Thank You, Steve Bailey

If there's anyone who deserves more ink on these pages, it's Steve Bailey. His final business column for the Globe, in Friday's paper, is so excellent -- personal and witty, with a philosophical nugget (if not originally his own), and one of the best defenses of the newspaper industry that I've read in a long time: "Newspapers, in print and online, continue to provide our common language. After a lifetime spent in newsrooms, I believe this as much as I believe anything. Flawed though they are, newspapers are our town common, the place where we meet, learn about one another, and debate what is right and what is not. They amuse us, and they anger us. And to the extent that people opt out of that common conversation, we are the lesser for it."

I now have a reason to start reading Bloomberg News.

Living Proof

It's been a few days since it happened, but, boy, it still feels really good.

Think You Had An Embarassing Week?

At least you're not Richard J. Ross.

Who's Richard Ross, you ask? Well, until last week, I doubt more than 5,000 people could identify him. But thanks to his unusual performance at the Massachusetts House's debate on Gov. Deval Patrick's casino gambling legislation, hopefully that number has vaulted to at least 10,000.

Ross is a second-term, relatively obscure Republican state representative from Wrentham. He also runs a funeral home and looks somewhat plastic in his head shot.

And he also cast the deciding committee vote that ensured Patrick's desire for three casinos here would die on the full House floor, which it did the next day. But funny enough, Ross cast a committee vote against casinos after saying the night before, "I'm sticking with the governor," i.e. he was going to cast a committee vote for casinos.

What changed? The House speaker, Salvatore DiMasi, who, it appears, only likes blocking legislation for the sake of blocking legislation. (The man is unimaginative and power-hungry, which really just makes him a top state lawmaker in any state.) He doesn't like casinos, mainly, it seems, because he didn't propose the idea and convinced nearly the whole House to vote against them. But the way he convinced Ross to vote against them was by expressing mild support for allowing slots at the state's racetracks, which is just another form of gambling, and eventually bringing that legislation to a floor vote. (In DiMasi's defense, he can always vote against it.) Conveniently and unsurprisingly, one of those racetracks, Plainridge Racecourse, is in Ross' district.

Too much insider baseball? OK, maybe you're right. But here's where it gets even worse for Ross. Matt Viser and Frank Phillips of the Globe report that as Ross was trying to figure out it his committee vote, he was "suddenly dashing around the hallways of the State House, visibly shaken..."

And then this exchange for Ross: "At about 11 Wednesday morning, he approached Representative Brad Hill, an Ipswich Republican, in a hallway between the offices of the governor and the speaker. 'I don't know what to do,' he said. 'Go talk to Jones-y,' Hill told him, referring to House minority leader Bradley Jones. Ross sprinted off in that direction."

After spending hours on the phone with the racetrack's president and last-minute courting from Patrick's cabinet, Ross ultimately went with DiMasi and the racetrack. Ugh. Things Ross should also have done in this situation: grown up; acted mature and composed; and had a mind of his own.

As if it couldn't get any worse for Ross, when the full House vote was taken Thursday, he voted in favor of casinos even though he didn't mean to! He actually had it changed for the record that while he voted formally voted "no" (which in this case actually meant sending the casino bill onwards instead of back to committee, which is only logical in the illogical world of wording legislation), he had intended to vote "yes." What does that mean? Ross didn't even understand the wording of the motion and was incapable of following along! (Providing the link again here; scroll down to fully understand Ross' incompetence.)

I'm quite divided on allowing three casinos to locate here. It's poor economic development -- the salaries are not very good and they will most likely hurt all dining and entertainment within at least a 10-mile radius of each one -- but I don't gamble and never will and don't think I live anywhere close to where a casino would want to locate so it wouldn't directly impact me, and people will just keep going to Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun or Twin River, so why not keep that revenue in Massachusetts? But if it's going to make our elected lawmakers act so idiotically, maybe it's best that we not have them.

Finally, the TV news report below on the casino debate is priceless. Not only does WBZ create its own impossibly cheesy slots graphic to visualize how Dimasi felt, but the reporter's name is "Joe Shortsleeve." It doesn't get any better.

Farewell, James E. Cayne

Any way you gawk at it, it is incredible how little money JP Morgan Chase spent to buy Bear Stearns last night.

In the end, the investment bank was nearly a penny stock. It sold for $236 million, aka $2 per share, when early last year the stock price sat at $170, early last week at about $70 and late Friday at about $30. Think about this: In one weekend, the value of one of the country's most famous financial institutions declined by more than 90 percent, and was only bought because the Fed agreed to provide a $30 billion credit line to complete the deal. And Bear Stearns' headquarters, at Madison and 47th, which it owns, has to be worth at least $500 million alone, meaning the company was worth much less than nothing. Let's see if the their quant or derivatives desks can calculate that value.

Update: The WSJ reports here that Bear Stearns' HQ is actually worth as much as $1.4 billion. So the company was even more worthless than I thought. Wow.

Me to my dad last night: "Do you realize how much money James Cayne lost this weekend?"

My dad to me: "No one should spend any time worrying about Jimmy Cayne."

(For the record, Cayne, Bear Stearns chief executive until last January, when the collapse of two in-house hedge funds last year [what proved to be only the first company fiasco of the past year!] prompted him to step down, and still the chairman [if that title's worth anything now] made about $13.4 million from the deal, the Times reports, compared to the $1.2 billion his shares were worth back in January 2007. He owned about 5 percent of the company.)

My dad is obviously correct: No one should worry about Jimmy Cayne. He's still worth exponentially more than almost every other American. (And has an elitist-looking comb-over and big-money jowls to prove it!) But the point is, How can so much value disappear so quickly with so few people realizing what was going on? And no, it has nothing to do with how Cayne is such an expert bridge player, which, it seems, every Times story about the guy loves to point out.

I, obviously, don't have an answer for many reasons, but let's just end by pointing out what the Fed decided to do over the weekend. In addition to the $30 billion loan to JP Morgan, they cut the discount rate by a quarter point again and "announced an open-ended lending program for the biggest investment firms on Wall Street," writes Edmund L. Andrews of the Times, over the weekend. The concept of "moral hazard" is no longer even in the rear-view mirror. In fact, if the Fed is a car, it ran over moral hazard some time last week and is dragging it along underneath the chassis for miles and miles of rough road.

A friend of mine in town said he'd like to see an analysis of what the markets would look like this week if the Fed just let Bear Stearns die an organized death. I would too. Instead, this comment from a financial analyst in Gretchen Morgenson's scathingly excellent column in this week's Sunday Business section hits hard: “For the government to print money at the expense of taxpayers as opposed to requiring or going about a receivership and wind-down of any insolvent institutions should be troubling to taxpayers and regulators alike. The Fed has now crossed the line in a very clear way on ‘moral hazard,’ because they have opened the door to the view that they are required to save almost any institution through non-recourse loans — except the government doesn’t have the money and it destroys the U.S.’s reputation as the broadest, deepest, most transparent and properly regulated capital market in the world.”

Enough About Eliot Spitzer

As crushing as the revelation was this week that the (now-former) New York governor is also "Client No. 9" in a busted online prostitution ring, about as devastating was news that Steve Bailey is leaving the Globe.

Bailey's been a reporter and business columnist there for decades. In the two-plus years since I started reading the paper daily, he's been the only must-read ever single time he publishes something. (Wednesdays and Fridays, for the uninitiated.) His writing is witty, tight and fearless; his reporting accurate, thorough and impeccably sourced. The overall themes in his columns are humble: All he wants is a government and business community that's transparent, honest, intelligent and hard-working. Sounds so simple and deserved for all of us, and yet, as his columns always show, it's so hard to achieve.

I suppose it's not terribly surprising he's leaving. He's branched out to other media -- he's the best segment on an otherwise terrible radio show and also appears weekly on NECN -- and apparently, his wife is French and would like to live closer to home. (He's taking a spot in Bloomberg News' London bureau.) But come April, when his column no longer appears, it'll be tough to bear. As a young Boston-area reporter, there's no one whose career I would rather emulate.

As for Spitzer, the best analysis I've seen on it is the New Republic's comparison of him to Roth's Portnoy. It comes from Noam Scheiber, which I guess just proves it takes a Jewish boy to know a Jewish boy.

When It Fails, They All Deserve to Lose Their Jobs

The Times reported a couple weeks ago that Perez Hilton, aka Mario Lavandeira, aka the creator of perezhilton.com, one of the worst Web sites there is, is getting his own label imprint with Warner Bros. Records. Ugh.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Lavandeira's Web site, take a moment to peruse. OK, you're done? Yeah, it only takes a moment to get the gist: He posts endlessly and saracastically -- sometimes lovingly -- about people who are only famous because they're famous, and he has a knack for doing this well enough that he too is now famous only because he's famous. What does that mean? He, along with everyone else in this celebrity niche, has no real talents/skills, just an intellect for exploiting the worst sub-markets in 21st-century, Internet-driven media: people vapidly looking to kill time without any meaningful curiosity about the world.

It's quite possible Mr. Lavandeira's imprint will find some musicians who will sell a few million records, but why isn't Warner Music, or its brethren, working to introduce quality music to the world? (And if perezhilton.com is any indication, the acts Mr. Lavandeira sign will not be "quality.") That these bands linked here haven't sold hundreds of thousands of more records than they have is a shame.

For the Times' much better counterpoint, in yesterday's Arts & Leisure section, about the new Brooklyn bands getting (relatively) popular, click here.

What Do Ryan Adams and Samantha Power Have in Common?

Their professional nadirs involve monsters.

For Ryan Adams, it's "I See Monsters," the worst song on his ridiculously terrible 2004 album, "Love is Hell." When the album is titled as such and your persona is Ryan Adams', how could it not be bad? And yes, I own it and have listened to it too many times.

For Samantha Power, it was her comment this week that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton is a "monster." Not exactly timely when you're a foreign policy adviser to, and big supporter of, Clinton's rival, Sen. Barack Obama. (Power promptly resigned.)

She knew it wasn't the right thing to say, too. According to the Scotsmen, the paper to whom she made the remark (which has probably had millions more hits in the last 48 hours than in the past 48 months), the full quote is: "She is a monster too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything." Trying to take something off the record after saying it is never a good idea, because it just clues in the reporter that you let your guard down, you left diplomacy behind for a moment, these are your true feelings. It's akin to blood in the water for a shark.

But really, it's just poor, "gotcha" journalism. Yes, for someone who reached international fame for her analysis of modern genocide, describing a U.S. politician, particuarly one of Hillary Clinton's stature, as a "monster" is stupid. But the fact that Power calls Clinton bad names when she's feeling frustrated, as the report suggests she was, is not news to me. I'm having trouble finding a full transcript of the remarks, but I bet if we were to listen to the reporter's recorded conversation -- or, at least, look at her notes -- Power returns to rationality pretty quickly. It's news if Power is so uneducated to only think of Clinton as a "monster."

Actually, I'll take that back. Power's sentence is news because it fits into a larger theme of the Democratic campaign, particularly since it became Clinton v. Obama. The number of famous surrogates who have said truly mean-spirited things this year now includes: Power; Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET Entertainment and owner of the NBA team the Charlotte Bobcats; former Nebraska Sen. and presidential candidate Bob Kerrey (also now president of the New School); Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell; and former Clinton national co-chairman Bill Shaheen (also the husband of former New Hampshire Gov. and current Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen).

These are truly impressive people, and all but Power support Clinton. I truly believe her campaign has directed its surrogates to be as rhetorically aggressive as possible -- that it's OK for them to toe the "politically correct" line -- and these transgressions are what sometimes happen when that is the campaign's MO. (And I'm sure they're [correctly] thinking, No one will remember.) Clinton and the campaign know there is a fixed number, somewhere in the tens of millions, that is going to vote for her no matter what: They love her hard work and intelligence; her historical campaign; and the good times of the '90s the Clinton "brand" conjures. What they have to do is prevent Obama's campaign from expanding the electorate so there are more people -- Democrats, independents and those under 30 years old -- who will vote for him, and one way to do it sowing seeds of fear. All the above people who put their feet in their mouths suggested Obama is too black, too mysterious, too ghetto, to be president.

David Brooks looks more prescient than ever right now, considering his column in Friday's Times -- written before Power "drove the day," to use biz lingo -- was all about how Obama can't mimic Clinton's passion for rough-and-tumble politics and still expect to win the nomination. Brooks, even if he wouldn't vote for Obama, urges him not to follow the Clinton path. To quote: "As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself. And even if he goes on to win the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president." (But really, you should read the whole thing for yourself. Brooks has been absolutely on fire recently. His column last month about consumer science and how it relates to Clinton v. Obama was also dead on.)

Brooks is absolutely correct. Obama wins the nomination and closes an era in American politics by ending the way he started the campaign -- liberal policy ideas wrapped in a inspiring, post-partisan message that says, "Look over there. Over there is a better place and here is why. I want to lead us there. Who will follow me? Let us all go together!" He has to stick to it or the next four (probably eight?) years are assured of being a legislative muddle, sort of like the past eight minus the Iraq War, the tax cuts and torture -- well, it'll be different because it's impossible to take those three out of the equation.

Update: Add former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter, to the list of famous foot-in-mouthers. She was quoted in the Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze saying of Obama: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." It took a week, but, unsurpisingly, created quite the uproar, and Ferraro resigned from her honorary post on the Clinton Campaign's finance committee. (Bet the reporter there who got the interview assignment didn't think it would become the second-biggest national story this week.) Ferraro's comment is interesting because it doesn't ghettoize Obama, but still very much dismisses him as untalented and unworthy. Oddly enough, Ferraro said everyone was so excited about her on the 1984 Democratic ticket for the same reason, i.e. the first female vice presidential candidate, but that reads like self-flagellation to make up for the spiteful comment. (Though, to note, Ferraro stands by it.) Orlando Patterson, the noted Harvard sociologist, had an interesting op-ed column in the Times this week about Clinton's "3 a.m. phone call" ad. It made some interesting points, though perhaps overly deconstructed it and read too much race into it, but I'd be more interested in hearing Patterson analyze the Clinton campaign surrogates' comments.

Further Update: To bring this (incredibly long) post back to where it started: Oh boy, Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams' old band, is re-releasing its second record "Strangers' Almanac." (Pitchfork review here.) The full "Baseball Park" and "Barn's on Fire" sessions are included, as is "Wither, I'm a Flower," the most overwrought yet still-excellent song title there is. Looks like someone will be spending $23.98.

The Job of an Op-Ed Columnist Seems Fun

It's amusing how nearly the Times' entire roster of op-ed columnists is openly rooting against Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. The paper's policy prohibits them from making outright endorsements, but it seems they've skirted as close to endorsing Sen. Barack Obama as possible without typing the explicit sentence. And it's gotten harsher as the Democratic primary has matured.

Frank Rich, who slings the sharpest, most insightful journalistic lightning bolts week after week (and is, it appears, a liberal Democrat), criticized the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, by writing he's been running a campaign that's nearly as bad as Clinton's. Rich on McCain: "He is emulating almost identically the suicidal Clinton campaign against Mr. Obama. He has mimicked Mrs. Clinton’s message and rhetorical style, her tone-deaf contempt for Mr. Obama’s cultural appeal, and her complete misreading of just how politically radioactive the war in Iraq remains despite its migration from the front page." Ouch.

Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins, who playfully romp through domestic politics, routinely hit Clinton for being too boring and uninspiring; wonder why she can claim the presidential experience she claims to have; and point out she attacks and then makes nice, and then plays the feminine victim card. (Well, Collins tends to disect the absurdity of it all, i.e. the presidential race, whereas Dowd is almost all Hillary, all the time. And considering how much Dowd's work relies on deconstructing and rebuilding feminism, I'm trying to read too deeply into her attractive head shot found in the above embedded link.)

Even David Brooks, that mild-mannered conservative who might want to consider thinner glasses frames, comes back to the Obama side in his column today. Whereas two weeks ago he wrote about the inevitable comedown from Obama's revivalistic campaign (and as a Massachusetts resident, I'll note that perhaps Obama's good friend, Gov. Deval Patrick, serves as a good precedent), today Brooks, writing about speeches Clinton and Obama gave to Iowa's Democratic Party on the same November night, says: "Clinton had sounded like Old Politics, but Obama created a vision of New Politics. And the past several months have revolved around the choice he framed there that night." Although, true to his realist form, Brooks adds: "There’s only one politics, and, tragically, it’s the old kind, filled with conflict and bad choices."

(Obviously, Billy "Crystal" Kristol disdains both Democratic candidates; Paul Krugman strongly prefers the Clintons; I don't read Bob Herbert that much, but he seems to have voted for Obama; and Nicholas Kristof is off in Africa again, fighting the good fight, not really commenting on this race. An old tennis partner of mine once said he's surprised Kristof is still alive, which I agree with, considering his penchant to parachute into the world's most volatile situations time after time.)

Now there are two sides you can take in this: It could be read as further proof that the press loves Obama, hates the Clintons and will only truly scrutinize one, as Saturday Night Live satirized two weeks ago, which Hillary Clinton then cited as proof she is being treated unequally in this race. (I would assume the Clinton camp already knows this, but memo to Mark Penn: The first and quickest way to alienate the press is to say they're the reason things are going poorly for you.)

Or it could be read that Obama really is the more inspiring and promising candidate, less fraught with the burden of partisanship fostered during the (Bill) Clinton era and still strong today, and the Times' roster all realizes that. (Do they talk about this themselves or would purposefully hitting the same message be newsprint collusion?) I say it's a combination of the two because they're so closely connected. Actually, instead of words like "inspiring and promising," I think the more appropriate one is "authentic," as there is one candidate in the Democratic primary who screams authenticity and one who screams calculated, down-the-middle, focus-tested policy, campaigning and even facial expressions. I'll let you figure out which one is which.

When I posted on the day of the Iowa caucuses, I wrote, "Here's to hoping no one trounces anyone tonight so the primary season is extended as long as possible. At least until Feb. 5 when I can vote." But today, as much as I'd like to see a longer primary season, I think that would require a total revamping of how it actually unfolds, so: Hopefully things are settled tonight.

Putting the "Gross" Back in "Engrossing"

The cover of Animal Collective's latest record, "Strawberry Jam," is fascinating. Said jam is repulsive, captivating, almost pulsating, much like the band's music, which captures those moments in life when you're both clairvoyant and demonic. There's (rarely-in-tune) singing, screeching, lines that are brilliant, lines that are meaningless, lines that are worthless. Almost all of it rattles, in this propulsion that suggests life, in all its joy, languor and disappointments, is nothing but off-kilter.

I wonder how the band composes its music. There are verses and choruses, but it sounds like the band stumbles upon them, and when Avey Tare aka Dave Portner, or Panda Bear aka Noah Lennox, start singing, it sounds spontaneous. So much percussion, so many samples, so many unexpected sounds, so few actual instruments, and such a repetitious base, how do they plan it all? Is it all looped or do they somehow create this organically?

"Strawberry Jam." For a band that also often sounds like it's playing around a campfire on Mars, high on drugs and physics Earth will never know, what a great title. What does a strawberry jam sound like? This.