If you hunger for a good snicker and you're somewhat of a news junkie, what's better than a concise roundup of the best Bernie Madoff news stories — the good parts, the adjectives, the apoplexy?

Look no further than a December 22 court document in the case of another Ponzi schemer and Democratic Party fundraiser, Norman Hsu.

The Clinton pal is facing trial in Manhattan Federal Court, but his lawyer is pleading for at least a 60-day delay to let the publicity about Madoff subside. Too prejudicial to Hsu, the lawyer argues.

Thanks to the Smoking Gun, you can glom the court doc, which rests under the headline "Obama and That Other Ponzi Scheme: President-elect's name may emerge in Norman Hsu fraud trial."

Hsu's lawyer has a point. As the court papers indicate, the Madoff scandal even prompted the New York Times to proclaim that the country has been "engrossed in an orgy of scandal."

Not sure whether the Times would even know an orgy if it saw one, but yes, we have been getting fucked. No, we haven't been enjoying it.

Reading about it is a lot safer than letting someone like Madoff or Hsu touch you in a "bad" place — like your wallet.

Running down the press:

After carving themselves another Ground Zero in Manhattan (without the actual deaths), Wall Street's bankers are frantically rebuilding.

Their jobs — and your jobs — are at stake.

I'm not trying to disrespect the 9/11 tragedy or minimize that day's deaths. But the New York Times's headline this morning does use a physical-space metaphor for a fiscal-space collapse: "Bids to Halt Crisis Reshape Wall St. Landscape."

Loading their aging cannons with adjectives and even a colorful verb, the Times team crafts this lede:

For my lack of money, I'll take the Wall Street Journal's tighter lede, headlined "Crisis on Wall Street as Lehman Totters, Merrill Is Sold, AIG Seeks to Raise Cash":

What about our mortgages and our shaky grip on our jobs and our real estate? I guess news about the impact of Wall Street's meltdown on us will just have to wait.

Anyway, at least the Times's third and fourth grafs give us a glimpse of the stress felt by those poor Wall Street bankers:

Meanwhile, the New York Post couldn't resist punning (who canned?) the scary threat to Wall Street's fairy-tale profit-taking: ' "DOOMED" LEHMAN NOW BROS. GRIM'

But you won't go wrong this morning if you stick to the Post (which, after all, is the WSJ's sister Murdoch paper). At least the Post's Mark DeCambre mentions us commoners in its lede:

And the Post mentions our jobs in its third graf, followed by a quick review of the tragedy by Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan (see the website run by Rand's own followers):

DeCambre is clearly the city's best journo this morning. His sidebar "Thain Plays It Sane" (that's his editors' headline, so don't blame him) is seriously excellent, and he plays that tune in only seven grafs. On this historically frightening day, I'm stealing the whole thing for you:

A fine analysis and he even followed Post style by using the word "funky" and squeezing "honcho," "pedigree," and "gussy" into the same sentence.

I'm not faulting him, but DeCambre didn't mention some relevant background concerning O'Neal. Four long years ago, on July 7, 2004, I noted, under the subhead "For Bush, Black Is Beautiful, if by 'Black' You Mean Stan O'Neal":

Go back and read the May 24, 2004, Washington Post story I mentioned above. Just its headline gives you some good background on the current slide toward a depression: "Wall Street Firms Funnel Millions to Bush: Finance Sector Produces Surge of Cash to President Who Cut Taxes on Dividends, Gains."

Back to the New York Post: DeCambre's not the only person on Wall Street who pulled an all-nighter, but he's one of the few whose stock is rising. In an item posted at 4:02 a.m., he strikes yet again with another brief but pungent morsel, "GOV'T FORCING GIANT TO SWALLOW BITTER PILL". His lede:

The Wall Street meltdown is bad timing for the Democrats — not to mention the grim future an Obama Administration would have to deal with. After all the puff pieces on Sarah Palin were widely disseminated in the first blush of her unvetted selection, now some real news is unfolding about her shenanigans — and a blatant lie from John McCain — and yet it's buried beneath the meltdown.

For example, the Wall Street Journal's intriguing piece this morning that got pushed back to page A5:

And the story gets better:

In other news, people were killed in a commuter train crash in L.A. (which didn't even have commuter trains until a few years ago), we're still losing the war in Afghanistan, stuff is happening in Zimbabwe, and, as the New York Post reports in a preview of a September 18 event, "Britney look-alikes show 'pieces' of the famous pop tart."

Lehman's impending collapse — unless the taxpayers bail it out — is especially bad news for pols.

The Center for Responsive Politics points out this afternoon that the Wall Street scuffed-shoe firm has hardly ever met a politician it didn't try to buy. That's no surprise, of course, but the numbers are interesting. In its latest news alert, "Brothers Grim: Is Lehman Next?" the CRP (also known as opensecrets.org) reports:

The D.C. pols may try to keep Lehman afloat at least until it spends all its lobbying and campaign money for this election cycle.

Bad news for the Democrats. It was uncomfortable enough that one of Obama's top dogs was a Fannie Mae guy, James Johnson, and that Obama has reaped much more loot from Fannie and Freddie than McCain has gotten.

Now it seems that Lehman has handed over many more cash-stuffed envelopes to Obama than to McCain. Takes a little edge off Obama's claim to be an agent for change.

Ralph Nader, the newest entrant in the presidential race, is sure to implode, but not before he wreaks some panic among Democrats. He's our own homegrown suicide bomber of politics.

Suicide bombers elsewhere are exploding, not imploding. Yesterday, on the road from Baghdad to Karbala, one of the schmucks killed a couple of dozen of pilgrims at a rest stop:

And in Pakistan, one of Nader's kissing-of-death cousins targeted a cop:

Nader, however, is the only suicide bomber who publicly announces his intentions:

Sounds as if Nader's the one who's feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized, and disrespected.

The latest episode of HBO's The Wire, the best piece of investigative entertainment ever seen on TV, is once again instructive. Detective Jimmy McNulty's "serial killer" — a fake murderer springing only from McNulty's imaginative scam to get more money for police work — warranted an FBI profile. And McNulty himself fits the profile — especially the part about the "killer" feeling superior to everyone else. Back to reality: For once, the New York Times put perspective in a political story — probably because Adam Nagourney didn't write it:

Worth it for whom? Nader's quixotic quests for the presidency are reminiscent of Harold Stassen's. Only no one's laughing, except for the Republicans. If McCain's people are smart, they'll start siphoning campaign funds to Nader. So far, the only campaign contributor to Nader in the past six months appears to be one Patricia Gilmartin of Homewood, Illinois, according to federal campaign records. And, schizophrenically, she also has given money to Barry Obama.

Nader came to fame with his auto exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed. But he just can't seem to take his pedal off the metal. Take it out of first gear, Ralph. Your whining is annoying.

Hillary desperately shops for gold — and the right brand — after Super Tuesday gives way to Ashes Wednesday.

Now that Barack Obama has caught her, Hillary Clinton is going on a shopping spree for cash — the safe way, from the now-shaky Democratic establishment. It's hubby Bill Clinton who's expected to bring home the groceries from his buddy Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire.

Clean up in all aisles, Bill!

Number today as a crossroads in the presidential campaign — actually a crossing of the paths of the campaign and the still-bloody Iraq War, news of which has been pushed back to the grocery ads in your struggling daily papers. The digits are truly lined up:

Just a day or so away from synchronicity. What's your magic number? Anyway, forget about Iraq and focus on the presidential race. Maybe we'll find out that Obama is also leaving a trail of glittering sleaze behind him on the campaign trail, but for now, Hillary has a commanding lead when it comes to that.

So Americans want change? Hillary, for one, hasn't crossed over to a different aisle, despite what prominent newsmongers are omitting from their stories. Check this out and see if it registers: Blinded by celebrity, the Washington Post's Eli Saslow reports today on Hillary's supposed success in California. Actually, Obama did far better than expected in that Democratic-establishment stronghold. Saslow writes about "Clinton's California dream team," starting out with an anecdote about Rob Reiner, one of the Hollywood meatheads supporting her. Getting to the point in a style typical of the supermarket tabloids, Saslow writes:

The Post is so often at the head of the daily-paper pack that it's shocking that this article makes no mention of Ron Burkle, the former bag boy who became Bill Clinton's most dependable bag man. For a quick study of Burkle, read Jason Horowitz's "The Complete Ron Burkle," a quick-and-dirty April 2006 rundown in the New York Observer.

More recent is "What’s Hidden in the Latest Numbers," John Heilemann's excellent piece of numerology in New York magazine. Here are a few of Heilemann's numbers from the February 6 piece:

It's Obama against the Democratic establishment, so prepare to be inundated by ad after ad after ad. While Bill Clinton gets cash back at the head of the line, you might want to go back to aisle 14 for the Dramamine.

The presidential contenders — a gaggle of self-styled New England patriots, at least temporarily — are hunkered down right now in New Hampshire waiting to see who's going to be voted off the continent.

At the last minute, trailing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton swore that she is a "doer." Yeah, a doer in the headlights. Her eyes welled up with tears, so the stories say, and though it's more likely that they were crocodilian and that she was cynically playing the stereotypical-female card (or the press was), columnist Errol Louis of the New York Daily News says he thinks those tears were 100 percent saline:

Meanwhile, we sit back haplessly and see this tiny — beautiful but really tiny — state decide for the rest of the country who we're going to be stuck with to follow the disastrous Bush regime.

And isn't it fitting that New Hampshire, whose population is 1.1 percent black in a nation whose overall population is 12.8 percent black, may decide the fate of the most viable black presidential candidate ever?

This is democracy? It's like Pakistan, only colder. New Hampshire's state motto is particularly apt: "Live free or die." After the primary results are in, several of these candidates will probably have to exit, ending their free ride of matching campaign funds and potential Secret Service protection and future taxpayer-funded royal living.

As the wife of a former president, Clinton will continue to live high with free protection from the commoners, but today still may turn out to be a black moment for her.

There's nothing wrong with weeping — it's only human — but if she cries tonight, those tears will be believable.

The one piece of truthtelling yesterday came from, of all people, Roger Clemens. The pitcher injected at least a little honesty into his Monday press conference when, acting like a 'roid rage driver after a fender-bender, he angrily said, "I put my butt on the line and I worked my tail off . . ."

Yes, he did put his butt on the line so his trainer, Brian McNamee, could inject something into it.

We're still waiting for Clemens's first bout of crying.

Merrill's Stan O'Neal wasn't ready for subprime time, but he was a record-setting fundraiser for Bush

Merrill Lynch's ouster of CEO E. Stanley O'Neal is good timing for the financial behemoth, but it comes a few years too late for America and for thousands of Merrill employees.

He's being driven out for his reckless bundling of subprime mortgages into shaky securities that Merrill aggressively peddled and that are now shaking Wall Street's foundations. Yes, these big financial institutions play funny money with your monthly payments, making millions while you don't see a dime from their monopoly tactics.

Not that this is anything new. The explosion in subprime mortgages is caused in large part by predatory lending practices, which are particularly aimed at black people (O'Neal used to be one of those) and other minorities.

More on O'Neal in a minute, but as I wrote in April 2001 about this financiopathic scheme — "From the Subprime to the Ridiculous" — when the War of Terror was still being waged almost entirely on the domestic front by banks and companies like Merrill:

In those days, Stan O'Neal, while firing thousands of Merrill employees, was recklessly expanding Merrill's subprime bidness.

In 2003, as I previously noted, O'Neal, the highest-ranking black man on Wall Street, was a reckless bundler in another way: He set a fundraising record for George W. Bush's campaign by sending out a letter that generated $279,750 from other rich people in less than three weeks' time, the most in such a such a short period.

O'Neal, one of the nine Bush "Rangers" on Wall Street, was a prime bundler before the term hit its current vogue.

As this moneychanger is being driven from the temple, he'll be dragging along a big bag of cash. Details of that aren't immediately known, but, like most CEOs, he had one helluva deal. For instance, as the New York Times's Eric Dash noted this past April, O'Neal had a particularly sweet clause in his Merrill deal just in case the big company wobbled so much that it fell under the control of another big company:

Hell, that was incentive for him to be reckless enough take Merrill into the toilet. If he had stayed around long enough to really ruin the company to the extent that some other behemoth would take control, he would have gotten a quarter of a billion.

Now O'Neal joins the ranks of former Merrill employees. He probably won't be asked to join them for commiseration drinks. He fired more than 25,000 of them during his tenure.

Bad karma: Pitcher's wife gave cash to Bush campaign.

After the worst performance of his career personally guaranteed the worst collapse by a team in baseball history, New York Mets pitcher Tom Glavine was practically blasé — he talked about "we" this and "we" that.

Glavine told the Bergen (N.J.) Record's Steve Popper:

His refusal to stand up and personally take at least some of the blame is reminiscent of George W. Bush's well-known refusal to personally admit mistakes, even in light of the Iraq debacle.

Why be so oxymoronic as to bring up Bush? Back in 2004, Glavine's wife, Christine, gave $500 to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Federal records show that it's the couple's only contribution to any candidate.

That's nothing but bad karma.

Yankee fans had better beware. Alex Rodriguez is another Bush supporter. Records show that star third-baseman A-Rod gave the Bush-Cheney campaign $2,000 in August 2003.

We'll see whether A-Rod comes through in the playoffs and, if not, whether he'll take the heat.

We already know that Glavine, like Bush, is not a stand-up guy. As the Record's Bob Klapisch wrote:

Contrast Glavine's reaction to that of San Diego Padres relief pitcher Trevor Hoffman, also a sure-fire Hall of Famer, whose miserable performance Monday night gave a playoff spot to the Colorado Rockies. Hoffman was all over the news this morning, saying:

Mets manager Willie Randolph, whose job is now in jeopardy, had no problem standing up, as the Record's Popper noted:

Glavine, though, had already cleaned out his locker on Sunday night and was headed home to his mansion in Alpharetta, Georgia — Atlanta's most exclusive suburb — where he's protected in the gated community of Country Club of the South. (His celeb neighbors in Alpharetta have included Jeff Foxworthy, Usher, Morris Day, Greg Maddux, and Damon Stoudamire.)

Glavine won his historic 300th game this season. Mission accomplished. An avid golfer, he'll stroke himself all winter and then possibly return to the Braves, with whom he spent his entire career before joining the Mets a few seasons ago as an aging baseball mercenary.

But it's up to Glavine. He was paid $7.5 million this season and has an option to return to the Mets for $9 million in 2008 — yes, that's a 20 percent raise after pitching the worst inning of his career in the biggest game of the season.

We New Yorkers have probably seen the last of Glavine's TV commercials on behalf of union workers. A leader of baseball's players union last decade, Glavine has earned lavish praise by the AFL-CIO for standing up for his union brothers in other, less glamorous, trades.

At some point, at least, Glavine was a stand-up millionaire guy.

Cuba's not a dead issue in the nutty debate over health care for poor kids.

Americans owe thanks this morning to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi for clarifying how different our health-care system is from Cuba's.

During heated debate in the Senate yesterday, Enzi zoomed in on a crucial point of George W. Bush's threatened veto of funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal-state partnership that provides coverage to about 6 million poor children.

The Senate passed a pretty good compromise to help out those kids. Bush, while asking for an increase of more than $40 billion for the Iraq war, has said he won't spend more than $30 billion on this children's health program. The Senate disagreed — even some of its rock-hard conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch and Pat Roberts — and passed a bill. Roberts, a hardline Kansas conservative, pointed out that Bush is misinformed. You think?

But Mike Enzi is tagging right along with Bush, telling his fellow senators:

Our kids should be so lucky — rather, our babies should live so long. Enzi and the other senators didn't bring this up, so I will:

Cuba's infant-mortality rate is lower than the U.S.'s, according to widely accepted stats from the UN's World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision.

The number of infant deaths per thousand live births in the period 2000 to 2005 was 6.1 in Cuba. It was 6.8 in the U.S. In deaths under the age of 5, Cuba's rate is 7.7, and the U.S.'s rate is 8.4

When it comes to overall death rates, Americans have it even worse.

The CIA's World Factbook reveals that the estimated overall death rate in the U.S. in 2007, per thousand people, is 8.26. Cuba's death rate is 7.14.

African kids have it worse than anyone else on the planet. But the U.S. is an anomaly among other developed nations. It has a higher overall death rate than the rates of most of those countries, like France, Sweden, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. overall death rate is higher than the rates in the following countries (this is a partial list):

Cambodia, Bangladesh, Kiribati, Yemen, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Maldives, Paulu, Nauru, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Iran.

Yes, according to the CIA, the U.S. death rate is higher than the death rates in Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.

If you really want to understand this current problem of health care for poor kids in the U.S., go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where you can read a readable analysis of the bill and a breakdown of Bush's wrong analysis of the issue.

As for Enzi, a 63-year-old former Eagle Scout, shoe salesman and accountant, let's just say that his personal financial disclosure for 2006 shows that he ranks only 82nd in the Senate in net worth: His is $190,039 to $853,000. But 94 percent of his investments are in oil and gas, plus he does have at least $50,000 in his Senate credit union account — and the time to spend that cash: His tardiness rate is twice as high as the average senator's.

More to the point, he got no campaign money from Cuba, but the health-care industry poured $259,591 into Enzi's campaign coffers last year, second only to the support he got from big finance. And the health-care industry hates federal health care programs unless the money goes directly to the industry.

Enzi's PAC, Making Business Excel — get it? Michael B. Enzi, Making Business Excel? MBE, MBE? — raked in an additional $646,567 last year.

And no surprise here: Enzi gets more campaign money from D.C.-area operatives than he gets from the home folks in Wyoming.

Who cares about death rates when our political system is running so smoothly?

$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.

Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:

Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:

Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.

It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.