By Jeff Smith, on Mon Jun 4, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Does John Edwards deserve to go to prison? The jury has decided, and he’s walking.
Whatever we may think of the Edwards trial, one thing is certain: the prosecution was a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money on a non-crime. Who cares if a billionaire wants to give a multimillionaire some money to hide his mistress (who pays taxes on the gift)?
The prosecution of Edwards was never so much about Edwards as it was about George Holding.
Wait — who is George Holding? And why should we care?
 After winning a recent primary, Holding is likely the next congressman in the 13th District of North Carolina. He initiated the prosecution against Edwards while he was a U.S. Attorney. But he didn’t argue the case in court. Instead, after receiving a year’s worth of headlines (and Republican praise) for charging Edwards, Holding resigned from the case to run for Congress.
Maybe Holding understood the weakness of the case, which rested upon Edwards’ failure to report the money billionaire heiress Bunny Mellon and another wealthy donor gave to him to help hide his mistress. The problem is that if Edwards had reported contributions and then used them for personal expenses, he would have been guilty of a crime, since the Federal Election Commission bars spending official campaign funds on personal expenses. Therefore, according to Holding, Edwards was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Edwards Trial A Ridiculous Waste of Taxpayer Money
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jun 1, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET  I’ve noticed younger people on Facebook (OK, kids!) often can post a single word for a status update and add three exclamation points– and they are deluged with “likes” and comments.
How do they do that?
It must be some sort of secret young people language or maybe it’s just brevity of thought.
Oh never mind. I’m depressed now.
This is the first time ever I referred young people as “kids” and it makes me feel… it….it’s….I’m going to need some time to let this sink in before finishing this thought.
Damn!!!
By Jason Grill, on Fri Jun 1, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Farms, cows and Dorothy? Try entrepreneurship, high tech and the arts.
The Kansas City Metropolitan area is becoming the envy of individuals on the East and West coasts who have long since considered it merely flyover country. The City of Fountains has been praised as a great place to live, work and visit for many years, but recently it is becoming a hot bed for entrepreneurial investment, high culture and the innovations of the future.
Kansas City, Missouri, is home to the world renownedKauffman Foundation. The foundation’s mission is to help individuals attain economic independence by advancing educational achievement and entrepreneurial success. The Kauffman Foundation’s focus on entrepreneurship, innovation, education, and research has helped fuel Kansas City’s global presence as an attractive place for creativity and business. Nearly 300,000 individuals from throughout the world have been part of the Kauffman FastTrac program, which has helped entrepreneurs start and grow their business. In addition to the Kauffman Foundation, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Graduate Entrepreneurship Program was recently named the 2012 National Model Graduate Entrepreneurship Program by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE). Entrepreneurship is booming and alive in Kansas City.
 The entrepreneurial spirit in Kansas City has led the city to become a national leader in technology. Google recently announced it will build its first ultra high-speed broadband network between Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City was chosen over 1,100 other cities. Google Fiber will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans experience. The Wall Street Journal recently coined Kansas City as “Silicon Prairie” and believes that the first Google Fiber network “will likely bolster cloud-based technologies and pave the way for high-definition streaming services that will be hard to find elsewhere.” Combine this with the friendly business climate on the state and city leveland the low cost of living, and you will understand how Kansas City is gaining innovators and entrepreneurs from coast to coast.
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Jason Grill: Flyover Country? Not this Kansas City!
By Jeff Smith, on Thu May 31, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET  Articles like this just warm my heart – and probably John Edwards’ too. “Super PAC Timing Raises Questions” [Politico]
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu May 31, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET Thought for the day to change the world.
If everyone followed the section from the prayer of St Francis asking,
“Lord, grant that I may seek rather to understand, than to be understood.”
Thought for the day to change myself (as a back-up plan in case the world doesn’t change).
If I followed the section from the prayer of St Francis asking,
“Lord, grant that I may seek rather to understand, than to be understood.”
By Artur Davis, on Thu May 31, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Mitt Romney’s venture into education policy this week was overdue, but bold in the right places. It was a striking improvement from his previous blend of clichés about local control and hints that the Education Department might be eliminated altogether.
The conventional wisdom is that the Obama Administration has all but swept education reform off the table with its own maneuvering toward the center on the issue. The reality, though, is that the White House has mixed instances of toughness—incentivizing states to embrace charter schools, defending mass firings of teachers in underperforming Rhode Island districts—with a conventional Democratic resistance to merit based pay, vouchers, or any revamping of state tenure laws. It is a record that has won bipartisan plaudits from reformers, but not one that has made much headway in alleviating the festering mediocrity that marks many of our public schools, and that careens into outright disgrace in most inner city venues.
 In fact, success under the Obama model would look remarkably similar to the landscape that prevails in education today: a scattering of high profile innovations in either deep pocketed big cities, or states that already have a strong reform culture, with the prospects of individual children turning largely on the vagaries of location and local leadership. Not surprisingly, the politically influential teachers unions have grumbled about the current agenda, but they have adjusted to it as an incremental set of half measures that they can fend off state by state.
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Artur Davis: Romney’s Education Gambit
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed May 30, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET Father and teen daughter conversation.
Daughter: Dad, I’m going to visit a friend today I haven’t seen in a year and we are going to lunch and shopping at the mall for the afternoon. Could I please have some money….like….$20?
Father: $20?! For lunch–and some window shopping? Where are you planning on eating? You don’t really need to buy anything at the mall. How about, oh, $5.
Daughter: Dad…
Father: How about this. I’ll make it $10 because I’m an amazing dad. Deal?
Daughter: Make it $20 because I’m an amazing daughter. Deal?
Dad: You got me. Deal.
By Jason Grill, on Wed May 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET Politics and sports are two things that incite strong emotions in nearly every individual in this country, but they should very rarely converge. Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee announced there would be an upcoming hearing about bounties in professional football and other major sports as a result of recent allegations that the New Orleans Saints employed a system in which players would receive extra cash for hits that hurt high-profile opponents.
Are they serious? Well, yes they are. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) wants to examine whether a federal law should make bounty systems a crime. This week reports have surfaced that the IRS is now poking around and monitoring the situation about the payments that were made to players. The dominos are beginning to fall and political grandstanding has already begun. I am not a pollster, but if I had to guess I would assume more Americans are concerned with their pocket books and the economy right now than on professional sports bounty programs. Shockingly, I know I am going out on a limb here. Seriously though, Congress should only involve itself in sports-related matters on very rare occasions. One of those is sports gambling.
 The Final Four [took place] in New Orleans with four historically good programs. More than six million people filled out NCAA tournament brackets on ESPN.com alone. Last month the Super Bowl game garnered the prize as the highest-rated television show in United States history with an estimated 111 million people watching.
Reports have shown that nearly half of all American adults make some sort of wager on the Super Bowl. The time has come for Congress to open its eyes when it comes to sports gambling.
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Jason Grill: Come on, Congress — Sports Gambling, Not Bounties
By Artur Davis, on Wed May 30, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  While I’ve gone to great lengths to keep this website a forum for ideas, and not a personal forum, I should say something about the various stories regarding my political future in Virginia, the state that has been my primary home since late December 2010. The short of it is this: I don’t know and am nowhere near deciding. If I were to run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another.
As to the horse-race question that animated parts of the blogosphere, it is true that people whose judgment I value have asked me to weigh the prospect of running in one of the Northern Virginia congressional districts in 2014 or 2016, or alternatively, for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 2015. If that sounds imprecise, it’s a function of how uncertain political opportunities can be—and if that sounds expedient, never lose sight of the fact that politics is not wishfulness, it’s the execution of a long, draining process to win votes and help and relationships while your adversaries are working just as hard to tear down the ground you build.
 I by no means underestimate the difficulty of putting together a campaign again, especially in a community to which I have no long-standing ties. I have a mountain of details to learn about this northern slice of Virginia and its aspirations, and given the many times I have advised would-be candidates to have a platform and a reason for serving, as opposed to a desire to hold an office, that learning curve is one I would take seriously.
And the question of party label in what remains a two team enterprise? That, too, is no light decision on my part: cutting ties with an Alabama Democratic Party that has weakened and lost faith with more and more Alabamians every year is one thing; leaving a national party that has been the home for my political values for two decades is quite another. My personal library is still full of books on John and Robert Kennedy, and I have rarely talked about politics without trying to capture the noble things they stood for. I have also not forgotten that in my early thirties, the Democratic Party managed to engineer the last run of robust growth and expanded social mobility that we have enjoyed; and when the party was doing that work, it felt inclusive, vibrant, and open-minded.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: A Response to Political Rumors
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue May 29, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET One more reason I love technology.
In the old days when you committed you were going to start a new diet you had to join a gym, buy some new work out clothes, get a heart rate watch, subscribe to an exercise magazine, and perhaps even hire a personal trainer.
Before failing at the diet and exercise plan.
But not anymore!
Thanks to the internet and smartphones, we can save time and money by bragging to our friends—and they pretending to believe us—that we are “committed” to making some major changes in our dietary lifestyle without having to spend hundreds of dollars on all these old school props.
All we have to do is download an “app” for our smartphone called “Lose It”
And then fail at the diet and exercise plan.
Sure, we’re still overweight but look at the time, money and energy we save!
Thanks technology!! You really do deliver! Despite having to put up with us too human humans.
(Caveat: Some people really have succeeded using this app. They must have either really wanted to lose weight or simply lacked the ability to be able to fool themselves.)
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After winning a recent primary, Holding is likely the next congressman in the 13th District of North Carolina. He initiated the prosecution against Edwards while he was a U.S. Attorney. But he didn’t argue the case in court. Instead, after receiving a year’s worth of headlines (and Republican praise) for charging Edwards, Holding resigned from the case to run for Congress.
