BofA

It won't surprise (m)any of you, but I hate the B of A deal with Countrywide. First of all, I don't think it was much of a bargain. Sure, they paid $4 billion for a bank with a book value of $12 billion but, really, who can be sure what the true book value of this pig is?

Second, why buy it now? If they were really interested in the business, why not wait until Countrywide files Chapter 11? It would have delayed the transaction by what, a week? Two?

Third, I understand that Countrywide owns something like 1 in 5 mortgages in the US, and B of A is not (was not) a major mortgage player. I also understand that B of A is anticipating having that portfolio once the housing market turns around. What I fear (for them) is that by the time the market turns, they may still be a smaller player in the mortgage market, but a huge landlord.

Many are pointing to this deal as evidence that the market works, that companies are able to find their own fixes and government need not "interfere with the market". The cynic in me believes that Ken Lewis had a long and fruitful discussion with both Hank Paulson and Ben Bernake before agreeing to take the plunge here. Let's see what happens once the write downs begin in earnest.

I guess the one upside of all of this is for B of A retail banking customers - they will probably enjoy some seriously good rates on deposits as B of A ramps up the funding mechanisms to feed the Countrywide pig.

Thoughts?

Interesting Rudy POV

Haven't had a good Rudy-bashing in a while, it seems that he's doing a good enough job of that himself these days (his 9/11 Tourette's is reaching truly amazing proportions). That said, here is an interesting take on Rudy via TPM:

The conventional wisdom on Rudy's Super Tuesday "strategy" has been universally described as "risky" and occasionally "crazy." To me this provides a direct window into his judgement and how he would govern as President and it's not a flattering picture. Is he the kind of president who would go with a high risk, high reward strategy all the time? It sure gives me pause. I'm surprised the other candidates have not used this as a way to paint Rudy as a risky or crazy choice for President. It could dovetail with some of his other judgement problems like Bernie Kerik & dealing with his ex-wives & children. Poor judgement is not just limited to Bernie Kerik. His whole election strategy suffers from poor judgement as well.

Now THAT's a market movement - Part 2

Intrade had a huge reversal based on New Hampshire. Obama to 40 from about 70 yesterday, Clinton to 59 from about 30. More volatility than the DJIA.

FWIW: Bill Richardson is also running behind Al Gore on Intrade. Time to drop out when you fall behind people who aren't even running.

I can't watch MSNBC

I tried to watch as much as I could last night, but my God the people MSNBC had on were terrible. Not to pile on too much, as the lefty blogosphere is doing a swell job of that already, I really must mention that Chris Matthews is unwatchable. Terrible. Horrible. Ditto with Joe Scarborough.

I've been trying to rely more on print and blogs this cycle and last night my make me abandon TV coverage of the political cycle entirely. It sucks.

Who is the bigger culture surfer

Andrew Sullivan or Dennis Miller? Discuss.

Bike Snob and Rock Racing

Bike Snob NYC is a very funny cycling site. At times, it may be too inside for the very casual cyclist, but it's worth checking out periodically. Yesterday, it took a shot at my new favorite team to hate, Rock Racing:

Team owner Michael Ball, with the help of his tan, has been hiring pretty much every disgraced pro he can get his hands on, mouthing off to the press, and generally trying to become the Vince McMahon of cycling. If cycling were a 15 year old girl, he’d be offering her liquor and trying to get into her pants...

They even use Escalades as team cars. While I suppose that gives people a rare chance to see one of the word’s most obnoxious SUVs with a bicycle on top of it instead of underneath it, it’s still an offensive image.

I think I'm going to start a pool for when the first RR rider will come up positive. I'm going with July.

Now that's a market movement

Has anyone checked out intrade lately on the status of the democratic race? Hilary is down to 25 (from about 70), Obama up to 70 (70!) from about 20 or so not that long ago. That's quite a movement in a very short period of time.

Intrade has gotten lots of press over the years for its ability to correctly predict the outcome of elections, but does anyone know if prior years have seen such volatility in the trading? My recollection is that the trading was fairly consistent in the past, but I could be very wrong on this.

Edwards running for VEEP again?

Just a thought/observation based on watching some of the debate on Saturday and reading some of Edwards' statements since Iowa.

Thoughts?

Good for Frankie

I don't think his career has been squeaky-clean, but I always did think he was one of the good guys.

Citing differences "with business strategies and the direction the team is headed," director Frankie Andreu has ended his contract with Rock Racing.

The former professional, with nine Tours de France on his résumé, assumed director's duties on the team owned by Rock & Republic fashion designer and CEO Michael Ball, at the beginning of 2007. Recently, however, Andreu said he'd become unhappy with the way that the program was being run. Andreu said he increasingly had concerns about the business model of the team and felt that he his authority as team director was gradually being undermined.

Cool Product

This would definetly get me out of bed in the morning:

[It's an alarm clock that] Connects via WiFi to your online bank account, and donates YOUR real money to an organization you HATE when you decide to snooze!

Couple of bad nights and Rudy could be drowning in cash!

Iowa

I have to admit that I am surprised that Obama won. I wonder what this will do for him, especially in New Hampshire next Tuesday. As of now it looks like Hillary is going to finish 3rd which is disaster for her from a PR perspective. I don't think that Edwards can do much beyond Iowa, but who knows.

Huckabee won big, but I don't think it's going to matter at all. I don't think he has the money to compete going forward, and I can't see him doing well in CA, FL, NY, or even PA for that matter. I think the big news on the Rep. side is that Thompson finished 3rd.

So now we'll see

how and if Mukasey is independent of the White House. I'm not particularly optimistic, but I've been surprised before in my life.

A tale of two teams

Slipstream-Chipolte is a cycling team that looks, on the face of it, like they are trying to seriously combat doping in cycling, to the point where they are explicitly stating that they'd like to win races, but they are not all about winning. The feeling is, by doing so they are removing some of the pressure on their riders to dope. Slipstream is also implementing a state of the art rider monitoring system to, to the degree they can, ensure that their riders don't dope. They are going to be my team to root for in 2008.

On the other side, Astana may have a rival, Rock Racing. In fact, I'm betting that this team implodes completely in 2008. It doesn't hurt my prediction that they just signed Tyler Hamilton to race for them in '08. He joins Santi Botero who hasn't really raced since rumors started flowing about him while Phonak was blowing up. Cycling doesn't need Rock Racing right now.

Circuit City

I posted on Circuit City here. How are they doing now? Not so well:

Circuit City Stores Inc., the second-largest U.S. consumer-electronics retailer, reported a fifth straight loss and said it won't make money this quarter, when it typically generates most of its annual profit. The chain dropped 32 percent in early New York trading.

Buh-bye.

I LOVE the WSJ Editorial Page

Since the Weekly World News is out of print. Today's Op-Ed:

[Obama] skips the tie at major indoor events, not just outdoor rallies and Rock the Vote concerts sponsored by MTV. He goes tieless not merely in his shirtsleeves, or even with a blazer. He carries the open-necked look into a realm it was never meant to go: with the two-piece, dark business suit.
This heresy earns the young senator praise from today's keepers of the style tablets. The Washington Post's Robin Givhan -- the acid-penned Madame Blackwell of the Beltway -- could hardly contain herself. "[Obama's] tieless suit," she gushed, "[is] a cross between the style of a 1950s home-from-the-office dad and a 1990s GQ man about town. It is warmly, safely, nostalgically . . . cool."
Others have noticed something else. Take the impeccably liberal Jeff Greenfield. Ask yourself," he challenged his CNN audience, "is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable." We can thank Mr. Greenfield for being reckless enough to say what many were thinking. But he mistakes Mr. Ahmadinejad's source. Mr. Obama may have gotten the idea from GQ, but the Iranian President got it from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
One of the lesser-known outcomes of the 1979 Iranian revolution was the stigmatization of the tie as a tool of Western Imperialism. The Ayatollah even denounced some of his perceived enemies as "tie-wearing cronies of the West." Today in much of the Islamist world, the tie is seen as not merely pro-Western but anti-Islamic, even though no prohibition of the garment can be found in Islamic law. There is a stricture against men wearing silk, but Muslim dandies can get around that by wearing cashmere or linen ties -- and many do.
It's hard to think of anything less hip -- or less intended to be hip -- than Islamist dogma on personal grooming. Yet despite traveling radically different routes along the way, Messrs. Obama and Ahmadinejad somehow manage to wind up in the same sartorial spot. Sort of like the way Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich share virtually identical foreign policies.

My goodness that's a good piece. In one piece they imply that Obama may not wear ties out of some fealty to Khomeni (perhaps his bare neckedness is supposed to be to Muslims what Bush's "Don't put a period on the sentence..." bullshit is to fundamentalist Christians?), but also equate Ron Paul with Kucinich. That is professionalism. That is efficiency. My one critique is that they never got Obama's middle name into the piece, but perhaps they thought it would be too obvious?

This is an embarrassment, even by the low standards of the WSJ editorial page.

Charlie Wilson's War

I read the book a few years ago and was appalled. For those of you who didn't read it, Charlie Wilson was a Congressman who secretly funded the Afghans in their battle against the Soviets during the 80's and 90's. He did it through his control of defense spending, particularly black box spending that he was able to allocate without oversight or approval.

I assume the movie is going to cast Wilson as a swashbuckling, larger-than-life, go-it-alone American misfit does good character. If so, and if that sort of story appeal to you, please keep the following in mind:

1. Wilson was funding the Taliban when they were fighting the Soviets. Money that he secretly sent to them was used to purchase weapons that are likely killing American soldiers today.
2. Since this was all done secretly, nobody within the policy arm of the government could comment on whether this was, or was not, a good idea.
3. This was done at a time when there still was government oversight - imagine what similar black box ops are being funded right now. Look for some of these to blow up in the coming decades as well.

I don't understand the appeal of Charlie Wilson. Check that, I get it (rule breaker, love maker, drug taker) he's a prototypical American hero, I just don't understand why more people don't look at his rule breaking with utter revulsion.

Thoughts?

Different take on e-paper

It's not a reader, but a writer:

So long as the user writes on paper printed with a special pattern, the smartpen transforms what is written into interactive text. For example, the pen has a recording function, called paper replay, that can record sound and connect it to what the user writes while the sounds are being recorded. Later, the user can tap the pen over what she wrote and replay the associated sounds. "We're starting to make the whole world of printable surfaces accessible and functional," says Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff.

The idea and the product have been around for a few years in a number of iterations and form factors. The thing I like about this one is the recording ability - you can retain both the spoken words and your written notes and pair them up. In fact, it could change note-taking altogether since you will no longer have to capture the words spoken, but can instead riff on the ideas.

I'm a pen and paper guy, so the feel of the paper and the pen are going to be issues for me, but it seems like it could be a really cool thing.

Question of the Day

Do Bonds and/or Clemens get into the Hall of Fame?

Baseball and Steriods

Suppose I should say something about this. I've been saying for a while that in aerobic sports (running, cycling) there are no longer any legitimate superhuman efforts. It just can't happen. Looks like the same applies to non-aerobic sports as well.

Any thoughts on whether the players' association will agree to blood testing for HGH? I'm going with a solid "no" because I'm not sure how much people really care about athletes cheating and as long as the union can dig in its heels, I don't see much substantive change.

Hilliary and Message Discipline

Boy, there sure are a bunch of Hilliary staffers releasing unapproved messages these days. A positively alarming amount of freelancing. I really hope she can corral those bad eggs.