† Your Bonus: $0. Continued Employment: Priceless.: AIG must stand for “Arrogant, Imbecilic Greed.” Where did a huge chunk of taxpayer bailout money end up? In the pockets of its trading partners and employees, reports The Wall Street Journal:

Troubled insurer American International Group Inc., now 80% owned by U.S. taxpayers … disclosed Sunday that roughly two-thirds of the $173.3 billion in federal aid it received has been paid out to trading partners such as banks and municipalities in the U.S. and abroad. …

The disclosures came as AIG was lambasted for about $450 million in bonus payments planned for employees at a business unit that lost $40.5 billion last year. The unit's woes pushed the company to near-collapse, forcing the government bailout. …

In a letter to Mr. Liddy on Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley said Fed officials are "deeply troubled" by the nearly $170 million in payments to about 370 financial-products employees. …

If it wanted to try to avoid making the payments, AIG could tell employees that if they chose not to take the bonus, they could keep their jobs, suggested Mark Reilly, a partner at 3C-Compensation Consulting Consortium, a Chicago firm. "There's a lot of people looking for work on Wall Street," Mr. Reilly said.

President Barack Obama has tasked Treasury Secretary - and AIG rescue plan architect - Tiny Tim Geithner with getting some or all of the money back from those got bonuses for irresponsibly betting the house on such exotic - and risky - derivatives as credit default swaps.

Editorial Note: In a New York Times op-ed, Eduardo Porter explains how investment bankers came to command such obscenely outsized compensation packages. Apparently they are elephant seal bulls, and the “fallout of their mating habits” harms society financially (“handsomely compensated financiers engineer[ed] the dot-com bubble and the housing crisis”), and by devaluing other professions (“more of the nation’s pool of talented students decided there was no point in becoming a doctor or an engineer, when one could be a banker”).  

† Honor Killing And Beheading: Stereotype Or True To Type?: Muzzammil Hassan has pleaded not guilty to murder i of his wife Aasiya, reports The Associated Press. After seeking a divorce, Mrs. Hassan was repeatedly stabbed and decapitated in the upstate NY offices of Bridges TV, a Muslim-oriented cable channel the couple had co-founded.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: After The New York Times scoped out the shadowy world of fine art pawnshops in NYC, Agence France-Presse found similar outfits discreetly catering to the temporarily cash-squeezed Beverly Hills set:

An original Kandinsky, an Andy Warhol, a grand piano and Rolexes by the dozen: as the economic crisis bites even the filthy rich are hocking prized possessions to pay the bills.

"This business in the past eight months is booming," said Yossi Dina, the presi, dent of The Dina Collection, who describes himself as the pawnbroker to the stars.

"I'm very special because I don't give small loans. I give big loans, people call me for half a million, two hundred, big loans.” …

"We are living a big time, the business people, the big people ... they need money for short time, they're business people, but short of cash," said Dina, a former commando in the Israeli army who arrived in the US in the late 1970s. …

Under California law, pawnshops can hold onto the goods for four months and 10 days after which the owners must redeem them by repaying the loan, or can arrange for the goods to be held for another four months at a monthly average 4.0 percent interest rate. …

California's unemployment rate stands at 10.1 percent, higher than the national average of 8.1 percent, and with mortgage costs rising many may now have no option but to hand over that Kandinsky or Rolex to pay for the rent, the BMW car or even the plastic surgeon.

† One Man’s Meat Is Another Man’s Poison (second item): The New York Times profiles a repo man who specializes in recovering private jets from deadbeat owners:

Ken Hill’s last business trip took him through eight states in January and netted him 12 planes. His current one is a 30- to 45-day trip for 27 more planes, his biggest ever.

Mr. Hill is an airplane repo man, one of the best and busiest in the business. With the economy sinking and the general aviation industry suffering, Mr. Hill is working flat out as he makes his way from one airport to another, carrying just a few basic tools - a propeller lock, a portable radio, hand-held GPS device and a fanny pack stuffed with hundreds of keys. …

A career plane dealer and licensed pilot, Mr. Hill, 66, estimates that he has repossessed hundreds of aircraft since his first propeller-powered Piper Cherokee 180 in 1969. Friends call him the Grim Reaper, an image he seems to alternately relish and detest.

Whether times are good or bad, the costs of owning a plane are considerable.

Besides the purchase price, there are maintenance, hangar, fuel, catering and insurance costs. Many owners help pay the bills by chartering their airplanes, but demand is shrinking in this economy. …

Mr. Hill, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., said he typically repossessed about 30 planes a year, ranging from propeller-powered Piper trainers to twin-engine Gulfstream business jets. Last year, he brought in 50 aircraft. This year, “it could be 100,” he said. …

Given the burdensome costs of storing and maintaining seized airplanes, banks are loath to call on the repo man. By the time Mr. Hill gets involved, a borrower is typically 60 days behind on payments.

† What Passes For “News” These Days: Who cares that an assistant press secretary was feted with a chorus of “Happy Birthday” and a chocolate cake? Or that White House Office of Management and Budget chief, Peter R. Orszag, is a Diet Coke man? Or that White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel went to the bank for some cash?

“Are any of these items newsworthy?,” asks The New York Times? Apparently, “a lot of Web sites, bloggers and Twitterers” think so. “[T]oday’s White House press corps (competing for up-to-the-second news) has elevated the most banal doings to a coveted ‘get.’”

As if to prove The Times’ point, The Associated Press reports that President Barack Obama was asked by a hardnosed journo whether he tried out the swing set he installed for his daughters outside the Oval Office.

How did we come to this? “It started as sort of a joke to treat official Washington as a celebrity culture,” Ana Marie Cox tells The Times. “Now it seems that a lot of the irony has been lost and the joke has turned real,” adds Cox, who blogs and tweets for Air America.

Though The Times credits Cox for “helping create the genre” when she launched her political satire Web site Wonkette five years ago, the celebrification of politicos begin with George, the glossy magazine founded by John-John Kennedy and Michael J. Berman that was published from 1995 until 2001.

BTW: It would have been newsworthy if a stripper jumped out of the chocolate cake, or Emanuel needed the cash to bribe Roland Burris to resign (second item). The Stiletto cannot think of any circumstances in which Orzag’s beverage preferences would be newsworthy.  

† That ‘70s Show: Remember when parts of The Bronx used to be referred to as Fort Apache? The metaphor may need to be resurrected: In the tony Riverdale section of the borough, roughly five miles north of the once-infamous Simpson Street, traffic court officer Denise Delgado-Brown, 51, was struck in the abdomen by a 30-inch fiberglass arrow, “which came rushing through the sky above the Schervier Nursing Care Center on Independence Avenue,” reports The New York Times:

Ms. Brown had driven up to the nursing home to drop off a friend who lives there, and was opening the passenger’s door of her red Kia Sorrento when she was struck by the arrow.

Sgt. Kevin Hayes, a police spokesman, said that the arrow hit her in a downward path, and that it was possible that someone might have shot the arrow into the air from a nearby park.

The police say they do not believe Ms. Brown was a target.

No arrests have yet been made. Brown, who was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital for emergency surgery, is in stable condition.

[Hat Tip: The Heel, an Ivy-educated attorney with a prestigious New York firm, and occasional contributor to this blog.]

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Why We Need Gitmo): Declaring themselves “terrorists to the bone” who believe that “killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you … are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion,” puts the “9/11 is America’s fault” crowd in a tough spot, writes New York Post columnist Ralph Peters:  

Unfortunately for Washington wonks determined to deny that Islamist extremists are motivated by extremist Islam, the pride and prejudice of Allah's butchers were on public display (again) this week. …

Desperate to placate its blame-America supporters, the Obama administration has clamped down on news from Guantanamo. Why? After their lurid criticisms of Gitmo, the Dems now have the world's worst killers on their hands.

And they don't know what to do. Responsibility sucks. …

Yet, no matter how fiercely our enemies declare that their faith compels them to kill, our elected and appointed officials continue to insist that … they're really driven by economic factors or our own foreign-policy missteps, that their savage interpretation of Islam is only a ploy. …

Listen to the Gitmo Five. Unlike our Washington pols, they have intellectual integrity. They're telling us honestly who they are and why they seek to kill us.