This morning in Chicago Obama rolls out the appointments of a couple of key financial regulators. That and the day’s other news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
At the recent Harper’s-NYU forum on how to deal with Bush-era war crimes, TPMtv caught up with Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner, who has worked on torture prosecutions of Donald Rumsfeld in Europe. Ratner gives the rundown of future travel options for the Cheneys, Yoos, and Addingtons of the Bush Administration: France, maybe. Germany, harder to say. Italy and Spain? Not so much …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
TPM Reader EC says that Richard Whitney, who I mentioned a few days ago as a Depression-Era Bernie Madoff, doesn’t hold a candle to another contender, Ivar Kreuger, whose fraud was so vast he actually precipitated a reasonably sized market crash in 1933.
In the midst of a scandal like the Madoff story, we need to on guard for a lot of people saying they saw it coming all along even though that’s the furthest thing from the truth. But there’s enough information out there to suggest that within the small and parochial community of people with the technical knowledge to understand this stuff Madoff’s fall from grace did not come as a big surprise.
Though I can’t give many details of the identity of the person since the industry is so small, a known reader passes on word from a hedge-fund analyst at one of the big (remaining) financial services powerhouses who says that Madoff was always on their short list of people he and his colleagues thought were crooks.
A bit more concretely, let’s go back to Harry Markopolos, the money manager and financial fraud investigator who’d been blowing whistles on Madoff for almost a decade. In the report he submitted to the SEC in 2005, in addition to complex mathematical analyses showing that Madoff’s system couldn’t work, he said that “I have also spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivative trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud.”
Again, people say a lot of things, and hindsight is 20/20. But I’m seeing enough stuff like this to make me think that for a lot of people this was no surprise at all.
MSNBC is announcing that Chuck Todd has just been appointed chief White House correspondent for NBC News.
I must say
I did not expect that. And it seems like an odd choice. Not a bad choice, but not at all what I would have expected from them.
Let me be clear. I’m a big, big fan of Chuck Todd. In addition to being a very shrewd political analyst. He’s a great generational turnover from a cadre that’s mainly in its 50s and 60s.
But I don’t think of him as a beat reporter like that, more of an analyst, an explainer of the details of the whole political scene.
It may be an inspired choice. Just for political smarts I think Todd probably blows away all the competitors for the slot. But not a choice I expected, though even as I write this post I’m starting to warm to the idea.
Thoughts?
Late Update: Grooming him for the future? TPM Reader DC writes, “expanding the resume. More things to come in 3-4 years?”
Later Update: TPM Reader JP’s thinking along similar line: “Put me in the “grooming him for the future” column. He’s obviously the most talented observer of the political scene on TV today (setting up so many embarrassing interludes with the ignorant Tweety over the last cycle that I lost count). NBC missed a big opportunity in not slotting him right into the Meet The Press Slot. He’s miles in front of David Gregory.”
SEIU president Andy Stern is all aglow about Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA) as Obama’s pick for secretary of labor.
The Coleman-Franken Recount has gone on for so long and there have been so many back and forths that for a lot of us it’s all become a blur.
But over the last 48 hours, it’s become increasingly clear that Al Franken is the odds on favorite to be the next senator from Minnesota.