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Filed under: Government/Legal, GM, Earnings/Financials

While General Motors is busy making marketing hay from its early payoff of $5.8 billion in loans, Senator Chuck Grassley and House Representative Darrell Issa aren’t buying it. “It looks like GM merely used one source of TARP funds to repay another,” said Grassley of General Motors financial moves. Grassley has asked for justification of the creative money-shuffling from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Meanwhile, Representative Issa is looking at the new fuel economy standards that went into effect last month. Documents about the negotiations leading up to the 35.5 mpg standard have been requested from GM, Ford and Chrysler, as well as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Suzuki, Volkswagen and BMW. Issa contends that the standard only passed because GM and Chrysler were put in a hammerlock and forced to agree in exchange for bailouts.

[Source: Detroit Free Press]

Report: GOP argues GM loan payoff just a TARP money shuffle originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 24 Apr 2010 13:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The mayor has a lot of nerve blaming “people at the
highest levels” of DWP management of being “the biggest defenders of
the
status quo,” of failing to respond to the policy direction,” of being engaged in “an absolute war” against his leadership.

Year after year, this mayor and previous mayors, this City Council and previous ones have used the DWP as a cash cow of cover up their gross mismanagement of the city and its finances.

They politicized every policy decision, appointed nine general managers in 10 years who lacked the experience or ability to run the largest municipal utility in America, demanded they carry out political agendas without regard to the interests of the residents and businesses, without regard to the need to modernize the infrastructure.

They have failed to carry out comprehensive strategies to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or to achieve moderation in consumption of water and power.

They have turned the citizen watchdogs who are supposed to serve as an independent buffer between politicians and bureaucrats into stooge commissions, corrupting the intent the City Charter.

At every juncture, they have given into blackmail, rewarding IBEW union bully Brian D’Arcy with spectacular contracts, featherbedding and law work rules. They have taken millions of dollars of his union’s money for their campaigns and quaked at his threats

D’Arcy takes umbrage at the mayor suggesting his union is “part of the problem and part of the solution, saying he is “shocked and disappointed” at the mayor’s “failing to take responsibility for his own actions” in running the DWP.

But so what?

The mayor and his latest unqualified DWP general manager Austin Beutner already have taken any question of wage concessions from D’Arcy off the table even as they develop phony plans for green energy and fake their commitment to transparency when all they want is billions of dollars more in higher rates from the public to add thousands of new jobs to the IBEW rolls and enrich green-washer environmentalists and green investors with insider connections.

The only statement with even an ounce of truth in it that has come out of the mayor’s circle was fired GM David Nahai’s retort to D’Arcy’s pointing the finger of blame at the succession of DWP bosses:

“If Mr. D’Arcy truly wants to uncover the cause of the present problems at the DWP, a good, long look in the mirror might help,” Nahai said.

The whole truth is they all need to look in the mirror.

Everyone in power over the last decade or long kept rates low by relying on dirty coal for half the city’s power so they could afford the soaring IBEW salaries and benefits and declare as surplus electricity revenue 5, 6, 7, now 8 percent of it to keep the city general solvent.

Understand, the city already gets $300 million from the 10 percent utility tax on power and now Antonio is counting on more than $250 million extra from the “power surplus” next year, $37 million more than the DWP is supposed to supply this year if it turns over the $73.5 million that is being held hostage to force the Council to approve a rate hike.

The general fund gets 12.5 percent of all its revenue from your electricity payments to DWP, money that is used to pay the salaries and benefits of other city workers who account for 80 percent of the basic costs of city government.

Don’t kid yourself, the mayor and Council talked about 4,000 layoffs and sweetened pensions for 2,400 other city workers but in the end only 103 employees have even received pink slips and a total of 750 are targeted in the mayor’s 2010-11 budget for layoff or transfer.  incentivized early retirement

All that talk was phony because all they have ever been concerned about is protecting city workers’ jobs, not public services. Every one of the hundreds of workers transferred already to special funds, the harbor, airport and DWP already are providing services to the public — not police or fire or library or parks or planning or code enforcement or any other core services.

City Hall has become a jobs program, not a services provider.

If there was any doubt just look at how the mayor has ceded so much of his authority to “jobs czar” Austin Beutner whose stated mission — when you translate his slick pronouncements lacking in specificity — is to protect and create city jobs and buy whatever jobs he can in the private sector whether they are in sweatshops or the low-wage service industry.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, here are some of Beutner’s recent pronouncements:

“What people don’t realize is that at the DWP, labor is only 25 percent
of its cost. And, they do a good job in their work. What
I want to do is look at the other three-quarters of the agency and make
sure costs are in line. People have made labor the issue and I don’t
think it’s the top issue facing the agency.”

“What I want to do is make sure the mayor, the commission and the City
council area all sharing the same information and make sure we avoid
falling in to the same sort of trap.
What I have started to do
and hope to do is look at all the information we have about the DWP and
see what we can do to restore trust.”

He admits they can’t hire a professional utility manager because they have made such a mess of the DWP, yet he wants to get rid of or demote the best professionals the DWP has, create more DWP jobs, be just transparent enough to get the Council to go along, as they just did deceitfully in approving a 5 percent rate hike permanently, with one rate hike after another.

The problem is bigger than just cutting deals with business, labor and the Council to shove rate hikes down people’s throats and make them subsidize the bills of hundreds of thousands of other customers.

The DWP must come clean about everything.

The year-old and almost totally ignored study by PA Consulting, the same firm that just sabotaged the mayor’s 20 to 30 percent rate hike, is a blueprint for all that’s wrong with the DWP.

Wages and benefit costs must be brought in line with that of private utilities and the same efficiency must be achieved. Costs and rates need to be made clear. We need to know who’s really paying the bills and who is not.

When the DWP is totally transparent and property oversight put in place, when plans for fixing the infrastructure and investing in green technology are thoroughly and publicly analyzed, when providing of water and power services and not jobs and subsidizee economic development are the strategic goals, then we can talk about how much and how fast we can spend our money to fix what they have broken.

Anything less is just another ripoff of the public by a rogue agency.

Apart from Intel and AMD, VIA technologies are also one of the x86-64 processor manufacturers in the market. VIA CPUs might not be as popular as their Intel and AMD counterparts, but the company still has some market share. Today, VIA unveiled their Nano E-series of processors. The Nano-E series of CPUs have native 64 bit software support and virtualization support.

At the time of their launch, the Nano-E CPUs will be available in speeds ranging from 800MHz to 1.8Ghz. The CPUs will also feature VIA’s integrated media system processors and various other codec’s including HD video playback and 3D graphics acceleration. VIA have guaranteed that these processors will have a longevity of seven years. The Nano-E series processors from VIA have many other top-end features so as to support the upcoming Windows Embedded Standard 7.

The Windows Embedded Standard 7 states that every CPU should double the amount of data it can process per clock cycle. But according to VIA, virtual software deployment could revolutionize the embedded market. VIA said that it expects to “become the norm, not the exception for upcoming embedded system developers”.

(Source)

Don’t miss these Related Posts:

• Rumor: Apple May Use AMD Processors In Its Line-up
• AMD Launches Low Power Consuming 6 Core Based Server Class Processors
• AMD Set To Release Many New Inexpensive Processors
• Virtualization Added To Lower Spec’ed Intel Processors
• AMD Unveils the Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 Dual Core Processors

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Today’s casualty is Caitlin Spaan, veep for Palm’s carrier marketing. It’s a comparatively small loss compared to when their Senior VP of software bailed two weeks ago, but it amplifies an increasingly obvious message: Palm is in a death spiral. More »

Published April 23

Janie Brinkman, 73, of Kennewick, watches Rudy Guidry of Pasco play her late husband’s tenor saxophone Thursday at Columbia Basin College. Brinkman wondered what to do with two saxophones that belonged to her late husband when she read about the CBC student. Guidry is an accomplished sax and tuba musician who could never afford to buy his own instruments but didn’t let that stand in the way of learning to play. Brinkman met up with the 21-year-old at CBC and gave him her husband’s Yamaha alto and tenor saxophones. Photo by Richard Dickin of the Tri-City Herald

Photo Gallery: Sax Donation

KENNEWICK — Janie Brinkman, 73, thought she might sell her late husband’s two beloved saxophones.

Then she read a recent Herald story about 21-year-old Rudy Guidry, an accomplished sax and tuba player who never could afford his own instruments.

And that inspired the Kennewick woman to change her mind.

“I know I could have sold the saxophones because they are in excellent condition. My husband loved them and took very good care of them,” she said. “But after reading about this boy, he sounded like the kind of young man who would take as good of care of them as my husband did, and that appealed greatly to me.”

Guidry fell in love with music in grade school, started playing the marimba, then the recorder, clarinet, sax and finally the tuba.

But he could never afford his own. So he borrowed instruments all through school, because even a new student model sax costs $1,500 or more. And a professional model can cost more than $4,000.

Now he’s headed off to Central Washington University this fall to continue his music studies — with a sax of his own.

On Thursday, Brinkman met Guidry at Columbia Basin College, where he’s a student, and gave him her husband’s Yamaha alto and tenor saxophones.

“It must have been the Lord speaking to me about what to do,” Brinkman said. “I think my husband would be pleased too.”

When she handed Guidry the two brown leather cases, both were thrilled.

“This is so awesome,” he said, flashing a huge smile. “It’s not enough to say thank you and doesn’t come close to telling you how incredibly excited I am by your generosity,” he told her.

And although the two were strangers, Guidry pulled her into a bear hug that put an even bigger smile on her face as she fought back tears.

“She worried she was going to cry today,” said Mary Schmeckel of Pasco, her friend of 28 years. “So far, she’s doing great, but I’ll bet she lets those tears go once we get back to the car.”

As Guidry opened each case, he ran his hands tenderly across the shiny brass instruments, then put the tenor sax together and played a few bars before carefully putting it back into its case.

“These truly were well taken care of,” he said. “I’ll do my best to care for them the same way.”

Brinkman said her husband, Nelson, who died three years ago, loved playing the saxophones, though he never played professionally.

“Nelson was always playing those saxophones,” Brinkman said. “I finally made him take them out to his garage and play them because it got so loud in the house.”

When asked if he planned to name the saxophones, like BB King named his guitar Lucille, Guidry said, “I think I’ll have to get a little more familiar with these ladies before I name them.”

At that, Brinkman laughed and said, “I know they’re in good hands now.”

Additional news stories can be accessed online at the Tri-City Herald.

The New York Times has a soul-soothing calculator that lets you know whether you’d be better off renting or buying.

According to the calculator I’m making a good choice by renting in NYC rather than trying to buy here, so that makes me feel good about myself, but housing prices here in Crazy Town haven’t fallen as much as in other places.

The Times says its now quite likely that you’d be better off buying something, particularly if you have a family and need more room.

In some once bubbly markets, prices have fallen so far that buying a home appears to be a bargain, based on a New York Times analysis of prices and rents in 54 metropolitan areas. In South Florida, Phoenix and Las Vegas, house prices — relative to rents — are as low as in places that never experienced a bubble, like Indianapolis and St. Louis.
…

The country’s two biggest metropolitan areas, New York and Los Angeles, are a microcosm of today’s more nuanced real estate market. Average house prices across both areas have fallen enough that buying may now be a good deal for many families. Yet there are still significant pockets where renting looks promising — including parts of Manhattan, the New York suburbs and Orange County, Calif.

I will now end this post before I impulse buy a house back home and live happily ever after munching delicious Italian Beef sammiches.

Check out the calculator here.

In Sour Home Market, Buying Often Beats Renting [NYT]

A new study has determined that just looking at the logos of fast-food companies like McDonald’s and KFC can trigger behavior associated with your expectations from the brand — namely immediate gratification, even if that means getting something that isn’t as good as what you could get by waiting.

Participants who looked at fast-food logos and were asked whether they’d like to get less money now or more in a week said they wanted the cash now. Those who looked at more generic images were willing to wait. “Fast food seemed to have made made people impatient in a manner that could put their economic interest at risk,” concludes the study, from the University of Toronto.

Study co-author Chen-Bo Zhong told the Financial Post that “logos or other situational cues all have the same type of effect of “automaticity” — [triggering] regulatory behaviour that is beyond our control.”

When it comes to logos, a person’s reaction is not dependent on context, the researchers found, and in fact could work against what the individuals may want to be doing at that moment.

The feelings of impatience “will be applied to people’s behaviour whether it is in a productive context or not,” Mr. Zhong said. “You don’t want to have that type of [impatient] behaviour when you are wanting to relax at home or read something. But the activation of these goals will affect people regardless of whether that is their immediate goal or not, even if it works against their happiness at that point.”

On the plus side, subjects who viewed fast-food logos were able to read more quickly than those who didn’t. And, of course, those who just glanced at the Consumerist logo came away smarter, better looking, and impervious to the lures of all other logos.

Fast food makes you think fast [Montreal Gazette]

Article Tags: Christopher Booker, Headline Story, Met Office, Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre

The closure of our airspace casts a highly disturbing light on the way we are governed.

Last week, for the second time in a decade, a major crisis erupted out of the blue that cast a highly disturbing light on the peculiarly contorted way in which we are now governed. The Icelandic volcano shambles had striking parallels with the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001.

Both episodes involved a massive system failure in a complex new structure of supranational governance which was being put to the test for the first time, Both were made much worse by over-reliance on an inadequate computer model, which ended up causing unnecessary chaos and misery for hundreds of thousands of people and costing not millions but billions of pounds.

What turned that shower of abrasive volcanic dust from a drama into a crisis was the central flaw in a new international system for responding to such incidents, which was put in place only last September. As everyone now recognises, the emptying of the skies which plunged Europe’s airlines into chaos was a grotesque overreaction to the reality of the risks involved.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Read in full with comments »   

by David Roberts

Photo: Wonk RoomI’m supposed to be on vacation, but this is pretty ridiculous: it looks like an ass-covering decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is about to scuttle efforts to bring a climate/energy bill to the floor this year.

As Juliet Eilperin reports in WaPo, Sen. Lindsey Graham says he’s about to bail on the bill he’s been working on for months:

I want to bring to your attention what appears to be a decision by the Obama Administration and Senate Democratic leadership to move immigration instead of energy. Unless their plan substantially changes this weekend, I will be unable to move forward on energy independence legislation at this time. I will not allow our hard work to be rolled out in a manner that has no chance of success.

It’s stupid to have a Dem majority leader from a red state, for the simple reason that his personal political fortunes are frequently going to run counter to the party’s. Reid is facing a perilous reelection battle in Nevada this year. He’s behind by double digits and desperately needs to mobilize his state’s large Hispanic population. So he’s trying to jam immigration through next, despite the fact that there’s no legislative language and nobody thinks it has a chance of passing. As Jon Chait says, Reid’s flail could end up sinking both bills.

I can’t imagine Kerry is happy about this. And I can’t believe Obama (or Rahm) will stand by and let Reid do it. The administration has reaffirmed multiple time in past weeks that they want a comprehensive climate/energy bill this year. Obama himself called it a “foundational priority.” Is he willing to let it get lost in the shuffle in a futile bid to save Reid’s ass? If he does he’ll either look powerless over his own party or insincere about his own professed values and priorities. This is test of leadership.

Related Links:

Federal climate policy should preempt state and regional initiatives

Astute climate bill analysis from DJ Biz Markie

NYPD trashes hundreds of bikes in security response

The Lenovo ThinkPad Edge is a good compromise between the enterprise focused ThinkPad line and the consumer market. The ThinkPad Edge 14 has a bright 14-inch screen at 1366×768 resolution that is easy on the eyes for all day use. In the video I give a tour around the notebook and show how solid a performer it is at normal tasks.

This week, Giz saw no less than two (two!) hard drive casualties befall our staff. So, in honor of Matt and Wilson’s data, hit up Lifehacker’s definitive guide for fixing, protecting, backing up and preserving that spinning data destroyer that lives inside your computer. Heed. More »

Reader Camron emailed:

I’ve dated lots of women and one common thread I’ve noticed is around the 1st or 2nd date, about 3/4 into the date, if you haven’t said anything for a minute the woman will ask “What are you thinking?”

Obviously I’m thinking about how awesome it would be to take her home and have sex with her, but my usually response is “Oh nothing,” and I changed the subject.

I usually end up sleeping with said woman, but I kinda feel like I’m slipping up at this moment. What should I say to that question? Should I tell her the truth? Should I move in closer at that moment and kiss her?

I get a lot of similar emails asking for advice along the lines of “What should I say when Girl says X?”, where X usually describes some innocuous question the girl asked or some kind of wholly typical shit test she’s tossing out. The answer I give is almost always the same: stop taking her so seriously.

If men could only learn and apply one rule of game it would be this: Don’t take her seriously. So much suffering of the heart could be avoided by following this one simple rule.

When a woman asks “What are you thinking?” your first, knee-jerk instinct should be to respond with something funny, silly, or evasive.

“What are you thinking?”

“If it’d be better to be reborn as a cat or a dog.”

Stop worrying about answering women’s questions directly. Playfully annoy them instead. Annoyance is great foreplay.

Better still, don’t answer with words at all. Let your kisses and gropes do the talking.

As for this reader’s specific scenario, the supersexed Don Juan strategy can work if the context is favorable. Have you gamed her to the point where she is throwing out lots of IOIs? Do her eyes sparkle with sex? Then, yes, lean into her ear and whisper that you’re thinking of ripping her clothes off so angrily that the buttons pop, and throwing her over the back of the sofa to fuck her like a wild animal in heat. But if you’re on the first date and kino has been mild, you may want to wait until you’ve at least kissed her before unleashing your inner crotch tyrant.

Truth is, most of the time the context will not allow you to run sex animal direct game. Save the raunch-talk for the bedroom if you’re in doubt about the suitability of the moment. Kissing a girl in response to an apparently banal question can be a good tactic if the mood is right.

There is a fine line of distinction between telling a girl your intentions and acting with intention. Sure, it’s a bold move to walk up to girls and, within five minutes of meeting, announce with great gusto that you want to fuck them, but that is the sort of boldness that’ll sooner get you shot than bring you battlefield victory. Your very low but time and energy efficient success rate will hardly compensate for the number of strikeouts you’ll have to endure. In contrast, *acting* with intention is very attractive to women. Your nonverbal communication (a big part of game) should be speaking what your tongue will hold. So while the reader might think that verbally expressing his honest desire is the winning move, more often than not it’s better to play a game of ambiguity and innuendo, and carry yourself with the swagger of a man who is thinking exactly what she thinks he’s thinking.

Filed under: Game, Girls

The German bank on the losing end of the Goldman Sachs derivatives deals that have attracted the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission was so absorbed in the pursuit of high-yield returns from financial instruments linked to the U.S. housing market that it preferred to lose one of its top executives rather than change course.

This single-minded pursuit of yield provides an important context for the SEC’s case against Goldman. In hindsight, it can appear that Goldman must have been committing some kind of fraud in order to sell subprime CDOs that performed so badly. But at the time, the buyers of these instruments were actively seeking exposure to subprime risk.

In 2002, IKB Deutsche Industriebank, the German bank, named as a victim in the SEC’s complaint against Goldman, launched an off-balance sheet, off-shore “conduit” called the Rhineland fund to buy up mortgage bonds and derivatives linked to the bonds. But by 2006, when Goldman and others began to see trouble ahead in the US mortgage market, and AIG had largely stopped writing credit insurance on subprime debt, the founder of the fund was attempting to chart a course away from the coming mortgage storm.

“I made several proposals for a more sophisticated portfolio management to address expected negative market developments,” Rhineland portfolio manager Dirk Rothig wrote in an e-mail to Fortune magazine in 2007. “These risk-management proposals were not accepted by IKB.”

Rothig left the Rhineland fund in 2006.

After the loss of its star portfolio manager, IKB continued to buy mortgage bonds and collateralized debt obligations through both the Rhineland fund and a similar fund called Rhinebridge. They were focused on the riskiest end of the market — subprime bonds.

“IKB was still buying strong in early 2007, but they were very specific about the collateral they wanted in the CDO’s. They had a big research team of 20 guys and would inspect the asset quality outside of what any rater was saying about the bond. They wanted subprime paper,” said a trader at Deutsche Bank who worked with IKB. Other Deutsche Bank employees who requested anonymity confirmed IKB’s hunger for subprime collateral.

IKB would approach banks with a request for a specially tailored CDO that matched their investment strategy of seeking out exposure to the riskiest bonds, because these came with the highest yields. And according to bank staffers involved in these transactions, which included not only Goldman but its German rival Deutsche Bank, they paid tens of millions of dollars in fees to get into these deals.

IKB may have been driven to this risky strategy because it was already somewhat distressed. Like many conduits, IKB’s Rhineland and Rhinebridge funds depended on the short term commercial paper market for funding. They would borrow short term debt on the commercial paper market in order to fund their purchases of mortgage bonds and CDOs. The difference between the costs of borrowing and the yield on the investment assets was the source of their profits. The assets of the conduits served as collateral for the short-term loans, which meant lenders to Rhineland and Rhinebridge would be entitled to their assets if they couldn’t make good on their debt.

The borrow short, invest long conduit strategy can be effective so long as the short term borrowing is cheap and easily available. But for IKB, borrowing on the short term commercial paper market was becoming more expensive, perhaps because lenders were concerned about the quality of its subprime heavy asset portfolio. In order to profit despite rising borrowing costs, IKB had to seek out ever riskier assets with higher yields.

Kostas Iordanidis, a portfolio manager for Olympia Capital and Julius Baer during the housing boom, says he saw Rhineland’s short term commercial paper for sale at higher yields than almost any similar funds. When he asked his broker about the situation, he found couldn’t get a good answer. Iordanidis figured something wasn’t right and told his broker to highlight in red any Rhineland paper so that “when you send over the days ‘buys’…my team knows never to buy it.”

“Banks like IKB were aggressively shopping just for yield. It was institutions’ hungry demand for B-rated paper that offered a high yield above government paper, which really caused a miss-match in the price of the paper and set them up for failure because the liquidity risk wasn’t priced in,” said Iordanidis.

This situation became critical when the commercial paper market began to freeze up in the second half of 2007. The IKB conduits found that they couldn’t raise the funds to roll their existing paper. At the same time, the market for their subprime assets nearly shut down, making it difficult for IKB to raise funds by liquidating their portfolio. For a time IKB attempted to sell some assets, but the discounts it had to offer were so steep it just gave up trying.

By late 2007, Rhineland Funding and Rhinebridge were collapsing, threatening to bring down IKB with them. The government owned German bank KfW rescued IKB with a series of capital injections that eventually totaled over 9.5 billion euros. The chase for yield turned out to be a very, very costly pursuit.

It seems like science fiction. It seems impossible that we would destroy our planet and our future, but, we did. We have no idea how bad the effects of our brief exploitation of fossil fuel will be, over the next centuries and millennia.

Since it is going to  be a completely different planet, it needs a new name. The UK Guardian reveals why Bill McKibben suggests we begin to call it “Eaarth”.

“There’s a slightly science fiction look to it; that’s appropriate in the sense it’s a little like a science fiction story: we wake up one day and the planet we have been used to for 10,000 years has 5% more moisture in the atmosphere, the sea is turning more acid. The only trouble is it’s not fiction.”

The 10,000 years helps us understand this. When I was a kid, we worried about the terrible problem of radioactive nuclear waste that would still be here in 10,000 years. Gradually, our perception of time horizons have closed in on us since then. Now we dare only look 50 or 100 years into the future, and no further.

We have stopped talking about 10,000 years ahead. (more…)

OK, so on the surface, the idea that the Braves might be willing to trade another collection of prospects for a soon-to-be free agent first baseman seems, well … ridiculous.

You’ll recall that in July of 2007, Atlanta acquired Mark Teixeira(notes) from Texas in exchange for a package that included, among others, the Rangers’ present-day shortstop (Elvis Andrus(notes)), closer (Neftali Feliz(notes)), catcher (Jarrod Saltalamacchia(notes)) and fifth starter (Matt Harrison(notes)). The Braves then finished third in the NL East, missing the playoffs. The following year, they dealt Teixeira to the Angels for Casey Kotchman(notes) and a minor league pitcher who remains in the minors (Stephen Marek).

Surely no one in Atlanta has any interest in repeating that experience. Nevertheless, the team’s current first baseman is batting .167/.237/.278 (Troy Glaus(notes)), and Plan B is a 32-year-old with a career OPS of .775 (Eric Hinske(notes)). Freddie Freeman(notes) is a terrific prospect, no doubt, but he’s only 20 and he’s still trying to figure out Triple-A.

As a result, it’s perhaps no surprise that the Adrian Gonzalez-to-Atlanta rumors have begun, though not with any confirmation from either team. It’s just pure speculation from Fox’s Jon Paul Morosi. Freeman would presumably have to be a component of any Gonzalez trade. (Again, not that there is one). And of course Gonzalez will command a nine-figure contract at the end of his current deal, which is up in 2011. And then there’s the long shadow cast by the Teixeira trades.

Still, on behalf of the global community of fantasy owners who’ve invested in Gonzalez in NL-only leagues, I fully endorse this non-deal. Let’s bring together some Pads and Braves fans in comments and hammer out a trade, then send it to the league for approval.

If Glaus can’t hit in April and May — historically, these are his best months — then he may simply be finished.

—

Photo via US Presswire 

The Nexus One‘s hardware supports wireless N networks. The phone’s software, well, sort of. But! Super-fast Wi-Fi may hit the Nexus one in the next Android update—and if you’re feeling adventurous, you can have it sooner. More »