Sham

I was disappointed by the Fumo sentencing. He plotted and manipulated "OPM" to live off the fat of the land. He used his position to live a life of comfort, lies and manipulations at everyone else's expense. This is a sham and disgrace. He was in a position to do good, but chose to do otherwise. I thought we were prosecuting Fumo for his crimes - so much for "justice. " Veronica Wojnar, Philadelphia

"The best lives are invented," observes an elderly Albert Dehousse (Jean-Louis Trintignant), reflecting on his years as a Resistance fighter, a French lieutenant colonel, a government minister and a complete and utter sham, in Jacques Audiard's fascinating A Self-Made Hero. The opening selection of the sixth annual Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, which gets underway tonight, Hero is a remarkable study of individual deceit and a nation's collective reckoning over its tortured role during World War II. Writer-director Audiard has created both a serious rumination about self-invention and a playful, provocative entertainment through documentary techniques (talking-head interviews with "witnesses")

It's called Time Out, but French director Laurent Cantet's unsettling film about a businessman between situations might well be called "Fake This Job and Love It. " Vincent (Aur?lien Recoing) resembles both Prince Albert of Monaco and a corporate executive. But he is a sham. Recently fired and too ashamed to admit it, Vincent constructs an alternative universe. To impress friends and family, he says he is a U.N. consultant in Geneva. He works harder to get the job description and language down than he would if he were actually employed.

Some shots are so obvious, so easy, you wonder whether to even take them. But these clowns deserve it. Last July, as you may have heard, Pennsylvania lawmakers sneaked through pay raises of 16 percent to 34 percent for themselves - and concocted a shady gambit to collect the raises before the next election. Yet, before recessing, the lords of Harrisburg couldn't find time to act on another bill, one that would have subsidized life insurance premiums for Pennsylvania National Guard members summoned for active duty.

TEN YEARS ago, then-Mayor John Street took the podium at a NAACP convention and declared: "The brothers and sisters are running this city. Running it! Don't you let nobody fool you; we are in charge of the City of Brotherly Love. " Yet, when it came to city contracts, most black-owned companies weren't getting any love. They were getting a ridiculously thin slice of a huge pie. More like crumbs, actually. Between 1998 and 2003, only 2.3 percent of city-contract dollars went to minority-owned firms, and 2.2 percent to women, according to Councilman W. Wilson Goode Jr. Companies owned by white men handled 95.5 percent of the work.

Mabel Crisp was up to her thighs in chicken. Hamburgers, too. And she more than had her fill of lamb chops and baked fish, not to mention a few other dishes she didn't even know the names of. But she kept right on eating them all . . . the chicken, the burgers, chops, and fish. She didn't have much choice. Mabel Crisp couldn't read a menu, so "when I went out to eat I got chicken or whatever my friends ordered. " She couldn't read labels, either, so "when I went shopping I 'picture- shopped' - I knew what I was buying by looking at the picture on the can. " And she couldn't read street signs, so "when I rode on a bus I told the driver I wasn't sure where I was going and asked him to tell me when my stop came.

YBM Magnex International was a stock market sensation. Founded in 1994 by a Russian emigre scientist who lives in Bucks County, the magnet and bicycle manufacturer rose from an obscure penny stock to a multinational worth nearly $1 billion in less than four years. Its numbers astonished competitors and delighted stockholders. Net sales quadrupled from 1994 to March 1998, net income jumped ninefold, earnings rose by a factor of five, and the future looked just as promising.

Read between the dance lines Last weekend's performance of Chinese classical works by the Shen Yun Performing Arts group included magnificent choreography, costumes, and music. However, unbeknownst to many ticket buyers - unless they thought to research it, which I did not - the Merriam Theater appearance also had a political/religious agenda that I found to be disconcerting. Shen Yun is part of the international Falun Gong movement, a religious practice that has borne the brunt of brutal persecution by the Chinese government.

MY TIME in the makeup and costume trailers over, I was told to head toward the "Secretariat" movie set, the tunnel underneath the grandstand at historic Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky. It was a year ago, a perfect fall morning. They were setting up a shot of a news conference before the 1973 Belmont Stakes. The connections of Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Secretariat were to be there, along with the people behind Derby and Preakness runner-up Sham. Actually, the real people weren't there.

Qun Chen, 26, of Mayfair Street near Tabor Road, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Philadelphia yesterday for alleged involvement in a $5.4 million food stamp fraud. A Chinese national who is married to a U.S. citizen and who hopes to become a naturalized citizen, Chen allegedly operated two sham groceries, the Wyoming Variety Store, at Front and Wyoming, and the Tasker Grocery, on 13th Street near Tasker, through which the food stamps were redeemed over a four-year period, 1994-1997.

Read between the dance lines Last weekend's performance of Chinese classical works by the Shen Yun Performing Arts group included magnificent choreography, costumes, and music. However, unbeknownst to many ticket buyers - unless they thought to research it, which I did not - the Merriam Theater appearance also had a political/religious agenda that I found to be disconcerting. Shen Yun is part of the international Falun Gong movement, a religious practice that has borne the brunt of brutal persecution by the Chinese government.

AN OFFICE OF the Inspector General investigation found that 10 more companies working with the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. had been using a sham subcontractor to meet minority-participation requirements. The prime contractors made it appear as if JHS and Sons Supply Co., a minority-owned firm, was getting a substantial portion of the business. In fact JHS was just acting as a "pass-through" for the money to get to another company, William Betz Jr. Inc., that was actually doing the subcontracted work.

NOW THAT the NCAA has revealed that it is investigating its investigators, isn't it time to end this fraud once and for all. One of the great political mysteries is how an organization that generates ridiculous amounts of cash for the television rights to the NCAA basketball tournament and oversees a never-ending arms race among its member schools in search of endless revenue streams is able to maintain its tax-exempt status. Seems that everybody gets paid expect the players, aka, the "student-athletes.

TEN YEARS ago, then-Mayor John Street took the podium at a NAACP convention and declared: "The brothers and sisters are running this city. Running it! Don't you let nobody fool you; we are in charge of the City of Brotherly Love. " Yet, when it came to city contracts, most black-owned companies weren't getting any love. They were getting a ridiculously thin slice of a huge pie. More like crumbs, actually. Between 1998 and 2003, only 2.3 percent of city-contract dollars went to minority-owned firms, and 2.2 percent to women, according to Councilman W. Wilson Goode Jr. Companies owned by white men handled 95.5 percent of the work.

By Steve Lopez Back in 2003, I witnessed a remarkable spectacle at a rally for then-gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. As I talked to people about allegations that Schwarzenegger had crudely groped women against their will, using his celebrity and power to have his way, they were outraged - not at Schwarzenegger, but at the Los Angeles Times, for reporting the stories. Even after Schwarzenegger stepped to the stage and admitted that "where there's smoke, there's fire," women who espoused family values came to his defense.

TRIPOLI, Libya - Several hundred tribal elders gathered Thursday in the Libyan capital in what a government official said was a show of widespread support for Moammar Gadhafi. Rebels dismissed the claim as bogus. In Rome, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the best way to protect Libya's people was to get Gadhafi to leave power. "This is the outcome we are seeking," she told representatives from 22 nations and organizations. Gadhafi has tried to crush an 11-week-old armed rebellion against his rule, including by shelling rebel positions, particularly in the western part of the country that largely remains under his control.

TWO DOWN, four to go. On Friday, Democratic Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller announced that she would not seek re-election. Earlier, Republican Councilman Jack Kelly told me that he won't run. Four months from today, those two names won't be on the ballot when you vote. We're winning. Until last week, six had signed up for the Deferred Retirement Option Plan, a/k/a Taxpayer-Provided Powerball. Although DROP requires an "irrevocable" promise to retire, like zombies they planned to come back.

When Dmitry Medvedev became president of Russia two years ago he pledged to combat "legal nihilism," the disrespect for law that feeds corruption and backwardness in his country. Any hope that Medvedev might behave differently from his mentor, and Russia's real ruler - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - has been doused by the biggest show trial since the days of the Soviet Union. On Monday, the former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who's already served seven years in Siberian jails on trumped up tax-evasion charges, was found guilty in a second sham trial.

MY TIME in the makeup and costume trailers over, I was told to head toward the "Secretariat" movie set, the tunnel underneath the grandstand at historic Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky. It was a year ago, a perfect fall morning. They were setting up a shot of a news conference before the 1973 Belmont Stakes. The connections of Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Secretariat were to be there, along with the people behind Derby and Preakness runner-up Sham. Actually, the real people weren't there.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Canadian detainee Omar Khadr on Monday denounced his coming war-crimes trial as a sham, saying he had been offered a secret plea deal for release after five years served at Guantanamo. Instead, Khadr, 23, fired all his attorneys and said he would offer no defense. "I'm representing myself, and I'm boycotting," said Khadr, the son of a slain al-Qaeda financier, who has grown from an adolescent captured near death in Afghanistan in 2002 into manhood in U.S. military custody.