Money talks for Anheuser-Busch investors?

Money talks. And on the far coast of these United States, I can almost be sympathetic.

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de La Merced bring us the latest on InBev’s bid for Anheuser-Busch:

In a reversal of its previous hostility to the idea, Anheuser-Busch is in active talks to sell itself to the Belgian brewer InBev in a friendly deal, people briefed on the matter said.

InBev has raised its offer to $70 a share, more than the $65 it had originally offered, a person close to the talks said on Friday.

An announcement of the deal could come as early as Monday, though people briefed on the talks cautioned that they might still break down ….

…. Helping to drive the deal talks was the indication that some of Anheuser’s largest shareholders, including Warren E. Buffett, were leaning toward backing a deal with InBev.

The turnabout comes only days after Anheuser-Busch, said to be weakly positioned to fight the takeover bid, filed a desperate lawsuit, hoping to stave off the transnational corporation’s attempt by accusing it of “a litany of sins, from rumor-mongering to lying to trying to violate the United States’s trade embargo with Cuba”.

Good faith, and what the hell is going on here?

While some of our politically conservative neighbors in these United States might be mourning what they perceive as the death of marriage—a lament we should expect to hear many times in the future, wondering just how many times an idea can die—it seems almost ironic that we cannot say the same of the concept of good faith, largely because the patient’s condition is classified.

Michael Abramowitz last weekend brought us the front-page story of how the White House ignored legal advice that its detention policy for terror suspects was untenable. We should not be surprised that at least one lawyer would be willing to state the point clearly: “I can virtually guarantee you,” wrote John B. Bellinger III, in August, 2006, “without a legislative basis, federal courts are not going to be willing to uphold the indefinite detention of unlawful combatants”.