Department of This Should Make You Sick: Special Grandma Millie edition

Tapes Reveal Enron's Power Plant Rigging Transcripts detail how electricity traders conspired to shut down smooth-running generating facilities during the energy crisis.

Kevin Drum, at The Washington Monthly has this to say:

I hope there's no one left who still thinks California's problems were caused by too little power plant construction, or overly restrictive environmental regulations, or a badly constructed power grid, or mismanagement by Gray Davis. This tape is just one more piece of evidence that what really happened was fraud. Enron and other energy traders took a routine, temporary problem that could have been solved fairly easily, and made it into a crisis by deliberately removing power from the grid at times calculated to cause the greatest possible panic.

And just in case anyone has forgotten, Kenneth Lay was an eyelash away from being nominated as Bush's Energy Secretary, and Joe Allbaugh, whose wife has already been indicted in energy scheming in California, was Bush's first director of FEMA, and is on the short list of loyalists-for-profit being considered for Tom Ridge's vacant DHS Secretary position. Strange bedfellows there Mr. President. Care to ask Murmur Cheney to release the names of the people who helped formulate our National Energy Policy now? Or is that still top secret?