† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The New York Times reports that with corporate expense accounts under close scrutiny (well, except when it comes to their own columnist Maureen Dowd), “the delicate social rituals of the bull market era, when executives tried to outdo one another in expense-account one-upmanship, have been upended”:  

Instead of dessert, many meals are ending with a cold, hard calculation of who is worth paying for and who isn’t. Often, the answers cause discomfort on both sides of the table. …

Not surprisingly, the politics of the business lunch have tilted toward the haves versus the have-a-littles. Nowadays, picking up the check is often a reflection of whose corporate balance sheet is in better shape. …

For those lucky enough to have jobs, meals with colleagues who recently lost theirs can bring a new social dilemma. Do you pick up the check? And if so, do you submit it to your company for reimbursement or does it come out your own pocket?

When execs do go out, they are “passing up extras like bottled water and rarely ordering both an appetizer and a dessert,” reports The Times.

† US Librarians Condemn Book Banning In The US, But Not In Cuba: The 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of the Miami-Dade County School District, which voted to remove 49 copies of "A Visit to Cuba" ("Vamos a Cuba") from school libraries in 2006 after Juan Amador, a parent who was a former political prisoner in Cuba, complained that the children’s book did not depict life in the communist country accurately, reports The Associated Press:

A federal judge in Miami later ruled that the board should add books of different perspectives instead of removing offending titles.

However, the panel of the 11th Circuit sided with the school board in a 2-1 ruling.

"There is a difference between not including graphic detail about adult subjects on the one hand and falsely representing that everything is hunky dory on the other," Judge Ed Carnes wrote.

Circuit Judge Charles R. Wilson wrote in dissent that it appeared the book was banned for political rather than educational reasons.

Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said the two judges managed "to twist the law into a pretzel." …

He promised "further legal action to prevent the shelves of Miami-Dade school libraries from being scrubbed of books that some people find to have an objectionable view point."

Schools Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho said in a statement he was glad the issue was resolved.

Predictably, The New York Times published an editorial urging the Supreme Court to strike the appellate court’s ruling:

Schools are supposed to introduce children to a variety of ideas and viewpoints, but the Miami-Dade School Board decided a few years ago to put one viewpoint off limits. …

The father of an elementary-school student, complaining that the portrait of Cuba in the book was inaccurate, petitioned to have “A Visit to Cuba” pulled. …

School boards have some discretion about what books to place in school libraries. The First Amendment does not, however, allow them to suppress political viewpoints.

The Miami-Dade School Board’s decision is not only unconstitutional, it is counterproductive. If the board wants to oppose the totalitarianism of the Castro regime, banning books is an odd way to go about it.

Curiously, The Times does not describe these “inaccuracies.” We’re not talking typos. According to AP, Amador complained that “the book made no mention of lack of civil liberties, political indoctrination of school children, food rationing or child labor” and “portrays a life in Cuba that does not exist.”

† Updates To Previous (fourth item, Your Bonus: $0. Continued Employment: Priceless.): NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wrote a letter to the House Financial Services Committee sharing the findings of his investigation on executive bonuses distributed by Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and other financial institutions given $350 billion in public funds:  

What my Office has learned thus far concerning the allocation of the nearly $4 billion in Merrill Lynch bonuses is nothing short of staggering. Some analysts have wrongly claimed that individual bonuses were actually quite modest and thus legitimate because dividing the $3.6 billion over thousands upon thousands of employees results in relatively small amounts estimated at approximately $91,000 per employee. In fact, Merrill chose to do the opposite. While more than 39 thousand Merrill employees received bonuses from the pool, the vast majority of these funds were disproportionately distributed to a small number of individuals. Indeed, Merrill chose to make millionaires out of a select group of 700 employees. Furthermore, as the statistics below make clear, Merrill Lynch awarded an even smaller group of top executives what can only be described as gigantic bonuses.

The “select group” of 696 employees to which Cuomo refers each received $1 million or more in bonus payments. The top four recipients of bonus money were awarded a total of $121 million; a second group of four top recipients got a total of $62 million; and a third group of six top recipients received a total of $66 million.

If the $3.6 billion bonus pool had been disbursed equally amongst Merrill’s entire work force, every employee would have received about $91,000, reports The New York Times:

It is not clear whether Mr. Cuomo will seek to claw back those bonuses. Proving that the payments violated New York’s so-called fraudulent conveyance law, which enables creditors to sue to recover unjustified compensation in certain cases, would be difficult because of high legal hurdles. Mr. Cuomo may try to show that Merrill and Bank of America failed to disclose material information about Merrill’s financial health to allow the payments to be made.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that one of the compromises that House and Senate negotiators made to reconcile the two versions of the “stimulus” bill was to drop provisions to penalize banks that made outsized bonus payments to employees, and to put a salary cap of $400K on the 25 highest-paid senior executives at companies needing another infusion of public money: 

The provisions in the Senate bill were part of a flurry of efforts by legislators to curb executive pay. While similar proposals remain in Congress, their elimination from the stimulus package highlights the difficulty of passing such measures.

Several compensation analysts said yesterday that many of the measures that were in the Senate bill would have faced legal hurdles because they applied retroactively to banks that received government funds under rules agreed to last fall when Congress passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program's capital repurchase plan.

The White House's $500K ceiling on executive pay applies only to institutions that receive government funds in the future, and permits companies to incent executives with company stock that could be cashed in after government bailout funds were repaid.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, The Media Love Obama, But He Doesn’t Love Them Back): Perhaps it’s just sour grapes - The Wall Street Journal didn’t make The List, though The Huffington Post did - but the paper complains that President Barack Obama “had decided in advance who would be allowed to question the President and who was left out” – which seems to be his M.O. when it comes to handling the media:

Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness. ... Mr. Obama can more than handle his own, so our guess is that this is an attempt to discipline reporters who aren't White House favorites.

BTW: Obama answered 13 questions, and either ignored follow-up questions or answered them in a single terse sentence before calling out the name of the next reporter on his list.

Editorial Note: Obama was asked a question about Iran by Caren Bohan of Reuters. The transcript cannot capture how haltingly he felt his way through the answer (video; 14:08 into the clip):

Bohan: Thank you, Mr. President. I'd like to shift gears to foreign policy. What is your strategy for engaging Iran, and when will you start to implement it? Will your timetable be affected at all by the Iranian elections? And are you getting any indications that Iran is interested in a dialogue with the United States?

Obama: I said during the campaign that Iran is a country that has extraordinary people, extraordinary history and traditions, but that its actions over many years now have been unhelpful when it comes to promoting peace and prosperity both in the region and around the world; that their attacks or their financing of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, the bellicose language that they've used towards Israel, their development of a nuclear weapon, or their pursuit of a nuclear weapon - that all those things create the possibility of destabilizing the region and are not only contrary to our interests, but I think are contrary to the interests of international peace. What I've also said is that we should take an approach with Iran that employs all of the resources at the United States' disposal, and that includes diplomacy.

And so my national security team is currently reviewing our existing Iran policy, looking at areas where we can have constructive dialogue, where we can directly engage with them. And my expectation is in the coming months we will be looking for openings that can be created where we can start sitting across the table, face to face, diplomatic overtures that will allow us to move our policy in a new direction.

There's been a lot of mistrust built up over the years, so it's not going to happen overnight. And it's important that even as we engage in this direct diplomacy, we are very clear about certain deep concerns that we have as a country - that Iran understands that we find the funding of terrorist organizations unacceptable; that we're clear about the fact that a nuclear Iran could set off a nuclear arms race in the region that would be profoundly destabilizing.

So there are going to be a set of objectives that we have in these conversations, but I think that there's the possibility at least of a relationship of mutual respect and progress. And I think that if you look at how we've approached the Middle East, my designation of George Mitchell as a special envoy to help deal with the Arab-Israeli situation, some of the interviews that I've given, it indicates the degree to which we want to do things differently in the region. Now it's time for Iran to send some signals that it wants to act differently as well, and recognize that even as it has some rights as a member of the international community, with those rights come responsibilities.