Ron Letterman’s surgery was successful.  He is having his stitches removed soon.  If you would like to send Ron a get well message you can email him at ronletterman@yahoo.com. 

A fellow calling himself CommonSense is crying about an inability to publicly reply to WGMD blog posts. 

First, let me recite an old argument.  I’m William R. Colley.  It’s on my birth certificate.  It’s also on my driver’s license and my mail.

CommonSense isn’t the name on that fellows mail, license or birth records.  Pseudonyms, as I’ve stated here before, are for cowards.

Number two.  The WGMD website is an extension of Resort Broadcasting.  It isn’t a public park. 

Number three.  The renovation of the website and the changes it wrought are not of my control and are beyond my pay grade.  Approval of comments has never been my responsibility.  It wasn’t before the upgrade and it currently exceeds my brief. 

Number four.  I’ve investigated and asked questions on behalf of CommonSense and others attempting comments.  If it were in my power to approve I would certainly open the floor.  At this juncture I’m unable to get technical clearance.

You can always create your own website and offer all manner of insights, however.  As I’ve stated in another recent post if a tree falls in the forest and there isn’t anyone there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Frequently I’m reminded when watching TV news or reading the nation’s remaining newspapers of an old line about trees falling in the forest.  If there isn’t anyone available to hear it happen does it make a sound?  When we reach high summer we’re going to be seeing once great brand names in news tumbling on a weekly basis.  The case may not be much better for some large alphabet brand names in TV news. 

Witness a few paragraphs today from Mark Steyn.  Mr. Steyn makes no claim to objectivity.  He’s an opinion columnist and Monday morning I found at The Washington Times website a review he wrote about last week’s tea party coverage.  Steyn takes issue when he clearly spots bias.

Asked about the tea parties, President Obama responded that he was not aware of them. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let them drink Lapsang Souchong.” His Imperial Majesty at Barackingham Palace having declined to acknowledge the tea parties, his courtiers at the Globe and elsewhere fell into line. Talk-show host Michael Graham spoke to one attendee at the 2009 Boston tea party who remarked of the press embargo: “If Obama had been the King of England, the Globe wouldn’t have covered the American Revolution.”

The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else’s into the same abyss. That is why they have decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans’ wealth and their children’s future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it’s AstroTurf - fake grass roots, not the real thing.

Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN’s Miss Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was there:

“Because,” said the tea partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right. . . .”

But Miss Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

Had the tea party animal been as angry as these angry white men are supposed to be, he would have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from “A Man for All Seasons”: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for a $400 tax credit?”

Steyn writes The Boston Globe didn’t even cover the Boson area tea parties, which did have a historic and local “angle”.  We should mention as an investment the paper isn’t worth the price of today’s copy. 

During the “historic” coverage of the 2008 election campaign there were content analyses of television news.  One of the great surprises for the folks at the old alphabet networks was a determination FOX had the year’s most balanced coverage.  So how is it we keep hearing from counterparts FOX is manipulating the stupid into demonstrating for lower taxes when the obvious is old media continues to skew what you hear and see?  Or what’s left of old media. 

Instead of soul-searching the old guard has a sinister plan in place for maintaining an effort to deceive.  The Fairness Doctrine.  I suppose unemployed newspaper editors believe they’ll be taking my seat at the microphone.  They, along with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, will be the arbiters of fairness.  Or a Fairness Board comprised of Marxist academics and Democrat Party campaign workers will make “case-by-case” decisions.  When you consider there are more than two points of view, and we’re talking dozens, the result will be government sanctioned pabulum.  Quite appropriate for the nanny state and its indebted children. 

Oh, and I sent a note to the CNN reporter mentioned by Steyn.  Before you can fill out the message board you must check a circle.  Are your comments positive or negative?  Guess which get deep sixed?

Susan Boyle is God’s messenger.

A writer at the Boston Globe named Paulson asks us why Boyle has touched so many people around the planet.  He admits to his worries about the demise of his paper but is transfixed by the You Tube video of Boyle singing on television.  M. Paulson quotes theologians and wants your thoughts on why Boyle is important to all of us. 

The theologians have it right but I’ll go beyond.  Boyle is God’s message.  She has lived quietly and unassumingly for almost 50 years in Scotland in preparation for our times.  The Globe writer fears for his job.  There are food riots around the world.  The Chinese have eaten our lunch.  Newsweek charges Americans have given up on God. 

Then comes a humble Scot and we are moved from our self pity and shaken by the voice.  By Friday I stumbled across a ten year old recording of Boyle singing.  Tears formed in my eyes. 

Boyle’s voice is God telling us, “Be not afraid”. 

John Madden is on my TV tonight.  Oh, sure, he’s all over TV.  I came home after work and flipped on the NFL Channel, which is offering a retrospective of the Oakland Raiders 1976 season.  All the details I remember so well it’s just like it happened yesterday.  Then I see the bad haircuts and the men wearing checked pants.  Yeah, it was long ago.  President Ford was in The White House; my parents were alive and younger than I am right now. 

I’ve been on the telephone tonight with my buddy, Walt.  He’s a veteran of the network news wars but gave it up for life at the beach.  This morning I told The Redhead about a job posting for a talk show host in a much larger city.  She suggested I could seek the job if I could find some way to do it from home.  I’ll take her over any work at WCCO, WBZ or WABC.  This represents at this late stage in my life a radical departure from my old M.O.  It was always job first then relationships second.  She changed my motivation.

My daughter was here for much of the week.  She got introduced to The Long Neck Diner on Saturday night.  It’s where she ordered the teriyaki.  Odd choice at a Greek owned diner.  Then we came home to watch The Ten Commandments.  For a 15 year old this great film looks cheesy when it comes to special effects and she thought the acting over-the-top. 

Easter afternoon was a very special time.  We picked up The Redhead and drove to Ocean City.  A portrait artist at the convention center did a pencil drawing of my daughter.  He also does oil portraits but there are only so many hours in a day, right?  What surprised me was that the amusement parks were open Easter Sunday.  It has been a long time since my daughter shared an amusement ride with me.  It’s going to be even longer.  I watched the two most important women in my life share the rides.  I’m O.K. with that but it was cold along the beach.  The sun warmed the sand but it was windy and just 50 degrees and my hands got cold along the boardwalk.  It made it difficult to purchase ride tickets.  Or as The Redhead tells me it’s just my usual penny pinching.  I keep telling her it’s how I was raised. 

Sunday was chilly but our only cloudless day.  By Tuesday it was cold and rainy and it stayed that way until Thursday morning.  Wednesday afternoon I took my once little girl to Hazelton, Pennsylvania where she met other family for the rest of her weeklong vacation.  The clouds broke just south of town and it was warmer on the Pocono Mountain topside than it was along the lower reaches of Delmarva.  Despite the rain I don’t regret a few days with my daughter.  My need to make a living separated us but she’s of the age where she can choose where she would like to live.  Maybe a day will come when I’m in old age and she’s near.  There was a time when she was younger and she didn’t talk much about what troubled her and now we talk freely.  It’s usually long distance but on short notice my employer gave me some time this week to spend freely.  It’s nice and rare in our modern economy to be treated so well.  It’s also why I like going to work. 

When I first moved here I was talking one day after mass with Father Dan.  It was a warm late autumn day and we were standing in the sun when he introduced me to some other members of the parish.  A man asked me how I liked living in paradise.  Having spent my childhood in the Allegheny foothills and most of my adult life in The Finger Lakes I thought it a strange question.  Then The Redhead arrived and now Easter with my daughter offers another meaning.

Walt is just one of several friends here.  I’ve a neighbor named George Parish.  He serves as our County Clerk of the Peace and like Walt is a Washington refugee.  Last week he reminded me about an old Andy Griffith episode.  Andy turns down an offer in Raleigh to maintain his quality of small town life.  Let the record state as a boy it was my favorite TV show and long before John Madden.    

You can sign a postcard and mail it:

Delaware Tea Party

PO Box 95

Milton, DE 19968

A friend serving in Iraq wrote Rush Limbaugh and copied me.  This is the soldier’s message followed by my reply:

Dear Rush, some thoughts for you…

As an American soldier currently serving in Iraq, I feel compelled to write to express my deepest disappointment with the current state of affairs in America, particularly with the fact that I now face being categorically branded a potential terrorist according to the Dept. of Homeland Security.

Yes, I will admit, I have long had right-wing, conservative political leanings, I am against illegal immigration since it is illegal, I strongly support the right to bear arms, and am an advocate for states’ rights.  In fact, I am greatly alarmed at how the federal government is currently over-stepping its bounds and is dangerously extending its scope and power into realms where it has no Constitutional authority.  Frankly, I’m pretty pissed off at how criminally irresponsible our so-called elected representatives in Washington have been giving our hard-earned tax dollars away without our approval.  And yes, I have been known to place bumper stickers of various 3rd party candidates and other political slogans on the bumper of my pickup truck.

So, I ask, does all of the above make me a potential terrorist?  Am I to be lumped in with the same groups as the Ku Klux Klan and Al Qaeda?  Or, because I’m really sick and tired of the hypocrisy of overpaid and corrupt government officials could I be considered a dangerous Lone Wolf?

Well, Sec. Napolitano and President Obama and company, have you considered the fact that I might just be an American citizen with the legal and God-given right to embrace all of the above in the Land of the Free?  Isn’t that why I’m over here, taking precious time away from my family and business to defend those rights inherited by our Founding Fathers, who were they alive today, might very well be on your list as well?

I would hate to think that the very actions of representatives of the federal government, such as this report by the DHS, might contribute to further alienation of the American public towards said government, resulting in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.  After all, the Founding Fathers did charge us with safeguarding our freedoms from an overbearing government seeking to infringe upon our individual rights.

My reply:

Jon, God bless you and I hope he reads it.  I certainly will. 

A former preacher and now politician who does an hour with me on Mondays brought me the Napolitano report.  My Lord, I’m an American and not the enemy.

Last week there was a meeting here at the Legion hall.  It’s the group modeled on The Patriot League but with no plans to make the same mistakes.  We’re, as I said earlier, growing vegetables and canning, and there are plans to use the organization as a political action committee. 

There was a government agent taking down license plates in the parking lot.  Two miles away there are hundreds of illegal aliens working at a chicken plant. 

How many Legionnaires in the next room having a beer had their plate numbers taken?  Men who bled on battlefields for their country now collateral damage for the latest government purge. 

The Obamites may well be creating the situation they claim to fear. 

This is a clearer picture of the scheduled tea parties in our corner of Delaware.

These are all scheduled for April 15, 2009.

12:00 P.M. to 2:00 P.M. at The Circle in Georgetown.

4:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M. at Janosik Park in Laurel. 

4:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. outside Legislative Hall in Dover. 

I would also like to post locations for Maryland and New Jersey.  Pass them along! 

In addition there is a planning meeting for “We Surround Them” at the Bowers Beach Fire Hall in Frederica on April 10, a Friday.  At 7:00 P.M.

Speaking of meetings.  Sussex County Community Organized Regiment gathers Wednesday April 8, 2009.  This meeting will take place at 8:30 P.M. at The American Legion off Route 24 between Long Neck and Oak Orchard.