Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth grilling bank regulators.  (Clip from Huffpo)

Wowee! That's never happened before! No politician ever finished a campaign in the red, I guess.  Oh, how they chortled and snickered. "She's supposed to be a banker, and a college professor, and she can't even keep her own books straight. And, she's supposed to supervise others? Oh, Ho, Ho, Ho.

The money laundering charge includes only one $449,000. transfer. If she pays the charity back the money she took, the case will be dropped and no guilty plea will be required.

On Feb. 4, Jonas-Boggioni and husband Guido Boggioni, 66, were driving home to Plano after a trip to Columbus to attend the funeral of his mother, Eleanor, 92.

They were in the westbound lanes of I-40, a few miles east of Memphis, when a black police SUV with flashing lights pulled them over, Jonas-Boggioni said.A second black SUV soon pulled up behind the first one.

"Knowing I wasn't speeding, I couldn't imagine why," she said.

Two officers approached, one on each side of the car.

"They were very serious," she said. "They had the body armor and the guns."

Because the couple's two schnauzers were barking furiously, one of the officers had Jonas-Boggioni exit the car so he could hear her better.

"What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?" he asked her.

She explained that it is actually a Buckeye leaf decal, just like the ones that Ohio State players are given to put on their helmets to mark good plays.

"He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language," she said.

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution--"to form a more perfect union"--the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator--for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared--the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.

The former Pope will be tended to by the same nuns that look after him now. Since 1996  Georg Ganswein, the 56-year old German cleric has been a personal aide to Cardinal Ratzinger and continued on after Ratzinger was elected Pope.   Msgr. Ganswein has been described as the "George Clooney of the Vatican" by the Italian press and appeared on the cover of Italian Vanity Fair. In 2007, there was some discussion of naming Ganswein Archbishop of Munich, but the Pope decided to keep him closer.

In Hawaii state court, it's called a DAG plea, the acronym for "Deferred Acceptance of Guilt." It's offered occasionally to first-time misdemeanor offenders, meaning that if they comply with the court's directives and don't get into further legal trouble, their slate's wiped clean after a couple years. I've just never heard of it offered in federal court until now.

Okay, we're off to Hilo. Thank you again. I learned something new today.

Facebook's income tax refunds stem from the company's use of a single tax break, that is the tax deductibility of executive stock options. That tax break reduced Facebook's federal and state income taxes by $1,033 million in 2012, including refunds of earlier years' taxes of $451 million.

It must be noted they are not the only company that does the samething.