It’s that time of year. The sun is shining, the flowers are in bloom and all across America, graduating students are forced to endure that dreaded rite of passage, the commencement speech. Often boring, typically clichéd and frequently self-aggrandizing, commencement speeches form their own subgenre of fatuous prose.

Get out the barf bag! Here are a few choice orations from some of America’s most illustrious jerks.

1. Ivan Boesky at Berkeley, 1986

Ivan Boesky was a big-time stock trader who hustled his way to riches betting on corporate takeovers. On May 18, 1986 at the University of California, Berkeley, he shared these lustrous pearls of wisdom with business school students:

“Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”

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But Armstrong has not been forgotten – especially by the U.S. government. On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a 28-page complaint against the man, detailing what USA Today plain-spokenly refers to as "several years of lying, cheating and manipulating" Uncle Sam during the six years he was sponsored by the Postal Service.

The suit claims "the USPS paid approximately $40 million to sponsor [Armstrong's] USPS cycling team from 1998 to 2004," a period Armstrong is charged with using "prohibited drugs" in violation of his contract. Under the False Claims Act, Armstrong could be held accountable for $100 million in damages. On the bright side, it looks like the government has come up with a plan to help the economy.

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From the Independent:

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The suit the Justice Department is joining was filed in 2010 by former teammate Floyd Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title for doping.

An Armstrong lawyer, Robert Luskin, said Friday that negotiations with the government failed because "we disagree about whether the postal service was damaged."

Said Luskin: "The postal service's own studies show that the service benefited tremendously from its sponsorship - benefits totaling more than $100 million."

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It is simple enough to understand why a child would reflexively believe a parent’s protests of being falsely accused. The better, tougher question is why the rest of us took Armstrong at his word, or just dodged the whole subject, as evidence of his cheating built over the course of a decade.

Yes, we know that Armstrong protected himself, his image, and his Livestrong charity in part by threatening and intimidating the journalists and former teammates who contended that he had doped in order to win his seven Tour de France titles. And, yes, we know that the tens of millions of dollars that Armstrong raised for cancer research granted him a wide cushion from scrutiny.

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A century after Max Weber identified the “Protestant ethic” at our nation’s moral spine, America has become a smorgasbord of cultures and faiths, where organized religion is fading fast (although spiritual belief is still widespread). But our public life and our popular culture remain profoundly entangled with Christian ideas about redemption and salvation, however half-baked and bastardized they have become. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our national obsession with confession and forgiveness, which extends from reality TV to the 12-step meeting in the church basement down the street. Sit alone in a bar long enough, and somebody will start telling you about how he screwed up his marriage and that time in Florida with that girl and all that coke.

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The NRA is claiming huge membership increases as well as spike in the sale of assault rifles.

Did we have an assault weapons binge?

Just the thought should make all of us cringe.

Can we trust NRA,

to be honest when they,

Are the voice of a lunatic fringe?

Stephen Whitred
Barriere, B.C., Canada

Teachers with guns? – No thank you.

It’s an idea we need to eschew.

For let’s not forget,

There’d be a new threat;

Teachers can go psycho too.

Mark Tendas
Los Angeles
Quarterbacks come and quarterbacks go.

It ain't rocket science- it's just a big show.

So why shed a tear,

For the life and career,

Of the prayerful Timothy Tebow?

David Lloyd Maron
New York City

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Here is the Hunger Games champ at this post-Hunger Games press conference. One reporter wants to know: Did she take performance-enhancing drugs? What no one wants to know: Anything about the only other winner, Peeta. Poor chump.

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Unlike Bad Robots' typically sci-fi cache, the Armstrong pic probably won't include aliens or time travel. Instead, the movie will be based on the proposal for "Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong," a HarperCollins book to be written by New York Times sports reporter Juliet Macur, who has covered Armstrong's career throughout his tragic downfall.

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At first glance, Armstrong and Te'o would appear to have little in common beyond professional athleticism and a penchant for elaborate ruses. In an interview with our national confessor in chief Oprah Winfrey, the 41-year-old Armstrong acknowledged that he'd been doping up a storm throughout his professional cycling career, including his seven winning Tour de France races. Meanwhile, after a sensational exposé in Deadspin, Notre Dame linebacker Te'o admitted that his girlfriend Lennay Kekua, who'd tragically died of leukemia in September, had never existed at all. And it's in the way that both men have handled their deceptions that another commonality has emerged – neither one will ever win a prize for World's Greatest Apologizer.

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Armstrong reveals the range of banned substances for 13 years. He says was not possible to win the Tour de France seven times without the drugs:

When Oprah asks, "Why now admit it?" Armstrong responds, "I don't know that I have a great answer," adding, "this is too late." He explains that having "the perfect story" compelled him to maintain the lie:

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I would like to propose the following rule for journalists: When presented with a feel-good story on a sports-related subject, you should presume the story is fabricated, unless persuaded by clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.

This is just one of the many lessons to be extracted from the increasingly bizarre story of Manti Te’o, the star football player whose heart-rending narrative about the simultaneous death of his grandmother and his girlfriend turned out to have been invented out of whole cyber-cloth.

(Another lesson is that administrators at Notre Dame are far more likely to weep over the imaginary death of a nonexistent girl than they are to shed tears for a real girl who actually committed suicide, after allegedly being sexually assaulted by one of Teo’s teammates.)

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Descriptions of the interview itself give the impression that Armstrong surrendered during an intense, emotional session with Oprah, who said on "CBS This Morning" that Armstrong "did not come clean in the manner I had expected":

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The admission Monday came hours after an emotional apology by Armstrong to the Livestrong charity that he founded and turned into a global institution on the strength of his celebrity as a cancer survivor.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the interview is to be broadcast Thursday on Winfrey's network. She tweeted afterward, "Just wrapped with (at)lancearmstrong More than 2 1/2 hours. He came READY!" She was scheduled to appear on "CBS This Morning" on Tuesday to discuss the interview.

The confession was a stunning reversal for Armstrong after years of public statements, interviews and court battles in which he denied doping and zealously protected his reputation.

Even before the taping session with Winfrey began around 2 p.m., EST, Armstrong's apology suggested he would carry through on promises over the weekend to answer her questions "directly, honestly and candidly."

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The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussion was private.

Stripped last year of his seven Tour de France titles because of doping charges, Armstrong addressed the staff Monday and said, "I'm sorry." The person said the disgraced cyclist choked up and several employees cried during the session.

The person also said Armstrong apologized for letting the staff down and putting Livestrong at risk but he did not make a direct confession to the group about using banned drugs. He said he would try to restore the foundation's reputation, and urged the group to continue fighting for the charity's mission of helping cancer patients and their families.

After the meeting, Armstrong, his legal team and close advisers gathered at a downtown Austin hotel for the interview.

The cyclist will make a limited confession to Winfrey about his role as the head of a long-running scheme to dominate the Tour with the aid of performance-enhancing drugs, a person with knowledge of the situation has told the AP.

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Armstrong, who has long denied doping, will also offer an apology during the interview scheduled to be taped Monday at his home in Austin, according to the person who spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to speak publicly on the matter.

While not directly saying he would confess or apologize, Armstrong sent a text message to The Associated Press early Saturday that said: "I told her (Winfrey) to go wherever she wants and I'll answer the questions directly, honestly and candidly. That's all I can say."

The 41-year-old Armstrong, who vehemently denied doping for years, has not spoken publicly about the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency report last year that cast him as the leader of a sophisticated and brazen doping program on his U.S. Postal Service teams that included use of steroids, blood boosters and illegal blood transfusions.

The USADA report led to Armstrong being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and given a lifetime ban from the sport.

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On her site, Winfrey and company promise the interview, airing next week, will be "no-holds-barred" — and that "Armstrong will address the alleged doping scandal, years of accusations of cheating, and charges of lying about the use of performance-enhancing drugs throughout his storied cycling career." Last week, the New York Times laid the groundwork for what he might reveal, with the news that "he is considering publicly admitting that he used banned performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions during his cycling career." The Times says rumor has it Armstrong is mulling an admission in the hopes of an eventual reinstatement for competition – a career move that the 41-year-old realistically doesn't have a whole lot of time left to make.

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The controversial cyclist will give his first interview since he was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles to Winfrey, she announced today, and it will air Thursday, Jan. 17 on her cable network, OWN.

The announcement of the audience with Oprah comes just days after the New York Times reported that Armstrong has been talking with advisers and friends about possibly admitting to doping.

Winfrey said that Armstrong will address "the alleged doping scandal and charges of lying about the use of performance-enhancing drugs throughout his cycling career."

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