So: we got teased yesterday and this morning with two great pieces on Glenn Beck talking in his strange, voodoo-esque language on whatever way he plans to molest and exploit the minds of whoever will lend him an open ear to aim his ideological piss into. The first was the aforementioned Politico note, which quoted Beck teasing his big ideas on his show. But this was fun! Remember that scary 9/12 Project that was presumed to have gone away because only crazy people listened to crazy people and hey, there can't be that many crazy people who are that organized. We call those cults, and there are lots of them, sure. But they don't represent any kind of frightening majority. Because crazy people need crazy leaders with power and a platform and there aren't really any of those out there as completely insane as the 9/12ers are, right?

Christine Drawdy, a Florida event promoter involved in the tea party and 9/12 movements who is listed as the travel coordinator for the 2010 march, said the permit for the march is in the name of The 9.12 Project's administrator, Yvonne Donnelly. Though Drawdy stressed that Beck "is not the leader of" the 912 movement, she added "all he has to do is say something, and they'll jump."

And by 'jump,' she means, kill people.

Brian Stetler at the New York Times also talked to Beck before today. Stetler's a sizable dude, not someone I imagine can be easily intimidated, nice as he is. Really, he could probably bounce a guy Glenn Beck's size easily.

That said, I imagine he'll be sleeping in the fetal position tonight:

"We'll be looking for ways to get people involved in politics," [Beck] said. "I hear people saying, ‘O.K., now what?' They're calling their representative, but it's time to get more proactive."

Right. So. What was Beck's big plan? He unveiled it today, starting with his website, which is the image you see at the top of this post. One more thing before we get there, though. This video, taken at a Borders yesterday, of Beck teasing out The Plan.

"We're gonna be asking of you some big things." Funny, I've been told the same thing by my bosses, but the first thought that went through my head never involved any kind of civil war and/or revolution.

But hey, Beck: he's just passionate! No way could this entire rollout involve the guy cashing in.

No way could all of this buzz, this entire thing, all of this talk about "community organizing"—taking The Dirty Word of President Barack Obama's past and platform, and putting it to their own new, awesome, terrible uses—no way could Beck be leading his flock into spending some cash.

Funny, then, that they found out that The Plan was for them to spend more money on Glenn Beck, The Brand. Observe his two key points from the manifesto written on his website:

- I have begun meeting with some of the best minds in the country that believe in limited government, maximum freedom and the values of our Founders. I am developing a 100 year plan. I know that the bipartisan corruption in Washington that has brought us to this brink and it will not be defeated easily. It will require unconventional thinking and a radical plan to restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting, using only the battlefield of ideas.

- All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding.

Kinda sounds like a cross between Avon and the Left Behind series, right? Except with scarier salespeople who have drier hands.

Yeah, Glenn Beck's got a plan: for the next 100 years, he's gonna keep writing books and making TV shows, and his fans are going to keep buying into both of them. It's kind of genius. His entire multimedia empire is predicated on one, long, 100-year plot arc: that the main character will make viewers'/listeners'/readers' lives better so long as they're with him every step of the way. The man will make references to revolution, to change, to bringing everything back to a fundamental state. The beautiful irony he has to see and embrace—in order for this to have worked as long as it has—is that the only real movement he'll be making is into better cars and larger houses. The kinds that are far away from the rabid zombies who salivate at every vague allusion to blood and violence Mama Bird spits out like discarded pieces of chewing gum for them to suck every last grain of sweet flavor out of. The kind, if provoked, and unleashed, are as much as a threat to anybody as they are to him. A "random act of violence" is never really that random, is it? Especially when the word "radical" gets thrown around over, and over, and over.

More than anything, this guy is a threat to the proliferation of rational thought. Beck knows that there're people in the world who listen to this kind of nonsense without processing it any way but through their emotions, because they're tired, hungry, scared, or angry, and maybe, sometimes, rightfully so. Then again, so are most of us! But when you have an asshole like Beck running the con, one thing leads to another, and shit like this happens. Believe me, nothing would bring me more joy than to watch Glenn Beck get the Downfall-meme treatment after his empire of exploitative bullshit comes crumbling down under the weight of the inevitable rise of the truth: that this man is a crook, a fraud, a shyster, and a very skilled, sophisticated con artist. But who wants it to get that far?

Glenn Beck does have one up on Hitler in terms of likability: a decent Kermit impersonation. I'm pretty sure nobody with such an affection for Muppets can possibly be capable of anything too terrible.

Then again, evil, as we're all aware, is a scary, subversive force, and comes in all forms, at all times, with little to no discretion. Beware.

[Top image via Glenn Beck's website. Bottom image via Bert Is Evil.]

The new $11 billion operating budget is actually just an ominous warning that in a year—or maybe a few months—the Transit Authority will once again cite the need to hike fares in order to strong arm Albany in finding a newer, more regressive way of funding operating costs.

They have basically promised it already:

In addition to the 2010 budget, the MTA released a four-year fiscal plan. It envisions 7.5% fare and toll hikes in 2011 and 2013 as the agency tries to establish a pattern of regular inflation-based increases.

There is really not so much inflation right now, in America, is there? (But who knows what the future holds!)

But, yes, it is insane that our mass transit is operated by a rotating cast of idiot millionaires with free E-Zpasses for life (and beyond!) beholden to absolutely no one, at all, operating with two sets of books, and yet we have to actually sympathize with them because the people who profit from the way an efficient mass transit system allows for the mobility of cheap labor don't think they should be forced to pony up any money to keep transit affordable. Fares are simply taxes—incredibly regressive taxes, just like the sales taxes that New York City residents suffer to fund our own transit while suburban New Yorkers bitch about the prospect of being charged to clog our streets with their cars, and Jersey dicks bemoan the tolls they have to pay to enter the city where they make all of their money while contributing nothing back.

Meanwhile, though, the MTA lies, about everything, all the time. They are saving just enough of the money from the emergency bailout earlier this year to allow them to not threaten to raise fares again for one (1) year (while fighting transit workers' promised wage increase in court). And thanks to that bailout, we only had to endure a slight fare increase with no service cuts! Except that not a single goddamn line is running on schedule anymore, ever, and that's been the case all year and it only gets worse every week.

Track and signal work must be up 1000% across the board, because there's hardly a line that isn't out of commission on the conveniently poorer or less utilizied portions of the routes these days. The F just gives up at Jay St now. The service advisories, when they are actually correctly posted, which is rarely, grow longer every weekend. If you live outside Manhattan, you better catch a train home before 11 pm, because otherwise who the fuck knows when a train will show up and where it will actually take you. Lord only knows what the hell the G train was doing last weekend, and why. Everyone, anecdotally, has noticed this. But no one has just straight-up said that these are the across the board service cuts that they promised they wouldn't need to institute once we saved them from disaster a few months ago.

It is time, now, immediately, to do a few things:

• To end the insane federal transit funding system that a) overfunds highways and b) dispenses capital project money for urban mass transit systems but forbids any federal spending on operating costs for cities of more than 200,000 people. The Reagan administration slashed mass transit funding, of course, but it was Mr. Bill Clinton who eliminated operating assistance altogether. Do you want to know about how much highway funding has increased over the same period of time? No, you don't. Real estate taxes and fares are not the proper way to fund the nation's largest subway system, especially when we will earmark federal cash for the Robert Byrd Memorial Frontage Road to the Erma Ora Byrd Conference and Learning Center and Community Swimming Pool.
• To destroy the MTA. The public authorities reform bill that just passed the Assembly is a wonderful start! But the entire board needs to be dissolved and replaced with, you know, actual subway riders, elitist technocrat transit wonks, and people with experience in government management and accounting. Civil servants, in other words.
• Everyone in Albany should be tarred and feathered. This is an important part of our prescription for any local problem.
• Also fuck Bloomberg.

Anyway! No fare increases until January 1, 2011! And some day—maybe in like 2015, when you ride the robot-operated Second Avenue line to your favorite soup kitchen—there may be those little signs that tell you when the next train is coming! This "install little signs" project is only a zillion dollars over budget (so far!).

The AP got a copy of Goin' Rogue, Also: Modern Warfare 2 and they totally read it even, which is probably more than Sarah can say.

"... [S]he says that most of her legal bills were generated defending what she called frivolous ethics complaints, but she reveals that about one-tenth of the $500,000 was a bill she received to pay for the McCain campaign vetting her for the VP nod.

She said when she asked the McCain campaign if it would help her financially, she was told McCain's camp would have paid all the bills if he'd won; since he lost, the vetting legal bills were her responsibility."

You may be shocked to learn that this is not a thing that happens, ever, "billing" someone for their own "vetting." The McCain campaign paid for its own vetting. Maybe Sarah Palin paid her own lawyer for lawyering work during that process? In that case, her lawyer would've been billing her for his services, to her, and that is not a thing John McCain made her pay for.

And the other thing, where the McCain campaign did not pay her legal bills for her own legal problems related to Troopergate and other ethics investigations? In addition to not being his responsibility, the McCain campaign thought it would probably violate the law to pay her legal bills with campaign money.

(Oh, Sarah Palin Facebooked about this:

As you probably have heard, the AP snagged a copy of my memoir, 'Going Rogue,' before its Tuesday release. And as is expected, the AP and a number of subsequent media outlets are erroneously reporting the contents of the book.

To be fair, the AP originally reported that McCain handed her a $500,000 bill. The real price on the imaginary bill that Palin made up for her book of lies and hate was $50,000. So she is totally right.)

The GDP numbers released this morning were better than expected, and were driven by a 3.4% increase in consumer spending. What this means is that everyone's expectations will be higher in the future about the strength and pace of the recovery, according to the Wall Street Journal:

"The data is suggesting that the economy does have some strength behind it, and that growth itself is going to be on the higher end of expectations," said Kent Engelke, chief economic strategist at Capitol Securities Management.

We're very happy for the economy and its excellent quarter. How did American human beings do last quarter? Let's have a look:

• Personal income decreased .5%, or $15.5 billion.
• Personal income taxes withheld increased $4.8 billion.
• Total personal spending increased .7%, or $20.4 billion
• Personal savings dropped 33% from the previous quarter.
• The number of new jobless claims last week was virtually unchanged from the previous week.

To recap: Your income decreased by $15.5 billion while your spending increased by $20.4 billion and your taxes increased by $4.8 billion, resulting in a 33% drop in "savings," which means the amount of money you have. And you still don't have a job. This recovery is going to be awesome.

On the upside, the total number of people on unemployment has dropped to 5.8 million, the lowest number in seven months, according to Bloomberg. That's great until you think of all the people who have dropped off the rolls because their benefits ran out.

Bloomberg also reports that Caterpillar has started rehiring some of its laid-off employees, finally fulfilling a promise that Barack Obama made about the stimulus package eight months ago. These things take time.

But that is probably not all of it, as that financial disclosure only covers the period before she suddenly resigned as governor of the Alaska.

Still: a lot of money!

What is weirder, though, in her financial disclosure: last April Sarah Palin created a company called "Pie Spy." No one knows what this company does. Just that it is called "Pie Spy," and it is a "marketing" company. And:

It is listed with a North American Industry Classification System code corresponding to companies that provide services to the elderly or to people with disabilities.

But no one will say anything about this "Pie Spy" company that markets secret pies to crippled old people! What does it mean?

No, seriously: this guy Chuck Ripka of Otsego, Minnesota was once in the news for advocating prayer in the workplace. He wrote a book about how God told him to open his bank, and that God would "take care of the bottom line." The above picture was placed prominently in their offices. And yesterday, Ripka's bank was shut down by the Minnesota Department of Commerce regulators after screwing themselves via mass real-estate lending. It's been bought out by another bank already. This was sometime after a gas leak killed three bank workers in one of Ripka's offices a few years back. Lesson learned: if Jesus saves, he doesn't do it in Minnesota. Or he won't be doing it anymore. Meanwhile, watch Ripka in action below, and decide exactly how godless you prefer your finance professionals to be next time.

Shark Tank airs 8pm ET on ABC. It's a fascinating inside look at what it's like to pitch a business idea before a group of cut throat business gurus with money to burn. The ideas that are pitched are sometimes brilliant, sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes just downright awful.

Who are these titans of industry looking to throw their wads of cash at hungry entrepreneurs?

Kevin O'Leary is the most ruthless of the sharks. He made his money selling educational software. His big payday came when he sold his company to Mattel for $3.7 billion.

Barabara Corcoran made her bones in Real Estate. She's had 20 jobs since she was 23.

Daymon John founded Fubu. Peaking with $350 in revenue in 1998.

Robert Herjavek sold his first tech company for $100 million. He's often butting heads with O'Leary for control of deals on the show.

Kevin Harrington made his money in informercials. His first company reached $500 million in annual sales.

Got that? Alright, good. Let's strap in for some dealmaking.

Our first entrepreneur tonight has a business selling custom-made bobbleheads. Jeff Wolosky already has a lucrative business and he's looking for $75k in exchange for 18% equity in his company. He's made a bobblehead in the image of each Shark and hands them out to the panel. Nice move, Jeff.

Jeff doesn't want to give up the online end of his business which is turning the Sharks off. He's only looking to move the brick and mortar piece. He's going to have a tough sell with these savvy Sharks knowing the overhead is much lower online with a bigger profit margin.

Kevin puts an offer on the table. He's offering $75 for the 15% stake and he's forbidding Kevin from selling in brick and mortar stores. He wants to invest strictly in the online end of his business. Jeff quickly declines.

Damon, Kevin, and Barbara are out. Robert wants some hard numbers. Jeff says his business makes between $500-$600,000 a year. Whoa, who knew bobbleheads were so lucrative?

Robert drops down an offer $100k for 20%

The sharks have Jeff leave the room so they can come up with a plan.

They realize they're bidding the price up among each other. Only on Shark Tank can these guys collude amonst each other! As we go to commerical, what do you think Jeff's business is worth?

Drop your offers in the comments.

Jeff returns and Kevin and Robert offer $100k for 20% of the business.

Jeff declines, and Robert offers $125k for 20%. He declines and offers 7% for $125k.

The sharks have heard enough and ask Jeff to leave. Ouch! No deal. Jeff leaves with his head bobbling.

Here comes our next entrepreneur, lets hope they fare better.

Sandy and Roman are a couple living in NYC and they started a company called Mr. Poncho. They're young and they're making money with their business. They just need some help from the sharks to take it to the next level.

Mr. Poncho is a sleeve that goes over your iPod. They made $35k on it over the last year. They have a patent pending on the sleeve and the device that holds the headphones. Clever, since the headphone tangling is a common issue for folks with iPods.

They're looking for $50k for 25% equity.

It sells for $18 and costs them $3 to make.

Barbara is out because they don't yet have a patent. Damon knows the most about manufacturing, but he thinks they are still too new and the sleeve has no window to see what song is playing, which is a big thumbs down. None of the other sharks are interested either. Sorry kids, take your ponchos and get out.

Dr. Floyd is a urologist. He's created a great product that needs the distribution and manufacturing the sharks can bring to the table.

He created the Uro Club and he wants $25k for a 51% stake in the company. Many of his male patients pee a lot and they play golf. Oh boy, we know where this is going. The Uro Club is a self contained urine recepticle that looks like a golf club. What a pisser!

The Uro Club comes with a towel that clips on your waistband and acts as a privacy shield. He's thought of everything. His pitch is you're far away from the clubhouse, and you drink a lot on the course, so you're likely to need a place to relieve yourself. The Sharks think the receptacle is too small.

Kevin sees it as a gag gift, which the doctor won't dispute. He's sold 3,000 of them already. He's got a website for it and 15,000 of these bad boys in stock, along with a patent. Can this thing get you busted for indecent exposure? He doesn't think so. He tells the sharks you're going to relieve yourself either in his device in the woods, so one way or other, you're whipping it out.

Kevin is interested in 71% of the business for $25k, and Dr. Floyd quickly accepts. That had to be the cheapest and most quickly accepted deal I have seen on Shark Tank. He's a doctor, money isn't a big deal, so it seems like he just wants his pee pole on the market. Unbelievable. Kevin's the infomercial guy, which means we are going to see Uro Club commercials at 3am in our near future.

Brian and Adam have a college recruitment business that works as an online database for college athletes to market themselves to professional teams. They're offering 10% of the business for $150k

They have 30 different schools and 60k students signed up. They've got $150k in contracts at this point. He thinks he can take it to $2 million with the Sharks help. They know all the complex rules and regulations for dealing with college athletes and they have the business plugged into a mobile app. Most coaches are using their phones for recruitment so this is a huge plus.

Kevin thinks this is too complicated, Damon and Barbara do as well. This leaves it to Robert and Kevin.

These are very smart guys, they have multiple business and accounting degrees. Kevin and Robert are in a bidding war now. Robert is pissed at Kevin for driving up the price. Robert offered $200k for 20%, Kevin offered $300k for 35%. Robert asks the entrepreneurs to leave so he can discuss with Kevin.

Kevin asks Robert if he's threatening him. Ohhhhhh damnnnn. Robert tells Kevin, why not $400 for 50%. They split it for 200k each. Kevin likes this idea. They bring the entrepreneurs back.

Robert goes into his pitch. He tells them they're gonna offer $400k and it's for 50%

The entrepreneurs don't want all that cash because they want equity to use later. They want to go back to $200k but the sharks want to know how much that gets them. The entrepreneurs offer 16%. Not enough for the sharks. They really want 50% and are willing to give them that $400k. The entrepreneurs aren't budging. Whoa, Kevin just went to $600k for 50%!

Off to commercial. Do you think that Kevin's offer is good? Should they take it?

We are back and the entrepreneurs have a big decision to make. $600k for 50%. The entrepreneurs are only wiling to give up 50% if Kevin and Robert are both in and it's for $750k. The other option the entrepreneurs offer is 300k for 25%

Kevin is sticking to $600k for 50%. Will they take the offer??

Robert tries to sell them the experience that he and Kevin bring to the table. He tells these guys he can make them very, very rich.

They accept!

See kids...the economy isn't that bad. They're practically giving money away on TV. Start getting your business plans ready for the next season of Shark Tank. Thanks for playing.

If you're a Google-horny fanperson with enthusiastic regard towards the way your existence will be cataloged on the internet, this one's for you. Google Wave is, in the words of Gizmodo:

What could best be described as a genetically modified inter-species lovespawn between Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter and AIM.

But really, is so ridiculously confusing, there's now a website devoted to voting on how confusing it actually is. Naturally, people are gonna put their lives on this thing, which Google will hold in their severs to one day hand over to the government when they ask for it. This is mildly unsettling.

Even moreso: people are now paying for the privilege to do it. Google Wave Invites, the community devoted to people sharing their invites, is now raffling off four invites. You can buy a ticket at a $1 a piece to enter in the drawing. Interestingly, the site's been down since they sent out the announcement, which you can view below. Yes, I wanted one (and still do!) to see what all this talk is about, and also, because I'm pretty sure our privacy's long doomed, anyway. Someone, somewhere, might be getting kneecapped by a man dressed in primary colors.

The funny upshot, however: some guy's making money from Wave invites, or at least trying. Wonder what Google has to say.

Enjoy it. Click to enlarge.

Yup: fucked.

It's all obviously a charade in which everyone pretends that expectations for this woman were so low that her ability to read lies written by some anonymous party functionary was somehow surprising. But these very different reports on how her little talk was received are fun.

The New York Times on reactions to Sarah Palin's speech to Hong Kong investors:

A number of people who heard the speech in a packed hotel ballroom, which was closed to the media, said Mrs. Palin spoke from notes for 90 minutes and that she was articulate, well-prepared and even compelling.

"The speech was wide-ranging, very balanced, and she beat all expectations," said Doug A. Coulter, head of private equity in the Asia-Pacific region for LGT Capital Partners.

"She didn't sound at all like a far-right-wing conservative. She seemed to be positioning herself as a libertarian or a small-c conservative," he said, adding that she mentioned both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. "She brought up both those names."

The Times of London on reactions to same:

Several audience members reportedly walked out of Ms Palin's speech 30 minutes before the end, citing "more important things to do" or describing the talk as "too partisan and too much like a speech at the Republican convention".

One senior fund manager told The Times that the 80-minute lecture, and the lack of an opportunity to fire any questions at Ms Palin, was a disappointment. "You would think that with her team of speechwriters and a supposedly media-free environment Palin could have afforded to be either funny or thought-provoking, but she was neither," she said.

Curious!

[Photo: AP]

A year later, we're looking at some of the characters of the fallen bank. And by we, it's, you know, the BBC, the New York Times, the Daily News (who has a surprisingly uplifting take), the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Telegraph, etc. But because the New York Times profile is exactly what you think it's going to be, we can go with that:

• There's Tom Ollquist, whose dreams of retiring and becoming a high school basketball coach have gone up in smoke, with the bank. "He now spends his days making cold calls and peddling bonds for a firm that few have ever heard of," the Times reports. Ollquist himself doesn't see it as so bad, as he does some serious Lady MacBeth-like handwringing:

  "I have blood on my hands," Mr. Ollquist acknowledges, fiddling with several bracelets he wears, each with its own sentimental story, before he quickly ticks off a list of other parties he thinks are even more culpable than salesmen like him for the meltdown: regulators, senior executives, rival firms and traders who believed that their elaborate computer algorithms insulated them from risk.

  
  

• Then there are the assholes who survived because they were smart enough to stash their cash in a mattress and leave it there: "The luckiest, like Ken Linton, a former Lehman trader, made enough money during the boom years to avoid having to think about their next paychecks. He spends his time flying jets."
  
  
• Women, of course, are screwed, or the Times lets the one post-Lehman interviewee they have project the idea as such: "...There are those like Leslee Gelber, who is out of work, professionally adrift, and fearful that Wall Street will bounce back without her."
  
  
• And then there's the fall-from-grace-into-blue-collar-America story we know all too well: "Jeff Schaefer, a former managing director, for instance, now owns a car wash and gas station in Florida." Oh, and this, the ultimate buck-passing of culpability: we did it due to the demand of our services. Which is akin to smoking crack because it needs to be smoked.

  "How do you blame us? A lot of what we did from an origination standpoint was based on investors' appetite," he says. "Do you think we would just go out and say, ‘I think we're going to do $100 million in no-doc loans?'"

So, people who've fallen from opulence into the struggles of your average American. They're sad in only one regard: the loss effect of someone who goes from having potentially tens of millions of dollars to millions of dollars carries a heavier psychological weight than the person who has nothing but money problems their entire life. Then again, not to throw populism in the mix, but (A) they're not in Darfur and (B) why isn't the Times profiling the janitors at Lehman who smiled at the assholes that would walk in every day, who proceeded to destroy a pension they worked double-digit years earning?

We know these stories, we've heard them too many times before, and they've been told in far more interesting ways already. There's one part of the Times piece that's particularly poignant, however, where the future of America's banking fuckups are found.

There's this:

He says he will steer his oldest son, who just left for college, away from a Wall Street career. The Street, he says, no longer offers the opportunities it once did.

and this:

He also still encourages his college-age son's goal of becoming a trader, a dream hatched in visits with his father to Lehman's mortgage desk in New York.

Guess which quote belongs to who: the guy who passes the buck doing the moral hand-wringing, or the guy just passing the buck, writing off his experiences as a result of the demand. No, really: just guess.

The Observer caught Lebowitz at a Graydon Carter-hosted book party last night and asked her what she thought of the McKinsey consultants descending on Condé Nast:

"Well, I don't think it's anyone working there who hired them!" Ms. Lebowitz said. "The thing is, everyone seeks a lot of advice now. People who make $40,000 a year have financial consultants. 'How should I deal with my money?' Don't spend all of it! It's just common sense."

Annie, you should listen to Frannie.

Badly. Not only was the SEC never able to get an accurate measure on the size of Mr. Madoff's penis, but they also weren't able to catch him after crossing the trail he left several times over a period of time lasting about 17 years. The Wall Street Journal tears into it, teeth bared, as the report more or less implicates the SEC as the Keystone Cops of American Finance. Among the better ones:

• "A May 2003 email from a hedge-fund manager citing 'indicia of a Ponzi scheme,' but the agency months later decided to pursue a different allegation because that's where its expertise lay."
  
  
• In 1992, the SEC looked into two Florida accountants who were getting money to Madoff. They punished the accountants, but not Madoff.
  
  
• 25 people invested with Madoff after the SEC issued a report saying there was no reason to believe Madoff was a crook. Whoops!
  
  
• In May, 2003, a hedge fund manager tipped off the SEC to Madoff's Money not adding up. The SEC senior examiner in charge chose to look at abusive trading practices (called "front-running") instead of the questions raised by the SEC tipster because that's where the senior examiner's "team's area of expertise led." In other words: the senior-examiner thought he'd further his own career by pushing forward on a line of inquiry he knew he could handle as opposed to something he'd have to call in help for. Whoops.
  
  
• A routine examination of a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies, run by a guy named James Simons, yielded internal emails wondering whether or not Madoff's money was real. These emails led to a 2005 SEC investigation of Madoff's funds.
  
  
• My favorite: an anonymous complaint registered with the SEC suggested "a scandal of major proportion." The SEC looked into it, by calling Madoff's lawyer about a specific investor. They asked, he denied, and they dropped it. Wow.

So! To sadists, schadenfreude enthusiasts, and to those of you who fetishize and enjoy the fuckups of an overinflated bureaucracy, of fraud perpetrated in proportions otherwise unseen, and of people losing millions and millions of dollars, the entire thing will make a great read, and can be downloaded here. To those of you who lost any amount of money to Bernie Madoff and have dutifully paid taxes assuming that one day that money would go to protect you in the event of something like this, uh, yeah, you're not gonna be happy.

• Oprah once dedicated an episode on domestic violence to all "the Rihannas in the world," which Chris Brown described as a "slap in the face" because he has helped Oprah and Africa and the world, so he deserves respect and Oprah can suck it and should have offered assistance. [MSNBC]
  
  
• Rihanna has clearly moved on from Chris Brown: the singer has been running around Los Angeles with Travis London, who has been "linked," whatever that means, to Mary-Kate Olsen. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Susan Boyle's album, which comes out in November, has hit Amazon's number one music slot, which means she's beating out the legendary Whitney Houston. That's got to hurt. [3am]
  
  
• The Miss Universe court has confirmed that Donald Trump helps pick the top 15, but absolutely promise the top ten are picked by outside judges. [Page Six]
  
  
• When Jerry Powers sold out his Ocean Drive magazine to Niche Media, he signed a noncompete contract. But now he's suing to be released so he can start a new glossy and publish a teen-targeted non-profit publication, which Niche rudely considers competition. [Page Six]
  
  
• Celebrity baby fans, pay attention: Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs have welcomed their first child, a son named Walter, into the world. Rejoice! [NYDN]
  
  
• Crazed fans held up filming on Sex and the City Sequel when they swarmed Cynthia Nixon, forcing her to barricade herself in her trailer until enough holy water could be delivered. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• A tabloid recently ragged on Russell Crowe for eating tacos and smoking while he was meant to be riding his bike with a trainer. Not one to let others make an ass of him, Crowe has now challenged the gossip columnist to a two-wheeled duel. [Mirror]
  
  
• Speaking of hold ups, Nike has put off plans to release the late DJ AM's shoe line. The company and his family have discuss the "next step in terms of release." Does that mean money? [TMZ]

Ms. Nielsen runs a porn site called GodsGirls, and no, it doesn't prominently feature BARELY LEGAL CHOIR CHICKS, though surely, there's one out there that does. GodsGirls is an "alt-porn" site (read: tattooed, pierced hipsters, often with asymmetrical and/or dyed hair, nekkid) that also has a social networking component to it! Genius. Per the site's FAQ:

"What the fuck is this site?"

godsgirls.com is an alt porn/alt erotica site with a lot of really really amazing, 100 percent exclusive pictures that you can't see anywhere else. the ladies are very lovely and some of them have tattoos and piercings and rebellious haircuts. it also features a community set up to act as a place for the wonderful sort of people who might subscribe to this site to get to know one another and exchange telephone numbers and jokes and funny websites and maybe even get married and have a family and then we could run a sweet commercial featuring happy love connections made between site members like the ones you see for jdate or eharmony or whatever. wouldn't that be fantastic? or you can just talk about boobs and politics because meeting people from the internet is dangerous and scary.

Yes! Like J-Date, except for non-denominational fans of pierced people porn. Like-minded folks, as it goes. And why do we think Ms. Nielsen won? Let's turn to her Twitter—which sounds naughty, but it isn't!—as pointed out to us by our friend Igor at (the mildly NSFW) Driven By Boredom:

Sure sounds like a winner to me. Also: the winner's from San Gabriel, which is where Nielsen supposedly hails from.

Notably, Nielsen's last Tweet came in around fourteen hours ago, which doesn't look to be the typical output by her. If you won the lottery, you think you'd be on Twitter today? Sorry Evan and Biz, but your consolation prize is that you've had your first life-changing lottery winner liveblog! Maybe she'll throw you a buck.

In the event this does turn out to be true, we wish America's Newest Multimillionare a fruitful life henceforth with all the cold, hard cash she's gonna have. Of course, for her sake, we (A) hope she's right and (B) gets someone good to tell her what to do with it in lieu of circumventing the common ruin a windfall of money can bring. In the mean time, all of you hardworking, morally rigid suckers can get back to work (and dreaming). Today, the universe apparently enjoys the business of naked girls more than whatever you do. Sorry.

Update: Well, we had a question, we got an answer: she didn't win. Tragedy and the power of social networking! We were rooting for her, too. The universe isn't down with porn enough to merit giving one of its burgeoning businesswomen a windfall of cash, it appears. On the plus side, we've narrowed down the field of possible Mega Millions winners by one. Someone in San Gabriel: you still have a chance!

Goldman's write-around profile of an artist in crisis goes a long way toward explaining exactly how the world's most celebrated celebrity photographer wound up hocking her photographic legacy to keep up with her mounting bills. Mostly it's that she never cared about how much anything cost, was an obsessive perfectionist, and trusted the wrong accountant.

Here's Annie the spendthrift:

Leibovitz had also built a life that had become extraordinarily expensive to maintain. It wasn't just the mortgages on the homes. It was the Range Rover, the trips to Paris, the chef and housekeeper, the handyman, the personal yoga instructor, the terrace gardener, and the live-in nanny. There was only one man Leibovitz deemed qualified to work on anything involving air-conditioning or ductwork at either residence, and he lived in Vermont. "She wanted her life to be like a magazine spread," Kellum says. "Everything beautiful, nothing out of place. She wanted everything to be perfect."

Along the same lines, Goldman reports, she flew in kid-song star Dan Zanes and Rosanne Cash to perform at her daughter's first birthday party.

As for Annie the perfectionist, in 2007, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown asked Leibovitz to take the author jacket photo for her book about Princess Diana. Leibovitz showed up with two cars bearing a stylist, an assistant, a wardrobe, and a wind machine, and tried to extend the shoot to a second day after she was unsatisfied with the first days' results. Leibovitz was bearing the cost of the shoot herself.

That sort of behavior tends to pile up the debts, and in 2007 Leibovitz—who had an extremely hard time doing simple things like signing her own prints in order to make a lot of money selling them—fired her accountant Rick Kantor and manager Jimmy Moffat, who told Goldman that they had done what they could to rein in Leibovitz's spending. She replaced them with an accountant named Kenneth Starr (no relation), who had worked with Wesley Snipes (!). It was Starr who introduced Leibovitz to Art Capital Group. Goldman says Leibovitz didn't run the loan by her family or agent, and had no idea what she was getting into. She was shocked by a New York Times article reporting that she'd put her photos up as collateral:

"Trust me," says her sister Paula. "She thought it was a pure loan. That New York Times article was as much news to her as it was to anybody else."

Interestingly, the loan was financed by Goldman Sachs, which seems to be behind every epic collapse these days, and Goldman is now distancing itself from Art Capital: "We are deeply troubled by recent developments concerning Annie Leibovitz and Art Capital," Goldman (the firm) told Goldman (the writer). "Goldman Sachs owns a portion of the loan underwritten by an affiliate of Art Capital to Annie Leibovitz, but we have no involvement in the current sales-agreement dispute between Art Capital and Ms. Leibovitz. We have proposed to Art Capital that we terminate the current loan agreement with their affiliate so that we can work directly with Ms. Leibovitz to help her resolve her financing needs."

The one question that Goldman doesn't answer: Where did she get the money that she was spending so liberally? When Leibovitz went to Art Capital, her mortgage debts totaled $15.5 million. Half that, Goldman notes, was owed to her employer Condé Nast itself. (We broke that story two weeks ago, but Goldman doesn't credit us. We forgive him both because he is a stand-up gent and because he found out about it independently before we did, but sat helpless while New York's publication schedule worked its slow magic and the internet kept going.) But Leibovitz borrowed $24 million, indicating that there was an additional $9 million or so in debt she was facing—otherwise why borrow that much more than she needed for a short-term loan? There were other debts, including about $700,000 in lawsuits from unpaid vendors and a million or so in tax liens. But no matter how you cut it, Leibovitz appears to have owed millions more than we currently know about. We have a good idea what she spent it on, but where did it come from? Who else was loaning Leibovitz money? It's an especially interesting question because Leibovitz was never a good credit risk—as far back as the 1980s, Goldman writes, she had trouble getting an American Express card even as she was shooting ad campaigns for American Express (an ad agency intervened and arranged for her to get a card after Leibovitz lost an envelope full of cash she kept handy to pay vendors).

Somehow, it seems, Leibovitz managed to get nearly $10 million in the hole over and above the mortgages on her homes. Was that all on her AmEx? We don't think so.

Yes: "squeak by," as in the article's title: "Squeaking By On $300,000." Now, give the writer the benefit of the doubt. Surely, she knows that $300,000 a year is opulence to some American families, right? She couldn't just write this in a bubble in which that's not much money. Hell, she doesn't make nearly that much money herself. And the case Washington Post staff writer Anne Hull — now the Cintra Wilson of Washinton Post staff writers — tries to be fair.

It goes something like: various expenses and a bad real estate market, paired with investments (houses, cars, private schooling) made in better times have now become fiscal traps that could - theoretically, bear with me - become difficult to edge your way out of. Right?

Let's skip to the very last line in the piece:

"We might live in nice houses and drive nice cars, but we're just holding on," she says. Perfect looks perfect from a distance.

Oh, yes. More:

The decline is found in the fine print. On the bulletin board at the YMCA in Rye, for example, where nannies and maids who've been let go look for new employment. On the wait list at the $7,000-a-year nursery school at Rye Presbyterian Church, where only 30 names hover instead of the usual 300. On the sleepy crime blotter of the Rye Police Department, which shows an increase in neighbor and domestic tensions. "You have a guy who was at the top of his game on Wall Street," explains Police Commissioner William Connors. "For the first time, he gets up in the morning and he has no place to go." He hears a neighbor using a loud leaf blower at 7 in the morning and calls the police to complain.

When Wall Street crashed, so did this community.

It's like the exact opposite of recession porn. And you know what? Why not?

Why not write a story that's not often told? It's something different. It's a story we otherwise don't hear about. A somehow common, yet obscure human story of voices drowned out by larger, louder complaints of economic hardship onto economic hardship. Isn't this what the people want to read? Judging by the comments on the piece, now at 628...

...no.

The New York state government took $140 million of the Obama stimulus money, and, along with $35 million from Soros, decided to give it to poor kids. But only poor kids! Sure, they are going to immediately go spend that money on school supplies, because poor families are not traditionally known for saving and investing effectively, and that will "stimulate" the economy and help poor kids, but we all know that giving money to poor kids is pointless and irresponsible.

That is why Drudge highlighted this miserable story of mothers in the Bronx taking the free money to buy uniforms for their kids, this morning. Presumably we're meant to skip to this bit at the end:

Paterson's Republican critics blasted the giveaway, saying he should spend the money to reduce property taxes.

"It is a plan that is ripe for fraud and abuse," said Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos. "This is a totally irresponsible use of federal stimulus money."

Yes, right, lowering property taxes is definitely what should've been done with this $140 million of cash, because that is how stimulus spending works. Actually Paterson should've just given it directly to landlords, probably.

[Photo: Getty]