Scissor season: Moody's is expected to begin cutting ratings on banks any day now, and Bloomberg notes the consequences: Higher funding costs, curbed lending and another thorn in the side of economic growth. According to a Moody's note last month, Italian lenders are first on the chopping block, to be followed by banks in other European countries. U.S. banks will also come in for potential downgrades, but are unlikely to see ratings changes until June.

Banks in trouble: Spain is likely to require lenders to post an additional $45 billion in collateral against loans to the construction sector, Reuters reports, raising the likelihood of another injection of public cash. The Spanish government is expected to announce new demands after a cabinet meeting on Friday.

Meanwhile, Spanish banks are pushing their debt and equity on retail customers as larger investors pull back. The Journal worries that a vicious circle may be emerging: Fearing that losses would spook individual investors, banks have put off recognizing losses, exacerbating the tenuous position of Spanish banks, and the eventual reckoning for mom and pop.

Margin-roasted: Robert Stiller was relieved of his position as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters chairman after he sold 5 million shares in the company, worth $125.5 million, in a margin call. Green Mountain's stock lost nearly half its value last week after the company reported disappointing earnings and amid calls by short sellers such as Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn, and Deutsche Bank forced Mr. Stiller to sell shares to satisfy loans secured against his Green Mountain holdings.

BofA meets: The great unwashed are expected to descend on Charlotte, North Carolina today to protest Bank of America's annual meeting, though it may be a toss-up as to whether the protestors bear the lender the most ill will. Other candidates: Recently jettisoned employees, refi applicants, holders of the company's basement-dwelling stock. In case you were worried, city officials passed an ordinance in January prohibiting items "ranging from backpacks to crowbars" at large events. Hecklers interrupted a Bank of America presentation at the Citi Financial Services conference in New York in March, chanting "bust up Bank of America before it busts up America," and at least 24 protestors were arrested at Wells Fargo's annual meeting in San Francisco last month.

Americans not wanted: Wealth managers around the world are closing the door on American clients as the start date for rules to prevent tax evasion approaches. Beginning next year, foreign financial institutions must report information about income and interest accrued to the accounts of U.S. clients, raising compliance costs and limiting the options of Americans living abroad, according to Bloomberg. The IRS is holding a May 15 hearing, which could soften the implementation of the rules.

Tech banker: Michael Grimes, the banker who managed LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon IPOs, spent years laying the ground work for Morgan Stanley's lead role in the Facebook offering, and made his career winning over Silicon Valley with a more flexible approach to investment banking.

Red tape: And it still takes a long time to refinance a mortgage.

[Stan Honda/AFP]

Giuseppe Garibaldi, formerly of Staten Island. (Photo: nndb.com)

In November 1853, a 46-year-old candle-maker set sail from Staten Island for Europe, where he had been one of the most famous soldiers since the fall of Napoleon 40 years before. Giuseppe Garibaldi was already one-half on his way to becoming “the Hero of Two Worlds” of legend, as he had the previous decade fought for Uruguayan independence in South America. His fighting on behalf of his native soil, however, had not gone so spectacularly.

Garibaldi, who was born in Nice when it was still part of the proto-Italian kingdom of Piedmont, had been one of the top leaders of the Roman Republic of 1849, the result of the residents of the city and surrounding areas rebelling against the temporal rule of the archconservative Pope Pius IX (aptly translated from Pio Nono) and the French, Austrian and Neapolitan troops propping him up. The republic lasted a few months; it collapsed after a siege by those same foreign troops; Pio Nono safely returned to rule another 20 years; and Garibaldi split Europe, eventually ending up casting candles on Staten Island (the cottage where he lived is still there as a museum).

It is what happened before and after his swaggering run in Rome that matters most to the story of Italy told commandingly by British history writer David Gilmour in his The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions and Their Peoples (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 447 pages; $30). Garibaldi had returned to Europe from South America in the revolutionary year of 1848; and “had led without distinction a volunteer force against the Austrians in the foothills of the Alps. Surprised to find that the local population was unwilling to join his irregular troops, he had been outmaneuvered by the enemy and forced to take refuge in Switzerland.” And after his later defeat in Rome, some of the happiest people to see him go were Italian politicians from his native Piedmont.

That Garibaldi could not rally Italians against the Austrians before Rome, and that many of those same Italians were happy to see him high-tail it to New York after the republic's fall encapsulates Mr. Gilmour’s argument: Just as is the case today, while there were plenty of people on the peninsula 150 years ago who may have identified themselves ethnically as Italians, there were not that many who were keen on identifying themselves so politically. This went for the people who, largely by accident, formed the Italian state.

There was the bellicose King Victor Emanuel II of Piedmont, squat and mustachioed, fond of medals but not of the fighting to earn them; Cavour, his canny lieutenant who as prime minister sought the expansion of Piedmont but not necessarily the birth of the Kingdom of Italy until the two became one in the same; and other players like Mazzini, the dreamer (think of him as the Italian equivalent of Thomas Paine), stoking nationalist fire (though, like the king, Mazzini was no fan of actual fighting). And then there was Garibaldi, Italy’s George Washington, a farmer inimitable as a soldier but uncomfortable as a leader (ironically enough, after his role in uniting Italy, he would take a steamer called “Washington” back to his farm in northern Sardinia, having refused honors from Victor Emanuel).

Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in May 1860 with a volunteer army culled mostly from northern Italian states like Piedmont, Lombardy and Tuscany—and with the backing of the British navy—commenced one of the more brilliant military campaigns of the 19th century. Within a year it was all over: Garibaldi’s “Thousand” had routed the Neapolitan government, a wing of the Spanish monarchy, and its Austrian allies; captured the capital Naples; and basically met Cavour’s expansionist Piedmont army in the middle of the peninsula, where together they swept away Pio Nono’s domains all the way to the gates of Rome. The Romantic revolutionary—literally, in this case—coming from the south had joined with the pragmatic politicians coming from the north. Italy was born. (Rome, the last piece of the puzzle, would be fitted in after the French troops protecting the pope dashed out in September 1870 to fight the new German empire.)

But then what?

Mr. Gilmour shows that as is often the case with accidents people get hurt. Cavour died suddenly in 1861, and Garibaldi the same year shuffled nobly off the stage. Victor Emanuel—who, tellingly, kept the “II” after his name as if continuing to rule as the king of Piedmont rather than as the first king of Italy—was not much of an administrator; and he left his new country at the whim of northern politicians who saw the south as inferior and perhaps hopelessly so. “The Piedmontese who came uninvited in 1860 felt they had arrived in another country but in another continent.” A racist joke circulated in Victor Emanuel’s court that Garibaldi had not united Italy but had split Africa.

And, despite the northerners’ “sprees of statue-making and street-christening in homage to the heroic four” of the king, Garibaldi, Cavour and Mazzini, southerners rebelled, sometimes in large numbers, against what many considered a foreign occupation. Indeed, Mr. Gilmour guesses that long-forgotten uprisings in the former Kingdom of Naples could have cost as many as 60,000 lives in the 1860s. The northerners dismissed the fighting as “brigandage,” with Victor Emanuel authorizing brutal reprisals against southern peasants who hadn’t gotten the memo re: the unification of Italy; that it was clean and foreordained, and most certainly did not involve conquest.

So, instead of economic development for the south or political reforms across the board to welcome disparate former states into the new kingdom (Venice, an independent republic for hundreds of years, was as discontented as Naples—maybe more so—at being dragooned into Italy), the king’s governments chose a succession of ill-fated wars to … to what, really? To show that Italians could be as militant and imperialistic as Germans or Englishmen, one guesses. Revenue that could have been steered toward road and railroad building, education and trade, was instead spent on colonial conquests in Africa, including in Libya, and on fighting on the (barely) winning side in World War I. In that conflagration, the Italians were soundly and routinely beaten by the Germans and Austrians, time and again having to be rescued by the French and British.

A national inferiority complex set in. Millions on the peninsula simply threw up their hands and emigrated away from the grinding poverty and the anemic social mobility (including this writer’s grandparents). Of the four million, mostly southern Italians who emigrated from the late 19th century through the 1920s, most settled in the U.S., and the vast majority passed through New York City on their ways.

Italy’s more recent history will be familiar to many, though Mr. Gilmour gives Mussolini and the corruption-infused march to modernity since World War II, all the way through Berlusconi, their thorough due (as he does Italy's history from antiquity to the early 19th century). But it's those years of unification upon which he hinges his argument—the Italian state was an accident, though one that need not have been so damaging.

"It was a very different Italy which I spent my life dreaming of," Garibaldi wrote shortly before his death in 1882, "not the impoverished and humiliated country which we now see ruled by the dregs of the nation."

tacitelli@observer.com  ::  Follow on Twitter @tacitelli

Once again, European leaders are working to contain the crisis, which has only now spilled over from the peripheral economies to one of the Continent’s largest.

The stakes are high. If the potential for contagion is fully realized in Europe, the resulting disruptions will threaten another global recession. As for the means to the end, bond markets are seeking deep spending cuts rather than substantial increases in taxes. The economic literature suggests that closing the budget gap can be expansionary, sometimes even in the short-run.

There are lessons therein for the United States, where the looming threat of default forewarns an even more perilous upending of world economic and geopolitical stability.

In Italy, as Here, a Political Dimension

Writing over the weekend from my hotel near the Swiss-Italian border, the immediacy of the latter’s predicament seems to have abated for the time being. Last Thursday, its Treasury successfully auctioned $5 billion in government bonds, albeit at sharply higher spreads than just a month earlier. The oversubscription of the bond sales is a fleeting comfort for Europe’s leaders.

The vagaries of the market mean that a sense of crisis—in Italy or elsewhere in the euro zone—will reassert itself vigorously if the region’s broader dilemma is met with further indecisiveness.

It was not assured that markets would turn on Italy until yields actually spiked. As Alan Auerbach describes in a paper prepared for the Bank of International Settlements conference here in Lucerne just a few weeks ago, “Debt-GDP ratios alone typically do not tell us how long countries have before they must make fiscal adjustments or how large these adjustments need to be” [i].

Rather than a pure economic driver, Rome’s dysfunctional political environment served as the immediate trigger for Italy’s current slide into disfavor. In particular, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s recent muddying of budgetary politics cast into doubt his commitment to fiscal discipline, prompting last week’s backlash from bond markets.

Mr. Auerbach proves himself prescient, writing that, “Fiscal projections aside, a country’s political environment and fiscal institutions matter, too, for they provide a reading of the ease or difficulty with which needed adjustments can occur” [ii].

Politics Aside, a Real Problem

Apart from the political theater, Italy faces very real challenges. In spite of a primary balance surplus (a budget surplus before interest payments), the government is deeply indebted, to the tune of 120 percent of gross domestic product.

That presents a serious challenge in light of Italy’s lackluster historical and projected growth trends. Servicing its legacy debt obligations is sufficiently onerous that its overall obligations continue to rise. Mr. Auerbach describes three sources of fiscal imbalances: cyclical, as tends to be observed during recessions; structural, implying a deficit that persists even after the economy has returned to health; and those related to current or future pension and health spending. In Italy, at least two of these are relevant, made larger by the slow growth in economic output.

The need for structural adjustments in the Italian budget might be taken in stride but for current optics. The debt burdens of the major economies are under close scrutiny. Thus far, the euro zone has shown itself regrettably plodding in dealing with the crisis along its periphery.

Differences of ideology, incentives and opinion about who should bear the cost of restructuring and whether to take the significant step of authorizing eurobonds separate the weaker economies from Europe’s core and have precluded durable solutions when they would have been most efficacious. The result of inaction has been a decline in market confidence regarding the position of the peripheral economies and their stronger counterparts, as well.

The partial solutions adopted for Greece, in particular, have left open the potential for contagion. Recent events suggest that that potential is being realized. And whereas the euro zone’s resources, coupled with those of the International Monetary Fund, can meet the demands of crises in the smallest economies, the scale of Italy’s sovereign bond market dwarfs the capacity of the European Financial Stability Facility. The largest sovereign market in Europe and the third largest globally, Italy has $2.6 trillion in debt outstanding, in the range of 10 times the stability funds committed and still available.

Can Austerity Be Expansionary?

In an effort to avoid a default in Europe, a given country’s debt might be restructured, with banks or other private-sector parties holding exposures bearing the costs that are not borne by governments. As a complement or alternative, countries enjoying continued access to credit markets might directly or indirectly extend lines of credit to their constrained peers. In many respects, a Eurobond market is little more than a formalization of such an arrangement.

In any case, lenders and investors will typically demand serious concessions of defaulters that are favorable to long-term fiscal sustainability. For a country like Greece, that means a combination of revenue programs and spending cuts. In part, because of where the relative burden of these two options falls, the fiscal adjustment takes on a socioeconomic dimension that plays out in politics and the streets.

The United States is not so different from Greece in this regard. At the heart of the domestic budget debate here is the question of whether to increase taxes, a burden that is perceived as falling disproportionately on high-income households, or curtailing expenditures on programs that benefit a wider cross-section of Americans. The polarization of the public discourse and the portrayal of these options as mutually exclusive are unfortunate. Nothing in the economic analysis requires that we act with opprobrium.

We do not expect that our elected officials will agree on matters of ideological and political significance. On the contrary, the short-term incentives to which they are most sensitive push them very hard to disagree. We do, however, expect the parties’ leadership to find common ground on issues that are vital to the national interests. As of the time of this writing, however, no budget deal had been reached. A resolution at the 11th hour deserves no self-congratulation given the stalemate’s drag on economic activity. As with European hesitation, brinksmanship at home has undercut confidence in our political system and our economy, jeopardizing our recovery.

Apart from the complex political calculus of necessary entitlement reform, policymakers are reasonably concerned with the impact of any contraction on fiscal consolidation.  The elementary Keynesian analysis is straightforward: a drop in government expenditures will reduce GDP growth.

The reality is more nuanced and depends upon expectations about future public expenditures. The bulk of the economic literature shows that narrowing budget deficits are generally expansionary. Although their results are qualified by more recent research, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna show that cutbacks in public spending can be associated with increases in private consumption [iii]. Of course, that will not always be the case. On a systematic level, the literature may also overstate the expansionary effect of austerity.

In a just-released working paper from the International Monetary Fund, Jaime Guajardo and his colleagues find that “the standard method used to identify fiscal consolidation in the literature may bias the analysis toward finding support for the expansionary austerity hypothesis” [iv]. This is an important qualifier that I must concede in fairness to the analysis.

Balancing Mr. Guajardo’s findings, a new research paper from the European Central Bank again demonstrates the confidence channel whereby “fiscal shocks that are followed by an expected future reversal in spending have a positive effect on output, private consumption, and investment” [v].

I would postulate that, controlling for the fiscal shock, private investment and consumption respond positively to businesses’ and consumers’ expectations of improving fiscal discipline. Further, that expectation is better served by a contraction in public spending than an increase in taxes since the latter suggests a weaker commitment to containing public expenditure growth. If that is the case, our choices in balancing spending cuts and tax increases should signal a commitment to long-term fiscal discipline by incorporating credible and permanent reductions in expenditures.

The more effective the signal that results, the stronger the outlook will be for the American economy.

dsc@chandan.com

Sam Chandan, Ph.D., is president and chief economist of Chandan Economics and an adjunct professor at the Wharton School.

[i] Alan Auerbach: Long-Term Fiscal Sustainability in Major Economies. Prepared for the Tenth Annual Bank of International Settlements Annual Conference, Lucerne, Switzerland, June 2011.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna: Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending, Tax Policy and the Economy. Edited by Jeffrey Brown. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010.

[iv] Jaime Guajardo, Daniel Leigh and Andrea Pescatori: Expansionary Austerity: New International Evidence. International Monetary Fund Working Paper WP-11-158.[v] Jacopo Cimadomo, Sebastien Hauptmeier and Sergio Sola: Identifying the Effects of Government Spending Shocks With and Without Expected Reversal. European Central Bank Working Paper Series, No. 1361, July 2011.

Can anyone in Milan buy us a copy?

We read with extreme interest the Page Six news that Lindsay Lohan was to be on the cover of the September issue of Vanity Fair--though the item, which posited the specific photographer for Vogue's upcoming Kate Moss cover (Mario Testino), only informed us that the VF photoshoot was taken during Ms. Lohan's house arrest period and featured new, bleached-blonde hair.

Turns out, the Vanity Fair photoshoot was for the Italian edition (we'll be waiting to see if the U.S. one materializes). Today, Italian VF released its spread on Ms. Lohan, with new blonde hair in a sad little Bardot-faux bun. The spread, undertaken during Ms. Lohan's house arrest and shot by one Alan Gelati, features Ms. Lohan sprawled against a giant teddy bear, holding a gilded skull. Annie L. this isn't.

FreeTranslation.com indicates that the headline and subhed read: "Lindsay Lohan: 'That badly I did yourselves?: 'Unless you have not killed someone, I do not see the reason to be in prison'. The actress is confided openly and in exclusive right to Vanity Fair." [sic] We'll always have Rome, Lindsay!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Claribel was a doctor 20 years before American women could vote; she wrote passionately about the beauty to be found under a microscope. Etta, six years younger, had high school French and a taste for painting. Both favored black dresses worn with chunky pins and Belgian lace collars, the sensible garb of women who traveled easily between the laboratory and the salon. Stein wrote the poem "Two Women" about the Cones: "There were two of them, they were sisters, they were large women, they were rich."

These women arrived in Paris in time for the 1905 art exhibition the Salon d'Automne. They rented an apartment around the corner from Stein and her brother Leo, who were family friends, and accompanied the poet to Matisse's studio, where Stein bought his Woman With a Hat. Much ridiculed at the Salon, it was one of the pictures that got Matisse dubbed a "fauve," or wild colorist. (Etta chose his more traditional still life Yellow Pottery From Provence.) They followed Stein to portrait sittings at Picasso's Montmartre studio.

At 41 and 35, the sisters were just beginning their lives abroad when Baltimore society might have considered them spinsters. Receipts show money spent on cabs, Cézanne lithographs, and flowers for Stein. There were personal intrigues: that Stein dumped Etta to take up with Alice B. Toklas seems likely.

From Paris, they made a trip around the world--Budapest, Athens, Cairo, Shanghai--collecting ivory bangles, Buddhist figurines, Turkish mosque tiles and Indian silk scarves. Such items were not the finest of the Cone purchases, but they added notes of exoticism to art-filled apartments.

On their second trip to Paris, in 1922, the Cones had greater buying power. Their brothers' cotton mills made cloth for the U.S. military during the First World War and became the largest supplier of denim to Levi Strauss. Such was their wealth that when they went to the opera, they bought an extra seat on which to rest that day's purchases. They shipped home seven crates of art, and Claribel hired three staterooms for herself and her luggage. Upon her arrival in Baltimore, she was forced to take on a second apartment; her art had literally crowded her out.

If their taste was decorative--Etta's favorite of her Matisses was Interior, Flowers and Parakeets, a lushly patterned interior--and sometimes slight, it had the key qualities of deep pockets and unflinching commitment to the right artists. Between them, the Cones eventually acquired 500 works by Matisse and over 100 by Picasso. And they took risks: at a time when women collectors favored still lifes and landscapes, they didn't shy away from sensual nudes. The best of these are by Matisse: Standing Odalisque Reflected in a Mirror, Two Negresses (their arms intertwined) and the bronze Reclining Nude III. Delacroix's painting Perseus and Andromeda, purchased from the Steins, is typical of the Cones' unconventional eroticism, the naked princess chained to a rock being one of the racier subjects in Greek mythology.

Etta became the keeper of the sisters' treasures after Claribel died in Lausanne at age 64--not before buying a Courbet landscape earlier that day. Their art was beginning to gain institutional acceptance: this was 1929, the year the Museum of Modern Art was founded. For the next 20 years, Etta maintained Claribel's apartment and one of America's finest collections of modern art. Her fortune grew through the Great Depression, and Etta's purchases after 1930 were made with the idea that the collection would ultimately become a gift to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Accordingly, her taste became bolder. Among her acquisitions were Women of the Mango (Vahine no te vi), an iconic 1892 Gauguin, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude of 1935. The nude's body is a smooth melon-pink against a background of blue tiles; the painting points to a geometric abstraction the sisters never fully embraced.

We now see the Cones above all as prescient collectors, but you get the sense that they were searching, in their travels, for freedom from the narrow roles they might have inhabited back home. Collecting transformed the Cone women from mothers and wives manquée to connoisseurs of radical art; they remade themselves as patrons who found meaning and left a legacy in their relationships with Matisse and Stein. From Baltimore to the Bateau-Lavoir, the Cone sisters found an exhilarating escape; we're lucky to have their souvenirs.

editorial@observer.com

Yes, what will this crew get into once it says "arrivederci!" to the Garden State and "ciao!" to Europe? Next Media Animation has an idea. The CGI recapping of the travel news was whipped up quickly, as these NMA things typically are, and it depicts a little romp through Italy with poor-to-decent approximations of the cast. They're thrill-seeking (renting jet skis to flip the Venetian gondoliers), politically active (partying with Berlusconi, who's surrounded by women) and down for authentic Italian food (fist-pumping their way to Olive Garden).

Wishful thinking perhaps, but we all have dreams. Watch the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZu1QPb9P3c

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Pauly D Preps For Italy By Tweeting in Some Kind of Foreign Language

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

But do you get to have a "sure-to-be mini-bottle laden plane ride?" This is how MTV describes the voyage the cast of "Jersey Shore" will take to Italy, the chosen location for the show's fourth season. There, they will reconnect with their ethic identities, immerse themselves in a foreign culture, get blackout drunk, have sex with each other, flex, study the works of Dante, take in a day of art at the Uffizi gallery, tan until dark orange, and get blackout drunk again.

TMZ ran rumors of the new locale earlier today, and then MTV confirmed it. The release is written with a lot of voice.

While "Jersey Shore" is a popular program internationally, there are bound to be plenty of people oblivious to "The Situation" and his colorful cronies, as well as the circus of debauchery they bring with them to every locale. Who knows how the OGs of Italy will react to our self-proclaimed guidos and guidettes? Luckily, Vinny's got first generation family (wait, there's more of them?!) who'll be nearby to offer up heaps of comfort food and some guidance on the cultural ways of "the beautiful country."

There are obvious Godfather allusions to be made here -- "laying low in the old country," Apollonia, etc -- but this reminds us more of Everything is Illuminated. You think Snooki's read it?

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

The decision to direct such a blunt gesture toward Italy's financial headquarters has drawn criticism, but Massimiliano Finazzer Flory — the splendidly named Milanese commissioner for culture — defends Cattelan's works, telling Reuters that they "call our times into question, offering themselves as a mirror, however cracked, of our present."

Cattelan's most well-known work may be "La Nona Hora," which depicts Pope John Paul II getting smashed in by a meteorite. He also was commissioned by Interview publisher Peter Brant to make a bust of his off-again on-again supermodel wife Stephanie Seymour naked and clutching her breasts. The sculpture — nicknamed "Trophy Wife" — will be sold in an auction by Phillips, de Pury & Co. on Nov. 8. 

Of the "L.O.V.E." sculpture, Cattelan has said that "it is mainly about imagination" — interesting, because an enormous hand flicking off a stock exchange doesn't exactly leave much to the imagination. 

The rest of the page is so graphically quiet, with so little left to it, that the News' decision to flag the earthquake in Italy loses much of its potential drama. And never mind the third story, which isn't really even a story so much as a refer to the back page: “Santana's sharp, but CC is not.” Since fans already know what happened last night in the Mets' and Yankees' first games, we think a Sports refer on Page One ought to advance the point of view on the news a bit, and this is pretty lame. Taking the risk of looking at the back page, we see that the News isn't shy in its analysis of what happened last night: “MONEY FOR NOTHING” reads the Sports-page cover depicting Yanks' last great hope, the expensive C.C. Sabathia, looking tolerably worn out. We can understand not wanting to repeat the same analysis on the front and back, but could we have had some of the energy of this coverage on the front? We'd have voted to give C.C. somewhere between a half and a third of a page, and some real display copy, too.

The New York Post gives more real estate to last night's baseball action, but somewhat inexplicably gives it to Johan Santana instead of C.C. Sabathia. It's not just that we think bad news sells better than good news—both the tabloids have disproved that old canard over and over again. It's that the loss by the Yankees and the buildup over Mr. Sabathia was such more dramatic fodder than Johan Santana's (to his credit) predictably good performance for the Mets. Again, the back page isn't shy (though it's a bit of a stretch): “BIRDBATHIA,” it reads. We don't see this entering the sports fan's vernacular for future poor performances.

The Post, too, has decided to flag this letter from the Binghamton shooter, but manages to get the message across in a single line at the bottom of the page, in knockout text on a red field. This is probably what we would have done with it, too, though we hadn't thought of “HAVE A NICE DAY.” But now it's time to talk about something else: Hello, FRIAR TUCK! This morning the Post goes big on Staten Island pastor William Blasingame, who apparently embezzled congregation money to buy fancy clothes and get cosmetic procedures, as well as to pay insurance on his car. It's a pretty great headline. And it's one of those Post pieces that you imagine will dribble out the facts in a series of paragraphs that repeat the premise with a new joke that might have been the headline. Inside the headline is “Tale of Beauty and the Priest.” Not bad! “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the cutest clergyman of them all?” the article begins. Later, it is explained that his Stapleton parish, with its Victorian Gothic church, had set up a fund to cover the “maintenance, upkeep and beautification of its grounds.” But! “Blasingame was using the money to fund his own beautification and upkeep, officials said.” Zing. On its face it's just another instance of tabloid anticlericalism, in the broad sense of the word: The petty officials that run your life are vain, prideful and preposterous, and will take you for a ride if you let them! Come join us as we catch them redhanded and humiliate them! But the fact that this priest isn't Catholic will greatly reduce the population that will feel directly implicated in the case: Countless Catholic readers will devour anything about a Catholic priest's misdeeds pretty much wherever he works, but a charismatic pastor with mostly his own congregation—on Staten Island no less!—and not much else to worry about still seems like somebody else's business. And no, the fact that the Post doesn't specify the denomination before the jump doesn't matter: If the priest were Catholic it would say so. Is it a stretch to think that the prospect of the “FRIAR TUCK” headline is what led the Post to put this on the front page in the first place?

General observations: It's a hard one. Which is worse: devoting so little space to the season opener on Page One that it does you no good, or choosing the wrong story to play big?  The box treatment at the top of the page over at the News may as well not exist, but the Post doesn't exactly hit it out of the park with that Johan Santana display either. We think this breaks to the Post, by a hair. We also think the Post gave the right treatment, from a news perspective, to the Jiverly Wong letter; it's a question of what's left to you, and whether you're forced to do something big with "HAVE A NICE DAY." Without asking what else there was in the paper today (presumably that was already handled in a Page One meeting yesterday and the answer was "not much"), and strictly from the standpoint of selling the poor consumer on the front page, we have to give points for drama to the News here. If you haven't picked it up yet, though, keep in mind you'll be disappointed. What's left is the earthquake in Italy and ... Friar Tuck! Faint heart never won fair maiden, but sometimes going big with the wrong story means going wrong in a big way. We call "FRIAR TUCK" a stinker, though we again have to hand it to the headline writer.
"HAVE A NICE DAY" beats it.

Winner: The Daily News.

Senator Francesco Rutelli, former candidate for prime minister in Italy, who is attending the Democratic National Convention, said Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton provided a valuable lesson in unity for him and his fellow Italian politicians.

“This is one of the important lessons America gives us,” said Rutelli, speaking to Italian reporters after a panel on transatlantic views on national security at the Sheraton.

(After yet another government collapse by a left-leaning Italian government in January, the raucous factions have tried to meld into a new “Democratic” Party. Its candidate, Walter Veltroni, who took to saying “yes we can” -- in English -- on the campaign trail, lost to conservative Silvio Berlusconi.)

Rutelli modeled his own failed bid to lead Italy on a Bill Clinton-like third-way platform, but he also lost to Berlusconi (who hired Mark Penn as a pollster.) The Italian reporters asked him for his impressions of Hillary Clinton’s speech last night, and whether he thought she had made a strong enough enough case for Barack Obama.

“She was great,” he said. “Really great.”

“I spoke with many Clintonites on the sidelines, and everyone felt she was very sincere. With Hillary speaking yesterday, and Bill speaking tonight, and the roll call vote will give an emotional outlet to her supporters.”

The vote would help the Clinton supporters move on "psychologically," he said.