“Just as it takes a village to raise a child, according to the old African proverb, sometimes it takes a comedian to let the emperors of Wall Street journalism know when their clothes are falling apart,” columnist Clarence Page wrote about Jon Stewart’s smackdown of CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer. But columnist Richard Cohen contends that assigning that much blame to Cramer or other financial journalists is misplaced. “They do not have subpoena power,” he wrote. “They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at. The financial instruments that Wall Street firms were both peddling and buying are the functional equivalent of particle physics. To this day, no one knows their true worth.”
To support his conclusion that the “culture wars are a luxury the country — the GOP included — can no longer afford,” New York Times columnist Frank Rich pointed to what happened when President Obama nominated Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a pro-choice Roman Catholic, as secretary of Health and Human Services. Rich wrote: “Tony Perkins, the leader of the Family Research Council, became nearly as apoplectic as the other Tony Perkins playing Norman Bates. ‘If Republicans won’t take a stand now, when will they?’ the godly Perkins thundered online. But congressional Republicans ignored him, sending out (at most) tepid press releases of complaint, much as they did in response to Obama’s stem-cell order. The two anti-abortion Kansas Republicans in the Senate, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, both endorsed Sebelius.”
With so many financial firms in free fall, analysts and educators are wondering if business schools also need to reform, the New York Times reported. Critics say that some business schools are too detached from real-world issues, teach students to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems, and produce graduates with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended in an interview this past weekend the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation program.” But a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed how indefensible — and likely criminal — that program was. The ICRC concluded that the interrogation methods used constituted torture and were expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. According to the report, terrorism suspects were beaten, slammed head-first into walls and waterboarded, among other “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
