Hey Brian Dunn, CEO of gadget lover's cathedral top electronics retailer Best Buy, what's on your short list of five great bang-for-your-buck devices for this holiday season?
(Thanks to the CNN Money reporter for asking this question at a press conference today)

DUNN: My short list?

* (First), on my personal short list -- a netbook is definitely on my short list - and by the way it's a companion device. It's lightweight, it's small, it's great to take on a quick trip.
* (Second) I think the HD Instinct is a very interesting smartphone. [Mediafile: That's Samsung's Instinct HD]
* (Third) I love my Flip HD camcorder. That's a great piece.
* Four, I really love the Ultra Thin OLED TVs are cool. [Mediafile: Um, cool yes. Bang for Buck? At about $2,000 for an 11-inch screen, let's just leave it at cool and move on. mkay?]
* The fifth one, of course, is a gift card , that I can give to the people I love, so they can get whatever it is they want.

Well played, Brian. Well Played.

How the art world embraces much more photography than, say, painting -- WaPo

Can we force the ratings agencies to have some kind of skin in the game should their ratings go spectacularly awry? -- Drum

The end of TED's magnum opus on banker pay has some really good insights -- TED

Vanity Fair owns the Conde-McKinsey-end-of-an-era story -- VF

Konczal on Waldman on Konczal on vanilla products - this is the blogosphere at its finest -- Rortybomb

Placebo may cause side effects -- the same side effects as the medicine for which it's standing in -- Cheeptalk

This CQ mess makes the Economist look positively evil. Do they know that? -- WaPo

True Blood, now in its 18th week of DVD release has $54.998 million in total sales. -- TV by the Numbers

Newsmax publishes, then takes down, column calling for military coup against Obama -- TPM

With the FDIC taking over 95 banks this year, it has many assets to dispose of, including a Ferrari -- The Deal

Does President Obama have a secret plan to raise taxes on middle-class Americans -- and,well, pretty much everybody else -- with a European-style, value-added tax? Actually, it's not such a big secret. Connect the dots:

1) The joint statement from the just-concluded G20 Summit in Pittsburgh called for balanced global growth -- which means Americans must spend less and save more and reduce its budget deficit.

2) That same weekend, John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team and an outside White House adviser, tells a Bloomberg reporter that a value-added tax is “more plausible today” than ever, adding that “there’s going to have to be revenue in this budget.” A VAT is a kind of consumption tax.

3) Yesterday, the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank with close White House ties, holds a conference on the rising national debt. While speaker after speaker -- Paul Krugman, Roger Altman, CAP President Podesta (again), Laura Tyson -- admits entitlement spending must be reduced, they also agree that taxes must be raised. Altman suggests $400 billion in new tax revenue is needed almost immediately to calm financial market fears, and a VAT would be a great way of doing it. That's $400 billion a year, by the way, not over ten years.

4) Also, yesterday was the first meeting of President Obama's tax reform panel led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. In a two-part interview with Charlie Rose airing yesterday and today, Volcker says that if Washington can't get spending under control, either a VAT or a carbon tax would be effective revenue raisers. "Those are two big ones," he says.

5) As they used to say in the Soviet Union, "It's no coincidence." This is also the conclusion of one Washington insider with ties to the White House economic team: "Does this all add up to a trial balloon? Of course, it's a trial balloon. And I expect the administration will propose major tax reform, including a VAT."

Obama's campaign promise to not raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 a year was always considered a joke here inside the Beltway. It's the economic "consensus" -- and this was true even before the financial meltdown and recession -- that rising entitlement costs would eventually mean a higher tax burden for the American people.

Maybe it was a joke inside the campaign, too. Since being elected, Obama has raised cigarette taxes and has advocated raising healthcare taxes, energy and small business taxes, in addition to corporate taxes. What's more, economic advisers like Larry Summers seem eager to get rid of all the Bush tax cuts, not just those on so-called wealthy Americans.

And it's also no secret that economists love the idea of a VAT. It promotes savings over consumption, and its hidden nature may mean it has less behavioral impact on taxpayers. Conservative economist Bruce Bartlet puts it this way, "As a broad-based tax on consumption, it creates less economic distortion per dollar of revenue than any other tax--certainly much less than the income tax." Indeed, a VAT is part of cash-strapped California's newly proposed tax reform.

Liberals love the idea of a VAT because it's, well, so European -- also because it does raise tons of revenue to expand government. And that is what Obama wants: more revenue to pay for bigger government. Is a VAT better than the soak-the-rich approach favored by Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel? Sure. Of course, the concern is that a VAT would be in addition to new soak-the-rich taxes.

See, even after the recession, there might be a 6 percentage point difference between what Uncle Sam spends as a percentage of GDP and what it takes in. Liberals like Krugman have no problem with making up that difference purely through higher taxes, even though that translates into raising the national tax burden by at least a third. And that, even though such a massive hike might well have a crushing effect on growth.

Obama wants a VAT? First, it should be part of broader tax reform, including getting rid of capital gains and corporate taxes. Second, it should accompany an Economic Bill of Rights much like Ronald Reagan used to suggest. Its elements: a) a balanced budget amendment, b) a line-item veto, c) a spending limit such as inflation plus population growth, d) and a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate for any tax increases. (Reagan also wanted a prohibition on wage and price controls. That would likely kill ObamaCare.)

And come to think of it, let's cut spending and streamline government before cash-strapped, wealth-reduced taxpayers are forced to pony up a penny more, OK?

Running a bank the size of BofA is impossible. So long as the Fed does its best to make the banking system profitable, you could put a baked Alaska in charge and the bank would throw off billions of dollars a year in profits. The job of the CEO is not really about managing down, so much as managing out -- repairing relationships with Andrew Cuomo, Sheila Bair, Barney Frank, Mary Shapiro, Elizabeth Warren, and other Washington VIPs. The board will want an experienced manager, to be sure. But they'll really want someone with political skills, who can calm the savage beast that has woken up DC and which is eyeing the giant of Charlotte.

Which is one reason it's not so ridiculous that Sallie Krawcheck is being talked of as a serious contender for the top job at BofA. She has the kind of credibility as a straight-shooter that the company desperately needs, and she might be able to mollify some of the bank's more antagonistic foes.

Meanwhile, if the board starts looking at external candidates, all such candidates must be thinking in the back of their head that a very similar opening is likely to appear at Citigroup sooner rather than later. Vikram Pandit has done amazingly well just to outlast Ken Lewis -- his ability to stay in his job is impressive, even if it's largely a function of the fact that Citi has no succession plan. But as the last of the great destroyers of value still to be drawing a paycheck, he can't last much longer.

It's a good time, then, to be a potential megabank CEO. But it's still a thankless job. Both banks are too big to manage, and both are likely to be broken up eventually. And that kind of decision can't come from a new CEO: it has to come from the board.

Sheila Bair and Dick Parsons may not be best friends, but they certainly spent a lot of time together this summer.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp head Bair and the Citigroup chairman met or spoke on the phone on at least five occasions during the summer, FDIC records show. Parsons got more official face time with her than any single bank executive.

Parsons even had more time with FDIC chairman Bair than Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- the Obama administration's point man on financial regulatory reform. Bair and Geithner, who haven't always seen eye to eye on reforming the banking industry, met three times on official business this summer.

The FDIC provided Reuters with a copy of Bair's datebook from June through August in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The 92-page document offers a window into the FDIC chairman's world, providing a brief listing of who Bair met with during that three-month period.

There is no record of what was discussed during those meetings, so it forces one to become a bit of a detective to piece together what may have been on the agenda. One can only guess what Bair and Alan Greenspan talked about over lunch on July 1, or what she and bank analyst Meredith Whitney may have chatted about on July 9.

But it is Bair's frequent consultations with Parsons and other Citi board members that really jump out from the pages of the datebook. In June alone, Bair met with Parsons three times.

These communications may not be too surprising, given Citi's precarious financial state, and the federal government's big monetary commitment to prop up the banking giant.

Yet it's notable that after The Wall Street Journal reported on June 5 that the FDIC was pushing for a management shake-up at Citi, there's no record of Bair meeting even once with Citi CEO Vikram Pandit. It doesn't appear Bair met or scheduled a phone call with a single member of Pandit's management team over the summer.

Interestingly, the Journal's page-one story about Bair rattling the cages at Citi ran just three days after Parsons met with her on June 2. Seven days later, Bair had a teleconference with Parsons and the rest of the 17-member bank's board, which includes Pandit.

It's been clear that Parsons has taken the lead in handling Citi's often tense relationship with the FDIC and other federal agencies. But it's still surprising that neither Pandit nor anyone from his team met with Bair, even after Citi did as the FDIC requested and installed a new chief financial officer on July 9 along with other management changes.

These days the storyline coming from those close to Citi and its 17-member board is that Parsons has managed to smooth out any lingering bad feelings between Bair and Citi's top management.

Some of that bad blood stems from the FDIC throwing up a road block to Citi's unsuccessful bid for Wachovia. The former Time Warner chairman and chief executive supposedly convinced Bair not to push for Pandit's ouster and put the FDIC chairman more at ease with the direction Pandit is taking the bank.

Maybe that's the case.

But Pandit may not want to rest too comfortably. The apparent absence of any one-on-one between Bair and Pandit may speak volumes about her true feelings.

That's because Bair managed to make time to meet with executives from other big banks that have received assistance from the federal government. On June 30, for instance, she met
with Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf and Howard Atkins, the bank's chief financial officer. And on August 11, she met with Bank of America's new chief risk officer, Gregory Curl.

Parsons' last get-together with Bair during this three-month stretch occurred on August 10. Three days later, the Financial Times ran a story that Citi, at the request of regulators, had hired an outside consultant to conduct a top-to-bottom management review and recommend additional managerial changes.

The outside consultant's management review is supposed to be presented to Citi's board and regulators sometime in October -- around the time the bank reports third-quarter earnings.

So should Bair have reason again this fall to talk to Parsons, the result may be less comforting to Pandit and his management team.

The Wall Street Journal has the details here. Thanks to the magic of matching funds and leverage provided by the Federal Reserve, this program will have much more than the $1.13 billion raised by participating private funds to buy toxic assets.

The timing couldn't be better. Housing is looking to be stabilizing (well at least price declines are slowing) so it should be easier to haggle on the price of bonds backed by home loans. When home prices were in free fall, few could say with any certainty whether they should be valued at 5 cents (the vultures) or 80 cents (the banks). Now is should be easier to model potential losses.

But banks could still balk and it will be much more interesting to see how quickly those funds are invested.

A street vendor in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, sold hundreds of framed portraits of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in the last one week.

Kashmiri separatists and many residents are all praise for Gaddafi after his maiden address to the U.N. General Assembly last week in which he said Kashmir should be an "independent state."

It was a diplomatic embarrassment for India but has Gaddafi's U.N. speech actually won him an enthusiastic fan base in strife-weary Kashmir where Muslim militants are fighting New Delhi's rule since 1989.

The Libyan leader told the U.N. General Assembly last week that Kashmir should be an independent state, not Indian, not Pakistani.

Last week, dozens of Kashmiris carried placards reading "Gaddafi The Lion of Desert II" referring to the 1981 Hollywood movie "Lion of the Desert", which is about Omar Mukhtar, who led the rebellion against Italian rule in Libya and was captured and hanged in 1931.

The movie on Omar Mukhtar encouraged rebellion in Kashmir in 1985. This is for the first time in recent times a Muslim leader outside the Indian sub-continent has advocated Kashmir's complete independence both from India and Pakistan.

The two countries claim the region in full but rule in parts.

Encouraged by the speech, separatist leaders say Gaddafi's statement in the U.N. General Assembly should serve as an eye-opener for Indian and Pakistani leaders.

Despite two wars over Kashmir, India and Pakistan have so far failed to find a solution to the more than six-decade-old dispute over Kashmir.

New Delhi has so far largely struggled to win the hearts and minds of the people of Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment still runs deep.

Gaddafi also opposed the expansion of the U.N. Security Council by including countries like India. New Delhi, which has downplayed Gaddafi's statement, has not yet reacted officially.

Has Gaddafi's U.N. speech on Kashmir's "freedom" won him foes in India and friends in Kashmir?

If you read often enough about the supposed death of the newspaper business, you would think that the nation's newsrooms are increasingly depopulated, barren places, with darkened offices and empty cubicles... the occasional tumbleweed blowing past. (Actually,  large stretches of Tribune Co's New York bureau look just like that, as I saw earlier this year).

In San Francisco, Chicago and other metropolitan centers, you would be wrong. It's true that both cities bear unfortunate marks of how rough the advertising decline, rise of the Internet and financial crisis have treated their news operations: Hearst was toying with shutting down the San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago's leading daily papers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, are owned by bankrupt companies. Improbably enough, both are turning into hot spots for local news competition.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are fighting over San Francisco, and a private equity guy has teamed up with KQED and UC Berkeley to try a nonprofit local news experiment. And now, the Times reported on Wednesday, it is targeting some other cities, including Chicago. Here is an excerpt from reporter Richard Perez-Pena's writeup on the Times's decoder blog:

Plans for the San Francisco edition call for adding to the paper, twice a week, two additional pages of news about northern California. At first, the added content will be produced by The Times’ own writers and editors. But eventually, the plan, as in Chicago, is to turn the production over to a local partner.

Here's more from spokeswoman Diane McNulty, whose statement also was in the Times's blog:

We're in conversations with potential news providers in Chicago about adding local content to The Times. Our intent is to roll out these expanded reports in several key markets around the country with Chicago following San Francisco. The details are still being discussed. The idea is to provide additional quality local content for our readers.

Papers like the Times and Journal are trying lots of things that they hope will stem their own ad declines and keep them profitable as they face the threat of a severely diminished future. The idea is to capitalize on the problems that local papers are having by scooping up their readers and giving them a comprehensive national report along with local news. But it's hard to see where the cost savings will come from in this Chicago case unless they find a local partner to print their papers.

Revenue-wise, perhaps any circulation bump is a good one when it comes to getting more advertising. In terms of fixing what else is wrong with the newspaper business these days, however, it doesn't look like a game changer. The reason that so many people tout local news as a more healthy media pursuit than national is because local publishers know local audiences and advertisers the best and presumably can give them something that few others can give them. To do that, it's good to remember that it's LOCAL publishers who tend to enjoy that advantage.

 So much for emerging-market solidarity.

A proposed $24 billion deal between Bharti of India and MTN of South Africa has fallen apart, not for the usual issues of price or control, but national ego.

The apparent sticking point was that South Africa was eager to retain MTN's national character and had approached Indian authorities to consider a dual-listed entity, a structure that Indian laws currently do not allow.

The opportunity for a landmark deal in southern economic cooperation, one that would have created the third-largest wireless operator in the world, looks lost. After several failed attempts, it is the credibility of their respective governments, not the companies themselves, that is left in doubt.

The message from the South African government is that international buyers can invest in, but not control, the country's companies. UK mining conglomerate Xtrata has been a two-time loser there, having abandoned a takeover plan for Lonmin Plc, then met with roadblocks in its offer to buy Anglo American.

India has been more than willing to help its biggest companies push onto the multinational stage in cars, steel and technology. But international companies looking to buy into India have received rough treatment as well.
  
Every country seems quite happy to have their companies do the buying, but no one wants to see its national heroes sold.

Western countries have used a mix of justifications, from competition to national security, to torpedo attempts by China to buy such prized assets as Rio Tinto or Unocal. The French went as far as to declare yogurt-maker Danone a strategic asset to block a takeover by PepsiCo of the United States.

Beyond the mutual recriminations between Bharti and MTN and their respective governments, the question now is what happens next. The two companies left open the possibility they might find a way to resume a deal. But recent history is not promising.

Bharti and MTN revived talks four months ago, a year after previous negotiations broke down over which executive team would control a merged mobile phone giant with more than 200 million customers across India, Africa and the Middle East.

Bharti could accomplish some of what it is after by stepping into the bidding for rival African and Middle East player Zain of Kuwait. But this has its own political and financial hurdles.

MTN's options look less promising. A foreign buyer seems like wishful thinking now. The No. 2 South African mobile phone company may have to content itself with the rapid growth taking place in its African and Middle East markets. The South African government is happy to allow it to diversify offshore.

But the road to south-south economic cooperation has been shown to be rockier than the tentative Bharti-MTN deal had promised.

You can read some of Eric's recent columns here.

(Photo credits: Reuters/Mike Hutchings, Reuters/Ajay Verma and Reuters/Mike Segar)

Ken Lewis is leaving Bank of America -- and about time too. The board now has three months to find a successor; the new chairman, Walter Massey, has no real choice but to move "in a deliberate and expeditious manner" to find a replacement.

The timing is intriguing, coming the day after this statement from Jamie Dimon about Bill Winters:

“Choosing between two outstanding people is the hardest part of this job. Bill is an outstanding professional. He has expressed a desire to be his own CEO and I think that is entirely reasonable.”

Would BofA choose an investment banker as its new CEO? That didn't work out so well for Citigroup. But on the other hand, Lewis has been personally identified with Bank of America for as long as it has existed in its present form (essentially, from the day that Nationsbank acquired the legacy BofA). There's certainly no heir apparent.

With John Thain out, the most likely successor is probably Brian Moynihan, the man who was parachuted in to save the day in the wake of Thain's ouster. But the fact that BofA isn't announcing a successor now is indicative of the chaos within the bank, and indicative too that Lewis's departure isn't entirely voluntary.

Did Massey finally get fed up with the SEC, and the New York attorney general, and Judge Jed Rakoff, and half of Congress, and a large part of the shareholder base, all calling for Lewis's head? Maybe we'll see when details of Lewis's exit package emerge. My guess is that his last act as CEO will be to strong-arm the board into giving him something very generous.