Today In Enron History – The Audio Version

I did something a little different today: I recorded audio of Today In Enron History. Check it:

[deleted]

For some reason, this isn’t working. Will try to get it up in the next few hours. Sorry.

The Cara Ellison Zombie Escape Plan

It’s all fun and games until the living dead show up and start acting like total assholes: harassing you at work, showing up in the backseat of your car, trying to eat your brains when you’re watching the Superbowl. And the deeper you get into a zombie crises, the more everyone acts like an asshole. So you can see how a zombie crisis can quickly grow into a real, entrenched, and unmanageable problem.

That’s why we here at Cara Ellison Corp. have a zombie escape plan, and we’d like to share it with you in the hopes that when the day comes that zombies take over the planet, you have a chance of survival.

Step One
When you first become aware that zombies have arrived, it is critical you stay calm. Luckily Cara Ellison Corp. owns three pharmaceutical companies which produce safe, highly addictive Zombie-B-Gone pills, sold under the trade name Zomcam. The pills will immediately make you calm and make you believe you have superhero powers. They will give you an opportunity to assess the situation and formulate your next steps.

Step Two
If you can’t outrun the zombies, you will need to find safe shelter immediately. We here at Cara Ellison Corp. have designed the Zoogloo, which is a plastic igloo with triple-bolted locks that will keep zombies out, and you safe inside.

Step Three
If the zombies in your neighborhood as much assholes as the ones in my neighborhood, you could be in your Zoogloo for a while. You’ll need nourishment. That’s why Cara Ellison manufactures Little Cara Snack Cakes. They have a shelf life of eighty years, and they’re just plain delicious!

Step Four
Relax. With asshole zombies pounding at the Zoogloo door and nothing to watch on teevee, your best bet is to simply take another Zomcam in your cozy little Zoogloo and eat Cara’s cake until you think it safe to leave.

Remember: most zombie crises do end. With Cara Ellison controlling your brain, your environment and your food, you’re prepared for whatever zombie crisis life throws at you next!

The Cara Ellison Sanity List

Websites

1. Right Wing News
2. Rush Limbaugh
3. ScrappleFace
4. Agent Bedhead
5. SixMeatBuffet

Books

1. Guilty by Ann Coulter
2. Joyce Carol Oates: Journals
3. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
4. Godspeed by Cara Ellison
5. On The Side of Angels: Enron From The Inside by Cara Ellison

Songs

1. Dress You Up by Madonna
2. Right Next Door (Because of Me) by Robert Cray
3. By Your Side by Sade
4. Imagining America by Everything But The Girl
5. Closer by Nine Inch Nails

Cherries and the Snow

I was born in a country that exists now only on old maps. My father was an air attache at the embassy so on the day when my mother began to feel the birth pains, my father took her to the embassy physician where most American babies were born. Because I was breech, the doctor decided that the best thing to do was get my mother to the main hospital.

My mother spoke no Czech, no Russian or German. So in this hospital where she couldn’t understand anyone, where the doctors were using outdated Soviet equipment, and under the auspices of the great nation of Czechoslovakia, I was born at three o’clock in the afternoon.

With a new infant, my mother insisted on returning to the United States. She could tolerate being pregnant in Prague, but she could not tolerate having a little baby there. My mother arrived with me in New Orleans when I was just a few months old. Her father had founded an oil company – you would recognize the name – and she worked there a few days a week while I was watched by a nanny I loved.

My father, apparently lonely in Prague without my mother, arrived a few months later. It went on like this for years. He was there a few months, gone a few months. I will never know the conversations they had, the compromises they struck. I will never know if he simply chose to live on another continent because my mother was such a shrew, and if that is the case then I applaud his perception.

But what I remember is that occasionally, when we were all together, my father would sometimes tell me the story of my birth. And sometimes, if I was persuasive enough, he would tell me the story of how he met my mother.

They were in college. He was running late for his class and as he was hurrying across the quad, he saw a girl on the library steps wearing a white dress with red cherries on it. “And?” I’d prompt.

“And she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” he would say.

The thought fascinated me. But I would sit quietly, and wait for the line I knew I was coming. He told me how the fact that he was late for class suddenly didn’t matter anymore; in fact it was forgotten completely. He approached her, this vision of lovliness in her cherry-print dress.

“And I asked her to go out with me.”

“And she said yes?”

“She said yes.”

“And just think,” he said, and kissed my cheek. “If I had been on time, I never would have met your mother…And you might never have been born.”

The thought riveted me. I could have not been born? The last time he told me the story, I was fourteen years old. We were in Jordan, and it was Christmastime.

“And she said yes?” I asked, though I’d heard the story a million times.

“She said yes. And just think. Had I been on time, I’d never have met your mother. And you might never have been born.”

I thought of how Czechoslovakia had evolved to the Czech Republic, how pretty and enormous the stars were in Jordan, how battered and disoriented I felt looking at all the snow in Moscow. I thought of all the countries I had seen in my fourteen years, how I knew the vastness of our world, how I felt so deeply attached to it all, and for the first time, I knew the story wasn’t over.

I knew it was impossible that I wouldn’t be born. Had my father been early, he might have seen her. Or maybe he’d have seen her on another day. Someway, somehow, I was going to happen.

I knew then, and I know now, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.

Technical Support

DBW, this is what the new Cara Ellison Corp. website is supposed to look like:

This is in Explorer. You’re not seeing this?

It Does No Good

[For The One Who Endures]

It does no good to try not to think. Thoughts wander in starburst patterns or circles. They go off on long wild drives down lonesome bayou roads, lifting like Vs of geese into wild fluttering formations against blue twilight.

Effortless, unwilled, undirected.

It does no good to try not to think, so I think of you. Sometimes in the middle of the day, when I should be writing about mark to market accounting or energy warrants or Brady evidence, I become aware that I have, in fact, been thinking of you for hours. The monitor is blank as my face, as guilty as the thoughts that kept me from my work in the first place.

It does no good try not to think, so I think of you. Like you, I love knowing what to do and doing it. You do what you do because you must – there are so few choices for you – and I do what I do because I must. Scraps of conversation drift in and out of recall, but really I am thinking, even now, how I feel made entirely of gleaming surfaces you helped polish. I lie to you all the time. Even right now, I’m lying by omission. I’m lying and you know I’m lying. Yet you say nothing.

It does no good to try not to think, so I think about you. There are things I have seen or done. They don’t amount to anything but there seems to be no way to get rid of them, except to write and pass them on. You are one of those things, but I fear this story is going to follow me out the door.

Cara Ellison Corp Announces New Website

Cara Ellison Corp. is pleased to maximize shareholder value with the unveiling of its new website at www.caraellison.com.

Today In Enron History

When you look over all the horrible things that happened in the collapse of Enron, it is difficult to choose one that would be most egregious. Jeff Skilling went to prison. Dr. Lay died before he could be sentenced. Ken Rice… Andy Fastow… there is so much destruction that the milestones all seem to blur together to create a single sustained crescendo of agony.

But this day, January 25, we can all agree, was the very worst day in all of Enron history.

About 2:15am on January 25, 2002, Cliff Baxter departed his home in Sugar Land and drove his black Mercedes down Palm Royale Boulevard. He stopped between two medians, where drivers might make a u-turn. He pulled out a small handgun, a .365 Magnum revolver, and shot himself in the right temple.

When he worked at Enron, Cliff Baxter was an executive vice president at Enron Corp, part of the core group of men who made Enron great. His last task before he resigned in May 01 was to sell international assets in the Raptors – a campaign called Project Summer. In Conspiracy of Fools, Eichenwald insists that Baxter was deeply frustrated by the slow pace of the sales but Baxter was not alive to speak for himself. It is unknown whether or not he was frustrated with his work. But that allegation is not the most heartbreaking.

In the movie Smartest Guys In The Room, Bethany McLean makes the slanderous, libelous statement that Cliff Baxter was manic/depressive. This is such an appalling allegation that during a Q & A at the showing of the movie at the River Oaks Theatre in Houston, Texas, Cliff Baxter’s widow stood up and asked Bethany about that statement. Carol Baxter did not cause a scene, of course, but she at least had the satisfaction of pushing back against the lies that were already beginning to accumulate about her husband.

Furthermore, McLean suggests that Baxter killed himself because “he would have to testify against his friends.” When Baxter passed away, not a single indictment had been issued. Not one formal accusation had been levied against anyone inside the organization. But that didn’t stop Bethany from stupidly speculating about the darkness inside the soul of a man she’d never met.

During Jeff Skilling’s congressional hearing, Rep. Cliff Stearns asked Skilling if before Cliff Baxter died, had the two had many conversations.

Skilling answered in the affirmative.

Stearns asked, “And were any of them relative to Enron?”

Skilling looked heartbroken for a moment before he answered yes. He said, “Cliff came over to my house and he says, ‘they’re calling us child molesters. And he says, ‘that will never wash off.’” The grief in his eyes is so naked it is difficult to look at, yet you can not look away.

I don’t know much about Cliff Baxter. I’ve intentionally kept myself ignorant about him; it seems the most respectful thing to do. But what I do know about him is that he, Ken Rice, and Jeff Skilling were a dream team of men – one of those magnificent teams that coalesce in a perfect storm of temperaments and abilities.

I miss knowing that he is in the world.

Pelosi Says Birth Control Will Help Economy

Via Drudge:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding to the new economic “stimulus” package, claiming “contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

Pelosi, the mother of 5 children and 6 grandchildren, who once said, “Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to being a mom,” seemed to imply babies are somehow a burden on the treasury.

The revelation came during an exchange Sunday morning on ABC’s THIS WEEK.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

Developing…

Speaker Pelosi is full of crap and she knows it. This ‘porkulus’ (opposite of stimulus) is just another way to entrench the liberal fascination with sex into the culture.

And by the way, whatever happened to getting the government out of our bedrooms? I guess she wants the gov in our bedrooms when we’re doing things the way she wants them done.

Typical Liberal Crap.

This is why we need Cara Ellison in the Senate, to help stop this stuff. Vote Cara, Vote For Change!

Dear Texas

Ladies and Gentlemen,

When we elect representatives to the United States Senate, we expect certain things in exchange for our votes. We expect that the wishes of the majority will be represented in Washington, D.C. We expect that the values that we elected in the first place will not become watered down in the mire of political horseracing. And we expect that our representatives will actually do the job they are sent to Washington, D.C. to accomplish.

Both John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, our Senators from the great state of Texas, have long, storied careers in politics. Both are respected and have tremendous sway with voters. And both have betrayed the Conservative values they were elected upon.

Hutchison and Cornyn both voted for TARP. And neither one has stood up against the push of socialism that is sweeping our nation. Both have shown their values are more in line with Democrats than with Conservative Republicans who voted for them.

So in 2010, I am asking that you send me to the United States Senate to represent your interests in Washington, D.C. I stand for low taxes, incentives for entrepreneurs, such as a one-year tax holiday for any company that incorporates by March 1, 2010, a $10,000 tax credit per salaried employee who makes over $35,000 for any company incorporated before 2008, and a 15% tax cut across the board for people who actually pay taxes. If you are one of the millions who do not pay taxes, the time has come for greater expectations. The era of tax cuts for people who do not pay taxes is over. “Free” is no longer a word that you will hear from your government.

For too long, the expectations of all Americans have been lowered to such a degree that now we want only to go to work, get a paycheck, and return home exhausted. No more. We should thrive instead of survive. We should forget all the nonsense of gender and race politics, of class envy, of special interest groups who vie for tax dollars and deliver nothing, year after year after year. All these things distract us from the only real issue any American – indeed any person – truly cares about : how to make life better for yourself, and those you care about.

In the era of Obama, the pull of Socialism is gaining momentum. He promises money for education and money for your mortgage and money for recreation. I will not support these phony promises which do nothing but further erode our American independence. For those of us who still believe that Americans are at their best when they are acting in their own best interest, and Americans can do more when they are unencumbered by government, and Americans achieve more when they are let loose to do so, I would be honored to represent you in the United States Senate.

On this blog you have honored me with your attention while I expound on my views. You know where I stand. You know what I stand for.

Now I am asking for your vote.

Sincerely,

Cara Ellison