• Maurice R. Greenberg, the impossibly geriatric former head of AIG, has been quietly luring young, unsuspecting insurance execs to his new firm. [New York Times]
• Harry Reid promised out loud that the new health care bill will have a public option, which means it actually might! [Washington Post]
• Like half an hour ago, NASA sent the the largest rocket ever (327 ft.) into space. The moon was unharmed. [CNN]
• Starting nowish, a Senate committee will meet for the next three days in order to figure out some tenable clean energy initiatives. It’s bipartisan, because look: Lamar Alexander! [Reuters]
• Over the last three days, 700 adults were arrested in sweeping sex-with-children raids that spanned 36 cities. [Los Angeles Times]
• The Somali pirates not only continue to exist if everyone pretty much ignores them, they also apparently continue to kidnap British people. [Times Online]

America’s greatest company, AIG, has a new CEO! How should he introduce himself to the American public, which has like an 80 percent stake in his company, but doesn’t really “own” it? As an industrious servant of the common man, of course! And that he does, in his big “debut” interview, with Reuters: “DUBROVNIK, Croatia (Reuters)—Wearing flip-flops, khaki shorts and a green polo shirt, the new chief executive of bailed-out insurer American International Group (AIG) says he’s getting a lot of work done from his massive villa overlooking the Adriatic. ‘People criticize me for being on vacation. I actually started work a week before I was actually supposed to,’ Robert Benmosche told Reuters in an interview.” Good lord. Things must be just stable enough now that these robberbarons don’t have to give a shit anymore about presenting themselves through shiny, remorseful PR channels. [Reuters]

Is that insanely cheap for commercial real estate? Seems like! Anyhow, the haunted million-square-foot carcass of the former AIG headquarters at 70 Pine and 72 Wall Street in beautiful New York City appears to have found a buyer for the bargain-basement price of $100 million. Who’s the lucky winner, Donald Trump? The Cato Institute? The buyers “would have been carefully vetted,” a source told the New York Post, from which we can conclude it’s just Tom Daschle wasting the last of his lunch money. [New York Post]

Hey remember just like a couple months ago when everybody was so angry over the AIG bonuses? Get ready to be outraged all over again because duh, of course a whole bunch of people knew these bonuses were going to be awarded and they did nothing to stop it because they were too busy saving the whole financial system from ruin. Bad PR move! MORE »

• WHAT HE NEEDS TO DO IS WRITE ANOTHER NYT OP-ED DESCRIBING THE INS-AND-OUTS OF RESOLVING A COMMODITY BUSINESS: Jake DeSantis, the AIG executive who recently penned a very nuanced take in the New York Times about why he deserves a publicly funded $750,000 bonus that otherwise would’ve been laughed out of bankruptcy court, is still working at that damn company, even though his NYT column was supposedly a resignation letter. Anyone have a ballpark figure on how long it takes to “resolve a commodity business?” [Daily Intel]

Wonkette drive-by operative “Gerogia” from Tessennee sends this photo and writes: “AIG was founded in Nashville. I live near the HQ in Nashville. A few days after the bonus debacle they blacked out the AIG logo. On my way to the gym last week I was startled by this new sign. I guess they renamed themselves and the marketing wizards are billing us (TAXPAYERS) for new signage, letterhead, business cards ect … Seriously this is what they are busy doing with our money …” SOMETHING LIKE THAT. They replaced the AIG logo with that of one of its non-corrupt subsidiaries. Meh, same difference to us. So now you’ll want to throw your Molotov cocktails at and poop on all AGLA signs, fyi.

Whoa, weird, Fox Business News has a delightful scoop today! They won a suit against the Treasury to release 10,000 pages in TARP-related government records, and for the good of mankind have already found a couple of funny anecdotes revealing cartoonish confusion and conflict. We’re starting to understand the mechanics of how AIG rips off the federal government so easily: the old racist means of pitting the bureaucrats against each other until they’ve all been killed off. MORE »

Here is your Minneapolis man Prince, on the Jay Leno (!) show, just cold singing about AIG and income inequality and hard times and such, with an honest “but me” when he mentions the old neighborhood. Good or bad? We are not sure! Not bad, though. Dylan and his three gospel singers, pretty much, 1979, + Stevie Wonder harmonica, Joe Strummer guitar toss, ice cold. Uhm. OPEN THREAD. [via Tony Pierce]

Earlier today we mentioned CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry’s performance at the press conference last night, and how he and his fellow busybodies were rapidly spinning and spinning and spinning to make it appear as though he didn’t look like a goober when Obama called him a twat. In the latest effort, Henry has written an exclusive article for CNN.com called, “What really happened with Obama.” It is approximately 5,000 words and includes sports metaphors, heavy doses of edge-of-your-seat drama, tricks o’ the trade, and maybe a little bit of SELF-SATISFACTION. To reiterate our headline, it is the worst article in American history, at least since yesterday when K-Lo wrote something funny about Notre Dame and abortions. MORE »

Well this is sort of neat! An actual AIG-FP executive wrote an op-ed in the Times explaining why he is not the most evil biological form on the planet short of the Ebola virus, and he makes some good points, such as: not everybody in the AIG-FP unit fucked up the world. It was only the credit default swap people. MORE »

This is what it was like in Soviet USSR Russia, we bet! The guy, on the teevee, every night. Five year plans, advancing upon the enemy stronghold, great progress made in the Martian Dirt Wars, etc. We don’t know FOR SURE about this, as we arrived in the USSR about two weeks after it officially ended — this is true! — and by then it was all tits & death metal on the RUBIN black-and-white set. Anyway, is the recession over yet? Has Komrade Obama talked it away, while his douche-bots in the East Room try to act like they understand anything beyond do-nuts and Twitter? MORE »