If someone had asserted a week ago at this writing - early AM Monday - that within a week, Eliot Spitzer's career and Bear Stearns would both spectacularly implode, the most likely response would have been derision.

And yet here we are, with Bear being essentially nationalized - the Fed is taking over that firm's assets as collateral for a thirty billion dollar loan guarantee - and Eliot Spitzer officially handing over the reins to his lieutenant governor at noon today.

The Sheriff of Wall Street went down at the same time as Wall Street itself. How ironic. Per the New York Times, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers may be next down the rabbit hole.

At the bottom of that hole sits the same culprit in both cases: the Bush administration. Any serious look at the investigation into Eliot Spitzer has to come to the conclusion that the Bush Department of Justice was aiming for a hit. And that's what they got, signed, sealed and delivered courtesy of Alberto Gonzales. Any why Spitzer? Because he was the lone politician to take on the business practices that first came to pass in the Bush era, when Wall Street knew its practices wouldn't be scrutinized too closely, Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley be damned.

Greg Palast takes a closer look:

Why is it, do you think, that some tyrants love show trials? Why not, as death squads did in Argentina and Chile kidnap, torture and murder at midnight? Why detain & torture people, coerce confessions, rig kangaroo courts (my apologies again to the kangaroos who, after all are innocent unlike our Decider-in-Chief) and bar lawyers from representing them effectively?

As you may well know by now, Mr. Bush as decided to follow up on the show trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein (who may well have been guilty of something, but we’ll never know) by trying” six people in Guantanamo before military commissions and executing them. Their crime? A la little Rudy one-note, claimed involvement in the September 11 attacks.

In order to make acceptable the “evidence” extracted by Mr. Bush by torture (Did he watch the torture tapes?) a public relations campaign has launched to show that water boarding is just fine. Mr. Injustice Antonin Scalia loves torture , he tells us, rewriting the Federal Rules of Evidence with scenes Fox’s 24. (Do you think Mr. Justice S plans to recuse himself from deciding these issues? Me neither.)

The White House whitewash of water boarding, here and here is buttressed by a bizarre argument: after we tortured them, we interrogated them nicely, indeed treated them to Starbucks Coffee and they still confessed.

Do you have to be a Nobel-prize winning economist like Joseph Stiglitz to understand that a fast, effective way to spend our way out of the Bush-GOP-invented economic swamp is to put cash into the hands of the poor? Food stamp increases and extension of unemployment insurance benefits could be done quickly by Congress and would be spent right away by the lower-income people they’d reach.

Yet, of course, the Bush-Pelosi plan doesn’t include them. It could be a worse plan, of course but its mechanism, tax refunds, will take five months (best case) and it directs the pump-priming cash to people who might well bank it instead of spending it. Indeed two-thirds of the money in the Bush-Pelosi plan goes to higher income while only a third goes to poorer people. ( Andrew Leonard at Salon tracks the saddest-funniest food story: Republicans saving the poor from fatness by blocking boost in food stamps. Who knew?) Many, many (too many?) updates (5 sets) are at the end of the post. Also Take Action! Urge a progressive stimulus package! Link at the end. .

This has led progressives like economist-columnist Paul Krugman to pan the Bush-Pelosi deal:

When the 18 and 1/2-minutes of Nixon-tape turned up missing, it was the beginning of the end for his presidency. Will the destroyed tapes of CIA torture end Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney’s Gestapo-like torture careers? (Check Washington Post story here )Perhaps not unlike Sgt. Shultz of Hogan’s Heroes, Mr. Bush "knows nothing, remembers nothing" His mouthpiece press spokespinner: "He has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday." So far as I’ve read Scott Horton’s take at Harpers is the most focused. But if you want a full scream-by-scream review try Dan Froomkin’s chronology with hot-links from the Washington post. Update: The White House now claims it tried to stop the CIA from destroying evidence; before they claimed destroying the videos was just peachy. I could give you a dozen hot-links but Scott Horton has already collected them with a Sgt. Shultz reference to spare.

UPDATE: Progressive Democrats of America, Brooklyn For Peace & others plan a protest at Sen. Schumer's Park Slope home Tuesday night. They write:

Senator Schumer's support of Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General is outrageous and we must respond.

New York Progressive Democrats of America joins with Brooklyn For Peace and other Neighborhood Peace organizations to protest Senator Charles Schumer's decision to support the nomination of Michael Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General.

PROTEST VIGIL - TUESDAY, NOV 6th, 6:00 pm
at Senator Schumer's residence: 9 Prospect Park West (corner of President Street in Park Slope)Brooklyn, NY

Protest Schumer's support of Michael Mukasey - who will support Bush's continued use of torture.
Protest Schumer's increasing support of military action against Iran and Bush's attempt to launch a new war.
Protest Schumer's continuing support of funding for the war against Iraq.

As Senate Judiciary power broker, Senator Schumer green-lighted the nomination of Michael Mukasey as Mr. Bush’s replacement AG to hit for Gonzo. The bad news of course is that Judge M cannot figure out whether waterboarding is torture. This put our senior senator in a spot. He now favors the Mukaseky. He may be a key to defeating it. What a sad situation.

NYC’s Housing Authority (NYCHA)has sold off property because, perhaps in part, it is being pushed over a fiscal brink by the combined defunding efforts of decades of GOP office holders at the city, state and federal level. (For a very cursory – but perhaps too long – overview of some of NYCHA’s financial and operating woes, click here ).

Those of you of a certain age who remember the War in Vietnam, may recall a puzzling Military concept:“we burned the village in order to save it.” Similarly, public housing operators across the US have from time-to-time destroyed huge public housing projects in order to save them. Forty years ago, for example, I spent a moderate amount of time in the Pruit-Igoe projects of St. Louis Mo.—a 33 building forest of medium-rise buildings so badly-built, so badly maintained so crime-ridden that they were torn down altogether in 1972. Since then, the dynamite & bull-dozer solution to public housing failures (and even some successes) has been applied in other locales (famously Cabrini-Green in Chicago and recently, in Staten Island). In general, NYCHA housing – even at its worst moments of disrepair and dangerousness – never equaled the disgrace of Pruitt-Igoe.

The right-wing idea is that the solution to the financial crisis in public housing

No! I don't mean NYCHA is not broke but ...New York City’s Housing Authority (NYCHA) has been and is being mugged and robbed by Federal, State and City Republicans. NYCHA operates more than 2600 buildings with more than 180,000 apartments and many more than 400,000 residents. (It does a lot more, but for purposes of this post and the next, I focus only on its role as housing operator) As a result of planned policies federal, state and local subsidies for NYCHA have declined dramatically over the Bush, Pataki, Giuliani and Bloomberg years. As a result, cash for routine maintenance is drained away, fees and rents have increased and surprisingly, NYC continues, vampire-like, to suck hundreds of millions of dollars a year from NYCHA. (See the figures after the jump)

NYCHA’s GOP government-induced financial crisis was the subject of a fascinating forum a few days ago at the New School's Center for NYC Affairs. There Daily News columnist and editorial board member and former NYCHA resident Errol Lewis convened a panel of experts and officials and an audience of alarmed tenants and activists. The tales they told, the problems they debated and recent developments point to a NYCHA crisis which could, if not addressed, severely damage the largest single bloc of affordable housing in NYC – some of it imposed by Mayor Bloomberg right this minute.(Check out the forum here)

Have you followed the most recent round of disclosures, lawyerly denials concerning President Bush mission to torture whomever he wishes? The story, that a secret Injustice Department memo authorized CIA torture, first appeared in The NY Times Thursday. Shock, dismay and outrage from Congressional Democrats followed as the night the day which were of course followed by Mr. Bush’s lawyerly, misleading statements that we don’t “torture.” Editorial condemnations here and here. Congressional Quarterly's report of persistent Congressional pique is here . Scott Horton writing at the Harper's Blog has this blistering torture essay which should not be missed.

George W. Bush vetoed the State Child Health Insurance Program at 10 AM Wednesday. The Reuters story (via the NY Times) is here and the fuller AP account is here

Moveon.org Political Action will take action with hundreds of rallies across the United States urging a veto over-ride. We will leaflet and ask the 70% of us who favor child health insurance to send Congress a serious wake up call: override this evil veto.

In Manhattan, Moveon Activists will rally on the West Side of Columbus Circle at 6PM Thursday You can sign up by clicking here

For those who want to take action online, Senator Patrick Lahey's Green Mountain PAC is soliciting letters to the editor about the S-CHIP over-ride. Click here.
The AFL-CIO is asking people to write their House members here

If you, as I do, worry about the quality of public education, hang out with public school teachers or have a child in school, you’ve probably given a thought to the federal “No Child Left Behind Act” an odd, ground-breaking statute which resulted from an alliance between President Bush and Senator Kennedy. (text, regulations & USDOE guidence here .) It’s brought vast increases in standardized testing to our nation’s schools, caused vast uproar among educators, parents and other “stakeholders” (standardized test vendors, prep course crammers and textbook publishers).

It’s up for renewal and /or major modification. One of my education heroes, Jonathan Kozol, on booktour with Letters to A Young Teacher, reports he has spent time talking with Democratic Senators about proposed revisions and says he thinks the renewed statute may more properly focus educational efforts away from standardized testing as the sole benchmark of student and school success. (Kozol was on WNYC last week – hear him here .

Wednesday, August 29, 2007, Rep George Miller (D.Calif), House education chair, floated the first Congressional proposals for revision of No Child Left Behind. The Education Week story is here (free registration required, sorry),