Saturday Night Special

Of course.

The sequester is really one person’s fault (ie- the guy who has been in the White House for the past four years) and it will hurt but taking it on everyone just make you look the bully, not the other guys:

Another federal employee has come forward to claim the Obama administration resisted efforts to ease the impact of sequester.

A U.S. park ranger, who did not wish to be identified, told FoxNews.com that supervisors within the National Park Service overruled plans to deal with the budget cuts in a way that would have had minimal impact on the public. Instead, the source said, park staff were told to cancel special events and cut “interpretation services” — the talks, tours and other education services provided by local park rangers.

“Apparently, they want the public to feel the pain,” the ranger said.

The National Park Service is among many federal agencies warning of a major impact from the sequester cuts, which took effect last Friday. The agency has warned of delayed access to portions of Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, closed campgrounds at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, reduced hours at the Grand Canyon visitor center and other ramifications.

(And I thank you)

What else can one say?

Dimwitted celebs rubbing elbows with fascists, dictators, totalitarians, and sundry president-for-life types has been commonplace for so long in our culture that hardly anyone is shocked by it. There are some obvious points of common ground for dictators and celebrities, including superhuman levels of vanity, a marked indifference to reality, and the uncanny ability to feel completely at ease in the presence of obvious sycophants.

History: it matters:

The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. 

... [But] Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War.... In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. 

... [The Crusades] were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Even if the writer was Coptic, he would more than have every right to point a finger at a Jew-hating venom-spewer:

A New York Times blogger became ensnared in controversy yesterday after asking a Weekly Standard author whether he was a Coptic Christian and if this played a factor in his reporting on anti-American and anti-Semitic activist Samira Ibrahim.

Weekly Standard writer Samuel Tadros broke the story of Ibrahim’s support for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Bulgarian bus bombing attack of 2012, resulting in the State Department’s decision to “defer” its plan to honor Ibrahim with a women’s courage award.

But Times reporter Robert Mackey speculated on Twitter that Tadros’s religious background, which Mackey believed was Coptic Christian, might have played a role in his reporting.

“Is it correct to say you’re from Egypt’s Coptic Christian community? If so, does that inform your criticism of Islamists?” Mackey asked Tadros.

Mackey was quickly flooded with Tweets saying his question was out of line.

“Please explain your theory for how being Coptic might make one critical of a non-Islamist (Samira) who celebrates 9/11,” wrote Eric Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“Your question was framed in a way often used by people to marginalize members of ethnic, religious and racial minorities,” wrote the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Mackey responded that he was not trying to diminish Tadros’s story, but merely point out that some reporters are influenced by their religious views.

“[H]ave we reached a point where questions about our perspectives can only be racist?

Alright.

If one were an atheist and pointed out that Samira Ibrahim’s profuse use of the word “Zionist” might seem a tad- oh- anti-semitic, would that colour one’s perception of her or not?

That’s true. Figures in the Bible are sometimes mentioned in the Koran. For example, there is a heresy in surah 5:75. Guess who?

When your lead actress and helmswoman is a skeevy, pudgy, pasty hack with nothing original to offer the TV-verse, the numbers don’t come as a shock:

In a country of over 300 million, 866,000 viewers is statistically zero. 

And yet:

Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series 'Girls,' has quietly shaken up the writing staff for her breakout comedy-drama about a group of young women making their way in New York.

"Breakout?" Season two's ratings are worse than season one's. 

Hollywood lives in a bubble. This should be obvious.

They can grope you but they cannot detect a bomb:

An undercover TSA inspector with an improvised explosive device stuffed in his pants got past two security screenings at Newark Airport — including a pat-down — and was cleared to get on board a commercial flight, sources told The Post yesterday.

Don't forget to turn your clocks forward.