When Rick Scott threw his little Tea Party hat into the Florida Governor's Race, I thought for sure Floridians would remember the Columbia/HCA debacle, which he managed to escape from with a resignation and no criminal charges. Basically, he bailed out and let the company pick up the pieces by paying the heftiest fine for Medicare fraud assessed in history.
After moving on from Columbia/HCA, he started Solantic, another health services company. Unsurprisingly, Solantic also faced fraud charges, this time for submitting falsified medical records to the state.
As part of the lawsuits against Solantic, Scott gave a deposition. The video above is a compilation of that deposition's greatest hits, courtesy of Rick Scott.
There comes a point where it isn't mere coincidence anymore, where lawsuits aren't just "part of the cost of doing business", and where a pattern emerges. What that pattern tells me is that Rick Scott is not qualified for public office, because he is a scofflaw who has no problem breaking laws to pump up his bottom line. How would that square with governing a state like Florida?
Before he was rounded up and sent to jail for allegedly bilking people out of billions, Allen Stanford was quite the jetsetter. A 2006 cable relating table conversation at a highbrow event in Barbados gives a little insight into Stanford's narcissism, and the Ambassador's ambivalence about their chat. There's something almost Alice-in-Wonderland-like about the whole thing.
Grandiose schemes:
In response to the Ambassador’s question about his business ventures, he discussed his plans to develop a number of homes in the US$10-20 million range and a world class golf course on a small island off the coast of Antigua.
[...]
Stanford’s second big venture in the Caribbean is investment in new airplanes for his Caribbean Star airline. (Note: The recent Federal Aviation Administration Category One rating for the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States means Antigua-based Caribbean Star can begin flights to the U.S. See Ref A for more details. End Note). He expects to be running about 400 flights a week throughout the Caribbean, including to San Juan and Caracas, but it is unclear when this expansion will occur.
Keeping a distance:
Embassy officers do not reach out to Stanford because of the allegations of bribery and money laundering. The Ambassador managed to stay out of any one-on-one photos with Stanford during the breakfast. For his part, Stanford said he preferred to conduct his business without contacting the Embassy, resolving any investment disputes directly with local governments. It is whispered in the region that Stanford facilitates resolution with significant cash contributions.
In 1999, Stanford Financial tried to take over Antiguan International Business Corp., which regulated offshore companies on the island, said Jonathan Winer, then a deputy U.S. assistant secretary of state.
State Department cables sent from the U.S. Embassy and provided to Bloomberg described a “power grab” and criticized the Stanford’s company’s hiring of U.S. consultants to revise Antigua’s offshore-banking rules.
I'll bet you $100 those "U.S. consultants" were on the US Chamber of Commerce referral lists.
Even if he is a psychopath, they should simply reduce the meds and make him stand trial. My guess is that he can rattle too many skeletons in others' closets for them to allow such a thing.
Instead of discrediting Andrew Brietbart for being a lying liar that hurts people, CNN's Kyra Phillips thinks the Shirley Sherrod story means we need to attack anonymous bloggers for their indiscretions. WTF? If a liberal blogger had released a phony video that targeted a Republican in the same way as Breitbart did, the outrage that would have followed from the media would have been cataclysmic. But when it's done by a conservative hitman ... crickets.
Phillips calls anonymous bloggers cowards, but what does that make Andrew Breitbart? I wonder if MSMers are really that naive? Breitbart smeared ACORN and essentially destroyed the one organization in this country dedicated to enrolling minority voters with doctored videos -- and yet he was positively celebrated for his efforts, and never faced any accountability when the entire smear was proven a fraud. Then he led the video smear of Sherrod. Who has been anonymous in any of these stories? We know all too exactly who smeared Sherrod. Why is CNN focusing on a nonexistent issue?
Anchors Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discussed the “mixed blessing of the Internet,” and agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage others on the internet. “There are so many great things that the internet does and has to offer, but at the same time, Kyra, as you know, there is this dark side,” Roberts said. “Imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t taken a look at what happened with Shirley Sherrod and plumbed the depths further and found out that what had been posted on the internet was not in fact reflective of what she said.” But Phillips replied that the mainstream media “can’t always do that.” “There’s going to have be a point in time where these people have to be held accountable,” Phillips said. “How about all these bloggers that blog anonymously? They say rotten things about people and they’re actually given credibility, which is crazy. They’re a bunch of cowards, they’re just people seeking attention.”
The whole reason you might think anonymous bloggers would be a problem is that they could make stuff up and nobody would know who they were in order to sanction them. In this case, though, there’s nothing anonymous about Andrew Breitbart so this problem shouldn’t exist. Except instead of sanctioning Andrew Breitbart, a specific individual with a specific name, and the other specific institutions (who employ specific individuals with names) CNN’s team is lashing out vaguely at “the internet” and “anonymous bloggers.” The issue here, however, is primarily Andrew Breitbart. To a secondary extent, it’s Fox News and conservative talk radio. And to a broader extent it’s a conservative movement that continues to celebrate Breitbart and Fox News despite their legacy of inaccuracy and race-baiting. Anonymous bloggers have nothing to do with anything.
The rage used to be focused on people leaving anonymous comments on websites, but CNN uses a false equivalency to turn it into bloggers. Why doesn't CNN denounce Breitbart and lead the way to discredit any such political operatives who act in a dishonest way?
I think this is telling. This is the only actual example of Obama’s alleged demonization of business that Zuckerman offers — and it’s essentially a mini-Breitbart, a quote taken out of context to make it seem as if Obama was saying something he wasn’t. That’s typical of the whole argument.
Oh, and one more thing: are there no copy editors at the FT? When I quote someone in my column, I supply the source material, and my copy editor checks, not just to be sure that the quote is accurate, but that it’s not taken out of context. But I guess such rules don’t apply if you’re a conservative.
As a resident of the Heartland, I'm tired of being denigrated by faithless blue-staters. My festering anger for these elitists finally erupted full force last Thursday when I saw the Frenchman, Alan Colmes, attack culture of life activist Neal Horsley for engaging in a traditional Heartland pastime...read on
Skippy has a little more about Brooks: shorter krugman: david brooks is a big fat weenie liar
His "proof" that black congressmen lied about being called "nigger" is as useless as his ACORN clips. Andrew Breitbart isn't fit to spit-shine the shoes of civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis. It's ludicrous to think that the right-wing bully believed he had the moral or political standing to call Lewis a liar, after Lewis and two other black congressmen reported they were called "nigger" by tea partiers during the healthcare reform vote March 20. Lewis's word on the confrontation is good enough for me.
Now comes news that Breitbart is the liar – or at least the misleader. Video he's been peddling to "prove" the congressmen were not called the N-word was actually after the slurs occurred. As a friend notes, "It's like running video of the Twin Towers on 9/10 to prove 9/11 didn't happen." Of course the videos Breitbart peddled to claim ACORN helped a supposed pimp and prostitute set up a child-prostitution ring have also been found misleading, at best. The California Attorney General's review said they were "severely edited" and in fact "showed no violation of the law." New York authorities concluded the same thing.
A reconstruction of the events shows that the conservative challenges largely sprang from a mislabeled video that was shot later in the day.
Breitbart posted two columns on his Web site saying the claims were fabricated. Both led with a 48-second YouTube video showing Lewis, Carson, other Congressional Black Caucus members and staffers leaving the Capitol. Some of the group were videotaping the booing crowd.
Breitbart asked why the epithet was not captured by the black lawmakers' cameras, and why nobody reacted as if they had heard the slur. He also questioned whether the epithets could have been shouted by liberals planted in the crowd.
But the 48-second video was shot as the group was leaving the Capitol — at least one hour after Lewis, D-Ga., and Carson walked to the Capitol, which is when they said the slurs were used.
Questioned about using a video on his Web site from the wrong moment, Breitbart stood by his claim that the lawmakers were lying.
"I'm not saying the video was conclusive proof," he said.
AP also reports that Rep. Heath Shuler – a Blue Dog Democrat from North Carolina, no raving lefty – says he heard the slurs too.
That's four congressmen vs. Breitbart and his tea-party bullies. Which story do you believe?
He says his videos aren't conclusive proof on his site. Really, you Richard Nixon wannabe. Then WTF are they on your site for you?
I met with Barney Frank last week and he backed up the claims of hatred that happened to him and told me that he was indeed called a faggot.
Hey Andrew, bring over the 100K to my house. We have mutual friends that can set it up. I'm here waiting to collect it and I'll deliver the money to John Lewis.
In these hyper-partisan times, it's rarely good enough to respond to an unfair attack with a factual argument. Fire is fought with more high heat. And so it was this week, when liberal bloggers reacted to the CPAC distortions with false attacks of their own. On the Daily Kos Web site, one blogger noted the standing ovation given to "the self-confessed war criminal Dick Cheney."
Whatever one might think of Cheney's interrogation policies, the former vice president has never been charged with a war crime, much less confessed to one.
No matter. The same blogger criticized anti-liberal protests at CPAC, adding with a rare burst of evenhandedness: "Some of what went on was the same kind of silliness partisans of all stripes engage in."
Is this madness? Somehow a diary on DKos is given equal weight to the lies of Mitt Romney, who is running for president in 2012? This, my friends, is why we call them "The Villagers."
Ron Fournier wrote in yesterday's WaPo about the lying rightwingers at CPAC and the equally dishonest liberal activists who hate them. His theme is that Real Americans are sick of all this lying by the partisans of both sides and just want the truth.
He then takes an example of each side's lies to illustrate this. The first is Mitt Romney, whom many people consider to be the front runner for the Republican nomination, at CPAC. He points out that Romney lied about the Democrats' policies on taxes, jobs, deficits, tort reform, and the treatment of terrorist suspects in his speech to the faithful. For the Democrats he used as an example an anonymous diarist at DKos who wrote that Dick Cheney was a "self-confessed war criminal," insisting that's a lie because Cheney has not been charged with a war crime, nor has he confessed to one...read on
And as Digby pointed out, Dick Cheney admitted to authorizing waterboarding -- which is, you know, a war crime. Is Fournier that ignorant not to understand this?
Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime and just because our political system is too weak to prosecute him for it doesn't mean it's a lie to point that out.
But hey, by all means, let's pretend that Mitt Romney's lies and this anonymous blogger's truth are both to blame for the fact that the country has no faith in politicians. Luckily we have the village arbiters of reality to help us work our way through it.
(Ron Fournier is the Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press.)
Barney Frank took the gloves off on the floor and called John Fund out for making up a story about a phony bill and then he outlined how the right wing noise machine works as a propaganda arm of the republicans to push that narrative into the mainstream.
Frank: You are entirely wrong about me and in the absence of your being able to show any basis which you made such a statement to ask you to acknowledge that fact. He's not only a liar, he's a coward. He wouldn't do it. My staff member asked him, called him up and said, what was this based on? Well, I made a mistake. Well, have you made a retraction? Oh, yeah, he said. Can we see it? "I told a couple of people." Mr. Fund makes it up. It's a lie, it's a myth. There was nothing there and it's to discredit all democrats.
His right-wing cohorts echo it and echo it. The next thing is it will be on the floor in the next two weeks. This is the democrat disregard for the electoral process. And when we call Mr. Fund's attention to the fact that this was a lie, what does he say? Whoops. but he's not going to tell anybody about it. Mr. Speaker, this is not the only case of this and I know this has happened before. But because I was directly involved here, I was in position to document this. It begins with a lie from this editorial writer from "the Wall street journal." it is then a lie repeated by his right-ring colleagues. He refuses to do anything about.
Frank responded to fabricated accounts of his supposed plans to introduce a bill on “universal voter registration.” The story began in November at the conservative Restoration Weekend conference in Palm Beach, Florida, where for $1,700 per person activists were able to hear talks by conservative opinion leaders on the theme, “Defending our Country and Culture.” At one session, John Fund, a writer for the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, claimed that Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chuck Schumer had hatched a plan to game the election system by registering felons, illegal aliens and others to vote:
Democrats were very rattled by the November 3rd election results. What do liberals do when they lose elections? They change the rules. In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration.
What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states, “Take everyone on every list of welfare recipients you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders, and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be.”
The allegation against Congressman Frank is absolutely false and has no basis in reality. The Congressman in fact heard about it for the first time after the story was launched in the conservative media.
Via ThinkProgress. The question of the day is, is Orrin Hatch a liar - or simply demented? And if he's demented, should he stay in the Senate? (Obviously, if he's a mere partisan liar, he fits right in.)
Last night, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) delivered an hour-long speech on the Senate floor condemning the Democratic health care reform bill and accusing Democrats of displaying “the arrogance of power” in trying to pass health reform before the holiday recess. Hatch predicted that if Republicans had 60 votes and control of all three branches of government, they would “get this country under control”:
This will become one more example of the arrogance of power being exerted since the Democrats secured a 60-vote majority in the United States Senate and took over the House and the White House. I dream some day of having the Republicans have 60 votes. I’ll tell you one thing, I think we would finally have the total responsibility to get this country under control and I believe we would. But we never come close to that. There are essentially no checks and balances found in Washington today just an arrogance of power with one party ramming through unpopular and devastating proposals on after the other.
Senator Hatch, are you smoking crack? The Republican Party not only had control of the country, y'all got it in exactly the sad state it's in today. Remember the tax cuts for the wealthy that ballooned the deficit? Remember Medicare Part B, which did the same for Medicare?
Remember the weapons of mass destruction, the reason we "had" to invade Iraq?
Under Republican control, we had deregulation, stagnant wages and massive increases in the number of Americans without health insurance.
Maybe it's time you walk over to that medical clinic they have in the Capitol building and ask them to evaluate your memory. Because seriously, either you're losing it ... or you're just another shameless Republican liar.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) raised hackles among liberals earlier this week when he claimed that the public option wasn't a part of the 2008 presidential campaign. He repeated that claim to reporters tonight, though acknowledged, when pressed, that then-candidate Barack Obama did in fact include a public option in his campaign health care proposal.
And then there's this: Anyway, I'm opposed to it."
Shorter Lieberfucktard: I don't care what it says: I'm against it. Oooh, LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!!!!
But he's such a serious warmonger that the media loves him.
