Sara Ganim, a 24-year-old crime reporter for the Harrisburg Patriot News… by-lines appeared as the story grew to include then Attorney General (and now Gov.) Tom Corbett’s lack of enthusiasm for pursuing Sandusky… Governors seldom, if ever, attend PSU Trustee meetings despite their automatic appointment.

It took the pleasant middle aged woman a few exchanges before she was able to penetrate his thick skull that the Texas ruling was not necessarily relevant to Pennsylvania because voter rights in Texas, unlike here in the Commonwealth, are subject to review by the Justice Department, a holdover from the civil rights day.

From the WASHINGTON POST: America spent $2.6 trillion on health care last year; about one in every six dollars went into the health-care system. A third of that spending — a full $750 billion — did nothing to make anyone healthier.

“What I’ve always believed is the states should decide,” he added. “I personally don’t agree with it, but this is something Coloradans have to decide for themselves.”

There is a big difference between Sentencing Guidelines, which exist, and the proposed Mandatory Minimums. The Guidelines are recommendations but not absolute constraints on a judge, although if he or she totally ignore guidelines they are going to be subject to criticism and conceivably discipline. Mandatory Minimums deprives judges of the ability to use judgment in determining the harshness of a sentence.

From USA TODAY: ….In his acceptance speech, [President] Obama set a second-term goal of putting the country on a course for $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade. Also: a million new manufacturing jobs, 100,000 new math and science teachers, and a 50% reduction in net oil imports by 2020.

In an abruptly announced bench trial that lasted a little over an hour, Judge John M. Torrence of Jackson County Circuit Court found Bishop Finn guilty of one misdemeanor charge, and not guilty on a second. The charges each carried a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine, but Bishop Finn received a sentence of two years of court-supervised probation.

“In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president’s re-election was pretty simple: ‘We left him a total mess, he hasn’t finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in,’ ” Clinton said in nominating Obama for a second term. “I like the argument for President Obama’s re-election a lot better.”

From the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Editorial: When Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court convenes in Philadelphia Sept. 13 to consider whether the state’s restrictive voter-ID law violates citizens’ rights, the justices should have read the federal court decision blocking a similarly restrictive law in Texas.

The university said it has spent almost $16.8 million through June 30. Nearly $10 million of that went to seven firms for what Penn State calls internal investigation and crisis communications, including a report by former FBI director Louis Freeh, who led the school’s internal investigation in the scandal and said that former coach Joe Paterno and three former school officials concealed allegations against Sandusky.

Our families … didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did — in fact, they admired it,” she said. But she also praised her husband for skipping a lucrative job to work in a struggling neighborhood. “For Barack, success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives,” another subtle jab at the Romneys’ wealth…