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Category Archives: Issues

Bigger houses for flatter incomes

Friday, August 10, 2007

According to CNN, there is talk in Congress about bailing out the mortgage industry. Of course, all the talk is about directing help toward the crooks and liars who created the crisis in the first place; the homeowners who were suckered into borrowing too much money will get nothing. What I found sort of unbelievable […]

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Channeling Condi

Friday, July 27, 2007

When I was in college, I took a sociology course from a very bright professor, who told us that certain industries, including banking, avoid hiring intelligent people because they ask too many questions. It certainly does seem that the folks who have brought us he latest housing bubble are none too smart. Consider Angelo R. […]

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House votes contempt, but …

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The House Judiciary Committee has voted to hold Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolton in contempt. The vote was along party lines. Yet more evidence that the system of checks and balances has been all but destroyed. One must wonder whether the White House has conveyed more than brilliant legal arguments to the House Republicans in […]

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Outrage fatigue closing in on the tax front-what else is new

Friday, July 13, 2007

Life is tough for pundits like Paul Krugman. Yesterday’s outrage seems mild by comparison with today’s. If you write your column a day or two ahead of deadline you risk writing about yesterday’s scandal. Case in point, today Krugman takes the Democrats to task for slowly walking away from mandating fair taxation of hedge fund […]

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NY Firefighters take on Giuliani

Thursday, July 12, 2007

The New York Times published an article on the New York Firefighters video piece on Rudy Giuliani. Here’s the video itself. You wonder, sometimes, how people like Giuliani manage to sleep. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYEEO-58I[/youtube] By the way, the Times, along with a number of other media outlets, somehow forgot to mention that “Richard Shierer, a former firefighter […]

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Candid advice to Democrats-no charge

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Harriet Miers, she who would have been a Supreme Court justice (could we have done worse than we did?) is going to refuse to even appear to a Congressional hearing to which she has been subpoenaed, because George Bush has invoked “executive privilege” and instructed her not to appear. Congressional Democrats are outraged. After all, […]

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I’m outraged, how about you?

Monday, July 2, 2007

George Bush has commuted Libby’s prison sentence because two and a half years in prison is excessive for merely perverting the course of justice and committing perjury. This is merely the last in a “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinc[ing] a design to reduce [us] under absolute Despotism.” . […]

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Big Boys

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

This morning’s Times has an interesting article (Side Deals in a Gray Area) about a new trend among the financial criminal class: While regulators have focused on the buying of options or stocks on leaks about deals before they become public, there is another, more subtle way that big investors can trade while possessing information […]

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Deja vu in Iran

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Something to file away in case Bush is crazy enough to start pumping up a war with Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Friday said Iran has not hampered the IAEA’s inspection of Iran’s nuclear facility. “The information… is untrue,” IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire told a press conference when asked about recent reports […]

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Kickbacks for doctors

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Some time ago I was involved in a horrible case in which our client was accused of paying kickbacks to the representative of a firm that bought products from him. In essence, the buyer got a hidden percentage of each payment that the firm made to our client. I hated the case with a passion, […]

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