Ben Bernanke testified before Congress yesterday. Here are two newspaper accounts of the exact same testimony. First, the Washington Times:

With uncharacteristic bluntness, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned Congress on Wednesday that the United States could soon face a debt crisis like the one in Greece, and declared that the central bank will not help legislators by printing money to pay for the ballooning federal debt.

And here is the Los Angeles Times:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke acknowledged Wednesday that the government's bulging deficits are reaching levels that are unsustainable in the long run, but he said substantial action to reduce them was probably at least two years away.

The embryonic recovery from the worst economic crisis in more than half a century, especially the nation's weak job market, is much too fragile to begin cutting back on government support any time soon, he said...."I'm not advocating, I don't think anyone's really advocating trying to balance the budget this year or next year," he said in delivering the Fed's semiannual report to Congress in front of members of the House Financial Services Committee.

Of course, there's another difference between the two accounts as well. Later in its piece, the LA Times does report that Bernanke also has long-term deficit concerns. They tell the whole story. Later in its story, the Washington Times.....reports that Alan Greenspan is concerned about deficits too. You can read their entire 1000-word account and never have any idea the Bernanke thinks big federal deficits are just fine for the next couple of years. Nice job.

     

The study by Gentzkow and Shapiro has been around for a while in working paper form, though I only came across it on Friday when the latest issue of Econometrica in which it was finally published arrived in my mailbox.

Gentzkow and Shapiro propose to measure the slant of a particular newspaper by searching speeches entered into the Congressional Record and counting the number of times particular phrases were used by representatives of each party, mechanically identifying phrases favored by one party over the other. For example, a Democrat is more likely to use the phrase "workers rights" whereas a Republican is more likely to use the phrase "human embryos". They then counted the number of times phrases of each type appeared in a particular newspaper to construct an index of the political slant of that newspaper. The Gentzkow-Shapiro index of slant (shown on the vertical axis in the diagram below) has a reasonable correlation with subjective measures such as ratings assigned by users of Mondo Times (horizontal axis). For example, both measures agree that the Washington Times is one of the most conservative papers and the Atlanta Constitution is one of the most liberal newspapers.

Gentzkow and Shapiro then asked what other factors help explain a newspaper's slant. They found that the most important variable is the political orientation of people living within the paper's market. For example, the higher the vote share received by Bush in 2004 in the newspaper's market (horizontal axis below), the higher the Gentzkow-Shapiro measure of conservative slant (vertical axis).

On the other hand, the politics of the paper's owner seem to matter much less. For example, once one controls for geographic factors, there is no statistically significant correlation between the newspaper's own slant (horizontal axis below) and average slant of papers in other communities owned by the same owner (vertical axis).

Gentzkow and Shapiro conclude that papers to some degree are just giving their readers what the readers want so as to maximize the newspapers' profits.

One detail I'm curious about is how slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way they've chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. The result is social networks that don't recognize that they have developed a groupthink that is not centered on the truth.

Peter Gordon marvels that

There are intelligent adults in the world who go to bed each night believing that the other side tells lies, but their side is above all that.

Arnold Kling made a related point on Thursday:

There are two ways to approach reducing the use of high-cost, low-benefit procedures. You can have the government tell people what they can and cannot have. Or you can have individuals pay for a larger fraction of the medical procedures that they consume. It really comes down to those choices.

Advocating either one of those is political suicide, and talking about anything else is a waste of time. The Democrats will not advocate government rationing, and the Republicans will not advocate scrapping most of our current system of third-party payment in medicine. Instead, the summit, like the entire “health reform debate” this year, will be a waste of time.

I do, though, think that Arnold is being too generous when he gives the health care summit participants grades ranging from D+ to F-. They are wasting our time and money by refusing to confront and address the core incentive problem, which is the staggeringly distortionary and inefficient coupling of employment and health insurance.

The New York Times has provided a handy blogging point for today in the form of a long piece on the relationships Tim Geithner formed while head of the New York Fed. The story is based in part on the results of a Times FOIA request, for the contents of Geithner's daily calendar while at the bank, and bloggers have primarily approached the story as a search for potentially nefarious activities. As examples, we see Paul Kedrosky concluding that there's no real "smoking gun," and Yves Smith writing that the story is far too kind, as it mysteriously excises all the times Geithner was scheduled to dine on babies and puppies in the company of Satan and AIG executives.

For the life of me, I don't know why we're not spending at least a little more time on the opening anecdote:

Last June, with a financial hurricane gathering force, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. convened the nation's economic stewards for a brainstorming session. What emergency powers might the government want at its disposal to confront the crisis? he asked.

Timothy F. Geithner, who as president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank oversaw many of the nation's most powerful financial institutions, stunned the group with the audacity of his answer. He proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system, according to two participants, including Michele Davis, then an assistant Treasury secretary.

The proposal quickly died amid protests that it was politically untenable because it could put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.

Smith notes the line and proceeds to throw of a line constituting one of the most epic examples of point missing in recent memory:

The story fails to note this was almost assuredly the most bank friendly program possible.

To begin with, that's not even true. The most bank friendly program possible is handing the banks a lot of money with no strings attached. But how does Smith miss that this would not only have been a very smart and prescient move, but it might also have laid the groundwork for a much tougher bank policy? Guaranteeing all the bank debt was, of course, one of the key ingredients of the Swedish bank rescue so beloved by fans of nationalization. Smith just assumes Geithner is looking to help his Wall Street buddies, but he might just as easily have been reading directly from the Swedes' playbook.

Moreover, this move would have entirely changed the calculus in September. It would have made the government much more reluctant to let Lehman fail, which I believe we can agree would have been a good thing. Had they nonetheless decided that Lehman should be allowed to go down, in the knowledge that the government would have to make the debtholders whole, then we would have avoided most of the negative effects of the actual Lehman collapse. No money market fund would break the buck. No freeze in commercial paper markets would have resulted. And no emergency rush to TARP would have followed. Correspondingly, no intense fear of bank failures or nationalizations would have cast its shadow over all subsequent decisions.

This should be getting more attention, and it should also be causing Geithner-haters to rethink what they think they know about the man -- about his timidity, subservience, and allegiances. But it's already clear that it won't.Related Links
Geithner's Brave New Regulatory World: An IMterview
Finally, Drama! A Geithner vs. Bair Clash?
Harder Times

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The Seattle-based Alliance of Angels invested record amounts in Northwest companies last year, pouring $9.1 million into 29 early stage ventures, the organization announced today.

It was the biggest year so far for the 12-year-old group that connects individual investors with entrepreneurs. Its previous record was $7 million to 20 companies in 2005.

"We experienced our strongest year ever in terms of dollars flowing to entrepreneurs, even in the midst of a severe downturn," Alliance chairman, Dan Rosen, said in the release.

Nine companies received their first funding from the group last year and the other 20 received follow-on funding.

Software companies received the largest share of the investments - 33 percent of the funding went to 13 software companies. Clean tech was the next leading category with 28 percent of the funding going to two companies. Also funded were six consumer-products and retail companies, three Internet companies, two in the mobile industry and two medical device makers.

Despite my best efforts, there was no way that I was going to actually manage to blog while I was still at the TED conference this year. I don't know how anyone can do it. I suppose that is why there was such an explosion of tweeting at TED -- you can do it on the fly. But if you want to sit down and write anything vaguely coherent, it takes time. And the TED conference isn't about free time. In fact, I managed to get about 10 hours of sleep over the last three nights of TED. But now that I am back and rested, I figured I'd tap out some thoughts.

As with every year, now that TED is over, the debate has begun -- is TED an elitist event that is nothing more than a party for the rich and self-involved? I am reluctant to jump into the fray on this one. Not because I don't have an opinion. Nor because I fear angering those who will see my defense of TED as ... well ... elitist. Mostly because I think this debate is pretty well trodden territory. In fact, Robert Scoble just wrote a great post on the issue called "The Elephants in the Room at TED." But before getting to the content of this year's excellent TED, let me share a few thoughts on the democratization of TED.

When I first started attending TED a decade ago, I was blown away by the people in the room. I was by far the smallest house on the block, metaphorically speaking (still am). In fact, I distinctly remember my friend Andrew Anker leaning over to me before the start of one TED session back in the early 2000's and saying:

Don't look now, but if this row blows up, the New York Times will report "7 people died today, five of whom were Herbie Hancock, Yo-Yo Ma, Frank Gehry, Rupert Murdoch and [someone amazing who I can't remember]."

The TED conference was a spectacular salon of interesting, thoughtful, brilliant people. I considered myself lucky to participate. And while the conference didn't go out of its way to be elitist, there was no question that TED was in fact a gathering of the elite (from Technology, Entertainment and Design). What's more, the only way that you could enjoy TED was to be a member of that elite (or, maybe, borrow the coveted DVDs made of the conference that were only distributed to the attendees).

But that all changed a few years ago. In 2002, Chris Anderson took over TED. He loved TED and wanted to nurture the fantastic stuff that had come before him. But he also wanted to add pieces of himself to the event. He cared about the discussion. And he cared about the community. But he also cared about the world. And about the ideas. So he brought in some amazing people to work with him on the event. And he did what great CEOs do (after all, he had been a wildly successful entrepreneur before becoming the curator of TED) -- he asked anyone and everyone how they would make TED a better experience. What's more, he listened.

As a result of those conversations, rather than tighten the elite nature of the TED conference, Chris sought to democratize it. The first, and most significant, thing he did was to opened up his archive of amazing talks to the world. At the urging of June Cohen, TED's digital media czar, Chris made TED.com the home of "Ideas Worth Spreading." And boy have those ideas spread. As of today, over 200M TED talks have been viewed around the world. What's more, the TED team has created a user-generated translation engine for the TED Talks which allows the talks to be translated into a vast array of languages. Today TED Talks can be viewed with subtitles in over 80 languages. And those numbers are growing in all dimensions.

The good-news/bad-news of the success of the TED talks was that, as the talks spread throughout the world, interest in the TED conference grew massively. Suddenly there was more intense pressure than ever on the TED team to accommodate a larger number of people at the conference itself. In response to that huge demand, Chris and team did several things. First, they moved the conference from its beloved home in Monterey to a venue that could accommodate a much larger number of attendees. Second, they created something called TED Active -- a separate venue in which hundreds more attendees could enjoy the conference in simulcast. Third, they created the TED Associate Membership which allowed people to watch the conference streamed live into their homes and offices. Anyone who wanted could be part of the TED "elite" and watch the talks in real time. While attending TED in Long Beach remains a tough ticket to get, thousands upon thousands of individuals now experience the TED conference in real time throughout the world.

The TED team was not content for their conference to involve only well-known thinkers and doers. They recognized that up and comers had a huge amount to contribute to the discussion. The result: the TED Fellows program. Some 40 young scientist, environmentalists, artists, musicians, magicians, designers... joined this year's TED conference on "scholarship." They presented their work in sessions before the conference and several joined the main stage during TED proper to describe topics ranging from the emerging tattoo culture to the future of scientific discovery. As the best of the TED Fellow talks make their way to the Web, the broader public will benefit greatly from what these emerging influencers have to say.

But perhaps their boldest and most democratizing move the TED team made was to lend the TED brand to independent gatherings. The TEDx program was launched about a year ago. Under the TEDx moniker, hundreds of TED-like programs have been hosted around the world -- from TEDxBuenosAires to TEDxBrisbane to TEDxBudapest. These independent gatherings bring the power of TED to a local level. While it was a huge risk for TED to allow these independent events to carry the TED brand, the impact has been nothing shy of spectacular. The TED conference experience is literally everywhere now. In fact, if there isn't a TEDx event being put on in your community, grab the bull by the horns and start one yourself. TED is yours for the making.

I know that it is easy to point to the $6,000 price tag of TED and cry elitism. And it is hard to deny that attending the TED conference in Long Beach is a lucky privilege that can only be lived by a small number of people. But Chris Anderson and the TED team have done everything in their power to democratize the TED experience. They coined the phrase "Ideas Worth Spreading" and are living by it. They have worked tirelessly to make the TED and these "Ideas Worth Spreading" accessible to the largest number of people possible. TED is not about elitism. TED is about the democratization of ideas -- a powerful goal which Chris and his team continue to pursue maniacally. For that I am grateful.

We've long argued that the last ten years have been a Lost Decade for Everyday Americans. A number of publications have joined in as well. Now, The Economist weighs in, noting:

In terms of employment growth, the 2000s were also a lost decade. In the years between 1940 and 1999 the number of Americans employed outside farming grew by an average of 27% each decade. In the one just past it fell by 0.8%. In January this year, the number of people who had been jobless for more than six months reached 6.3m. And though the economy has grown for each of the past two quarters, the unemployment rate has only just begun to inch downwards. Though the recession is now supposedly at an end, the pain of the noughties’ miserable economic performance will be felt for a long time to come.

Obviously the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression mean that overall GDP growth for the decade looks very weak. It's worth noting that before the Great Recession, GDP growth for the decade was relatively strong, but job creation and incomes were just not keeping up with GDP or productivity growth the way we generally expect. 

Heather Hopkins is senior online analyst at Hitwise, which monitors traffic to web sites for Experian. She writes that "Facebook Users Prefer Broadcast Media."

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry about Facebook becoming the largest news reader. Facebook does send more traffic to News and Media sites than Google News but looking more closely at the data, I noticed that the two sites send traffic to a very different list of News and Media websites.

The following table starts to tell the story, showing the top 10 News and Media websites visited after Facebook and Google News last week.

She's puzzled why there is such a large difference in the two lists. And she tries to run additional analysis to figure out why the two lists aren't more similar.

I think the answer is that she is comparing apples to oranges. I might go to Google news to become more informed about a particular news topic. But on Facebook I'm more likely to share a different type of news, about bad weather coming my way, or more quirky content about the rich and famous (People magazine), etc.

Ms Hopkins is comparing news that is shared (Facebook), with news that is consumed (Google News). There's a big difference, as she has discovered.

- - -

Please see: The Latest Pew Report Reveals Very Sophisiticated News Consumers - SVW

Filed under: Internet, Google (GOOG), News Corp'B' (NWS), Media World

Apparently, all the hype wasn't worth it. After Twitter COO Dick Costolo explained that the company was going to unveil a "non-traditional" advertising model and claimed that "people will love it," what we're seeing is a foray into decidedly charted territory.

According to AllThingsD, Twitter's ad model will resemble the one that has been so successful for search and online ad giant Google (GOOG). Ads, essentially, will be tied to search.

Yawn.

Continue reading Twitter Unveils Google Ad Model, Despite Hype

Twitter Unveils Google Ad Model, Despite Hype originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Earnings Reports, Federal Natl Mtge (FNM), Housing, Recession, Financial Crisis

Fannie Mae (FNM), the country's largest mortgage lender, said Friday when it reported its latest quarterly results that it needs another $16.3 billion to stay afloat. Fannie Mae has been under water since the government started bailing it out in 2008.

The reason for Fannie's persistent problems are the mortgage defaults spreading throughout the housing industry. Serious delinquencies rose to 5.38% as of December 31, up from 4.72% on Sept 30 and 2.42% at the end of 2008.

Continue reading Fannie Mae Requests Another $16.3 Billion from the U.S. Treasury

Fannie Mae Requests Another $16.3 Billion from the U.S. Treasury originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Earnings Reports, Federal Natl Mtge (FNM), Housing, Recession, Financial Crisis

Fannie Mae (FNM), the country's largest mortgage lender, said Friday when it reported its latest quarterly results that it needs another $16.3 billion to stay afloat. Fannie Mae has been under water since the government started bailing it out in 2008.

The reason for Fannie's persistent problems are the mortgage defaults spreading throughout the housing industry. Serious delinquencies rose to 5.38% as of December 31, up from 4.72% on Sept 30 and 2.42% at the end of 2008.

Continue reading Fannie Mae Requests Another $16.3 Billion from the U.S. Treasury

Fannie Mae Requests Another $16.3 Billion from the U.S. Treasury originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

My friends at Bailey * Gardiner helped me get a room at the trés chic Sé San Diego hotel to save me from the hell of a cheap motel in the burbs.

I dutifully checked in with the popular geolocation game Foursquare when I arrived, and you can imagine my surprise when I got this:

To put it mildly, I was offended.

I would like to think that I have a good sense of humor (though my kids might disagree!), but I was not happy to be insulted because I had an opportunity to stay at a trendy place. Worse, from the perspective of someone who works with marketing and PR teams, I realized that this was a potential liability for the hotel as it tries to appeal to a younger audience: is being labeled a "douchebag" for staying at the hotel a good thing? I think not.

As a result, I posted a complaint on the Foursquare support boards, saying this:

Predictably, I got responses like this one: "The fact that you are so upset about the deuche[sic] bag award kind of shows you deserve it..." but they missed the point, as I highlighted in a follow-on message:

The problem here is a fundamental one: Web 2.0 companies need to grow up if they want to play in the bigger marketplace of business and corporate America. Does Foursquare? As far as I can tell, businesses are their only revenue stream, sponsorships and special promotions offered to Foursquare users, so that's an unequivocal yes in my book.

This is really no different from any previous era when companies had to decide whether they were going to stay within their target demographic or dilute the edginess of their brand and thereby appeal to a wider audience. Think 60s hippie demo, for example: did you stay a small company and highlight how you were "sticking it to the man" or did you become a bit less anti-establishment and get those advertising and sponsorship dollars from Fortune 500 companies that would let you grow? I'm thinking Ben & Jerry's here...

Subsequent to me bringing up the issue of the insulting "Douchebag Badge" on the Foursquare support forum, the issue was raised on TechCrunch with the subsequent comments being predictably vitrolic, since their audience is primarily the 20-somethings who think that a "douchebag" is a funny label and not insulting.

As one TechCrunch reader said, "Grow up, chill out, or get out!" and another, a better example of how there's a demographic that finds the word amusing and not crude or insulting: "the problem is not calling a badge 'douchebag' it's that as [Foursquare's] userbase grows, more actual douches will start using foursquare, rendering it too mainstream for early adopters to appreciate anymore."

Chrysanthe Tenentes of Foursquare did pipe in on the support forum and share that "the team is taking the sensitive nature of the db badge very seriously. The way that tagging works is also under review. Hearing user feedback is integral to improving foursquare features. Thanks everyone for piping in!"

What I find interesting in that remark? She didn't want to use the phrase "douchebag", so she abbreviated it "db". Indeed.

Ultimately, Foursquare faces the same dilemma that just about every self-consciously über-hip young Web 2.0 company is going to face: stick to your edgy personality and accept that you're going to be offensive to some of your potential audience and thereby limit your growth potential, or compromise, dilute some of the hipster vibe and be more appealing as a mainstream product or service?

In the case of Foursquare, geolocation check-in games are already a very competitive market segment (with Gowalla and Yelp doing well and, rumor has it, Facebook entering the space very soon) and if they hope to grow beyond their small market segment -- as is clearly the case given that they just signed TV network Bravo as a sponsor -- it's time for them to either make the douchebag badge optional or just scrub it entirely.

And as for the rest of these hip Web 2.0 companies, take a deep breath, it's time to grow up.

Filed under: International Markets

The earthquake that ripped through Chile left total economic damages estimated to range from $15 billion to $30 billion. The magnitude 8.8 quake impacted Santiago, where more than half the economic losses are said to have occurred, as well as the coastal area of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, according to a report by catastrophe modeling firm EQECAT.

Based on the preliminary economic estimates, the impact of the disaster is equivalent to 10% to 15% of Chile's real GDP, and reconstruction costs are expected to be much higher than the stated losses, due to newer building standards that must be met. Damage to residential properties is expected to range from 55% to 65% of the total, with commercial damage accounting for 20% to 30% and industrial damage 15% to 20%, EQECAT says.

Insurance and reinsurance companies with risk in this region will be watching subsequent reports closely in order to gauge the impact on their portfolios.

Chilean Earthquake Decimates More Than 10% of Its GDP originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last year at the massive Consumer Electronics Show, I was privileged to speak at the Social Media Jungle event that Jeff Pulver hosted the day before CES really kicked off.

This year, I'm co-hosting with Jeff and we have a pretty amazing lineup of speakers for our half-day event on January 6th, 2010 in Las Vegas.

Here's Jeff's description of the event:

It's wild out there in the social media jungle! Unbridled growth and tens of millions of "addicts" have made social media an unstoppable force that's changing the way we live and work. Sit in on state-of-the-industry updates, and get a candid look at how social media disrupts the workplace by empowering companies to lower burn rates. Plus, you'll learn how companies can use social media to motivate consumers and drive product sales without increasing costs. This year our underlying theme is: "How the consumer electronics industry can benefit from social media."

So who do we have speaking at the event? I'll do you one better: here's our full schedule:

9:00-9:10 a.m. Welcome to the Jungle, Jeff Pulver

9:10-9:30 a.m. Consumer Marketing in the State of NOW, Jeff Pulver

9:30-9:45 a.m. Social Media Reputation, Dave Taylor

9:45-9:55 a.m. Brand Engagement in Social Media, Chris Rauschnot

9:55-10:20 a.m. Effects of twitter on Consumer Marketing, Jeffrey Sass

10:20-10:30 a.m. Building Trust in Social Media, Eric Weaver

10:30-10:50 a.m. What's Next in Social Media? Robert Scoble

10:50-11:00 a.m. Social Media ROI, Ben Grossman

11:00-11:10 a.m. Social Media Reciprocity, Warren Whitlock

11:10-11:25 a.m. Digital Presence in the NOW and Beyond, Dean Landsman

11:25-11:35 a.m. Effective PR Strategies in the era of Social Media, Susan Etlinger

11:35-11:45 a.m. Leveraging the Livestream in Consumer Marketing, Kevin Sablan

11:45-11:55 a.m. Social Media Lessons Learned during 2009, Justin Levy

11:55-12:15 p.m. Evolution of Trust Agents, Chris Brogan

Personally, I'm pretty psyched to be in such august company and consider many of the speakers good friends and all of them highly respected colleagues.

How much would you pay to pow-wow with these folk? Well, we won't have a fire going and we won't be passing around a peace pipe (though it is a pretty cool idea!) but we do very much welcome your attendance, but more, your participation in the Social Media Jungle next week in Las Vegas.

To join us please start here: CES Registration then follow the registration process and select Social Media Jungle as the registration option.

Hopefully we'll see you there!

I finally signed up to KeywordSpy to get in on some action again in the Affiliate Marketing Arena.

Well after following one site which is close to my Niche I just logged in to Adwords to find I’d burnt £80 and I only turned one sale = £20

Lost – £60

Its hard work to get PPC right but when you do master it there is lots of cash to be made. I’m not new to PPC and know how to write ads so I was a bit pissed to find I allowed myself to lose £60 on 3 measly keywords!

To be honest I think I set my daily rate too high which was £40 a day (I only did 2 days) let me explain why I did this.

I’m in a niche which is massive and keywords cost a lot (but then these day most do) long are the days of 0.05 per click!

My site is ranked ok Organically and I’m waiting for the keywords I tested to rank on page 1 soon anyway but I thought lets test them to see if my site converts.

In KeywordSpy I chose my competitors top ROI keywords. KeywordSpy gives you the first time the keyword was seen and the last, so you know that if the advertiser has been using that keyword for that long it must be converting right?

Well in my case Wrong! – I decided on 3 main keywords based on what KeywordSpy was telling me.

244 Clicks
1.44% CTR
Average CPC £0.33

Total Cost £80
1 x Sale £20
Burnt – £60

This is my own product so its almost all profit apart from PayPal fee’s.

If my competitor is spending this much money over so many months, he has to be making money.

My conclusions are that KeywordSpy is either totally incorrect or his site converts better than mine.

I need to do some more testing…I’m thinking my competitors site converts better so I think I need to set a landing page exactly relevant to the keyword.

Simple stuff but I get lazy…

Via Spencer Ackerman, the Christian Science Monitor reports that Pakistan's offensive against Taliban leaders on its territory has been far more extensive than we thought:

Pakistan has arrested nearly half of the Afghanistan Taliban’s leadership in recent days, Pakistani officials told the Monitor Wednesday, dealing what could be a crucial blow to the insurgent movement.

In total, seven of the insurgent group’s 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, including the head of military operations, have been apprehended in the past week, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

....Much about the arrests and Pakistan’s motives remain unclear, but they do reflect Pakistan’s evolving approach to the Afghan Taliban leadership inside its borders. “A year ago when this [Obama] administration was completing its first Afghanistan review and we asked the Pakistanis about the Afghan Taliban leadership operating from their country, they flatly denied it,” says Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst who led President Obama’s initial Afghanistan policy review. “Now not only do they say there are senior Taliban leaders in their country, but they are frankly taking action against them.”

Pakistan's motivations are still murky, but they're obviously pretty serious about this one way or another. And even if they're doing this only because they want to make sure they have a seat at the table when it comes time to negotiate a peace settlement with the Taliban, that's probably OK too. After all, no settlement is worth much of anything unless Pakistan is OK with it.

So far, Obama's Afghanistan strategy seems to be paying steady dividends. I'm still not especially optimistic about our chances of accomplishing much of lasting significance there, but things have certainly gone better than I expected. Stay tuned.

     

• Transparency in financial markets is a good thing.
• Banks can boost savings rate by holding lotteries.
• The good and bad of financial innovation.

Go read. It's all good stuff.

     

Every weekend, the New York Times' Weddings & Celebrations arise like media manna from the heavens for vicarious brides-to-be and nostalgic has-beens. And every weekend, Gawker Weddings Expert Phyllis Nefler scores them. I now pronounce you blog and Altarcations.

I'm not sure if you guys know this, cause it hasn't been announced
(Psych! The phone's been ringing off the hook from here inside the house)
But this weekend is the last time Foster Kamer has the keys
To the once-great website which he's aptly driven to its knees.

So because we're clearly operating absent any rules
And this final weekend feels like Quasimodo's Feast of Fools
And these newlyweds are basically the contra of legit
I figured, hell, I'll monkey with the format just a bit.

Leslie Streeter writes a weekly column in a Palm Beach rag
Where she chronicles the happenings of all the gents and hags.
Given Florida's demographics, I suspect that we could get
A situation where the subjects die before The Death of Print.

Leslie first met Scott Zervitz, the man she'd later come to catch,
As a "very nice girl" in high school (he drove a Camaro, natch.)
Facebook brought them back together, as that thing is wont to do,
And she told her readers he'd proposed in a restaurant review.

In a story that kind of conjured up the Dirty Dancing plot,
Hali Feldman's dad first met Ben Friehling in a vacation spot.
And the Feldman family starting dining yearly at Benji and Jakes,
A restaurant owned by Friehling near the Catskills in White Lake.

Friehling fell "immediately in love with her, without a doubt,"
And when he served their table he would always go all out.
Although Hali found him too young (at that point he was 22)
They ran into one another on a Tulum beach; sparks flew.

Later, on a sunset horseback ride on "Ms. Feldman's family ranch,"
She was thrown off saddle, causing frantic Ben Friehling to blanch.
Paralysis was feared but thankfully did not occur
Hali was confined to bedrest for a month; Ben stood by her.

If you're someone who gets riled by gentrification creep
You might dislike this happy pair who have "classed up" the Bowery.
Jeffrey Goldstein's store, called Blue and Cream, is a Hamptons import
That went up right near the time that CBGB's closed its doors.

The couple grew up near each other (Upper West Side, obvi)
And first met, the story goes, on New Years Eve down in Miami.
And now they work together selling overpriced apparel,
Their wedding, unsurprisingly, was at the Standard Hotel.

(You have to put the em-pha-sis on the first syl-lab-ble for that last one to work, but just go with it, k?)

The law school at GWU was the first date spot for this pair,
They're like a median composite sketch of every student there.
The bride in this other couple analyzes all the ads
That run on CNN.com; does that mean this FAIL was her bad?

To the Faceoff we now go, although this week's so mediocre
That they're kind of the head fleas on a dead dog among these jokers.
But still, props to our two couples who by virtue of their status
Have come out on top per Altarcation's scoring apparatus.

Cindy Hwang and Jay Chiang had quite impressive undergrads,
He went to MIT; she was cum laude at Yale. Not bad!
That's five points right there, and two more points for their advanced degrees:
She's a lawyer out of NYU, and he's a PhD.

Jay's a worker at McKinsey and his dad's a physicist;
Cindy works in law: I wonder, are her doctor parents pissed?
That's another five for these two, bringing them to twelve in sum,
I look forward to the power couple they will soon become.

Sarah Burley and Doug Reid get minus one for being old,
But she gets plus seven from her Harvard/Dartmouth path, all told.
And her mother is a) named "True" and b) the piano lady
At the Brookline schools, which are the very opposite of shady.

Plus two for that, and plus one for Reid's MBA degree,
Since it wasn't from an Ivy school he does not get plus three.
But they were married up at Harvard by an Episcopal priest,
So that nets them two more points, they'd get eleven at the least.

I like the looks of these two though, especially her pearls
And the pink cableknit sweater is a must-have for good girls.
(Note to Julia: this is how pink and preppy is best done!)
So we'll finish them with thirteen points, which makes them number one.

Foster's moving to the Village Voice, just a few clicks away
So I want to take a moment of your time so I can say
That we'll miss him very dearly (unless Nick Denton is our name)
and it's safe to say he's going out atop his fearsome game.

[I will never—ever—watch 'Say Yes to the Dress.' Ever. But Altarcations will continue to run after I'm gone, every Sunday, right here. Nefler: You're awesome. - F.]

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