Martha Stewart again. Marthamania. I'm really not that interested in her, but I couldn't resist watching the segment about her on CNN's NewsNight last night. They showed a clip from Martha's regular morning cooking segment on CBS's "This Morning" show, which she does once a week. Surprisingly, she showed up to do it this week, although she must have known that the hosts would want to ask her about her insider-trading troubles, not her recipes. Jane Clayson, the female host, introduced Martha with a capsule summary of her financial woes and (alleged) shenanigans. While Clayson was speaking, an odd sound could be heard off camera--a sort of pounding, chopping sound. Turned out it was Martha attacking a cabbage, chopping it up in prepartation for her cooking segment. The more Clayson droned on about insider trading and the arrest of Martha's ImClone pal, the louder the chopping sound became. The effect was hilarious.

During the cooking segment, Clayson asked a couple of ImClone related questions, which clearly annoyed Martha--she wanted to talk about cabbages. She said she "couldn't talk about it" but that it reminded her of when she used to work as a model and wanted to be on the covers of all the magazines. "Now, I don't want to be on the cover of anything," Martha declared. She waved off any further probing with a breezy "this will all blow over." She also said something about being the CEO of a major corporation (Martha Stewart Omnimedia) in a way that implied--to me at least--that she believes she should be above any of those silly insider-trading laws.

I don't think Martha quite "gets" it yet.

On the radio this morning, one of the newscasters pounted out that if she had just held the stock, she would only have lost $43,000 (loose change to her). But she sold, and now, because of the scandal, the value of the stock she holds in her own company has declined by over $100 million. The price of arrogance?