My own 22-year-old daughter was murdered just a little over a month ago. Believe me, everyone, when I say sorrow and pain, shock, anguish and mourning are completely non-partisan and non-discriminatory. Sometimes you have to experience it to learn it. My heart, my thoughts and my prayers, are with the families who lost loved ones in this tragedy. Long after the media circus and its clowns have packed up and moved on to the next sideshow, they --not CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX, et. al.-- will still be living with this horror. They will be for the rest of their lives, I'm afraid.

I agree.

These very thoughts raced through my head as I watched the pre-fight scene in "Rocky Balboa" when Little Marie brings Rocky the picture of Adrian and Rocky mumbles, "Yeah, she always brought me luck." Luck?!?!?! Rocky must be punchy. As you noted, seems like all she ever brought was wet-blanketing grief and negativism. WHile I would never wish the dear lady dead, it is for sure that she'd had been fighting Rocky tooth-and-nail every inch of the way. Poor guy.

George Bailey got to stay home and bang away at Mary Hatch every night. I fail to see the downside.

Funniest man on the planet.

I think it's the name. What a stupid name. I always thought it was a play on the phrase "Whooopsy daisy" or something. Comparatively, "The Osborn Sisters" sounds positively Shakespearean.

Also great as John Geste in William Wellman's 1939 classic "Beau Geste." Not the star, but he held his own against a formidable cast: Gary Cooper, Robert Preston, Brian Donleavy, Broderick Crawford and an outlandishly young and radiant Susan Hayward.

Whiled away his Golden Years starring in depressing drek like "Frogs," "The Thing with Two Heads," and "The House in Nightmare Park," but he, like Vincent Price, always remained a gentleman about it.

Third.

I, perhaps like many victims, was merely flashing back to my own experience with abuse, in this case to my junior high school days, when my brother and I --not even minor league ass wipes-- were repeatedly harrassed, assaulted, and beaten. Our "crime?" The color of our skin (which was, and continues to be, white).

The point people are making here is that the media and society have taught the masses to process stories like these by a simple syllogism: If the white guy's in the wrong, then the white guy's wrong; the black guy's in the wrong, then the white guy is still wrong --simply by virtue of that whiteness.

Sure, at this point nobody knows who or what started it. But the larger point is that if the black kid started it simply out of racial animus (which, contrary to what liberal politicians, media members, and educators might have you and everyone else believe, is entirely possible --repeated personal experience has pointed that painfully out to me) there will no repercussions whatsoever. The same would not, will not, hold true if the roles were or are reversed. I know it. And I think you do, too.

Most likely it will come out that the white kid used the "N-word" at some point, and the implication will be that, thus, he "got what he deserved." It's been my experience that whenever video or reports like this emerge, that's always the first line of defense, that the perpetrator is actually the victim, striking out, striking back, at America's shameful legacy of hate, bigotry and racism. And so on. And then everyone's like, "Yeah, right, okay..." And life goes on.