[UPDATE]: Hi, Instapundit readers. I covered some of what Glenn mentioned in a podcast today with Fausta, actually. Pretty much my first one ever.

Now, that’s Hunter Biden, corporate lobbyist and former Amtrak vice-chair, not Beau Biden, former state attorney general – and widely-assumed heir-in-exile to his father’s Senate seat, just as soon as they can have the formality of an election in 2010. Heaven forbid that you get these two scions of a good working class family mixed up, or something.

Speaking of getting mixed up in something, hey!

A fund of hedge funds run by two members of Vice President Joe Biden’s family was marketed exclusively by companies controlled by Texas financier R. Allen Stanford, who is facing Securities and Exchange Commission accusations of engaging in an $8 billion fraud.

The $50 million fund was jointly branded between the Bidens’ Paradigm Global Advisors LLC and a Stanford Financial Group entity and was known as the Paradigm Stanford Capital Management Core Alternative Fund. Stanford-related companies marketed the fund to investors and also invested about $2.7 million of their own money in the fund, according to a lawyer for Paradigm. Paradigm Global Advisors is owned through a holding company by the vice president’s son, Hunter, and Joe Biden’s brother, James.

(Via Glenn Reynolds)  Oh, but they’re busily divesting away, away, singing happy little divesting songs as they attack the connections between them and Stanford with fire axes. Never talked to him, you see. No communications. They didn’t ask questions, didn’t look into their business partners, didn’t see anything that made them stop and scratch their heads. In other words, they are not responsible. Which is true, if you add the word “being” after “not.”

The more we get into this new administration, the clearer it’s getting: John Edwards was right. Two Americas, and we all belong to the America that doesn’t get to play at these interlocking levels of finance, influence, and accounting chicanery. It’s not something that bugs me, normally – but then, normally my country isn’t in the middle of a financial crisis. Put another way: the rules of the game are changing, ye members of the privileged class. We are quite aware that your existence is a luxury that the rest of us have indulged ourselves in so that our most clever, most skillful, or luckiest will have a suitable life goal. Unfortunately, that scenario requires a rich society in general, and we’re not feeling particularly rich right now.  And the American people are not dumb: we know full well that in an emergency, luxuries are the first thing that need to get stricken from the budget.  Fair warning, and heed it, because the alternative is awful:

You may have to end up working for a living.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.