Free Republic

The wife of Massachusetts Democratic Rep. John Tierney was sentenced Thursday to thirty days in jail and two years of supervised release, five months of which will be spent under house arrest. Patrice Tierney was charged with assisting in the preparation of false tax returns for her brother Robert Eremian. Eremian is currently wanted on numerous federal charges related to an illegal gambling operation operated from the Caribbean island Antigua. Tierney was accused of managing a bank account for her brother’s illicit income and deliberately misstating information on her brother’s tax returns. In October, Tierney plead guilty to four charges...

In a shocking turn of events, a federal judge this afternoon sentenced the wife of U.S. Rep. John Tierney to 30 days in prison followed by five months of house arrest for “aiding and abetting” the filing of a false tax return by her brother, a fugitive from justice. Prosecutors did not request jail time for Patrice Tierney, asking for 90 days house arrest, but U.S. District Court Judge William Young did give her jail time. Patrice Tierney’s brother, Robert Eremian, is on the run from federal charges he was operating an illegal Internet gambling operation in Antigua. She did...

Bill Hudak has a fundraising moneybomb going on. He is a Republican running for the 6th District in MA against incumbent John Tierney (whose wife just got a slap on the wrist for money-laundering $7 million). 5 days left. Stop Tierney and Pelosi.

Congressman John Tierney tried to put his wife's legal troubles behind him during a contentious television debate last night with Republican Bill Hudak. Fox 25 news anchor Maria Stephanos began by asking Tierney about his wife, Patrice, who pleaded guilty Wednesday to four counts of aiding and abetting the filing of false federal tax returns. She admitted to managing a bank account for her brother, Robert Eremian, that contained $7 million of his illegal gambling profits. "You live with your wife: How could this go on for so long, for so many years, and you didn't know a thing about...

As Patrice Eremian was planning a wedding to the North Shore's new congressman in 1997, her younger bother, Robert Eremian, was busy defending himself against allegations of operating an illegal gambling business, money laundering and tax evasion. It wasn't Eremeian's first brush with the law, nor would it be his last. Ultimately, he would plead guilty in 2002 to just one count of tax evasion, spend two years on probation and pay nearly $60,000 in restitution and more than $458,000 in back taxes. Shortly afterward, he got permission from the court to leave the country. While his sister and her...

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard. This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments...

An inspector general's report ripped NOAA for unfairly targeting the northeast fishermen. "I don't know if you know, it but we are in panic mode," said one local fisherman. An industry in peril. Fisherman told one of the highest ranking members of NOAA who is in charge of fishing regulations that the rules are killing them. "You're going to see a lot of guys go by the wayside," said a Gloucester fisherman. "It's a shame because we put a lot of sacrifice into this, so to see it all go away is going to be a shame." Dr. Jane Lubchenco...

Keith Ellison, widely hailed as America's first Muslim congressman, could more accurately be described as CAIR and Hamas' man in Congress. Congressman Ellison has been a regular presence at CAIR fundraisers and at pro-Hamas rallies in the United States. As a former member of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam , Ellison has enough anti-semitic and Islamist credentials to satisfy anyone, and had expressed openly anti-semitic beliefs in the past. Since Ellison got his start with CAIR , his attempt to provide support for Hamas is completely unsurprising. Both Hamas and CAIR are projects of the Muslim Brotherhood, which also helped...

Sixty years ago, a group of physicists concerned about nuclear weapons created the Doomsday Clock and set its hands at seven minutes to midnight. Now, the clock's keepers, alarmed by dangers like climate change, have moved the hands to 11:55 p.m. The news wasn't all bad. After all, the 1947 doomsday prediction marked the start of a golden age. Never have so many humans lived so long -- and maybe never so peacefully -- as during the past 60 years. The per-capita rate of violence, particularly in the West, seems remarkably low by historical standards. If the clock's keepers are...

Harry Whittington tried to calm the furor on Friday, but we must not let him. Leaving the hospital, he expressed regret for Dick Cheney’s troubles over what he considered a simple hunting accident at a friend’s ranch. But it was so much more. It was a violation of the public’s right to know. Apologists for Dick Cheney argue that the public was informed of the accident, but it took almost 20 hours — almost an entire news cycle! The Sunday morning talk shows, deprived of what was rightfully their story, were tragically forced to discuss the National Security Agency and...

John Tierney in the New York Times took up that old favorite question of why university professors are so liberal. ...the profs do read the New York Times, so they were glad to write in to Mr. Tierney suggesting some possible explanations for the lack of conservatives in the academy. In his column he shared them with us. They are as follows: 1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake. 2. Conservatives do not care about the social good. 3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages. 4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure. Tentatively,...

New York Times columnist John Tierney brings libertarian ideas to America's big-government bible. A Reason interview Earlier this year, libertarians greeted with enthusiasm the news that The New York Times' John Tierney had been tapped to succeed William Safire as a voice from the right on the country's most influential liberal op-ed page. A firm libertarian himself, Tierney had broken The New York Times Magazine's hate mail record with an article on compulsory recycling, infuriated fellow train lovers with a feature piece titled "Amtrak Must Die," and riffed on Robert Nozick and the immorality of rent control in his eclectic...

Dana Milbank and Alan Cooperman do a pretty good job of making John J. Tierney look like an alarmist nut based on their report of his presentation at the Heritage Foundation yesterday. His upcoming book apparently researches the funding and momentum behind the burgeoning anti-war protest industry and finds a lot of evidence that it primarily consists of unreconstructed communists. The Washington Post report of the event has Tierney painting a pretty broad brush on this score, however, and starts out by using what it believes to be a killer emotional rebuttal: Cindy Sheehan: anti-American communist? That was the accusation...

NEW YORK The New York Times has named conservative columnist John Tierney to its op-ed page after the departure of Times legend William Safire, the paper announced Tuesday. "Safire retired, and now we have John Tierney as a new Op-Ed columnist," Diane McNulty, a Times spokeswoman, told E&P. "You don't replace William Safire." Tierney, who joined the Times in 1990, will begin writing a twice-weekly op-ed column in April, the paper said. Since joining The Times, Tierney has been a general-assignment reporter, a staff writer for the Sunday magazine, and a columnist. He wrote the weekly “Political Points” column during...