TheSmokingGun.com reports on a crime where a man got into an argument with two teenagers over their stupid habit of wearing their pants hanging down below their asses, and ended up shooting one of them in the ass.

I can’t say that I blame him.

In fact, I think they should probably give the guy a medal instead of arresting him.

Here’s the story:

Incensed when two teenagers ignored his demands to pull up their saggy pants, a Memphis man allegedly shot one of the youths in the back, according to police.

Kenneth Bonds was arrested Saturday night and charged with two counts of aggravated assault and jailed on $25,000 bond. Bonds, 45, is pictured in the mug shot at right.

Investigators contend that Bonds admitted to shooting Cameron Tucker, 17, following a September 25 argument on a Memphis sidewalk. The teenager was accompanied by Isaac Taylor, a 16-year-old friend.

Tucker told cops that he and Taylor were walking to a candy store when Bonds “began yelling at them to pull their pants up,” according to a Memphis Police Department arrest warrant affidavit. “Bonds got angry when Tucker and Taylor refused and that’s when the three got into a heated argument,” reported police.

At that point, Bonds allegedly pulled out a pistol and fired a shot at the older boy. The shot missed, but as the boys fled, Bonds continued firing at them. One bullet hit the 17-year-old in the buttocks and exited through his thigh (the boy was treated for the wound at two different hospitals).

A witness, Percy Chalmers, told cops that he saw Bonds “pull a large black semi auto handgun from his waist band” and fire several shots. Both Tucker and Taylor were able to identify Bonds in a photo spread prepared by Memphis police.

When contacted by phone, Bonds reportedly “admitted to shooting Cameron Tucker after an argument,” according to the police affidavit. Bonds was scheduled to be arraigned this morning on the felony counts

Mitch Albom, of the Detroit Free Press, recently penned this great opinion piece that is so good, it deserves to be reproduced everywhere possible!

It is already one of the most embarrassing video clips in sports history, and it has nothing to do with dropped passes or missed dunks. It is footage of New York Jets defensive back Antonio Cromartie, a 26-year-old man, trying to list the names of his children.

Cromartie, in the HBO reality series “Hard Knocks,” sits on the field, counting his kids on his fingers. At times he seems to struggle remembering them, and he skips one of their names altogether.

Then again, who could blame him? He has, by his own count, fathered eight children, apparently with six different women. Only at the end of his list does he say, “And I have my newborn with my wife.”

So Cromartie is the new face of irresponsible fatherhood. But while he has more than earned the honor (the Jets, according to reports, had to front him $500,000 for paternity suits), he is hardly alone.

Fathering kids as if you’re watering plants is a growing problem in the sports world, particularly in African-American circles. And if we are going to talk about this issue, we need to drop our sensitivities toward this fact.

No, African Americans aren’t the only ones having kids out of wedlock. But, yes, the news is worst in that community, where, in recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics, 72% of new babies were born out of wedlock, versus 28% among whites and 17% among Asians. This is not in the skin. It is not about color. It’s about culture.

And if the culture doesn’t change, neither will the pattern.

Cromartie, in listing his offspring on “Hard Knocks,” mentions four who are around age 3. I’ll never understand men who father kids as if opening Starbucks franchises. But four in one year?

That’s unforgivable. Obviously, Cromartie enjoys his sex, but is it a sin to take precautions? Or does he think his seed is so special he needs to procreate on a quarterly basis?

And what about the women involved? Are they that naive? Or do some figure the fastest route to a sports star’s wallet is through the delivery room?

Both parties ignore the well-documented consequences of absent fathers. Lack of guidance, discipline or demonstration of the love and respect needed in a marriage. Crime rates, dropout rates, violence rates — all are higher for kids without fathers. It’s not like this is a secret.

Yet the situation repeats, over and over. It is simply cruel. How will children ever learn their way out of the cycle? If we, in the 21st Century, have fostered a culture where “baby mama” is an acceptable term, we have little to be proud of.

“A house without a father is a challenge,” Bill Cosby once wrote. “A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe.”

Travis Henry, the former NFL running back, reportedly has fathered at least 11 children with 10 different women. Evander Holyfield, the boxing champ who claims to be a man of God, fathered two children with two women a month apart — while being married to another.

Now comes Cromartie — on prime-time TV — to again demonstrate how flippant fatherhood can be. He actually has the nerve to tell the camera, “Soon as you leave (work) and get home, you got to be that father figure.”

He is not a father figure.

But, sadly, a white columnist bemoaning this issue won’t change it in the black community. An older couple wagging fingers won’t make young people listen. Critics may be dismissed with, “It’s not your place to say anything.”

But it is my place and it is your place, black or white or brown, because we share this country, and playing Johnny Appleseed to kids you won’t tend to makes our country a more difficult place. That holds for Antonio Cromartie or Kevin Federline.

Cromartie’s video is now the butt of endless Internet jokes. And almost unbelievably, Cromartie has complained only that HBO didn’t show another clip in which he recited his children’s names faster.

Hey, Antonio. It isn’t how fast you remembered the kids. It’s how fast you created them. And there’s nothing funny about your story. It’s sad. Really sad.

How about this story for irony!  Queen Rania of Jordan, a country supposedly at peace with Israel, has recently written a book on tolerance—specifically about bridging the cultural gap between the Arab world and the Western world—but, somehow that tolerance doesn’t extend to the Jews living next door!

Tom Gross reports on this:

Jordan’s Queen Rania says she is on a mission to bridge the religious and cultural divides between the Muslim and Western worlds. To help advance this worthy goal, she has written a children’s book (for kids aged 4-8) called “The Sandwich Swap”.

The book uses lunch sandwiches (the Western girl, Lily, has a peanut butter and jelly one, the Muslim girl, Salma, has one with pita and hummus) as a metaphor for the differences between two friends from different cultures.

The book’s aim is to promote openness, tolerance and multiculturalism, and in the U.S. it has been published by a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

Following high-profile TV interviews between Queen Rania and Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters, and a reading at the United Nations, the book has entered The New York Times’ bestseller list.

And yet Queen Rania, who since 2007 has been working with UNICEF on child welfare issues and is honorary chairwoman of the UN’s effort to promote the education of girls, has (according to press reports) now refused offers to have her book published in Hebrew for distribution in Israel, a country with which Jordan has signed a peace treaty.

So much for the UN and Queen Rania promoting tolerance.

This hilarious report from one of last month’s issues of National Review:

A lawsuit has recently been filed over the 2008 Gay Softball World Series, in which a San Francisco team called D2 was stripped of its second-place finish for having three bisexuals on its roster. The rules allow no more than two straight players per team, and in the middle of the championship game, D2 was angrily charged (by a team it had previously defeated) with insufficient gayness. After the game, the accused were taken to a conference room and asked a series of rather personal questions in an attempt to nail down their exact preferences. The ruling: Instead of adding up to one and a half heterosexuals, the fence-sitting trio were considered to be three “non-gays,” thus exceeding the quota. All three were suspended from gay softball for at least a year; it was not made clear how they might reestablish their eligibility.

As Connie Hair of Human Events asks: “When did decorum go out of style?”

Maybe it didn’t. Maybe that old, senile idiot Paul McCartney is just not as stylish as he thinks, because his ugly remarks really tainted what could have been a great moment for him in American history.

Instead, the moment will go down as one at which a guest in our country being honored by our country used the opportunity to wander down a completely unrelated and unwarranted road by taking a disgracefully cheap shot at a former president of our country.

As the evening celebrating his Gershwin Prize for Popular Song by the Library of Congress was ending, McCartney blurted out, “after the last eight years, it’s great to have a President who knows what a library is.”

McCartney, you are a despicable, classless imbecile.

It’s very ironic that someone who never even graduated college is criticizing the education of someone with an MBA from Harvard, who also happens to be married to a librarian.

If it were up to me, I’d immediately revoke the award and deport that old hag back to Europe.

Thankfully, this didn’t pass unnoticed, and House Minority Leader John Boehner had this to say:

Like millions of other Americans, I have always had a good impression of Paul McCartney and thought of him as a classy guy, but I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of grace and respect he displayed at the White House… I hope he’ll apologize to the American people for his conduct which demeaned him, the White House and President Obama.

It’s nice, though, when idiots like this open their mouths, because then you can see them for who they really are. After all, just think of how many people who for years have idolized this moron are now opening their eyes to what a dirtbag he really is.

This has to be one of the most disturbing news items I’ve seen in a while: a two-year-old boy with a two-pack-a-day smoking habit.

I’m surprised, though, that this news report, in which they report on the father’s opinions regarding the baby’s health, doesn’t answer the most glaring question: how did a baby get addicted to cigarettes like that??? What do the parents have to say about that??

I am writing this post to urge everyone I know to please take three minutes of your time to view the video below, and an additional minute of your time to sign an online petition on behalf of Sholom Rubashkin.

As most of you already know, he was convicted of money laundering and bank fraud last year and, since then, has clearly been chosen to be punished so severely as to “set an example”. There’s a clear and distinct line, though, beyond which an example is being made not of the person’s crime and his punishment, but rather of the injustice of his treatment! While I certainly do not condone his past criminal activities, I am appalled at this treatment.

While other CEOs in similar situations (or worse!) often get off with a slap on the wrist, e.g., the fine levied against the CEO of Toyota for mechanical failures (resulting in actual victims, by the way), for some reason the federal prosecutors decided that a case like this involving a prominent Jew would be a good candidate for an unprecedentedly harsh punishment.

Despite breaking news that they aren’t pursuing a life sentence anymore, they are still pushing for a 25-year sentence which, his lead attorney points out, is “a step in the right direction but for all practical purposes it’s still a life request.”

Please view the video below, and go to http://justiceforsholom.org and sign the petition there!

I’ve been keeping a running log for the past couple of weeks of how many times I hear the phrase “at the end of the day” used. So far, not a single day has gone by that someone hasn’t used it in conversation with me, and some days I’ve been forced to hear it over the course of three or more separate conversations!

What is it with this stupid phrase? Why is it that people can’t try to be a little creative and mix it up a bit with alternatives like “in the end”, or “when all is said and done”, or—best of all—just a simple “ultimately”? How long are we going to be subjected to this stupid phrase over and over again ad nauseam?

If you’re reading this, I apologize for opening your eyes to something that has probably always just gone right past you unnoticed, and for probably now making you, like me, cringe every time you hear the phrase.

The Daily Mail is reporting that:

A 13-year-old girl has been sentenced to 90 lashes and two months’ prison in Saudi Arabia after she took a mobile phone to school.

A court ordered the girl to be flogged in front of her classmates following an assault on the school principal, according to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan.

After the assault she was discovered to have concealed a mobile phone, breaking strict Saudi regulations banning the use of camera-equipped phones in girls’ schools.

Al-Watan said a court in the northeastern Gulf port of Jubail had sentenced the girl to 90 lashes inside her school, followed by two months’ detention.

The punishment is harsher than tha dished out to some robbers and looters.

Saudi Arabia, a leading US ally in the Middle East, is an absolute monarchy controlled by  the Al-Saud ruling tribe, and lacks any legal code….

Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading country in the use of torture-by-flogging, public beheadings and publically crucifying condemned prisoners.

The country crucified two people in 2009, including one in the capital Riyadh during President Barak Obama’s visit last April.

So when can we expect the NY Times, Washington Post, and CNN to start decrying Saudi Arabia’s gross human rights violations with the same vigor they use for Israel’s supposed transgressions?

A little over four months ago, I posted about second-rate has-been Danny Glover’s idiotic decision to dabble in politics (if you thought he was bad at acting…). Well, it seems he can’t keep his big mouth shut for too long.

Now, after the devastating disaster in Haiti, he amazingly came to the conclusion that he knows why this happened (a la Pat Robertson)! And what, pray tell, is the reason for this, Danny?  Drum roll, please………. It’s the earth’s retribution for mankind not coming out of the Copenhagen climate summit with the usual onslaught of bizarre resolutions, programs, pacts, and treaties.

Seriously, here’s what he said:

When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?

And here’s the video:

Shelby Steele wrote a great piece in yesterday’s WSJ describing our post-modern race problem: how our country’s past problem of white racism against blacks has slowly shifted into what is now whites overcompensating and bending over backwards to prove that they are not racist—and throwing common sense out the window in the process.

He writes:

America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

The essence of our new “post-modern” race problem can be seen in the parable of the emperor’s new clothes. The emperor was told by his swindling tailors that people who could not see his new clothes were stupid and incompetent. So when his new clothes arrived and he could not see them, he put them on anyway so that no one would think him stupid and incompetent. And when he appeared before his people in these new clothes, they too—not wanting to appear stupid and incompetent—exclaimed the beauty of his wardrobe. It was finally a mere child who said, “The emperor has no clothes.”

The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication—joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees—in this case the emperor’s flagrant nakedness.

America’s primary race problem today is our new “sophistication” around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods (“diversity”) and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If “hope and change” was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Our new race problem—the sophistication of seeing what isn’t there rather than what is—has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale. Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn’t fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not “add to the deficit?” How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?

Mr. Obama’s economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.

On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the “rational” and “earnest” way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.

And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America’s role in the world? Are we the world’s exceptional power and thereby charged with enforcing a certain balance of power, or are we now embracing European self-effacement and nonengagement? Where is the clear center in all this?

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called “individuating”—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots”—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself…

A greater problem for our nation today is that we have a president whose benign—and therefore desirable—blackness exempted him from the political individuation process that makes for strong, clear-headed leaders. He has not had to gamble his popularity on his principles, and it is impossible to know one’s true beliefs without this. In the future he may stumble now and then into a right action, but there is no hard-earned center to the man out of which he might truly lead.

And yes, white America conditioned Barack Obama to emptiness—valued him all along for his “articulate and clean” blackness, so flattering to American innocence. He is a president come to us out of our national insecurities.

I love to laugh at those global warming hypocrites. You know the ones I mean: those idiots you read about in the news or see on TV preaching about global warming, only to then head off stage into their waiting private jet.

The most famous one is probably Al Gore, who came out with a whole pseudo-documentary to try to convince people to change their evil carbon-emitting ways—and had the sheer audacity to actually ask people (via the camera): “Are you ready to change the way you live?”—when the blathering moron flies around in a private jet and lives in a mansion that sucks up power like Good Humor on a hot day, complete with an indoor swimming pool that costs $500 a month to heat. I guess that’s one hypocrite just not yet ready to change the way he lives.

Well, the London Times put together a great list of these hypocrites (probably the most comprehensive such list I’ve seen so far), including John Travolta; Oprah Winfrey; Sting’s wife, Dame Trudie Styler; Tom Cruise; Sheryl Crow; Jennifer Aniston; Coldplay’s Chris Martin; and others.

If only this sort of public ridicule would get these people to finally shut up.

When most people think of Dubai, they think of the six-star hotels, the man-made islands, the indoor ski slopes… essentially the life of luxury. Of course, that life of luxury has a price and apparently, based on the recent stories coming from the international news wires, that price is way too high for Dubai to actually pay. They are up to their ears in debt and the entire emirate is on the verge of complete financial meltdown. If it weren’t for Abu Dhabi pumping a bazillion dollars into their emirate to help keep them afloat, the Dubai would be halfway to a dried up, shriveled up desert wasteland.

Naturally, with this being big news now, a lot of not-so-recent news stories and special editorials are making their way around the internet. Among them is a really detailed and riveting expose, written by Johann Hari for the Independent, of the outright slavery and exploitation that exists on a huge scale—openly—in Dubai.

Read this incredible story, “The dark side of Dubai“, and you will be blown away by how much of an illusion this “paradise” is, and just how close this bizarre society lives to all hell breaking loose.

National Review had this gem in last issue’s The Week:

If you think you can’t use the word “black,” and must use “African-American” instead, you may find that you can’t talk straight.

At the 2002 Winter Olympics, an American woman won a gold medal in the bobsled. She was the first black woman ever to win a gold medal in the Winter Games. But NBC, the network covering the Games, had no way of conveying this fact to its viewers. An announcer was reduced to saying, “She’s the first African-American woman from any country to win the gold medal.” In the American media, Nelson Mandela has been called “the first African-American president of South Africa.” Students have written that Othello was “African-American.” And so on.

The latest comes from The New Republic, whose review of a biography of Booker T. Washington began this way: “Once the most famous and influential African American in the United States (and probably the world), Booker T. Washington . . .” Surely the writer meant that Washington was probably the most famous and influential black man in the world. And there is nothing wrong with saying so, for, as we used to say in a bygone era, “black is beautiful.”

Should I start worrying about myself?  After all, for the second time in just 4 months I am actually agreeing with an issue PETA has raised! (See my post on Ringling Bros. Circus Abuse for the first such occasion.)

Now, PETA has come out very strongly against a video on YouTube showing what is apparently a specialty of certain Chinese chefs who have come up with a way to keep a fish alive while deep frying it. In the video you can actually witness the fish lying in a platter of sauce, attempting to breathe, while diners begin picking chunks out of it to eat.

The Daily Telegraph reports that PETA called it “disgusting” and that a PETA spokesperson said that “every decent person should be shocked when anyone mocks or abuses a helpless dying animal”.

I couldn’t agree more. I may differ with PETA when it comes to eating meat (as long as the animal is killed for food, not sport, and killed as quickly and painlessly as possible), but watching this video shocked and sickened me to my core. The suffering that they are obviously putting that creature through is unspeakable.

Obviously, the Chinese don’t believe in karma.

For those of you with a strong stomach (seriously), here is the video. I strongly caution anyone with a combination of a strong conscience and a weak stomach not to watch this, as you quite possibly will have nightmares.