The grand jury investigation into the Valerie Plame affair came into the media spotlight today as we find that Bush is speaking with private counsel about what he should do if they want to ‘sit down and talk’ with him. This is most interesting in that it means the grand jury might be focusing on more than just Cheney’s chief of staff, if only as far as looking into what the president knew and when did he know it.

Meanwhile, another Bush-related scandal has also shifted back into view: Enron, Bush’s biggest Texas backers. We are now getting an earful of the traders cheerfully gabbing about screwing California over:

“He just f—s California. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”

Shutting down power plants to drive up prices:

“If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?”

“Oh, it’s not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let’s put it that way,”

“Well, why don’t you just go ahead and shut her down.”

“They’re f——g taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”

“Yeah, grandma Millie, man”

“Yeah, now she wants her f—–g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”

Enron traders hoping for Bush to win in 2000:

“It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy.”

“When this election comes Bush will f——g whack this s–t, man. He won’t play this price-cap b——t.”

Which is exactly what Bush did. “We will not take any action that makes California’s problems worse and that’s why I oppose price caps,” Bush said during the election. It is commonly believed that Bush fully supported not only Enron and its shady business practices, but also the rifling of California through usurious energy rates, so that Democrats in that particular Blue State would become unpopular, so that Republicans could take over. And guess what happened?

And as a massive fire scorched California, one trader made the quintessential Enron comment about California: “Burn, baby, burn. That’s a beautiful thing.”