Did you catch the amount that the FBI has reuested in its budget for fiscal 2009? That info was kind of buried in news reports about how the House Appropriations Committee was tough on Director Mueller in the hearings earlier this week.

In a column this morning for TownHall.Com, David W. Almasi calls me a "race-monger" for pointing out the racial implications of the LeBron James/Gisele Bundchen Vogue magazine cover. Annie Leibovitz's photo was a recreation of a famous World War I military recruitment poster, with James in the role of the woman-lusting gorilla and Bundchen as his prey. People who see King Kong in the cover are not far off the mark.

Life in the current federal government just keeps getting stranger. The EPA has banned new contracts with IBM which automatically resulted in IBM being banned from new contracts with all other fed agencies.

The cover of April's edition of Vogue has generated controversy over how NBA star LeBron James is depicted with model Gisele Bundchen. Some critics have alleged that the picture, taken by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz, makes him look like King Kong carrying off Fay Wray, a racially loaded simian metaphor. Others don't see it at all, suggesting that James is demonstrating the same intensity he shows on the court and people are trying too hard to be offended. A comparison between the cover and a World War I recruitment poster should settle the argument. Leibovitz was clearly, unmistakeably using one of the world's most famous black men to portray a ferocious gorilla carrying off a white woman.

Jimi Hendrix asked, "Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced?" Hillary Clinton now (and Republicans later), asks, "Is Obama experienced? Has he ever been experienced?" And the whole issue is the rottenest of red herrings.

For days, Hillary Clinton has padded her foreign policy resume with an anecdote about a 1996 trip to Bosnia in which her diplomatic entourage evaded sniper fire and made a dangerous corkscrew landing. Now that video has emerged to prove this to be blatantly false, it may be the biggest blunder of her campaign.

I really think we need to reconsider what we call "constants", those things we can really rely on to never change; death, taxes, relativity...

And the total arrogance of our leaders, oh yes....

While most people were nervously watching the continued economic disintegration of the country, the Pew Center on the States published a report that should (but won't) cause sufficient national disgust to create a rebellion. We've reached the exalted state of having a full 1+ percent of our adults behind bars.

I've been thinking of late that we might have hit bottom as a culture, a country, and a concept. I should know better, and who better to teach me once again that you can always go lower than a nice respected institution of higher learning like Hunter College.

This commentary may well get me another load of brickbats my way, but I seem to adore playing the iconclast, always have. Well, grab a chair, light one up, and let's rehash some rhetoric.

And yes, learn something about sorry excuses...

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