Report finds Securities and Exchange Commission regulators watched porn while US economy was on the brink of collapse

Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, the SEC's inspector general says.

Some of the findings include a senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters who spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office.

In other findings an accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general.

California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."

In the recent Goldman Sacs indictments Republican lawmakers accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The SEC's commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two who objected were Republicans.

Republican strategy to win back congress; obstruct all federal programs that help Americans, and label all help as socialist

Republicans have a two-fold strategy to win one or both houses of congress this November. Their strategy is based on the condemnation, denigration and paralysis of the federal government.

After holding the reins of government from 2001 to 2009 where the republicans started two unfunded wars and looked the other way as Wall Street ransacked the middle-class and almost brought the whole US economic system down in ruins; they are expecting that Americans have such short memories that they can just place blame everywhere but where it belongs and show that government is not a force for good or positive change.

After president Obama’s election, as people were hurting, his administration had to struggle against the inclination to punish the scoundrels and instead focus on righting the ship of state. That cost him huge amounts of political capital. Then came the health care reform battle, an explicitly vicious process the Republicans eagerly exploited.

Mr. Obama got his win, but Republicans managed to burn away whatever remaining credibility that government had.

The first part of the Republican strategy is to obstruct and delay, to prevent even the opening of debate, which effectively gums up the works of government, and therefore makes Democrats look ineffective.

The second part is shameless and brazen: portray everything Mr. Obama does as being in league with socialists and communists. This discredits the very idea that government ought to do anything at all. According to recent public surveys people believe it because they blame government for the underlying economic despair.

Rightly or wrongly the Democrats are being blamed for the previous group of incompetent and/or crooked Republican government watchdogs who let Wall Street bring the economy to the brink of collapse, then bailed these financial wizards out, all while letting them continue receiving huge bonuses, which resulted in 8 million Americans being thrown out of their jobs.


Why is it that Republicans who all belittle the federal government so often want so much , through lies, deception, or whatever means, to run congress again? 

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) imagines herself as being so important that the Democratic Party wants to ‘take her out’.

Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (MN) suffers from a very unusual form of the persecution complex: she imagines herself as being so important that the entire Democratic Party is planning to ‘take her out’.

First she called the Obama Administration a "gangster government." Now she's claiming that President Bill Clinton is trying to "take her out."

"Because I'm using a statement like 'gangster,' I'm responsible for creating the climate of hate that could lead to another Timothy McVeigh and another Oklahoma City bombing," Bachmann said when speaking at a Tea Bagger rally last Thursday in Washington, adding: "I'm in my second term as a Congresswoman and the former president of the United States decides I'm important enough to take me out!"

Mr. Clinton called out the Minnesota Republican for associating the Obama administration with a gangster government. "They are not gangsters," Mr. Clinton said. "They were elected. They are not doing anything they were not elected to do."

Tea Baggers can't handle the truth, turn on conservative speaker when he asks them to vote for independents not Republicans

Tea-Baggers claim to be about expressing freedom and coming together to protect God-given liberties; except when someone disagrees, then they must be shouted down until silenced. Matt Walsh, a conservative Georgetown, Delaware radio host, was speaking to a group of tea-bagger protesters on April 15 when he encouraged the crowd to vote for independents over Republicans.

The crowd became incredulous, booing and jeering Walsh as he began asking whether free speech really meant something to the tea parties.

"Seriously, what everybody needs to understand here is that, number one, Republicans are not the answer," he'd said. "They are not, period. Do not vote for a Republican. Please, I beg you, do not vote for a Republican. What has a Republican done for you? Everyone says, 'Well, at least they're not as bad as Democrats.' Yes they are! They're all bad!"

He continued: "Vote for an independent and please, God almighty, do not vote for Sarah Palin. Please dear God do not vote for Sarah Palin. She has not shown us anything. I know everyone's very excited about her, she's probably a very nice woman, but she is not the answer."

That was it: the tea-baggers began to heckle the right-wing host in earnest.

"You're going to boo me off?" Walsh asked. "You're going to boo me off because I'm talking about Sarah Palin? Then you're the problem."

"You're a punk!" a man yelled. "I'm a punk? Walsh asked. "Because I'm talking about Sarah Palin?"

"She's more of a man than you are!" another bagger shouted.

"Sir, you need to back off and let me have my time up here, okay?" Walsh fired back. "You're the problem, sir ... I'm not sure why I can't point out the fact that Sarah Palin is a Republican and is part of the system. She couldn't even finish her time as Governor of Alaska! I know that's because she was being attacked but she's gonna be attacked ten-fold when she runs for office. I'm advocating that we put real independents in office."

At that point in the speech, a man placed a sign with the word ‘infiltrator’ scrawled on it," and pointed it directly at Walsh.

"I'm not an infiltrator!" Walsh countered as the rabble erupted into cheers. "I guarantee you, I'm more conservative than you are. I guarantee you, I'm more conservative than everyone in this audience -- tune into my show sometime. Hold on, wait a second, because I'm insulting Sarah Palin that makes me an infiltrator? This is not the Sarah Palin movement, is it?"

The tea-bagger’s jeers grew even louder. "Okay, okay," he said. "So, this is the Sarah Palin movement, then."

The lesson here is that Tea-Baggers can’t handle the truth.

Watch a video of the event here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvvnHK_wM8k&feature=player_embedded

With more indictments against Wall Street likely, Republicans unanimously opposed to financial reform

 

Following indictments for fraud brought against financial titan Goldman Sachs by the Securities and Exchange Commission, James Hackney, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, said this is just the tip of the iceberg. Professor Hackney continued, "There are a lot of folks out there in different deals who played similar roles, and once it starts building steam, plaintiffs' lawyers will figure out this is where the money is and there should be a lot of action."

After the SEC went public with the Goldman Sachs allegations, the Dow Jones dropped 125 points and Goldman Sachs stocks dropped 13 percent, the largest one-day drop in company history.

The charges against Goldman relate to a complex investment tied to the performance of pools of risky mortgages. The SEC alleges that Goldman marketed the package to investors without disclosing a major conflict of interest: The pools were picked by another client, a prominent hedge fund that was betting the housing bubble would burst.

Goldman Sachs was not the only bank to pursue these financial schemes to profit on the collapse of the housing mortgage market. At the tail end of the real estate bubble, wily and underhanded investors searched for bigger ways to extract huge profits from the approaching disaster of using derivatives. These financial institutions basically placed bets and profited from the American economy’s downfall.

All 41 Senate Republicans declared their unanimous opposition to financial reform in a Friday letter to Majority Leader Harry With these indictments, and likely more to come, Republicans are going to have a much tougher time convincing Americans that immediate financial reform isn't necessary after the SEC's charges.