• DERIVATIVES! DERIVATIVES! DERIVATIVES! DERIVATIVES! We’re so pumped to see financial reform finally pass between the House and Senate that “DERIVATIVES!” is kinda like a battle cry for us. Or not. But Christopher Dodd gets his name on the broadest rewrite of financial law since the 1930s, and the deal-brokering has if nothing else, made the bill palatable to some on both sides of the aisle. Congress has given themselves a deadline of today, so some stuff may end up on the cutting-room floor, but it would still be a big victory. Right? Right? DERIVATIVES! source

• YES at least that’s what CNN’s source says source

• 48% disapprove of Obama’s job performance
• 45% approve of how the avant-garde artist is doing his job
• 7% were covered in oil and couldn’t respond source

• what? The Supreme Court favored limiting a law used to prosecute white-collar criminals, the “honest services” law, from being used that way ever again.
• but … Two cases which used this law (Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and newspaper magnate Conrad Black) were not simply overturned, but sent to lower courts. source

• YES believe it or not; it was in Portland, Oregon source

Weekly Address: Jobs Creation from White House Weekly Address on Vimeo.

• For people who think that avant garde music and film is completely stupid, The Onion agrees with you. They agree with you so much, in fact, that they created this spot-on parody of the avant-garde movement, using Obama’s weekly video addresses as a vector. It’s the funniest non-good-timing thing they’ve done in a while. source

• 40minutes, the length of the interview David Patraeus got

• six days ago, the White House got some fact-checking calls from Rolling Stone
• 48 hours ago, the article came out (though Rolling Stone sat on the hit machine at first, idiots)
• <30 number of minutes it took Obama to talk it through with Stanley McChrystal source

• Spitzer, a Democrat who resigned as governor in March 2008 after acknowledging visiting a prostitute, is a well respected political mind and a take-no-prisoners prosecutor who has been often referred to as the ‘Sheriff of Wall Street.’
• A CNN press release • Regarding the move to take the former New York governor and put him on their 8 p.m. slot against Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. Spitzer, who we admit to be willing to give a second chance, will be joined by conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker. All told, the stunt-casting should get CNN some of eyeballs that Campbell Brown’s show never did. (Maybe.) Now, next step: Filling that 9 p.m. slot with someone other than Larry King. source

• Conan O’Brien has a new doppelganger. Julia Gillard, who replaced Kevin Rudd as Australian prime minister just a little while ago, is one of the Labor Party’s leading lights, and might have a better chance of winning in an election. And she’s not even from Australia! She was originally born in Wales, just like all the truly awesome people out there. (We’re not Welsh.) source