Aww How Cute

Ezra Klein is jealous of Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Matt Yglesias pens a contrarian* blog post about how Veterans Day is bad because it glorifies war. I'm sure veterans everywhere agree. He writes:

To lose a war, like in Vietnam, is a bad thing. But there seems to be a growing conventional wisdom that the surge has somehow redeemed Iraq and that the only thing we’re allowed to talk about with regard to Afghanistan is whether we can or will "win."

I'm not a conservative but I do think it's good that American soldiers removed Saddam Hussein from power. They can be proud of that no matter what the antiwar folks say and no matter what red herring arguments they bring up to change the subject.

A war with Iran would be a disaster no matter what warmongering conservatives say, but Afghanistan deserves better than the Taliban, who - antiwar folks conveniently forget - refused to turn over bin Laden. "He is our guest" Mullah Omar said. Why do antiwar folks always forget that?

And there's Glenn Greenwald, the master of the double standards, who today writes

In April of this year, the British daily, The Guardian, published an article by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi citizen, documenting the increasingly autocratic practices of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  The article quoted an Iraqi intelligence official claiming that "Maliki is running a dictatorship."  As if to prove their point, the reaction of the Maliki government was to sue The Guardian under a law that does "not allow foreigners to publish articles critical of the prime minister or president," and yesterday, an Iraqi court ordered the newspaper to pay Maliki the equivalent of £52,000.  Iraq's leading journalism organization says the court order "is part of a wider crackdown against media outlets designed to discourage scrutiny of public officials" and that "the Iraqi media have been inundated by writs from officials in recent months and have lost official access and status to state-backed organisations."  Both The New York Times and AP in Iraq have received such writs.

Greenwald doesn't seem to realize that under Saddam Hussein, Iraq didn't have independent journalism organizations, let alone a "leading" one. Even the Guardian article he links to says this explicitly!

Media freedoms have improved substantially in Iraq since the tyrannical decades of Saddam Hussein, when all information was controlled by cronies of the former dictator, such as Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who was the information minister during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was popularly known as Comical Ali** for his increasingly outlandish claims about the strength of the Iraqi army.

Does Greenwald want us to stay in Iraq? No, he wishes uber-Cheneyite Saddam Hussein or his psychopathic sons were in power.
---------------------
* Yglesias on foreign policy is like Superfreakonomics: annoying too-clever-by-half contrarianism. For good contrarianism see this article in Slate by Jonah Weiner, Creed is Good.
** Comical Ali was known in the US as Baghdad Bob. On April 7, 2003, he claimed that there were no American troops in Baghdad, and that the Americans were committing suicide by the hundreds at the city's gates. At that time, American tanks were patrolling the streets only a few hundred meters from the location where the press conference was held.

Obama was elected a year ago today. Here he is in Raleigh, North Carolina in April of last year. Check out the dog whistle at 2:20. He said he learned it from his aide Reggie Love. Despite the primary nastiness I am glad Obama asked Hillary to be Secretary of State and she is doing a good job (except when on her recent trip to the Middle East, she praised as "unprecedented" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to slow the building of settlements. It upset our Arab allies.) Axelrod, Obama, and Plouffe ran a great campaign. Plouffe has a new book out on the campaign where he lists some of the few mistakes (which I thought were overblown at the time.) It truly was an amazing campaign.

Jonesin

As that great epistemologist Donald Rumsfeld once said there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns and as a lot of people say the truly smart people are those who are aware how much they don't know.

 Lorrie Moore mentioned in an interview that her Internet reading includes Wikipedia,* as does mine. It's always showing you how much you don't know. And on Wikipedia I learned that Norah Jones's father is Ravi Shankar. She has a new album out titled "The Fall." Check out this cool video with Wax Poetic featuring Jones, back before she hit it big.

Actress Rashida Jones (left photo) was in I Love You, Man and the Office and is now on the show Parks and Recreation.** On Wikipedia I learned that she's the daughter of Quincy Jones. She has a graphic novel/comic series titled Frenemy of the State, which is now going to be made into a movie. Jones is writing the script with Will McCormack. And she is dating Jon Favreau, the Director of Speechwriting for Obama, which makes her suspiciously too cool.

-------------------------
*Which I learned on Wikipedia. I learned elsewhere that like 80 percent of the editors at Wikipedia are male, so the site's info must be skewed.
** In an interview with the Onion this week, Chris Pratt, who plays Andy Dwyer, said Parks and Recreation will have another season which is good news. Also, they discussed the fact he's married to the lovely Anna Faris(!). Another great character on the show is the manager Ron Swanson, played by Nick Offerman. He has really developed over the season just as Flight of the Concords' Murray Hewitt, played by Rhys Darby, really blossomed over the Concords' seasons. Either could do a spin-off later on, after these shows have their run, like Fraiser did after Cheers. Speaking of Cheers, what about Woody Harrelson and Ted Danson???!!! Harrelson keeps on making great movies while maintaing a lifestyle as a dope-smoking, vegan eco-anarchist while Danson has been great recently on Curb Your Enthusiasm and the brand-new Bored To Death. And speaking of Bored To Death, it's great to see Zach Galifianakis have success with that show and The Hangover. I've had a man-crush on Galifianakis for years (like how on Seinfeld George Costanza developed a man-crush on a friend at the gym.) Okay I've probably said enough.

Krugmania

"The Defining Moment"

"Too Little of a Good Thing"

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers - and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

The political question is whether you'd rather have the money going to the upper class young people or invest it in the rest of the younger generation.

Blog post about Barry Eichengreen and Doug Irwin's new paper challenging the conventional wisdom about protectionism in the 1930s.

It wasn’t about economic ignorance, or at least not about microeconomics; it was about the attempt to escape the "golden fetters" of the exchange rate. The most protectionist countries were those that tried to keep their peg to gold; and as they say,

This suggests that trade protection in the 1930s was less an instance of special interest politics run amok than second-best macroeconomic policy management when monetary and fiscal policies were constrained.

Pregnant Pause

"Highway 61 Revisited"*
Oh, God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on."
God say "No," Abe say "What?"
God say "You can do what you want Abe, but
the next time you see me you better run."
[Pregnant Pause]
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."

Reviews of  R. Crumb's "Book of Genesis Illustrated" in the LA Times and in the New York Times.  
--------------
*Highway 61 was a highway that stretched from Minnesota, where Dylan was from, down to New Orleans, before Eisenhower built the interstate system. The painting above is The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio. It appears towards the end of the Coen brothers move A Serious Man and is on the cover of Hitchens's book Prepared for the Worst.

Hard to Be Soft, Tough to Be Tender
Noble-prize winning economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen believe we need another metric other than G.D.P. (gross domestic product) which measures sustainable growth with an eye towards human welfare. Toronto-based band Metric (sounds like the Pixies):



Inglourious Basterd (...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead) HUGO STIGLITZ (no relation):



My grandfather Siegfried passed away recently at the age of 94. He was first generation German-American and had lived through the Great Depression. He was drafted into the US Army in November of 1942, served in the South Pacific, receiving a battlefield commission.

His mother had come to America by boat and had five sisters who remained in Germany. They all lived into their 90s or 100s. (Two of his cousins were sent to the Eastern Front and were never heard from again.) His father was a construction worker in New York City and was crushed to death by some girders while on the job. His mother took my grandfather and his sister to Duluth, Minnesota and became a podiatrist. She never remarried.

Before the war, he played football in college. They wore leather helmets without a facemask. After the war, he and my grandmother moved to the Chicago suburbs. They were the last ones on the block to purchase a television, because he believed it was a passing fad. He was a cheery, honest man with a good sense of humor.

When I was a kid he nicknamed me "Petrovich" whether because in his eyes I had Communist tendencies or a Russian soul, I never found out. But it was flattering that I was the only grandchild he nicknamed and it always heartwarming the way he'd call it out as if he was surprised to see me - "Petrovitch!" - whenever we met.

This new derby movie directed by Drew Barrymore looks like it could be good. Ellen Page stars as Babe Ruthless and Barrymore's character is Smashly Simpson (does she not like Ashly or are they friends?). Kristin Wiig is Maggie Mayhem, Eve is Rosa Sparks, Zoe Bell is Bloody Holly, Ari Graynor is Eva Destruction, Juliette Lewis is Iron Maven, and looks like Andrew Wilson (brother of Luke and Owen) is the underdogs' coach. There's also the Manson sisters and Jaba the Slut.

Hate, Love, Chores: Lorrie Moore’s Midwest Chronicle by Motoko Rich

Last Year’s Role Model
by Lorrie Moore

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? by Paul Krugman

Lehman Had to Die So Global Finance Could Live by Joe Nocera

Martin Wolf interviews Nouriel Roubini

And though the news was rather sad, well I just had to laugh




Michiko Kakutani's review of "A Gate at the Stairs."

"Eyes Wide Open" by Jonathan Lethem

From "In Fed We Trust," by David Wessel

Barney Frank, the congressman from Massachusetts, proposed declaring Monday, September 15, to be Free Market Day. On Sunday, the Fed and the Treasury let Lehman fail; on Tuesday, they took over AIG. "The national commitment to the free market lasted one day," Frank said. "It was Monday."

Article on Barney Frank in the Boston Globe.

Frank on Planet Money.

Obamacare: It's People!



Rick Perlstein's In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

(via Krugman)

Along with the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam and John Waters, one of favorite moviemakers is John Carpenter. He made Escape from New York, The Thing, They Live and Big Trouble in Little China, which the Onion features in its "Better Late Than Never?" section.

Also Quentin Tarantino is good, and his new movie Inglourious Basterds is his best since Pulp Fiction.

"That's what we like about you, Mulder. Your ideas are even weirder than ours."

John Fitzgerald Byers (Bruce Harwood) was once a public relations worker for the FCC. He was a conservative dresser with a neatly trimmed beard, a stark contrast to his grungier comrades. He had at least some working knowledge of medicine, genetics and chemistry and is known for the famous line, "That's what we like about you, Mulder. Your ideas are even weirder than ours." He was born on November 22, 1963, the same day that President Kennedy died. His parents named him after the fallen president. His name would have been Bertram otherwise. Byers was the most "normal" of the three, and while Frohike and Langly were seemingly born angry misfits, Byers dreamed of a quiet, uneventful, suburban life. Byers' father was a high-ranking government official, but they never saw eye to eye and when Byers' father appears in The Lone Gunmen pilot, the two hadn't spoken for some time.

Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood) was a former '60s radical and the oldest of the three. Though a skilled computer hacker, Frohike was primarily the photography specialist for the newsletter. Frohike had a lascivious attitude toward women. However, he had a more purely romantic attitude towards Dana Scully; when she was gravely ill in the episode 'One Breath', Frohike appeared at the hospital in a tailored suit carrying a bouquet. His unique sense of fashion made him stand out: leather jackets, furry vests, combat boots, fingerless gloves, etc. Frohike considered himself the "action man" of the trio and would often be seen doing very intense stunts (many rigged to look more impressive than they really were). Despite his childish scraps with Langly and others, Frohike's age and experience gave him a kind of quiet wisdom that occasionally surfaced when he consoled his friends about the sorry nature of their lives. In The Lone Gunmen episode "Tango de los Pistoleros," Frohike was revealed to be a former tango champion who danced under the stage name "El Lobo."

Richard Langly (Dean Haglund) was the most confrontational and socially immature of the three. He was a big fan of The Ramones and enjoyed critiquing the scientific inaccuracies of the short-lived sci-fi series Earth 2, and he had a long-running competition with Frohike over who was a better computer hacker. He also had "a philosophical aversion to having his image bounced off a satellite." His nickname was "Ringo". Langly was a Dungeons and Dragons player (as 'Lord Manhammer') and enjoyed violent videogames like Quake.

Happy Birthdays to India and Julia Child (if she was still around).

Solitary Crow On Fence Post Portending Doom, Analysts Warn














The wingèd harbinger of our own condemnation.

Run Crying to Mama

The funniest moment for me during the Great Panic was when the freewheeling global investment banks reverted to regular national banks.

Adding to questions about Mr. Paulson’s role, critics say, is the fact that Goldman Sachs was among a group of banks that received substantial government assistance during the turmoil. Goldman not only received $13 billion in taxpayer money as a result of the A.I.G. bailout, but also was given permission at the height of the crisis to convert from an investment firm to a national bank, giving it easier access to federal financing in the event it came under greater financial pressure.

As did the other big investment banks who years before had successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to repeal the "archaic"Glass Stegall Act.

Lollapalooza yesterday had Gomez, Coheed & Cambria and Tool. (Unfortunately the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played at the same time as Tool.)





Tonight there's a show at a small venue with Josh Homme of the the Queens of the Stone Age, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones. It sold out quickly. In 1999 a friend got us tickets to a Halloween show at the same place with the Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age which was amazing. After the Queens played two guys dressed as Teletubbies came out on stage and took off their heads. One had a mask of Al Gore on, the other had a mask of Bush. Grohl ran around in the crowd which was crazy.

When I was in college I was lucky enough to attend the original Lollapalooza which had the Rollins Band, the Butthole Surfers, Nine Inch Nales, Ice-T and Body Count, Jane's Addiction, Living Color, and Siouxsie and the Banshies. 1996 was great too with Soundgarden, the Ramones, Rancid, and the Wu-Tang Clan.

Sometimes William Safire's On Language column makes me laugh:

The geezersphere will remember the previous vogue use of model to describe the willowy women on whom clothes designers draped their creations. That word’s meaning was later applied by captious caption writers to any attractive female in a tabloid’s photos. (I had a date once in the 1950s with the model Nancy Berg, who along with the cover girls Suzy Parker and her sister Dorian Leigh broke the $100-an-hour modeling fee. In that era, those were the models to follow, blazing the trail for today’s supermodels.)

In hindsight, if Obama gets decent health care reform, forgoing the Swedish model of banking reform may be seen smart polically for it placated the deficit hawks who are suspicious of government. If not, it will be seen as a risky move, things could have easily turned out worse, which allowed the banking sector to remain in bad shape and hurt the economic outlook more than necessary.

The Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibbi

Taibbi mentions Time magazine's Dewey Defeats Truman cover:

It became almost a national cliche that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy - a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD.

Interesting that Time takes the time to critcize the piece:

"The [Rolling Stone] article makes a very compelling case against Goldman Sachs, but I think the problems it identifies are pervasive in financial firms and corporate America in general," says Nell Minow, who is the co-founder of the Corporate Library, a research firm that tracks corporate-governance issues. "We need to launch substantive financial reform rather than weighing the faults of one firm versus another." Minow's point is this: spend too much time on Goldman and you miss the fact of how broadly the financial system and the regulations that are supposed to keep profiteers in check failed us. And she's right.

Taibbi responds:

I had to read that passage several times to even begin to grasp its ostensible meaning. Apparently this is the best argument that Time could come up with to discredit this article, that the rhetorical technique of using a specific example of a specific bank like Goldman to tell a broader story about Wall Street in general distracts readers from the "more important" issue of how government regulators... failed to stop banks like Goldman! I mean, really, how’s that for circular thinking? This is silly stuff even by Time magazine’s standards.

I’ve been shocked by how many grown adult people seem to have swallowed this argument, that the argument against Goldman's behavior during the bubbles of recent decades is invalid because "everyone was doing it" - and other banks, like for instance Morgan Stanley, were "just as bad" as Goldman was.

Two things about that. One, it isn't true, not really. By any reasonable measure Goldman is and has been the baddest guy on the block for a long time. When it comes to government influence, no other Wall Street company even comes close. And while maybe one might have made an argument that other players were more damaging to society before the crisis of last year, there's simply no question now, after the bailouts and especially after the AIG fiasco, that Goldman now reigns supreme in the area of insider advantage. To pick any other bank to tell the story of the rapidly growing influence of Wall Street on politics and the blurring of public and private roles would be a glaring journalistic oversight, and surely even Goldman’s biggest supporters would admit this.

Two, even if it is true that "everyone else was doing it": so what? Who cares? To me this response is highly telling. We published a piece accusing Goldman Sachs of systematically ripping off pensioners and other retail investors by sticking them with rafts of toxic mortgages it knew were losers, of looting taxpayer reserves to cover its bad bets made with AIG, of manipulating gas prices to massive detrimental effect, of helping to explode an internet bubble that caused over $5 trillion in wealth to disappear, and numerous other crimes - and the response isn't "You're wrong," or "We didn't do that shit, not us," but "Well, Morgan did the same stuff," and "Why aren't you writing about Morgan?"

Why didn't we write about Morgan? Because we didn't. Because it's your turn, you assholes. Maybe later someone will tell the story of the other banks, but for now, while most ordinary people are only just learning about the workings of the financial innovation era that blew up in their faces last year, the top dog in that universe is going to be first in line to get the special treatment. That might be inconvenient for Goldman, but it doesn’t make the things I or anyone else say about them untrue.

Normally I don't care so much when people criticize my work. It goes with the territory. But in this case, the response of a bank like Goldman and Goldman's supporters is characteristic of the subject matter in a way that is important to point out, even after the fact of publication. These are powerful people who know how to play the public relations game, have all the appropriate contacts, and have a playbook that they follow to discredit their critics. Whether it's me now or the next guy who takes them on, they're going to come back with some kind of charge, be it "Everyone was doing it," or "We're just smarter than the other guys, you can't blame us for that," or "The real culprits are the ineffective regulators," something.

As much as I agree with Taibbi, I don't blame Obama for bringing on Geithner and Larry Summers in the midst of a crisis. They know the ropes and have been doing and saying the right things since the crisis hit. And ultimately Obama is in charge. That's politics: Goldman and Wall Street will try to mitigate the backlash - and they have plenty of cash and influence in their arsenal - but at the end of the day, they're "too big to fail" and essential to the economy. It's a dance with the devil.

And it should be noted Goldman Sachs tends to lean towards the Democrats and Taibbi is libertarian in a vaguely conservative manner. He fails to mention the Republican's raison d'etre: less government, less regulation, and a jihad against campaign finance reform. It was the conservative policy agenda that enabled the collapse. At least Taibbi didn't blame Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And he is quite correct to highlight the Clintonoid's culpability:

A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated - and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.

More regulation wasn't exactly what Goldman had in mind. "The banks go crazy - they want it stopped," says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. "Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped."

Clinton's reigning economic foursome - "especially Rubin," according to Greenberger - called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 1l,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

Hitchens on Iran and Iraq.

Krugman on Charlie Rose

Transformers: ROTF
How Michael Bay met Obama.



Michael Bay finally made an art movie by Charlie Jane Anders.

(via Yglesias).

You know when the apolitical jocks start showing solidarity it's serious business.

(via Andrew Sullivan who is overdue for a mental health break.)

Satrapi-Makhmalbaf Joint Conference EU Parliament Brussels

Invited by European Green Party Deputy Daniel Cohn Bendit (Iconic Former Student Leader of France's May 68 Revolution) , Iranian Filmmakers Marjane Satrapi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf demand foreign governments Not to recognize the government of so-called President Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Back last September, The Onion AV Club reported:

The A.V. Club is delighted to point you to a free download of a new live collaboration between Wilco and Fleet Foxes, a cover of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" which was recorded in Bend, OR on the recent Wilco tour. Wilco's working with Headcount.org, "a nonpartisan, non-profit organization dedicated to voter registration and inspiring participation in democracy through the power of music." So when you download this track, you'll be asked to click a simple button, pledging to vote in the upcoming national election on November 4. And if you're feeling particularly generous, Wilco's also suggesting you make a donation to Second Harvest/Feed America.

I've added some new blog links. All of these bloggers are extremely informative. First, I've added Glenn Greenwald even though I felt he was unfair to Obama during the primary.

Same thing with Ezra Klein, who is now at the Washington Post. Yesterday the New York Times reported that Obama shared a New Yorker article with aides and Senators that had effected his thinking on health care reform. Klein had raved about it when it came too.

Finally, Hilzoy is a longtime blogger who is eminently fair and informed and with whom I usually agree. Turns out her father was President of Harvard from '71-'91 and took over from Larry Summers after his infamous comments about women. Her maternal grandparents were Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal. Whoa.

Ahmed Rashid writes about Pakistan.

Podcast with Rashid.

Adolph Joffe was a Bolshevik who supported Trotsky. Remembering Joffe's presence with the Bolshevik delegation at Brest-Litovsk, Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarians' representative would later write:

The leader of the Russian delegation is a Jew, named Joffe, who has recently been released from Siberia [...] after the meal I had a first conversation with Mr. Joffe. His whole theory is simply based on the universal application of the right of self-governance of nations in the broadest form. The thus liberated nations then have to be brought to love each other [...] I advised him that we would not attempt to imitate the Russian example and that we likewise would not tolerate a meddling in our internal affairs. If he continued to hold on his utopic viewpoints the peace would not be possible and then he would be well advised just to take the journey back with the next train. Mr. Joffe looked astonishedly at me with his gentle eyes and was silent for a while. Then he continued in an for me ever unforgettable friendly - I would even nearly say suppliant - tone: 'I very much hope that we will be able to raise the revolution also in your country...'

Poehler at the White House Correspondents Dinner after party.


















Poehler on Charlie Rose.

Amy Poehler on NPR.

Losing your religion

Michelle Cottle writes about a conference for religion writers where a scientist attempts to square faith and science:

His maiden BioLogos blog post (which appears on beliefnet) opens with an anecdote about a devout home-schooled Christian girl who, once she got to college and embarked on a biology major, promptly suffered a four-alarm crisis of faith. If the creation had not gone exactly as she had been taught, were all of her beliefs a lie? While Hitchens would surely like her to conclude "yes," presumably her family and faith community would prefer a different outcome. 

In my younger years, I underwent a vastly lower-key recalibration along these lines that pretty much ruined religion for me. More seriously, I had a devoutly Christian friend whose little brother became damn near suicidal trying to reconcile his fundamentalism with the basic realities of the world beyond his church. If the stats and stories are to be believed, scads of kids have similar experiences.

I shared a fiction writing class with Cottle at Vanderbilt, which come to think of it did have a lot of religious students. Cottle is distractingly pretty, so of course she'd catch me stealing glances during the time fellow classmates were reading their boring short stories aloud. This must have been before her recalibration because she was consistently impervious to my attempts at after-class chit-chat like "I really liked your story, great stuff" and "That story was even better than the last, especially that part when ..." Or maybe not.

With all of its straight-laced God-fearing southern students, I found it ironic that the university was founded by that OG corporate titan, robber baron Cornelious Vanderbilt, also know as the Commodore which is the school's mascot. There's a new biography out on him:

Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great steamship and then railroad magnate, the man who built the original Grand Central Terminal, was not much of a conversationalist. If a man boasted in his presence, he would say, "That amounts to nothing." If interrupted while speaking, he would stop talking and not resume the subject. Vanderbilt (1794-1877) didn’t need words. His actions spoke with a brute eloquence.

Coincidently, Slate recently had a piece where John Swansburg discusses what your favorite Grateful Dead song says about you

"Tennessee Jed": ...While you were paddling Vanderbilt freshmen over at the Sigma Chi house, she was hot-boxing in a VW bus with her vegan friend Judy. You hated all that drug stuff, but you were fond of Brianna's liberated approach in the boudoir (actually the back of the VW). Brianna dragged you to a few Dead shows, but you never thought Jerry had anything on Gregg Allman.

I was actually a member of Sigma Chi until national pulled our charter for excessive partying. The chapter wasn't very hardcore fraternity-wise with only officers living at the house, but there were lots of parties where the music usually consisted of countrified Grateful Dead or Allman Brothers or the Rollings Stones' countrified rock of Exile on Main St. and Sticky Fingers.




Many believe the guy in the jeans in Andy Warhol's album cover is Mick Jagger, but it's actually Joe Dallesandro, who acted in Warhol's films. He also later appeared in John Waters's Cry-Baby as a religious zealot. Waters praised him as "A wonderful actor who forever changed male sexuality on the screen."

Hey Nineteen

According to the stress tests, Bernanke and Geithner say the banks need $75 billion in fresh capital to weather an economic storm worse than expected:

Under the worst-case scenario - an unemployment rate of 10.3 percent, an economic contraction of 3.3 percent this year and a 22 percent further decline in housing prices - the losses by the 19 banks could total $600 billion this year and next, or 9.1 percent of the banks' total loans, regulators concluded. Losses to the banks' loan portfolios alone could total $455 billion this year and next.

And the winners are....
(or Lovers in Japan (Osaka version))

Tomorrow is Stress Test Thursday, when the Obama administration provides the public with some more transparency regarding the financial sector, the specifically the top 19 banks.

Bernanke says things are stabilizing but there will be no quick recovery:

In his most upbeat assessment in a long time, Mr. Bernanke said a wide array of indicators, from consumer spending and home sales to a revival in the credit markets, now suggested that the economy was stabilizing.

Mark Thoma fears we may be falling into a Japanese rut.

Brad DeLong is happy as credit fears ease.

Obama has critics Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz over for dinner.

Joe Nocera has been searching conferences and symposiums for the answer and reports Stiglitz gives the Obama administration an A++, however that's grading on a curve.

Obama interview with David Leonhardt.

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

The WHO upgrades the risk level to 5* and now there are reports of swine flu in my hometown of Chicago, which gives one a little frisson.

A Quiet Day in Iowa as Same-Sex Couples Line Up to Marry

Now New Hampshire and Maine are looking to legalize also.

And there are signs the GOP is rethinking its stance on gay marriage.

Gay and lesbian groups that want this should ally themselves with divorce lawyer associations, see Intolerable Cruelty,** who would no doubt be willing to pony up for the cause.

---------------------------
* out of 6

**

The Australian duo Empire of the Sun.

Martin Amis remembers J.G. Ballard.

Tom Bissell writes about David Foster Wallace.

I heard Bissell on the radio once talking about a trip he took to post-Soviet states, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. He laughed as he told how the former communist boss/ current dictator of one of them granted a holiday amnesty and emptied the prisons while he was in the country. Bissell was mugged 4 or 5 times the following days.

Like Wallace, the 41 year-old financial chief of Fannie Mae David Kellermann recently committed suicide. With suicide you can't really explain why, even though Wallace was clinically depressed and Kellermann was under enormous pressure. Others suffering in a similar manner don't do it. In medieval Europe, suicides were denied a Christian burial and superstitiously buried at crossroads with a stake through their heart. As if their heart wasn't already broken.

Centrists Gone Radical!


Tim Fenrholz writes about Simon Johnson.

Paul Krugman writes about Bush's drive to war in Iraq:

"The Bush administration was obviously - yes, obviously - telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did - and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.

For me and many others that was a radicalizing experience; I’ll never trust "sensible" opinion again."

Here, Krugman points us to the new IMF report titled World Economic Outlook.

The New York Times reports on it here and here.

The I.M.F. projected a 1.3 percent decline in global economic activity for 2009,[first decline since WWII] down sharply even from the modest 0.5 percent growth it had projected in January. In the United States, still the "epicenter" of the crisis, according to the fund, economic contraction would be even greater, at 2.8 percent this year, with zero growth for 2010.
...
Mr. Blanchard said that the fiscal responses of several major countries had made "a gigantic difference."

"If there had been no fiscal stimulus across the world, world growth in 2009 would be 1.5 to 2 percent less," he said. "We would be in the middle of something very close to a depression."

One has to give props to China who enacted a $500 billion (converted) stimulus package. Japan also enacted one. The IMF puts bank losses from global economic crisis at $4.1 Trillion:

Of that amount, $2.7 trillion is from loans and assets originating in the United States, the fund said. That estimate is up from $2.2 trillion in the fund’s interim report in January, and $1.4 trillion last October.
...
Among European countries, the fund has already agreed to more than $55 billion in loans to Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Iceland, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia. More may yet need to be bailed out.

On Tuesday, Colombia became the second Latin American country to seek aid, requesting $10.4 billion. Last Friday, the fund approved a $47 billion line of credit for Mexico, making it the first country to qualify for a loan from a program that extends credit to emerging economies that are considered well managed. Poland also said this week that it would seek a $20.5 billion credit line under that program.
...
In a twist that leaves some experts shaking their heads, the fund needs money from cash-rich developing countries, like China and India, to help more developed but strapped countries, like those in Eastern Europe.

Mark Weisbrot argues the IMF needs reform.

The Stockholm Syndrome

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Via Matthew Yglesias. Yglesias also reports good news: his friend Ezra Klein was hired by the Washington Post.





But to my sorrow Matt also linked to Daniel Larison at the American Conservative. Larison is a conservative isolationist of the Patrick Buchanan/Justin Raimondo/Charles Lindbergh school and is currently being touted by the anti-interventionist faction. From Wikipedia:

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps on September 14, 1939 to campaign as a private citizen for the antiwar America First Committee. He soon became its most prominent public spokesman, speaking to overflowing crowds in Madison Square Garden in New York City and Soldier Field in Chicago. His speeches were heard by millions. During this time, Lindbergh lived in Lloyd Neck, on Long Island, New York.

Lindbergh argued that America did not have any business attacking Germany and believed in upholding the Monroe Doctrine, which his interventionist rivals felt was outdated. Before World War II, according to Lindbergh historian A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh characterized that:

"the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization."

Charles Lindbergh speaking at an AFC rally.

During his January 23, 1941, testimony before The House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lindbergh recommended the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany.

In a speech at an America First rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, "Who Are the War Agitators?" Lindbergh claimed the three groups, "pressing this country toward war [are] the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration" and said of Jewish groups,

"Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation."

In the speech, he warned of the Jewish People's "large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government," and went on to say of Germany's antisemitism, "No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany." Lindbergh declared,

"I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."

J.G. Ballard passed away this past Sunday.

Johann Hari asks: Was J.G. Ballard a prophet of doom - or the future?

Ballard's vision hangs like black smoke over my instinctive liberalism and rationality, as a constant, nagging doubt. His novels present a world where people will not - cannot - be persuaded by facts and evidence and reason for long. Our frontal lobes are too weak; our adrenal glands are too big. We would rather hug our consumer goods and our guts today than preserve ourselves and our species for tomorrow. He said of his novels: "I see myself more as a kind of investigator, a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not."
...
The roots of Ballard's vision obviously lay in his childhood. He grew up in the ornate mansions of the International Settlement in Shanghai in the 1930s, waited on by battalions of servants paid for by his father, who was a rich textile chemist. When the Japanese invaded, that world was stripped away overnight. His family was interred in a detention camp, and he scavenged and starved in suddenly abandoned mansions - a story told in the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun.

From the New York Times:

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

Then he was waterboarded another 82 times.

Khalid Sheik Mohammad was waterboarded 183 times.

I think Obama has the right idea that a bipartisan 9-11 type committee should be formed instead of Leahy's truth commision because that might become too partisan.

I love Anna Faris, so I was interested to read Majikthise's criticism of a scene in the new movie Observe and Report, which I haven't seen.

I tend to agree with Dana Stevens more, who says that Ronnie stopped once he realized Brandi was passed out. Although I haven't seen the movie.

Hopefully Faris's next movie will be better - like House Bunny or Smiley Face - since neither Beyerstein nor Stevens liked this one.

In an interview with Newsweek, Faris says she and Seth Rogan believed the scene would be cut.

Kiefer Sutherland was on a local radio station last night promoting his record label by hanging out and playing songs by bands on the label. I've watched his show 24 this season and it's really good with loads of great actors (like Mary Lynn Rajskub* and Janeane Garofalo pictured above). Sutherland said they start shooting the next season in three weeks.

Coincidently yesterday the Obama administration released the Office of Legal Council memos about torture yesterday. Hell froze over as Glenn Greenwald had some kind words to say about Obama's decision.

--------------------
*Rajskub and Kristen Wiig were good in this past season's The Flight of the Conchords also.

Happy Tax Day!

(And a belated Happy Zombie Jesus Day!)

Patriots Glenn Beck and Nick Cavuto and Dick Armey among others have been organizing "Tea Parties" to protest Obama's alleged drift towards socialism, Think Progress reports. The turnouts were rather low.

DeLong doesn't believe the Obama administration is giving the public a narrative about the Geithner plan.

If the Obama administration were selling any of these three lines of narrative--or were selling all of them--it seems likely to me that it would be having more success is building support for its strategy. But I do not think that it is selling any of these narrative lines to make sense of its policies. Indeed, I do not know what the narrative story it wants to tell about the current situation is.

As I understand, Obama explained that the credit markets have stopped working (and the Fed has already lowered interest rates to zero). They have a three-pronged approach: the first leg of the "stool" is the stimulus, to kick-start consumption and employment.

Second, mortgage relief so people stay in their homes, keep their jobs, and continue to spend. Also this is to help the banks.

Third, TARP and the Geithner plan - or son of TARP plus stress tests, etc. - to sort out the banks and get credit markets flowing again after the stimulus kicks in.

James K. Galbraith doesn't believe the Geithner plan will get credit moving again.

The dismal science is sexy again!

Why so serious, Ludwig?

I thought it was funny that at the beginning of the film Happy-Go-Lucky, the happy-go-lucky protagonist wanders into a book store where Ray Monk's biography of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is on display. Alexander Waugh - son of the satirist Auberon Waugh and grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh - has a new book out on the Wittgenstein family.

From Wikipedia: "In 1929 he decided, at the urging of Ramsey and others, to return to Cambridge. He was met at the railway station by a crowd of England's greatest intellectuals, discovering rather to his horror that he was one of the most famed philosophers in the world. In a letter to his wife, Lydia Lopokova, Wittgenstein's old friend John Maynard Keynes wrote: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.""

The Newsweek cover story on Paul Krugman by Evan Thomas was pretty good, but it missed some things.

It does get at what's appealing about his demeanor, like "One thing he still has is a smile that plays around his face when he's talking, almost like he's looking at himself and thinking, 'What am I doing here?'" "He is an unusual mix, at once nervous, shy, sweet and fiercely sure of himself." "Krugman is "not a prima donna, he wears his fame lightly," and that Krugman is not resented among his academic colleagues, who can be a jealous lot." And "Ideologically, Krugman is a European Social Democrat. Brought up to worship the New Deal, he says, "I am not overflowing with human compassion. It's more of an intellectual thing. I don't buy that selfishness is always good. That doesn't fit the way the world works.""

In the beginning of the piece, Krugman is quoted commenting that he hasn't received any outreach from the Obama administration. Thomas doesn't give a possible explanation until later in the piece: "In the 2008 election, Krugman first leaned toward populist John Edwards, then Hillary Clinton. "Obama offered a weak health-care plan," he explains, "and he had a postpartisan shtik, which I thought was naive."" In fact during the primary Krugman was fairly critical.

A few days ago, I wrote that Stereolab would be my pick for favorite band, if I had to choose under duress.

So by coincidence, a couple of days later they note at their website with characteristcally good-spirited humor that they'll be taking a "Hiatus/Sabbatical/Pause/Intermission/Breather."

Dear All,

As we recently made #51 with Emperor Tomato Ketchup in the Amazon 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums of all Time we feel that our work is done for the moment.

We have had to cancel the last two shows that we were scheduled to play, apologies to all that had bought tickets, and there are no plans to record new tracks.

Duophonic are working on the release of Chemical Chords 2, we also have plans for a new Switched On and remastering of the back catalogue.

We are are all going to have a bit of a rest now after nearly 19 years and work on a few other projects.

The website will still be updated and disks released but there won't be any new Stereolab product for a while.

100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums of All Time

In the earlier post, I listed their influences such as Krautrock. But really they are sort of sui generis. Or a new synthesis. Imagine humanity survives another 500-1000 years and evolves slightly. It avoids environmental cataclysm and economic catastrophe and nuclear war. Sterolab would be this future humanity's American idol winner or teen sensation like the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus transported back in time.

Her eyes tell me that in a former life she organized doomed children’s crusades and burned heretics by the gross.

And yet this zealous flame is imprisoned in the body of a suburban, would-be-folksy Minnesotan. It’s that contrast, I think, that makes her so hypnotic.

Michael Bérubé discusses Obama gaffe on Jay Lano.

Study Finds Paint Aisle At Lowe's Best Place To Have Complete Meltdown

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Or if you're a conservative, you can have it on cable television.

(via Rick Hertzberg)

Michael Lewis's Vanity Fair piece on Iceland.

(via Lindsay Beyerstein)

Last summer I caught Sigur Rós's tour film Heima which was really good. In 2006, having toured the world over, Sigur Rós returned home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland. Heima is a unique record of that tour filmed in 16 locations across the island, taking in the biggest and smallest shows of the band's career. 'Heima' is a 97 minute documentary feature film including songs from all four Sigur Rós albums alongside previously unreleased material.

Congressional hearing on the lessons from the New Deal.

Panel 1: Christina Romer, Chair, Council of Economic Advisors

Panel 2: James Galbraith, Professors DeLong, Winkler and Ohanian

(via Mark Thoma)

"No Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of."

Onion's Gateways to Geekery: krautrock

If forced to choose, I'd have to pick Stereolab as my favorite band. They were influenced by krautrock, lounge, '60s pop, and the Velvet Underground. In interviews they always mention the Beach Boys as a favorite which always makes me laugh for some reason.

Having a Bad Week

TOKYO (AP) - A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both atomic bombings by the United States, officials said Tuesday.

The survivor, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, had already been a certified hibakusha, or radiation survivor, of the bombing on Aug. 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, but he has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier, in which he suffered serious burns to his upper body. Certification qualifies survivors for compensation, including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He returned to Nagasaki, his hometown, before the second attack, officials said.

Vampire Prejudice

Ezra Klein has an excellent post on Simon Johnson who was a former chief economist at the IMF and has now become a prominent analyst of the Great Recession.

Ezra believes he deserves this prominence as do I and Johnson's definitely doing the country a service by trying to help everyone understand what is going on.

When reading the prolific Johnson's analysis of the G-20 conference or the Geithner Plan or whatever, my mind inevitably recalls that great quote Doug Henwood made early on:

The IMF, which was off the scene for many years, is, like a vampire salivating at sunset, returning to action. It's already developed a program for Iceland, which is being put through the austerity wringer; apparently being white and Nordic doesn’t earn you an exemption. It's likely to lend some money to some countries that it deems virtuous on easy terms - among them Brazil but not Argentina. More on all this in the coming weeks. (emphasis added)

The IMF pushes bankrupt nations to enact Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in return for loans. Critics say SAPs often involve austerity measures which are very hard on the average citizen and rather lenient on foreign investors and local oligarchs.

Johnson touches on this in his Atlantic piece:

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or-here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique-the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk-at least until the riots grow too large.

Klein provides a link to an IMF critic, Dani Rodrik, who rightly notes:

And I find it astonishing that Simon would present the IMF as the voice of wisdom on these matters--the same IMF which until recently advocated capital-account liberalization for some of the poorest countries in the world and which was totally tone deaf when it came to the cost of fiscal stringency in countries going through similar upheavals (as during the Asian financial crisis).

Simon's account is based on a very simple, and I believe misguided, theory of politics and economics. It is an odd marriage of populist and technocratic visions. Countries fail because political elites always end up in bed with economic elites. The solution, apparently, is to let the technocrats (read the IMF) run your affairs.

But perhaps the IMF can learn and change as Bill Compton did in True Blood.

Pragmatic Politics

At the beginning of the movie Happy-Go-Lucky the protagonist and her friends are dancing at a club to Pulp's Common People.



If one is holding up the liberal-left-social-democratic side of the rope in the political tug of war, you support economic and legal policies that pragmatically support the common people. This is what I try to do, which means not being ideological about, say, government regulation or taxes or unions.

And when I read a cri de coeur by an AIG executive, like this, I want to play the world's tiniest violin about his hurt feelings and complaints about "the environment," i.e. constant bashing of AIG management.

On the foreign policy front, though, my views differ from the ones common on the left-liberal side. I saw Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and thought it was a pretty good movie although many who are sympathetic with the common people will see it as warmongering propaganda. The scene where Leonardo DiCaprio is arguing with his girlfriend's sister over Iraq is especially good, because the sister is a "common person" who's against American foreign policy in the Middle East and yet I agreed with the arguments of DiCaprio's character and could see where he's coming from.

Russell Crowe is good in the movie as a CIA officer in Langley, as is Mark Strong who plays a Jordanian spy chief. Strong was also great in Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla and will be in Ritchie's upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie which opens Christmas. (see Hitchens on Arthur Conan Doyle.)