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Several Washington-insider journalists were agog last night at the notion that the President of the United States would deign to "slam," "take on," or "scold" the Justices of the Supreme Court for their charged ruling last week on campaign finance reform. It's a great angle--if only it were backed by the facts. "Extaordinary," wrote Jan Crawford, my colleague and successor at CBS News. She labeled the President's remarks "a frontal assault," "in your face" and "a fiery attack on the Court." The Washington Post's Robert Barnes was a little more sublime. Like Crawford, he focused upon the reaction of Justice Samuel A. Alito,...More
I am wending my way back home from the Sundance Film Festival, sleep deprived, blood full of hemoglobin from the altitude and ready to leave Utah's 3.2 beer. As Bob Dylan sang, "I'm going back to New York CIty. I do believe I've had enough." Still, I had a good time premiering my film, "CASINO JACK and the United States of Money" about former uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Audiences seemed to respond well, particularly in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision to unleash the unchecked financial power of corporate cash on our political system. Suddenly the history of influence...More
Toyota's decision to suspend sales and production of some of its best-selling models in the U.S., after a series of sudden acceleration accidents, deserves applause. But it also raises a question. How could such bad things happen to a brand once a watchword for quality control? The writer William Langewiesche recently upset some readers with his praise for the automated flight control technology of the Airbus 320--and his belief that the engineer, ace pilot, and Airbus executive Bernard Ziegler, responsible for its design, should share credit with the captain of US Airways Flight 1549, Chesley Sullenberger III, for its miraculous...More
For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight, if it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one's fellow travelers.
For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight, if it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one's fellow travelers. "Why airports?" you might ask. Well, for one thing there is the lighting--the big picture windows that allow you to see planes taking off are marvelous at lighting skin, muscle. A turn of a woman's neck, an elegant profile, but also an enlarged thyroid, perhaps not...More
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Small Business Correspondent
Key Insights from The World Economic Forum
01/28/10 2:58 PM
Will There be a "Many-Lateral" Sea Change?
Last night in Davos, everyone watched Obama rip at the banking industry in his State of the Union speech. "We all hated the bank bailout," Obama said. Then he affirmed that he wants to put limits on the size of the banking industry. He also wants to recirculate any money given back to the government by the industry--as loans to small businesses across America. In Davos (where it's been snowy and the traffic is snarled), Bill Clinton seems to think that's a good idea to limit the size of banks. The heads of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank have given the proposal their qualified support. George...More
Legal analyst and commentator
01/27/10 8:16 AM
Money's Polluting Effect on Politics "Speaks For Itself"
There is an ancient and famous legal doctrine called Res Ipsa Loquitur. Literally translated, it means "the thing speaks for itself." As a rule of evidence, it permits a plaintiff in certain circumstances to meet his or her burden of proof that an injury was caused by the negligent conduct of another party by use of an accepted assumption that the injury would not have occurred without the negligence. It puts the onus then on the defendant to establish a lack of causation. The doctrine is a short-cut, a judge-made fiction that has been sanctioned in courtrooms for hundreds of years. The Thing Speaks For Itself. It's also a doctrine...More
Every other January, members of Congress--all 435 in the House and newly-elected Senators--take an oath of office in which they swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Now it happens that defending the Constitution of the United States entails a fairly serious commitment because that document actually imposes a considerable amount of obligation. Unlike in a court of law, however, there is no actual punishment for swearing falsely when one takes such an oath; that is unfortunate because it is increasingly clear that a bunch of those folks who swear to meet their constitutional responsibilities have...More
It is fascinating and encouraging to see the titans of technology competing to distribute digital books. The new Apple reader will feature multi-media applications that have proved to be hugely popular on the iPhone. Amazon's Kindle, among other devices, already has validated the e-book experience for significant audiences. Recognizing the importance--the potential and the risks--of this digital transformation, the publishing world, from industry behemoths to authors willing to self-publish, have mobilized to join a major new marketplace. What follows is a wrap-up I wrote as the executive director of Caravan, a just-concluded, four-year project to support leading university and...More
1) Supreme Court rules that at least in political campaign finance, corporations are people, too.2) New York Magazine publishes a feature by John Homans with the cover headline "A Dog Is Not a Human Being. Right?" on evidence that many people say Wrong. To quote what Paul Newman never said, "Coincidence? I think not." Scientific trends are blurring the boundaries of personhood. In some interpretations, shared DNA brings us closer to other animals, and even plants. Professor Marc Feinstein of Hampshire College, with a Ph.D. in human linguistics, has been studying the communication of dogs and even sheep. On the...More
Last year I went to see Leonard Cohen's sold-out performance at Madison Square Garden at $250 a ticket. I had never heard of him, but my companions extolled his art, particularly his lyrics. Those lyrics are deemed to be poetry by his followers, very much in the style of Bob Dylan. The audience couldn't get enough of him. I did not particularly enjoy that concert and wondered if I would feel differently about Cohen and his talents if I didn't have to pay such a hefty price to see him perform. So I decided to see this documentary, Leonard...More
Former NYC mayor (1978-89), film buff
01/25/10 12:23 PM
'The Girl on the Train': Not Terrible, But Not First-Rate
Manohla Dargis's favorable review of this movie in The New York Times--one of those amorphous kudos--was, in my opinion, undeserved. She wrote: "The film can be described as a character study or a fictionalized slice of terribly real life. Mostly, though, it is an inquiry into the mysteries of other people." While not a terrible picture, this is certainly not a first-rate movie. The narrative consists of several stories and subplots, and the main characters in each are linked to one another. Those subplots, however, are not fleshed out in the style of Robert Altman's film "Short Cuts." The...More
The Supreme Court's 183-page judicially-active decision Thursday on campaign finance reform marks a clear end to one phase in the long legal battle over which constitutional protections are to be afforded corporate speech in the political realm. And the epic ruling-- quarterbacked by a Reagan-appointee, anchored by the Court's four further right-side tackles-- no doubt marks the beginning of a new struggle between right and left, corporate and individual, government and the governed, which strikes at the core of our modern-day capitalistic democracy. One question for today is as simple to phrase as it has proven difficult to answer: If our nation's top judges, constitutionally insulated as they are from the political process,...More
Somewhere along the line, right wingers stopped complaining about "New Deal judges"--presumably because an actual FDR-appointed judiciary had largely passed from the scene--and began assailing "activist judges" instead. There was a certain logic to it; by 1968, the appointment power had been in liberal hands for 20 28 of the previous 28 36 years, and therefore, any judicial activism on display was likely to have been liberal activism.But it was also a canard, an attempt to hide an ideological grievance behind something abstract and ostensibly principled rather than purely political. It was put most baldly, and most disingenuously, by John...More
Has held top posts in government, law and biz
01/24/10 11:13 AM
The Supreme Paradox: When the Court Overrides Congress
The paradox of the United States Supreme Court is that, from one perspective, it is a traditional judicial institution deciding individual cases. But from another perspective, it makes broad value choices in the name of constitutional interpretation; strikes down acts of democratically elected legislatures; and issues rules with impact on our national life as great or greater than Acts of Congress. This paradox is vividly reflected in the Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which, on First Amendment grounds, invalidated Congressional limits on independent expenditures by corporations and unions in support of candidates (and by implication limits...More
Ryan Grim, in a posting January 21 on Huffington Post, states that "a recent poll [a Research 2000 National Poll] found that 47 percent of Americans think Bernanke cares more about Wall Street than Main Street, while only 20 percent think he works for Main Street. Independents, who swung heavily for Brown in Massachusetts, are even more opposed to Bernanke than Democrats or Republicans. Fifty percent of independents think he cares first about Wall Street; 15 percent think he prioritizes the needs of Main Street. That's a difficult vote in the face of an angry public." I'm not familiar with...More
There is a disturbing report in The New York Times this evening: Senator Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, is reported to have said publicly that "he had decided to support Mr. Bernanke [for a new term as chairman of the Federal Reserve] with trepidation and only after he received a commitment that the Fed chairman would take additional steps to increase the flow of credit to middle-class Americans." (Emphasis mine.) I take no position on whether Bernanke should be confirmed; it would be inappropriate for me to comment publicly on a federal personnel matter and anyway I don't think I'm sufficiently...More
Predictably, conservatives and liberals have taken quite different positions on the Supreme Court decision upholding the right of corporations to finance political advertising. To conservatives, the decision (which refused to strike down corporate funding of a political film) was a righteous affirmation of constitutional guarantees of free speech. Liberals saw the Court's ruling as handing the keys of government to greedy corporate fat cats who would use huge warchests to buy or bludgeon legislators. There is something inherently wrong with both positions. Both the Left and Right are more concerned with achieving the policy outcome--and the election results--they prefer than...More
This week, the Chinese government announced that China's economy had expanded by a stronger-than-anticipated 10.7 percent in the last quarter of 2009 and that it had grown 8.7 percent for the entire year. This news, however, was not greeted with relief but with the skepticism that has typically met such news emanating from China in recent years. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on its front page with the headline "China Seeks to Tame Boom, Stirs Growth Fears." Because the news was accompanied by higher inflation, primarily the result of higher food prices, global markets reacted negatively, under the...More
Some more mixesVia Good Records: a mix of 60s and 70s-era Haitian heat from Captain PlanetElsewhere on the planet: Mike Simonetti of Italians Do It Better with "Back to Africa," a special mix for the Cosmic Disco siteMore wit and scathing insight from Andrew Weatherall, guest DJ-ing with Steve Lamacq...More
"Got nothing," Cincinnati Reds' manager Sparky Anderson said without rancor or objection to his young catcher, Johnny Bench, while they were standing together on the mound at the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore during Game 5 of the 1970 World Series....More
Writer Jeremy Miller reminded me this morning that "we are in an unprecedented age of migration and slum building.... The U.N. projects that over the next 20 years, the world's urban population will swell from three billion to five billion people--as rural populations move with increasing rapidity into the cities of the developing world." I opine in this morning's Boston Globe that Haiti's most recent calamity underscores the high cost of this desperate stampede.... ...More
Women now account for at least 30 percent of all physicians, but men still account for less than 6 percent of the nursing profession. The percentage of women lawyers has almost doubled since 1985, but the percentage of women pilots has remained stuck at around 6 percent for the past half century. What accounts for the differences? Two sociologists highlighted in a recent article in The New York Times have a new theory about why some professions tend to become, and remain, populated mostly by people of one gender, type of personality, or political affiliation. In a working paper called "Why Are...More
Author and federal appeals court judge
01/22/10 1:15 AM
The Volcker Plan and the Politics of Financial Regulatory Reform
The recent announcement of what I'll call the "Volcker Plan" for regulating banks was sandwiched between two major political events: the election of a Republican Senator from Massachusetts and the Supreme Court's decision "deregulating" corporate campaign contributions. The timing of the announcement in relation to the election of the Republican (Scott Bowen) is suspicious: it suggests a desire to change the subject and recapture the populist mandate by attacking the hated banks in a more dramatic fashion than by the proposal for a bank tax that I discussed in my last post. The suggestion that Vice President Biden was a...More
Another surprise from the Massachusetts senatorial race: the paradoxical power of professorial politics. Many conservatives resent what they consider the hold of tenured, indoctrinating radicals on the college curriculum. But Tufts University, the alma mater of the victor, Scott Brown, is one of America's most politically liberal colleges, edging out Martha Coakley's Williams, and clearly beating Harvard and Yale, according to the Web site myplan.com. Of course Mr. Brown studied at Tufts 30 years ago, but even then it was starting to soar under the new leadership of the distinguished French-born nutritionist and World War II hero Jean Mayer, who...More
Having watched Spencer Tracy in Inherit The Wind Tuesday night, having therefore been sensitized again to the layers of injustice this country has so frequently tolerated from its "justice system," it was particularly disappointing to read just one evening later the disgracefully apologetic "findings of fact" issued Wednesday in the case of Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller. You remember Keller. She is the judge who told a capital defendant's lawyers trying to file an important brief on the eve of his execution, "We close at 5," before leaving early for the afternoon to go home to meet a repairman. The judge didn't tell her colleagues...More
Author and federal appeals court judge
01/20/10 11:56 PM
Bernanke, Angelides, and the Bank Tax: Part II
The big news of the day is the president's apparent embrace of Paul Volcker's proposal to "restore Glass-Steagall," which is short-hand for confining commercial banks to traditional commercial banking activities, and specifically bar them from trading on their own account. I do not know how serious the proposal is or what support it will garner in Congress; maybe it's just an attempt to change the subject from health care in light of the result of the Massachusetts senatorial election. In my new book I argue that Volcker's proposal deserves serious consideration--which is not to say that it is the solution, but...More
