Last June Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes had one of those grand press conferences surrounded by prosecutors, investigators and police brass. The details were shocking. Four young black men from Crown Heights had just been indicted for raping an Orthodox Jewish woman.  One of the defendants, Darrell Dula, 25, had been accused of forcing the woman since she was 13 to have sex with other black men for a decade. 

Beth Meyers, 55, Mitt Romney’s closest aide will head the search for his Vice Presidential candidate. Myers, Romney’s chief of staff during his one term as Governor, has ample time as Romney quietly seals the nomination this Tuesday in New York.  But the history behind the VP nominee has proven to be more interesting than the outcome of the election itself.

I was ten years old in the summer of 1971 watching “Bonanza,” which was interrupted for an important announcement by President Richard Nixon. The gold standard, or what was left of it, was gone, the President said. No more would the dollar be defined by metal we had to dig out of the Earth and put into banks. From that point on we could just trust the people at the Federal Reserve to print money as needed. Little was said then, and now.

Thatcherism, the label for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing social and economic policies is where we can trace the current crisis in banking institutions and the beginning of our recession. Thatcher and Reagan were the champions for deregulation of financial institutions, cuts in social programs while attacking trade unions.

The colonial power under “The Iron Lady” continued to block sanctions against apartheid in South Africa, and backed the Khmer Rouge after it was common knowledge that Pol Pot was orchestrating the world’s largest genocide.

At a recent debate all six of the remaining Republican Contenders for President were asked “where should Americans feel the pain”?  Each took turns beating the drum with cut and dry programs designed to inflict that pain, all on the poor and elderly. Cuts designed to reduce federal agencies that protect the environment, and enhance standards in education. The real cost, and pain, being inflicted on all Americans by the military and prison industrial complex was never addressed by any of the Republicans. Any except  Congressman Ron Paul.

The response in today’s Wall Street Journal from Manhattan DA Vance about his string of losses in three high profile cases tells it all. “A few media cases don’t define what we’re doing,” said spokesperson Erin Duggan.

True the Manhattan District Attorney’s office handles over 100,000 cases a year, but there were three that made the headlines. First, the cops acquitted of rape, next the two safety inspectors on trial for alleged crimes that claimed the lives of two firemen in the Deutsch Bank case, and now the DSK rape case.

Since its all Weiner all the time, let’s get to the real issue everyone’s avoiding. When will woman get their day in the spotlight?

A recent study by Dr. Helen Fisher, an Anthropologist at Rutgers University, has some encouraging news. Dr. Fisher’s survey showed that married women under 40 are as likely to commit adultery as men. So there is hope. But in order for a woman politician to have a sex scandal, we’re going to need more of them in office; however those numbers are not encouraging.

When Maureen Callahan in Sunday’s New York Post sides with the French, it’s time to check if hell’s frozen over. The “Perp Walk” a time honored publicity stunt first created by J. Edgar Hoover is now causing an international stir. Former IMF head and French Presidential Candidate Dominique Strauss-Khan, disheveled and handcuffed, was paraded before the press last week by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

For ten years while American troops searched for Bin Laden in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan, it turns out he was hunkered down at a relative’s mansion in Pakistan. President Obama, who informed Pakistan’s President Zardari of the raid only after it was completed, has demanded answers. How Bin Laden was hiding all these years in plain sight?

The New York State Court of Appeals is the most inactive Court in the Country.  Each year the High Court is in session for sixty six days, which means their off for approximately 299 days a year. Each of the seven Judges draws an annual salary of $165,000, which includes a staff, a state car and a driver. The Judges also get to choose an office that’s convenient to their home.

Author CJ Maloney just published his first book “Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning.”  A superb read about the new deal, but unlike other books that give us the broad picture, the writer Maloney walks us through the social experiment of the “New Deal.” More important, he showed how big government touched the lives of those immediately affected.

On Saturday morning, director and screenwriter Sidney Lumet died at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

His first movie, 12 Angry Men (1957) took us into the jury room where one lone juror, Henry Fonda, stood alone against the pressure of his 11 colleagues for a man who turned out to be innocent.

The classics followed with Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975)  The Pawnbroker (1964), and dozens of others. For Lumet, New York City was the main character in his films.

On April 2, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet were in the final stage of abandoning the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia.  The plan was to establish a new capitol further South with Davis proclaiming victory for the confederacy now that it was not burdened with defending Richmond from the invading Union forces. The spin didn’t fly, and historians portrayed the confederate government which operated for two weeks from a freight train, as a government on wheels. No plan or purpose, aimlessly roaming further south. The circumstances show that Davis had a plan.

Last June I attended a reading by Clint Johnson, author of the newly released book “A Vast and Fiendish Plot”. The book focuses on the Confederate government’s attack on New York City in November of 1864, originally planned to disrupt the re-election of President Abraham Lincoln. The plot, funded by the Confederate Secret Service, originated in response to Lincoln’s approval of a full scale assault on the Confederate Capital in Richmond Virginia.  Lincoln’s purpose was the assassination of the Confederate cabinet, and it’s President Jefferson Davis.

On April 15, 1865 two men going by the names of Tyson and Taylor knocked on the door of Dr. Samuel Mudd, one of them in need of treatment for a broken leg.  Mudd, a slave owner, lived on a remote farm thirty miles outside of Washington DC.  Dr. Mudd treated the man who called himself Tyler and let the two men spend the night.

Three days later four detectives and dozens of soldiers arrived at Dr. Mudd’s house, who at first denied that any strangers showed up at his house in the middle of the night. After the detectives confronted Mudd with the details of a conversation he had with a reward seeking relative days earlier, Mudd admitted to receiving the visitors Tyson and Taylor, but claimed he did not recognize either of the men. Dr. Mudd then produced the boot he cut off Tyler’s injured leg, where the name J. Wilkes was clearly printed.  It seemed odd to the detectives that five hours after shooting the sixteenth president of the United States, John Wilkes Booth just happened to show up at Dr Mudd’s door. Immediately placed under arrest for his complicity in the assassination of  Abraham Lincoln, Mudd was taken to Washington and tried before a Military Tribunal with eight of his alleged conspirators.