Al Khawahir’s nephew, Nasser Almarzooq, told The Associated Press last Monday the case was simply a misunderstanding. He said his uncle was coming to visit him for a couple weeks and only wanted the device for cooking. Almarzooq is a student at the University of Toledo in Ohio. The man was scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Detroit for a hearing to determine whether he will be released on bond or detained.

Well, let’s see, what could possibly be wrong with a Muslim man traveling from Saudi Arabia with a pressure cooker only a few weeks after two Muslim men used pressure cookers to blow up people in Boston? But wait. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here. If the guy is telling the truth – if he’s only bringing the thing half way around the world so he can make dinner for his nephew, then HE’S AN IDIOT!

On the other hand, if the guy is a terrorist who planned to use the pressure cooker to make a bomb then HE’S STILL AN IDIOT. That only makes him a dangerous idiot, but an idiot never the less. And if there’s one thing we don’t need in this country, it’s another idiot.

Story number two: Drugs and prostitution going on at a senior citizen housing complex? Unbelievable but true. A man, 75, and a woman, 66, suspected of using cocaine and running a prostitution ring out of their apartments at the Vincente K. Tibbs Senior Citizen Building in Englewood, New Jersey have been arrested after residents complained about vagrants, drunks, and addicts invading their building, authorities said.

In late April, police arrested fifth-floor residents James Parham and his neighbor Cheryl Chaney on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia and maintaining a drug nuisance. Chaney faces an additional charge of possession of crack cocaine. Parham admitted providing prostitutes — mostly young women with crack cocaine addictions — to some of his younger neighbors in the building, Detective Capt. Timothy Torell said. More charges could be pending.

Sex and drugs in the old age home. The hippie generation of the ‘60s never changes I guess, they just get older.

Story number three: It’s a given that politicians don’t always tell the complete truth but when the president lies and continues to lie even in the face of facts easily verified on video tape, it’s pretty shocking. But that is exactly what President Obama is doing … again and again and again.

Last Monday, during an appearance before the media, President Obama was again caught lying to cover-up his lying and covering-up in the aftermath of that horrendous terror attack in Benghazi, Libya that cost four American lives including our ambassador. Obama actually claimed before the world that, “The day after [Libya] happened; I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” Uh, oh. Liar, liar, pants on fire, Mr. President.

In fact it is such a bald-faced lie that Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler awarded the President the full-boat of four Pinocchios:

“[T]he president’s claim that he said ‘act of terrorism’ is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.

“Indeed, the initial unedited talking points did not call it an act of terrorism. Instead of pretending the right words were uttered, it would be far better to acknowledge that he was echoing what the intelligence community believed at the time — and that the administration’s phrasing could have been clearer and more forthright from the start.”

The lying from this Administration is so blatant that it’s embarrassing (but not to the president apparently). The lies about Libya never stop, no matter how much evidence is uncovered. As I said, politicians have been playing fast and loose with the truth forever, but this is a very different and much more serious thing. When it’s the President of the United States doing the lying and doing so before all of the media in the most brazen way imaginable, it goes beyond unbelievable. It’s criminal.

The three young women were found alive along with a six year old child who was born to one of the captive women. A former assistant safety director for the city, said law enforcement officials told him that the women were beaten while pregnant, with unborn children not surviving, and that a dungeon of sorts with chains was in the home.

Police have arrested Ariel Castro, 52, the owner of the house and a former Cleveland school bus driver in connection with the alleged abductions. More than likely he has kidnapped and tortured many other girls through the years. This is pure evil; there is no other name for it.

Evil exists in Philadelphia too, where abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell is charged with five counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and four babies allegedly born alive and then killed with scissors. It is legal in Pennsylvania to abort a fetus up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy. Dr. Gosnell also faces charges that he performed 24 abortions well beyond 24 weeks.

Judge Jeffrey Minehart told jurors that state law defines a live baby as one that is fully expelled from the mother and showing signs of life such as breathing, heart beat or movement. These jurors actually had to have someone explain to them what constitutes a living baby. Can you imagine? God in Heaven! What a time we live in!

These four babies were supposed to be aborted, but they didn’t cooperate with the late-term abortion and actually had the nerve to be born alive. They breathed, they survived, but then, prosecutors said, the good doctor deliberately severed their spinal cords. A doctor. Evil exists.

I’m angered when monsters like these get a pass from society by labeling them “sick.” Calling an evil act “sick” is marginalizing it. It also turns the monster who committed the act into a victim. It relieves him of personal responsibility. You see, it isn’t his fault that he did what he did because he’s sick. “Poor guy, he’s sick, you know. Can’t help himself.” A sickness can be cured, so let’s hospitalize the poor bastard and get him some treatment. “He isn’t really bad, he just needs proper medication. Once he’s rehabilitated he will become a productive member of society.”

Yes, there are some people who are really mentally deranged and commit horrible acts, I don’t deny that. Tucson killer Jared Lee Loughner and Colorado movie theater killer James Holmes are two that come to mind. I’m no doctor, but I think I’d be close in calling those two paranoid schizophrenic maniacs (or psycho killers for short). But I wouldn’t label the kidnapper and rapist in Cleveland as such and neither would I call the abortion doctor by that term. These people are not crazy lunatics that have gone off their meds, they are evil.

Would you call the Nazi SS murderers “sick?” There were thousands of Nazis that committed horrible atrocities and murdered innocent men, women, children, and babies. Were they all sick? The Soviet Union communists of the 20th Century killed and tortured millions. Was that a mental illness? Were the killing fields of Pol Pot something that might have been avoided with proper medication? What about the radical Islamic Jihadists? Are they all in need of medical attention? No, evil is what it is and evil it should be called.

In today’s world of instant gratification and quick and easy answers it is always tempting to look for a convenient, easy answer to an unspeakable horror. But guess what? Sometimes there are no easy answers. The unfortunate fact is, evil is as much a part of our world as anything else. We’ll never completely stop it from occurring but we have to face it honestly, head on, in order to deal with it. How do we do that? By calling evil by its proper name whenever it occurs.

First up, let’s go to the latest news about the Boston bomber dirt bags, as I affectionately call them. The Boston Herald has reported that the Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a freakin’ bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012. “The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.

The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify. “I can assure members of the public that this committee will actively review every single piece of information we can find because clearly the public has a substantial right to know what benefits, if any, this family or individuals accused of some horrific crimes were receiving,” said state Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick), the committee’s chairman.

Wow, is this a great country or what? Beg America for asylum so you can escape from your third world hellhole and America says, “Sure thing, bro. Come on down!” Then once you get in, work the system for all the welfare, medical, free food, school tuitions, and Obama cell phones you can get your grubby swarthy hands on while all the while planning to kill as many Americans as you can. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me! “Come on in, everybody! Take your best shot!”

But wait. Don’t leave me yet. I’ve got the best part of this thing coming right up. After the first Islamic Jihadist brother was killed and the second one was taken into custody, the FBI began to interrogate him, right? I mean that’s what you want the Feds to do, in order to find out if the dirtbags were working with anyone else and if so, who and where they are. This is really important info to get out of this guy because we’d like to try and keep another terrorist attack from happening, right?

So what happens? Eric Holder and his Department of Justice rushes in dragging a federal district court judge with them just sixteen hours after investigators began interrogating the younger bastard. He was quickly Mirandized and stopped talking after being read his constitutional rights. Wham! He clammed up tighter than the Obama administration being questioned about Benghasi. This totally took the FBI by surprise and closed down the questioning right then and there. This human garbage has now “lawyered up.” We may never know what information the Feds could have gotten out of him if they weren’t stopped by the DOJ.

And on top of everything else we have the media turning the whole thing into a Jihadist version of The Bachelor. Have you seen the hot, hunky photos of the two murderers that the mainstream media have been drooling over in their newscasts? Shots of them working out, doing boxing, playing sports, etc. Just a couple of cool dudes doing all kinds of cool macho stuff. What the hell is the matter with our so-called news media anyway? Why are they making these bums into sexy beefcake hotties?

The internet is filled with thousands of stupid teenage (and maybe not-so-teenage) girls who would like to “date” the living brother. Why so many idiotic women want to sleep with mass murderers is something I will never understand, but it has been going on forever. (“OMG, murdering dirtbags are sooo cute!”) What isn’t cute is when our main news sources play into that derangement. An American press is which is completely devoid of any semblance of what once was called, “journalistic ethics.” CBS’ 60 Minutes even interviewed a former girlfriend of one of these two who cooed into the camera saying just how “floored” she was and how much she cared for him. This turned the events upside-down – making the bomber the victim.

Splashing their “cool photos” across the internet and television screens is exactly what psychos like these want to happen! They want the glory, the celebrity, the glam. They crave the media attention to their cause and if all the dopey girls fall in love with them, well, how great is that? Giving terrorists the celebrity treatment gives all the other potential murderers even more incentive to “just do it.”

Listen, these bums may not get their 72 virgins in heaven but one thing is for damn sure, they’ll be immortalized in the American media and thousands of girls will swoon over them. Not too bad for the price of a pressure cooker and a few nails.

Stay tuned for next week’s column when I excerpt parts from my new book, “How did my glasses disappear when I haven’t moved from this chair in an hour?

They came to America as refuges, ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the U.S. for about a decade and were believed to be living in Cambridge, Mass. We know the brothers were Muslims from the Russian Caucasus, one was around 9 years old the other 16 when they came here with their family.

The Chechen people are a largely Muslim ethnic group that has lived for centuries in the mountainous North Caucasus region. For the past two hundred years, Chechens have resisted Russian rule. During World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused the Chechens of cooperating with the Nazis and forcibly deported the entire population to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Tens of thousands of Chechens died, and the survivors were allowed to return home only after Stalin’s death.

Understand that these two brothers came from a region which is a hotbed of jihad activity. The objective of the jihadists in Chechnya is to establish an Islamic state in the Caucasus. Chechnya is the tip of the spear for al-Qaeda.

It appears that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had deeply embraced the jihad ideology that permeates Chechnya and the Muslim areas of the Russia Caucasus in general. As reported in the New York Times: “On Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social media platform, the younger brother, Dzhokhar, describes his worldview as ‘Islam’….”

The older brother, Tamerlan traveled to Russia last year and returned to the U.S. six months later, government officials told The Associated Press. More wasn’t known about his travels but authorities will be looking into it. A couple of years ago he was questioned by FBI agents at the request of a foreign government tip. They decided that he was okay and no action against him was taken.

Tamerlan posted this: “I’m very religious.” He subscribed to a YouTube channel entitled “Allah is the One????” It appears he posted a video that hails “the promised emergence of the black flags [of jihad] from the promised land of Khorasan,” and lauds jihadists who are posing “with a flag of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Tamerlan reportedly died wearing a suicide vest. The web site Debka. com has reported that the brothers were “members of a Wahhabi cell funded by Saudi al Qaeda” but this hasn’t yet been verified by other sources.

Put all this together with the simple fact that in the past 35 years or so our public schools and colleges have stopped teaching students to love the USA. Patriotism and pride in American culture and history has not been taught nor encouraged. If American history is taught at all, it is taught through leftist revisionism depicting the founders as evil white European men. America, they teach, is a colonial bully that has robbed from the other peoples of the world for centuries.

Multiculturalism, moral relativism, and egalitarianism are stressed and the quaint idea that America is the greatest country on earth is scoffed at. At today’s schools all cultures are treated as being equal, Western civilization and American values are no better than say, the culture or values of any other society, primitive or otherwise. Americanism once meant assimilation, but not anymore. People come to America but they retain their ethnic group-think. They are encouraged to do so by our schools.

Add to this our pop culture of the last 40 years with its vulgarity and twisted morals. Movies, television, and the recording industry have now shaped at least two or three generations of Americans into selfish, narcissistic shallow individuals. The messages relayed through our pop culture has been that anything goes if it feels good, cheating is fine if it can get you what you want, and self esteem is more important than self control.

Have your baby out of wedlock, do drugs if you got ‘em, and speak using the filthiest terms you want. Good manners, respect for others, and civility are traits of another time. For the most part, pop culture and the mainstream media actually celebrate the underclass and the vulgar and support the same leftist teachings of our schools and universities.

Taking all this into consideration along with their background, it isn’t really too hard to figure out how the Tsarnaev brothers became what they were. If the term “Americanized” means being schooled in this country and being exposed to today’s American pop culture, than maybe the problem isn’t so much that they weren’t Americanized enough … maybe the problem was that they were Americanized too much.

Too bad some of our newspapers and news services don’t have the guts to do the same. The print edition of the Los Angeles Daily News not only didn’t use the word “terrorist” in their story, they couldn’t even bring themselves to report that the bombs were purposely set by anyone at all. Someone reading the story who just flew down from Mars would think that the explosions were some natural occurrence or a broken gas line.

The paper used the words “bombs,” “blasts,” and “explosions,” to describe what happened but never gave a cause for the bombs, blasts, and explosions, even though within hours of the attack investigative officials said that the bombs contained shrapnel made up of ball bearings, nails, and other metal fragments put together in the same fashion as roadside IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The online version of the paper did use the dreaded “t” word but with the weasely caveat “That terrorists might have struck again in the U.S.” MIGHT have? Using the word might is the cowardly way of dancing around what we know was most definitely an act of terrorism. It MIGHT have been terrorists or it MIGHT be the work of undocumented leprechauns. Or it MIGHT be spontaneous combustion. Who’s to say?

I can’t explain why the media skirts the use of the word terrorist, except that I guess they don’t want to hurt the feelings of terrorists.

As I write this, investigators still haven’t found the perpetrators of this terrorist bombing and no one person or group has taken credit for it. Hopefully by the time you read this, they will have found and arrested the responsible evil bastards. The good news is that only three lives were lost, it might have been many more – the Boston Marathon attracts thousands to its streets.

This is the first terrorist bombing in our country since 9/11 and because of that it jars us, bringing back all the horrifying memories of that fateful day. Authorities are saying that we Americans are a strong people, a brave people, so we will not let this terrorism frighten us. That sounds good, but it actually isn’t true. Government authorities will react.

What this means to us all, in our everyday lives, is we can count on even tighter security being put into play by government. More barriers will be put up, more security guards and increased scanners will be used at ever more sporting venues, theme parks, and other places where large numbers of people gather. We will lose a little more of our precious freedom to move easily and without fear throughout our country.

Just as the hijacking of those planes on 9/11 brought about tighter security on airplanes, look for this incident to increase security at marathon races, parades, street fairs, circuses, community open houses, and any number of other like events which attract many people to one place. Will we be seeing pat downs at parades? Will we have to go through security screening before entering our shopping malls and every single office building and store?

The monsters that blow up innocent people have not succeeded in taking down western civilization or destroying America, not by a long shot. However, they have succeeded in altering the way we live and move about. We Americans aren’t quite as free and easy as we once were.

As we mourn for those who were killed and maimed in Boston, let’s remember that if we are ever to defeat terrorism we need to call it by its proper name. There is such a thing as evil in our world and we must identify it whenever it rears up. Newspapers and other media need to be honest in their reporting. Even if it means that calling terrorists “terrorists” offends the feelings of terrorists.

Even the police departments around the country have been hurt by the ammunition shortage. Some police departments have been bartering among each other in order to get the necessary ammo for their cops. Police Chief Cameron Arthur of Jenks, Oklahoma says, “Ammunition and assault weapons in general have skyrocketed. In addition to the fact, not only is it a lot more expensive, but the time to get it could be six months to a year, or in some cases even longer.”

Arthur says he is waiting on an order placed last October and that many departments have begun to trade and barter with each other because of the high demand. “Most police departments are having a very difficult time even getting the necessary ammunition for handguns, shotguns, and especially rifles,” Arthur said. “With the delay in ammunition, some departments are limiting the number of rounds they carry in their handgun because of the shortage of ammunition. We get to the point where it is difficult to have enough ammo to train and also equip the officers.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Timothy Huelskamp (R-Kansas) says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has failed to respond to multiple members of Congress asking why DHS bought more than 1.6 billion rounds in the past year. What does Homeland Security need with so much ammo? Some say this is a deliberate attempt to stockpile ammunition by the government and keep it out of the hands of citizens. They may not be able to confiscate everyone’s guns yet, but what good is a gun if you can’t get bullets for it?

And the debate over gun control and the Second Amendment goes on. If you happen to be on the fence over this issue, you might consider the following facts:

1. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.

2. Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.

3. As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.

4. Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606). And as reported by Newsweek, “only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The ‘error rate’ for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high.”

And you might want to take the following true story into account as well:

The Washington Times ran this story on April 8th. A father who was trying to eat with his family at Burger King was able to defeat an armed robber by pulling his own weapon and shooting at him, according to Miami police. It was at the height of lunch time, about 1 p.m., when a would-be robber walked into a Burger King, flashed his gun at one of the family diners, and demanded the diner hand over money and valuables, police said in a CBS report. The robber was exiting when the father, who feared for his and his family’s life, took out his own gun and shot the suspect in the leg.

The suspect then fled in his Ford F-150. Police later found him — 36-year-old Travis Harris — and the driver of the truck, 38-year-old Ramon Smalls, at a gas station down the road, CBS said. The pair was linked to another robbery of a woman that took place earlier that day, Harris was taken to the hospital for treatment and was charged with three counts of armed robbery, police said.

And the there’s this, from a recent interview in Time Magazine. Famous poet and Obama supporter Maya Angelou recalled a time in her life when she fired a gun to scare off an intruder. “I do like to have guns around,” she told Time’s Belinda Luscombe when asked if she shared her mother’s fondness for firearms. “I don’t like to carry them, but I like — if somebody is going to come into my house and I have not put out the welcome mat, I want to stop them.”

“Have you ever fired a weapon?” the interviewer asked.

“Of course!” Angelou affirmed.

But will she ever be able to buy bullets for her guns anymore? Well, maybe she can persuade her pal, Barack, to send her some.

I quit subscribing to the Los Angeles Times after I couldn’t take the paper’s leftist bias any longer. I didn’t mind it so much on the editorial pages, a paper has every right to take whatever position it wants in its editorials, but it didn’t stop there. The bias was liberally (pun intended) sprinkled throughout all the sections, the Front Page most of all. It finally made reading the paper a daily aggravation that I no longer wanted to pay for.

I turned to the only other newspaper choice open to me, The Daily News. Not exactly in the same league as the Times, it was at least a viable alternative with a somewhat more balanced reportage. Their features were pretty good too, with two pages of comics and puzzles, two pages of editorial and opinion, and a nice little local business section. They had several exclusive area columnists, most notably Dennis McCarthy who managed to dig up wonderful human interest pieces of local everyday people. I always looked forward to reading McCarthy’s column.

The Daily News was a real hometown newspaper with good city news reporting and just enough national and world news to keep its readers up on most of the important stuff. It had no pretense or ambition to be a giant media monolith, it was what it was, a nice little daily paper. Always easy to read, always something interesting to discover within its pages, the Daily News chugged along like The Little Engine That Could, and that was enough.

And then someone at the top decided to change things. To “fix” things, as they like to say, in order to create a new, improved Daily News. So what did they do? They eliminated features, they dropped columnists, and the ones they kept, were harder to find within the paper. They redesigned the masthead, changing the two-color logo to one color and thus watering down its impact. They increased the sizes of the photos which lessened the space for the stories.

They changed the type face in the headlines making it more difficult to read, the fonts changing from story to story. Maybe the graphic designers think that making a newspaper more difficult to read is somehow “edgier,” but it’s about as edgy as a Frisbee. The italicized fonts now make the news story headlines look like copy headings for advertisements. Some of the section mastheads are printed in light primary colors, which also give them the look of ads.

The page numbers in the main section have been made smaller, harder to read and harder to find the continuation of stories. The comics have been reduced to one page, with many favorites being dropped. The Business section no longer appears on a daily basis. The Dining/Food section has been eliminated entirely. In short, there is less paper to read now, therefore less reason to subscribe to it. How is giving its readers less to read an improvement? How does dropping features make the newspaper better? How does making the page numbers harder to read enhance the paper?

If the intention of the powers that be at the paper is to chase readers away, they’re doing a good job.

In the world of today we can always grab the headline news on the cable news stations or on the internet certainly, but that doesn’t or shouldn’t take the place of a daily newspaper. Reading a good paper is very different from surfing the web or watching television news. It offers a totally different dynamic. Papers should offer more in depth news reporting than you get on TV. They used to. And why does it have to be one or the other? Who is to say we can’t have newspapers AND electronic news?

When and if the day finally comes that all things printed on paper are gone forever, that will be a very sad chapter in the history of communication. But when that happens don’t look for the story on the obituary page because there won’t be one. It might get 20 sections on the network evening newscast, however, if you’re lucky.

“The Homeless” sounds as if they are normal everyday people just like you and me, except for the fact they have no home. It’s like if they only had a home they would be normal, productive people. Really? This couldn’t be further from the truth. Although there are some exceptions, most of these pitiful individuals are either alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill, or any combination thereof. They are not normal well-balanced people, not by a long shot. It’s pathetic and disgraceful of course.

I’ve written about this before, but it really hit home for me as I was driving to the supermarket around 10:00 in the morning recently. I glanced over and saw a guy walking in the street along the gutter wearing a big heavy bedspread draped over his shoulders, shaking his head and talking to himself. He looked like he hadn’t been in water since maybe the last time it rained, or maybe not even then. Disgusting doesn’t come close to describing his condition. And this was in a pretty nice residential neighborhood.

Later, after I shopped and was on my way back home, I saw another street person. This time it was a woman sitting against a low cinderblock wall; her belongings in a heap beside her. She had a sad dirty dog lying nearby. Just like the man I saw with the bedspread, she was talking to the air. Her toothless mouth going a mile a minute, her empty eyes staring at nothing, and her poor dog stretched out on the sidewalk looking forlorn.

Why are there so many of these people now? This may come as a shock to some folks under the age of forty, but America wasn’t always this way. When I grew up in the fifties and sixties the only time I saw street people was the rare times when we went into downtown L.A. and saw bums on skid row. In those days most people with severe mental illness or alcohol addiction were in hospitals or treatment centers, not on the streets.

What has come to be known as today’s “homelessness” started in the 1970s with what was called the “deinstitutionalization” of patients from state psychiatric hospitals. This was a major factor that laid the ground work of the homeless population, especially in urban areas such as New York City. Some say that Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Lanterman– Petris–Short Act greatly exacerbated homelessness among the mentally ill. This law lowered the standards for involuntary commitment in civil courtrooms and was followed by significant de-funding of 1,700 hospitals caring for mental patients. But the homeless problem really started at least a decade before that.

The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 really set the stage for homelessness in the United States. Long term psychiatric patients were released from state hospitals into SROs (single resident occupancy houses) and were supposed to be sent to community mental health centers for treatment and follow-up. At least that was the idea, but it didn’t work out that way. The community mental health centers mostly did not materialize, and suddenly these people largely were found living in the streets with no sustainable support system. The mentally ill joined the drug addicts and alcoholics sleeping in doorways, roaming the streets, and defecating in public.

Today it has turned into an industry, there’s even lobby groups associated with these street people. Politicians and lawyers along with the ACLU have gotten into the mix, turning these pathetic souls into a new civil rights minority group. The focus is not on getting these people off the streets and into the proper institutions, but rather to demand their “right” to live on the street or wherever. As we know, police don’t round up vagrants anymore or even chase them away. That would be a violation of their civil rights. The so-called homeless even have their own web sites now.

I’m not saying the “good old days” were perfect. But back in the day when the mentally ill were being treated by doctors in mental institutions, and the alcoholics were drying out at facilities where they were being monitored, and the drug addicts were in addiction treatment centers, seems to me to be a better solution for all concerned. What is REALLY SICK is having addicted, deranged people on the streets that are unable to care for themselves. We should be ashamed.

A more important distinction in this particular pope is his unusual humility. He travels by bus and when appointed a cardinal he chose to give up the lavish cardinal’s residence in the Argentine capital for a modest small apartment, and rejected the notion of a chauffeur driven car for public transportation. Immediately after his election he turned down the special sedan that was to transport him to the hotel and instead rode on the bus with the other cardinals. During his first day as pontiff, Pope Francis stopped by his hotel to pick up his luggage and pay the bill himself.

He appears to be a real man of the people, well known for his work with the poor in Buenos Aires’ slums. As cardinal he would celebrate Masses with homeless people and prostitutes in Buenos Aires. He believes that the church needs to reach out to the people and he considers social outreach to be the essential business of the church. Staying in touch with his congregants seems to be a major part of who he has been throughout his time in service to God.

And then there is this, on March 13th the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) welcomed the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina as the next Pope Francis I, applauding his close relationship with the Jewish community.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director said the following in a statement, “We congratulate the new Pope and wish him well in his important new responsibility. We believe that the election of Francis I is a significant moment in the history of the Church. We look forward to working with him to continue to foster Catholic-Jewish relations as we have with his predecessors. There is much in his record that reassures us about the future.”

Foxman went on to say, “Under his leadership in Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio made important strides in maintaining positive Catholic-Jewish relations following the transformational papacies of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI – pontiffs who launched historic reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.

“Cardinal Bergoglio maintained a close relationship with the Jewish community in Argentina. He has celebrated various Jewish holidays with the Argentinean Jewish community, including Chanukah where he lit a candle on the menorah, attended a Buenos Aires synagogue for Slichot, a pre-Rosh Hashanah service, the Jewish New Year, as well as a commemoration of Kristallnacht, the wave of violent Nazi attacks against Jews before World War II.

“In 2010, during a commemoration of the 1994 bombing of that synagogue, Cardinal Bergoglio called it ‘a house of solidarity’ and added ‘God bless them and help them accomplish their work,’ which showed his dedication and support in standing up against extremism.

“In 2010, he together with Argentinean Rabbi Abraham Skorka, published the book On Heaven and Earth addressing issues of interfaith dialogue. The new Pope’s sensitivity to the Jews emerges from this work in his comments on the Church’s approach to the Jewish people since Vatican II, the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice, and bigotry toward the Jewish people, so a statement of endorsement such as this one isn’t exactly chopped liver coming from its national director.

As a Jewish man I am encouraged by Director Foxman’s statement. At this Passover season it is gladdening and inspiring to think that this pope may bring a new level of Catholic-Jewish understanding and togetherness to our world. Anyway, it is something to hope for. And this is the season of hope after all.

There’s another little bonus for all you pet owners out there – thanks to Obamacare your visits to the vet are going to be more expensive now. That’s right, veterinary bills for Fluffy, Rover, and Polly are being increased as Obamacare kicks in. And you thought this would only affect humans, right? Just another unintended consequence of Washington medical reform.

The CBS affiliate in Miami reported how dog owner Lori Heiselman was surprised when her veterinarian posted a warning on Facebook. The notice read: “Because medical equipment and supplies will be going up in cost, that extra expense will have to be passed on to the customer.” It’s all part of a new 2.3-percent federal excise tax on certain medical devices that just went into effect. The tax will help pay for Obamacare, intended for people, not pets.

Manufacturers are getting slapped with the tax, but a recent survey found more than half of them plan to pass it along to the vets who in turn will pass it along to their customers. Kind of like hot potato. Many animal doctors say they have no choice but to pass it along since they can’t afford to take the tax hit. A case in point is Dr. Mike Hatcher who explained, “I’m extremely concerned how this is going to be a hidden tax to our consumers that is going to be passed on.”

Medical devices that are used only on animals are exempt. But any medical devices that can be used on people as well as animals will be subject to the new tax. These items include IV pumps, sterile scalpels, and anesthesia equipment, all of which are medical devices that have a dual use, meaning they can be used on people and animals. Hatcher said, “Putting off an equipment purchase is something that can terribly affect our clients’ ability to have quality care.”

The American Veterinary Medical Association represents 82,000 vets. At this point, they don’t know how much this new tax will indirectly cost them. The organizations members are waiting to hear from more device makers. Dr. Mark Lutschaunig, director of the Governmental Relations Division of the American Veterinary Medical Association said, “Congress never intended for this tax to impact veterinarian medicine and unfortunately it has, and I think that’s very unfortunate that veterinarian medicine now is subsidizing human health care.”

And since we’re on the subject of unintended consequences of Obamacare, let’s move now from bulldogs to hot dogs. From beagles to burgers. A national chain of restaurants called Five Guys have announced that they will be raising prices of burgers and hot dogs in order to cover the president’s mandated insurance coverage.

“Any added costs are going to have to be passed on,” said Mike Ruffer, a Five Guys franchise holder with eight of the popular restaurants in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C. area. He will need all the profits from at least one of his eight outlets just to cover his estimated added $60,000-a year in new Obamacare costs.

Not only that, but he’s scrapped plans to build another three restaurants until after the administration explains the exact rules and penalties employers will face under the new law. The law’s plan to have those available March 1 has been pushed back to October, which leaves restaurant operators like Ruffer in the dark concerning additional costs. Many other operators are in the same boat.

Business owners like Ruffer are being punished for being too successful. Because he has enough full time employees to activate the law, he faces either coughing up the money to provide health insurance or paying a fine of up to $3,000 per worker. Or he can let people go or cut down on their hours of work. But whatever he does, he has to raise his prices to customers in order to stay in business. Thanks Obama. Nice going.

And the health care law isn’t only going to hit Ruffer. He’s quizzed his workers to ask if they understand that they will be fined if they don’t get health insurance. Just one of 20 workers was aware of the $95 tax penalty that rises to $695 by 2016. That’s right, they either have to pay for health insurance or they pay a fine to Uncle Sam. Or should I say Uncle Barack.

These two examples are only the tip of the Obamacare costs and consequences which will be coming to your wallet in the months and years ahead. So to all you idealistic liberals who thought that Obamacare meant “free medical coverage,” get ready to pay dearly for it. And in lots of ways you didn’t figure on. Maybe someday you’ll figure out that nothing the government gives you is ever free. Suckers.