After reading Michael Perino‘s The Hellhound of Wall Street, I was wondering if we would ever see the likes of a Ferdinand Pecora who would explicate the figures and practices behind the financial crisis of 2008 as well as Pecora, the Manhattan prosecutor, did during the Depression for the Crash of 1929. Well, opportunities for …
The head of Fox News, the prodigiously jowly former Richard Nixon tub-thumper Roger Ailes, gave an interview to Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast earlier this week. It is instructive to read what Ailes said, because his comments are full of lies of every sort–simple untruths, hyperbolic overstatement, nasty misinterpretation. They show what a low, …
My friend Howard Samuels was the recipient of the 2010 Hollywood Arts Inspiration Award last Saturday night in Los Angeles. Congratulations, Howard! Well done!
Yesterday in The Washington Post, Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell, two formerly hotshot pollsters, wrote what certainly has to be the most disingenuous, cynical and purely dumb op-ed article of the year. Called “One and Done,” Schoen and Caddell argue the entirely preposterous position that to be a great president, Barack Obama should not seek …
Cut defense spending, says Eugene Robinson in this morning’s Washington Post. “The United States accounts for 46.5 percent of the world’s total defense spending,” he writes. “The next-biggest spender is China, which has undertaken an immense buildup to become a military as well as economic superpower – yet accounts for just 6.6 percent of the …
The internet is a funny and amazing thing. Last year, fooling around on one of those that finds people, I typed in my own name, and discovered the existence of another Jamie Malanowski. I found this surprising, since Malanowski is not a particularly common name; my father was one of ten sons, and so far …
New York Magazine rates The Disunion Blog at the apogee of the north-south Highbrow/Lowbow side of its Approval Matrix, and well on the Brilliant side of its east-west Despicable/Brilliant range. Thanks, New York! Just wait for the next few installments–it gets brillianter! The columns are going well. They have received a ton of reader comments, …
In his new memoir Decision Points, former President George W. Bush says that he personally approved the use of waterboarding against 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission human rights experts say could have legal consequences for him. Bush says that he was asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who …
In what is apt to be the single most provocative personnel change in Washington after the elections, the Washington Post reports that Congressman-elect Allen West, a Republican of the Tea Party persuasion, has hired Joyce Kaufman, a local conservative talk radio commentator known for her provocative and sometimes incendiary statements, as his chief of staff. …
Last night at Borders in Mount Kisco I had the pleasure of meeting Maneet Ahuja, one of the producers of Squawk Box, CNBC’s always informative, highly stimulating, and occasionally depressing morning program. The multi-talented Maneet is working on a book about hedge fund managers that promises to be one of the definitive studies of these …