NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Not all chief executives at the nation's largest investment banks will receive a lump of coal instead of their typical millions of dollars in holiday bonuses this Christmas.

In a year where most investment banks lost billions of dollars on bad bets in the mortgage industry, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, still managed to take home $68.5 million in total compensation _ a record for an investment bank chief executive.

Blankfein will receive $26.8 million in cash, and $41 million in stock and options. He also will get a base salary of $600,000.

Blankfein's bonus is a 27.2 percent jump from the record bonus he received last year of $53.4 million in cash and stock.

Goldman Sachs was able to largely avoid the mortgage-losses that plagued its competitors, leading it to post record profits during the year. Goldman Sachs posted $3.17 billion in profit in its fourth quarter alone, far surpassing its peers.

Other investment banks have been hit hard by the declining value of debt backed by mortgages. As those mortgages _ especially subprime home loans made to customers with poor credit history _ have increasingly defaulted, the banks have been forced to cut the value of the bonds.

The only other chief executive among the five largest U.S. investment banks taking home a year-end bonus is Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s Richard Fuld. Fuld will receive a stock award valued at about $35 million, the company said, shortly after announcing it earned $870 million during its fiscal fourth quarter ending Nov. 30.

Morgan Stanley Chief Executive John Mack said earlier in the week he is bypassing his year-end bonus because of "deeply disappointing" fourth-quarter writedowns tied to losses in the mortgage market. Morgan Stanley wrote down the value of $9.4 billion in bonds backed by mortgage debt during the fourth quarter, en route to posting its first ever quarterly loss.

Mack received a stock and option bonus in 2006 that, at the time of the award, was worth $40 million.

Bear Stearns Cos. Chief Executive James Cayne is also spending the holiday season knowing the year will not end with tens of millions of dollars. Cayne and Bear Stearns other top executives will not receive bonuses this year, as the company was among the hardest hit by mortgage woes.

Though he will not officially receive a year-end bonus, Merrill Lynch & Co.'s new CEO, John Thain, took home a $15 million cash bonus just for taking the job. Thain took over as CEO Dec. 1 from Stanley O'Neal, who was forced into retirement after Merrill Lynch took nearly $8 billion in mortgage-related writedowns in the third quarter.

Blankfein's payout isn't the biggest for other parts of Wall Street. Dealmakers at hedge funds and private-equity firms could bring in substantially larger bonuses. For instance, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman made $400 million in 2006.

Doesn't your heart just break for the poor dears? How many of us could be living for the rest of our lives on Blankfein's bonus? And this is all fine....how?

Enron isn't gone folks, it's just moved to New Jersey. This is the same shit and we can wait for the scandals out of these folks. Here's why: if these companies think that disparities like this are okay, there is a whole lot more shit going on before the 10Q reports.

Any corporation who can countenance this stuff doesn't have any trouble what soever with massive corruption. Oops, I fogot that Bush gutted the auditing unit at the IRS, which exists now to harrass widowed school teachers.

The fact that these financial folks aren't embarrassed by this stuff tells you everything you need to know. I sure as hell wouldn't be shouting from the rooftops when there are people sleeping on grates. The disconnect is so massive that I don't know how to repair it.

LATimes news writers like to be arch and cop an attitude rather than conveying information to us. This piece is no exception, so you have to read between the lines to figure out what the story is. Cut to the chase: if the Writer's Guild strike continues into the February sweeps period, a whole lot of people (not the least the producers and studio) are going to be bleeding.

The studios blew this one badly: there is very little incentive for the Union to settle before they get their bottom line and they have all the leverage. The deal the writers wanted is one that the studios could have afforded easily, the suits shot themselves in someplace that might be a little more dear than the foot.

Fun with TV stats

The rhetoric from both sides in the Hollywood writers strike has occasionally been entertaining, at least to those of us with no skin in the game, but more often it's just ... bewildering. Take, for example, the release today from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (i.e., the studios). It touts a survey by TNS Media Intelligence, [ed.note, management propaganda] which purportedly showed that almost 67% of the population hasn't taken a position on the strike. Those results stand in sharp contrast to the USAToday/Gallup survey cited in this release by the Writers Guild of America, which claimed that 60% of Americans are backing the writers. Just a guess here, but I'm betting TNS phrased their questions a bit differently from USAToday and Gallup....

Anyway, the most interesting thing in the AMPTP release is this line drawn from the TNS survey: "the strike has caused no impact on the viewing habits of 74 percent of Americans." Looked at another way -- the strike has changed the way more than 27 million households, or one quarter of the audience, watch TV -- and it seems like not such good news. In fact, the survey's findings are actually more alarming than that, at least from the TV networks' perspective. According to TNS, "the research also reveals that only (sic) 22 percent of Americans are watching significantly less TV than they were before" the strike. Only 22%?!? That's like saying the strike has led only 24 million households to find something better to do than watch TV. The USAToday/Gallup poll produced a similar result, finding that 38% of prime-time viewers were watching less TV.

Where are those disgruntled viewers going? Not, apparently, to the networks' websites to view TV shows on demand. The helpful folks at Nielsen Online generated a report for me (download it here) on the number of unique visitors at several networks' websites over the past eight weeks. Other than saying it's not a boom time for those sites, it's hard to draw conclusions from the data because the trend lines aren't clear. Traffic at ABC, Fox and Comedy Central has slumped sharply the past three to four weeks, as one would expect to see as the supply of new episodes from popular shows dries up. But traffic at NBC, CBS, PBS and HBO has been up and down in a seemingly random way. If my hunch is correct, Comedy Central's traffic should recover next month when Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart go back on the air. Download the chart and peruse the numbers yourself, then offer your own analysis below. It's bound to be more insightful than mine.

Yup, that February Nielsen is going to be a bitch....

Study: Lack of insurance boosts cancer death risk

Ya think? Lack of insurance boosts risk of death from all sorts of diseases and this is news?

Tuchman: Hitting the road (literally) with some faithful

DALLAS, Texas (CNN) -- If you turn to the Bible -- Isaiah Chapter 35, Verse 8 -- you will see a passage that in part says, "A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness."

Now, is it possible that this "highway" mentioned in Chapter 35 is actually Interstate 35 that runs through six U.S. states, from southern Texas to northern Minnesota? Some Christians have faith that is indeed the case.

It was with that interesting belief in mind that we decided to head to Texas, the southernmost state in the I-35 corridor, to do a story about a prayer campaign called "Light the Highway."

Churchgoers in all six states recently finished 35 days of praying alongside Interstate 35, but the prayers are still continuing.

Some of the faithful believe that in order to fulfill the prophecy of I-35 being the "holy" highway, it needs some intensive prayer first. So we watched as about 25 fervent and enthusiastic Christians prayed on the the interstate's shoulder in Dallas.

They chanted loudly and vibrantly, making many people in the neighborhood wonder what was going on. They prayed that adult businesses along the corridor would "see the light" and perhaps close down.

They prayed for safety and freedom from crime for people who lived along the interstate. They prayed that all Americans would accept Jesus into their lives. Video Watch believers offer prayers »

The woman who came up with the concept of "Light the Highway" is a Texas minister named Cindy Jacobs.

She says she can't be sure Interstate 35 really is what is mentioned in the Bible but says she received a revelation to start this campaign after "once again reading Isaiah, Chapter 35."

CNN continues to desparetly pursue it's agenda of becoming a totally news free zone. Last time I checked, we are involved in a couple of shooting wars. I'm so tired of these stupid non-stories.