with Leighton Levy

So here I am sitting in my living room at the eleventh hour staring at a blank page. This week's column is past due and I have nothing. Over the past three hours, I have read everything in sight and surfed through half the Internet; the other half is porn, and still nothing. I scour Facebook, nada. I call people I know and still drawing blanks.

It seems that this week I have, at least for the time being, run out of things to rant about. But in reality that shouldn't be. Elections are coming up and the latest polls say that the Jamaica Labour Party and People's National Party are in a statistical dead heat. Not good news for the PNP which not so long ago was calling for elections to be called now; this, in the wake of Bruce Golding stepping down as prime minister. I guess they will want to wait awhile now. No sense in having an election and they're on the wrong end of a national poll.

However, for some reason I really don't care. I mean, what I really need to see is someone come to the fore who is willing to do the unpopular but right thing to get Jamaica on the path to economic stability and then economic boom. I don't know if Andrew Holness is the man for the job but we will find out if Jamaicans feel that he could be. I will wait and see.

Vybz Kartel is in jail on two murder charges. In one of those murders, it is alleged that there is videotape which implicates Kartel, so things aren't looking so good for the so-called Worl' Boss. Then this week, things seemingly got worse when this woman with an English accent claimed she was now representing the entertainer who has been locked up since September and must now be getting darker even though he hasn't had the benefit of much sunlight.

I was thinking that the entertainer may have been locked up too long and it has affected his brain because I wasn't going to change my legal team that includes Christian Tavares Finson. Eventually common sense prevailed and a statement was released saying Kartel had NOT changed the people in whose hands his life so desperately depends.

One thing that did strike me, though, is the way Kartel's arrest has divided Jamaicans. I read a series of comments on Facebook recently, more than 100 of them, where one half was almost blindly claiming that Kartel was innocent while the other half celebrated his incarceration. The to and fros were violent and vulgar in nature to the point where people were threatening each other's lives. What I want to know is whether Kartel is worth losing one's life over and is he really worth all this time and space? Personally, I don't think so but apparently some people think otherwise. I leave them to their own devices.

I think I must be jaded because not even this thing happening at Penn State University where a coach has been charged with sexually abusing about nine boys during his tenure as defensive coordinator has given me anything. As a result, the university's president was fired for not acting on information they had received that could have put an end to the abuse the boys endured for all those years. The head coach of the football team, who has been coach for 46 years, was also fired. He too, the university board believed, was in a position to blow the whistle on the deviant coach.

All these things should have inspired something but, alas, they have not, so I guess there won't be a column this week.

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