Don’t you just love it when you stumble onto a whole net niche you never knew about? I suppose I could have guessed it was out there, but I just discovered the world of retro design blogs…

My favorite so far is SO MUCH PILEUP, which offers such excellent features as Classic Bank Logos, weekly “Philately Fridays” with gems like these:

and don’t miss all the beautiful animated tv logos like these CBC bumpers!

Today’s Washington Post describes the Treasury Department’s latest plan:

The government is seeking to resuscitate the nation’s crippled financial system by forging an alliance with the very outfits that most benefited from the bonanza preceding the collapse of the credit markets: hedge funds and private-equity firms.

The initiative to revive the consumer lending business, outlined by officials this week, offers these wealthy investors a new chance to make sizable profits — but, thanks to the government, without the risk of massive losses.

That would be like the government guaranteeing the mortgages of all the homeowners who are “underwater,” but letting the homeowners keep all the profits if their homes rise in value and they’re able to sell at a profit. Something tells me that wouldn’t fly. As Atrios says,

They made bad bets when they at least theoretically thought they could incur losses. Now the cunning plan is to hope they make good bets even though…no chance of losses!

This is all going to end really badly.

Although the word bubbles are silly, maybe even good for a little chuckle, will you look at this picture? What is the astronaut doing in the office? If he was added in via Photoshop, nice job with the desk reflection. I like this. Then again, I have a thing for astronauts.

A great Vanity Fair article explains Iceland’s economic crash:

Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. “They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,” says a London hedge-fund manager. “This was how the banks and investment companies grew and grew. But they were lightweights in the international markets.”

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

That’s Harper’s contributor and Constitutional law expert Scott Horton, reacting to the Obama administration’s release yesterday of a slew of secret Justice Department memoranda from the Bush administration.

The New York Times has the sobering details:

The secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants…

The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.