Jon Stewart needs to move on

As much as I've enjoyed Jon Stewart's prosecution of Jim Cramer, I'm not sure what he managed to prove except that a lot of his advice turned out to be bad. He did that pretty effectively. I hadn't realized that in addition to the bogus clip that Stewart played first (showing Cramer assuring a caller that his money was safe as a client of Bear Stearns, which it was), there were also clips from about the same time of Cramer recommending Bear stock.

Still, I have no idea what Stewart means when he chides "I understand you want to make finance entertaining. But it's not a fucking game." Besides being maybe the most cringingly unfunny thing he's ever said, what's his fucking point? That if Cramer didn't scream and have sound effects that his mother's 401k would be in better shape? Give me a fucking break.

I think CNBC appeared on Stewart's radar because of the Rick Santelli thing, when he realized, apparently all of a sudden, that the dominant financial news channel was largely staffed by super right-wing cheerleaders of corporate America. And I'm glad that he's gone after CNBC.

But the political bias of the "news" side of CNBC has nothing to do with Cramer. Yes, he has called Obama a "wealth destroyer" and talked about certain stocks being "Obama-proof," but it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek and always in the context of pitching an investment theme. He "liked" the Bush administration because it was "of, by and for the corporation," friendly to mergers, etc. But if he really shared Larry Kudlow's politics I wouldn't be able to watch the show.

Unless you're going to outlaw giving financial advice on television, I'm not sure what Cramer is supposed to do differently except stop making bad calls, which obviously no one can do. If you don't like Cramer, don't watch him! Or take the other side of the trade! I have zero sympathy for people who lost money following his advice. Or at least, no more than I have for anyone who lost money.

Stewart seems to honestly believe that Cramer bears some personal responsibility not just for the advice he's given/his failure to predict the financial collapse but for the financial collapse itself, which is intensely stupid even though it sounds plausible that such a figure would have "contributed to a frenzied environment" or whatever.

Anyway, whether or not Cramer is actually good at giving financial advice I don't think he deserves the accusation that he was recklessly endangering people's money. Stocks really had outperformed every other asset class by a wide margin for a long time, and if you've watched his show for any length of time his advice actually tends to be fairly conservative.

Cramer didn't look good when he got all indignant that a "comedian" would deign to criticize him when he didn't even know what Tier 1 capital was, but Stewart was much more the self-important, uninformed asshole in this little skirmish.

Does Mickey Kaus know about this?

CNN just did a segment on a website called BlueServo.net that lets you monitor the U.S.-Mexico border via webcam. It's sponsored by the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition (TBSC), and enlists, I'm not making this up, "Virtual Texas Deputies" to report any suspicious activity to the brick-and-mortar border patrol.

This is going to be like the Shiba Inu puppy cam for wingnuts.

Ross Douthat is a joke

Everyone is very excited that Ross Douthat is going to be replacing Bill Kristol as the house conservative of the New York Times op-ed page.

On the one hand, I do think this is a brilliant move by the Times. As conservative pundits go, Douthat is smooth jazz to Kristol's death metal. He's just the kind of conservative that allows liberals to pat themselves on the head for finding common ground with an ideological foe.

But the idea that Ross Douthat represents a new breed of "conservative intellectual" only goes to show what an oxymoron that term really is. His thesis: "Liberals are probably right about supply-side economics being bunk, but do they have to be so mean to pro-lifers like myself?" He's not so much a right winger as he is a young person who manages to whine about the kids these days as you'd think only an old person could.

That's his whole schtick. He's a conservative who often seems like he knows better, but (as you can tell by his grandfatherly Brooks Brothers style) he identifies with things that are Old and Traditional, like the Catholic church. His politics seem fundamentally driven by aesthetic considerations. He opposes reproductive rights not so much because he's a misogynist, but because he fancies himself "old school."

So fine, he's an improvement over Kristol, but spare me the fawning. I'd rather the Times look for a conservative who's actually persuasive instead of one who just knows how to flatter liberals before whining about how intolerant we are of God-fearing traditionalists like himself.

And just for fun, this was his reaction to John McCain's VP pick:

At the moment, I'm probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you're reading my commentary.

But he's a very serious thinker.

That's a big 16 year-old

via ($)

When white people do it it's "political violence"

I don't think anyone had a problem calling the USS Cole bombing an act of "terrorism," even though it was a military target, so I'm not sure why the New York Times would decline to use the term anywhere in this story.

Sounds plausible

DougJ: "To put it simply, I fear that we are now ruled by incompetent egomaniacs who will never blow the whistle on each other, no matter how bad things get, because to do so would be to admit that none of them is indispensable or brilliant after all."

h/t

Obama Embraces Unitary Executive

I've finally taken the time to read Glenn Greenwald's various indictments of the Obama administration's views on executive power, and he does seem to have the goods. So I'm answering the call and acknowledging that Obama is indeed making some of the absurd, wholly unconstitutional legal claims that the Bush administration made.

As disastrous and unjustified as the Iraq War may have been, there wasn't anything unconstitutional about it. There was no formal declaration of war, but we haven't gone that route in a while, and both houses of Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq. Whatever else it was, it didn't represent an attempt by Bush to undermine our whole system of government.

The real Constitution-shredding lay in Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo's claims that when acting in the interest of national defense (as determined by him, of course) the president doesn't have to obey the law. That was the essence of the FISA controversy, which was staggeringly soft-pedaled by the media. It was the most dangerous, though hardly the bloodiest, legacy of the Bush administration.

So Obama's decision to basically spit on a court order and claim executive powers he doesn't have is really bad news. The "Unitary Executive" theory is completely un-American and we shouldn't be letting Obama trot it out when he finds it convenient. In the best case scenario, he's only doing it to protect Bush administration officials from prosecution (enforcing the law being too "divisive" for his liking). But even that would be a piss-poor justification, and the alternatives are all worse.

Who cares about Opening Day?

The coverage of Johan Santana's elbow has focused overwhelmingly on the question of whether or not he will be able to pitch on Opening Day. I am not agnostic on this question. I have a strong preference for "Yes," and the latest is that it is still possible and that's all to the good. But the focus on Opening Day specifically, as opposed to say Game 4 of the 162 game regular season, seems to miss the point.

I'm worried about Opening Day only to the extent that Santana's inability to make his first scheduled start would bode extremely ill for the total number of starts he makes. I don't care if he misses one, or which one it is, as long as he makes the vast majority of them. The Mets are in Cincinnati for their first series anyway.

It's good to hear that he and the Mets are trying to keep hope alive for Opening Day. And the fact that they have him throwing at all means the medical staff must be supremely confident that nothing is about to explode, but I'm still very worried. And I'll remain worried even if he makes his (all-important) Opening Day start and throws a gem. Something must have really scared Omar Minaya for him to give assurances to the Daily News that he still has minor league chips left to trade (say if the ace of the staff went down for the season).

And that elbow has a lot of miles on it for a guy who hasn't quite turned 30. Every year since he was 25, Santana has tossed at least 219 innings. Last year he threw a career high 234. Of course this is the "damned if you do" paradox of staying so healthy for so long, but you'd have to think that kind of workload eventually catches up even to durable players. And while his out pitch may be his change-up, he's not exactly a finesse pitcher, either.

In any case, the metric that people should be following is not % Chance of Making His Opening Day Start it's the Over/Under on starts for the season (I'd put it at 28 personally). They're related, but the former is only significant to the extent it changes the latter.

Krugman has come around on Obama

Reading Krugman's column today on Obama's budget (synopsis: "Booyah!"), you wouldn't guess how skeptical he's been of Obama since before the primaries.

Not cool

Johan Santana pushed back from scheduled spring training start because of elbow tenderness.

Without Santana, the Mets rotation becomes Pelfrey-Maine-Perez-Garcia-Redding, or to put it another way, it becomes 40% filler and completely devoid of top quintile talent.

Here's hoping it's nothing serious.

David Brooks puts on fireworks display of conservative self-hatred

I had read the transcript, which was good enough, but the video cries out for syndication. The sad little laugh he gives at the end is awesome:

h/t Ezra Klein

First Solar spits the bit

Wow is this ugly. I'm listening to the First Solar (FSLR) call from yesterday after the close, and it's becoming clear why the stock cratered afterhours: doom and gloom! Lack of financing crushing demand? Check. Customer distress starting to eat away at backlog? Check. Intense price competition from module oversupply? You know it.

Maybe the scariest development is the disclosure that the company is starting to take ownership of some of the projects that had been customers. So they are being effectively pulled "downstream" (i.e. towards the actual construction/installation of solar facilities, away from their core business of making the panels) by the absence of financially healthy customers.

On the other hand, they're still profitable and they still have what could be the leading solar panel technology. I think it's got a 20% chance of becoming a $100 billion company, so at a $10 billion valuation I'm not selling. Things could easily get worse before they get better, though.

Disclosure: I own FSLR shares

All those injuries are behind him now

Peter Gammons column, yesterday:

It begins with Vernon Wells, who at 30 is poised for a monster season. He has been limited to 36 homers the past two years because of shoulder and back injuries and a broken wrist, but this winter he hired a trainer from the Athletes Performance Institute in Tempe, Ariz., took the trainer to his home in Dallas, brought him to spring training and will continue to use him all season, for a total investment of between $150,000 and $200,000.

"The workouts have made a big difference in flexibility and strength," says Wells.

ESPN news item, today:

Toronto Blue Jays center fielder Vernon Wells expects to miss two weeks after an MRI showed he re-injured the left hamstring that kept him on the disabled list for a month late last season.

Gammons forgot about the hamstring.

Just let the ball drop!

"The Indians had a scare when outfielders Grady Sizemore and Shin-Shoo Choo collided while chasing a ball in right-center during a drill. Choo was escorted from the field by a trainer and had his right knee examined before returning for batting practice about 30 minutes later. He suffered only a bruise and felt lucky not to be more seriously hurt. "We hit knees. I was really scared," said Choo..."

In football, players have to run into one another, even in preseason. Not so in baseball. I appreciate that it goes strongly against a professional outfielder's instinct to just stop running at the first sight of a teammate approaching his general area. But teams just should not allow for even a remote possibility that their best player, by far, could collide with their maybe 3rd or 4th best player in the course of a drill.

Here's a non-sub version of the story.

Government to convert its preferred into common

This is being seen as another "step towards nationalization," and that's one way to look at it. I think of it as a step towards recognizing what's already taken place: government being on the hook for the losses of the money center banks. They've just been gradually working up the courage to insist a share of the profits when things recover (the preferred equity that the government/we currently hold is more like debt, where you just get your money back with interest).

People talk a lot about whether they "feel bad" for the bank shareholders or if they "deserve" their losses. This is a stupid discussion. These banks are insolvent, which to my mind is synonymous with the shareholders not owning anything. If shareholder equity is negative, and the government is compelled to assume the liabilities to prevent massive debt defaults and a run on the banking system, the shareholders are SOL.

The only way sympathy enters into things is if you propose government cushion the losses of equity investors, just 'cause they're probably nice people or something, which is clearly bonkers.

Anyway, the market is down 3% despite big rallies in the banks. Apparently people are taking this equity conversion as a sign that the government "sees value" in the common. I'm hoping the rationale is to own 40% of the common so that when it eventually has to be wiped out it will only be 60% publicly held.

Update:
In his post "Citigroup's Clever Plan to Screw Taxpayers Again," Henry Blodget makes the key observation that the government can either convert $45 billion of preferred into common equity or it can take only a 40% stake of the common. But doing both requires assigning a wildly above-market value to the common stock in the conversion (i.e. requires the government to give Citigroup free money.) This post wasn't misleading, since I didn't mention the $45 billion figure, just the 40%, but the fact that the story's numbers don't add up is a big deal.

If the government is going to get $45 billion worth of Citigroup common stock and be treated fairly, then the government won't own 40% of the company, it will own well over 90%.

Obama, Jesus, MLK, in that order

"Obama beats out Jesus as America's hero" reads the headline of the Chicago Sun-Times, with just a touch of hometown pride. Yes, it's a real article. I've got a screenshot in case they take it down.

The reason I thought that might be necessary is that I'm thinking some people, and I'm not necessarily one of them, might question the taste of the accompanying portraits. They've got the president and the Reverend on either side of a mid-crucifixion Jim Caviezel from "The Passion of the Christ."

While the individual images themselves might be unobjectionable in a different context, the arrangement of the three vertically, as if in order of finish in an election, is very funny. And very funny gags at Jesus's expense are often controversial.

And there's no way the humor is unintentional. Obama's picture shows him holding up his hand as if to quiet an adoring crowd... it's too well done.

Bobby Jindal and Tommy Carcetti

Ryan Powers has an item on Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's refusal of federal aid for expanded unemployment benefits (part of Obama's stimulus plan). Other Republican governors, like Mark Sanford of South Carolina, have been making similar noises initially, but for the most part I believe they all soon bowed to political necessity and stopped pretending that they were going to try to turn away much-needed federal dollars for their state. But unlike Mark Sanford, Bobby Jindal might be the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.

In the final season of The Wire, the mayor of Baltimore finds himself in dire need of state assistance to help pay for schools and police. He is ultimately unwilling, however, to "go begging" to the governor in Annapolis. Why turn down free money? Because the mayor is planning to run for governor himself in the next election, and he doesn't want to give his would-be opponent a huge gift by appearing to be dependent on or subservient to him.

Being human, Mayor Carcetti feels badly about his cynical short-changing of the citizens of Baltimore, whom he was elected to represent, but he justifies it by telling himself that, after he does what is politically necessary and thereby becomes governor, he'll be able to help them more than he ever could as mayor.

... or Jindal's opposition could be totally principled, of course.


h/t Yglesias

The Braves: How worried should we be?

Last July when the Braves traded Mark Teixeira to the Angels I wrote:

What major league talent did they get back in the deal? Casey Kotchman? Good luck with that. When you're ready to field a competitive team again, come back without that stupid chant, you goobers.

Now, I stand by the sentiment, but I'm starting to wonder if they don't still have a somewhat competitive team. Here are the key questions as I see it:

1) What and how much do they get from Chipper Jones?

Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA system has Larry Jones projected to have the 5th highest VORP (65.0 runs) of any hitter in 2009. That's better than Ryan Braun, Lance Berkman, or Alex Rodriguez. And remember, VORP is playing time dependent, so he's already getting dinged for his expected DL trip. PECOTA has him hitting .341/.443/.564. Now far be it from me to question science, but I can't help but be skeptical that someone so old and so injury prone stays that good for the vast majority of 2009.

2) Who's their third best hitter?

Behind Jones and McCann, things get questionable fast. Jeff Francoeur would have been the obvious choice, but a funny thing happened on the way to stardom: He hit .239/.294/.359 over a full season. That's some shameful hitting, and it was evenly divided across the two halves of the season (.659 OPS pre-ASB, .645 post). The Braves also feature a first baseman in Kotchman who doesn't exactly hit like a first baseman. Their third best hitter is probably Kelly Johnson, who makes for a very handy leadoff man.

3) Does Javier Vazquez dominate?

PECOTA says yes, absolutely, and I'm inclined to agree. Vazquez gives up a few too many home runs, which keeps his ERA on the hefty side, but he's going to throw about 200 innings, and he's going to strike out about 200 hitters. He's at an age (32) where he's probably not going to suddenly break down. I wish the Mets had gotten him.

4) What do they get from their rookies?

BP's #50 prospect entering the season, Jordan Schafer is reportedly going to compete for the center field job in spring training. He's never played above Double-A before, but he was quite good at that level last year when he was all of 21. Jason Heyward is even more highly touted but is further away. And on the pitching side, Tommy Hanson seems to have some control issues but is a gigantic, overpowering righthander of the sort that tend to make effective relievers.

***

I don't know how all these things work out. My sense is that the Phillies are still the primary concern, but looking at the team in greater depth I'm sure I was too quick to dismiss them last year. Yes, Casey Kotchman kinda sucks, but Jeff Francoeur may not. He may come back. And you don't have to add that much to Jones/McCann/Johnson to have a league-average offense. And their pitching staff has lost Hudson but gained Vazquez and Lowe. Plus another year of seasoning for Jurrjens...

They don't look as bad as I wish they did, let's put it that way.

The 'Let's Surprise the Markets' Strategy

Von at Obsidian Wings has a firm but fair takedown of Matt Yglesias's suggestion that Chris Dodd shouldn't be musing openly about nationalization.

Yglesias on finance is like Shaq at the free throw line: you live with it because he's so good at other things.

Ana Marie Cox has the internet on lockdown

Ana Marie Cox is the white Oprah of new media. You may not have known there was one, but there is, and AMC is she.

Her Twitter feed now has 62,830 followers. More than Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey or The Onion (though fewer than Barack Obama). It's also more people than could be seated at RFK Stadium. And they don't seem to tell you how fast the count has grown but my impression, having been a subscriber for a long time, is very fast.

It seems like a long time ago now that she was the original Wonkette, until she left (sold?) that operation for an ostensibly more prestigious job as a political reporter for Time magazine. Perhaps sensing that posting at Swampland, in between Joe Klein and Karen Tumulty, wasn't exactly the bleeding edge of online content, she started devoting more (like, a lot of) attention to her Twitter feed.

Many people, and by that I mean mostly nerds and some investors, are convinced that Twitter is going to be a really big deal. If they're right, AMC will be in even closer to the ground floor than she was with Wonkette as blogs were gaining popularity.

Techcrunch, which as the 16th most-followed has just over 100,000 followers, will always appeal more or less exclusively to serious geeks, so as the universe of Twitter users expands beyond serious geeks its share of the total audience is sure to shrink. AMC's feed is mostly funny, sometimes very funny political/internet coverage, with generous helpings of pop culture and non-political humor. The addressable market seems for that seems like it should be much bigger.

As a political reporter, she's not my favorite. Whatever the exact opposite of Charlie Savage is, she's in the ballpark. But she takes her comedy very seriously, and she definitely doesn't get enough credit for being consistently at the forefront of online punditry.

See, in the time it took me to write this post, 243 more people started following anamariecox.

Good call, fellas

I didn't realize that Marc Ambinder and Mark Halperin thought at the time that the Terry Schiavo thing was going to be a real political windfall for Republicans. Oops.

via kos

The Chamber of Commerce really hates Tim Geithner

I was shocked at how bad his speech was, but this means Geithner must be doing something right.

Eisinger and Salmon on the financial crisis

Jesse Eisinger (Portfolio) and Felix Salmon talk about the financial crisis and the government response.

It's worth checking out if only because it's nice to hear a relatively optimistic viewpoint from someone (Salmon) who is more interesting than the usual permabulls on CNBC. At the same time, I agree with Eisinger that Salmon is totally underestimating the trouble that the banks are in, by overestimating the extent to which debt is being temporarily "mispriced" because of liquidity constraints. As Eisinger says here:



Eisinger also makes a point I've been meaning to make about the relationship between government policy and the stock market: Bank nationalization could be (and I think probably is) the best route to take for the country, economically. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have dire implications for financial stocks. A lot of them would go to zero! And that's what should happen because they are at the very bottom of the capital structure (i.e. last in line to get their money back) and there's not enough money to go around. Even debtholders, who are ahead of them in line, will probably lose some of their investment.

Even though most of the damage has already been done (bonus Salmon link), bank nationalization would almost certainly result in "another leg down" in the equity markets. Just mechanically, with index funds and ETFs, you can't literally wipe out a lot of shareholders in one industry without affecting shareholders in a bunch of other industries. It would almost certainly be Bad For Stocks.

But the real economy would survive bank nationalization just fine. Individuals and businesses would still go to the same bank, it would just be owned by the government instead of a bunch of really pissed-off stockholders.

Anyway my guess is Obama really doesn't want to go the "Swedish route" but people should realize that the stock market should absolutely be expected to react poorly to bank nationalization (or an increasing perceived probability of it), and that the declines are in no way evidence that nationalization is a bad idea.

Rick Reilly: Give Bonds' MVP Awards to Pujols!

Rick Reilly sets out to "right some wrongs, one MVP at a time,":

I have a U-Haul of hardware here for Jose Alberto Pujols Alcántara of the St. Louis Cardinals. You already have two MVPs, Albert, and you're about to get three more, since Barry Bonds ripped you off worse than Bernie Madoff to win the award from 2002 to 2004. You hit .335 and averaged 41 bombs those years and yet you finished second behind the clearly creaming Bonds in '02 and '03 and third behind Bonds and Adrian Beltre in '04. We're throwing out Beltre since, while he denies ever using PEDs, he fell off the face of the planet once baseball put in stricter steroid suspensions in 2005. If he wasn't cheating, I'm the Queen Mother. And this is history we're making here. It gives you five MVPs, and nobody else in baseball history now has more than three. Just don't let us down on this thing, Albert. You know what we're talking about.

It's hard to know where to begin with this.

1) You have to be a total sucker not to suspect Albert Pujols of using performance enhancing drugs.

Albert Pujols' long-time strength and conditioning coach, Chris Mihlfeld, was named in the Jason Grimsley report as having referred Grimsley to a source of "amphetamines, anabolic steroids and human growth hormone." Here's a completely non steroids-related story about how Pujols got started training with Mihlfeld:

"[Pujols] was really kind of a pear-shaped kid, heavy from the waist down, and that scared some scouts off," Meyer remembered. "And, like with a lot of Latin players, there were always the inevitable questions about his age."

There were other concerns about his defensive ability and where Pujols would fit on a Major League team.

Consequently, a frustrated Albert Pujols -- after spending a year at Kansas City's Maple Woods Community College, where he met strength and conditioning guru Chris Mihlfeld and started the process of building an Adonis-like upper body-- waited 13 rounds before getting the call from the Cardinals. [Emphasis mine]

2) If you're not going to suspect Albert Pujols of using performance-enhancing drugs, then maybe you should have more evidence against Adrian Beltre than an isolated fluke year before you write "If he wasn't cheating, I'm the Queen Mother." Had Beltre just not discovered steroids before 2004? If you're going to operate on the assumption that abnormal performance requires cheating, then why would you possibly give Pujols the benefit of the doubt?

Which brings me to

3) "Just don't let us down on this thing"??? WTF? Rick, if he used steroids then it's already happened! It would obviously just be a question of whether it will become public or not. See, Reilly's not a sucker at all. He absolutely suspects Pujols. Other than Barry Bonds, nobody has hit like Pujols, ever. As per point 1, you'd have to be a sucker not to suspect.

The only reason Reilly is pretending to believe that Pujols is "clean" is because after touting him as such, and larding him up with 3 MVP awards he didn't win, if he does turn out to have been dirty it will be that much more of a betrayal for him to write about.

Like an expert pool player, Reilly's setting up his next shot. So when someone comes forward a year or so later with a bunch of needles they claim to have injected into Albert Pujols' ass, he'll be able to put on his biggest hissyfit EVAR.

photo courtesy of Fredbird

Mr. Market takes another swig of Haterade

If there is a global conspiracy to make Barack Obama look good, I think it's now safe to say that it does not extend to manipulation of the stock market. Equity prices have tanked on election day, Geithner plan announcement day, and now on the day he signs the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

For the S&P to be down almost 5% in a day is serious business, even by recent standards of volatility.

"You're enjoying one of the best margaritas that there is on the market."

I don't know much about Bob Schaffer, the Colorado Republican who ran for U.S. Senate in 2008. I just saw his thirty minute debate on "Meet the Press" against Mark Udall, but it was enough to form an impression of a very weird and unpleasant person. So it was nice, if unsurprising, to see Udall trounce him in the election.

But for some reason I'm having trouble enjoying this video of him and his wife doing infomercial-style promotion for their own brand of tequila on Denver television. Some things are just too hard to watch. To give you an idea how awkward Schaffer is, here's his answer when the local TV reporter jokingly asks if the genesis of the tequila venture was campaign-related stress relief:

"It would be an awful lot of fun to, uh, go along with you on this. But the reality is that this [gesturing to the tequila] didn't play any role in the campaign."

h/t Josh Green

Update: TPM has the money clip...

How stupid is Michael Goldfarb?

Stupid enough to think that not only does NPR have to let Juan Williams (whom they employ) appear on Fox News, to do things like call Michelle Obama "Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress," they also have to let Fox advertise his NPR affiliation while he does so. Oh, and they can't publicly disavow such statements, either.

Batting order revisited

Sokojoe at Amazin' Avenue has crunched the numbers, and the numbers agree with Jerry Manuel and myself that hitting Luis Castillo leadoff and moving Jose Reyes down to third makes good sense.

The model that he used is a free one whose only inputs are OBP and SLG (blind to baserunning), so it's not as robust as it could be. But Sokojoe fed it two different sets of projections for each player. One from the all-seeing eye of PECOTA, and the other from a system I'd never heard of called CHONE (which, if it's named after Chone Figgins, should be pronounced "Shawn").

No matter which projections he put in, the optimal lineup came out:

Castillo
Beltran
Reyes
Delgado
Wright
Church
Murphy
Schneider

Interestingly, the PECOTA projections recommend this order despite pegging Reyes for a .374 OBP, which is 20 points higher than he's ever had before, and Castillo for a below career-average .347 OBP. So you don't even need to think especially highly of Castillo, or poorly of Reyes, in terms of getting on base. The difference in their respective slugging percentages (.307 to .478) alone is enough to make one guy the table-setter and the other guy the three hitter.

99% chance of Best Picture fail

Nate Silver gives "Slumdog Millionaire" a 99% chance of winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

I hated Slumdog Millionaire. It's just a horribly told story. Given the title and the first fifteen minutes of the movie, you know...

a) that the hero wins on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"
b) that he wins because the questions all happen to pertain to things that have personal significance to him.

Again, you know these things in the first fifteen minutes. So why is this a two hour movie? Because of the flashbacks that explain the personal significance. With each question from the squirrelly game show host, asked in biographical order of course, we get more backstory on the hero, his brother, and his true love.

But it's just backstory! Nothing actually happens in any one or any set of flashbacks that constitutes a second plot. I spent most of the flashbacks waiting for them to end so we could get back to see what happens in the main plot, only to remind myself that we already know he wins and that this, the flashbacks, is really what it's all about. At which point I check my watch. The "Three Musketeers" grow older and go their separate ways, but the hero never gives up on them. etc. etc.

So that's how the Best Director of the year stretched out a simple, stupid gimmicky plot that he gives away immediately into two hours of motion picture magic: flashbacks*.

There is only one conceivable reason why a movie this bad is almost certainly going to win multiple Oscars, and it is the fact that the hero of the pointless story is Indian, and he wins on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" after being asked India-related questions that are coincidentally relevant to his Indian life experience.

I would have thought by 2008 the idea of India being a real country where people had hopes and dreams and game shows, just like in America, would have lost some if not all of its novelty. But "Slumdog" owes everything to its being-set-in-Indianess (with a director named Boyle it is not an Indian film).

Making matters worse, it seems to acknowledge as much. The film constantly invites the audience to feel more worldly just for having watched it, never more openly than in the tour guide scenes (featuring tourists who are so clueless as to elicit embarrassment and pity from even the least-traveled viewer).

Apparently it worked, because nowhere in all these glowing reviews does anyone mention that the film is stone cold boring. The closest anyone comes is Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, who acknowledges that it "has a problem in its storytelling," and that it "unfolds in a start-and-stop way that kills suspense, leans heavily on flashbacks and robs the movie of most of its velocity." But even this, the film's harshest review is entitled "'Slumdog Millionaire' Ultimately Pays Off."

No! No it doesn't! That it is a Nate-Silver-Says-99% lock to win the Oscar for Best Picture is only proof that you don't need a good story if you manage to flatter your audience's sense of sophistication.




* Screen time breaks down approximately as follows:
20% - Scenes from a game show whose outcome is known in advance
10% - Post-victory interrogation scenes, setting up flashbacks
70% - Assorted flashbacks

Marc Ambinder sees no evil

In a post entitled "Straw Man," Marc Ambinder calls a foul on Obama for saying the following:

As I said, the one concern I've got on the stimulus package in terms of the debate and listening to some of what's been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who -- I don't doubt their sincerity -- who just believe that we should do nothing.

Ambinder says this is unfair because "[e]xcept for a Republicans on the fringe, the opposition party did want to do something: they wanted more tax cuts and [less] spending."

Well... okay, I guess. Technically, I suppose cutting taxes in the fashion contemplated by the DeMint amendment, and cutting government spending, qualifies as "doing something." But it would obviously constrict rather than expand the government's ability to prop up aggregate demand. So it would have actually been worse than doing nothing.

But that's not even the worst part of the post. Ambinder then segues into an accusation that David Axelrod has a "persecution complex":

"Indeed, Axelrod has a similar habit of discovering new opponents, a tendency that manifested itself at various points in the presidential campaign. Obama's going through a rough patch; the cable news networks are Availability Biasing the present, turning bumps in the road into insurmountable boulders, reporters are asking normal questions, and - boom - persecution complex . Washington thinks one thing, but Obama thinks another. The smelly denizens of the Beltway are totally out of touch with the American people. The American people know exactly what Obama is doing. Washington's ways are the problem."

In Ambinder's world, reporters were just "asking normal questions." There certainly was no conventional wisdom that congealed around the idea that Republicans were "winning the argument" on the merits, or that the stimulus bill was getting more and more unpopular. Never happened!

After gamely defending the "punditocracy" from such (entirely fair) accusations, Ambinder's final gambit is to deny the very existence of such a group:

"[T]he p-tocracy doesn't exist in the way Axe and Rich believe it does. There are so many different types of pundits, analysts and reporters, all broadcasting to an immensely sophisticated audience that sifts, filters and chooses what to believe."

Translation: We in the political journalism business are a freethinking collection of empiricists; it's the audience that sucks.

Dropping Reyes in the lineup

I like it. My first impression was that Luis Castillo was hardly an OBP monster in his own right, but then I looked it up and he kind of is. His career OBP is actually a rather whopping .367. For context, here are a few players who posted lower marks than that last season:

.361 Derrek Lee (1B)
.361 Adrian Gonzalez (1B)
.349 Jimmy Rollins (SS)

Castillo himself came in at .355 last year, just under his career mark, and that was despite having an uncharacteristically horrible batting average (.245). In years past his OBP was more a function of beating out infield singles than actual plate discipline. If he can keep last year's selectivity and get the average closer to his career .292, he could be more valuable than I was giving him credit for.

It's not that Castillo represents an "upgrade" over Reyes, exactly, no matter what lineup slot you're talking about. But it seems to make sense to put light-hitting OBP guys at the top of the lineup and power-hitting free swingers in the middle. That rule of thumb has Castillo hitting in front of Reyes every time.

The leadoff spot seems like an intuitively good place to hit your best basestealer, and Reyes did steal 56 bases last year, but he also got thrown out 15 times, more than 25% of his attempts (enough to negate most if not all of the runs created with the successful attempts). Luis Castillo stole 17 bases and got caught twice, less than 10% of the time.

So both in terms of getting on base and base-stealing effectiveness, Castillo actually looks like at least Reyes's equal. The third reason this is a good idea is that Reyes has too much power for the leadoff spot.

It's true that his slugging percentage is slightly misleading, because so many of Reyes's extra bases are collected because he's fast enough to take them, not because he's hitting the ball so hard. He managed to actually clear the fence with only 16 home runs last year, in 688 at-bats. But even after discounting his doubles and triples to a certain extent, you're still looking at a player who hits hard line drives very often. He was also, let's not forget, still just 24 last year, which means he's almost certainly becoming a more serious home run threat.

The best argument, as I see it, for leaving Reyes is to have the team's best hitters come to bat as often as possible, which makes, say, Reyes-Beltran-Wright-Delgado more appealing than anything that starts with Castillo. But since Castillo is going to need to fit somewhere on the lineup card every day, even in the best of circumstances, I do think he would work fairly well as a table-setter for the more devastating bats.

This is what I'm talking about

Jayson Stark's latest column is a monument to the inanity of modern sports journalism. I click on a link on ESPN's front page called "C.C.'s First Day," expecting to find, perchance, something about how he has a new training regimen this offseason (which he did) or lost a lot of weight (which he didn't). Maybe a bullpen session that provided some evidence that his massive and arguably overworked body isn't on the verge of finally giving out, just months after signing a nine-figure deal.

But no, Stark isn't interested in the outlook for Sabathia's 2009 season or analysis of whether he (or Roy Halladay) is the really the best pitcher in the division. His readers are instead treated to an entire column about how the A-Rod steroid scandal has made Sabathia's arrival a secondary story. That the only thing reporters are asking the just-arrived Sabathia is how he feels about A-Rod, whom he hasn't actually played with yet, etc. etc.

It would meet the textbook definition of irony if, in the course of bemoaning how big and distracting this A-Rod steroids controversy is, Stark was at the same time making it bigger and more distracting. But Stark doesn't even have the decency to bemoan this state of affairs. He loves the media circus-as-story. He seems to find it more interesting than baseball. I actually did a post flagging this back in 2005, when he was writing about Randy Johnson signing with the Yankees, and making dire warnings that Johnson was "not yet prepared" for the scrutiny he was about to receive.

My theory is that Stark likes the idea that baseball writers are really important people, and believes that where he and his peers happen to focus their attention is a big deal and influences even the players themselves ("How is the fact that we're not writing about you affecting you, C.C.? Do you find it galling?"). I would submit that, while self-importance on the part of sports columnists is always and everywhere annoying, Stark manages to take it one step further by dedicating a whole column to the "issue" of a stupid story preempting an interesting story, without ever bothering to get around to the latter.

Here's how it starts:

He was supposed to be the biggest ring in the 2009 Yankees circus. Well … never mind.

Oh sure, there was a time when the sight of Carsten Charles (CC) Sabathia bursting through the gates of George M. Steinbrenner Field seemed like it might actually be a gigantic event in Yankee Land.

But that was sooooooo last week.

So there was the inimitable CC on Friday, on his very first day of enrollment at Bronx Zoo University, learning an invaluable lesson:

When you're a Yankee, you're never more than a back-page headline away from going from Most Monstrous Story in the Yankees Universe to $161-million subplot in, like, 14 seconds.

Sadly, if you're reading Jayson Stark's column about C.C. Sabathia's first day in Yankee camp, you're always more than 14 seconds away from something interesting about C.C. Sabathia, or the Yankees, or baseball...

"I couldn't be Judd Gregg"

I never had any feeling one way or the other about Judd Gregg until today, but what a moron. It's embarrassing for Obama, too, but probably not in a very damaging way. Personally, I think it's an excellent case study in why 'bipartisanship,' which usually means either doing what Republicans want or, as in this case, expecting Republicans to support a Democratic agenda, is the dumbest virtue going.

There was another good example of this the other day when Roy LaHood, the Illinois Republican Obama picked for Transportation Secretary, proved unwilling to say on television that he would vote for the stimulus bill were he still in Congress. With a PR push like that, it's hard to believe the 'centrist'/preening narcissist caucus managed to do so much damage to the bill.

Still waiting for the proof that the strategy of sucking up to and legitimizing Republicans is a good thing. I am aware that lots of people (e.g. Chris Matthews) are demanding liberals be happy about the stimulus bill, because it's, like, sooo much money. But to paraphrase Chris Rock, that's what the government is supposed to do in a massive recession. Especially a government in which the president and the majority of the legislature aren't insane.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see who's behind Door #3 for Commerce. Larry Kudlow?

Please no more steroids revelations

I am deeply disappointed in Alex Rodriguez, for subjecting baseball fans to another month-long installment of the most stupefyingly boring mega-scandal in sports history. Please make it stop.

ESPN is of course in full self parody mode:

'I Was Stupid'

"In an interview with Peter Gammons, Alex Rodriguez admits to using steroids for three years with the Texas Rangers, saying, 'I needed to perform.'"

"Vote: Forgive Him?"

That's right, ESPN Nation, you get to render your personal judgment on whether to let the healing begin, or whether your feelings are still too raw. The results:

38% say "Yes [Forgive him]"
33% say "No"
29% say "No need to forgive him"

In the words of Caroline Kennedy: Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman's magazine or something?

Agreed

Tristero: Clearly, the top of the party has learned zip in the past 8 to 10 years or so. I think it's time to work seriously to replace them. This isn't a progressive vs. centrist issue, this is a competence issue. The current crop of Democratic leaders in Congress simply appear incapable of standing up to the malicious wackiness of Republicans. It is more than demoralizing. We live in exceedingly dangerous times and we simply cannot afford to have Republicans' mad ideas continue to be injected into the mainstream discourse without vigorous objection.

This simply has to stop.

Update: I'm not sure who exactly would "work to replace" the leadership, but the underlying point about national Democrats being utterly pathetic advocates for their agenda is sound.

Doesn't look good

Tim Geithner
Position: Treasury Secretary
Unpaid tax liability: $48,000
Nomimation status: Confirmed

Tom Daschle
Position: Secretary of Health & Human Services
Unpaid tax liability: $140,000
Nomination status: Very likely to be confirmed. Still supported by Obama.

Nancy Killefer
Position: Chief Performance Officer
Unpaid tax liability: $948.69
Nomination status: Derailed

Accountability is for women and non-cabinet appointments, apparently.

Late Update: Nevermind! Daschle took himself out, which may be bad for the cause of health care reform but will certainly mean we won't have to see as much of those stupid red glasses.

"Incredulous"

Marc Ambinder talks to Republican officials about Michael Steele's becoming RNC chairman, and finds that social conservatives are worried that he's squishy on gay marriage:

"...I spoke with a committeewoman from a southern state who echoed these concerns. On condition of anonymity, she admitted she still had strong reservations about Steele's conservative credentials and was pledging her support to [Katon] Dawson. She was incredulous when asked if the GOP needed to recalibrate its message after its recent electoral setbacks, citing Republican victories in the Georgia Senate runoff and Louisiana's congressional elections." [Emphasis mine]

Don't try this s--- at home

I like Paul Kedrosky's blog. It's a fixture in the old RSS reader, and it isn't in any danger of getting expelled. He just digs up too much interesting stuff to exclude on personality grounds alone. But ohmigod is he capable of heroic feats of wankery. To wit:

I'm tired of behavioral finance. It has become a sort of socio-psychological financial freakshow, the past decade's version of chaos theory. It can go away now.

Uh huh.

Sure, we could tell lots of good stories – availability heuristic! hindsight bias! rational inattention ! etc. -- but what was the real and measurable contribution of behavioral finance to ameliorating the credit crisis. Tell me, because I don't know.

Ummm...

What happens? Well, it's not that we abandon the stuff. Some of behavioral finance gets pulled into finance (whatever that is anymore, and that's a bigger subject). And much of the "oooh, look at the silly humans" behavioral stuff finally bores enough people that it doesn't sell books or get articles published. Then that's it. We just have finance again -- and it's as ex post and generally useless as ever, but at least they can tell better stories.

Paul Kedrosky, ladies and gentlemen. If I ever get like that, I want someone to tell me.

Teh Internets: The early years

Amazing video of 1981 San Francisco local news segment on accessing the newspaper online. Of course, the words "online" or "internet" weren't even in use yet. They just talk about reading the newspaper on your "home computer."

For as much as we think of technological change as occurring at this breakneck pace, that was 1981, and we had already sniffed out the idea of transmitting content via computer. There were rotary phones involved, yes, but the concept was fully formed. But it wasn't until December 2008 that the internet finally surpassed the newspaper as our secondary source of news (after the TV).

The award for most prescient prediction goes to the newspaper representative who says that, as cool as the "electronic newspaper" may be, he doesn't expect they'll make much money on it.


h/t

Score one for the Juicebox Mafia

Yglesias: "My understanding is that Canadian Jewish opinion is about as sympathetic to the national aspirations of the Québécois as The New Republic is to those of the Palestinians. So in the event of a crisis, I think we can expect TNR to take a leading role in advocating that the U.S. stand foresquare [sic] behind Canada (our most important ally in North America!) as it seeks to repress Francophone terror through violence and collective punishment."

Funny

via

Bye Bill

How sweet it is:

[Characteristically uninteresting and wrong Bill Kristol column]

This is William Kristol’s last column.

There's some good housecleaning going on this year. Now about that Friedman fellow...

A Sarah Palin of our own

I didn't know until she was all but announced just how awful Kirsten Gillibrand was.

Gillibrand has described her own voting record as "one of the most conservative in the state." She opposes any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, supports renewing the Bush tax cuts for individuals earning up to $1 million annually, and voted for the Bush-backed FISA bill that permits wiretapping of international calls. She was one of four Democratic freshmen in the country, and the only Democrat in the New York delegation, to vote for the Bush administration's bill to extend funding for the Iraq war shortly after she entered congress in 2007. While she now contends that she's always opposed the war and has voted for bills to end it, one upstate paper reported when she first ran for the seat: "She said she supports the war in Iraq."

The pick only makes sense in terms of cynical political calculation by Paterson. He flatters upstaters, women, and Republicans in one fell swoop, making his '10 campaign against Ghouliani or whomever that much easier. I don't generally have any problem with cynical political calculation, but I sure hope this particular call backfires on him.

Gillibrand comes from a Republican-leaning district, which she won because the incumbent John Sweeney imploded spectacularly in 2006, so, as an added bonus, her selection creates a nice pickup opportunity for the GOP.

It also probably means that she'll try to tack left as a senator, which she's already started doing with gay marriage. But what I'd like even more than a Blue Dog who makes insincere efforts to make herself palatable to actual Democrats is an actual Democrat, and I look forward to volunteering for whichever one primaries her in 2010.

In the meantime, we're just going to have to put up with this clown. Ugh.

Update:
Lawrence O'Donnell is also unimpressed: "This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.”
(via)

Animal Collective - "My Girls"

Geithner's taxes

It looks for all the world like Tim Geithner, Obama's nominee for Treasury Secretary, is going to get confirmed easily despite recent the recent revelation that he had underpaid his taxes by about $42,000.

I obviously don't have any idea whether the mistake was honest or not, but the "it was an obscure IMF-specific technicality" excuse should be completely off limits to him. If you can't figure out your tax liability, I would think you shouldn't be Treasury Secretary, no matter how complicated the rules may be.

The weird thing about the unpaid taxes is that Geithner seems to have spent his entire professional life in training for this job. You'd think that for an ambitious bank regulator, the cost-benefit analysis of cheating Uncle Sam out of $42k is about as unfavorable as it gets. Then again, he was caught and it's still not going to stop him from getting the job, so maybe it wasn't that unfavorable after all.

In any case I'll be interested to hear about his secret plan to save the banks.

Thoughts on the Inauguration

I was even happier watching the inauguration proceedings than I thought I'd be. Ceremony works.

The shots of the vast crowd were great. The shots of the Republican leadership were even better. Not so much in a "Yeah, that's right. Kiss the ring, motherfuckers!" sense, although there's some of that, but more from a profound sense of relief and almost bafflement at the peaceful transfer of power. I didn't actually expect John Boehner to bolt from his seat mid-oath and try to knock the Lincoln bible out of Michelle's hands or anything like that. Nonetheless, watching the Republicans not do so, and instead just sit there and smile and applaud, giving at least tacit assent to what was taking place right in front of them... well it felt good.

The speech was largely as expected, but I was pleasantly surprised by this hard-to-miss condemnation of his predecessor:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals... Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Translation: "The thuggery ends with Bush."

I know it's not clear yet exactly what the Obama administration is going to do differently, and of course he's publicly opposed to any legal accountability for Bush administration officials. But the mushy, conservative-flattering Obama of my nightmares does not deliver this line, because if there's one thing wingnuts can't stand, it's the slightest regard for international public opinion. They deny that the Bush years are to be apologized for, but obviously they are and it was good to hear Obama do so in his inaugural speech.

On the domestic front, the speech offered some promising evidence for the theory that "bipartisanship" is, for Obama, just another word for Republican capitulation:

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done...

Casting the opposition to the Keynesian stimulus plan as a bunch of cynics who think America just isn't up to the task of massive deficit spending is a pretty tough line. Those who oppose the plan in good faith may have a right to cry foul, but I don't think the GOP caucus is reading from the same hymnal because they've all been convinced by Peter Schiff. In any case, the line suggests that Obama sees getting to his goal of 80 votes in the Senate as more a matter of shaming the Hooverites than accomodating them.

... What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

That's right, and what a lot of the commentariat still fails to understand is that Obama's repudiation of "stale political arguments" is not a matter of splitting the difference in the interest of comity. It's a matter of his agenda, which is moderate but decidedly liberal, being so popular as to render the argument effectively over.

The real legislative work is yet to be done, and there is no numerical advantage so large or political tailwind so strong that I'd completely trust Harry Reid or the Blue Dogs not to screw it up, but I feel more confident in Obama's commitment than I did yesterday.

Plus, he's actually president now, instead of that disgrace. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.

15 months?

I don't condone imprisoning male prostitutes. Let me just get that out of the way up front. At the same time, 15 months in jail seems like a pretty severe punishment for Boy George, who only imprisoned his for "under an hour."

Thoughts on the steroid scandal

1. Roger Clemens is the subject of a federal grand jury for lying to Congress about his steroid use.

2. The Clear was legal and not a steroid, which seems to exonerate Barry Bonds of perjury.

3. Bonds will remain a pariah while Clemens's steroid use and subsequent lying will not significantly damage his legacy.

Why don't they listen?

Sometimes it feels like Omar Minaya doesn't even read this blog. I tell him to sign Derek Lowe. Then I tell him he really needs to sign Derek Lowe because otherwise he'll land in the division (with the Braves), making the Mets doubly worse off. And what happens? He sticks with his cheapo 3 yr/$36 million offer as final and lets the Braves get Derek Lowe.

It feels a little weird railing about our guy's reluctance to go a fourth year at more money for a 35 year-old starter who doesn't really strike people out, but Lowe was a special case, especially for a Mets rotation that's shallower than daytime TV.

Now he's offering Oliver Perez 3 yrs/$30 million. That's a figure which is unlikely to make Scott Boras's heart go pitter-patter, especially compared to what he just got Lowe, so hopefully there aren't any other serious suitors still out there.

It puts the starting pitching in the basket!

Harry Markopolos

Barry Ritholtz has been following the story of Harry Markopolos, and it's kinda awesome. Markopolis is the accountant who independently figured out that Bernie Madoff's hedge fund was a huge Ponzi scheme, and wrote a lengthy memo telling the SEC all about it in 2005.

It's a great story both because the protagonist seems to fit exactly what you would expect from a movie version of events (he's a semi-paranoid Rain Man with pit bull tenacity) and because it strips the the SEC of any remaining fig leaf of credibility. I mean jeebus. How do they prevent anything whatsoever if they got a 19-page memo about Bernie Madoff entitled "The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud" and he still had to turn himself in three years later?

I had assumed that Markopolis was just dismissed by the SEC as some crank who maybe lost money or something, but apparently he had a regular contact there named Ed Manion, who the Globe story says "encouraged" him to pursue Madoff. The story does not specify why Manion himself did not also pursue Madoff, being, between the two of them, the one who works (still!) for the SEC.

It's too bad Markopolos seems so publicity-shy, because he should really get a little something for the effort. A fat book deal or high-paid consulting gig or something. He started putting the case together in 1999. It wasn't his fault the regulators are morons or don't care. He did what he could, and it was an awful lot. You don't even need to speak financial jargon to understand a lot of his memo. It's a pretty amazing document if you ask me.

No it's not Lowe, but it's not bad

He's not super-durable like Derek Lowe, or better than league-average like Derek Lowe, but for one year at $2.25 million I'm happy the Mets got Tim Redding. Giving him the ball every fifth day would not be tantamount to conceding the division to the Phillies. Heck, before the All-Star break last year he was looking downright useful, and there was a time not so long ago when a guy like that would be demanding multiple years at much more than $2 million per.

Still, he's not good. His absolute ceiling is a #4-type starter. We need one more good pitcher to make Pelfrey our #4 and make Redding/Niese/Parnell/whoever compete for the 5th/spot positions.

One more reason to get Derek Lowe: the Mets have to play the Braves 18 times a season, and the Bravos have already signed Javier Vazquez, who has become badly underrated (did you know he struck out 200 last year?). So, if they added Lowe their rotation would be Hudson-Vazquez-Lowe-Jurrjens-Campillo. Yes, the Philles would have to deal with it, too, but the Wild Card, God forbid, is not adjusted for strength of schedule.

Just give him what he wants.

The Mets need to sign Derek Lowe. It seems like it will probably happen. The powers that be reportedly talked to Scott Boras about "all" his clients, which would include Oliver Perez, and Manny Ramirez as well, but the other two are really luxuries.

Jon Niese and Bobby Parnell look like nice enough prospects, but if they're both fixtures in the 2009 rotation, it's going to be trouble. The Mets are too good in other areas, too likely to make the playoffs, to let that happen. So, more than any other team, the Mets could use a guy who is an incredibly safe bet for 200 innings of sub-4.00 ERA ball.

Derek Lowe is the only pitcher available who fits that bill (Tim Redding does not, no matter what MLB's subheadline writers may think). Paul DePodesta was questioned if not vilified for signing him to a 4yr/$36 million deal in the '04-'05 offseason, but that turned out to be a fantastic investment for the Dodgers.

Now it turns out the Braves are going to get in on the bidding. If the Mets end up getting outbid on Lowe by Atlanta, either Omar needs to go or the Wilpons lost more money to Bernie Madoff than they let on.

I didn't know she said things like that

TPM: In an interview with the New York Times, Caroline Kennedy became somewhat annoyed when asked to describe the moment when she decided to seek Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. "Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman's magazine or something?" said Kennedy. "I thought you were the crack political team."

Jennifer Palmieri: Perfect for the Obama administration

So Jennifer Palmieri, the acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, for whom Matt Yglesias writes since his departure from the Atlantic, apparently received threats to her loved ones from Democratic advocacy group Third Way. She hasn't said so explicitly, but it's the only plausible explanation for why she decided to commandeer Yglesias's blog at 10:30pm last night to write the following:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

As Atrios and others have noted, this is insane. The word "creepy" appears frequently in the 538-and-counting comments from outraged readers, and that's putting it lightly. Everybody who reads Yglesias's blog knows (or knew, until Palmieri bigfooted him) that his views are his own. The only "audience" for her Special Note was the delicate flowers at Third Way, whom nobody's heard of or cares about anyway.

But wait, maybe there's a reasonable explanation staring us in the face: Palmieri is apparently being considered for a job in the Obama administration, namely as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and what better way to angle for such a position than by gratuitously pissing off liberals? Clearly, a president-elect so eager to enrage his biggest supporters that he'd have the Purpose Driven Asshole give the invocation at his inauguration would read this Special Note and wonder who is that fresh-faced go-getter?

More seriously, this Third Way thing doesn't have anything to do with Obama, but it's worrisome that someone as stupid and pliant as Ms. Palmieri seems to be is running the country's most influential liberal advocacy organization. After all, the reason she's the acting CEO is that the regular CEO is running Obama's transition team.

Harry Reid's core competencies

Sure, the Senate Majority Leader might not actually be any good at leading the Democrats' Senate majority, but if you're a dubiously qualified member of a political dynasty who wants an appointment to a vacated seat, Harry Reid's your man.

It's true that Caroline Kennedy hasn't been a deadbeat or anything, and she's actually a legitimate New York resident, which Hillary wasn't. But give me an effing break regardless. It's just a staggering display of bandwagon-jumping, and it would speak very badly of Gov. Paterson if he's actually considering rewarding it with a U.S. Senate seat she has no business occupying.

A word about the Mets' reliever moves

Well, I wasn't exactly lobbying for Francisco Rodriguez, but there's a big difference between the 5 years/$75 million that it was supposed to have taken and the 3 years/$37 million that it actually took. At that price it's hard to complain. The guy is pretty good, after all.

It's even harder to complain after seeing that the Indians had to go over $10 million/yr to get Kerry Wood, whose injury problems have been very real instead of just seemingly inevitable like K-Rod's.

And the 12-player JJ Putz deal seems borderline brilliant, as it appears that Endy Chavez might have been the most valuable player the Mets gave up. Heilman was going to do be assigned to mop-up duty at best, and I don't know of any particular reason to be worried that Mike Carp is the next Jeff Bagwell. Plus the throw-ins Omar got along with Putz are kinda interesting. Outfielder Jeremy Reed was once considered an elite prospect. Sure, he's not anymore, but at 27 it's not like he couldn't become a Chavez-caliber role player. And Sean Green, while unspectacular, gave up fewer home runs in 2008 than Heilman gave up in a bad inning.

I still don't like Santana, Maine, Pelfrey, ?? and ??? as a starting five, but I'm glad Omar didn't give A.J. Burnett what the Yankees did, and if he had to go out and get two famous Closers, at least he did it about as efficiently as one could hope for.

Velazquez drops out

Well that's disappointing.

Right at the start, Nydia Velazquez seemed plausible because she was Hispanic and a woman.

But in truth, she had been dropped out of the Hillary Senate sweepstakes by most informed observers a while ago -- partly because of a long ago suicide attempt, partly because of some grumbles about her votes on Israel that could have threatened the Jewish support a Democrat needs in NY in a competitive race, partly because she just didn't seem like a candidate that could be sold statewide.

None of those sound like especially good reasons to me.

The Wilpons lost money in the Madoff scheme

CNBC just announced that the Fred Wilpon's Sterling Equities had "accounts" with Bernard Madoff (actually pronounced Made-Off), whose brokerage firm turns out to have been a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Still, it was a better decision than signing Mo Vaughn.

Bloomberg has the story here.

Cramer wasn't recommending Bear stock

Bad Rap Alert!

Foreign Policy has a list of the 10 Worst Predictions of 2008. I like that Bill Kristol gets the top spot, even though a lot of people thought HRC would roll Obama. But their #2 pick is a travesty.

My view of Jim Cramer's predictive abilities, and, yes, personal integrity have dimmed this year, but it's simply not fair to accuse him of recommending Bear Stearns (BSC) as a stock pick on March 11. What he was saying, accurately, was that it wasn't necessary for the caller to close his account with Bear's brokerage operation. Even as Bear shareholders got almost wiped out, Bear clients simply became JPMorgan Chase clients, and were no worse off for it.

Would he have said the same thing if he knew what kind of shape Bear was really in at the time? Probably not, but the fact remains that he was not telling people to buy the late BSC. Foreign Policy should stick to its guns!

via AMC's twitter feed

Profiles in Discretion: Rod Blagojevich

You don't see political careers explode that spectacularly very often. When you've got a governor on tape saying, explicitly, "I want money" in exchange for the U.S. Senate seat he's authorized to fill, and pointing out how much leverage he has, since if they don't pay, he can always appoint himself to the Senate... Well, you're just being greedy if you ask for that governor to also be a Republican.

WSJ: "Mark-to-Market Likely to Remain"

Good. Suspending it was an unusually bad idea.

Blacks vs. Gays

Or BVG, when the movie gets made. Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz have a good op-ed on the Prop 8 fallout. The key point is that we shouldn't be too surprised to "discover that one oppressed group does not necessarily support the goals of another oppressed group." They also point out that the dominant party in a two-party system is of necessity a coalition of subgroups, majorities of which are bound to oppose each other on certain issues.

So the scapegoating of the 70% of black Californians who voted Yes, as either traitorous Democrats or ungrateful beneficiaries of the civil rights movement, is intensely stupid. Still, I'm not sure how sympathetic I am to those African-Americans who find the appeal to the civil rights movement "galling."

On the one hand, those who oppose gay marriage almost certainly don't see a fundamental similarity between the two, and the "Who had it worse?" contest is not close. But it's hard to see how the analogy could be taken as a sign of disrespect. People probably wouldn't compare their cause to another unless a) they also supported that cause, and b) the other cause was successful. Otherwise it's not a terribly useful analogy. And it should be possible to argue that two historical injustices are similar in principle without implying that they are responsible for equal amounts of human suffering.

Later the authors attempt to peel back the layers of the onion that is African-American opposition to gay marriage:

Furthermore — and perhaps even more painfully for those of us who support gay marriage and all that it represents — Christian teaching on marriage is not the only reason so many blacks supported Proposition 8. Although it has come as a shocking realization to many in this community, a host of sociological studies confirm that many blacks feel a significant aversion to homosexuality itself, finding it morally and sexually repugnant.

I don't know what community they're referring to, but I'm not sure why anyone would be shocked by those studies. That "significant aversion" is also called homophobia, and it can be identified in many whites too! It doesn't become some new phenomenon when it's found to be especially prevalent among black people.

My suspicion is that this gut feeling preceded the religious dictates that legitimized it, and that at this point Romans 1:27 is mostly a convenient fig leaf that spares people of all races from having to come out and say "Because it's just gross, is why!"

That's crucial because, in arguing that a large minority population must retain its narrower set of rights than that afforded everyone else, they know they need a better reason for it than the squick factor. Gay marriage opponents who are black shouldn't be expected to have a better explanation for themselves than those who aren't, but they all should have a better one than that.

British Sea Power - "No Lucifer"

Don't do the Big Dog like that

The New York Times ran a story headlined "Bill Clinton Speech in Malaysia Irks Investors"

Now, I don't think I was the only person to read that and think that the investors were irked by something Bill Clinton said in his speech. But that's not really the thrust of the story at all. Clinton just said nice things about the guy who organized the event and paid him his $200k to be there. I don't think "investors" should have been too surprised by that.

What the story actually tries to demonstrate is that the organizer in question, a guy named Vinod Sekhar, is a sketchy character. If it manages to accomplish even this, it does so barely. The most damning accusation by anyone quoted in the piece is that the only reason he hired Clinton to appear is because "[h]e just wants to get new investors." Well golly. That's almost as bad as the charge of living in a rented house, which I'm pretty sure is legal. And yeah he settled some lawsuits (one from Bruce Willis) but the guy doesn't have a criminal rap sheet or anything.

So the story is actually about some disgruntled investors of Sekhar's who don't like him and disapprove of Clinton's shilling for him. And the Times runs with the headline "Bill Clinton Speech in Malaysia Irks Investors"?

I'm sure Bill Clinton will do something embarrassing or controversial soon enough, but there's no need to just make shit up.

I guess real estate didn't take

A little under nine months. That's how much time passed between the breaking of the Eliot Spitzer prostitute story and his first column for Slate. The title of this business column is "The Best Policy." That would of course be a reference to the old saw: "Committing adultery is the best policy." Anyway I have a few gripes with the debut column itself:

1. I don't think the fact that international buyers now trust the Chinese to manufacture aircraft (instead of, say, shoes or consumer electronics) is terrible news for America.

2. Using $7.8 trillion figure for the "cost" of the bailouts is pretty misleading. Yes, he specifies that it includes guarantees but he nonetheless talks about the money as if it's been "spent." The government hasn't spent anywhere near that much money. The difference between taking a loss and being exposed to a loss is very big.

3. Spitzer writes:

For years, we have accepted a theory of financial concentration—not only across all lines of previously differentiated sectors (insurance, commercial banking, investment banking, retail brokerage, etc.) but in terms of sheer size. The theory was that capital depth would permit the various entities, dubbed financial supermarkets, to compete and provide full service to customers while cross-marketing various products. That model has failed..."

This is nonsense. If anything the "financial supermarket" model has been vindicated. Look at the biggest of the survivors: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citi... all of them are supermarkets, with retail branches and investment banking operations. Bear and Lehman were pure investment banks, as was Merrill (which didn't end quite as badly). And now the remaining pure investment banks are looking to get into the retail business, because deposits are the readiest source of funding these days.

The problem isn't that the banks were supermarkets, it's that their proprietary trading, and the amount of risk they took on in general, was wildly irresponsible. But that mismanagement didn't flow necessarily from the diversity of business lines, and there are better ways to address it than to try to arbitrarily cap banks at a certain size. Reserve requirements can be imposed, better underwriting standards can be enforced in the mortgage industry, the rating agencies can be blown up reformed, etc.

I don't have a problem with "true competition with winners and losers; companies that disappear; shareholders and CEOs who can lose as well as win..." But it's worth separating the practices which are intrinsically flawed and prone to causing financial catastrophe from those that aren't.

Anyway I'm not a huge fan of the piece. It's pretty interesting, though, I'll give him that. I'll continue to read him even though he's a scumbag.

The HRC-Tweety nexus

A non-trivial drawback, as I saw it, to the nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was that it would render large swaths of Hardball with Chris Matthews utterly unwatchable. But if Matthews is going to run for Arlen Specter's Senate seat, that means Tweety's fevered speculation about Hillary-Bill-Obama dynamics won't be a staple of every episode of the show from 2009-10. That's good news.

He might win, too.

The coveted SF endorsement

So there's apparently a good chance that, when Hillary resigns her seat post-inauguration, Gov. David Paterson will select my congresswoman, Nydia Velazquez, to fill her Senate seat and I'm hoping that he does so.

For one thing, she's clearly a twofer on the identity politics front, which is the cause of most of my optimism and some of my enthusiasm for her selection. But since she's been my representative I've checked to make sure she votes the right way on important stuff and sure enough, she has. It reminds me of an Alec Baldwin line from 30 Rock, where he's talking to the young white male NBC page Kenneth and informs him that, politically speaking, he's actually a latina woman. That's me.

My only beef with Rep. Velazquez was that she, along with I believe every other New York politician, supported Clinton in the primary. (I wrote her a letter sometime after Super Tuesday urging her to abandon ship and throw her support to Obama, but she took no heed.) And she also was a bit of a villain in David Einhorn's book, having failed to do anything as chair of the Small Business Committee over the utterly corrupt Small Business Administration (which pretty clearly falls in her purview), even after he made his case to her staff.

But on the whole, good peoples. And all the alternatives are either unknown or annoying. Andrew Cuomo? No gracias.

BTW the place to go for the latest on all the Paterson-stalking and nomination-jockeying is Elizabeth Benjamin's blog, which is the rookie of the year in my RSS reader.

Why would they stop covering for him now?

Josh Marshall explains the MSM's idea of "candor": "Let's go over this very slowly. For Bush to blame the failure of intel for his decision to invade is not a concession at all, and it is not an admission of failure on his part. Rather, it is the opposite of these things. It is an evasion of responsibility for what happened."

Not only will there not be adequate accountability for the Iraq War, there will hardly be any at all. Obama or no Obama, the vast majority of Americans don't have any appreciation for how thoroughly criminal the Iraq War was/is.

WFaNFC - Sarah Dreams of Summer