Guilt

The invoices are trickling into City Hall for former Mayor Sheila Dixon. The latest is that the city was billed by her hair stylist. What's next? Starbucks bills? Athletic center invoices? As we attempt to distance ourselves from our former mayor, the reminders continue to prove that she obviously put herself into a position of self-serving greed while city children went without food and homeless citizens combed the street corners for handouts. Does Ms. Dixon feel any guilt?

With Mother's Day approaching, that suggested a motherly, guilt trip-y theme for Midweek Madness. Here's the great comic duo Elaine May and Mike Nichols, presenting a classic case of a mother whose son never calls.

Laurel -- You know the commercials.A small child is sitting in a corner. His mother is packing up the household belongings. When the child asks why, the mother explains that the single reason for the family move is that people aren't buying daddy's products anymore.''Why?'' asks the child choking back the tears.''I don't know'' says Mommy, mystified.Perhaps it's because Daddy's products are as poorly made as the commercial. Daddy needs to get a life. The scary part is to think about where this kind of guilt-by-advertising could lead.

Two city youths charged with fatally shooting a 13-year-old girl in the chest and then hiding her body under a pile of trash in an East Baltimore alley admitted to their respective roles in the killing Tuesday afternoon in juvenile court. A 13-year-old boy tendered an admission — the juvenile court equivalent of a guilty plea — to a charge of involuntary manslaughter for accidentally shooting Monae Turnage in March. A 12-year-old friend admitted to being an accessory to the crime for helping move her body.

Baltimore-born Alger Hiss (1904-1996) was the central figure in one of the Cold War's most sensational espionage cases. Raised in Bolton Hill and educated at City College, Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, Hiss was a New Dealer who served in the departments of Agriculture, Justice and State. After World War II, he helped draft the United Nations charter and was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a self-professed one-time communist spy, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss had been a member of his espionage ring and had given him classified State Department documents.

I am woman, hear my guilt.There are many things we women feel guilty about, from being too tired to cook the family dinner and sort the laundry to leaving the new baby to return to a career.Now it's time to defy these old cliches, to disallow them and not keep trying to explain and explain.Of course, guilt was built into the way we were raised: to be feminine, complying, complacent, domestic and darling -- but never too daring.Among the guilt that makes us so easily vulnerable as mothers is leaving the baby with someone else.

Sorrow, anxiety, relief, resentment, guilt. These are some of the emotions you may be feeling if you've survived one or more recession-driven corporate cutbacks while others have not.It's survivor guilt, say the experts, the same guilt that people feel when they live through a natural disaster that others do not survive, or survive a plane crash, guerrilla attack, armed robbery, plague or other catastrophe while others do not.The survivor guilt that you...

CLARIFICATIONA column by Michael Olesker in Tuesday's editions of The Sun said that a study by the Regional Economic Studies Institute in Towson found that Maryland's economy was the fifth most prosperous in the country. In fact, the May 1997 study said that Maryland had the fifth highest per capita income in the country.The latest bit of bad news for Parris Glendening is Bill Clinton. This is what some Republicans are now claiming. They think the Democratic governor could suffer integrity fallout from the current troubles of the Democratic president.

BERLIN -- Among the recent prime-time offerings on German television was American actress Valerie Perrine sprawled nude on a bed, lustily displaying herself for a salivating Dustin Hoffman.It was a scene from the 1970s film "Lenny," a biography of self-destructive comedian Lenny Bruce, and you didn't need cable to see it.Meanwhile, playing at the same moment in Germany on U.S. armed forces television was a memorable scene from the Mel Brooks comedy "Blazing Saddles." Dusty cowboys encircled a campfire, gobbling beans.

WASHINGTON -- Americans are an argument-prone lot, with an unquenchable passion for choosing up sides on big issues of the day. No doubt, they will debate the O. J. Simpson verdict loudly and, maybe, endlessly. But, chances are, many will be talking facts or suspicions, not guilt or innocence.Millions of Americans have served on juries, in big cases or small, and most of them come away with some sense of this vital difference: Factual guilt is not necessarily legal guilt; a person who may have committed a crime, in fact, is not necessarily guilty of the crime.

Call me old-fashioned, but I figure the process should be like this: guilt and punishment, followed by disgrace and shame, followed by a period of humility and self-examination, followed by insight and contrition, followed by a public appeal for forgiveness, followed by hard labor in good deeds, then redemption and grace, and maybe someday (if the statutes, stars and voters allow it) re-election. That's my idea of how a corrupt American politician who betrayed the trust of the people who elected her — say, Baltimore's former mayor, Sheila Dixon — might execute a successful political comeback.

The trial of Cleaven L. Williams Jr., who is charged with murder in his wife's stabbing death, opened Tuesday with the defense and prosecution agreeing on one thing: He did it. Williams was shot twice by an officer Nov. 17, 2008, while sitting on top of the bloodied body of Veronica Williams, his wife of nearly 10 years and the pregnant mother of their three young children. The dispute is not about his guilt, but whether he planned the fatal attack or if it was a spontaneous, irrational act. "There are different degrees of homicide," his defense attorney, Melissa Phinn, told the jury.

A Northrop Grumman engineer gave an Anne Arundel County prosecutor a check Friday to pay for signs supporting a slots parlor at Arundel Mills mall that were stolen during last fall's campaign, a move that his lawyer said was not an admission of guilt. David Scott Corrigan, 50, of Glen Burnie was charged Oct. 23 with property destruction and theft of $1,000 to $10,000. Police said that when arrested, Corrigan had 70 of the signs in the bed of his pickup in addition to one they said they saw him remove by the headquarters of the pro-slots campaign in Severna Park.

The first Christmas I spent away from my family was also the first I would spend with my future wife. I was a young reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, just six months out of college, and I didn't rate time off at the holidays. But she was still in school, so she was free, and she is Jewish, so she had no pressing engagements. Hanukkah and Christmas overlapped that year. It would also be the first Jewish holiday we spent together, and I was eager to demonstrate my willingness to get in the spirit.

In the matter of Mark Farley Grant — who was convicted in 1983 of a murder that the Innocence Project argues persuasively he did not commit — there is no DNA evidence. There's no old shirt with stains, no jacket or pants in a forensics lab, nothing that could undergo the kind of biological testing that might exonerate him and force the governor of Maryland to release Mr. Grant after 27 years in prison. There's nothing CSI-like about the case. No, the things that would prove Mr. Grant's innocence are kind of old-fashioned: affidavits of witnesses who said they lied at his trial way back when, the discovery of a failed lie detector test by the key prosecution witness, that sort of thing.

The invoices are trickling into City Hall for former Mayor Sheila Dixon. The latest is that the city was billed by her hair stylist. What's next? Starbucks bills? Athletic center invoices? As we attempt to distance ourselves from our former mayor, the reminders continue to prove that she obviously put herself into a position of self-serving greed while city children went without food and homeless citizens combed the street corners for handouts. Does Ms. Dixon feel any guilt?

Like many of you, I own an exercise bike. It is in the basement. We have a very nice basement, I'm told. One of those cheery clubrooms with lots of posters on the walls. There's a pool table, I think.If it sounds like I'm doing this from memory, it's because I haven't been in the basement for going on three years.I stay away because I can't face the bike.Let's just say, I'd rather look at Rush Limbaugh naked.Here's the deal on the exercise bike. You have only two options, both of them terrifying.

WASHINGTON -- You can tell a lot about a country by the gurus it chooses. Fifteen years ago, we received moral instruction from the likes of Phil Donahue and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.At their hands, we learned that the only thing to be ashamed of was shame, that it took courage to break with centuries-old traditions, and that we needed to give ourselves ''permission'' (Mr. Donahue's favorite word) to indulge our fantasies, flout our religious tenets and seek our own personal happiness.The worm has turned.

A Baltimore man backed out of a federal plea deal Friday, but still went ahead with his guilty plea in a surprising move that could net him extra prison time. Defendant Anthony Wiggins, 31, readily accepted responsibility for being a felon in possession of a handgun -- two, in fact, both loaded -- when his cab was pulled over in Baltimore for broken tail lights on Sept.16. He also admits to resisting arrest and trying to escape by jumping in the Patapsco River. But he refused to concede government claims that he attacked three officers.

I completely agree with the decision by Baltimore Circuit Judge Marcella A. Holland to ban using Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites inside Baltimore courthouses ("Twitter in the court," Feb. 15). I agree that our court system is based on openness to citizens and letting the average man decide, but there has to be a limit on the openness. The usual jury of 12 seems enough to give a verdict on a defendant's guilt. Bailiffs need to be there to help impose order, and of course the state and defendant need representation through legal counsel.