Breaking News (but still not a breaking story that we fought for Jihad in 1990s Bosnia):

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The United States has been the greatest country in the world for so long, many of its residents seem to think it’s the only country in the world.

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In about a month, if a congressional “super committee” can’t come up with a plan to slim down the federal budget by $1.5 trillion in 10 years, the Pentagon will be facing the budget cleaver– again.

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James Carville has resurfaced with another strategic warning to Barack Obama. You’ll recall that a few months ago, Carville let loose about the President’s political problems. He fumed that Obama should “fire everybody,” bring in a new team, shake things up.

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What about a CEO’s major illness? This information will likely affect price of the company stock and leadership succession. Shareholders would certainly want information about their CEO’s condition. This conflicts with the notion of personal privacy and the CEO’s understandable reluctance toward disclosure. Steve Jobs’s case is particularly instructive. No CEO was more intimately identified, or more important to his company. Because of his well-known penchant for privacy, the medical facts in Jobs’s case are not completely clear.

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Let’s take a quick look around, shall we?

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In past posts I’ve described how the CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, created a website called Deep Capture that is aimed at smearing the critics of his stewardship of Overstock.com.

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Recall a posting of mine from the summer, concerning a July 4th Associated Press item saying that at his first hearing in June, Mladic had drawn his finger across his throat toward the Bosnian-Muslims in the public gallery. Knowing that if this had really happened, there would have been wide coverage and footage (since it’s exactly the kind of behavior the media and public look for in the Serb Villain we’ve constructed), a reader named Nikole combed through reports from the June hearing. There was nothing. Except this: an AP item with a female Bosnian-Muslim “victim” boasting that she made the menacing gesture toward Mladic.

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Today is Simchat Torah.  This year  Gilad Shalit Comes Home with Tears of Joy Mixed With Bitter Tears of Sorrow. What else is new? you’d rightly ask.  The Jewish state has paid an exorbitant price to reaffirm the Jewish maxim that all of Israel are responsible for each other and Jews world over are going to dance with the Torah with more joyfully and committedly than usual.  They understand instinctively that this sense of mutual responsibility carries the key to Jewish survival.  When one part of the Jewish world falters, the other is there to pick up the slack.   This aspect of Jewish history has long been celebrated.  Less celebrated is the role the rejuvenated slacker plays in strengthening the tiring hands of those who helped them.   Time and again the enthusiasm of the Jews rediscovering their religion serves as an adrenaline shot to the jaded comfortable communities.  This has been the case of the Spanish/Portuguese survivors in the Netherlands.  This had been the case of the Holocaust survivors in Israel and America and this is the case with the post Soviet Jewry today.  Let us not forget, Simchat Torah the holiday used by Soviet Jews to demonstrate their willingness to pay any price for the privilege of remaining a Jew. 

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Even before he saw a doctor; before he was able to embrace his parents after more than five years in captivity, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was paraded before cameras in Egypt for a televised interview.

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Doubtful. But the rest of Hollywood came out in force to celebrate the man who raped Miss America.

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When I stopped my car at an intersection on Friday night, I heard yelling from the car behind me.  It was hard to make out what the commotion was about until the car pulled up to the next lane.  The young driver, his face contorted with hate and rage, was yelling at me, “F— Israel!  F– ISRAEL!”  Apparently he had seen the sticker on my car’s back bumper:  “I Stand with Israel.”

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As I read the details of the beauty salon slayings I was sickened to my stomach. Not only did Scott Dekraai take out his ex-wife but seven additional, innocent people as well. To further prove his evil, we now know he was also a coward. When arrested, he had several guns in his possession, was wearing a bullet-proof vest and surrendered meekly to the police for fear of being shot himself. What a man he is, huh?

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And this summer, I got my iPad. And realized that, despite what Jobs thought he invented back in  1976 (and later in 1984), this was the true “personal computer.” Indeed, it is so “personal” that it doesn’t seem like a “computer.” Instead, the technological became an extension of the discrete diverse tastes and interests of the individual. It’s not about buttons anymore; it’s about a most intimate of human activities — touch. And you can carry your entire life — books, music, work, etc. in a slim, sleek device.

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     Homeless people are routinely swept off the streets  for disobeying city laws against loitering.  If they borrowed some signs from the squatters of Zucotti Park and claimed to be protesting some inequality, they might earn the same leniency from our mayor to live on the street for an indefinite period of time.  Just hold a sign and you’ll be fine seems to be his criterion.  Mayor Mike claims that the  Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are simply expressing their freedom of speech and so long as their conduct remains within the law, they are free to do so without interference from authority.  This is the same big-hearted mayor who wouldn’t invite religious leaders to the 9/11 Memorial in order to enforce the separation of church and state, and the same man whose fine analytical mind concluded that anyone opposed to the Ground Zero Mosque was a bigot who dis-respected our constitutional freedom of worship.  The Occupy Wall Street-ers have inhabited a privately owned park for a lmost a month, during which time they have appropriated its use solely for themselves.  They have trashed it along with the bathrooms of neighboring restaurants and stores whose business has been sorely impacted by this invasion of hundred of free loaders enjoying the balmy weather and this year’s version of Woodstock.  The cost of maintaining extra police on duty round the clock is borne by all NYC taxpayers;  the inconvenience of living near these noisy squatters is borne unfairly and exclusively by the residents of Tribeca and the Financial District.

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It appears the Republican field is set, unless a truly dark horse suddenly announces a run.  Yes, Rudy Giuliani is still undecided, and in fact polls reasonably well, but his Hamlet routine is wearing thin, and his exploits on 9/11 a distant memory.  We detect no great “wanting” of Rudy.

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Reading the obits on Gent, even from the “great newspapers” is a joke. All he becomes is a caricature guy who blew the whistle on pro football in his best-known, but not his best work, North Dallas Forty. He was a superb writer. The obits all talked about how he wrote North Dallas Forty and “exposed the seamy side of football”, typical obits not really capturing his brilliance, In reality, he was a much more nunaced character.

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The outlandish attack on Rick Perry by the Washington Post over the weekend, essentially charging him with a close association with a camping ground that had once had a racially charged name, is the latest in a “get Perry” series of articles in liberal papers.  The New York Times has been especially bad.

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The recent report about the elimination of the American-born Islamist terrorist and the one about Hispanic children vanishing from Alabama schools, I think, are two sides of the same coin.

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