[With apologies to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged"]

Louis Farrakhan calls President Barack Obama an “assassin.” Presumably one is racist if one agrees, and racist if one disagrees. And even more racist if one doesn’t care.

I assume most of the US media will ignore the story, demonstrating a lack of sensitivity in the opinions of African-Americans. That seems the truly patronising approach…

A normal person could say: “I changed my mind.” But a politician raised to the level of an atheist Messiah has to always be right, just like Stalin or Big Brother.

A man who was cuckholded for 10 years and retaliated by using text messaging and social media to expose the culprit, Timothy Haynes, who stole from his employer and harrassed his mistress, according to evidence presented in court.

The inevitable abuse of power by police to shut down Ian Puddick has failed, as District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe returned a not guilty verdict to two charges of harrassment.

A guilty verdict would have made it easier to shut down Guido Fawkes blog, for instance.

I guess those Islamic scholars who insisted that the burqa was a liberation have a point.

All this for $7,500,000,000 a year. Worth every penny, I’m sure.

“Romney did not win every question, but he did present himself as the front-runner in the nature of Walter Mondale. Steady and gray. Some may sprint ahead, but slow and steady can win this primary race.”

Just a reminder:

Ronald Reagan (Republican): 54 and a half million votes, won all 50 states except Minnesota (where Walter Mondale was from) and Washington DC (which has always voted Democrat since the constitution was amended to allow the federal capital to vote in 1964).

Walter Mondale (Democrat): 37 and a half million votes, barely held his own state by 3,761 votes (which would be small in a British parliamentary election) or 1,036,364 to 1,032,603 votes.

If I were Mitt Romney, I wouldn’t want too many comparisons with Walter Mondale, least of all approving ones.

A 50-year old mother has been stripped naked and forced to parade through a village in Northern Pakistan because her son had got a married woman living next door pregnant.

Seeing as I suspect rural Pakistan is the sort of place where women tend to raise a family at the younger end of the fertility scale, we’re not likely to be talking about an underage child.

Holding parents accountable – at least to some extent – for how their children turn out doesn’t seem that daft an idea. It would reduce shoplifting and petty thieving for a start. But it bothers me than in an Islamic society, the notion that the young man might be in any way responsible for his actions seems to be absent. That’s not how Switzerland, which is where the story was published, developed into a society that has achieved one of the highest levels of wealth per inhabitant of any country in the world.

Switzerland GNI per inhabitant: $65,430
Pakistan GNI per inhabitant: $1,000
Figures are from 2009, using the World Bank’s nominal Atlas method.

Note: I use GNI rather than GDP as the latter tends to underestimate revenue from investments abroad.

And please someone make me laugh by claiming that Switzerland’s natural resources, colonial slave empire and friendly terrain gave the Swiss a head start.

Here’s what he has to say:

I’d had plenty of rest anyway, with Sunday being a quiet day after play was abandoned because of the rain. The most exciting things that happened while we waited around were a quick game of table tennis with Tsonga, and a Twitter conversation about karaoke with Novak [Djokovik], Serena [Williams] and a few others.

That can really help when you’re waiting around because you need to do stuff, talk to people and just take your mind off playing something like the final at Queen’s or a big match at Wimbledon.

I get quite involved in Twitter – I think it’s important for the sport that people see the other side of the players, and the fact that a lot of us get on well. I know sometimes that might not appeal to everyone, if they want to see a few more fights and some arguing on court, but there are a lot of nice people on the tour on the women’s and the men’s side.

Obviously, I need to be a bit careful and think about what I say on Twitter or Facebook, and I always try to be very positive because I really don’t understand why people go on just to slam others or be negative. I never talk badly about people on there, I just try to enjoy it and let people know what I’m up to, or if there’s something funny happening.

Of course, Murray is rather better paid than most politicians or media types, but events in recent weeks have shown how someone who developed a reputation for being “brattish” would seem to be a lot wiser about using communications tools than say, a certain member of the US House of Representatives.

But the article also shows how judicious use of Twitter is being used to project positive images about people and brands. In other words, propaganda.

Which is precisely the sort of thing the media and commentators generally need to watch out for.

On the tennis: I thought Andy Murray would win a Gland Slam event soon, but not Wimbledon first, if at all. Winning the Queen’s club championship for the second time in three years makes me think I could be wrong. If you can find a betting website that has no hyped up British customers dragging the odds down, might be worth an eachway bet (to make the final).