Stacy Horn

This is from one of the last episodes of Newsroom. Don told Sloan that she never explained the subprime mortgage scandal in a way that most people could understand. Here is her attempt. Did Sorkin get it right? PS: Someone give Olivia Munn her own series.

Sloan: Markets rely on Standard & Poor’s to objectively rate debt. But the companies that want a favorable debt rating are the same companies that pay Standard & Poor’s. You follow so far?

Don: Yeah.

Sloan: Banks wrote a ton of bad mortgages to people they knew were going to default. It’s called predatory lending. Then hid those bad mortgages inside good mortgages to shine up the books for S&P, which gave them triple-A ratings. Then they’d bundle the whole thing and sell the debt to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is owned by–

Don: You and me.

Sloan: Yes. And then the banks bet on those loans defaulting. Not that much different from fixing a college basketball game except a ton of people wind up broke and homeless. Those people can’t buy things anymore, so businesses start going out of business and more people are broke. When you start eliminating consumers, you start eliminating jobs, which eliminates consumers, which eliminates jobs, which eliminates consumers, and you see where this is going?

A Christmas tree behind the Jefferson Market Library (aka where Miranda and Steve got married in Sex and the City).

It’s one of the best things I’ve read in years: The Halfway Café. It’s a quick read so there’s no excuse not to give it a try. You must read it! I was very moved by it. I was actually moved to forgive someone who did terrible things to me, someone I’ve been trying to forgive for years. I was about to write him but then I realized he’s still a terrible person and I should forgive him in my heart but not re-establish contact.

Why I took a picture of a pay phone. Because 1, it just appeared out of the blue. I didn’t even know new pay phones were being installed anymore. And 2, it’s not new. Someone installed an old, unclean, used pay phone. It’s just odd.

I adored Mario Cuomo. I saw him speak at the 92nd Street Y in January, 2010. It feels so recent to me. He was still so strong and vigorous and SMART. I was looking for a copy of his speech, but I couldn’t find it. What I did find was his answer to an audience question about advice for President Obama.

1. Mr. President, you shouldn’t have started with healthcare. With everything else falling down around us, there were other issues that needed tending first. However, now that we have gone down this road, we must finish what we started. We must get some kind of heathcare bill passed. And yes, Mrs. Pelosi, you have to go get those Senate votes by any means necessary. The bill won’t be perfect. We aren’t going to get a complete fix to healthcare, but we have to at least have a bill that is a start down the road to improvement.

2. You, Mr. President, are the most burdened President in modern history. Not even FDR had the troubles you have in this current state of the nation: healthcare, education, the energy crisis, Afghanistan, and this dreadful economy. You won’t get it all done in 4 years. Think of it as work to complete in 8 years. This will help us take 1 issue at a time.

3. Please, Mr. President, don’t lose heart. In this next year you will have to fight and fight hard. While you are the most burdened President in modern history, you are also the most brilliant and the most eloquent. What you lacked was experience, and in your first year in office, you got plenty of experience.

Heavy sigh. How I wish you could have lived, and governed, forever. You would have made such a great Supreme Court Justice, but apparently you really and truly didn’t want that job.

My friend Howard reading to the granddaughter of a friend of ours. I’m so mad her face is blocked! I didn’t notice at the time, I took the shot so quickly (Howard does not like having his picture taken).

I had Echo problems AGAIN, with an assist from the place where Echo’s domain is registered (soon to be the former place where Echo’s name is registered). For whatever reason, any problem with Echo is enormously upsetting to me, and I just can’t relax. It’s like my child is in the hospital. The world won’t be okay again until my kid/Echo is okay.

Everything is back to normal except now I have a splitting headache. Still, it will be a most happy new year for me now. Echo is okay, my friends and family are okay, and my cats are okay. For now.

Looking up 5th Avenue, towards Central Park. It was a little dismal that day.

By now you’ve seen the video of a woman walking down the street and all the catcalls she gets. The NYPD could make a similar video. My eyes were opened to what a cop has to deal with when I hung out with one of the cold case detectives who’d been assigned to a post at the Iraq war protest (obviously this was years ago).

Here’s what happened. People trying to enter the protest were constantly being stopped from doing so. They’d come up to a cross street but they’d be told it was closed and they had to go up to the next street to enter the protest. Except they’d go up to the next street and be told the same thing. Go up to the next block. This would keep happening. At one point I asked, “Just tell me the truth, which blocks are actually open,” and the cop had to admit they didn’t know. So after 10 or 20 blocks of this people would lose their patience and they’d stop asking so politely.

I spent some time with a detective who was at one of the closed off blocks. He was further uptown, so he was getting people who were basically tired of being jerked around, they just wanted to join the protest already. My sympathy was with them. But at the same time, it wasn’t this detective’s fault that his block was closed. And it was the boss’s fault that the cops assigned to the blocks weren’t being given accurate information to tell the protestors, like which blocks were open.

So I watched for a few hours as people took their frustration out on this detective and the other cops with him. He knew what was going on and why they were frustrated and he remained polite in his answers regardless of how anyone talked to him. But after a couple of hours his responses got shorter and shorter, and while he wasn’t exactly impolite, he was definitely less friendly and impatient as time wore on. I can see how people with poor anger management skills (and who weren’t being watched) could behave a lot worse under the circumstances. But I could also see losing it. I’m not sure people realized how assholish they were being, even if they had a good reason to be mad.

This is a long way of explaining why I suggest making a film like the one of the girl walking down the street. The NYPD could make a similar video showing some of the things people say and call out to cops as they are doing their job. I know how it can get quite ugly, and it could give the public a real sense of what a cop has to deal with every day. You might also include—except I know this would never happen in a MILLION YEARS—what some of the bosses say and do to their own men and women. That was a real revelation to me when I researched my book, the fact that some of the jerkiest behavior a cop has to deal with comes from the inside! They are not all on the same side in there.

But it would make a great video and it would show how often cops are in a no-win situation, getting it from both sides, the public and the brass.

Looking out my window and down to the street where the police and the fire department are working together to evict a mentally disturbed man from his apartment (this was the guy who thought a Time Warner repairman working in his building was there to kill him and turned on the gas jets in his apartment and left them on). This was the day after Christmas. Talk about a not-fun part of your job.