bribery | The Obama Diary

President Barack Obama makes a statement at the start of a Cabinet Meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, Monday, Oct. 3, 2011. From left are, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice.

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Michael Tomasky: So the Rick Perry hunting ground story has been absorbed …. the way things seem to be shaking out, the big loser from the revelation that the property bore the name “Ni**erhead” is … not Rick Perry. It’s the black guy.

…. Herman Cain was the first – and as of Sunday night the only – Perry opponent to pounce on The Washington Post’s revelations published Sunday morning …. it is instructive, is it not, that no other candidate jumped on this revelation?

… This charge may make some conservatives feel that Perry is a tad embarrassing. But how many will it personally offend? Let’s face it, based on the evidence of the last debate, the GOP base thinks Perry isn’t racially insensitive enough, giving $100,000 college-education discounts to all those illegal brown children.

…. If the story is true in its worst light, it maybe doesn’t make him a racist. It does make him a person who doesn’t care what people who aren’t just like him think — and who doesn’t even bother to be friends with anyone who cares. I have a word for that: Texashead. But it’s OK. That used to be a kind of railroad spike.

Full article here

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Steve Benen: The RNC was delighted today to trumpet a quote from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about the Obama White House. “‘I think you need to talk about how poorly they do on message,” she was quoted as saying about the president and his team. “They can’t see around corners; they anticipate nothing.”

I was curious about the context, so I went to the Newsweek/Daily Beast article that featured the quote. It wasn’t there. As it turns out, there’s a good reason for that:

Just one problem: She never said it, according to both her office and sources at Newsweek …. Newsweek has retracted the quote, and put an editor’s note on the piece: “Editor’s Note; An earlier version of this story included a comment erroneously attributed to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, criticizing the White House’s efforts at political messaging. Newsweek and The Daily Beast regret the error.”

More here

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Bloomberg: In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”

…. Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination.

…. A Bloomberg Markets investigation has (also) found that Koch Industries – in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle Easre – has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.

Full article here

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Worth seeing again (and again and again and again….):

ThinkProgress

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President Obama: “I don’t think the American people would dispute that at every step of the way, I have done everything I can to try to get the Republican Party to work with me to try to deal with what is the biggest crisis of our lifetime, and each time all we’ve gotten from them is, ‘no’.”

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