"Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk!"

This was exactly my reaction when Mrs. JP was trolling on the HuffPo earlier tonight and told me the result of the Fed's "investigation" of lenders fraudulently foreclosing on 3,000,000 homeowners last year. Here's the incredible finding (emphasis mine):

During a public meeting attended by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and other regulators, consumer advocates on the panel criticized federal bank regulators for narrowly defining what constitutes a "wrongful foreclosure." At least one member of the panel voiced concerns that the public would not take the Fed's findings of improper practices seriously, since the wide-ranging review did not find a single homeowner who was wrongfully foreclosed upon.

I guess that would include those homeowners who'd been foreclosed on despite not having a mortgage, and owning their homes lock, stock and barrel, seizing the wrong homes. That would also include those who were told they were in default in excess of what they actually owed or even those who never missed a payment.

Here's the best part, in case you're wondering how Big Ben's Fed was able to investigate all 3,000,000 cases of foreclosure: They only did a sample of 500 cases. Using a sampling plan when dealing with large numbers of widgets works in a quality control lab but not when you're dealing with real people who've been thrown out of real homes. One has to wonder if these 500 case files were really drawn at random or subject to some pre-screening process to guarantee a 100% "See No Evil" verdict.

So, tell me how ethical it is for the Federal Reserve, an entity that bailed out these same lenders to the tune of billions, to investigate these same lenders for foreclosure fraud, especially when it involves a simple narrowing of the definition of "wrongful foreclosure"?

The Bushies got away with torture because ass monkeys like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo simply narrowed the definition of torture to mean simply something that results in organ failure without once taking into account the psychological effects of a person's dehumanization.

And, in the bait and switch scam of the year, Republicans in Wisconsin just yesterday passed the union-busting bill without the necessary quorum of 20 people by resorting to sleazy, pseudo-legal parliamentary tricks that cannot possibly be legal and will surely fall once it's up for judicial review.

Forget the fact that stripping collective bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin will not do jack shit for "repairing" the state budget that was partly made all but irreparable because of tax cuts for the super wealthy. And let's just forget that with a simple narrowing of the definition of the phrase "wrongful foreclosure" not one person was illegally tossed from their home last year.

The crooks are now running the asylum and they're not even making an effort at plausible deniability.