http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/asia/02anniversary.html?hp

These are the godless overlords scheduled to rule the planet.

Look, I’m a neutral observer when it comes to state sponsored gambling, however.  If the elected folks in the state of Delaware believe they and the state aren’t getting a fair shake in court then it may be time to ponder a Tenth Amendment resolution.  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” 

Maybe a lawyer can also explain number nine.  “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Frankly, a declaration of state sovereignty may be just what Delaware needs in pursuit of gambling expansion. 

I gamble.  Not much.  I’m not at all sure the state should be in the gambling business and I don’t believe it ultimately solves the spending problem in Dover.  Those things said, make the declarations for the right of the state and of the right of the people and go ahead with the gambling expansion. 

Do you believe Washington will send in troops and depose Governor Markell, while shuttering slots parlors and casinos? 

Seriously, someone in government really needs to show a set of stones in order to restore the intent of the original document.  This is a golden opportunity. 

My neighbor, I’ll call him Jim, grew up one of 17 children of Italian immigrants.  Now 75, he’s one of the last of the children still living.  Recently he buried a 93 year old brother.  The brother had been what we now call developmentally disabled.  He spent the last 75 years, all of Jim’s life, in a home.  When Jim’s brother died he planned to bury him near family in Wilmington.  The home explained it could happen if Jim paid the costs.  Otherwise a member of a close knit family would end up in the equivalent of a potter’s field. 

Jim telephoned his state and federal representatives.  He explains most of his life he’d been told a portion of Social Security had been set aside for the burial of his brother.  He found no answers from the people he once voted for.  A Democrat for most of his life, my neighbor now identifies as an independent.  Raised a Roman Catholic, he now also identifies his Christian faith much the same way.  He still remembers being a boy and pitching pennies.  The local Monsignor caught him and it wasn’t long before parents learned their son enjoyed gambling.  It didn’t go very well at home.  Jim still believes his church is filled with hypocrites. 

He enjoys gambling.  Mainly on horses and can share many memories of visits to harness tracks in Upstate New York, which I called home as a boy.  Judging by the man’s well appointed home he either had some serious skill or he never had a serious gambling addiction.  It was something he did, like many others, for a little enjoyment every now and then.  In other words, he’s a very typical American.  What I think also very clear is he no longer trusts the institutions which defined a way of life. 

Government leaders are viewed as ineffectual and our leaders in pursuit of heaven prove to be just as much as we are human. 

One can ask where we’re headed.  All summer long I’ve been reading the mainstream media warnings about the coarsening of civic debate.  Mind you, it was never coarsened by the filthy demonstrators of the 1960s and certainly not by the modern Cindy Sheehan’s.  Left wing foul mouths are victims.  Right wingers picking up after themselves following a rally in Washington are dangerous. 

What is clear is the breakdown of the family unit, the collapse of major cities and the crumbling U.S. Dollar should frighten all people into action.  Check your TV ratings and you’ll get the impression otherwise.  Can do spirit was long ago replaced by the spirit of New Orleans, where you wait for the government to come and get you as the water rises to your chin. 

A few months back I was channel surfing and came across a documentary about one of the aboriginal nations of the Americas.  Archeologists looking to make sense of its collapse discovered near its end citizens were sacrificing young children.  Remains of children estimated to be as young as 3 years old have been unearthed.  These toddlers died terrified and what little trust they had learned was destroyed as they were ripped from the arms of parents and cast to their drowning deaths.  My few remaining liberal friends insist we have become so technologically advanced it could never happen here.  Not from a people who put a man on the moon, not long after pioneering mass media and not much later personal computing.  I remember my country put a man on the moon when I was a child and it was momentous in the middle of an era marked by war and burning cities abroad and at home.  A few years later a court ruled babies could be ripped from the warmth of their mother’s wombs.  And mothers willingly assisted.  Fifty million times.

Terror alerts worry me. Could these be preparation for a false-flag attack? It would distract us from some debates in the House and Senate, enhance the President’s cult-of-personality and provide him with fodder for his latest proposal. He wants a single world economic system.

My question is simple. Will Americans die to enhance Mr. Obama’s goals?

This one’s for the guys.  Does your wife or girlfriend let you watch football?  A little football, some football or a lot of football?  My first marriage faltered, as most of you know, not because of football but because we grew apart in other areas.  I stayed sane.  She didn’t. 

I’ve pledged not to make the same mistakes the next time around and I’ve known Mary T. for a little more than a year and we appear quite compatible, however.  Football season just got underway.  Sometime late last winter or early spring I pledged I would do some of her yard work, which ended up mainly being cutting the grass, in exchange for football this fall.  I didn’t ask for college ball.  I’ve never been a great negotiator.  On opening weekend the big game wasn’t until Monday night, or at least from my perspective, so I didn’t mind missing some earlier action.

This weekend was different.  There were big games at one o’clock and 4 o’clock and 8 o’clock.  Do you think when we made this agreement she was aware football could eat up ten hours of a day?   Again, it would be twenty for a weekend if I’d been granted a concession for college ball. 

Newsflash:  I didn’t get anywhere near ten hours Sunday.  Actually it has been years since I spent an entire day watching three games.  Or a rainy day or two last year and maybe a snowy day as well but for it didn’t snow here until March and then just that once.

She came by late Sunday morning to use the computer.  The former programmer of the mainframe at Martin-Marietta doesn’t have one at home.  Then she needed me to go to BJ’s wholesale before I mowed any grass.  After leaving BJ’s she wanted to go to Lowe’s.  It was approaching 1:00 P.M. and I mentioned football.  It’s when I was told I needed to communicate these things earlier.  Point taken.  I went to church Saturday night in order to get to the grass early Sunday.  Guess I should have explained my actions.  Meanwhile she spent the next couple of hours grousing about football.  A little girl who grew up down the street from John Unitas can’t fathom the attraction.  She also said what you’ve been currently reading shouldn’t be a subject for on-air discussion, which means it won’t be and which is why instead it’s written down.  Enough of this but I’ve wrought one more concession.  She agreed the other day to go with me to see a Ravens’ game.  Of course, I know it’s because it gives her an opportunity to make a few extra shopping stops in Baltimore. 

You may be reading this and thinking I’m involved with the wrong woman but I’ll offer more.  Disputes about football and lawn mowing are small potatoes and she didn’t hear what her neighbor said Sunday.  While I was mowing the front section of the lawn he came over and asked why I wasn’t watching the Redskins’ game?  I just smiled and said it was being negotiated. 

Saturday we went shopping in Salisbury and as we were turning down a service road to the store we saw an old man pushing a grocery cart.  It was stuffed with his belongings.  He had a small dog as sidekick and I recognized his jacket.  It was red and there was a yellow stripe down one side.  The man was a veteran. My redheaded friend insisted on stopping and giving him some money.  Behind us a young man driving a taxi cab was in a hurry.  He started honking his car’s horn.  It angered me and she wanted to then follow him to give the youngster an earful.  We let our cooler heads prevail. 

Her dad died when she was very young.  Her mother remarried an Air Force Colonel and that man was a major influence on my girlfriend’s life. 

 She’s infuriated there are people in media and politics labeling patriots as mobs and now racists.  Her stepfather worked at the Pentagon when Jimmy Carter was Commander-in-Chief and an exceptionally poor one.  Still, the racist talk of the last week subsided quickly when the left found it was a tag that wouldn’t stick.  Now infamous columnists, Frank Rich is one, are writing the nation is approaching the rhetoric that preceded the Civil War.  He’s not alone.  On the right the same is coming from Victor Davis Hanson.  A few years ago I was still living near Syracuse and one day, it was 4 or 5 years ago as I recall, when the show was finished a friend telephoned and asked me for lunch.  Father Charles Vavonese is the number two man for the Roman Catholic Diocesan Schools for a 16 county area, or he was the last we spoke.  At lunch that day he offered a chilling prophesy.  He saw Civil War and he predicted that day it would erupt in another 5 years.  When I shared his comments with friends and listeners they thought the priest and I had gotten food poisoning.

Flash forward following a contentious summer.  Football is a comfort and it’s familiar.  It’s orderly and it’s my escape.  For just one day every week. 

White Devil Bill Colley checking in this lovely Saturday morning on the Lower Shore and reading the latest arguments as to why I’m a racist.  A fellow at the New York Times writes today it’s as obvious as the lily-white nose on my face.  Bob Herbert is a successful and now wealthy columnist at the nation’s premier left-leaning newspaper.  “For many white Americans, Barack Obama is nothing more than that black guy in the White House, and they want him out of there”, Herbert writes today, which appears odd as a large number of white devils put Obama in the building. 

For the record, I don’t want Obama in the White House.  For the same reasons I didn’t want Hillary Clinton or Howard Dean there.  You may not know this, but under the scales, Clinton and Dean both look pink.  Caucasian if you will.  When I look at Obama all I see is a school superintendent, which is where I think his abilities would best serve the public.  Every time he scolds from behind a podium I’m reminded of some uncomfortable moments in the auditorium at old Cuba High. 

Can I also bring something else forward for the record?  I do realize Mr. Obama has a bit more pigment under his skin than most people in my social circle.  Not everyone but most of my friends are somewhat pale.  A great many of them are also political junkies.  Most of them are conservatives and the inebriates are libertarians.  These friends know the names Ward Connerly and Alan Keyes.  Connerly and Keyes are conservatives and men of color.  If I told Mr. Herbert I admired those men you can bet the farm he would swat me away with an allegation the two examples are sell-outs and tools of the “man”.  Herbert would be a bit more eloquent but the response is clear.  Herbert and all those like him have rigged the game.  They won’t separate left-leaning politics from race.  It allows them to maintain righteousness and to continue playing the aggrieved.  Why is Herbert aggrieved, you may ask?  He’s atop his profession and millions of people read his work.  It’s because he knows every white person passing him on the street is looking down at him.  He’s written about it in past columns.  He perceives a slight.  It’s a self-concept issue.  Herbert doesn’t know if he got to the top because he’s very good (and he can write some great stuff) or because Mr. Sulzberger made it happen to raise the percentage of people of color in high profile positions at the paper. 

Connerly and Keyes have argued the same for many years.  This is why Herbert doesn’t invite them to drop-in for cocktails. 

Now, another question, you saw it coming, didn’t you?  A majority of Americans knew the day would come when the President would be in a political dogfight and the race card would come out of the political bag of tricks.  What surprises me is how quickly the card was played.  Just three quarters into the first year of his first term.  May I suggest the most frightening explanation?  Mr. Obama and his supporters are bereft of ideas.  That bag was always empty.  It’s why the liberals haven’t been trusted for decades.  The color of a fellow’s skin is irrelevant.  Millions of people out of work and tens of millions watching China eat our lunch, our children’s dinner and the table scraps of our grandchildren are looking for anyone who can turn things around.  Mr. Obama doesn’t have the goods.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091802823.html

I imagine while growing up Jimmy Carter’s mother kept telling him he was better than all the other children in Plains, Georgia were.  A younger Carter brother missed the lessons but Jimmy made sure he didn’t wipe his mouth with a sleeve and didn’t play in his Sunday best.  At some point, I imagine, Jimmy harbored a disdain for the other kids teasing him for being such a square, a stick in the mud and a momma’s boy.  Brother Billy said “Hell, no”, and popped the tab on another beer.  Billy must have been a racist.

Most of you know I grew up in rural America.  My people were bright but I wouldn’t exactly argue they were mannerly.  My Uncle Frank used a sawed off cardboard milk carton as a spittoon.  He’d spend Sundays on a couch, chewing tobacco and waiting for Grandma to bring him food.  At Thanksgiving, he’d tell dirty jokes and the other adults would just glower at him.  My dad had a reputation in local taverns for being a really, really mean drunk. 

What else I remember of these two men are the long talks I had with them about life.  When I was 13, I went with Uncle Frank in his truck on a long haul.  He explained back home there were people who thought their “s*** doesn’t stink”, and he offered some family histories otherwise.  Every family has an Uncle Frank and a brother like Billy Carter.  Frank marveled at the efforts some people made to distance themselves from their own flesh and blood and from a few neighbors who knew all about the personal demons the swells attempted to wash away.  My old man liked opera and had always regretted he failed to learn to play the piano.  You can say I saw two sides of these men and while one side wasn’t as civilized as many would like it was clear they did use their noggins for thinking.  Sometimes. 

Joe Wilson is learning the lessons the swells want all of us to remember.  You can’t have a say in the public debate until you wash, put on some nice clothes and speak in a refined manner.  In other words, the swells are setting the rules in an effort to exclude.  Swells include most elected politicians, members of the media and a handful of old schoolteachers telling me no longer to send them email messages.  If we don’t talk “real nice like”, we’ve got to go stand in the corner. 

This morning there is a new column from the New York Times David Brooks.  Brooks was once a fire-breathing conservative but then he adopted manners when hired by the Times.  He posits today Wilson and tea party patriots aren’t racists but just the latest strain in populist American politics.  Andrew Jackson wasn’t renowned for his manners.  From Brooks’s pen “We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.” 

“Progressive” is a strange term in that it asserts progress but the folks who cloak themselves in it are following some old rules promulgated by Miss Lillian Carter.  Miss Lillian, Billy Carter, Uncle Frank and my dad are all dead.  Wherever they went, I’m not at all sure there is any specific social order. 

Few things in nature quite touch me like an autumn sky. It’s why I’m including a grainy shot from my cell phone camera, snapped while leaving work tonight. Autumn sunsets make me long for those past falls in Upstate New York. The sun sets early and the temperature plummets and by late September the leaves have reached fever pitch and by early October there are frosts and people walking around in bubble coats after dark. And the air you take into your nose and lungs seems more pure. The air is still as the insect chorus of summer and spring is mute for months ahead.

The days are free of high dew points but often still warm and in a part of the world known for cloudy skies there is suddenly plenty of sunshine. On weekends there is football and from my daughter a clamor about the onrushing winter holidays. It’s escapism and as I grow older I find what’s left of my mind drifting to those serene moments because I fear the unknown and the mismanagement of my country, which makes me fear for my daughter’s future and her future memories.

Many of you know I’ve been in a running battle the last several days with some big media in Washington and Baltimore. The minor leaguer from across the bay is using every last nugget of logic to bring an honest accounting of last weekend’s rally at the Capitol. There is great resistance, arrogance and nastiness from large American media. A college professor and columnist at The Baltimore Sun put down the estimates of my friends. My friends are engineers, pharmaceutical salesmen and retired military officers. Another fellow at The Washington Post acknowledges I’ve got some great points but newsroom inertia isn’t easy to budge. Surprisingly, I’ve been relatively diplomatic through all of this, which as members of my daily audience attest is rare. Imagine a ship’s captain ignoring the pleas of passengers who’ve noticed a hole in the hull. This is the state of newspapers in our country. “Don’t tell me how to foul my business”, they say. “I can reach the bottom on my own”.

It isn’t just papers. The redhead was here last night for some computer work and she was listening to the TV while I was watching Olbermann and Maddow. There were nearly as many Americans watching those shows as the estimated rally figures they offered. I switched to another channel and watched a show about archeologists discovering Mt. Sinai. I needed some hope.

You wouldn’t know it if you get your news from mainstream U.S. media, but when asked, the folks at the Washington Metro answered an additional one quarter of a million people bought train tickets last Saturday when compared to corresponding Saturdays. This doesn’t even approach the numbers of folks arriving by bus, plane and their own cars and trucks. As it happens, the Ombudsman at the Post hints no one at the paper bothered to ask about ticket sales.

Do you remember the story of Moses? When he came down from the mountain, what passed for the media of his day was leading the people astray. Moses had an answer that day for 3,000 members of the media and he preserved a people and a just culture.

This week I’ve been reading about the lack of civility in our culture witnessed by Kanye West, tennis players and, as the media would have it, Joe Wilson. Our institutions are crumbling and no longer trusted. Pew surveyed the public and it finds an all-time record low have any confidence in journalists.

Archeologists insist this is usually the point where cultures collapse and there are a handful of options. In Rome the military and a series of strongmen seized power and the moral rot continued for centuries and with terrible consequences for common people. In the desert southwest of what later became the United States of America the people offered their little children for blood sacrifice.

I’ve developed decent relationships with the 2 most recent Ombudsman at The Washington Post.  The man currently holding that job emailed me this morning with news the Post is looking again at Saturday’s crowd estimate.  I used comments from the paper’s story (and the NY Times) Saturday evening and the numbers from Metro ridership that day.  It appears the dogged press over looked the figures from the Metro, which a single telephone call would’ve revealed.  Is the media biased or just plain lazy?  By the way, ridership jumped by one quarter million compared to most Saturdays and weekends following Labor Day.

This doesn’t take into account buses and people driving to the event.  Many outsiders have no knowledge of the metro.  Get my drift?  Eat my dust, liberals.