Also, the daily itinerary of every congressmen should be available easily to every citizen. My boss can read my email, how come I don’t get daily updates on MY employees whereabouts? Who they meet with and what business they conduct in their offices is just as important as the bills they (don’t read but) pass.

Clearly everyone has recognized the brilliancy of the idea to Wiki-ize the bill process. Having a secure-but-public, electronic version of all legislation available which clearly shows authorship of all amendments in real-time would bring our government into the 21rst century and must be done.

You and I may have to agree to disagree about the merits of certain aspects of the Thompson Memo. However, the indisputable facts about the recent changes are that (1) DOJ overreached in the KPMG investigation, (2) the judge handling the criminal trials of the former KPMG partners slapped them around about it, and (3) DOJ had to respond to the judge’s criticism.

FWIW, I’m not sure I agree that KPMG’s actions in conditioning reimbursement of former partners’ legal fees on their cooperation with DOJ’s investigation of the firm really denied anyone’s right to counsel — but the judge thought so, and his opinion matters more than mine.

Final note: it is, I suppose, wonderfully ironic that in its marketing efforts, KPMG is now referring to the monitor and the other things it agreed to in the deferred prosection agreement as positive differentiators vs. the competition (”Our work is of the highest quality — it has to be, because we’ve got DOJ looking over our shoulder on a daily basis.”).

Create a new bureaucratic mechanism…

or…

DO YOUR FUCKING JOB AND CONFRONT THE PROBLEMS AND PEOPLE CAUSING THEM.

Yeah, I see how that would be a hard call, actually.

Thank you for sticking up for me, but I actually agree with cuphoder. I don’t have any realistic hope that Pelosi will do it. That’s kinda the point.It is simple, there is precendent, and it uses existing competent infrastructure.

Anything that workable will fail utterly to provide needed Kabuki and might actually work, no beltway insider will tolerate it.

My point, maybe too sublte, is this is not hard IF YOU REALLY WANT TO DO REFORM.

(and burnspbesq has hit the nail directly on the head about SOX, which is next in line for gutting after McNulty evisterated the Thompson Memo)

It’s funny how with every new day, reality sounds more and more like a paranoid’s dream. I mean, even now it’s difficult for *sensible* people to grasp the notion that Paul Wellstone was murdered so that they would control the Senate. People will look at you as if you’re mad if you mention the fact that Patsy Mink died of what look very much like some form of biowarfare. The fact that the most liberal Senator and the most liberal member of the House happened to die within a month of each other, and on the heels of a Democrats only anthrax attack…seems to fly right over the heads of even intelligent folks.

When you stop and think of the potential profits that the shadow government (the military industrial complex) hopes to make from the eternal war that they are trying so hard to start, you begin to see just how dangerous our present environment is. Think of how much money we put into agencies like the CIA and just what kind of resources that money buys. Now reflect on the notion that a shadow government would have virtually the same tools, perhaps even MORE sophisticated tools, with which to remove any “obstacles” to their plans. They can fabricate a murder that will appear like just about any disease you could name and buy off any number of Doctors and legal officials to back it all up. Such is the power you have when you own the printing presses that churn out money. You see, they can pay *any* price that might be required, and if anyone were to threaten to reveal the plot, well they simply print a few more millions and buy the best assassin/clean-up teams in existence. Nice racket, huh?

So don’t get any fancy ideas of the good things that Democrats are going to do…. they aren’t going to do a damn thing but cheer for President-for-Life Bush when he announces that he’s just massively nuked Iran… because not to would be dangerously un-American. Wouldn’t it? Don’t you have even the slightest curiosity as to why we’re being told that Bushie will reveal his plans for Iraq “next year”? It’s because (you big silly!) by next year, the Democrats will know that they won’t control Congress, and even promising not to impeach clown-boy wasn’t enough to let Democracy work as planned. *That* my friends, will never happen again. “Democracy” is a thing of the past and we’ll never see it’s face again.

The problem with SOX — especially Section 404 — is not the legislation itself. The problem with SOX 404 is that the accounting oligopoly (the Big Four and the Next Three) perverted the legislation to their own ends, said ends being the sucking of huge sums of money out of their clients’ pockets by designing a system that was much more intrusive and expensive than Congress ever had in mind.

Ask any soul working in the finance department of a publicly-owned corporation how long it took to implement changes related to SOX.

It’s simple, easy, and you can implement tomorrow. Just a thought.

Hardly. But the concept is still sound. It’s not unlike the ISO9000 standard used by manufacturing – document what your rules and policies are, and then invite a 3rd party in to ensure you are following them.

It’s like having your partner check your work before turning it in.

-GFO

good thinking!

Some tech vendors are making a killing selling stuff with the line “if you dont do this you will go to jail!”

Interesting info all through the post. The press is touting the McNulty changes as being primarily addressed to the issues of waiver of atty/client and corp willingness to fund a charged officer/director’s legal fees.

SP,CPA – I would if I could, but I don’t know how to search through to find my rants and I know there are a lot (LOT) of posts. I do think there are lots of (proofed and organized *g*) lists of impeachable offenses that people have out on the web. I can’t remember getting into that per se, but I’ve mouthed off about a lot of things so I probably did.

I wrote a short list of impeachable offenses here. I don’t know if that’s what folks are refering to or not. I never wrote a laundry list of DoJ problems, though, so I’m pretty sure they were talking about something you and/or LHP were writing about.

Since then, of course, the MCA has inoculated Bush and others concerning the black sites, etc., and we’ve learned that there’s nothing that ties the President to the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson. Still leaves us a few items, though.