What else are you supposed to think by looking at this AP story?
UPDATE: Dean Esmay on The New McCarthyism: “Betraying the elected government of your nation simply because you don’t like the policy choices of that elected government.”
UPDATE II: Will Collier, writing at Vodka Pundit, nails it,
Are many things classified that shouldn’t be? You bet. Is it legal, moral, or ethical for somebody who has sworn to keep those secrets to unilaterally reveal them, for political reasons?
Hell no, it isn’t. And suggesting that McCarthy should get some kind of pass just because a bunch of ideological yahoos who work for newspapers like what she did is beyond asinine. What she did is no different, and no less unforgivable, than if she were an al-Queida spy. Her actions had the exact same outcome of aiding deadly enemies.
Lock her up.
Patterico’s ongoing battle with LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik has taken a hilarious turn.
Hiltzik is being schooled in the way of the blogs by one of the best. He has been thoroughly humiliated in this latest episode.
Damn, I enjoyed this post
To listen to Pundit Review Radio interviews with Patterico, click here and here.
UPDATE: L.A. Times Yanks Columnists Blog
…and I thought I enjoyed this story yesterday!
Minutemen to Bush: Build fence or we will
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Minuteman border watch leader Chris Simcox has a message for President Bush: Build new security fencing along the border with Mexico or private citizens will.
Simcox said Wednesday that he’s sending an ultimatum to the president, through the media, of course – “You can’t get through to the president any other way” – to deploy military reserves and the National Guard to the Arizona border by May 25.
Or, Simcox said, by the Memorial Day weekend Minuteman Civil Defense Corps volunteers and supporters will break ground to start erecting fencing privately.
“We have had landowners approach,” Simcox said in an interview. “We’ve been working on this idea for a while. We’re going to show the federal government how easy it is to build these security fences, how inexpensively they can be built when built by private people and free enterprise.”
We recently interviewed Minutemen leader Chris Simcox on Pundit Review Radio. You can listent to that interview here.
Remember the story of the autistic high school basketball player Jason McElwain, who scored an incredible twenty points in four minutes of his final high school game?
If you don’t, grab a hankie and watch this clip.
We thought it was pretty cool when he was able to meet President Bush recently.
Now his story is being made into a major motion picture.
If Hollywood screws up this wonderful story, they should take down the big sign and turn out the lights. This was clearly one of the feel good stories of this, or any year. I hope the movie lives up to reality.
Good for Jason and his family, I hope they are set for life.
Yahoo First-Quarter Profit Drops 22 Percent to $159.6 Million but Meets Analysts’ Expectations
It wasn’t an apples-to-apples comparison because of new rules requiring companies to recognize the costs of their employee stock options.
The change, imposed over strident protests from Silicon Valley, is taking an especially large bite from the profits of Yahoo and other high-tech companies that have distributed bushels of stock options to reward their workers.
Yahoo said the accounting change lowered its earnings by $71 million in this year’s first quarter versus $6 million a year ago.
When Yahoo reported earning in January, we questioned their management and their generous stock grants to…themselves.
I understand that stock options are a big part of attracting and retaining executives, but what Yahoo is doing seems pigish, excessive and not in the best interest of shareholders. If they are selling like crazy, why wouldnâ??t you?
The update on Yahoo insider action for the trailing 6 months is the following,
Zero PURCHASES on the open market
Forty One SALES Totalling 7.33 million shares
Six months ago the stock traded for around $34 per share. It rose steadily to $43, then crashed after the last earnings report in January finally bottoming at $29.75. Today’s close, $31.30. All that volitility and not a single insider saw a good time to throw a bone?
The worst of the bunch is Terry Semel, the CEO. In January 2006, Semel had sold $244 million in stock in the previous 12 months. Since then, he has been a busy man.
Sure he exercised his right to purchase more shares, spending nearly $9 million. The options he exercised were priced at $15 per share. Not a bad deal for him, considering the stock closed at 31.30 today. Nice tidy 100% profit. For the rest of the bagholders, er, shareholders, Yahoo stock is down 10% since mid-January.
Doesn’t really matter to management.
The stock could go down another 50% and Semel’s self-awarded option grants would still be above water. I say self-awarded because Semel is CEO and Chairman of the Board. To say that the interest of shareholders are not aligned with that of management would be an understatement. (I’m not a shareholder)
Since January, Semel has sold an additional $33 million in stock. That makes a 15 month total of more than $277 million for a guy who has been with the company since May, 2001. I don’t have the strength, energy or patience to look up Semel’s first three years. Incredible.
This problem isn’t confined to Yahoo, UnitedHealth has been hit with the news that the SEC is looking into their grants and whether not they were rigged in favor of CEO Dr. William McGuire, whom Kevin Aylward of Wizbang called, the richest guy you’ve never heard of. This one is interesting because UNH has had an excellent reputation on Wall Street for delivering consistent earnings and explosive stock appreciation.
Lee Raymond never looked so good..:)
UPDATE: It looks like Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal agrees with me,
Exxon Mobil Corp.’s former chief executive, Lee Raymond, has become the latest target of critics of executive pay. He doesn’t deserve it.
Shareholders, by and large, got their money’s worth from Mr. Raymond’s tough-minded leadership. He not only gave them the phenomenal returns that resulted from an oil-price boom — a feat a well-trained monkey might have accomplished — but also managed to modestly outperform the rest of the industry, which isn’t easy for such a big company.
Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst with Oppenheimer & Co., calculates that Exxon Mobil has provided total returns to shareholders of 223% over the past decade — factoring in Exxon’s 1998 takeover of Mobil — while other big oil companies have averaged 205%. The difference is worth about $16 billion to those lucky enough to have held Exxon, and then Exxon Mobil, stock during that period.
From America’s newsman, Brit Hume,
Former Clinton CENTCOM commander, Anthony Zinni â?? the most prominent of the retired generals attacking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld â?? now says that, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, “What bothered me … [was that] I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn’t fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD.”
But in early 2000, Zinni told Congress “Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region,” adding, “Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, [and] retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions … Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months.”
How on earth can Zinni square these two statements? I’d love to see some member of the MSM ask him directly. Something tells me, that won’t happen.
“The economy is working really well for many people. But if you look just over the horizon and below the surface there are some troubling issues.” Clinton said, “the rich are getting richer, everybody else is marching in place” and ” don’t think that’s good for us.”
Is that so Hillary? How is it that sub 5% unemployment when your pseudo-husband was President was an economic miracle, part of the new American economy. Under George W. Bush, sub 5% unemployment means that people have all been laid off and are now working at Wal-Mart or flipping burgers.
Sorry Hillary. Once again, the facts are not aligned with your political talking points.
Minority Groups Increasing Business Ownership at Higher Rate than National Average, Census Bureau Reports
Minority groups and women are increasing their business ownership at a much higher rate than the national average, according to new tabulations titled Preliminary Estimates of Business Ownership by Gender, Hispanic or Latino Origin, and Race: 2002, from the U.S. Census Bureauâ??s 2002 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) released today.
While the number of U.S. businesses increased by 10 percent between 1997 and 2002 to 23 million, the rate of growth for minority- and women-owned businesses was far higher, ranging from 67 percent for native Hawaiian- and other Pacific islander-owned businesses to 20 percent for firms owned by women. (See Summary Table.)
The nationâ??s 23 million businesses increased their receipts by 22 percent between 1997 and 2002 to reach $22.6 trillion. Increases in receipts ranged from a high of 30 percent for black-owned firms to 5 percent for businesses owned by whites.
There were 1.2 million black-owned businesses in 2002, up 45 percent from 1997.
There were 1.6 million Hispanic-owned businesses in 2002, up 31 percent from 1997.
There were 1.1 million Asian-owned businesses in 2002, up 24 percent from 1997.
There were 6.5 million women-owned businesses in 2002, up 20 percent from 1997.
According to Bloomberg,
Clinton, 58, also expressed concerns about U.S. manufacturing being able to compete in a “race to the bottom” with other nations over cheap labor. “It’s defeatist to think U.S. manufacturing can’t compete,” she said, citing currency manipulation and other unfair trade practices. Clinton said “there can’t be an abrupt change” in the exchange rate of China’s yuan, which many U.S. manufacturers say is kept artificially low, giving Chinese exporters an unfair advantage. Yet, she added, “I don’t want us to be played for a sucker.”
Considering your talking points relationship to the facts, someone is playing you for a sucker Mrs. Clinton.
According to an April 3 report from the highly regarded Institute for Supply Management,
Economic activity in the manufacturing sector grew in March for the 34th consecutive month, while the overall economy grew for the 53rd consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.
The report was issued today by Norbert J. Ore, C.P.M., chair of the Institute for Supply Managementâ?¢ Manufacturing Business Survey Committee. “The manufacturing sector, led by continued strength in new orders and production, continued to grow in March. The first quarter is now complete, and the ISM data indicates that it was a good quarter for U.S. manufacturing. Prices are still a major concern, particularly in the energy and metals markets. In general, manufacturing continues to experience a significant level of growth.”