Moue Magazine

Bernie Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years. Unless Madoff has Nicholas Flamel as one of his co-conspirators, that’s going to be a life sentence.

Where does one go with cigarette advertising as…

Bigotry requires a certain level of cognitive dissonance among its practitioners. There needs to be a series of blind spots in place if someone is going to believe wholly in racial stereotypes that are very easily disproved. So it isn’t surprising when an act of bigotry is illogical. Take, for example, the National Review’s cover featuring SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

I received my acceptance letter from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst last week to finish my Bachelor’s degree in Journalism (my original major was Biochemistry — long story behind the switch). I’m still figuring out how I’m going to provide the $300 per credit hour and trying to convince myself that it will be worth it in the long run. This chart from Calculated Risk showing the unemployment rate based on level of education makes me feel slightly better about my forthcoming loan debt:

I’m working on some longer posts on this subject but since it’s Friday and everyone’s on their way out, I’ll put up some links pertaining to the Stress Test results released yesterday.

Bank of America shareholders are having their annual meeting in North Carolina today and their itinerary includes a vote as to whether the board- including chairman and CEO Ken Lewis- should keep their jobs following the disasterous (and muddy) Merrill Lynch deal. I’m working on a longer post about the vote and Merrill that I’ll put up after the meeting is over but I thought this spoke to the mood in the room:

Partial results of the inproperly calibrated, impossible to fail Stress Tests may be made public. As Ryan Avent points out, it isn’t promising that there seems to be some indecision regarding what is released:

The Geithner authorized bank Stress Tests are the economic equivalent of a high school football coach padding the grades of his players so that they can all play in the next big game. Unfortunately for the team, a few of the players have died. But that doesn’t stop Coach from dressing them in uniform and propping their bodies up on the bench next to the Gatorade cooler.

Those dirty hippies at the Michigan chapter of the ACLU are at it again. This time they’re claiming that being poor is not a crime in America, the silly, deluded fools.

The latest Employment Report did not bring tidings of cheer and prosperity. Instead, there were 663,000 jobs lost in March and the national unemployment rate rose from 8.1 to 8.5% (highest since 1983). 5.1 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007 but 3.3 million of those jobs were lost within the past 5 months.