Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1102
April 3, 2013
Obama Sequesters Himself to Prove the Wrong Point
In a measure of solidarity with those affected by the budget-slashing government sequestration, President Obama is giving up 5 percent of his salary for rest of the year, which is almost as admirable and sensible as a mansion-owner shutting off his marble fountains during a drought.
This is not to imply that the president shouldn't demonstrate some unity with those who've been furloughed or lost work because of the blind slashing the sequestration prompted. People like Jeff Maryak, profiled by BuzzFeed, who is considering re-enlisting to make ends meet after a 27 percent pay cut. People like those who've lost access to critical public services as government employees have been told to stay at home. Obama should certainly show that he understands how the cuts — which he signed into law — are hurting people across the country.
But a 5 percent pay cut is stupid. The New York Times reports that the amount was meant to "approximate the level of automatic spending cuts to non-defense federal agencies that took effect" at the beginning of March. (Obama's pay cut is retroactive to that date and runs through the end of the year, so he's forgoing 4.2 percent of his 2013.) For Obama, who makes a federally mandated $400,000 a year, he's losing $16,667 this year. For a worker earning minimum wage, Obama's pay cut is $1,500 more than they'll earn this year.
Unlike the cuts faced by others, Obama's dip will not affect his lifestyle. The president has a few other perks that an average worker doesn't. He has a house, for example. He doesn't pay for gas in his limousine fleet. He pays for personal expenses, but also has an expense account, as detailed in this great (if old) Slate explainer. Very, very few people earning minimum wage can match that.
Nor would this be a big dent if the president weren't actually president. Barack Obama, thanks mostly to sales of his various books, has a pretty decent bank account. Last year, CNNMoney estimated his net worth at between $2.8 and $11 million. In 2011, the last year for which data is available, he earned about $790,000, including his presidential salary. Even if CNNMoney's lower bound estimate is correct, losing 16 grand is a dip of about .6 percent in his net worth.
All of which makes his offer to sacrifice five percent of his salary a worse move than if he'd done nothing. If someone you know to be wealthy drops a quarter into a cup held by a homeless person, you're far more likely to consider the move cheap than generous.
Granted, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel forced Obama's hand a bit, by offering to take a similar cut yesterday afternoon. (Hagel's losing about ten grand.) But the real problem is that cutting the salaries of individual elected officials is almost always a silly gesture. There are 100 senators in Washington. If each cut his or her (but mostly his) salary by 10 percent for the entirety of 2013, do you know how much that would save the budget? $1.7 million — or .00005 percent of the federal government's 2012 budget of about $3.5 trillion. Add in the House, and you get up to .0002 percent. People love the idea — there's a tantalizing punitive aspect to forcing pay cuts on legislators — but it's all show.
What Obama's move does do is draw precisely the wrong sort of attention to cuts. The sequestration is having an affect across the country, but it's mostly hidden, falling on the backs of recipients of housing vouchers and food pantries and the long-term unemployed. Obama's move is forcing the press to talk about the issue again, but what the press is discussing isn't poor workers who are trying to make ends meet. Instead, they're discussing a wealthy man with exceptional benefits who is dropping quarters into tip cups.






A Glazed Donut-Bacon-Egg Sandwich Isn't as Bad for You as You Might Think
Is the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich unhealthy? Or rather, just how unhealthy is it? According to a spokeswoman for Dunkin Donuts, the item weighs in at ... 360 calories. Which, considering its ingredients, is actually surprising! For the past two days, the fast-food chain Dunkin' Donuts has been testing a new item in a handful of stores near the company's corporate office in Eastern Massachusetts: the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich (pictured above), consisting of two slices of bacon and a "pepper fried egg" sandwiched between two halves of a sliced glazed donut. It sounds like an novelty food item to be hawked during a county fair on a hot summer day. It also sounds very, very unhealthy?
At 360 calories, it's just 60 more than the Egg McMuffin, the staple breakfast sandwich at McDonald's, and 10 calories less than the Sausage McMuffin, both of which are unadulterated by something as indulgent sounding as a glazed donut. It's also no Bacon Sundae, a questionable Burger King dessert that packs 510 calories. More broadly, the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich eats up less than one-fifth of the average adult's daily calorie allotment. So while it sounds bad, it's not as bad as its competition, which is a testament to the state of fast food breakfast fare today. Which means, you're no health nut to eat a Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich (obviously) but neither are you putting on a stunt eating competition.
The G.D.B.S. seems to be doing well for Dunkin' Donuts. When asked to describe the sandwich's popularity, a spokeswoman told the Wire, "We are pleased with the response so far, however, we cannot share any specific sales data. That said, the product has only been in restaurants for two days so we have limited information available." (We were able to corroborate the item's popularity using Twitter, where the sandwich is being met with a mixture of shock and, inevitably, desire.)
Food critics are still recovering from the shock, though. As the foodie website Eater noted on Wednesday afternoon, "Doughnut sandwiches are not new, obviously. Still, Dunkin' Donuts is a huge, national chain." (Previously, the donut-sandwich phenomenon had been limited to stunts or local establishments.)






Artisanal Won't Die
A long, long, long time ago (like, last year) I wrote an obituary for the word Artisanal. It seemed high time to declare the word dead and get on with our lives. And yet, it has become clear in the months that have followed that even if Artisanal did die, Artisanal has a radioactive half-life so powerful that it could for years sustain full-fledged underground communities of humans making bread from hand-picked cornhusks and locally sifted flour. Artisanal is not dead, it's undead, a whole food zombie running around feasting on artisanal brains. Artisanal, regardless of an organic beefsteak tomato through the heart or a hand-hewn bamboo stick to the brain, is eternal. Eternally damned, maybe, but sticking around and torturing us nonetheless.
But, look, according to a search via Google books' Ngram viewer (see at right) we're at slightly less peak artisanal than we were in the late '90s. It's an artisanal dip! So why does everything feel so insufferably artisanal?
Well, because (compare the word to hipster and you'll see the problem) even if artisanal might be ebbing, we are so surrounded by artisanal that it's hard to see the hand-tended forest for the individually planted trees. Let's say we reached peaked use of the phrase (in books) in the '90s and that there hasn't been an epic jump past 2010 that remains uncharted. Artisanal online is a whole other matter, as here there is infinite room for things to be artisanally discussed. And so they are, and with the popularity of the word artisanal comes more artisanal. Is the media's artisanal-hate, and the desire to mock the phrase ironically, simply breeding more artisanal? Quite possibly. This very post uses the word 40-some times. I am part of the problem, not the solution; I am a cog in the artisanal cheese-wheel.
But it's not just my fault! Here are some actual non-word things that are artisanal: Mayonnaise. Cheese, of course, cheese. Bread. Los Angeles. Entire movements. Popsicles, pickles, lemonade, soap, butter, coffee, knives, pizza, donuts, gift wrapping, chips, markets, but also stuff you buy at the 7-11, liquor chocolate, restaurants, water, yes there is artisanal water. I'm just going to stop now because it should be clear that everything that can be made artisanally is pretty much artisanal, now, and there are things that used to be artisanal that are now artisanal again. Like jerky. Well before the Slim Jim, people were making jerky at their homemade Laura Ingalls Wilder houses in the big woods, by hand—and yet, people are working to make it more artisanal now, to bring it back to its artisanal roots. There are grants being given for this, according to Laura Kusisto, writing in the Wall Street Journal: "Kings County Jerky Co. is one of three recipients of $50,000 grants from the city, which were announced last night at an event in the Goldman Sachs building in Lower Manhattan. The grants also went to kd Dids, which makes knitted athletic wear, and Kombucha Brooklyn, maker of the trendy fermented health drink."
It has come to this: EVERYTHING IS ARTISANAL. Is it wrong that the jerky sounds sort of tasty, "in flavors including Korean BBQ with chili paste and sesame seeds and Szechuan flavor with fresh ginger, peppercorns and star anise"? Does this mean that our brains have been co-opted into artisanal thinking (mmmmm star anise)? Still, we can admit that artisanal as a feature of a food or a product is not inherently bad, not like hipster-bad. We like our foods and various household items and accessories to be hand-made and special instead of mass-produced and manufactured by machines! Still, the question remains: if there is a slight dampening in artisanal fervor as noted by Google books' Ngram, when do we actually get to see that decrease in phrase use in our artisanal conversations?
Oh you still use power stations? I make my own artisanal electricity from spring water and plant matter hand-crushed in a pestle and mortar.
— Graham Lee (@secboffin) April 3, 2013
Artisanal and hipster (see also, "Goldman Sachs") are two words that most people will, at least in public, agree should be buried together and covered liberally with fresh earth held in the hands of skinny-jeans-wearing, ennui-riddled twentysomethings. And yet so long as we keep calling things artisanal or hipster, they never will be truly dead and gone. My beef is not with the jerky; it's with the adjective. When everything is artisanal, what will be left to make artisanal? is the question our children will be mournfully asking one another via brain lasers in the dystopia that exists 50 years hence. The great irony, though, is that someday, and maybe this day will be soon, maybe it is now, we'll have stopped needing to denote that anything is artisanal because the only oddity worth mentioning is the product that is not artisanal—i.e., that which is produced "in enormous quantities available for all often using totally newfangled and post-modern methods." Like ... cell phones. Why is no technology artisanal? Perhaps this will happen on its own, and maybe that, finally that, will be the ultimate end of artisanal. Until then, we wait, but we also acknowledge that it starts with us. Buy something prepackaged and crappy that calls itself that today.
Suggested replacement for artisanal: Things that are artesian. That word hasn't been hot since 1910. This is its fetch moment.
Image via Shutterstock by mizio70.






Every Era Gets the 'Tonight Show' Host It Deserves
Now that it's official that Jimmy Fallon will take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno next February, it's time to start thinking about what it all means for the entertainment powers-that-program-NBC are shifting form an old yukkity-yuk to a hip R.A. Well, if anything it shows us this generation is, for better or worse, getting the Tonight Show host it deserves. Just as the last one did.
Let's dispense with one idea right out: Jimmy Fallon, who is 38, isn't that young. Johnny Carson was younger than Fallon will be when he took over Tonight in 1962. Leno wasn't much older. In fact, the oldest new Tonight show host ever was Conan O'Brien! And he was already 46. Even though everyone was always going on about how Conan was so young-skewing and too edgy for all the squares, in terms of host age? He was the oldest. Sure he was but a wee babe at 30 when he started on Late Night, but by the time he got the Tonight gig, he was fourteen years older than Steve Allen was when he started the whole thing. So while Jimmy Fallon's hiring means some significant things, his age (he'll be 39 when he starts, same as Jack Paar) doesn't much mean of anything. Instead it's really about style.
If Jay Leno wasn't the ne plus ultra of '80s brick-wall comedy, he was certainly close. His was that wry observational style that, as the '80s bled into the '90s, became de rigeur on television. When Leno began hosting Tonight in 1992, it was the height of standup network deals, of shows built around guys (and a few gals) with acts. Leno, never much of an actor (not that Jerry Seinfeld was either!), bypassed that whole scene and went straight for the comedy brass ring, the dream chair. He'd frequently filled in for Carson and though he didn't have the same twinkle in his eye that Carson did, Leno could at least provide reliably easy, jovial, warmed-over laffs for folks to say goodnight to. His news-of-the-day monologues and ain't-life-silly found-item desk bits were perfectly pleasant entertainment for the pre-Internet '90s, when word spread more slowly, jokes stayed fresher for longer, and a research team combing through hundreads of newspapers was amazing.
But then the Internet did come, and Leno's style, which he seemed completely unwilling to change, quickly began to feel stale and creaky. He still had an audience, but those sought-after tastemakers and influencers — young or hip people who help shape cultural conversation — weren't paying attention. The Tonight Show became something cornier than maybe it had ever been, a husk of a show built out of lame jokes. Leno's style didn't fit the plugged-in 2000s in any way, and the show moldered. Perhaps that was Conan's time, right at the turn of the millennium. Had he sneaked in then, maybe he could have brought the show to a more modern place while still doing all the traditional Tonight Show stuff that he so vocally loved. But by the time 2009 rolled around and it was his time to steer the ship, his oddballness didn't seem so oddball anymore. Not with Tim & Eric and other Adult Swim-types running around in various comedy corners. And he'd gotten a little too self-deprecating and acerbic over his sixteen years spent in the Late Night shadows. (Same thing that happened to Letterman, maybe.) The Tonight Show has to tread a tricky line between being sharp in its humor and yet still comforting. It's a hard balance to strike, and by the time Conan was put in the lead, he just wasn't up to the task. And so he got the bum's rush and it was back to square one. We, and NBC, were once again stuck with Leno.
But there was Conan's Late Night replacement, Jimmy Fallon hovering back there at 12:30. He seemed like a risky choice even for that job, an only sorta beloved SNL player whose movie career had fizzled and hadn't been doing much of anything in recent years. But producer Lorne Michaels took a chance on him and gradually, slowly that chance began to pay off. The brilliance, if you can call it that, of Fallon's Late Night is that it immediately ran right at the contemporary world and asked it to inform the show. Sure Jimmy still does the classic newsy monologue, but he's also got Twitter jokes going, he has a laptop at his desk, he has The Roots as his house band. The whole thing feels personal and yet vaguely crowdsourced too, as if it's an entire show made up of Kickstarter rewards. And Fallon sells it. Rightfully wary of trying to compete with the in-the-know likes of Jon Stewart, Fallon has embraced absurdity just as Conan did, but his is a warmer and goofier kind. Instead of Conan's Weird we have Jimmy's Silly. It's college-y, getting guests to play beirut (beer pong, for you weirdos) and sing funny songs, but not fratty. It's not alienating in any way, really. What better host for these web 2.0, so-called "new nice" times than someone who just wants everyone to have fun and feel a part of the experience?
And now we're going to see how he can translate that aesthetic to the more venerable Tonight Show. NBC is doing a lot to accommodate him, bringing the program back to New York City after a forty-year stint in Burbank, so they're clearly invested, though I'm not exactly sure public hopes are all that high. Fallon certainly has his loyal fans, but he has plenty of committed detractors too. That's true of any entertainer of course, but Fallon's non-fans seem like a slightly more dedicated breed. Also, as Conan learned the hard way, The Tonight Show has an older, crankier, and more change-averse audience. Will sixty-year-olds who've been watching the show for forty years really be laughing at hashtag games? Well, the case may be that NBC doesn't really care about those sixty-year-olds. The network is in something of a free fall if you haven't noticed, so if it can attract a strong number of the valuable younger demo, which Fallon seems capable of doing, then maybe a Tonight Show that looks nothing like what the Boomers want it to look like is exactly what NBC wants. A complete reinvention, not Conan's halfway thing. A total overhaul that throws the show into the 21st century, Tumblr giggling and all.
It's a big job to ask of Fallon, but he's proven himself at 12:30, lasting way longer than many a betting person thought he would. And while some may want to remember The Tonight Show as something comfy and uncontroversial, familiar and unchanging, the fact is it's of course always been changing, and one day someone will likely pine for the old cozy days of Fallon and his Twitter jokes. As far as Tonight is concerned, Fallon feels like the guy for today. So what if he's a terrible interviewer? Jay wasn't much of one either.






Are The Roots Going with Jimmy Fallon?
Now that we know that Jimmy Fallon is officially taking over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno in 2014, there's one big question remaining: Will the Roots go with him? The Grammy-winning band has been one of the integral parts of Fallon's success since The Roots are a) undeniably good, b) undeniably cool, and c) frequent participants in Fallon's sketches. They help him slow jam the news. They comprise the members of Black Simon and Garfunkel. They play classroom instruments with famous singers. They once made Michele Bachmann mad. In a column back in July, James Poniewozik of Time called The Roots "accompanyists, co-conspirators and a kind of musical Greek chorus" for Fallon. Dan DeLuca of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, when wondering whether The Roots would come to The Tonight Show last month, "the reason Mr. Fallon's show has so much cred basically boils down to The Roots." Anyone who watches Fallon will tell you that the show would be far inferior without The Roots.
One would assume that Fallon knows how much The Roots mean to his brand, and would not choose to take on something like The Tonight Show without them following him, but it was not clear from NBC's official statement whether or not The Roots would be coming along. Bill Carter's story on the subject also didn't mention the band. Rebecca Marks of NBC publicity told the Atlantic Wire: "We have no announcements at this time" regarding the subject. This lack of confirmation has concerned some on Twitter.
As for the band itself? Members have been tweeting in vague terms. After news of Fallon's succession broke Questlove said:
What's this about The Tonight Show?
— Questo of The Roots (@questlove) April 3, 2013
Damon "Tuba Gooding Jr." Bryson, meanwhile, has simply been retweeting Fallon's good news from a variety of sources:
Keyboardist James Poyser had this to say:
Times a'changing....
— JamesPoyser (@jamespoyser) April 3, 2013
All of which perhaps suggest The Roots are in fact going to The Tonight Show—if you want to read it that way—but none of it explicitly confirms it.
It wouldn't be unprecedented for a band to come with a host to a new gig. Paul Shaffer, for instance, followed David Letterman from NBC to CBS when he moved from Fallon's current slot to the 11:35 hour. Max Weinberg also went with Conan O'Brien from his edition of the Late Show to The Tonight Show, even though he is not currently on the host's TBS show.
NBC and Fallon would be silly to attempt The Tonight Show move without The Roots. One reason? Note the folks on Twitter hoping they are part of the new gig:
If Fallon leaves The Roots behind, he leaves behind some of what's best about Fallon.






April 2, 2013
Why the GOP Should Embrace Federally Funded Studies of Duck Penises
One of conservatives' favorite examples of wasteful government spending in recent weeks has been a federally funded study of duck penises. This is dumb. They should be celebrating duck penis research. As the Republican Party looks to recover from its 2012 losses, sure, it should appeal to a wider audience by talking more about immigration and talking less about gay marriage. But they should demand more duck penis research. So far, the most prominent Republican demanding this kind of path forward has been Newt Gingrich, who said that Republicans should promote the very type of technological innovation made possible by the weird science research the party is currently dismissing as silly and wasteful.
Fox News and several other conservative outlets have bashed duck penis research recently. Leading duck penis researcher Patricia Brennan defends her work at Slate Tuesday in her cold, hard, sciencey way, explaining that the federal government funds basic science — why things are the way they are — in part because it can lead to applied science. So, as Brennan explains, a new adhesive is based on research on geckos. But Brennan sort of underplays her hand here. Duck penises are incredibly fascinating. Male ducks have penises that explode into a corkscrew during an erection. Because female ducks are raped so much — as much as half of duck sex is rape — they've developed complex corkscrew vaginas that makes insemination really difficult. So, as PolitiFact noted, that thing Todd Akin said about "legitimate rape"? That the "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down"? That's actually true of ducks! Duck penises waste away when mating season ends, and grow back bigger or smaller based on how dominant the other males in the group are. The clichéd "dick measuring contest"? That is real life for ducks. They are "are essentially engineering their own phallus in response to social challenges," Brennan told Wired in 2010. Duck genitals are incredible! Really great party anecdote at the right kind of party.
Meanwhile, conservatives have been bashing scientific research recently as Washington debates spending cuts. President Obama announced a $300 million-a-year program Tuesday to map the human brain, and Michelle Malkin mocks the research as silly. Cuts to really expensive things, like the military and Medicare, are controversial. But cutting funding of animal genital research sounds more inoffensive. House Speaker John Boehner wrote in February, "no one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cellphones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines." New York's Jonathan Chait explained that the smoking machines were created to simulate smoking in mice so the Veterans Administration could study chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. So yeah, smoking machines sound dumb, until you consider the alternative, which is training mice to smoke cigarettes, or start testing on humans. Likewise, the "paying people to play video games" thing is a National Science Foundation grant to study if playing video games can slow old people's loss of brain power.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal appeared to call for a less anti-science tone right after the election, when he said the GOP needed to stop being the "stupid party." He used this line again. But when he gave nearly the same speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, he cut that bit from his speech. A CPAC panel titled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Plastic Water Bottles, Fracking, Genetically Modified Food, & Big Gulp Sodas" had a long riff on "dihydrogen oxide" — as in, water is a chemical, so we shouldn't fear any chemicals! (There were no thalidomide babies on the panel.) The only speaker to demand at CPAC that the GOP go pro-science was Newt Gingrich. Gingrich held up a candle and a light bulb and said the GOP should be the party of the latter. Of the House GOP, he said:
They could be having a hearing every week on the future in every single committee and subcommittee. They could be contrasting the various and sundry bureaucratic candles that are trapped in a world of limited light with all the breakthroughs in new science and technology.
A bunch of reporters made fun of Gingrich on Twitter, on the Internet, a thing Gingrich embraced way back in the '90s while many of their publications were hoping it would go away. Gingrich suggested the GOP should counter anti-progress back-to-nature tendencies on the left. (Those are real!) The party should focus on encouraging technological innovation, he said. That includes duck penis research. Who knows what kind of miraculous technology might come from understand spiraling duck genitals? Gingrich/Duck Penis Research 2016.
(Top photo by Binu . via Flickr; inset photo by Jose Luis Magana/AP)






TARP Is Mostly Dead and Fannie Mae Is Alive
Fannie Mae, the government-funded mortgage lender, had some surprising news earlier today. During 2012, for the first time in four years, it didn't require any funding from the Treasury Department. And, better yet, it contributed $7.6 billion back into the government's pocketbook. Which inspired us to check in on the government's other semi-willing recession-era investments.
The news about Fannie Mae is undeniably good. The Times' Dealbook blog explains the significance:
The huge profits rolling in at Fannie, and at its corporate sibling Freddie Mac, reflect the enormous role the government is playing in the housing market nearly five years after the crisis. As a result, the earnings will intensify the debate over the role that government should play in supporting housing. …
Fannie and Freddie charge fees in return for a guarantee that they will pay back mortgages that default. In the first years after the crisis, that fee revenue was overwhelmed by losses. As those have abated, profits have returned for the two mortgage giants.
According to the agency's full press release, here's how its "draws from Treasury" (took) and "dividend payments to Treasury" (paid) compare.
Clearly the trend is good. But it will take a while to make up for that giant red spike. The entire amount repaid since 2009 amounts to only about half of what was borrowed that year. Or, to put it another way, here's the ratio of what has been borrowed to what has been repaid.
Thirty-one billion down, 85 billion to go.
We can do a similar calculation for the other elements of the government bailout — or, at least, those items included in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. At its creation, the government assigned a special inspector general to review TARP investments and compile quarterly reports on the process. The most recent report came out in January, and suggests that the government is doing much better with TARP than with Fannie Mae.
The most important chart is this one. Of the $418 billion TARP has loaned out (or, in some cases, gave), $344.8 has been repaid. (The actual outstanding amount is about $67.3 billion, due to rounding errors.) Over 83 percent of the money has been repaid.
The Inspector General's report breaks TARP down into ten programs. Here's how each has fared, with SIGTARP's descriptions of each beneath. Full descriptions start on page 43 here. (We've included the Fannie Mae figures and the TARP total in this first graph.)
Housing support programs
Description: Modification of mortgage loans
Status: Open
Amount loaned: $6.4 billion
Amount repaid: $0 billion (This program does not require repayment.)
Capital purchase programDescription: Investments in 707 banks
Status: Closed
Amount loaned: $204.9 billion
Amount repaid: $194.3 billion
Percent repaid:5.2 percent
Community development capital initiative
Description: Investments in Community Development Financial Institutions (“CDFIs”)
Status: Closed
Amount loaned: $0.2 billion
Amount repaid: $0 billion
Percent repaid:250 percent
Systemically significant failing institutionsDescription: AIG investment
Status: Closed
Amount loaned: $67.8 billion
Amount repaid: $54.4 billion
Percent repaid:19.9 percent
Targeted investment program
Description: Citigroup, Bank of America investments
Status: Closed
Amount loaned: $40 billion
Amount repaid: $40 billion
Percent repaid:0 percent
Asset guarantee program
Description: Citigroup, ring-fence asset guarantee
Status: Closed
Amount loaned: $0 billion
Amount repaid: $0 billion
Percent repaid:0 percent
Term asset-backed securities loan facilityDescription: FRBNY non-recourse loans for purchase of asset-backed securities
Status: Open
Amount loaned: $0.1 billion
Amount repaid: $0 billion
Percent repaid:100 percent
Public-private investment programDescription: Investments in legacy mortgage-backed securities using private and Government equity, along with Government debt
Status: Open
Amount loaned: $18.6 billion
Amount repaid: $15 billion
Percent repaid:19.4 percent
Unlocking credit for small businesses
Description: Purchase of securities backed by sba loans
Status: Closed
Amount loaned: $0.4 billion
Amount repaid: $0.4 billion
Percent repaid:0 percent
Automotive industry support programsDescription: GM, Chrysler, ally Financial inc. (formerly GMaC), Chrysler Financial; received $34.2 billion in loan repayments, preferred stock redemptions and proceeds from the sale of common stock; terminated Chrysler’s $2.1 billion in undrawn loan commitments
Status: Closed
Amount loaned: $79.7 billion
Amount repaid: $40.7 billion
Percent repaid:48.9 percent
To this last point, you may be curious: How have individual automakers fared? Chrysler is out of TARP. GM still owes taxpayers $21.6 billion. Or, in our ongoing efforts to make such numbers accessible — enough to buy 1.26 million Chevy Cruzes.






Will Kevin Ware Ever Play Basketball Again?
The leg injury suffered by Louisville's Kevin Ware this weekend was so devastating that some people automatically wondered if he would ever play basketball or even walk normally again. The short answer, after he left an Indianapolis hospital Tuesday to join the Cardinals at the Final Four in Atlanta this weekend, is yes—but not for a while, and the fallout could have been worse for another student-athlete.
Doctors did not give a timetable for his recovery after successful leg surgery, but with such a severe break, it could be as much as a year without basketball. If he's not close to returning this fall, he could take a medical redshirt year and sit out all of the 2013-2014 season. Then he could return in the Fall of 2014 with two full years of eligibility remaining. Most experts have agreed that given time, there's no reason he can't make a full recovery and play for Louisville once again.
As for who takes care of that recovery, things get a little trickier. Louisville's insurance should cover his medical bills, but they aren't required to do it. Technically, there's nothing preventing Louisville from cutting Ware from the team right now, taking away his scholarship, and sending him packing. NCAA rules don't mandate that scholarships be guaranteed or that athletes get all their medical bills paid for. It's up to each school decide how much coverage they will offer or if they want to continue to offer it all.
Legally, student-athletes are not employees and get none of the usual workplace protections. Ware can't make a workman's compensation claim for being injured on the job and he can't sue the school to pay for his medical bills. Plus, even if he graduates without any debt, any lingering medical issues would be his problem, not the NCAA's. There are plenty of athletes who found themselves on the hook for hefty deductibles, uncovered services, and chronic health problems that follow them after college.
Fortunately for Ware, Louisville is the most profitable basketball school in the country and can afford to pay up. That and basic human decency are his only real protections right now. We can't imagine the storm that would come down on a school should they someday decide to cut a kid loose after any entire emotional public watched in horror as he injured himself on live TV.
I can't even get myself together. I don't even wanna watch the rest of this game. His life just change
— Michael Bush (@michaelbush29) March 31, 2013
As for Ware's future as a basketball player, there's no reason the broken leg should stop him from returning to form once it's healed. Two recent injuries that have been compared to his are those of Michael Bush, a running back who shattered his leg (while playing football for Louisville, oddly enough), and wide receiver Patrick Edwards, whose leg was nearly severed by a utility cart in 2008 while playing at Houston. Both men recovered and made it to the NFL, though the injury did set them back a bit and probably hurt their draft standing. Washington quarterback Joe Theismann never played again after having his leg shattered on national TV, but he was much older at the time of his injury and came from an era with significant disadvantage in medical technology. (Theisman said in several interviews Tuesday that he, too remained optimistic about recovery.)
Ware was always a marginal NBA prospect—he doesn't start for the Cardinals—and would have been a long-shot even without the leg problem. If anything, the injury might boost his chances of catching on with the NBA's Developmental League or some team in Europe, since at the very least he a more recognizable name now. Sympathy alone might be enough for someone to throw a professional contract his way in a couple years.
Bush was right that Ware's life has been changed forever. Thankfully, that doesn't have to mean that it's damaged forever.






If NBC's 'Hollywood Game Night' Is Like 'Hollywood Squares' with Booze, Rejoice
NBC's had a rough time of it in recent months, but the network finally has something lined up that's majorly piquing our attention. Deadline reported today that NBC has arranged for some actual celebrity guests to play their new game show Hollywood Game Night. So if you ever imagined what it would be like to have cocktails and play weird games with Michael Bluth, Leslie Knope, Schmidt, and Veronica Mars—and, let's face it, you have—you're about to be in luck. We think.
Game Night will be hosted by Jane Lynch, and even without a set premiere date or too many details, it's got some willing participants of note: Jason Bateman, Amy Poehler, Max Greenfield, and Kristen Bell, plus Matthew Perry, Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, Martin Short, Molly Shannon, and more. More guests will join, apparently, and not as recurring players so much as pop-ins. And so far the show seems to be populated by a bunch of fun, funny, down-to-Earth people. Not Dancing with the Stars D-listers, but TV stars who have already ingratiated themselves with viewers. Okay, so no one is going to be playing Pictionary with the Pitt-Jolie clan, but something tells us that wouldn't be as fun.
The show is said to have been inspired by real-life celebrity parties hosted by Game Night executive producer Sean Hayes and producer Todd Milliner, which The Hollywood Reporter explained back in February tend to feature off-beat games like "putting Michael Jackson's faces in chronological order." Tom Hanks called one of these parties the most fun evening he's ever had. According to THR's Philiana Ng, Hayes and Milliner pitched the show by inviting NBC executives to one of the parties.
Something about this whole thing strikes us as something akin to Hollywood Squares with booze, which sounds great. We're hoping there's actual booze involved, though Deadline says it's a "cocktail party atmosphere." According to Deadline: "In each episode, two contestants will be treated to a night of fun and celebration where they get to rub shoulders with the celebrity crowd. At the end, one of the contestants will walk away with a cash prize and a night of stories and memories." Alas, there are still a lot of unknowns. For instance: How is said cash prize won? (And will said cash lead to unfunny "normal people" participants?) How many of these celebrities are going to appear in each episode? (And will that lead to strange Survivor-style cabals?) Is the show just going to be like watching a party with a bunch of celebrities? (And does that mean it will get really old, really fast?) Will they have inside celebrity jokes that we don't get? (And will that be kind of sad?) The questions are overwhelming, and potentially troubling.
But we guess the biggest questions of all are simple: What games will these celebrities play alongside the two normal people? An earlier Deadline post said they are "pop-culture based," and given that the Michael Jackson's face example seems a little more ambitious than charades, we're hoping for big things. Perhaps Poehler could rehash the rules of her Golden Globes drinking game. Maybe Perry could dust off the old Friends trivia board. Maybe, just maybe, Greenfield will lead everyone in a round of True American. Okay, pinch us, we've drifted off into TV dreamland.
Even with everything left unanswered, we're going to give a point to NBC on this one. The mix of celebrities just seems too good to be true.






Apple Leaks Cheap iPhone & iPhone 5S Rumors Just Enough to Make You Sweat
The Wall Street Journal is once again reporting that Apple is working on a lower cost iPhone that could arrive in 2013, the exact same rumor that the paper first reported in January. Apple must really want us to know that this thing is on its way, because the leaks keep on coming, perhaps because of competition that is both looming (in the form of Facebook this week) and that's already arrived (hello again, Samsung!). The Galaxy SIV hitting stores this month will certainly win over some Apple fans — unless Apple can convince us otherwise. Or maybe the cheap iPhone leak had something to do with Jim Cramer's "J.C. Penney of tech" comment on CNBC this morning: "Whatever product that is coming out in September is a clear loser. We haven't seen it yet, but it is a loser," he said. So perhaps Apple, feeding "a possible summer launch" to the Journal while having their spokespeople conveniently "declining to comment," is reassuring us — anonymously, of course... or at least "according to people familiar with the device's production." (Perhaps with 24 hours we'll get another rumor of sub-$100 pricing from another source, like we did the last time around.)
Anyway, in case you haven't heard, sources say Apple's working with manufacturing partners in China to get a "less expensive" iPhone made with a different, cheaper casing, and production is set to being this summer. Again, that sounds a lot like what its sources said in January. "The cheaper phone could resemble the standard iPhone, with a different, less-expensive body, one of the people said," the Journal wrote back then, albeit with a "later this year" launch table as opposed to, you know, maybe possibly this summer. Since then, Apple said it would not pursue a cheaper phone just for market share, which still left room for the low-cost gadget — just not for market share, but for... other reasons. Apple has also indicated that it "wants to provide the best products," which again leaves room for the best cheapish smartphone out there. Tuesday's leak once again confirms all of that, without confirming much of anything.
In addition, these mysterious Apple whisperers say the company will start making a "a refreshed iPhone similar in size and shape to its current one" (that storied iPhone 5S), readying it for that potential summer launch. Again: We've heard this one before. It aligns with the previous rumor reports and analyst tea-leaf reading, which again means that maybe possibly this thing will end up happening. So, in conclusion: The Wall Street Journal knows everything you already knew about the iPhone. Although, the Journal does have one new-ish bit of info: "Apple has been working on different color shells for the phone but its plans remain unclear." (That would seem to "confirm" what still other rumorers have "reported.") Of course, there are many other iPhone rumors that the Journal has not reported — and, we can pretty much assume, that Apple has not yet chosen to leak: a super fast "A7" chip, a 13 megapixel camera, and a finger print sensor with NFC capabilities to go along with it, all presumably arriving in the iPhone 5S, possibly later this summer, maybe now along with the cheap iPhone.
So, it's all old rumor news here, suggesting that Apple just felt that now was a good time for a trusty ole Journal leak to get the word out about its upcoming products. Apple stock certainly hasn't had the best few months; in the past, a little rumor talk has gotten investors excited. And maybe if the Apple leakers remind consumers that a 5S is around the corner, they won't all bail before the big actual reveal.






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