If you keep hearing bad news, you come to expect it. I suppose in a way that’s a good thing because you are at least spared the shock to your system. Therefore, the only real surprise these days is when a bit of good news slips through.

For instance, I know that David Axelrod is getting a lot of media attention for writing a book in which he divulges the news – stop the presses! – that Barack Obama did not really evolve, as he claimed, from being opposed to same-sex marriages to being an ardent supporter. Axelrod explained that Obama was always in favor of them, but claimed otherwise in 2008 for political reasons. But, really, did anyone really believe he was on the conservative side of the debate? Even homosexuals knew better, which explains why they voted overwhelmingly for the great pretender.

In Chapel Hill, a disgruntled neighbor apparently shot and killed three Muslims – Deah Barakat, his wife and sister-in-law – in a dispute over a parking space. Although everyone who knew the killer said he was an atheist who despised all believers, whatever their religion, as well as everyone else in town, Muslims are demanding it be treated as a hate crime and, so, naturally, Eric Holder’s flying monkeys are looking into it.

What is not being broadcast is that the real hater was young Mr. Barakat himself. According to a slew of his tweets, he hated Israel and he hated the U.S. because of its historic ties to Israel. He was consistently tweeting support for Hamas and comparing Israel to the Nazis, as well as parroting the slander that the Israelis and George Bush were behind 9/11.

To me, the surprise isn’t that America’s Muslims are, as usual, claiming victimhood. The only real surprise is how rarely they’re victimized.

At a conference in Brussels, Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica,, the Executive Secretary of the U.N.‘s Framework Convention on Climate Change, gave what is perhaps the first noteworthy speech ever delivered in Brussels. (Mrs. Figueres, by the way, must have to pay an overweight fee every time she boards an airplane just to cart her title around.)

What she admitted is that the primary goal of environmentalists, of which she is one, is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but to destroy capitalism. She confessed: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, ever since the Industrial Revolution.”

So the next time, Obama, Gore, Biden, Pelosi or some lunkhead at the U.N. tells you the planet is on the verge of being incinerated, keep in mind that the actual target is the only economic system that has ever lifted people out of poverty and allowed them to rise, through honest endeavor, above the station into which they were born.

In case you ever wondered why civil servants should never have been allowed to unionize – a move which led to huge blocs of voters in a position to negotiate their contracts with corrupt politicians – it seems that 4,481 retired New York City school teachers are receiving annual pensions in excess of $100,000.

Because politicians rarely give a thought to anything beyond their next election, and because the money they cough up, whether in the form of welfare, disability or pensions, is not coming out of their own pockets, they go through life like Santa Claus’s evil brother, Insanity Claus.

Although it’s been fun piling on Brian Williams, I hate to see him be the only person being suspended, a suspension which will very likely lead to termination. After all, every member of every NBC camera crew that accompanied him to Iraq, New Orleans and D-Day’s Omaha Beach, knew he was lying. Every producer who was ever assigned to his show knew he was lying. Every executive in the news division of NBC knew he was lying. And yet, so far as we know, every single one of them was complicit in his lies, maintaining a collective silence the Mafia would have envied, until a few members of the military spilled their guts to a reporter for Stars and Stripes.

In a just world, it’s NBC that would be serving a six month suspension.

In other news, Oregon’s Governor John Kitzhaber (D), recently elected to a fourth term, has been forced to resign in the wake of a scandal involving his fiancée using his office to induce huge bribes from those involved in the so-called clean energy industry.

Although Kitzhaber tried to tough it out, he was eventually forced to cave to media and party pressure, and call it quits.

Because Oregon doesn’t have a lieutenant governor, his resignation paved the way for Secretary of State Kate Brown to assume the office. What makes her ascension newsworthy is the fact that she is now America’s first openly bi-sexual governor.

Frankly, if I were bi-sexual, I think I’d keep it under wraps. In this day and age, thanks to a general breakdown in morals and sanity, there is apparently nothing intrinsically shameful about anyone’s sexual bent, even if one’s taste runs to inflatable dolls, farm animals or Rosie O'Donnell.

However, as bad as it is if you’re heterosexual or homosexual and can’t scrounge up a date for Saturday night, if you’re bi-sexual, it means that absolutely nobody in the entire universe wants to be seen with you.