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Alan, Alan, Alan...you forgot to use the Keith Olbermann "How to talk to Bill O'Reilly's stalker-producer in a way that guarantees the interview doesn't get on the air" guide for dealing with this sort of situation. Bill-O decided to send his stalker-producer Griff Jenkins out to do another one of his ambush interviews to get Rep. Grayson to respond to calling Enron lobbyist turned Fed lobbyist Linda Robertson a "K Street whore", which Grayson has since apologized for.

Someone needs to send Rep. Grayson Keith's tips in case Griffy-boy decides to take some more time away from promoting the Tea Baggers and sit outside of his office all day waiting to shove a microphone in his face. Three words Mr. Grayson--Malmedy, Mackris, loofah.

Howie Klein's got more on Grayson's comment about Linda Robertson over at the HuffPo--Alan Grayson calls a whore a whore-- Beltway whores freak out & defend Enron lobbyist working at the Fed.

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Keith has the run down on United Health Group's Stephen Hemsley who's leading the charge against health care/insurance reform and who was recently sending employees armed with talking points to attend protests and town halls. First up, his campaign donations from OpenSecrets: United Health Group Contributions to Federal Candidates:

House
Total to Democrats: $138,700
Total to Republicans: $100,500

Senate
Total to Democrats: $71,500
Total to Republicans: $58,300

Next we have the lawsuit they settled just one week before President Obama took office. Health insurer accused of overcharging millions:

One of the nation’s largest health insurers has agreed to pay $50 million in a settlement announced today after being accused of overcharging millions of Americans for health care.

The New York attorney general’s office launched an investigation after receiving hundreds of complaints about Oxford Insurance and its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, which claims to rely on “independent research from across the health care industry” to determine reimbursement rates. In actuality though, it relies on Ingenix, a research firm owned by UnitedHealth Group.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo says Ingenix has been manipulating the numbers so insurance companies pay less. In a just-released report, he contends that Americans have been “under-reimbursed to the tune of at least hundreds of millions of dollars.” Although UnitedHealth Group and Oxford Insurance were the only entities investigated, other major insurers use Ingenix, including Aetna, CIGNA and WellPoint/Empire BlueCross BlueShield.

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Rachel Maddow exposes the monied interests pretending to be "average Americans" who are fueling the outrage at these "town halls gone wild". First up, Recess Rally, sponsored by Michelle Malkin, Smart Girl Politics, Redstate, but also American Majority, and as Rachel points out, this group is hardly made up of average Americans even though they tout themselves as being a non-profit, non-partisan organization.

The people behind American Majority; Ned Ryun, former George W. Bush speech writer, Lonny Leitner, Regional Field Director for Bush/Cheney '04, Shari Weber, former Republican State Legislator, Matt Pinnell, a former Washington conservative lobbyist.

Rachel notes that American Majority is an offshoot of another Recess Rally sponsor, The Sam Adams Alliance. Their President, John Tsarpalas, former Executive Director of the Illinois State Republican party, their Director, Joseph Lehman, former Dow Chemicals engineer and president of the nation's largest conservative state level policy think tank.

Another sponsor of Recess Rally, Let Freedom Ring. Their founder, the money man behind the television ad exploiting 9-11 to promote the Iraq invasion. Another sponsor, the swift boaters.

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As the crisis of the American financial system deepens, former Texas Senator Phil Gramm is a consensus choice as one of its chief culprits. In recent weeks, the New York Times, Time and Nobel prize-winning economists alike have suggested a warm seat awaits Gramm in Dante's inner circle. Which is why on the very day the UBS vice-chairman's firm was sued by the Justice Department for its role in a mushrooming tax evasion scandal, Gramm took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to blame others for the economic calamity he helped create.

As ThinkProgress noted, Gramm in his extreme makeover pointed the finger at the right-wing's usual suspects. In Gramm's revisionist history, Fannie and Freddie, the Community Reinvestment Act and, above all, the poor are responsible for the nation's economic plight. Three months after the New York Times concluded "deregulator looks back, unswayed," Gramm insisted the 1990's deregulation crusade he led had nothing to do with it:

"I believe that a strong case can be made that the financial crisis stemmed from a confluence of two factors. The first was the unintended consequences of a monetary policy, developed to combat inventory cycle recessions in the last half of the 20th century, that was not well suited to the speculative bubble recession of 2001. The second was the politicization of mortgage lending."

Gramm's fingerprints, of course, have been all over the financial meltdown and steep downturn gripping the U.S. economy over the past year. In his role as an adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign, Gramm famously decried the "mental recession" and mocked the United States as a "nation of whiners." But it was his "Enron Loophole," codified in the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which not only enabled the Enron disaster but opened "the door to unregulated trading of credit default swaps, the financial instruments blamed, in part, for the current economic meltdown." And the Texas Senator's machinations in the Senate to create the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act helped produce the subprime mortgage cataclysm, including catastrophic losses at UBS since joining the company in 2002.

Which brings us to a final irony of Gramm's extreme makeover. As it turns out, before he became a UBS vice-chairman in 2002, a company which this week agreed to pay a $780 million criminal fine and admitted to conspiring to defraud the IRS, then Senator Phil Gramm helped lead the 1990's Republican war to gut the Internal Revenue Service. Perrspectives has the details.

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From 60 Minutes. The entire segment can be seen here. More results from Dick Cheney's secret energy task force? Or just more proof that businesses will behave badly when left unregulated? I hope we have some adult supervision return with the swearing in of Obama. Time will tell.

About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market.

So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.

[....]

It's impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation. And in 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps, as well as electronic trading on private exchanges.

"Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger.

"You'd have to say Enron," he replied. "This was something they desperately wanted, and they got."

Greenberger, who wanted more regulation while he was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not less, says it all happened when Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the United States. "This was when Enron was riding high. And what Enron wanted, Enron got."

Full transcript to follow.

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[An on-topic 30-second spot from Media Needle.]

 Thomas Frank is the Wall Street Journal's resident liberal, still, this has gotta hurt:

Last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a commission to "find out what went wrong" on Wall Street. It was an excellent suggestion: Public inquiries into Wall Street practices served the country well in the 1930s.

And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation -- many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin.

Read on.   Phil Gramm's wife's connection to Enron?  Cindy was having tea with the Keating Five in comparison.

It's not nice to be a Republican these days. Heather made up a mash up of callers that blasted Republican Jeb Hensarling from Texas <corrected> after he blames every problem this country faces on the Democratic Party.

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Caller: I think that it's politics as usual. It's time for you to tell the truth.

It makes it way too easy for someone to document their crimes.

An internet agitprop artist publishing the website "Republican Offenders dot com" has produced a list of 272 Republicans charged with criminal activity, 60 of which are pedophiles. Each name is linked to a group heading of the type of crime alleged or convicted. (Among the categories are rape, bribery and "assorted felonies".)

The list really has to be seen to be appreciated.

Howard Dean his own self could not have thought the culture of corruption ran this wide and deep. h/t Contextual Criticism.

LA Times:

The Supreme Court today dismissed a huge lawsuit growing out of the Enron debacle that sought to hold Wall Street bankers liable for scheming with the executives of the defunct Houston energy trader.

Lawyers for investment funds and pension plans, including the University of California's pension plan, had sued Merrill Lynch and the other bankers, seeking to recover more than $30 billion that was lost when Enron folded in 2001. They argued that all the key players in the scheme that fooled stockholders should be forced to pay.

In dismissing the appeal of the Regents of the University of California vs. Merrill Lynch, the court appeared to doom the big lawsuits still pending against Enron's bankers.

Today's ruling is the most recent of a spate of decisions in which the courts have favored businesses. Last week, the Supreme Court rejected the notion of "scheme liability" in a closely watched stock fraud case involving a cable TV company and its vendors. In a 5-3 ruling, the court said suits for stock fraud are limited to the company that sells stock to the public, not bankers and other firms that had done deals with the company.

Decisions favoring businesses and protecting them from accountability from collusion and fraud against investors, whodathunk it from the Roberts Supreme Court? This precedent will also make it difficult to sue sub-prime players. As the Houston Chronicles says, the Enron-driven reforms are now unraveling. And it is this environment that the White House want YOU to direct your Social Security account...with no security.

Via Bloomberg: (h/t BillW)

U.S. businesses, with the help of civil libertarians, are on the verge of outmaneuvering federal prosecutors and persuading Congress to limit the government's power to pursue corporate fraud.

Lawmakers are considering a measure that would, among other things, bar the government from demanding that companies reveal confidential talks with their lawyers in order to win leniency in plea deals. It would also prohibit federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, from demanding that companies fire or cut off legal support for employees under investigation.

``Pre-Enron, U.S. attorneys never brought these cases, and after this bill is passed, they will quit bringing them again,'' says Lynn Turner, a former SEC accounting chief. ``This is a very clear message from Congress: Don't touch white-collar criminals.'' Read more...

Contact your reps in the House and Senate and tell them what you think. Remember, be polite.

NY Times: (reg req'd.)

In a lawsuit that harks back to the Enron scandal, the Bush administration is at odds with the federal agency that oversees securities markets as well as with state attorneys general and consumer and investor advocates.President Bush personally weighed in with his views before the administration decided not to support investors whose securities fraud case is now before the Supreme Court.

The president's message was that it's important to reduce ''unnecessary lawsuits'' and that federal securities regulators are in the best position to sue, said Al Hubbard, Bush's chief economic adviser and director of the National Economic Council.[..]

UPDATE: Barney Frank (Chairman of House Financial Services Committee) Critical of Bush's Involvement in Suits

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NYTimes:

A federal appeals panel ruled yesterday that a class-action lawsuit against investment banks over their role as advisers to Enron cannot go ahead, dealing a blow to shareholders who lost billions of dollars after the company collapsed in 2001.

While shareholders can still pursue individual claims against the banks, the decision stymies any mass effort by shareholders to recoup $40 billion in losses from the Wall Street banks that had earned millions of dollars in banking fees from Enron.

"This is a devastating ruling for shareholders," said Thomas R. Ajamie, a Houston securities lawyer. "It's hard to believe that shareholders won't recovery money from an admitted fraud, but this U.S. Court of Appeals circuit has been more hostile to investors than other circuits have been."

In its opinion, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said: "Presuming plaintiffs' allegations to be true, Enron committed fraud by misstating its accounts, but the banks only aided and abetted that fraud by engaging in transactions to make it more plausible; they owed no duty to Enron's shareholders."

So they aided and abetted fraud, but owe no duty to the victims of that fraud?  You have to twist your mind into a pretzel to wrap around that logic. 

BBC:

Former Enron boss Jeffrey Skilling has been sentenced to 24 years for his role in the giant fraud that led to the energy firm's 2001 collapse.

In May he had been found guilty on 19 counts including fraud, conspiracy and insider trading, and was told he could expect 20 to 30 years in prison.

The former Enron chief executive was tried and convicted together with the firm's former chairman Kenneth Lay.

Mr Lay has since died and his convictions have been quashed.  Read on...  

WaPo:

A federal judge in Houston yesterday wiped away the fraud and conspiracy conviction of Kenneth L. Lay, the Enron Corp. founder who died of heart disease in July, bowing to decades of legal precedent but frustrating government attempts to seize nearly $44 million from his family.

The ruling worried employees and investors who lost billions of dollars when the Houston energy-trading company filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2001. It also came more than a week after Congress recessed for the November elections without acting on a last-ditch Justice Department proposal that would have changed the law to allow prosecutors to seize millions of dollars in investments and other assets that Lay controlled.

[..]Legal analysts said Lake's ruling closely hewed to a long-held doctrine called abatement, which allows a conviction to be vacated if defendants die before they are able to exercise their right to appeal. Courts typically rule that defendants' constitutional rights to challenge their convictions outweigh other considerations, and the law hesitates to punish the dead, the analysts said. Read on... 

It's so nice to see Bush 41 honor a man who destroyed so many lives.

 Former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were among the mourners Wednesday at the funeral of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay. Lay's funeral drew some of the high-profile guests who were close to him before he was convicted in May of fraud and conspiracy for lying to investors and the public about the energy company's financial health before it collapsed in 2001.