Reconciliation

 The Slap (Will Smith versus Chris Rock) riveted the world, or at least its news media, for two weeks, but now Smith has issued a video apology all of us can share.  Maybe Rock won't take his call.  Anyway, Rock jokes about it in his shows.  Smith is under a ten-year ban from the Academy of Motion Picture whatever.  I don't know if that means he can't vote, can't be nominated, can't attend or can't watch it on television.  Does anybody watch it on television?

Paul Manafort used some of his free time to hire a ghostwriter who produced Political Prisoner:  Persecuted, Prosecuted But Not Silenced, his remorseful account of helping Putin rig the 2016 election.  I kid.  He makes the astonishing claim that Trump apologized to Ted Cruz for accusing his father of conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy and calling his wife a fright.  I assume Cruz accepted the apology.  He would hardly dare not to.

In other forgiveness news, Ivana Trump accused her ex-husband of rape but he still had her gold-plated coffin buried at the Bedminster golf course, near the first tee.  The ground was "consecrated" so she could have a Catholic burial.  As Maynard G. Krebs used to say, I'm getting like all misty.  I wonder how much a plot in a real Catholic cemetery costs.

Jared Kushner didn't quite bring peace to the Middle East but he says he reconciled Daddy-in-Law with Rupert Murdoch.  According to his ghost-written memoir, back in 2015 the Boss was already tired of Murdoch's withering criticism.  "This guy's no good.  And I'm going to tweet it."  Kushner pleaded, "You don't need to get on the wrong side of Rupert.  Give me a couple of hours to fix it."  What a guy.  No wonder the Boss thought he could sort out the Sunni and the Shia.  Now what is the slumlord going to do about those editorials in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post?  Not to mention Fox's failure to carry his big policy speech in Washington.

F. Andino Reynal, attorney for Alex Jones, is sorry for flipping the bird to the plaintiffs' attorney Mark Bankston in an Austin courtroom.  "I apologize for yesterday's outburst.  It was not appropriate," he said.  Mr. Bankston has probably accepted the apology because his mother raised him right.  She  operates Juanita Jean's, The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, which you should be reading.

The Czech Republic's ruling Civic Democrat party has called climate change "bogus" and those who worry about it "a threat to freedom and economic growth."  But that was before fire devastated a national park near the German border and smoke engulfed the whole country.  Now Prime Minister Petr Fiala says he "would have to wear blinkers and not think rationally" to go on ignoring the high temperatures and changing climate of all Europe.  Which is sort of an apology for the wishful-thinking approach to environmental degradation.

Meanwhile Kentucky has the opposite problem:  Too much water has killed at least twenty-five people in flash floods and others are missing.  I am not among those who think blinkered, irrational Kentuckians and their Republican representatives are getting a good lesson, but I would like to see Tom Massie and his kids stop the rain with their long guns.  Aren't guns the answer to everything?