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While Bernard Madoff is being investigated for his alleged $50 billion fraud scheme, a report says he is considering an insanity defense. "Bernie's family and his attorneys may argue that, somewhere along the line, he had a mental break," a Madoff acquaintance told the New York Daily News. "They may even say he has a multiple personality disorder," the source added Madoff's business began to collapse this fall as investors, hit by the financial crisis and seeking cash, started taking money out faster than Madoff could bring fresh cash into the country. A quiet force on Wall Street for decades,...

Remember the John McCain that many Arizonans grew to like over the years - the one who stuck by his principles but was not politically dogmatic or doctrinaire, and instead tried to represent the interests of people in general? Well, that John McCain seems to be back after a long journey into the dark jungle of presidential politics where he seemed to veer from his familiar middle-of-the-road approach to politics - an approach that a lot of Arizonans prefer, based on their long support for him.

Barack Obama conducted his first press conference as President Elect, with Vice President Elect Joe Biden and his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel at his side and his economic advisors, looking appropriately dour and serious, standing behind him. There was not much in the way of news made at the Obama press conference, aside from a shot taken at an old lady named Nancy Reagan. The majority of the questions were about the current economic situation and what Obama intends to do about it. The short answer appears to be the enactment of some kind of economic stimulus package, the...

Polls show Clinton holding a stubborn lead over Obama and, if she wins, she will have staved off political death one more time. Yet if Clinton wins by a narrow margin - even after an unusually bad stretch for Obama, including his foolish observation about 'bitter' small-town voters and a horrendous debate on Wednesday - her victory will be underwhelming. In the next two primaries, on 6 May, she trails badly in one (North Carolina) and has surrendered a one-time lead in another (Indiana). Even some Clintonites say they will pressure her to drop out should she lose both those...

Late payments on U.S. home equity lines of credit rose to a 5-1/2 year high in the second quarter of 2007 but delinquencies on many other types of consumer loans fell, the American Bankers Association said Wednesday. In its quarterly report on consumer borrowing, the bankers group said delinquencies in repaying home equity lines of credit rose to 0.77 percent in the April-June period. That compared to a rate of 0.60 percent in the first quarter and represented the highest rate since the fourth quarter of 2001 when the rate was 0.81 percent. However, the rate of closed-end home equity...

State Sen. Charles Bishop hit Sen. Lowell Barron on the floor of the Senate this afternoon. The Senate was in recess when Bishop, a Republican from Arley, and Barron, a Democrat from Fyffe, started an animated conversation. Bishop suddenly hit Barron in the face, and Barron fell back onto a desk. Patrick Harris, assistant secretary of the Senate, said he saw Bishop hit Barron and quickly grabbed Bishop and pulled him back. Bishop in an interview later said Barron called him a s...o...b, so he hit Barron in the face. "If he calls me that again, it'll happen again," Bishop...

The reporter in question being Adam Housley, who’s been covering the protests in Caracas all week, and the apologist being NYC Councilman Charles Barron, whom you’ll remember more recently from his violent threats towards the NYPD and less recently as host to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe. Here he gives us a glimpse of what the western left must have sounded like during Stalin’s heyday. Don’t call him a useful idiot. He’s not an idiot; he’s just on the other side. The dispute here is over Chavez’s shutdown of RCTV, the opposition television station in Caracas whose closure inspired the street...

Apprised of the fact that the potato famine of 1846-7 may have killed a million Irish people, Lord Cardigan sniffed: “Not enough to do any good.” Plainly Lord Cardigan was a son of a bitch. That’s the quality I want to talk about; but since the full expression offends the eyes of many, I’ll abbreviate that last noun phrase to the common “SOB” in what follows. Furthermore, since we don’t have what Prof. Jespersen called an “immaterial mass-word” to denote the quality of being an SOB, I’m just going to invent one pro tem: “SOBness.” And finally — before I...

January 4, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - Rep. Charles Rangel has evicted Vice President Dick Cheney from his office in the Capitol, and the Harlem heavyweight is moving into the prime digs today, The Post has learned. Gilded letters were freshly painted atop the office door yesterday proclaiming "Ways and Means Committee" - confirming that the office now belongs to Rangel, the House panel's new chairman. Sources said Cheney's and his staff's belongings were removed over the holidays. The new digs give Rangel some of the choicest and most politically central real estate in all of Washington - as well as...

Clinton turns 60: Second wind with the Stones By Laszlo Trankovits Aug 18, 2006, 12:20 GMT Washington - Bill Clinton is a master of self invention. Nearly every American knows the photograph of the star-struck 16- year-old youth, worshipfully shaking the hand of President John F Kennedy - symbolic of his teenage dream to live in the White House someday. Nearly six years after the end of his spectacular presidency, Clinton is still mining the suggestive power of photographs. His picture is everywhere - at the AIDS conference in Toronto with Bill Gates, in Southeast Asia with the elder President...

CLEBURNE, Texas: A rail worker who lost his legs when a train ran over him used a mobile phone to report that he was trapped and had been "cut in two". Truman Duncan, 36, was in a critical condition yesterday after the accident on Sunday at the Gunderson Southwest rail yard in Cleburne. In a tape of the 911 call, Duncan tells the operator: "I need 911 ... I think I'm cut in two." The operator asks: "Someone got run over?" Duncan replies: "It was me. I guess I'm going into shock. Hurry up, ma'am, because I'm about to pass...

Last week, we wrote about the cornucopia of celebs who support clemency for convicted murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams, co-founder of the Crips and murderer of at least four people (probably more). To recap, we reported that Williams was a multiple-time Nobel Prize nominee for writing a kids book and allegedly helping to stop violence (not really). Today, we have some questions we'd like to raise about Tookie. Questions that were NOT raised by the mainstream media. But, first, we'd like to draw your attention to "their" Tookie versus the REAL Tookie Williams, as encapsulated in the photo the liberal (mainstream)...

The Anti-Defamation League has called on Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin to apologize for comparing alleged abuses at Guantanamo Bay to torture and killing by the Nazi regime. "Whatever your views on the treatment of detainees and alleged excesses at the Guantanamo Bay facility, it is inappropriate and insensitive to suggest that actions by American troops in any way resemble actions taken by Nazis in their treatment of prisoners," wrote ADL head Abraham Foxman in a letter to the Illinois lawmaker. [See video of the remarks here.]

Claim: Senator John Kerry referred to a Secret Service agent as a "son of a bitch." Status: True.

http://tinpan.fortunecity.com/vanishing/958/midi.htm MIDI - IF I FELL - click on Beatles, then click on first version If I fell down on the slopes...would some fans then give up hope Would they not hear my pitch I must come up with a plan...I will blame the SS man That son of a *itch I fell six times on my rear...down in the snow But there was no camera near...nobody needs to know I was having such a ball...it made me high I proclaimed I do not fall...that was a lie But then...I know how to fabricate...so well You want me to tell...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Arnold Schwarzenegger's promise to clean house if he wins California's recall election for governor next week has many nervous state appointees worried their jobs could soon be terminated. While uncertainty is a trademark of any job in politics, California's Oct. 7 recall election could lead to the unusually quick removal of Gov. Gray Davis and many of his estimated 3,000 appointees less than one year after the Democrat won a second term last November. It is a daunting prospect in an uneven economy -- a core reason for the electoral drive to remove Davis -- for...

Just announced on the radio.

Posted on Thu, Dec. 05, 2002 Courtney sentenced to 30 years By MARK MORRIS The Kansas City Star Robert Courtney sits as victims speak before his sentencing Thursday in Federal Court in Kansas City. A federal judge gave him to the maximum 30 years in prison for diluting cancer drugs for profit. Illustration by L. Eric Craven, The Star Former Kansas City pharmacist Robert R. Courtney was sentenced today to a maximum of 30 years in prison for diluting chemotherapy medications he prepared for cancer patients. Courtney, 50, faced a sentence of 171/2 years to 30 years in federal prison....