* Michael Lewis: The Fed rescue program is too bizarre to be true
* Dennis Berman: Meet my departed grandma, fledgling Facebook investor
* Vivek Wadhwa: Friends don’t let friends take education advice from Peter Thiel
* Morning Call: U.S. futures rise ahead of JP Morgan results, London opens strong on banks, European shares rebound and the Nikkei slips.
* Jed Rakoff: Are federal judges competent?
* Reuters: The U.S. and China have begun an M&A cold war
* Apollo Global Management (APO) gets itself into the broker-dealer biz
* Mark MacLeod: A checklist of what VCs are looking for in an elevator pitch
* Why not? League tables for PR firms repping M&A transactions (Abernathy is on top)
* Numbers not even a Winklevoss could love: Bleak financials from the MySpace pitchbook
* Painful: Charlie Christ cuts a video apologizing to David Byrne for using Talking Heads music in campaign ads
* J Crew boss Mickey Drexler discusses his actions leading up to the TPG/Leonard Green buyout: “I would do it the same way… I sleep well at night.”
* Worst week ever? Sequoia Capital’s Mark Kvamme is no longer Ohio’s head of economic development, following allegations that his appointment was illegal. Then he got injured in a motocross accident.