By Stan Isaacs

The few times I dipped into austere journals like  “Fortune,” “Business Week”  and “ Barrons” I invariably seemed to read glowing reports about lucky guys and gals who struck it rich on Wall Street. I looked on with wonder and, I admit, with some envy.  

In the spirit of easy money was a book published in 1999 that I think deserves a little attention now that the world financial markets are quaking. The book is: “Dow 36,000” by Kevin Hassett and James Glassman. At a time that the Dow Jones industrial average stood a little above 10,000, they predicted that the Dow would sooner or later—with emphasis on sooner it seemed—reach 36,000.Here is the full title and tease on the cover of their 1999 book:They called it “The new strategy for profiting from the coming rise in the stock market.”

That was followed by these lures to the avarice in all of us:

·        Why the Dow is still poised to zoom.                   

·        Why the financial establishment is wrong.                              

·        A radically new way to determine what stocks are really worth.                      

 ·        Why stocks are actually less risky than bonds.                 

·        How to build a maximizing portfolio and invest without fear.                   

 I suppose in those heady days there was something comforting about the cocksuredness of comments like these:

On Page  Three: “Throughout he 1980s and 1990s, as the Dow Jones industrial average rose from below 800 to above 11,000, Wall Street analysts and financial journalists warned that stocks were dangerously overvalued and that investors had been caught up in an insane euphoria. They were wrong. Stocks were undervalued then and they are undervalued now. Tomorrow stock prices could immediately double, triple, or even quadruple and still not be too expensive.”    

On Page Ninety:  “We can’t know for sure whether the PRP (Perfectly Reasonable Price) for the Dow is 27,000 or 54,000…anyone who claims that the market is too high today is viewing history from an outdated and flawed perspective.”

On Page 143, “It’s time to move from principle to practice—from telling you why stocks have soared in recent years and why they will soon double, triple and quadruple to telling you how to build in an investment plan to exploit the Dow 36,000 Theory and reap the profits of the historic rise in the market that’s ahead….soon, prices will rise to where they will be ‘perfectly reasonable’—around 36,000 on the Dow Jones industrial average.”There is more of this, but reading it all now makes me think that better advice once was offered by Woody Allen when he said, “Don’t invest any money with any brokerage firm in which one of the partners is named Frenchy.”

Messrs Hassett and Glassman had to lay low on the big talk for a time because not long after the book was published, the market plunged 3,000 points over the course of two years. The dot.com bubble burst, burying thousands of Web ventures and billions of investor dollars.And now we have the current meltdown. The market, which reached a high of 14,164 on Oct. 9, 2007, has been plunging ever since, devastatingly so in the last two months, and went below 9,000 a year to the day later for the first time in five years.

For all of that, the quick- riches guys have not suffered much from their “Dow 36,000” idiocy. Hassett became a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a reactionary think tank. And Glassman went on to become an executive at The New Republic and Atlantic Monthly among other publications and is regularly published in the Washington Post. Nor does Hassett seem to be embarrassed by his colossal misreading of the market. Among other keen points he has made of late was to quote a report by a University of North Carolina at Greensboro professor who found that “a temporary one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to an 0.5 to 0.6 per cent reduction in the mortality rate, or about 14,000 fewer deaths per year.”And Hassett blames the current world-wide debacle on the Democrats not reigning in the Fannie May and Freddie Mac mortgage lenders.

In the face of the widespread collapses over and beyond the mortgage market now, his pronunciamentos are worthy of a classic line by the sports sage, Stanley Woodward: it would be like blaming the Johnstown flood on a leaky faucet in Altoona.  It would be irrelevant to aim shots at these sitting ducks at this time except for one thing: Hassett was a financial adviser to George Bush. And he is a senior economic adviser right now to John (“The fundamentals of the economy are strong”) McCain.

  By Stan Isaacs 

While doing some idle reading in a book of American short stories, I came

across anew one of my favorite stories, James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat.”

I’ve long had an affection for it because “sitting in the catbird seat” was an

expression associated with Red Barber, the southerner who became a

Non-baseball aficionados might remember Barber for his interesting radio

Barber is mentioned in Thurber’s story. A character, an unappealing woman,

an efficiency expert who fired people from jobs, was given to using

expressions like “sitting in the catbird,” “tearing up the pea patch” and

They were all, another character explained, expressions that she picked up

from listening to Barber on radio broadcasts of Dodgers games. “He picked

The story is about the improbable scheme of a Caspar Milquetoast-like clerk

to get this awful woman fired. He is successful, and in the end he is sitting

The story was published in 1942, and reading it made me wonder at one time

if Red Barber had any contact with Thurber, the noted New Yorker writer

and cartoonist.  At one point I called Barber, who was living in retirement

“I had never met Thurber,” Barber said. “A mutual friend said Thurber often

listened to the Dodgers broadcasts and wanted to meet me, but we never met.

“A year or so after the story was published, I read in ‘Variety’ that ‘The

Catbird Seat’ would be made into a movie. I was irritated because that might

run into money, but none for me. I sent word to Thurber that I was perturbed.

I got word back that he was angry at me for his making liberal use of my

At about that time Bill Corum, the Journal American sports columnist, went

on leave and Barber was selected to write the column in the interim. “I wanted

to call the column, ‘The Catbird Seat’ ” Barber said, “but was advised by the

paper’s lawyers that I couldn’t because Thurber had a copywright on the title.

 Now that was getting the goose too far from the gander.” Barber settled on

He said the term “catbird seat” came from a poker game he had been involved

in years earlier when he was broadcasting in Cincinnati. “I was losing and

tried to run a pot. I tried to bluff with a pair of eights, but a man named Frank

Koch was sitting with a pair of aces from the beginning. He raked in the

money and thanked me for building the pot. He said, ‘I was sitting in the

Barber used another expression that found its way into literature. His use of

the word “rhubarb” as a synonym for an altercation or free-for-all was picked

“One of the first persons to interview me when I came to New York,” Barber

said, “was H. Allen Smith for the World Telegram. We had a pleasant

relationship living near each other in Westchester.” Smith got Barber’s

permission to use Rhubarb as the name of a rambunctious cat who owned

a baseball team in his comic novel by that name. “Rhubarb” was made into a

The expression “rhubarb” was passed on to him, Barber said, by sportswriter

“He had heard it from a bartender describing a wild, bloody fight in a

Brooklyn bar not far from Ebbets Field. Brooklyn had many small houses

with gardens in those days, and they grew rhubarb, which was red and messy

inside. I guess the bartender was thinking of the bloody red color of the

Some years later Barber’s daughter, Sara, taught English at LaGuardia

Community College in Queens. When she mentioned “catbird seat” in

relation to her father, she was told somewhat indignantly by a student that

In trying to explain the term’s origin to the skeptical students, Barber said,

“She had quite a rhubarb.”

By Helen Isaacson

More than hockey moms or gun-toting God lovers, old Floridian Jews are the most important demographic in this election. They make up about 5%  of the voters in a swing state with 27 electoral college votes. They never miss so much as a condo board vote and are normally reliable Democrats.


Barack Obama's trouble winning over older Jewish voters has been 
difficult for pollsters to explain, so I came here this week to visit 
my grandmother, Mama Ann, and find out what the hang-up is. After a 
long discussion about policy, I asked her if the reason she was 
leaning toward voting for McCain was because Obama is black. She 
assured me that it was not. Though during dinner, she did casually 
mention that her grandfather used to express a superstition that if 
you ate marrow, you'd date a black man. I had no idea that for so many  generations, Jews have hated marrow.


Mama Ann thought the three days of the Great Schlep would be very 
effective. "Oh boy, the grandparents will start cooking three days 
ahead," she said, making me worry that many Schleppers won't last 
through three days of canned pineapple and dry chicken. "If they see 
their grandchildren, they'll go along. They just need more assurance 
on Israel." Israel, Mama Ann explained, is the key issue her condo 
friends vote on. When McCain sings about bombing Iran, he is singing a  sweet serenade to Florida's electoral collegians.


To persuade Mama Ann to vote for Obama, I used many of the talking 
points suggested to me by Great Schlep organizer Mik Moore. These 
included the fact that Obama went to Columbia and Harvard, and McCain 
got bad grades in college; that Obama has been criticized by the Rev. 
Jesse Jackson; and that Obama ran the business side of his campaign 
better than any other candidate. I did not know that I could be so 
racially offended by my own people.


After convincing Mama Ann not to vote for McCain, I then had to 
persuade her not to write in Hillary Clinton, who the old Jews here 
love for her feisty, scrappy Estelle Getty-ness.


Feeling confident, I headed down to the condo Hadassah meeting, where I asked some people who they were voting for. A few had Obama buttons  n Hebrew. One wanted to tell me how Lyndon Johnson helped the Jews  more than people know. Seven wanted to set me up with their granddaughters despite the fact that I was wearing my wedding ring.


But many more were sure Obama was Muslim and that extremist Arabs "had his ear." I strongly urge Obama to take one day off campaigning and go to a courthouse to legally change his middle name from "Hussein" to "Seriously, People, I'm Not a Muslim."


Having tackled the Hadassah meeting, I drove over to Palm Beach with  Mama Ann to talk to her first cousin, Rochelle Bramsen. When 
Rochelle's daughter and son-in-law, whom she lives with, argued for 
Obama, she bristled. I joined in, and asked -- as suggested by the 
talking points -- if she inaccurately thought Obama was a Muslim. Both 
Aunt Rochelle and Mama Ann said yes, they thought he was. When we all tired of arguing about that, I asked if it would be such a big deal if 
Obama were a Muslim. This was, I quickly realized, not on the list of 
recommended talking points for good reason.


"For me, personally, that would be an issue," said Rochelle. Thinking 
we'd trapped her in a rhetorical corner, her kids and I asked why 
Muslims in office would be worse than Christians. To which Rochelle 
deftly responded, "Who says I'm OK with Christians?"


Rochelle was also upset that Obama didn't wear an American flag lapel  pin at first. I asked Rochelle if she wore a flag pin. "No, but I 
expect more from our leaders," she said. I am pretty sure Rochelle 
just doesn't trust anyone who doesn't wear at least some jewelry.


Still, by the end of our discussion, Rochelle seemed to have joined 
Mama Ann as an Obama supporter. But there's a fair chance that by 
Columbus Day, both Mama Ann and Aunt Rochelle will have forgotten that.


So it's important that other grandchildren -- hopefully some who are 
vaguely my age and shape -- fly down here for the Great Schlep salons. 
Even if they fail, they won't be sorry: I saw a movie for $3.50, had 
dinner for $10 and was treated like whatever the Jewish equivalent of 
a saint is by everyone in the condo complex just for stopping by. I 
say we do this every Columbus Day. Next year, hopefully, we'll be 
hanging poolside with retiree John McCain.

By Stan Isaacs

Walter O’Malley, the man who sold out Brooklyn, has been been voted into the baseball Hall of Fame by a veterans committee. Well, if Henry Kssinger could have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, I suppose anybody can be honored anywhere.  The people in Los Angeles have been lobbying for the inclusion of O’Malley for a long time. They have helped spread two myths:  1) O’Malley deserves credit for opening baseball to the west coast. 2) Robert Moses, not O’Malley, was the villain responsible for forcing the Dodgers to desert Brooklyn. 

First off, it was inevitable that baseball would expand to the west coast. It did a few years after the Dodgers’ move with the establishment of the Los Angeles Angels in the American League-- without taking a team from another city.  O/Malley killed baseball’s most meaningful franchise, the one that transformed the game and the country by breaking the color line with Jackie Robinson’s emergence in Brooklyn.  O’Malley slithered  his way out of Brooklyn by mouthing slanderous falsehoods about Ebbets Field and the neighborhood. Because of a few isolated incidents, the impression was given that fans constantly urinated on ramps and that the neighborhood was unsafe and that the lack of parking was deadly for accommodating fans. 

He trashed Ebbets Field as too old, too small to the extent that most people believed him. Lost upon many was the character of Ebbets Field, the kind of intimate charm celebrated by Boston’s Fenway Park now. Calls to build a new ball park for the Red Sox were beaten down by wiser heads, and Fenway is now the most celebrated park in baseball. Ebbets Field had aplenty what Fenway Park has. Once O’Malley smelled the golden riches of Los Angeles there was no holding him. Los Angeles offered him land in the center of the city, Chavez Ravine, that was the equivalent almost of Central Park in Manhattan.

According to one report, O’Malley told a Los Angeles county supervisor in 1956 (the Dogers left after the 1957 season) “I’m coming, but I will deny it to the press becaue I have another season to play in Ebbets Field.” In the 10 previous years before the Dodgers deserted, they were the second most profitable franchise in baseball to the Yankees. That wasn’t enough. Given the giveaway land deal in Los Angeles, he was able to obtain the funds to build his own stadium there. He also anticipated big bucks that could come from pay television in the new city.  He played a con game of making people think he really wanted to stay in Brooklyn. His notorious line was, “My roots are in Brooklyn.”

I remember only too well sitting at a table with O’Malley and several New York reporters and listening to him shilly shally on the subject of leaving Brookyn. I sat there not really believing him, but also thinking that the man could not  possibly move. How naive we were.  Buzzy Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager under O’Malley, later told New York Times columnist Dave Anderson, “Walter did it for a reason: money. All those acres in downtown Los Angeles. …We had a vote among the eight top people in the front office. The vote was 8 to 1 not to go to California, but the one vote was Walter’s.” 

The Los Angeles people seized on a book written by a City University professor, Neil Sullivan, in 1987, which made Moses the heavy. No doubt Moses was the power broker of New York at the time. He stood up to O’Malley’s demand for choice real estate in the heart of Brooklyn—Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues—and offered the Flushing Meadow site that eventually becamd Shea Stadium for the Mets. 

In those days cities didn’t give valuable land to private baseball owners. Later, cities did roll over and awarded sweetheart deals to baseball owners threatening to move. But that has stopped now. Like Moses, citizens in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami have refused to knuckle under to grasping big league moguls.  None other than Prof. Sulllivan wrote years later in a Times op-ed piece, “All stadium deals should be subjected to referendums, and politicians should be made to support the results. Let the taxpayers  decide what they owe the likes of George Steinbrenner.”  

The Hall of Fame veterans committee consists of former players Monte Irvin, Harmon Killebrew and Bobby Brown, executives John Harrington, Bill DeWitt, and Andy MacPhail, David Glass of WallMart,  and writers Paul Hagen of Philadelphia, Rick Hummel of St. Louis and Hal McCoy of Ohio. On top of the O’Malley outrage they did not distinguish themselves by voting  for the relatively inept baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, and not voting for union leader Marvin  Miller.  

People I respect are outraged by the omission of Miller so I would go along with them, but I have no such passion. I think Miller was a great man for the players, but not necessarily for the fans.  Miller helped established a strong union, seemingly loyal only to the players, often at the expense of the game and the fans. He helped enrich the players so that they command outrageous salaries now. So much so that only the richest baseball franchises—in TV rich cities, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in particular—can bid for free agent stars. Because these free agents players can command outlandish sums, small-market cities like Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Cincinnati cannot hold on to them or bid for them. They rarely can make their way into a World Series. This is blatantly unfair.  Fans are often at a loss to keep up with the players’ moves. Loyalty to one’s city and fans is lost. 

 All this is not an attractive aspect of what we still manage to call “the grand national pastime.”