[NeedKarma]

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Follow him on Twitter @michaelauslin.

He seems to be a product of good liberal institutuions (PBS and Yale!):

Auslin was an Assistant Professor (2000–2006) and then Associate Professor (2006–2007) in the Department of History at Yale University. In addition, he was also the Founding Director of the Project on Japan-U.S. Relations (2004–2007) and a Senior Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies (2006–2007) at Yale.

He was a featured commentator and script consultant in the 2004 PBS series "Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire."

[speechlesstx]

As Obama 4.0 headed off to 8 days in Martha's Vineyard at the home of private-equity investment mogul Mitt Rom... David Schulte, his DoJ offered some more of that famous Obama admin transparency in a Friday news dump.

In response to criticism from the left that he had not gone after mortgage fraudsters the administration announced its Mortgage Fraud Working Group was on the job and had successfully nabbed 530 fraudsters.

That was just a wee bit exaggerated...

The Justice Department made a long-overdue disclosure late Friday: Last year when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder boasted about the successes that a high-profile task force racked up pursuing mortgage fraud, the numbers he trumpeted were grossly overstated.

We’re not talking small differences here. Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. It now says the actual figure was 107 — or 80 percent less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.

They were only off 80 percent or so, and as usual the only reason they came clean is they got caught cooking the books. The article tells of a previous similar stunt by Holder...

What a charade. No wonder the government found it so difficult to bring a meaningful number of accounting-fraud cases against bank executives after the financial crisis. Its own books were cooked.

This was the second time, mind you, that Holder's Justice Department had pulled a stunt like this. In December 2010, Holder held a press conference to tout a supposed sweep by the president’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force called "Operation Broken Trust." (The mortgage-fraud program was part of the same task force.) As with the mortgage-fraud initiative, Broken Trust wasn’t actually a sweep. All the Justice Department did was lump together a bunch of small-fry, penny-ante fraud cases that had nothing to do with one another. Then it held a press gathering.

Operation Broken Trust, got to love the Orwellian touch to that.

Par for the course for the most transparent administration EVER, image is everything. Just throw out some numbers (i.e. jobs "saved or created") and hold a press conference or give a speech touting their awesomeness. Lot of good that does us.

[excon]

Hello Steve:

Sounds like you want to OCCUPY a bank... Me too.

excon