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Senator Scott P. Brown broke ranks with fellow Republicans today in a procedural vote for a Democratic proposal to raise the nation’s debt limit and avert a default this week, while high-level wrangling continues between the top GOP senator and the Obama administration. Brown was the only Republican to vote for cutting off debate on the plan from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. Brown had previously indicated that he could support the proposal, though had also said he approved of another, rival plan from House Speaker John A. Boehner, which Democrats considered dead on arrival in the...

If the House passes the Boehner plan today, Senate Democrats will be in a bind. They cannot pass their own plan, offered by Senator Reid, thanks to a GOP filibuster—which means the Boehner bill will be the only live option for avoiding default. Senate Democrats will likely respond by trying to put forward a third option—a compromise between the Boehner and Reid plans. But considering the difficulty Boehner has had in convincing House conservatives to vote for his plan, he can credibly say that passing a watered down version of his plan in the House would be nearly impossible. Boehner’s...

Poor President Obama just can't catch a break. Earlier today, the president entered the White House Rose Garden to announce that he'd tapped Richard Cordray to head the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But then he told a bad joke about Cordray's past as a Jeopardy! contestant. And nobody laughed. And it was sad.

[...] And all because I wrote, in June 2010, a column that began: “Sarah Palin can be the Republican nominee in 2012. I am not saying she will be, but she can be. Those who underestimate her do so at their own risk.” I advised her to do seven things: Dump Alaska, surround yourself with people smarter than you are, pick a handful of issues and stick to them, study up, don’t believe you can’t do it, don’t go changing and don’t worry about failure. [...] In The Washington Post on Monday, a front-page story referred to Romney as “widely...

Apparently, a lot of people consider President Barack Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. "The guy can't talk his way out of a paper bag!" a reader wrote to me recently. "Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It's the president whose sentences are undiagrammable," said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It's not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of "does Obama have a speech impediment" turns up several pages of discussion among the president's supporters and critics alike. Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of...

Amid shale boom, Pa. law offers little protection to archaeological sites. An excavation at a Westmoreland County site once occupied by Monongahela Indians produced abundant evidence of two villages and allowed researchers to piece together the violent end of the later settlement at the hands of invaders who sacked it, massacred its inhabitants, and burned houses and food stores, said William C. Johnson, an adviser to the project. But when Johnson returned last year to the dig, called the Kirshner site, he was stunned. "There is a drill rig and catchment basin sitting on half the village," said Johnson, who...

Osama Bin Laden was taking herbal Viagra when he was living in his Pakistani compound. The health of the tall, thin terror leader was the subject of much speculation in the last few years. Some in intelligence circles even believed he was having kidney dialysis treatment. But now evidence pulled from the medicine cabinet in his hideout, and interviews with his young wife in the Pakistani media, appear to show bin Laden, 54, was not in bad shape. They also show his fondness for herbal remedies. [...] Aside from its use to increase sexual desire and potency, Avena syrup is...

Ruth Ellen Brosseau. (Supplied Photo) OTTAWA - A controversial new NDP MP from Quebec has stepped out of the shadows and on to the pages of a newspaper in la belle province. Ruth Ellen Brosseau gave her first interview since the election to Le Nouvelliste, a local Quebec paper. Numerous media outlets have been chasing after the new MP, who has not made a public appearance since she was elected in the Quebec riding of Berthier-Maskinonge on Monday. “It’s been a big week,” she told the newspaper. Brosseau said it was a “shock” to see the election results come in...

The study found no difference in the ethical behavior of believers and nonbelievers. But participants who saw God as compassionate were more likely to cheat than those who believed in an angry, punitive God. [...] The study, titled "Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior" was peer reviewed and published earlier this month in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. In line with many previous studies, it found no difference between the ethical behavior of believers and nonbelievers. But those who believed in a loving, compassionate God were more likely to cheat than...

[...] The 39-year-old CBS foreign correspondent said she was convinced she was going to die when the frenzied mob tore her away from her film crew and bodyguard in Cairo's Tahrir Square. A group of at least 200 men beat her, pinched her and tore at her clothes in a 40-minute attack that only ended when a group of women came to her aid. She told the New York Times: 'For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands...What really struck me was how merciless they were. 'They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them...

Throughout a tumultuous career as an economist in Nairobi in the 1960s, Barack Hussein Obama, President Obama’s father, claimed to have earned a PhD from Harvard University. But according to federal immigration records, Obama was forced to leave the school by administrators alarmed at his freewheeling personal life and financial difficulties. In a May 1964 memo contained in the elder Obama’s Immigration and Naturalization Service file, an immigration inspector noted that Obama had passed his exams and was entitled to stay and complete the requirements for a PhD in economics. [...] Not long afterward, Harvard asked the INS to hold...

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. businesses in February posted the largest number of job openings in more than two years, evidence that hiring is picking up as the economy grows. The Labor Department said Wednesday that employers advertised 3.1 million available jobs that month, the most since September 2008. That was the height of the financial crisis, when Lehman Brothers collapsed. The competition for those jobs is easing, though still intense. The department's report shows that there were 4.4 people, on average, competing for each available job in February. That's down from nearly 7 in July 2009, but still above the...

Terry Jones admits that he finds Monty Python's Flying Circus "only occasionally" funny. He's right: a lot of it hasn't aged well. Not that that's unusual. Time is notoriously unkind to comedy. [...] The other night, I watched a forthcoming Arena documentary. It was about the Beatles' producer George Martin, and very good it was too, but the footage that most interested me wasn't of him. It was from a British news broadcast during the Second World War. Describing a mission in which the Fleet Air Arm had hit several Italian ships, the newsreader declared that Britain "had kicked the...

The Buffalo Sabres honored their past before Friday night's home finale, then assured a trip to the Stanley Cup Playoffs in their immediate future. Nathan Gerbe scored a highlight-reel goal midway through the third period to tie the game and Thomas Vanek won it with a breakaway goal 1:16 into OT as the Sabres beat the slumping Philadelphia Flyers 4-3 on Friday night. The Sabres (42-29-10) can finish no worse that seventh in the Eastern Conference -- they can go as high as six by getting one more point at Columbus on Saturday than Montreal does at Toronto. [...]

WILMINGTON, DE - A tenured professor fighting to keep his job at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington has sued the dean for allegedly making defamatory statements in an effort to fire the instructor. Lawrence J. Connell, an associate professor at the school, has accused dean Linda L. Ammons of intentionally making false statements that characterize Connell as a racist and sexist in administrative proceedings to oust the professor. [...] Speaking at a news conference, Connell said, "Ammons has destroyed my reputation because of my conservative, political and legal beliefs." Connell, who is white argues that Ammons, an African...

Delco mayor who died skydiving lived fast.He was a lone-wolf lawyer and freelance conservative crusader with a passion for skydiving, fast cars, motorcycles, and anyone he thought was on the right side of the U.S. Constitution. As brash on a case as he was brave in the skies, he once called for the arrest of Mayor Nutter over gun control, was nearly ejected from a Philadelphia courtroom in a defamation case, and became known as the go-to guy in heavily Democratic Southeastern Pennsylvania for right-wing legal challenges involving gun rights or free speech. [...] Shields, a small-town GOP mayor and...

[...] How we honor our history is what makes us Texans. It binds us together. It makes us distinct and, we believe, the envy of most Americans. [...] Arguably only one or two other states in the Union evoke as much international interest, visitation and admiration as Texas. Because of our state’s history, investing in and maintaining the awareness of historical places supports tourism and benefits the economy. Today, however, the Texas mystique is under siege. The unthinkable is happening: The ability to discover and preserve Texas history is under assault. Gov. Rick Perry’s recent State of the State address...

Notwithstanding his status as America's greatest thinker on crime, punishment and social order, James Q. Wilson's toleration for minor deviancies, his own and other's, is notable. [...] Mr. Wilson is most famous for the phrase "broken windows," but he is quick to point out that it didn't originate with him. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford conducted an experiment in which he found that a car parked on a sedate street in a middle-class New York neighborhood would sit unvandalized for days—that is, until Mr. Zimbardo himself came back with a hammer and broke the first window. [...] "The biggest change in...

Judge lets Sony spy on Geohot visitors in PS3 suit George Hotz faced another setback in his defense against Sony's anti-jailbreaking lawsuit late Thursday after a judge granted Sony a potentially controversial amount of information access. It now has permission to get the IP addresses, accounts and other details of anyone who has visited either his main Geohot site or his PS3 jailbreak Blogger site between January 2009 and the modern day. Sony made clear that the access wouldn't be limited to those who downloaded the jailbreak code.The company had already received permission to track as much information as possible...

It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie two years earlier to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary. Ms. Regan had once been involved in an affair with Mr. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner whose mentor and supporter, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was in the nascent stages of a presidential...