“Boobquake, a day of action that calls on women worldwide to dress scandalously and prove wrong an Iranian cleric who blames natural disasters on immodest cleavage, has started disastrously,” with a 6.9 magnitude earthquake hitting Taiwan. Cover up, ladies.

Good news, history fans: George W. Bush’s Decision Points comes out on November 9th, a week after the midterm elections. The former president “will write about political and personal challenges and discuss his handling of events including the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, as well as his embracing of his faith amid his effort to quit drinking… [Bush will] focus on 14 critical decisions in his life and share his reflections on subjects including the closely fought 2000 Presidential election and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

We’ve managed to score an early excerpt. It’s pretty exciting, because it tells the story of his momentous decision to run for president and the process that brought it about. Enjoy!

Chapter 3: National Cathedral

This bald man, an old friend of my dad’s, he was on his way to spend the night. He had some business in Austin. He called my dad from his office. Arrangements were made. He would come by private car, a three-hour trip, and my dad would meet him at the mansion. He hadn’t seen him since they had worked together in DC six years ago. But he and the bald man had kept in touch. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being bald bothered me. My idea of baldness came from the movies. In the movies, the bald were always trying too hard, like they wanted to make up for their lack of hair. My friend Karl was that way. At any rate, a bald man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

“What am I going to do with a bald man?” I asked my dad from the other room. He was drinking Scotch in the kitchen, making plans to go skydiving. Dad’s pretty spry, for an old guy.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” said Dad.

“Maybe I could take him hunting,” I said.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Dad. “He has something important he wants to talk to you about anyway.”

“I don’t know what I’d have to say to a bald man.” I pouted a little, I’ll admit it.

“Just do what I say, damn it,” said Dad, banging his hand on the table. “How many times do I need to tell you that? If it weren’t for me, you’d be another drunk with a couple of failed businesses on his hands.”

It was just like Dad to bring up a real sore spot like that. I could see him getting tense. I knew if I didn’t agree he’d start making fun of me for not becoming Commissioner of Baseball. Sometimes when he had a few too many he’d start in on me, calling me “Mr. Commissioner” in some kind of fancy-pants sissy way that Roger Ailes was never really able to beat out of him. I didn’t understand it, but then, like Dad tells me all the time, Jeb’s the one who got the brains. Anyway, I turned down the television and got real quiet for a minute.

Then a guard brought the bald man in. Just amazing. He and Dad hugged. This bald man, feature this, he wearing a pacemaker on the outside! On the outside! Too much, I say. The bald man reached into his briefcase and pulled out a blank pad of paper, the kind you’d give a kid to draw on. My dad brought him into the living room. I turned off the TV. I finished my soda, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door.

My dad said, “Georgie, you remember Dick.” He was beaming. He had this bald man by his coat sleeve.

“Yes, sir,” I said, although I didn’t really. Maybe he had hair the last time I met him. Who knows?

“Hey there, Georgie boy,” the bald man grunted and tried to make an expression that I think he thought was a smile. “Your dad tells me you’re doing some fine things here.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. That was definitely strange. Usually the only thing Dad said about my work was that I had the best job in the world because you could be as stupid as a Quayle and still not manage to fuck it up. I’m not sure what he had been telling the bald man, but I was happy to take the credit.

“You two don’t mind, I’m gonna skedaddle,” said Dad. “Ticker okay, Dick?”

“Had a small attack on the drive over,” grunted the bald man, “so I should be able to last a good three hours before the next one. You leave us be, we’ll be fine.”

Dad left. The bald man went over and turned the TV back on. He turned it up a little loud, if you ask me, but he was the guest, so I didn’t say anything.

“Ya got any booze in this place?” grunted the bald man.

“I don’t drink myself-”

“I don’t give a shit what you do or don’t do,” the bald man interrupted. Then he got quiet for a minute. “Sorry,” he grunted. “Don’t mean to get off on the wrong foot. It’s good that you don’t drink. It’ll be a plus for us.”

He looked around the room. Except for the noise from the TV it was totally quiet. Finally he spotted the Scotch.

“Mind if I have a rip?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” I said. “Glasses are-”

He was already drinking straight from the bottle.

“Come sit by me on the couch,” he said. We sat in front of the TV.

Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else, maybe the funny videos show. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized.

“Georgie, it’s all right,” the bald man grunted. “It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I mean, I probably already know everything there is to know, but sometimes you get surprised.”

We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very disconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped open again. Now and then he put his fingers on his pacemaker and massaged it, like he was about to have a heart attack. He grunted a lot and was sweating the whole time.

After a while the news came on. I usually flip it right off, but the bald man seemed interested. There was a picture of the place where the bad president from Arkansas who beat my dad lived.

“You see that man, Georgie?” asked the bald man.

“Hate him,” I said.

“He’s done some very bad things to this country,” nodded the bald man. “Made us a laughingstock. Things keep up the way they do, and his ozone buddy there takes over after, all of us-I mean you, and me, and your dad, and people like us-are fucked.”

He spat out the word “fucked,” but not in a way that sounded like it was the first time he had ever used it.

“What are your future plans, boy?” asked the bald man.

“Well, on Wednesday I’m cutting the ribbon at a hospital in Amarillo,” I said. “Then Friday we’re honoring the inventor of the chicken-fried bacon platter down in-”

“Fuck that shit,” grunted the bald man. “I mean large scale. You do think large scale, don’t you, Georgie?”

“Well, I’ve got two more years of this,” I said. “I thought after that maybe I’d… well, if Bud Selig’ll let me, I thought about taking another shot at being baseball commissioner. It’s all I ever wanted to do.”

He nodded at me. At first I thought I had finally found someone I could tell all my deep secrets to, but I looked in his eyes and saw the same kind of disgust my dad had whenever I suggested some new investment or idea. I quieted down real quick.

He sighed. Even his sighs sounded like grunts.

“Tell you what,” he grunted. “You got a pen around here?”

There was one on the desk. I brought it over.

“Okay, you’re gonna draw something.” He tossed the pad of paper on the floor and moved his hand in a way that told me he wanted me to crouch over it and start sketching. The bald man got down from the couch and sat next to me on the carpet.

He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

“All right,” he grunted. “All right, let’s do her.”

He grabbed my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, Georgie, draw,” he grunted. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the bald man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house my mom and dad used to live in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew columns. Crazy.

“Swell,” he grunted. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, Georgie? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

I put in windows with arches. I drew an east wing and a west wing. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The bald man looked over the paper. He moved the tips of the fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.

“Doing fine,” the bald man grunted.

I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.

My wife Laura came in and saw us on the floor. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.”

I didn’t answer her.

The bald man said, “We’re drawing a great house. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he grunted. “Sure. You got it, Georgie. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. “Here’s what I want you to do now. Draw yourself in front of that house.”

My wife said, “What’s going on? George, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

“It’s all right,” he grunted to her. “Close your eyes now,” the bald man grunted to me.

I did it. I closed them just like he said.

“Are they closed?” he grunted. “Don’t fuck around with me.”

“They’re closed,” I said.

“Keep them that way,” he grunted. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.”

So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now. I made my hips look a little thinner than they usually do, but I drew myself in that house.

Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he grunted. “Take a look. What do you think?”

But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”

My eyes were still closed. It was a picture of a big white house. I lived in it. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

“It’s really something,” I said.

So on the plus side, we’re living in a new golden age of the music video! It makes sense, because we all decided about four (six?) years ago that TV was the new cinema. (Then “The Sopranos” ended, but.) So I guess music videos are the new TV? This is a great thing, overall! Fun for everyone. Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” on the heels of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”…. They’re all political, or politically-tinged, or exploitatively political. (“Window Seat,” at least, was rooted pretty well in history and allegory; “Telephone” was mostly about play… mostly.) But this new thing from M.I.A.? This just reads like pornography to me. And uber-violence. Or maybe I’m missing something about the non-story of a goon squad chasing down a bunch of redheads. IS IT ABOUT NEOCOLONIALISM? Or, I guess, the OLD-FASHIONED ORIGINAL BRAND™ of colonialism? It’s about as politically coherent as an ad for Axe Body Spray.

Exhibiting the same sort of culinary restraint that it shows with its frozen custard flavors, New York’s Shake Shack has introduced a $5.50 peanut butter bacon burger that pretty much is what it sounds like, i.e., a burger topped with lots of thick bacon and a healthy schmear of peanut butter. Whether or not this invention was necessary or (more importantly) is breaking any new ground in consolidating fat and salt and general tastebud-aimed decadence into one messy sandwich is up for debate. Although honestly, one would think that Shake Shack would be wise enough to realize that the Internet Bacon Fetishism trend was pretty much driven into the ground by Colonel Sanders two weeks ago. Also, note that the burger experts at A Hamburger Today note that “the beef is barely noticeable” and suggest that it be swapped out in favor of bananas. I know the Elvis connection, but come on, bananas?! Why, those are almost healthy! What’s next, suggesting that the buns be whole grain?

by Eddie Money

From time to time, the Awl offers space to average citizens with important perspectives on national issues. This is one such time!

Hey, baby. It’s me, Eddie Money, here to rap at you about the financial regulatory reform bill being proposed by Connecticut senator Chris Dodd at the behest of the Obama administration. And more specifically, the danger of its getting weakened by congressional compromise.

Now, I can dig that some of you might be thinking: Why is Eddie Money rapping to me about financial regulatory reform? He’s just a cop from Brooklyn who happened to have a golden voice and a gift for melody and a rock n’ roll dream and the guts to follow it.

Well, sure, my name is Eddie Money. (Eddie Mahoney, originally, but y’know, that’s showbiz, baby.) And sure, they call me “The Money Man.” And yes, I have earned millions and millions of dollars during my legendary career. But I’ll tell you one thing: I never forgot where I came from. I never forgot the people who made me the star I am today. The people who come to Eddie Money shows are not always the richest people in the world. Sometimes their wives are working or they’re pulling double shifts. It’s hard to get a sitter. For people to take the time and the energy to get out there and hear some great rock n’ roll-I gotta tell you, I love the people who come to my shows. They’re really, really great people!

Check it out, the way I see it, the main problem the reforms need to address is the derivatives market. These fuckin’ derivatives, no one understands these things! No one knows what the fuck they are! What’s the actual product being sold? There’s no pool cue or coffee beans or classic radio hit powered by driving guitars and sweat and soul. There’s nothing you can hold in your hand or drink or sing to yourself all day while you’re at work. Nothing you can touch or feel. It’s all just hollow abstraction, magical numbers pulled out of the sky, equations invented by math geeks to legalize high-stakes gambling with invisible money. The shit that these Magneto guys were pulling, or Goldman Sachs: constructing deals so complex that no one really knew what’s going on, then pulling the rug out from under their own partners because they’d made more lucrative side bets against them. At least that’s my take. You see last week when Clinton admitted he’d make a mistake by leaving derivatives unregulated while he was in office? It’s like he wants to go back, go back and do it all over. But he can’t go back, you know? And the whole country, the real people, Eddie Money fans, that’s who ended up getting royally screwed.

So it’s up to my man Obama to fix it now. And congress. And it actually seems like there’s some solid progress being made. That prick Mitch McConnell wasn’t talkin’ so loud this week after the S.E.C. (it’s wild, man, those pasty-faced dudes are way into porn!), after they filed their suit against Goldman Sachs and the national polls started tilting over 50 percent in favor of regulation (as long as the words “Wall Street” were used as the object in the phrasing, ha ha.) Suddenly the republicans are willing to play ball. Suddenly it’s all a big bipartisan love party, right? But that’s where I get worried. This bill needs to have some teeth, to take a serious bite out of these legal swindlers right where the sun don’t shine. (Or semi-legal, or maybe it’s all just too Byzantine to tell.) I can picture Chris Dodd getting all cozy in that negotiation room with Richard Shelby, lighting up a stogie and compromising this thing right out of effectiveness. Financial reform is “at a crossroads,” according to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect.

It reminds of me something Apollonia said to me while we were filming the “Shakin’” video back in 1983. Yes, that Apollonia. What, you don’t think The Money Man’s got it like that fruity little cat in the purple pants? He does. I mean, I do.

She said, “You know how they say, ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good?’”

I said, “Yeah, sugar. I heard that.”

“Well, sometimes thinking the perfect is the enemy of the good becomes the enemy of the better.”

She blew my mind, Apollonia.

Couple years later, I kicked drugs and brought Ronnie Spector back to her rightful place at the top of the charts after that creepy gun freak kept her locked up in a mansion like frickin’ Beauty and the Beast or something. And as we know now, she’s lucky he didn’t shoot her in the face. There’s another argument for tighter regulation, right there! And gun control!

But what do I know, right? I’m just a cop from Brooklyn with a golden voice and a gift for melody who followed his rock n’ roll dream all the way to eleven (count ‘em!) top 40 hits and four platinum or multiplatinum certified albums. Whether those scumbag fat cat bankers on Wall Street like it or not, Eddie Money songs still get played on the radio every day in this country! Also, I’m touring throughout the rest of this year and doing a three-day Royal Caribbean concerts cruise to the Bahamas in November with Lou Gramm. It’s gonna be a gas! You should come. Here’s what you get for $799 (plus tax):

* Exclusive full band Concerts with Eddie Money and Lou Gramm of Foreigner
* Party with Eddie, Lou and their bands at your
* Private Cocktail Reception and Meet and Greet
* Party with great photo opportunities
* Ask the questions you’ve always wanted to know at the Artist’s Q&A;
sessions
* Intimate acoustic performance with Eddie
* Let Eddie and Lou decide if you should quit your day job as they judge
karaoke!

Hey, since everybody on board will technically be a “cruiser,” maybe we should call the whole thing “Eddie and the Cruisers!” I just made that up just now! I should call Royal Caribbean and see if we can work that in to the promotional material. Oh, but Lou might get pissed. Eddie and Lou and the Cruisers? Nah. Hmm. We will be leaving U.S. territory. Maybe we could work a “foreigners” thing in there somewhere. Or maybe I could get Lou bumped and replaced with John Cafferty? Nah. Lou’s good people. And I’m psyched to hear “Urgent” live on a boat.

“Money’s daughter Jesse Money appeared on the 2008 MTV reality competition Rock the Cradle, coming in last. She also toured with Eddie in 2008–2009, performing as his opening act, as well as singing backing vocals throughout his show, including the Ronnie Spector part on ‘Take Me Home Tonight.’”

How corrupt, cartelized, and conflict-ridden are industry oversight and enforcement practices in the financial sector? You could set about answering that question by poking through the lurid headlines surrounding Goldman Sachs-the latest being the release of Goldman emails openly contradicting the firm’s alibi of first resort, that it lost money on the collapse of the housing market and therefore couldn’t have been defrauding investors in its short-shelling Abacus fund, as the Securities and Exchange Commission alleges. Or you could look at the ridiculously conflicted status of credit-rating agencies-which collect their fees from the very investment concerns they’re supposed to be clinically and impartially sizing up, and which, in the latter stages of the housing bubble, saw said investment firms hire a steady stream of their former employees to structure their stake in the CDO market. Oh, and these newly minted fund analysts would typically come bearing their own intimate knowledge of the computer models that credit raters employed to grade risk-exposure in the investment world-an arrangement that, as the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenstern notes, “gave bankers the tools to tinker with their complicated mortgage deals until the models produced the desired ratings.”

Still, to get a real close-up and personal sense of the deeply rigged game of financial oversight, it’s hard to beat the SEC’s Inspector General’s report on the agency’s flubbed investigation of R. Allen Stanford, the Texas-born, Antiguan-knighted lord of an offshore Ponzi scheme that bilked investors of more than $7 billion. That report, as it happened, dropped the same day that the SEC announced its fraud complaint against Goldman, which would explain why you haven’t heard much about it since.

As detailed in the IG report, the Stanford fund operated pretty much on the same basis that the operatic frauds of Bernie Madoff did, promising investors returns on Antiguan certificates of deposit that far outstripped normal market returns. And much as was the case in Madoffland, there was simply no there there in Stanford’s business model-he was just using the money of new fund investors to artificially inflate returns for their forerunners.

The shadiness of the Stanford operation first caught the eye of an SEC investigator named Julie Preuitt back in 1997-yes, twelve years ago, in the Clinton era. She investigated the returns Stanford claimed for the fund, pronounced them “absolutely ludicrous,” and recommended that the agency launch a formal probe.

The good news is that the SEC’s enforcement division tried to do that, eight months after Preuitt’s recommendation. The bad news is that when Stanford refused to comply with any of the SEC investigators’ requests for documents, they simply let the matter drop

It gets worse, of course. Spencer Barasch, the director of the SEC’s Fort Worth office-which had jurisdiction over securities cases in Texas and three other states — reportedly told a fellow SEC attorney that he declined to green light the initial Stanford probe in 1998 after he called Stanford’s own attorney, Wayne Secore (himself a former lawyer with the SEC) to ask if there was a case against his client. When Secore, astonishingly enough, replied in the negative, that was evidence enough for Barasch, according to the IG report-though Barasch, solicitous to preserve a reputation for minimal professional competence, told the IG’s office that he had no memory of such an exchange, and that it sounded “absurd.”

Despite Barasch’s best efforts, the Stanford case wasn’t going away, though. Investor complaints surfaced against the fund in 2002 and 2003, and Barasch duly shrugged them off. Likewise, when his staff attorneys made fresh pitches for investigations in 2002 and 2005, Barasch declined to pursue them. In the latter instance, Victoria Prescott, the lawyer presenting the case for a Stanford probe, recalled that Barasch looked “annoyed” during her talk, and told her he had “no interest” in the idea. “And I no sooner sit down, shut up and the meeting ended, but then I get pulled aside and was told this had already been looked into and we’re not going to do it,” Prescott told the inspector general’s office.

There were institutional reasons behind the Fort Worth office’s dilatory handling of the case, the report notes-the division’s managers liked more direct and simpler prosecutions that helped boost its enforcement stats, and the challenge of getting subpoenas executed in an offshore investment haven like Antigua promised a number of grinding procedural headaches.

Still, the principal inconvenience a Stanford investigation seemed to present was to Barasch’s resume. He left the agency in 2005 to follow the Wayne Secore career path in white-collar criminal defense work-and according to the IG report, made three separate pitches to represent Stanford himself. After the second such pitch in 2006, Stanford indeed hired Barasch on, and the lawyer billed the fund manager for analyzing “documentation received from company about SEC and NASD matters.” Barasch even called his former assistant director, who by this time was trying to revive inquiries into the Stanford fund, with the ham-handed request “[c]an you work on this?” The patient soul on the other end of the line then told Barasch, “I’m not sure you can work on this.” Barasch’s interlocutor was right: When he belatedly put in for ethical clearance from the SEC to represent Stanford, it was denied.

Barasch was undaunted, though-he actually contacted Stanford a third time, in 2009, after the SEC finally got around to swearing out a complaint against the fund manager. Again, an ethics official at the SEC refused to clear the arrangement-telling the inspector general that “he could not recall another occasion when a former SEC employee had contacted his office on three separate occasions trying to represent a client on the same matter.” As he pushed to get the request approved, Barasch assured the agency that the 2009 case “was new and was different and unrelated to the matter that had occurred before he left” the SEC-somehow neglecting to note that his consistent posture regarding Stanford during his tenure was to deny each and every request for any Stanford-related “matter” to proceed in the first place. Barasch was at least admirably candid in his reply when the ethics official asked him to explain his persistence in seeking to sign on Stanford as a client: “Every lawyer in Texas and beyond is going to get rich on this case. OK? And I hated being left on the sidelines.”

It’s hard to imagine any better summing-up of a regulator’s dominant worldview during the deregulatory binges of the Clinton-Bush age. Unless, that is, one were to choose the testimony of Hugh Wright, Barasch’s predecessor as head of enforcement in the SEC Fort Worth office. “Spence was a real bright guy,” Wright told Dallas Morning News reporters Eric Torbenson and Dave Michaels, “but I didn’t trust him, because he lied a lot.”

Chris Lehmann has figured out a way to get rich quick. Ask him how!

The American Girl Cafe — where fans of the backstory-laden American Girl dolls can pay for the privilege of enjoying teatime (and actual food) with their poseable playmates — has reopened today after an outbreak of norovirus, the nasty stomach virus that can cause various types of digestive unpleasantness. The culprit is unknown at this point, but I like the idea of this being some grand prank played by the folks behind Garbage Pail Kids. (“Viral” marketing, right?)

About eight and a half years ago, the New York Times’ Joyce Purnick asked the following question:

If a mayor of New York conducts himself like a businessman by doing what he likes when he likes; if he flies off on his private jet without telling the public; if his spokesman tells reporters ‘’We’re not discussing his private schedule’’ when asked if the future mayor went to Bermuda for the weekend; and if the future mayor himself refuses to answer that question, what happens in the next crisis? How does the mayor establish the credibility to lead people through the dark days if they don’t know his moods and tastes in normal times?

I don’t know if we’ve quite figured out the answer, but for what it’s worth, he still has the place in Bermuda. Here’s wishing the “Bloomberg in Bermuda” story an early happy birthday.

The burning object that fell from the sky, through a surf board and onto a Tel Aviv beach Saturday is not a meteorite, as was originally thought. “It is plastic or silicon,” said Dr. Diana Laufer, of the Geophysics and Planetary Sciences Department of Tel Aviv University, who examined the object after police brought it to her house. (Which seems kind of odd, but anyway…) “Perhaps it is part of an airplane or a satellite, or it’s part of a flare. I do not know. But it certainly is not from space.” Whatever it was, it was very, very hot. I asked an Israeli friend to translate the voices in the cellphone video one of the surfers made after the thing landed.

Here’s what he said is being said:

“I don’t want a hundred thousand of these to fall!”

“You should throw it to the water.”

“I don’t want to throw it to the water.”

“It fell from the sky… this fell from the sky and lit up.”

“What a riot! So help me God. What a riot. So help me god. It fell from the sky and lit up!”

“Oh my God, it melts the shells! Wow, it might be volcanic ash.”

“Look at its melting ability.”

“It fell from the sky.”

“Must be from a plane.”

“Don’t touch it… look at its melting ability! It’s 180 degrees! What a riot. What a riot.”