• Fancy newspaper columnist Edmund Andrews wrote a book about why you should buy his book so the proceeds of his book can go to paying off his subprime mortgage. AIG gave it a AAA rating, which is why the entire universe has already pre-ordered on Amazon. [Matt Taibbi]
• Back when Money Czar Henry Paulson ran things, you weren’t allowed to leave a “working dinner” until you finished the box of Franzia Merlot that was duct-taped to your stomach. And then there was Timmy Geithner, the prude. [Politico]
• Barack Obama has a secret caging list he keeps on his BlackBerry, which is used to disenfranchise Dodge Durangos and other Chrysler products. [RedState]
• A pharmaceutical company has fulfilled an ancient Aztec prophesy — and a more recent Bill Kristol prediction — by tragically “sterilizing” marijuana in the form of a not-cool oral spray. [Slate]
• John Yoo, the microphallus who wrote Abu Ghraib fan fiction for the Bush Administration, has mercilessly broadsided Sonia-Maria Sotomayor with his creative grammar: “credentials do not an excellent justice make.” You should be expecting that royalty check in the mail any day now, Yoda. [The Enterprise Blog]

Oh hey here is a novel idea: in order to save our tragically beleaguered financial system, we must 1) replace the management at failing banks and 2) liquidate the banks that are completely hosed beyond repair. This makes sense to pretty much everyone, and our new boyfriend Simon Johnson said something like that a while ago on NPR so it must be true. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Well, if Prince is singing about AIG or something, then the recession must officially be sexy! It all makes sense, really: most pastimes Americans have up to this point enjoyed involve spending gobs of money ultimately derived from home equity lines of credit — with the sexy exception of sex, which is often “free,” and can take place in foreclosed condos and hobo shantytowns. MORE »

In the beloved tradition of “Is Eliot Spitzer Secret Phone Muppet?”, we bring you this picture of Treasury creep Tim “Turbo Tax” Geithner and this pot-reeking piano-playing lunatic from the classic kids film Reefer Madness. Have these two ever been seen together? No wonder Obama doesn’t want to legalize his dope — then Geithner would really go bananas.

Earlier we showed Barney Frank yelling at the goddamn Code Pink hippies on multiple occasions, but what else happened during this latest 94-hour grandstanding spectacle of a House Financial Services Committee hearing? Why the economy got saved, of course! Ha ha. (Kill us.) America’s C-SPAN watchers did, however, get to see such luminaries as Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and Maxine Waters confuse and/or irritate the hell out of Geithner and Bernanke (mostly Geithner — he scowls!) Plus there was this crazy guy from Illinois whom Bernanke shot down during a rare burst of self-confidence. Hooray for Congress! Burn it! MORE »

Here’s your “Tuesday Lunch Video,” hooray! During today’s House Financial Services Committee hearings with archvillains Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, Barney Frank interrupted each of them to admonish the daring Code Pink protesters in the room, who came with their usual cardboard signs and cat calls and what not. He told them to “grow up” because they were NOT HELPING THE BANKS with this behavior. More importantly, the CNN chyron brings us a crucial “UPDATE” during this clip: “Meghan McCain: ‘I support the president.’” So she’s a communist now, too. [YouTube, Salon]

The stock market has rallied in response to Tim Geithner’s latest details on his plan to fix America’s Banks by giving them lots of money for their trash, which makes sense, because the new plan is good good GOOD for Wall Street! Imagine a world where the government put up like 85% of the financing for something that you wanted — a robot, say — and you only had to throw in 5%. But after realizing that the robot was, indeed a piece of crap, made from defaulted mortgage contracts instead of the usual metals, the government lost all of that 85% investment, and you only lost 5%, so whatever. Let us look into this modern marvel of financial engineering known as the “Public-Private Investment Fund.” MORE »

Really, this rigmarole about Chris Dodd being the lyingest liar of liars who is responsible for the AIG bonuses because he took money from their contributors before the company broke down is… weak. Trite even! MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Ha ha, another week gone, another week in which our economy and the posh lifestyle it has afforded us continues to circle the drain, leading us inevitably towards despair! This has of course led to much finger-pointing, recrimination, etc. Should Tim Geithner be in charge of the Treasury? Should the entire class of jackholes who ran the financial services industry for the last decade be purged? And if so, who should we replace them with? Oh, sure, you liberals will be all like “Trained government bureaucrats!” But is that really “outside the box” enough for our current predicament? What if instead we turned to the animal kingdom? They could do all the work, while we relaxed and lived like kings! MORE »

Eek, would you want to be locked in a room getting yelled at by Henry Waxman for hours and hours? Because that is how Tim Geithner got to spend his Monday night, hooray! He has the worst job in America, worse even than those people who clean up murder scenes or give Rush Limbaugh enemas. MORE »

The Washington Post has an extraordinary article today about why Tim Geithner’s press conference to unveil the administration’s bank rescue plan last week seemed to… suck? Is that the word? Well it wasn’t the plan, so much — as best we understood this vague monstrosity, it was something like, “Public private money tax blah blah uhhh force lending guarantee toxic gas blah blah blah uhhhhh TWO TRILLION DOLLARS,” so fair enough — so much as it was Geithner himself, who appeared to have no confidence in himself, the plan, or America. The Post reports that this is probably because he had ditched a different plan a few days earlier, and what you heard at the press conference was just some unreadable gibberish he threw together on the john a few minutes before taking the podium. MORE »