Stan Musial

Stan Musial was one of the recipients this week of the presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.

I was an avid Cardinals fan growing up in St. Louis and saw Stan the Man play once at the old Busch stadium in a game against the Milwaukee Braves, with Warren Spahn pitching.

Even when we moved back to Pittsburg, I listened to the Cardinals every night on the radio. That was the team with Bill White, Ken Boyer, Curt Flood, Julian Javier and other legends. Harry Carey and Jack Buck called the games. It just doesn't get any better than that.

The end of Wall Street

I've been surprised by the lack of reaction to news that Germany is taking over the New York Stock Exchange. Perhaps because it was portrayed as a merger, people don't realize it is a takeover, even though both NYT and WSJ spelled it out his morning?

It was a scandal back in the day when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center. Now the very symbol of American capitalism is being swallowed up by the Germans. Can people simply not get their heads around the idea that we are actually surrendering the temple to Money on Wall Street? The very building that gives Wall Street its meaning as the center of American finance?

Where is Michael Bloomberg bewailing the end of New York as a global financial center, upstaged by Frankfurt and even by London, which at least retains its primacy in its link with Toronto? Where is Chuck Schumer? Since when does a merger not mean a huge loss of jobs for the acquired company? And not just NYSE itself, but everyone who works in the securities business in New York. Wall Street vanishes and New York has no better claim on being the country's financial capital than Chicago or Boston or San Francisco, perhaps less so.

But wait, you say, the stock exchange will still be there. No, it won't. It's gone, subsumed into a German-controlled financial conglomerate that will ensure stock trading of American equities will become as deracinated from New York as Chinese equities.

But maybe this is all premature, and the deal will fall apart. Or Bloomberg and Schumer have weapons they have not yet deployed. Or that toothless old, uh, lady, the SEC, will put the kabosh on it. Doubtful.

So why aren't people reacting? Has the revulsion against Wall Street reached the point that everyone is thinking Good Riddance? Let Frankfurt worry about Goldman Sachs. The rich underwriting and trading culture that sustained Wall Street has long since vanished into the ether of online trading. The New York Stock Exchange resisted the transition to electronic trading for too long, and then came too late to ever recapture its lead. Or perhaps those jobbers knew what was afoot, and that the exchange was doomed from the moment Nasdaq opened its doors.

Congratulations to Deutsche Boerse. Who would have thought that a little company that used to occupy the attic offices of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange would one day cast its net across the Atlantic and across the continent. For Deutsche Boerse has now succeeded in capturing Euronext after all.

It also signals the victory of futures and derivatives over stocks and bonds, for that is the muscle that enabled Deutsche Boerse to take over the Big Board, which failed here as well to anticipate the future. End of an era.

Aol strikes again

I can't see anything good coming out of the merger between Aol and Huffington Post. I was working at then-AOL when it undertook what is largely seen as the most disastrous merger of all time with its takeover of Time Warner. As a deadweight in Time Warner, Aol missed all the chances to reinvent itself as something useful. After it was spun off and Tim Armstrong came along saying that the company's future lay in content, I was more skeptical than ever.

The idea of the merger, apparently, is to harness HuffPost's large audience to Aol's other content and make real money on ads. There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, it's hard to know where to begin. HuffPost has its audience because it put up content that people wanted to read. The fact that Aol's expensive new content has not found its own audience speaks for itself.

But the crux of the matter is that what makes HuffPost work, and the only thing of value to pay $300 million for, is that the site's hugely left-wing audience loves it for a freedom it cannot possible have as part of a large corporation. The site's main capital is a group of bloggers and commenters and "community" that will now search for a new spiritual home, and leave HuffPost bereft of so much Aol wanted to acquire.

I was equally baffled by the linkup between Daily Beast and Newsweek. Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong are presumably all smart people, so maybe there's just something I don't see.

Even in the AOL-Time Warner merger there were areas where you could pretend there were synergies. There's nothing visible in this new merger except irreparable damage to HuffPost, which was on its way to being something, and another lost cause for Aol, which may finally succumb to its long series of mistakes and missed opportunities.

Howard Kurtz

Wow, Howard Kurtz was erratic even when he had good editors and now at Daily Beast he is verging into total incompetence. His naive whitewash of the Tucson shooting is embarrassing and shameful.

Can he really be stupid enough to write this: "This isn't about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map; it's about a lone nutjob who doesn't value human life"?

Apparently. The lesson here is clear: inflammatory rhetoric, while poisoning politics for those of use who think of ourselves as rational and stable, can set off the mentally ill, and it is not just the "fault" of the mentally ill. It's like the pathetic shill on TV Sunday who once again proffered the feeble NRA excuse that it's not guns that are responsible since most gun owners are adult. The problem is that a mentally unstable young man, with a documented history of disruption and borderline violence, can get an automatic weapon so easily.

It is not a sign of unity or compassion to bury our heads in the sand like Kurtz would have us do and pretend that, hey, what can you do, there's nutjobs out there? The Pima County sheriff has a much better grasp of what's going on than this useless pundit.

Update: And let's add Peter Beinart, another Daily Beast contributor, whose temporizing pseudoliberalism pretty much destroyed The New Republic to the list of white-washers.

William Daley

I don't really have a problem with William Daley as White House chief of staff, though his work for JP Morgan Chase is disturbing in light of the role Wall Street is now playing in the nation's economy and politics. But he is certainly the cabinet-level stature that Chris Matthews was calling for, and as some have pointed out, he is at least a "grown-up." Perhaps, as E.J. Dionne says, his very presence will reassure the corporate world and give Obama more leeway to veer left, though I think that's optimistic.

What's noticeable is that naming the White House chief of staff is not only front-page news, but lead story news. Don't think that was the case when Nixon named Haldeman and Ehrlichman, though they may be the reason why it is so newsworthy now. But I think it also means that people no longer perceive the president as making his own decisions, and see him rather as an arbiter of advice rendered. Certainly in the first half of Obama's term, decision-making remained totally opaque and it would be disappointing to think that Obama himself made so many bad decisions.

Steven Pearlstein

This Washington Post columnist hit a home run today with his passionate denunciation of Republicans' use of "job-killing" as a hot button description of Democratic policies to distract from the job-killing aspect of their own policies.

Here is Pearlstein's stirring conclusion: "So the next time you hear some politician or radio blowhard or corporate hack tossing around the "job-killing" accusation, you can be pretty sure he's not somebody to be taken seriously. It's a sign that he disrespects your intelligence, disrespects the truth and disrespects the democratic process. By poisoning the political well and making it difficult for our political system to respond effectively to economic challenges, Republicans may turn out to be the biggest job killers of all."

'Wealthy'

I never did understand why Obama and the Democrats latched onto the $250,000 threshold as defining the "wealthy" in the whole tax cut debate.

Just this week, the president explained that Robert Gibbs would be leaving the White House because he's been working for "relatively modest pay." Yet, Gibbs' $172,000 salary, along with the earnings from wife, a practicing attorney, would almost certainly put them in that category of "wealthy."

There's no question Gibbs will make more money working as a "private consultant" for the Obama reelection campaign, but the president's remark exposes the hypocrisy of his rhetoric.