Will she or won’t she? Will Sarah Palin, that is, accept the Iowa GOP’s invitation to be the featured speaker at this year’s Ronald Reagan Dinner? The invitation was issued by Iowa Republican bigwigs immediately after Palin seemingly signaled an interest in a presidential run in 2012 by announcing her intent to retire as Alaska’s [...]

Frank Rich’s take in the May 10 Times on the plight of the newspaper business concluded that, if the public wants in-depth news content, it will have to finance it. In Rich’s words, “…the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no [...]

Not long after I landed in Iowa in the early 1950s I trekked to the state house to listen to a debate about a proposed loyalty oath for public employees. Senator Joseph McCarthy was riding high in those days and an epidemic of loyalty oaths had swept the country. I figured Iowa would be next; [...]

Let’s say that Bernard Madoff duped not only investors but also the press and that, having heard about his celebrity customers, the financial press publicized the ostensibly generous returns that caused even savvy investors to flock to him. Naturally, the attention would be good for Madoff’s business. Question: When Madoff’s swindle was revealed, would the [...]

Hundreds of individuals and institutions hoodwinked by Bernard L. Madoff lost tens of billions of dollars. As the saying goes, it’s only money. Lives have been affected by Madoff’s scam, but only a couple are known to have been lost, by suicide. Destruction of human life is incalculably more devastating than money down the drain. [...]

The New York Times devoted a massive chunk of its Sunday Feb. 22 business section – 142 column inches by my count – to the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to executives of seven financial institutions despite their dismal management records. The question explored by the Times was whether compensation supposedly for performance should [...]

My wife and I had dinner recently at a place we frequent. This time we were involuntary witnesses to the sexual abuse of a child. The party at the adjoining table consisted of six persons — a couple of girls of about seven or eight, two youngish women, one of whom appeared to be the [...]

Irving H. Feiner was no household name, but on Feb. 3 the New York Times gave him a 27-inch obituary worthy of a celebrity. Why the big spread? Feiner was arrested in 1949 for a high-decibel harangue in inner-city Syracuse, N.Y., while he was a student at Syracuse University. His prosecution and conviction for disorderly [...]

Now that George W. Bush has vacated the Oval Office he will have time on his hands, some of which he plans to devote to the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. That may not be altogether welcome to some SMU faculty and staff. Word that the [...]

Where was the outrage over the brutalizing of Mohammed al Qahtani? Time reported the abusive treatment of the reputed “twentieth hijacker” in its June 12, 2005 issue. The magazine somehow had obtained the classified logs of the Guantanamo detainee’s 50-day interrogation ordeal, and it described the log’s contents in detail — the protracted questioning of [...]