I can see how some sheltered persons could be intimidated by a Supreme Court justice nominee who was quoted saying, as Sonia Sotomayor told a crowd at Berzerkley seven years ago in re judicial selection, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." ("Racist statement," says Rush Limbaugh here.)

I wish I could have asked my late grandfather, a Cuban citizen who graduated first in his class at a Boston night law school that Harvard tried to shut down, what he thought of this. As befit a corporate counsel, he was skeptical of politicizing the judiciary: "I don't agree with the idea that we need one Catholic, one Jew, one Anglo-Saxon on the Supreme Court." Good justices are rare; they need to make law for everyone; no ghetto. (Sotomayor would make the court two-thirds Catholic; nobody seems much worried about that.)

On the other hand, as befit the son of a revolutionary, Grandpa was also an ardent Latin American nationalist. And in our family we knew lots of wise Latinas in his and the next generation: My Cuba-born mother, my Mexican grandmother, my Puerto Rican godmother, and their pan-American amigas y companeras who filled our home en tiempos festivos gave me harto excellent advice, on education, money, women, family, and what constitutes true success. In those cases where I didn't follow it, I came to wish I had.

I expect they'd have been at least a match for Grandpa, if women from those communities had gone to law school then. Entonces pues si, why not put some more wise Latinas on the bench. Then let's concentrate on the main issue -- Sotomayor's ability to handle this big job. Is she prepared? Is she smart? Is she deep? Is she fair?

George E. Norcross III, chairman of $1 billion (yearly sales) insurance brokerage Conner Strong Cos. Inc., chairman of Cooper University Hospital and architect of its recent expansion, and premier Democratic Party leader and fundraiser in South Jersey, has moved his firm's headquarters and 130 Conner Strong workers to 40 Lake Center Executive Park, a four-story, 55,000-square-foot trapezoid on NJ 73 in Marlton.

The building was formerly the local office of subprime mortgage lender IndyMac Bank before the government took it over last year. Norcross told me he sublet the space, vacating his old office at 1006 Astoria Blvd in Cherry Hill. Conner Strong employs another 60 in Philadelphia, and 100 in North Jersey.

Deflation Watch: Starbucks is using brokers from the Cushman & Wakefield commercial real estate brokerage to push landlords to reduce rental rates for stores around the country, a couple of Philadelphia real estate sources tell me.

Starbucks operates more than 7,000 stores and licenses more than 4,000 more, and said in January it was trying to cut costs across the board. The company "is pushing some U.S. landlords for as much as a 25 percent reduction in lease rates, taking advantage of a declining real estate market to save on rent," Bloomberg reports here. 

Tough on landlords. But will it mean cheaper coffee? If not, we're still stopping at Wawa - or boiling our java on the stove.

Harvard University, with Yale and Princeton, was among the first U.S. institutions to invest heavily in venture capital. Commercial real estate. Hedge funds. The Pennsylvania State Employees' Retirement System and other aggressive investors followed. The University of Pennsylvania and other stock-and-bond shops worried they'd missed the party.

But now poor Harvard is saddled with illiquid assets, budget cuts and a big financial hangover from depending too much on its wonder-working millionaire fund managers, many of whom have left. 

In "Harvard Has a Cold," lead article in the first issue of PlanSponsor founder Charles Ruffel's new online magazine, www.ai5000.com, writer Kristopher McDaniel reports Harvard's had such a hard time turning its unwanted positions into the cash it counts on to support annual operations that it's "preparing a large bond offering" to borrow money. That's "indicative of a cash shortfall which impacts the university, the endowment and other Harvard entities."

"Yale plans for its endowment to support 44 percent of the university’s budget this fiscal year. Harvard depended on the endowment for about 35 percent of its revenue during the fiscal year ended June 30," Bloomberg reports here.  By contrast, Penn derives just 9% of its operating budget from its endowment, according to spokeswoman Lori Doyle.

Harvard and Yale "may have to cut investments in hedge funds and private equity because the risks of holding the hard-to-sell assets outweigh the returns," Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., tells Morningstar Inc.'s fund conference in Chicago, according to Bloomberg. "The Yale and Harvard portfolios, which have succeeded enormously over the past 10 or 20 years in terms of the emphasis on illiquidity and private investments and risk-taking -- you have to question that model."

Now that TimeWarner has spun off AmericaOnline and Time Warner Cable, WSJ's Deal Journal blog offers this "most attractive option" for Jeff Bewkes, who runs Time Warner's remaining, slow-growing video programming businesses (HBO, Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros.):  

"Sell the company to the likes of, say, Comcast, or News Corp... or perhaps DirecTV Group. Instead of trying to reinvent Time Warner, whose conglomerate structure he once derided as bull----, he could go down as the man who finally solved the company’s growth riddle once and for all."

Raises questions for us deal-watchers here in the shadow of Comcast Center:

Could Comcast's Brian Roberts (backed by his good friend Eric Schmidt at Google) succeed in building a high-growth cable-Internet-programming conglomerate where ex-TimeWarner boss Richard Parsons couldn't? 

Would Comcast risk annoying investors by spending the cash it's been building up on a big deal like TimeWarner? 

And does this make more sense than the One Big Cable Company (Comcast plus TimeWarner Cable) that we speculated about yesterday? 

For more AOL-TW speculation - check Nielsen on deal buzz here. Thanks Dave Ralis --

Shares of Brandywine Realty Trust topped $7 for the first time in four months yesterday after the Radnor-based office landlord sold 35 million new shares at $6.30 each. Brandywine sold another 5.25 million shares to underwriters led by Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Citi, bringing proceeds to the company from the sales to $243 million, and opening the stock higher again today.

The company also said it's bought back $34.5 million of its 5.625% Guaranteed Notes due next December, at 93 cents on the dollar.

Walter Tsou, former Philadelphia health commissioner and former head of the American Public Health Association, along with hospital union leaders, will address a noon rally tomorrow outside health insurer Cigna Corp.'s Two Liberty Place headquarters, at 16th and Market Streets.

On Sunday, U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), sponsor of H.B. 676 calling for a single-payer system, will speak at Princeton Theological Seminary's Mackay Center in a program starting at 1:30 p.m., cosponsored by the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Also speaking in Princeton will be Michael Paluszek, president of Princeton Satellite Systems. "I have an insurance plan for my employees. It's expensive and complex," said Paluszek, who employs 50. "Every year the plans change, with more fees. The cost for employees with families is prohibitive...I think that universal health care should be paid for by a progressive income tax paid for by all taxpayers." More in today's PhillyDeals column here, scroll to second item.

Rally organizer Jeff M. told me he hadn't talked to the Cigna people in advance of the rally. Cigna spokeswoman Gloria Barone-Rosanio reminded me the same crowd rallied last year; they do a great job getting environmentalists to support union causes, and vice versa, she said. Cigna opposes a single-payer system (it's an existential threat, more or less) but says it's open toward Obama's goal of expanding healthcare for the uninsured.

UPDATED: Pennsylvania has so much stock and bonds in state accounts that, over the past 10 years, it's been able to loan securities worth billions to hedge funds, short-sellers, and other international speculators, collecting fees that averaged $50 million a year, according to data from state Treasurer Rob McCord's office.

The state would take cash in exchange for the borrowed stock, and invest it in money-market funds and other secure investments. Profit turned to loss last September, when one of the investors (not borrowers), Sigma Finance Corp., a unit of London-based Gordian Knot Ltd. that used to invest in U.S. home loan mortgages and other risky assets, said it couldn't repay $133 million to Pennsylvania, after the value of its investments collapsed and its credit ratings were cut by Standard & Poor's and Moody's in a series of moves that began the previous Spring.

After September, then-Pennsylvania State Treasurer Robin Wiessmann stopped the securities lending program for a "re-evaluation," said John Lisko, McCord's chief of staff. Bank of New York Mellon has since refunded its $13 million annual fee for last year, Lisko told me. The bank collected $65 million for running the program in 1999-2007.

Other Sigma investors, like Swiss bank Zurich Financial Services AG and the central bank of Colombia, declared big losses when Sigma blew up last year. By contrast, Pennsylvania treasury officials at first hoped to keep the loss quiet and off the books, in hopes at least some of it could be reversed.

But the $133 million now looks like it's gone for good, McCord told Gov. Rendell and ten General Assembly leaders in a letter last week. He detailed the resulting losses:

- $57 million from the Public School Employees' Retirement System;
- $20 million from the State Employees' Retirement System;
- $9 million from the State Workers' Insurance Fund;
- $3.5 million EACH for the Tuition Account Program and the Tobacco Settlement Fund;
- $2.2 million to the Workers' Compensation Security Fund;
- And a total of $25 million to two funds that pool assets for various state agencies -- which will force cuts in payments some agencies were counting on, in the middle of a budget crisis.

Senate Democratic leader Robert J. Mellow, who represents Scranton, is angry about the late disclosure, which he made public yesterday. Despite her background as an investment banker, Wiessmann "didn't know what the hell was going on here," Mellow told me. "Why didn't she bring this to our attention?" The treasurer spent too much time doing "public service announcements" and hosting visits by former Vice President Al Gore, instead of responding to "red flags" that showed state investment values were collapsing, Mellow said.

 UPDATE: Wiessmann says her office was on top of the unusual situation and worked hard to limit losses. When she left office in January, negotiations were ongoing to get the money back. Other states had similar problems with securities lending; and Pennsylvania lost billions more in the investment market collapse than from security lending.//

"I've been in the Senate since 1970, and this is the worst budget cycle we've ever had," Mellow added. "To lose $135 million in taxpayer money this way is inconceivable." He's asked state officials to weigh possible lawsuits against Sigma, Gordian, and Bank of New York. He'll meet with McCord to learn more Monday.

There's obvious questions for the bank: Why was Sigma, which focused on high-yield bonds, considered an appropriate investor for short-term loans? Why didn't managers pull Pennsylvania's funds as soon as S&P and Moody's started downgrading Sigma in early 2008 [corrected], instead of waiting until it was too late? Why did the bank give back its fee? And who, if anyone, should make taxpayers whole? Bank spokesman Ron Gruendl says he'll have answers "soon". UPDATE: Gruendl says the bank worked hard to limit losses, etc. More in tomorrow's Inquirer.

In 1999, America Online, the Internet service, paid $124 billion for TimeWarner, the video/publishing conglomerate. Now, TimeWarner, worth just $24 billion, is giving AOL away to its shareholders after failing to find a buyer. AOL will be run as a public company by former Google executive Tim Armstrong.

The AOL deal ends one of the biggest and most expensive management failures in U.S. business. Who's paying the price? Investors, employees, customers. Not management: Richard D. Parsons, TimeWarner's president at the time of the AOL deal and its chief executive for most of the 2000s, is now chairman of Citigroup, the giant, government-subsidized bank. An elder statesman of corporate America.

This follows TimeWarner's March spin-off of TimeWarner Cable, which would make an interesting acquisition for its major cable-based competitor, Philadelphia's own Comcast, in its joint campaign with Google to dominate the  Internet. But first, Comcast would have to convince the Obama administration's antitrust lawyers that preserving multiple cable providers doesn't matter in today's online-phone-video competive environment, despite the pricing power already evident from cable's gravity-defying rate increases and robust profit margins. 

Bloomberg story on the AOL spin-off here.