Nov 6, 09 | 9:26 AM
How is it that we get a major insider trading scandal every two decades or so? The last big one, which ultimately ensnarled Michael Milken, the legendary junk bond king, happened in the late eighties. The current one, with a mass of arrests yesterday, threatens the hedge fund industry. It seems reasonable to assume from the intermittent decades of prosecution that this particular sort of financial larceny is quite a rare bird and when it rears its head the Feds pounce. And yet, as reasonably, we know the trading of information, the imperative to have such market-moving information, has...
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Nov 5, 09 | 8:41 AM
The Wall Street Journal was a great paper. It is still a pretty great paper but it is not the great Wall Street Journal. That former paper, with its particular look and feel and characteristically myopic focus on business and finance, has departed the stage, replaced by a vigorous, strong-minded paper focused on equal parts business, politics and public policy, and great events of the day. To that, its owner for almost two years now, Rupert Murdoch, is now adding a specifically New York focus. Murdoch is a singular fellow and a simple one. When he bought the Journal...
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Nov 4, 09 | 8:33 AM
I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs—true entrepreneurs—pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers, on their ability to take a punch. But there aren’t too many second chances. Not like the second chance that is unfolding right now. Among the greatest pieces of communications technology in our age of great communications technology, and...
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Nov 3, 09 | 9:11 AM
The strange business that is going on in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, which occupies some other universe than the one commonly associated with New York, wherein the designated middle of the road Republican fell to a crypto-fascist sort conservative, is meant to signal, at least for liberals, an internecine death struggle within the GOP. The hardliners, along with Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Fox News, will force the party so far to the right that it will be merely an oddball outpost. At the same time, the changing color and changing demographics of the US mean, almost...
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Nov 2, 09 | 8:40 AM
Of all the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election, the strangest, beyond the rise of Sarah Palin herself, is the success of Levi Johnston. He, in fact, may be the antidote to her rise, dogging her with his smile and his scabrous asides. Or, as likely, they enable each other. Both stoke the other’s publicity machine. Levi wouldn’t be anything without Sarah. Sarah might well have been just an ordinary failed VP candidate were it not for the too-late-to-do-anything-about-it revelation that Levi had gotten 17-year-old Bristol pregnant. That’s the story that most rescued...
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Oct 30, 09 | 9:21 AM
I participated the other night in an oddly formal, anglophilic, Oxford-style, for-and-against-the-proposition debate on the topic of (you guessed it) the mainstream media. I was on the side arguing (you guessed again) that it should be buried as fast as possible. My side, with radio host John Hockenberry and Politico founder Jim VandeHei, resoundingly lost. This seemed surprising, if not inconceivable, because mainstream media is being buried by the stampede of Americans who’ve deserted it without a second thought, who you think would have voted for us. But the audience for this...
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Oct 29, 09 | 8:58 AM
I had lunch yesterday with my old friend and former colleague, Chip Bayers, who, 15 years ago this week, after having left my fledgling Internet business in New York, helped start HotWired in San Francisco. This is significant because advertising on the Internet started with HotWired’s launch and because it started with the banner ad, invented by Wired’s editor and founder, Louis Rossetto, and because advertising on the Internet is still dominated by the banner ad, which has never worked all that well. In fact, this very development which, 15 years ago, launched the Internet...
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Oct 28, 09 | 11:10 AM
Wow. Pot. Just like that, on its way to being legalized. Well, just like that after 50 years or so. In order to save itself from financial oblivion, the state of California seems inclined to just do it . Just say yes. To become Amsterdam. It may be the biggest thing to come out of the financial meltdown. We won’t get meaningful reform of the banking system, but we’re going to get legalized pot. This is partly because the Justice Department has just issued new guidelines to prosecutors telling them not to override state laws about medicinal marijuana use. And because California’s...
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Oct 27, 09 | 8:58 AM
So it turns out there’s a reason the president hasn’t wrapped up health care or Iraq, figured out Afghanistan, closed Guantanamo, or found anybody a job. He’s been out raising money. He’s been schmoozing, and golfing, and kissing ass. The Wall Street Journal has outlined in quite excruciating detail just how the president has actually been spending a significant amount of his time and attention. In nine months he’s done 26 fundraisers. Three a month. George Bush, by this point in his presidency, had, according to the Journal, only done...
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Oct 26, 09 | 9:04 AM
Who’s tweaking whom? I have come to believe that the nearly daily back and forth between the White House and Fox News is good for both sides. I have further come to believe it’s good for the political class in general. For one thing, the fight is deeply self-referential and true inside baseball (who is doing what to whom on the basis of what strategy and what future benefit); for another it sets up the ultimate liberal-conservative face-off. In one corner the new young president (with all his promises of bipartisanship) and in the other Fox Chief Roger Ailes, that dark figure...
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