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CBS News poll 022706: Bush at all time low of 34% approval down from 42% last month. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the job the president is
doing. For the first time in this poll, most Americans say the president does
not care much about people like themselves. Fifty-one percent now think he
doesn't care, compared to 47% last fall. Just 30% approve of
how Mr. Bush is handling the Iraq war, another all-time low. Pollster John Zogby on new military survey: A first-ever survey of U.S. troops on the ground fighting a war overseas has revealed
surprising findings, not the least of which is that an overwhelming majority of
72% of American troops
in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year.
Further, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows that
more than one in four (29%) thought the U.S. should pull its troops
immediately. The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne
College's Center for Peace and Global Studies, also showed that another 22% of
the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S.
should leave Iraq in the next 6 months. One in every five troops - 21% - said
troops should be out between 6 and 12 months. Nearly a quarter - 23% - said
they should stay "as long as they are needed." Among all
respondents, 26% said they were on their first tour of duty in Iraq, while 45%
said they were on their second tour, and 29% said they were in Iraq for a third
time, or more. Three of every four were male respondents, with 63% under the
age of 30. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-zogby/on-a-new-poll-of-us-sol_b_16497.html The Washington
Times (aka Moonie Times) online Insight
reports that Cheney is expected to retire after 2006 midterm elections, an
increasing liability for the GOP. “Cheney's
next crisis could take place by the end of the year, the sources said. They
said the White House was expecting Cheney to defend himself against charges
from his former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, that the VP ordered him to relay
classified information. Such a charge could lead to a congressional
investigation and even impeachment proceedings. "Nothing will happen until
after the congressional elections," a GOP source said. "After that,
there will be significant changes in the administration and Cheney will
probably be part of that." Bush, the sources said, has rejected the advice
from circles close to his father, the former president, to dismiss Cheney. They
say Mr. Bush has long regarded Mr. Cheney as the experienced hand in national
security, as well as being trusted by the conservative wing of the GOP. "The
Libby case is far more lethal than the hunting accident,"
another GOP source said. "If the heat gets too much, Cheney might say his
health requires him to leave office. Whatever happens, the president will make
sure it's handled delicately."
http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/cheney3.htm And don’t forget that
other harbinger of bad karma to boomerang…. Enron
Trial Avoids the Real Rip-Off More than 400 pages of
documents released by federal energy regulators suggest that former Enron
chairman Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeff Skilling were aware that the
company's west coast traders may have broken the law by using manipulative
trading tactics in California to boost Enron's profits during the height of the
state's power crisis. Skilling and Lay are
being prosecuted for securities fraud and numerous other charges in a federal
courthouse in Houston. A judge has prohibited prosecutors from introducing
recorded evidence related to the California energy crisis in the case against
Skilling and Lay, saying it's too "prejudicial." The
transcripts
are from recorded conversations between Enron traders, company attorneys and
Enron's public and governmental affairs departments that took place at the height
of the California electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001. The material provides
the most vivid portrait to date of the company's questionable trading practices
that ignited California's power crisis, and led to a financial meltdown at the
company which Lay and Skilling hid from securities regulators and investors,
and which both men are now being prosecuted for. In the spring of 2001,
one of Enron's most powerful Washington lobbyists met with several members of
the Bush administration to talk about Enron's opposition to price controls on
electricity sales in California. The lobbyist was told
by Tim Belden, the mastermind
behind Enron's notorious trading scams, less than a year earlier that Belden
and other Enron traders who worked in Portland, Oregon, spent the better part
of 2000 and 2001 breaking the rules governing California's power market
"when opportunities presented themselves to make money." "There's
really two - two things that happened - two areas ... in terms of things
blowing up," Belden told Richard Shapiro,
Enron's vice president of regulatory affairs and one of the company's
lobbyists, in August 2000. "One is our day-ahead scheduling practices and
then the other is our real-time operations. Um, we've been doing and have been
doing for two years a lot of activity in, you know, there's black, there's
white and there's gray. Um, we have been endeavoring into the gray area when
opportunities present themselves to make money. We have now moved out of the
gray area into the clearly what's legal area ... not even legal, but what's,
um, there's like the letter of the law, the letter of the rules and the spirit
of the rules. Um, we've been exploiting the letter of the rules - or literally
interpreted - interpreting the rules, um, in California when we can make money
..." California's
electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers and businesses from the summer of
2000 to June of 2001, resulting in three days of rolling blackouts and hundreds
of emergency power alerts and forcing the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas
& Electric, into bankruptcy. The crisis cost the state more than $70
billion. In the conversation
between Shapiro and Belden, Shapiro urged Belden to pull back on his trading
schemes in California - such as artificially clogging transmission lines, sending power out
of state and submitting false data to the state's grid operator - and to begin working more closely
within the law because of the severe political risk associated with Enron and
the billions of dollars the company reaped from California's electricity crisis
to fill its coffers. But despite the fact that Shapiro was in the
know about Enron's questionable trading practices, he continued to lobby
powerful Washington lawmakers, urging them not to fix the market problems in
California, saying the crisis was the state's fault for not building enough
power plants, according to public documents from the House Governmental Affairs
Committee. Belden, however, told
Shapiro that he would continue to exploit the rules in California, even though
he might be breaking the law, as long as it didn't cause the lights to go out
in the state. He added that if Skilling were forced to testify before a
commission about the inner workings of the West Coast trading desk it could
hurt Belden's career. "I know there's a
lot of political risk and I know that we got a ton of money in our book and
then - if Jeff Skilling ah, has to go in front of some commission and explain
the activities of the West Power Group, that's probably not so great for my
career," Belden told Shapiro, according to the transcripts. This is the first
revelation that an Enron lobbyist was briefed on the company's manipulative
trading practices, and it appears likely that other executives were also in the
know. Shapiro wielded enormous influence with members of the Bush
administration. On May 23, 2001, he met with White House economic adviser Robert McNally and Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham's chief of staff about Bush's National Energy Policy and Enron's
opposition to price controls in California. The meeting between
Shapiro and McNally came at a crucial time for Enron. The company's most senior
executives recognized that Enron stood to lose hundreds of millions in profits
and its standing on Wall Street if California lawmakers were successful in
getting federal energy regulators to rewrite the rules in California's power
market. Judging by the events that followed, it appears that Bush and Cheney
were in Enron's corner. Six days before
Shapiro met with McNally and Abraham's staff, on May 17, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by the television news program
Frontline. When asked if companies like Enron were behaving like a
"cartel" and manipulating the California power market, Cheney
responded with a resounding "No." "The
problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things - an unwise
regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they're trapped
from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of
the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves ..." That same day, May 17, 2001, Cheney and Bush unveiled the
details of the National Energy Policy, in which Cheney adopted seven of Ken Lay's suggestions, according to published reports. Had the
intimate details of Enron's trading schemes been known to California officials,
it most certainly would have derailed Bush's energy policy, which called for
keeping many of deregulation's key components in place. A few months earlier,
Sue Mara, an Enron governmental affairs employee, phoned Bob Badeer, an Enron
trader, with a question from Ken Lay. Following public comments by Governor Gray Davis about the state of
California's energy crisis, Mara
said Lay personally wanted to know if Davis's comments had affected the price
of power in the forward market. That Lay would be interested in such minute
details contradicts the former chairman's public statements that he had no idea
about the shenanigans taking place inside Enron. California signed an
unprecedented $42 billion in long-term electricity contracts with more than
two-dozen energy companies to put the brakes on skyrocketing wholesale power
prices. The state no longer bought the bulk of its power needs in the open
market, where companies like Enron earned its windfall. In June 2001, shortly
after the details of the long-term contracts were revealed, Skilling and Lay
summoned Belden to Houston to discuss the company's West Coast trading
division, which Belden said in one recorded conversation accounted for 80
percent of Enron's profits in 2000 and 2001, to determine if anything could be
done to salvage the operation, according to one person working with the Justice
Department on the investigation. It's unclear what came
out of that meeting, but two months later Jeff Skilling resigned from Enron.
Just three months earlier, on March 9, 2001, he flew to Portland to take Belden
and other senior traders out to dinner at Higgins restaurant to celebrate
Enron's successful first quarter earnings. In the transcripts released by FERC,
traders said they made upwards of $10 million a day in 2000 by utilizing many
of the trading scams developed by Belden. What's surprising
about those scams Enron traders pulled in California is how well-known it was
within the company's Houston headquarters, according to the transcripts.
Indeed, one public affairs official at Enron instructed a trader based in the
company's Portland, Oregon trading division to lie to a Wall Street Journal
reporter who wanted to write a story about Enron's lucrative trading desk. "The thing is anything they'd ask you, you'd have to
lie because you wouldn't want to tell them the truth," an
unidentified Enron employee in the company's governmental affairs department
said to an Enron trader. The governmental affairs employee then attempts to
talk the trader out of doing the interview with the Journal. "I wouldn't
do it (the interview). 'Cause first of all, you'd have to tell 'em a lot of
lies, cause if you told 'em the truth..." “I'd
get in trouble," the trader says, interrupting the governmental affairs
employee. "You'd
get in trouble," the governmental affairs employee said. Perhaps the most
prescient part of the transcript is when John
Forney, a senior Enron trader who worked closely with Belden and was
indicted on conspiracy charges, fears that he may be sent to jail. In a conversation
Forney had with Belden, Forney seems to have misgivings about one scheme he
just pulled that involved California and Canada. Belden seems to brush
off Forney's concerns, according to the transcripts, and Forney says he can't
believe that none of his Enron colleagues seem to be concerned about the
possibility of going to jail as a result of the schemes he and other traders
have pulled. "I only want to
go to jail once," Forney says. "Yeah,"
Belden says. "Once in this country." Whether Skilling and
Lay join their one-time trading star remains to be seen. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022706A.shtml |
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