Another voice in the small but growing crowd urging legalization of drugs to end the Mexico drug war violence: Harvard Senior Lecturer in Economics Jeffrey Miron.

Argument 1: Prohibition creates violence. It happened with alcohol and gambling. End the prohibition, end the violence. [More...]

Does anyone remember Agent Orange? If this is what Janet Napolitano has in mind for Homeland Security, fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a wild and bumpy ride.

The U.S. Border Patrol plans to poison the plant life along a 1.1-mile stretch of the Rio Grande riverbank as soon as Wednesday to get rid of the hiding places used by smugglers, robbers and illegal immigrants.

If successful, the $2.1 million pilot project could later be duplicated along as many as 130 miles of river in the patrol’s Laredo Sector, as well as other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Are they going to force Sheriff Joe Arpaio's inmates to do the planting? [More...]

Via Ryan Secrest (the things you find on Twitter.)

Ok, you can all go back to the Geithner hearing now. this is an open thread, all topics welcome.

CNN.com is running the Geithner-Bernanke hearing before Barney Frank's committee. The focus is on AIG, nothing much yet on the Geithner Plan. I actually have a lot of sympathy for Geithner and Bernanke on the AIG bailout last fall. The situation then was incredibly volatile and there simply was not time or the legal mechanism to put AIG into receivership. It is true that no negotiations took place with counterparties to AIG contracts. I think the AIG ship has largely sailed (you could of course impose a surtax on those counterparty payments and no, that would not be a Bill of Attainder). The real issue is what we do going forward. The Geithner Plan and its serious flaws.

In short, I am not one to rail against Geithner and Bernanke about AIG. I will rail against the Geithner Plan. UPDATE - as always pols are pols, Maxine Waters wasting time grilling Geithner about his CoS being a former Goldman Sachs person. The issue is not who worked for who. It is what they are going to do.

More . .

Via Atrios, Stiglitz rips the Geithner Plan:

The U.S. government plan to rid banks of toxic assets will rob American taxpayers by exposing them to too much risk and is unlikely to work as long as the economy remains weak, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Tuesday. "The Geithner plan is very badly flawed," Stiglitz told Reuters in an interview during a Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong.

[More....]

There's tone-deaf and there's just plain stupid. J.P. Morgan apparently is both. After receiving $25 billion in TARP funds, the company is proceeding with plans to spend $138 million on two luxury corporate jets and build ""the premier corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard" to house them."

According to JPMorgan Chase architects, the new hangar will be built with reclaimed wood, quarry tile and even a "vegetated roof garden."

The Gulfstream 650's are described by the manufacturer as the "fastest," "widest" and "most comfortable" private jet ever with superior cabin amenities, an optional stateroom, and 12 interior designs to choose from.

The company says it's not using the TARP funds for the project. [More...]

Border Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean lost their bid to have the Supreme Court review their convictions for shooting an unarmed drug smuggler and lying about it.

The agents, already out of prison due to their ten-plus year sentences being commuted to two years by former President Bush, no doubt will be disappointed. I'm not. What's shocking about this case is that some people believe suspected drug dealers from Mexico inevitably deserve to be shot and that it's okay for law enforcement agents to shoot an unarmed suspect who is running away.

New York State Senator and former police officer Hiram Monserrate, a Demcorat recently sworn in to his first term, was indicted by a grand jury today on several felony and misdemeanor charges for cutting his girlfriend's eye with a drinking glass.

Monserrate insists the prosecution is politically motivated and it was an accident...he tripped. Karla Giraldo, his girlfriend, first said Monserrate was beating her. Now she agrees with his accident defense and wants the charges dropped.

How will they present the case without her cooperative testimony? Through the security camera at his apartment which captured him dragging her out the door and her banging on the neighbor's door. The neighbor heard a lot of screaming...which she says wasn't unusual. [More...]

Your turn.

This is an Open Thread.

(TL): It's Dancing With Stars and "24" night. What are you watching? And if you aren't watching anything, what are you doing instead?

. . . the Geithner Plan is to finance his Masters of The Universe bailout through a long term tax on banks? Via Krugman and Salmon, Nemo describes how the government subsidies (through non-recourse loans) will artifically inflate the prices for toxic assets but a Nemo commenter envisions how the government could recoup the money:

[C]ouldn’t [the FDIC] just raise the bank tax (or wait since the FDIC historically builds up a reserve over time) until the [government funds] [are] repayed? Sounds like a simple way to effectively have the banks slowly dig themselves out of this problem. . . . The only real downside I see is that it is slightly unfair to banks that are in good shape, since they will have to pay the increase[d] FDIC fee even thought they didn’t participate. . .

More . . .

Via Atrios, a vote of no confidence for the Geithner Plan from Bank of America analyst Richard Bernstein:

Investors should sell bank stocks after they rallied 12 percent today because the Treasury Department’s plan to buy toxic assets won’t stop profits from dropping, Bank of America Corp.’s Richard Bernstein said.

Removing devalued loans and securities from banks’ balance sheets is a short-term solution that will delay the problem’s ultimate solution, which is bank takeovers, Bernstein said. The government won’t be able to inflate the prices banks receive for selling bad assets indefinitely, he added.

But Krugman always hated Obama so it can't be true.

Speaking for me only

Before we throw trillions of dollars to Wall Street with the Geithner Plan, why not try throwing billions of dollars of tax credits to Wall Street and other private players by providing a lower tax rate (say 10% or even 5%) on capital gains on their investment in the toxic assets (or all mortgage backed securities?)

Obviously such a plan would create an artificially higher price for these assets due such special tax treatment. But so does the Geithner Plan. And the cost to the government (and taxpayers) would surely be less. The talk from Geithner and his supporters is that there is insufficient incentive for the private sector to invest in the toxic assets, due to current market conditions. How about trying a less expensive incentive first? Anyway, just a though off the top of my head.

Speaking for me only