Archive for June, 2008

More Concern about Jason Furman

Posted on June 12th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

A couple of days after I wrote about the issue here, the Times reports on concern that Jason Furman, Barack Obama’s new economic policy director, is too close to Bob Rubin and Larry Summers for what is supposed to be a progressive candidate.

Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, hired Jason Furman, a Harvard-trained economist closely associated with Mr. Rubin, a Wall Street insider who served as President Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Labor union leaders criticized the move, and said that “Rubinomics” focused too much on corporate America and not enough on workers
.

….Mr. Obama’s campaign aides, among them Bill Burton, the press secretary, emphasize that Mr. Furman has already consulted a range of experts, from Mr. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist who succeeded Mr. Rubin as Treasury secretary.

I like that! “A range of experts, from Mr. Rubin and Lawrence Summers.” Could you technically call those two phrases in proximity an oxymoron?

Bizarrely, Times reporter Louis Uchitelle does not even mention the word “Citigroup” in a piece about Bob Rubin and corporate values.

In conjunction with the frankly idiotic choice of the corrupt Jamie Johnson as part of his v-p vetting team, this is Obama’s second unfortunate personnel move in recent days. He must do better.

More on the Scandal at Harvard

Posted on June 10th, 2008 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Today’s Times takes aim at the bribery scandal involving Harvard scientists, drug companies, and unreported outside income.

Three prominent psychiatrists at the Harvard Medical School and its affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital have been caught vastly underreporting their income from drug companies whose fortunes could be affected by their studies and their promotional efforts on behalf of aggressive drug treatments. Their failure to divulge their conflicts is striking proof that today’s requirements for reporting payments from industry — essentially an honor system in which researchers are supposed to reveal their outside income to their institutions — needs to be strengthened.

How many more cases like these are out there?

iPhone 3G: Good Enough?

Posted on June 10th, 2008 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Normally I’m a huge Apple partisan, but I’m underwhelmed by the new iPhone announced yesterday.

Yes, the iPhone will be cheaper, faster, and have more memory.

However….

It still doesn’t have the ability to record video. The merely adequate camera remains unchanged. You still can’t cut and paste text. Battery life, a big problem with the iPhone, isn’t much better. The fee for unlimited data transmission is rising 50%, from $20 to $30 monthly.

And perhaps most irritating, to prevent buyers from unblocking their iPhone and using it with another company, buyers will now have to activate their phones in-store, at Apple or A.T. & T. stores, rather than at home as they could previously.

That’s going to be a nightmare. You can’t even buy the phone online as a result.

I think Apple’s going to face some serious pushback on this one.

Ordinarily I’d be one of the first to go out and upgrade my iPhone. This time around, I think I might wait for the iPhone 3.0.

Larry Summers: Back to DC?

Posted on June 9th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Barack Obama has named Jason Furman, a member of Bob Rubin and Larry Summers’ Hamilton Project, as economic policy director of his campaign.

Which means….

“My key mandate, which came directly from the senator, is to bring him a diverse set of voices and ideas, because that’s the kind of debate he likes to hear to make up his mind about his economic agenda,” Furman said. He named Rubin, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder as advisers the campaign would turn to.

Since all of those guys come from similar backgrounds and advocate pretty much the same things, that’s not exactly a diverse set of voices and ideas. In fact, it’s sort of the opposite of a diverse set of voices and ideas.

Rubin and Summers are certainly smart guys with loads of economic experience. But there’s a tinge of old-style, Washington politics about this appointment that disappoints me.

Will Bob Rubin represent the interests of Citigroup (not that he’s done so particularly well so far), rather than those of the millions of small Americans who’ve been hurt by the housing crisis?

Will Larry Summers fight the good fight for the little guys? Or will he stick up for the mammoth hedge fund, D.E. Shaw, which must now surely be happy about the investment it made in Summers a couple years back?

Furman, by the way, is a Harvard A.B. and Ph.D., another indication that Harvard would have major influence in an Obama administration.

The Greatest Game on Blogtalk

Posted on June 9th, 2008 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I was interviewed the other day by Mike Silva, host of an Internet radio show called Blog Talk Radio, and the interview will be aired at 6 PM on July 11 along with a conversation with relief pitcher Sparky Lyle.

Scandal at Harvard

Posted on June 8th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Greed, basically.

A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given congressional investigators.

Two other Harvard colleagues had similar conflicts of interest.

Greed, with children’s health at risk…and Charles Grassley of Iowa, who is quickly becoming the bane of Harvard, is on top of the case.

This is a big story…..

She’s Gone….

Posted on June 8th, 2008 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Although Mrs. Clinton proved a more agile candidate than many had expected, she built a campaign that was suffused in overconfidence, riven by acrimony and weighted by the emotional baggage of a marriage between former and would-be presidents.

In the Times, Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg analyze the end of the Clinton campaign.

It’s not pretty.

Some nuggets:

[Hillary] did little to stop the infighting back home among advisers who nursed grudges from their White House days. The aides grew distracted from battling Senator Barack Obama while they hurled expletives at one another, stormed out of meetings and schemed to get one another fired.

…[Clinton adviser Mark] Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s “lack of American roots,” referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word “American”….

….[Clinton adviser Harold] Ickes, a bare-knuckled liberal friend of labor, had despised Mr. Penn since their days in the Clinton White House and did nothing to hide it, regularly mocking “our vaunted chief strategist” and at least once engaging in a profanity-laden shouting match with him….

….Aides to Mrs. Clinton took umbrage at Mr. Clinton’s freelancing and deemed his office uncooperative….

….Mr. Clinton was making matters worse. On the night of the South Carolina primary, Mr. Clinton called and Mr. Clyburn said he told him to tone down his rhetoric against Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton responded by calling him a rude name that Mr. Clyburn would not repeat in an interview.

Mrs. Clinton dumped her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who had been with her since 1992, and the two have not spoken since.

A couple of impressions after reading this: One, why was there not a single new figure to emerge as a voice for change in the Clinton campaign? Ickes, Penn, Gruenwald, Wolfson—these are all old political hacks, and not the people to represent change or intuit new trends in politics. They reek of same old, same old.

And two…relief. Relief that these people will not be occuping the White House, busily fighting with each other, kicking and scratching over power while the business of the country suffered.

Can you imagine a White House with Mark Penn as its pollster and Harold Ickes as its chief of staff? Terry McAuliffe as, I don’t know, secretary of state or something? Bill Clinton as the resident curmudgeon and lech?

At a time when the country needs a quantum leap forward, the Clintons represented nothing but more of the same, and the failure to adapt was a huge mistake on Hillary’s part. She surrounded herself with cronies and she failed to realize that, with them infiltrating every important job in her campaign, it was fundamentally impossible for her to manifest a message of change.

The other thing this article accomplishes: It presents a picture of such disarray, cluelessness, infighting, and just general nastiness within the Clinton campaign that it adds substantially to the argument against picking her for v-p.

University Hall at War?

Posted on June 5th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Adam Goldenberg breaks some interesting news on his Gadfly blog: a fight at University Hall over the expulsion of Harvard College-related administrators.

FAS Dean Mike Smith’s decision to shuffle undergraduate affairs out of the College’s most central building is being hotly contested by the incoming Dean of the College, Evelynn Hammonds. It well should be.

Sending whole offices of the College administration across Massachusetts Avenue (to the Holyoke Centre) ought to sound a very bitter note for any ally of Harvard’s undergraduates.

The plot thickens……

Drew Faust in the NY Sun

Posted on June 5th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

In the Sun, Seth Gitell takes a different tack in covering Drew Faust’s ROTC speech: that she deserves credit for actually making it pro-military.

The existence of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays and lesbians is Harvard’s stated reason for keeping the program at arm’s length and is an object of fury among the school’s arts and sciences faculty members, the same group that helped show the school’s last president, Lawrence Summers, the door.

An object of fury? Hmmm. Perhaps we can de-ideologize that. Let’s switch “object of fury” with “principled and sometimes passionate disagreement.”

There. That’s better. Now it’s…accurate!

Some feared before the speech that she might engage in a full-throated denunciation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Her comments came in a somewhat vague, nuanced, and respectful fashion that left Harvard’s most passionate advocates of military service happy. If it was a speech that seemed to tread a careful line, she likely had her outspoken predecessor in mind. Still, the speech seemed brave, at least in the context of a hyper-sensitive campus where the slightest praise of America’s military can be toxic.

At Harvard, the slightest praise of America’s military can be toxic?

That’s a little strong, I think. Everyone praises the military these days. It’s the warm-up to criticizing Bush and the war in Iraq. “I support our troops, but….”

Praising “our men and women in harm’s way” is the way liberals show their open-mindedness. (And sometimes, to be sure, they believe it.) But it’s a pretty reflexive thought at this point. Do people even read about the war anymore?

Not that she’d have any reason to do this, but what would have really been brave is if Drew Faust had criticized the military for anything other than “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Not faulting DGF here; just saying we don’t want to define bravery downward. Honoring Harvard students who serve in the military and are “exhibiting courage and self-sacrifice in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world” is a fine and important thing to do. But courageous? I don’t think so.

The Speech

Posted on June 5th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Some of you have asked how my graduation talk to the 9th graders at Fairfield Country Day School went yesterday.

Thanks for asking. And thanks to those of you who proffered suggestions—several of them did indeed make their way into the talk, in one way or another.

My cautious assessment is that the speech went well, if perhaps a bit too long. I spoke about my own experience at the school and how kids can be cruel to each other—I was on the receiving end and the giving end of that at times—and why they shouldn’t be. And I explained a little bit about why I became a writer and how the school helped in that process.

Perhaps I’ll post it, slightly cleaned up, if anyone cares….

But the students were fantastic, the school teachers and administrators gracious and welcoming, and the parents and relatives very kind.

What was particularly fascinating to me, as I chatted with various people, was learning how the issues facing a small (270 kids in 10 grades) school such as FCDS are strikingly similar to some of the issues facing a mammoth university such as Harvard: pressure to diversify, the need to build the endowment, the need to expand versus the interests of the community, concern over how the school affects the tax base, a genuine desire to boost financial aid as well as an ongoing challenge to seek out minority and poor students who would be helped by moving to such a different environment and the struggle to help them transition into that environment.

Being the headmaster of a private day school sounds like a great job, but certainly not an easy one.