After spending 16 years in Mississippi jails for “their alleged role in a robbery in 1993 in which no one was hurt and $11 supposedly was taken,” the Scott sisters left prison yesterday. Their freedom, however, comes at a price: Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour agreed to the release of the sisters on the condition that Gladys Scott donate her kidney to her sister, Jamie, within one year. That condition has...

Skip the rice and orange blossoms, the New Year is starting out with deranged nuptial news. In the week that Elizabeth Edwards’ will was made public comes word that her widower will be marching down the aisle with Rielle Hunter, the horse killer’s daughter he impregnated during his wife’s terminal illness while still in the running for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. No word on...

Some news about legislative activity out West, via Ezra Klein:

Republicans in Congress seem to have a genius for screwing up their own gimmicks.

There has been a lot written and commented recently—including here at TMV—on Rep. Michele Bachmann. In his “Bachmann Gores Vidal,” Peter Orvetti was surprised to discover that Bachmann had once been a Democrat. So was I. Orvetti discusses how Bachmann suddenly converted from Democrat to Republican after reading a Gore Vidal novel aboard a train—some refer to this phenomenon as the “train...

Republicans made a new budget rule that all legislation must be paid for, and one of the first things they did in the new session was break their own rule:

There is really nothing, beyond the title, that I can add to this:

A Florida professor was reportedly arrested for being on a plane with a suspicious bagel. Did they put him in a cell with lots of lox? A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment. That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and...

Across the globe, we have accumulated mountains of public and private debts. Many of the debts are effectively unsecured since the underlying assets have fallen steeply in value and will unlikely return to inflated (bubble) values. Furthermore, remaining incomes for most of humanity are insufficient to pay off those debts, now or for the foreseeable future, without decimating the lives of billions of people,...

Think Progress: Rep. Allen West (R-FL), a newly-elected member who has loudly scapegoated Muslims and campaigned on a promise to oppose religious diversity, appeared on Frank Gaffney’s radio program last week. Gaffney, who routinely says that Obama is both a secret Muslim and a member of the “Muslim Brotherhood,” asked West about how the new Republican Congress plans to “take on Sharia...

Remember how, during the past few years, Republicans repeatedly accused the Democrats of a lack of “openness and transparency” in the legislative process, of not allowing adequate time to either review proposed legislation or to debate it and—in particular in the case of the health care bill—of ramming it down the throat of the GOP and of the American people without going through the bipartisan...

Answering the question “Do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president?” with the “Well she was born in the US and is over 35!” trope is a lame excuse for not answering the real question people know is being asked. Rick Santorum is the latest trying this duck: “What does it mean to be qualified to be president? She is born in this country and she’s the right age. Those...

Having written “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Smoke,” my eye quickly caught a Letter to the Editor in today’s Stars and Stripes, titled “‘‘Don’t ask,’ surf and turf.” While hopefully my piece was a little more serious and a little less irreverent, this letter in all its “cheeky,” sardonic glory certainly gets its message across—after a while. Enjoy, or endure, according...

Mark Twain once defined a classic as a book people praise but don’t read. It seems that his truism is still quite accurate. In another of the sadly ironic PC events of the day there will be a new version of Tom Sawyer which will remove ‘offensive words’. The word nigger (my sincere apologies to those who are offended by the use of this word but it would be sort of hypocritical to condemn censorship...

Here is the question as asked and the answer as given by U. S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in an interview for California Lawyer. “In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don’t think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we’ve...

How transformational are WikiLeaks and Facebook? According to columnist Antonio Pedro Vansconcelos of Portugal’s Sol newspaper, Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg have just heralded a brave new world, and those hoping for a smooth transition from the old civilization to the new are going to be ‘sorely disappointed.’ For Portugal’s Sol, Antonio Pedro Vansconcelos writes in part: If Facebook...

The new crop of congressional critters say they want to listen to the people and cut the deficit.  Perhaps this would be a good place to start listening and cutting. Sixty-three percent of people questioned in the poll say they oppose the war, with 35 percent saying they support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. “The war has not always been unpopular – back in March, when a majority thought that...

Last week, I wrote on the suspension of the consecutive life sentences of Jamie Scott and Gladys Scott by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. Part of the post was on how and why the Scott sisters received such severe sentences for “their alleged role in a robbery in 1993 in which no one was hurt and $11 supposedly was taken.” The remainder of the post focused on a New York Times column by Bob Herbert bemoaning...

The Navy said yesterday that it is investigating the “clearly inappropriate” videos made by USS Enterprise Capt. Owen Honors in 2006 and 2007 while he was the ship’s executive officer. Today they say it is unclear whether he will deploy with his ship when it leaves to support combat missions in Afghanistan this month. Broadcast to the crew of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the videos...

Now that the NFL’s 2010 season has been completed and we await the playoffs to decide the 46th Annual Super-bowl participants, it might be a good time to discuss bigger issues with respect to America’s favorite game. This exercise is far less stressful and depressing than discussing the barely-alive U.S. economy and its dysfunctional political system. I bring a dispassionate view to the entire exercise...