Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell.

In the near term, bet on the men with the guns.

The Egyptian Army, being slowly squeezed out of its central role in the nation's life by Mohammed Morsi, waited for the moment to oust the elected president and crush his Muslim Brotherhood.

"Sire, clear the square with gunfire or abdicate."

That was the message one of his generals gave the young czar Nicholas I in December of 1825, as thousands of civilians and soldiers massed in Senate Square to challenge his claim to the throne.

"There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking," said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin.

In what a Washington Post columnist describes as a rout of Rand Paul isolationism, the Senate just voted overwhelmingly to send another $1.5 billion in foreign aid to Egypt.

In his second term, Richard Nixon had Watergate, but also the rescue of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

"The First Black President ... Spoke First as a Black American," ran the banner headline of Sunday's Washington Post. But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up?

In the aftermath of the acquittal of George Zimmerman, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton and Ben Jealous of the NAACP are calling on the black community to rise up in national protest.

That the prosecution in the Zimmerman trial asked the judge to allow a verdict of "third-degree murder" -- i.e., child abuse, since Trayvon Martin was 17 -- testifies to the prosecution's failure and panic.

On Nov. 3, 1969, Richard Nixon, his presidency about to be broken by massive antiwar demonstrations, called on "the great silent majority" to stand by him for peace with honor in Vietnam.