It will be folded into the Financial Fraud Task Force that has been in existence since 2009, and was created by the Congress.

David Dayen:

The task force has had a mandate to investigate and prosecute financial fraud for well over two years. So what has been done? They've done some work on insider trading. And they've gone after a number of small fish who engaged in penny-ante mortgage fraud schemes. Has one Wall Street banker at the top been prosecuted? No. And in general terms, most of the civil fraud prosecutions have ended with these no-fault agreements, where the guilty party doesn't have to admit "alleged" wrongdoing and can just buy their way out of the problem. This is the practice that Jed Rakoff rapped the SEC for partaking in.

But more important than that, who is on the Financial Fraud Task Force? The same people who will be co-chairing the Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses with Eric Schneiderman. Take a look at the heads of the working groups on mortgage fraud and securities and commodities fraud:

The Mortgage Fraud Working Group, co-chaired by Ben Wagner, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, Tony West, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, Michael Stephens, Acting Inspector General for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Sharon Ormsby, well as representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Association of Attorneys General.

The Securities and Commodities Fraud Working Group, co-chaired by Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, Robert Khuzami, Director of Enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the David Meister, Director of Enforcement for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

West, Breuer and Khuzami are all co-chairs on the Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses. What's more, they all had duties in these working groups substantially similar to this new fraud unit. And they did nothing of consequence.

Still think this new division, of a task force that has done nothing to speak of on the mortgage mess, has teeth?  

It's far more likely that this is part of a strategy to push along the settlement deal that neither Tom Miller, its nominal head, nor Barack Obama have been able to close; this may be an attempt to undercut the so-far staunch resistance of more than a few state attorneys general by co-opting one of the settlement's strongest opponents: NY AG Eric Schneiderman.

I heavily participate on both networks, but...

On Facebook, I'm my dog! ;-) and anything I share is from Darla's perspective.  The advertisements I get are hysterical...many of them for senior retirment centers, since Darla is 80-something in dog years!

On Google+, I share my photographs. From those, people might glean that I like flowers, hiking, chocolate, silly things, etc.  I want the world to see my pics, so I don't care.  The ego food far outweighs any detriment in sharing them.  They are small sized, so if someone wanted to steal and print/make money from them, they'd be limited in their ability to do so.  My name is pretty much a John Smithian type of name, so I doubt any real info will be gleaned from knowing it.  I DO NOT put a picture of my face on the internet.

Google email is used for nothing except Google+ and Facebook communication, which means for pretty much nothing.

I DO use the Google search engine, but henceforth, my goal is to confuse data analytics by spending a lot of time searching for things I don't care about....just googled Newtie's hobbies ;-).

But people REALLY need to stop and think about how sharing their whole lives on blogs, social networks, etc benefits them.  All of the arguments that Facebook execs make about the benefits of being out here non-anonymously are FARRRR outweighed by the detriments.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Wednesday that he does not plan to serve if President Barack Obama wins a second term in November. Geithner said he was confident that Obama would be re-elected but added that he was also "confident that he is going to have the privilege of having another secretary of the Treasury." The comments came in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

As opposed to what?  Obama deeming Geithner so irreplaceable that he'd be forced to do without one?

I'm sure there's someone with Goldman Sachs in his resume who will have enough ego to believe he can fill Timmy's big shoes...

Interestingly, countries with strong public-sector banking systems largely escaped the 2008 credit crisis. These include the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - which contain 40 percent of the global population and are today's fastest growing economies. They escaped because their public-sector banks do not need to rely on repos and securitizations to back their loans. The banks are owned and operated by the ultimate guarantor - the government itself. The public-sector banking model deserves further study.

The best and most effective way that Obama supporters can grow support for Obama and increase his re-election prospects is to guarantee him that he has their votes if and only if he gets to work and produces real progressive populist effective working policies before the November election, and not otherwise.

In other words, do everything possible beginning now to drive his polling numbers and approval rate into the basement and make it is clear as a club on the head to him that he will lose in November otherwise.

Ann Coulter. . .(thinks) . .  they are morons--or even worse in the world of Coulter, she thinks they're Democrats!
. .  saying she thought it best to not hear from the so called "peanut gallery."

Is Ann becoming an elitist herself?

And are we seeing the right-wing media elite starting to act and think like the left wing media elite did? That THEY know more than the rest of America as far as what it means to be conservative, and who will best be in a position to beat President Obama.

I mean, why bother going through this whole election thing?!

Firefox gives me a message saying it cannot open the file because it contains errors - but right clicking and saving it, and then opening it with an image program like irfanview works fine...

So I re-sized it and uploaded it to photobucket as a 156Kb file, which is much less memory intensive and wont crash anyone's computer ;-)

Among the highlights:

Newt said "Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire's challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.

he called Reagan's meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev "the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with
Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich."

Some context around current proposals to go after those that many believe committed fraud and increase regulation to prevent same in the future.

The [Justice] department began pulling back from a more aggressive pursuit of white-collar crime around 2005, say defense lawyers and former prosecutors, after the Supreme Court overturned a conviction it won against the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. That ended an era of brass-knuckle prosecutions related to fraud at companies like Enron.

As Wall St. Polices Itself, Prosecutors Use Softer Approach, July 7, 2011

Leading up to the financial crisis, many officials said in interviews, regulators failed in their crucial duty to compile the information that traditionally has helped build criminal cases. In effect, the same dynamic that helped enable the crisis -- weak regulation -- also made it harder to pursue fraud in its aftermath