In the city of celebration, New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson may have the most to celebrate.

One way of getting ahead in most professions is to work hard, gain experience and acquire some mentors along the way.

A small, intensely local site launched yesterday using Muckety mapping.

While problems continued to hammer Toyota, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood compounded the trouble by tripping over his tongue.

In what is likely to be California’s most expensive gubernatorial campaign to date, billionaire Meg Whitman is outspending everybody.

Lost returns to ABC tonight, with promises of resolution for the survivors of flight 815 on the horizon.

The story line, all too real, reads like a made-for-TV movie.

Lions of politics and business have teamed up on a new documentary advocating an end to all nuclear weapons.

The common man isn’t the only one who resents bankers these days.

Before John Edwards came clean to the rest of the world about fathering an out-of-wedlock child, he made a special visit to see Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon.

We happened to notice that the Belizean Grove has shut down its formerly public web site.

The URL, www.belizeangrove.com, once listed a membership roll of prominent women, including Sonia Sotomayor.

The club was conceived as women’s alternative to the secretive, all-male Bohemian Club, which counts former presidents George H.W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon among its members.

When Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court, she came under fire for being a member of a women-only organization. She ultimately withdrew from the club.

Now the club has withdrawn as well. The site currently shows only a holding page for GoDaddy.com.

All the excitement over the iPad, Apple’s multimedia competitor to the Amazon Kindle and lesser foes, set us to thinking about books and networks.

Howard Wolfson, who got a $400,000 bonus for his work as spokesman for New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s successful re-election campaign last year, has taken a new position with the mayor.

Charles Phillips, the co-president of Oracle Corporation, got some unwanted press last week when giant billboards popped up in New York’s Times Square, San Francisco and Atlanta displaying photos of the executive with YaVaughnie Wilkins, the woman with whom he had an eight-year affair.

The billboards included quotes from Phillips to Wilkins, including “You are my soul mate forever” and a web site with photos and videos of the two together. The web site, which has since been taken down, was commissioned by Wilkins as a present to Phillips, reports Business Week. Images from the site were preserved by Gawker.

Phillips has since issued a statement acknowledging the eight-year relationship with Wilkins, which has since ended. His wife, Karen, began divorce proceedings in 2008, though it’s been speculated that the couple was heading toward a reconciliation.

Phillips sits on the boards of Viacom and Morgan Stanley, as well as President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. None of the companies affiliated with Phillips have commented on the developments.

First rule of New York state politics: Unannounced candidates get more attention than candidates who have actually made their intentions known.

Folksy radio commentator Paul Harvey, who died a year ago at age 90, was a sub rosa broadcast voice for the FBI.

When he wanted to play hardball with NBC over the terms of his departure from “The Tonight Show,” Conan O’Brien hired entertainment lawyer Patricia L. Glaser.

Carbon trading, according to investigative journalist Mark Schapiro, “is now the fastest-growing commodities market on earth.”

The Supreme Court handed a gift to big business Thursday.

Who knew that Joe Lieberman was a trendsetter?

While the loss of Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts has Democrats across the country blaming one another, Republican strategist Eric Fehrnstrom is basking in his success.

Carter G. Phillips has argued 66 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. It appears he could have at least one more.

Philip N. Angelides once described himself as a fighter who can take a punch and get back up.

As it is in nearly every major disaster, the Red Cross is at the forefront of relief efforts in Haiti.

Those who say they want government out of their lives should be forced to do rescue work in Haiti.

Here is a country without disaster preparedness, emergency response or building codes. Whatever rule existed before the earthquake has been reduced to rubble.

When a near-total leadership vacuum exists in an area of overwhelming need, the burden passes to outside NGOs and developed nations.

Yet U.S. aid to Haiti in the years leading up to the disaster shows a strong aversion to government intervention.

Between 2006 and 2009, USAID spent $14.6 million on disaster response in Haiti. Spending on preparedness and mitigation, in this Caribbean country beset by natural and political disasters, totaled just $1.1 million.

Adding together all U.S. government entities, assistance to Haiti has been substantial, if not effective

Yet the USAID figures come amazingly close to the old adage. We apparently would rather pay for a pound of cure than for an ounce of prevention.

The cost is inestimable.

Through horrific circumstances, Bill Clinton again finds his mark on the world stage.

In the wake of the nearly successful Christmas Day terrorism attempt, Adam Hanft posed a salient question on Huffington Post.

Hanft wrote: “I’d feel much safer if the engineers at Google were running the database that identifies and tracks potential terrorists. Wouldn’t you?”

Now Google is threatening to pull out of China because of targeted attacks on Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.

On the global political stage, Google is positioned to act (is already acting?) as a shadow government. Think of it as a customer-friendly Blackwater.

Through the combined powers of technical brilliance, computing infrastructure, massive databases, profit motive and cash, the company’s capacities in some arenas have outstripped those of Washington.

After a long silence, former baseball star Mark McGwire admitted on Monday that he had used steroids while playing.

Is Fox News chief Roger Ailes on his way out?

If comments from Rupert Murdoch’s family circle are an indication, the answer would be yes.

In a story Saturday, The New York Times quoted Murdoch son-in-law Matthew Freud as saying, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

As Newser columnist Michael Wolff points out, the kingmaker at News Corporation isn’t named Roger.

Wolff gives Ailes about a year.

The decision by the Washington Post to publish stories produced by a news startup founded and funded by billionaire Peter G. Peterson has stirred criticism.

Timothy Geithner has been called to testify before Congress about reports that the New York Federal Reserve Bank allegedly pressured insurance AIG to keep secret the terms of generous payments it made to partner banks.

Washington is “abuzz with speculation” over White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s future, including whether he might make a run for mayor of Chicago.

Democrats and Republicans are taking time off from the crucial work of dragging the country out of several quagmires to parse racially insensitive remarks made by leaders of both parties and work it to their own political advantage.

Anyone who follows politics in New York state doesn’t need reality TV.

With the release of the White House review of the Christmas Day terrorism attempt, the pundits are scornfully pointing out spelling problems.

Attempted terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had a U.S. visa, but because of a name misspelling, this record wasn’t correlated with his father’s report to authorities about his son’s radicalization.

While our national security system should be humiliated by this lapse, the issue is likely more complicated than the difference between McDonald and MacDonald.

Years ago, at another company, we created a place-name database for an NGO providing emergency services in the Mideast. Our biggest task was in cataloguing the many spelling variations that occur in converting Arabic to the English alphabet.

This is not an insurmountable obstacle, and it’s certainly one that intelligence should have cleared by now. But media coverage of the terrorist threat needs to make the complex understandable, rather than leaping for oversimplification.

Here’s a twist on the Kevin Bacon drinking game: How many financial crises can you link to Phil Gramm?

More powerful, but less popular, than ever, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, announced Wednesday that he would not seek re-election.

The University of Michigan Tuesday named David A. Brandon, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza, as the school’s new athletic director.

In the press of the new year, we let Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau leave office without a Muckety map.

As economic indicators, office buildings may be the reverse of hemlines.

One popular theory has it that as skirt lengths go up, so do stock prices. Rising building heights, on the other hand, could signal downturns.

The Christian Science Monitor suggests that we should all be worried that the world’s tallest skyscraper just opened in Dubai.

Construction of the Singer and Metropolitan Life Buildings, the newspaper notes, coincided with the Panic of 1907. New York’s Chrysler and Empire State buildings marked the beginning of the Great Depression.

So often is this correlation observed that it has been given a name: the skyscraper index.