Here's what the Beltway crowd still doesn't seem to get: If any of us stole from the company till, or forged documents, we'd be in jail right now. So average Americans, smarting from the fallout of these far-reaching and fraudulent deals that left so many people out of work, are wondering why there seems to be a separate standard of justice for Wall Street bankers. How do you respect your government when jail time only applies to the pot dealer down the street?

When are some of the bigwigs behind these scams going to prison?

WASHINGTON — A Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation's financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages in exchange for lucrative fees.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold a detailed hearing on Friday, where its chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., will introduce e-mail records in which executives from Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service acknowledge compromising the integrity of ratings to win business from big Wall Street firms.

"They did it for the big fees they got," Levin told reporters on Thursday after outlining the broad strokes of what he'd pursue Friday when he puts current and former ratings agency officials on the hot seat.

The documents to be released Friday confirm what a McClatchy investigation revealed in October _ that pressure from top ratings-agency executives to retain market share and the fees that it brought meant that ratings on complex deals were malleable. Some fees were as high as $1.4 million.

The agencies rate the quality of financial products such as bonds and serve as guides trusted by investors. Many of the bonds they rated as top-quality in the recent crisis turned out to be junk. The fallout from their deference to Wall Street's financial firms was a housing collapse that triggered a global financial crisis.

In one example obtained by the committee, Yvonne Fu, a Moody's employee, sent an e-mail to a banker at Merrill Lynch in June 2007, pressuring the investment bank to lock down a big fee in exchange for a positive rating.

"We have spent significant amount of resource on this deal and it will be difficult for us to continue with this process if we do not have an agreement on the fee issue," Fu wrote.

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John McCain is really scrambling this time around, it seems. In this segment on BillO's show, he hammers on the Federal government for not acting rapidly enough to 'secure the borders' while defending Arizona's new Xenophobia Act requiring all immigrants to keep their documents with them for examination at any time by law enforcement. Not content to stop there, he also blames immigrants for engaging in the 'intentional accident' scams.

O'REILLY: Now, next week, the governor is going to sign, we believe, a very stringent state law that gives the police in Arizona very, very broad authority to question people. And a lot of people say it's going to be racial profiling. You're going to look for Hispanics, question them, to see if they're here legally or not. And it's just not fair. And you say why?

MCCAIN: I say that the federal responsibilities have not been fulfilled. Therefore, the states are acting -- the state of Arizona is acting and doing what they feel they need to do in light of the fact that the federal government is not fulfilling its fundamental responsibility to secure our borders. Our borders must be secure.

O'REILLY: But what about the racial profiling? You know that's going to happen has to happen.

MCCAIN: I hope -- I would be very sorry that if some of that happens. And I regret it, but I also regret the -- really, it's not just the murder of Robert Krantz. It's the people whose homes and property are being violated. It's the drive-by that -- the drivers of cars with illegals in it that are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway. Look, our border is not secured. Our citizens are not safe.

Leaving aside the usual double-talk about the Feds from a "small-government" kind of guy, let's take a minute to think about those staged accidents. Here's how they work, usually in heavy traffic:

• The guy in front of you slams his brakes on after being cut off on the freeway.
• You slam your brakes on to avoid him, but you can't quite stop fast enough, so your car rear-ends his. Because these accidents are usually staged in heavy traffic, speed at impact tends to be low, but not low enough.
• The driver you hit has some passengers, and they all claim to have neck pain.
• You have to file a police report and an insurance claim, they run up medical bills with clinics involved in the scam, and they wait for the insurance settlement to close the deal

One of my kids was the victim of one of these scams. It's not immigrants running these; it's Molly Middle Class and her cronies. Immigrants would not risk arrest by getting involved in something involving lawyers, police reports, and ongoing investigations. They just wouldn't.

But keep it up, almost-President McCain, because I'm sure it plays well with those scared seniors in Arizona and the xenophobic gun-toting, immigrant-hating folks, too. Problem is, JD Hayworth may actually do it better than you.

(h/t Media Matters)

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John Fund went on Glenn Beck's show last night to help Beck with his characterization of the Obama White House as a nest of fist-bumping terrorist radicals, mostly by underscoring its supposed connection to ACORN and the SEIU. (According to Beck, SEIU's Andy Stern is "really controlling our country.")

At the end of the segment, Fund began describing the ways ACORN's nefarious activists are supposedly engaged in voter fraud in the New Jersey election:

Fund: People are going door to door in parts of Camden with Hispanics that don't have very much knowledge of English, and they're saying, "We have a new way for you to vote, la nueva forma de votar; just fill out these papers."

But as Media Matters noticed, he's actually describing something that happened in 1993 in Philadelphia. Indeed, he accurately described it in his Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he tried to claim that fraud was occurring in New Jersey:

There are additional reports from Camden that Hispanic voters have been misled into voting absentee ballots. So-called bearers who are allowed to collect and carry absentee ballots are said to have encouraged voters to fill out applications for absentee ballots. A few days later, the bearers reportedly return with the actual ballots, which they offer "assistance" in filling out.

Authorities in nearby Philadelphia know about such scams. In one infamous case, a key 1993 race that determined which party would control the Pennsylvania state senate was thrown out by a federal judge after massive evidence that hundreds of voters had been pressured into casting improper absentee ballots. Voters were told by "bearers" that it was all part of "la nueva forma de votar" -- the new way to vote. Local politicos tell me Philly operatives associated in the past with Acorn may now be advising their Jersey cousins on how to perform such vote harvesting.

Notice that in this version of events, there's no mention of the "la nueva forma de votar" ruse being used in Camden -- just the use of absentee ballots. And despite Fund's claims, there is no evidence of actual fraud yet even in this absentee-ballot operation -- just the potential for it.

Conservatives like Fund have long pinned their electoral hopes on reducing voter turnout, because encouraging large numbers of voters is a certain recipe to right-wing defeat. The Right succeeds most when voter turnout is suppressed -- and absentee-ballot efforts are part of reversing that trend.

They also like having handy excuses when they lose. It's clear that Fund, Beck, and the rest of the Right is setting themselves up with a way to claim that an electoral loss in New Jersey was illegitimate. Because that's what they're best at -- tearing down liberals after they beat them at the polls.

He's also looking into the AIG disbursements to counterparties, which will open a fresh can of worms:

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) -- The top cop tracking the government's $700 billion bailout program said Tuesday that he has opened 20 criminal investigations and six audits into whether tax dollars are being pilfered or wasted.

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, released a 250-page report detailing a long list of concerns about government efforts to prop up hundreds of banks, Wall Street firms and auto companies.

Barofsky, whose investigations could lead to criminal charges, told CNNMoney.com in an interview that he wants taxpayers to understand where their money is going. At the same time, he wants to alert officials to weaknesses in TARP that could invite corruption or fraud.

Bug - or feature? Hmmm.

"Our recommendations are forward looking and there are no vulnerabilities that can't be addressed," Barofsky said. "The balance of what we're trying to do is to inform, bring transparency and make appropriate recommendations."

The report reveals that Barofsky is looking into whether bailout decisions were influenced by those who stood to benefit from them and whether companies receiving bailout dollars are adhering to caps on executive pay.

Barofsky's report also makes several recommendations to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other officials charged with implementing the bailout. Among them: Require all TARP recipients to detail how they use bailout dollars and safeguard a new mortgage rescue effort against scams.

Maureen Dowd on Imus

Maureen was on Imus this morning and talked about her column that blasted Judy Miller. Imus interviews many journalists and politicians and is able to get then to talk pretty freely about what they feel is going on. Full interview here

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She made some interesting points about the Bush administration, the NY Times and Judy Miller. She also took some pot shots at Rush Limbaugh and the right wing smear machine. (rough transcript)

Dowd: Judy got ensnared in the two big scams of the Bush administration. The big scam and the little scam. The big scam was to take the country to war after 9/11 and go to Iraq instead of going after Osama which is going to haunt us for generations and the little scam was to smear anyone who, who got on to their ginned up intelligence and tried to tell the public about and she got too close to these scams.

Masters of Sleaze excerpts:

... Only a giant like Abramoff would have the guts to use one tribe's casino money to finance a Focus on the Family crusade against gambling in order to shut down a rival tribe's casino.... Soon the creative revolutionaries were blending the high-toned forms of the think tank with the low-toned scams of the buckraker. Ed Buckham, Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, helped run the U.S. Family Network, which supported the American family by accepting large donations and leasing skyboxes at the MCI Center, according to Roll Call.

Reed so strongly opposes gambling as a matter of principle that he bravely accepted $4 million through Abramoff from casino-rich Indian tribes to gin up a grass-roots campaign. read on

You have got to read this article. I guess it just took a matter of time for David to finally see some truth after all. Either that or he drank some Gatorade instead of the Kool-aid.