By DALE McFEATTERS, Scripps Howard News Service

Bernie Madoff made a pact with the devil. Do you suppose he regrets it?
Maybe not. He seems impervious to empathy with others. But for more than 20 years he had a good run. And he was an equal-opportunity fleecer, bilking friends, family, charities, sports stars, fellow financiers, pension funds and people of modest -- and now, thanks to him, no -- means.

Politicians like to ridicule Washington, D.C., as somehow different from what they insist on calling "the real America." And at one time it sort of was, not surprising in a place that for years was run by Congress.

Then-President Bush said he wanted the Guantanamo Bay prison closed and President Obama has ordered it closed. He repeated that in his speech to the joint session of Congress. So with those kinds of high-powered good intentions, it's going to be closed, right? You betcha.

In the recessionary times of failing firms and factory closings, business schools are faced with this dilemma: What do you teach when there is no business?

Test your knowledge of public affairs:
Who are J. Bonnie Newman, Ted Kaufman, Michael Bennett, Kirsten Gillibrand and Roland Burris, and what do they all have in common? (And, yes, I had to look a couple of them up.)

It's considered bad form nowadays to flaunt your money if you've still got it. And it's considered really bad form to flaunt your money if you've still got it and your investors don't.
This is a lesson learned with some pain by Citigroup and John Thain, the former chief of Merrill Lynch.

For two days, the nation's capital was a happy, joyful and courteous place. Even the traffic wasn't bad. That happens when you won't let people from Northern Virginia into the city.

These are not good days for the Big Three, GM, Ford and Chrysler.
Having been humiliated by Congress for arriving in Washington aboard separate private jets to request a taxpayer bailout, they returned, chastened, by car to grovel before a committee of lawmakers -- and they still didn't get the bailout.

To buck up the morale of America's dispirited and dwindling work force, The Wall Street Journal reported on how to divine hints from management of impending layoffs.
For example, when her boss suddenly stopped talking to her, "Ms. Finberg knew something was up. Three months later her job was eliminated."

Every year the Futurist magazine compiles the forecasts and predictions of assorted visionaries and is now out with its "Outlook for 2009 and Beyond."
Contemplating our immediate future would seem to be a dispiriting and joyless task -- look what it's done to Al Gore -- but these futurists come across as a cheerful and optimistic bunch. Takes this forecast: