It's so nice to hear a high-profile senator asking the same question that's been on the minds of voters for some time now. Fortunately, Sen. Warren is popular enough that the bankers are a tad afraid of her:

In a letter (PDF) sent to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Attorney General Eric Holder and SEC Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) demanded to know why the government keeps accepting financial settlements from criminal bankers when they could instead be taken to trial, convicted and locked up.

In six short paragraphs, Warren requested that each institution turn over copies of any internal research “on the trade-offs to the public” between letting big financial firms pay a fine and walk “without admission of guilt” versus moving forward with full-scale prosecutions.

The letter was sent as a follow-up to a similar question she asked of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Feb. 14. Warren noted that the OCC replied last week denying the existence of any such research. In her letter sent Tuesday, she went on to add:

…I believe very strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial — either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources — the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer.

The consequence can be insufficient compensation to those who are harmed by illegal activity and inadequate deterrence of future violations. If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate millions in profits and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.

There’s been a rash of mega-settlements between the government and the nation’s largest banks in recent years over allegations of foreclosing on people without just cause, knowingly making bad loans and reselling the debt, making false statements to rob from retired pensioners, laundering money for drug cartels, repressive regimes and terrorists, and agreeing to settlements and then ignoring them, to name a few.

“The problem is the banks have overwhelming confidence that law enforcement is not taking this seriously,” New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said last Monday, appearing on MSNBC.

“They have overwhelming confidence that whatever the rules are, they won’t be followed up on.”

Here's some sage advice for the ladies from that brave defender of traditional marriage, Pat Robertson. Ladies, if your man cheats on you, try harder! Clearly you haven't made your home "so wonderful that he doesn't want to wander." Yeah, I doubt that the wandering had much to do with the home, quite frankly. Uncle Pat, so full of sage advice, also informed the woman that it was too bad, but after all, "he's a man." Oooh, manly thing, breaking commitments and cheating on your wife. Yes, very, very manly.

More from Right Wing Watch:

On today’s 700 Club, Robertson told a woman whose husband was cheating on her that she should stop focusing on the adultery and instead ponder, “Does he provide a home for you to live in, does he provide food for you to eat, does he provide clothes for you to wear, is he nice to the children…is he handsome?”

Well, there you go. You know, those girls held hostage in Cincinnati were probably fed and clothed in some fashion and the guy did have them in the house, so there was that. He wasn't very handsome, though.

So all women could hope to expect was food, clothing, kindness to children and a handsome face -- in exchange for working their tails off making sure he was always so satisfied his eye wouldn't wander!

I guess General Petraeus' wife knew, since that was Robertson's reason for shrugging his affair off, too. I wish that woman had told Robertson her husband had a gay affair, just to see what his reaction would have been.

BradBlog - IG's report says no tempest in IRS teapot (see what I did there?);

Connecting.the.Dots - presenting your summer of scandals (Benghazi!);

FireDogLake - fight them over there so we don't etc. etc. - Boston bombing edition;

Goblinbooks - Dick Cheney and the Goblet of Sh*t;

Zandar Versus the Stupid - Louie Gohmert's asparagus.

blogenfreude blogs at stinque.com and just may have to darken the doors of a theater and see this new Star Trek Movie.

Send tips to MBRU [at] crooksandliars [DOT] com

Marc Maron reviews "Fabulous" Magazine for E!'s "The Soup."

Open Thread below...

You see, the reason the NBA this week turned away Hansen's bid to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to Seattle was that he was honest about his intentions. If he had followed the established NBA model, he would have gone about this thing entirely differently.

Clearly, the chief reasoning of NBA owners for declining to add Hansen and Steve Ballmer to their list of owners was that they were from Seattle. When the NBA ripped their team of 41 years out of Seattle back in 2007, it was intended as an object lesson for the rest of the league: Unless you bow to our extortion demands, you will lose your team.

Sacramento, obviously, got that lesson. After teetering on losing the Kings because of the failure to build a new arena, the city gave up every ounce of its soul in its desperate effort to keep the NBA in town. The new arena deal requires the taxpayers to foot about 60 percent of the tab.

So of course the NBA was going to reward the city that gave in to their extortion demands. And it would continue to punish the city that insists on limiting the taxpayers' role in enriching billionaire owners and their exposure to ever-ratcheting arena costs.

You see, Seattle thought it had done everything right for years. Its fans always supported the Sonics -- even when they sucked, the team still averaged 15,000 a game -- and were among the most rabid and knowledgeable in the league. (I was myself a season ticket holder for over a decade.) There's a reason so many NBA teams are populated with players from Seattle high schools: It is a basketball-saturated town.

We even bellied up to the bar in the 1990s on the arena demands -- spent $100 million tearing apart and renovating the old Seattle Center Coliseum, three-quarters of which was paid for by Seattle taxpayers. When it reopened in 1995, David Stern came and proclaimed the new facility as state-of-the-art for the next generation.

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As you know, I'm not an Obama fan. But there's just no "there" there with this Benghazi story. Unfortunately, with yesterday's email release, the administration only added more chum for the sharks in the water and nothing this president does will be enough to satisfy them. Who could have known?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House release of some 100 pages of emails and notes about the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year has failed to satisfy congressional Republicans, who are demanding more information.

“Why not release all of the unclassified documents?” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “The president has repeatedly said that when he gets new information, he’ll release it to the public. Why not release — instead of the hand-picked ones — why not release all the unclassified documents?”

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday Republicans hoped “this limited release of documents is a sign of more cooperation to come,” while the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee pressed the Pentagon for more details about military orders around the time of the attack and what military aircraft were in the region.

Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed when militants struck the U.S. mission and CIA annex in twin nighttime attacks on Sept. 11, 2012.

Republicans have accused the Obama administration of misleading the American people about the circumstances of the attack, playing down a terrorist strike that would reflect poorly on President Barack Obama in the heat of a presidential race. Obama has dismissed charges of a cover-up and suggested on Monday that the criticism was politically motivated.

Megyn Kelly went there on her show Wednesday, but you knew this was the goal all along, right? Republicans have wet dreams every night of a special prosecutor so they can harass Barack Obama through the last three and a half years of his presidency and make sure they don't get anything done. From Benghazi to Fast and Furious, they're practically squirming with anticipation.

For the recipe to work, they have to distort the facts in order to suggest something happened that didn't. Via Media Matters:

Fox News ignored President Obama's explicit demand for accountability in the wake of news that the Internal Revenue Service applied extra scrutiny to conservative groups. The network's omission gave it cover to accuse Obama of not taking the IRS's actions seriously and to call for a special prosecutor.

They also ignored the fact that the IG's report clearly stated that targeting was not exclusively limited to conservatives, because of course, that would be too much like the truth. Instead, they tried to pretend the president wasn't taking the scandal seriously, and went even farther into fantasyland in order to gin up their audience for only one thing.

Kelly and Stirewalt used their mischaracterization of Obama's response to call for a special prosecutor into the IRS's actions. Stirewalt told Kelly that if he were the president, he would "find a Republican of good standing" to appoint as an independent investigator. Kelly responded with the charge, "Where is the harm to this administration, if as these IRS employees state, no one outside of the IRS had anything to do with this, this was just IRS employees deciding to target conservatives. So if the White House and no one else had anything to do with it, where is the harm? Why doesn't the president just say 'absolutely'?"

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Yep, even after Barack Obama became the first two-term president since Eisenhower to win more than 51% of the popular vote in two elections, giggling wingnuts like Erickson are still using the "Black Jimmy Carter" line. And despite the non-stop giddy SCANDAL! drumbeat by right-wingers, his approval rating is at 49%.

In comparison, after the actual scandals of Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, Abu Grhaib, FISA, the US Attorney firings, and Valerie Plame, George W. Bush spent his last three years in the 30s.

How quickly they forget.

I'm shocked. He seemed like a harmless hippie to me, but apparently he isn't:

HADDONFIELD, N.J. - May 16, 2013 (WPVI) -- A man known on the internet as "Kai the Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker" is now being sought for the murder of a man in New Jersey.

The suspect is identified as Caleb Lawrence McGillvary, a 34-year-old who is well known on Facebook and YouTube.

An arrest warrant has been issued for McGillvary in the homicide of Joseph Galfy, Jr. in Clark, New Jersey, WABC-TV in New York reported.

He was last seen at a light rail station in the Haddonfield, New Jersey area, said Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow. McGillvary is considered to be armed and dangerous.

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Deficit projections have already decreased by $200 billion for this year alone, so why do Republicans keep lunging for ever-more radical spending cuts like they were corn dogs at a barbecue? That's more in deficit reduction than President Obama's proposed cut to Social Security would "save" in 10. So why hasn't he withdrawn the proposal?

It would make more sense to dial back on the sequester, which is the biggest driver of these revised deficit figures, and work on the fundamental weaknesses in our economy that are prolonging the recession. In the long run this approach would do more to reduce deficits, too.

Instead of cutting Social Security, they should be strengthening the country's social safety net. A good start would be the passage of Sen. Tom Harkin's bill to increase Social Security's benefits. (If I were you I'd contact our senators and representative and demand that they support it. I already have, by signing this petition.)

The Mother of All Crises
You wouldn't know it from listening to most politicians, but there's a crisis going on. In fact, there are a few of them going on -- including the crisis of un- and under-employment, the crisis of wage stagnation, and the crisis caused by lost social mobility.

Each of these unaddressed problems feed into the Mother of All Economic Crises, the one that our mothers and fathers are facing and we'll all confront ourselves someday: the retirement crisis. Sen. Tom Harkin has a bill that starts to address that crisis, in a bill that should be passed immediately.

Harkin's bill would increase the typical Social Security benefit by roughly $800 per year. Since most seniors depend on Social Security as their primary source of income, most of that money would be spent immediately. That means the Harkin bill will also have a modest but genuine stimulus effect. And by providing added protection for lower-income retirees, which would protect more seniors from falling into poverty while increasing the stimulus effect.

And it's all paid for. Harkin's bill would pay for this benefit increase and ensure Social Security's solvency by removing the tax cap which currently exempts income above a certain level (currently about $110,000) from taxation.

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