Links To End The Month

Here are some things going on as July 2012 comes to a close:

From the Los Angeles Times, a body believed to be of a missing FBI agent has been found in Burbank.

From Newsmax, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's Chik-fil-A support page on Facebook has been visited over 20 million times.

The Weekly Standard points out that what Mitt Romney said about culture impacting economic conditions during his recent visit to Jerusalem wasn't all that different from some things President Obama said during his 2009 speech in Cairo.

From LifeSiteNews, business has boomed for a bakery in Colorado, after it refused to provide a wedding cake for a gay couple.

From the Washington Times, the House Judiciary Committee reports on crimes committed by illegal aliens that the Obama administration won't deport.  (H/T Big Government)

From the Foundry, Republicans in the Senate say no votes on judges until after the election.

From Gateway Pundit, former Olympic organizer Mitt Romney gets the endorsement of former Olympic athletes including Christi Yamaguchi, and also from Lech Wałęsa.

From Smart Girl Politics, thanks to NY mayor Bloomberg, Obama's fictional Julia will learn to breastfeed.

From the Associated Press, the Syrian city of Aleppo has been under siege.

From the Wall Street Journal, a deal has been reached that will allow a female Saudi Arabian to compete in judo while wearing her head scarf.

Speaking of the Olympics, if the United States can't get all of the medals for the hammer throw, here's someone I'd like to see get one.  He used to compete for my alma mater, but now competes for one of my ancestral countries.

From Fox News, a Congressional report blames five ATF agents for "Fast and Furious".

From Yahoo News, Iraq will get some help from Great Britain in destroying the remains of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons.  You know, the stuff that Saddam didn't really have, but Dubya lied by saying he did.  (Admission by W's former leftwing critics that they were wrong in 4...3...2...oh wait, Hell will freeze over first.)

And finally, in one more from Yahoo News, a couple in New York state will remarry after 48 years of divorce.

An Interesting Question

Here's a short video from WordsMatter2012, showing some things that Teh One^TM has said during the last few years.  Could it be that his attitude toward his own accomplishments and toward the accomplishments of others might just be inconsistent?


(Brought to my attention by a Tweet from a Ponytail Patriot.)

I Love The 2nd Amendment

But two would-be home invaders in Atlanta are surely not very fond of it right now.  After getting out of a van, they knocked and kicked the door, but when the homeowner opened it, he also opened fire.  The two men were found a short distance away suffering from gunshot wounds, and taken to a nearby hospital.  Police are still investigating the incident and looking for a third suspect, which I would surmise to be the driver of the van, who drove away when the two men were shot.

Read more at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Gore Didn't Create The Internet, Bush Did

During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Democrat nominee Vice President Al Gore claimed to have created the Internet.  In the aftermath of the election, in which the Republican candidate George W. Bush (then the governor of Texas) carried Florida by a narrow margin and thus achieved a narrow victory in the Electoral College, there was an effort to recount the votes that was stopped by a Supreme Court decision.  Gore supporters would soon claim that their candidate was the true winner, and that Bush stole the election.

Although Al Gore's claim to be the Internet's creator has never been taken all that seriously, since it has been commonly thought that the Internet was a civilian by-product of a military project called ARPAnet, some recently revealed (according to the perspective of yours truly, anyway) information indicates that the idea of the Internet comes from a man named Bush.  This Bush, however, was not named George, but Vannevar.  He was a presidential science advisor during World War II.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, it was Vannevar Bush's ideas published in the Atlantic that motivated technologists to try to connect small networks into larger ones and form a global network.  The entity that succeeded was not part of the government, but part of Xerox, known for making copiers.  Specifically, it was Xerox Parc, located in Silicon Valley.  This means that like certain high-quality copiers, the Internet is just as good as a Xerox, because in a sense, it is a Xerox.

Cal Ripken's Mother Found Safe After Abduction

Victoria Ripken, the mother of baseball Hall of Fame member Cal Ripken Jr. was kidnapped from her home in Aberdeen, Maryland yesterday between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., by a gunman who forced her into her own car and drove off, but found safe this morning at around 6:15 a.m. in her car not far from her house.  Her hands were bound, but she was otherwise not physically harmed.  There was no known ransom demand or any relationship between the kidnapper and the Ripken family.

Mrs. Ripken's late husband Cal Ripken Sr. was a manager, coach and scout for the Orioles organization.  Another son Billy Ripken also played major league baseball, including some time with the Orioles.

Read the story at CNN and the Washington Post.

Sherman Hemsley, Movin' On Up

Sherman Hemsley, who played George Jefferson on All In The Family and The Jeffersons, and later Deacon Ernest Frye on Amen, died today at the age of 74, in his home in El Paso, Texas.  The cause of death has not yet been disclosed.  Besides his well-known acting career, he was also a singer who released two albums during the 1990's.

Read more at CNN, People, the Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly.  Here's the gospel-flavored Jeffersons theme song.

Sally Ride 1951-2012

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, has died at her home in La Jolla, California after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer.  Besides her two space shuttle flights, both aboard the Challenger, she served on the commission that investigated the explosion of that same shuttle in 1986.  She later served on the board investigating the loss of the Columbia in 2003, the only person to serve on both the Challenger and Columbia commissions.

Sally Ride received bachelor's degrees in both English and physics, and then went on to earn a masters and a PhD in physics, all from Stanford University.  Besides her work for NASA, she also served as a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego and as the director of the school's California Space Institute.  She also started her own company Sally Ride Science, which created educational programs and products intended to help girls and young women pursue interests in science and math.  Dr. Ride received many honors for her work, including NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Award and the NASA Space Flight Medal.

Read more at Biography, MSNBC, Fox News, USA Today, Yahoo News and CNET.  The MSNBC report recalls that on the day of her first space flight, thousands of people wore T-shirts and buttons bearing the slogan "Ride, Sally, Ride", but does not say where that slogan comes from.  That particular phrase is found in the backing vocals of a Wilson Pickett song.  Little did Pickett (or whoever actually wrote the song) know that he was predicting by name the first American woman to go into space.

Penn State Given Harsh Sanctions

As announced yesterday, the NCAA has come out with some severe (and deserved) sanctions against the Penn State football program.  Penn State will be fined $60 million, banned from post-season play for four years, put on probation for five years, limited to offering 15 new scholarships per year instead of the normal 25, and forced to vacate all of their wins from 1998 to 2011.  Any PSU football player who wishes to transfer to another Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division 1-A) school will be allowed to play for his new team without being required (as is normal) to sit out for a year.  CBS Sports has the details:



The removal of all victories over the past 14 seasons from Penn State's and Joe Paterno's totals will mean that retired Florida State and West Virginia coach Bobby Bowden will regain his status as the winningest coach in FBS history.  The winningest and longest lasting active FBS coach is my obvious favorite, Frank Beamer, who gained those distinctions with Paterno's ouster, which resulted from the charges (now convictions) against Penn State assistant Jerry Sandusky.

(For some reason, the post is showing a lot of space between the video and the paragraph below it, at least on my computer.  Sorry for the technical difficulties.)

Penn State Removes Joe Paterno Statue

Due to the fallout from the report by former FBI director Louis Freh, which found that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno and others had covered up allegations of child sexual abuse by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, the university has removed the statue of Paterno from its pedestal outside Beaver Stadium.  The university's president Rodney Erickson has stated that the statue will be stored in a "secure location", and that the school's library will continue to bear Paterno's name.

Read more at ESPN, TMZ, ABC News, Fox News and USA Today.

In other developments related to Penn State and the Sandusky case:

According to Newsday, Paterno's family says that tearing down the statue will not help either the university or Sandusky's victims.

CBS Sports reports that Penn State will face "unprecedented" sanctions, to be announced tomorrow.

Muslim Teenager Tries To Grab Olympic Torch

According to the Guardian, a "teenager" tried to grab the Olympic torch from Anna Skora, the runner who was carrying it.  The kid was quickly subdued and arrested by police.  What the Guardian left out of their report (and its accompanying video) is what he yelled, just before leaping at Skora.  However, a nearby spectator making an amateur video had no problem hearing and understanding him.  (H/T TROP)