Lehman Brothers Bank files bankruptcy
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aPTIdpST8HJ0&refer=home

80% of American International Group bought out by government
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/52646.html?mi_email=McClatchy%20Washington%20Bureau_DC+Newsletter

Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/opinion/18kristof.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin (go to http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com to get around the stupid compulsory sign-in)

WaMu looks for buyer
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008187176_wamu180.html

Paulson warns US is DIRE PERIL if $700B not passed
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080923/bs_afp/usfinancebanking_080923125015

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley try to become banks
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aoHW3zyqTeAA&refer=home

Washington Mutual biggest bank to fail in US history
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080926/ap_on_bi_ge/washington_mutual_future;_ylt=AnEIJKy9YVD57iHPIHRrM.Ws0NUE

WaMu gives its new CEO a golden parachute of $20M for 17 days of work
http://boards.msn.com/MSNBCboards/thread.aspx?threadid=795214

Royal Bank of Scotland gets billions in bailout
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2453817.0.0.php

Paul O'Neill says Paulson bank bailout is 'crazy'
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=atJMmClVjevU&refer=home

JPMorgan Chase had a computer named Zippy; produced memo called "Zippy Cheats & Tricks"
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2008/03/chase_mortgage_memo_pushes_che.html

Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers punched in the face
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3150319/Richard-Fuld-punched-in-face-in-Lehman-Brothers-gym.html

AIG executives on $440,000 CA retreat ($500\night)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081008/D93M0K6G3.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/07/creditcrunch.useconomy

Dana Perino doesn't know how recessions work
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/perino-impossible-to-say-if-country-is-in-a-recession-2008-10-07.html

AIG may ask for more $$
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6048251.html

Emerg meeting held for Lehman Brothers
http://apnews.myway.com//article//20080913/D935QG380.html

US finance system falls apart
http://uk.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUKN0927996520080914?sp=true

William Greider on the bailout
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Greider/America_Economic_FreeFall.html

(I may edit this a bit later.)

"LA VAQUERITA"

"CHAMBONEA"

"EL CONEJITO"

The President's Former Treasury Secretary Speaks Out About $700 Billion Bailout

By SCOTT MAYEROWITZ
ABC NEWS Business Unit  Sept. 25, 2008

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said today that our nation's leaders -- especially President Bush -- are "in a panic" and haven't thought through the $700 billion bailout plan very well in a rush to pass a plan by the end of the week.

"I don't think he understands or knows much about any of this and it shows," O'Neill said, adding that current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "knows a lot of about this, and it's good that he's there."

O'Neill, who served as Bush's first treasury secretary until being fired over diverging views with the president about tax cuts and other issues, didn't have favorable things to say about the economic policies of either presidential candidates, Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain.

"I think most of what has been said by both campaigns about economic stuff is ill-informed and ill-advised," he said. Asked for specifics, O'Neill said, "Everything."

"Hopefully, whichever one of these two people ends up being president, my prayer is that they will be better than what they have said in the campaign," O'Neill said in an interview with ABC News this afternoon.

"We have spun ourselves into a position where intelligent people don't believe they can tell the people the truth and still get elected, so they pander," he added. "One can only hope that they understand the difference between campaigning and governing, and that their governing will be better than what their campaign said."

The Bailout Plan

O'Neill said that "we do need to do something to avert a complete collapse of the credit system" but added the administration's bailout plan shouldn't the only option.

"It is possible to re-liquefy the credit system without 'We the People' owning $700 billion worth of homes," he said.

Instead, O'Neill would like for the government to calculate the present value of the mortgage-backed investments and then insure, rather than own, those assets.

Essentially, O'Neill said, we run the risk of become the largest owner of foreclosed properties in the world.

"We have notoriously no capability to do anything like that," he said. "There is no agency of government that could actually do that job."

Praying for Congress

O'Neill is pegging his hopes on Congressional leaders to investigate that option, because the Bush administration has the "door locked and they haven't taken on any new ideas."

So why is the president and his administration pushing so hard for this plan?

"I think it's because they're in a panic and they haven't thought about it very well," O'Neill said.

The bailout process risks being bogged down by a number of "sideshow issues," O'Neill said, including executive pay and aid for homeowners.

"Not a lot of people are saying, 'Slow down.' They've actually done something a lot worse than say,

'Slow down.' They've introduced a whole bunch of sideshow issues like executive compensation and oversight committees," O'Neill said. "All of that stuff is not relevant to the central problem of re-liquefying these financial instruments."

He said there is "flagrant overcompensation" of CEOs but that is a separate issue that is not relevant to the crisis.

"This is a side show, and it's frankly irritating as hell that the political process is so incompetent that it can't differentiate the important from the trivial," O'Neill said. "Right now, we have a kind of stay of execution, and workable, meaningful legislation is the only thing that is going to keep us from getting executed."

Helping out homeowners is also a separate issue in O'Neill's mind.

"It's not to say that you don't feel compassion and sorrow for people that have got financial problems," he said. "But if your solution is to give them more money, then you're going to have to take it away from somebody who's got it."

Having this crisis hit right before a key election is not helping.

"It complicates it because [Congress is] wanting to rush out of town &133; and get reelected," O'Neill said. "So rather than doing this in a deliberate way and hearing from a lot of different, careful points of view, they desperately want to be able to leave town on Friday and not come back until the day after the election."

Mortgage Meltdown Causes

O'Neill said we got into this mess because bankers were not making prudent decisions, because they believed that by reselling mortgages to Wall Street they weren't going to be stuck with the problems.

"We suspended disbelief and said we can take people with no known source income or wealth generation and we can give them a $500,000 mortgage," he said. "I think there's a very important thing: When you violate fundamental principles of economics you can get away with it for a while, but eventually it's going to get you."

Does O'Neill wish he was still in office?

"I wish I was there two years ago became I think I would have blown the whistle of these unbelievable loan practices and we would never gotten to today," he said. "That might be wishful thinking. It's not possible to really know that. But I'm a detail guy and I think I would have been paying enough attention to the details that I would have stopped the music."

O'Neill has been asked by the Obama campaign "on several occasions" to take part in conversations with the candidate on the economy with the understanding that his participation doesn't represent an endorsement. He said he would be willing to offer the same help to McCain but hasn't been asked.

Last Friday, he was on the telephone with an Obama meeting that involved the candidate, his running mate Sen. Joseph Biden, investor Warren Buffet, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former treasury secretaries Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, and the former chairwoman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Laura Tyson.

"I'm happy to be part of that kind of opportunity to talk about serious issues and bring the knowledge I have to bear on what people are thinking," O'Neill said. "I'm happy to do that, and I'd do it for either party."

Winners from the Santa Cruz Skim Fest earlier this month were Adam Loera, Corey Ryan, and George Bryan.

O'Neill's America is a big recycling bank, processing the exiled, the dispossessed, the junk of the world. During his two years in the wilderness (spanning 2002-04), Hans turns to cricket, and the company of a shady businessman, Chuck Ramkissoon. Narrated from a distant vantage point in 2006, the story takes the form of a disjointed, whimsical, dreamy tour through the fog of Hans' banal and miserable memories. Indeed, the narration is so distant that when pivotal events took place I felt like I was watching through a net curtain -- unlike, say, Damon Galgut, O'Neill spurns immediacy.

There is an interesting whiff of W.G. Sebald here. But where Sebald writes fiction in the guise of travel writing, O’Neill writes travel writing in the guise of fiction. The novel is self-evidently, embarrassingly autobiographical -- Hans never convinces as an investment banker but is a perfect alterego for a cricket-loving, self-consciously lyrical novelist. The book, gently plotted, thin on action or interaction of any kind, is worth reading largely for its immensely pretty descriptive prose and wonderfully rich sense of place. Some of O'Neill's observations are gorgeously on-the-money:

The tail lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit store fronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York.

But O’Neill comes off badly in the comparison to Sebald. Too often the book drifts from poetic beauty to pompous nonsense. When every sentence aims for Banville-at-his-best lyricism, some are bound to fall flat, and plenty do:

Before long the night had assumed the character of an evil black soup, sampled somewhere along the line, whose bitty, fatty constituents rose sickeningly to the surface before sinking back again into a spoon-deep dark.

And I can’t help thinking London and New York are too overdescribed in literature, too cliché — O’Neill can’t mould them to his own ends in the way Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn (1995), makes Suffolk indisputably his.

The result is a competent and impressive piece of writing that, like cricket, entertains subtly and coolly -- but, like cricket, leaves you wondering if you might have better spent the time on something a little more alive and emotionally grabbing.

5. There's a chance Pavano will *gulp* not suffer from a new injury this year. Gotta love more Yankee history.

4. Must see if Moose can manage to get to 20 for the first time in his career. I know everyone is rooting for him. He more than deserves it.

3. There's still the last game in Yankee Stadium to look forward to and who wouldn't want to see if the Yanks can bash them out of the ballpark in celebration of the Stadium... or embarrass themselves again. Either way it'll be news.

2. To see the reaction of the players as they get closer and closer to being mathematically eliminated. My mind is still trying to imagine what Jeter will say when his team officially won't make it to the postseason for the first time in his career. I can pretty much bet the $2 I have in my pocket right now that the players will be relatively calm and will make statements somewhere along the lines of  "What can you do?" or "Bottom line: We didn't play well" or "Now all we can do is get vamped up and do what we can to get ready for next year." Is it too much to ask for someone to get erratically furious? Bring O'Neill back to the Stadium. I need to see some cooler smashing.

1. Lastly... C'mon, is it not sheer entertainment hearing Joe G.'s various statements of denial? My favorites of the year so far: "It's not the end of the world" and "There's still a lot to play for." Hmm... yeah, I'm not sure 3rd place can be considered as "something to play for." Maybe it is in the underwater world of the Marlins but in Yankee Universe... not so much.

If you guys think up any other good reasons, let me know.

P.S. Yes, a post with no great picture... it's rare, but it does happen.

tratto da articolo del Sole24Ore del 5/9/2008

Il bello della finanza è che le opinioni possono essere continuamente cambiate, in fondo non è mai chiaro chi abbia ragione. Questa è una notizia che potete facilmente trovare dopo ogni giornata di forte ribasso azionario. Alla prima giornata di discreto rialzo avremo modo di leggere qualcosa di ben diverso..... come se gli scenari economici potessero cambiare in pochi giorni o magari in poche ore. :-)

La Rideuse du Team O'NEILL, Amandine SANCHEZ devient la marraine du Premier Club de Surf à PARIS: Le ROAD SURF CLUB.

La TEAM GIRLS RSC comptent bien apporter leur pierre à l’édifice, dans le cadre de la démocratisation du Surf féminin. Mais, surtout, elles souhaitent partager leur passion avec celles qui ont toujours souhaité « se jeter à l’eau » sans oser le faire…

Amandine aidera les aidera au mieux dans cette tache.

O’NEILL DEVIENT PARTENAIRE OFFICIEL DU ROAD SURF CLUB... La célèbre marque de Surf Californienne O’NEILL est devenue le partenaire officiel du Premier Club de Surf à PARIS.

Après seulement sept mois d’existence, le ROAD SURF CLUB fait toujours parler de lui.

Cette association "hors normes" est devenue au fil des mois le Club de Surf référence à PARIS.

O’NEILL rejoint la longue liste de nos partenaires :

• ALLOSURF
• TRIP SURF
• FEDERATION FRANCAISE DE SURF
• AVENUE DE LA GLISSE
• CHATTANOOGA
• MANGO SURF
• INNOVACTIONS ]]> http://jseliger.wordpress.com/?p=348 Sun, 24 Aug 2008 04:31:15 +0000 Jake Seliger http://jseliger.nl.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/netherland-%e2%80%94-joseph-oneill/ Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is a puzzling novel whose comparisons to The Great Gatsby aren't warranted; although the two share some superficial themes in the sense of making America, their dissimilar narrative structure further separates them. At a sufficient level of abstraction, they bear some similarities, but in going too far toward generalities one loses the particulars that uphold those generalities. One becomes the literary equivalent of an architecture astronaut.

Another qualification: "puzzling" is not necessarily a slander—Ulysses puzzled the first time through, and a novel that starts in confusion might end in brilliant harmony, like John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. For Netherland, it connotes my uncertainty about how to evaluate a book so perilously treading the narrow path between profundity and random observation that I can't ascertain which side it strays toward. This might be its great virtue. Unlike, say, Sleepless Nights, it is coherent; but unlike, say, The Name of the Rose, it doesn't wear many of its meanings on its sleeves. When Netherland does, it is least successful, and within that least successful field is Rachel; she says, for example, "Darling, I've got to move on. You've got to move on. We can't go on like this, waiting for something to happen." She speaks in cliché when she's not speaking in armchair psychologist.

This is especially problematic because Rachel is the primary female character in Netherland. She's married to Hans. They have a son. Theirs are issues of marriage and family, and in another instance of separation from Gatsby, that novel's hero has the concerns of adolescence: the yearning for the unavailable girl, the creation of identity via effort to make one's self greater through bravado and material possessions, and the endless chase. Hans is a family man and a more active character than Nick Carraway—while the latter functions chiefly as a reporter and is the conduit through which Gatsby flows, Hans is a stronger character in his own right and imprints more of his personality and views on events. Granted, that personality is most often dour and depressed, but it is unmediated. Rachel, although more independent than, say, Daisy, nonetheless shares Daisy's flatness, and both reify Leslie Fiedler's argument regarding the juvenile male character of American literature, made in Love and Death in the American Novel.

At one point, Rachel tells Hans:

"You were just happy to play with [Chuck]. Same thing with America. You're like a child. You don't look beneath the surface."
My reaction to her remark is to think, Look beneath Chuck's surface? For what?

The dialog not involving Rachel is usually much better than this and sometimes very good, but Rachel does bring out O'Neill's tendency to play with Big Themes explicitly, which is an unfortunate trait in a book often much more subtle than this. Hans observes this, but the observation and self-knowledge doesn't excuse the habit any more, if it ever did.

Later on, Hans recalls the sensation of staring at the sky as a boy, and in simple language conveys the mystery of existence and pondering existence, creating a powerful moment in sharp contrast to Rachel's eye-rolling. Dropping from story into philosophy is another separation from Gatsby, which doesn't tend to have this strain between plot and ideas, perhaps because Nick isn't as strong a personality as Hans and Gatsby focuses on the unattainable Daisy rather than the narrator.

Still, the persistence of the Gatsby allusions are notable, but the novel gets past them with ideas of its own, and some of its praise is not undeserved. In the New Yorker, James Wood wrote:

Despite cricket’s seeming irrelevance to America, the game makes his exquisitely written novel “Netherland” (Pantheon; $23.95) a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read. Cricket, like every sport, is an activity and the dream of an activity, badged with random ideals, aspirations, and memories.

A large fictional achievement? Perhaps. Its academic and critical appeal is apparent from the subtle narrative shifts, as if the ground moves up or down a few degrees as you walk on it, the cultural intersections, and the frequent bouts of existential despair. Granted, I'm half-mocking such appeal, but I can see Netherland's fit from the timeline shifts and the Big Ideas bursting forth in a way that comes perilously close to destroying the story vessel carrying them. Skepticism about conventional ideas, even once-unconventional ideas that have since become conventional, appears: a "shrink [...] subscribed to the fine, progressive notion that each day we have lived is a kind of possession and, if we are its alert custodian, brings us ever closer to knowledge of the slipperiest kind." Chuck Ramkissoon, a foreigner and sometime friend of Hans', is a "Magic Negro" who acts as a liminar while becoming a repository for much of Hans' musings about the nature of the world and success.

Their relationship is one of the central beams in Netherland, but not the only one. It differs from Gatsby, All the King's Men, and Moby Dick, in that the first-person protagonist, rather than being drawn taunt between telling his own story and telling the story of the great man around him, is fundamentally the center of the novel's universe. It also allows a narrator somewhat bigger than those of Ishmael or Carraway, which is a blessing and nurse. The discussion of big themes is calibrated at such a high plane that oxygen grows short, but that's not to say that the novel isn't full of amusing and witty comments, my favorite being "We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically." American college students prefer the same style. Hans says, "I was young. I was not much extracted from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent world conspires to place us as children." Another line freights cricket with meaning:

I fell into that state of self-absorption that afflicts the waiting batsman as he studies the bowling for signs of cunning and untoward movement and, trying to recall what it means to be at bat, trying to make knowledge out of memory, replays in his mind bygone shots splendid and shaming.

Not only batsmen, Hans, and not only in cricket. The temptation to try and make further knowledge of this novel from the memory of my reading is strong but I will retire here, thinking that this is a novel whose flavor, like that of many chilis, is better the second time through.

« poderá andar-se metido num amor a contragosto? claro que sim.

um amor a contragosto é um amor em relação ao qual o sujeito que o sofre palpita que está numa perspectiva catastrófica e que, em princípio, nada poderá fazer para evitar a catástrofe, que esta o espera no fim de tudo e se prepara para o mastigar sem contemplações, reduzindo-o a cisco.

"reconquista-me!", diz o objecto desse amor a contragosto, entremostrando-se e furtando-se logo de seguida. e o sofrente do amor a contragosto compraz-se (afinal com imenso gosto!) em esfalfar-se e em arruinar-se nessa descida aos inferninhos do amor infeliz.

como se chega – e para quê – a uma situação destas?

por muitos caminhos e para muitos fins. mas o que importa aqui dizer é que o amor a contragosto não é um amor partilhado. o sofrente nunca é igual a quem lhe inflige o sofrimento. é mais. mais sentimento, mais tormento.

"mas que figurões!", dirão as rãs que, na circunstância, sempre se juntam para fazer coro. é que eles – o sofrente e o que faz sofrer – não sabem que estão, na sua luta (assalto e defesa), a dar-se em espectáculo aos que, e ainda por cima isentos, assistem a essa terrível devoração afectiva.

de um amor a contragosto dificilmente se sai. é como um vício arraigado, é como um redemoinho que puxa irresistivelmente para baixo.

talvez a única maneira, como ensinam certos nadadores experimentados em águas traiçoeiras, seja o sofrente deixar-se ir até ao fundo e aí, com um golpe rápido de braços e de pernas, sair do medonho vórtice. então, poderá voltar à superfície, nadar para terra, sentar-se na areia e dizer:

– olha do que me safei! – o mundo recobrará cor e significado.

quem estiver na situação de sofrente, metido num amor a contragosto, pode treinar esse processo de salvação. a caparica não é longe. »

*alexandre o'neill, “uma coisa em forma de assim”, 1980

[listening: charlotte gainsbourg, "the songs that we sing">> ouvir AQUI]

.

Davis in my opinion is a tidy and technically gifted player, but his lack of physical presence gave him many problems playing for Fulham in the first part of last season. Martin O'Neill, his former boss at Aston Villa, said after selling him to Fulham that Davis struggles in a four man midfield for this reason as he needs more protection. Sanchez's use of the midfielder didn't give him a chance to get the ball down and play the passing football he is capable of and that's where Sanchez went so wrong by playing his long ball game - but that's a different matter altogether.

However, Davis shone on loan last season and will be a star performer in the Scottish league no doubt. I wish him well and will always feel he didn't deserve the abuse he got after some poor performances for the Whites - after being made the scapegoat he never really had a chance.

In other news it appears David Healy's move to Sunderland is imminent and it is also understood Eddie Johnson could well be on his way to Cardiff on loan.

Healy has produced wonders at international level and Johnson has scored lots of goals in the MLS, but both lacked the goal scoring touch we so desperately needed last season.

Collins John is the interest of Crystal Palace boss Neil Warnock, however it appears Volz's move to Ipswich has hit a stumbling block as the right-back would rather stay in the top flight.

by Eric Boehlert

It sure felt like déjà vu all over again, didn't it?

No election watcher could forget the summer of 2004, when Fox News repeatedly invited Swift Boat author John O'Neill onto cable prime time and allowed him to air his scurrilous allegations about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War record. Even before the partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group unveiled its infamous television ads, it was on Fox News where the controversy was birthed. It was Fox News that allowed O'Neill a mostly unobstructed platform on August 10, 17, 19, and 24, 2004, to libel Kerry and to gin up a controversy that eventually swamped the Democratic candidate for most of that crucial summer month.

Then, almost exactly four years later to the dates (on July 31, August 3, 12, and 14), Fox News presented its White House campaign sequel. It welcomed O'Neill's Swift Boat writing partner, Jerome Corsi, to publicize his new attack book, The Obama Nation. Laying out his fever-swamp allegations about Obama's drug use and his supposed connections to Islam, Corsi enjoyed the type of national exposure, courtesy of Fox News, that every author craves.

It was an audience that helped propel The Obama Nation to No. 1 on the bestsellers list, which then ignited wide-scale mainstream coverage for Corsi and his book.

In other words, everything was going according to plan. The sequel had been set up -- had been marketed -- just like the Swift Boat predecessor, and now all conservatives had to do was sit back and watch the fun, as the Obama campaign became engulfed in Corsi-led controversy.

Right?

It hasn't worked that way. The Obama Nation's allegations, as slight and flimsy as they are, have taken a back seat to questions about Corsi's own credibility. In fact, journalists have likely spent more time dissecting the errors in Obama Nation and highlighting Corsi's controversial path, including the hateful, bigoted items he used to post in online forums, than they have focusing on the allegations Corsi wanted to broadcast.

As the conservative National Review Online noted with frustration, "The media narrative thus becomes 'Corsi refuted' rather than 'Obama embattled.' "

Add in the fact that some conservatives have stepped forward to publically denounce Corsi and his brand of slime, beseeching the movement to divorce itself from Corsi's unsubstantiated attacks, and suddenly the sequel is in real distress.

Oh sure, it's selling. (Thanks in part to bulk sales, a right-wing marketing staple.) But in terms of affecting the race, in terms of gumming up the works for the Obama campaign, the book has so far been a bust.

What happened? How did a sure-fire follow-up hit turn into such a trouble-plagued production? And why isn't Fox News' Swift Boat formula working?

Simple. Both Corsi and the Fox News team are living in the past and failed to realize how dramatically the media landscape has shifted since the shady Swift Boat accusers were able to deftly use the media to spread their lies.

First and foremost, the progressive movement has spent the last four years bulking up its infrastructure, and specifically readying itself to respond to media-driven attacks from the right; the way Media Matters for America immediately blanketed The Obama Nation and documented its egregious errors (often floated on Fox News) and also raised doubts about the author's veracity and integrity. And thanks to the larger Netroots community, Corsi hasn't had any breathing room to spread his misinformation.

But there were also key marketplace changes within the cable news industry that affected the Corsi coverage, I think. Because remember that in 2004, Fox News drove the Swift Boat saga; it was practically a co-sponsor of the anti-Kerry crusade, devoting endless hours to promoting the Vietnam-era allegations. By sheer force of repetition, Fox News, then the dominant player in cable news, forced its competitors to not only acknowledge the Swift Boat story, but to go all in as well. And soon all the cable news outlets were treating the Swift Boat saga with Fox News-like breathlessness. (CNN aired nearly 300 segments referencing the topic.)

And just like Fox, they weren't asking the tough questions. Instead, they gave the Swift Boat accusers the same free ride that Fox News did. They became media enablers, too.

Not this time around. With Fox News no longer the dominant cable news king -- and with Fox News no longer driving the campaign narratives -- its competitors opted for a much different approach to covering Corsi. And I think the coverage from the competitors sent a subtle, yet simple, message: We no longer take our cues from Fox News' lead, because they no longer dictate campaign coverage. Instead, we're going to exult in our role as a counterbalance, as a fact-checker, to the Fox News-produced Corsi attack campaign. In fact, we're gonna help pull the curtain back on Corsi.

Just look at how MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer greeted Corsi, as he ventured for the first time beyond the friendly TV confines of Rupert World:

BREWER: You say it's a comprehensive look, and yet there are already online bloggers that are going through this book page by page and picking apart what they see as factual errors. ... If they're going through, and they're finding all of these factual errors in your book, why should we give you the credibility?

CNN's Campbell Brown introduced a prime-time report by announcing, "Obama Nation is riddled with pretty much every unsubstantiated rumor you ever heard about Obama."

And on Larry King Live, Corsi was forced to face off against Media Matters Senior Fellow Paul Waldman, who refused to let the author spread his misinformation uncontested.

All the above represented precisely what the press, and most especially the cable outfits, should have done -- but mostly refused to do -- in 2004.

They refused to allow articulate, independent critics onto the national stage to debunk the patently false Swift Boat charges. Instead, the press most often treated the Swift Boat story as a political one, which meant amplifying the partisan charges and then going to the Kerry campaign for a quote, or inviting a Kerry campaign surrogate on the air to debate a Swift Boat liar.

Rather than forcefully labeling the Swift Boat attacks a charade and IDing the attackers as pranksters, and instead of holding the Swift Boat accusers accountable, the press played dumb and abandoned its traditional campaign role.

As Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher noted, "The mainstream press gave the charges -- carried in ads, in books and articles, and in major TV appearances -- a free ride for a spell, then a respectful airing mixed with critique, before in many cases finally attempting to shoot them down as overwhelmingly exaggerated or false."

In the infamous words of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie, upon being pressed about the paper's Swift Boat coverage in August 2004: "We are not judging the credibility of Kerry or the [Swift Boat] Veterans, we just print the facts."

Talk about abdicating your role as journalists. During the Swift Boat hoax, Downie and his team at the Post essentially walked off the field, refusing to officiate the smear campaign. Wasn't judging the credibility of the previously unknown Swift Boat accusers precisely what the Post and the rest of the press should have been doing in August 2004?

Thankfully, that kind of cowardice has been replaced by actual journalism when dealing with the Corsi sequel. And on TV, I'd suggest that about-face has been fueled by Fox News' fall from ratings grace, as its competitors, flush with confidence, realize they no longer have to follow.

Instead, they can lead.

Of course, the fact that Corsi won't admit or correct obvious errors in his book has only emboldened the press to pose tough questions. His often loopy logic has also not helped him, like suggesting we cannot believe Obama when he said he stopped taking drugs in college because, according to the author, "self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable."

When Corsi stumbled down that twisted path on CNN's Larry King Live last week, Media Matters' Waldman was waiting to pounce:

WALDMAN: You put up on right-wing websites a whole series of bigoted and hateful posts in 2002 and 2003 that you later had to admit to when you got found out -- all kinds of really vile, malicious stuff.

CORSI: OK. If you --

WALDMAN: Now, you say that you've stopped that. You say that you've stopped that and you don't put up those kinds of vile, bigoted, malicious, hateful posts on right-wing websites. But all we have is your word. I mean, do -- can we really trust you? People who do that kind of thing, well, you know, they're not really very trustworthy.

CORSI: We have --

WALDMAN: So can we trust you? Are you still doing that?

CORSI: You have more than my word. You've got the record of everything I've written since then.

WALDMAN: Can you prove that you're not doing it anonymously? Can you prove it?

I'm hard-pressed to recall the last time I saw an author get so thoroughly discredited on national television the way Corsi was at the hands of Waldman. (The encounter simply confirmed why conservatives often refuse to go head-to-head with reps from Media Matters in public settings.)

That undressing proved infectious within the mainstream media, as it began to spell out, fairly and accurately, what Corsi and his book were about. The Associated Press' Nedra Pickler reported, "Corsi suggests, without a shred of proof, that Obama may be using drugs today. Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine as a teenager but says he quit when he went to college and hasn't used drugs since."

The New York Times' political blog, The Caucus, set aside space to detail Corsi's touting of radical 9-11 theories that suggest explosives detonated inside the Twin Towers were also responsible for the destruction, not just the terrorist-piloted jumbo jets. And Politico noted how Corsi had "left a trail of wild theories, vitriol and dogma that have called into question his credibility."

Is it some sort of collective penance journalists are serving for the media's Swift Boat failures of 2004? Who knows? But it's exactly what journalists ought to be doing when mischief-makers like Corsi climb onto the national stage (ladder, courtesy of Simon & Schuster), and start making unsubstantiated charges about presidential contenders.

Conservatives now whine about the press taking sides, that it's teaming up on Corsi. In fact, the press is simply doing exactly what it should have done in 2004, and that's vet the accuser. Period.

The game has changed. But somebody forgot to tell Corsi and his friends at Fox News.

Here's what she had to say, according to the Pretty Tough sports blog.

“I’m so stoked right now,” Manuel said. “My sponsors gave me the wildcard into this event and I was just happy to be here. To get to surf against some of my heroes and to be in the Final with my friend Coco (Ho) is just something I would have never dreamed of.”

I think that's really incredible, and it's so promising that so many young athletes are competing at such a high level. It really says a lot for the future of women's sports.