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Congress should pass the Patriots Act

Arlen Specter wants to get to the bottom of the Patriots’ spying scandal, which broke early this season. And he’s mad that the NFL erased the evidence that the Pats turned over:

“That requires an explanation,” Specter said. “The N.F.L. has a very preferred status in our country with their antitrust exemption. The American people are entitled to be sure about the integrity of the game. It’s analogous to the C.I.A. destruction of tapes. Or any time you have records destroyed.”

In a certain very literal respect, I suppose destroying those tapes does compare to the CIA’s destruction of tapes. But in most other respects, I don’t think we’re served well when a senator compares the outcome of football games to CIA torture of terror suspects who were shipped to secret prisons.

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In Equity

Speaking of not being able to handle prosperity, the first details of Jerome Kerviel’s testimony have been leaked:

As of Dec. 31, 2007, my gains had reached €1.4 billion ($2 billion), which I had not declared to the bank. At that point I had been overtaken by events and didn’t know how to present this to the bank. It represented undeclared cash of €1.4 billion. No one else had ever realized such a sum, which represented 50% of the total result of the equity-index division of SocGen. I didn’t know how to deal with it, I was happy and proud of myself, but I didn’t know how to justify it. Thus I decided not to declare it, and to hide the sum, I created an opposite fictional operation.