Shots in the Dark

“We don’t look to make large sums of money. We want to do this because we love baseball. We love the city. There are some people who will tell you that the Wilpon and Katz families have contributed a lot to the city.”

—New York Mets co-owner Fred Wilpon, who’s been accused by Madoff trustee Irving Picard of knowing that he was investing in a Ponzi scheme, in the New York Times.

Sadly, there aren’t very many people who would tell you that the Mets ownership has contributed very much to the city, and to the extent that they have, it has nothing to do with the Mets, who’ve been for years not only a lousy team but an unpleasant team.

In the Times’ fascinating scoop/interview with Madoff, the sleazeball con man sounded generally truthful, insisting that those doing business with him “had to know” that that business was a scam.

Only this part, in which Madoff spoke of the Mets owners, who happened to be his childhood friends, rang false:

Mr. Madoff said about Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, Mr. Wilpon’s brother-in-law and business partner: “They knew nothing. They knew nothing.”

So everyone else knew except for Madoff’s friends? It’s hard to believe.

If the Wilpons and Katzes truly cared about baseball, and New York City, they’d sell the team.

As if you needed one.

Was I unfair to Alan Dershowitz in suggesting that he was joining Julian Assange’s legal team more because of a desire to be in the public eye than because of his devotion to the 1st and 4th Amendments?

Here’s Dershowitz on CNN explaining his “unofficial” role advising Assange’s British lawyers.

(What does Kathleen Parker do on this show, anyway?)

And here’s Dershowitz explaining that, thanks to Wikileaks, we have more evidence that bombing Iran might be a good idea.

And here he is beating the same war drum in the Guardian:

Now that it has been made public that Arab nations favour a military attack, it will become more difficult for these countries to condemn Israel if it was to decide on a surgical strike. This public disclosure might embolden Israel to consider such a strike as a last resort.

So the leaking of secret information may have grave, even if unintended, consequences. We need new laws and new technologies to cope with the apparent ease with which low-level functionaries can access and download the most secret of information. But there will always be those willing to break the law and suffer the consequences for what they believe is a higher purpose; and it is always just a matter of time until the techno-thieves catch up to the techno-cops. We will have to learn to live with the reality that there is no absolute assurance that “gentlemen” (and others) will not be reading each other’s mail.

The argument seems to be, “Because the leaking of material by Wikileaks shores up my case for bombing Iran, it is good.”

In fact, I agree with Dershowitz on several points he makes, including the inevitability that electronic documents will be leaked and the belief that those who publish leaked documents should be protected by the 1st Amendment.

(In fact, I’ve gone to court—well, been taken to court—for that principle.)

And I agree with Dershowitz that the government’s subpoena of Twitter records related to Wikileaks could have a profound chilling effect on free speech.

So, yes, probably I was unfair to Dershowitz for suggesting that he was attracted to the Wikileaks case for publicity-oriented reasons.

I suppose that, after Dershowitz’s alleged behavior in the Jeffrey Epstein case, and his role in the O.J. Simpson trial, I just don’t instinctively give him the benefit of the doubt.

All right, that’s giving myself a little too much credit.

All right, a lot too much credit.

But, like me, Jon Stewart finds humor in Republicans trying to be funny.

(Because, you know, it’s hard to be funny, racist and bitter all at once. Try it sometime! Or, on second thought, don’t.)

The Washington Post reports on how some potential GOP presidential candidates are starting to take potshots at Sarah Palin.

Last week, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum started a controversy by postulating in an online radio interview that Palin might be skipping the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) because “she has some demands on her time, and a lot of them have financial benefit attached to them.

...Then came South Dakota Sen. John Thune‘s speech at CPAC in which he uttered the line: “The closest I’ve come to being on a reality TV show is C-SPAN’s live coverage of the Senate floor.“

The audience “oohed.”

The Post reports that some Republican presidential wannabes are holding off because a) what’s the point of attacking Palin if she doesn’t run? You only risk alienating her followers, and b) even if she does run, they think, she might not be a serious threat.

But since Palin tends to claw back every time she’s criticized, criticizing her is a fine way for the lesser-known candidates to make news.

Which is to say, all this should be very entertaining.

Fresh off defending alleged rapist billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz has signed on to defend alleged rapist Julian Assange.

I was in Penn Station yesterday, and the corridors were lined with enormous white banners advertising VisitPhilly.com.

Don’t do it! Don’t visit Philadelphia.

Here’s a more accurate picture of life in the, um, naked streets in the city of Brotherly Love. In Philly, stuff like this happens every day.

(My favorite lines: “Oh, they about to Taser her!” Or: “You got the 3G or the 3GS? Yeah, the 3G don’t got video.” Or—and this is sort of sad—”Stay off the crack!”)

Also in Philadelphia, 50 priests have been accused of sexual abuse, and the Catholic archdiocese knew and did nothing about it.

At least 37 priests who are subject to “substantial evidence of abuse” are still in roles that bring them into contact with children, the new report said, and 10 of those have been in place since before 2005, when the last grand jury made its allegations.

Take a look at the five guys pictured. Would you let your kid get into a confessional with any of them?

I’m sure it’s just an unfortunate coincidence that the VisitPhilly website features a campaign called “With Love, Philadelphia“…..

Various Republicans spoke on the theme of religious freedom at last weekend’s CPAC conference.

“The way things are going, Obama may want to look into becoming the president of Egypt. Nobody would complain about him being a Muslim then.”

—Ann Coulter

“I’m not one who questions the president’s birth certificate and the existence of his birth certificate. But when you listen to his policies, don’t you at least wonder what planet he’s from?”

—Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty

“I was fortunate enough to be an American citizen by birth, and I have the birth certificate to prove it.”

—Idaho congressman Paul Labrador

“The president says he’s a Christian. I accept him at his word.”

—Speaker of the House John Boehner

“Sit down and shut up.”

—Dick Cheney

All these people allege to have learned from Ronald Reagan, but they haven’t learned one of Reagan’s foremost lessons: That optimism works better than negativity.

…they probably wouldn’t be bloggers.

(I can say this because, well, you know.)

Now that HuffPo has been valued at $315 million by AOL—a move that will prove disastrous, IMHO—the people who create the content for it would actually like to be paid, the Daily reports.

“Even $50 per blog would help out,” said Tara Dublin, an unemployed Portland-based (and how many times have we heard that before?) HuffPo contributor.

I’m sure it would! If I paid myself $50 per blog, I’d be pretty close to a millionaire. (We’re approaching 5,000 posts here on Shots in the Dark. Hooray!)

Of course, then you’d have the question of whether to pay some people more than others, and whether some bloggers were just, you know, bad. ‘Cause some of ’em are.

In any event, the point is moot: Let ’em eat liberal cake! Arianna’s not paying them a dime! (And don’t even think about health insurance.)

According to the Daily, Huffington sent her bloggers an email saying that the only real change they’d notice from the sale is “more people reading what you wrote.”

Which will surely make them feel better when they’re writing rent checks.

Full disclosure: I blogged a bit for HuffPo back when it first started. The idea was that you’d trade content for exposure. But after a while, I thought, wait a minute—the point of this exposure is to make me money, and that it isn’t. No one was calling me up and saying, “Love your blogs—how about a column in [insert name of dying print media publication here].”

Plus, since HuffPo was adding about ten new bloggers every time Arianna went to Starbucks, one’s “brand” was constantly diluted.

So I thought back to Tom Sawyer and the fence and decided that I didn’t need the exposure that much.

Props, of course, to Huffington, who I’m sure has worked her tuckus off building the site, and she certainly took a lot of shit for it in the early days. But how long can something survive when it’s based on free labor? Or is there a continuous supply of suckers in the blogosphere?