TPM Reader BH gets it right:

Regarding Jindal’s speech last night, I am seeing a fair amount of negative comments on the delivery. While the delivery was atrocious – really atrocious – I think this misses the more important problem.

Admittedly I was also struggling to get past the “Kenneth the Page” thing, but what really struck me was the poor substance of the speech. To my ear, it sounded like a complete rehash of the Republican talking points we have been hearing since Reagan. It might be true that Jindal is a smart, honest guy and that he really believes excessive government is the problem, but Republicans just don’t have any credibility with this argument right now.

Unfortunately for Jindal (and the country), Republicans used that same argument for decades while the intrusiveness of our government and the country’s deficits continued to grow at unprecedented rates. His party used the same arguments while they happily used the government to transfer obscene amounts of public wealth to a small sliver of the population and completely trash our economy.

Simply put, his party has been the one controlling our government for a long, long time. The problem isn’t government, it’s Republican government – and everyone knows it.

So now that the government has released all those new documents on how former CIA No. 3 Dusty Foggo was using agency resources hidden in the black ops budget to benefit his pal Brent Wilkes, we’re tying to mine them for good stories. Zack Roth is going through the docs now and already found one little gem about the kind of guy Foggo is, and he’s ready to mine your comments for things you find as you go through the documents. Have fun.

As we’ve noted, Monday the federal government rolled out a new plan for the banks in which our preferred stock from the last deal could be converted into common stock. Without going into too much detail, this would strengthen the banks financial position — at least in a notational sense. And it wouldn’t require a direct injection of new money from the Feds. However, it amounts to a much better deal for the banks because it relieves them of having to pay us dividends and various other rights attached to preferred stock ownership. So we don’t have to pay more money, just agree not to get the money we’re currently entitled to.

In any case, the Dems don’t really seem to be raising much of a ruckus over this, perhaps because it’s a Democratic president calling the shots.

On the other hand, as Elana Schor found out yesterday when talking to various Republican lawmakers, Republicans are criticizing the plan — and pinpointing a lot of the key weaknesses. That’s good in one sense. But since they aren’t willing to entertain the other option — some form of nationalization — they’re criticizing this plan while refusing to sign on for the only obvious alternative.

A choice,

not an echo!

Sen. Vitter, fresh off his prostitution scandal might be challenged for his seat by the chief of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, who presumably doesn’t sleep with prostitutes.

And if porn star Stormy Daniels gets into the race, it’ll be a threesome.

From a Justice Department press release we just received:

According to a three-count complaint unsealed today in Manhattan federal court, from at least 1996 through February 2009, [Paul Greenwood, 61, of North Salem, N.Y., and Stephen Walsh, 64, of Sands Point, N.Y.] ran a fraudulent commodities trading and investment advisory scheme using an entity they controlled called WG Trading Investors. Through a marketer, Greenwood and Walsh solicited investor funds on the understanding that they would invest the funds in a program called “enhanced stock indexing,” which they represented was a conservative trading strategy that had outperformed the results of the S&P 500 Index for more than 10 years.

Several institutional investors – including charitable and university foundations, retirement and pension plans and others – invested more than $668 million through WG Trading Investors, receiving in exchange promissory notes issued by WG Trading Investors that the defendants represented would pay interest at a rate equal to the investment returns earned by the enhanced stock indexing strategy.

Contrary to their representations to their investors, Greenwood and Walsh are alleged to have misappropriated the majority of the investor funds. Among other things, Greenwood is alleged to have used the funds to purchase expensive collectible items and horses, as well as for other personal expenditures. Walsh is alleged to have misappropriated investor funds for himself, and to have made large cash payments to his ex-wife. …

In February 2009, the National Futures Association (NFA) conducted an audit of WG Investors and related entities. In the audit, the NFA discovered that of approximately $812 million purportedly on the books of WG Investors, more than $794 million was booked as receivables due from Greenwood and Walsh and investments in entities that they controlled.

Late Update: The AP has more:

The complaint alleges that since the summer of 2007, $1.3 billion in illegal wire transfers were made to bank accounts held by Greenwood and Walsh’s wife. …

The arrests come less than a week after the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University sued Westridge, Greenwood and Walsh, seeking the immediate return of more than $114 million they invested.

After he got his mistress’ boss at CIA fired for criticizing her job performance, Dusty Foggo told his lady friend, “You can thank me later.” Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

Ben Bernanke: “Nationalization, to my mind, is when government seizes the banks, zeros out the shareholders and begins to manage and run the bank, and we don’t plan anything like that.”

As an aside, Ben Smith makes a point I’ve been thinking about too: after the GOP has burned through Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal, I’m not sure they have any non-white guys left.

I never fail to be surprised by the gonzo alternative universe so many political crooks live in. It turns out that Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the crooked CIA #3 who was the inside man for Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes, was thinking ahead to life after the CIA. He was getting ready to run for Cunningham’s congressional seat in San Diego before the feds nabbed him.

There have been a lot of articles over the last 48 hours arguing that the biggest banks are simply too complex and multifaceted to be taken over and run for any period of time by the relevant government agencies. It does not seem prohibitive to me. But just how the government would run Citibank in the short to medium term is a good question to start pondering. But there’s a politico-economic argument for nationalization that Paul Krugman (and Noam Scheiber) references in a post he just did on his blog.

Namely, you’re just not going to get another big bailout bill through Congress as long as it leaves the present crew (management and shareholders) in place, since it will be (rightly) seen as another taxpayer giveaway to the investors and executives who caused the problem in the first place. So even if you could hypothetically stabilize the banks with a massive taxpayer ripoff, the money probably isn’t there. In other words, the intersection of the economics and the politics seals the deal.

As Krugman puts it …

As long as capital injections are seen as a way to bail out the people who got us into this mess (which they are as long as the banks haven’t been put into receivership), the political system won’t, repeat, won’t be willing to come up with enough money to make the system healthy again. At most we’ll get a slow intravenous drip that’s enough to keep the banks shambling along.