Former Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) Chief Executive Richard Parsons is rumored to be under consideration to be the next Secretary of Commerce after New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson withdrew his name because of an ongoing investigation in his state.

Parsons, who tangled with billionaire Carl Icahn during the recent proxy fight, already is an economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama. He would make a great spokesman for American business during the current economic crisis.

In fact, Parsons is probably more suited for the job than Richardson, a career politician. Parsons does have baggage, though. You can expect service on corporate boards such as Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) to come up during his confirmation hearings.

Parsons joined Time Warner's board in 1991 and became CEO in 2002 after the problematic $124 billion merger with AOL (the parent company of this blog), which the company is still recovering from today. He deserves some credit for patching up the situation and settling costly investor lawsuits.

Should Parsons join the administration, he will not be the only former Time Warner employee to do so. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the globe-trotting CNN medical correspondent, is slated to be Surgeon General.

The recent Barron's cover story which anointed Mitt Romney and Bill Richardson as the candidates best suited for investors contained this political propaganda: "Polls show that most Americans consider estate taxes to be unjust."

That statement is misleading.

The latest Gallup poll on the topic from 2000 showed that 53% of people surveyed didn't know enough about the estate tax to have an opinion. Once the issue was explained to them, 60% said they favored eliminating it though only 17% said they would personally benefit from such a move.

Exactly how this was explained isn't clear and a recent Yale University paper argued that people's opposition to the estate tax evaporates once they learn how few people actually pay the tax and the enormous $30 billion to $40 billion hole it would leave in the federal budget if it were repealed.

Bilked investors will remember the name Stephen Parker Gardner, former CEO of software company Peregrine Systems Inc. He initially plead not guilty to charges in the accounting fraud scheme that bankrupted the company in 2004. Gardner negotiated a $150 million line of credit based on knowingly false data, lied to SEC investigators about it, and exercised $14 million worth of stock options despite knowing the stock price was inflated. He was responsible for booking almost $250 million in inflated revenue 1999-2001. Gardner recently appeared in court to change his plea to guilty and to indicate he may cooperate in criminal proceedings against other Peregrine Systems executives in exchange for a lighter sentence. Hewlett-Packard bought Peregrine Systems for $425 million in 2005, $26.08 per share, when Peregrin Systems emerged from bankruptcy.

The reason any of this is current news is that Stephen Parker Gardner is the brother-in-law of Democractic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, former Energy secretary and UN Ambassador, currently governor of New Mexico. Richardson was on Peregrine's board from February 2001 until June 2002. Richardson claims he knew nothing about any financial irregularities, and didn't attend that many meetings anyway. Look for his democratic rivals to use his associations with Peregrine to smear him