Kerik's opposition was concise, taking the form of a link-only Tweet:

http://www.newsmax.com/FrankGaffney/Gaffney--mosque--ground--zero--Manhattan-/2010/07/22/id/365393

Salon, who pointed us to this development, looked into the matter of who actually clicked the publish button on that Tweet. As it is with so many celebrities, Kerik's account is most likely handled by an intermediary.

Mr. Kerik's lawyers asked that he be free until federal officials determine where he'll be sent. Mr. Kerik has been confined to house arrest while he awaited sentencing, which has provided ample time to update his Facebook page and a personal blog, The Pillar of Strength. Last year, he made a cameo appearance--accompanying one of the couples to a guard dog training session--on Real Housewives of New Jersey.

The Observer last spoke with Mr. Kerik on September 10, 2008--four years after his precipitous fall began--while the former police commissioner was planting 23 flags in his yard to commemorate the officers he lost in the 9/11 attacks.

The gunman, identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, was shot by a Fort Hood police officer responding to the scene. Mr. Hasan remained hospitalized on a ventilator on Friday morning, but was in stable condition, Army officials said at a news conference held at the entrance to the base.

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist  about to be deployed to Afghanistan. The Times says that he listed "no religious preference" on his personnel records, but the Daily News says he was a devout Muslim. The Post goes with the headline "Muslim major screamed 'Allahu Akbar' before slaughtering 13 at Ft. Hood." The Daily News tries to make sense of his motives:

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a soldier who didn't want to go to war, a man of God who defended murder and a doctor who shot up the soldiers he was supposed to heal.

Closer to home, the trial of a narcotics detective has brought attention to the "tricky balancing act" that law enforcement officers must strike in using confidential informers, says The Times. Detective Earl Williams is charged with official misconduct and hindering prosecution:

Prosecutors say that investigators for the Drug Enforcement Administration told Detective Williams that [his C.I.s] Batman and Robin had become the subjects of one of their investigations and that they were tapping their telephones.

In fact, prosecutors have said, Detective Williams knew that his confidential informers were selling drugs outside their sphere of work for him. But instead of trying to stop them, the prosecutors said, he continued to use them as informers, and even leaked crucial information to the two men.

And Bernard Kerik, as expected, pleaded guilty. Reports The Times:

In a deep, gravelly voice, he said, "Guilty, Your Honor," as the judge read the charges against him.

Both the The Times and the Daily News lead with the projects' proximity to Yankee Stadium:  less than a mile. They're following police commissioner Raymond Kelly's lead in tying the bust to baseball. From the Daily News:

"The residents of the Bronx have a couple of reasons to be happy today," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. "The Yankees are back home and a major drug-dealing operation, just 10 blocks from Yankee Stadium, has been taken out of business."

From The Times:

"At dawn this morning, as the grounds crews were preparing the stadium for the sixth game of the World Series," Commissioner Kelly said, the agencies "were doing their own housecleaning, so to speak."

Both papers recount also the various "brand names" the gangs used for their drugs--Magic, Poison, Scorpion--all of which sound like Little League team names. And regrettably, while both papers explain some drug-dealer slang, neither makes any comment on the term "pitchers" for street-level dealers.

The police are now investigating the gangs' involvement in firearms trafficking, 40 shootings, and 20 unsolved murders.

A good day for commissioner Kelly, and a not-totally-bad day for former commissioner Kerik: he's expected to accept a plea deal that will give him less than three years in jail, says The Times. If convicted of the most serious corruption charges against him, he would have faced up to 20 years.

And, for reasons that Dominic Carter does not understand, Dominic Carter continues to be unsympathetic. In fact, says the Post, he is whiny:

Poor Dominic Carter.

The violent NY1 political anchor and his lawyer have whined and moaned for the past year about how "unfair" the prosecution has been to him, and how they've wasted his "precious time" in pursuing charges that he was beating his wife, transcripts obtained by The Post show.

"This is unfair!" Carter griped at a March 26 hearing in Ramapo Justice Court in Rockland County, after prosecutors refused to cut him a deal and drop the case if he stayed out of trouble.

"Now I got to stand trial because I [won't] accept a plea bargain on anything," he griped, according to transcripts from multiple court hearings on a single charge of domestic-violence assault in October 2008.

Governor Paterson may have broken the law by soliciting free tickets to the opening game of the World Series--an ethics panel is currently investigating the incident. According to The Times, members of the state executive branch are forbidden from "soliciting or accepting gifts of more than nominal value from any lobbyist if the gift appears intended to sway the official." Paterson says that he attended in "his official capacity." But:

While state ethics rules do allow some gifts accepted in connection with official duties, they appear to exclude most tickets to sporting events. An advisory opinion by the commission last year stated that attendance at events which are "substantially recreational in nature" cannot generally be considered official duties.

Rats.

The Post reports that the "daring skylight burglar" who stole Amanda Peet's jewels last Tuesday is in now in jail. He was arrested Thursday in connection with an earlier skylight burglary, then tied to the Peet case. The Post also reports that Peet "is best known for her roles in the films 'Saving Silverman' and 'The Whole Nine Yards.'" Henry Santos may have stolen her jewels, but you have stolen her dignity, Post.

The Daily News has posted two versions of the the news, one from the A.P. and one by their own reporter. The original A.P. story, which is no longer up on the web site, described the diminished circumstances of Madoff's life in jail ("sleeps on the lower bunk of a cell he shares with a drug offender"). The second focuses instead on his sordid past, when he presided over a coke-fueled office ("it was known as the 'North Pole'") and partied with strippers ("topless waitresses who wore little more than G-strings").

The Post's account deftly combines the two narratives:

Newly filed court papers paint a bleak picture of Bernard Madoff's present life -- and a strippers- and drug-filled portrait of his past.

The one detail that no story omits: Madoff now eats pizza cooked by a child molester.

In news of other potentially criminal Bernards, former police commissioner Kerik—about to be tried for corruption, conspiracy and tax fraud—has had his bail revoked. The judge offered an assessment of Kerik that The Times called "withering" and the Post recounted thus:

"He has a toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance. And I fear that that confidence leads him to believe that the ends justify the means, that the rules that apply to all don't necessarily apply to him in the same way.

"He sees the court's rulings as an inconvenience, something to be ignored, an obstacle to be circumvented."

Which is just the mindset you want in a top law-enforcement official.

But fraud is not only for powerful Bernards; it is also for ordinary appartment-seeking New Yorkers. Six women have been arrested after pretending to be domestic abuse victims in order to avoid the wait for subsidized housing. The New York Times calls their scheme "particularly imaginative."

This was back when memories of the disputed 2000 election were still fresh, so the sentiment that Giuliani, who typically mentioned the anecdote to Republican crowds, was really conveying was more like: “Thank God Al Gore isn’t our president! God help us if a Democrat had tried to lead America on 9/11.”

It was, of course, a thoroughly self-serving story—an expedient way for Giuliani to forge a connection with the Democrat-hating conservative Republicans he’d need to win over for a 2008 presidential bid. But, at a certain level, he was onto something: It can sometimes take a crisis to illuminate the real nature of the choice voters faced in the previous election.

That is certainly the case right now. Few Americans went to the polls last November with Iran on their minds at all, and yet it was one of the campaign issues on which the differences between Barack Obama and John McCain were the most clear. Now, as the Iranian government attempts to bloody its own people into submission while American politicians argue over the proper response, the wisdom (perhaps inadvertent) of the voters’ decision to entrust foreign policy to Obama has become clear.

Since hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in protest of a stolen election last week, McCain has loudly and persistently called on Obama not to mince words in denouncing Iran’s rulers and to take every conceivable step short of an actual military campaign to buttress the protesters. Obama has resisted, at least as much as domestic politics will allow, making clear his concerns about the legitimacy of the election and the violence of the government while keeping the rhetorical heat and volume to a minimum.

This dispute actually reveals something fundamental about the two men and their understanding of history.

Appearing on Face the Nation on Sunday, McCain referred to himself as a student of history and invoked both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of the Solidarity movement as proof that the United States can play a critical role in supporting democratic uprisings around the world.