As the Times now publishes the right-wing William Kristol, who just a couple of years earlier called for it to be prosecuted for treason, it seems right that the Journal publishes the left-wing Frank, even if the column leaves some readers sputtering.

WSJ on the quake: magnificent and heartbreaking

A Credit to The Wall Street Journal for its heartbreaking front-page piece on a mother’s search for her son, buried in the rubble of last week’s earthquake in southwestern China (part of an overall package of superb work by the paper all week).

The piece, by Gordon Fairclough, starts:

For two days after Monday’s earthquake demolished her house and those around it, Deng Yizhen and her family tried to claw through the rubble and rescue her only child, 34-year-old Deng Yujian.

They tried to flag down rescue crews and cranes. None stopped to lend a hand, they said.
All were rushing elsewhere to grapple with the disaster.

For the first few hours, Mr. Deng called for help. He spoke from under a deep pile of
broken concrete slabs to his mother and his wife, Qin Ke. ‘I told him I would get him
out,’ says Ms. Qin, whose legs were gashed as she dug in the debris. ‘But he said he was
too badly hurt. He said he wouldn’t make it. He told me not to wait for him.’

We’ll leave the rest for you to read. It speaks for itself. Congrats to the WSJ generally for its stellar coverage of this disaster.

Insight into Scruggs’s fall

A Credit to The New Yorker for an intriguing story (abstract) on how prominent tobacco- and insurance-industry crusader Dickie Scruggs got involved in a bribery scandal that brought down his law firm.

The question that drives the piece:

The reaction to the indictment was incredulity. Scruggs had achieved rare standing among trial lawyers—as a visionary, whose extravagant fee awards allowed him to discount, with some credibility, money as his prime motivation. He was said to have scored a billion-dollar fee in the tobacco case. Why would he bother with a tawdry little bribery scam?

Reporter Peter J. Boyer takes us inside the world of Mississippi politics:

Mississippi lawyers keep score, counting each other’s divorces and courtroom outcomes. Scruggs is not the only one of them to have been portrayed in the movies (‘The Insider’), or to pilot his own jet, but he is the only lawyer notable for both distinctions.

The story never quite answers the question of why Scruggs got involved in that “tawdry little bribery scam.” But it’s a story as old as the classics: money and power corrupt— even those whose very mission is to tackle money, power, and corruption.

Who knows? Not him

A Debit to MarketWatch for a video (embedded in this column) that’s almost a parody of a news report.

The video accompanies a column by Jon Friedman on how, having hired Norman Pearlstine, “the Bloomberg company is making a statement: It’s poised to do something BIG.”

Something big?

That primes us to not expect too many details. But the video falls short of even that low expectation.

Friedman intones:

Bloomberg LP, Mike Bloomberg’s company, is doing something big.”

Yep. Got that.

He then goes on to explain (we’re trying to be nice):

I’m not sure what. Nobody’s sure what….Something’s going on there for sure.

Got that?

And finally…

A Credit to Next American City for a cover story on sustainable development in areas prone to fire, floods, and other natural disasters.

We like this piece for its broad take on the issue of development in vulnerable areas. Flood and fire are not quite opposites: both require adaptive building techniques and a respect for the instability of the natural environment.

This piece is especially useful during a week when the National Research Council criticized the Army Corps of Engineers’ plan for coastal Louisiana, and we heard the disturbing news that the structural integrity of thousands of levees across the country is unknown to the Corps, which oversees them.

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