Free Republic

Jean, a 73-year-old grandmother, was at her Long Island home Thursday morning when she received a phone call from a man claiming to be her grandson. He was in jail for drunken driving, he said. He needed her help posting an $8,000 bail. But there was one problem, Jean thought — her grandsons are far too young to drive. It was a scam. So Jean decided to swindle the swindler. “I knew he was a real scammer. I just knew he wasn’t going to scam me,” Jean told WCBS, which identified her only by her first name. Jean played along,...

Second Thoughts By: William W. Lawrence 06/08/2004 The champagne corks were not popping at 400 N. Broad St., but there were some smiles. Circulation rose a paltry 800 to 387,692, which was an improvement over past years when the left-wing, liberal publication appeared to be in free-fall. In 1999, the Inquirer was losing readers faster than any newspaper of comparable size in the country. An Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), the largest independent verifier of newspapers' circulation figures, showed that the Inquirer's daily circulation had dipped to just under 402,000 -- a 7.2 percent decrease from the same six-month period...