I think they have it. If they don't have the votes for the best and purest version of the bill, I think they at least have a fallback position which holds 60 votes.

I believe this has to be true because you wouldn't risk your presidency and place in...

How is it that we get a major insider trading scandal every two decades or so? The last big one, which ultimately ensnarled Michael Milken, the legendary junk bond king, happened in the late eighties. The current one, with a mass of arrests yesterday, threatens the hedge fund industry.

The Wall Street Journal was a great paper. It is still a pretty great paper but it is not the great Wall Street Journal. That former paper, with its particular look and feel and characteristically myopic focus on business and finance, has departed the stage, replaced by a vigorous, strong-minded...

I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs--true entrepreneurs--pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers, on their ability to take a...

The strange business that is going on in New York's 23rd Congressional District, which occupies some other universe than the one commonly associated with New York, wherein the designated middle of the road Republican fell to a crypto-fascist sort conservative, is meant to signal, at least for liberals, an...

Of all the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election, the strangest, beyond the rise of Sarah Palin herself, is the success of Levi Johnston.

He, in fact, may be the antidote to her rise, dogging her with his smile and his scabrous asides.

Or, as likely, they enable each...

I participated the other night in an oddly formal, anglophilic, Oxford-style, for-and-against-the-proposition debate on the topic of (you guessed it) the mainstream media. I was on the side arguing (you guessed again) that it should be buried as fast as possible.

My side, with NPR host John Hockenberry and Politico...

I had lunch yesterday with my old friend and former colleague, Chip Bayers, who, 15 years ago this week, after having left my fledgling Internet business in New York, helped start HotWired in San Francisco. This is significant because advertising on the Internet started with HotWired's launch and because it...

Wow. Pot. Just like that, on its way to being legalized. Well, just like that after 50 years or so.

In order to save itself from financial oblivion, the state of California seems inclined to just do it. Just say yes. To become Amsterdam.

It may be the...

So it turns out there's a reason the president hasn't wrapped up health care or Iraq, figured out Afghanistan, closed Guantanamo, or found anybody a job. He's been out raising money.

He's been schmoozing, and golfing, and kissing ass.

The Wall Street Journal has outlined in quite excruciating detail...

Who's tweaking whom?

I have come to believe that the nearly daily back and forth between the White House and Fox News is good for both sides. I have further come to believe it's good for the political class in general. For one thing, the fight is deeply self-referential and...

The most popular news medium became, over the last 10 years, the computer, effectively putting newspapers out of business and changing the nature of television news. Over the past year, it has become clear that the next news medium of choice will be your phone.

The latest iPhone version...

One of the big changes that took place in America over the last 25 years was that people at the top came to be paid so much more than the average person in their companies. It was an exponential increase. Where not long ago the top guy made 20 or...

I have never met Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and Rudy Giuliani crony and business partner, but he is my Facebook friend. He friended me.

This might be because, indicted on a variety of tax abuse and public corruption charges, he's looking for good...

Here's what nobody seems to know: whether we're a liberal nation or a conservative one.

For a long time the conservatives convinced us that we were, largely, in our souls and pocketbooks, conservative (even though the Republicans have, in recent memory, not gotten more than 50% of the national vote)....

The boy in the balloon or, as it were, the boy not in the balloon, is a publicity stunt which has many people outraged, questioning the sanity of the boy's father, the intelligence of the media, and the values of a media-driven culture.

But other than...

Here's the setup: There's a gay guy named Kevin Jennings who's made a career dealing with the issues of gay kids in American schools. In what must have seemed like a kinder-gentler-bureaucracy good idea, the Obama administration gave him a job promoting school safety, which seems to be about...

I think I've got it -- the hate in America and where it's coming from.

Rush Limbaugh's effort -- aborted by his fellow investors, it seems -- to buy the St. Louis Rams has given me the insight. Other people, when they don't get something they want --...

Politicians used to be fat, and voters used to be thin. This has been turned on its head: Now a fat politician is an unusual bird, while the majority of voters are corpulent beasts.

Fat used to be an attribute of a successful man, suggesting power, status, and fine dining--the...

It could be that in the years ahead every Italian alive in the strange years of Silvio Berlusconi, as both his nation's leading media mogul and dominant political figure, will take a certain pride in being able to tell the tale. Grandchildren will gather round. Historians will debate the significant...