President Bush and the Robber Barons

Hi, I'm Bill O'Reilly.  Thank you for watching us tonight.

President Bush and the robber barons, that is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo.

The president gave a speech today on Washington, promising tough action against corporate thieves, including seizing their assets if they're convicted.

Some Americans who don't like Mr. Bush are cynical about his current zeal and point to his questionable corporate dealings.

The Harken deal bothered me as well, so we did some digging, and here's what we found out.

Mr. Bush was on the board of directors of the Harken Energy Company, and on June 22, 1990, he sold Harken stock valued at more than $800,000 to him.  By law, Mr. Bush was required to report that transaction to the SEC, but his filing was months late.

The president says somebody screwed up, but he's not sure who.

Anyway, five months after Bush sold the stock, it lost 50 percent of its value, and that doesn't look good, right?  But wait.  Nine months after that, Harken stock had recovered and was worth twice what the president had sold it for.

So the insider trading-profiteering charge seems to be bogus.

Today Mr. Bush talked tough about putting the corporate bandits that have stolen from the American people in prison.  And "Talking Points" was heartened because two weeks ago I told Neil Cavuto what Mr. Bush had to do in fairness to the American people.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, JUNE 26)

O'REILLY:  I want, I want, I want to explain to the audience that we were on The Radio Factor today, Cavuto and I.  It was his big break.  And I said I knew two things.  Number one, if I were President Bush, I'd, hell, I'd do a speech to the nation, you know, one -- a chat, say, look, this is what I'm going to do, this is how serious -- to show the nation, look, we're taking this seriously.  And number two, I'd appoint a federal task force under the aegis of the Justice Department to basically look into other things that go on...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

And obviously Mr. Bush did give his address today, and he did appoint a task force under the aegis of the Justice Department.  And we applaud that.

Now, we hope the president will follow through, and vigorously prosecute these corporate thieves.  We'll be tracking it.

And that's "The Memo."

The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day

Time now for "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day."

Every year, hundreds of, shall we say, curiosity seekers go to Spain to run with the bulls.  Of course, this doesn't always work out real well.  Whoa.  Doesn't look fun.  Bulls get a little tired of being taunted.  And inevitably some moron gets gored.  And you'll see one in a minute.  Oh, there he goes.  Not good.  Some people feel sorry for the gore-ee, but I feel sorry for the bulls.  And if I were one of them, I'd stick it to these guys good.  To not do that would be ridiculous and that's no bull.

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