A Financial Planner You Can Trust: Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson

Old financial saying: "If you owe the bank $1000, the bank owns you. But if you owe the bank $1,000,000, you own the bank."

Updated financial saying: "If you owe the bank $1000, the bank owns you. But if the bank horribly mishandles $700,000,000,000 in a orgiastic capitalistic bender, you get to own 80% of the bank, at least until the flabbergastingly mild slap on the banker's wrist ends, and these scumbags can return to their six-figure incomes, vacation chalet in Andorra and completely unregulated industry."

Meanwhile, it has come to my attention that I misspelled the name of our esteemed (and heretofore completely invisible) Treasury Department Secretary, Henry M. (Pat) Paulson. I spelled it PaulsEn, an offense unforgivable when the guy is splashed across the Internet these days like a Lindsay Lohan photo circa last Spring. By the way, if anyone has any Lindsay Lohan-esque photos of Mr. PaulsOn provocatively passed out in his Bentley, now would be the time to share them. If my Photoshop skills were any good, I'd be working on it right now.

We at Babble will get back to our Unabomber-esque Manifesto on revising school administrations tomorrow or so. For today, I just want to scream at pictures of Henry M. (Pat) PaulsOn, while throwing ibogaine-tipped darts at his portrait.

"I coulda swore we had enough money in the bank, Mr. Cheney, but I just looked at the statement online...and Holy Jeebus, we're $700,000,000,000 overdrawn! We gotta do something before the bank opens tomorrow!"

Criminy.

P.S.: Remember way back when, in the last days of the Clinton Administration, when Bill pardoned that international commodities trader, Marc Rich? And everybody freaked out? Doesn't it seem that the Bush Administration, in most probably the last days of a Republican Administration in quite some time, is pardoning an entire industry? Hmmm....