Archive for January 3, 2009

Whoa! There Aren’t Enough Restaurants to Employ Them

“Them” being investment bankers, many now unemployed, who are looking at their life courses in a new light, deciding to follow the dreams they suppressed many moons ago, when cramming for the GMAT and whooping it up at wine & cheese mixers at Wharton.

That’s right. What they really want to do is write … or act … or direct.

And why not? Investment banking as an industry helped ram the economy down the toilet; doing the same to American entertainment will be a comparative breeze, considering the job is perpetually half done.

After leaving his job as a vice president at Goldman Sachs in August, [Benjamin Cox, 33] immediately began incubating his plans to work on his screenplay — he calls it a cross between “Swingers” and “Annie Hall” — and start a production company.

Oh, lordy.

The Shoe’s on the Other Foot: the Republican Approach to Litigating Elections Needs Re-Examining

Good news everyone! According to calculations by the Minnesota Board of Elections – see right – Al Franken maintains a shocking, insurmountable forty-nine vote lead over Republican challenger Norm Coleman. What’s actually remarkable is that this lead is, actually, potentially insurmountable, and the Coleman campaign is already plotting and executing strategic legal reversals to try to weasel their way back into the lead… even to the point of threatening to filibuster the Senate’s (eventual) procedural motion to seat Senator-Elect Franken:

If lawmakers push to seat Mr. Franken, who holds a 49-vote lead over Mr. Coleman, Mr. Cornyn said on Friday the move would leave the Senate with a “reputation for chaos.” [. . .] The Coleman campaign said that as it stands, Mr. Franken’s lead is artificial, and lawyers for the Republican senator have threatened to challenge the results in court.

Here’s the thing: for the past eight years, and especially almost exactly eight years ago, we Democrats heard continually from the Republicans about the dangers of an overly litigious culture, and how suing over elections is a sign of being a “sore loser,” nothing more. Remember these?

But oh, how the times have changed. A majority of the American public, finally tired of Bush now that it no longer matters, looks back on the end of the 2000 election with shame and regret. The Onion was part right: at least one of the Supreme Court justices who formed the majority in Bush v. Gore is among them (here’s looking at you, Justice O’Connor). And, now that Republicans across the nation are confronting the reality of defeat, litigation doesn’t look so much like a last-ditch, loser’s option anymore. I wonder if that lesson will take.