Jeff Skilling and Frank Gehry

I love this! Jeff Skilling speaking about Frank Gehry on May 18, 2001:

“The uniqueness of Frank Gehry’s work is the blending of the functional with the artistic to create an innovative product,” said Jeff Skilling, Enron President and CEO. “This is a quality Enron relates to every day as we question traditional business assumptions and embrace innovative solutions. We are pleased to help showcase Frank Gehry’s genius.”

I realize that I could be said to be a little … perhaps… biased in favor of Jeff Skilling but I love this statement and I absolutely agree with it. As someone who once seriously considered architecture school, I’ve always seen or conjured a weird association between architecture and Enron, but unlike Skilling, I think my association comes from the ability to fluidly create a shocking, functional, product that appears on the landscape as if it had always been there. EnronOnline, for instance, should have always been there and it remains, actually, though it’s called something else now. The Broadband Operating System and the Gas Bank both seem organic business elements, the same way a well-made home can appear to have simply grown out of the ground one day and been there ever since.

After his sentencing, Jeff Skilling famously uttered, “Some things work and some things don’t.” Well, some things belong and some things don’t. Architecture is partially the exercising of discipline to remove the superfluous. Deleting, deleting, deleting until the form meets the standard the architect has set for herself. Enron’s products arrived fully-formed and necessary to the business landscape.

They are recognizable as the shocking, modern, disruptive, whimiscal buildings built by Frank Gehry, with all the grace and technical acumen as Frank Lloyd Wright and the modernist pioneering of Mies van der Rohe.

Sarah Palin For President

When Sarah Palin announced she was resigning as Governor of Alaska later this month and would not seek re-election, my first instinct was to brace for some horrible scandal. Had she been caught with some attractive ski instructor somewhere? Did Todd stray? Was Bristol pregnant again?

No. Instead, she intimated that she was casting her gaze on bigger things. Like the Presidency. She’s being coy about it, and maybe it’s just my over-optimistic nature, but that’s what I heard in her resignation announcement.

Sarah Palin as President would be a dream come true. The USA needs her right now – we need that feisty pioneering spirit, her lust for independence, her great knowledge of energy. We need Sarah Palin to reverse some of the awful things that have been happening in our country since Obama took office, like these neverending deficits, the nationalization of banks and automobile companies, and his wishy-washy response to crises in Iran, North Korea and Russia.

Sarah Palin is the only believable Republican right now, and ironically the only believable feminist. I can’t help but compare her to old Hillary “Cankles” Clinton. While Sarah rallies support with her enthusiasm and ability to face men on equal grounds because she understands that she is inherently equal to them, Hillary screeches, demands people conform to her, and threatens. She doesn’t seem to believe that she’s equal to anyone at all; she casts herself as the little guy, demanding respect and ultimately authority, which she can only achieve through the great American art of creating a fancy title and evading all questions of substance. Compare Hillary’s “first wife screech” that to the breezy, beautiful, charming, natural way Sarah has of communicating with her audiences.

Sarah Palin’s life story is compelling and authentic. She lives her values. Her family is obviously precious to her and her career is also critical to her own well-being. Ordinary women look at her and see a woman who has it all because she’s earned it.

Our party needs Sarah Palin. Her unimpeachable Conservative credentials are needed to fight the socialist agenda of President Obama. She is someone Conservatives may finally believe in – someone who actually holds strong Conservative values instead of John McCain’s “moderate” blather, as indistinct as putty. While McCain and other Republicans struggle to define their positions by contrast, Sarah Palin simply says she is pro-life, believes in small, efficient government, believes in spending within our means, loves the public sector, and believes we should drill in ANWR.

Yet even some of the talk-show-circuit Republicans have some gripes against her. This is because she’s disruptive. She doesn’t countenance hypocrisy. She makes enemies of lobbyists and eschews the Washington DC socialite set. She really means what she says. None of this is particularly valuable if you’re trying to impress Peggy Noonan or Colin Powell.

But it’s very powerful if you’re talking to ordinary voters in Texas, Nebraska or Idaho. The masses love Sarah Palin. The masses need Sarah Palin. Only Sarah Palin can rescue us from Obama.

Sarah Palin for President in 2012.

Enron On The Rack

Broadband Hog 2

This was taken at the Modulus/EBS building — not at Enron Headquarters at 1400 Smith.

The Enron Executives: Rex Shelby

Rex Shelby is a serial entrepreneur, a man who started several successful companies before founding Modulus. Modulus developed distributed communications middleware. InterAgent was the messaging middleware that routed information through networks – and it was this piece of the software that Enron wanted. (Incidentally the VoIP application that Scott Yeager supported was made with InterAgent as well.) In late 1998, Enron made an offer for Modulus. Rex Shelby and his partner accepted, then Shelby went to work for Enron as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations for Enron Broadband Services.

Rex brought with him his core Modulus group. These engineers were accomplished men in their own right. Many were entrepreneurs themselves. They were the ones who built InterAgent. They were not in the business of building vaporware, as the government accused them. One of these men, Larry Ciscon, would later be threatened by the Enron Task Force against testifying. Yet he stood up to the Task Force and testified on his friend’s behalf. Ciscon is a Rice Ph.D. and the primary author of the Broadband Operating System patent. Yes, the group filed a patent for the software which the government claims did not exist, and it was granted in 2005, shortly before the Broadband trial. Another of Shelby’s men is Mark Palmer, who also testified on Shelby’s behalf. These men – and several others – are “Shelby’s guys”. While Shelby did have friendships and great working relationships with EBS engineers, these were the men that Shelby loved and trusted. When Shelby was accused of lying about the BOS, he was enraged not just on his own behalf, but for his friends and these engineers who had put so much of their lives into this product. He had created a close, convivial group. For instance, all the Modulus guys knew about JO Shelby and talked about him. They even used his name in some of their emails to describe potential business strategies.

At Modulus, Rex Shelby would host an annual Christmas party. He would reserve a room at a nice restaurant just for the Modulus employees and their spouses or guests. One of the traditions was that he got up before the meal and gave a “State of Modulus Address” — he always made it fun and made a point of mentioning people and what they had accomplished. The employees would clamor each year for him to stand up and talk.

For the first party, on a whim, he clipped on this cheap red bowtie — a gag gift someone gave to him. Apparently the employees loved this, because someone mentioned it the next year, and he wore it again. But the third year, he didn’t think about it and went to the party without clipping it on. The employees (and especially the spouses) were visibly disappointed. So he apologized during the State of Modulus Address, but never forgot the bowtie after that.

These silly traditions were important. They gave each Modulus employee a common background. And it demonstrates that Rex Shelby was deeply involved in his company, he passionately loved the work and he loved his employees.

By every account, Rex Shelby is a brilliant technical mind and “a good guy.” He is obsessive about work to the most extreme degree; his entrepreneurial mind and technical insight make him a danger to the status quo.

Friends describe him as “brilliant”, “honest”, “a great guy”, and “stubborn.” (Curiously, even a prosecution witness described him as “stubborn” and “a good guy”.) At Enron, he was well-liked. Former Enron engineers remember him walking the floor (much like Jeff Skilling did) to chat with ordinary engineers and not just the executives. He was considered approachable, honest, and extremely smart.

While at EBS, Rex Shelby continued to make progress with the BOS. A core concept of the BOS was the idea of services embedded in the network. The BOS already provided distributed caching as a native part of the EBS network that could be accessed by any application written using the BOS SDK. There were roughly a dozen key services that the BOS allowed developers to access within the EBS network. Pretty cool. As Kirkendall once wrote, based on the current success of the technologies pioneered by EBS, the company was grossly undervalued by the market (rather than overvalued as the government implied).

Enron Corporation collapsed before the success of the products could be proven.

John Kroger – by literally every account – is an egotistical idiot. Even prosecution witnesses agree on this point. Kroger was without a doubt the very worst of the prosecutors, too stupid and blinded by his own enormous ego to realize that he was intellectually outmatched. He wrote in his book that he wanted to be “the first on the boards”, so he rushed an indictment so he could beat the other ETF teams to the punch. The first indictments – against the Broadband defendants – in the Enron cases were issued by John Kroger. And notably, they’re still going on, some seven years later.

Rex Shelby was accused of lying about the ability of the BOS, thus inflating the stock and ultimately enriching himself.

This is absurd. Anyone who knows Rex Shelby will tell you the man does not care about money. He lives modestly, he doesn’t care about designer clothes or fancy cars. He is obsessed with work, not the rewards of work. He had never owned even a single share of stock before he sold the Enron stock. One of the Modulus friends, in fact, had told him when to buy and sell. Rex Shelby was too busy working to care about something as ephemeral as money.

Mr. Shelby was acquitted on insider trading charges. The jury hung on the conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering counts.

Prosecutors re-indicted him with Joe Hirko. Shelby, Hirko and Yeager appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and lost. They each then took their cases to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court denied Shelby’s motion, did not comment on Hirko’s until this week and granted writ certiorari to Yeager.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Yeager’s favor, it was a victory for Rex Shelby too. The Supreme Court ruled that collateral estoppel is invoked when an issue of fact has been determined by a jury and can not be litigated again by the same parties in any future lawsuit – the same fundamental principles enshrined in the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment which protects a defendant from being retried for a crime for which he has already been acquitted.

Mr. Shelby is expected to appeal to Judge Gilmore to dismiss the case. If she doesn’t dismiss, it will be just one more travesty in a long list of travesties. If she does, Rex Shelby will finally be returned to his real life, no doubt not even taking a well-deserved break before he stalks off in search of the next enormous challenge.

Enron Executives: Scott Yeager

F. Scott Yeager and Rex Shelby knew each other before they worked together at Enron Broadband Services. Rex Shelby was President of his company, Modulus, and Scott was at MFS Datanet, a communications company that was eventually acquired by WorldCom. At Modulus, Shelby’s team built an application which provided voice over IP. Modulus installed the application, called AudioNet, on servers in several MFS Datanet POPs around the country. Scott supported the application but could not get the MFS Datanet executives behind it, showing how smart both Shelby and Scott Yeager were to recognize the benefits – in 1996 – of telephone quality voice over IP.

Rex Shelby and Scott Yeager joined Joe Hirko at Enron Broadband Services. At trial, Yeager would be called “the idea man who created the idea of building a new network with revolutionary software.” Credit where credit is due, the Prosecution was exactly correct on this point. His idea meshed beautifully with Hirko’s knowledge and background in fiber-optic networks and it needed Rex Shelby’s masterful technical skills.

While he was at EBS, the company did well and many successes were achieved. But he was a bit of a wild card; all that fiery intelligence and drive did have the ability to knock people back on their heels. In January 2001 he was given a bad performance review. He left the company in July 2001.

On November 5, 2004, a grand jury indicted Yeager with 126 counts of five federal offenses: conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud; securities fraud; wire fraud; insider trading; and money laundering. The Government alleged that while Yeager was an executive at Enron Corporation, he purposefully deceived the public about the Broadband Operating System in order to inflate the value of Enron’s stock and, ultimately, to enrich himself.

He was tried with Rex Shelby, Joe Hirko, Michael Krautz and Kevin Howard. Michael Krautz was acquitted; Kevin Howard was found guilty of five counts but his conviction was later overturned because prosecutors wrongly presented a theory of guilt that had already prompted an appeals panel to reverse convictions in a separate Enron case. Joe Hirko, Rex Shelby and Scott Yeager, however, received a mix of acquittals and hung counts.

Prosecutors re-indicted each with fewer counts and split them into three separate cases: Kevin Howard and Michael Krautz, and then Hirko and Shelby, and Yeager. Hirko, Shelby and Yeager appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and lost. They each then took their cases to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court denied Shelby’s motion, did not comment on Hirko’s until this week and granted writ certiorari to Yeager.

In his petition before the Supreme Court, Scott Yeager argued that double jeopardy applied because the jury had already contemplated matters of fact related to the hung counts and could not legally be considered again. On June 18, 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that Scott Yeager was correct. “We won, we were right, we cannot be retried for these issues,” said Tony Canales, one of Yeager’s lead lawyers.

The Supreme Court, however, did leave open a tiny door for the Fifth Circuit to re-examine its ruling that the jury must have found, when it acquitted Yeager, that Yeager did not possess any inside information. The government had argued that the jury did not necessarily decide that issue by its verdict.

If the government is foolish enough to prosecute Scott Yeager again, Yeager will no doubt meet the challenge with the same dogged energy that has got him this far.

The Enron Broadband Services Ferrari

Enron Broadband Services Co-CEO Ken Rice races an Enron Broadband-marked Ferrari. Sweeeet! (That giant E on the hood…. Oh God. My heart. I can’t take it. It’s too beautiful, too much.)

Bandwidth Hog

The Enron Executives: Joseph Hirko

[I'm starting a new series of Enron biographies. I begin with the Broadband Three, specifically Joe Hirko.]

At age 38, Joseph Hirko was the youngest CFO of an electric utility (Portland General Electric) anywhere in the country. His solid understanding of business and his ability to inspire others made him a popular, well-liked executive. A friend who remembers him from Portland General says that Joe was the epitome of calm command. “He’s the kind of guy who, if he was on fire, would calmly ask someone to bring him a glass of water,” the friend says. Understatement might have been his way, but his work product always overperformed. Like many of his future colleagues at Enron, Joe Hirko was ambitious and obsessive about his work. While he was CFO, he headed up a tiny new venture in the company called FirstPoint Communications, which was building a fiber-optics network.

When Enron bought PGE in 1997, Hirko thought it was a good time to expand the fiber-optic network, which was making money. This idea would become one of the three business units at Enron Broadband Services.

While at EBS, Joe Hirko was co-CEO, splitting responsibilities with Ken Rice. He was well-liked at EBS, just as he was at Portland General. He was a conscientious leader, and one person who knew him at EBS says that he was more involved in the daily tasks than Ken Rice. For instance, he held weekly status meetings to ensure everyone was meeting objectives. He reviewed marketing/sales reports, tended to organizational and personnel issues, handled financial problems, and reviewed the collateral that left the EBS office, including press releases.

Under Hirko’s leadership, EBS was able to reach many high-profile objectives. He was changing the world with sophisticated Broadband products that are still in use today. Enron Broadband Services was a spunky little company with big dreams, plenty of ambition, and a destiny that would shatter Shakespeare. The three business units were progressing well, but it was still a very young company and by the time Enron Corporation collapsed, EBS had not yet fulfilled its potential. All three business units had successes; the most successful was the intermediation company, ie. EnronOnline. It was up and running and a huge success. The fiber-optic network was making great strides. The content-services unit was doing very well too, having had some big successes in its broadcasting of the Country Music Awards, and an Andre Agassi tennis tournament.

After the company collapsed, Joe Hirko was indicted with seven other Broadband defendants on a litany of charges. At trial, he was acquitted of some charges and the jury hung on others. Mr. Hirko vowed to fight on. But Mr. Hirko was tired. Like so many of the Enron defendants, Hirko was losing fortunes on attorney fees, not to mention the emotional toll that seven years of trials and accusations had taken. On October 14, 2008, Hirko accepted a plea deal offered by the government.

According to the government, Enron issued a press release on May 15, 2000, announcing the acquisition of Warpspeed Communications. According to Mr. Hirko’s plea agreement, the press release falsely represented the status of the Broadband Operating System, saying that it was presently functioning as part of Enron’s network. The press release says:

Broadband Operating System allows application developers to dynamically provision bandwidth on demand for the end-to-end quality of service necessary to deliver broadband content.

Mr. Hirko’s plea agreement states that he approved this language though he knew it contained materially inaccurate representations of the BOS’s status. According to the plea agreement, Hirko’s approval of this press release, as well as other press releases, assisted in maintaining Enron’s overall stock price, thereby improperly increasing the value of Hirko’s holdings of Enron stock.

Mr. Hirko accepted the plea agreement while he and his co-defendants Rex Shelby and Scott Yeager had petitions before the Supreme Court. The government crafted the plea so that it was irrevocable, regardless of the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Shelby and/or Yeager cases. Mr. Hirko, exhausted and wanting to move on with his life, accepted this condition on his plea.

Presently Mr. Hirko awaits sentencing, scheduled for September. If he can not change or withdraw his plea, it is possible Judge Vanessa Gilmore will do one of two things: sentence him at the low end of the range requested by the government (ie, twelve months) or she can refuse to accept the plea at sentencing. During the Broadband trial, Gilmore seemed very tough on the defendants but over the last year, she’s been more accepting of their motions, unexpectedly ruling in their favor in some motions, so it is possible that she will accept the successful Yeager decision a mitigating factor in her sentence.

It is a small blessing that Joe Hirko’s temperament is naturally calm. He is able to handle crises with grace and aplomb, so I know that he will survive in prison. He will endure, and return free to the shores of his own real life.

Ben Campbell Scolds Arsonist

From his tenure on the Enron Task Force, Ben Campbell has moved on to more violent investigations.

Yesterday Brooklyn federal prosecutors announced the sentencing of Carmine Graziano, the former owner of Copperfield’s Pub in New Hyde Park, who hired a bar patron to set fire to Roseanne’s Cards Galore. Graziano was sentenced to 15 years’ in prison, five years of supervised release, and $216,924 in restitution.

The resulting firebombing completely destroyed Roseanne’s and forced the evacuation of residents of several apartments located directly above the store, including a severely physically disabled man who suffered burns and smoke inhalation.

In March 2008, Graziano was convicted on all counts in the indictment following a two-week jury trial. As established by the trial evidence, in August 2003, Graziano hired a heroin-addicted patron of Copperfield’s to set fire to Roseanne’s, a family-owned stationery store.

……

“In an effort to preserve profits, the defendant destroyed a neighboring business and endangered the lives of residents and emergency responders,” stated United States Attorney Benton Campbell in Downtown Brooklyn. “Those who employ such violence will be pursued, prosecuted, and punished.”

Arsonists are more Campbell’s speed. He was put in his place when he cross-examined Rex Shelby during the Broadband trial. He accused Mr. Shelby’s attorney of writing notes for Mr. Shelby. Mr. Shelby then calmly told him that he didn’t even have an attorney when he wrote the notes. Then Mr. Campbell quietly walked over to the prosecution’s table to re-attach his balls.

In fairness, my opinion of Mr. Campbell is not universal. Some believe he was the fairest of the Enron Task Force prosecutors.

Swedish Couple Keep 2 Year Old Child’s Gender Secret

A couple of Swedish parents have stirred up debate in the country by refusing to reveal whether their two-and-a-half-year-old child is a boy or a girl..

Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It’s cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

The child’s parents said so long as they keep Pop’s gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.

Pop’s wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop’s hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop’s parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child – they just say Pop.

“I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime,” said Pop’s mother.

But while Pop’s parents say they have received supportive feedback from many of their peers, not everyone agrees that their chosen course of action will have a positive outcome.

“Ignoring children’s natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

“Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Pinker tells The Local.

“It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to keep this a secret for long. Children are curious about their own identity, and are likely to gravitate towards others of the same sex during free play time in early childhood.”

Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

But Swedish gender equality consultant Kristina Henkel says Pop’s parents’ experiment might have positive results.

“If the parents are doing this because they want to create a discussion with other adults about why gender is important, then I think they can make a point of it,” Henkel says in a telephone interview with The Local.

I was going to save my outrage for the end but this paragraph floored me. Children are not experiments for social discussion. This is sick!

“You can talk about there being a non-stereotypical gender; if you are a girl you can do the same as a boy, and if you’re a boy you can do the same as a girl.”

Henkel also says a child’s sex can deeply affect how they are treated growing up, and distract them from simply being a human being.

“If the child is dressed up as a girl or boy, it affects them because people see and treat them in a more gender-typical way,” Henkel explains.

“Girls are told they are cute in their dresses, and boys are told they are cool with their car toys. But if you give them no gender they will be seen more as a human or not a stereotype as a boy or girl.”

But… they are a girl or a boy. Why are stereotypes bad anyway? If a person mistakenly called me “Sir”, I would be aghast. I love being a female, even with all the craziness that entails. I can’t imagine hating oneself enough that even your gender is somehow not your own.

She says that without these gender stereotypes, children can build character as individuals, not hindered by preconceived notions of what they should be as males or females.

But kids do that anyway! Boys will take dolls and make guns of them. Girls will decorate trucks and have tea parties. This isn’t bad. This is nature. There’s a reason for this.

“I think that can make these kids stronger,” Henkel says.

They’re going to need that strength for all the ass-kicking they will receive at school.

Anna Nordenström, a paediatric endocrinologist at Karolinska Institutet, says it’s hard to know what effects the parents’ decision will have on Pop.

“It will affect the child, but it’s hard to say if it will hurt the child,” says Nordenström, who studies hormonal influences on gender development.

“I don’t know what they are trying to achieve. It’s going to make the child different, make them very special.”

No doubt. He’ll be the only boy in a skirt, crying because his dollie was taken away by that bitch in the orange Osh Kosh.

She says if Pop is still ‘genderless’ by the time he or she starts school, Pop will certainly receive a lot of attention from classmates.

“We don’t know exactly what determines sexual identity, but it’s not only sexual upbringing,” says Nordenström. “Gender-typical behaviour, sexual preferences and sexual identity usually go together. There are hormonal and other influences that we don’t know that will determine the gender of the child.”

Both Nordenström and Pinker refer to a controversial case from 1967 when a circumcision left one of two twin brothers without a penis. Dr. John Money, who asserted that gender was learned rather than innate, convinced the parents to raise ‘David’ as ‘Brenda’ and the child had cosmetic genitalia reconstruction surgery.

She was raised as a female, with girls’ clothes, games and codes of behaviour. The parents never told Brenda the secret until she was a teenager and rebelled against femininity. She then started receiving testosterone injections and underwent another genetic reconstruction process to become David again. David Reimer denounced the experiment as a crushing failure before committing suicide at the age of 38.

So not a success, is what you’re saying here. Right? Not a success to mess with the fancy parts. Not a good thing.

“I don’t think that trying to keep a child’s sex a secret will fool anyone, nor do I think it’s wise or ethical,” says Pinker. “As with any family secret, when we try to keep an elemental truth from children, it usually blows up in the parent’s face, via psychosomatic illness or rebellious behaviour.”

But with a second child on the way, Pop’s parents have no plans to change what they see as a winning formula. As for Pop, they say they will only reveal the child’s sex when Pop thinks it’s time.

In other words when he kills them while they’re sleeping or commits suicide.

Crossing The “Sexual Lines”

The Mark Sanford scandal is starting to fade a little bit but I’m embarrassed at how rapt I still am with this story. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so lurid in my life – and that includes Bill Clinton’s White House affair with his Native American intern, Kneeling Fox.

Sanford’s honesty is cringe-inducing. Yesterday he admitted that he’s “trying to fall back in love with [his] wife” and his paramour was his “soulmate”. He said that “It’s a love affair.”

As I watched the press conference, I kept expecting some crazy woman to enter from Stage Left, all windmilling arms and kicking feet and a Jerry Springer mania in her eye. But alas, the wifey was quiet all during this humiliating display. It makes me wonder if perhaps Sanford is hoping that the Missus gets so frustrated and/or disgusted she leaves his sorry ass, thus leaving him free to be with his Argentinian “soulmate.” He can then say “well I tried” and then get busy learning the Latin romance languages.

I do believe him though. That kind of wrought honesty is undeniable. As comparison believe for an instant that John Edwards was deeply in love with his mistress? I didn’t. I can’t remember ever hearing a politician claim that love was the reason for his affair. It is usually “personal weakness” or whatever. But love? It’s certainly refreshing, at least.

I don’t think Sanford is going to make his marriage work. I give it two months before he’s in Argentina with his lover. There is a whiff of “Duke Windsor/ Wallis Simpson” about this whole affair, the public proclamations of love, “soulmate”, etc. It sounds like he’s sending his mistress a message, frankly. I think he’s just about crazy enough to say, you know what? Fuck it, I’m gone.

The wifey in all this has behaved marvelously. She was noticeably absent from his public confessions. She’s cheerful, taking care of the kids, publicly saying she wants to make her marriage work but she doesn’t quite know if it will. We don’t have too many Republican scorned wives. When compared to Silda Spitzer, Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and the scores of other Democrat wives who meekly stand by their husbands, Mrs. Sanford is a beacon of morality.

Ironic that we had to discover that through the bad behavior of her husband.

Today In Enron History

Today in 1997, the Portland General Electric/Enron merger was finalized and official.

It’s also an important day in the Marlin-Marlin II/Osprey/Whitewing transaction, which was part of the purchase of Wessex which later became Azurix. Marlin was a SPE that was used to issue debt backed by water assets (ie, Enron sold the assets to Marlin.) Backed by these assets, on July 1, 2001 Marlin II issued $1 billion of debt that would mature on July 1, 2003. The debt had one of Fastow’s weird little gotchas in it; if Marlin II could not pay for the debt, Enron would issue more stock to cover the difference. But the important trigger was that if that if Enron’s stock price fell below $34.13 and/or Enron’s credit rating fell below investment grade, the billion dollars would be due immediately. This would later set the company on it’s final death spiral.

Joe Hirko’s Big Escape

I know how Joe Hirko can escape his plea deal. He simply needs to claim that there was a secret verbal side deal with the government assuring him that all charges would be dismissed if the SCOTUS remanded his petition.

The government has already established that actual written agreements are trumped by secret verbal side deals. So they would have to let him go!

I must pass this on to Hirko’s attorneys ASAP.

Prince Alwaleed’s Tips For Staying Rich and Fit

See Dealbreaker. I’m sort of speechless, except to say ew, ew, ew, gross! and yet so spleen-bustingly funny.