EdCone.com

Oh, crap.

American International Group Inc., the insurer selling assets to repay a U.S. loan, may shut its mortgage guarantor after failing to turn around the unprofitable unit, said two people familiar with the matter.

AIG may wind down any parts of the mortgage insurer that can’t be sold, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are confidential. AIG’s United Guaranty Corp. has posted more than $2.8 billion in operating losses since April of 2007.

The destruction of wealth in Greensboro during this Lesser Depression seems to me to have been out of proportion to our size and our status in the financial world. A good chunk of the losses came with the collapse of AIG, in which a lot of local folks have UGC-based stakes dating back decades. Losing UGC completely would be a nasty blow.

Blue NC Blogger Bash, Saturday, Chapel Hill.

A little local television love for Piece Work and the Mill Village Project, which open tomorrow evening at the Greensboro Historical Museum. More from Jeri Rowe.

[S]cientists studying the [swine flu] virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

I'm going to panic anyway.

Chrysler's bankruptcy seems like a shot across the bow of GM creditors.

UPDATE: "If TWC wins [in North Carolina], this could be bad news for broadband in other states as incumbents try to repeat this performance."

The North Carolina chapter of a group calling itself "Americans for Prosperity" wants you to support that anti-muni-broadband bill.

Hey, I'm an American, and I'm for prosperity! I guess we don't all think alike.

More about the group here and here.

Whitman: Moderates shouldn't quit the GOP, but "Specter did not reach his decision in a vacuum. He was responding to what he and others saw as a trend in the party — a trend that will make it harder to get out a centrist message." She cites the upcoming gubernatorial races in NJ and VA, and the 2010 congressional cycle, as risks for the Republicans.

"Just like the housing meltdown, the commercial real estate crunch is likely to begin as a slow bleed that gains momentum. The coming commercial real-estate crunch is likely to be spread evenly across the nation, in large part because of an outgoing economic tide that's spared few companies anywhere." Good thing the banks are doing so well, then.

Bad headline of the day, from the front page of this morning's News & Record: "Foxx irks gays with comment on killing."

I guess "Foxx irks decent people across the spectrum of sexual preference and practice with comment on killing" didn't fit, what with the new constraints on space.

Maybe it's not such a good idea for one person to be chair and CEO in the first place, huh?

Corporate governance and shareholder rights are not as sexy as the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but they deserve more attention.

Let's hope the "unusually successful shareholder revolt" that got to Ken Lewis becomes less unusual.

So much fuss about 100 days, when we all know that the Failed Obama Presidency has been over since, like, December. But for nostalgia's sake, here's an interview with the Portuguese Water Dog Owner in Chief.

Bill Winfield, a prominent local culture-warrior in the 1990s, dead at 62.

Ryan Shell is running for GSO City Council. We've had a lot of candidates with blogs, but Ryan is a blogger who became a candidate.

D.G. Martin digs Edgar Award winner John Hart's soon-to-be-released thriller, The Last Child. I read an advance copy; it's a page-turner.

Tickets are going fast for Hart's May 11 book party in Greensboro, which is a fundraiser for the Children's Museum.

As mentioned here from time to time, we'll know how bad this recession was when it's over. That is, comparisons tend to be made between wherever we are at a given moment versus the troughs of previous downturns, not nadir-to-nadir.

Anyway, the numbers now are bad enough to make some of those things-are-not-so-bad comparisons look even worse in retrospect.

Homers:

The N.C. Treasury announced [Tuesday] that it will vote in favor of Ken Lewis and the entire board of Bank of America directors at the shareholders meeting in Charlotte...

...The N.C. department, which runs the state's public pension fund, is breaking from its peers in many other states, choosing loyalty to a home-state company over anger about the bank's purchase of Merrill Lynch & Co.

Olympia Snowe say the GOP "cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates."

This is about more than an opportunistic Senator saving his own hide. Specter's defection was not an isolated act; he followed some 200,000 PA Republicans who switched to Democratic registration last year. That narrowing of the party strengthens the primary challenger and pushes the party further right. PA was very recently seen as a battleground state, now it may be solidly blue for a while.

And the ramifications extend beyond the Keystone State. As Snowe says, "the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide."

More here.

Obama and the Democrats will be judged on their own success or failure. The GOP is left, for the moment, to root for the latter, which is not much of a platform.

A taxonomy of news sites, with respective survival prospects.

Dealing with the important stuff: "Brief swear words might cost broadcasters a bundle now under a much-anticipated ruling that the Supreme Court issued Tuesday."

Yankees cut ticket prices. $1,250 to watch a baseball game may still strike some people as a little pricey.

Analyst sez BAC needs $60-70 billion in capital.

Yes, the same Bank of America that just reported an awesome first quarter and said it didn't need no more money.

Arlen Specter reportedly switches parties.

Not much room left in that big tent for moderate Republicans, I guess.

UPDATE: Specter's statement. "Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right...I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans."

More: The move presents "Democrats with a possible 60th vote and the power to break Senate filibusters as they try to advance the Obama administration’s new agenda...Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine [...] said Mr. Specter's decision reflected the increasingly inhospitable climate in the Republican party for moderates."

More:

Reihan Salam, co-author of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save America," said this week that the danger for Republicans is to believe they now represent a vast, silent majority that is waiting to reassert itself. A louder voice from a smaller cadre of supporters is not the answer, he warned. That will just prevent Republicans from reassessing their old agenda, developing new ideas and once again learning to reach out broadly.

Mapping the Seven Deadly Sins; click the sides of the map to scroll through sins. North Carolina is a diverse place, apparently.

"At this point, if you want to maintain criminal laws against more dangerous drugs, you're better off conceding the legality of marijuana, lest the public lose respect for drug laws in general."

The Just Say No meme never bore much scrutiny, especially if the catchall "drugs" did not include alcohol and nicotine.

It does seem that we're near a tipping point.

"Just as the invention of the atomic bomb changed warfare and deterrence 64 years ago, a new international race has begun to develop cyberweapons and systems to protect against them." So the next war will be won by a teenager with a bad attitude.

Don Beason's name used to pop up around here pretty often. Here it comes again.

Hog-waste lagoons a possible source of swine flu?

Via Exile, which has more links.

North Carolina has a decent anti-predatory lending law; after years of trying, it looks like some version will become federal law -- a weaker brew that will water down North Carolina's own protections.

When I was growing up we learned the GM brands the way students at Clongowes Wood learned the Catechism.

When the bondholders are in trouble you know it's nut-cutting time.

980 comments and counting beneath the Freep article.

Low-flying jet over Manhattan. What could possibly go wrong?

At least it was for a really good cause: "The mission on Monday, officials said, was set up to create an iconic shot of Air Force One, similar to one that was taken in recent years over the Grand Canyon."

In which Greensboro is shown to be less forward-thinking than Wilson.

Portfolio, closed.

I wonder what I should do with the rest of my life.

Consumers’ new-found freedom to choose has struck fear into the hearts of the cable companies. They have been trying to slow internet television’s steady march into the living room by rolling out DOCSIS 3 at a snail’s pace and then stinging customers for its services. Another favourite trick has been to cap the amount of data that can be downloaded, or to charge extortionately by the megabyte.

Yet the measures to suffocate internet television being taken by the cable companies may already be too late...

Thnx to alert reader DE for the link. Our local provider is called out by name: "Time Warner Cable remains in the dark ages with its Road Runner service dribbling out three megabits a second (if you are lucky) for $35 a month."

Just a thought: The NFL draft is not a sporting event.

Lebron is making the NBA interesting again. The Yankees are having problems filling their fancy new stadium. There's even hockey happening in North Carolina. Enough, already, with the draft.

Social Democrats win in Iceland. I guess this guy will get his wish!

More: "The island economy remains in a tailspin and is expected to contract by more than 10 per cent this year."

As if having Dick Cheney as your spokesman is not enough:

Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

The New York Fed is, by custom and design, clubby and opaque. It is charged with curbing banks’ risky impulses, yet its president is selected by and reports to a board dominated by the chief executives of some of those same banks. Traditionally, the New York Fed president’s intelligence-gathering role has involved routine consultation with financiers, though Mr. Geithner’s recent predecessors generally did not meet with them unless senior aides were also present, according to the bank’s former general counsel.

By those standards, Mr. Geithner’s reliance on bankers, hedge fund managers and others to assess the market’s health — and provide guidance once it faltered — stood out.

How'd that work out? "But for all his ties to Citi, Mr. Geithner repeatedly missed or overlooked signs that the bank — along with the rest of the financial system — was falling apart. When he did spot trouble, analysts say, his responses were too measured, or too late."

Roubini is asked what will drive future economic growth:

That is a difficult question because the periods of high growth in the United States in the last 25 years have been characterized by an asset and credit bubble...We have to switch our capital into things that are more productive and more stable in terms of social growth. That is going to be a challenge. And the potential growth rate might fall to a much lower rate.

His vagueness is not encouraging.

Last year, Eric Janszen nominated alternative energy as a boom/bubble driver; my take on the bubble cycle from 2007.

"Try to avoid close contact with sick people."

Helpful advice from the CDC's "Things You Can Do" page on Swine Flu.

What's worse about the bounce-back in Wall Street pay -- that it's funded with your money, or that the "strong start of the year for bank profits" used to justify it is based on voodoo accounting?

Time Warner Cable has a new way of dealing with its best customers people who use too much bandwidth: disconnecting them.

TWC is not the first company to play this game. Dave Winer wrote last year, "As long as I've been a customer of Comcast I've been writing how much I wish they'd sell their Internet business to a company that doesn't hate its customers so much."

Something to do in Greensboro next week.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Both men grew up to be successful writers, and funny ones at that. Not sure what, if anything, that says about funny writers.

News & Record getting smaller. "However, please evaluate us on the quality of the content, not on the number of sections." Noted.

My newspaper column is round-up of recent stories, including the tax-day Tea Parties and Time-Warner's tiered-pricing plan.

No proof harsh interrogations stopped any "specific imminent attacks." And of course, there's no way of knowing what information yielded under such techniques might have been forthcoming via other methods.

Waterboarding is an issue unto itself, but the larger question of interrogation techniques across the intelligence and military communities seems to me to be, well, the larger question. How did these techniques become policy, and how do we maintain an effective counterterrorism effort without giving up our own values?

It's a truism that trends start in California and spread to the rest of the country. This two-year-old post (found via this alarming update) examines a cultural pathology that engulfed much of the nation. The behavioral differences between rich and poor defined in the piece come down, essentially, to thrift:

Look at the difference between the behavior of rich and poor when it comes to home price appreciation. The rich view home price appreciation as adding to their net worth. If lower interest rates allow them to refinance, they will restructure their debt to pay off the loan more quickly in order to increase their wealth. Poor people view home price appreciation as income; free money for them to spend. If lower interest rates allow them to refinance, they will restructure their loan to pull as much home equity as possible and reduce their payment as much as possible so they can spend more. If any net worth happens to accumulate, they obtain a home equity line of credit and spend the appreciation as quickly as possible -- it makes them feel rich even though it really makes them poor.

We created a culture where feeling rich, and looking rich, was the most important thing.

As was true for the Iraq war itself: "At some point they are going to figure out that for most of us, we don’t care if the person has a (R) or (D) behind their name when they were instituting a policy of torture."

"North Carolina's meat industries are battling a bill the Humane Society of the United States and its vegan president say is meant to protect puppies, warning instead that it is the first step toward ending meat eating as we know it." I don't know the specifics of the legislation, but I'm guessing we can regulate puppy mills and the excesses of factory farming without mandating veganism.

Time Warner Cable's new pricing plan? Thnx to B-Dub for the tip.