Cheat Sheet

No more back and forth about whether we’re in a recession: According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, we’ve already been in one for a year. The nonpartisan group’s Business Cycle Dating Committee released a statement today saying the US economy entered a recession in December 2007, and the news sparked a sharp selloff on Wall Street. The Dow dropped 679.95 points to close at 8,149.09, while the S&P and Nasdaq were off almost 9 percent. GE and Caterpillar both lost more than 6 percent after a report that manufacturing contracted at the fastest pace in 26 years, while AmEx and JPMorgan Chase dropped more than 9 percent on news that credit card companies would cut available lending by 45 percent. “The economic news is going to continue to get worse before it gets better,” Leo Grohowski of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. told Bloomberg Radio. “The biggest single challenge in terms of the economy is the state of housing and it still remains precarious.”

Now he tells us: In an interview tonight, President Bush tells ABC News “I think I was unprepared for war.” He also calls the incorrect intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction the “biggest regret of all the presidency.” When asked, however, if he would have still gone to war if he knew Hussein did not have WMDs, Bush said “"That is a do-over that I can't do.” He also said that he regretted partisanship in Washington. “"I also knew that the president has the responsibility to try to elevate the tone. And, frankly, it just didn't work, much as I'd like to have it work." And he seems to have a grasp on the reality of the last election: “I think it was a repudiation of Republicans. And I'm sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me.”

According to ABC News, American intelligence agencies warned India in mid-October of a potential attack “from the sea against hotels and business centers in Mumbai.” According to one source, specific locations including the Taj Hotel were named. And, on November 18, Indian intelligence intercepted a satellite call by a leader of the group believed to be responsible for the attack that revealed a possible sea-borne attack. Since the attacks, American intelligence has been tracking the phones and SIM cards recovered from the Mumbai gunmen, which lead back to terrorist organizations in Pakistan and possible connections in the United States.

Over at The New Yorker’s Think Tank blog, Steve Coll has a must-read post on the Islamabad government’s relationship with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based Islamist organization that Indian and American officials are now linking to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week. Coll testifies to the group’s “maritime” capability, writing: “I was not too long ago a passenger” on Lashkar’s pontoon boat fleet. In 2005, he visited facilities run by the group’s charity, Jamat-ud-Dawa, which the Pakistani government openly tolerates, though the US has banned it as a terrorist organization “on the grounds that it is merely an alias for Lashkar.” If it is proved that the events in Mumbai “were purposeful attacks endorsed by [Lashkar chief Hafez] Saeed and aided by elements of the Army, then the Pakistan government will have no choice but to at least make a show of closing down Jamat and arresting Saeed,” Coll writes.

Tourists are being urged to stay away from Venice, which is submerged in its worst floods in more than 20 years. After days of heavy rain, the lagoon around the historic Italian city has risen to more than 4 feet above normal, and is at its fourth highest in modern times, with ferry and water taxi services suspended. “The whole of Venice is under three feet of water,” a British tourist tells The Daily Mail. “You can actually swim across St. Mark’s Square. We’ve just waded an hour and a half to get to our hotel.” In 1900, the Mail reports, St. Mark’s Square flooded 10 times a year, but now it floods as much as 60 times every year, and the city is sinking 10 centimeters annually. Mayor Massimo Cacciari is asking tourists to put off visiting the city and locals to stay indoors. Meanwhile, further downpours are in the forecast.

Weeks after Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew were killed, her estranged brother-in-law has been charged with their murders. William Balfour, 27, who is separated from wife Julia Hudson, was arrested Monday afternoon; he was already being held on parole violations. Police said they believe Balfour fought with Julia Hudson at the Hudsons’ home on the South Side of Chicago before shooting to death Darnell Donerson, 57, and Jason Hudson, 29, on October 24. The body of Julian King, 7, was found three days after the murders. Donerson’s cousin, Ruth Nichols, told the Chicago Sun-Times she and her family had been praying for an arrest: “It’s not going to bring your loved ones back, but if they have the person that did it, it’s some kind of relief,” she said. “I was just hoping they would get whoever did it.” Nichols said she didn’t know whether Balfour was the killer. “I don’t know who did it,” she said. “Everyone has to go to trial. Everyone has to be tried.” Authorities have recovered a .45-caliber pistol owned by Jason Hudson; they believe Balfour stole it.

Topping vet, socialism, maverick, and bipartisan, bailout has emerged as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2008. “Bailout, defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition as ‘a rescue from financial distress,’ received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time,” the dictionary team reports. Rounding out the rest of the top ten were trepidation, precipice, rogue, misogyny, and turmoil. The presidential campaign and financial meltdown were evidently on the minds of visitors to Merriam-Webster’s online site throughout the year. By contrast, 2007’s top pick—w00t, which means “to triumph over” or “an interjection expressing joy”—seems like a flashback of those halcyon days.

Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, has become one of the singular pariahs of the financial crisis. New York magazine concludes that it was the culture Fuld created, not his actions towards the end, which doomed his firm. Brought aboard in 1994, Fuld nurtured traders with a working-class resentment against "fucking bankers" with Ivy league diplomas. When the markets turned sour Fuld refused to bend, handing out plastic swords to his traders to urge them into battle. That summer, though, "the reliable us-against-them mentality seemed to create blind spots. There was a disconnect to the outside world, and the risk was substantial." Fuld worked the phones searching for a buyer, but Lehmen wasn't tied in to the financial firmament in the same way other big banks were. "Starting Friday night, September 12, a series of meetings was convened at the Fed’s concrete fortress on Liberty Street. Paulson and Tim Geithner, head of the New York Fed and now secretary-designate of Treasury, had summoned the heads of the country’s largest investment banks." Fuld wasn't even at the table.

Serial forgetters of keys, people’s names, and gloves may wish they had a perfect memory, but scientists have finally found a woman who has one, and she says it’s no picnic. “People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory,” Jill Price, 42, tells Der Spiegel. “But it’s also agonizing.” Price, who runs a religious school at a synagogue in the Los Angeles area, says there are no gaps in her memory after age 15: “Starting on Feb. 5, 1980, I remember everything. That was a Tuesday.” But in addition to good memories, Price retains every insult, every terrible shock. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance,” she says. “It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button…All of this is incredibly exhausting.”

Iraq has finally set a date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but the remnants of older wars still linger. For the first time in five years, Iraq and Iran met at a border crossing to exchange the bodies of casualties, resuming a practice that ended when the U.S. invasion of Iraq began in 2003. The war between the two nations, which claimed over 1 million lives, ended 20 years ago. “We want to pursue this long unresolved humanitarian case until it is totally closed,” said Mohammed Baghban, the Iranian Consul in Basra. The bodies of 41 Iranians and 200 Iraqis were exchanged while families wept and military bands played. "There will be more remains to be handed over because there are still people missing,” Baghban said.

Larissa MacFarquhar has a smart profile of New Left poster child Naomi Klein in this week's New Yorker. Klein, the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine has embarked on a lifelong project to rehabilitate the Left. In part, this means drawing neat parallels between capitalism and communism in order to counter the equivalency between communism and Stalin. When Pinochet, Yeltsin, and Suharto did terrible things, they each took the blame, she points out; but when Stalin did terrible things, Marxism itself took the hit. Klein says the key for American leftists is to move the center leftward. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.”

Audiences are flocking to movie theaters this holiday season—proof in numbers that an HDTV system at home is still no match for the escape (from the in-laws or incessant bad news—take your pick) provided by a theater. Even though consumers are reportedly cutting back on entertainment during the economic crisis, the box office felt no ill effects this weekend. While holiday and family themed films are typically the biggest draws during the Thanksgiving holiday, this year films of all types succeeded, with Four Christmases, Milk, and Australia taking in big numbers. People might be cutting back, but their love of sweeping epics and badly reviewed rom-coms remains strong enough.

Sarah Palin, still on the national stage weeks after the election, is attending four rallies today for Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who faces a runoff tomorrow against Democratic challenger Jim Martin. "We need Saxby because we need checks and balances in Washington, and we will not have that if Saxby is not re-elected," Palin said in Augusta today. Democrats, who currently hold 58 seats in the senate, need a win in Georgia and a successful recount in Minnesota in order to reach a filibuster-proof 60 votes. McCain has also campaigned on Chambliss' behalf. Barack Obama recorded radio ads supporting Jim Martin, but the president-elect has not held any campaign events in Georgia on his behalf.

Understanding contemporary art now requires an open mind and an appreciation of two-dimensional cartoon characters. The United Kingdom’s annual Turner Prize for contemporary art was awarded to Mark Leckey for his video “Industrial Light and Magic,” which combines Felix the Cat and an episode of The Simpsons under a voiceover from the artist. The “intelligent, energetic, and seductive nature of the work” was hailed as the “runaway favorite” of judges, while critics are panning the prize as the "worst on record," comparing it to an “afternoon spent in a Heathrow departure lounge.” Previous winners include an empty room with flashing lights and a canvas with elephant dung attached. Who says art is dead?

President Bush has pardoned Leslie Owen Collier. Collier is a Missouri hunter and farmer who, in 1995, attempted to help wild turkeys make a comeback in his area by poisoning the coyotes that fed on them. The problem? The poison also killed three bald eagles that scavenged the coyotes' carcasses, and a slew of other birds as well. As killing the national bird is a federal crime, the farmer was sentenced to two years probation, and he had to give up his guns. "I guess I was humbled is the best way to say it—I never thought it would happen," Collier said about his pardon in a phone interview. "It was emotional. I almost came to tears, really."

Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn’s holiday comedy Four Christmases ranked first at the box office this extended weekend, raking in $46.7 million since Wednesday, including $31.7 over the weekend. The earnings helped the weekend become the second-biggest Thanksgiving for movies ever. Teen sensation Twilight dropped to a very close third behind Disney feature Bolt; earning $26.4 and $26.6 million respectively. Bond’s Quantum of Solace and Australia rounded out the top 5 films. Milk came in at No. 10 with $1.4 million in receipts.

The Independent has a message from "the Russian version of Paris Hilton": "Everyone else has a crisis, but we have a millionaire's fair." Russia did indeed have a millionaire's fair this weekend, but attendees seemed rather tight with their wallets. "This year, people are just coming by to say hello, out of politeness," said the representative of a private jet company, which sold an average of 20 planes for $150 to $250 million over the past few years, but has sold none so far this year. The sour mood came despite a government ban at one point on using the word "crisis" on state-run television. ("There is no crisis. What crisis?" said one attendee.) Russia's oligarchy has lost an estimated $230 billion since the credit crisis began, and analysts estimate that it is about six to nine months behind the west in feeling the effects of the financial crisis.

For 30 years, adherents of Iran’s Islamic revolution, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have sported the chafiyeh, the black and white checkered scarf that is a symbol of Iran’s Islamic revolution. But now, The Guardian reports, the scarf is a craze among emerging rappers on Iran’s underground scene, who wear it in concerts and in video clips. Last year, Iran’s culture and Islamic guidance ministry began campaigning against rap, which it sees as vulgar and obscene. And if the mere wearing of the chafiyeh in a hip-hop setting wasn’t ironic enough, young MCs are pairing the scarf with that staple of hipster fashion: the band t-shirt.

In Republicans' own telling, their party's modern heritage begins with the libertarian campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964. In today's Los Angeles Times, Neal Gabler suggests a different lineage: "[T]he real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin." Before McCarthy, the GOP was "bland, temperate, and feckless." McCarthy made it so "conservatism would be as much about electoral slash-and-burn as it would be about a policy agenda." His legacy is a keystone of Republican strategy: "[T]o build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don't exist." The tendency has entered the GOP's genes: "[T]he Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come."

Among the juicier bits from Maureen Dowd’s Vanity Fair profile of Tina Fey: Lorne Michaels was warned not to put her on screen because “she doesn’t have the looks”; her husband of seven years, Jeff Richmond, calls himself the “Joe Biden of husbands” because he always says the wrong thing; the scar on her left cheek is from “a violent cutting attack by a stranger when Fey was five”; and Fey admires Leni Riefenstahl. Really. “If she hadn’t been so brilliant at what she did,” Fey says, “she wouldn’t have been so evil. She was like, in the book, ‘He was the leader of the country. Who was I not to go?’ And it’s like, Note to self: Think through the invite from the leader of your country.”

More distressing news for the rich: According to The Wall Street Journal, 10 to 15 percent of golf clubs are in financial distress. Membership is down 29 percent from their peaks at these clubs and 57 percent are operating at a loss. According to the chairman and CEO of the country's largest manager of golf courses, 20 percent of private clubs could be gone within five years. Many of these clubs' problems may be attributable to the stubbornness of their older members: "They like things the way they are, and perhaps calculate that in five years or so, they won't have as much need for a golf club anyway."

On Friday night, New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself in the thigh at a Manhattan nightclub. According to The New York Post, this was only the beginning of Burress’s strange evening. After the shooting, the paper says Burress made “frantic calls to figure out where his wound could be discretely treated.” He wound up checking into New York-Cornell Hospital as “Harris Smith,” and told the staff he’d been shot at Applebee’s. Police are investigating whether the hospital promptly reported the shooting injury, as required by law. The Post also says the nightclub, Latin Quarter, knew Burress had a gun and may have even cleaned up parts of the alleged crime scene. Burress will turn himself in today and plead not guilty to felony gun charges.

What you’ve known for weeks is now official: Hillary Clinton will be Barack Obama's secretary of state. At a press conference in Washington, Obama introduced Hillary and several other members of his cabinet, including defense secretary Robert Gates, attorney general Eric Holder, and homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano. Obama also announced two more top positions—Susan Rice as ambassador to the United Nations and General James Jones as his national security advisor. "I have known Hillary Clinton as a friend, a colleague, a source of counsel, and a tough campaign opponent. She possesses an extraordinary intelligence and a remarkable work ethic," Obama said at the event, "I am proud that she will be secretary of state." Clinton pledged to give "my all" and said that America "must pursue vigorous diplomacy using all the tools we can muster to build a future with more partners and fewer adversaries." The New York Times reports that this approach could include a shift of resources from defense spending to diplomatic efforts.

During the election, Barack Obama was tarred as a lightweight. But since winning, writes Peter Brown at Political Perceptions, "the way he teased the markets and the media about what he will do about taxes and spending also showed an aptitude for operating in the Wall Street-Washington arena." When word broke that Timothy Geithner would be Treasury Secretary, "the leak was meant to buttress the market." The move worked: The Dow rallied 500 points and the market some feared would finish below 7,000 that day finished about at 8,000. And Obama has promised stimulus and to not raise taxes in his first year—moves that instigated three consecutive days of gains for the Dow and S&P 500 for the first time since July 2007. "[P]erhaps Mr. Obama, or at least someone on his team," Brown writes, "isn't quite as inexperienced about how the world works--at least the world of money--than his opponents suggested during the campaign."