From a Wall Street Journal article on possible plans for a larger federal ownership stake in Citigroup:

Under the scenario being considered, a substantial chunk of the $45 billion in preferred shares held by the government would convert into common stock, people familiar with the matter said. The government obtained those shares, equivalent to a 7.8% stake, in return for pumping capital into Citigroup.

The move wouldn’t cost taxpayers additional money, but other Citigroup shareholders would see their shares diluted. A larger ownership stake by the federal government could fuel speculation that other troubled banks will line up for similar agreements. [...] As part of the plan, Citigroup officials hope to persuade private investors that have bought preferred shares — such as the Government of Singapore Investment Corp., Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Kuwait Investment Authority — to follow the government’s lead in converting some of those stakes into common stock, according to people familiar with the matter. That would further bolster an obscure but increasingly pivotal measure of banks’ capital known as “tangible common equity,” or TCE.

Words like “Government of” and “Authority” when paired with the names of countries are usually indications that we’re dealing with government entities, not private ones. The upshot of this would be to turn Citigroup into a company that was, in essence, jointly owned by a few different governments.

Faiz Shakir has George P. Bush laying the groundwork for his presidential primary big in 2032 or 2036:

Afterward, Bush said he doesn’t think Crist is a fiscal conservative and that he may have hurt himself with some Republicans for his appearance with Obama and his support of the stimulus plan.

“That will be on his track record and people are going to remember that,” Bush said, adding that Crist is running the risk of falling in the “D light” category of the party.

Just remember, the last time the Republican Party captured the White House without a member of the Bush family on the ticket was 1972. It’s true that right now people hate the Bushes. But people hated the Bushes in 1993, too. The country has a short memory, and for some reason the GOP just can’t quit these people. It’ll be Jeb in 2016 and George P. somewhere down the line.

Here’s an intriguing swathe of Ryan Lizza’s profile of Rahm Emanuel:

“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?” [...] “Now, my view is that Krugman as an economist is not wrong. But in the art of the possible, of the deal, he is wrong. He couldn’t get his legislation.”

Whether or not you think Emanuel is right about the legislative politics, it seems to significant for the White House Chief of Staff to concede that Krugman is correct about the economics and the legislation President Obama signed into law may, in virtue of its concessions to conservatives, be too small to rescue the economy.

I also always find this particular form of ping-pong to be a big odd:

1. Practical Politician A offers Proposal X.
2. Outside Commenter B says that X is too moderate on the merits.
3. Practical Politician A angrily retorts that better legislation on the merits would have been impossible to secure.

I think the right way to understand the (1)/(2) dynamic here is that the criticism in step (2) makes it easier to secure the passage of legislation. If you propose something, and every single progressive in all the land immediately lauds it as the greatest bill ever written, then your legislation is now an extreme left proposal and it’s doomed. If you’re going to make concessions to political reality then you need to weather a bit of criticism from your left—that’s what establishes the proposal as moderate and sensible. Things like “some liberal economists such as Paul Krugman say the proposal is too small” is a helpful piece of context-setting that prevents the proposal from appearing too radical.

I just wanted to second Scott Lemieux on this point:

One thing I do want to address, though, is the idiotic argument (sometimes made by defenders of the film) in some quarters that it’s just a Rocky clone with better acting/direction. I can’t imagine missing the point more. Pro wrestling makes such a great subject for a movie — and avoids the sports movie cliches that mar this year’s Best Picture winner — precisely because there can be not heroic triumph (or near-triumph) when there’s nothing to win. Neither the pre-destined winner nor the loser in wrestling are permitted the dignity of competition that made Rocky seem like a winner even when he lost, and the implications of this are explored with great effect. And there are lots of other nice touches — for example, the amazing scenes of the washed-up wrestlers hawking VHS tapes at the American Legion hall, the parallels between pro wrestling that are never belabored or (so rarely in the age in which Aaron Sorkin is considerd a genius) theorized about by the characters.

Right. The transportation of certain “fight”/”sports” tropes into the context of a fake sport plays with the genres and enormously complicated our understanding of what’s happening.

Speaking of marijuana legalization polls, the question of course arises as to whether we should legalize pot. On this, I’ve come to stand with Mark Kleiman who conveniently repeated his gospel yesterday:

Substantively, I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction. (Cannabis abuse is somewhat less common, and tends to be somewhat less long-lasting, than alcohol abuse, and the physiological and behavioral effects tend to be less dramatic, but about 11% of those who smoke a fifth lifetime joint go on to a period of heavy daily use measured in months.) So I’d expect outright legalization to lead to a substantial increase in the prevalence of cannabis-related drug abuse disorder: I’d regard an increase of only 50% as a pleasant surprise, and if I had to guess I’d guess at something like a doubling.

So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.

That beautifully-crafted policy has only two major defects that I’m aware of: it wouldn’t create tax revenue, and no one but me supports it. On the drug-warrior side of the argument, even those who can read the handwriting on the wall won’t dare to deviate from the orthodoxy. As we did with alcohol, the country will lurch from one bad policy (prohibition) to another (commercial legalization). I just hope the sellers are required to measure the cannabinoid profiles of their products and put those measurements on the label.

I support it too! But if it is true that we need to choose between the current regime and an alcohol-style regime, I would certainly prefer commercial legalization. The public health harms would be real, but they’d be more than offset by the benefits—gains to non-abusive users, increased tax revenues that could fund worthwhile endeavors, resources currently devoted to a senseless criminalization scheme could be repurposed. This would also be an area in which America’s tradition of federalism and localism could be put to good use. In many parts of the country, people probably wouldn’t want to see any pot stores or “coffee shops” and they could, presumably, decline to license any even if federal law permitted such licenses in general.

On ABC right now, they’re talking about the question of whether or not LeBron James could ever average a triple-double across the course of a season, the way Oscar Robinson did in the 1961-62 season. Discussion of this issue would benefit from consideration of the question of pace. NBA record-keeping wasn’t sufficiently detailed in the 1960s to calculate pace factor in a fully rigorous manner, but everyone’s understanding is that the game was played much faster in the 60s than it was even in the 1980s which, in turn, were faster than today. For example, in the 61-62 season, the average team took 8619 field goal attempts over the course of an 80 game season. Last season the average team had only 6683 field goal attempts in an 82 game season.

In the 2007-2008 season, LeBron averaged 7.2 assists, and 7.9 rebounds as well as 30 points per game. That season, the Cleveland Cavaliers played with a pace factor of 90.2, which was unusually slow—22nd out of 30. To have any chance at breaking the Robinson line, not only would LeBron probably need to start wracking up assists at a somewhat higher rate, but Cleveland would need to start playing substantially faster.