidates' debate.

[Sir Toose]

Lieberman made a little personal divergence of his own when he agreed to run with Gore in the election.

Lieberman has lost much credibility to me, he has no more influence on my brain than Al Sharpton these days.

Now, Dean. He's too far left. He's also a person who comes across as having a low moral character as he's prone to personally attacking his 'foes' versus telling us what he thinks and how he'd go about fixing it. He's not appealing to people's intelligence with his current tack... his tactics are much baser than that. He reminds me of the Martin Sheen character in the "Dead Zone".

I don't like his politics. If I vote Democrat this time it won't be for him. Frankly, I haven't seen anyone yet who I'd prefer over Bush for another term.

[sunfrog]

They need someone better looking. Why don't you run Toose? :love:

[Django]

I'm reposting this from anothe thread I posted it in:

Here's an interesting news item I just uncovered:

Liberal billionaire George Soros, who has compared President Bush to the Nazis and said that defeating him is "the central focus" of his life, will now spend $25 million in special interest money attacking him!


This (http://www.msnbc.com/news/991865.asp) is what George Soros has to say about the Bush administration:

America, under Bush, is a danger to the world,” Soros said. Then he smiled: “And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”

Soros believes a “supremacist ideology” guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans.” It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit (“The enemy is listening”): “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me,” he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

Soros’s contributions are filling a gap in Democratic Party finances that opened after the restrictions in the 2002 McCain-Feingold law took effect. In the past, political parties paid a large share of television and get-out-the-vote costs with unregulated “soft money” contributions from corporations, unions and rich individuals. The parties are now barred from accepting such money. But non-party groups in both camps are stepping in, accepting soft money and taking over voter mobilization.

“It’s incredibly ironic that George Soros is trying to create a more open society by using an unregulated, under-the-radar-screen, shadowy, soft-money group to do it,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said. “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party.”

In past election cycles, Soros contributed relatively modest sums. In 2000, his aide said, he gave $122,000, mostly to Democratic causes and candidates. But recently, Soros has grown alarmed at the influence of neoconservatives, whom he calls “a bunch of extremists guided by a crude form of social Darwinism.”

Neoconservatives, Soros said, are exploiting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a preexisting agenda of preemptive war and world dominion. “Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God,” Soros said. “He’s leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence.”

Here (http://www.soros.org/about/bios/a_soros) is a biographical note of billionaire George Soros:

George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. He survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest and left communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE). While a student at LSE, Soros became familiar with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound influence on his thinking and later on his professional and philanthropic activities.

The financier. In 1956, Soros moved to the United States, where he began to accumulate a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Today he is chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC.

The philanthropist. Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa. Today he is chairman of the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the founder of a network of philanthropic organizations that are active in more than 50 countries. Based primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union—but also in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States—these foundations are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society. They work closely with OSI to develop and implement a range of programs focusing on civil society, education, media, public health, and human rights as well as social, legal, and economic reform. In recent years, OSI and the Soros foundations network have spent more than $400 million annually to support projects in these and other focus areas. In 1992, Soros founded Central European University, with its primary campus in Budapest.

The philosopher. Soros is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming The Bubble of America Supremacy (PublicAffairs, January 2004). His other books include George Soros on Globalization (2002); The Alchemy of Finance (1987); Opening the Soviet System (1990); Underwriting Democracy (1991); Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995); The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (1998); and Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000). His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world.

Here (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/11/politics/main582932.shtml) is another news article about George Soros' personal mission to put an end to the Bush administration:

Billionaire Bankrolls Bush Bashers
NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2003

(CBS) Billionaire George Soros has pledged $15.5 million to efforts to unseat President Bush in an election that he sees as a "life and death" struggle to defeat the administration's "supremacist ideology," a newspaper reports.

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," the 74-year-old Soros tells The Washington Post. "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

Calling the 2004 race "the central focus of my life" and comparing the president's ideology to what he witnessed in Nazi occupied Hungary, Soros is fueling attacks on the president that campaign finance reform might have prevented, The Post reports.

Last year's soft-money ban is starving the national parties of the cash they once used to finance advertising and door-to-door campaigns. Soros is filling the gap by donating to independent groups bent on defeating the president, like MoveOn.org, to which he and a partner pledged up to $5 million this week.

He has also raised money directly for former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, and supports Democratic runners Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, retired Gen. Wesley Clark and Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri.

Republicans see irony in Soros, who has spent millions promoting open societies abroad, is helping Democratic adherents skirt campaign finance laws.

"George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party," Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson told The Post.

Campaign finance advocates have also expressed concerns over Soros' spending, The Post reports.

Soros says his motivation is deeply personal, the result of deep anxieties over the nation's direction that sometimes wake him at 3 in the morning. The Post quotes the billionaire comparing the president's phrase "You're either with us or against us" in the war on terrorism, to Nazi slogans he saw in his childhood Hungary, like "The enemy is listening."

Soros also believes Mr. Bush feels "anointed by God."

In his efforts, Soros has been allied with former Clinton chief of staff John Podestra and liberal heavyweights. Soros' willingness to part with massive sums has spurred other wealthy people to ante up as well — the day after Soros offered $10 million to Americans Coming Together, five friends donated an additional $13.5 million to the group.

This is not the first year Soros has been generous with campaign funds. According to a database run by the Federal Election Commission, between 2000 and 2002 Soros gave $153,000 in soft money to the Democratic National Committee in three massive installments.

Since 1998, he donated $125,000 directly to candidates and committees. Except for one $1,000 check to Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, it all went to Democratic candidates or PACs that favor Democrats.

©MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[Django]

Now, Dean. He's too far left. He's also a person who comes across as having a low moral character as he's prone to personally attacking his 'foes' versus telling us what he thinks and how he'd go about fixing it. He's not appealing to people's intelligence with his current tack... his tactics are much baser than that. He reminds me of the Martin Sheen character in the "Dead Zone".

I don't like his politics. If I vote Democrat this time it won't be for him. Frankly, I haven't seen anyone yet who I'd prefer over Bush for another term.
About Dean's position... I'm given to believe that he represents a curious combination of left and right wing ideologies. He also happens to be a wealthy doctor enjoying the support of self-made billionaires, so I hardly think his politics represents strictly left-wing politics.

[Django]

Here (http://www.quantumphilosophy.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=777&mode=nested&order=2&thold=0) is another interesting article quoting George Soros's opinions about George W. Bush:

Soros on Bush

George Soros, Wall Street billionaire turned uber-philanthropist, penned this op-ed for the Korea Herald concerning the Iraq crisis. I link it here because I like it when people are able to criticize even after looking at both sides of an argument.

Iraq is the first instance when the Bush doctrine is being applied and it is provoking an allergic reaction. The Bush doctrine is built on two pillars: (1) The United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy; and (2) the United States arrogates the right to preemptive action.

These pillars support two classes of sovereignty: American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations, and the sovereignty of all other states. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated starkly; it is buried in Orwellian doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because the doctrine contradicts American values.

The doublespeak that he is talking about is fairly evident in the current environment, especially our new security policy (mentioned and linked in this missive). Now references to 1984 are well and good, but then we get to the credibility part.

Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable, and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Bush counts on.

Now these are all certainly possibilities, but Soros' argument that even is these things were to come about, it would be bad in the long run because good results would come from bad actions. Thus reinforcing bad behaviour.

To draw a quick analogy. Say you feel bad. So you shoot some heroin. And you feel better. You've just learned that when you feel bad, shooting heroin makes you feel better. Which is to say, it is a sound strategy in the short run, but in the long run will only lead to disaster, as the gain (of pre-emptive war) is not worth the cost (of war).

I found this article intriguing because it does allow that a best case scenario in Iraq can lead to gains. Unfortunately, the Bush administration (and, I'm sorry to say, a number of my countrymen) will use this high to go after Iran. And then whoever is next. And each step of the way, each movement toward the goal of peace and happiness, will be marked like needle-tracts up the arm of the American People.

[Piddzilla]

Isn't this thread called "Howard Dean"?

[blibblobblib]

:sleep::sleep::sleep::sleep::sleep:

I thought this thread was about Howerd Stern at first...i didnt read it properly. How dissapointing :(

[Django]

Isn't this thread called "Howard Dean"?
Well, it's related... George Soros is a major Dean contributor and lends credibility to his camp.

[Yoda]

About Dean's position... I'm given to believe that he represents a curious combination of left and right wing ideologies. He also happens to be a wealthy doctor enjoying the support of self-made billionaires, so I hardly think his politics represents strictly left-wing politics.Why would having the support of a billionaire shoot down the notion that he is highly left-wing?


Well, it's related... George Soros is a major Dean contributor and lends credibility to his camp.George Soros is not a credible individual; he is a hypocrite. As was touched upon in some of the material you posted earlier, he fought vehemently for campaign finance reform; to close up the soft money loophole, in other words. Once done, he proceeded to find another loophole, and used it to donate millions of dollars to the Democratic party.

It should come as no surprise, then, that he likes Howard Dean, as Dean has quite the reputation himself (http://www.wafflepoweredhoward.com/) when it comes to contradiction.

[MacReady]

Dean is a lefty. If he were a Republican and was a far to the right as he is to the left, he would be savaged on daily basis by all the major media outlets.

[Piddzilla]

Dean is a lefty. If he were a Republican and was a far to the right as he is to the left, he would be savaged on daily basis by all the major media outlets.

That is because that would make him a nazi.

[Django]

If Dean was so far to the left that he would be the leftist equivalent of a Nazi, he would be a hard-core communist. Is that what he is? A member of the communist party?

EDIT: Incidentally, compare the facts that one of Howard Dean's major sponsors is George Soros, vs. the fact that one of George W. Bush's major contributors, in the recent past, has been Enron Corp. Says a lot, don't you think?

[Piddzilla]

If Dean was so far to the left that he would be the leftist equivalent of a Nazi, he would be a hard-core communist. Is that what he is? A member of the communist party?



The entire american political spectrum is considerably right wing universally speaking. So you don't have to be a communist to have an extreme right wing equivalent within that american political spectrum.

Actually, my comment was made as a joke. I don't know **** about Dean or the american nazi scene.

[Django]

The entire american political spectrum is considerably right wing universally speaking. So you don't have to be a communist to have an extreme right wing equivalent within that american political spectrum.

Actually, my comment was made as a joke. I don't know **** about Dean or the american nazi scene.
Oh, a joke! In that case... ha, ha, ha! :rolleyes:

[MacReady]

If Dean was so far to the left that he would be the leftist equivalent of a Nazi, he would be a hard-core communist. Is that what he is? A member of the communist party?

EDIT: Incidentally, compare the facts that one of Howard Dean's major sponsors is George Soros, vs. the fact that one of George W. Bush's major contributors, in the recent past, has been Enron Corp. Says a lot, don't you think?

Upon further inpsection of my post, I made a bit of a gaffe! Dean is no way a hard-core communist. I realize I had typed a response in haste and not though it through! :(

[Piddzilla]

Oh, a joke! In that case... ha, ha, ha! :rolleyes:

Yeah, and everybody but you got the irony.

[Yoda]

EDIT: Incidentally, compare the facts that one of Howard Dean's major sponsors is George Soros, vs. the fact that one of George W. Bush's major contributors, in the recent past, has been Enron Corp. Says a lot, don't you think?Of course not. They are one of thousands of donors, and despite giving more to Republicans, they gave nearly $2 million to Democrats. If it says a lot about one side, it says plenty about the other, too. In reality, it says very little about either. Every major modern campaign will inevitably take money from shady people without knowing it.

I'm glad you brought this up, though, because the Enron debacle was caused in part because employees did not have enough control over their 401(k) plans. By my memory, Republicans have been trying to change that for quite awhile by giving employees the option to invest such money where they see fit. They've been repeatedly shot down by the Democratic opposition.

This is ignoring the already proven fact that Soros is a known hypocrite, and therefore does not necessarily reflect well on Dean at all. I really don't think you've done your homework properly on either of them. Both are quite far to the left, and seem to share the trait of self-contradiction.

[Django]

Of course not. They are one of thousands of donors, and despite giving more to Republicans, they gave nearly $2 million to Democrats. If it says a lot about one side, it says plenty about the other, too. In reality, it says very little about either. Every major modern campaign will inevitably take money from shady people without knowing it.
Here (http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/alertv6_31.asp) are some interesting facts about Enron:

The Fall of a Giant: Enron’s Campaign Contributions and Lobbying

Caught in a swarm of controversy over questionable business deals and faulty financial statements that have caused its stock price to plummet, energy giant Enron announced this week that the company could be sold to rival Dynegy, signaling the demise of one of the country’s biggest political contributors–and one of the most generous donors to President Bush.

The announcement comes almost a year to the day after an election in which Enron contributed more than $2.4 million in individual, PAC, and soft money contributions to federal candidates and parties, ranking it among the top 50 organizational donors in the 1999-2000 election cycle. The company’s contribution total for the 2000 elections more than doubled its political donations in each of the two previous election cycles.

Enron has already contributed nearly $173,000 to candidates and parties so far this year, almost 90 percent to Republicans. Since the 1989-90 election cycle, Enron has made nearly $5.8 million in campaign contributions, 73 percent to Republicans.

Earlier this year, Enron was one of the country’s 10 largest companies and the leading energy broker in the United States. But in recent weeks the Houston-based energy trading company has come under fire for entering into business partnerships that presented possible conflicts of interest for several Enron executives. The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a formal investigation into those partnerships.

The federal government’s involvement could create a quandary for President Bush, who raised nearly $114,000 in PAC and individual contributions from Enron in 1999-2000, making the company one of his biggest donors. Enron also donated $100,000 to the Bush/Cheney inaugural gala in January, a contribution that was matched by Enron’s chairman and chief executive, Kenneth Lay, and his wife. The Lays have contributed a total of almost $883,000 to candidates and parties since 1989, of which 90 percent went to Republicans. They are by far the largest political contributors among Enron employees.

Lay is a longtime friend of the president and was one of Bush’s top contributors during the presidential election and two gubernatorial campaigns in Texas. Lay, listed by the Bush/Cheney campaign as a Pioneer who raised at least $100,000 for the election, reportedly has been one of the administration’s closest advisors on energy policy since Bush took office.

Enron hopes to draw on close relationships with a number of elected officials for help during its current crisis. The company spent $2.1 million lobbying Congress and the White House in 2000, an increase over the $1.9 million it spent on lobbying in 1999. Enron has contributed to the campaign accounts of 71 current senators and 188 current members (43 percent) of the House.

Not surprisingly, the top recipients of Enron’s contributions among current members of Congress are all from Texas. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) and Phil Gramm (R) lead the list of Senate recipients since 1989. The seven biggest House beneficiaries of Enron’s giving since 1989 are also from Texas. They are led by Democratic Rep. Ken Bentsen.


Enron's total contributions (http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/enron_totals.asp) dating back to 1989.
Enron's top individual donors (http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/enron_indiv.asp)
Enron's contributions to members of Congress. (http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/enron_cong.asp)
Enron's contributions to presidential candidates (http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/enron_pres.asp)

[Sir Toose]

Why is it a big surprise that big business gives more to the republican party than they do to the dems? The republican agenda closely supports big business.

What should be surprising is that any money was given to the dems at all.... especially by individual contributors.

[Django]

Why is it a big surprise that big business gives more to the republican party than they do to the dems? The republican agenda closely supports big business.

What should be surprising is that any money was given to the dems at all.... especially by individual contributors.
That says something, doesn't it? Enron... a Houston based energy company... one of the Bush campaign's biggest donors... Enron, with it's history of corrupt business deals and faulty financial statements... Enron, which robbed its own employees of their very life-savings... says a lot to me! To say nothing of the fact that, apparently, Enron CEO and Chairman Kenneth Lay happens to be a close personal friend of George W. Bush, and one of the top contributors to his presidential campaign and two gubernatorial campaigns in Texas.

[Yoda]

That says something, doesn't it? Enron... a Houston based energy company... one of the Bush campaign's biggest donors... Enron, with it's history of corrupt business deals and faulty financial statements... Enron, which robbed its own employees of their very life-savings... says a lot to me! To say nothing of the fact that, apparently, Enron CEO and Chairman Kenneth Lay happens to be a close personal friend of George W. Bush, and one of the top contributors to his presidential campaign and to two gubernatorial campaigns in Texas.And yet, as I pointed out earlier (without response) Bush and the Republican party have steadfastly opposed the sorts of restrictions which assisted Enron in doing that. Doesn't seem consistent with the corruption you're implying.

Neither does the fact that the earning misstatements took place under Clinton's tenure. They were only discovered under Bush. In other words, he didn't commit the murder, but he found the body. These crimes happened under Clinton's watch, and Enron got away with them until Bush took office, which would seem to imply the exact opposite of what you're insinuating.

And no, it doesn't really say much, for the reasons Toose already gave, which you haven't addressed in any way, shape, or form. All you did in response to his post, it seems, was repeat your gripes. His point (and it's a good one) is that Republicans are almost universally easier on business in general. It's not unlike Freedom of Speech in that sense; it'll produce plenty of vulgarity and idiocy, but the good dramatically outweighs the bad.

[Django]

I'll discuss this in greater depth later, but here are some quick comments:

And yet, as I pointed out earlier (without response) Bush and the Republican party have steadfastly opposed the sorts of restrictions which assisted Enron in doing that. Doesn't seem consistent with the corruption you're implying.
That sounds a lot like what Bush said about the Halliburton overcharging scam... something to the effect of "We opposed this sort of thing"... I don't know about you, but it rings hollow.

Neither does the fact that the earning misstatements took place under Clinton's tenure. They were only discovered under Bush. In other words, he didn't commit the murder, but he found the body. These crimes happened under Clinton's watch, and Enron got away with them until Bush took office, which would seem to imply the exact opposite of what you're insinuating.
The difference, of course, is that regardless of the timing of when this happened, Clinton's job was President of the United States, not President of Enron. On the other hand, Chairman and CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, remains a long-time ally and personal friend of Bush. Also, your remark seems to imply that the Bush administration had a personal hand in exposing Enron. My understanding, and I have yet to investigate this so please feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken, is that Enron's dirty dealings were exposed only when the company got into financial trouble. More on this later.

And no, it doesn't really say much, for the reasons Toose already gave, which you haven't addressed in any way, shape, or form. All you did in response to his post, it seems, was repeat your gripes. His point (and it's a good one) is that Republicans are almost universally easier on business in general. It's not unlike Freedom of Speech in that sense; it'll produce plenty of vulgarity and idiocy, but the good dramatically outweighs the bad.
I'll address this later.

[Django]

I'm glad you brought this up, though, because the Enron debacle was caused in part because employees did not have enough control over their 401(k) plans. By my memory, Republicans have been trying to change that for quite awhile by giving employees the option to invest such money where they see fit. They've been repeatedly shot down by the Democratic opposition.
Okay, Here's (http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2002/01/13/13edita.htm) a news article that makes it plain that the reforms you have described above were only undertaken after the Enron scandal, as a reactionary move designed to distance the White House from Enron. Keep in mind that Enron CEO Kenneth Lay is a Bush family friend and was the biggest contributor to the Bush Jr. Presidential campaign fund:

Enron scandal gets worse
The White House must be forthcoming and cooperative with investigators, wherever the questions lead.
January 13, 2002

The Bush administration last week launched several pre-emptive strikes in the swiftly mushrooming Enron scandal, but they were overshadowed by the bombshell revelation by the company's auditor that thousands of Enron documents sought by a congressional committee investigating the firm had been destroyed.

As red flags go, this one is a doozy.

A former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, upon hearing of the destroyed documents, called the act "unconscionable." A lot of people went further, saying it could be criminal.

Indeed, everything about this affair suggests the unconscionable and the criminal. Small wonder President Bush has sought to distance himself from the shocking disintegration of what was the world's largest energy company and just happened to be run by a longtime friend of the Bush family who was also the biggest contributor to the younger Bush's presidential camapaign.

In his first direct comment on the controversy, the president last week said he had "never discussed" the financial problems of Enron with Kenneth Lay, company CEO and Bush supporter. Bush also pledged that his administration would "fully investigate issues such as the Enron bankruptcy to make sure we learn from the past."

That's fine, but it's hardly enough.

From what has been reported, Enron's top executives appear to have:
Lied to stockholders and federal regulators about the company's true financial situation.
Used shady accounting techniques to shift Enron funds to accounts held by Enron partners.
Sold off $1 billion in Enron stocks before the collapse began, while at the same time prohibiting Enron employees from selling their Enron shares. Those shares made up some 70 percent of Enron workers' investments in 401(k) retirement plans. When the company finally revealed its true financial situation, the price of Enron shares plummeted to 65 cents, leaving employees' retirement plans almost worthless. Millions were lost. This is the most unconscionable and potentially criminal act of all.
Called Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Don Evans last fall looking for help because a bond rating company was set to lower Enron's credit rating. That would make nearly $4 billion in Enron debt come due. The White House revealed these phone calls and several others last week as part of the pre-emptive campaign, adding that the administration did nothing to help Enron.

The most significant White House step taken last week was the formation of a Justice Department task force to conduct a criminal investigation of Enron. That unusual approach was taken because of the company's far-reaching ties in government. Attorney General John Ashcroft has recused himself from the probe because he received more than $57,000 in campaign contributions from Enron executives for his failed 2002 U.S. Senate campaign in Missouri.

In another act that demonstrates Enron's wide reach, the entire staff of the U.S. attorney's office in Houston, where Enron is based, also recused itself from the Justice probe.

Finally, President Bush also ordered a review of rules for retirement funds to protect others from the fate of Enron's employees. This may be what Bush meant when he talked about learning from the past, which is certainly something that needs to happen. Retirement plans should not be stock reinvestment plans. Company employees should not lose their life savings because company executives steer the firm into bankuptcy, especially when they hide the truth from everyone. (emphasis mine: this is the point you mentioned, Yoda--looks like a reactionary move to the scandal)

Last week's developments have propelled the Enron story from a controversy the White House hoped to remain at arm's length from into a full-scale scandal with several congressional investigations, the Justice Department criminal probe and reviews by the Treasury Departmnt, the SEC, the Federal Reserve and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

With all this activity, can a special prosecutor be far behind?

After all, the revelation that Lay called Cabinet officials last fall means the White House knew that Enron was on the verge of collapse, but seems to have done nothing to protect Enron employees and shareholders.

Furthermore, Vice President Dick Cheney, head of the president's energy task force, has refused to reveal the details of six closed-door meetings he had with Lay last year. This stonewalling by Cheney is reminiscent of previous administrations involved in scandals.

Add to this the destruction of paper and electronic files by Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that was Enron's supposedly independent auditor, and it is clear there are a lot of people who have not learned from history, as the president suggested should happen.

The president has enjoyed unprecedentedly high approval ratings because of his conduct of the war on terrorism, and deservedly so. But he has remained suspect on the homefront, especially because of his well-known ties to business, notably in the energy industry. Enron's sudden collapse and its fallout have revived those concerns.

If the White House hopes to maintain its credibility and wide support among the American people, it must make sure the Justice Department probe is conducted vigorously and without interference from anyone connected to the administration. It must make sure all questions are answered and materials requested provided.

Given the powerful people and vast sums of money involved, there can be no other way for the White House to deal with this scandal, regardless of how embarrassing some of the questions may be.

If anything, history teaches us that.

[Django]

Here's (http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12525) another fascinating article... (more to come later)

The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection?
By Ron Callari, Albion Monitor
February 28, 2002

Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it. Not just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking scandals, each outrageous in its own right.

There's Enron the Wall St. con game, where company bookkeepers used sleight of hand to turn four years of steady losses into stunning profits. There's Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole from its own employees even as its executives were hauling millions of dollars out the backdoor. There's Enron's Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the corporation's fraudulent wealth to broker elections and skew public policy to his liking. And then there are the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and the White House seeks to conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice President Cheney.

The coverups are still very much a mystery. What were the documents that were fed into the shredder – even after the corporation declared bankruptcy? What is the White House fighting to keep secret, even going to the length of redefining executive privilege and inviting the first Congressional lawsuit ever filed against a president? Were the consequences of releasing these documents more damaging than the consequences of destroying them?

1: Starting in the mid-1990s, Unocal and its partners planned to build a 1,000 mile gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan. Cost: about $2 billion (all pipeline routes shown are very approximate). Also considered was a more difficult route from Iran to Multan, which is not shown here.

2: A proposed 400-mile extension from Multan to New Delhi would bring some of the ultra-cheap gas into India's network of gas pipelines. Cost: $600 million.

3: The HBJ pipeline carries most of India's liquid natural gas.

4: Hazira, north of Bombay, is the end of the HBJ pipeline. But in 1997, Enron announced plans to link Dabhol to the Hazira terminal. Enron also said they were going to add to about 1500 miles to the HBJ pipeline. Costs: $300 million and $900 million, respectively.

5: Any gas pipeline across Pakistan could have a spur to the seaport of Gwadar, where tankers could take gas to Korea and Japan, largest consumers of liquid gas in the world. A sea route from Gwadar to Dabhol would be even easier.

Could the Big Secret be that the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew during the summer of 2001 that the largest bankruptcy in history was imminent? Or was it that Enron and the White House were working closely with the Taliban – including Osama bin Laden – up to weeks before the Sept. 11 attack? Was a deal in Afghanistan part of a desperate last-ditch "end run" to bail out Enron? Here's a tip for Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors: Start by looking at the India deal. Closely.

Enron had a $3 billion investment in the Dabhol power plant, near Bombay on India's west coast. The project began in 1992, and the liquefied natural gas- powered plant was supposed to supply energy- hungry India with about one-fifth of its energy needs by 1997. It was one of Enron's largest development projects ever (and the single largest direct foreign investment in India's history). The company owned 65 percent of Dabhol; the other partners were Bechtel, General Electric and State Electricity Board.

The fly in the ointment, however was that the Indian consumers could not afford the cost of the electricity that was to be produced. The World Bank had warned at the beginning that the energy produced by the plant would be too costly, and Enron proved them right. Power from the plant was 700 percent higher than electricity from other sources.

Enron had promised India that the Dabhol power would be affordable once the next phase of the project was completed. But to cut expenses, Enron had to find cheap gas to fuel it. They started burning naphtha, with plans that they would retrofit the plant to gas once it was available.

Originally, Enron was planning to get the liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar, where Enron had a joint venture with the state-owned Qatar Gas and Pipeline Company. In fact, the Qatar project was one of the reasons why Enron selected India to set up Dabhol: it had to ensure that its Qatar gas did not remain unsold. In April 1999, however, the project was cancelled because of the global oil and gas glut. With Qatar gone, Enron was back to square one in trying to locate an inexpensive LNG supply source.

Enter the Afghanistan connection.

Where the "Great Game" in Afghanistan was once about czars and commissars seeking access to the warm water ports of the Persian Gulf, today it is about laying oil and gas pipelines via the untapped petroleum reserves of Central Asia, a region previously dominated by the former Soviet Union, with strong influence from Iran and Pakistan. Studies have placed the total worth of oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian republics at between $3 and $6 trillion.

Who has access to that vast sea of oil? Right now the only existing export routes from the Caspian Basin lead through Russia. U.S. oil companies have longed dreamed of their own pipeline routes that will give them control of the oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea. Likewise, the U.S. government also wants to dominate Central Asian oil in order to reduce dependency on resources from the Persian/Arabian Gulf, which it cannot control. Thus the U.S. is poised to challenge Russian hegemony in a new version of the "Great Game."

Construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan was under serious consideration during the Clinton years. In 1996, Unocal – one of the world's leading energy resource and project development companies – won a contract to build a 1,005-mile oil pipeline in order to exploit the vast Turkmenistan natural gas fields in Duletabad. The pipeline would extend through Afghanistan and Pakistan, terminating in Multan, near the India border.

Multan was also the end point for another proposed pipeline, this one from Iran. This project never left the drawing boards, however; the pipeline would be much longer (over 1,600 miles) and more expensive. Still, this route was being seriously considered as of early 2001, and it increased the odds that gas would be flowing into Multan from somewhere.

Unocal wasn't the only energy company laying pipe. In 1997, Enron announced that it was going to spend over $1 billion building and improving the lines between the Dabhol plant and India's network of gas pipelines.

Follow the map: Once a proposed 400-mile extension from Multan, Pakistan to New Delhi, India was built, Caspian Sea gas could flow into India's network to New Delhi, follow the route to Bombay – and bingo! A plentiful source of ultra-cheap LNG that could supply Enron's plant in India for three decades or more.

Besides the route to Multan, another proposed spur of the pipeline would have ended on the Pakistan coast, where an estimated one million barrels of LNG per day could be shipped to Japan and Korea, the largest consumers of LNG in the world. For Enron, there was an upside here as well. Entering the South Eastern Asian markets, which offered vast growth potential, could position Enron well in the global marketplace and offset some of their losses in other markets.

There was one gotcha: It looked like the trans-Afghan section of the pipeline might never be built. Afghanistan was controlled by religious extremists who didn't want to cooperate.

Enter the Taliban.

From 1997 to as late as August 2001, the U.S. government continued to negotiate with the Taliban, trying to find a stabilizing factor that would allow American oil ventures to proceed with this project without interference. To this end, in December 1997, Unocal invited the Taliban contingency to Texas to negotiate protection while the pipeline was under construction. At the end of their stay, the Afghan visitors were invited to Washington to meet with the government officials of the Clinton Administration.

But in August, 1998, terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa. After a few cruise missiles were fired into Afghanistan and the Pentagon boasted that we had disabled bin Laden's "terrorist network," Unocal said they were abandoning plans for a route through the country. But was such a potentially lucrative deal really dead?

Not hardly. Although Unocal had the largest share, the "Central Asian Gas Pipeline" (CentGas) consortium had six other partners, including companies in Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil Company – the next largest shareholder with 15 percent – and groups in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan. They vowed to continue the project, and had strong national interests in seeing the Afghanistan pipeline built.

The U.S. looked for other options, and the Trade and Development Agency commissioned a feasibility study for an improbable east- to- west route that would cross the Caspian Mountains and end at a Mediterranean seaport in Turkey. The company hired for that study was Enron. If that pipeline were to be constructed, Turkmenistan signed an agreement that it would be built by Bechtel and GE Capital Services – the same American companies that were Enron's business partners in the Dabhol power plant.

No matter which direction the Central Asia natural gas would eventually flow, Enron would profit. Should it go south towards ships waiting on the Pakistan coast, it would be still only a few hundred miles at sea to Dabhol. The trip from the Mediterranean would be farther (and thus more expensive for Enron to buy gas), but it was also the least likely route to be constructed. Estimated costs were almost $1 billion more than the route through Afghanistan, and engineering plans had not even started. No, the only practical route for the Caspian Sea gas was through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the border of India. All that was lacking was the political will to make it happen.

How Deeply Were Bush and Cheney Involved?

Was the Bush White House negotiating with the Taliban to help Kenneth Lay and Enron? Were Cabinet members and the National Security Council running a "war room" to save the company that was the closest friend of the president and vice president?

As of this writing in February 2002, little is really known. But if the White House, Enron, and Dabhol timelines are combined, curious details appear.

Enter George W. Bush.

Bush's long and personal relationship with Enron's former CEO Kenneth Lay is now well known, as is his generous contribution of over $600,000 to advance the political career of the man who now holds the White House. Not so well known is how Bush has helped Enron.

In 1988, Bush allegedly called Argentina's Minister of Public Works to pressure him into awarding Enron a $300 million contract shortly after his father won the presidency. Rodolfo Terragno recalled that the younger George Bush said that giving Enron the project "would be very favorable for Argentina and its relations with the United States." Terragno didn't know whether this message was from the White House or whether Bush was working a business deal on his own.

(Although unlikely, it is possible that Terragno was called by brother Neil Bush, who would later seek an oil drilling deal in Argentina. The Bush Sr. campaign denied that George W. made the call. This was, however, the time period when Lay began to cultivate his friendship with George W. and there is no known association between Neil Bush and Lay. That two Bush brothers are suspects, however, speaks to the levels of power that this family wields.)

By the time George W. became president, the India project was in serious trouble. Enron's reputation as a bully in India was legion. The Human Rights Watch released a report that indicated human rights violations had occurred as a result of opposition to the Dabhol Power project. Beginning in late 1996 and continuing throughout 1997, leading Indian environmental activists and employee organizations organized to oppose the project and, as a direct result of their opposition were not paid and subjected to repeated short-term detention. One ghastly report actually states that police stormed the homes of several women in western India who had led a massive protest against Enron's new natural-gas plant near their fishing village. According to Amnesty International, the women were dragged from their homes and beaten by officers paid by Enron.

The crisis came just a few months after the Bush inauguration. Contractors walked off the job, saying they hadn't been paid for over a month. The [India state of] Maharashtra Electricity Board stopped paying for Dabhol's power in May 2001, saying it was too expensive. Enron counter-charged that the Board owed them $64 million. The plant was closed, although it is said to be 97 percent complete. All that was missing was a source for cheap, cheap, natural gas.

Enter Dick Cheney.

Scarcely a month after Bush moves into the White House, Vice President Cheney has his first secret meeting with Ken Lay and other Enron executives on February 22, 2001. Other meetings follow on March 7 and April 17. It is the details of these meetings that the Bush Administration is seeking to keep private.

It's clear the Cheney had his own conflicts of interest with Enron. A chief benefactor in the trans-Caspian pipeline deal would have been Halliburton, the huge oil pipeline construction firm which was previously headed by Cheney. After Cheney's selection as Bush's Vice Presidential candidate, Halliburton also contributed a huge amount of cash into the Bush-Cheney campaign coffers.

So the obvious question: Did Enron lobby Cheney for help in India? It has already been documented that the Vice President's energy task force changed a draft energy proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India in February of last year. The amendment was so narrow that it apparently was targeted only to help Enron's Dabhol plant in India. Later, Cheney stepped in to try to help Enron collect its $64 million debt during a June 27 meeting with India's opposition leader Sonia Gandhi. But behind the scenes, much more was cooking.

A series of e-mail memos obtained by the Washington Post and NY Daily News in January revealed that the National Security Council led a "Dabhol Working Group" composed of officials from various Cabinet departments during the summer of 2001. The memos suggest that the Bush Administration was running exactly the sort of "war room" that was a favorite subject of ridicule by Republicans during the Clinton years.

The Working Group prepared "talking points" for both Cheney and Bush and recommended that the need to "broaden the advocacy" of settling the Enron debt. Every development was closely monitored: "Good news" a NSC staff member wrote in a e-mail memo: "The Veep mentioned Enron in his meeting with Sonia Gandhi." The Post commented that the NSC went so far that it "acted as a sort of concierge service for Enron Chairman Kenneth L. Lay and India's national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra" in trying to arrange a dinner meeting between the Indian official and Lay.

While lobbying India, it appears that the Bush Administration was also raising the heat on the Taliban to allow the pipeline.

The book "Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth" by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasique claims that the U.S. tried to negotiate the pipeline deal with the Taliban as late as August, 2001. According to the authors, the Bush Administration attempted to get the Taliban on board and believed they could depend upon the regime to stabilize the country while the pipeline construction was underway. Bush had already indirectly given the Taliban $43 million for their supposed efforts to stamp out opium-poppy cultivation. Was this an award – or a bribe? The circumstances make this a valid question.

Enron was unraveling at the seams, yet in early August, Kenneth Lay seemed optimistic, even exuberant. Was he whistling past the graveyard, or did he have secret information? The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington; on that occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the U.S. government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad on August 2, 2001. Rocca said the Taliban representative, Mr. Zaeef, was aware of the strong U.S. commitment to help the Afghan people and the fact that the United States had provided $132 million in relief assistance so far that year.

Lay's last documented e-mail was sent on August 27th, about the same time the Taliban allowed the International Red Cross to visit jailed foreign aid workers in Afghanistan. In it, Lay waxes optimistic about the strength and stability of his company, and exhorts his employees to buy into the company's stock program. Was Kenneth Lay anticipating a new pipeline deal, and an Enron contract, courtesy of George W. Bush? If a deal was at hand, he had every reason to be optimistic about the future.

Even though the trans-Caspian pipeline and the extension into India would be years from completion, Enron's conceit of working above the law was ultimately the guiding beacon in all of its transactions. They had played the game of subterfuge for so long, they were near experts at covering their tracks. Even if Lay knew at this point that bankruptcy was imminent, Enron had always survived major hurdles in the past, right? The possibility of a total meltdown was most likely not even a consideration – there could always be an 11th hour federal bailout.

However, from all records, relationships became strained. The Taliban had demanded that the U.S. should also reconstruct Afghanistan's infrastructure and that the pipeline be open for local consumption. Instead, the U.S. wanted a closed pipeline pumping gas for export only and was not interested in helping to rebuild the country.

In turn, the U.S. threatened the Taliban during the negotiations. The directive of "we'll either carpet you in gold or carpet you in bombs" was bantered about in the press to underscore the emerging willfulness of the U.S.

But sometime in late August, apparently the whole deal went sour.

Enron had one last card to play, and that was selling the Dabhol plant for quick cash – if it could. If Enron could get its asking price of $2.3 billion, then maybe the company could pull out of its bankruptcy nose dive.

In late August, Lay appeared to threaten India in an article in the London Financial Times. We expect full price for the plant, he warned; if they received anything less, there could be backlash: "There are laws that could prevent the U.S. government from providing any aid or assistance to India going forward if, in fact, they expropriate property of U.S. companies," he said. When Indian officials called these statements "strong arm tactics," an Enron statement claimed Lay "was merely referring to U.S. laws." Again Lay appeared to threaten India in a Sept. 14 letter to the Prime Minister, insisting that the $2.3 billion price was reasonable because they had a "legal claim" of up to $5 billion.

But the house of cards collapsed dramatically on November 8, when Enron disclosed that it had overstated earnings dating back to 1997 by almost $600 million. That same day, an e-mail ("Importance: High"), whose sender and recipient are blacked out, warned, "President Bush cannot talk about Dabhol as was already mentioned." The memo also said that Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey could not discuss Enron either. Lindsey had been an Enron consultant.

The end came in December 2001, as Enron fired the 300 remaining workers at the plant. Enron also filed a $200 million claim with the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. taxpayer- funded insurance fund for American companies abroad, in an attempt to recoup losses from the Dabhol Power Corporation.

On the last day of the year, President Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzad as his special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad is a former Unocal consultant, whose positions on Afghanistan changed in sync with Unocal's own. When it looked like the pipeline would be built in 1996, Khalilzad advocated that the U.S. should work with moderate elements in the Taliban. By 2000 Unocal was out of the project, and Khalilzad was writing that the U.S. must undermine the Taliban.

It's clear that once again the Great Game is afoot, now that the Taliban are gone. Today, Khalilzad is the Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council member responsible for setting up the post-Taliban "Pro-Unocal" regime in Afghanistan. International oil men euphemistically call the project the new "Silk Road." On Feb. 8, Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai and Pakistan's president agreed to revive plans for a trans-Afghanistan route for Iranian gas. The next day, Turkmenistan chimed in that they hoped their trans- Afghanistan route would be soon built. It's all but certain that gas from somewhere will reach Multan – and the Dabhol plant beyond.

For investors, Dabhol should be a bitter lesson. Enron was a company known for its hubris that tried to accomplish too much, too quickly, playing too fast and loose with financial realities. In the end, Enron found that its far-reaching global clout could no longer circumvent the rules of basic economics – nor could it count on the players they helped bring into power.

Until there is a full investigation, questions will remain about how far the Bush team went to try to save their buddies at Enron. Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to release details about his private April meeting with Lay is suspicious. It is already known that Cheney accepted seven out of eight national energy policy recommendations made by Lay; so what are they so damned determined to keep secret? What could be more incriminating than that?

On Feb. 22, the GAO sued Cheney, who has stated that the White House will go to court to fight the release of the documents. (However, John W. Dean, former Nixon staffer and Watergate witness, is quick to point out that executive privilege is unique to the president, not the vice president.) With recent discovery that a highest-level "Dabhol Working Group" was set up in the Bush Administration, it appears that there is much more to be uncovered.

Is the White House covering up that it was molding foreign policy as well as energy policy to suit Enron? Did the Bush Administration know that Enron's collapse was coming as early as August? If any of these is true, the largest bankruptcy in American history may well connect with the greatest political scandal in American history.

Ron Callari is a freelancer writer. This article originally appeared in the Albion Monitor.

Another article: (http://www.alternet.org/letters_ed.html?BulletinID=13)

How Much Were Bush and Cheney Involved?

June 5, 1992: Enron sent a group of officials to New Delhi to make arrangements to survey the land around Dabhol for the purpose of building a large power plant.

June 20, 1992: Enron and the government of the state of Maharashtra signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build the plant. This led to formation of the Dabhol Power Company (DPC), a joint venture of Enron and two other American corporations, General Electric and Bechtel.

February, 1993: A formal agreement was signed for a plant that could generate about 2450 megawatts at an approximate cost of $3 billion.

April, 1993: Heinz Vergin, World Bank manager for India, rejects Enron's loan application, saying that the Dabhol plant is "not economically viable."

November, 1993: The Central Electricity Authority in New Delhi gave provisional clearance to the project. It was the largest single foreign investment in India.

1994: The Washington-based Export-Import Bank approved a $302 million loan toward a $3 billion Enron-controlled power plant in India. President Clinton took an interest in the deal, asking the U.S. ambassador to that country and his former chief of staff, Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty, then a presidential adviser, to monitor the proposal.

August, 1995: Clinton administration's cabinet members, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, personally urged India to accept Enron's proposed project.

October, 1995: Indian Prime Minister Rao and Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati discussed a routing alternatives for a natural gas pipeline, including one which would run through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

1996: "Mack" McLarty, who later became a paid Enron director, spoke with Ken Lay on several occasions about the plant. Four days before India granted approval for Enron's project, the Houston-based firm contributed $100,000 to the Democratic Party.

1996: Enron signed a contract giving it rights to explore 11 gas fields in Uzbekistan, a project costing $1.3 billion. The goal was to sell gas to the Russian markets, and link to Unocal's southern export pipeline crossing Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

January 8, 1996: Enron and the state government of Maharashtra reached a new agreement that would shift some of the construction costs and lower the electricity tariffs.

June,1997: As an advisor for Unocal, Zalmay Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. He participated in talks and social meetings between Unocal and Taliban officials in 1997.

June 3, 1997: Police stormed the homes of several women in western India who had led a massive protest against Enron's new natural-gas plant near their fishing village. According to Amnesty International, the women were dragged from their homes and beaten by officers paid by Enron.

November 14, 1997: Enron International's CEO Rebecca Mark unveiled an energy plan that included a $300 million project to build a pipeline from Dabhol to Hazira and to the North to add 1200 km of complimentary pipeline system to the existing HBJ pipeline at a cost of $900 million.

December 7, 1997: Unocal invited a Taliban contingency to visit them in Houston, Texas, housed them in five-star hotels, dined them at the home of Unocal VP and medically treated the former foreign minister, Mullah Mohammed Ghaus before he returned home.

February 12, 1998: Testimony of John J Maresca, vice-president, international relations, Unocal Corporation was heard by the House Committee on International Relations and the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific regarding "a proposed extension (of the proposed trans-Caspian pipeline) would link with the SUI pipeline system, moving gas to near New Delhi, where it would connect with the existing HBJ pipeline..."

June 23, 1998: In a speech to the "Collateral Damage Conference" of the Cato Institute, Cheney said, "the good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

July 29 ,1998: The Department of State is pleased that Turkmen Minister of Oil and Gas Arazov announced Turkmenistan's selection of the U.S. company Enron to carry out a feasibility study funded by the Trade and Development Agency for a trans-Caspian gas pipeline.

August 20, 1998: U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles target Kandahar Afghanistan and sites believed to be Osama bin Laden's training camps. Shortly after, the UN imposes sanctions on Afghanistan that isolate the nation.

January 25, 1999: Human Rights Watch released a report that indicated human right violations had occurred as a result of opposition to the Dabhol Power project. Beginning in late 1996 and continuing throughout 1997, leading Indian environmental activists and representatives of villagers' organizations in the affected area organized to oppose the project and, as a direct result of their opposition, were subjected to beatings, repeated short-term detention and were not paid.

February, 1999: Joint agreement signed by Turkmenistan and two American companies, Bechtel and GE Capital Services to build a $2.5 billion trans-Caspian pipeline, after Enron conducted a feasibility study.

November, 1999: Enron purchased 5.1 percent of the company that operates the country's sole long-distance gas pipeline, which runs from the offshore gas fields in the Bombay High area to the country's capital, New Delhi.

June-Oct 2000: Maharashtra government allies demand scrapping the project because of the cost of the power it produces.

Early 2001: Vice President Cheney held several secret meetings with top Enron officials, including its Chairman Kenneth Lay. These meetings were presumably part of Cheney's non-public Energy Task Force sessions. A number of Enron stockholders, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, became officials in the Bush administration. In addition, Thomas White, a former Vice Chairman of Enron and a multimillionaire in Enron stock, currently serves as the Secretary of the Army.

February, 2001: Vice President Cheney's energy task force changed a draft energy proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India. The amendment was so narrow that it apparently was targeted only to Enron's power plant in India.

March, 2001: Laila Helms, the part- Afghan niece of the former CIA director and former U.S. ambassador to Tehran Richard Helms is described as unofficial Taliban representative in Washington. Ms Helms brought Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an adviser to Mullah Omar, to Washington.after the Taliban had destroyed the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. Hashimi met the directorate of Central Intelligence at the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.

April, 2001: An Enron memo, which Lay gave Cheney during their one-on-one meeting, makes eight energy-policy recommendations. Seven out of eight recommendations were adopted in the administration's final energy plan.

May, 2001: A conference held at the Brookings Institution provides evidence that the exploitation of Caspian Basin and Asian energy markets was an urgent priority for the Bush administration, and the centerpiece of its energy policy

May, 17, 2001: The U.S. indirectly gives $43 million to Afghanistan's Taliban government as a reward for its efforts to stamp out opium-poppy cultivation. The same day, White House's energy policy recommended, "the president direct the Secretaries of State and Energy to work with India's Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas to help India maximize its domestic oil and gas production."

June, 2001: Construction halted on the Dabhol plant.

June, 27, 2001: Cheney stepped in to try to help Enron collect a $64 million debt from Dabhol. Conducted at a Washington meeting between Cheney and the leader of India's opposition, Sonia Gandhi.

June 28, 2001: "Good news" a NSC staff member wrote in a e-mail memo: "The Veep mentioned Enron in his meeting with Sonia Gandhi." An unnamed government staff member wrote that (s)he would "ask the Indians" if Kenneth Lay "is invited to the dinner" with India's national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra. The memo is part of a series uncovered by the Washington Post that revealed that the National Security Council led a "Dabhol Working Group."

June 30, 2001: Another Dabhol Working Group memo states the need to "broaden the advocacy" and recommends diplomatic action by the U.S. Embassy and the Ambassador. The memo also notes that Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the U.S. government, met with a top aide to the Indian prime minister. The memo is marked as a "Confidential Business Communication."

August 2, 2001: The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad.

August 27, 2001: Kenneth Lay wrote another email to his employee/stockholders extolling the value of an employee stock option program, describing a "significantly higher price" the stock would bring in the near future.

September 5, 2001: Lay announces that the company will divest itself of $4-$5 billion in assets in the next two years.

September 10, 2001: "Those who control the oil routes out of Central Asia will impact all future direction and quantities of flow and the distribution of revenues from new production," wrote energy expert James Dorian in Oil & Gas Journal, published the day before the terrorist attacks.

September 14, 2001: Unocal issued the following statement: "The company is not supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan in any way whatsoever. Nor do we have any project or involvement in Afghanistan." Lay also writes to the Prime Minister of India, insisting that his $2.3 billion asking price is reasonable "compared to the size of our legal claim," which Enron placed at $5 billion. September 19, 2001: Enron invokes a clause in its Dabhol power plant contract, claiming that because the Maharashtra State Electricity Board has violated its power purchase agreement, the Maharashtra state government and the government of India are liable for $5 billion.

October 3, 2001: Cheney meets with India External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh. The NSC sends "Dabhol talking points" to Cheney's staff.

November 1, 2001: Bush signed Executive Order 13233 which limits public access to papers of all presidents since 1980 – including George W. Bush. Another memo written this day states that talking points for Bush were prepared for his meeting with the India Prime Minister. Bush did not discuss Enron during the meeting.

November 6, 2001: OPIC President Peter Watson contacts a top aide of the Indian Prime Minister: "The acute lack of progress in this matter has forced Dabhol to rise to the highest levels of the United States government."

November 8, 2001: Enron president Lawrence "Greg" Whalley called Treasury Undersecretary Peter Fisher in late October and disclosed that it had overstated earnings dating back to 1997 by almost $600 million. That same day, an e-mail ("Importance: High"), whose sender and recipient are blacked out, warned, "President Bush cannot talk about Dabhol."

November 9, 2001: An e-mail noted that Lawrence Lindsey, chairman of Bush's National Economic Council, had met India's National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra on Nov. 7, but it said Lindsey was "advised that he could not discuss Dabhol." Lindsey is a former Enron consultant and had served on its board of advisers.

Late November, 2001: Lay called Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Don Evans seeking a last-minute federal bailout and was turned down.

December 2, 2001: Enron files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

December 27, 2001: Bush Administration repealed a Clinton-era rule that prevents the government from awarding federal contracts to businesses that have broken environmental, labor, tax, civil rights or other laws.

December 31, 2001: President Bush appointed a former aide to Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan. The nomination was announced nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul.

January 17, 2002: Enron reportedly filed an approximately $200 million claim with the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation in an attempt to recoup losses from the Dabhol Power Corporation.

January 18, 2002: According to documents released on this date, it was noted the Bush administration intervened with top Indian officials last year in a bid to salvage the Enron project in India. The White House said the effort, involving Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials, was justified because the $2.9 billion Dabhol power project was financed in part through the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a taxpayer-backed agency that provides "political risk" insurance and loans to help U.S. companies invest in developing nations. The White House denied the push was influenced by Enron's political contributions.

January 28, 2002: U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwell addresses an Indian energy industry meeting and demands India honor the "sanctity of contract" and make good on the Enron debt, warning that India's hopes for "big-time international investment" could be harmed otherwise.

February 8, 2002: Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai said he and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had agreed to revive a plan for a trans-Caspian gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.

February 9, 2002: Turkmenistan hopes the fragile peace in neighboring Afghanistan will allow work to resume on the natural gas pipeline connecting to Pakistan.

February 20, 2002: OPIC reveals that it gave Enron $554 million in loans and $204 million in insurance. Congress also learns the the Export-Import Bank loaned $675 million to Enron and associated companies.

February 22, 2002: The GAO sues Cheney for refusing to reveal details of his meetings with Enron officials. It is the first time that the agency has sued a member of the executive branch of government.

[Django]

Another (http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=80&row=1) fascinating article:

BUSH ENERGY PLAN - POLICY OR PAYBACK?(BBC TRANSCRIPT)
BBC Newsnight
Thursday, May 17, 2001

[JIMI HENDRIX PLAYS, 'STAR-SPANGLED BANNER.']

VOICE OF JIM HIGHTOWER, FORMER TEXAS STATE AGRICULTURE COMMISSIONER
"Any fantasy that a CEO has can come true if you put enough money into Bush's political ambitions."

LIST OF BIGGEST ENERGY INDUSTRY DONORS TO REPUBLICAN PARTY DURING BUSH CAMPAIGN:

ENRON $1,800,000
EXXON $1,200,000
KOCH INDUSTRIES $970,000
SOUTHERN $900,000
BP AMOCO $800,000
LEHMAN BROTHERS $808,000
EL PASO ENERGY $787,000
CHEVRON OIL CORP 780,000
RELIANT ENERGY $642,000
TEXAS UTILITIES TXU $635,000

VOICE OF LaNell ANDERSON, TEXAN BUCKET BRIGADE
"Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the that the lobbyists' money has found its mark"

[Bush energy policy line at top...]
From the moment GB announced he was running for President 50 MILLION dollars came in from Texas-based energy companies but they got a payback of 5 billion dollars - half delivered since GB was President and half while he was still Governor of Texas which is where it all begins.


[GREG PALAST IN AN AIRPLANE OVER HOUSTON, TEXAS]
Welcome to Toxic Texas - a 15 mile wide forest of smoke stacks on the edge of Houston. A place famous for pumping out pollution, profits and the political donations which put George Bush into the White House. Let's go down and take a look.

PALAST:
When it comes to pollution, Texas is champ the No 1 state in emissions of greenhouse gases and toxic chemicals

[FLARING SMOKE stack -]
We watched this mile long cloud of black smoke - and flames 200 ft high -- erupting out of a Houston cracking plant -- they are burning off a ruined batch of ethylene and other toxic chemicals after a hydrogen line snapped.

This sort of accident is common this side of Houston where poisonous smoke rains on local neighbourhoods. And its not just VISIBLE emissions locals have to worry about.

LaNell Anderson lived in the shadow of the Houston smoke stacks - her mother and father died too young - bone cancer and lung disease - and LaNell became suspicious.

She started taking air samples after an ethylene leak caused the local high school running team to collapse on the track.

Lab analysis of her bucket samples has found carcinogens in the air way above legal limits.

LaNell, PULLING AIR SAMPLE BAG FROM BUCKET: 'THIS IS AN Excellent sample' ....

She has since found that local cancer cases are twice the normal rate. She took us on a toxic tour.

[LANELL INTERVIEW]
GP "What are you doing?"
LA "I'm smelling something - do you smell it"
GP Its disgusting but what is it we're smelling?
LA Its Hydrogen Sulphide because its that bad eggs smell
GP Are they supposed to be releasing Hydrogen Sulphide
LA No they're not supposed to be releasing anything these are outside chemical impacts that's not supposed to happen its supposed to stop at that fenceline.

So how do the polluters get away with it?

LANELL Vending machine governance is where the lobbyists put the money in and out comes lax regulation.

LA Its just an ongoing war with the ..they do not care what their neighbours think they do not care if their neighbours die.

This is the home of America's petrochemical industry - the nation's biggest refinery, Exxon's plant in Baytown.

LANELL
Exxon are on my radar - they're the largest emitter in Harris county and they have the worst attitude of any corporation I've ever witnessed...

PALAST:
Exxon wouldn't accept that and neither would George Bush - as Texas Governor Bush QUIETLY set up a committee led by Exxon, with other big oil and chemical companies to advise him what to do about the state's deadly air pollution.

SHOT OF ACTUAL LETTER FROM EXXON TO GOVERNOR GEORGE W BUSH

Regulators wanted compulsory cuts in emissions of up to 50%. This "secret" committee instead proposed making the cuts ... voluntary. Bush steered the polluters plan through the State legislature.

Texas anti-corruption law makes it illegal to donate money to Bush as Governor while such legislation is under consideration. But that month, Bush declared for President - making the150,000 dollars donated by committee
members and their representatives completely legal.

The bill passed and pollution did go down - by 3% ... Saving the companies hundreds of millions of dollars compared to the COMPULSORY cut.

And there's been a bonus for chemical industry donors since Bush became President. Newsnight learned he's quietly RESTRICTING public access to
estimates of the number of people who will burn or die in case of a catastrophic explosion
near these plants.

Car Radio OVER SCENES OF SMOGGY HOUSTON:
"This is Randy Lemon's gardening spot..."

PALAST: On a clear day you can see Downtown Houston

RADIO:
"A car went in through the front doors and out through the back doors"

STILLS OF BASEBALL GAME - HOUSTON ASTROS AT ENRON FIELD.

PALAST IN FRONT OF BALL PARK IN HOUSTON:
This is Enron field - new home to the Houston Astros - $265 million including the sliding roof. You've never heard of Enron Corporation? They're
America's Number One power trading team and they know you can't win the power game unless you play the political game and they're the champs. No one's given more money to the political campaigns of George Bush than Enron - let's go see if we can find their HQ.

The biggest power traders are on this corner.

[PALAST WALKING THROUGH DOWNTOWN HOUSTON ...]
Is this it? No! El Paso - EL PASO's in a little trouble, under investigation for manipulating the California power market - luckily they gave 3/4 of a million to the Republican campaign. This it? -No that's Reliant -- $600,000 to the Republicans - Oh [POINTING TO BUILDING ACROSS STREET] Mr Farish's building ... He gave 140 thousand dollars and Bush made him ambassador to Great Britain - the guy who got France put up $400,000 ... lets see oh [POINTS TO FOURTH BUILDING] Dynegy! only 300 grand ... [LOOKS DOWN STREET] there's a new building maybe that's our boys.

PALAST: Investigations are proceeding into profiteering by power traders during the California energy crisis and black-outs. The State of California has accused El Paso corporation and Dynegy of deliberately restricting the flow of natural gas through the pipeline from Texas CREATING an artificial
shortage which caused prices to go up ten fold.

[GRAPHIC - CALIFORNIA GAS PRICE SPIKE.]

[graphic - Clinton notice DOE

So - on December 14 President Clinton ordered an end to speculation in energy prices in California - which bit into the profits of El Paso and Dynegy ... and Enron and Reliant too. But they were betting on another horse. Between them they gave $3.5 million to Bush and the Republicans.

Reliant told us "Frankly, we feel some andidate's philosophies will benefit the company, its stockholders, and its customers more than will others"

Three days after his inauguation Bush swept away Clinton's anti-speculation orders.

[PHOTO OF BUSH ANNOUNCEMENT ENDING CALIFORNIA ELECTRICITY CONTROLS]

Profits for these four power traders are up 220 million in the first quarter.

PALAST IN FRONT OF ENRON:
After Bush lifted controls Enron's profits jumped up by 87 million not a bad return on political contributions of 1.8 million dollars.

PALAST IN AIRPLANE TAKING OFF FROM RURAL AIRSTRIP ...

We've skedaddled out of the big city following the Bush money trail 200 miles West into the Mesquite ranches and cowboy country - but there's a big hole on the range where the deer and antelopes should be playing.

FILM FROM PALAST'S PLANE OF HUGE STRIP MINE, BLACK MILE-LONG PIT ...

PALAST IN AIRPLANE: See that lovely scar down there? that's a lignite strip mine - about the filthiest fuel you can burn feeds the Alcoa aluminum plant I wonder what its like to live next door to that thing?

Alcoa was facing a demand to cut emissions by 50%, that would have meant replacing the cheap and dirty lignite with clean but expensive natural gas.

But Within a month of passage of Bush's 'voluntary' pollution law,attorneys with the law firm pleading Alcoa's case to the regulators gave $170,000 to the Republican campaign. Coincidence? Alcoa deny any link they
told us they "exert no control over the legal and lobbying firms" they retain.

According to Alcoa's own figures not switching to gas saved them $100 million.


PALAST - DRIVING THROUGH SMALL TEXAS TOWN ...
In sleepy Rockdale, rancher Wayne Brinkley faces the fallout.

PALAST - POINTING AT DIRTY FARM TRAILER - WHY DON'T YOU CLEAN THAT THING,BUDDY?
WAYNE: YA' CAN'T. I TRIED EVERYTHING. THAT'S POTASH FROM THE PLANT. SEE THAT RUST ON THAT SHED? THAT'S FROM THE PLANT TOO. BUT IF THEIR
POISONS KILL THAT TREE (POINTS TO OAK), I'LL BE REALLY MAD!

PALAST - LOOKING AT DEAD MESQUITE: Too late for that one

WAYNE: POINTING TO ALCOA ALUMINUM PLANT IN DISTANCE, BROWN SMOKE POURING FROM STACKS ...

It's like Sulphur burning your skin ... there's just lot of pollution comes out of that plant they just don't seem like they want to do anything about it.

PALAST: And there will be no point going to the Environmental Protection Agency. Newsnight has discovered, deep in Bush's new budget, the million-dollar fund for civil enforcement to deter pollution will be axed. Law enforcement will be left to locals - and in Texas, the weak State watchdog is letting Alcoa open a new lignite pit 20 miles away.

Other Texas ranchers are stopping by Wayne's to get a look at their future...

Rancher Billie Woods drives in - Hi wayne how's it going - Billie's ranch is now threatened

PALAST TO BILLIE: Its only a little hole - hey, America needs aluminum.

B: Its not a little hole! its 250 feet deep! - they pump out all the water my well will go dry. they run their operations 365 days a year 24 hours a day. I will no longer be able to see stars at night.


Palast voice: Alcoa's former chief Paul O'Neill is making new friends - Bush named him Secretary of the US Treasury ... so O'Neill has to sell off
his Alcoa shares - he'll get about $100 million. Alcoa made a $100,000 contribution to the Bush Cheney inaugural. They told us this was in honor of Paul O'Neill.

He's also on Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Group.

Apart from Paul O'Neill, the committee includes Bush's Commerce Secretary Don Evans - he was CEO of Tom Brown Inc a billion dollar oil and gas
company, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, a motor industry favorite - they gave him $700,000 last year... and of course Dick Cheney, the Vice President,former boss of Halliburton which builds nuclear power plants and is the world's largest oil services company. And what a coincidence. Today, the Cheney group recommended building
more nukes, drilling more oil and burning more coal.

MUSIC RADIO DRIVE IN TO AUSTIN
Our hunt for the secret behind Bush's astonishing fundraising prowess eventually led us to the Texas state capital.

Executives of the big banking firm MBNA invested 3 million dollars in George Bush's political career. Their boss, Charles M Cawley, contributed $70,000 himself.

IN FRONT OF CAPITOL, WASHINGTON DC: Craig
McDonald - [Director, Texans for Public Justice.]

- what did they get - one of the first major pieces of legislation to go through Congress under President Bush is a bankruptcy bill that protects mbna the largest manufacturer and seller of credit cards, citizens in this country can no longer write off credit card debt when they file for bankruptcy it was a key priority of Mr Cawley and his bank and he bet early and he bet often on our Governor would some day be in the White House and would some day be able to deliver on this favour

PALAST: Wall Street analysts put MBNA's gain at 75 million dollars

GRAPHIC: PAYBACK $75 MILLION

Cawley is a 'Pioneer' - not the kind that lives in a little house on the prairie -- but a member of a special club set up by George Bush.

MCDONALD:
"He put together this network of what they call the pioneers, a group of 400 people most of them corporate executives who pledged to raise a minimum of $100,000. That network alone raised over 40 million dollars

PALAST: But what did they get in return? We went into the capital to ask a real Pioneer the tough questions ...

[Palast in the Office of Texas State Senator Teel Bivins]
PALAST: Tell us about your chaps
BIVINS: No they're not chaps! they're shaps! these are called shaps they're spelt c.h.a.p.s but I'm in the ranching business that's what a real Texan does...

Palast Senator Teel Bivins is a power in the Texas Legislature ... one of the founding pioneers, along with Ken Lay, CEO of Enron Corporation. George W gave the Senator his nick-name.

BIVINS: I'm Biv - he met me and i said Teel Bivins and he said Biv and that was it I've been Biv ever since...

So if Americans want to be on first-name terms with their President, do they have to pay for it?

BIVINS:
The reality is individuals in a country of 300 million people have very little opportunity to speak to the President of the United States

Palast to Bivins: Well, Ken Lay who was a Pioneer had direct access to the President as a member of the transition team advising the Governor on energy matters including those issues in California which made Enron a very profitable corporation this year so he's had direct access as a Pioneer?

BIVINS: And so you wouldn't have direct access if you had spent 2 years of your life working hard to get this guy elected President raising hundreds of thousands of dollars... "you dance with them what brung ya"

[Palast flying over Houston chemical plants, traffic and smog, playing Hendrix ...]
This is the model for Bush's America - for Bush's planet - It's all in Cheney's energy announcement - another Pioneer payday.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

Award-winning reporter Palast writes Inside Corporate America for the London Observer. To read other Palast reports, to contact the author or to subscribe to his column, go to GregPalast.Com

[Django]

Another (http://www.guardian.co.uk/enron/story/0,11337,632153,00.html) interesting article, from the Guardian:

'It would help Enron if you made that call' Bush was told

Price of power

He has won the Afghan war, but President Bush's peace is threatened by the Enron scandal. Ed Vulliamy reveals how far the White House is entwined in the biggest bankruptcy in US history

Sunday January 13, 2002
The Observer

As he approaches the first anniversary of his inauguration, George W Bush is under siege. He has won the war in Afghanistan, but finds himself engaged in a new battle against a scandal that is threatening to dog his administration and tarnish his reputation .
Bush and his administration have been revealed as entwined in a story of corporate greed and political manipulation by an energy firm called Enron, now under double criminal investigation.

The scandal - in which the life savings and retirement funds of tens of thousands of employees vanished while a number of executive directors lined their pockets - reaches so high that John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, has had to withdraw from the investigation because he received Enron money, and lawsuits are the pipeline to force Vice-President Dick Cheney for details of his contacts with the company.

The day Bush took office - a year ago next Saturday - was as cold and comfortless as his victory; his motorcade braved driving rain and a gauntlet of demonstrations marking the most contested and ugliest election result in US history. After 11 September, the world changed and so did America's view of Bush. He became the only President since Franklin Roosevelt to maintain the support of over 80 per cent of Americans for weeks on end.

But now the White House is laid bare by what rivals call 'Enronomics' - the political fable of the Enron corporation.

It has long been reported how the Bush administration and family is beholden to the energy industry. Before the Afghan war, an 'Energy Task Force' favourable to the industry was the main concern for Cheney, who himself came to office from the biggest oil equipment firm in the world.

Enron was just the kind of scandal a war would hide. The company plunged from a stock rating worth $60 billion - seventh on the Fortune list of US companies - into the biggest bankruptcy filing in US history, registered on 2 December.

The ethical - maybe criminal - core of the scandal is that Enron trapped its employees into a 'stock-lock', whereby they were not allowed to sell share options bought by way of savings. When the company collapsed, they lost everything. Meanwhile, Enron's executives - blessed by inside information and foresight - made a killing by scrambling to sell shares before the price collapsed.

The victims of Enron's rise and fall were regular employees who opted to join a savings plan by investing in their employer - and why not? With soaring energy prices and giddy profits, the share value quadrupled between 1997 and January last year. The catch was they were not allowed to sell.

They were people like Pat Betteridge, of the subsidiary Portland General Electric company in Oregon, who remembers grand claims by Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay on a visit north: 'We like to think of ourselves,' he bragged, 'as the Microsoft of the energy world.'

Betteridge used his $300,000 retirement savings to buy 3,500 shares - now worth not a cent. 'If I was hired to do electrical work and I botched it as bad as them,' he says, 'I'd either be doing time or get my licence yanked.'

The beneficiaries of the company's surge to power were those who boarded the wheel of perpetual motion that binds the Bush administration to the energy industry. Then the company's brass even tried to make their fortune out of its fall as well.

The Observer has dug into Enron's past to find that intimate connections with Bush and his Texan Republicans started long before the campaigns that brought them to Washington

Enron is a Houston-based utility trading company that sells energy to consumers, industrial and domestic. It is one of the biggest of its kind in the world - a standing it owes in no small part to Bush's governorship in Texas.

Texas's 1992 Energy Policy Act opened a regulatory black hole into which Enron moved and thrived, forcing established utility companies to buy energy from it. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under the presidency of Bush's father, allowed for an exemption in trading energy subsidiaries. The practice would be Enron's downfall.

The 1992 trading commission was chaired by Wendy Gramm, wife of Texas Senator Phil Gramm, close friend of the Bush family and recipient of $97,350 in political donations from Enron.

Once the exemption was accomplished, Mrs Gramm resigned to join the Enron board. As a member of its current audit committee, she is expected to play a key role in the forthcoming lawsuits and criminal investigation into bankruptcy and document destruction.

In 1997, Enron was anxious to break into Pennsylvania, one of America's biggest energy markets, with its huge consumers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The company was having difficulty, and Lay asked Bush (who liked to call him 'Kenny boy') to help.

Bush duly called the then state governor, Tom Ridge, to pitch for Enron, whose bid duly succeeded. 'I called George W to kind of tell him what was going on,' said Lay at the time, 'and I said it would be very helpful to Enron if he could just call the governor and tell him Enron is a serious company'. Ridge was made Secretary of Homeland Security - Bush's new White House office - after 11 September.

Lay and Enron have been bountiful contributors to George Bush Jnr. Since 1993, company executives have donated nearly $2 million to him personally. Lay also donated $326,000 in soft money to the Republican Party over the three years prior to Bush's presidential bid and his wife added $100,000 for the inauguration festivities.

The administration is splattered with senior officials owning stock in Enron. Economic adviser Larry Lindsay and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick went straight from Enron's payroll into office.

The biggest holding is that of Army Secretary Thomas White, who as a former Enron executive holds stock and options totalling $50m to $100m. Rove himself holds as much as $250,000 in stock, and other holders include Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his assistant William Winkenwerder, Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Weinberger, Economic Undersecretary Kathleen Cooper, Education Undersecretary Eugene Hickock, the ambassadors to Russia, Ireland, the Emirates and officials in the energy department, including its chief financial officer Bruce Carnes. It is not known which - if any - of these privileged stockholders sold their shares along with the Enron bosses, or suffered the same loss as everyone else. Such details will appear when they make this year's filings - leaving any that did so open to ethical, if not criminal, inquiry.

Bush has pursued the aggressive deregulation policies preferred by Enron and its kind, including legislation that exempts key elements of Enron's energy business from oversight by the federal government - pushed by none other than Senator Phil Gramm.

Lay's hand can meanwhile be found behind such episodes as the sudden replacement of Curtis Hebert as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Texan Pat Wood, a friend of Lay. According to one source, the sacking after only weeks in the job came after 'an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth Lay' in which he was 'prodded to back a faster pace in opening up access to the electricity transmission grid'.

For all its troubles, Enron continued to benefit from Bush policies - markedly a refusal to step in and help California during the energy crisis last year, leaving consumers to pay the price... to Enron.

Enron was so close to the bosom of the administration that Lay and other executives were called to the White House for six meetings with Cheney and his staff - the last one only a week before the company made the staggering announcement that it was slashing shareholder equity by $1.2bn.

For Enron was playing a double game. In the run-up to the announcement, its president, Greg Whalley, was frantically lobbying another wing of the administration for help in arranging loans. His point man was Undersecretary Peter Fisher.

Lay discussed the upcoming bankruptcy twice with Commerce Secretary Don Evans - one of the Texan 'Iron Triangle' that propelled Bush to power. Later, he also twice pleaded Enron's case to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

But the Republicans were not the only political heavyweights to benefit from Enron's greed. The company has made donations to many Democrats too - some 27 per cent of its political contributions, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics in Washington.

And among Enron's top point men in Washington during the bankruptcy saga was Clinton's former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was revealed by the Washington Post yesterday as having made a representation last November to the current Treasury on behalf of the company. Rubin is now chairman of the executive committee of the Citigroup bank, one of Enron's principal backers, trying, with the JP Morgan bank, to raise $1.5bn in an effort to see the company through the bankruptcy crisis.

These are matters for the six Congressional committees preparing to investigate Enron. But they will have to wait for the two criminal investigations launched this week: one into Enron's bankruptcy, the other into the admission by the company's auditor, Arthur Andersen, that it destroyed thousands of documents about the bankruptcy.

Andersen had good reason to destroy the papers. The reasons for Enron's destruction when all the winds seemed to blow behind the company's fortunes are associated with the labyrinth of subsidiaries built up by Chief Finance Officer Andrew Fastow, fired on 24 October, and other executives.

Fastow created partnerships with what were described as outside, independently-run companies with names such as 'Chewco' or 'Jedi' - after characters in Star Wars - that were owned by him or others with Enron backing.

As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars were slushing overseas to tax havens as Fastow and other executives - so they said - sought to shore up the company against a possible fall in energy prices. What they were allegedly doing was amassing personal fortunes.

The ensuing gaps in the balance sheet became a gaping abyss which could not be hidden and down which the company finally fell. Enron admitted that it had overstated profits by $400m in reports issued since. However, Chewco alone enabled Enron to be able to keep some $600m of debt off its books.

The crucial criminal issue is whether executives misled investors by inflating revenues and minimising debts. The political issue is how closely entwined is the Washington elite - and the immediate circle around Bush.

Seven months of Bush's oil-friendly presidency was driven out of the spotlight by 11 September. It had pleased the industry for its isolationism and determination to withdraw from world affairs - the Kyoto Accords on global warming or arms reduction with Russia.

Domestically, Bush's cause was an articulate one: a tax cut worth $1.3 trillion, of which nine-tenths went to the 1 per cent of wealthiest Americans, and ambitions to drill for oil across the Alaskan wilderness and deregulate controls over the oil and energy industries.

By the afternoon of 11 September, Bush had become the vanishing president during his people's hour of need, cowering underground beneath an Air Force base in remote Nebraska. But by the end of that week, Americans saw in Bush not a spoiled brat, but the man they wanted to lead the nation to war.

Now the Enron scandal brings the presidency home, with Bush as Winston Churchill preparing for the 1945 election in Britain. The would-be Clement Attlee is Tom Daschle, leader of the Senate Democrats, who last week left the unity of war behind to unleash his congressional campaign for November 2002 with an offensive over welfare, tax policy, health care, energy and the environment.

The elections are critical to Bush and the Republicans: no US president apart from Nixon and Reagan has not lost ground at the mid-term polls, and the Democrats, even without making substantial gains, can keep control of the Senate while taking over the House and state governorships.

For the State of the Union address Bush will give on the twenty-ninth of this month, White House staff are scrambling to entwine the war in Afghanistan with the continuing domestic agenda. But the minefield they must cross is named Enron.

[Piddzilla]

Django, for heaven's sake. The hyperlink. USE THE HYPERLINK!!! :bored:

[Django]

I have used the hyperlink, and also reposted the articles in here because they are so damn fascinating...

The corruption, the sleaze... it reads like a bad novel... but it's all true!

[Sir Toose]

That says something, doesn't it? Enron... a Houston based energy company... one of the Bush campaign's biggest donors... Enron, with it's history of corrupt business deals and faulty financial statements... Enron, which robbed its own employees of their very life-savings... says a lot to me! To say nothing of the fact that, apparently, Enron CEO and Chairman Kenneth Lay happens to be a close personal friend of George W. Bush, and one of the top contributors to his presidential campaign and two gubernatorial campaigns in Texas.


So, by that logic, since I am also Houston based I am corrupt? What does Houston have to do with it?

You're on a slippery slope here. You're insinuating that because someone is close friends with someone else (if it's even true) then they are complicit in wrongdoings simply because of said friendship. If this were true, then every close personal friend of Clinton's is guilty of a presidential BJ?

I could go on and on with this one... is it necessary?

[Django]

So, by that logic, since I am also Houston based I am corrupt? What does Houston have to do with it?

You're on a slippery slope here. You're insinuating that because someone is close friends with someone else (if it's even true) then they are complicit in wrongdoings simply because of said friendship. If this were true, then every close personal friend of Clinton's is guilty of a presidential BJ?

I could go on and on with this one... is it necessary?
lol! That's a funny analogy, but a lame defense, I'm afraid.

The facts are on the table. The ties between Bush and Enron are far more than circumstantial.

[Yoda]

Okay, Here's (http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2002/01/13/13edita.htm) a news article that makes it plain that the reforms you have described above were only undertaken after the Enron scandal, as a reactionary move designed to distance the White House from Enron. Keep in mind that Enron CEO Kenneth Lay is a Bush family friend and was the biggest contributor to the Bush Jr. Presidential campaign fund:I'm not referring to those reforms. Republicans in general have been fighting for things like the option to privatize one's own 401(k) plan since before the exposure of Enron. Increased flexibility can help prevent these kinds of debacles.

As for the rest: I don't see any response to any of the arguments I put forth.

Running a web search and throwing whatever speculative articles it turns up is not research, and it certainly doesn't constitute a retort. The simple facts of the matter show us that, whether they were friends or not, Bush was not in office at the time of their misdeeds, and that they were found out after he took over. This single fact is, all by itself, enough to contradict your insinuations of corruption.

[Django]

I'm not referring to those reforms. Republicans in general have been fighting for things like the option to privatize one's own 401(k) plan since before the exposure of Enron. Increased flexibility can help prevent these kinds of debacles.
Can you give me some examples?

As for the rest: I don't see any response to any of the arguments I put forth.

Running a web search and throwing whatever speculative articles it turns up is not research, and it certainly doesn't constitute a retort. The simple facts of the matter show us that, whether they were friends or not, Bush was not in office at the time of their misdeeds, and that they were found out after he took over. This single fact is, all by itself, enough to contradict your insinuations of corruption.
Hardly. The fact of the matter is that Bush being in office had nothing to do with the exposure of Enron. And Clinton being in office had nothing to do with the fraudulent accounting practices of Enron. The facts, rather, seem to suggest close ties between Bush's political agenda and the special interests of contributors like Enron. There are too many "coincidences" and suspicious circumstances in all of this to ignore. How deeply was Bush involved with "Kenny boy" (Bush's nickname for Enron CEO, Ken Lay)? Remains to be seen. One of the articles does cite the possibility that Bush was lobbying for Ken Lay years before. That sounds like a pretty familiar connection--definitely hinging on common interests. My articles are not speculative--they state FACTS. True, there is some speculative material in them--but they are valid speculations based on the facts, not simply arbitrary claims. The articles raise some very important questions concerning the connection between Bush and Enron CEO Ken Lay. They were carefully selected to address many of the issues I have been raising in the past.

[Yoda]

That sounds a lot like what Bush said about the Halliburton overcharging scam... something to the effect of "We opposed this sort of thing"... I don't know about you, but it rings hollow.As stated before, I'm not talking about comments made after Enron was exposed.


The difference, of course, is that regardless of the timing of when this happened, Clinton's job was President of the United States, not President of Enron. On the other hand, Chairman and CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, remains a long-time ally and personal friend of Bush. Also, your remark seems to imply that the Bush administration had a personal hand in exposing Enron. My understanding, and I have yet to investigate this so please feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken, is that Enron's dirty dealings were exposed only when the company got into financial trouble. More on this later.No, I don't really think Bush had a hand in exposing them, but I don't think he was helping them to cover up, either. I don't think either President is to blame; only the company itself. Any attempt to pin this on a particular administration or elected official is little more political opportunism.


I'll address this later.Yes, I'm sure you will; probably about the same time you substantiate your "restocking of inventories" theory. :rolleyes:

[Yoda]

Can you give me some examples?I did. The Republican party made clear its desire to allow employees increased flexibility with their 401(k) plans; specifically, the ability to invest it privately. The employees of Enron, if memory serves, had virtually no options in how to handle their retirement plans, and were essentially stuck with Enron. Had they had more flexibility, their money could have been potentially saved.


Hardly. The fact of the matter is that Bush being in office had nothing to do with the exposure of Enron. And Clinton being in office had nothing to do with the fraudulent accounting practices of Enron.I agree. But it's also true that Bush being in office had nothing to do with the fradulent accounting practices, either.


The facts, rather, seem to suggest close ties between Bush's political agenda and the special interests of contributors like Enron. There are too many "coincidences" and suspicious circumstances in all of this to ignore. How deeply was Bush involved with "Kenny boy" (Bush's nickname for Enron CEO, Ken Lay)? Remains to be seen. One of the articles does cite the possibility that Bush was lobbying for Ken Lay years before. That sounds like a pretty familiar connection--definitely hinging on common interests. My articles are not speculative--they state FACTS. True, there is some speculative material in them--but they are valid speculations based on the facts, not simply arbitrary claims. The articles raise some very important questions concerning the connection between Bush and Enron CEO Ken Lay. They were carefully selected to address many of the issues I have been raising in the past.You're still not addressing what I said: I'm not denying a connection between the two. I suspect the connection is overblown, but it doesn't matter. Whether or not they are friends is rendered irrelevant when you look at the timeline of actual events, which suggest the exact opposite of collusion.

In other words, if Bush was trying to help Enron, then it is a remarkable coincidence that they were nabbed very shortly after their supposed benefactor came into power.

[Django]

I did. The Republican party made clear its desire to allow employees increased flexibility with their 401(k) plans; specifically, the ability to invest it privately. The employees of Enron, if memory serves, had virtually no options in how to handle their retirement plans, and were essentially stuck with Enron. Had they had more flexibility, their money could have been potentially saved.
I think the employees had a choice--to invest in Enron or outside. But because Enron was a huge power company that was doing so well, so they thought, many employees chose to invest in Enron. The catch was that they could never sell their stock. So, just before the Enron stock prices plummetted, the management dumped their stock, making millions, while the employees who were stuck with their stock lost all their life savings. In any case, the Bush strategy of diversifying employee investment options seems to have come about only after the Enron debacle, as a reactionary move on the part of the administration to distance itself from a potentially huge political scandal.


I agree. But it's also true that Bush being in office had nothing to do with the fradulent accounting practices, either.
You're still not addressing what I said: I'm not denying a connection between the two. I suspect the connection is overblown, but it doesn't matter. Whether or not they are friends is rendered irrelevant when you look at the timeline of actual events, which suggest the exact opposite of collusion.

In other words, if Bush was trying to help Enron, then it is a remarkable coincidence that they were nabbed very shortly after their supposed benefactor came into power.

You're still not addressing what I said: I'm not denying a connection between the two. I suspect the connection is overblown, but it doesn't matter. Whether or not they are friends is rendered irrelevant when you look at the timeline of actual events, which suggest the exact opposite of collusion.

In other words, if Bush was trying to help Enron, then it is a remarkable coincidence that they were nabbed very shortly after their supposed benefactor came into power.
That is a very simplistic argument. The facts are that:
The Observer has dug into Enron's past to find that intimate connections with Bush and his Texan Republicans started long before the campaigns that brought them to Washington

Enron is a Houston-based utility trading company that sells energy to consumers, industrial and domestic. It is one of the biggest of its kind in the world - a standing it owes in no small part to Bush's governorship in Texas.

Texas's 1992 Energy Policy Act opened a regulatory black hole into which Enron moved and thrived, forcing established utility companies to buy energy from it. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under the presidency of Bush's father, allowed for an exemption in trading energy subsidiaries. The practice would be Enron's downfall.

The 1992 trading commission was chaired by Wendy Gramm, wife of Texas Senator Phil Gramm, close friend of the Bush family and recipient of $97,350 in political donations from Enron.

Once the exemption was accomplished, Mrs Gramm resigned to join the Enron board. As a member of its current audit committee, she is expected to play a key role in the forthcoming lawsuits and criminal investigation into bankruptcy and document destruction.

In 1997, Enron was anxious to break into Pennsylvania, one of America's biggest energy markets, with its huge consumers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The company was having difficulty, and Lay asked Bush (who liked to call him 'Kenny boy') to help.

Bush duly called the then state governor, Tom Ridge, to pitch for Enron, whose bid duly succeeded. 'I called George W to kind of tell him what was going on,' said Lay at the time, 'and I said it would be very helpful to Enron if he could just call the governor and tell him Enron is a serious company'. Ridge was made Secretary of Homeland Security - Bush's new White House office - after 11 September.

Lay and Enron have been bountiful contributors to George Bush Jnr. Since 1993, company executives have donated nearly $2 million to him personally. Lay also donated $326,000 in soft money to the Republican Party over the three years prior to Bush's presidential bid and his wife added $100,000 for the inauguration festivities.

The administration is splattered with senior officials owning stock in Enron. Economic adviser Larry Lindsay and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick went straight from Enron's payroll into office.

The biggest holding is that of Army Secretary Thomas White, who as a former Enron executive holds stock and options totalling $50m to $100m. Rove himself holds as much as $250,000 in stock, and other holders include Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his assistant William Winkenwerder, Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Weinberger, Economic Undersecretary Kathleen Cooper, Education Undersecretary Eugene Hickock, the ambassadors to Russia, Ireland, the Emirates and officials in the energy department, including its chief financial officer Bruce Carnes. It is not known which - if any - of these privileged stockholders sold their shares along with the Enron bosses, or suffered the same loss as everyone else. Such details will appear when they make this year's filings - leaving any that did so open to ethical, if not criminal, inquiry.

Bush has pursued the aggressive deregulation policies preferred by Enron and its kind, including legislation that exempts key elements of Enron's energy business from oversight by the federal government - pushed by none other than Senator Phil Gramm.

Lay's hand can meanwhile be found behind such episodes as the sudden replacement of Curtis Hebert as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Texan Pat Wood, a friend of Lay. According to one source, the sacking after only weeks in the job came after 'an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth Lay' in which he was 'prodded to back a faster pace in opening up access to the electricity transmission grid'.

For all its troubles, Enron continued to benefit from Bush policies - markedly a refusal to step in and help California during the energy crisis last year, leaving consumers to pay the price... to Enron.

Enron was so close to the bosom of the administration that Lay and other executives were called to the White House for six meetings with Cheney and his staff - the last one only a week before the company made the staggering announcement that it was slashing shareholder equity by $1.2bn.

(Quoted from the Observer article above.)

The lead-up to the Enron debacle:

These are matters for the six Congressional committees preparing to investigate Enron. But they will have to wait for the two criminal investigations launched this week: one into Enron's bankruptcy, the other into the admission by the company's auditor, Arthur Andersen, that it destroyed thousands of documents about the bankruptcy.

Andersen had good reason to destroy the papers. The reasons for Enron's destruction when all the winds seemed to blow behind the company's fortunes are associated with the labyrinth of subsidiaries built up by Chief Finance Officer Andrew Fastow, fired on 24 October, and other executives.

Fastow created partnerships with what were described as outside, independently-run companies with names such as 'Chewco' or 'Jedi' - after characters in Star Wars - that were owned by him or others with Enron backing.

As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars were slushing overseas to tax havens as Fastow and other executives - so they said - sought to shore up the company against a possible fall in energy prices. What they were allegedly doing was amassing personal fortunes.

The ensuing gaps in the balance sheet became a gaping abyss which could not be hidden and down which the company finally fell. Enron admitted that it had overstated profits by $400m in reports issued since. However, Chewco alone enabled Enron to be able to keep some $600m of debt off its books.

The crucial criminal issue is whether executives misled investors by inflating revenues and minimising debts. The political issue is how closely entwined is the Washington elite - and the immediate circle around Bush.

Seven months of Bush's oil-friendly presidency was driven out of the spotlight by 11 September. It had pleased the industry for its isolationism and determination to withdraw from world affairs - the Kyoto Accords on global warming or arms reduction with Russia.

Domestically, Bush's cause was an articulate one: a tax cut worth $1.3 trillion, of which nine-tenths went to the 1 per cent of wealthiest Americans, and ambitions to drill for oil across the Alaskan wilderness and deregulate controls over the oil and energy industries.

(Quoted from the Observer article above.)

[Caitlyn]

Well, it's related... George Soros is a major Dean contributor and lends credibility to his camp.


I would have thought Soros was too busy pushing for the legalization of drugs and the euthanasia of people to have time to take on Bush…

[Django]

I would have thought Soros was too busy pushing for the legalization of drugs and the euthanasia of people to have time to take on Bush…
What's your point?

[Django]

To be fair, here's a link to a discussion of Soros' social agenda, which has it's eccentricities, which I cannot deny: George Soros' Social Agenda (http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/x3770435801.pdf). I don't agree with his funding of marijuana legalization--and, in any case, it doesn't affect me personally, one way or the other, as I don't smoke or take drugs. Unlike George W. Bush, incidentally, who happens to have a history of drug use and alcoholism. Anyway, here's (http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2002/september/karatnycyk.html) an interesting book review of a Soros biography:

Messianic Billionaire
Soros funded freedom where it was lacking

By Adrian Karatnycky

Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire
by Michael T. Kaufman
Alfred A. Knopf
344 pp., $27.50

For the past 15 years, George Soros has been one of the world's most influential philanthropists. Through charitable work that promoted democratic reform around the world, Soros helped sustain and inspire civic groups and mass movements that ushered in non-violent democratic revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and '90s.

Michael T. Kaufman's Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire offers a detailed portrait of Soros the man, the investor, the activist, the political analyst, and the philanthropist; it does justice to a figure of significant intellectual complexity and major impact.

Kaufman is well equipped for the task. A former East European correspondent at the New York Times, with an intimate knowledge of the region's politics, he knows much of the terrain in which Soros has played an influential role. Himself the son of an eminent leader of the Jewish community in prewar Poland, Kaufman has a strong understanding of the maelstrom into which European Jewry fell in the 1930s and '40s, the period of Soros's childhood and adolescence.

From this informed perspective, Kaufman is able to provide an engaging and sympathetic narrative of Soros's early turbulent years, when Nazism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia cast a dark shadow over his Jewish family and disrupted his upper-middle-class life. Kaufman traces Soros's life trajectory from war-ravaged Hungary to an encounter with the philosopher Karl Popper's ideas on "open society" at the London School of Economics, to a remarkable career in New York in hedge funds and international finance, and on to philanthropy and efforts to promote democratic change in closed societies.

Soros has made a mark as one of a handful of wealthy moneymakers and hedge fund managers. But what has truly distinguished him has been his unique form of cause-oriented philanthropy, for which he has provided huge resources, averaging in the last decade roughly $500 million in grants per year.

Not only the scale of Soros's philanthropy has made it so effective, but its precise focus and approach. Soros has been most influential when addressing the transcendent issue of helping to topple tyrannies and replace them with societies rooted in the rule of law and democratic accountability.

His early ventures into philanthropy were conventional and unremarkable: support for the arts, for scholarship on his former homeland Hungary, and for the restoration of New York's Central Park. But by the mid-1980s, as his fortune grew, he began to direct his attention to the cause of promoting openness in countries governed by closed, authoritarian systems. His growing wealth, and the growing political ferment in the Communist world, allowed him to focus his energies on giving practical expression to the views of his intellectual mentor, Sir Karl Popper, and his influential work The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Soros's funding was effective because it assumed a centrist orientation. It was linked to a noble cause, supporting broad coalitions that worked peacefully for revolutionary democratic change. Soros's philanthropy assisted and helped bring together social democrats, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians in some of the world's most oppressive regimes.

Clearly, such coalitions cannot persist in perpetuity. Once a tyranny unravels, and democracy and open society take root, normal democratic interest-group politics intrudes and policy differences rend the once-unified fabric of democratic movements. Soros was influential because he focused primarily on deploying his resources at these transcendent moments, and then assisting democratic forces in the early years when the institutional, civic, and cultural architecture of a liberal democracy needs to be shaped. His philanthropy was truly non-partisan, and it deepened support for and understanding of his aim of open societies. To be sure, Soros's network of foundations was not the only Western institution offering assistance to democratic forces trying to topple dictatorships peacefully. In the early 1980s, other U.S. organizations like the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as the Catholic Church, the West German government, and the AFL-CIO, played crucial roles in assisting democratic forces in the Communist bloc and around the world. Nevertheless, Soros was preeminent among private philanthropists seeking to bring freedom to Central and Eastern Europe. Some of his earliest grantees are now influential figures in their countries' independent civic life. Many have also served in key positions in government as ministers and sub-ministers throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

After martial law was declared in Poland in 1981 and the Solidarity movement was driven underground, Soros provided modest assistance to a network of underground newspapers and journals that eventually became the bedrock of democratic Poland's free media. Soros also assisted democratic voices in Poland through the Stefan Batory Foundation, which became a crucial source of support for reformists such as Bronislaw Geremek (later a foreign minister) and Tadeusz Mazowiecki (who served as Prime Minister). Soros was an early financial supporter of a circle of Czech dissidents that included Václav Havel, the country's current President. In Hungary, a Soros foundation established in 1983 became a crucial funnel of aid and assistance to political leaders and independent publishers, who helped usher in the fall of Communism in 1989.

Soros had not only a clear vision for his philanthropy, he also understood that at key junctures of history carefully focused resources play a decisive role. He adopted a similar approach in promoting democratic voices in Kosovo in the period before Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, in Bosnia, and in Serbia. In the latter case, it was these civic forces and independent media-with assistance from Soros and significant support from the U.S. government-that helped ensure the political defeat of Milosevic.

Soros was an early investor in efforts to assist reformers in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia, where he focused on issues like education, curriculum development, and support for civil society. Over the last decade, he has rapidly expanded his network of foundations beyond the former Soviet bloc to focus on promoting democracy in Africa and Asia. For example, he has assisted democratic intellectuals and human rights activists from China and Burma.

Kaufman portrays Soros as a hands-on philanthropist who moves rapidly and responds to intellectual and political passions. At times, this has resulted in a jumble of inchoate, sometimes duplicative and competing initiatives, a problem Soros has attempted to resolve by building a more coherent network of coordinated foundations. Still, Soros has recognized that sometimes the best way to approach a problem is to attempt a series of avenues of solution, and then to invest significant resources in the projects that appear to gather momentum.

Soros remains a man of enthusiasms, able to launch new initiatives and redirect resources at lightning speed. In some sense, he has operated as the de facto chief program officer in his vast network of foundations. This personal engagement means that Soros, who travels the world constantly and regularly meets with civic, political, and intellectual leaders, is able to respond quickly to emerging needs and, more importantly, to emerging opportunities. I witnessed this in Warsaw in the summer of 2000. Soros had helped support the World Forum on Democracy, a meeting of civic leaders, democratic activists, and intellectuals. One of the democratic opposition leaders was Alejandro Toledo, who was the chief political opponent to Peru's authoritarian ruler Alberto Fujimori. Toledo represented a mass movement that was pressing for free elections and an end to state domination of the media. Within weeks of their discussion, Soros had quietly provided a grant of $1 million to support Toledo's campaign of mass protest marches and to sustain a network of opposition to the increasingly repressive Peruvian government. When a videotape scandal broke that proved the government's complicity in bribing legislators and the media, Toledo's movement was ready to press for change. Today, Alejandro Toledo is the democratically elected President of his country, and Fujimori is living in exile in Japan as Peruvian authorities press for his return to face criminal charges. Former State Department official Morton Abramowitz puts it well: Soros is "the only man in the United States who has his own foreign policy and can implement it."

Soros not only has been integral to many of the most important political changes of the last half-century; he also has been a key force for popularizing the objective of achieving a world of liberty. He has achieved his greatest influence in advancing the ideas of open society because his work has been largely free of partisanship, that is, he has sought to promote open systems and not to focus on specific policies.

In 1996, Kaufman tells us, "Soros had come to the conclusion that 'if an open society is to serve as an ideal worth striving for, it can no longer be defined in terms of the Communist menace; it must be given more positive content.'" As a result, these days Soros is out to avert the threat to open society that he sees arising in America. He now devotes approximately $100 million per year to domestic U.S. issues.

This means Soros's global efforts to promote the broad aim of open society are now accompanied by philanthropic activism that is necessarily adopting a more prescriptive cast. In these new domestic efforts, Soros is supporting campaigns aimed at the decriminalization of drug use and the reduction of and alternatives to prison sentences. More recently, Soros has vigorously criticized the anti-terrorism efforts of the Bush administration, which he believes pose threats to civil liberties.

Soros clearly has the right to address what he sees as vexing issues of American political life. Some may even argue that by engaging what he believes are the defects of our own democracy, he is enhancing the credibility of his efforts abroad. But by staking out clear prescriptive positions, his philanthropy is losing its distinctiveness; Soros's efforts now increasingly resemble those of the rest of the crowd. Indeed, his more recent U.S. initiatives on alternatives to incarceration, on the abolition of the death penalty, on drug policy, and on immigrant rights have little to distinguish them from the conventional projects funded by numerous major establishment foundations.

By supporting specific policy remedies, rather than funding a broad array of creative and at times competing approaches on these issues, Soros is departing from the open society approach that has been his hallmark. At the same time, by allowing his U.S. foundation to adopt language that resembles that of the far left ("mass incarceration of poor people," "massive destabilization of communities [that has resulted from] punitive criminal justice policies"), even as he seeks to be a highly visible nonpartisan advocate of open society and democracy, Soros likely is diminishing his ability to influence change around the world.

As the events of September 11 made clear, the great global task that Soros undertook in the 1980s-the defeat of tyrannies and the construction of open societies-remains far from complete. The Arab world and the Islamic world are dominated by tyrannies, out-of-touch monarchies, and obscurantist ideas. In many poorer countries, fragile new and restored democracies are under great strain. In many other places where Soros contributed to bringing down tyranny, democracy did not take root. The democrats Soros helped empower are losing out to the old ex-Communist nomenklatura, who have ushered in regimes built on cronyism and corruption in places like Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova.

To address these vexing challenges will require greater philanthropic commitment to broad-based efforts that eschew partisanship and help unite the world's democratic forces. Whether, in the light of his growing domestic advocacy in America, George Soros will be able to continue to play the role of a central advocate of such a movement will determine whether he will be as influential a philanthropist in the next century as he was in the last.

Adrian Karatnycky is president of Freedom House.

[jamesglewisf]

Holy cow. Your posts are so stinking long I don't even read them, and I don't have ADD!!! Provide a link and post some excerpts, not the whole freaking thing. It's probably a copyright violation.

Howard Dean is the best thing that could happen to George Bush. All he has to do is keep talking. He thinks Osama ain't guilty until proven so in court. He thinks we're no safer with Saddam locked up. Now he's trying to make us believe he's a Christian. Ha. He obviously never read 2 Corinthians 6:14.

[Django]

Well, first take the trouble to read the material, and then we can talk after that...

Wait... don't tell me... you never learned how to read?

I guess that might be part of the reason our world is in the situation it is in right now...

We don't want the truth...

We want entertaining sound bites...

No wonder George W. Bush is the President of the US! :rolleyes:

[Django]

Howard Dean is the best thing that could happen to George Bush. All he has to do is keep talking. He thinks Osama ain't guilty until proven so in court. He thinks we're no safer with Saddam locked up. Now he's trying to make us believe he's a Christian. Ha. He obviously never read 2 Corinthians 6:14.
Your words strike me as the words of a raving fundamentalist... you probably don't believe in the separation of church and state either... and you probably think of the Crusades as the pinnacle of human achievement! How convenient it is for pseudo-Christians like you to use 2 Corinthians 6:14 to justify your own racism, while ignoring the rest of Christian doctrine... such as, for example, "Love your neighbor as yourself" and "Do unto others and you would have done unto you"! You strike me as being the kind of Christian who probably looks up to the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson! My suggestion to you... get rid of your provincial KKK mentality and try broadening your horizons! There's a lot more to the world than your back yard!

[Yoda]

I think the employees had a choice--to invest in Enron or outside. But because Enron was a huge power company that was doing so well, so they thought, many employees chose to invest in Enron. The catch was that they could never sell their stock. So, just before the Enron stock prices plummetted, the management dumped their stock, making millions, while the employees who were stuck with their stock lost all their life savings. In any case, the Bush strategy of diversifying employee investment options seems to have come about only after the Enron debacle, as a reactionary move on the part of the administration to distance itself from a potentially huge political scandal.I feel like I'm talking to Leonard Shelby. As I stated before, the move to diversify employee investment came before Enron's downfall. This should come as no shock; conservatives almost always advocate an increase in personal responsibility.

That is a very simplistic argument. The facts are that:It's simple, not simplistic; and intentionally so. The simpler an argument is, the harder it is to avoid, though you've certainly tried to. I see nary a counterpoint to my claims. Trying to let other people's articles argue for you is bad enough, but you're not even picking ones relevant to the questions you're being subjected to.

That level of research and debate isn't going to cut it here. Never has, never will.

[Django]

I feel like I'm talking to Leonard Shelby. As I stated before, the move to diversify employee investment came before Enron's downfall. This should come as no shock; conservatives almost always advocate an increase in personal responsibility.
I need some conclusive evidence here. Your claims ring hollow.

It's simple, not simplistic; and intentionally so. The simpler an argument is, the harder it is to avoid, though you've certainly tried to. I see nary a counterpoint to my claims. Trying to let other people's articles argue for you is bad enough, but you're not even picking ones relevant to the questions you're being subjected to.

That level of research and debate isn't going to cut it here. Never has, never will.
Well, I've provided you with a great deal of strong factual material. Sorry, but your flip dismissal of these facts just doesn't cut it here! Never has, never will! :D

[Yoda]

Well, first take the trouble to read the material, and then we can talk after that...

Wait... don't tell me... you never learned how to read?

I guess that might be part of the reason our world is in the situation it is in right now...

We don't want the truth...

We want entertaining sound bites...

No wonder George W. Bush is the President of the US! :rolleyes:You can't throw up half a dozen articles (most of which don't even apply to what James said), and then require that everyone read them before discussing anything with you. That's cowardly, and stupid.


Your words strike me as the words of a raving fundamentalist... you probably don't believe in the separation of church and state either... and you probably think of the Crusades as the pinnacle of human achievement! How convenient it is for pseudo-Christians like you to use 2 Corinthians 6:14 to justify your own racism, while ignoring the rest of Christian doctrine... such as, for example, "Love your neighbor as yourself" and "Do unto others and you would have done unto you"! You strike me as being the kind of Christian who probably looks up to the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson! My suggestion to you... get rid of your provincial KKK mentality and try broadening your horizons! There's a lot more to the world than your back yard!It's painfully obvious to every forum regular that accusations of racism and bigotry are among your choice argumentative crutches.

This entire paragraph is just insulting speculation, filled with "you probably" this and "I'll bet you're" that. That's not civilized discussion; that's socially inept childishness.

[Yoda]

I need some conclusive evidence here. Your claims ring hollow.What're you looking for? And that reminds me: didn't you promise to address any number of issues some weeks ago? Toose's point about the Republican view towards business in general, for example (though the "restocking inventories" embarrassment of an argument has gone unanswered, too).


Well, I've provided you with a great deal of strong factual material. Sorry, but your flip dismissal of these facts just doesn't cut it here! Never has, never will! :DHey, Abe Lincoln's dead. That's factual material. Problem is, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with what we're talking about.

Such is the nature of the "factual material" you've provided. Why? Because all of it intends to make one point: that Bush and Starr had some sort of tie. But as everyone else reading this thread knows by now, I'm not denying that they did. Rather, I'm pointing out that whether or not they did is irrelevant when you look at the timeline of events, which shows us that Enron was nabbed after its supposed benefactor Bush took office. If he was looking out for them, why were they nabbed very shortly after their alleged crony became the most powerful man in the world?

Do you get it yet? Or are we going to get another massive post trying to demonstrate a link that no one's been denying?

[Django]

:rolleyes: How relevant are any of the points you have raised to a discussion of Howard Dean?

Anyway, I'll come back to this some other time. More important things to do right now!

[Yoda]

:rolleyes: How relevant are any of the points you have raised to a discussion of Howard Dean?Good question. Maybe you should ask yourself, because you're the one who brought it up (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showpost.php?p=129439&postcount=13). Oh, wait, I forgot; we learned from our last argument that you can declare a topic irrelevant, even if you're the one who started discussing it. My mistake. :rolleyes:


Anyway, I'll come back to this some other time. More important things to do right now!Uh-huh.

[Django]

:rolleyes:

[Henry The Kid]

You have to give the Dems credit. I can't believe they found a candidate worse for the country than Bush.

[Jackie Malfoy]

I want Bush to win this year!Yea go Repubicans!
A quick question why is the donkey used for the Dems and a Elephant used for the Republian?
Anyone know?See you around!JM :cool: ;) :p :) :D

[jamesglewisf]

Your words strike me as the words of a raving fundamentalist... you probably don't believe in the separation of church and state either... and you probably think of the Crusades as the pinnacle of human achievement! How convenient it is for pseudo-Christians like you to use 2 Corinthians 6:14 to justify your own racism, while ignoring the rest of Christian doctrine... such as, for example, "Love your neighbor as yourself" and "Do unto others and you would have done unto you"! You strike me as being the kind of Christian who probably looks up to the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson! My suggestion to you... get rid of your provincial KKK mentality and try broadening your horizons! There's a lot more to the world than your back yard!

Do you know what 2 Corinthians 6:14 means? It means that Christians should not be yoked to unbelievers. It has nothing to do with race. He is a Christian married to a Jew. Two different faiths. I don't even know what her race is, so quit jumping to conclusions.

And BTW, two of my long-time friends (15 years) are a mixed-race couple. He happens to be black, and he was in my wedding. OMIGOSH. a black man in my wedding!!! He's not just an acquaintance. He was also in my accountability group and my Bible study class for years. It gets worse. When I was asked to teach a Bible study class at my church, he is the man I asked to be the director of the class. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible that prevents mixed-race marriages. In fact, Galatians 3:23, 1 Corinthians 12:13, Colossians 3:11, among others eliminate discrimination of any kind for believers.

But, we are still supposed to marry only believers. It even goes beyond that. We are supposed to marry believers with the same spiritual maturity.

I'm not a fan of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson either. I mostly cringe when they speak in public.

Where do you get off calling me a pseudo-Christian and a KKK fan? You don't know squat about me. I spend a lot of time correcting Christians who don't understand the Bible, who probably haven't even read it. I've read it all the way through once a year for since 1994.

What's with the personal attacks? All I asked you to do was post excerpts with a link. I didn't insult you at all.

[jamesglewisf]

Your words strike me as the words of a raving fundamentalist... you probably don't believe in the separation of church and state either... and you probably think of the Crusades as the pinnacle of human achievement!
Forgot about this part. I could care less about separation of church and state. It is irrelevant to how I live my life. Whether there is a government-run church or a church-run government or complete separation of the two, I'm still going to live my life according to Scripture.

And no, I'm not a fan of the Crusades.

[Django]

You have to give the Dems credit. I can't believe they found a candidate worse for the country than Bush.
I can't imagine anyone worse for the country than Bush!

Howard Dean happens to be a qualified professional who seems to know what he is saying. He happens to be a medical doctor, which means that he is actually qualified, unlike Bush, who is not qualified in anything other than screwing up the world as we know it. Howard Dean also happens to be a responsible adult, which is more than anyone could ever say about Bush.

There is simply no comparison. George W. Bush is a spoiled rich kid who doesn't know what he is doing and who has essentially hijacked the US government to serve the interests of his friends and business partners. Howard Dean seems to me to be a conscientious politician who is genuinely concerned about the direction our country is headed.

How you could possibly make such an irresponsible, even absurd, statement is beyond me!

[Django]

I want Bush to win this year!Yea go Repubicans!
A quick question why is the donkey used for the Dems and a Elephant used for the Republian?
Anyone know?See you around!JM :cool: ;) :p :) :D
Well, the democrat mascot is a caricature of their opposition, so the donkey represents George W. Bush. On the other hand, the Republican mascot is a caricature of their financial supporters, so the elephant represents big business and corporate America.

[Django]

Do you know what 2 Corinthians 6:14 means? It means that Christians should not be yoked to unbelievers. It has nothing to do with race. He is a Christian married to a Jew. Two different faiths. I don't even know what her race is, so quit jumping to conclusions.

And BTW, two of my long-time friends (15 years) are a mixed-race couple. He happens to be black, and he was in my wedding. OMIGOSH. a black man in my wedding!!! He's not just an acquaintance. He was also in my accountability group and my Bible study class for years. It gets worse. When I was asked to teach a Bible study class at my church, he is the man I asked to be the director of the class. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible that prevents mixed-race marriages. In fact, Galatians 3:23, 1 Corinthians 12:13, Colossians 3:11, among others eliminate discrimination of any kind for believers.

But, we are still supposed to marry only believers. It even goes beyond that. We are supposed to marry believers with the same spiritual maturity.

I'm not a fan of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson either. I mostly cringe when they speak in public.

Where do you get off calling me a pseudo-Christian and a KKK fan? You don't know squat about me. I spend a lot of time correcting Christians who don't understand the Bible, who probably haven't even read it. I've read it all the way through once a year for since 1994.

What's with the personal attacks? All I asked you to do was post excerpts with a link. I didn't insult you at all.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. Didn't mean to offend you--I just felt offended by your citation of that particular Bible verse in this particular context, hence my somewhat harsh response.

In any case, your interpretation of the Bible verse remains somewhat arbitrary--who's to judge a person's spiritual maturity? What gives the church the right to tell you who you can or cannot marry? There is such a thing as individual liberties--one of the principles this country is based upon. Which means that individuals have the right to have relationships with anyone they choose to. And that no institution has the right to interfere in personal relationships. Anyway, the verse you cited is good advice, to be sure, but I still reserve the right to have a relationship with anyone I personally choose to have a relationship with. And no darned institution, not the government nor even the church, has the right to dictate to me whom I can or cannot have a relationship with.

[jamesglewisf]

django,

The church doesn't tell you whom to marry. The Bible does. The Christian has individual liberties as long as he lives within the confines of the Bible. You can't call God Lord of your life and then ignore what He says to do. That's hypocrisy.

Think of it this way. I believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins. I don't obey his commands because I'm some sort of slave or robot. I obey them out of love and gratitude.

My interpretation of that verse is not arbitrary. That is the plain and almost universally held interpretation of it. Judging for yourself the maturity level of a potential spouse is arbitrary. But it is no more arbitrary than deciding whether or not you are compatible politically, ethically, or morally. Before considering marriage, I need to make sure that my potential spouse has similar interests, such as hobbies, fitness, sports, etc. All of these decisions are arbitrary. I'm not "judging" the person as in good versus bad. I'm evaluating the compatibility of the person and myself. One of those compatibility issues needs to be spirituality.

All you have to do is attend one of the ladies' Bible studies at our church and listen to the hardships many of them deal with because of their unbelieving husbands or practically spiritually dead husbands. It's not that the men are bad people, but the wives want to go to church with their husbands. They want to discuss spiritual matters with their husbands. They want spiritual leaders, but they don't have one.

There is a lady I know whose two boys were baptized this weekend. The husband doesn't even like her going to church. He came to the baptisms, but he might as well have not even been there. It's heartbreaking for her.

Believers aren't better people than unbelievers. That's not the issue. The issue is that for a Christian, the most important thing in his life should be his faith, his relationship to God. To be married to someone with different values or a different faith is awful to a devoted Christian or a devoted Muslim or a devoted Jew. This is especially true because divorce is not an option for Christians except in cases of adultery or an unbelieving spouse who divorces you. Imagine not being able to discuss with your spouse the singlemost important issue in your life! Its a nightmare.

[Django]

django,

The church doesn't tell you whom to marry. The Bible does. The Christian has individual liberties as long as he lives within the confines of the Bible. You can't call God Lord of your life and then ignore what He says to do. That's hypocrisy.

Think of it this way. I believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins. I don't obey his commands because I'm some sort of slave or robot. I obey them out of love and gratitude.

My interpretation of that verse is not arbitrary. That is the plain and almost universally held interpretation of it. Judging for yourself the maturity level of a potential spouse is arbitrary. But it is no more arbitrary than deciding whether or not you are compatible politically, ethically, or morally. Before considering marriage, I need to make sure that my potential spouse has similar interests, such as hobbies, fitness, sports, etc. All of these decisions are arbitrary. I'm not "judging" the person as in good versus bad. I'm evaluating the compatibility of the person and myself. One of those compatibility issues needs to be spirituality.

All you have to do is attend one of the ladies' Bible studies at our church and listen to the hardships many of them deal with because of their unbelieving husbands or practically spiritually dead husbands. It's not that the men are bad people, but the wives want to go to church with their husbands. They want to discuss spiritual matters with their husbands. They want spiritual leaders, but they don't have one.

There is a lady I know whose two boys were baptized this weekend. The husband doesn't even like her going to church. He came to the baptisms, but he might as well have not even been there. It's heartbreaking for her.

Believers aren't better people than unbelievers. That's not the issue. The issue is that for a Christian, the most important thing in his life should be his faith, his relationship to God. To be married to someone with different values or a different faith is awful to a devoted Christian or a devoted Muslim or a devoted Jew. This is especially true because divorce is not an option for Christians except in cases of adultery or an unbelieving spouse who divorces you. Imagine not being able to discuss with your spouse the singlemost important issue in your life! Its a nightmare.
I see your point. Of course, one would only have a relationship with someone who shares your interests and ideas, but, on the other hand, differences spice up a relationship. No way would I want to have a relationship with someone who was a carbon copy of myself. In any case, I think your interpretation of this particular Bible verse is treading the line of being obnoxious to the extent that you are presuming that the church or the Bible or religious authority or whatever has the right to control an individual's personal relationships and social life. Like I said, no one does. This sort of thing is obnoxious in the extreme. Sorry, but that's my opinion. Sure, I follow Christian doctrine out of love for my savior, but I have my disagreements with your somewhat authoritarian interpretation of Christian doctrine.

[Yoda]

:rolleyes:Brilliant retort.

I can't imagine anyone worse for the country than Bush!

Howard Dean happens to be a qualified professional who seems to know what he is saying. He happens to be a medical doctor, which means that he is actually qualified, unlike Bush, who is not qualified in anything other than screwing up the world as we know it. Howard Dean also happens to be a responsible adult, which is more than anyone could ever say about Bush.

There is simply no comparison. George W. Bush is a spoiled rich kid who doesn't know what he is doing and who has essentially hijacked the US government to serve the interests of his friends and business partners. Howard Dean seems to me to be a conscientious politician who is genuinely concerned about the direction our country is headed.

How you could possibly make such an irresponsible, even absurd, statement is beyond me!According to polls, the majority of Americans make that same "irresponsible, even absurd" statement when asked to choose between the two candidates.

So what if Dean's a doctor? You call him a "qualified" but being a doctor only makes him qualified to remove my appendix; it doesn't mean a damned thing in regards to running a country. But even if you insist on sticking by such a silly standard, Bush has an MBA from Yale, which is far more applicable to the Presidency than an intimate familiarity with the human colon.

You can babble on with phrases like "responsible adult" and "spoiled rich kid," but it's ultimately all rhetoric...and very poor rhetoric, at that.

I see your point. Of course, one would only have a relationship with someone who shares your interests and ideas, but, on the other hand, differences spice up a relationship. No way would I want to have a relationship with someone who was a carbon copy of myself. In any case, I think your interpretation of this particular Bible verse is treading the line of being obnoxious to the extent that you are presuming that the church or the Bible or religious authority or whatever has the right to control an individual's personal relationships and social life. Like I said, no one does. This sort of thing is obnoxious in the extreme. Sorry, but that's my opinion. Sure, I follow Christian doctrine out of love for my savior, but I have my disagreements with your somewhat authoritarian interpretation of Christian doctrine.James never even implied that anyone needs to find a carbon copy of themselves; just that a lifelong, "one flesh" union between people with different religions is clearly inadvisable. The verse in question says the same; if you have a different interpretation, let's hear it, because I think the passage is quite clear.

And on a related note, James has been stunningly patient with you, despite your childish barrage of uninformed accusations. He's presented and supported his point of view clearly and respectfully, even in the face of despicable off-the-cuff insults. He deserves better than the responses you're giving him; even this last one, which doesn't even appear to make any kind of counter-case.

[Django]

According to polls, the majority of Americans make that same "irresponsible, even absurd" statement when asked to choose between the two candidates.
Well, that doesn't say very much for the majority of Americans, does it?


So what if Dean's a doctor? You call him a "qualified" but being a doctor only makes him qualified to remove my appendix; it doesn't mean a damned thing in regards to running a country. But even if you insist on sticking by such a silly standard, Bush has an MBA from Yale, which is far more applicable to the Presidency than an intimate familiarity with the human colon.
LOL! What it tells me is that Howard Dean is an intelligent, qualified professional. George W. Bush's MBA... :rolleyes: Give me a break! The only reason that Bush was even admitted to a university like Yale was because of his father's connections. Face it, man, Bush has no credibility at all vis-a-vis his qualifications or education.


You can babble on with phrases like "responsible adult" and "spoiled rich kid," but it's ultimately all rhetoric...and very poor rhetoric, at that.
No, I believe it is a dead-on statement of the facts.


James never even implied that anyone needs to find a carbon copy of themselves; just that a lifelong, "one flesh" union between people with different religions is clearly inadvisable. The verse in question says the same; if you have a different interpretation, let's hear it, because I think the passage is quite clear.
The passage leaves room for interpretation. It doesn't necessarily apply to marriage or relationships. In any case, like you said, the Bible gives advice. It doesn't dictate terms to you.


And on a related note, James has been stunningly patient with you, despite your childish barrage of uninformed accusations. He's presented and supported his point of view clearly and respectfully, even in the face of despicable off-the-cuff insults. He deserves better than the responses you're giving him; even this last one, which doesn't even appear to make any kind of counter-case.
I have hardly insulted or accused James in any way. I stated the fact that I was offended by his interpretation of the Bible. My responses to his statements are more than adequate. Your arrogance and bias as a forum admin, however, is getting on my nerves again! You just don't know when to shut the hell up!

[Yoda]

Well, that doesn't say very much for the majority of Americans, does it?I think it says that they pay attention to the economy, and Dean's dubious flip-flopping.

LOL! What it tells me is that Howard Dean is an intelligent, qualified professional. George W. Bush's MBA... :rolleyes: Give me a break! The only reason that Bush was even admitted to a university like Yale was because of his father's connections. Face it, man, Bush has no credibility at all vis-a-vis his qualifications or education.It's quite possible (maybe even probable) that his family name got him into that college, but his name isn't what helped him graduate. Getting in isn't all there is to it.

Regardless, you didn't really address the more pertinent point, which is that Howard Dean's status as a medical doctor does not speak to his qualifications as President of the United States (neither does his record of hypocriscy). I think I'll cast my vote on something a bit more relevant to the position than a detailed knowledge of the human digestive system.

No, I believe it is a dead-on statement of the facts."Spoiled rich kid" is not a factual statement, it is editorializing. And quite spiteful.

The passage leaves room for interpretation. It doesn't necessarily apply to marriage or relationships. In any case, like you said, the Bible gives advice. It doesn't dictate terms to you.It's the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Pieces of Advice. The Bible gives advice, sure, but it also lays a moral framework for us. Disobeying it is not a dealbreaker, but part of Christianity is at least acknowleding the validity of those rules, even when we break them, which you're not doing. If the verse doesn't apply to marriage or relationships, what does it apply to?

I have hardly insulted or accused James in any way. I stated the fact that I was offended by his interpretation of the Bible. My responses to his statements are more than adequate.Yeah, you didn't insult him. You just called him a "pseudo-Christian" and "raving fundamentalist" with a "KKK mentality" who "probably thinks of the Crusades as the pinnacle of human achievement" and is trying to "justify his own racism."

Your arrogance and bias as a forum admin, however, is getting on my nerves again! You just don't know when to shut the hell up!I'd be able to say these exact same things no matter what my rank in the community. And I'm not going to be held accountable for the fact that you apparently have no tolerance for questioning, though I will point out that it's the kind of trait you'd expect to find in a particularly close-minded individual.

[theshape82]

i noticed that django says vis-a-vis alot lately
did he just see matrix: reloaded or something?

[Django]

I think it says that they pay attention to the economy, and Dean's dubious flip-flopping.
The economy... we've already talked about that. I honestly can't see how Bush's tax cuts, which inordinately favor the wealthiest 1% of the nation to the tune of 40%, in addition to the $87 billion wasted in Iraq, could possibly be responsible for the recovery. There just is no grounds for attributing Bush with the credit for that, especially in the light of his past record vis-a-vis the Enron debacle, etc. And Dean's "dubious flip-flopping"--what exactly are you referring to? Or is this, more likely, nothing more than a meaningless sound-bite? Please elaborate.

It's quite possible (maybe even probable) that his family name got him into that college, but his name isn't what helped him graduate. Getting in isn't all there is to it.
It's also quite possible that his wealth and family name helped him graduate. There are numerous avenues available to people who have the money. And considering how literate he comes across as being, it seems more than likely that Bush paid his way through his education. Yale graduate... yeah, right! :rolleyes:

Regardless, you didn't really address the more pertinent point, which is that Howard Dean's status as a medical doctor does not speak to his qualifications as President of the United States (neither does his record of hypocriscy). I think I'll cast my vote on something a bit more relevant to the position than a detailed knowledge of the human digestive system.
lol! Very cute! However, the objection remains irrelevant. My point is that in order to be as qualified as he is, he must have the psychological and intellectual capabilities, and, especially, the character (to have gotten through all those years of med school) to make a more than adequate president.

"Spoiled rich kid" is not a factual statement, it is editorializing. And quite spiteful.
Oh, please! :rolleyes: It is an undeniable fact! I mean, look at the guy's connections--Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, one of his best buddies. Look at how he conducts his business in office--look at his tax cut policy, shamelessly favoring the rich. It all spells "spoiled rich kid". Add "shameless" to that.

It's the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Pieces of Advice. The Bible gives advice, sure, but it also lays a moral framework for us. Disobeying it is not a dealbreaker, but part of Christianity is at least acknowleding the validity of those rules, even when we break them, which you're not doing. If the verse doesn't apply to marriage or relationships, what does it apply to?
Hmm... the "Ten Commandments," eh? I'm glad you brought that up. The Bible also contains an interesting little passage about removing the plank from your own eye before removing the speck from your neighbor's eye. Let's take a look at Biblical teaching and compare it with the policies of the Bush administration. Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about lying and killing? Doesn't it say "Thou shalt not lie?" and "Thou shalt not kill?" How does starting an international war on false pretenses measure up to that? And isn't there something in the Bible about the poor being favored over the rich in the eyes of God? How does a tax cut that inordinately favor the wealthiest 1% of the nation measure up to that? To say nothing of the Enron connection. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah, you didn't insult him. You just called him a "pseudo-Christian" and "raving fundamentalist" with a "KKK mentality" who "probably thinks of the Crusades as the pinnacle of human achievement" and is trying to "justify his own racism."
Well, like I said, I was offended by his citation of a Bible verse in that particular context. I apologize if my response was somewhat extreme, but it reflects the degree of my being offended.

I'd be able to say these exact same things no matter what my rank in the community. And I'm not going to be held accountable for the fact that you apparently have no tolerance for questioning, though I will point out that it's the kind of trait you'd expect to find in a particularly close-minded individual.
I'm sorry, but that is a complete lie. I have endured your endless interrogation, or, should I say, inquisition, or, perhaps, cross-examination, for longer than anyone else in my position would.

[theshape82]

wow...it almost made me care that django is still here :rolleyes:

[Django]

wow...it almost made me care that django is still here :rolleyes:
Yeah, whatever! :rolleyes:

[Django]

Basically, what it comes down to is that if you earn less than $200,000 p.a. and support George W. Bush for President, you are either stupid or out of your bleeding mind! It's as simple as that! Bush doesn't give a rat's ass about you! So if you support him, you're just plain crazy!

Yoda: You come across as being an intelligent adult. Are you a multi-millionaire as well? Because, face it, if you are not, then your support of George W. Bush is asinine in the extreme... for all your erudition, you would prove yourself to being pretty darn stupid to have fallen for Bush's hollow rhetoric and pretenses.

http://http.dvlabs.com/greenwald/UNCOVERED_Trailer_270K_MP4.mov

http://www.truthuncovered.com/home.cfm

Robert Baer is a former CIA operative who spent twenty-five years in the Middle East serving in Iraq and Lebanon:
http://http.dvlabs.com/carolina/Baer.mov

Milt Bearden headed up the CIA's Soviet/Eastern European division as the Soviet Union was coming undone. He was the CIA station chief in Pakistan and was responsible for that agency's covert action program in support of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet-supported government:
http://http.dvlabs.com/carolina/MiltB.mov

Joe Wilson is the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. More recently, Wilson served as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council:
http://http.dvlabs.com/carolina/wilsonnewforinternet.mov

David Corn is the Washington editor of the Nation magazine and a Fox News Channel contributor. He has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, Harper's, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, Slate, Salon and many other publications. He is also the author of "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception" (Crown Publishers).www.bushlies.com:
http://http.dvlabs.com/carolina/Corn.mov

Former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman is currently the President of the Middle East Policy Council and Chairman of Projects International, Inc. He previously served as Assistant Secretary of Defense:
http://http.dvlabs.com/carolina/Freeman.mov

Karen Kwiatkowski is a recently retired Air Force Lt. Colonel who worked in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon:
http://http.dvlabs.com/carolina/Karen.mov

[LordSlaytan]

Hey... if you guys feel so insecure by my presence in this forum, I don't really need to waste my time in here! lol! I don't feel any compelling need to belong to your twisted little WASPs-only, "Lord of the Rings"-worshipping, George W. Bush supporting club! It's a big world out there! See ya!

This post was made at 4:15pm. You were lying again. :rolleyes:

[Django]

This post was made at 4:15pm. You were lying again. :rolleyes:
I wasn't lying at all. I feel no compulsion to belong to your clique of arrogant waspish LOTR devotees. However, I do feel compelled to add to the content of this thread.

[Yoda]

The economy... we've already talked about that.Yes, we have. And you either tapdance around it or, like last time, ignore it outright. You've made virtually no case whatsoever against Bush, economically.

I honestly can't see how Bush's tax cuts, which inordinately favor the wealthiest 1% of the nation to the tune of 40%, in addition to the $87 billion wasted in Iraq, could possibly be responsible for the recovery.You can't see how because I don't believe you are truly familiar with what each of his cuts entailed. His first cut, enacted in July of 2001, was set to give the poor and middle class their cuts immediately; even retroactively, hence the instant rebate checks. The wealthy were to get their end of that same cut several years down the road. In May of this year, however, Bush decided they should get their part of the cut sooner; he also cut taxes on stock dividends. The result? The very next quarter saw the fastest growth in 20 years, and the quarter in which the cut took place saw an upward revision.

The tax cuts have been for everyone; the wealthy just got theirs later. Regardless, even if they were getting an "inordinate" amount back, there's really no doubt that they put an "inordinate" amount in. We discussed this point not long ago and you yielded somewhat to the idea that perhaps America's wealthy are, in fact, overtaxed. I say they are. I also say that people fail to realize that rich people are a key component of a healthy economy.

As for Iraq; $87 billion is nowhere near enough to bring down an economy of this size and strength. It's not chump change, but relatively speaking, it's a drop in the bucket.

There just is no grounds for attributing Bush with the credit for that, especially in the light of his past record vis-a-vis the Enron debacle, etc. And Dean's "dubious flip-flopping"--what exactly are you referring to? Or is this, more likely, nothing more than a meaningless sound-bite? Please elaborate.The Enron debacle is not related to the recession or recovery. As for Dean's hypocriscy; I've linked you to examples before, so I shall do so again: Waffle Powered Howard (http://www.wafflepoweredhoward.com/). For someone who loves to assign reading material, you sure don't pay much attention to what others suggest you read.

It's also quite possible that his wealth and family name helped him graduate. There are numerous avenues available to people who have the money. And considering how literate he comes across as being, it seems more than likely that Bush paid his way through his education. Yale graduate... yeah, right! :rolleyes:You're not allowing for argument here; you've made up your mind and there's no way to convince you otherwise, so I'll simply state my opinion: he probably had help getting in, but probably had to work his way through it like everyone else. One does not need to highly literate or articulate to graduate with an MBA. He's an above-average public speaker in a position that usually boasts excellent public speakers. His lack of articulation is a very weak reason to doubt his entire college education. He got a 1200 on his SATs, and has won several large-scale political campaigns. There's no reason to suspect he's not capable of applying himself enough to graduate legitimately.

lol! Very cute! However, the objection remains irrelevant. My point is that in order to be as qualified as he is, he must have the psychological and intellectual capabilities, and, especially, the character (to have gotten through all those years of med school) to make a more than adequate president.His being a doctor proves that he's not a slovely idiot, sure. But it doesn't prove that he's by any means qualified for the job.

As for "character;" our last President made it through law school, presumably on his own, and he displayed less-than-stellar character during his tenure. Such things are not accurate measurements of character.

Oh, please! :rolleyes: It is an undeniable fact! I mean, look at the guy's connections--Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, one of his best buddies. Look at how he conducts his business in office--look at his tax cut policy, shamelessly favoring the rich. It all spells "spoiled rich kid". Add "shameless" to that.I've addressed the tax cut issue above (and in the past). And being friends with the owner of a large corporation does not make him a "spoiled rich kid." Rich, sure. But there's nothing wrong with being rich. To the contrary, it's usually something to admire a person for.

Hmm... the "Ten Commandments," eh? I'm glad you brought that up. The Bible also contains an interesting little passage about removing the plank from your own eye before removing the speck from your neighbor's eye. Let's take a look at Biblical teaching and compare it with the policies of the Bush administration. Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about lying and killing? Doesn't it say "Thou shalt not lie?" and "Thou shalt not kill?" How does starting an international war on false pretenses measure up to that? And isn't there something in the Bible about the poor being favored over the rich in the eyes of God? How does a tax cut that inordinately favor the wealthiest 1% of the nation measure up to that? To say nothing of the Enron connection. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.You're changing the subject. The topic is your self-proclaimed Christianity, and whether or not you're living up to it by potentially rejecting part of The Bible's morality. You're off in tangent-land here.

Well, like I said, I was offended by his citation of a Bible verse in that particular context. I apologize if my response was somewhat extreme, but it reflects the degree of my being offended.Glad you've apologized and all, but you did, in fact, deny having insulted or accused him. That's what I was referring to. You're free to do it, rude as it may be, but you almost invariably denying doing so in some form afterwards.

I'm sorry, but that is a complete lie. I have endured your endless interrogation, or, should I say, inquisition, or, perhaps, cross-examination, for longer than anyone else in my position would.You have not endured it; you've whined and bitched and moaned about it. Replying with a giant rhetoric-laden speech about my alleged character flaws is not being tolerant of questioning. When questioned, you become hostile and defensive; that's what I'm referring to.

Basically, what it comes down to is that if you earn less than $200,000 p.a. and support George W. Bush for President, you are either stupid or out of your bleeding mind! It's as simple as that! Bush doesn't give a rat's ass about you! So if you support him, you're just plain crazy!Rhetoric. Provide evidence, or else peddle this to someone with laxer standards of belief.

Yoda: You come across as being an intelligent adult. Are you a multi-millionaire as well? Because, face it, if you are not, then your support of George W. Bush is asinine in the extreme... for all your erudition, you would prove yourself to being pretty darn stupid to have fallen for Bush's hollow rhetoric and pretenses.

http://http.dvlabs.com/greenwald/UNCOVERED_Trailer_270K_MP4.mov

http://www.truthuncovered.com/home.cfmNo, I am not a multi-millionaire. And you'd do well to stop saying things like "face it." Doing so treats what you're saying as an established, proven, or undeniable fact. It most certainly isn't.

The fact that so many people -- both educated and not, informed and apathetic -- still support him should at least tell you that there's some merit to his positions. Disapprove all you want, but it takes a great deal of arrogance to declare that the majority of American voters are not only wrong (which happens), but absurdly so (which is rare). It's very difficult for most of the people to go so very far wrong all at once, which is why Democracy works. A reasonable person would conclude, then, that even if Bush is wrong, the matter is not half as clear-cut as you suggest.

[LordSlaytan]

I wasn't lying at all. I feel no compulsion to belong to your clique of arrogant waspish LOTR devotees. However, I do feel compelled to add to the content of this thread.

So your saying, "see ya!" didn't mean see ya? Oh, I see. It meant, "I think I'll stay after all!" *sigh* Too bad.

[Yoda]

I don't feel any compelling need to belong to your twisted little WASPs-only, "Lord of the Rings"-worshipping, George W. Bush supporting club!More lazy accusations. WASP = White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Pidzilla - Swedish Atheist. Dislikes Bush.
Caitlyn - Part Native-American. Has not declared a religion, to my knowledge.
The Silver Bullet - Agnostic. Dislikes Bush.
LordSlaytan - I believe he's an Agnostic. Dislikes Dubya.
Monkeypunch - Atheist. Despises Bush.
Tim/r66 - Part Mexican. Don't know his religion, if any. Dislikes Dubya.
Executive summary: characterizing this place as a WASP and/or Republican hangout makes no sense. You've tried many times to make us all out to be of one religion, race, or political persuasion, but you can't, because this is a very diverse community. You cannot peg your infamy to any shared prejudice or bias; because a dissaproval of how you conduct yourself is one of the very few things almost all of us have in common.

[Django]

As for Dean's hypocriscy; I've linked you to examples before, so I shall do so again: Waffle Powered Howard.
Yeah, I've read that stuff. It's an anthology of minor inconsistencies, many of which span a period of years, if not decades. Howard Dean doesn't claim to be a computer! If you study the words of any person over a period of several years, some inconsistencies are bound to creep into what he says.

But let's compare Howard Dean's inconsistencies to...

The Top 10 Lies of George W. Bush
compiled by David Corn, author of The Lies of George W. Bush (http://www.bushlies.com)

After I finished writing a 300-page book detailing a wide assortment of George W. Bush lies—scores of deceptions, if not many more (I haven’t counted)—my publisher requested that I produce a top-ten list of Bush lies. It would be good for marketing, I was told. In my mind, the "top" lies numbered far more than ten. And after all, the book has fourteen chapters. A list of ten would have to leave out entire swaths of this work, including sections on such important subjects as global warming, missile defense, environmental standards, Bush’s failed energy plan, and Afghanistan reconstruction. It also would have to rely upon a false equivalency in order to provide a full flavor of the book. One could easily argue that the ten most significant lies of the Bush presidency all related to his campaign for war in Iraq. But such a list would not be much good from a sales perspective, for the point of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception is to show that Bush has lied his way through most serious policy matters (as well as through his bid for the presidency). Thus, I’m forced, as I brutally boil down 120,000 words to ten bullet items, to rely upon lies that represent larger body of lies. So here is a painfully constructed list—arranged in quasi-chronological order--that demonstrates the severity and range of Bush’s serial lying but that only skims the surface. For the complete picture—as well as for all the details that support the below accusations—please read the book.

10. "I have been very candid about my past." Bush said this during a press conference a few days before Election Day 2000. He was then in the middle of media firestorm that followed the revelation that he had once been arrested for drunken driving. Of course, this statement was untrue. He uttered it while he was trying to explain why he had not been "candid" about his arrest record. And during the campaign, he had not been "candid" about other significant matters, including what seemed to be a missing year in his National Guard service (which did not jibe with what he wrote about his service in his autobiography) and his apparent (though unacknowledged) shift from supporting abortion rights in the late-1970s to opposing them in the 1990s. He also was not "candid" about the tax plans he had pushed while governor of Texas. He always referred to them as "tax cuts" and did not mention that his major tax proposal included both tax cuts for property owners and an increase in the sales tax and the creation of a new business tax.

9. "I’m a uniter not a divider." This was a Bush catchphrase, a mantra. It was shorthand for his claim that he engaged in positive, not negative, politics and could heal a political culture ripped apart by the bitter ideological and partisan combat of the Clinton years. Yet during the 2000 presidential campaign and the Florida fracas, Bush and his lieutenants engaged in down-and-dirty and divisive political maneuvers. Just ask Senator John McCain, Bush’s main Republican opponent, whose record on veterans affairs was falsely attacked by a Bush surrogate and who was accused falsely by the Bush campaign of opposing research for breast cancer. As president-elect, Bush nominated one of the most divisive ideologues in Washington, former Senator John Ashcroft, to be attorney general. During a pre-inauguration interview, Bush acknowledged that he expected Ashcroft to be a lightning rod. But would-be uniters-not-dividers do not shove lightning rods up the backsides of their opponents. Another example: during the 2002 congressional campaign, Bush accused Democrats—who differed with him on employment rules for the new Department of Homeland Security—of sacrificing national security for their own petty purposes. He did this to help elect Republicans to office. Such a move was well within his rights as a political player, but not the action of a fellow who cares more about uniting than dividing.

8. "My plan unlocks the door to the middle class of millions of hard-working Americans." All the available slots of this top-ten list could be filled by statements Bush made to sell his tax cuts at various points—on the campaign trail, in 2001 (for the first major tax-cuts battle), and in 2003 (for the second major tax-cuts battle). But I chose an assertion from 2001 that echoed statements from the campaign trail, that would be reprised in 2003, and that represented the best-sounding argument for his tax cuts. Bush frequently claimed his tax cuts would help low- and middle-income Americans, and in 2000 and 2001 he often spoke of a mythical single-mom waitress, making $22,000 or so, who would be guided into the middle-class by his tax cuts. The point was to make it seem as if he truly cared for hard-pressed Americans and that his tax cuts did indeed embody his promise of "compassionate conservatism." (By the way, I am not placing on this list Bush’s claim that he is a "compassionate conservative." That’s a rather relative term more suitable for judgment than truth-based evaluation.) But when the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche reviewed his tax plan for Time magazine during the 2000 campaign, it found that his beloved waitress would receive no reduction in her taxes. Zippo. In 2001, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that this waitress might gain $200 from Bush’s tax cuts if she managed to pull in $25,000 a year. But such a sum would not place her on the highway to the middle class. In fact, about 12 million low- and moderate-income families received no tax relief from Bush’s 2001 tax cuts (and millions of families were left out of his 2003 package). His plan unlocked few doors. Instead, about 45 percent of the 2001 package was slated to go to the top 1 percent of income earners. In 2003, Citizens for Tax Justice calculated that individuals earning between $16,000 and $29,000 would net about $99 from Bush’s proposed tax cuts. Again, not an amount that would cover the entrance fee for a middle-class life.

7. "This allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research." That was what Bush said during an August 9, 2001, speech, announcing his decision to permit the federal funding of stem cell research that only used stem cells lines that existed before his speech. Bush was presenting his policy as a Solomon-like compromise. Religious right leaders and the Catholic Church were opposed to all stem cell research because it uses cells extracted from five-day old blastocysts (or embryos) in a process that destroys the embryos. (These embryos usually are leftovers created by in vitro fertilization at fertility clinics and no longer needed by the couples for which they were produced). But many prominent Republican donors and patient advocacy groups supported stem cell research, noting that scientists believed that studying stem cells (which have the potential to grow into any one of the more than 200 different types of human cells) could lead to treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other terrible diseases. In his speech, Bush said that 60 stem cell lines already existed—"where the life and death decision has already been made"--and that these lines could support a vital and vibrant research effort. Consequently, he said, federally funding could be limited to underwriting research that employed only these lines. Bush was trying to have it both ways. He could appease his social conservative supporters by saying no to any federal support for new stem cell lines, and he could claim to support research that might potentially help millions of people. There was one problem. The 60 pre-existing lines did not exist. The number was closer to a dozen—if that—an amount that experts in the field did not consider sufficient for research purposes. And when scientists and media reports convincingly discredited Bush’s count—which Bush might have initially assumed to be correct—the Bush administration kept repeating its untruthful position. Sticking to the 60-lines fantasy (or lie) permitted Bush to avoid making an explicit decision to curtail stem cell research. But in effect that was what he had done without admitting it.

6. "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th." Bush said this in November 2002, as he appointed Henry Kissinger to be chairman of an independent 9/11 commission that Bush had orignially opposed. (Kissinger lasted two weeks in the job.) But Bush has not encouraged the uncovering of every detail. His administration did not turn over information to the congressional 9/11 inquiry about intelligence warnings the White House reviewed before 9/11. The administration also refused to say whether certain pre-9/11 intelligence warnings—including a July 2001 report noting that Osama bin Laden was poised to launch a "spectacular" attack "designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests"—were shared with Bush and what he did in response, if he had received them. Moreover, the administration claimed that Bush’s awareness of these warnings (not the warnings themselves) was classified information—an argument unprecedented in the modern history of national security secrets. Bush also refused to let the congressional inquiry release the portion of its final report that concerned connections between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi citizens or officials. By resorting to such secrecy—which happened to keep hidden information that might be embarrassing or inconvenient for the Bush administration--Bush made it impossible for investigators to "uncover every detail" and for the nation to "learn every lesson."

5. "[We are] taking every possible step to protect our country from danger." Bush said that a month after 9/11, and he has repeated that vow several times since then, including at the start of his recent month-long vacation at his Texas ranch. Every possible step? A reassuring line, but it is not true. Two years after the attacks, there still is no plan for enhanced security at the nation’s thousands of chemical plants. (Over a hundred of them handle chemicals that if released could threaten a million or so Americans.) According to the General Accounting Office, the Bush administration has not even "comprehensively assessed the chemical industry’s vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks." In October 2002, Tom Ridge, Bush’s chief homeland security official, said that voluntary regulations for the chemical industry would not suffice, but that is the policy the administration has been slowly pursuing. And less-than-everything has been the approach in other critical areas. A recent report from a Council on Foreign Relations task force—headed up by former Republican Senator Warren Rudman—says that not enough has been done to improve the abilities of first responders and that their basic needs will be underfunded by $100 billion over the next five years. The nation’s ports have asked for $1 billion to beef up security; the Bush administration has announced grants of $300 million. Various reports note that the federal government has not done all that is necessary to improve its biodefense capabilities. The administration has opposed efforts to mandate the screening of commercial cargo carried by passenger aircraft. (Most of this sort of cargo is not currently screened—creating one large security loophole.) So "every possible step" has not been taken.

4. "I first got to know Ken [Lay in 1994]." As the Enron scandal reached the White House in early 2002, Bush uttered this remark, claiming he had nothing to do with Lay until after winning the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. It was an apparent and clumsy effort to diminish his relationship with the now-disgraced Enron chief. But in1994, Lay and Enron had been leading contributors to Bush’s campaign. And Lay—long a patron of Bush’s father—had worked with Bush in political settings prior to 1994. In a pre-scandal interview, Lay noted he had been "very close to George W." for years before1994. (In the mid-1980s, Bush’s oil venture was in a partnership with Enron.) Bush also claimed that his administration had been of absolutely no help to Enron. That might have been true during the scam-based company’s final days. But in the months preceding that, the Bush administration had assisted Enron in a variety of ways. This included appointing individuals recommended by Lay as top energy regulators and opposing wholesale price caps on electricity during the California energy crisis, a move that came after Lay (whose electricity-selling company was using manipulative tactics to gouge California) urged the White House to block price caps.

3. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." And, "[Saddam Hussein is] a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda." These two Bush remarks go hand in hand, even though the first was said on March 17, 2003, two days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, and the other came during a November 7, 2002, press conference. Together they represented his argument for war: Hussein possessed actual weapons of mass destruction and at any moment could hand them to his supposed partners in al Qaeda. That is why Hussein was an immediate threat to the United States and had to be taken out quickly. But neither of these assertions were truthful. There has been much media debate over all this. But the postwar statements of Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, provide the most compelling proof. He has been conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, and he has told reporters that the intelligence on Hussein’s WMDs was full of caveats and qualifiers and based mostly on inferential or circumstantial evidence. In other words, it was not no-doubt material. He also has said that prewar intelligence reports did not contain evidence of links between Hussein and al Qaeda. The best information to date indicates that the prewar intelligence did not leave "no doubt" about WMDs and did not support Bush’s claim that Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda. Bush’s primary reason for war was founded on falsehoods

2. "We found the weapons of mass destruction." Bush issued this triumphant remark in late May 2003, while being interviewed by a Polish television reporter. He was referring to two tractor-trailers obtained by U.S. forces in Iraq. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded these vehicles were mobile bio-weapons plants. Yet they had found not a trace of biological agents on either. (And no bio-weapon facility could be scrubbed completely clean.) In subsequent weeks, it turned out that State Department analysts and even DIA engineering experts—as well as outside experts—did not accept the CIA and DIA conclusion, and some of these doubters believed the explanation of Iraqis who claimed the trucks were built to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. Whichever side might be ultimately right about the trailers, this all-important piece of evidence was hotly contested. It was hardly solid enough to support Bush’s we-found-them declaration or to justify a war.

1. "It’s time to restore honor and dignity to the White House." Bush said that many a time during the 2000 presidential campaign, and in at least one ad pledged to "return honor and integrity" to the Oval Office. See above--and read the book.

Also, check out the following links:

http://www.bushlies.com/excerpts.pdf

http://www.truthuncovered.com/transcript/index.cfm

[Django]

More lazy accusations. WASP = White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Pidzilla - Swedish Atheist. Dislikes Bush.
Caitlyn - Part Native-American. Has not declared a religion, to my knowledge.
The Silver Bullet - Agnostic. Dislikes Bush.
LordSlaytan - I believe he's an Agnostic. Dislikes Dubya.
Monkeypunch - Atheist. Despises Bush.
Tim/r66 - Part Mexican. Don't know his religion, if any. Dislikes Dubya.
Executive summary: characterizing this place as a WASP and/or Republican hangout makes no sense. You've tried many times to make us all out to be of one religion, race, or political persuasion, but you can't, because this is a very diverse community. You cannot peg your infamy to any shared prejudice or bias; because a dissaproval of how you conduct yourself is one of the very few things almost all of us have in common.
The irony in this list is that every one of the names you cited were, at one time, friendly towards me, until you managed to turn them all against me thanks to your relentless hate campaign directed against me. Also, you neglected to mention the names of all the wasps who are obviously sympathetic towards you. Also, the term "WASP" does not refer so much to practicing relgion as to cultural background, so many people who claim to be atheist or agnostic still qualify as WASP by virtue of their background... but that's besides the point.

[Yoda]

The irony in this list is that every one of the names you cited were, at one time, friendly towards me, until you managed to turn them all against me thanks to your relentless hate campaign directed against me.Almost none of them were "friendly" towards you. It'd be more accurate to say that they didn't hate you.

Regardless, I will defy you once again, as I have been for roughly half a year, to produce a single person who I turned against you. I've yet to receive an answer. You need to accept the fact that everyone who's weighed in on the matter has heard your side of the story, and rejected it based on their own reasoning.

Also, you neglected to mention the names of all the wasps who are obviously sympathetic towards you.Like who? Though even if I had, I cannot list everyone. So I listed some of the most active posters, the point of which, in case you've already forgotten, is to demonstrate that this is by no means some sort of ethnic club.

Also, the term "WASP" does not refer so much to practicing relgion as to cultural background, so many people who claim to be atheist or agnostic still qualify as WASP by virtue of their background... but that's besides the point.Even excluding religion, your claim is hollow. Our regulars include people from various countries, and minorities in terms of both race and sexual preference.

[Django]

Almost none of them were "friendly" towards you. It'd be more accurate to say that they didn't hate you.
No, it would be more accurate to say that they were quite friendly and amicable towards me and that I got along just fine with most, if not all, of them. And, for the most part, I still do.

Regardless, I will defy you once again, as I have been for roughly half a year, to produce a single person who I turned against you. I've yet to receive an answer. You need to accept the fact that everyone who's weighed in on the matter has heard your side of the story, and rejected it based on their own reasoning.
Oh, please! :rolleyes: You have single-handedly turned every single name listed against me by means of your perverse tactics of undermining my credibility by such methods as deleting and editing my posts and basically hounding me with your irrelevant arguments.

Like who? Though even if I had, I cannot list everyone. So I listed some of the most active posters, the point of which, in case you've already forgotten, is to demonstrate that this is by no means some sort of ethnic club.
Hey, there seem to be a huge coterie of posters on this forum, and you, yourself, have admitted at one point that the majority of them are WASPs. So let's not have more flip-flopping from you!

Even excluding religion, your claim is hollow. Our regulars include people from various countries, and minorities in terms of both race and sexual preference.
Yeah, well, they all look like WASPs to me... and for good reason, I imagine, for if they are not explicitly WASPs, they are probably WASP-sympathizers!

[Django]

This is an excerpt from the introduction of the book The Lies of George W. Bush (http://www.bushlies.com) by David Corn:

“Some people think it’s inappropriate to draw a moral line. Not me. For our children to have the lives we want for them, they must learn to say yes to responsibility . . . yes to honesty.”
—George W. Bush, June 12, 1999
George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission. He has misstated facts, knowingly or not. He has misled. He has broken promises, been unfaithful to political vows. Through his campaign for the presidency and his first years in the White House, he has mugged the truth—not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly to advance his career and his agenda. Lying greased his path toward the White House; it has been one of the essential tools of his presidency. To call the 43rd president of the United States a prevaricator is not an exercise of opinion, not an inflammatory talk-radio device. This insult is supported by an all too extensive record of self-serving falsifications. So constant is his fibbing that a history of his lies offers a close approximation of the history of his presidential tenure.

While politicians are often derided as liars, this charge should be particularly stinging for Bush. During the campaign of 2000, he pitched himself as a candidate who could “restore” honor and integrity to an Oval Office stained by the misdeeds and falsehoods of his predecessor. To brand Bush a liar is to negate what he and his supporters claimed as his most basic and most important qualification for the job; it is a challenge, in a sense, to his legitimacy. But it is a challenge fully supported by his words and actions, as well as those of the aides and officials who speak and act for him. The list of falsehoods is long. And only one man bears responsibility for that—the fellow who campaigned in an airplane christened Responsibility One.

Does the truth matter to Bush? No more than winning office, gaining a political advantage, or prevailing in a policy dispute. He has lied not only to cover up inconvenient matters or facts, or out of defensiveness when caught in a contradiction or an uncomfortable spot. He has engaged in strategic lying—that is, prevaricating about the fundamental elements of his presidency, including his basic goals and his own convictions. He has used lies to render himself and his ideas more enticing to voters and the public. And that raises the question: has lying been critical to his success? Were Bush and his proposals—unadorned by fiction—not sufficiently appealing?

Read the rest of the introduction here (http://www.bushlies.com/excerpts.pdf).

[Yoda]

No, it would be more accurate to say that they were quite friendly and amicable towards me and that I got along just fine with most, if not all, of them. And, for the most part, I still do.Oh yeah, you get along swimmingly with the community at-large.

Oh, please! :rolleyes: You have single-handedly turned every single name listed against me by means of your perverse tactics of undermining my credibility by such methods as deleting and editing my posts and basically hounding me with your irrelevant arguments.Why on earth would me arguing with you cause them to dislike you? And if it did, do you deny that every single one of them has heard your side of the story, and therefore have come to disapprove of your methods through their own faculties?

Hey, there seem to be a huge coterie of posters on this forum, and you, yourself, have admitted at one point that the majority of them are WASPs. So let's not have more flip-flopping from you!Not at all; I never said WASPs were not the majority here; but they're the majority in many other places, too. Given that fact, I think MoFo is reasonably diverse. Or at least diverse enough to demonstrate that the complaints surrounding you are not limited to any specific race or ideology. They're rooted in a common standard of social behavior and courtesy.

Yeah, well, they all look like WASPs to me... and for good reason, I imagine, for if they are not explicitly WASPs, they are probably WASP-sympathizers!You seem to be under the impression that being white is some sort of crime.

[Yoda]

This is an excerpt from the introduction of the book The Lies of George W. Bush (http://www.bushlies.com/) by David Corn:Do you have any idea how transparent it is that you're throwing up articles out of an inability to form a coherent argument on your own? It takes virtually no skill in debate nor knowledge of political realities to do what you're doing right now.

[Django]

:laugh: Still harping on about the irrelevancies, aren't you? And conveniently ignoring the issues, as usual.

[LordSlaytan]

Django,

You turned me against you. Actually, I never really liked or disliked you until recently. The reason I wish you to leave is because I see you as a virus to this community. You hardly ever have anything worthwhile to say, usually your posts are just to cause strife (which you deny, of course) or they are there just to aggravate (which you also deny). You constantly say you don't need us, you don't care what we think, and you are leaving for good, but it's apparent to all of us that:

a) You do need the attention given to you by the members of this forum. Especially Chris, Caitlyn, and Matt, who you will goad into an argument if there is none already in the works.

b) You do care what we think because you cannot stop yourself from posting responses trying to defend yourself by claiming persecution and mob-like mentality. Funny thing about that though; you could just try to be a little less accusatory and argumentative and people may warm to you.

c) You have said multiple times that you are leaving for good. 4:15pm today was your last announcement of that very subject. Yet, less than an hour later you are posting again in an argumentative manner and denying that is what you meant...WHEN YOUR QUOTE, WORD FOR WORD, IS ONE POST ABOVE YOUR DENIAL!

I cannot stand your style. You turn me off. Your presence disrupts countless threads that had some sort of point before you arrive to turn it into another Django thread. You always cry that it's not your fault, though by your very essence, you are offensive. One typewritten line from you is like a corrosive poison that disintegrates a thread and alters it to the point of obscurity. You act like we are all ignorant saps that cannot see what you are doing, when we all can, and despise the way you rob so many threads of its integrity. I do not like you. I have defended you in the past, but I didn't like you then either. I really mean what I say when I say please leave the forum. Perhaps what we should all do since you carefully stay within bounds of banishment, is to do a mass ignore user of your name. Then we can all pretend like you're gone at least.

[Django]

Do you have any idea how transparent it is that you're throwing up articles out of an inability to form a coherent argument on your own? It takes virtually no skill in debate nor knowledge of political realities to do what you're doing right now.
Well, you're the one who:
Demanded documentary validation of the claims I had made in the past.
Posted a link to minor inconsistencies in Howard Dean's campaign for President

[Yoda]

:laugh: Still harping on about the irrelevancies, aren't you? And conveniently ignoring the issues, as usual.Funny how the issues on which you know nothing of are always the "irrelevant" ones. Funnier still that you're the one who's always bringing them up. I've done nothing but reply to your statements. I've also been arguing with you on the merits (or lack thereof) of both Bush and Dean for maybe a dozen posts thus far. Short-term memory problem?

[Django]

Django,

You turned me against you. Actually, I never really liked or disliked you until recently. The reason I wish you to leave is because I see you as a virus to this community. You hardly ever have anything worthwhile to say, usually your posts are just to cause strife (which you deny, of course) or they are there just to aggravate (which you also deny). You constantly say you don't need us, you don't care what we think, and you are leaving for good, but it's apparent to all of us that:

a) You do need the attention given to you by the members of this forum. Especially Chris, Caitlyn, and Matt, who you will goad into an argument if there is none already in the works.

b) You do care what we think because you cannot stop yourself from posting responses trying to defend yourself by claiming persecution and mob-like mentality. Funny thing about that though; you could just try to be a little less accusatory and argumentative and people may warm to you.

c) You have said multiple times that you are leaving for good. 4:15pm today was your last announcement of that very subject. Yet, less than an hour later you are posting again in an argumentative manner and denying that is what you meant...WHEN YOUR QUOTE, WORD FOR WORD, IS ONE POST ABOVE YOUR DENIAL!

I cannot stand your style. You turn me off. Your presence disrupts countless threads that had some sort of point before you arrive to turn it into another Django thread. You always cry that it's not your fault, though by your very essence, you are offensive. One typewritten line from you is like a corrosive poison that disintegrates a thread and alters it to the point of obscurity. You act like we are all ignorant saps that cannot see what you are doing, when we all can, and despise the way you rob so many threads of its integrity. I do not like you. I have defended you in the past, but I didn't like you then either. I really mean what I say when I say please leave the forum. Perhaps what we should all do since you carefully stay within bounds of banishment, is to do a mass ignore user of your name. Then we can all pretend like you're gone at least.
Your statements above are totally out of whack. My presence does not "disrupt countless threads" because I pretty much stick to my own threads. On the contrary, Yoda is the one who has been consistently disrupting all my threads.

Secondly, your words strike me as coming from a severely prejudiced, hate-filled frame of mind. You obviously have some deep antipathy towards me for some reason, which has led you to make such extreme comments. You perceive me as a "virus", using Nazi-like metaphors to antagonize against me. On the contrary, I am a victim of a relentless campaign of hatred that has been directed against me for no conceivable reason. I'm simply here to express my opinion and to stand by my words. I think I deserve that right, as does every free individual in this country. Your hate-filled words against me are only seeking to deny me my civil liberties.

[Django]

Anyway, I've said my piece! You jerks can continue to rant and rave all you like! Doesn't affect me in the least! :D The truth will set you free! You may choose to ignore it, but sooner or later it will creep up behind you and bite you in the ass! So watch out! ;) :D

[Yoda]

Demanded documentary validation of the claims I had made in the past.I did not demand any anti-Bush article you could find. I've generally demanded documentation of specific claims, generally economic. You're throwing anything and everything up here, and when I do take the time to trudge through it, I often find that it has little to no bearing on the specific topic of discussion.

Posted a link to minor inconsistencies in Howard Dean's campaign for PresidentHave you really read them? Because many of them are anything but minor. He's even contradicted himself in regards to the War in Iraq...which is one of the cornerstones of his campaign against President Bush.

[LordSlaytan]

Your statements above are totally out of whack. My presence does not "disrupt countless threads" because I pretty much stick to my own threads. On the contrary, Yoda is the one who has been consistently disrupting all my threads.

Secondly, your words strike me as coming from a severely prejudiced, hate-filled frame of mind. You obviously have some deep antipathy towards me for some reason, which has led you to make such extreme comments. You perceive me as a "virus", using Nazi-like metaphors to antagonize against me. On the contrary, I am a victim of a relentless campaign of hatred that has been directed against me for no conceivable reason. I'm simply here to express my opinion and to stand by my words. I think I deserve that right, as does every free individual in this country. Your hate-filled words against me are only seeking to deny me my civil liberties.

My God!!! You are so pathetic!!! Oh my goodness...:laugh:

First off...virus is a common usage word that's been around a long time before Nazi propoganda decided it worked for them.

Secondly...again you claim victimization. Can you not see that it is not what you believe, but the way you present yourself that makes people act so coldly towards you? You are irritating and banal. You squirm around in denial about everything that is obvious about you. You remind me of a child who will swear until the belt comes off that the lamp broke itself. IT IS YOUR PERSONALITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I could give a rip about your ethnicity, political and religious beliefs, or sexual orientation. You are a jerk. THAT'S what I don't like about you.

And lastly...I'm denying you jack buddy, actually, I'm giving you what you want...another chance at martyrdom.

Christ! I'm going to puke reading the bull**** that this guy spews. Am I the only one that cringes reading some of this crap??!!??

[Yoda]

Your hate-filled words against me are only seeking to deny me my civil liberties.An individual's civil liberties include the right to private property. And guess what? This message board qualifies. It is a piece of property, on which you have no claim or right.

More importantly, it would only be a denial of your liberties if you were forcibly prevented from posting on a publicly-provided board. As it stands, someone is trying to convince you to leave a privately-provided board. You're tossing out desperate, sensationalist accusations, as is your custom.

You jerks can continue to rant and rave all you like! Doesn't affect me in the least! :D:rotfl:

After 1,600 posts and 10 months he still tries to pretend it doesn't really matter to him. Right. :laugh: Remember this?

"It may not seem like much to you, but it is personally very damaging to me--and a serious issue in my life"

[Django]

Have you really read them? Because many of them are anything but minor. He's even contradicted himself in regards to the War in Iraq...which is one of the cornerstones of his campaign against President Bush.
Have you even looked at the source materials these so-called citations are taken from? Because most of them are distortions of Dean's words, taken way out of context. Especially the comments regarding the Iraq war. Doesn't say very much for your dubious source material.

[Django]

An individual's civil liberties include the right to private property. And guess what? This message board qualifies. It is a piece of property, on which you have no claim or right.
So what you're saying is that because you own this message board, in order to participate in here, one has to be a yes-man. That is the sum of my argument against you! Your administration of your forum is biased and does not allow for the free and open exchange of ideas. It is biased and mismanaged.

More importantly, it would only be a denial of your liberties if you were forcibly prevented from posting on a publicly-provided board. As it stands, someone is trying to convince you to leave a privately-provided board. You're tossing out desperate, sensationalist accusations, as is your custom.
Hey, I'm only replying to strongly worded comments directed against me. In any case, I don't see the point of wasting my time in a message-board largely populated by racist hate-mongers. So I'm gone!

[LordSlaytan]

Screw you, *******!
***tTwwWWaaAnNNGggggG***
Damn, that's some nerve you've got there!



So I'm gone!

Posted at 9:33PM. We'll see when he post's next.

[Yoda]

Have you even looked at the source materials these so-called citations are taken from? Because most of them are distortions of Dean's words, taken way out of context. Especially the comments regarding the Iraq war. Doesn't say very much for your dubious source material.Dean said he believes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. As you are so fond of pointing out, we've not found any. Yet I haven't heard you chastise him for making this claim. He also said he supported Bush's policy in regards to North Korea this year, and then calls the U.S. policy towards it "incoherent, inconsistent and dangerously disengaged." This one is key, because it shows that he's apt to criticize things he's shown agreement with purely to have something negative to say about his opponent.

[Yoda]

So what you're saying is that because you own this message board, in order to participate in here, one has to be a yes-man. That is the sum of my argument against you! Your administration of your forum is biased and does not allow for the free and open exchange of ideas. It is biased and mismanaged.I said no such thing. What I said is that this "civil liberties" nonsense has no bearing in reality, because this website is private property, and even if it wasn't, trying to persuade you to leave would not in any way be any denial of your rights. Like I said: sensationalist and desperate.

We've been over the yes-man blather before; many of the forum's most popular members think I'm dead-wrong on a host of issues. And they say so.

Hey, I'm only replying to strongly worded comments directed against me. In any case, I don't see the point of wasting my time in a message-board largely populated by racist hate-mongers. So I'm gone!I'd really like to believe this.

[LordSlaytan]

Well, I'm just glad I'm not some fat, ugly couch potato like you, dawg! See ya!

12 minutes. That's a record...dawg.

Alright, let's try again. 9:45PM.

[Django]

:rotfl:

After 1,600 posts and 10 months he still tries to pretend it doesn't really matter to him. Right. :laugh: Remember this?

"It may not seem like much to you, but it is personally very damaging to me--and a serious issue in my life"
You flatter yourself if you think I could care less what you think.

[LordSlaytan]

2 hours. Pathetic. :rolleyes:

[Yoda]

You flatter yourself if you think I could care less what you think.And yet here you are. Your repeated presence and multitude of posts and arguments contradicts you.

[LordSlaytan]

This guy couldn't take a hint, and now he can't figure out a general concensus slapping him in the face. Kid in a playground with a runny nose and dirt on his face screaming at the top of his lungs, "AM TOO!!!! ARE NOT!!!!"

I also think it's fairly hilarious that Django gave me negative rep points stating that I am a, "Disgusting Racist Pig!!!".

[TheOne]

This guy couldn't take a hint, and now he can't figure out a general concensus slapping him in the face. Kid in a playground with a runny nose and dirt on his face screaming at the top of his lungs, "AM TOO!!!! ARE NOT!!!!"

I also think it's fairly hilarious that Django gave me negative rep points stating that I am a, "Disgusting Racist Pig!!!".



cant we all just get a long

[Caitlyn]

I also think it's fairly hilarious that Django gave me negative rep points stating that I am a, "Disgusting Racist Pig!!!".


Doesn’t surprise me… it's typical Djerko… everyone is a racist but him… :rolleyes:

[Yoda]

More unanswered arguments...I guess copying-and-pasting articles is a lot easier than forming a cohesive ideology.

[Piddzilla]

I also think it's fairly hilarious that Django gave me negative rep points stating that I am a, "Disgusting Racist Pig!!!".

You're my disgusting racist pig, damnit! Djangs! HANDS OFF!!! :mad:

[Django]

You're my disgusting racist pig, damnit! Djangs! HANDS OFF!!! :mad:
He's all yours, Piddz!

[Piddzilla]

He's all yours, Piddz!

Not interested in a little manage a trois, no?

[Django]

Not interested in a little manage a trois, no?
lol! Thanks, but no thanks...

[Piddzilla]

lol! Thanks, but no thanks...

What, you have anything against heterosexual guys?

[Django]

What, you have anything against heterosexual guys?
It's just that I'm monogamous by nature.

I'm a one-woman guy... (more or less...)