April 03, 2006

Coingate! How does a politician with a love of rare coins use big-money influence to become chairman of the brand-new US Treasury Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, only to lose $13 million in state funds in a failed coin venture and be charged with 53 felony counts for theft and corruption as well as federal money-laundering charges stemming from raising $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign and $200,000 for the GOP in general? Um, well here's one way.

Yawn if you will, but this story has something none of those other raise-a-bunch-of-money-for-the-GOP-get-the-rules-changed-for-you-then-get-busted stories have. GOLD! Gold I tells ya! Hee HEE hee hee heee!! AH HAha hahahHAAAhahHAaaa!!

posted by petebest 18 years ago
  • Republicans, corrupt? This is not possible, my friend. Too out of the ordinary.
  • Good lord. We're descending into farce here.
  • We would have to go up about five floors before we could descend into farce here.
  • petebest, any more lip out of you and I'll haul off and let you have it. If you know what's good for you, you won't monkey around with Fred C. Dobbs! Do you believe that stuff the old man was saying the other night at the Oso Negro about gold changin' a man's soul so's he ain't the same sort of man as he was before findin' it? ...but seriously, interesting post. “Noe Supper Club” - you couldn’t make that stuff up.
  • heheh. There's something sympathetic about the central character - it seems like he does have a genuine love for coins . . . for . . for gold . . .
  • oh noes! you couldn't make this stuff up. it's comedy ..., er, comedy silver!
  • Cointcha just see the look on his face when he got busted? He'd be all like, "Dime innocent!"
  • OMFG. I actually knew about this already, because it happened where I live. Seriously, I used to work across the street from the Ohio Statehouse, even. And the whole story seriously pisses me off, especially the part about the reporter who withheld the investigation/publication bits to help Bush's 2004 campaign chances in OH. (The state that, you know, won him the election, and where all voting errors were in his favor, and where the CEO of Diebold is from, the one who made the voting machines and also said at one point that he was "committed to delivering Ohio for Bush.") Gah. Two and a half more years if he doesn't get impeached or declare martial law and suspend voting. Which would be less and interminably more, respectively.
  • the chargesse against me; they're specie!
  • verbminx, do tell - what reporter? Craps! Do you realize who's running the govern-mint?!
  • Fritz Wenzel. Quit the Blade on Friday and had a job as a Republican political consultant on Monday morning. See this one too. It's not the article I was thinking of, which may actually have been in Salon last year, but it also describes how the story's suppression early on helped Bush in the 2004 election. And... aha! here it is.
  • But Bush's reelection may have been made possible by a Blade reporter with close ties to the Republican Party who reportedly knew about Noe's potential campaign violations in early 2004 but suppressed the story. Ahh, that's my ShrubCo-era media. Doing its very best to destroy democracy. Kudos Herr Wenzel. Kudos.
  • I live in Ohio, too, and have also been following the story. If people didn't know that the state government was thoroughly rotten before, hopefully they do now.
  • Ya' think there's even gonna be ANY kind of small change? with the BushCo Mafia in charge? FuckBush. Oh, wait, have I said that before in another thread? Probably not loud enough that anyone remembers: FUCKBUSH
  • The worst part of all of this is that the phrase "fuck bush" has turned into something negative. When I was younger and had to walk thirty miles in the snow to school, we thought fuck bush was something completely different...
  • You know what my Grandma used to say to describe anyone who was immorally greedy and corrupt? "He'd steal the coins off a dead man's eyes."
  • I also thought it was interesting that America doesn't have a .9999 24k gold coin. Canada does. Think they're so big.
  • Hey, dead guys don't need money where they're goin. Tell your grandma to get off my case.
  • I used to work on the Hades ferry, the union is pretty strict.
  • EXCUSE ME?!?!?!?!!? *GramMa slowly rises out of easy chair
  • I smell a smackdown.
  • Charon, he who ferries the dead across the Styx in the belief-system of the ancient Greeks, always accepted silver and/or copper coins -- the value traditionally being one eighth of an obol, which at one time was silver, and later copper. [see Chalcus]. Some maintain coins were placed on the eyes of the dead, while others have them placed in the deceased's mouth. The Greeks seem terribly literal compared to the Chinese, who finally began to use paper money for rewarding/buying off their increasingly bureaucratic gods; for this purpose there is specially printed red paper, red being an auspicious colour to the Chinese. However, the Chinese dead were ignorant of the need for a post-mortem ferryboat-ride, and so did not have to cross the Styx.