Melinda Henneberger

Melinda Henneberger is the editor-in-chief of PoliticsDaily.com. She spent 10 years as a reporter for the New York Times, in the paper’s Washington and Rome bureaus... more

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Published: 12/27/10

Notre Dame's Fr. Jenkins Pins Delays in Lizzy Seeberg Case on 'Discrepancies'

Ahead of the Notre Dame football team's appearance in the Sun Bowl this Friday, the president of the university granted his hometown newspaper quite an interview in defense of the school's handling of the Lizzy Seeberg case. Seeberg is the 19-year-old Saint Mary's College freshman who committed suicide 10 days after accusing a Notre Dame football player of molesting her in his dorm room. At the time of her death, the campus police to whom she reported the incident still had not interviewed the player. In an interview with the South Bend Tribune, the Rev. John Jenkins attributed the ...

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Published: 12/19/10

Hacked but Not Hacked Off (Also Not in London, and No More Broke Than Usual)

Last week, everyone I have ever communicated with by e-mail (on an address I've used since the dawn of the Internet) seems to have received the following note from the identity thieves who hacked into my account: "I am writing this with tears in my eyes, I came down here to United Kingdom for a short vacation unfortunately I was mugged at the park of the hotel where I stayed, all cash, credit card and cell phone were stolen off me but luckily for me I still have my passport with me. I've been to the embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all and my return flight leaves ...

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Published: 12/17/10

Lizzy Seeberg's Family Feels Rejected by Notre Dame as Football Star Is Not Charged

NORTHBROOK, Ill. -- All of the dozen family members gathered in Tom and Mary Seeberg's living room on Wednesday night said they've loved the University of Notre Dame, where 11 Seebergs have gone to college, for so long that they barely know how to process the way they've been treated by the school in the last three months. Tom and Mary's daughter Lizzy, a 19-year-old freshman at Notre Dame's sister school, Saint Mary's College, committed suicide in September, 10 days after reporting that she had been fondled against her will by a Notre Dame football player whose aggressiveness terrified her ...

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Published: 12/7/10

Elizabeth Edwards, Rest in Peace

The most disarming, beloved and beleaguered woman in the American political arena died of cancer Tuesday, at age 61, at the Chapel Hill estate that Mary Elizabeth Anania Edwards once told me she'd built in part to compensate for the succession of modest homes she'd lived in as a Navy brat. "From years of living in military housing, I like a big room," the wife of then-presidential hopeful John Edwards said in an interview in front of her hotel lobby-sized Christmas tree three years ago. Because some of the bedrooms she'd had as a kid were so dinky you couldn't fit the bed in and still close ...

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Published: 12/6/10

David Broder Is Not the Dean of Me (And I Do Not Cry for Charlie Rangel)

If David Broder wants to weep for Charlie Rangel, that is his business. What bothers me, though, about Broder's Washington Post column justifying and praising the censured congressman, is the mortifying suggestion that the long-serving "dean of the Washington press corps" is speaking for, as he says outright at one point, "many of us in the press gallery.'' I hope that's not the case, as I not only disagree with nearly every word of "Happy Warriors Brought Low," but see in it much of what America minds about our poor, ailing industry. "This was a sad time for many of us watching Charlie ...

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Published: 11/28/10

Harry Potter and the Teen Love Triangle: 'It Could Always Have Gone Either Way'

LOS ANGELES – I would live here in a minute, even if the land of the skinny half-caf latte does make me feel like Will Ferrell's oversized Elf at the North Pole. One pleasure among many is the abundance of huge movie screens like the ones at the Grove, where in a city where they know almost no one, my 14-year-old twins consented to accompany me to a midday screening of Part I of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.'' The demo in the theater on Black Friday was not what I expected; the audience was mostly adults unaccompanied by minors and included many Friends of Dumbledore, which ...

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Published: 11/25/10

Notre Dame's Punt in the Probe of Lizzy Seeberg's Sad Death

LOS ANGELES -- Elizabeth "Lizzy" Seeberg was a college freshman with a wide-open smile – here is a heartbreaking photo of her in spaghetti straps and pearls – who built houses with Habitat for Humanity and hoped to become a nurse. Lizzy also suffered from depression, and 10 days after telling friends and campus cops that she'd been sexually assaulted by a University of Notre Dame football player, rape crisis volunteers who knew she had missed a counseling session found her barely breathing in her dorm room. The 19-year-old daughter of serious Catholics and prominent volunteers in ...

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Published: 11/18/10

Barbour on '12 Run: 'We've Begun to Talk About It' (And Daniels? 'I'm Thinking')

SAN DIEGO -- At the final news conference of the Republican Governors Association conference here, a nervous (and beautiful) young reporter addressed her question to the "president" instead of the governor – but which governor? "Hopefully someday you will be president,'' she corrected herself, and now all six men in blue shirts sitting at the dais were waiting to see which of them she meant: Was it Mississippi's Haley Barbour, maybe, or Indiana's Mitch Daniels? (Nope, it was actually . . . Michigan's governor-elect, Rick Snyder, which prompted a huge laugh from the others.) "Can you ...

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Published: 11/18/10

Chris Christie's Advice to GOP Governors Brings Down the House

SAN DIEGO -- When at least four possible presidential contenders – Govs. Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels -- shared a stage at the Republican Governors Association conference Thursday morning, along with Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, who do you think was the standout? Yes, Barbour's every word is quotable, Daniels has sewn up the David Brooks primary, and no one can say that Pawlenty doesn't present well. But if you read Politics Daily's Jill Lawrence, you might not be surprised to learn that it was Christie who got the most applause and laughs from the ...

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Published: 11/17/10

Republican Governors Association: Celebrating New Faces, Visiting Familiar Themes

SAN DIEGO -- The "Daddy Party" put its three new women governors-elect -- South Carolina's Nikki Haley, New Mexico's Susana Martinez, and Oklahoma's Mary Fallin -- out front Wednesday at the Republican Governors Association conference. But at a press conference celebrating them as the shiny and "changing face" of the Grand Old Party, all three initially suggested that gender was incidental to either their success or the moment. In a pink leather jacket and a very big smile, Haley said her victory "had nothing to do with a label . . . and any party that thinks it's about labels will be the ...

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