Are you disgusted yet? This week MBIA (NYSE: MBI) testified -- no they lobbied, hmm, actually they complained -- well the truth is they whined to Congress that short-seller William Ackman had trashed its reputation, and its stock for personal gain -- gee, no kidding -- but the big problem is he seems to have been correct to a major extent. For more on this see MBIA asks Congress to fight its battles with Ackman by Peter Cohan or MBIA plays the spooky short-seller card by Zac Bissonnette.

I own MBIA shares and recently "adventured" into more, but it was not based on management crying foul and everything being just fine. I did it because I think the company will work through the mess over time and that it is oversold now based on fear. MBIA needs to focus on cleaning up its exposure to risk and underwriting standards and stop looking for scapegoats.

Others are in the same boat. There are times the squirming around the truth is painful to watch. This week we watched a baseball pitching icon, Roger Clemens, remind us once again of the first rule of holes: "If you're in one, stop digging." I'm afraid this truism that I often refer to will continue to be a recurring theme in my stories every so often, because some folks just don't get it.

Certainly Andy Pettitte, a teammate of Clemens, must have learned it at a younger age, but for some it seems impossible. When Pettitte was confronted with the Mitchell Report -- something I wish had not been done at all -- he came clean immediately. Baseball fans want desperately for Roger Clemens to be innocent of taking advantage of the illegal substances that he vehemently denies using.

We all want to believe him. But with sadness in our hearts, it is getting harder as circumstantial evidence mounts and his waffling and contradictory testimony befuddles us all. Worst of all, it's never going to go away. Not in our lifetimes. It will come up over and over again. That is part of the pain that Clemens has cast on us all as the charade continues -- a charade not started by him, but by MLB owners and the players union.

This permeates our society, as the Major League Baseball owners turned a blind eye and the players union refused to demonstrate any integrity. With a wink and nod they contibuted to one more scandal. The results of this inaction are as bad as the illegal behavior itself. The owners' and the players' behavior was wanton and scandalous, and the media did not press hard enough either.

We investors are forced to be the audience to all this nasty stuff, and if you are not disgusted with the presentation you have been watching, there is going to be more. Over the last few months, our major financial institutions have been dribbling out bad information with great resistance to the truth.

Is there anybody out there who thinks we have heard the last of troubles at Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC), Citigroup (NYSE: C), Countrywide (NYSE: CFC), Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER), and other financial institutions? About their exposure to risks that they say they themselves did not understand?

Why do they dribble out little bits of information instead of just 'fessing up and moving on? Why do we have to get the news at the eleventh hour when some new investigation and/or arm-twisting by third parties, both private and institutional, forces them to make public their wrongdoing.

It's disgusting, but I'm afraid we are going to be spoon-fed bad news all year long. Maybe they think it is better for us not to know the full extent of the write-downs, fraud and ineptitude all at once, for fear of pushing the economy from the brink of disaster into a full-blown crash. In any event, bravo to those few stand-up guys that are willing to say "my bad," here is what we are going to do about it and here is how we are going to keep you all informed.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. To find potential opportunities and verify my track record, read Chasing Value or Serious Money. Disclosure: I own shares of BSC & MBIA.