I didn’t even hear about this at the time, but apparently in 2010 an Albanian in England beheaded a Brit. The update is that he was sentenced last week:

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     Twenty-five years ago, the Reverend Al Sharpton jumped headfirst into the public spotlight to defend a black teenager who accused six white men of repeatedly raping her and smearing her body with dog feces and racial slurs.  Even after a grand jury found that Tawana Brawley had concocted an elaborate hoax to deflect punishment by her murderous step-father, Sharpton refused to concede that the truth made any difference.  What was important to him then was race-mongering and getting the maximum media play from his histrionic agit-prop.  Now, a generation later, he has found another opportunity to foment racial unrest in the case of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was killed in Florida by a mixed race Hispanic man serving as a neighborhood watchman.

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All the signs are there, yet way too much of the West is either ignoring them, denying them or, worse, are fine with them and where they’re leading.

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Who was the greatest American military commander of the 20th Century? Was it World War I General Blackjack Pershing or either of the two popular World War II biopic generals, George Patton or Douglas MacArthur? How about George Marshall, a superb leader of the war effort in World War II, but one whose role was more coordination and delegation than command? If the answer depends on military accomplishment alone, then it is unquestionably General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II and coincidentally the 34th President of the United States.

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A&E’s “Dog the Bounty Hunter” returns this week after a month’s hiatus. But it was that last episode before the hiatus that I can’t get out of my mind. Imagine the surreality of stumbling onto the show whose star Duane Chapman in 2007 was caught dissuading his son from bringing around his black girlfriend and other “n—–s” — and finding oneself being lectured by the Dog to “not discriminate against anybody and it’s about time that we became leaders of that in America.”

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President Obama has launched his re-election effort. He’s kicking it off with no official governing business today; instead he’s spending the day at campaign and fundraising events. Five of them, to be exact.

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Today, the agent for Peyton Manning was instructed to open negotiations with the Denver Broncos for the purpose of signing the quarterback to a multi-year deal that could be worth $60 million dollars. On the surface, John Elway, the general manager of the Broncos looks like a genius here. Manning is a lock for the NFL Hall of Fame. He is known for bringing his former team, the Indianapolis Colts, to nine straight playoff appearances and a Super Bowl victory. He is an 11-time Pro Bowler and has won the MVP award four times. Denver is incredibly blessed to have this champion except for the elephant in the living room. A very BIG elephant.

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Michelle Obama has been busy getting her organic garden ready for the spring and summer, pushing her “Let’s Move” exercise campaign, and seating herself next to George Clooney at last night’s state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron.

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A maxim says, “Dance with the one that brung you.”  For half-a-century, Democrats have waltzed with leftist pressure groups, bowing and bartering.  By contrast, till George W. Bush the Republican dance card featured Americanism v. tribalism, general v/ special interest, and melting pot v. manic pluralism.

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At first blush, the news stories of tweeted Palestinian and Israeli photos could be seen as two examples of the same dishonesty. But it doesn’t take much digging to realize these two things are not the same at all, despite how it’s presented in the press.

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Over the past few weeks, Team Obama and the Democrats have been letting out a collective sigh of relief, excited that the worst politically may be behind them and that better days were ahead: an improving economy and with it, sunnier re-election chances for Obama.

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The National Football League faces an oncoming spate of lawsuits by former players over traumatic brain injuries. Class-action suits filed in several states have already been consolidated to a federal court in Philadelphia and more suits by former players suits are certain to follow. Meanwhile, the recent revelation that teams unofficially paid bounties to defensive players, offering large sums of money for “cartoff” and “knockout” injuries that removed opponents from games comes at a bad time, suggesting the NFL has condoned deliberate violence and downplayed the long-term consequences.

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# of brain tumors expected in 2012 from field personnel in 1980 = 7/100,000 x 1500 x 32 = 3.4

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Attendees’ reactions to President Barack Obama’s speech yesterday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference ranged, among the delegates with whom this reporter spoke, from mixed to strongly positive.

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My new book “Ayn Rand Nation” is out this week, and as the title indicates, it describes how the Russian-born philosopher has become a phenomenon in the thirty years since her death.

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As it happens, a unique opportunity has presented itself in the form of simultaneous news stories, to compare side-by-side two clearly offensive actions aimed at two different religious groups and how they’re being dealt with by the “victims.”

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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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