The niece was my segway into watching women's collegiate sports, however, I've now been bitten by the bug so that I search ESPN for games and spend more time than I care to admit watching women's basketball.  These women (in all women's sports, I'm sure) play their hearts and souls out and make some incredible plays.  They are inspirational, very worth watching.  

The NCAA Division 1 conference championships are going on right now so some especially good games are being played on ESPN, etc.  Next week the NCAA playoffs start, so games will be even better.

The sad thing about watching is seeing the empty stands. Women's sport just aren't valued as much and men's, even though the competitions are equally as fierce and nail-biting.

So please watch women's sports on TV.  Or if you're local to a college hosting a championship, go get tickets for some of the championship games.  The tickets are surprisingly cheap and might make for a fun family outing.  But please support the women. They deserve your support.

Newly released text messages show inside the scandal

The actual text messages - warning - some messages may be graphic

Kwame demanded $100 million from SkyTel for turning over text messages

Bernanke Says Financial Rules Need an Overhaul

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, on Tuesday called for a broad reworking of how the government regulates the financial system to prevent future financial meltdowns.

In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Mr. Bernanke said the financial system needed to be regulated "as a whole, in a holistic way" and that stricter oversight of banks would not be enough to guard against future crises.

"Strong and effective regulation and supervision of banking institutions, although necessary for reducing systemic risk, are not sufficient by themselves to achieve this aim," Mr. Bernanke said.

He said that the failures of government oversight systems and private risk management helped to precipitate the economic crisis by not ensuring that a flood of foreign money into the United States was prudently invested. Credit markets seized up and global economies began contracting in what Mr. Bernanke called the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

Even as the Fed and other central banks scramble to rebuild confidence in the financial system and free up credit, Mr. Bernanke said that policymakers needed to look ahead to long-term changes in the financial system.

Mr. Bernanke said that policy makers also needed to examine the problem of institutions deemed "too big to fail" because of the role they played in the broader system. Huge institutions like Citigroup and the insurer American International Group have received billions in bailout aid as the government sought to ward off a collapse in the financial system.

"In the present crisis, the too-big-to-fail issue has emerged as an enormous problem," Mr. Bernanke said.

Specifically, he called for "especially close" oversight of firms whose collapse would pose a systemic threat to the broader economy, and said that regulators need to zealously monitor the risk-taking and financial stability of major financial institutions, and that they must be held to high standards of liquidity.

He called for a review of the accounting rules that govern how companies value assets -- a crucial issue as banks struggle under the weight of mortgage-related debts whose underlying values have fallen as housing prices crumbled. Mr. Bernanke said accounting rules and other financial regulations should not amplify the natural ups and downs in market cycles.

"Further review of accounting standards governing valuation and loss provisioning would be useful, and might result in modifications to the accounting rules that reduce their pro-cyclical effects without compromising the goals of disclosure and transparency," he said.

In a question-and-answer session after the speech, Mr. Bernanke said he did not favor a suspension of the mark-to-market accounting standards, but said that the weakness in current rules should be identified and corrected.

Mr. Bernanke also called for the creation of an authority to monitor and oversee broad, systemic risks, and said that policy makers need to add muscle to the rules governing payment and trading so that the financial markets perform better under stress.

He said the United States could take a "macroprudential" approach -- surveying the breadth of markets and financial institutions for signs of bubbles, growing risks like the subprime mortgage market, or risks shared by interconnected markets. Congress could empower a government agency like the Fed to take on that task.

"The policy actions I've discussed would inhibit the buildup of risks within the financial system and improve the resilience of the financial system to adverse shocks," Mr. Bernanke said.

Please.  How about this?  We stimulate our economy by engaging in an uprecedented building of modern and equipped schools in every neighborhood that needs one, in every small town and big city, from sea to shining sea, and then when we build them we are going to staff them with the best and the brightest.

That won't even cover the job loss through this year.  The jobs "saved" is such a wildly contingent and subjective number and can be padded with little difficulty.  

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed. Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman's decision with regret.

President Obama will sign an executive order tomorrow to establish a White House Council on Women and Girls, according to an administration official familiar with the move.

The Council will be chaired by Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser and personal friend to the president, and the day-to-day operations will be run Tina Tchen, who is currently director of the White House Office of Public Liaison and was a major fundraiser for Obama during the campaign.

"The mission of the Council will be to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families," reads a memo describing the move and obtained by The Fix.

Charles Freeman, the Obama administration's choice for National Intelligence Council chief, has withdrawn following controversy over his nomination.

The former Pentagon official and diplomat had faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee over his lack of intelligence experience, and some prior headline-grabbing remarks, particularly with regard to Israel. He also drew controversy over a statement that he believed the Chinese government did not crack down quickly enough on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananment Square in 1989.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair defended Freeman today on Capitol Hill, telling Sen. Joe Lieberman at a Senate hearing that Freeman's comments had been taken out of context. He also said he felt he would do a better job if he were "getting strong analytical viewpoints" like Freeman's to "sort out and pass on" to Congress and the president.

ROME (AP) -- Italy's Constitutional Court has thrown out the charges against 26 Americans accused of involvement in the alleged CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect in Milan in 2003.
The ruling by the country's highest court sides with the government in saying prosecutors used classified information to build the case and threw out some key evidence on which the indictments were based.
State lawyer Massimo Giannuzzi says the ruling Wednesday means the prosecution will have to seek new indictments based on the remaining evidence or reopen the investigation.