Election 2010: Massachusetts Special Senate Election  —  2010 Massachusetts Senate: Coakley 50%, Brown 41%  —  State Attorney General Martha Coakley holds a nine-point lead over her Republican rival, state Senator Scott Brown, in Massachusetts' special U.S. Senate election to fill the seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy.

The Tea Party Teens  —  The United States opens this decade in a sour mood.  First, Americans are anxious about the future.  Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey.  Only 27 percent feel confident …

Health talks resume with W.H. meet  —  Congressional Democrats are embarking on an abbreviated negotiation to save Reid the hassle of overcoming more procedural hurdles, but that means the resulting negotiations will be held behind closed-doors as the various stakeholders push for final changes.

How Visa, Using Card Fees, Dominates a Market  —  Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name.  —  It is a pointless distinction to most consumers …

In Yemen, U.S. Faces Leader Who Puts Family First  —  SANA, Yemen — The United States is quickly ramping up its aid to Yemen, which Washington sees as a revived new front against Al Qaeda.  But one of the most delicate tasks will be managing the relationship with the president of Yemen …

MI5 told US about Detroit bomber's terror links ‘a year ago’  —  Britain told American intelligence agents more than a year ago that the Detroit bomber had links to extremists, according to Downing Street.  —  The prime minister's spokesman indicated that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was named …

Personal Bankruptcy Filings Rising Fast  —  The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy rose by nearly a third in 2009, a surge largely driven by foreclosures and job losses.  —  And more people are filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which liquidates assets to pay off some debts and absolves the filers of others.

Secret Service confirms third crasher at White House state dinner  —  Another uninvited guest made it into the White House state dinner made famous by gate-crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the Secret Service announced Monday — exposing more holes in the security perimeter around President Obama.

New scanners break child porn laws  —  The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.  —  Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines …

A Crime Theory Demolished  —  If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?  —  Printer  —  Friendly  —  The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s …

First Transgender Appointee Fears Being Labeled ‘Token’  —  Amanda Simpson Says It Was Her Merits, Not Gender Identity, That Got Her Commerce Job  —  For Amanda Simpson, believed to be America's first openly transgender presidential appointee, the job she starts Tuesday in the U.S. Commerce Department …

CHERRY WILL DROP OUT OF GOV'S RACE  —  UPDATE: 6 News Capitol Correspondent Tim Skubick reports that Lt. Governor John Cherry, once the presumed front-runner for the Democratic nomination, will drop out of the race for Governor.  —  Several sources have confirmed the story 6 News first broke Monday night at 11pm.

White House Spokeswoman Says Different Bertha Lewis on Visitor's Log  —  UPDATE: According to Politico's Ben Smith, the Bertha Lewis who went to the White House is not ACORN's CEO but another woman named “Bertha Lewis.”  I contacted Smith to tell him that Big Government would offer a correction if the …

Pensioners burn books for warmth  —  Hard-up pensioners have resorted to buying books from charity shops and burning them to keep warm.  —  Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

For Obama, terrorism is a four-letter word: Bush  —  The attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 was more than just al Qaeda's latest attempt to bring death and destruction to American shores.  It was also, in its still-unfolding political aftermath, a head-on collision between …

Matthews Bites The Politico That Feeds Him Cheney  —  It's delightful to see someone in the media go after Politico for their stenography.  J-Mart looked like the cat who ate the canary having to dodge the question about how Dick Cheney was using Politico as his conduit.  And there's simply no excuse for it.

Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work  —  Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.  —  There were other important death penalty developments last year …

Moussaoui Conviction Upheld — By: Andy McCarthy  —  The Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has affirmed the conviction and sentence of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.  Enthusiasts of the law-enforcement approach to terrorism will undoubtedly claim this development as more evidence that their strategy works.

C.I.A. Is Sharing Data With Climate Scientists  —  The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change.

Wherein Lies the Greatness of Janet Napolitano?  —  She gave an awful public performance in the wake of the Flt. 253 terror incident—assuring air travelers that “the system worked” when the one obvious thing was that for whatever reason the system didn't work, as President Obama acknowledged a few days later.

Brit Hume's off message: Have faith, Tiger Woods, as long is it's Christianity  —  In “North by Northwest,” cold and heartless bureaucrats in Washington realize they may have inadvertently sent a frivolous but innocent advertising man to his death, and one of them says, “It's so horribly sad — why do I feel like laughing?”

Fannie, Freddie, and the New Red and Blue … Over the Christmas holiday a nasty thing happened: Tim Geithner's Treasury Department decided to lift the cap on aid to the Government-Sponsored Entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, apparently in response to Obama administration fears that the two agencies would become insolvent.

GOP Chief: Republicans ‘Screwed Up’ After Reagan  —  WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele offers a simple explanation for why the GOP all too often lost touch with typical Americans since the Ronald Reagan era: “We screwed up,” he claims in a new book offering a blueprint for the party's resurgence.

What Spitzer, Sanford, Ensign and Edwards Could Learn From John Profumo  —  In politics, a new year inevitably brings tidings of hope and dreams of regeneration to those who have embarrassingly stumbled along the corridors of power.  If only the change in calendar also carried with it a dollop of self-awareness.