Christmas came early to US banks, says the New York Times, when Treasury Secretary Paulson decided to use the first installment of the $700 billion bailout money to recapitalize banks instead of buying up their toxic securities. That would be, he claimed the fastest way to get banks making loans again. If Congress didn’t hand over the money at once, recession would hit us!
You already know to watch out for poisoned teacups, but what you should have been worrying about instead …
An internet-based team of “three people from the United States, three from the Ukraine, two from China, one from Estonia and one from Belarus” (says Reuters) stole credit card numbers by millions from US retailers, and sold them “… to people in the U.S. and Europe for thousands of dollars. The buyers then withdrew tens of thousands of dollars at a time from automated teller machines, officials said.” Even so, the chief conspirator’s lawyer sounds very confident that his client will never enter a jail cell.
After all…. the guy who made possible the NH 2002 election phone-jamming got his conviction overturned because the interstate denial-of-service attack on Democrats’ phones was not covered by Federal laws against phone “harassment.”
It’s more than a year from now until November of 2008. That’s time enough for black-hat hackers to create and offer up for sale the kinds of code tricks California researchers identified–many of which require no more access than a few minutes privacy with one machine. The kind of privacy that you expect when you’re voting.
It ought to be time for the Democrats we just elected to make sure that all votes will be counted fairly in 2008. That’s much more important than investigating Gonzales.
