Dick Cheney took way more of a pay cut than $8 million to $12 million per year to go back to the public sector, which I know he did because he wanted to and felt he could do some good. I also don't begrudge him that stock option or golden parachute money he got based on Halliburton's success in the war. Sure, Halliburton and its Kellogg Brown & Root subsiduary are making a killing, but that $75 million figure is just standard fare for CEOs of big Texas companies. They get these enormous stock options every year (Cheney is said to have about 450,000 in them from Halliburton) and the SEC laws allow them a smallish six-week window of opportunity to exercise them each year, generally. For tax reasons, of course, they usually exercise their options very gradually, and they usually use that sell-off option money to pay the taxes on their other investments and income.

CEOs and their cronies are the men I used to work for as a speechwriter, only I didn't write for Halliburton. I wrote for a technology company on whose board of directors Dick Cheney sat till he went back to the public sector.

CEO salaries are the real issue here. But it's true that Halliburton's stock has been enjoying good health thanks to KBR's monopoly in Iraq. It's rumored around Dallas that the SEC is going to be doing some investigating into that stock price, and my hunch is that congressional inquiries will be coming very soon. Halliburton has recently been awarded a number of Katrina-related contracts, too.