A question we would like an answer to, as well.....

Kucinich: Who Told SEC to "Stand Down" on Stanford Probe? Chairman of Domestic Policy Subcommittee Opens Inquiry Rep. Dennis Kucinich Washington, Feb 20 - Chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today sent a letter to Ms. Mary Schapiro, Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requesting documents that could reveal which government agency told the SEC to "stand down" rather than take enforcement action against the Stanford Group in October 2006 as has been reported by the New York Times. Recent media reports have indicated that the SEC was aware of improprieties at Stanford Financial Group as early as October 2006, but withheld action at the request of another government agency. In a report published in the February 17th edition of the New York Times, an SEC official said that an inquiry had been opened on Stanford in October of 2006. According to the Times report, an associate regional director of enforcement said the SEC "stood down" on its investigation as a result of the intervention of another federal agency. Stanford is now the focus of an $8 billion fraud investigation and, presumably, an earlier inquiry would have spared many Stanford investors and triggered similar inquiries into other funds which lacked transparency. "The SEC's recent filing against Stanford stemmed from the 2006 SEC inquiry that had been apparently shelved at the request of the unnamed agency. If this is true, we must find out why the SEC delayed enforcement, and if there were other cases where other government agencies intervened to block enforcement,” Chairman Kucinich said. "If the SEC did indeed begin an inquiry in 2006 and was called off by another agency, our subcommittee will demand that the SEC reveal the name of that agency which told it not to enforce federal laws which protect investors," said Chairman Kucinich. The full text of the letter follows: February 20, 2009 Ms. Mary Schapiro Chair U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 100 F Street, NE Washington, DC 20549 Dear Ms. Schapiro: The Domestic Policy Subcommittee, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is pleased that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has initiated an enforcement action against Robert Allen Stanford; however the Subcommittee remains concerned about the substantial delay in the Commission’s action. Recent published news reports assert that as early as 2006, the SEC suspended its investigation of Stanford Group under pressure from another unidentified federal agency.1 This assertion raises serious questions about the Commission’s dedication to its mission of protecting investors. The Subcommittee is interested in learning why the SEC suspended in 2006 its investigation of Mr. Stanford’s financial dealings, as well as any role that other federal agencies may have had in that decision. In order to assist the Subcommittee with its inquiry, I request the following: (1) All documents pertaining to “Robert Allen Stanford;” Stanford Financial Group and all subsidiaries; including all documents where abovementioned entities may have been referred to by alternate names or identifications; and (2) All documents received by the SEC from any other federal agency, as well as all documents sent by the SEC to any other federal agency, that pertain to any of the entities covered in (1), between 2006 and the present date. The Oversight and Government Reform Committee is the principal oversight committee in the House of Representatives and has broad oversight jurisdiction as set forth in House Rule X including over the Securities and Exchange Commission. An attachment to this letter provides information on how to respond to the Subcommittee’s request. We request that you provide these documents as soon as possible, but in no case later than 5:00 p.m. on Monday March 9, 2009. Sincerely, Dennis J. Kucinich Chairman Domestic Policy Subcommittee cc: Jim Jordan Ranking Minority Member 1 Krauss, C., Zweig, P., and Creswell, J. “Texas Firm Accused of $8 Billion Fraud.” New York Times. February 17, 2009.

Sympathy For the W?

In the end, a new portrait of Bush as tired, misunderstood, ruined

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, January 2, 2009

You have to go deep. You have to scrape and dig and plow, hunt and dive and sigh and even then it might take so long and cost so much invaluable energy and ultimately prove to be so damn near impossible, you will wonder if it's even worth it and why the hell I am even trying because, well, sweet Jesus knows he doesn't deserve it in the first place.

But if you're so inclined, if the temperature of your temperament is just so, if that fourth glass of $10 recession-defying wine is making you feel unusually generous, maybe, just maybe you can muster a bit of sympathy for George W. Bush.

Possible? Insane? Blasphemous? Damn straight.

It's already happening. I've read a number of pieces and a few strange, sepia-toned articles of late (like this one) that, while certainly not daring to paint Bush with any sort of gushing, rose-colored, wasn't-he-an-unrecognized-genius brush of overt kindness, still attempt to give him a far larger dose of humanity and pathos than which might sit well with your very soul.

It's certainly not uncommon, this soft-focus retrospective thing. Every president gets it right about now -- the benefit-of-the-doubt overview, the look back in wistful pondering before the battered chief steps away for good and history gets hold of the whole package and makes it into various flavors of reconstituted mincemeat.

Writers of such pieces invariably comment on how tired and old the president now looks, how exhausted and beaten down, how eight years in office under that kind of constant pressure absolutely destroys your health, your marriage, your skin, your hair color, and by the way what about that legacy?

But with Bush -- the worst-regarded, least popular, most ethically offensive president most of us will ever know -- things are just little bit different. His is that most peculiar and disquieting of exit portraits, a slumpy little guy initially thought to be a middling and relatively harmless puppet, suddenly thrust into history's limelight by the most dire of events, who then squandered every drop of global goodwill and violated most every international law and whored away the very soul of the nation with far more dazzling, efficient success than anyone could have ever imagined.

That's because that's what was intended from the beginning; he wanted to be a war preznit.

The upshot is as painful as it is undeniable: Dubya is, whether we like it or not, one of the most extraordinary and influential presidents of all time. Imagine.

So then, would you care for a more intimate sense of just what sort of man Bush was? What hidden or lesser-known facets we might have missed, how it's possible that Dubya might've been slightly more complicated and interesting than anyone ever really imagined because we only imagine him as a squinty smirky inarticulate destroyer of worlds?

Here is Bush as the good listener. Bush as the simple but spirited debater. Bush as the inviter of disagreement (wait, what?), Bush as the thoughtful and open-minded (please, no gagging) evaluator of opposing argument before choosing his position and closing his little fist around it and never letting go no matter what, because that would look weak and indecisive and we just can't have that.

One who is weak an indecisive will always portray to the world that he is just the opposite.

Bush as the family man. Bush as the master of friendly interpersonal relations. Bush as the dorky wise-crackin' fishing buddy. Bush as the war-weary, wizened, slightly deluded visionary whose vision just so happened to be horribly wrong in every possible way, but who nevertheless truly believed he was doing right by his confused and angry God, and probably still does, and doesn't that make him some sort of sad and tragic figure in our sad and tragic history?

Well, no, it doesn't. Pathetic? Yes. Pitiable? Maybe. But tragic? That implies honor gone wrong, integrity soured by unforeseen traumas, noble intent and spiritual purity ruined by dark forces beyond his control. Not a chance. Bush might not be the cleverest dolt in the playground, but he is far from ignorant of the dishonest, crony-laden, criminal slant of nearly every decision his administration has ever made.

To my mind, even the softest portrait of W merely raises the larger question, perhaps not to be fully answered for many years: How could such a mediocre and unimaginative human cause so much damage? How could this frat house daddy's-boy dullard so perfectly undermine America's fundamental identity and disfigure every major department of government and bring the nation to its knees? Indeed, unpacking that one may take awhile.

Other questions, though, are not so difficult. Questions like: Has it really been all that bad? Have we been too hard on the poor schlub? Does Bush really deserve such white-hot derision and international contempt? Or is he just lost and misunderstood, like a sad clown with a big shotgun and an unfortunate muscle spasm? I think we can all answer those without the slightest hesitation.

There is, after all, no escaping history. There is no escaping the hard reality of our gutted and mangled nation, how the past eight years are simply some of the most dismal and corrupt in our nation's history, a modern take on the Dark Ages. And there is also no escaping the sense that we barely got out of it alive.

But you know what? Maybe there will eventually be a tiny bit of room for empathy for George W. Bush, for feeling a tiny bit sorry for the guy for being so inept and so deeply loathed and for never really understanding the scope of the damage he was doing, or who was really pulling the strings.

They say forgiveness, after all, is one of the highest virtues of man. Particularly forgiveness of those who have wronged us, harmed us, wreaked violence and idiocy and a homophobic war-loving fundamentalist Jesus upon us. The question then becomes, how do you begin? Where do you look inside yourself for a hint of mercy and absolution for this most banal and regrettable of evil overlords?

Maybe you don't look inside at all. Maybe, at least initially, it's more effective to do the exact opposite, to step back and take the long view, widen your lens until it encompasses the entire insane pageant of life, until you can't help but see Bush and all his concomitant demons for what they really are: a blip, a blink, a shrug of God, a speck of sad lint floating through the giant, never-ending cosmic circus.

Hey, it might not be forgiveness, but it's a start.

Not this time, Mark. There must be accountability!

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Thoughts about this column? E-mail Mark.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate.com. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal (i.e.; non-Chronicle) mailing list (appearances, books, readings, blogs, yoga and more), please click here and remove two more.

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Dick Cheney: Hang Him?

Though  we agree that Cheney is the most evil of the two, let us not forget that Bush openly stated that he wanted to be a "war preznit," and that he liked being "misundersestimated."

Most of us misunderstamated him and his whole damn family, not to mention the Neocons and their hidden agenda.

We should be ashamed! We have known about the Bushies evil tendencies since Prescott laundered money for ther Nazis.

Dick Cheney: Evil Loves a Vacuum

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0901/S00036.htm
sent by Fiore since 18 hours 45 minutes, published about 53 minutes

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that Cheney “became vice president well before George Bush picked him." Cheney “was going to be able to convince this guy [Bush] to pick him,” Wilkerson said. Then, for all students of American and world history, he added words that should echo down through the ages: Cheney knew he would “be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum." 

The reason these vacuums existed, according to Wilkerson, is that “let’s face it… George Bush was a Sarah Palin-like president,” utterly lacking in foreign policy experience. The idea in 2000 was that Bush “was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," beginning with Cheney. 

There is another vacuum however, which Wilkerson does not mention, a vacuum that Cheney didn’t even try to fill, or have his willful puppet George fill. That’s the moral and leadership vacuum left when America, the ‘leader of the free world,’ was clearly seen to be vacuous and leaderless. The question to my mind is this: Can and will Barack Obama and his administration fill this vacuum? The answer, for a variety of reasons, is no.

If we don't have hope, in a time like this, we hae nothing. We may well have nothing, but I have to have hope in Obama or I simply cannot go on...............