Apparently practically no one in New York received a Wall Street Journal today. What, did the Fed need to hijack its plant to print all that new money they're "injecting"? A customer service representative I reached after ninety six minutes on hold* just told me it's the result of a production snafu in Rochester, but if the Journal is being printed five and a half hours away they totally deserve this for having such a terrible carbon footprint. The Journal managed to put out a paper the day after its office was destroyed by terrorists so whatever it is must be pretty bad. Anyway, if you are a subscriber, here is what you missed: insurance giant AIG got taken over by that same acquisition-happy behemoth that just acquired Freddie and Fannie, but if you are a subscriber you probably knew this last night.In any case, if you're a subscriber you'll be reminded of it again tomorrow, when you'll have probably forgotten amidst all the other crazyass shit that is already filling the Journal's annoyingly Portfolio-esque redesigned website. Hey look, the SEC is regulating short selling again, good idea! As with the rest of this meltdown, we'll keep you posted on What This Means as soon as we figure out What It Means which is to say don't hold your breath!

The Observer has a new profile of Matthew Moinian, a 23-year-old "real estate magnate" whose family's real estate business is one of the biggest property owners in downtown New York. He has a full-floor bachelor pad in a brand new W hotel—a construction project he's in charge of. Nice for him! It's a typical Observer profile that is simultaneously fascinated by a rich kid and mocking of him. But they did miss one thing: the lawsuit just filed against Moinian's dad, the real real estate magnate in the family:

Natural resource pipelines are essential but controversial. Some people argue they are God's will, others believe they are unsightly and hazardous to all the beautiful nature God wanted us to enjoy. So many crafty individuals go through the mindboggling trouble of building such things way underwater where they are less unsightly. Well guess what some crafty Russian individuals did after building one of these undersea pipelines to Estonia? They pumped it full of vodka, 'course!And sold it on the black market. Or tried to sell it, anyway. Says the AFP:

In December, Fortune magazine admitted it had been remiss naming insurance giant AIG one of its "10 Stocks To Buy Now" before a yearlong 18 percent decline. "We... didn't expect [the] mortgage unit to be such an albatross," editors wrote. To correct the error, the magazine had a fresh list of "The Best Stocks For 2008" — including Merrill Lynch. "Smart investors should buy this stock before everyone else comes to their senses," Fortune wrote, calling a recent correction in Merrill stock "an overreaction." Investors who followed this advice are now down 93 61 percent. All the big financial magazines butter their bread with dubious prescriptions for how hobbyist investors can beat market professionals, so Fortune is hardly alone in being humiliated by the ongoing market meltdown. We'll spread the embarrassment around after the jump.

This is what happens when you let an Australian-born media mogul buy an American newspaper and import his chief editor from Britain: Suddenly no one on staff can correctly identify the country to the north (for the record, it's "Canada" — just "Canada"). And to think we actually believed Robert Thomson would make the Wall Street Journal more globalist! [WSJ]

Today Chris Hitchens's Slate column praises Barack Obama. This is notable because the Hitch would seem to rather have his nuts waxed for a story and/or get waterboarded for a story than be caught praising any politician less unlikely than former Former Undersecretary Of Hobbesean Experimentation/Torture In The Iraq Doug Feith for a story. So over the past year Hitch has generally stuck to dissing Obama for tolerating supposed champions of the oppressed who live in fancy houses like Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton, for marrying someone who was not a good writer in college, for taking that fancy tour of Europe and for resorting to "tiresome demagoguery" in knocking John McCain for purporting to champion the oppressed while living in all those fancy houses,Today though, The Hitch decided to praise Obama's foreign policy. Is O polling so bad that to say nice things about him qualifies as sufficiently pathologically contrarian for Mr. Sarah Palin could be a secret genius? Or maybe Hitch counterintuitively decided to watch Obama on O'Reilly the other day and liked the fancy BBC presenter way Obama pronounces "Pakistan." Actually come to think of it that is probably what happened.

Ha ha ha just months ago the stupid business press were writing glowing cover stories of Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain like he was John McCain in 2000 and now look his company doesn't exist anymore! Yes we've received those tips. "Aside from its obvious troubles-afflicting all the largest financial institutions," Forbes wrote, "Merrill is in damn good shape." Interesting word choice, media! Distracted by a certain someone's athletic physique?Oh but wait, everyone still hearts John Thain. He was not a giant arrogant prick, managed to understand all those complex securities without being autistic, and he looks go good next to that other guy! By which I mean Lehman CEO Dick Fuld, but also Thain's his predecessor at Merrill, and his predecessor before that from the New York Stock Exchange, and pretty much any other asshole by whom you could be being laid off right now. From today's Journal:

Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola either drew the short straw at the assignment desk yesterday, or he sincerely believes that a five-year-old's opinion on the graffiti menace is worth 700 words. A mouthy little law-and-order kindergartener on Long Island got so worked up by an earlier Newsday story on taggers that he had his grandpa transcribe his tiny thoughts on the issue into a letter, which warranted another Newsday story, in which everybody comes off as monumentally stupid. Particularly Newsday:

Greta Van Susteren scored an interview with Todd "First Dude" Palin last night — he actually came from a smaller town than Wasilla?! — that will give you a better idea of what everyone wants to know about Sarah Palin, which is to say "what she was like in high school." The answer is not Tracey Flick! Mysteries still remain: he claims she was "shy" but does that mean "shy" in an aloof popular way or "shy" in a "it is actually conceivable that she conceived Track the night she lost her virginity" way? Also: Sarah Palin looked exactly like a character on the cover of a Sweet Valley High book. Anyway, Todd seems generally sweet and if not exactly conveying of a towering intellect he at least seems to appreciate the value of diplomacy: when asked about his wife's high school basketball career he says: "She wasn't a player who you would see in all of the stats, but she was a valuable part of the team."

On the whole, the journalists who've TURNED AGAINST their former boyfriend John McCain are some of our least favorite journalists in the nation, embodying as they do everything insular and adolescent about the Washington Press Corps. They loved John McCain when he could convince them that he was only bullshitting to the voters, not to them. Now, he won't speak to them! And hey, he's lying about shit, too, but whatever. Today, another media person handed McCain back his class ring and ran home, weeping. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, explain yourself!

Rumors: did they take down Lehman? This was one of those nagging questions to which we were too overwhelmed to answer yesterday. Now we know: Yes and no! On the one hand, as both rumormonger David Einhorn and pretty stiletto-wearing former Lehman CFO Erin Callan could tell you, that is how capitalism works. You short a stock, you start a word-of-mouth marketing campaign about how, say, "Lehman is the new Bear," which translates roughly to "Lehman is the new venerable investment bank whose demise those terrible short-sellers and their malicious rumormongering will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy," and, lo and behold, the shit happens. Of course…it doesn't happen if your company has a sane and convincing leader who can go on CNBC and say, "here, look at our books! Our firm has such robust ratios of cash and hard tangible assets to covenants and other accounts payable that it really doesn't matter what our stock price does because, familiar as we are with the pussy nature of Wall Street confidence and the easily-distracted myopic ephemera-addled lemmings who govern such day-to-day fluctuations, we've seen to it to inoculate our business from such attacks by stockpiling enough hard currency and solid — but also liquid! — financial instruments that we can weather a crisis of confidence without having to undermine our case by begging them for money!" Lehman had no such leader. And it had no such assets!

No story about a bankrupt company is complete without the requisite "sad sack carries own crap out of office in boxes" shot, so of course every media outlet in the world was rolling tape or snapping pictures outside Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York Monday. TV reporters were doing their standups with the building in the background, so the average Joe watching at home would be able to say to his wife, "so that's where my securitized subprime mortgage is bundled with commercial-mortgage-backed securities into a mark-to-model collateralized debt obligation!" Over-extrapolating from the financial fortunes of others is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place but, but on the other hand you can't expect people not to stare at pictures of anyone potentially in the process of becoming a hobo. Watch the media watch the (maybe) new poors in the gallery after the jump.

Did you know that any taxi driver in any city on earth is able to sum up the mood of his entire nation on cue with a single pithy yet heartfelt quote? It's lucky, since every foreign correspondent in the world (especially Thomas Friedman) bases his or her understanding of a country on what a taxi driver says. It's the classic easy quote. But now that old misguided trope may be dying! It's being overtaken by something even worse: the Twitter "hypergrapevine." Just what journalism needs, more lazy quote-whoring from a voluble unrepresentative minority! Twitter CEO (nice business card, ha) Jack Dorsey says the teeny-typing service is a boon for reporters:

The morning news is terrifying even before the ominous opening of U.S. markets today, and was also scary hours ago before overseas markets opened and U.S. stock futures fell sharply. The bankruptcy at Lehman Brothers, the takeover of Merrill Lynch and the plea by insurance giant AIG for $40 billion in federal aid made for scary front pages (pictured, click for larger image) and heated chatter on CNBC. And no one wasted any time telling everyone how bad things really are. The "American financial system was shaken to its core," the Wall Street Journal said, warning of a "crisis on Wall Street." Other media outlets were scarcely more comforting:

This Weather Channel reporter was just following in the footsteps of his colleagues at CNN and every other news network when he stupidly stepped into the hurricane-force winds still remaining from Hurricane Ike this weekend. But unlike them he was nearly blown into oblivion. Luckily there was a residential fence to keep him from, you know, dying. All this for one of the most clichéd shots in TV news. Someone end the madness.

With its crack team of arrows, Newsweek makes sense of this week's natural disaster for you. After the jump, the verdict. Ike=Fail. "Houston, you have a problem. And so might Bush/McCain. Will FEMA redeema?" What? Also, only the hurricane and the Department of the Interior get down arrows. Biden, the Clintons, Obama, Palin, McCain-even 9/11-get sideways arrows. And the arrows point both ways. It seems that if you can't make a judgment using simply an arrow, you're in trouble. Or maybe, the situation is too nuanced and varied to be summed up with an arrow. In which case, go back to words. The Economist doesn't use arrows. The Economist uses words. [Newsweek]

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a story about Lehman Brothers wherein the paper sent a reporter out to eavesdrop around the bank's headquarters. "It's over, man...unless we get bought out in the next 24 hours, it's over," they quoted a "young man" as saying to someone on his cell phone. Then over by a "fast food cart" the reporter quoted one of three men wearing Lehman badges discussing the future of all capitalism in the event that the government decides to stop printing money to rescue banks whose stocks have been mercilessly pointlessly attacked by all those greedy/fearful predatory/lemminglike enemies of capitalism known as "capitalists," asking: "At some point, where does it stop?" Well here's where it stops, bro: your egg and cheese. They don't serve them with a "side of digital recorder" around here anymore.The food cart guy knows that whispers like the ones he hears outside are self-fulfilling prophecies in an irrational era like the modern ones, so he's shutting off the coffee spigot to reporters descending on the area to cover the Lehman crisis! You gotta wonder why he cares though. I mean, sure the impending layoffs at Lehman will have some "trickle-down" effect. But in lean times won't a larger percentage of bankers be eating from the food cart in lieu of whatever fancy hotels they've been patronizing on the company dime? Ha ha ha, or maybe that's just how I wish "lean times" worked at publicly traded companies. In any case I have another theory: the food cart guy is trying to buy Lehman Brothers. Sure 24,000 employees is a little ambitious, but Lehman stock is off 93% and at least you can read the food cart's balance sheet. Or maybe the food cart guy is just a decent guy. Photo Of The Day [Portfolio] Credit Crisis Strains Government's Options [WSJ]

Editor Bill Keller to the New York Times Metro team, whose stand-alone section will soon be folded in with the sports section: "I know it will take more than a beer to make up for the loss of your section...But I figure a beer can't hurt. I'm buying." As if the Times can even afford that! [Observer]

It was the sound of Christian humility: We can't know the mind of God, we can only pray we are in accord with it. Pop quiz: to what faith-based public gesture is esteemed pundit Peggy Noonan referring with this line in today's Wall Street Journal column? Click the blingee for a multiple choice!1. When Barack Obama told Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren that the precise moment at which human life, in the Christian sense denoting the establishment of a unique human "soul," begins was a matter "above my pay grade." 2. When Sarah Palin told a church youth group that "our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God" with regard to The Iraq. Ha ha ha, stab stab stab. Here's what she wrote on #1:

Sharp-eyed readers of this morning's Wall Street Journal may notice that editor and Briton Robert Thomson has imported to the financial paper not just the starchy crispness of his old Financial Times but a dash of London's Fleet Street, as well. Read to the end of the front-pager on Lehman Brothers shopping itself and you'll find, as Daily Intelligencer did, that the Journal has truly redefined what it means by "Heard On The Street." In addition to being the title of the paper's bread-and-butter finance column, the phrase now literally describes how Journal reporters collect information. From the article: