Columnist.
Did GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman shove an employee when she was CEO of eBay -- resulting in a $200,000 settlement for the employee? Well, she did tell the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that she "physically guided" eBay employee Young Mi Kim "out of the conference room into a hallway." Shortly after Whitman won the GOP primary, The New York Times cited "multiple" unnamed sources to support a report that on June 1, 2007, Whitman and Kim had some sort of spat. According to the story, while there were no witnesses to the event, Kim told "at least one colleague" that Whitman "used an expletive and shoved her." Kim left eBay for four months, but returned after there was a settlement.
During the George W. Bush presidency, the media were fixated with the need for military brass to be able to challenge the president. In the age of Obama, however, what once was hailed as principled dissent has morphed into intolerable insubordination. Witness the calls for Gen. Stanley McChrystal to resign from his NATO command in Afghanistan. CNN's anchors are in a tizzy that the brass "mocked" the administration.
I want to start a series of occasional columns about how in modern America, everything is so complicated that we can't get simple things done. When you look at government -- the criminal justice system, the courts, the federal budget -- engines that used to work smoothly now are sputtering. They're all cog, no machine. That's why so many Americans are angry at the system -- it's all check, no balance.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon got the tough new Arizona immigration law wrong when he told Congress on Thursday, "It is a law that not only ignores a reality -- but also introduces a terrible idea of racial profiling as the basis for law enforcement." To the contrary, Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which makes it a state crime to be in the United States illegally, expressly prohibits police actions based on "race, color or national origin."
