Well, it's kind of a slow news day. Unless you count a freaking plane landing on the Hudson River!The Wall Street Journal points out that the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 performed "one of the most technically challenging and seldom attempted feats in commercial aviation: landing on water successfully." Thrilling stuff.
A fascinating story in Jewish Week shows the complex nature of the Bernie Madoff scandal. While the Jewish charity Hadassah did lose $90 million in current assets in the Madoff scam, they had pulled $130 million from the fund over the years. That doesn't mean Hadassah didn't get screwed, or is trying to swindle anybody. The story does illustrate the incredibly complex machinations of modern finance. The math gets fuzzy, but we are starting to wonder if that "$50 billion" figure we hear about might be a little inflated.
In the NYT, Gail Collins says President Bush has been "saying goodbye for so long, he’s come to resemble one of those reconstituted rock bands that have been on a farewell tour since 1982." Funny. Unfortunately, that's the only line in the piece worth reading. The rest of the column is a stale recitation of every Bush joke from the last eight years. The only thing missing is a reference to falling off a Segue. The second Times columnist, Roger Cohen, starts out well, with a stirring ode to the potential of the new president. Then, weirdly, he falls into an over-intellectualized sort of defeatism. America, he says, has passed "the zenith of its post-cold-war power," and the "world view shaped in the Middle East by Al Jazeera is not amenable to Western logic."
Why not?
