Well hats off to Senator Byron Dorgan, who read about the Treasury’s proposed “Humor In The Workplace” presentations for Bureau of the Public Debt employees, called the Department to complain, issued a few grandstanding words about Wasting Taxpayers’ Money, and got the events canceled. Good for you, asshole. Two 3-hour presentations from a fun clown at $15 an hour. You just saved the American taxpayers a whole $90, aimed at bringing some levity to what must be one of the government’s most soul-crushing office environments. You’re a hero, Byron Dorgan. And if money’s the problem, your Wonkette editors will gladly and patriotically lead these presentations for free. Intern Riley is good at drawing and stuff. [The Hill]

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT: We are the Treasury Department. We deal with government funds. There are not many government funds. One of our divisions is the Bureau of the Public Debt. There is much public debt. Employees in the Bureau of the Public Debt analyze statistics about the public debt. They read and write forms about the public debt. They are losing productivity. There is just so much debt. They do not enjoy their lives. We seek (Solicitation Number: RFI-BPD-09-0028) to contract a professional clown to provide Humor In The Workplace seminars to Bureau of the Public Debt employees. The clown will draw comical cartoons to teach the employees about the benefits of humor. MORE »

Sure, Barack Obama changed his mind about releasing the very scary photos of widespread medieval U.S. war crimes everywhere, but Robert Gibbs cut off that leftist hippie firestorm right quick when he stole a reporter’s telephone and everyone got distracted and forgot about war and stuff. What’s the other terrible thing happening in the world now? Oh yes, money, and how we lost all of it after a few companies had to put up collateral on all those credit default swaps they made in secret, but then they didn’t have any reserves whatsoever, because saving is gay. Well the Treasury is finally releasing a plan to introduce basic, very basic regulations to the derivatives market. Why does the government hate capitalism? MORE »

Whoa, weird, Fox Business News has a delightful scoop today! They won a suit against the Treasury to release 10,000 pages in TARP-related government records, and for the good of mankind have already found a couple of funny anecdotes revealing cartoonish confusion and conflict. We’re starting to understand the mechanics of how AIG rips off the federal government so easily: the old racist means of pitting the bureaucrats against each other until they’ve all been killed off. MORE »

Your friendly neighborhood Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the nice people who insure consumers’ bank deposits — has been having a sort of a rough time lately, what with all the banks constantly going broke. The insurance fund was pretty heavily depleted over the past year, thanks to horrific failures like IndyMac which cost the FDIC more than $10 billion. And it’s not like we have seen the end of bank failures, nosir! MORE »

Today the Bush administration offered its brave response to the current financial crisis, as delivered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The administration has faced overwhelming pressure to give the government more oversight and regulation within the financial markets, since every major player (investment banks, hedge funds) keeps dying and then asks the government for money. And who better to ramp up regulation on investment banks than Henry Paulson, the former C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs! So what’s in his funny new oversight package, and how will it not do anything save the economy again? MORE »

MORE »

We tend to think of Cabinet officials as “goody two-shoes” types. People who never got into trouble when they were kids — like that piano-playing, figure-skating prodigy, Condoleezza Rice. (And no, we don’t believe the latest rumors about her.) MORE »

* Short week, short review. First thing you need to know is: on Friday, Wal-Mart tried to answer the questions, “Why you acting shady? Why you ain’t callin’ me baby?”, by having Beyonce and Taylor Hicks perform at their shareholder meeting. CostCo admits they were served. MORE »

The new guy’s kinda… weird, don’t you think? MORE »

Seriously, is it just us? The one one the right is a like a John Turturro/John Waters-lookin’ guy. MORE »