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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Washington. -- "How's your column, Papa?''My son, Grady, who will be 3 in June, spoke those magical words during breakfast, as I was trying simultaneously to sip coffee, scan the headlines and make sure he spooned more Cheerios into his tummy than into his little lap.Grady is too young to know what a ''column'' is, except that, whatever it is, it competes with him for Daddy's time. Since he is just emerging out of that Mama-is-God stage in life to want to tag along with Dad a bit more, he is particularly difficult to leave in the morning.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The United Way of Central Maryland is betting that guilt will speak louder than words in this year's campaign to raise $34.8 million.The charity has moved away from its standard advertising method, which built an awareness of the United Way and its programs, and taken a more hard-hitting approach, attempting to stir emotions by featuring abused children, homeless people and the elderly in television ads that began running Aug. 27."People need to be convinced thatthere is a greater sense of urgency, especially with government funding for social services being cut back," United Way spokesman Mel Tansill said yesterday.

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.

As if you need another reason to feel guilty about indulging on Thanksgiving Day, consider this: Researchers at the University of Manchester in England figure that a turkey-n-trimmings feast for eight produces approximately 44 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. About 60 percent of that planet-warming gas comes from the life cycle of the turkey, alone. The report is being touted by the Washington-based Center for Food Safety, which wants Americans to lay off food produced by industrial agriculture for the sake of the planet, if not their health.