Permawar: The US is sending what is described as a small number of special operations troops to Syria to advise so-called “moderate” rebel forces. Administration officials say the troops are not supposed to get involved in front line combat, but history has proven that’s hard to avoid. This is how US involvement began in Vietnam.

The move into Syria also poses the danger that American ground forces could be hit by Russian air attacks, many of which have been targeted at rebels supported by the US.

The Series: The New York Mets came roaring back last night to beat the Kansas City Royals 9-3 at home in New York. The game opened when the Mets Noah Syndergaard fired a 97 mph bean ball at the Royals’ Alcides Escobar, who hit an in the park home run in the first game. Escobar had to think about it for a moment before he got back in the batter’s box.

Game four is tonight.

World: A judge in Poland refused to extradite the 82-year-old film director Roman Polanski who is still wanted in California for his 1977 conviction for having sex with a 13-year-old girl at the home of actor Jack Nicholson. Polanski skipped the country just before he was to enter a plea agreement that might have sent him to prison. The judge in Poland said turning over Polanski would be an “obviously unlawful” deprivation of liberty, and that a California prison would be unlikely to have the facilities to house a man of Polanski’s age.

Polanski made The Pianist in 2002, but he’s know for some of Hollywood’s most enduring films, including Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.

Disaster: A Russian airliner carrying 224 people crashed today 20 minutes after takeoff from a popular resort in Egypt on the Sinai Peninsula that is popular with Russian tourists. There was no immediate word on casualties or survivors.

>Fire ripped through a nightclub in Bucharest, Romania last night, killing 27 people and injuring 180. The featured band had a pyrotechnic show, but it was not immediately determined whether that was the cause of the fire.

Fallout: Angry about the tone of this week’s debate on CNBC, the Republican Party called off its cooperation with NBC News for a debate scheduled for Feb. 26^th in Houston. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in a letter to the president of NBC News that, “CNBC’s moderators engaged in a series of ‘gotcha’ questions, petty and mean-spirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates.”

CNBC is a separate division of NBC, not controlled by NBC News and its cable outlet MSNBC.

Unafforded Care: The New York Times mapped the concentrations of Americans who do not have healthcare and found that most of the uninsured live in the South and Southwest and tend to be in Republican dominated states that refused to expand Medicare under the Affordable Care Act.

In the upper Midwest and New England States, the percentage of uninsured is in the single digits, less than 10 percent. Across the South the percentage of uninsured runs in the double digits, with some pockets approaching 30 percent. Georgia has more uninsured people than it did last year.

Speed: In a bizarre accident yesterday, a 20-year-old man driving on LA’s 5 Freeway died when his car rolled over and he was ejected, landing high overhead on an exit sign. The fire department had to use a ladder to bring down the body.

-30-: ESPN abruptly shut down its popular sports and culture website “Grantland” yesterday, saying, “we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise.” Beware anyone who uses the phrase “going forward.”

Grantland was known for featuring excellent writers, but ESPN is shrinking. Losing subscribers as sports fans turn to the Internet, ESPN recently laid off 300 employees, and Grantland became another target of the cost-cutter’s axe.

Dept. of Corrections: We stirred the alphabet soup of television networks yesterday and incorrectly said the host of the third Republican debate was MSNBC. It was CNBC.

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