Reporting by the Associated Press, translation by your humble narrator (and armchair economist):

JPMorgan Chase said Sunday it will acquire rival Bear Stearns for a bargain-basement $236.2 million — or $2 a share — a stunning collapse for one of the world’s largest and most storied investment banks. The last-minute buyout was aimed at averting a Bear Stearns bankruptcy and a spreading crisis of confidence in the global financial system.

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government swiftly approved the all-stock deal, showing the urgency of completing the deal before world markets opened.

Translation: someone at the Federal Reserve got it into their heads that if Bear Stearns could somehow not go bankrupt, the U.S. economy could just get over its whole “collapsing” thing. And someone at JPMorgan Chase was like, “whoa, we can double the size of our investment banking unit for less than we spent on copying last year? Sold!”

Bear Stearns shares closed Friday at $30 a share. At their peak, the shares traded at $159.36.

At $30 per share, Bear Stearns should be worth over $30 billion. So either the Fed forgot to carry a decimal place or two, or they’re saying that a Bear Stearns collapse and bankruptcy was inevitable and decided to just cut to the part where the vultures make off with the carcass. They’re also trying to put a dollar amount on the firm’s utter stupidity w/r/t subprime loans, in hopes of convincing global markets that the subprime problem has been contained. It’s a tourniquet, and whether it’ll actually stop the bleeding remains to be seen.

The Fed will provide special financing to JPMorgan Chase for the deal, JPMorgan Chase said. The central bank has agreed to fund up to $30 billion of Bear Stearns’ less liquid assets. Risky bets on securities tied to subprime mortgages — loans given to customers with poor credit history — crippled Bear Stearns, the nations’ fifth-largest investment bank.

Imagine that you’re in a police station, and an emo-looking rich kid is being booked for attempted arson. His dad, a silver-haired man with an American flag pin and a firm handshake, walks in and talks to the arresting officer. The kid is the U.S. economy, and he’s being charged with trying to set the global financial system on fire. His dad is the Federal Reserve, and he’s slipping the cop a couple greenbacks to just chalk it up to a youthful prank — irrational exuberance, if you will — and let this one slide, call it even. What I’m saying is, the Fed is admitting no responsibility for the dominant U.S. economy turning to shit, but is nonetheless willing to pay for the damages to avoid causing a ruckus.

So where is Bear Stearns in this metaphor? Well, it’s the bad kid from the wrong side of town, who our emo-economy fell in with? It seems clear to me that the Fed, with help from JPMorgan Chase, is trying to turn Bear Stearns into the scapegoat for the subprime mess, just as Long-Term Capital Management was the scapegoat for the hedge fund crisis that started our last recession a decade ago. They’re the company everyone can point to, saying “hey, they’re the ones who wrecked the financial system! But they’ve been dealt with, so everything’s gonna be okay! Right? Right?”

And I’m pretty sure that good or bad, the answer to that question will be the top story on Monday’s evening newscasts.

Holy fallacy, Batman! I think people might have noticed that nothing the Clinton campaign says makes any goddamned sense!

Electoral Politics, Meet Smartass Bloggery: So, on Wednesday the Clinton campaign sent out a memo explaining that since Obama was not likely to win next month’s Pennsylvania primary, he therefore has no shot at winning the state in the general election and therefore no shot at winning the presidency. I’ll leave it to the Obama campaign, who put out their own annotated version of that memo, to explain why this logic is retarded.

That Doesn’t Mean I Didn’t Win: Speaking of logic, Steve Delahoyde and the folks at Schadenfreude put together a series of short parables illustrating the logic behind several of Hillary’s recent assertions.

The Ferraro Flap, Serious Version: Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comment” the other night about Sen. Clinton’s response to the Geraldine Ferraro debacle pretty much matches my own thoughts, minus me laughing every time I see a new note from the Clinton campaign trying to place the blame on the Obama campaign.

The Ferraro Flap, Funny Version: And finally, if you’re looking for a reason to laugh about all this passive-aggressive racism flying around, look no further than Fmr. Rep. Ferraro herself, appearing on various talk shows this week in a montage from TPMtv.

Oh my, what a thing of beauty:

I’ve got a longer post in the works in reaction to last night’s awesome final episode of The Wire, but here’s a great, long interview with show creator David Simon:

The main theme [of season five’s Baltimore Sun storyline] is not the fabulist and what he is perpetrating. That’s the overt plot. The main theme is that, with the exception of the bookends — at the beginning, the excellent effort at adversarial journalism that begins the piece in episode one and the genuine piece of narrative journalism that concludes it, with Bubbles — it’s a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season.

Roger Johansson’s first look at Internet Explorer 8, which dropped in beta form on Wednesday:

Press releases and documents on the IE 8 site contain plenty of exciting promises of new and improved features. It all sounds very promising, but if you’re hoping for IE 8 Beta 1 to catch up with other contemporary browsers, you’d better lower your expectations a bit. I had high hopes after reading about the new features and improved support for standards Microsoft are aiming for in IE 8, but after trying out Beta 1 I have to say that I am a little disappointed.

They say there are no stupid questions. Well, Engadget editor-in-chief did his best to disprove that today by using a rare audience with Steve Jobs to ask the following question, about the just-released iPhone SDK:

We asked: Will SIM unlock software be considered software not allowed in the app store?

A: Steve: (pause) “… yes.” Laughter.

I’m usually not one to say one shouldn’t ask a question just because you think you already know the answer. But seriously, dude, what the fuck was that?

Jezebel, Gawker’s crazy-smart lady blog, is a new permanent fixture in my RSS reader. Their analysis of the semiotics of glamour rag covers and celeb culture are like a daily Happy Meal for postmodern media critics, and today’s compare-and-contrast of Hayden Panettiere as depicted in both Seventeen and Cosmo is an excellent example of the awesomeness. (The short version: Seventeen is faux-chaste and pro-shopping, Cosmo is faux-slutty and pro-shopping.)

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group, announcing that IE8 will, praise jeebus, actually behave like a standards-compliant browser without the use of crazy version switches:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can…Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

Translation: We are afraid of Europe, and while we don’t know yet if the EU or any other entity can ding us for shipping yet another shitty browser, we sure as hell don’t want to find out.

Basically, they’re flipping their previous “solution” backwards — IE8’s true standards-compliant rendering will be the default, and developers can pass an X-UA-Compatible header/META tag to request that their pages be rendered using the IE 7 engine instead. This also means anyone whose pages render correctly in Firefox, Safari or Opera should hopefully be able to count on greater, if not total, compatibility in IE. Which is like whoa.

Much love to the IE team for making the right move on this.