As Worldcom execs take the fifth and both Congress and the Dubya administration prep for damage control (for the latter, in a Wall Street speech tomorrow,) White House strategists look desperately for a way to avoid being hoisted by their own petard. Says Dubya of his Vice-President, who’s in deep with the Halliburton scandal: “There are good actors and there are bad actors; he’s one of the good guys.” May work for terrorists, George…doesn’t work so well for executive profiteers.
Category: GOP Culture of Corruption
Corporate Finance Reform.
Meanwhile, John McCain weighs in on the corporate scandals and calls for the resignation of SEC Chairman (Dubya flunky) Robert Pitt. (Via the swankily redesigned Medley.)
Hitting .333.
Frank Rich weighs in with another discerning op-ed on Enrongate, in which he notes that the Bush administration has significant ties to FIVE of the companies currently under scrutiny – Enron, Halliburton, Andersen, KMPG and Merrill Lynch (which is why, of course, Dubya keeps talking about WorldCom.)
Grand Moff Harken.
Just as the Bush White House tries to sidestep the corporate scandals, Dubya changes his story about a Martha Stewart-esque stock dump he made as director of Harken Energy Corporation in 1990, two months before the shares went sour.
Returning Fire.
Frustrated by the FEC gutting of campaign finance reform last week, John McCain promises to hold up FEC appointments in the Senate until a more reform-sympathetic panel is appointed. Turns out Dubya’s kept a ringer on the panel a year beyond his term, Democrat Karl Sandstrom, expressly for the purpose of stifling reform. (He appointed a new Republican to the FEC in March.) Hmmm…why am I picturing Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell in a smoke-filled room?
Truckin’.
Republican candidates for the South Carolina governorship try to outredneck each other. Only in Carolina would a candidate brag that he “stood up against the NAACP when no one else would.” Unbelievable.
The Washington Ten.
Speaking of which, if you can’t beat ’em, blacklist ’em. The GOP attempts to filter out Democrats from the lobbyist pool.
Lobbyists Strike Back.
The “feeding frenzy is over,” according to Phil Gramm, and corporate lobbyists are breathing a sigh of relief. The impetus stalls for post-Enron corporate reform in Congress.