At 92, best-known now as Michael Douglas’ father and Catherine Zeta-Jones’ father-in-law, a movie legend is taking “an audit of my life” and, of course, doing it on stage and in front of cameras. Kirk Douglas’ career is at the heart of a larger 20th century American story: how the children of refugees from European cruelty went to Hollywood and, as John Updike put it, “out of immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.” After World...

Anyone who has ever cashed in a Certificate of Deposit knows banks are adamant about extracting a penalty for early withdrawal but now, in repaying taxpayers, they are whining about the rules. According to the New York Times, “Some of the healthier banks want to pay back their bailout loans to avoid executive pay and other restrictions that come with the money. But the banks are balking at the hefty premium they agreed to pay when they took the money.” In a perverse way, it’s reassuring...

The gardening industry is growing as Americans across the country follow the First Lady’s example of raising vegetables, fruit and herbs. At yesterday’s White House planting, Mrs. Obama told her fifth-grade helpers of international interest in their efforts on her trip abroad. “Every single person from Prince Charles on down was excited because we are planting a garden,” she said as they dug in seeds and seedlings for spinach, chard, collards, kale, shallots, peas, broccoli, fennel,...

The health care reform that dares not speak its name edged out of the shadows yesterday with a New York Times editorial suggesting: “A new public plan–to offer consumers greater choice, keep the private plans honest and, one can hope, restrain the relentless growth in health care premiums and underlying medical costs–seems worth trying. “Any new public plan would constitute only part of a much broader effort to provide coverage for 46 million Americans who currently are uninsured...

After his surprise visit to Baghdad, Barack Obama is heading home to rising approval ratings after a week of showing all the symbolic talents he brings to the White House with both rhetoric and body language. On the weekend in Istanbul, he affirmed US-Muslim relations and wowed young Turks in a town hall but, to balance any adverse reaction by hardliners back home, stopped off in Iraq to demonstrate his commitment there and award medals to the troops. Skeptics may view all this and Obama’s...

For a Jewish World War II veteran, it’s comforting to learn from a New York Times OpEd that “There Are No Hurt Feelings in Germany.” Our new president, a German novelist reveals, is still much admired, even though “current warnings that Mr. Obama must inevitably disappoint the hopes we’ve placed on him will probably turn out to have been somewhat justified.” He goes on to explain: “People like my 75-year-old grandparents, who live in the countryside and have...

This has been a dizzying week for deciding who is above the law or below it, with figures from Ted Stevens and Rod Blagojevich to the AIG bonus recipients parading before the public bench for reappraisal. *The former Republican senator from Alaska gets a pass from a Democratic Attorney General on the grounds of bad behavior by prosecutors from the Bush Justice Department, which still faces unresolved accusations of firing eight federal prosecutors for not being political enough. (Sarah Palin wants...

Below the radar of saving the global economy, President Obama was working in London this week to keep the world from blowing itself up with nuclear weapons. A meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev produced a joint statement that the two countries will begin negotiations to reduce arsenals in anticipation of an Obama visit to Moscow this summer. Unlike George W. Bush’s 2001 first encounter with Vladimir Putin, Obama did not look into Medvedev’s eyes to get “a sense of his...

After his first foreign trip as President, JFK said, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris–and I have enjoyed it!” Barack Obama may be feeling that way in London this week as the Gallup Poll shows the First Lady’s favorable ratings eclipsing his own. The British press, as always on the lookout to criticize crude Americans, half-heartedly tried to stir a flap about Michelle Obama “hugging” the Queen, but apparently Her Majesty hugged first, so...

Another winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and a former Clinton White House adviser, joins Paul Krugman today in turning thumbs down on the Treasury’s public-private toxic asset plan and suggests that nationalizing banks would be “preferable.” Joseph Stiglitz concludes: “Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily ‘nationalize’ the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control...

In a magazine cover, we have a reflection of what’s happening not only to the American economy but politics and journalism as well: a close-cropped half of a bearded face and the lines, “Obama Is Wrong: The loyal opposition of Paul Krugman.” Newsweek’s story tells us about the economist-turned-pundit who “criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking,” but also illustrates the desperation of...

As George W. Bush goes off to write his “authoritarian” version of the past eight years, we are getting the first glimpse of what could be a drawback in having an articulate president. Barack Obama made a ringing statement Friday about the US mission in Afghanistan, but we now learn how divided his Administration was over the decision, including the opposition of Joe Biden, who knows more about the region than anyone else involved. “The United States of America,” the President...

I wouldn’t buy one from Larry Summers. I might take a chance on Tim Geithner but have a good mechanic check it out first. As the President’s top two economic advisers keep offering us financial vehicles for the rocky road ahead, they just don’t inspire confidence in survivors still stunned by the crash of those in which the two of them had so much involvement over the past decade. Summers tell us the Administration’s new toxic asset plan will create “better functioning...

As Hillary Clinton arrives in Mexico to admit that America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” the cocaine-consuming capital of Hollywood announces a new HBO movie about Monica Lewinsky and you-know-who. The film, we’re told, is “actually about the frustrated efforts of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to form a working relationship with President Clinton, who seemed increasingly distracted by the fallout from the scandal.” The title...

If we were paying the President by the hour, the economic crisis would be worse. After the Tonight Show, 60 Minutes and town halls everywhere, we get a prime-time news conference this evening. If that sounds like a complaint, it isn’t. In this time of multiple anxieties, Barack Obama, despite the inevitability of falling approval ratings, has succeeded brilliantly as Comforter-in-Chief. With his remarkable capacity to put mixed feelings into context (i.e., the AIG bonuses are an outrage, but...

The credit crunch is squeezing American businesses and consumers, except for the directors, top executives and other insiders who have loans from their own banks totaling $41 billion. We learn this from the Charlotte Observer, which reports: “At Charlotte-based Bank of America, those loans more than doubled last year, to $624.2 million–the biggest dollar jump in the country. The largest of them likely went to three directors or their companies. The surge came during the third quarter...

This has been a bad week for American leadership, and next week could be worse. In trying to calm the country, Barack Obama made one joke too many while lawmakers in Washington spent their time acting out the worst stereotypes of politicians as fools, cowards and knaves. “Congress,” writes New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, “with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the...

State by state, the Recovery Scoreboard is lighting up with projects to be funded by some of the $787 billion Congress passed last month to get the economy moving again. Just keeping track of the money, let alone spending it wisely, is going to be a monumental job as governors appoint overseeing groups and, in some cases, “czars” to make sure the money is not fraudulently or stupidly spent. The Recovery.gov web site is getting almost 4,000 hits a second, according to the chairman of the...

If you could get through all the commercials NBC larded into his sitdown with Jay Leno, the President managed to make his points about the economic crisis to millions of Americans who probably never watch Meet the Press. But Jay Leno’s approach to the Leader of the Free World recalled a night almost half a century ago when I was an accidental matchmaker for the first White House figure ever to appear on the Tonight Show. In 1960, after my magazine ran a piece by Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Advice...

With each passing day, the insurance giant is looking more like Western Europe after World War II–devastated, bankrupt and occupied by the American government. As Congress conducts its equivalent of war crimes trials for AIG executives to recover a fraction of one percent of bailout money, the larger question for American taxpayers is how to rebuild, salvage and/or sell off the corporation, of which they now own 80 percent. While there may be gratification in vengefully hounding the defeated,...

Of all people, Barack Obama is the unlikeliest to be stirring up a lynch mob, but there is no other way to describe his stoking of public anger over the AIG bonuses. “In the last six months, A.I.G. has received substantial sums from the U.S. Treasury,” Mr. Obama took the podium to say yesterday. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?” He railed against “recklessness and greed.” Undoing unconscionable bonuses in the company that...

Who’s next? Gordon Gekko? As the economy crumbles, the usual cultural indicators of panic are on the rise–gun sales, survivalist talk and, of course, interest in the last century’s loony goddess of selfishness. “Ayn Rand,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books,...

The hot topic this week has been inside information–in the Stewart-Cramer dustup, the Madoff mess, the Seymour Hersh blurtout about a Bush-Cheney “executive assassination ring.” In a 24/7 flood of facts, factoids and fake news, who finds the truth and who tells it? Barack Obama won the White House with promises of transparency to voters starved for some sense of reality in a world of flimflam and lies that have led to so much social devastation. Yet truth-telling has traditionally...

We have been here before–fighting and occupying countries with ancient hatreds and no history of anything resembling democracy–in Vietnam and Iraq. Lyndon Johnson’s pride led to humiliation, George W. Bush’s stubbornness to stalemate. Can Barack Obama’s rationality save us from more of the same in Afghanistan? In the New York Times today, as the cheerleaders for the Surge argue for an encore, Leslie Gelb makes the opening argument in the case for “How to Leave...

A drug dealer named Shorty joins Warren Buffet and Bill Gates on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people as President Obama talks about sending National Guard troops to the Mexican border because “it’s unacceptable if you’ve got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens.” We are living in a sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 movie “Traffic” now as the American appetite for controlled substances competes with financial greed to...