via 

Did the New York Knicks try to pump up sales of playoff tickets by hiding the news that Jeremy Lin had suffered a season-ending knee injury?

That’s the accusation leveled by Frank Isola of the New York Daily News.

Isola points out that Lin had an MRI that showed he had a torn meniscus in his left knee two days before the March 28 deadline for season-ticket holders to buy playoff tickets. And such cartilage tears almost always require surgery.

Isola’s column also notes that an e-mail was sent to fans with a picture of Lin leaping in celebration.

Madison Square Garden spokeswoman Stacey Escudero said the story’s “completely false.”

Lin didn’t announce his decision to have surgery until Saturday. But the question of who knew what about Lin’s injury arose last Friday when interim Knicks coach Mike Woodson said he had “no idea” when Lin would be able to return. Woodson also said it was possible Lin wouldn’t make it back this season.

Isola writes that within an hour of Woodson’s comments the Knicks’ media relations staff put out a statement contradicting the coach.

The Knicks are 2 1/2 games ahead of Milwaukee for the final Eastern Conference playoff berth, with 13 games to go.

(Reuters) – China’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) unexpectedly jumped in March t o an 11-month highs of 53.1, the government said on Sunday, as surprisingly firm demand boosted new orders and new export orders for factories.

Analysts had forecast the PMI, which previews China’s vast factory sector before official industrial production data, to dip at 50.5.

The new orders sub-index climbed to 55.1 in March from February’s 51 points, the National Bureau of Statistics said, while the sub-index for new export orders was up at 51.9, compared with February’s 51.1.

The latest PMI reading suggests Chinese factories are not struggling as much as some reports indicated. HSBC’s Flash PMI released last week had shown factory activity slowing for the fifth straight month in March as new orders sunk to four-month lows.

via NYT DealBook

Another View: March Badness

The New York Times

As March comes to an end and the NCAA basketball tournament heads into the Final Four, most office pools are likely to be in tatters. But Joshua Brown — a financial adviser for Fusion Analytics Investment Partners who blogs and tweets as The Reformed Broker — is giving Wall Street fans another chance at bracket dominance.

With his first book, “Backstage Wall Street,” hitting shelves this month, Mr. Brown sketched out a new type of tournament, a face-off between 16 well-known financial scandals. He calls it “March Badness.”

His rules are simple: the biggest scandal wins. Will Jon Corzine take down Jimmy Cayne? Will John Thain pull out an upset over Greg Smith, like Lehigh did over Duke?

Mr. Brown has come up with his own matchups for the Sweet 16, winnowing it down to the Elite Eight. In the end, he believes Mr. Cayne will take home the glory. It’s “too much money involved and too many livelihoods at stake,” said Mr. Brown.

Leave your own match-ups in the comments below.

Dick Fuld (Lehman Brothers) vs. Jimmy Cayne (Bear Stearns)

In the battle to see who could blow up their firm faster, Jimmy Cayne had a slight edge on the timing, having fortuitously spent as much time as possible out of the office playing bridge and other extracurricular activities. Dick Fuld preferred a more hands-on approach in his firm’s implosion, turning away suitors and masking losses right up to the buzzer.

Winner: Jimmy Cayne.

Alex Wong/Getty ImagesJon S. Corzine at a House panel last year on MF Global’s collapse.

MF Global vs. the Rogue Trader All-Stars

How does one trump the world’s sneakiest rogue traders operating at firms like SocGen? How about getting the board of directors to allow you to put the entire firm on the line with a half-court Hail Mary of a European sovereign debt trade! Why skulk in the shadows, quietly losing the firm’s cash with unauthorized trades when you can actually do it all in broad daylight from a BlackBerry – and with increased leverage to boot! Sorry Jérôme Kerviel, Jon Corzine wiped the floor with you guys – he beat you so badly there’s still a billion dollars in the wind somewhere!

Winner: MF Global

Raj Rajaratnam vs. Martha Stewart

It’s the insider trading showdown of the century – the Domestic Doyenne put on quite a defensive show on the court, complete with horrible legal advice and the stonewalling of federal agents. But in the end, Raj was just too much for poor Martha – the man was getting assists from tipsters, company executives, expert networks and even rival players in the hedge fund game. Raj’s moves were unstoppable, and poor Martha had no answer to the flirtatious offensive moves of his point guard Danielle “the Refrigerator” Chiesi.

Winner: Raj Rajaratnam

Fred Prouser/ReutersMichael Milken at a health conference in 2009.

Long Term Capital Management vs. Michael Milken

L.T.C.M., led by the unsinkable John Meriwether, brought his A game out to the courts, leveraging every instrument he could get his hands on and wrapping them altogether into a wicked knot that only the entire Wall Street brain trust could unravel in time to prevent the world’s end. But Michael Milken would emerge victorious in terms of absolute damage across the entire economy. By the time he was done, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house nor was there an unleveraged balance sheet in the country – you name it, he indebted it, and sold the bonds off for a double-dip fee on the other side. A crossover dribble so vicious he ought to have been jailed. Oh, wait a minute…

Winner: Michael Milken

Dennis Kozlowski vs. John Thain

The Koz, C.E.O. and master of everything he surveyed at Tyco, got off to an extremely promising start. His raiding and spending of shareholder cash and his “versatility” with accounting seemed like an invincible combo – a $2 million Sardinian birthday party complete with seminude entertainers and a Jimmy Buffett concert, man that’s unbeatable! But Sir John Thain, the cybernetic new C.E.O. of credit crisis-era Merrill Lynch wasn’t backing down so easily. Did Thain let the fact that Merrill was facing losses of capital in the $39 billion range get him down? No, sir! An $87,000 area rug – bang! A $68,000 credenza and a $1,400 parchment waste can – boom! Thain looked Kozlowski dead in his eye and said “Watch me drop $35,000 on a toilet, Homeboy.” And he did. Thain’s $1.2 million office renovation at the bankrupt Merrill Lynch put him over the top in terms of sheer audacity. Better luck next time, Dennis.

Winner: John Thain

Fred Prouser/ReutersGreg Smith said that Goldman Sachs employees referred to clients as “Muppets.”

Abacus vs. Muppetgate

Two Goldman Sachs alums, but only one can advance to the next round! Fresh from the European League, “Fabulous” Fabrice Tourre came to win. Pecking out a half-French, half-English e-mail about the coming real estate collapse was one thing. But then turning around and producing a 65-page flipbook to sell the billion dollar Abacus portfolio of real estate loans? Transcendent! But then Greg Smith comes bounding up the court, fire in his eyes and an acute attack of conscience in his gut. Smith, a former Jewish Olympics bronze medalist in table tennis, is in peak condition as he resigns from Goldman Sachs via an opinion article in The New York Times. He head fakes Fab under the basket, then pivots with his revelation that Goldman MDs refer to their clients as Muppets. In the end, the eyeball-gouging Smith article is simply too viral to be defeated.

Winner: Muppetgate

Tony Avelar/Bloomberg NewsFrank Quattrone, the founder of Qatalyst Partners, at a technology conference in 2010.

Jack Grubman vs. Frank Quattrone

The Ranking for Banking Bowl is one of this tournament’s most anticipated matchups as two, shall we say, morally agile Wall Streeters face off for the title. Jack Grubman is the fan favorite (and at $20 million a year during the telecom bubble’s heyday, one of Wall Street’s highest paid analysts in history). His ability to guarantee Strong Buy ratings to secure lucrative I.P.O. business for Smith Barney put him squarely ahead of the field in the early going. ButFrank Quattrone goes hard in paint for Credit Suisse. He is based in Silicon Valley and runs the vaunted “Friends of Frank” offense — you play by Frank’s rules or you don’t exist. In the end, Grubman was simply no match for Quattrone, a banker who controlled the analysts with an iron fist.

Winner: Frank Quattrone

Stan O’Neal (Merrill Lynch) vs. Angelo Mozillo (Countrywide)

On paper, Angelo Mozillo is easily the more devastating in this head-to-head, and he’s certainly the more orange hued. Having steered his mortgage machine to a $200 billion monstrosity by the peak of the housing bubble, Mozillo walked off just in time to watch it blow up in someone else’s hands (BofA – who else?). Ol’ Angelo nailed the timing walking off the court at halftime with a mere $65 million in fines and disgorgement. But his rival, Stan O’Neal had driven Merrill into the ground in spectacular fashion, turning the old stalwart brokerage firm into a leveraged debt hedge fund almost by accident. O’Neal’s negligence was magnificent to behold, golfing while his firm went to 20, then 30, then 40-to-1 debt to equity all in the name of slathering their bank accounts with bigger and bigger bonuses. And the losses at Merrill were simply breathtaking. From July 2007 to July 2008, a total of $19.2 billion vaporized – or $52 million in losses per day! Reached for comment after the game, the oblivious O’Neal was quoted as saying, “Wait, what happened again?”

Winner: Stan O’Neal

Headline via DrudgeReport.com

See video of gripping victim impact statements here

Parents of murdered British students criticise Barack Obama (via telegraph.co.uk)

The parents of two British students murdered in Florida have criticised President Barack Obama for his lack of compassion over their son’s deaths.

Image 1 of 2

Shawn Tyson

NYPOST.com Exclusive 

Eddie Lampert is cleaning out the closet at Sears, and he’s not feeling sentimental about Lands’ End.

The number-crunching hedge-fund tycoon — who, as chairman of Sears Holdings, has lately been scrambling to raise cash amid heavy losses at the Sears and Kmart retail chains — has quietly been shopping the Dodgeville Wis. mail-order catalog to potential buyers, The Post has learned.

Lampert, who inherited Lands’ End when he took control of Sears in 2005 by merging it with Kmart, has approached a handful of private-equity firms as he looks to raise as much as $2 billion in cash, sources said.

AP

Sears boss Eddie Lampert is shopping the retailer’s underperforming khaki-andplaid Lands’ End brand, which he bought for just under $2B a decade ago.

While it’s early in the process, sources said that Lampert is likely to tap Goldman Sachs to run the sale.

Last month, Sears said it had moved to raise upwards of $750 million by selling 11 stores and spinning off some smaller-format stores as it disclosed it lost $3.1 billion last year.

Sears has since cut a deal to sell three prize stores in Canada for $170 million.

“Everybody is talking to Sears about buying back stores,” according to a real-estate source. “It stinks of desperation.”

A Sears spokeswoman yesterday said the retailer doesn’t “comment on rumor or speculation.”

Lampert is looking to find a buyer who will license Lands’ End to Sears while pursuing growth elsewhere, possibly in Europe, according to a source.

“The idea is that Lands’ End would become something like Tommy Hilfiger,” according to the source, noting that the global brand’s clothing is licensed exclusively to Macy’s in the US.

Nevertheless, many insiders question whether the hard-bargaining billionaire could fully recover the $1.86 billion shelled out in 2002 by former Sears CEO Alan Lacy — a price tag that was widely viewed as inflated at the time.

That’s because Lands’ End — which had seen torrid growth in the 1990s as a family destination for khakis, cardigans and sensible swimsuits — hasn’t grown much under the Sears umbrella.

Sears has mostly kept mum about the brand’s financial performance in recent years, but sources said its profitability hasn’t changed much either, generating between $150 million and $200 million annually in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda.

While Sears had paid more than 10 times Ebitda for Lands’ End, today’s rocky retail environment makes a deal more likely in the $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion range, bankers said.

Lands’ End’s upscale image was an awkward fit from the beginning for Sears, whose stores have become increasingly shabby as Lampert has slashed capital spending.

While it’s rare for a brand to rebound, Martha Stewart has been successful at Macy’s despite a previous stint at Kmart, notes Michael Stone of the Beanstalk Group, a branding consultant.

“A lot of people remember Lands’ End before it went to Sears,” Stone said. “It can certainly be brought back to its former glory by the right company.”
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/lands_end_game_5p3ePLWUD0sqSpTPERJGeM#ixzz1qWI6UmuU

Story via NYPOST.com

A good 20 minutes before the West Village Japanese restaurant Takashi opens its doors at 6 p.m. on a recent Monday, there is already a line of hungry customers forming out front.

Alex Raij, 43, is one such customer. “We’re super-excited,” says Raij, who had enlisted her mother to watch her two kids so that she and her husband, Eder Montero, 36, could dine out.

“We’ve been really keen to try it.”

What could have stoked such excitement in Raij — herself a busy chef at highly regarded tapas spots Txikito and El Quinto Pino?

Raw meat.

Takashi is one of a small but growing number of restaurants around the city catering to those who are rah-rah about consuming their animal flesh raw-raw.

The heart sashimi is a popular draw at Takashi in the West Village — but it’s not for the faint of (heh, heh) heart.

The first dish to come out is the yooke, ground chuck prepared like a Japanese version of steak tartare. Topped with a raw quail egg, it’s adorned with Japanese seaweed and an enormous shiso leaf.

It’s also by far the tamest uncooked dish at Takashi, which gets its meat from some of the better purveyors around, such as Dickson’s Farmstand and Pat LaFrieda.

There’s the heart sashimi — the organ thinly sliced and simply dressed with wasabi and soy. There’s the namagimo — slivers of liver with sesame oil and rock salt. And, perhaps wildest of all, there’s the nama-senmai, a white, chewy third stomach. (Cows have four stomachs — the third one is used to absorb nutrients.) Flash-boiled but essentially raw, it’s served with spicy miso sauce and scallions and somewhat resembles a bowl of discarded computer parts. “I like that snappiness,” says Raij of the stomach dish. But it’s not her favorite. That would have to be the niku-uni, beef tartare topped with sea urchin and wasabi. “That was delicious. It really contrasted [with seared beef] in temperature and flavor,” she says.

While New Yorkers have long embraced the concept of raw fish, our relationship with raw meat has been more complicated. “Raw meats or undercooked foods leave you at risk of infection [of parasites or a slew of other illnesses],” says Dr. Michael Mansour of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The health risks — including tapeworms — are not all that different than the ones you face eating sushi. “If you are a person who is elderly, pregnant or your immune system is compromised . . . you should think very carefully about exposing yourself to raw foods, whether sushi or raw meat,” he adds.

According to NYC’s Department of Health, restaurants must notify diners when food isn’t cooked to required temperatures — either verbally or by printing this on the menu. A diner may also request such a dish. Basically, it’s buyer beware — though the DOH says it will investigate complaints of people getting sick from eating raw food. But with so many New Yorkers obsessed with high-quality ingredients, meat so fresh it can be served raw is seen as a benchmark — not a danger.

“There’s no better way to sample quality than when all the other things are stripped away,” says “Bizarre Foods” TV host Andrew Zimmern. The appeal of eating raw is that one tastes the meat without the smoke or the char associated with the cooking process.

And then there’s the primal urge: “Since cavemen have been dragging a brontosaurus leg to the homestead [people enjoyed raw meat],” adds Zimmern.

At downtown’s Acme, you’ll find endive leaves stuffed with a mix of raw bison and sweet shrimp. At Manzo in Eataly, Piedmontese beef is hand-cut and ground to order. Hakata Tonton, just a couple of blocks from Takashi, offers veal liver sashimi on its menu, as does EN Japanese Brasserie on Hudson Street. Last fall, Hecho en Dumbo in the East Village offered venison tartare on the chef’s menu. (It plans to bring it back next fall, too.)

“This is basically dzik,” says Danny Mena, chef of Hecho en Dumbo, referring to the Yucatan specialty. Mena puts his own spin on the dish by soaking cubes of raw venison in sour orange juice, radishes, red onion and cilantro.

And then there’s raw chicken, a dish not for the squeamish. “There are a lot of places in the city that serve raw chicken,” says Dave Pasternack, chef-owner of Esca in Hell’s Kitchen. But you might have to ask, with a nudge and a wink, to go off the menu.

For some, raw meat is uncontroversial. “It’s my soul food,” says Takashi’s Inoue, who grew up in Osaka. “That’s how we eat in my home in Japan. The meat is very, very fresh.”

At First Oasis, out in Bay Ridge, Said Albahri serves raw kebbeh — minced raw lamb mixed with cracked wheat, onions and spices.

“Raw meat is very popular in Syria,” says Albahri, who grew up in Damascus. His customers include plenty of Middle Easterners and locals — but also the epicurious from as far away as Queens.

Still, some dishes haven’t crossed the cultural divide. At the original branch of Eataly in Turin, Italy, you’ll find a raw sausage sandwich — an item you can’t get in NYC.

And despite the popularity of places like Takashi, it can still be a struggle to get diners to try their meat raw. Mena only serves venison tartare on his tasting menu, where there are no substitutions. “I would never put it on the regular menu,” he says. But one can’t argue with the reaction. “It was very positive,” says Mena. “The customers might not have ordered [it if it was served à la carte], but 99 percent of people would finish it.”

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/food/they_like_it_raw_U1hn0eFWD4rCY2KlDQdm6L#ixzz1qRClL3TG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RvqvXhXwMbw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aJHrfSjcJoY

A JetBlue captain reportedly went berserk on a flight from JFK to Las Vegas today and was kicked out of the flight deck while the plane made an emergency landing.

JetBlue Flight 191 diverted to Amarillo, Texas after the captain was ejected from the cockpit, said a Federal Aviation Administion statement.

An Amarillo TV station quoted a passenger as saying the pilot “began running up and down the aisles screaming.”

The pilot banged on the cockpit door but was not allowed to get back in, the passenger said.

The pilot’s actions prompted a panicked flight attendant to get on the intercom and urge passengers to restrain him.

Several passengers proceeded to tackle the pilot to the floor and hold him down until the plane landed, according to the station.

The FAA statement confirmed the pilot was subdued by passengers.

JetBlue said the captain had a “medical situation” and was taken to an Amarillo hospital.

He was replaced on the flight deck by another off-duty captain who happened to be on the plane, the airline said.

The flight has 135 passengers and five crew members aboard when it departed JFK, the statement said.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/jetblue_captain_goes_berserk_on_A4AFpyyOXCuUvryqgykKwI#ixzz1qLSQv8t0

via dailymail.co.uk 

It was the kind of crime that strikes terror into the hearts of  parents everywhere.

A bright young couple were carjacked after a Saturday night date and murdered in the most brutal way imaginable.

Christopher Newsom, 23, was tied up and raped, shot in the back of the head and then dragged to a railway track and set on fire.

His girlfriend, 21-year-old University of Tennessee student Channon Christian’s fate was even more horrific.

Her death came only after hours of torture, during which time she was raped and savaged with a broken chair leg.

She was beaten in the head and a household bleach was poured down her throat and over her bleeding and battered genital area in an attempt by her attackers to cover any evidence of rape – all while she was still alive.

Torture: Channon Christian was forced to watch the attackers rape and kill her boyfriend Christopher Newsom before she was murdered

Then she was ‘hog-tied’ with curtains and a strip of bedding and a plastic bag was wrapped over her face.

Her body was stashed inside five bigger rubbish liners and dumped in a bin, where, according to the autopsy report, she slowly suffocated to death.

On Monday, the alleged ringleader of the gang accused of the killings goes on trial in Knoxville, Tennessee.

One of the gang has already been convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

But, even though the killings happened in January, 2007, they have attracted very little national and international coverage.

That’s because they do not fit into the conventional contours of an attack in America’s Deep South, where a shameful history of racial intolerance has meant assaults by whites on blacks have historically been regarded in the context of race.

In this case, the races were reversed: the victims were white and the four men and one woman charged in connection with the murders are black.

Ironically, the case has now generated more publicity surrounding the furore over whether or not political correctness was behind the US media’s decision to largely ignore the story than it did for the murders themselves.

Lemaricus Davidson, centre, goes on trial in Tennessee over the murders this week. Letalvis Cobbins, top right, has been jailed for life. Eric Boyd, Vanessa Coleman and George Thomas will be tried after Davidson

Life: Letalvis ‘Rome’ Cobbins was found guilty of multiple counts of first degree murder. He was also convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery

Defence lawyers were quick to say that some of the accused dated white women and even prosecutors denied any racial overtones.

‘There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,’ said John Gill, special counsel to Knox County District Attorney Randy Nichols.

‘It was a terrible crime, a horrendous crime, but race was not a motive. We know from our investigation that the people charged in this case were friends with white people, socialised with white people, dated white people.

‘So not only is there no evidence of any racial animus, there’s evidence to the contrary,’ he added.

But that hasn’t stopped conservative critics from blaming liberal bias in the US mainstream media for failing to cover the attacks.

Columnist and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin weighed in, saying: ‘This case – an attractive white couple murdered by five black thugs –doesn’t fit any political agenda.

‘It’s not a useful crime. Reverse the races and just imagine how the national media would cover the story of a young black couple murdered by five white assailants.’

Country music singer Charlie Daniels pointed out the media frenzy that came after a black woman accused three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of raping her.

The players were later cleared after their accuser changed her story.

But Daniels said on his website: ‘If this had been white on black crime, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their ilk would have descended on Knoxville like a swarm of angry bees.’

Victims: Channon christian, 21, and boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23, were carjacked and murdered after a Saturday night date in Tennessee in 2007

Much of the criticism over the scant coverage of the murders has been on the internet through blogs and websites.

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds said the American media has a ‘template’ for covering white-on-black crime but not the reverse.

‘I think it would have gotten a lot of national play faster if it had been a black couple kidnapped and killed by five white people,’ he told the local paper in Knoxville.

White supremacists have jumped onto the bandwagon, seeking to twist the facts for their own racist agenda.

They spread false details about the murders, claiming the victims were sexually dismembered and that Channon was sexually tortured for days, neither of which is true.

‘The DA’s office is outraged they have tried to abuse the victims by using the death of loved ones for racist purposes,’ John Gill said.

‘The things that have been seized on by these hate groups are things that never happened.’

‘There are people out there that just want to make something even worse than what it already is,’ Channon’s father, Gary Christian, said in a recent interview.

But Chris’s father, Hugh, told a local TV station: ‘Would they have done that to a black couple? I don’t think so.’

‘With all the things they did to them, what else could you call it but hate?’ his wife, Mary, said.

‘I think any kind of crime like that’s a hate crime. Was it racial? No, I don’t think so’, Mr Christian added.

Outrage: Campaigners believe the murders haven’t received extensive media coverage because of race issues

Knox County Sheriff Jimmy Jones said: ‘I don’t believe if they’d been Mexican, Chinese or Japanese it would have mattered. I believe these  people were evil.

‘I believe it was a plan. These two kids just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

According to court testimony, Chris, a talented carpenter and former high school baseball player, and college senior Channon had gone to a friend’s home after a date at a local restaurant when they were held up at gunpoint and carjacked on January 6, 2007.

They were forced to drive to an old clapboard house in one of Knoxville’s toughest neighbourhoods, where their captors, some of them ex-convicts, subjected them to the nightmare ordeal.

Wearing glasses and dressed smartly in trousers, a collared shirt and jumper, Lemaricus Davidson, 28, looked more like a college student than an accused killer during pre-trial hearings.

The seven women and five man jury includes just one black juror. If convicted, Davidson could face the death penalty.

In a separate trial last month, Davidson’s brother, Letalvis Cobbins, 27, was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of multiple counts of first degree murder. He was also convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery.

George Thomas, 27, and Cobbins’ former girlfriend, Vannessa Coleman, 21, will be tried after Davidson.

A fifth defendant, Eric Boyd, 37, is serving an 18-year prison sentence after being convicted of being an accessory to a fatal carjacking.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1220695/Is-political-correctness-blame-lack-coverage-horrific-black-white-killings-Americas-Deep-South-Tennessee-Channon-Christian-Christopher-Newsom-carjack.html#ixzz1qKYKvvzB

via hotair.com  Hat Tip @Woodshedder for the lead

A good catch by The Daily Caller’s Caroline May: As of this morning, two provocative web addresses — Socialists.com and Communists.com — redirect to the Barack Obama campaign website. Type “Socialists.com” into your browser and you’ll swiftly be greeted with an invitation to “like” Obamacare. (Yes, that is the current landing page for Obama’s campaign site — an invitation to express support for Obamacare!) May reports:

It is unknown who the responsible party is.

While it’s unclear if the campaign can come up with a solution for this, Twitter users have already begun to take notice.

“Someone is being cheeky: go to http://communists.com or http://socialists.com” tweeted @zaijian.

“So http://Socialists.com and http://Communists.com redirect to Obama’s website. Yeah, this is going to be a fun campaign,” added @DavidKenner.

The prankster behind this actually betrays uncommon insight into the conflict of visions that exists in this country. In one corner, free marketeers. In the other, collectivists and statists. Individuals range along the spectrum, but it doesn’t change the nature of the conflict, which was introduced in the twentieth century but, surprisingly, was still not settled by the outset of the twenty-first, despite the evidence of numerous failed centrally planned economies.

It serves no point to try to rename “socialism” or “communism” or to eliminate the words from our lexicon. The terms refer to theories of social and economic organization in the same way that “capitalism” does — and the theories continue to attract adherents to greater and lesser degrees. The president has openly stated his approval of wealth redistribution and has also displayed a marked tendency toward central planning, particularly in the area of energy policy. Why he should balk at being called either a “socialist” or a “communist” puzzles me. Why not attempt to defend his ideas instead of hiding behind conservative rhetoric as he pushes a progressive agenda? I’d never recoil from the label of “capitalist”even though “the 99 percent” thinks capitalism is evil. What does it matter to the president if half the country doesn’t like his ideas? Oh, right. That’s why it matters. He has an agenda to push, yes, but he has to win reelection to push it. That’s why this prank is so brilliant. I’d love to hear the president explain why he doesn’t want those links to redirect to his website. Or, better yet, I’d love to hear him explain why he does.

Expanding the definition of “cracker,” a t-shirt featuring the photo of the man who shot Trayvon Martin is now available for purchase.

As seen (above), the shirt has a picture of George Zimmerman and the words “Pussy Ass Cracker.” Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic, killed Martin, 17, last month while acting as a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida.

The shirt’s “pussy ass cracker” line is apparently a reference to lyrics from the rapper Plies’s song “100 Years,” which bemoans stiff sentences handed out by racist judges.

VIA THESMOKINGGUN.COM

Japan’s markets open higher; Nikkei average up 0.3% – @MarketWatch

Eric Risberg / AP

Mallory Whitt works at her desk at the offices of the Wikipedia Foundation in San Francisco. The nonprofit is one of the largest websites.

By Douglas A. McIntyre, 24/7 Wall St.

via MSNBC.com

The 10 most-visited websites in America may share a few characteristics, but interestingly enough, none are in the same business, with the exception of two portals. Each has a different business model as well. An analysis of these largest sites shows that no single model has helped one type of Internet property or another to dominate the web in terms of traffic. The collection of media that is the Internet shows how essential web diversity has become to Americans’ lives.

This list of the most visited sites includes the world’s largest search engine, web portal, video site, software company, social network, encyclopedia, and e-commerce site. One of the sites on this list, Wikipedia, is a nonprofit that runs on a budget of a few million dollars a year. Another, Google, has revenue that will be well above $50 billion. Revenue is not essential to size online, but size can be essential to revenue.

Internet giants have been in particular focus recently, mostly for three reasons. The first is that large sites collect millions and millions of pieces of information about their visitors. Governments, both inside the U.S. and, especially, in Europe have become concerned with how this information is gathered, to whom it is given, what is done with it, and for what financial consideration. Naturally, sites with the largest number of visitors are at the center of this because their inventories of user data are so vast.

Another reason large Internet properties are of interest lately is the upcoming initial public offering of Facebook. The online social networking site has close to one billion members, many of whom spend hundreds of hours each month on the site. The company’s value is set at about $100 billion ahead of the public offering, which is extraordinary because Facebook’s revenue was less than $4 billion in 2011. There is a great disparity among the value of the most visited websites, causing a debate about why users of an e-commerce site are worth any more or less than users of a search engine or a social network.

Finally, sites with tens of millions of visitors are in focus also because of the mass movement of Internet users from PC to smartphones. Smartphones have browsers that operate nearly identically to those on PCs. Strong processors and high-speed wireless connections allow smartphone users to visit the same sites and use them in the same way as they do on computers. The owners of all sites are in a frenzy to see if they can hold onto their user base in the smartphone environment. What happens to the very largest sites will at least be instructional.

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With each year, the Internet becomes increasingly crowded with websites of various sizes, features and functions. The most-visited sites have been among the largest ones for several years. That tells a great deal about the real interests of Americans, probably as much as any other set of markers.

24/7 Wall St. used data from Quantcast to rank the sites. The rank is based on the number of people in the United States who visit each site in a month. The data are updated daily. Revenue figures are based on SEC filings for the public companies and for those in the process of going public. For others, the information is based on data from third party analysts. Revenue data or estimates are for full year 2011.

10. Microsoft.com

• Monthly audience: 61,981,128
• Year founded: 1975
• Revenue size: $69.9 billion

Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) website traffic does not include visits to content sites it controls such as the MSN portal, MSNBC news site or the Bing search engine. The visitors counted are for the online corporate destination of the world’s largest software company. Microsoft’s site primary purposes are to sell, download and support its most widely used software products — Windows and its business suite of tools. Microsoft.com is also the destination for public company information, including financial data and the company’s significant patent and intellectual property legal activity.

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9. WordPress.com

• Monthly audience: 63,933,088
• Year founded: 2003
• Revenue size: $10 million

WordPress has two large online destination sites. One is WordPress.org, a place where millions of bloggers download basic open source software they can use to create and maintain their own websites. The WordPress.org traffic is not included in WordPress.com’s traffic figure. WordPress.com is the destination for a broad spectrum of users — from small bloggers to large companies — that use the site to post information and design their blogs. WordPress.com is operated by Automattic, which sells custom design, custom domains and upgrades to the basic WordPress open source software. While the WordPress for-profit business has products used by a large number of different media and large companies, Automattic does not charge high enough fees to make the “upgrade” business a large one.

8. Wikipedia.org

• Year founded: 2001
• Monthly audience: 77,354,504
• Revenue: $20 million

Wikipedia is operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. The work of the foundation is to support a collection of open source encyclopedias. This already includes dozens of encyclopedias written in the world’s most common languages. The number of articles created for the sites is huge. The English version alone has 3.9 million articles. The German language edition has 1.4 million articles. The tiny budget of the foundation is being used to drive global traffic to the level of one billion readers and the number of articles to 50 million. All of the capital for these projects is donated to the nonprofit foundation. Wikipedia is most famous for making information on a universe of subjects available for free to anyone with access to the Internet. But with such a large amount of content and small staff to monitor its quality, Wikipedia is also infamous for being inconsistent with mixed quality in different subjects.

7. MSN

• Monthly audience: 78,095,128
• Year founded: 1995
• Revenue: $2.5 billion

MSN.com is one of the three largest Internet content portals, along with Yahoo! and Aol (NYSE: AOL). Its business is supported by display advertising and search revenue. The portal model is based on providing millions of visitors access to a large range of content. This includes a number of areas that used to be exclusively the role of national magazines, newspapers, radio and television. News posted by the portals is among their most visited content, and so is content about sports, entertainment and self-help. The portals have expanded into areas that can get some local advertising revenue, particularly automobiles and real estate. Premium news and entertainment content have recently become a large part of the offerings of these sites as well.

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6. Twitter

• Monthly audience: 90,790,080
• Year founded: 2006
• Revenue: $140 million

Twitter is described alternatively as a “microblog” and as a “social network.” Users, which by many estimates exceed 300 million, can post messages of up to 140 characters at a time. This is microblogging to the extent that the “tweets” are available for large numbers of people to read. It is a social network to the extent that it allows users to exchange details about their lives, plans and interests. The problem Twitter faces is that it has not been able to turn what some industry experts believe is 200 million tweets a day into a viable business. Advertisers have shown a reluctance to put marketing messages into these tweets because they are so short and because Twitter users have often rejected using a service that has become partially commercialized. Some of the Twitter users with the largest followings, mostly celebrities connected to millions of fans, use these followings as a way to promote causes, products or even their own careers. So far, this has proved a more successful way to exploit the service than traditional advertising.

5. Yahoo!

• Monthly audience: 94,840,280
• Year founded: 1995
• Revenue: $5 billion

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) has been at the center of a number of controversies over the past several years. It rejected a rich bid by Microsoft in 2008, had three CEOs in four years, and executed a large series of layoffs. Recently, a substantial portion of its board of directors resigned. Yet, the remarkable size of the website’s traffic has not changed, and the parent company continues to be profitable, despite a lack of revenue growth. Some of the sites on this list would welcome Yahoo!’s profits. The Internet portal makes money from a combination of display and search advertising. Yahoo! runs far behind Google in terms of search engine traffic, and it holds only 14 percent of the U.S. market for search activity, according to Comscore. But it still manages to capitalize on that small share.

4. Amazon.com

• Monthly audience: 99,374,352
• Year founded: 1994
• Revenue: $48 billion

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is the primary website for the world’s largest e-commerce company. It is an online superstore with an immensely diverse virtual inventory. It sells nearly anything brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Kroger (NYSE: KR) sell. And that is to list just a few. Amazon has used the traffic and customer base it has established over the years to enter a number of new, lucrative and even revolutionary businesses. This includes electronic books, which barely existed five years ago. It includes the e-reader business, which Amazon pioneered with the 2007 introduction of the Kindle. And it includes the online video-on-demand business. Amazon has recently been transformed from a company that competes with other retailers to one that also competes with the likes of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) in the content delivery business and with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) in the consumer electronics sector.

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3. Facebook

• Monthly audience: 149,488,208
• Year founded: 2004
• Revenue: $3.7 billion

Facebook, the world’s largest social network with nearly one billion members, plans to raise enough money through an IPO this year to value the company at nearly $100 billion. The site is not even 10 years old. The meteoric rise of the business is largely due to how it altered people’s use the Internet. Before Facebook, Internet use was mostly passive. Visitors went to a portal to get information, to a search engine to get research results, and to video sites to watch content. Facebook helped the Internet evolve into a two-way interpersonal medium on which people voluntarily offer a great deal of their personal information to interact with friends, family and business associates. In the process, Facebook has been at the core of one of the most revolutionary changes in human interaction. Despite this, Facebook has not been able to find a way to make a great deal of money from its huge membership, particularly when compared to Google and Amazon.

2. YouTube

• Monthly audience: 159,975,920
• Year founded: 2005
• Revenue: $1.6 billion

YouTube is the largest video site in the world. To give an idea of its dominance of the U.S. market, 18.6 billion videos were viewed at this division of Google in January against the a total of 40 billion nationwide for all websites. The average number of minutes per viewer for Google’s video content, almost all of it on YouTube, was 448 minutes in January, compared to 57 minutes on Yahoo! and 22 minutes on Facebook. YouTube’s sales are only 5 percent of Google’s total revenue, an extremely small amount given its size. To a great extent, this is because most of the content posted at the site continues to be low-quality, user-created videos, and these videos do not create an environment attractive to major marketers. YouTube has found other ways to pursue revenue. Premium content owners have started to use YouTube to build audiences, and they often pay YouTube for traffic. YouTube also has set up a paid video rental business and joint ventures with several studios. Despite all of this, its revenue was only $1.6 billion in 2011, as based on several estimates. YouTube is the only site on this list that could not have existed before the advent of the broadband technology that allows the transfer of large amounts of data online.

1. Google

• Monthly audience: 185,167,472
• Year founded: 1998
• Revenue: $37.5 billion

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is the largest search engine in the U.S. Its dominance goes beyond that. It is also the largest search engine by market share throughout most of Europe. The only large markets where it has stiff competition happen to be emerging markets with huge populations such as China, India and Russia. Google has two substantial challenges now that will determine whether its business can continue to expand at the extraordinary rate of the past decade. First, there is a great deal of competition to become the primary search engine on new tablet PCs like the Apple iPad and smartphones like the iPhone. As more Americans turn to these portable devices to use the Internet, it is not certain that Google will be able to hold the dominant position it currently has against Microsoft and Yahoo! The second challenge Google faces is expanding its other offerings beyond search. It is unclear whether it can use its Google.com site as a means to help it successfully market these products, including applications that compete with Microsoft’s Windows products or e-commerce products like Google Wallet. Google has yet to demonstrate that it is more than a single legged company — at least so far as sales are concerned.

Developing…

Printed $542.80 …down from day’s high of $601.80

Developing…

via Bill James @ grantland.com

There are three stages in the history of baseball. In the first stage, which ended about 1920, if you stood up in the front row and bellowed, “Hey, Cobb, I hear your mudder used to work bachelor parties,” Ty Cobb would come over to your seat and personally introduce you to his knuckles. In the third stage, which began about 1983, if you stand up and scream, “Hey, Pujols, I hear your mommy used to work bachelor parties,” three men with walkie-talkies will immediately surround you and escort you off the premises. But in the intermediate stage, you could take off your shirt, stand on your seat, and yell any goddamned idiotic thing you wanted to, and nobody would do anything except the beer vendors, who would come by your seat every inning to sell you as many cold ones as you wanted to buy.

Ah, those were the days; syphilis could be cured and AIDS hadn’t started yet. Boobies could be assumed to be natural, and condoms were only sold in the bathrooms of service stations. You could walk up to the gate of Fenway Park 10 minutes before game time and buy a ticket behind the dugout, where you were guaranteed to be seated next to some loud, drunken idiot screaming at Carlton Fisk about his mother. You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not; I went to 40 major league games in 1982, and I was seated within 15 feet of a loud, drunken fan every game — even when I didn’t go with Neyer. (I’m joking; Neyer was a little kid then, and he doesn’t have to drink to start screaming at players. He doesn’t even have to be seated where a player can hear him. I’ve known him to do it through his television set, cold sober.)

The Internet is still in Stage One; we have loud drunks who feel the need “comment” on everything, but nobody knows what to do about them except to scream back at them, which doesn’t really seem to help. They’re called “trolls” now. I used to be kind of a troll myself, I think. I have sympathy for them, philosophically, and I haven’t shot any of them because they won’t let you bring your gun to the ballpark anymore. Oh, yes; you could; you could carry anything into a game in 1980 — backpacks, firecrackers, plastic explosives. Rick Monday became a national hero in 1976 by rescuing an American flag from a couple of trolls who had jumped the fence and were pouring gasoline on the flag. Think about it: You could bring a gasoline canister into a ballpark, and nobody would say anything about it. Those were the days, man; ah, the stuff I wish I had thought of doing when I still had the chance. Vince Coleman once threw a cherry bomb at a group of fans. His reputation suffered, but I understood what he was thinking. It was just his way of getting even with us.

The second stage of baseball history ended in the early 1980s after an incident in Houston not directly involving the Bush family. Cesar Cedeno had been involved in an unfortunate event involving the death of a young woman in his hotel room, and a distinguished gentleman was screaming at him for three days, yelling things like “Murderer” and the N-word, and also berating Cedeno’s wife, who was seated nearby. Finally Cedeno had had as much of that as he was going to take, and he went Ty Cobb all over the guy — not that I should pick on Cobb; Ruth, Anson, Joe Tinker, and most of the other superstars of that era also dealt with their detractors in a direct, personal manner. Cedeno was suspended for five games, but after a while baseball thought about it and said, “You know, maybe we should have done something about that situation there before Cedeno did.”

That’s the thing about regulating conduct; there is always some conduct that doesn’t get policed. When baseball effectively prohibited its players from defending their good names with physical threats and small weapons, this in essence required the players to put up with verbal abuse from fat, pimply guys whom they could have very easily beaten the grits out of. People say things in public all the time now for which, if you had said them 40 years ago, somebody would have kicked your ass. We’ve regulated the ass-kicking, so the rudeness is out of control, and we wind up with Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh doing political commentary that falls in the same general class as drunken, shirtless bellowing.

I used to know both of those guys. Limbaugh used to work for the Royals. I didn’t really know him, but I bumped into him a couple of times. Olbermann used to be a broadcaster; funny, funny guy. They’re good guys; I wouldn’t have any trouble playing poker with either one of them, but I’m not sure what moron gave either one of them a microphone.

Which is an unfair thing to say; they have complex political philosophies, both of them, and they have microphones because somebody figured out that you could make a lot of money by combining a sophisticated political philosophy with oral flatulence. But I was reminiscing about the good old days, when men were men and high school girls didn’t have nipple rings, and you knew who the heavyweight boxing champion of the world was — even the high school girls did — because there was only one at a time and he was a big deal.

In his 1929 book 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Warden Lewis E. Lawes says that his young daughter, who was born inside the prison, knew all of the prisoners and was allowed to wander freely around the prison, with a few obvious out-of-bounds penalties. Think about what a different world that is from a modern prison. If I could divert your attention for just a second with a serious question: How did we slip backward like that? How did prisons become these violent hellholes that they now are, so that it is unimaginable to have an 8-year-old girl wandering the hallways of a maximum-security lockup?

It has to do with the three stages I was talking about before. Prisons in that era were in Stage One: If a prisoner acted belligerently toward the guards, the guards would pull out the rubber hoses. The Warren Court put an end to that era, which was a good idea, I suppose, but that pushed us into Stage Two, during which baseball fans would scream at the players and nobody would do anything about it. The inmates now can abuse the guards, and the guards don’t really know what to do about it other than to transfer the offender to an isolation unit when it gets too bad. What is really needed is not a program of reacting to the worst abuse the prisoners can come up with, but a program of reacting swiftly to small infractions. But prisons have pushed the living conditions of the convicts down as far as the courts will allow them to be pushed, so the wardens have little operating margin to react to small infractions.

Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Crowd Control: For every problem you solve, there is an equal and opposite problem that you’ll get around to in about 60 years. Warden Lawes created sports teams for the inmates, to give them something worthwhile to do; this became a popular idea, and for 50 years almost all prisons had sports teams. These can still be seen in a few old movies like The Longest Yard. If wardens now would create sports teams or, for example, let the prisoners play video games, this would create an operating margin for the authorities, something that could be easily taken away if the prisoner misbehaved. But if the courts required that prisoners had a right to play video games, that would just make the problem worse, since that would mean, in essence, that the prisoners could play video games and throw urine at the guards — the best of both worlds.

I’m in Florida right now. Florida — which has an appalling crime rate — has lots of “security” provided by old men in golf carts. Every hotel, strip mall, ballpark, and shoeshine parlor is patrolled by two septuagenarians in a golf cart. We make fun of them, but the fact is that they do provide a good deal of security, by the simple actions of regular crowd control. Crowd control makes the really bad guys stand out from the masses of people milling around, which makes the bad guys go off somewhere else, where they’re not so conspicuous.

Baseball games have crowd control pretty well figured out by this time; the prisons, not so much, while the Internet and reasoned political debate have met at the intersection of screaming and deceit. It’s a truism that people act worse in groups than they do as individuals. In my experience this truism is mostly untrue. Most of the time people actbetter in crowds than they do as individuals; it’s just that when this is true, we take it for granted, and when it is not true, we notice it. People act as they are expected to act, plus every crowd creates an ethic of conduct that is, to an extent, inexplicable. You can see a movie with one audience and they’ll be roaring at the jokes; you can see the same movie at the same time in the same theater the next day and people will be sitting there snarling like Carlos Zambrano in a room full of umpires. Thirty years ago people expected to go to a baseball game, get drunk, and act stupid; now, no one expects to be able to do that, so the issue doesn’t really come up. Crowd control — like prison control and standing up a democracy — is mostly a matter of managing expectations.

via newyorker.com

I am Marie-Céline Dundelle, and I do not need a book contract to reveal that French women are superior in all matters. Our secret lies in an attitude toward life, a point of view that I can only call Frenchy. For example, let us discuss weight loss. The American woman obsesses over every calorie and sit-up, while in France we do not even have a word for fat. If a woman is obese, we simply call her American. Whenever my friend Jeanne-Hélène has gained a few pounds, I will say to her, “Jeanne-Hélène, you are hiding at least two Americans under your skirt, and your upper arms are looking, how you say, very Ohio.”

To maintain my figure, I eat only half portions of any food, always arranging it on my plate in the shape of a semicolon. For exercise, at least once a day I approach a total stranger and slap him. And late each afternoon I read a paragraph of any work of acclaimed American literary fiction, which makes me vomit.

As for family life, Americans are far too concerned with a child’s self-esteem and accomplishments. The French woman knows that to build a child’s inner strength it is best either to completely ignore the child or to belittle him. As I was giving birth to my daughter, I refused to put down my copy of French Vogue. When it was over, I turned to my husband and remarked, “I have just had an unusually large bowel movement that will never be as attractive as me.” During my son’s thirteenth-birthday party, I ordered him to remove all his clothing, and I told the assembled guests, “You see? That is why we raised him as a girl.” My wisdom can be traced to the influence of my own mother. When I was five years old, I asked her, “What is love?” She took my small, flowerlike face in her slender hands and replied, “What do I look like, Yoda?”

Although we French are renowned for our sophistication in matters of romance, French men have a reputation for being cads. Americans will point a finger at Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is indeed a portly, repugnant fellow and a man who has been accused of assaulting women. When asked about Strauss-Kahn’s participation in orgies, his lawyer stated that Strauss-Kahn may have been unaware that the women involved were prostitutes because they were naked. Yet Strauss-Kahn’s wife has stood by him, for a simple reason: because she has married a French man, at least she will never have to say, “My name is Mrs. Newt Gingrich.”

The French woman is known for being effortlessly chic. I have, in fact, offered tutorials on elegance to American women. I will hand an American an Hermès scarf and ask her to tie it somewhere on her body, anywhere but around her neck. A French woman might use the scarf to secure a ponytail, or she’ll knot it loosely around the strap of her Chanel handbag. Sadly, most of my American pupils either use the scarf as a makeshift sling or eat it. I have attempted to counsel many American women against overdressing. I told one woman, “I’m going to turn my back, and I want you to take off three things.” A moment later, when I faced her, the woman had removed her teeth, one of her eyes, and an Ace bandage.

French culture remains unmatched. Our films include rollicking farces, searing documentaries, and quietly explosive investigations of family life. In these films, to avoid vulgarity, nothing happens, and none of the actors’ faces ever move. French filmmaking has recently reached a peak with the almost entirely silent Oscar-winning movie “The Artist.” Truecinéastes say that the ultimate French film will be a still photograph of a dead mime.

The French woman has given so much to the world. Marie Antoinette alone has inspired books, movies, operas, and the hair style and perspective of Donald Trump. Our current First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, is not only a role model but an ex-model. But the most glorious and eternal symbol of French womanhood is, of course, Joan of Arc, because she was a cigarette. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/03/26/120326sh_shouts_rudnick#ixzz1pgvEKaf5

Denver Broncos, Peyton Manning reach agreement on 5-year, $96 million contract, league source says – @espn

via ESPN.com