Small potatoes compared to Kenny Boy? Damn straight. So if I rob a convenience store, I should walk because someone else robbed a bank? Bull.

Saying the crooks at Enron, WorldCom, and all the rest should be behind bars is spot on. Saying because they’re not she shouldn’t have been is spot off.

As for investing in a potential cure for cancer – I challenge anyone to come up with even a minor mitigation without a great deal of investment from rather a lot of people – be the money extorted from taxpayers by the crooks in Congress or proffered by willing investors. Speculation is what one does with money one can afford to loose. Investing is what one does when one hopes to add value to the common good in exchange for a reasonable profit. Some people invest their time flipping hamburgers in exchange for cash. Sometimes it is evident to the consumer of the service just how altruistic the flipper feels about his/her investment of time. Some people have more money than time, so they use their money to find ways to make it possible for others, with more time than money, to invest what they have. Then there are those who take what they can from life giving as little as possible in return. I’m sure present company would not fall in that category!

If recollection serves, the principle of the company Martha had invested in sought to advise all his main supporters when he learned the FDA would not approve his application for whatever it was. By so doing he was short-changing his smaller investors anyone to whom the sellers of the stock would be selling.

I’m a person who doesn’t believe generally in telling untruths, but were I not very tolerant I’d be very lonely! Martha would have been way smarter to just tell the truth, “My broker called and advised me to sell, the kind of thing comissioned brokers are licensed for being competent to do, so I sold.” End of story. Being a woman, she probably couldn’t help starting in the middle of the story and volunteering irrelevant but suspicious details.

My hat is off to her for taking her punishment as well as for her years of not just making the world a better place but showing millions of others how to do so too.

Thank you Martha for your examples!

Y

Martha Stewart? Go piss up a rope.

Stewart might have lied to the government, but the fruits of her misdeeds pale in comparison to what Enron did to a vast multitude of people, many of whom are facing retirement hell.

I agree that without a doubt Stewart is playing this script to her benefit. And the decision to land her corporate jet in the wee hours against airport policy suggests that she still doesn’t consider herself to be one of the stinking normal people. But she’s a piker compared to many Wall Street types who are far more deserving of prosecutorial attention.

The larger question, however, is why our government feels obliged to selectively prosecute famous people in this manner. Rather than assuring us that even the rich and powerful are not beyond the reach of law and order, this instead sends the message that if the legs can be knocked out from under Martha Stewart, we’d darn well better know our place and keep to it.

Above all, the message of the Martha Stewart and Enron cases is that our lap-dog media are supremely manipulable and there is an inevitable point at which they decide they’ve been there, done that — and are moving on.

Except, of course, when a white blond wife is killed and her husband is on trial. Murder and mayhem that is just a hair removed from the bad “female in jeopardy” cookie-cutter made-for-TV movie of the Lifetime Network makes for excellent programming.

Other than that, thank God for Sherman Skolnick!