The Olympics is always celebrated with a great deal of pageantry, nationalism and achievement. For all its talk of “sporting excellence,” the media tends to distill everything down to the medal count.  (The New York Times’ Olympics 2008 website carries an updated count by country at the top of its page.) In one of the first events held Saturday in...

It began with a one-minute TV commercial – one stranger helps another who helps another who helps another. Insurance giant Liberty Mutual wanted to get people to think about personal responsibility.  (And to be fair, they also want to create a lot more interest in their company.) But, the reaction to this memorable concept commercial has been thousands of messages thanking the...

If you vote by mail, then die before Election Day, does your vote count? Not if you live in South Dakota. According to a (July 25) AP story, “Laws in at least a dozen states are evenly split between tallying and dumping the votes.” Most voters had not heard of this until the issue was raised during the last primary...

It’s 1938 and the darling of the British stage, Julia Lambert, has just finished another sterling performance.  The next morning, she throws another sterling tantrum. I was thinking about the Annette Bening movie, “Being Julia” when I read that the Boston Red Sox had traded their “sterling” left field slugger, Manny Ramírez to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The last several...

If I had the opportunity to speak to Congress on the importance of trust, it might sound something like this – The first time I became aware of political leadership it was 1961. Our 7th grade homeroom teacher wheeled in a big television set so that the entire class could watch the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. We all sat...

Whom can we trust? Who has the credibility to lead? These are just two of the critical questions Charles Lewis, founder of The Center for Public Integrity has raised in his investigative examinations into the inextricable link between Congress and special interests.  And yet, there are examples of leaders who do it right.  In his 1998 book, The Buying of the...

The 2007 “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act” was passed in response to a laundry list of scandals involving convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.  The new law outlines tougher standards for lobbyists in an effort to stop the flow of undue influence in Congress. That’s a good thing. There’s just one tiny flaw. “…former Senator John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, said lobbyists [have]...

The Washington Post reported (July 23) that the Government Accountability Office found that supervisors at the Pentagon pressured internal auditors “…to skew their reports on a major defense contractor’s work, hiding wrongdoing and charges of overbilling.” Of course, whenever we hear another story detailing fraud and corruption in Washington it serves to strengthen the argument that everyone in Washington is corrupt.  And...

It’s new.  It’s terrific.  It’s the greatest thing since the I-Mac™, I-Pod™ and I-Phone™! What is it? It’s the XRS R9G IntelliLink™ Wireless Remote Maximum Performance Digital Radar/Laser Detector with Speed & Red Light Camera GPS Locator!! Wow, what’s that? Back in the day, we used to call it… a Fuzzbuster. Sooner or later, high-performance technology had to return to the...

In 2002 Time magazine selected three women of “ordinary demeanor,” and extraordinary personal integrity to become the magazine’s Persons of the Year. Cynthia Cooper was the internal auditor who exposed what has grown to $11 billion in fraud at WorldCom.  Coleen Rowley was the FBI attorney who wrote a memo to Director Robert Mueller “about how the bureau brushed off...