ANSWER: Whatever that number is, it’s too many.

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Michelle Malkin rounded up the news on a horrible New York City murder on on Friday. It should not be forgotten — ever:

The New York Post had the story that everyone in NYC was talking about:

IN a stunning turnaround, a construction worker yesterday confessed to killing indie actress Adrienne Shelly, whose death in a Greenwich Village apartment last week was first thought to be suicide, cops said.

“I was having a bad day,” illegal immigrant Diego Pillco, 19, allegedly told cops. “I didn’t mean to kill her. But I did kill her.”

Pillco told detectives that he punched Shelly, 40, last Wednesday afternoon outside the Abingdon Square apartment she was using as an office after she yelled at him about the noise he was making while working in a vacant apartment below.

Pillco, who is from Ecuador and speaks only Spanish, also claimed that Shelly slapped him first.

After seeing she was unconscious and believing she was dead, Pillco claimed, he dragged Shelly into her apartment, wrapped a bed sheet around her neck and attached it to a shower rod in the bathroom to make it appear she had hanged herself, sources said. The medical examiner has not yet released autopsy results.

Shelly’s marketing-exec husband, Andrew Ostroy, found her body just before 6 that evening.

Pillco was nabbed early yesterday at his Brooklyn apartment after detectives matched several Reebok sneaker prints from the toilet seat in Shelly’s bathroom to a print they found in the apartment downstairs.

The open-borders Wall Street Journal, while claiming the election results repudiate border enforcement, has apparently not seen fit to comment.

Similarly, there has been no meaningful media follow-up (in fact, I would call it “willful blindness“) after initial reports of the fact that a gang attempting retaliation on behalf of a fired Warren County illegal-alien construction worker nearly murdered his supervisor in July. That construction worker was arrested, but is out on bail. All of this is of no apparent interest to Greater Cincinnati’s media. And I believe that one of the two illegals involved in Kevin Barnhill’s murder in the northeastern Cincinnati suburb of Mason not only remains at large, but has basically vanished.

Adding insult to injury, as Michelle notes, the election results on Tuesday are being falsely spun as a repudiation of border enforcement by the GOP powers-that-be:

Out-of-touch GOP elites in Manhattan and Washington are deluding themselves. While they crow about Graf and Hayworth’s losses in Arizona, voters in that state approved four immigration-related ballot measures by resoundingly wide margins: banning state subsidies to illegal aliens for education and child care; denying bail to illegal aliens; banning punitive damage awards to illegals; and declaring English the state’s official language. In Colorado, pro-enforcement measures passed requiring the state attorney general to sue the federal government for failing to enforce immigration laws and deny tax credits to employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Top Dem winners Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb and other Blue Dog Dems adopted tough-on-borders postures. Open-borders pundits swallowed ridiculously biased exit poll questions, notes Mark Krikorian, to bolster their unreality-based conclusions.

While the commentariat argues about the political costs and benefits of immigration policy, innocent Americans and law-abiding residents are left to grapple with the bloody consequences of lax immigration enforcement, failed deportation policies, failed employer sanctions, unchecked illegal alien smuggling, and crime-abetting sanctuary cities.

The horrifying murder of Adrienne Shelly is just the latest addition to the human toll of open borders that no one in Washington wants to tally.

Will one of the elites’ own have to be taken out by illegal-immigrant crime before they begin to take it seriously? Will that even be enough?

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UPDATE: The NY Times reported on Wednesday (may require free registration) that Adrienne Shelly was not dead yet when Pillco hung her from her shower. The NY Post reported Thursday that Pillco and the prison system (these are my words) are starting to play pysch and “mental health” games.

Nice (HT Techdirt), but we could have used it a year or so ago, at least:

November 09, 2006

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was in fine fettle Thursday, aiming sharp barbs at the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) rules governing U.S. public companies.

He was the keynote speaker at AMR Research Inc.’s Executive Leadership Conference in Boston. Greenspan stepped down from his role at the Federal Reserve in January after heading the agency for 18 years. In a wide-ranging look at the U.S. and global economies, Greenspan gave his take on SOX legislation, which was implemented in the wake of major corporate accounting scandals.

A lot of financial reporting is less of a historical record and more of a forecast, according to Greenspan. “What the chief accountant creates is a work of art,” he added to audience laughter. So, requiring chief executive officers and chief financial officers to sign off on company accounts is a good thing, he said, since they have the best sense of where the value of a business lies.

However, he described SOX Section 404 as a “nightmare” and extremely costly. That section requires a company’s auditor to attest to the effectiveness of internal controls implemented to protect financial reporting systems and processes.

“What can you expect when you get virtual unanimity in both houses [of government]?” Greenspan asked. “Any bill that gets that can’t be good.” He believes that the vast majority of the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives failed to actually read the bill, which passed largely uncontested in 2002.

Legislators who don’t read the legislation they’re voting on? I’m shocked …… SHOCKED (/sarcasm)

Cpl. Jason Dunham is receiving the recognition of his selfless bravery posthumously:

11/10/2006, 8:37 p.m. ET

QUANTICO, Va. (AP) — An emotional President Bush said Friday he would present the Medal of Honor — America’s highest military decoration — to a Marine who died when he jumped on a grenade in Iraq and saved the lives of two comrades.

The medal will be given posthumously to Cpl. Jason Dunham of Scio, N.Y., who died on April 22, 2004, of wounds he suffered when his patrol was ambushed near the Syrian border.

“He and his men stopped a convoy of cars that were trying to make an escape,” Bush said during a speech to dedicate a new Marine museum. “As he moved to search one of the vehicles, an insurgent jumped out and grabbed the corporal by the throat.”

During hand-to-hand combat with the insurgent, Dunham called out to his fellow Marines: “No, no, no. Watch his hand!”

“Moments later, an enemy grenade rolled out,” Bush said. “Cpl. Dunham did not hesitate. He jumped on the grenade to protect his fellow Marines. He used his helmet and his body to absorb the blast.”

Friday would have been Dunham’s 25th birthday. The museum dedication came on the 231st anniversary of the establishment of the Marines.

“You might say that he was born to be a Marine,” Bush told Dunham’s mother and father, who were among an estimated 10,000 people attending the dedication of the museum. They will be presented with the award, which is voted by Congress, at the White House.