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Ten years ago, the Financial Accounting Standards Board proposed that stock options granted to executives and employees be treated just like any other form of compensation and therefore counted as an expense on corporate balance sheets. The proposal was entirely logical. Compensation is compensation. A company gives stock options as a form of payment in […]

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser and author of eight books, including The Grand Chessboard, has a hawk-like nose and blue eyes. These days, he works out of a K Street office decorated with a chess board, an Oriental rug, and a spiked club traditionally used by Ukrainian war commanders. He spoke recently with a visitor […]

At the end of June, that very powerful group of bankers, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC), got together under Chairman Alan Greenspan’s leadership to decide whether they should try to slow down the pace of economic growth by raising the federal funds rate. That’s the interest rate that banks charge each other for […]

With about 30 legislative days left this year, Republicans have decided to spend a good part of that time focusing on the issue of gay marriage. Yes, they still haven’t passed a budget, most of the appropriations bills, or legislation like class-action reform (which went on life support recently) but no matter — this year […]

Legendary metal band Metallica has wreaked a lot of havoc over its 23 years. “Blistering,” “lacerating,” “gut-assaulting,” and “bone-crunching” are the terms most often used to describe the band’s oeuvre — words more frequently associated with bodily harm than with the experience of listening to a CD. That seems like an awful lot of anger […]

It was exactly four years ago today as I write these words that candidate George W. Bush appeared before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At the time, the Bush campaign was pushing “compassionate conservatism.” In that context, the NAACP speech was one of Bush’s most important of the campaign. Very few […]

Maine. Pseudo–swing state Maine tried to avenge itself against those of us who’ve mocked its battleground status by turning in a tied Bush-Kerry result in a June 30 Strategic Marketing Services (SMS) poll. Upon further examination, though, there may be nothing to worry about. Undecided voters typically break in favor of the challenger, and the […]

Quite instructively, something that should have happened didn’t happen in the nation’s capital over the past few days. None of our nation’s leaders — of any political tendency, so far as I could see — paid any notice to Marlon Brando’s death, or life. And, at first glance, of course they didn’t. Wasn’t there something […]

To hear Democratic strategists and political commentators tell it, the selection of John Edwards as John Kerry’s running mate heralds the dawn of a new Democratic day in the South, with the Carolinas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia suddenly in play this November. After all, as the Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne, Jr. points out, since 1960 […]

As evidenced by Lawrence Weschler’s latest book, the juxtaposition of the unexpected can be an engaging and startling affair. Including pieces from over the past twenty years, Vermeer in Bosnia incorporates such various works as a profile of Roman Polanski, a commentary on the light in Los Angeles, and a reflection on Weschler’s daughter’s eyes. […]