My Plan for Bad Bank Assets  —  The private sector will set prices.  Taxpayers will share in any upside.  —  The American economy and much of the world now face extraordinary challenges, and confronting these challenges will continue to require extraordinary actions.

Kroft to Obama: Are you punch-drunk?  —  President Barack Obama said he believes the global financial system remains at risk of implosion with the failure of Citigroup or AIG, which could touch off “an even more destructive recession and potentially depression.”

Obama Upsets Sarkozy With Letter to Jacques Chirac  —  In his latest faux pas Obama managed to pi$$ off France...  President Obama wrote Jacques Chirac saying he was looking forward to working with the former French president in the coming four years(?)  —  Monsters and Critics reported:

500 miles later, I'm back in Madison.  —  Did you understand the previous post?  If not, the answer — along with much congratulations and debate — appears in the comments, notably here.  Let there be no doubt about it: A blogger — Althouse — is engaged to be married to a man who began …

WOW, I NEEDED THAT  —  As part of their efforts to make the scale and scope of Bernie Madoff's crimes clear to Judge Denny Chin in deciding the terms of his plea, confinement and eventual sentencing, the folks at the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York submitted emails …

GOP licks chops over Dem stumbles  —  Featured Topics: - Barack Obama - Presidential Transition  —  Three days after Barack Obama became president, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made a prediction: Democrats would make big mistakes that would play into the Republicans' hands going into the 2010 midterm elections.

Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath's son commits suicide  —  The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.  —  Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.

Various matters  —  (updated below)  —  (1) The New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, has a column today on a topic I've written about more times than I can count: that the NYT routinely grants anonymity without any justification whatsoever and, more notably, does so in flagrant violation of its own policy on anonymous sources.

GOV PLOTS SECRET TAX HIKE ON RICH  —  GOV. PATERSON and legislative Democrats have secretly agreed on an $8 billion, two- year tax hike on individuals making more than $500,000 a year that will “sunset” around the time he plans to run for election in 2010, legislative sources told The Post.

From Tehran to Tel Aviv  —  With his bold message to Iran's leaders, President Obama achieved four things essential to any rapprochement.  —  He abandoned regime change as an American goal.  He shelved the so-called military option.  He buried a carrot-and-sticks approach viewed with contempt by Iranians as fit only for donkeys.

US will appoint ‘Afghan PM’ to bypass Hamid Karzai  —  White House plans new executive role to challenge corrupt government in Kabul  —  The US and its European allies are ­preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president …

Obama Says a Way Out of Afghanistan Is Needed  —  WASHINGTON — The United States must look for a way out of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama said, in a signal that the military build-up in Afghanistan will not be open-ended and will lead to the eventual withdrawal of American and NATO troops from the country.