HULK VINDICATE!

This is a joke, right? Right? A little good-natured April Fool's ribbing by the Justice Department?

The Justice Department has asked a judge to drop corruption charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens, saying prosecutors withheld evidence from the trial that led to his conviction.

Damn, that's some funny shit. You kids at Justice sure know how to cook a story.

The 85-year-old Alaska Republican was convicted late last year on seven felony counts of lying on Senate financial disclosure forms to conceal hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and home renovations from a businessman.

Yeah, seven counts. Seven. No way the team prosecuting this case could have screwed the pooch that badly, right? The more elaborate the lie, the more easily it'll be believed, right?

In early morning court filings Wednesday, the Justice Department said prosecutors withheld evidence from Stevens' defense team that could have been used at trial. Prosecutors asked that the charges be dropped.

Jesus... Well, they'll just declare a mistrial and haul his goldbricking ass back into court all over again, right?

They said they will not seek a new trial.

But we had all of these "Ted the Pin Cushion" and "Dartboard Hulk" jokes already written... Fuck it. I'm going back to bed.

It's not my fault: Madoff edition

THE SEC WATCHDOG WHO MISSED MADOFF

The Securities and Exchange Commission's New York watchdog, under fire for failing to uncover Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme - despite a dead-on tip by a whistleblower - yesterday tearfully defended herself, arguing that she and the agency did the best job possible.

"Why are you taking a mid-level staff person and making me responsible for the failure of the American economy?" an upset Meaghan Cheung, with eyes tearing up, told The Post.

"I worked very hard for 10 years to make a career, and a reputation, and that has been destroyed in a month," said Cheung, who was the SEC's branch chief of the New York enforcement division during that unit's earlier probe of Madoff's brokerage business.

The 37-year-old has been singled out by whistleblower Harry Markopolos as the woman who failed to detect the scam despite his lengthy warnings. It was Cheung who signed off on a 2006 SEC investigation that effectively gave Madoff the all clear.

First off, you are a Branch Chief. That's not mid-level. Secondly, you received extremely specific warnings about the exact type of scheme Madoff was running and you failed to even come anywhere close to finding out what happened, in fact you said everything was on the level. Ponzi schemes are possibly the easiest fraud schemes to figure out and bust. The fraud behind a Ponzi scheme is that they don't have the amount of money or holdings that they say they do. Whether or not they are telling the truth is a matter of you looking at what they claim they hold and then going to the custodian/banks who are holding all that money/filthy lucre and seeing if the numbers match up. You couldn't even do that.

Boo hoo, you fucked up horrifically. Of course your career should take a drubbing. Despite a detailed map, flashlight, and a sherpa, you couldn't hack it up the mountain. Maybe you're an idiot, maybe you didn't want to take on the guy who was buddy-buddy with everyone important in the financial industry, including the SEC. Either way you told everyone the guy who defrauded people for $50 billion was squeaky clean, despite him running one of the oldest, most obvious, and most easily verifiable scams in the books. You didn't notice any of this, but it wasn't your fault. Thanks for taking responsibility and showing so much dignity, somewhere there's a four year old who's embarrassed for you.

Broken News: Executives Pledge new Concessions in Bid for Aid

WASHINGTON--The chief executive officers of Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp., encouraged by sudden government interest in their pathetic pleas after the executives promised to stop taking private jets for purposes of begging, have decided to lengthen their list of concessions.

While both Ford CEO Alan Mulally and GM CEO Rick Wagoner have already agreed to work for $1 a year should the company receive federal funds to cushion the blow their poor stewardship has wrought upon the American automotive industry, the executives grew a great deal more creative at a joint press conference today.

Speaking from behind a stack of plastic milk crates held together with bungee cords, Mulally detailed a plan to only heat the wings of his Grosse Pointe mansion containing rooms he "might enter within the week." Wagoner, for his part, promised to downgrade to four-figure escorts and "never more than three at a time."

In addition Mulally pledged to have his chauffeur drive him to the Thursday hearings in his new 2009 Bentley Arnage RL Sedan. This after the three separate private jet charters he, Wagoner, and Chrysler Chief Executive Robert Nardelli took to the last hearing caused them to face a minimal level of scrutiny and tongue-clucking consternation from slightly less-well-off media figures.

When asked why he was using the famed English luxury auto manufacturer instead of his own company's line of cars, Mulally shuddered and said he "wouldn't be caught dead in one" before proceeding to derogatorily list different ethnicities he thought were fit to drive Fords, closing with "...but never a white man. Especially not a rich white man." He then motioned to his chauffeur, Wooster, to warm up the car.

Wagoner, for his part, offered to sell up to two of GM's seven private planes and vowed not to put his feet up on any of the stewardesses he typically uses as footstools on long flights. When asked if they were selling his corporate jet Wagoner just laughed and sarcastically said "Yeah, we're really going to look into that one" before adding "We're just going to dump the two shitty ones the junior execs use. Especially the one where our Junior VP for Overseas Development got gassed on uppers and murdered those call girls. No one wants to use it anymore, on account of the hooker ghosts."

This bold move comes just one day after crippled insurance giant American International Group announced that its CEO, Edward M. Liddy, would receive only a $1 annual base salary in both 2008 and 2009, in addition to an undisclosed number of equity grants in the company. The mainstream media, asked not to pose too many questions about the quantity or worth of Liddy's equity grants, kindly obliged.

Ford Spokeswoman Marissa Florentine lauded the move as "Proof that these noble autocrats are not detached from the severity of the situation, that they are willing and able to sympathize with the taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars they seek and the government prone to backing truckloads of freshly minted currency up on to corporate lawns before hitting the gas so everything falls out in a nice, big pile."

However, as the conference continued, a contest of one-upsmanship took shape, prompted by Mulally's vow to eat either surf or turf, "Never both!" at the Waldorf-Astoria.

This pledge was met quickly by Wagoner, who vowed to not only eat a lower grade of caviar but to stop bathing entirely. "In fact, I started two days ago," clarified the GM Chief as he waved dismissively at a small cluster of flies hovering above his left shoulder.

As deadline approached, the executives were still standing behind the podium after swearing abstinence, sobriety, honesty, respectfulness, and finally, begrudgingly, a modicum of competency in leadership. Both also said they would "think about looking into that 'fuel-efficiency' thing" while stifling laughter and referring to all hybrids as "Jap-wagons."

No statement was issued from the final member of "the big three," Chrysler LLC. Because it is a privately held company, Chrysler does not disclose how its executives are compensated, although sources close to the CEO's office claim to have overheard him acquiescing to drowning shelter kittens instead of pure breeds until this whole thing blows over.

Both men hope that their new spirit of sacrifice would spur the government into quick action so that they can fix their companies and get back to the robber-baron lives they had so graciously put on hold. In particular they hoped that their dollar-a-year salary pledge would trickle down to the United Auto Workers union, perhaps inspiring them to build cars on a similar wage scale.