MEGAN: Um, prosecutor dude? Most 63-year-old women don't really menstruate.
MEGAN: Also, the whole thing just makes the prosecutor sound like en enourmous douchesack.
MOE: Um, and speaking of sex crimes...James Bevel WTF. The septugenarian MLK BFF is going to prison for incest. Feeling up his daughter = science class!

Hoffman asked Bevel whether he had ever rubbed Machado's chest — another allegation she has made but one that is not part of this criminal case.
"Yes, I have engaged in rubbing [her] chest in an educational context," he said. Bevel testified that as a minister and a teacher, he has educated people, including his children, on the "science" of sex and marriage.

MEGAN: Also, I love that his defense lawyer played a video of the pervert with MLK in order to try to get the jury to reduce his sentence for molesting his daughter, even though everyone testified she was neither his first nor his last victim.
MEGAN: Especially given what I know about how the King family treats scholars that wish to use their archives (but remembering that they sold his Lincoln Memorial speech footage for a telecomm commercial).
MOE: Fuck if I know honestly. He's 71 so it's sort of a moot point. He was sentenced 15 years. Isn't incest also a worse crime than simple molestation? I'm changing the subject though. Margaret Carlson, who is I guess writing for Bloomberg now, takes issue with John McCain's optimism re coming together and ensuring The Iraq invasion was not and invainsion. Deep down she would like to buy into his romantic worldview, but she can't. I can't read any of this without thinking how she stalked Fred Thompson and, therefore, you know, should probably steer clear of matters pertaining to the nexus of politics and romantic worldviews?

MEGAN: Ew, she stalked Fred Thompson?
MEGAN: As in, she wanted to bone him?
MOE: Oh yes!
MEGAN: You know, I have to say and we can all admit that some women like to pursue attached men, as though it's some sort of validation of their hotness or something. I once dated an older guy — who, truly, was neither tall, built, obviously wealthy, or anything close to "hot" but he did look 20 years older than me — and I'll be damned if every time we were in a bar together if some women 10 years or more older than me wouldn't mack on him.
MEGAN: And I wanted to be like... he's dating a 25-year-old. Really?
MEGAN: But, yeah, at the point at which a dude's girlfriend goes to the papers about you, you really gotta examine that line between "aggressive pursuit" and "stalker." And when you're pursuing Fred Thompson, you really gotta deal with your daddy issues (which, hello, is why I started seeing a therapist).
MEGAN: Not that I pursued Fred Thompson.

MEGAN: Hey, speaking of kooky old men and bitter women, here's a new poll showing that 25% of Obama supporters and 30% of Clinton supporters will vote McCain out of spite if the other candidate gets the Democratic nod. 100 years of Iraq! God, I love being an imperialist occupying force.

MOE: Honestly? I just don't believe any of that crap. Why? Who are these crackpots? Also: the Pennsylvania primary: can it just happen already?
MEGAN: No, dammit, Moe, you will pay attention to Pennsylvania for a whole 4 weeks before it fades into Rust Belt obscurity until October when it gets called a swing state and pretends to be important in the scheme of things.
MOE: I don't know how to segue. I didn't read this story about how Barack Obama is refusing to dole out "street money" to ward leaders in Philadelphia, but I'll say this about ward leaders in Philadelphia: they expect their street money. People who play the lottery like to be bribed, even if the bribes are comically low, which they generally are in the case of street money.
MEGAN: I read it! I was like, holy shit, is that shit actually legal? And I love how the low-end street money recipients are all like, but how can he spend a million dollars on advertisements and not buy our votes? They literally want him to spend half a million in bribes to win in Philly and he's all like, whatever, I got North Carolina I need to advertise in.

MOE: The thing is, you know, the ward leaders dole out the money to committepersons to get out the vote on election day. Committemen are like block captains basically. They basically get around $50 to make sure everyone goes to the polls. FIFTY BUCKS. They do this for fifty bucks. If that isn't a sign the market economy has failed us, well...
MEGAN: I think the prob is that Obama is used to people doing that for free because of his hope-y deliciousness. I guess hope doesn't go that far when you'll work your ass off for $50.
MOE: Well it's also not just the fifty bucks. It's respect. It's tradition. In Philadelphia if you're a committeeperson you are upholding a tradition. The fifty bucks is not much, especially compared to, say, the fact that you can get your deadbeat ex-con son-in-law a cushy job at City Hall ...or that you're the person your neighbors approach in when they find junkies on their doorsteps or when they want to shut down the Section 8 house... the fifty bucks, it's a symbol...of an anachronistic, flawed, pillaged democratic system? Which is sort of what makes Obama's gamble interesting.
MEGAN: It's also why I don't gamble. I think immediate self-interest and ego will always trump politics.

MOE: And yet again I find myself at a loss when a segue should be easy here. Maybe because the "end of history" has ended? Nothing makes sense anymore. There is no Barack Obama of the whole "Autocracy is Virtuous" meme, or if there is we're too busy watching The Hills to know who the fuck it is. But yeah, anyway...street money, tradition, Putin, Hu Jintao...
MOE:

As some Chinese scholars put it, democratic liberalism became dominant after the fall of Soviet communism and is sustained by an "international hierarchy dominated by the United States and its democratic allies," a "U.S.-centered great power group." The Chinese and Russians feel like outliers from this exclusive and powerful clique. "You western countries, you decide the rules, you give the grades, you say, 'you have been a bad boy,'" complained one Chinese official at Davos this year. Putin also complains that "we are constantly being taught about democracy."

MEGAN: Autocracy gets its own wing of Poli Sci Theory 101! Hooray.
MEGAN: What I liked about it was where they compared Putin to one of the Louises
MEGAN:

When Louis XIV remarked, "L'Etat, c'est moi," he was declaring himself the living embodiment of the French nation, asserting that his interests and France's interests were the same. When Putin declares that he has a "moral right" to continue to rule Russia, he is saying that it is in Russia's interest for him to remain in power; and just as Louis XIV could not imagine it being in the interests of France for the monarchy to perish, neither can Putin imagine it could be in Russia's interest for him to give up power. As Minxin Pei has pointed out, when Chinese leaders face the choice between economic efficiency and the preservation of power, they choose power. That is their pragmatism.

MEGAN: It's just practically another rehashing of the big-man theory of political history with a soupçon of structuralist theory thrown in (i.e., the Chinese and Russians don't mind being ruled by autocrats) so he doesn't get laughed out of academia for subscribing to a 50s notion of how the world works.
MOE: Annoying quibble: why can't we just get used to the fact that Chinese put their last names first? Pei Minxin. We're such hegemonists. And wait, are you referring to Putin? Or the author?
MEGAN: The author, though I have no doubt whatsoever that Putin subscribes to the same theory. He doesn't seem like a structuralist. That's, like, practically Marxist.
MOE: How do you do that thing with the "soupcon"
MOE: Do it with "neocon"

MEGAN: Neoçon. It's fun, isn't it? Since I majored in a language and took another in college, I had to memorize all the keyboard shortcuts. On a PC (yes, I know, I'm antiquated) it's Alt+0231 on your numbers pad. I think on a Mac it's an Alt comma, but it's been 13 years since I did it on a Mac.
MEGAN: Other fun foreign characters? æ and ß, my beloved s-zett practically eliminted by the Rechtschreibungsreform at the turn of the century. Sigh.
MOE: yeah we don't have "alt." maybe option. That's cool though, I don't really trust those funny symbol thingies. And I don't know why I'm trying to make myself slog through this. I am not just bored with the ephemera; I am the ephemera. Maybe it's an absurdist exercise. Yes, that's it.
MEGAN: Yeah, Option is right.
MOE: ∆¬¥ˆ¬∂ˆø˜µ¬∑¥∂≈∫¥å≈≥
MOE: What if we just did that all day? Someone would have to read it!
MEGAN: People would totally cut and paste it into Word or something and try it in another font hoping it was Wingdings

MEGAN: Good morning! I'm caffeinated this morning!
MEGAN: There will be a lot of exclamation points!

MOE: I'm...HUNGOVER! And it's kind of late. Did you have sex or something? Wait don't answer that in public!
MEGAN: Oh, wait, I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you just said. Oh, well. Wanna talk about the news?
MEGAN: I feel like being a rapist, accomplice or apologist is practically a checkbox you have to have before going to Iraq for KBR these days.
MOE: Okay China is saying it broke up a terrorist plot to kidnap Olympians.
MOE: And yeah, we don't want the Crappy Hour to get too rapey
MEGAN: Yeah, I was listening to that this morning.

MEGAN: This terrorist plot to supposedly kidnap athletes and foreign journos is probably why China shouldn't have censored the movie Munich. I mean, other than the hottness of Eric Bana and Daniel Craig and that French guy from Amelie, that is.
MOE: Dude, I never saw that movie, dammit. I wonder if it's OnDemand. Fuck New York and all its deleterious outdoor social obligating. Here's the thing about the Olympic protests: they really did seem to come from nowhere, right? Even the Dalai Lama seems surprised.

"Right from the beginning, we supported the Olympic Games." Speaking of pro-Tibetan protesters, he said nobody "has the right to tell them to shut up.

MEGAN: The Golden Gate bridge people should be in the Olympics. That was some epic shit.
MOE: Uh-oh, the wheelchair girl was interviewed by the Chinese press. I can't figure out whether that's good or bad.
MEGAN: I mean, it seems like a lot of the torch runners are Asian, so maybe it's designed to highlight the Chinese diaspora? Is there such a thing?

MOE: And then in London you had the horrible Chinese thugs issue..
MOE:

Miss Huq, one of 80 torchbearers said: "The men in blue perplexed everyone. Nobody seemed to know who they were officially or what their title was. They were very robotic, very full on, and I noticed them having skirmishes with our own police and the Olympic authorities before our leg of the relay, which was confusing.
"They were barking orders at me, like 'Run! Stop!' and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, who are these people?'
"They kept pushing my hand up higher when I was holding the torch, so they were...interesting."
Miss Huq was nearly knocked to the ground by a protester as thousands of campaigners disrupted the procession to demonstrate against China's human rights abuses and brutality in Tibet.
It was reported the men have been recruited from Chinese special forces brigades. Some came from the feared Flying Dragons and rthe Sword of Flying Dragons counter-terror units.

MOE: Obama joined the boycott bandwagon. Angela Merkel isn't showing up, incidentally.
MEGAN: Or Gordon Brown.
MOE: Yeah, but he's attending the closing ceremony? I guess since London gets the Olympics next there's probably some important torch duty to attend to there. Anyway, meanwhile in China executive compensation is stoking outrage!
MEGAN: Hahaha. So much for "Communism" suckers. Faux meritocracy FTW! You'll get your own mortgage crisis just as soon as the government lets the peons own property!

MOE: Well, um, the government lets the peons own property, they just get backsies if someone wealthier wants to build there. What's interesting is that these "multimillion yuan" salaries are inciting such a huge outcry from Chinese citizens. Do they have any idea of the magnitude of the pay packages of the Western executives who created all that shareholder value outsourcing all their operations to China? I wonder how, or if, the Chinese press covers American corporate culture/excesses/etc.
MEGAN: I have to think they cover it to some degree, right? I mean, the Russians propagandized the hell out of that shit.
MOE: Yeah, but it wasn't an iconic Soviet autocrat who said "To get rich is glorious."
MEGAN: Oh, sure, but not to to people he was oppressing, I think. It's all lifting every boat and shit, work for your comrades, blah blah blah while the people at the top of the hierarchy convince you and themselves that they "deserve" to live better lives because their work is, like, harder and stuff. Just like here!
MOE: And speaking of, the dollar dipped below seven yuan. This is big news because the central bank sets exchange rates.

MEGAN: Wait, so they're actually letting their currency appreciate! Tell the unions! Shout to the steel lobbyists! Inform Congress immediately that there's no need to pass legislation to impose sanctions China for its exchange rate policy, not that it will have any effect on anything whatsoever because it's all about perception in Washington rather than actuality.
MOE: Well yeah and it's not like their policy changed, per se.
MEGAN: Yeah, it's just this thing in DC that has annoyed me for years as though China's the only country on the face of the Earth that doesn't manipulate its exchange rate. I mean, we don't but we sort of do, but the VAST majority of countries in the world don't float their currency.
MEGAN: It just gets shouted about in Washington because it's something to hang a political hat on because no one knows anything about exchange rates and you can make it sound really unique and unfair when it comes to China and the same people shouting about it have no idea of the downstream consequences to our own economy.
MEGAN: [/rant] Caffeine!
MOE: China has kept theirs artificially low, which for us, has been sort of like a reverse mortgage.
MEGAN: Right.
MEGAN: Just another way we in effect financed the universal right to a flat screen. Made in Korea.
MOE: Here's a decent piece on the Olympics and China and what it all means. Although by decent I do not mean "universe altering." Anyway, can anyone tell me, getting back to San Francisco, who were those guys?
MEGAN: They were members of Students for a Free Tibet. All but one of them was over 30.

MOE: Holy shit:

Reached by cell phone as he dangled from the bridge, Sutherlin said he was worried that the torch's planned route through Tibet would lead to more arrests and that Chinese officials

MOE: Hey hi what's up shit is pretty fucked huh.
MEGAN: It makes me a little glad I never leave my house. Hooray for blogoraphobia.
MOE: Okay, first things first: there are violent protests in Tibet, and China has to quell them in a way that doesn't make Stephen Spielberg look good, and now the protests have spread to other provinces.
Tibet has long been a pretty sweet separatist province to have, what with the exiled leader advocating nonviolence and spending most of his time with Beastie Boys etc. etc.
MEGAN: And getting to meet practically every head of state in the world, albeit unofficially...
Except for, obviously, those countries in Africa rapidly becoming Chinese client states.
MOE: China has a whole other separatist province called Xinjiang and no one pays attention to those guys. Because they're angry Muslims. Hey Sudanese Islamofascists? How's about some CONSISTENCY??
MEGAN: Wait, didn't we care about that for like 2 seconds last week when Al Qaeda did a video of training there? I didn't realize that we'd forgotten to care about that.
MOE: Hey, look, a story about a recent thwarted hijacking attempt by a Uighur Al Qaeda girlbomber! I think the Chinese government thinks you should care again.
MEGAN: Oh, thanks nameless Chinese propagandists newswriters!
Anyway, so, how soon until they start beating monks in the streets and we issue some sort of vague milquetoast protest about it that in no way compares to our reaction to the monk beatings in Myanmar? Or did I blink and miss it?
MOE: Oooooh, think Laura Bush drop her cookie sheet again and get on the phone with Hu Jintao?
MEGAN: Maybe she could send him cookies? I'll bet some chocolate chip ones could go a long way toward repairing US-China relations
MOE: I
Yikes, that disappeared.
MOE: Okay yeah so, it's very tricky what is happening with Tibet, but either way, it led to an incredibly cerebral discussion of Bjork on the comments over the weekend, did you see? My father was impressed with Bjork's timing on that one, but perhaps if he knew Bjork's tears cure cancer (too bad she never cries) he wouldn't be so surprised. Interestingly, this week Taiwan is holding elections, and he's headed out there. Taiwan is interesting because, you know, they really have it best, as "splittist" provinces go. Elections, democracy, a decent standard of living, no painful shared history of, like, cannibalism or Cultural Revolution or any such thing. The pro-China Kuomintang party is supposed to win though.
MEGAN: Interesting. Wait, now, Taiwan's pro-China even though China considers them a rogue provice? Taiwanese politics are so hard to understand. Is it possible that China's financing the Kuomintang or something
MOE: hahahaha well China's financing the entire economy, sort of like ours. The thing is that the Kuomintang came from mainland China and fled to Taiwan, with numerous palace treasures and such, in 1949. There they found a happy population of ethnic Chinese who spoke another dialect and also, Japanese because the Japanese colonized it, and proceeded to pretty much subjugate them until the seventies, when a democracy movement began burgeoning and our relations with the mainland made it a lot easier for Jimmy Carter to pressure the Kuomintang to treat the "ethnic Taiwanese" better. Somewhere in there Chiang Kai-shek died, his much nicer son Chiang Chingguo took over, and a kind of slow, steady democratization took hold. The thing is that most Chinese, no matter what dialect they speak, are pretty pragmatic and rational and no one wants war with China, but while they have us around a lot of them also don't feel like taking shit from China. On the other hand, of course, Taiwanese control most of the factories in China. It's complicated.
MEGAN: [Awkward segue alert] As complicated at Dina Mattos McGreevey's sex life?
MOE: Hey, good call. That conversation was certainly venturing into prurient and meaningless territory so I'm glad we can now focus our attention on The McGreevey-driver threesomes. I think my favorite part is that they were described as "intense" "hard-core consensual sex orgies".That sounds so...cardio! It's a good thing too I guess if they all started with get-togethers at T.G.I.Fridays.
MEGAN: Like, taking a date to TGI Fridays is so Jersey and let us not pretend that it is not because it is. Also, their intense 3-way orgies (which, can an orgy really only involve 3 people?) always involved one of the guys jacking off while one of them fucked Dina.
But what's sort of really interesting to me is that in earlier publications, he's said not to have started working for McGreevey until 2000, which throws off his timeline I think, and that Dina's divorce lawyer wants financial records about financial records and correspondence with McGreevey's rich boyfriend. Also, apparently, they're due in court soon to litigate over the money McGreevey is hiding from Matos so that he doesn't have to pay as much in child support and alimony. Fucker. Like, aren't gay men supposed to be the good ones?
MOE: Um yeah they shared a room at the TRUMP PLAZA in Atlantic City. Here is what I have to say about that; okay, there is a hotel room shortage in Atlantic City, sure. But if if you are the governor you get the "casino" rate and that is seventy bucks. "It became almost laughable — I would never have my own hotel room," Pedersen said. Okay, so a few things: what does this mean about Silda Spitzer? How long has the New York Post been sitting on this story just waiting for everyone to remember that they once for a brief moment cared about Dina Matos McGreevey?
MEGAN: I'm personally hoping that Silda's sunning herself on a beach somewhere foreign and being served tropical alcoholic beverages by inappropriately young but attractive cabana boys.
And that she and Eliot didn't fuck around with 3rd parties because it's one thing imagining Gay McGreevey jerking off and another entirely grosser thing to have to picture Eliot Spitzer in a wide variety of sexual situations
Excuse my while I go wash my brain out with bleach. Maybe you could talk about the financial markets and i'll try to think of something to say that makes it sound like my summer interning for the Bank of New York wasn't a complete waste of time for everyone involved?
MOE: Okay, well, the government is going to have to print money to bail out the banks because they made the financial instruments so complicated no one has a fucking clue how much, if anything, they're worth, and everything is so interconnected that it could all collapse like in the Asian Financial Crisis unless the Fed steps in and offers a quarter trillion dollars to save it. Or something.
Here it is explained by someone named Dave Wilson who is on some email list that my ex-boyfriend is on.

There's currently a kind of cascade failure happening throughout the financial community, spurred
both by extraordinary levels of borrowed money that was used to speculate (it's like those mortgages that were issued for 110% of the value of the house, except that type of "investment" has, unbeknownst to most people, actually been taking place in pretty much every investment sphere you can think of); if those speculative investments go South, investors have to come up with lots of cash, fast, (this is known as a margin call) meaning they wind up selling everything they own to raise cash, which then depresses the value of the stuff the investors had to sell (as well as similar stuff owned by others) since suddenly there's a lack of scarcity combined with a suspicion on the part of would-be buyers that perhaps this stuff is being dumped for reasons other than a need for quick cash...

Last fall, the former Treasury secretary confessed to Fortune magazine that until the mortgage storms broke over his head in the summer of 2007, he was unfamiliar with the kinds of complex mortgage structures with which Citi's own balance sheet was packed. Almost certainly, the gulf between competence and compensation on Wall Street has never been wider.

"Why not set an example of Bear Stearns, the guys who have this record of dog-eat-dog, we're brass knuckles, we're tough?" asked William A. Fleckenstein, president of Fleckenstein Capital in Issaquah, Wash., and co-author with Fred Sheehan of "Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve." "This is the perfect time to set an example, but they are not interested in setting an example. We are Bailout Nation."