What I want to know is what the heck Bush is doing handing our diplomatic responsibilities over to a guy like Roland Arnall? This is a man, who, by all indications, presided over some shady predatory lending and fraudulent activities while running Ameriquest. One can only wonder how much of the $12.25 million he gave to Bush came from Grandma's pocket.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/24/AR2005072401451.html
Arnall's company is the largest mortgage lender to lower-income folks and those with iffy credit ratings. Concerns about shoddy lending practices, alleged fraud, falsification of documents and bait-and-switch sales tactics have been raised in a few -- okay, 25 -- states, the company announced a few months ago. Ameriquest also said it had agreed to pay as much as $50 million to settle allegations it had defrauded borrowers in four states, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Not that any of us are suprised, but this looks like just one more example of Bush overlooking someones unethical business practices as long as you shower him and his party with money.
Under traditional ground rules, plum ambassadorships are doled out pretty much exclusively to people who have served this country in key ways, such as by being a family member or close friend of the president, by having campaigned or worked for him or by having been a longtime and huge contributor or fundraiser for the president and his party.
Contributions to political opponents, however, would invariably doom your chances for such jobs, unless those misdeeds were decades ago, before you saw the light.
But now it's clear that boatloads of money can compensate even for that last problem. And so President Bush has picked Los Angeles multibillionaire Roland Arnall , a longtime major Democratic contributor until just a year ago, to a most excellent posting as ambassador to the Netherlands.
How did this happen?
Well, Arnall and his wife, Dawn , were the single biggest source of financial support for Bush since 2002. Over the period, they gave and raised at least $12.25 million. Arnall and his company, Ameriquest Capital Corp., are reported to have given more than $1.2 million to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and raised much more.