All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Ward Sloane is a CBS News producer based in Washington.

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To paraphrase T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I am not an economist, nor was meant to be. I never did very well at math and naturally shied away from the more complex courses, beginning with calculus.

Calculus, however, is not needed to understand exactly what is going on these days between the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. Over the weekend, the Federal Reserve Board's Ben Bernanke announced another billionaire bail-out. This time he has decided the American people should take on $30 billion in potentially and likely bad mortgage debt so that JP Morgan could then assume the other assets of the formerly venerable Bear Stearns investment house. We get $30 billion in bad debt; JP Morgan gets Bear Sterns at two dollars per share.

Wow.

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Ward Sloane is a CBS News producer based in Washington.

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Please don’t take this the wrong way.

As I read the first wires on the death of William F. Buckley this morning, I thought how appropriate that he should die during the year that the conservative movement seems fractured, a shadow of its once formidable presence.

Buckley was conservative before conservative was cool. He was brilliant, Ivy League, handsome and very, very, VERY articulate. And he was, well, so very self confident. All of his talent and style combined to rebirth the moribund conservative movement in this country. From his founding of the National Review to the day he stepped down from moderating his signature talk show, “Firing Line.” It is fair to say that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich all owe their place in American history to the man who once famously wrote that he didn’t know anyone smarter than himself.

Ronald Reagan was the man who is most associated with making the “L-word,” that is, Liberal, a dirty word. But it was Buckley who first started mocking and ridiculing liberals as being out of touch with mainstream America. Eventually he demonstrated through thoughtful and forceful debate that conservatism could not only survive, but thrive in the American marketplace of ideas. There are others who contributed, but Buckley was the vanguard.

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Ward Sloane is a CBS News producer based in Washington.

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The CBS Evening News reported a fact that is well-known among airplane crash reporters and investigators. There hasn’t been a big commercial jetliner crash in the United State since November 2001. Smaller jets have crashed – and these are just as devastating, but it’s the big jets that scare most of us. A big commercial jet crash sends shivers through the collective soul of the country.

That’s because nearly two million Americans get on 28,000 flights everyday. When the flying day reaches it peak, there can be 5,000 airplanes in the air at the same time. It is a lot of people on a lot of planes everyday.

Any reporter who has covered a commercial plane crash never looks at a plane in the sky quite the same way. Every time a plane takes off or lands, the thought, “hope it lands safely,” is more than likely to creep into the back of their minds.

I suspect it’s the same for a crash investigator.

That’s because aviation reporters and investigators know that there is no standard cause for a plane crash. It’s not always mechanical, electronic or human. It can be one or two or any combination of these factors. And all it takes is one tiny little oversight to trip off a series of events that result in a catastrophic failure and the loss of hundreds of lives.

No one wants to mess with that chain of events...

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Ward Sloane is a CBS News producer based in Washington.

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U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton threw the book at Scooter Libby for lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice. Judge Walton is known for stiff sentences, so this case is no surprise. He did, however, get a lot of advice from Americans as to what Libby’s sentence should be.

Some 160 Americans wrote letters to Judge Walton. People speculated for weeks over whether Vice President Dick Cheney would write Walton on Mr. Libby’s behalf. He did not, nor did the President. The two most famous were Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger; both recommended no jail time.

Many of the architects and supporters of the Iraq War – men who were integral to planning and executing the war – did weigh in and advocated leniency for Libby. These include Ken Adelman, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Gen. Richard Myers, Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Peter Pace and Richard Perle.

There were no famous names calling for Judge Walton to throw the book at Libby. Those expressing this sentiment were average Americans...

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Ward Sloane is a CBS News producer based in Washington.

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From the day he took the oath of office, on March 20, 1981, until the day he left Washington to return to California, President Ronald Reagan kept a daily diary. The diaries are a fascinating account of one of the most eventful periods in modern American history. They’ll be published on Tuesday, May 22 by HarperCollins.

The fact is that many Americans and -- not surprisingly to some of you reading this blog -- many members of the mainstream press believed that Ronald Reagan was aloof and disconnected from the events that marked his presidency. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited the diaries at the invitation of Nancy Reagan, says they show Reagan to be exactly the opposite.

In an interview with CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante, Brinkley says, “I don’t think that you can call the man who wrote these diaries a dunce. He’s somebody is very much on top of what his policy is, who has reflection, who has a handling on details…” Brinkley says his writing does not reveal a man as intellectual as Thomas Jefferson or Theodore Roosevelt, yet, he is “able to keep his game together, he knows that the wolves are always circling him but they never outfox him.”

Anyone who reads the diaries will understand, as Brinkley says, that the defining moment of his presidency came on March 30, 1981, when a crazed young man tried to assassinate him. It is clear from reading the diaries that Reagan believed that he was saved from death in order to do great things, and he perceived these things to be arms control and restraining and remaking the federal government...

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In the Hollywood Bowl – where Barack Obama is facing off against Hillary Clinton — so far it seems like no contest. Barack clearly got the best of Hillary in yesterday’s war of the press releases that was started by the really mean and nasty comments David Geffen made about both Hillary and Bill Clinton.

While Obama has promised many times to run an “unconventional campaign,” that apparently doesn’t preclude letting your surrogates do your mud slinging for you. And what’s more, Barack was not letting Hillary mother him; he was very in her face last night when he told reporters he had nothing to apologize for.

And then there’s this: a list in this morning’s New York Daily News of what Hollywood names are backing which candidate. The Daily News is more charitable than I’m going to be, saying all of these names are “A-listers.”

I don’t think so.

Here is the list:

FOR BARACK
David Geffen
Oprah Winfrey
George Clooney
Halle Berry
Ben Affleck
Matt Damon
Sharon Stone
Oliver Stone
Jennifer Anniston
Denzel Washington
Eddie Murphy
Demi Moore
Ashton Kutcher
Will Smith

FOR HILLARY
Elizabeth Taylor
Madonna
Quincy Jones
Martha Stewart
Janet Jackson
Bette Midler
Reese Witherspoon
Meg Ryan
Robert De Niro
Chevy Chase.

I’d say right now, in the Hollywood Bowl, Barack has easily out-scored and out-classed Hillary. Her list just looks like so yesterday.

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Sen. Barack Obama's exploratory committee announcement got lots of good press yesterday. Was it all warranted? Producer Ward Sloane covers national politics, and has a reality check.

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And on the second day, Obama went to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq. He basically asked one question. It rambled on for a long, long time punctuated with a lot of "ahs," "ers," "ands," and well, it just wasn't pretty or eloquent. It was not the Obama we yearn to see.

This is probably unfair, but the junior Senator from Illinois got a free ride to the front pages and first sections of network newscasts yesterday after he used the hermetically sealed World Wide Web to announce his exploratory committee. It just seems like a big let down.

Maybe this is good. It gives everyone a chance to sit back and conduct a reality check on Senator Obama.

Campaign Experience: Little to None.

Obama has no real campaign experience.

1996: In his first election, to the Illinois state Senate, he was unopposed in the Democratic primary. This is in Chicago, on the Southside. He won, automatically.

2000: Obama tried to defeat incumbent 1st District Democratic Representative Bobby Rush in the 2000 primary. Rush had the endorsement of the Daley machine and, this is important, then President Bill Clinton. With the establishment behind him, Rush easily beat back Obama, 61% to 30%. This is charitably called a "political misstep."...

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CBS News producer Ward Sloane looks at Gerald Ford's attempt to heal his beloved Episcopal Church.

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President Gerald R. Ford lived a wonderful life. By all accounts he was a man of faith and his actions as a public and private figure certainly seem to bear out those accounts. It is, perhaps, why, when he stunned the country and granted a disgraced president an unconditional pardon he was able to go out and play golf later that afternoon. That is the mark of a man who is comfortable in his own skin and confident in his judgment.

Watergate was a big breach. Somebody had to take hold and move the country forward. Gerald Ford decided he was that man.

Historians are now rewriting their own histories of Gerald Ford, exonerating the President for his once unpardonable pardon. See Richard Reeves, who wrote "A Ford, Not a Lincoln." Politicians, too, are changing their minds, even Democrats. See Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy.

And now there is another Ford stunner.

I refer to the eulogy given by Gerald Ford's rector at the State Funeral in the Washington National Cathedral. I suspect that it was not lost on the Rev. Dr. Roger Certain that the pulpit in which he stood is in fact the most influential pulpit of the Episcopal Church in the United States. It is a national house of prayer, but it also the national home of the Episcopal Church.

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Washington Producer Ward Sloane has some thoughts on how one word may have changed history.

What a difference one word can make.

Yesterday afternoon, Senator George Allen conceded that Democrat Jim Webb had defeated him. Not by much, he said, but beaten none-the-less. Still, he was gracious and announced that he wouldn’t demand a recount. Oh, and he didn’t call anyone “macaca.”

Before last August, hardly anyone in America had ever heard the word “macaca.”

Then, in the heat of his campaign, Senator Allen turned toward a member of Jim Webb’s staff who was recording the event on video and inexplicably used the word that would mean the end of his senate career...

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Veteran Washington producer Ward Sloane, using all his fingers and toes, has done some campaign arithmatic. He sent us the following dispatch this morning. - Ed.

Here’s an interesting factoid about the campaign season. Combined, the national Republican and Democratic parties have raised over 1 billion dollars.

To be exact, through the end of September 2006, they have raised $1,005,208,381 dollars. Given that we just passed the 300,000,000 million population mark, that means the parties have raised a little over 3 dollars for every man, woman and child in America.

I can’t even think about this, it’s too hard. And this is after campaign finance reform – which means its “hard money” that is, money that’s hard to raise because it’s got to come in small amounts from individuals and political action committees. It does not include unlimited amounts of money, or “soft money” which used by legal and was given to the parties by corporations or labor unions.

On one hand, I guess it’s a good sign that there are enough people out there who are willing to collectively give up one billion dollars. But the other hand says this is too much money for such a poor return.

How is it possible to raise so much money in the current political climate? These billion dollars have been raised just for the upcoming Congressional elections (some of the money is for governors, but not much of it).

Think about it. The one thing Congress does well – and on a bi-partisan basis – is vote themselves periodic pay raises. It has also allowed the Executive branch to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, with no oversight and no consequences.

Oh, and this billion dollars? It does not include the money all of the candidates have raised for their own campaign. I can’t even begin to add all that up; but the top ten money raisers in the Senate have collectively raised $285,832,000.

Why do Americans give so much for so little?

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