† We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?:  Christopher Paul, an African American convert to Islam, pleaded guilty in June to one count of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction in terrorist attacks, and has been sentenced to 20 years in prison, reports The Associated Press:

U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Frost said he was at a loss to explain how Paul, 44, got himself caught up in such a mess. The judge said it was difficult to understand "how you allowed yourself to pervert the religion that you supposedly follow." …

He was accused of joining al-Qaida in the early 1990s and helping teach fellow Muslim extremists how to bomb U.S. and European targets. Prosecutors agreed to drop charges of providing material support to terrorists and conspiracy to provide support to terrorists.

Paul was one of three men who the Justice Department accused of discussing terrorist attacks during an August 2002 meeting at the Caribou Cafe coffee shop in Upper Arlington.

The other two also pleaded guilty, but the government hasn't said whether the case is now considered closed. Iyman Faris was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleaded guilty in 2003 in an alleged plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. Nuradin Abdi was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2007 after pleading guilty in an alleged plot to blow up an Ohio shopping mall.

† Can The Nutrition Police Lay Off Coffee, Already?: Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle believe they have found the mechanism that explains why caffeine seems to be protective against skin cancer, reports HealthDay News:

[I]n cells damaged by UV rays, caffeine interrupted a protein called ATR-Chk1, causing the damaged cells to self-destruct. …

ATR is essential to damaged cells that are growing rapidly … and caffeine specifically targets damaged cells that can become cancerous.

Lead researcher Dr. Paul Nghiem, an associate professor of dermatology is also trying topical application of caffeine, and tells HealthDay that "[i]t suppresses skin cancer development by as much as 72 percent in mice.

He adds: "Caffeine is both a sunscreen and it deletes damaged cells. It may well make sense to put it into a sunscreen preparation."

† Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!: In a commentary for ReealClearPolitics, Robert Tracinski, editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com, writes, “I have been wondering whether Barack Obama will turn out to be another Jimmy Carter or another Franklin Roosevelt”:

The least bad option is Carter: a leader whose policies are disastrous for the economy and for US foreign policy, but who ends up being rejected by the American people and voted out of office after only one term--as opposed to a leader like FDR, whose policies are also disastrous, but who ends up being loved by the American people nonetheless and voted back into office.

After viewing Obama's speech [to Congress], I am forced to conclude that he has the makings of another FDR.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times): The Washington Post reports on a new trend – “insourcing” – that is, people doing household and other chores themselves rather than paying others to relieve them of the drudgery:

"There are many of us that have been spending money that we can't afford to spend and have taken on habits that we had no business taking on," said Paco Underhill, who studies consumer behavior and wrote the book "Why We Buy." "Those time-based trade-offs actually are some of the easiest forms of economizing that a person can do."

More people are now hemming their pants, doing yard work and simple car repairs, grooming their pets, giving themselves home pedicures and even dyeing their hair in the kitchen sink. But some “outsourcing” may be recession-proof, according to the WaPo:

Brenda Waller, 42, of Herndon … has called off the lawn care service for the coming summer and asked the woman who does her nails to cut them extra short - so the manicure will last longer. And no more pedicures. But she is holding on to DoodyCalls, a company that cleans up after her pets in the yard. Founder Jacob D'Aniello said his Charlottesville-based company grew by 21 percent last year.

"The only time I really felt we'd be in trouble," he said, "is if everybody woke up one morning and decided they liked picking up dog poop" [contextual link added by The Stiletto].

It’s not just the middle class sacrificing on these small luxuries. The New York Times reports that President Barack Obama’s proposed $500K salary cap on executives of failing companies that need taxpayer bailouts is forcing the Masters of The Universe who live in the toniest areas in and around NYC to rethink their spending on such items as “private school: $32,000 a year per student; mortgage: $96,000 a year; co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year; nanny: $45,000 a year”:

We are already at $269,000, and we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet. …

Sure, the solution may seem simple: move to Brooklyn or Hoboken, put the children in public schools and buy a MetroCard. But more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men (and they are almost invariably men) whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover.

Even in “reduced” circumstances, the rich are very different from the rest of us: They’re weighing whether a nanny is a necessity, we’re just trying to scrape together enough to pay a professional pooper-scooper.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race): When the sh*t hit the fan over the New York Post cartoon that some insist is depicting President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee, The Wall Street Journal – among many other MSM outlets – helpfully informed readers that “[m]onkeys have been used historically in pejorative portrayals of black people.” Someone should have informed the MSM that blacks are not alone in having been given the monkey business.

In the late 19^th century British and American cartoonists routinely depicted the Irish as monkeys or apes – as did historians and scientists:

In the 1860s, the debate among scientists about the relationship of humans to animals prompted British racists to make frequent comparisons between Irish people, Black people and apes. The Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley wrote to his wife from Ireland in 1860: "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours." …

[A] proponent of the theory of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy was James Anthony Froude, a professor of history at Oxford. He described the Irish country folk as "more like squalid apes than human beings." He depicted the Irish as "unstable as water", while the English stood for order and self-control. Only "efficient military despotism" could succeed in Ireland, he wrote, because the "wild Irish" understood only force.

In fact, American cartoonist Thomas Nast made a career of it: 

Unlike the Post cartoon, Nast’s Irish apes are drawn as chimeras – only partly human, to make the unmistakable point that the Irish are not quite human. Sean Delonas, in contrast, drew the chimpanzee as … a chimpanzee:

Cartoons like Nast’s are recognized as hate speech today – unless they involve one particular American of Scots Irish descent: George W. Bush. Numerous blogs and Web sites – as well as professional editorial cartoonists – often portrayed Bush as, or likened him to, a chimpanzee (can you imagine a blog about the Obama administration called “The Smirking Chimp” or an article titled “New Scientific Study Reveals Obama Is A Chimp”?):

Note that this portrait of Bush juxtaposes his face on a simian body – again, no mistaking the intent to show the former president as a sub-human, or leaving it to the eye of the beholder.

Given this country’s virulent and shameful history of anti-Irish racism, depicting Bush as a chimp is as racist – and racist in the exact same way - as depicting Obama as a chimp. But neither Al Sharpton and other race-baiters, nor their liberal enablers in the MSM and academe, ever protested.