Hey, four out of nine people willing to actually sign their names to what they think and believe! (I'm counting "Jerry", though I missed his post, and "Giuseppe Castellacci", though I sense some truth may lie beneath his comment, both as anonymous.) That's a pretty good ratio.

I'm all out of outrage at the AIG execs, I used it up on the government officials of both parties that allowed this whole mess to happen over the past ten years.

The outrage over the AIG bonuse is morally unobjectionable, but its volume
and tone seem just the latest feat of political diversion, an art at which
Washington excels (remember lipstick on pigs?).

The bonuses amount to about one thousandth the size of the funds the US has sunk into
this black hole of structured finance. Those funds have been making all AIG's
counterparties whole. A de facto bailout with none of the strings that were attached
to the second stage of TARP (equity infusion into major banks), which so much
irritated its recipients.
Will Goldman's press conference
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123756518992096521.html) be the final word or is
there room for investigative journalism?

I would love to see--speaking of outrage, a retrosepctive done on the hamstringing of Brooksley Born at the hands lf Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Arthur Levitt. This was a modern day Cassandra who saw the direction the credit default swaps were going over 10 years ago and was systematically marginalized for trying to do something about it.

Where is that outrage?

On the media???

Letting Obama bloviate on what hypocrites Republicans are for feigning outrage?

Not so much as mentioning how Obama, his appointees, and his supporters were outed last week for their own complicity in protecting the AIG bonuses and lying about when anyone knew about them???

This ranks up there with the most surreal things I've heard from the media in the last year.

Vulgarity vanishes, but Bob's bloviating remains eternal; though I will agree that OTM has directed many angry, obnoxious and fact-free commentaries toward the previous administration.

Judith Miller's a tough one: Bob and Brooke seem to treat anyone from the Times with deferential reverence.

Jerry's first comment will be removed for vulgarity Monday morning, but meantime let me say that he is --in addition to angry and obnoxious -- absolutely wrong.

In fact, OTM has done several interviews about market hype by CNBC over the 8 1/2 years on our watch. As for his comments about Judith Miller, the Taliban and the Bush administration, the man has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. It's hard to be so wildly wrong, but he pulls it off.

Ben, thank you for pointing that out so I didn't have to. Would like to point out though that among Sideshow Bob's many horrific crimes, one of them landed him in a "minimum security prison" for white collar criminals where the front gate was left unlocked. Possible future home of Bernie Madoff/AIG executives?

Brooke, thanks for the Simpsons reference, however that was Sideshow Bob, rather than Homer, who kept stepping on the brooms. And they were rakes, not brooms. And the sound he made wasn't "ow" so much as "urrrrrnngrnrnrngghrhhrhhh."

The timing of all the lil pit bulls seems almost coordinated and timed for maximum effect. I wonder if all this coordinated outrage has anything to do with the recently disclosed JournoList?