Today's Bathroom Reading

Jim Cramer "The Bottom Line" (New York Magazine) March 21, 2008 * * 1/2

And believe me, the only character who ever played more hardball with the government than the CEO of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, was Michael Corleone when he negotiated his casino deal with Senator Geary in Godfather II. Like Michael, Dimon basically told Treasury and the Fed, “My offer is this: nothing.” The Feds countered with $2; Jamie Dimon said, Throw in $30 billion in loan guarantees against Bear’s bad mortgage portfolio—the Corleone equivalent of Geary’s putting up the fee personally for the casino’s gaming license!—and you get your deal done in time to save the free world’s financial system. The government, which had been hoping to get $20 for Bear, a $10 haircut from Friday’s close, had no choice, and Dimon got his casino, with a billion-dollar headquarters thrown in.

Sean McManus "If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?" (New York Magazine) April 21, 2008 * * *

Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the results of its “Religious Landscape” survey in February and found that 16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. “Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don’t feel like they need an organization,” says Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. “They’re so independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don’t join an organization—they start their own.”

William Safire "In The Tank" (New York Times) April 20, 2008 * * * *

A tank was the 19th-century term for what we now call a swimming pool; the metaphor evoked a picture of diving to the ring’s canvas-covered floor — as if into a pool — to feign loss of consciousness. “By extension,” Dickson reports, “when a fighter or anything else (including a stock) takes a nose dive he or she has tanked.”
That’s what the Time columnist Joe Klein meant when he told CNN that Hillary Clinton “is not going to be able to put together the math to win this nomination unless Obama tanks completely.” It’s also where we get “the economy is tanking,” as the Henny Pennys of the dismal science like to say, though such alarmists do not impute a crooked intent to any hard landing.