Bernard Madoff went to jail for his stupendous financial con. His eldest son, Mark, has gone to oblivion, having hung himself from a dog leash on the second anniversary of his father's outing as perpetrator of a $20 billion con.
Federal judge William A. Fletcher recently told the Gonzaga University School of Law that Kevin Cooper, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the brutal 1983 slaying of Chino Hills, Calif., chiropractors Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and 11-year-old house guest Christopher Hughes, is "probably" innocent. Cooper, Fletcher added, is "on Death Row because the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department framed him."
"The single most important jobs program we can put in place is a growing economy." So said Barack Obama at his surly press conference last week defending the tax deal he made with Republicans.
For weeks now, speculation has been rampant about who killed well-liked publicist to the stars Ronni Chasen and why.
For once, top Obama economic advisor Larry Summers got it right. Warning opponents of the big tax-cut deal, Summers told reporters, "Failure to pass this bill in the next couple weeks would materially increase the risk that the economy would stall out and we would have a double-dip recession."
Late last week, a state judge on Long Island in New York certified that Mineola mayor Jack Martins, a Republican, had won the race for state Senate District 7 by a mere 451 votes out of the more than 85,000 cast.
The political lineup for and against the controversial tax deal evokes great bemusement. Once again, Republicans representing the poorer conservative states are pounding the table for the lower taxes that benefit the richer, liberal ones.
Reality strikes. Barack Obama spurned the advice of columnists Paul Krugman and Katrina vanden Heuvel and agreed with Republicans to extend the current income tax rates -- the so-called Bush tax cuts -- for another two years.
In the last week or two, an eccentric debate has been dividing Democratic Party pols and commentators in Washington: In 2011, should President Obama strive to be more like Harry Truman in 1947 or Bill Clinton in 1995?
I don't care what they said about her in "Game Change." Bitchy? Who wouldn't be? Difficult? She had a right to be.
Don't ask, don't tell -- don't know why we're still talking about this. "Don't ask, don't tell" is the rule barring openly gay soldiers from serving in the U.S. military. This relic of the culture wars is so past its prime that even Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don't spend much time whipping it up.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates released a long-awaited Pentagon working-group report on the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy enacted under President Bill Clinton. Most troops, the review found, would not object to a repeal.
Unemployment jumped to 9.8 percent in a very disappointing November jobs report. Non-farm payrolls increased by only 39,000, and private jobs expanded by just 50,000. This is way below what the economy needs.
A simple map of House gains in November 2010 is quite revealing.
Sandwiched between the Democrats’ disappointing 2002 election cycle and their 2010 “shellacking,” the party made significant gains during the three, mid-decade intervening elections of 2004, 2006 and 2008. And nowhere were the party’s gains more impressive than in four states: Colorado, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.
We always talk about "The American Dream" -- about living it, saving it, wondering what happened to it. Few bother to define it.
Defenders of Mohamed Osman Mohamud are already arguing to the press that he was set up and in court that he was entrapped. Every state recognizes a defense that argues a defendant was "entrapped," but most of them define it narrowly, as do the federal courts.
I suppose it is to be expected that the Great Recession should be accompanied by a sweeping national pessimism in which our purported leaders and commentators express historic despair, while the people and corporations mope about, convinced that the sun will not come up tomorrow.
The recently leaked diplomatic cables reveal both Arab and Israeli horror at a nuclear Iran. Last year, Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, evidently told the American ambassador that the world had 18 months or less to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, warning "any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage." Bahrain's King Hamad sent a cable saying, "That program must be stopped," and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed said, "Ahmadinejad is Hitler."
In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.
