I'll be in the city that afternoon at an NYU Center on Law and Security conference about Blackwater. maybe I'd check that out first. I like blogging about politics/world affairs cause very few of my friends like to discuss such stuff. But some people lose their minds when they're out there blogging on the net. It's like everything else, can be used for good or bad-depends on who's behind the keyboard.

As with all things in Washington, follow the money ...

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/in_letter_a_dozen_top_clinton.php

Blogger ethics? How about MSM ethics? How about press ethics? How about congressional ethics? How about business ethics?

How about I.Q. test for congress?

Today's Congressional Imbecile Ethics Award goes to Barney Frank:

Mr. Frank wasn't aware that even after Enron and all their hearings on Enron that congress had done nothing about regulating financial reporting in critical markets and expresses surprise that Citibank and others were doing the same thing?

Hiding investment vehciles loaded with loses and debt is EXACTLY how Enron CEO's sucked money out of Enron and raped their investors and employees.

But Barney says:

"When it came to Wall Street, he says, “we thought we didn’t need regulation.”

http://tinyurl.com/yp9g39

NYT - "Who Created This Monster"

"TWO months before he resigned as chief executive of Citigroup last year amid nearly $20 billion in write-downs, Charles O. Prince III sat down in Washington with Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Among the topics they discussed were investment vehicles that allowed Citigroup and other banks to keep billions of dollars in potential liabilities off of their balance sheets — and away from the scrutiny of investors and analysts.

“Why aren’t they on your balance sheet?” asked Mr. Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts. The congressman recalled that Mr. Prince said doing so would have put Citigroup at a disadvantage with Wall Street investment banks that were more loosely regulated and were allowed to take far greater risks. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Prince confirmed the conversation.)

It was at that moment, Mr. Frank says, that he first realized just how much freedom Wall Street firms had, and how lightly regulated they were in comparison with commercial banks, which have to answer to an alphabet soup of government agencies like the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency.

“Not only did Wall Street have so much freedom, but it gave commercial banks an incentive to try and evade their regulations,” Mr. Frank says. When it came to Wall Street, he says, “we thought we didn’t need regulation.”

In fact, Washington has long followed the financial industry’s lead in supporting deregulation, even as newly minted but little-understood products like derivatives proliferated.

During the late 1990s, Wall Street fought bitterly against any attempt to regulate the emerging derivatives market, recalls Michael Greenberger, a former senior regulator at

Mr. Frank says. When it came to Wall Street, he says, “we thought we didn’t need regulation.”
>>>>>>>>>>

Plezzzzzzzze...just BWTTGASO

Are they going to comment on people like Joe Klein and the comments he made while the FISA fight was hot and heavy(Where he admitted he had no clue what the bill contained and didn't care)? While I hear the TradMed moan about the supposed lack of ethics of the blogostan, they don't make themselves look much better. In fact, one could argue they are even less ethical then the lefty blogostan.