Rewatching The Bionic Woman - The Original

It's been decades since I've seen this show, but the first two seasons are now out on DVD, so....

My first discovery: The pilot and related episodes - i.e., the whole set-up and backstory episodes - are appallingly awful. I mean, we're talking embarrassment squick territory. We're talking directorial incompetence rivaled only by early-season Highlander. And they're also incredibly dull because they aren't about Jaime at all; they're about the Bionic Man.

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And now I also remember just how hard I 'shipped Oscar/Jaime back in the day. Man, my mentor/mentee kink (which is second only to my buddy kink) really has a long history.

So the upshot of all of this is that I was prompted to rewatch dualbunny's Bionic Woman: Reboot vid, I Want What I Want, and of course, now I have to remind myself that the show was not anywhere near as interesting as it appears in the vid and therefore I have no need to obtain the DVDs.

Goddammit, Work!

This is the worst possible time to pile on! Don't you know that next week, the season premieres of White Collar and Covert Affairs air, and SPN Big Bang begins posting? Arrrggghhh!

In other news, I am indefensibly fascinated by cat_adoration, where people apparently just post pictures of their cats (except for one troll who posted ... something horrible ... but thankfully another poster put up a warning before I could see it), and The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee blog (thank you, whoever on my FList/DWircle gave me the link), which is a blog by someone who fosters kittens. I find them very ... soothing.

Color me shocked.

Bloomberg:

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators may issue a public rebuke of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ) and its former executives instead of suing them for actions that led to the firm’s 2008 failure, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

SEC enforcement lawyers, who have struggled for more than two years to find definitive evidence that the company and its leaders violated securities laws, are concerned that a legal attack on Lehman’s accounting practices would likely fail, the people said...

Lehman, which filed the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history in September 2008, was faulted along with its former executives in a report by Anton Valukas, the court-appointed examiner, who said they misled investors with “accounting gimmicks.” Valukas alleged that Lehman used the technique, known as Repo 105s, to hide billions of dollars in assets and artificially reduce the firm’s leverage. The actions may not have violated accounting rules, making it difficult for the SEC to pursue fraud claims.

The rebuke is “about the least harmful sanction anybody could get,” [Prof. James] Cox said.

Just to be clear, as I'm sure the SEC knows, it is not necessary to establish a technical violation of the accounting rules to prove fraud. If you manage to comply technically but still mislead investors, that's both fraud and a violation of the accounting rules, because the overall rule is "don't mislead." See United States v. Ebbers, 458 F.3d 110, 125-26 (2d Cir. 2006) ("If the government proves that a defendant was responsible for financial reports that intentionally and materially misled investors, the statute is satisfied. The government is not required in addition to prevail in a battle of expert witnesses over the application of individual GAAP [accounting] rules.")

A day for surprises

At Bank of America, more incomplete mortgage docs raise more questions

Are Countrywide mortgage-backed securities really mortgage-backed? Do banks even have the legal right to foreclose on certain homes?

Court testimony by a former Countrywide employee added to the intrigue last fall, because she confessed that many loans there weren't properly handled, bringing into doubt the validity of Countrywide's securitization process. Bank of America, which owns Countrywide, quickly silenced the discussion with firm denials.

But Fortune has examined dozens of court records that corroborate the employee's testimony. And if Countrywide's mortgage securitizations systematically failed as it appears they did, Bank of America's potential liability dwarfs its shareholder equity, as the Congressional Oversight Panel points out.

Fortune examined the foreclosures filed in two New York counties (Westchester and the Bronx) between 2006 and 2010. There were 130 cases where the Bank of New York (BK) was foreclosing on behalf of a Countrywide mortgage-backed security. In 104 of those cases, the loan was originally made by Countrywide....

None of the 104 Countrywide loans were endorsed by Countrywide... If the lack of endorsement on these notes is typical -- and 104 out of 104 suggests it is -- the problem occurs across Countrywide securities and for loans that pre-date the peak-bubble mortgage frenzy.

It will be left to the investigators – and possibly ultimately the courts – to decide whether the applicable laws were indeed followed. Meanwhile, Countrywide managers have given interviews to Moody's Investor Service, which led Moody's to reassure investors that notes were systematically endorsed....

But if that's accurate, why don't the sampled court records reflect it?

Knows where the campaign contributions come from

A Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down

The Nation has a scoop—or had, actually—from Wikileaks cables showing that the Obama administration pressured Haiti not to raise its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, or five bucks a day.

The magazine posted the story the other day and has now pulled it, saying it will repost it next Wednesday “To accord with the publishing schedule of Haiti Liberté,” its partner on the piece.

Two years ago, Haiti unanimously passed a law sharply raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. That doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it was two and a half times the then-minimum of 24 cents an hour.

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies....