Quotes of the Morning: All in the Family

“I made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life, I have never profited from public service. I've earned every cent. And in all of my years in public life I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.”
-Richard Nixon

“A noble sentiment sir. I can only hope that all of our presidents can claim to have morality as solid as Richard Nixon.”
-Skippy

“A top House Democrat released e-mails Tuesday detailing Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's role in pushing a $236 million federal contract for Carnival Cruise Lines to house Hurricane Katrina victims.
In a letter, Rep. Henry Waxman of California called on Bush to explain his role in the award of the ‘lucrative contract,’ which was given to the Florida-based company without a full competitive bid process. The e-mails Waxman released were provided to Congress by Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The Carnival Cruise Lines contract has turned out to be enormously expensive," Waxman wrote to Gov. Bush, the president's younger brother. ‘The e-mails from Mr. Brown provide the first confirmation of your involvement in the award of this contract and the first details of your contacts with Carnival and FEMA.’
[…]
The Carnival official, Ric Cooper, has been a major political donor to the Florida and national Republican parties, including $65,000 to the state GOP in 2002, and $50,00 to the RNC in 2004, Waxman said.”
-Associated Press, February 28, 2006

“Doesn’t mean anything. Plus, that was Jeb, not Dubya. Jeb has made some money off of disasters, but Dubya has been honest.”
-Skippy

“Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.”
-Houston Chronicle, March 22, 2006

“That isn’t the President either. That is his mom making large tax-deductible donations to a non-profit organization owned by his brother. Nothing out of the ordinary there, there are lots of UAE sheiks donating to that same cause, and you never hear anyone complaining about THAT.”
-Skippy

“In 2002, for instance, Bush signed a consulting contract with Grace Semiconductor -- a Shanghai-based company managed in part by the son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Bush's contractual duties consist solely of attending board meetings and discussing ‘business strategies.’ For this, he is to be paid $2 million in company stock over five years, plus $10,000 for every board meeting he attends.
‘Now, you have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors, do you Mr. Bush?’ Brown asked.
‘That's correct,’ Bush responded.
Meanwhile, back home in Texas, Bush serves as co-chairman of a company called Crest Investment. Crest, he revealed in the deposition, pays him $60,000 a year to provide ‘miscellaneous consulting services.’
‘Such as?’ Brown asked.
‘Such as answering phone calls when Jamal Daniel, the other co-chairman, called and asked for advice,’ Bush replied.
Ah, it's nice to be Neil Bush, who seems to be living the lifestyle immortalized in those famous Dire Straits lyrics: ‘Money for nothin' and chicks for free.’"
-Washington Post, December 28, 2003

“Still Neal. I mean, you can’t hold what his brothers do against the President. It isn’t like the situations are related.. just the people.”
-Skippy

“As President Bush embarks on a new effort to shore up public support for the war in Iraq, an uncle of the commander in chief is collecting $2.7 million in cash and stock from the recent sale of a company that profited from the war.
A report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows that William H.T. Bush collected just under $1.9 million in cash plus stock valued at more than $800,000 from the sale of Engineered Support Systems Inc. to DRS Technologies of New Jersey....
Bush, known as ‘Uncle Bucky" in the president's family, joined ESSI's board in 2000, several months before his nephew became president.
He heads a St. Louis investment firm and is the youngest brother of former President George H.W. Bush.”
-LA Times, March 23, 2006

“Hey, that wasn’t Dubya either. That was his uncle. Dubya is a man of nobility and honor. And I’m sticking to that story.”
-Skippy

“Consider the Carlyle Group, the huge, politically wired private equity firm that has employed both the president and his father -- and from which the members of the Bush family and their closest associates, such as former Secretary of State James Baker III, have profited handsomely in recent years. With its sole Middle East office headquartered in Dubai, Carlyle has managed to attract substantial funding from the UAE government, which controls most of the tiny nation's oil wealth and channels that money into foreign investments.
Last year, to cite only the most recent example, Carlyle's newest buyout fund won an infusion of at least $100 million from the Dubai Investment Corp. -- another state-owned outfit created by the ruling families to reinvest the enormous inflows of capital from rising oil prices and oil consumption. If that individual deal with Carlyle represented only a small fraction of the Emirates' investments, the upside potential of the relationship could be far greater in the future. The directors of Dubai Investment expect to invest as much as $5 billion every year for a long time to come.
No doubt Carlyle will ardently bid to manage a slice of those billions -- and the president surely understands that maintaining good relations with the Emirates will enhance the prospects of the family's favorite equity firm. But to deprive Dubai of its $6.8 billion ports acquisition might well have the opposite effect. For a company that trades on its political influence as well as its business acumen, such incidents can be pivotal.”
-Salon, February 24, 2006

“And it is mainly Dubya’s father who is the big name at Carlyle. Dubya just worked there a while. Nothing to see here, and this had nothing to do with the port deal that Dubya was so adamantly behind (which, by the way, still happened). Let’s leave this story and get back to trying to do the important work: figuring out how to give tax cuts to the wealthy..”
-Skippy