kapkomet

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Jan 23, 2007 -> 08:23 PM) Negotiation does not equal appeasement. You can't "negotiate" with nutjobs who are hell bent on lying just to destroy you. What is there to "negotiate"? What do we give them, and what do they give us? There has to be a two way street, and there ain't in this case.

QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Jan 22, 2007 -> 03:18 AM) Hey, at least now I'm qualified to work for ESPN. LOL Post of the year, part two. That was a nice comeback.

QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Jan 22, 2007 -> 01:30 AM) I mean absolutely no offense to Colts fans here, but anyone who actually thought the Patriots might lose to Indy was crazy. They never had a chance, no matter what the circumstances. This s***'s like clockwork. New England and Indianapolis meet in the playoffs, Peyton Manning sucks, strange plays go in favor of the Patriots, and the Colts inevitably lose. LMFAO! Post of the year, so far.

Happy Birthday, you hippie rock freak... Hope you have a great day.

Probably because it is, and always has been. But Pelosi and her Democratic party is so righteous. /rolly

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 20, 2007 -> 04:31 PM) Excellent point. And I am OK with that, as long as the result is the new, alternative product. Plus, there are all sorts of little startups out there that are doing things differently, which could be supported. So instead of giving them the tax breaks on the oil money, give it to them on the alternative energy technology. Give them a financial reason to support it (which after all is the only reason to support things like this... *puke*).

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Jan 20, 2007 -> 04:32 AM) Unfortunately, because of the Nature of this Dem. Campaign, Richardson is starting off in what I would consider to be 4th position (which would drop if either Gore or Clark fully throw themselves into the race before the end of Feb.) Richardson has the disadvantages of lack of money, Obama usurping his internet support, and Obama being the #1 minority in the Dem fields. Without Barack, I think Richardson would have a real chance. But trying not to be a racist (Obama gets my vote from the 04 convention speech unless he calls me a KKK member), Obama is at the top of my list. I really respect Richardson and would love for him to be Obama's VP or the nominee in 12 if somehow Bush saves his party in 08 (highly doubtful), but in 08, I'll be voting solely on who I think can be the next Reagan; who I think can be the single man who leads the United States into the next period of its history. Given the abject disasters George W. Bush has created, I literally see no one who has a shot at repairing this mess other than Obama. And that, just the hope in his voice, has won Barack my vote 2 years ago. And nothing in the last 2 years has changed theat opinion. A good president will not save this nation from George W.'s disaster. The only thing that will save this nation is a great president. If our next leader is not one of the greatest we have ever had, then the United States will fall. And the only candidate I can hope will fullfill that role is Barack Obama. That is the end of my argument for Barack. He may well not be up to the task. But I see no others who even have a chance. Balta, with all due respect, what has he done to merit that kind of support, besides a good speech? Also, the Clinton machine is about to chew him up and spit him out. "He attended a madrassa for four years - *gasp* he's a Muslim!!!!!!!" - source? - "a democratic challenger study". Let me make it clear... I don't care, but that's getting ready to hit the crapper pretty soon.

Nice, mr-genius.

I wasn't that serious. Of course, we humans have an effect on climate. That goes without saying. How much impact? Now that is the real question.

I bet global warming contributed to the end of the ice age. What do you think about that?

QUOTE(Chisoxfn @ Jan 19, 2007 -> 07:26 PM) The thing is, as an auditor, I understand that for a large company (which Enron was) you have a large Audit team, but still, you are not talking about even an entire AA office. You are talking about one team, albeit a large one that may have consisted of 20-40 people, plus a partner or two (and partners who do concurring reviews, the problem is, prior to Sarbanes I don't think there was much substance to concurring reviews). These actions were done 100% seperately from AA (the firm as a whole) and that group of people brought down a company (and we are talking about a handful of partners at most for a firm that has well into the thousands of partners in the US) with thousands, if not a hundred thousand employees and billions in revenues. So I think people who somehow think that the whole company was in cahoots is dead wrong, thats not how the audit profession works. In a sense, you have a team which is like an individual company (representing our entire company as a whole) going in and doing our business and only members of that team review stuff (with a partner not associated with it doing a review afterwards just to verify we didn't miss something major). I feel very strongly about a company and so many people effected drastically by the actions of one team (less than 1% of that companies partners and work-force). Of course I'm sure people will make a case of Enron being effected by only a few people, but in that case we are talking about pretty much the entire upper/top management of the company (in AA's case you are talking about 1% of the top management, which would be the parnters). We are only as good as our image. And don't get me started on Sarbanes Oxley. On one hand it guarantees a public auditors employement as long as they are semi compitent, but on the other hand the pendulem has swung completely and unrealistically too far, imo. SarbOx is the biggest piece of crap legistlation to come out of DC in a long time. I'll just leave it there for a while. AA was at fault for being stupid, not being illegal. They were cleared of any wrong doing after the fact.

Ahh, the turf wars start. Pelosi is a piece of work.

QUOTE(Chisoxfn @ Jan 19, 2007 -> 05:41 PM) When it comes to Enron some of the people that got robbed the most were employees of Arthur Anderson and all the partners and principals of that company because it was a crying shame that they got closed down (and years later it came out that they should have never been forced to close, but unfortunately, it was too little too late and now we have the Big 4). Image is everything, my friend. Read Sarbanes Oxley if you don't believe that hype. BTW, twerp Jason, I hate auditors.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 19, 2007 -> 05:02 PM) Like I said, I have read the basics of the Enron thing at various times, but I am looking forward to this book for a little more in-depth stuff. What I do know was this wasn't nearly what that is saying. They were creating shell companies which they hid from their auditors, shareholders, and everybody else to hide their losses. Right, and they would transfer money between the companies in such a way that the timing threw off everybody. Sort of like cashing a check at one bank, to get the cash, and then walking down the street to another bank, and cashing another one to replenish the old account, and so on.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 19, 2007 -> 04:44 PM) Actually this was out a week ago from other news sources. I know I read it in one of the Chicago newspapers before, I believe it was the Sun-Times, because they were talking about how smoking gives him that dreamy gravely voice. Thank goodness he's not in the House of Representatives. He'd jones out when voting.

QUOTE(bmags @ Jan 19, 2007 -> 04:58 AM) what the new yorker said, was that enron didn't hide anything, obviously i'm only a sophomore in college so feel free to correct me if any of this looks wrong to any of you, but that all of revenue for enron was coming on deals that they'd get paid for when the contract starts, 2016 and the like. And also was their heavy reliance on SPE's. Which i'm basically paraphrasing as i'm reading : for a high money loan and to bypass high interest, they set up a partnership called the SPE, the bank lends money to the partnership, and it gives it to the business. It does not show up on balance sheets and many companies do this. Enron got in trouble by not getting SPE loans with deals it was sure to recoup on, it was using them on less reliable deals, which is where it got in trouble. now here was the point of the article, all of this info was reported and available, unfortunately all of this was hundreds of thousands of pages, literally, and would take an expert to figure it out over weeks. As the writer goes on to say, the judge accused enron of not releasing the info in a way we could understand, yet there were summaries of summaries of summaries and it was still 200 pages that was just as complicated to understand. Now, i should clarify at this point, that he is not saying enron didn't do anything wrong, what Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the article, is saying is that business deals are getting so complicated that we need to change the way we look at companies to prevent such a failure. As he pointed out, if we were to look at their tax returns we saw that they weren't paying any income tax, because they weren't making any money. it was really fascinating, i encourage you all to try and find it. To oversimplify, Enron was kiting their financials between one company to another.

QUOTE(Soxy @ Jan 19, 2007 -> 03:13 PM) Hi-larious. Although, I must say, I thought O'Reilly came off of Colbert looking a million times better than he does on his show. Maybe he's doing the same thing as Colbert, but just got put on the wrong station and realized he could make craploads of money? I saw the story on yahoo news. Seems like O'Reilly did ok for himself, huh?

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Jan 18, 2007 -> 06:20 PM) I wouldn't be surprised if there were a bunch on both sides who wanted it to just disappear, but it's certainly worth noting which group decided to make it happen. You see, I think this is all prescripted. Sorta like 9/11 was an inside job by Bushco.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 18, 2007 -> 06:14 PM) Nice thought, but not a snowballs chance in LA. So based on yesterday's weather, it will happen?

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Jan 18, 2007 -> 05:51 PM) I doubt this is people throwing their "Power" around. Something tells me that even if the Democrats fully gave in on the line-item veto, McConnel would find some other reason to filibuster this thing. He knows that any reform package that passes has the strong potential to help the Dems and hurt his side, which is why they couldn't even pass a rudimentary one last year, so he's trying to pick a popular issue that is only remotely related to the actual reform package, paper-clip those 2 issues together, and use that as an excuse to filibuster the bill he doesn't want to get through. You know what, though? I think the Democrats WANT this to be tabled. But that's just me.

In our office, we have a governmental affairs department (read: lobbyists, more or less), and they have a subscription to a political newspaper that comes out of Washington. I forget the name of it right now, I should go over there and look, but in it, it was saying that Dan Quayle should run in this environment, because he'd actually be a good candidate in the current climate. I laughed at the notion, and yet, it's almost true.

I'm torn on this one. I want to see reform, and I also want to see the line item veto. But it sounds like it can't be both because these knuckle heads want to throw their "power" around.

Yea, that article was in the WSJ last week.

QUOTE(RibbieRubarb @ Jan 18, 2007 -> 03:31 PM) I forgot about Bill Richardson... He is is an incredibly viable candidiate. See, and I actually respect him. It's too bad he probably won't get much traction.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 18, 2007 -> 01:40 PM) OK, so, I don't like Hillary. Of the Dem candidates, I think she may actually be my least favorite. I'd rather have Obama, Edwards, Biden, Richardson, Kucinich or almost anyone else. But... "Her Thighness"? I'm having a hard time not finding that a little offensive. Did Edwards actually write that piece?! You're right. I meant it as a joke, but it's tasteless. I won't say it again. I'll just call her "Her Highness". She's arrogant as all get out, and that's my point. It wasn't to be tasteless.