Low Payroll and High Hopes for the Brewers

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Murray Chass likes the Brewers chances:

TOM HICKS and Mark Attanasio have conducted business deals with each other, but it is a deal Hicks did on his own for which Attanasio owes Hicks a large thank-you. Hicks, the Texas Rangers’ owner, fired Doug Melvin as his general manager in 2001, three and a half years after Hicks bought the team. Melvin became the general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers in September 2002 and was in that position when Attanasio bought the Brewers in January 2005.

While Hicks’s Rangers continue to flail and founder in a sea of uncertain leadership, Attanasio’s Brewers are headed in the right direction. After a franchise-record 12 consecutive losing seasons, the Brewers last year won as many games as they lost. This season, they won their first five games before losing three of four.

“We’re more settled and we have more stability than we’ve had in the past,” Melvin said. “We know our players better. Two, three years ago, we weren’t sure. I think we have a club that has a chance to grow on the fans. I feel we have enough experience to contend.”

A City of Great Magnitude

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Janis Cooke Newman:

In April 1906, 70 years before my own first visit, Enrico Caruso also thought he was lucky to be here. The famed Italian tenor was supposed to be in Naples, but Mt. Vesuvius had erupted two weeks before, and Caruso thought he would be safer in San Francisco , where, after all, there are no volcanoes. “God has sent me here,” the singer declared before he went to bed the night of April 17. When he was shaken from that bed the following dawn, Caruso changed his opinion of the Almighty’s intent. “We are all doomed to die!” he shouted at his valet.

Jeanne Cooper chronicles the great quakes from 1906 to 2006.

Richard Davis’s Birthday Party: Audio / Video

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Often in life, the best things are free. Thanks, Richard and friends!

 Richard Davis’s Friday night Birthday Bash (Richard mentioned that his birthday is actually tax day, April 15) seemed an appropriate way to wrap up a beautiful Madison week, with temperatures reaching into the 70’s. The bash was held Friday night at Mills Hall and included participants from the Bass Conference Faculty.

Audio / Video:

Conference pictures are available here.

More on Richard: Wikipedia | Clusty | Google | Yahoo

Quarterly Google Earnings – Blodget

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Henry Blodget:

Okay, Google gamblers. This one’s going to be interesting.

On the one hand, Google’s modest deceleration last quarter suggests that the company is going to once again deliver (relatively) ho-hum results and disappoint investors conditioned to expect the astounding. It takes a long time for a supertanker to change speeds or course, and, last quarter, anyway, it did seem that the Google supertanker was finally beginning to slow down. This diagnosis seemed confirmed by possible canary-in-the-coalmine announcements from advertisers who were cutting back on search spending because prices had gotten out of hand. And then there was CFO George Reyes’ lucid mid-quarter explanation of why growth had slowed in Q4–because previous growth had been accelerated by a monetization program that had now run its course. This convincing explanation kneecapped the stock for the eight hours it took for the company to issue a press release that said, effectively, George was wrong.

The AMT Shell Game: Why Bush’s Tax “Cuts” Aren’t

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Scott Rosenberg:

Over at Slate, Daniel Gross is explaining, once more, the role the Alternative Minimum Tax continues to play in the Bush administration’s deceptive tax policies.

The AMT is a bizarre parallel-universe of taxation with its own set of complex rules that differ from the normal IRS system. It was passed decades ago as an effort to prevent gazillionaires from using elaborate tax shelters to reduce their tax bills to zero. For many years it was easily ignored by the vast majority of Americans, and as recently as a few years ago the only non-super-rich people who worried about it were tech-industry types who’d hit the stock-option jackpot but played their cards wrong.

But the AMT was designed with its very own time-bomb: It was never indexed for inflation, and so each year the rising tide of inflation — even the slow, relatively benign inflation the U.S. has experienced in the last decade — lifts more and more middle-class Americans into its maw. The obvious answer is to fix it, either by repeal or by indexing it for inflation so it continues to apply only to the gazillionaires who were its original target. Shouldn’t be so hard, right?

AT&T Seeks to Hide Spy Docs

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Ryan Singel:

AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the telecom giant helped the government set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.

In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn’t be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.

The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.

Sears Chairman Works on Selling Skills

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Michael Barbaro:

For 90 minutes on Wednesday, the investor, Edward S. Lampert, the normally reclusive chairman of Sears Holding, spoke expansively about the need to change attitudes and work habits at the merged company.

One effort is already under way: assembling the company’s top 500 managers here for marathon training sessions, where a film clip from “Miracle on Ice,” about the United States hockey team that won the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics, is used to promote team work and improve customer service.

“In the past, we had a situation where people worked here but could not get results,” Mr. Lampert said during the first shareholder meeting for the newly formed retailer. “We need to invest in those people.”

Sears owns nearby Lands End