I didn't imagine Mark Wahlberg's The Fighter would be so funny. A great cast including Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo and many others. Jamming soundtrack too!

I really, really liked The Fighter, The Social Network and True Grit. King's Speech was good also. As Daniel Davies wrote, The Black Swan was nothing like the book.

Battle Is Set as Verizon Adds iPhone by Jenna Wortham

Should I Buy a Verizon iPhone? by Farhad Manjoo

Insanely Savvy: Why Verizon's decision to pass on the iPhone six years ago is looking better and better by Annie Lowrey

The Politicized Mind by David Brooks

Good piece by Brooks but I would just say that Brooks's championing of the establisment's program of "socialism for the rich, austerity for the rest" falls very hard on the seriously mentally ill and their families. He should take a serious look at that and his deficit hawkery.

Reflections on Political Violence by Hitchens

Q & A with Gary Gorton

(via Yglesias)

Who Wants a 30-Year Mortgage? by Bethany McLean

I've been reading the book she wrote with Joe Nocera. Also about the housing market:

Postcrisis, A Struggle Over Mortgage Bond Ratings by Jesse Eisinger

Overweight, Out of Work at Rail Yard by Kari Lydersen

Resolved: Fix the Filibuster by Walter Mondale

When Harvey Met Bob

True Grit, Odd Wit: And Fame? No, Thanks by Charles McGrath

Explaining the Crisis with Dogma by Joe Nocera

I hope this is an eye opener for young people with functioning brain cells who are trying to figure out what's going on instead of just focusing on getting by.

I like Nocera and agree with his openly stated views but it wasn't very smart of him to bash Hewlett Packard's board in his column while his wife was working as a lawyer against those same people.

And yet he was very smart to team up with Bethany McLean and I am looking forward to reading their book.

I always cut people who I admire a lot of slack. (Although I never cut Clinton much slack, I do cut Obama some). They're human.

Krugman once consulted for Enron, but he learned from his mistake - although I'm not clear on the details - and will write: 

Or consider the California electricity crisis of 2001-2002. Years after we actually had tapes in which Enron traders could be heard telling power plants to shut down, news reports continued to repeat the conservative line that it was all about excessive regulation that wouldn’t let the power companies build capacity -- with no mention at all of the market manipulation.

In the same blog post, a good reference:

Put it this way: I’ve been rereading George Orwell’s Looking Back at the Spanish War, and it feels familiar.

Wall Street Whitewash by Krugman

Take a Load Off Fannie: Why won't the GOP's financial-crisis report follow the money? by Bethany McLean

Leonhardt on legal opposition to health care law

"We are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program," said one prominent critic of the new health care law. It is socialized medicine, he argued. If it stands, he said, "one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

The health care law in question was Medicare, and the critic was Ronald Reagan. He made the leap from actor to political activist, almost 50 years ago, in part by opposing government-run health insurance for the elderly.

Today, the supposed threat to free enterprise is a law that’s broader, if less radical, than Medicare: the bill Congress passed this year to create a system of privately run health insurance for everyone. On Monday, a federal judge ruled part of the law to be unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will probably need to settle the matter in the end.

What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama by Ishmael Reed

Deeper Looks at the Crisis of ’08 and the Oval Office by Michiko Kakutani

Echoing what Jonathan Alter wrote about the president in his recent book, "The Promise," Mr. Wolffe writes that "there were few around him who thought health care was the right way for Obama to define his first year," especially given the state of the economy. But the president pushed ahead anyway: in part, Mr. Wolffe suggests, because of memories of his mother’s worries about medical insurance in the months before her death from cancer; in part because it was a priority for the first lady; in part because he aspired to be a great, history-making president and liked to "take on the toughest political challenges he could find"

Reading David Plouffe's book, I learned that heath care reform was the number one priority for Democratic party primary voters.

True to 'True Grit' by Carlo Rotella

The Coen Brothers, Shooting Straight by David Carr

Krugman on Charles Stross and the amoral corporation

One thing I like about blogs is when writers I admire discuss other writers from other fields who they admire. And one of the things I like about Krugman and DeLong is that they're polymaths and not soley focused on economics. Krugman blogs:

If you ask how it’s possible that a handful of bad actors can get their way so often, the answer has to be, wasn’t it ever thus? What we call civilization has usually been a form of kleptocracy, varying mainly in its efficiency (the Romans were no nicer than the barbarians, just more orderly). Yes, we’ve had a few generations of government somewhat of, by, for the people in some places -- but that’s an outlier in the broader sweep of things.

So never mind the hive-minds; good old greed still rules.

Yes but there is progress. Often the kleptocrats are helped by red herrings and distractions like racism and clerical demogoguery.

Hitchens writes about the Tea Party.

Nixon resigned when I was almost 4 years old. Recent released tapes of years in Presidency reveal his prejudice against Jews, blacks, Irish, and Italians. No doubt the Republican elite knew of it and probably shared his hate for the most part. Same thing with the voters and many Democrats.

And almost 40 years later we have a black President. That's progress.

"We need a tow, not a jump-start."

Obama referenced Mark Zandi in defending the stimulus component of the tax cut deal.

Krugman responds that we're in a process of deleveraging at his blog here and here.

I disagree with Krugman's criticisms of Obama, but Krugman could be right if the engine of the private sector doesn't get going. My view is that he's wrong to personalize the issues when it comes to Obama by saying stuff like Obama isn't a fighter. He isn't tough enough? The first black President? The man has no fear. Obama, Axelrod, and Plouffe took on the Clinton machine in the Democratic primary and dealt with their hard ball  tactics with "dirt off the shoulder."



It gets me down when he links to Digby or DeLong links to Jane Hamsher or Atrios.

G.E. and JPMorgan Got Lots of Fed Help in ’08 by Sewell Chan and Jo Craven McGinty

The two companies received help even as their chief executives, Jeffrey R. Immelt of G.E. and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, sat on the nine-member board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Neither executive was involved in creating the emergency programs, which were approved by the Fed’s board of governors in Washington. Both companies also disclosed that they were among scores of institutions that received support from the Fed. Nevertheless, some policy experts expressed discomfort with the situation.

"In my view, it is an obvious conflict of interest for C.E.O.’s of banks and large corporations who serve on the Fed’s board of directors to have received cheap loans from the Fed," Senator Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent who wrote the legal provision requiring the Fed to make the disclosures, said in a statement on Sunday.

...

Goldman, previously an investment bank, became a Fed-regulated bank holding company during the crisis. It tapped the Fed program to help investment banks 52 times, owing $18 billion to the Fed at one point -- receiving far greater support than JPMorgan.

The chairman of the New York Fed at the time, Stephen Friedman, was a Goldman director and former chairman of Goldman. The Fed granted Mr. Friedman a waiver so he could continue serving as chairman of the New York Fed.

While awaiting the waiver, Mr. Friedman bought shares of Goldman around the time the bank received Fed support. After The Wall Street Journal reported on the purchases, Mr. Friedman stepped down, saying the Fed "does not need this distraction." The New York Fed’s top lawyer said at the time that Mr. Friedman "did not violate any Federal Reserve statute, rule or policy."

Mr. Friedman’s successor as chairman of the New York Fed was Denis M. Hughes, president of the New York State A.F.L.-C.I.O. Fed observers say it is unlikely that a former banker will serve as the agency’s chairman any time soon.

Jamie Dimon: America’s Least-Hated Banker by Roger Lowenstein in the New York Times Magazine:

TARP became a symbol of bailout policy gone awry. Actually, the program has succeeded for banks and, thus far, for the government. Taxpayers earned $795 million on the J. P. Morgan stake. Dimon is upset that people think he was bailed out. But there is at least some truth to the view of Christina Romer, a former economist for President Obama, who notes that Dimon "was part of the system that gave rise to the crisis. He certainly benefited. If the system went south, he’d have gone south with everybody else."

Christina Romer on uncertainty in the economy

The deepest and most destructive uncertainty we face centers on the overall health of the economy and its prospects for growth. Unlike other postwar recessions that were caused by tight monetary policy and high interest rates, the recent downturn resulted from the bursting of a housing bubble and a financial crisis. Because we are in largely uncharted territory, figuring out how and when the economy will recover is much harder than usual.

I think we know what to do, it's Republican opposition that is the problem (see for example the lunacy Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana and Senator Corker of Tennesse about how the Fed shouldn't concern itself about unemployment. And so Republican Bernanke has to go on 60 Minutes to defend the Fed.) Othewise I agree strongly with Romer's Op-ed.

Also in the New York Times Magazine, Daniel Bergner on John Pendergrast:

"I do human rights the way I played basketball," John Prendergast said. We were sitting in the outdoor restaurant of an unfinished hotel in Juba, a boomtown of mud and shanties beside the White Nile in southern Sudan. It’s a restaurant where the South’s liberation leaders tend to gather, and these days they are in a buoyant mood. They have traded their fatigues for dress shirts and suits. A half-century of civil war seems to be culminating in independence. If a referendum on Jan. 9 goes as expected, the map of Africa will be redrawn " with a new nation around the size of Texas. But for the moment, Prendergast, who is America’s most influential activist in Africa’s most troubled regions and who huddled on a White House patio with President Barack Obama a few days earlier, talked about basketball guards.

...

One way to understand Prendergast’s influence, suggested Samantha Power, who is the National Security Council’s senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights and who counts Prendergast among her close friends, is not to see Obama as lacking a sense of urgency on Sudan were it not for Prendergast’s recent activism, but rather to view the president as long-engaged on Sudan partly because of the highly successful advocacy movement Prendergast helped to start several years ago around the crisis in Darfur. And now, she continued, on North-South peace, Prendergast is "creating a political space; he’s putting political wind in the sails of people who care about this issue: the president, Denis" -- she nodded toward McDonough, the deputy national security adviser -- "me. He’s elevated Sudan to Himalayan proportions on the mattering map in Washington." While this may be an overstatement, Prendergast has surely helped to pull an expanse of scrub and swamp, and the people who live upon it, into American sightlines.(emphasis added)

Krugman on Poland and the euro

Good piece in the Times about the advantages Poland is deriving from not having adopted the euro (yet):

The floating zloty, which has fallen about 18 percent against the euro since early 2009, acted as a pressure release valve, helping to keep Polish products competitive on world markets and insulating Poland from the effects of the sovereign debt crisis.

Poland has proved itself to be Europe’s most dogged economy during the last two years. It was the only member of the European Union to avoid recession, soldiering on even after a plane crash in April killed much of the political elite, including the president and the central bank governor. No banks needed to be rescued.

You want to think about just how hard it would be to cut wages 18 percent, as opposed to achieving it automatically via depreciation.

Movie about the Clash in the works

Just the other a day an employee at the local used book store in my neighborhood was shocked when Mick Jones and Paul Simonon entered the store, browsed and asked if they had a certain book. They were playing with Gorillaz who were performing at a local music venue that night.

Coen Brothers' True Grit remake coming soon

With a sly hipness that is the trademark of Joel and Ethan Coen, a billboard just outside the Melrose Avenue gate at Paramount Pictures promotes their next film, "True Grit," with a promise: "Retribution. This Christmas."

It's funny but is it "hipness"?

But other film devotees were less charmed, particularly when they viewed "True Grit" through the filter of Vietnam-era politics and Wayne’s conservative principles -- which he had said were illustrated by a scene in which Cogburn shoots a rat after demonstrating the futility of trying to treat it under due process of law. (The new film has no such moment.)

Writing in The New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt complained of the movie’s "very right-wing and authoritarian tang." She was particularly put off by the frontier stoicism, which she described as "near-Fascist admiration for a simplified physical endurance of pain"

In The New Republic, Stanley Kaufman said of Mr. Portis’s novel, "Although it was short it was overlong by about a third." The film’s director, Henry Hathaway, he described as "an old workhorse" who "hasn’t had a new idea since the beginning of his career"

President Richard M. Nixon, for whom Wayne had campaigned, apparently felt otherwise, if a snippet of conversation caught by his Oval Office taping system in February 1971 is any measure. Greg Cumming, an archivist with the Nixon Library, said that the audio quality of the tape was bad, but that he could make out Nixon’s discussing "True Grit: with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. They talk of someone’s having gone "out in a blaze of glory," according to Mr. Cumming.

Of course, Wayne went on to make about 10 or so more films, including the 1975 sequel "Rooster Cogburn," before his death in 1979.

The Coens said they only dimly recalled having seen the earlier movie when they were young, and they did not watch it in preparing their own. "We didn’t do our homework," Ethan Coen said.

Joel Coen said they were drawn to the underlying book a few years ago after he had "re-read it out loud to my kid."

1969 trailer:

Sewell Chan on the Fed data dump

From December 2007 to October 2008, the Fed opened swap lines with foreign central banks, allowing them to temporarily trade their currencies for dollars to relieve pressures in their financial markets.

The European Central Bank drew the most heavily on these currency arrangements, the records show, but nine other central banks also made use of them: Australia, Denmark, England, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Sweden and Switzerland.