Maureen Dowd has one of those (too-rare) moments when she proves why she gets column inches of the world's most precious editorial real estate. This piece on the scandalous behavior of CEO's using bailout money for luxury perks burns with the same righteous anger thatso many Americans feel. What's gratifying is that something is being done to make it right. Or, at least, righter.Dowd is delighted that new Treasury secretary Tim Geithner had his office tell Citigroup execs they wouldn't be buying a $50 million corporate jet with some of that $345 billion in government guarantees. She exults that New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has subpoenaed former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to chat about the $4 billion in bonuses he handed out while his firm was failing. Dowd says it's time to "bring on the show trials." We would pay to watch.
Thomas Freidman uses the cloying conceit of writing a letter in someone else's voice to suggest his own Middle East peace plan. Here, he pretends to be King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia addressing Barack Obama. Basically, Friedman's "Five-State Solution" is that Israel should agree to withdraw from all of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. In return, Hamas and Fatah will form a "unity government" that accepts Egyptian and Jordanian troops as peacemakers. Apparently, those troops are also supposed to stop Palestinians from firing rockets into Israel, a prospect that seems unlikely at best.
The Times also has this unintentionally hysterical story about a support group for women whose banker husbands and boyfriends have lost their jobs. "It’s the Economy, Girlfriend" quotes Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a "beauty writer." Dawn is married to a 28-year-old private wealth manager who's deeply depressed by the downturn. “One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35,” Davis said. “It’s not what I signed up for.”
Right. Except for that part where she married him; where she stood before family and friends, swearing to love the man for richer or poorer, better or worse, until death do they part. Nice girl. Quality person.
The Wall Street Journal is appalled by the $825 billion legislation being sold as "economic stimulus" by the House. The Journal estimates that only $90 billion, or about 12 cents of every dollar, can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. The rest is raw pork; like $7 billion for "modernizing federal buildings and facilities."
This story on Al-Jazeera by Eric Calderwood is fascinating, if oddly sympathetic. Al-Jazeera's broadcasts, Calderwood writes, "routinely feature mutilated corpses being pulled from the scene of an explosion, or hospital interviews with maimed children, who bemoan the loss of their siblings or their parents..." This graphic response to CNN-style's bloodless journalism, he says, is "a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States."
Finally, season eight of "American Idol" is pissing off fans with so-called amateurs like Joanna Pacitti. The "unknown" singer first made national headlines in 1996 when, at age 12, she was fired from the cast of "Annie" before the show hit Broadway. Her parents sued and settled for an undisclosed sum. Later, A&M signed Pacitti to a record deal. She cut songs for several movie soundtracks, including "Legally Blonde," and released an album 2006 that sold 15,000 copies. But, other than that she's just waiting to be discovered by AI. Vote her off, America!
