News Roundup

• From the "Play Stupid Games" Department - Fox News is reporting that three American citizens have been arrested in Egypt after being accused of throwing Molotov cocktails during recent unrest in Cairo.  Here's a pro-tip from someone who's lived and travelled in a lot of places:  When overseas, you are probably wrong in an epic manner if you start taking part in local politics, especially if those politics are expressed with the exchange of rocks and gasoline-filled bottles for tear gas grenades and 7.62x39mm rounds.  These three knuckleheads should have stayed in their apartment, made sure their family knew they were OK, and kept their noses out of Egyptian politics.  Now they get to learn what real police suppression and brutality is all about.  
•  From the "Foreign Entanglements" Department - Apparently, trying to figure out how we're going to get our own fiscal house in order isn't enough.  The Federal Reserve has opened up lines of credit for European banks in an effort to help them stave off their own disaster.  So we are not only going to be paying off debt we ran up to buy bread and circuses for our own people, now we're going to be paying off debt we're running up to make sure the bread and circuses keep flowing in Paris, Rome, Athens, Dublin, and Madrid. Brilliant!
• From the "Manny, Moe, and Jack" Department - Carjackers in California were stymied when they found that they were unable to drive the car they had stolen, which had a manual transmission.  Kids these days, I tell you.  Time was when a teenager could hotwire a car, drive it with a clutch, steal the tires, and sell it to a chop shop all by himself.  Now we have three knuckleheads who have to hold up the owner for his keys, then abandon the car because they don't know how to drive a stick.  I blame the educational system.  Why aren't we teaching the children to be honest, self-reliant criminals like we did when I was growing up?
• From the "Dictators Ain't What They Used To Be" Department - Russian Leader-For-Life Vladimir Putin tried to get in the spotlight at an MMA match the other day, was booed by thousands of people for his efforts, and was visibly shaken by the experience.  This just goes to show how far Russia has slipped in the past 50 years or so.  If Stalin had gone into the ring of a boxing match and not had the entire stadium clap and cheer for him until they all passed out from the effort, the NKVD would have surrounded the stadium, arrested, tortured, and executed everyone present, then arrested their families and deported them to Kazakhstan, then arrested and killed all of the agents involved so that all memories of the incident were wiped out.  In this case, the bloggers are having a flame war on the Internet.  Vladimir, I've studied Stalin, I've listened to Stalin, and you're no Josef Stalin.