The newswire just delivered a stunner. Davy Jones of the Monkees died today of a heart attack. He was 66 years old. I liked him and their music. They were the Beatles Lite. They were fun. They were goofy. They sang the kinds of songs we all could sing along with and smile when we did it. The Monkees were my Generation’s Milli Vanilli. But, eventually, they learned how to play their own instruments and became credible.

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I’ve been meaning to do an update on Sami Osmakac, the Albanian would-be Tampa bomber. Of course, now we know that the name “Osmakac,” which caused me to question whether the offender was Albanian at all, is actually “Osmankaj,” as this caption makes clear: “A general view of the house where naturalized American citizen Sami Osmakac, 25, was born, in the Osmankaj family compound in the village of Lubizde, Kosovo.” As we learn in the article below, “U.S. officials are using a different spelling for his last name.” Hmm.

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Are they happy now – ESPN and CNN and the New York Times – for treating Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno like day-old mashed potatoes?

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“The Help” is an Academy Award nominated film based on a book set in the early Civil Rights South. The story is very popular, presenting both comedy and drama, and although it is fiction it cuts like fact.

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In its most flagrant example of Orwellian language inversion, the Times of Feb. 24th refers to the murder of two American soldiers as “self-inflicted wounds.”  Not that the soldiers themselves chose to court their own killings, but that the military’s decision to burn discarded copies of the Koran was “shockingly insensitive.”  Of course the Times knows better than any of us that religious insensitivity is only one of many infractions that merit murder in the Muslim world.  Four Muslim men were publicly decapitated this week for the shocking crime of carrying satellite phones;  young girls have been murdered for the shocking crime of going to school and females of all ages have been killed for the shocking crime of being raped.  The Times might recall that American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded for the shocking crime of being a Jew and Dutchman Theo Van Gogh was murdered for the shocking crime of making a film criticizing the Muslim treatment of women.  On 9/11, almost 3,000 Americans were killed for the shocking crime of being citizens of The Great Satan. What the Times should have editorialized is that it was shockingly dangerous for the army to burn the Korans, knowing that they were vulnerable to the retaliation of primitive, savage people mired in the fanatical religious mindset of the dark ages.

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One of our local politicians, Congressman Mike Thompson (CA-1) this week publically demanded that service members who were subjected to the Department of Defense’s chemical weapon testing get full medical care and disability compensation for their service-connected medical conditions.

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Let’s say someone opens a restaurant where the menu consists of fried chicken, collard greens and watermelon, served by people dressed as African-American slaves, with ankle chains, maybe. And “slave owners” with whips occasionally coming by and striking the servers and/or patrons?

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“Where are the jobs, Mr. President?” So wailed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when the unemployment rate was about 6 percent toward the end of President Bush’s term.

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OK, so, a federal judge has thrown out most of a Nebraska city’s ordinance that hoped to prevent hiring or renting to illegal immigrants, Associated Press reports.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a list of numbered propositions, each leading to the next. Number 6.4311 begins, “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”

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If you still think the Arab Spring in Egypt is a pro-Democracy movement, here’s a little something to chew on from the Associated Press.

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So a young kid plays basketball while at Harvard, goes undrafted, gets dropped by two NBA teams, kicks around for a while, bums couches to sleep on in New York, ends up playing for the New York Knicks…and becomes a sensation.

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In its reporting of the recent bomb attacks on Israeli diplomats in Georgia and New Delhi, the Associated Press makes it sound as though Israel is accusing Iran of wrongdoing without evidence, perhaps as an excuse for going after it militarily.A diplomat’s wife and driver and two others were injured in the India blast, while a similar device was discovered in Georgia and safely diffused.

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Nothing says Valentine’s Day like a new budget from the President that is chock-a-block with his usual big spending, big government nightmares: it’s another $3.8 TRILLION monstrosity, with another $1.3 TRILLION+ deficit, with higher taxes, more “stimulus” spending, more class warfare, much more debt, and no entitlement reform to the biggest budget busters of all. Every day with this man is Groundhog Day. He is exhausting.

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Today is Abraham Lincoln’s actual birthday.  It’s been shoved aside in favor of something called President’s Day, a time for cut-rate prices and pizzas, but today is the actual day.

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So, to recap this week’s Middle East news, the Syrian government is closing in on 6,000 civilian casualties for which it’s blaming Israel and the U.S., and Iran’s top religious grand Pooh-Bah, or whatever he is, is calling for the extermination of Israel in particular and Jews in general.

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“I had observed him by this time for several months,” Theodore H. White wrote of Richard Nixon in The Making of the President 1960, “and he had persisted as a puzzle to my mind and understanding.”  To me, Mitt Romney remains a puzzle. Gentle reader, help me unlock, as Churchill called Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

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Well, he’s done it again.

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When we lived in the city, my wife and I would load our two small boys into a big double stroller I called “the bus” and roll on over to the Lincoln Park Zoo to see our friend Adelor, the lion. He would welcome us with a low reverberating roar that you’d feel vibrating your sternum. That was in the late 1990s.

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Even as his government back home was sentencing to death an American citizen it outrageously claims is a spy, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad embarked on a five-day visit to four of Latin America’s most anti-American regimes: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Cuba.

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But your “doctor” still won’t refer you to a chiropractor. Because those guys are… “quacks.” It would seem, however, that most of the real quacks have the initials ‘M.D.’ after their names. They treat what they do not understand.

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