The elevator opened on the penthouse floor of the Statler Hilton and I dashed into the hall, late for the press conference, so late that it was all over. Two burly guards halted me with a not too friendly stiff arm on the shoulder. “Where ya goin’ kid?” said one while the other yelled back [...]

Vice Admiral Richard Carmona is conspicuous by his absence in discussion of CNN’s medical expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, to be the nation’s Surgeon General. That’s a point worth keeping in mind as part of the transition from the administration of President George W. Bush to the widely anticipated presidency of Barack Obama. Carmona, as you [...]

By all accounts Bernard Madoff got investors to part with their money by not actually investing the proceeds and earning returns but simply by paying off victims with money from his other marks. If that sounds familiar, it should; it’s the way lotteries work. When all is said and done, the lottery is essentially a [...]

Via Romenesko, I see Google CEO Eric Schmidt telling Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that he wants to help newspapers survive – he just doesn’t know how. “What if the newspaper industry does go down?” Lashinsky asks. Schmidt replies: “To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journalism is a central part of democracy. [...]

The spectacle of Roland Burris marched out of the Capitol by police guards is embarrassing – but not for Senate Democrats who turned him away. It is Burris himself who is to blame for the situation. When the nefarious Illinois governor asked Burris to accept the appointment, Burris had a choice, and he made the [...]

Post-racial America. It became a familiar term in the last year, and why not? It sounds wonderful. Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States. An African American, his wife and two little girls are planning a move into the White House. Time to turn the page on the country’s tangled history of racial conflict [...]