Spitzer, along with Frank Partnoy, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, and William Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, make the case in today's Times for releasing all the AIG emails before they're lost forever - and we never really know what happened to trigger their crash. Obviously, it serves the nation to know:

We end this extraordinary financial year with news that the Treasury is in discussions with American International Group about selling the taxpayers’ 80 percent ownership stake in that company. The government recently permitted several banks to break free of its potential oversight by repaying loans made during the rescue. But with respect to A.I.G., the Treasury should not move so fast. There is one job left to do.

A.I.G. was at the center of the web of bad business judgments, opaque financial derivatives, failed economics and questionable political relationships that set off the economic cataclysm of the past two years. When A.I.G.’s financial products division collapsed — ultimately requiring a federal bailout of $180 billion — those who had been prospering from A.I.G.’s schemes scurried for taxpayer cover. Yet, more than a year after the rescue began, crucial questions remain unanswered. Who knew what, and when? Who benefited, and by exactly how much? Would A.I.G.’s counterparties have failed without taxpayer support?

The three of us, as experienced investigators and prosecutors of financial fraud, cannot answer these questions now. But we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated by A.I.G. during the past decade. Before releasing its regulatory clutches, the government should insist that the company immediately make these materials public. By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of “open source” investigation.

Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story. In past cases of financial fraud — from the complex swaps that Bankers Trust sold to Procter & Gamble in the early 1990s to the I.P.O. kickback schemes of the late 1990s to the fall of Enron — e-mail messages and internal documents became the central exhibits in our collective understanding of what happened, and why.

So far, prosecutors and regulators have been unable to build such evidence into anything resembling a persuasive case against any financial institution. Most recently, a jury acquitted Bear Stearns employees of fraud related to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, in part because available e-mail messages suggested the employees had done nothing wrong.

Perhaps A.I.G.’s employees would also be judged not guilty. But we would like to see the record to find out. As fraud investigators, we would like to examine the trading patterns of A.I.G.’s financial products division, and its communications with Goldman Sachs and other bank counterparties who benefited from the bailout. We would like to understand whether the leaders of A.I.G. understood that they were approaching a financial Armageddon, and whether they alerted their counterparties, regulators and shareholders to the impending calamity.

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(Ride - obscure for absolutely no reason)

I think we're going to shelve the "theme weeks" for a while. I'm starting to realize a little goes a long way. So we're back to basics tonight.

Ride were an amazing band that broke up all too soon. They somehow got pigeonholed as "shoegaze", even though they did come about at the time when Indie was pretty much exploding on the music scene. There was very little of the mellowed out somnambulant they got saddled with to justify that. But . . what do you do?

Their first few albums were walls of guitar and vaguely ethereal vocals. But by the time of their last album Tarantula in 1996, they gave up the ethereal and went for the jugular, which was perfectly fine - and they could get away with it.

But Tarantula wound up being the last out of them and the band dissolved shortly after. Which was a shame as they evolved musically into one of the more consistently rewarding listening experiences I had in years.

But nothing ever stays the same and "Black Nite Crash" will have to do until a Ride reunion of some sort happens (they did do a one-off reunion of sorts in 2001 for the BBC). An official reunion was rumored to be this year, but was quickly denied.

Maybe someday.

I can't imagine the thinking behind this. We lend them the money and then let them pay it back - before we've fixed the problems that lead to the crash in the first place? And it won't do much for consumers, since half of them are investment banks.

Elizabeth Warren is skeptical, and wants to hear the terms of repayment. She also warns that the stress tests were not as strong as they should have been. Stay tuned:

... The decision to allow the banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, also ushered in a new, and potentially risky, phase of the banking crisis. Letting the lenders out now — earlier than many had envisioned, and without the industry reforms some consider necessary to prevent future crises — raises many sobering questions for policy makers, bankers and taxpayers.

The program was aimed at purchasing assets and equity from banks to strengthen them and encourage them to expand lending during a tightening credit squeeze. But after banks return the TARP money, the administration will forfeit much of its leverage over them. With that loss goes a rare opportunity to overhaul the industry. The administration’s ability to push institutions to purge themselves quickly of bad assets and do more to help hard-pressed homeowners will be diminished.

Of even deeper concern is the running trouble inside the banking industry. Despite tentative signs of revival, many banks remain fragile. Four of the nation’s five largest lenders, including Citigroup and Bank of America, were not allowed to return their bailout funds.

Some analysts worry that financial institutions that repay bailout money now may turn to Washington again if the economy worsens and losses overwhelm banks. One of the most vexing problems of the credit crisis — how to rid banks of their troubled mortgage investments — remains unresolved.

Which, of course, is why so many experts were urging the administration to nationalize the banks. Those bad mortgages have to be dealt with sooner or later, and the bailout program simply postponed the day of reckoning.

The banks are eager to escape TARP and the restrictions that come with it, particularly the limits on how much they can pay their 25 most highly compensated workers. (Even so, the Obama administration plans to propose guidelines on executive compensation for the broader industry as early as Wednesday.)

Yet even banks that return taxpayers’ money will remain dependent on other forms of government aid. Among them are enhanced deposit insurance, incentive payments to modify home mortgages and federal guarantees on bonds that banks sell to raise capital.

“They may need the government’s money to get through this storm,” Christopher Whalen, a managing partner at Institutional Risk Analytics, said of the banks. “If the banks have to come back and ask for more money in a few months, I don’t think the response from Washington will be too kind.”

Here's a collection of posts by angry, right wing conservatives who were freaking out when the DHS report was released. Obviously our soldiers aren't the focus of the report, but the right wing kooks needed to find something to attack it with because the report perfectly highlighted the issue at hand. And as we've seen so far, right-wing violence is up dramatically since President Obama was elected.

Limbaugh: Bring me the head of Janet Napolitano!

Pat Robertson urges his callers to crash Homeland Security hotline

Hannity: It's an insult to suggest that veterans are bias-crime victims

Conservatives are trying to whitewash far-right terrorists out of our memories There was Bill Bennett, that right-wing moral icon, telling John King's "State of the Union" panel yesterday on CNN that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's clear explanation wasn't good enough.

Is the DHS watching returning veterans? Only when they join far-right hate groups -- O'Reilly says the report was "unnecessary," cooked up by a bevy of myopic "far left" liberals freshly ensconced in their DHS offices.