JUSTICE: Court of secrecy: How Richard Baumgartner, a drug-addicted judge, stayed on the bench despite warnings. Check out the photo.

I continue to wonder if the “wall of protection” erected around him by law enforcement has anything to do with the rather obvious foot-dragging in the Henry Granju case. There may be no connection, but it’s easy to imagine that law enforcement folks might have feared one would turn up if they looked into things. And there really was a lot of foot-dragging.

I’ll also note that if this kind of scandal happened in a private-sector entity, we’d be hearing criticisms of the entire enterprise, not just the players involved. Why is it different when it’s the government? People are covering for impaired judges in courthouses all over the country.

NEAL BOORTZ doesn’t like Rick Santorum. “Rick Santorum believes that Libertarians belive in ‘no government.’ Now anyone with just the most basic education would know that it is anarchists who believe in not government, not libertarians. So why would Santorum utter this absurdity?”

REPORT: BIN LADEN GAVE UP ON JIHAD:

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education? The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young? It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?

Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren. “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said. “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words. The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reader Dave D’Auria writes: “So wait, that can’t mean Bush was right when he basically said Bin Laden wasn’t that important anymore, right?” Of course not. Bush, right? Don’t be ridiculous.

STICKY FINGERS IN THE CHOCOLATE CITY? Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin under investigation: source. “The investigation includes whether Nagin received favors or items of value from vendors to the city in return for contracts they received while Nagin was in office, the source said.”

BALTIMORE POLICE: It’s Legal For You To Record Us, But If You Keep It Up We’ll Arrest You For Loitering.

Okay, they obviously don’t care about the law. But as a result, citizens will start to wonder why they should respect the law, or those who purport to act in its name. The citizens of Baltimore shoud fire ’em, and privatize. Their replacements will probably have a clearer sense of responsibility, or at least a smaller sense of entitlement.

“I THINK MY BREASTS SAVED MY LIFE:” Huge-breasted model, 32, walks away from horror crash after her 38KKK chest acts as AIRBAG. Is there anything they can’t do?

TOM MAGUIRE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ CAREFUL BLURRING OF ENTITLEMENTS: “Wait – Medicare is now a ‘safety net’ program? I thought that, like Social Security, it was an earned benefit – we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible. Medicaid is means-tested; Medicare is not.”

Plus, from the comments: “If you’re paying for the pizza, you might as well take a slice. That’s the other part of the big government agenda. One is to create a permanent class of non-paying clients while the other is to make sure everyone else takes advantage of entitlements they’re paying for.” Yeah, you don’t want people to question the whole redistribution scheme, so you displace alternative approaches then call anyone who uses it a hypocrite if they complain. It’s political genius, until you run out of other people’s money.

UPDATE: Several readers point out that you can’t decline Medicare without also giving up Social Security.

“YELLOW PERIL” FEARS ON CAMPUS: Asian students face discrimination in college admissions.

AT AMAZON, Warehouse deals on music.

Plus, today only: Stuhrling Original Men’s Trinity Collection Chronograph Watches for $59.99.

Also today only: Free One-Day Shipping on Valentine’s Day Gifts.

MIA LOVE AT CPAC: Conventional Wisdom Says I Don’t Exist. “If CPAC has reinforced one thing for me, it’s this: The presidential election is important, but retaining the House and taking back the Senate is essential.”

Here’s her campaign website.

VIOLENCE AGAINST MEN: This Oikos yogurt commercial where the man (John Stamos) gets head-butted to the floor is still bugging me. Imagine if the genders were reversed. If you can. There certainly wouldn’t be excuse-making from lefty publications. Instead we’d hear that there’s no excuse for domestic violence!

HISTORY: Secret documents lift lid on WWII mutiny by US troops in north Queensland. “An Australian historian has uncovered hidden documents which reveal that African American troops used machine guns to attack their white officers in a siege on a US base in north Queensland in 1942. Information about the Townsville mutiny has never been released to the public. But the story began to come to light when James Cook University’s Ray Holyoak first began researching why US congressman Lyndon B Johnson visited Townsville for three days back in 1942.”

JOURNALISM: BBC ‘buried Savile sex abuse claims to save its reputation.’

The BBC now stands accused of covering up the allegations, which were detailed in The Oldie magazine, because senior executives did not want the corporation’s reputation to be tarnished.

A BBC News source said: “The extreme nature of the claims about Savile meant that the Newsnight report was going to seriously compromise the lavish BBC tributes scheduled to run later the same month.

“And second, the allegations directly involved the BBC, in that the woman who gave the interview said that she and others were abused by Savile on BBC premises.”

Well, it’s not like there were priests involved or anything.

MARK STEYN: Obama goes Henry VIII on the church.

The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass. Whatever religious institutions might profess to believe in the matter of “women’s health,” their pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities and immunities are now subordinate to a one-and-only supreme head on earth determined to repress, redress, restrain and amend their heresies. One wouldn’t wish to overextend the analogy: For one thing, the Catholic Church in America has been pathetically accommodating of Beltway bigwigs’ ravenous appetite for marital annulments in a way that Pope Clement VII was disinclined to be vis-a-vis the English king and Catherine of Aragon. But where’d all the pandering get them?

The wages of appeasement are usually the same.

LIFE AMONG THE BARBARIANS: Islamists Storm Maldives Museum & Destroy Entire Collection of 12th Century Buddhist Relics. Hmm. This’ll do wonders for the tourism industry upon which Maldives depends, just like the previous ban on hotel spas.

Fine. Go ahead and starve.

ANDREW BREITBART on libertarians in 2012.

LIES: George Lucas Confirms It: The Star Wars We Loved Never Existed. “Here’s the medicine we all need to swallow: as children we were more grown up than George Lucas is now as an adult. Han Solo’s entire character rested on what we saw in that early scene in the film. In shooting first Han Solo was a role model doing what any Real Man was supposed to do. Now we know that character only existed in our imaginations, not his creator’s. And that George Lucas regards most of his fans as amoral neanderthals.”

Meh, after the three “prequels,” who cares what he thinks?

A LOOK inside the bubble.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: WHY IS IT THAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING that the lesson of Enron is that we need more regulation? Seems to me, the lesson is that regulators are corrupt or incompetent. Or both. And by “regulators,” I include the press.

Also this: “It has always amazed my that the people who want the government to do a few important things, and to do them well, are called ‘anti-government,’ while those who want the government to do many things, all of them badly, are not.”

AT AMAZON, markdowns in Tools & Home Improvement.

ON THAT JEZEBEL GANG-RAPE VIDEO: “They definitely violated the SPJ code of ethics by posting this, but as we’ve seen, Gawker Media’s code of ethics seems to be limited to one rule, and that is ‘if it gets hits, publish it.'”

IN A TRULY UNCHARACTERISTIC FAILURE OF SELF-PROMOTION, I somehow forgot to post on my New York Post column earlier this week: Obama’s Flawed Fix For the College Cost Crisis. I don’t think he really understands the higher education bubble.

MITT ROMNEY wins the Maine caucuses.

PETER ROBINSON’S UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE IS NOW ON PJTV.