The Halliburton settlement

Billmon disects Dick Cheney's role in the Halliburton securities fraud that was settled early today.

Apparently, we're expected to believe that Halliburton's CEO was completely ignorant of an accounting change so significant it turned a quarterly loss in one of the company's two main operating division into a gain - even though, as we shall see, the switch also may have played a crucial role in Cheney's most important business achievement (if that's the right word), the merger with Dresser.

Josh Marshall:

So here you have the Vice President of the United States. His company gets caught in about as clear a case of cooking the books to inflate profits as you can imagine during the time he was CEO. (His salary and bonuses are tied to company profits.) And he won't even go to the trouble of denying that he was aware of the wrongdoing.