The Black KKK claimed
another victim, a high-profile professional football player with a
checkered past this time.

No, we don’t know for
certain the circumstances surrounding Taylor’s death. I could very
well be proven wrong for engaging in this sort of aggressive
speculation. But it’s no different than if you saw a fat man fall
to the ground clutching his chest. You’d assume a heart attack,
and you’d know, no matter the cause, the man needed to lose
weight.

Well, when shots are fired
and a black man hits the pavement, there’s every statistical
reason to believe another black man pulled the trigger. That’s not
some negative, unfair stereotype. It’s a reality we’ve been living
with, tolerating and rationalizing for far too long.

When the traditional, white
KKK lynched, terrorized and intimidated black folks at a slower
rate than its modern-day dark-skinned replacement, at least we had
the good sense to be outraged and in no mood to contemplate
rationalizations or be fooled by distractions.

Our new millennium strategy
is to pray the Black KKK goes away or ignores us. How’s that
working?

Does anyone decide which
candidate to choose based on the recommendation of a TV talk show
host or a singer/actress? If any group of citizens is uniquely
unqualified to tell someone else how to vote, it’s those of us
who live in the sheltered, privileged arena of celebrityhood. It’s
one thing to buy an ab machine because Chuck Norris recommends it
(he’s in good shape, isn’t he?) or a grill because George
Foreman’s name is on it (he’s a great guy, so it must be a
great grill!), but the idea of choosing the Leader of the Free
World based on the advice of someone who lives in the cloistered
world of stardom seems a bit loony to me.

The king of Spain’s recent
undiplomatic outburst at the Venezuelan president has become a
ringtone hit across Spain. An estimated 500,000 people have
downloaded the insult featuring the words "Why don’t you shut
up?", generating a reported 1.5m euros ($2m).

King Juan Carlos asked Hugo
Chavez to "shut up" at a summit in Chile last week after
the president said Spain’s ex-PM Jose Maria Aznar was a
"fascist".

Relax, and don’t forget what Al Gore the
Witchdoctor is carefully not telling you. Non exhaustively: that his computer
models are regularly proven wrong, that we’re coming out of a little Ice Age
(which tends to explain why it is a bit warmer than it used to be), that even if
the Arctic ice is melting, the Antarctic is getting colder (meaning that global
warming is not even global), that CO2 is a consequence, not a cause of warming,
that if some glaciers are melting, others right next to them are advancing, and
that compared to the 1930s and 1000 AD, it’s actually getting rather cold these
days.

Sydney’s Santa Clauses have
instead been instructed to say "ha ha ha" instead, the
Daily Telegraph reported.

One disgruntled Santa told
the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho
ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to
"ho", a US slang term for prostitute.