I'm off the Harken beat; I shouldn't really be blogging at all today. But Charles Murtaugh has got something to say, as does the newly returned Charles Dodgson.

In my comments, John Cole (whose formerly inactive blog is back in full swing, and who gives me one of the kindest denunciations I'm likely to ever receive) asks why I'm blaming Republicans for this wave of corporate scandals, when politicians on both sides share the blame.

In general, I think that excessive leniency with corporate malfeasance is far more of a Republican problem than a Democratic one. And on a normal day, I might go look up citations about the many cases where Republicans fought to loosen regulations and weaken regulatory agencies. I might even make the argument, "If Republicans hadn't taken action X to eliminate regulation Y, then scandal Z might not have occured."

But then I saw this.

Senate Democrats yesterday blocked a proposal that would have changed the way companies account for stock options, an initiative vehemently opposed by high-tech companies that have used such grants to award billions of dollars in compensation to their executives and employees.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) tried unsuccessfully to attach to a broader corporate accountability bill a requirement that companies subtract the cost of stock option grants from their reported profits. But the Democratic leadership prevented McCain's amendment from reaching a vote.

"The fix is in," said McCain, vowing to try to force a vote on the measure in the future. McCain's proposal faced bipartisan resistance in the Senate.

Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said he had misgivings about a "one-size-fits-all" formula for dealing with stock options, suggesting instead that the bill require the Securities and Exchange Commission and a proposed accounting oversight board to come up with regulations on the issue.

And it really took the wind out of my sails, you know what I mean? I mean, this is one of those common sense principles that pretty much everybody can agree on. A bright ten-year-old could tell you that grants of stock options cost money, and that a company should have to report that expense. A bright fifteen-year-old could tell you how widespread compensation with stock options gives management incentives to engage in destructive short-term strategies to pump up share price at the expense of the company. I'm positive that Tom Daschle understands this. But he was still in a hell of a rush to vacate the moral high ground.

I know, the Democratic party platform isn't a suicide pact, and Democrats need donations too. But this is utter bullshit, and we deserve better. I expect my party to have a little goddamn principle and backbone.

"If stock options are not compensation, what are they? If compensation is not an expense, what is it?" Warren Buffet

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." Malcom X

Charles Kuffner is absolutely right here. Permalinks are (surprise!) not working, so I'm going to reprint it:

Only $300,000 has been raised so far by the American Red Cross for victims of the recent flooding in Central Texas despite the $12 million the agency will spend on disaster relief. In bad economic times and with so many other catastrophes happening, it's gonna be tough for them. The Chron story has a link to the Red Cross donations page, or you can jump there from here.

A lot of people gave their time and money last year to help Houstonians who were wiped out by Tropical Storm Allison. I hope the same will be said of the flood victims this year.

Please consider contributing.

Rob Lyman, who has sent me some interesting mail in the past, (he sent me this letter on global warming that generated a good discussion) sent me this email about Mickey Kaus's forebodings of left-wing violence:

Mickey Kaus's connection of MWO with future violence is silly. So, by the way, was Clinton's connection of Rush Limbaugh with McVeigh. But that's not what really ticked me off. He also wrote: "That's true even if the law-abiding/violent ratio is somewhat higher on the left, because they don't have the guns--yet."

In other words, Kaus claims gun ownership is a causal factor in individual violence--people with guns (right wing) are more violent than people without guns (left wing) BECAUSE they own guns (rather than some other factor, such as ideology). If the left wing acquires guns, it will become violent.

This has the causal connection backward. Violent people acquire guns--guns do not cause otherwise peaceful people to turn violent.

We could go into depth with criminology and fancy statistical games, but that is hardly necessary. This statement reflects bigotry against gun owners. What if Kaus had said, "Political group A is less violent than group B, because black people prefer B"? Clear racism. Kaus is fired. His name becomes a swear word. Black gun owners show remarkable restraint and do not kill him, but he commits suicide after learning the KKK is about to give him a lifetime achievement award.

So I wrote him and complained. His one line response:

"I wasn't assuming gun owners were violent. I was assuming they had guns."

Now I'm REALLY pissed off. This guy is just as bad as Clinton for pete's sake! He could have disagreed with me on the merits. He could have apologized. He could have clarified. Instead, he denies the obvious and pretends I'm a moron for misunderstanding him!

Can somebody (that would be you) PLEASE take this guy to task in public?

Am I over sensitive? You bet. When the arrogant elitists of the media establishment stop treating me like a sex offender just because I have a couple of tools for self-defense and mean procurement, I'll stop being sensitive.

He's got a point. Kaus has got an equation here- to make a peaceful group more violent, just add guns- that does betray a clear anti-gun bias. Kaus doesn't write about guns very much, so I don't know if he really believes it. His smart-ass response doesn't tell us much. (Politeness pays.)

Now that Rob brings it up, I'm kind of surprised that some of the more enthusiastic gun-rights advocates haven't made this point yet.

Max Sawicky gets it just right here, in a post called "The Case for Corporate Amorality":

Corporate managers have only one social responsibility: obedience to the law. Anything more is wishful delusion. Where does responsibility truly lie? With the public sector. It is for democratic government to determine the laws and regulations that govern corporate behavior. It is politicians of both parties who are to blame for the ill effects of corporate behavior. Congress is charged with the tasks of writing laws, influencing the writing of regulations, and conducting oversight of executive agencies. The executive branch, headed by elected officials and their appointees, writes regulations, operates public programs, and enforces the law. This is fundamentally a failure of government, and the root of that failure is the ideology of laissez-faire.

On this issue, liberals are the hard-headed realists. And we're right.

I'd like to talk a little about Harken's sale of Aloha. In my comments, a few people, notably the estimable Megan McArdle*, argue that (a) the sale of Aloha by Harken appeared in Harken's financial statements; it was in the grey area but not necessarily unethical, and (b) Bush made a good-faith effort to obey the law. The first point is more interesting. I'm not a lawyer, so if I say something wrong here, please correct me.

When the Enron scandals broke, I think it was Robert Musil who pointed out that off-balance sheet transactions are not inherently deceptive. For an example of their legitimate usage, he brought up the example of an airline. Airlines would have to take on truly crushing debt to purchase their planes. Instead of owning their planes outright and keeping hundreds of millions of debt on the books, they may choose to sell their planes to another corporate body (often a partnership) and lease them back. The airline improves their balance sheet, and the partnership makes a little income from the lease. A triumph of American capitalism.

So what's the problem? Well, what if the airline tries to pump up their apparent revenues by selling their planes for a million jillion dollars and lease them back for $100 a month? That won't happen as long as the other body is really and truly independent. We can count on an independent actor to make economically rational decisions. They shouldn't be buying assets at above-market value rates, and they shouldn't be arranging financing on money losing terms. If they screw up, the shareholders in the partnership suffer, but the shareholders in the first body should be just fine.

The problem arises when the other actor isn't really independent. If (for example) the second body consists of insiders in the first body, or if they're entirely financed by the first body, they're not independent. There's every reason to believe that the partnership doesn't exist to acheive any economically rational goal. Rather, it may exist solely to perform irrational actions, like buying an airplane for a million jillion dollars. The airline would be fronting the cash that it paid to itself, artificially pump up revenues. Most importantly, if this scheme goes bust, the airline hasn't offlaid any risk- the people to suffer will be the airline's shareholders, not the partnership.

Now let me quote from a swell article by Spencer Ackerman:

The company struggled and by 1989, while Bush sat on Harken's audit committee, the company was hurting. But rather than disclose its troubles, the company loaned money to some of its insiders, who had formed a partnership called International Marketing & Resources. With that money, these officers turned right back around and bought 80 percent of a Harken subsidiary called Aloha Petroleum Ltd. The effect of this transaction was to shield almost $10 million in debt, much as companies like Enron later did.

I obviously don't know what the true market price of Aloha was in 1989. But this transaction looks very, very suspicious. It really seems like the partnership, Intenational Marketing and Resources, was more like a subdivision of Harken than an independent entity- same people, same funds, no real offlay of risk. I'd speculate that if it hadn't been George Bush's SEC, coming off of Neil Bush's scandal, they may have come to some kind of conclusion to that effect.


*Megan posts here defending her right to argue about economics. It sounds like she's gotten some seriously asinine email, and I remember seeing some blog sneering at her as an "uncredentialed economist". This is beyond dumb. Megan starts from a very different set of premises than I do, but she's honest and shows her work. If you want credentials, read a journal. (For sure, don't read my blog.) She shouldn't have to write this kind of post, and I wish that I could apologize on behalf of anyone on my "team" who made her write it.

UPDATE: Instapundit notes that he never believed in the Whitewater scandal, and even wrote a book partially inspired by the belief that too much was being made of it. I didn't intend to accuse him of being a Whitewater cheerleader, but it's a reasonable reading of what I wrote.

As long as we're playing against type, I'll drop a little secret: I voted against Clinton. Twice.

Mickey Kaus has been pretty silly recently. In particular, I think that he deserves the abuse he's gotten about the scary, scary left wing violence that's sure to spring from MWO's campaigns encouraging readers to write emails to journalists.

He's got one thing right, though: the graphic on the Salon's new Joe Conason blog, in which Joe Conason is sticking Bush in the ribs with a pen, is juvenile and creepy. Of course he's biased- we all are- but the graphic doesn't give me much confidence that Conason is even pretending to consider the issues. It functions as a big middle finger to Republicans, who would be most likely to dismiss him anyway.

If, say, Andrew Sullivan had adorned his site with a cartoon of the author assaulting Clinton, I would never have started reading him. Salon would be wise to rotate the graphic out of existence ASAP.

Matthew Yglesias (permalinks not working) has got an excellent post about the absurdity of Bush's line:

In the long run, there's no capitalism without conscience. There is no wealth without character.

There's nothing wrong with CEOs being greedy. Indeed, if CEO weren't greedy its hard to see how free-market economics could work at all. If greedy CEOs knew, however, that trying to perpetrate massive fraud would wind up landing them in jail and losing all their money, then greedy CEOs wouldn't perpetrate massive frauds. Thinking that we can solve social problems by asking people to just become more moral is the absolute worst kind of self-deception, and if that's really going to be our policy then this country's going to be in a lot of trouble.

Hear, hear.

Glenn Reynolds seems to be embracing a bracingly disengenuous spin on Harken via Media Pundit. He says that the scandal "has already died down" because the stock that Bush sold off rebounded and was worth more than he sold it for a year later.

Oh, dear. No, that just won't do. First of all, as Jeff Cooper points out, "six months after Bush's sale Harken's price was in the area of one dollar—three dollars per share less than what Bush obtained (the San Francisco Chronicle reports the same thing). In other words, this isn't an instance of Harken's stock taking a one day drop, then rebounding and continuing to rise, as Glenn seems to believe".

Second, let's look at the charges. It seems to me that there are three significant accusations here:

1. Harken sold one of its subsidiaries, Aloha Petroleum, to a group of insiders at an artificially inflated price in order to disguise $8 million dollars in losses. This kind of manipulation allowed Harken to state that they had a much smaller loss than they actually had, deceiving investors and shareholders. This is the kind of pump-and-dump for which WorldCom and others have been excoriated. It's unethical at best, illegal at worst. (Halliburton did a related trick, claiming credit for income they hadn't received.)

2. Anyone who knew what was going on could predict that Harken's share price would decline rapidly as soon as this ruse was discovered. George W. Bush was on the Harken audit committee at the time of these manipulations. It seems to me that he should have known. It hasn't been shown that he did know, but he behaved as if he did- he sold off 2/3 of his Harken stock in time to avoid the crash.

3. Bush didn't follow the relevant insider trading regulations when he sold this stock. The SEC was supposed to be notified quickly, but he didn't notify them for 34 weeks.

Harken manipulated the market to produce a short-term shoring up of stock price, and it looks like Bush took advantage of this opportunity without going through proper legal channels. None of these accusations becomes OK if Harken's stock doubled, tripled, or quadrupled a year later. Unethical short-term manipulations are still unethical, even if the long-term trend in the market is with you. Imagine that a group of gamblers at the racetrack drugged a horse in the second race and made a profit by betting on the fixed race. As it happens, they could have made even more money by betting on the tenth race. That doesn't make what they did in the second race acceptable.

Lastly, I grimly suspect that this line of argument has legs. Before I see any conservative pundits pushing this line, I'd like to see them on their knees, begging apology for the eight year, $70 million dollar investigation of Whitewater. After all, all that money, all those resources (Louis Freeh's FBI, I'm looking at you) and all that trouble for the country sprang from a transaction where the Clintons made a massive negative profit of $46,000.

Brian Linse has recently been listing great new left-wing blogs. It seems to me that there's been a sea change in the liberal blogosphere in recent months. In addition to dozens of us lowly hobby sites, we've got TAPped, at least two professors (law professor Jeff Cooper and economics professor Brad DeLong), and big-time cartoonist Tom Tomorrow. Media Whores Online is getting almost respectable, and the great Bob Somersby is writing again.

Drs. Josh Marshall and Max Sawicky wanna square dance with you. Joe Conason is entering the fray, following Eric Alterman. And even as kausfiles embraces his position as a full-time left-basher, the Bull Moose has come to delight in right-bashing as an M.O. A pretty fair trade, I'd have to say.

Like it or lump it, the days of right-wing dominance of the blogosphere are pretty much over. I won't say that the blogosphere looks like America, exactly, but we've got a pretty impressive spectrum of opinion going on here. Welcome, everybody.

UPDATE: Also, we got mad phat poor quasi-neo-liberal college students, some of whom who run legit publications.

Men in Black II: The Ultimate Review

Via Jim Treacher's blog, this is the funniest goddamn thing I've seen in ages.

I've seen this before- a few guys pretend to be pre-teenage girls on AOL Chat and screw with the minds of the perverts who want to have cybersex with them. If this sounds like your bag, check out The Legend of Cooter Joe.

Peter Beinhart states an obvious, but often overlooked, point:

The right's urge to blame Clinton stems partly from its refusal to acknowledge the basic tension within conservative ideology between cultural traditionalism and economic libertarianism. Whether it's Hollywood or Wall Street, conservatives hate to admit that it is the cultural amorality of the profit motive itself that sometimes produces moral rot. So when movie moguls or corporate chieftains choose the bottom line over basic decency, conservatives are reduced to suggesting that the scoundrels lost their family values at Woodstock (or by watching Clinton) rather than admit that they are simply following the structural incentives of an inadequately regulated free market.

Beautifully put.

This is good, too:

Similarly, the penalties for corporate fraud were diminishing. In 1995 Newt Gingrich and the newly elected Republican Congress--having vowed to restrict lawsuits in the Contract with America--pushed through a bill making it much harder to sue companies for misleading their investors. And that same year the House and Senate froze the budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), even though the agency (as the General Accounting Office would later find) already lacked the staff to adequately monitor corporate balance sheets. As David Ruder, a former Republican head of the SEC, told The New York Times in 1995, "The Republican Congress is dealing with the SEC as though it is the enemy, instead of the policeman on the beat." And, as conservatives often remind liberals, when you undermine the policeman on the beat, crime goes up.

Which brings us back to Bill Clinton. If conservatives are serious about blaming him for Enron and WorldCom, they should focus not on Monica Lewinsky but on the decline in white-collar law enforcement that occurred on his watch. But, if they do, they'll notice that Clinton vetoed the 1995 bill that shielded corporate executives from shareholder lawsuits, and his SEC chief, Arthur Levitt, proposed barring accounting firms from consulting for firms they were simultaneously auditing. Unfortunately, Clinton's veto was overridden-a slight majority of Democrats voted to uphold it, but virtually every congressional Republican voted to override. Levitt's proposal was torpedoed as well. By my count, 33 of the 37 members of Congress who signed public letters protesting his reform were Republicans. And the lobbyist who spearheaded the accounting industry's campaign against the Levitt proposal was none other than Harvey Pitt, President Bush's pick to head the SEC. In other words, the '90s moral tone that made Enron and WorldCom possible wasn't Clintonism; it was Gingrichism. And that's one moral tone George W. Bush hasn't changed at all.

All hail the Poor Man! I wish I had written these lines:

On John Derbyshire: You know, if you take away victor Davis Hanson, Jonah Goldberg, National Treasure Bill "Junior" Buckley, and Jay Nordlinger's good days, the National Review is a really horrible publication. Not just regular horrible - really, really, "The Nation'-style batshit-insane ranting horrible.

On Alec Baldwin: Actors, please listen to me. Shut up. No one cares what you have to say. Have you noticed that when people go to see movies, you are always saying words that other people thought up? That's because you are idiots, and everything you say is utterly embarrassing. Stop talking. Just stop.

On Bill Maher: All the Bill Maher fans are now all like "well, he's funnier than you." Well, fine - maybe I have been panning in the River of Levity for some time now without finding a whole lot of Comedy Gold. But then again, when you're trying to find something to watch before you go to bed that doesn't involve Regis Philbin asking losers what color Mary's little lamb's fleece was for more money than I'll make in ten years, this web page doesn't turn up hosting a current events panel discussion with Simon LeBon, Jimmy Walker, Jake Busey and Jorge Posada, so fucking there.

On Katha Pollitt: I used to think that there weren't really people like this in the world, that they only existed as a Republican strawman. I guess they're real. Ick.

(Sidenote: I don't know who Katha Pollitt is; I just thought that was funny.)

On Camille Paglia: Used to have a column on Salon, which was the worst thing ever. I used to read it just to annoy myself, but then I stopped reading Salon entirely because I found out that there's actual, honest-to-goodness porn on the internet, and I didn't have to make do with this pseudo-intellectual coffee house poetry reading crap version. Paglia could never decide if she was voting for Nader or Bush, and she had incredible long-winded and pretentious explainations for her positions that probably make lots of sense is you spent the years 1972-1976 continuously tripping. And she's always be saying things like "according to Plato (who I've read in the original Greek)." What are you, seven years old? No one cares that you read a book. Get a clue: you are the poor (but still very pretentious) man's Angie Bowie. You suck.

(Sidenote: Fuck, yeah. I could devote a whole side blog to loathing Camille Paglia. Modern Humorist once had a fan letter from Camille Paglia to Britney Spears that rocked the house sideways: it began "Attention Young Valkyrie!" and ended, "My partner Allison agrees with me 100%" I wish Modern Humorist was up.)

On Rush Limbaugh: He'd just make stuff up. It wasn't spinning or anything - he just changed the facts and presented it like truth. He'd get all worked up about the stories he pretty much invented, and his audience would get all worked up about it, but it was all ridiculous because he might as well have been talking about Hobbits and leprechauns for all the relationship it had to the real world.

Amount of money the Clintons lost over Whitewater: $46,000

Cost to taxpayers of eight year Whitewater investigation: $70 million

Proceeds from Bush's sale of Harkin stock before the public announcement of Harkin's losses, unnannounced to the SEC for 34 weeks: $848,000



Hearing the "honor and integrity" President say "Sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures," and having the press laugh out loud: Priceless



More Harkin coverage at the Prospect, on Busy Busy Busy, on Media Whores Online, and on Get Donkey, among others.

******WARNING: TRAVEL STORY AHEAD*********

I'm back from Croatia. Travel stories, as a rule, are horribly boring unless something went wrong, so I'll keep it short. (I saw P.J. O'Rourke make this point on a panel once- he was saying most travel stories consist of "It was such a nice hotel, and the food was so good, and the beack was so nice...") I had the pleasure of welcoming my brother's new wife and her daughter into our family. My dad cried, which made the trip worth it all by itself.

I'll just give you one vignette. We spent a little time in the capital city of Zagreb, which is not going to be listed in the world's most beautiful cities anytime soon. It's got some nice old buildings, a number of museums, and an attractive medieval quarter. But much of the city looks the part of a former Communist hellhole. If you get out of the very center of the city, you'll stumble into blocks and blocks of unrelenting grey, In addition, it's very expensive to stay there, because Tito apparently had little interest in building hotels. Luckily, Lonely Planet directed us to Samobar, a charming little town a bus ride away, where a beautiful hotel room was available for less than 1/3 of the cost in Zagreb. Do you remember the first song in the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast," where Belle dancing through the town square and singing about how there must be more than this provincial life? Samobar looked a lot like that.

The first night we were there, Samobar was having a music festival in the center of town, with lots of choral music and string ensembles. That night, I wandered out to watch them sing. I can only assume that a lot of what they were singing was traditional Croatian music, because a lot of the crowd was mouthing along with the words. If I'm right and that was traditional Croatian music, it's very dramatic. The loudest voice is not the melody line but the harmony line, which was a few steps above the melody. It's a remarkable, intense sound.

My hometown in Ohio is a self-consciously quaint town with an old-fashioned town green and gazebo, where they put on concerts when the weather is nice. Usually the music is distinctly old-timey, bluegrass or 20s/ 30s swing or brass band. People come out in the summer to relax and enjoy the sunsets, listen to the music, and daydream about living in Our Town, where kids still play with marbles and put up lemonade stands for 5 cents. The people in the audience in Samobar reminded me of that scene. Physically, they looked a lot like Americans; they had the same kinds of clothes, haircuts, and builds. If I picked up the crowd in Samobar and dropped them in Ohio, no one would notice until they started to speak. I found myself thinking aimlessly about the parallels between Croatia (which had recently celebrated its independence day) and the US. I thought that this festival of Croatian music had a parallel with our Fourth of July, where Americans watch fireworks, listen to patriotic music and speeches, and feel like something called "Americans."

But I caught myself before I went to far with this "people are people" line of thought. It's not the same. Croatia fought its war of independence ten years ago. The local church was surrounded by plaques to the recent war dead- it was a tiny town, and there must have been at least forty or fifty. Our revolutionary war heroes, while properly revered, are popularly seen as figures in waistcoats and wigs, dead for over 150 years. Their revolutionary war heroes are their old grocery baggers and their old roommates. They were fighting a revolutionary war while I was watching Nirvana on SNL. It's just not the same thing.

It's also not the same because the Croatian war was fought for at least two closely related reasons: (a) to break free from the collapsing communist mess of Yugoslavia, and (b) to form a nation-state based on racial identity. The first reason makes a lot of sense to me, while the second reason gives me hives. There's quite a lot that I like about Europe, but it's always made me uncomfortable are the fact that European nationalism can be tied to ethnicity in a way that it just isn't possible in the immigrant nation of the United States. "America for the Americans" is pretty much self-refuting, while "France for the French" is a perennial campaign theme. (As an interesting aside, one of my brother's groomsmen made the mistake once while on duty of asking a Croatian translator if he spoke Serbo-Croatian. The translator bit his head off, insisting that there's no such thing as Serbo-Croatian- the two languages are totally separate, and he didn't speak Serbian. This is not actually true- the languages are more or less identical- but Serbs write it in the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatians write it in the Roman alphabet.)

No conclusions, really. Just two thoughts:

I don't know if I can really understand how Croatians feel when they're celebrating their nation. Or anyone else.

God bless America.

Did you ever look at Kausfiles' links? Did you ever notice this one?

Ann "Too Far" Coulter--Sometimes it's just far enough.

Is it "too far" or "just far enough" to write a column titled "Liberalism and terrorism: Different stages of same disease?" Let's just take one line:

Ashcroft has been incessantly attacked on the op-ed page of The New York Times by the same columnists who are now angrily demanding to know why the Bush administration didn't imprison all Arabs before Sept. 11.

What... the... fuck? How do you even make fun of a line like that?

In the July 8th and 15th New Republic, there's a scathing review of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men tacked on to a review of Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. (It's not online.) At one point, the reviewer (Alan Wolfe) cites a story from the book: Moore says that after hearing conservative pundit Fred Barnes decrying the fact that kids didn't know about the Iliad and the Odyssey anymore. So Moore calls Barnes and asks whether he knows what they are. "Well, they're... uh... you know... uh... OK, fine, you got me. I don't know what they're about. Happy now?"

Wolfe doubts that this story is true, so he emails Barnes and asks about it. Barnes writes back:

It never happened. One, I've never talked to Michael Moore. Two, I have read the Iliad and the Odyssey. I didn't read them until I got to college, but I did read them. So I know exactly what they're about. Besides that, I've seen movie versions of them.

I agree with Wolfe; I find it hard to believe that Barnes would have no idea what these books are about. However, there's no movie version of the Iliad. What is Barnes talking about? Could he be referring to...

this?
this?
this?
this?

Or was Barnes just gilding the lily a wee bit?

Two important links:

A while ago, I mentioned some anti- Democrat and pro-Bush funny money that I bought as souvenirs at the gun show. Ginger Stampley, of What She Really Thinks, has been kind enough to scan them and post them here.

Also, frequent correspondent and good guy Mark Poyser has a detailed (and well-researched) diagram of the recent investment scandals that is getting picked up by a Canadian newspaper. It's also available as a T-shirt or mousepad.

Also, one unimportant link: My friend sent me this page dedicated to Tokyo toilet bowls. I'm including it only to make sure that I don't get cocky- Tokyo toilet bowls have gotten 10 times as many hits as I have.