Funny how the rich take care of themselves. There are rumors that the people most responsible for Lehman’s losses are working on compensating themselves for their own loss:
Talk Of Palace Coup & Strategic Chaos At Top Firm

Finally, The Sunday Times reports that Lehman is trying work out a payout plan for senior executives to compensate them for ‘the huge loss of value in their share options’, due to the dramatic fall in the firm’s share price over the last 12 months. The newspaper quotes an unnamed source, who said: ‘There has been talk at a senior level about finding some form of compensation for the loss of value in the share options’.

The FBI is starting to walk-back some of it’s circumstantial evidence against
Dr. Ivins. It turns out that he did give them the correct sample and it was
just that the FBI messed up. In other words, he wasn’t trying to mislead them
like the criminal master mind the FBI is implying. Note: the strains did match
but, unlike the FBI’s claim, it’s possible that nearly a 100 people had access
to that particular strain.
Also, the envelopes that got traced to the post
office near his home turn out to be more widely available then originally
claimed.
F.B.I. Will
Present Scientific Evidence in Anthrax Case to Counter Doubts

But F.B.I. officials acknowledged at the closed-door
briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Dr. Ivins gave
them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks, but,
because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Dr. Ivins’s failure
to provide the sample in the format requested, the F.B.I. did not realize that
it was a correct match until three years later.

In addition, people who
were briefed by the F.B.I. said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the
anthrax attacks — another piece of evidence used to link Dr. Ivins to the
attacks — could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had
initially led them to believe.

Judith Warner writes that saying something is a lot cheaper than actually
doing something. Why listen to a politicians words when he has plenty of
actions that reflect reality. Remember Bush and “Compassionate Conservatism”:

In real life, it’s another story.

McCain has opposed legislation aimed at helping women sue in cases of pay
discrimination on the grounds that it could make businesses vulnerable to
frivolous lawsuits. He criticized Barack Obama’s latest woman-friendly proposals
– guaranteed sick days and more family leave – as ‘big-government’
extravagances. He has voted to restrict womens access not just to abortion but
to birth control and affordable prenatal health care, and – though his own
memory failed him in recalling this last week – he voted against legislation
that would have required insurance companies to include contraceptives as part
of their prescription drug coverage.

Paul Krugman reminds us that The Onion is the only paper that really understands things. From a prescient spoof in Jan, 2001:

We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”

I think Scott McClellan’s new book is just re-hashing old news and buying it just rewards someone that failed miserably at serving the country. But part of what’s happening is the many media notables claiming they did a good job on reporting the runnup to the Iraq war. They didn’t!
One of the few news agencies that did a good job reporting, Knight Ridder (since purchased by McClatchy), has this to say:
From Blog: Nukes Spooks:

The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill on this point).”

The following chart is from the San Francisco Federal Reserve certainly leave one very worried about the economy. Jump to about slide 20 for summary information. There’s even concern about stagflation.

Here are some more statistic supporting my previous post that Republicans are toast. The turnout in Democratic primaries has been phenominal:
From The Democratic Party :

– Turnout increases ranged from 18 percent in Arkansas to an astronomical 2,549 percent in Kansas.
– In contrast, comparing 2008 Republican turnout to the last contested Republican primary in 2000, Republican turnout either stayed relatively stagnant or decreased. Sinking turnout throughout the country for Republicans shows the contrast between Democrats and Republicans this primary season.
– In fact, for the 30 states for which comparable data is available, 27 of them saw more Democratic than Republican voters this year.

And even though John McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, one quarter of Republicans voted for a candidate not even in the race anymore:

As Democrats continue to see unprecedented enthusiasm for our candidates, the
news continues to be worrisome for John McCain. Even after locking up the
Republican nomination, 27 percent of Republican voters voted for another
Republican candidate in North Carolina, and 23 percent of Republican voters
voted for another Republican candidate in Indiana. [abcnews.com, accessed
5/7/08]