Shots in the Dark

Some articles of interest….

What would you do if you were a professional baseball player and you tossed a ball to a fan who, in trying to catch it, fell over a wall and died?

Sadly—very sadly—the Rangers Josh Hamilton is finding that out.

Sometimes (lots of times) Goldman Sachs is kinda creepy.

The Times posits three theories of what might have happened between DSK and the Sofitel maid—a “forced and brief encounter,” a “consensual act,” and a “misunderstanding.”

Under this theory, the oral sex began as a consensual act, but something later drove the housekeeper to press criminal charges…

Errol Morris has a new film coming out, which is always cause for celebration.

The Journal’s Allen Barra thinks the Yankees should sign the Mets’ Jose Reyes after this season is over. This is a terrible idea. The Yankees would then have two shortstops earning in the area of $20 million a year—hello, $15 hot dogs!—despite the fact that Jeter’s apparent replacement, Eduardo Nunez, played great while Jeter was just hurt and the Yankees went on a tear. He’s 24, and yes, his defense is lousy right now—Jeter’s has never been so great—but he probably makes about $300k—the Yankees should give him a chance.

Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty may drop out of the GOP presidential campaign. So should about half a dozen other people. It’s going to be Mitt Romney, folks—you heard it here first.

Got any money invested with Harvard alum Alphonse Fletcher? You should read this.

Marc Andreessen blogs about Larry Summers joining his PE firm.

And most importantly, he was a pivotal character in The Social Network.…

I keep thinking about Summers’ uncharacteristically jovial response to the question, a couple months back, whether his portrayal in The Social Network was accurate. In retrospect, it’s hard not to think that Summers was responding in a way that would best facilitate his entrance into the world of Silicon Valley venture capital—basically saying, yes, I’m a hard ass, but I was backing Facebook from the beginning. Could Summers have planted the question?

It’s also hard not to wonder if, even at the time of the meeting portrayed in the film, Summers had a desire to get into the tech world, a desire which might have influenced his hostile response to the Winklevosses….

…but that is probably a stretch. The Winklevosses were preppy and privileged, and that alone, I think, was reason enough for Summers to dislike them.

Derek Jeter got two hits last night as the Yankees crushed the Indians, 9-2, to remain 1.5 games ahead of the BoSox. Jeter is now four hits away from 3, 000.

Meanwhile, the person who wrote “Meet the Mets” died.

Makes you think….

It’s not just because of the hacking scandal, as shocking—and few things are truly shocking anymore, but deleting a dead girl’s voicemail so that her distraught parents can then leave new ones that you can write about is pretty shocking—as that is.

It’s because today’s Wall Street Journal ran that photo—which Gawker ran yesterday morning—of the guy who tried to escape from a Mexican jail in a suitcase.

On page one.

Even the NY Post only ran it on page 3….

And the cell phone hacking story re the Murdoch-owned News of the World? Buried in yesterday’s paper. Better today, but still.

This is how a once-great newspaper is dragged down inexorably towards the gutter.

So my wife and I ate at Daniel last night, thanks to a very generous wedding gift from two of my cousins. And I was waiting outside the restaurant, watching True Grit (the original, with John Wayne and Glen Campbell) on my iPad before the iTunes rental period expired.

And the door opens and Daniel himself walks out, gives me and my iPad a weird look, then hops into the back seat of a waiting Lexis limousine, begins checking his Blackberry and is driven away….

Forbes blogger Peter Cohan writes that Larry Summers joining the technology investment firm Andreessen Horowitz is a bad sign for both the firm and the tech economy in general.

Summers, Cohan writes, is a…

…[signal] of an interloper effect that happens when the money-making opportunities in a non-conventional part of the economy become so significant that those from the conventional part come rushing in to get their share…..

Summers does not appear to have much expertise when it comes to technology. But he is smart enough to grab easy money when he sees it. Fortunately, Summers came highly recommended to Marc Andreessen by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, who was formerly Summers’ chief of staff when he was Treasury Secretary…

Scratch-scratch-scratch-scratch….

(That’s the sound of backs being—you know—scratched.)

Let me quote Cohan a bit more—sorry, Mr. Cohan, to use your word so liberally, but some readers of this blog will truly appreciate them.

This is not the first time Summers has cashed in on a hot trend while out of government office. After all, he got paid over $5 million to serve D.E. Shaw & Co as a managing director over a 16-month period in 2008 and 2009. During that period, the middle of the financial crisis, D.E. Shaw’s assets declined, falling by almost half between 2008 and 2010, according to Bloomberg.

Did Summers have anything to do with D.E. Shaw’s asset plunge? It’s not clear that he did. But Harvard’s endowment lost almost $1 billion in 2009 on interest-rate swaps that Summers put on Harvard’s books, when he was that university’s president, to lock in December 2004′s interest rates.

This is the kind of thinking Summers would likely approve of if it didn’t apply to him. He would never support the hiring of a semi-retired, not particularly influential economist (not influential, at least, in his field) to teach at Harvard, especially if that person was past his prime, as Summers has said that academics are by the time they’ve reached his age.

But what applied to the university apparently doesn’t apply to the private sector—even though Summers professed himself to be a great advocate for private sector-style means-testing being applied to university decisionmaking.

I’m not saying that Summers should call it a day and never try to do anything new, and you can’t blame the guy for wanting to make some money. (Okay, a ton of money.)

It’s just worth pointing out that Summers really doesn’t practice what he preaches. Or that he frequently considers himself the exception to the rules he makes for others.

“My colleague David Brooks seems close to realizing what I realized a decade ago.”

—Paul Krugman, on his blog.

Of course, Krugman’s not the only person to have realized that the people in charge of the Congressional GOP are anti-intellectual radicals (and should be a bit more gracious about acknowledging that). But what must be really infuriating to him is that, for all his tardiness in making the point, David Brooks will probably have a bigger influence on the debate than Krugman has had.

World's End park, Hingham, MA (iPhone photo)

Happy 4th of July to all…..

On Business Insider, Henry Blodget floats the idea that apparently-stepping down Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner could and maybe should be replaced by…wait for it…Sheryl Sandberg.

You know—Larry Summers’ former chief of staff who’s since gone on to work at Google and Facebook.

Blodget writes:

Being Treasury Secretary these days is a thankless job, given the hatred of the Wall Street bailouts, the failure of financial reform, and the massive stimulus and support the government is still directing to the nation’s big banks. But if anyone could pull it off and not become an object of loathing, it would be Sheryl. Unlike Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Sheryl also has enough distance from Wall Street that she could do the job without appearing to be a pawn of the big banks and alienating most of the country in the process.

I wonder slightly about Blodget’s use of Sandberg’s first name there—are they friends? (If not, would he use the first name of a man he didn’t know while nominating him for Treasury secretary? Hard to imagine.)

More important, Sandberg’s qualifications for the position are absurdly thin. Being chief of staff at Treasury does not mean that you have to understand economics; it means that you have to be good at running an office. And from what I can tell, her jobs at Google and Facebook have been, essentially, marketing and business development. Business Insider, however, calls her a “Facebook goddess.”

Sandberg has always enjoyed adoring reviews from the media. I can’t see why. (Or, actually, maybe I can.)

The Business Week profile linked to above gives this as an example of Sandberg’s brilliant decisionmaking:

She convened a series of regular after-work meetings at the company’s downtown Palo Alto offices, ordering in food and scrawling potential revenue opportunities on white boards. The possibilities, she recalls, boiled down to two categories—making users pay or making advertisers pay. Employees quickly agreed with her that the latter was far more appealing. “It was stressful because this was about our entire business and all of our revenue,” she says.

Um…yes. But is that really a difficult decision? Consider the thought process:” If we charge users, then lots of them will drop out or not sign up and a competing site will start up that doesn’t, especially since a plurality of our users belong to a generation which doesn’t believe you should have to pay for anything online. Okay, let’s not charge users.” Done. This is not rocket science.

Blodget describes Sandberg’s as “one of the names that came up” in discussions of a replacement for Geithner. He doesn’t say where, other than his own column, and a Google search for “Sheryl Sandberg” and “Treasury secretary” turns up…Blodget’s column.

Hmmm…..

I know Henry a little bit and think highly of him, but this trial balloon should be quickly deflated.

Far be it from a highly opinionated blogger to cast aspersions on punditry, but… I’m going to cast aspersions on punditry.

Having spent time in the self-satisfied fields of political media, I was reminded how much I don’t miss it by yesterday’s Mark Halperin episode, in which the Time columnist and MSNBC commentator smugly called President Obama “a dick” on the punditry show, Morning Joe.

Halperin quickly apologized, saying that he thought the remark would be bleeped out, but MSNBC suspended him for a while.

Bleh.

I’m influenced by my old boss, John Kennedy—sorry for the name drop, but it’s relevant here, I really did come to feel differently on this point after working with John—who firmly believed that, no matter how much you disagreed with a president, having the most powerful job in the world is brutally hard and the people who volunteer for it deserve our respect. Or at the very least, our civility.

If Mark Halperin dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, 50,000 people could fill his professional shoes. Not so President Obama. But punditry is the great equalizer, a self-contained world in which participants have the right to slag off the president because their chatter is nothing but a sport, a game. They are the media’s equivalent of soccer’s hooligans. And while I think the freedom to criticize the president is one of democracy’s great and essential virtues, still, I wish they’d aim a little higher than hitting below the belt.

Which actually brings me to the thought that got me writing this post, something Paul Krugman wrote on his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal.”

In describing a latecomer to the idea that the original stimulus package was too small, Krugman writes,

This is actually a fairly familiar thing from my years as a pundit: the surest way to get branded as not Serious is to figure things out too soon. To be considered credible on politics you have to have considered Bush a great leader, and not realized until Katrina that he was a disaster; to be considered credible on national security you have to have supported the Iraq War, and not realized until 2005 that it was a terrible mistake; to be credible on economics you have to have regarded Greenspan as a great mind, and not become disillusioned until 2007 or maybe 2008.

This is classic Krugman: Implicitly self-congratulatory and irritatingly self-satisfied. But at the same time, he’s exactly right. People who are too far out there too early in staking out a position generally get ignored when their position turns out to be right.
But the people who were wrong and then convert—the plaudits they receive!

Why this phenomenon happens…I wish I knew.