between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky).

It's hard to root for Spitzer with much enthusiasm, beyond mandatory support for anyone facing political ruin and possible criminal charges for having sex with a consenting adult. But Spitzer had frightened Wall Street - which was a good thing.

Major Wall Street operators created the housing bubble, fixed the system of bogus AAA ratings, kept the debt off their balance sheets and prevented pricing transparency. As with the dot-com NASDAQ bubble of nearly a decade ago, there are perpetrators who should be facing criminal sanctions. Wall Street has nothing to fear for its sub-prime frauds from the Security Exchange Commission (SEC); the SEC has no criminal prosecutorial powers.

But New York State does have the Martin Act, one of the most powerful criminal enforcement weapon in the country and used to great effect by attorney general Spitzer. In January of this year there were news stories about the current attorney general Andrew Cuomo using the Martin Act to go after the

sub-prime corporate miscreants. Such an onslaught, with the backing of Gov Spitzer, was undoubtedly making Wall Street nervous.

As traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange cheered Spitzer's downfall yesterday, guess who rang the closing bell? Lynn Pike, president of Capital One, which owns the North Fork bank. She was celebrating the opening of more than 350 banks in the New York region. Are these 350 now deployed to bag more Dems?