“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped,” Herbert Humphrey once said. A quarter century later, a pharmaceutical executive riffed on the former vice president, saying that his own “industry should be held to the same moral standard.

The Case of the Northwest Pilots keeps getting funnier and funnier. Of course, it wouldn’t be one bit amusing if it had happened to me, but as Woody Allen once said, when I get a hangnail, it’s tragedy; when you fall down the stairs, it’s comedy. Or maybe it wasn’t Woody Allen

It’s one of those days. Maybe you have technical problems, or a project that isn’t going well, you couldn’t sleep last night, you’ve run into a writer’s block or thinker’s block or city block.

Stephen Colbert has a plan for health care reform that will appease the insurance companies and the American people: Get rid of pre-existing conditions by breeding insurable people with CEOs of insurance companies to create a master race. Yes, he knows what you’re thinking: That sounds awfully Hitler-esque.

Human CDOs , perhaps that is the name we should give to banking executives who need the lure of excessive compensation in order to remain at US firms that are yet to repay the taxpayers who bailed them out. CDOs, you may recall, were the financial instruments that were at the center of the global financial crisis.

Investor Whitney Tilson has another take on the August house-price numbers, which sent housing bulls into spasms of glee a few days ago. Whitney’s concern is that the sequential increase in prices in August was less than the sequential increase in July.


 
 A wealthy accountant who provided extensive help in the tax evasion probe of Swiss bank UBS AG was sentenced to a year of house arrest Wednesday after admitting he concealed about $6 million in assets from the IRS. Steven Michael Rubinstein, 55, was the first U.S. citizen charged in the probe.