"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.