Reuters published an article entitled “Mark-to-market rule set to lose a few teeth” available at www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE5312T020090402

Your first thought may be that by itself this may not raise concerns. What if you learned about someone who said we went down the same road in the past when another regulator was attacked for signing a warning. Her name is Wanda Wallace, and she is concerned again about political pressure on accountants. 

And who is she that we should listen to her? Wanda A. Wallace, Ph.D, is the John N. Dalton Professor of Business Emerita at the College of William and Mary, and has served on FASB's Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council and the Comptroller General's Government Auditing Standards Advisory Council, in the Clinton Administration.

Again, why should we care? Wanda feels the politicians are pushing (politically nicer to say than browbeating the accountants) on the use of warrants. www.webcpa.com/article.cfm?articleid=30047

Rather than dwell to much on arcane accounting issues, her concern is that our politicians are pushing watered down standards to get through an inconvenient time for themselves, and then will come back and blame the accounting profession late when problems occur. 

Sort of like the reference I saw in Washington Technology about how Congress has taken a large credit for their budget on the return they plan to get us sometime on the future from the first part of the 700 billion dollar bailout expenditures, so the deficit they are running up looks 90% smaller.
http://washingtontechnology.com/Articles/2008/12/04/Still-sunny-in-the-services-sector.aspx?Page=2

Being specific on the quote to save some of you need to drill down to the article. "In October, the government invested $115 billion in preferred stock at eight banks under TARP. The Congressional Budget Office used a present-value method to come up with $17 billion as the cost of the investments, while the Treasury Department used a cash-basis method and deducted the full $115 billion from the deficit. "

If information is becoming more transparent, why are more and more of these articles showing up about how things are becoming more muddled and more complicated?