As you may have heard, New York's governor has been involved in some type of prostitution ring. What implications do you think this will have on the upcoming elections/primaries?
Imagine that! The same guy gets involved in both politics and prostitution. Seems appropriate, given the substantial similarity between what politicians and prostitutes do.
The brilliant Harvard-educated lawyer apparently never thought of using a pre-paid cell phone from Wal-Mart, a fake name, and paying cash.
He's a former prosecutor. He knows all about wiretaps, e-mails stored on servers and all the rest of it. It's all kind of incomprehensible. Spitzer is a silver-spoon kind of guy though, and may have imagined himself a breed apart, invincible somehow. By all accounts he's widely disliked, reportedly because of his personal arrogance. It's hubris yet again, just like in a Greek tragedy. Excessive pride, bad judgement and then the inevitable crash to earth.
On the upcoming national elections? None at all. In New York, the Lt. Governor will serve out the rest of Spitzer's term and the next elections are reportedly several years off. The new Gov. will be widely liked by all accounts (America's first blind Governor) but he's apparently very liberal, so the whole tenor of state politics will doubtless change. More political division, less personal animosity. From my perspective on the other side of the continent, I'm kind of sorry to see Spitzer go. I liked him for precisely the reason that he's so savagely hated on Wall Street. He was willing to take on that little club of top executives and fund managers that essentially manage the economy for their own benefit. For example, Spitzer didn't just shrug off Grasso's $180 million severance package from the NYSE. Sometimes it appears to me that top executives are just looting the companies that they supposedly serve. There have to be effective checks-and-balances, but when boards of directors are hand-picked and when the majority of voting shares are controlled either by insiders or by large institutional investors who belong to the same club (sometimes literally), guys like Spitzer are all that the public has left. I applaud him for that and I hope that his fall doesn't mean the end of states' willingness to confront the worst excesses of corporate America.
I bet that you have locked up plenty of people who, while not as bright as Spitzer, were fairly smart but made foolish mistakes especially when it came to sex. I can recall quite a few and almost invariably it was because they weren't making their decisions with the head on top of their shoulders.
I think that much of what Spitzer with respect to Wall Street was a political calculation. After all, the Spitzer family profited heavily from their participation in Jim Cramer's flagship hedge fund in the 80's and early 90's. Did Wall Street need to be cleaned up? Yes, but Spitzer wasn't the white knight his PR people portrayed him as, just another hypocritical politician and former prosecutor. His knowledge of and willingness to use basic techniques of money laundering while satisfying his darkest desires tell us more than we really need to know about the man's character.
Another one bites the dust. What is it with high ranking officials and prostitutes? What about the devasted wife and kids? Pathetic.
Me and my wife both use pre-paid phones ($100 per year). However we had to produce an ID to buy them (one from Virgin and one from T-Mobile). Perhaops this is either a California requirement or the phone companies playing it safe.
Around here, anyone can walk into Wal-Mart or even the local quickie mart and walk out with a no-name prepaid cell phone. They're outrageously expensive considering what you get, but when you're paying $5000 for a prostitute I'm sure it's peanuts in comparison.
Paul McCartney only paid $1,430.86 per hour so I guess marriage is a better deal. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080317/McCartney_Mills_080317/20080317?hub=CanadaAM
They should give the prostitute a medal for state service and a ten thousand dollar check for rooting out another morally bankrupt politican...if they can't tow the line, then kick'em to the curb. Here in SC, they caught the former state treasurer with 27 grams of cocaine which he said was bought for "his friends to give away" so as to avoid a higher felony charge of dealing the junk. I was hoping prosecuters would then lean on him until he dropped a dime on who was his "friends"....might could have really cleaned out the state house! Personally I would have enjoyed watching a few other elected roustabouts boil to the surface. Since this rich kid came from a long line of SC politicans there is a nice new bridge in Charleston which cost millions of dollars that was named after one of his relatives. In retrospect, the bridge should be renamed after the coke dealer who rooted this guy out. The same should also apply, a state medal and ten thousand dollar check! It seems hookers and drug dealers are getting these bums busted faster than FBI sting operations... dont we owe them a debt of gratitude in the same way we have honored Melvin Purvis? Gavin
That's a big reason why many states changed their laws from "Possession With Intent to Sell" to "Intent to Distribute"; you can intend to sell it, transfer it, give it away, or pay people to take it off your hands, it's still the same criminal charge.
