Last night, the New York Times reported on Iowa Congressman Steve King’s attempt to block the Obama administration from changing the face of the $20 bill from Andrew Jackson to the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman. At first glance, the piece reads as straightforward, workaday journalism. On closer inspection, however, it reveals a few of the paper of record’s most entrenched pathologies.

Arthur Livingston, 39, maybe "alive" in the "technical" tense. He is "breathing" and his "biological heart" is "beating." But he's not alive in a much more important sense: his bank has declared him dead. Since May 2009.

It's only been one day since ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. Government's credit rating from AAA to AA+, and already I've been forced to kill two people who tried to steal my food. And it could get worse! The agency says there's a one-in-three chance the U.S. will be downgraded again.

We all know that broke, friendless presidential candidate Newt Gingrich loves Tiffany & Co enough to have held a $250,000 - $500,000 credit account at the high-end jeweler. But did you know he loves the place so much he had a second, $500,000 - $1 million line of credit? And also he dyed his hair Tiffany blue?

Given that the nation's credit rating bureaus have names that are somewhat nightclubby — "see you later on at Club Experian!" — it almost makes sense that they maintain VIP lists. Almost.

The American empire took another small step towards its inevitable fall this morning as the S&P cut its outlook on the nation's credit rating to "negative." The chance that our national credit rating will be downgraded from its current AAA rating some time in the next two years is now "at least one-in-three."

Highly questionable ratings agency Moody's today classified Ireland's banks as junk — which is sort of like saying Ireland isn't trustworthy enough for a Discover card.

The Way We Live Now: cutting corners. Corners are expensive. You want a 90-degree angle? Pay up. Otherwise you get a ragged, crumbling edge, just like everyone else.

Moody's, the global credit rating scam agency, dropped Ireland's government bond rating five notches today from "Aa2" to "Baa1," which isn't good (at all)! Greece and Spain could soon feel the Moody's hammer, too. Sucks to be them!

In the future, credit cards will be funner: they'll have buttons and batteries and "tiny lights" and all the bloopity bleep-bloop that you, the consumers, love. It will be that much more enjoyable to pay off your crushing college debt.

S&P is so slick! The credit-rating agency has comically put rival Moody's on its watch list for a downgrade, replete with a lecture about how reform legislation (that applies to both firms) will devastate Moody's, only. Oh, it's on now.

So: Visa and Mastercard—who've helped ensure that your brokeass stays broke after buying things that leave you broke—waived fees on Haiti donation transactions. Wells Fargo didn't. Somebody on the internet bitched about it. Wells Fargo's response is hysterical:

As if America's jobless weren't screwed enough — more employers are running credit checks on potential employees for jobs that involve no financial decisions, so you'd better pay your bills on time even if you don't have a job!

How did all those shady mortgage companies get America's finances all fucked up in the first place? By using the freakish amount of publicly available data about all of our lives to target those people who were the most needy, vulnerable, and ignorant, and reel them into unsustainable debt. Now that everything is screwed up, how are financial companies going to pull us out of this mess? The exact same way! Data mining is going just as strong as ever, and all these credit card and loan companies are really trying to bring in new customers now that their last round of customers have all gone bankrupt. Even the big credit rating firms like Equifax and Experian make huge money slicing up all of the information they have on everyone, classifying us into little demographic groups, and selling it to third parties who can then send disturbingly well-targeted (or just disturbing, period) pitches. One woman got dozens of credit card offers congratulating her on recently emerging from bankruptcy. Other people get letters from random companies that show how much the balance is left on their own home mortgage. Someone should be punched for this. Possibly these people:

For some reason, The Incredible Hulk star Edward Norton has apparently been telling fans that he wrote the screenplay for the superhero flick. This doesn't sit well at all with screenwriter Zak Penn, considering that he enjoys sole writing credit and says he'd been working on the story for more than a decade. Penn showed up at San Diego's Comic-Con 2008 yesterday and aired his thoughts to an appreciative audience of nerds.

"Jack Flack" at Portfolio.com is one of a small handful of bloggers who writes things that are interesting and intelligent about corporate PR. One of his trademark constructions is "Parsing XYZ," where he takes some statement or speech or press release full of corporate doublespeak and decodes it. I identify him so closely with that stuff that I even gave him credit the last time I used the word "Parsing!" But not so for the Wall Street Journal, which ran a column last weekend with a premise virtually identical [see update also, below] to an earlier Jack Flack column:

"A federal jury on Wednesday ruled against a New Jersey man who says his services helped 'Sopranos' creator David Chase develop ideas for the hit HBO mob drama." The losing plaintiff, Robert Baer, promptly boarded a midnight train leaving from Newark Penn Station. When the conductor asked where he was headed, he simply sighed and replied, "Oh, anywhere!" Roll credits. [WNBC]