It is no surprise that Phil Gramm is John McCain's leading financial adviser.  

When McCain decided to go after the 2008 Republican presidential nomination with gusto he realized that tactically the road to success lay in rolling over and becoming the reliant and supplicant puppy dog to Bush-Cheney and the neoconservative corporate bag men.

As such he could not have picked a better bag man than the former senator from Texas Gramm, who along with his wife created a king size loophole for Enron to be exempt from energy trading.  

Phil's senatorial largesse to Ken Lay's corrupt company, which then had a "full speed ahead" signal to rape California's power supply, came after his wife Wendy, as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, had earlier pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight.

Jeff Skilling found guilty on counts 1-19; not guilty on 9 counts, involving securities fraud, conspiracy, wire fraud, insider trading, and lying to authorities. and wire fraud.

The verdict for Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling is being announced in Houston as I write. Ken Lay was found guilty on all 6 counts.

As you may remember (I know, it's been a long time coming), Ken Lay was charged with 6 counts and Jeff Skilling was charged with 28 counts of conspiracy, fraud, and other crimes.

Here's a timeline of Enron's success and collapse.

Shortly before he entered the courtroom, Ken Lay was "confident" he would be found innocent.

The jury returned a little sooner than expected.  (That usually isn't a good sign for the defense.)

Of course, they'll appeal.

I'll update as more facts emerge.

NOW!!  If you hurry, you can probably pick up your name tag and get to your seat before The Man comes in.

Oh, wait. Tickets have been sold out since December 8th.  Guess we'll have to wait for the transcript on the website.

Ah well, so many indictments, so many crimes, so little time.

Using the same PR tactics Bush is using to try to turn the tide in his falling poll numbers, Ken Lay is addressing the nonprofit (do these guys even understand that term?) group, the Houston Forum as I write this.

The web site for this group is all ready to post Lay's speech and remarks as soon as it concludes today.  While the group claims to invite famous speakers on a variety of topics, previous speakers include the following:  John McCain (who was there yesterday), Michael Chertoff, George H. W. Bush, Jim Baker, Condi Rice, Tommy Franks, Rudi Guiliani, Clarence Thomas, and, well, you get the picture.  A few others, like Jane Goodall and George Foreman also appear.