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Hightower Lowdown
"No matter how cynical you get, it's almost impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
April's Lowdown
The great American medicine show, a spectacle of deceit, manipulation, and flimflammery
Butterflies waft across a beautiful field of spring flowers. A delightful young family bicycles joyously down a country lane. A couple on a park bench leans sensually into each other. A 40-something woman's face radiates with both perfect beauty and internal happiness. "All's right with the world," is the message... as long as you've taken your dosages of Lunesta, Celebrex, Cialis, and Botox.
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The "environmental President" he won't be
When polluters challenge, al gore backs down
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The lowdown gooberhead award
Time to issue another of our Gooberhead Awards, which we hand out periodically to those in the news who've got their mouths going 100 miles per hour . . . but don't seem to have their brains in gear.
This month's Goober is the very deserving Michael Milken, the former junk-bond king and Wall Street finagler who spent a couple of years in the federal pokey and paid $600 million in fines for securities fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy. Only, please, don't call Mike the "former junk-bond king" anymore.
Apparently it irritates him, so he had his PR staff send out a memo to editors entitled "Who Michael Milken is . . . and is not." Reprinted in Harper's Magazine, the memo instructs the media on how to identify Milken properly.
The memo notes that since leaving prison, Mike has been heading his own economic think tank and a family foundation he established with about half a billion ill- gotten bucks he squirreled away in the names of his wife and children. So, say his spin-meisters, "financier and philanthropist is probably the most common short description" for Mike.
The PR people petulantly sniff that, "Those who mindlessly regurgitate 'junk bond king' have no understanding of Milken's work or its complex theoretical underpinning." Oh, yeah, fraud and conspiracy can be pretty complex.
Still, to avoid the complexity, henceforth we'll just refer to Milken as a "crook and former jailbird."