Missing the Point Playboy is a women-run organization. -- Parson Jim

Playboy magazine is now headed by Christy Hefner. However, most of the staff is still male (importantly, all the photographers) and to think that she has an attitude about the "editorial" and pictorial content remarkably different from her father is stupid. You don't fuck with (pun intended) a successful format.

The meter on her 15-minutes of national fame ran out even before the election. She's found her grubstake, and she's welcome to fleecing the rubes all she likes. You're never going to change the minds of 99% of rural voters anyway, and there are far more Americans who despise her in the major cities than people who love her in the "real America."

@zorkna Totally agree.-- Parson Jim

Therefore it will be ignored.

@cryofan, the entirety of this bill is taking a catchphrase, "too big to fall" and deciding the solution to the problem is taking anything that falls in this category and making it disappear through means Senator Sanders never actually came up with (just let the treasury sort it out).

It's actually pretty easy. Banks have retail, commercial, trust, and residential and commercial mortgage lending departments. Others have tacked on investment and money management banking as well. As it is, most of these businesses operate with a degree of autonomy to begin with.

At no time should the assets/collateral on these disparate businesses be co-mingled. This is why Chase being allowed to take over WaMu was essentially a financial coup. WaMu Savings Bank was not broke. WaMu the commercial lender was not broke. But WaMu the residential lender was. Long gone are the days of the mutual savings and loan where savings deposits were used to fund residential or consumer lending.

Look at AIG. Once one of the most respected insurance and re-insurance companies in the world. I guess inflation plus 2-5% a year return wasn't good enough. So they got involved in complicated unsecured investments. The investment wing of AIG is dead and never will return. It has completely poisoned the AIG "brand" so that, like Enron, everyone will remember AIG as a disaster when in fact the insurance business is doing just fine.

In most cases, the problem was that so many of these investments (known as bets in gambling establishments) weren't backed by any collateral. Churning funds based on notes promising to pay interest isn't really the same thing as real assets or collateral. The whole CDO mess was nothing but a form of money laundering, in this case with the credit rating agencies acting as the bank. But I digress.

Splitting up big companies isn't an inherently bad thing, but doing it in this situation to solve this problem is idiotic. -- robrobrob

No. Actually, this is exactly what needs to happen. We went through this once before in the Gilded Age. Then we were able to go after a number of the monopolists with anti-trust laws. We effectively have no anti-trust enforcement any longer. I don't care what Paul Volker says: bring back Glass-Steagall.

You have a choice: either you enact laws re-segregating these businesses or you put them under holding company arrangements that separate the assets of the different businesses. As it stands now BofA and Citibank are essentially unchanged and, because there have been no changes in regulation, the only thing that keeps them from fucking up again five or ten years down the road is if they change internally. Who's going to assure that happens if there is no external pressure or potential penalty for not changing?

. . . because he’s managed to put together a music video so offensive and misogynist it makes "Smack My Bitch Up" and "Stan" look like promos for the Oxygen network.

The subject named "Stan" in the song/video by Eminem is a misogynist but, more important, he's someone with severe psychological problems. Just a bit different than the crap in your typical gangsta rap or hair metal band video glorifying misogyny rather than it being an aspect of someone's psychosis.

. . . Robert Smith has talent. Marilyn Manson wasn't even Alice Cooper.

CronenBurgerMeister Maybe so... but Robert Smith still looks just like every other carb-faced British lager lout who's scarfed down one too many after-concert chip butties... Given enough time, even the skinniest, palest Goth turns into Buster Bloodvessel... and that always makes me laugh... -- Unbelivable Bastard

It was mostly crap. Does that mean that Super Freakonomics is super crap?

. . . "conservative Christians," on a moral pedestal. It's all part of a larger issue with these idiots - same-sex marriage, abortion, sex out of wedlock, etc., etc.

How is that "hypocracy?" (sic) Did she tape herself getting gay-married? — Like Radium

But seriously, what's up with Broadsheet and '90s craprockers lately? Marilyn Manson yesterday and now fucking Rammstein? What's next, Andrew W.K.?— Unbelievable Bastard

I guess it might be germane if the album from Rammstein wasn't so successful because then we could point to this as not just gratuitous nonsense, but as yet another example of wasteful record company spending in a time where videos no longer sell music and CD sales, as opposed to individual downloads, no longer make much money.

Otherwise, it's interesting as yet one more example of how far Western culture has declined thanks to R&R since Elvis first swiveled his hips.

That American taxpayers repeatedly vote to throw their money down a rat hole rather than for their own benefit has always baffled the hell out of me. I have to congratulate Rush, Fox Network, and the Republicans in general for pulling it off. — chamsticks

Another example is that conservatives don't want federal funding for abortion included in health care reform, but then they also hate all forms of social welfare programs that could be used to help care for the unwanted children they insist must be carried to term.

Americans may be the stupidest people on Earth.