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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: richard surckla who wrote (148516)	7/18/2002 9:00:57 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578884

SOLID, FACTUAL, EVIDENCE THAT YOU HAVE OF ANY CHENEY WRONGDOING This Cheney allegation is purely political. It is, to me, amazing that the Democrats have gotten this much mileage out of the story. This nitwit Chris Matthews had on last night, Slocum, literally had ZERO knowledge of the accounting issues involved. He said words to the effect of "Well, they changed from treating cost overruns as EXPENSES, as they should have, to treating them as REVENUE". This statement reflects a lack of basic accounting knowledge (a misstatement of this type would not affect earnings by one red cent). Kudlow chewed him up and spit him out, and nailed the issue. (1) THERE WAS FULL DISCLOSURE. You can make accounting changes all day long, but at the end of the day, if you disclose it, at worst you are guilty of a mechanical error. (2) THE AMOUNTS INVOLVED WERE IMMATERIAL. When doing accounting, you make judgments on a daily basis about the treatment of certain items -- how long will a fixed asset last (10 years, or is it 20?), fair market values, bad debt loss estimates. Sometimes these estimates are wrong. If they are not material to the financial statements, we ignore them. There is nothing new about this. (3) A STRONG ARGUMENT CAN BE MADE THAT THE CHANGE WAS TO A MORE APPROPRIATE ACCOUNTING METHOD. What happened in the HAL incident was an "ACCOUNTING CHANGE". They happen every day, when it is determined that a different accounting method more clearly reflects income. For example, a growing business will often change from cash basis to accrual basis accounting. A strong argument can be made that the method HAL changed TO more clearly reflected income than the method they were changing FROM. There is, quite simply NO WAY to construe the HAL changes as "wrongdoing". This story is TOTALLY about liberal politics and the liberal media, and I've never seen a more blatant case of it in my life.