After reading the big news of the day, the only thing I can say is:  ”Gross.”

According to the Associated Press, a new report from the SEC’s Inspector General suggests SEC lawyers were watching a boatload of porno on their work computers, even as the financial system collapsed around them:

California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said it was “disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation’s economy on the brink of collapse.”

He said in a statement Thursday that SEC officials “were preoccupied with other distractions” when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.

Here are some of the juicy bits most interesting stories from the report:

• A Headquarters Senior Attorney admitted accessing Internet pornography and downloading pornographic images to his SEC computer during work hours so frequently that, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet pornography. In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.
•  A Regional Office Staff Accountant received over 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the Commission’s Internet filter as either “Sex” or “Pornography” in a one-month period. In addition, the hard drive of this employee’s SEC laptop contained numerous sexually suggestive and inappropriate images.
• A Division of Corporation Finance Staff Accountant admitted that he accessed Internet pornography on a repeated basis during and after work hours and, on certain SEC workdays, he spent up to five hours accessing Internet pornography. This employee also admitted opening accounts with Internet pornography websites using his SEC computer, that he bookmarked sites containing sexually explicit videos or images as his website favorites, and that he had uploaded a sexually explicit video file from his SEC computer onto one of the websites he had joined.

The report reflects that ladies like porn, too:

• A Regional Office Staff Accountant received nearly 1,800 access denials for pornographic websites using her SEC laptop in only a two-week period, and had nearly 600 pornographic images saved on her laptop hard drive.

Senate Republicans think this is a big deal, but no doubt many disagree.  After all, the internet is for porn.

-Michael