“They can beg and they can plead But they can’t see the light, that’s right Cause the boy with the cold hard cash Is always mister right…” – Madonna, “Material Girl,” 1984 That’s it, right next to the Boca Burgers.  That’s the $90,000, in cash, the FBI found in former Representative William Jefferson’s freezer. Wednesday afternoon the Democratic Representative from Louisiana...

Based on just the past 18 months of ethics-related scandals, it’s safe to say that trust is difficult to come by in corporate and political leaders, not to mention the media. With the passing of Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” the Washington Post asked readers to submit their own nominees for trustworthiness.  Here are a few: Oprah Winfrey, “because...

Ever since I started searching the Internet I started collecting quotes.  I opened a file and every time I came across a quote that made a connection, I’d add it to the file.  It didn’t take long to discover a pattern – that true wisdom knows no period in history, religion, culture, race, age, gender or TV channel. Here are...

Ethics is not about what we say or what we intend, it’s about what we do. This is the heart of integrity – demonstrating a consistency between ethical principle and practice. Who we are is never more clearly revealed than in the daily moments of our lives. How we respond to some of those moments reveals whether we stand up for...

Much has been made recently of the health care debate.  And it’s important.  But there’s another issue that is just as critical. Around the time news icon Walter Cronkite died, a harmonic convergence of sorts took place in my office.  I had been revisiting a report by founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation David Krieger entitled, A Return to Sanity...

I was in the midst of writing a piece on President Obama’s initial remarks made last Wednesday concerning the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley when news came Friday of Mr. Obama making a new statement to “recalibrate” his language. More accurately, he was recalibrating his judgment. When I first heard the news that Mr....

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”             – Winston Churchill What is said:  “I’m lovin’ it.”  “Can you hear me now?” “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” What you hear:  McDonald’s, Verizon, M&M’s. As pollster and word specialist Frank Luntz points out in his book “Words...

Monday, July 20th marked the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In a White House meeting, President Obama welcomed Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and called them “genuine American heroes.  I think it’s fair to say” the president said, “that the touchstone for excellence in exploration and discovery is always going to be represented by the...

By the time you read this, there will have been many tributes to CBS newsman Walter Cronkite who died Friday at the age of 92.  Most, if not all, of those tributes will mention the word “trust” in describing both his approach and integrity to the news. With 24/7 cable news service today, it’s hard to imagine what it was...

Sitting in a Chinese restaurant, I remember opening a “fortune cookie” which read:  Confucius say… Wealth and renown gained without honor are nothing but drifting clouds. More than 2,500 years later, the Chinese philosopher and social thinker would probably laugh to discover that much of his wisdom has been distilled and tweaked to fit inside the modern invention of a cookie which...