The current mortgage crisis belongs, in part, at the feet of the Fed. The SEC runs hot and cold, sometimes being anal retentive, sometimes being so lax you wonder if anyone is paying attention. If you gave the government control over credit ratings, sometimes they'd do a good job and sometimes they'd do a bad job. And that's a statement you can make about the current crop of commercial credit raters. The only difference is that the public weal currently doesn't pay for that rating service. I don't want to start.

Rating the credit worthiness does involve some degree of judgment; something the government is not well known for. Give the government control and they will try to make the process cookie cutter with even more regulation of details. In the end what you'll get is not better rating of anything but more compliance with regulation. Given the difference between the talent available to the government vice the talent available to industry, the government will be far less qualified to assess any financial innovation (which isn't all bad) than the industry.

That said, did the ratings agencies screw up when it came to CDOs? Oh, yeah. Big time. Should they pay for it? I think so. But you're advocating a systemic change to respond to a spectacular failure. That's sorta like saying that because you wrapped your car around a light pole that all you want to do now is walk - as opposed to learning how to drive the car better. Dumb.

As a generalization, women aren't any less sexist than men; it's just yours is expressed differently than the male version. The good news is that my company embraced the non-sexist version and allowed us to bring either sons or daughters to work - something that would not have been allowed previously. This allowed me to bring my youngest two daughters to work with me (the older 4 daughters exceeded the age limits and were SOL)(yes, the only logical explanation for having six daughters is that I committed heinous crimes in a previous life).

I happen to think that it's important to bring your kids to work so they can see what their parents do for a living. The bad news is that my kids came away with the idea that Dad surfed the internet all day. Since I was the guy who controlled the code and built the software product for testing and delivery, when the guys heard I was bringing a daughter to work, they sat on their code and I had little to do on the day they came. The next day I ran my ass off when they dumped it all on me at once.

has forever sullied the phrase fair and balanced. I also realize that this is one woman's story of her divorce and she certainly isn't obliged to be either fair or balanced in her telling of the tale. However, two things struck me. One was the railing about the unfairness in attitudes towards the female vice the male. That unfairness is not unique to her divorce and neatly ignores (if she was even aware of) the different but equally unfair aspects of all this that the male is faced with (which one rarely hears about). The second was the "He who?" at the end. Certainly, you're not obliged, required, or even particularly expected to be interested in how the former spousal unit is doing but, divorce notwithstanding, you're still connected at the hip by your kids. I have a sneaking suspicion that Ms. Finnamore exhibits a common feminine sexism that the kids are hers and there is neither a need nor a desire to involve the father in their lives after the divorce. Indeed, I suspect that Ms. Finnamore made certain that she was going to be the one who decided weather or not to involve her ex-husband (as opposed to him being involved regardless of her desires).

I think we already tried to overthrow the democratically elected government by sending arms to Fatah which I understand was the proximate cause of Hamas taking steps to take over Gaza.