I have nothing against the folks who created Tumblr and managed to get Yahoo to bid a whopping $1.1 billion this week to buy the company. More power to them, I thought as I attended the event they helped sponsor Monday night for winners of this year's Webby Awards, one...

Elizabeth Warren does great email. One payoff of my pittance of a contribution to her grassroots-funded campaign -- I regret not contributing more -- is that I am regularly alerted by the new Massachusetts senator to the favoritism of our Congress toward Wall Street.

That's how I was reminded this...

The love fest between Barack Obama and his top fundraiser Penny Pritzker that has led to her being nominated as Commerce secretary would not be so unseemly if they both just confessed that they did it for the money. Her money, not his, financed his rise to the White House...

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, "The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution," makes for very scary reading. It is not so much because of what he and co-author Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, have to say about...

The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. "Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim" is the way the New York Times defined the hideousness of the weapons used, and President Obama made clear that "any time bombs...

Why is David Stockman driving everyone crazy? The shoot-the-messenger frenzy that has greeted Sunday's New York Times op-ed by Ronald Reagan's former budget director leaves one searching for the message that has so unhinged his critics.

I borrowed that word "unhinged" from more than one of Stockman's...

Sorry to be such a nudge, but as I write this before heading off to yet another in a long lifetime of Passover Seders, I still can't get my head wrapped around this business of the plagues. Particularly that tenth plague, the one that gave the Passover holiday its name...

It is a staple of our widely trumpeted Judeo-Christian heritage that the acknowledgment of sin is a prelude to redemption. So how is it that there is no palpable sense of soul searching associated with the 10th anniversary of a war based on officially concocted lies and a policy of...

Go offshore, young man, and avoid paying taxes. Plunder at will in those foreign lands, and if you get in trouble, Uncle Sam will come rushing to your assistance, diplomatically, financially and militarily, even if you have managed to avoid paying for those government services. Just pretend you're a multinational...

Where is the Occupy movement now that the depravity of the super rich is on full display?

The suddenly increased national debt is primarily the result of a deep recession caused by the top bankers and hedge fund hustlers of Wall Street, saved from their folly by massive and...

What was Michelle Obama thinking? If the card for Zero Dark Thirty had been lurking in that best picture envelope Sunday, the gushing first lady would have appeared to the 1 billion people watching to have endorsed the very torture policies that her husband has denounced, at least rhetorically, if...

It is bizarre that Chuck Hagel, a war hero with a long record of sensible views on the deployment of military power, gets blocked as the president's nominee to run the Pentagon, while Jack Lew, steeped in Wall Street greed, sails through as Treasury secretary.

There is, of course,...

The title, "Globalizing Torture," says it all. This meticulous accounting of the network of torture chambers that the United States has authorized in more than 54 nations is a damning indictment that should make all of us in this country cringe with shame.

The report is a product...

Here's a get-out-of-jail-free card, and while we're at it, take this obscenely huge bonus for having wrecked the economy. As the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program pointed out in a devastating report this week, "excessive" compensation was approved by the Treasury Department for the executives...

Why aren't film director Kathryn Bigelow's claimed government sources, including employees of the CIA, in jail like Pfc. Bradley Manning? Or, at the very least, being investigated for their role in one of the most damaging leaks of national security information in U.S. history?

How did the Japanese-owned...

I suppose that he can't be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the...

How fitting that Dan Quayle, a bumbling excuse for a vice president of the United States, should end up as a top executive of a $20 billion private equity firm mired in controversy. Quayle, who signed on with Cerberus in 1999, was with that company during its takeover and subsequent...

Where is Phil Gramm hiding? The former Republican senator from Texas, who wrote the radical banking deregulation of the 1990s and was rewarded for his efforts to enrich the banks with a plum job at Switzerland-based UBS, has not been heard from since his bank got nailed by the G-men....

Keep an American soldier locked up naked in a cage and driven half mad while deprived of all basic rights, and you will be instantly condemned as a barbaric terrorist. Unless the jailer is an authorized agent of the U.S. government, in which case even treatment approaching torture will go...

Please don't tell me that these reports in the business press touting Sallie Krawcheck as a front-runner for chairman of the SEC or even a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary are true. Who is she? Oh, just another former Citigroup CFO, and therefore a prime...