New Kerry&Taylor Agent

Mon Cher John Kerry,

Although Je ne suis pas Charlie but appreciate that tu es Charlie, as you would insist that people everywhere should be (dodging fatwas, of course—little joke there), I'm writing to suggest you use the services of the Department for Instilling Promulgations of Love Overcoming Murders and Tortures, usually known by its acronym DIPLOMAT, of which Je suis CEO. Your genius in having James Taylor sing “You've Got a Friend” to the French president the other day, along with your hugging him twice or thrice to calm French discomfiture over the assassinations at “Hebdo,” will move you toward legend-hood in the hallowed ledger of Secretaries of State. It doesn't hurt, also, as rumor has it, that you considered English as your second language at Yale and tried to get “Skull and Bones” changed to “Crâne et Tibias.”

One agency at DIPLOMAT that will help is the Rhythmic Options for Classical Kinetics, known as ROCK, for short. It will help you choose American music that will endear the U.S. to the French, who, as everyone knows, hate everybody up to and including themselves. George Gershwin's tone poem “An American in Paris” comes to mind, having even the taxi-horns in the movement. Also, someone like Tony Bennett singing that pensive “La Vie en Rose” with a cool quartet (piano, sax, bass, drums) would have French women in a swoon, nothing like Taylor and his guitar, blue jeans and sandals?—I don't remember. Bennett would be coat-and-tie, have his hair combed and sing on pitch. “You've Got a Friend” was...well...so ditsy. Parisians don't want friends...they need money and the National Guard to clean out the no-go-zones. ROCK is an unintended acronym but in the U.S. great music is either amplified and done in clouds of mary-jane smoke or consigned to the netherworld.

Another agency for help is tagged Rhyming for Asinine Poems, or RAP, for short. The music (actually people beating mostly on anything handy, sometimes each other) is designed to greatly offend Muslims—actually everyone, though the French may not be offended since the lyrics are sort of racy and the French are known for such things as prime ministers with harems and may not recognize the goodwill gesture. Perhaps the most elite artist is Gangsta-Rapper Drake, so maybe he could go over and “recite” his big hit “The Motto,” which has this uber-intellectual line, “almost drowned in her pussy so I swam to her butt.” Or...you might send another rap-king, Bruno Mars, whose “Locked Out of Heaven” has this French-toned line, “Your sex takes me to paradise.” Get it? The shooters knew they would inevitably be killed and thus headed, according to the late Imam al-Awlaki, to join him in paradise with their own 72 virgins apiece. Another rapper, using a revered rap-word for woman—bitch—is rumored to be putting together a new masterpiece called “Beating Burka Bitches Back to Baghdad Bared and Bruised.” He's already claimed he'll make a half-billion on it. He's mostly using lyrics applied to cops and mothers in the U.S.

Then there's Diplomat's agency, Bureau for Appealing Love Lyrics and Ditties—you guessed it, BALLAD, for short. This is a work in progress since most of the appropriate music was written 1900-1960, especially in the 20s-50s and today's U.S. singers aren't actually singers, a requirement for this music. The male award winners sing into a mike a half-inch from their mouths, sound raspy or hoarse or both and have no intention to sing words anyone will hear over the bedlam of the amps. Maybe someone like Harry Connick could go over and sing old-fashioned stuff like “More than You Know” or “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or “Stardust,” national life-sanity-saving-stuff during World War II and Korea in both France and the U.S. Girl-singers are more interested in bump-and-grind nudity than music so they can't out-French the French in that. Beyonce might go over and lip-synch the French national anthem La Marseillaise like she did the U.S. national anthem during the last inauguration but they would hardly notice. Anyway, if she should take a bow and flash the whole country there might be an incident.

In any case, cher John, give DIPLOMAT some serious thought in the interest of showing solidarity with the French. Let ROCK, RAP and BALLAD help you do better than James Taylor the next time. We also have plans for other nations, too, especially the ones insulted by the administration on practically a daily basis, like the Brits, for instance.

Bien Cordialement,
Je Suis Otherself, CEO
DIPLOMAT

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Big Joke...Deflated Football

The inordinate nationwide interest (furor, too) vis-a-vis the slightly deflated football used by the Boston Patriots in their walloping of the Indianapolis Colts for the right to play in the Super Bowl is strange, at least perhaps to those like me, who figure that cheating has always been a part of the sports-scene. Whether it's a boxer “taking a dive” or nearly the entire Chicago White Sox team in 1919 “fixing” the world series and later called the “Black Sox,” it's just par for the course to get an “edge” over the opponent, often by any means necessary.

In the 1940s-50s, some starters on the University of Kentucky basketball teams apparently “fixed” games not necessarily to lose but simply to guarantee the right point-spread for gamblers and/or themselves (with payoffs) to get well. The reason the players could pull it off was simply that they were so much better than other players that they could hit and miss at will. Three players on another UK team in the early 1990s “fixed” foul shooting in at least one game (maybe more) when in confusion after a foul call on Vandy they twice substituted a player at the foul-line who was not fouled but who was a sure shot for one who wasn't. Nobody caught the subterfuge at the time and the players just figured they were doing “what comes naturally”—getting an edge.

More seriously, during 2009-11 there was a “bounty hunter” effort among some of the NFL New Orleans Saints players and coaches, in which players received bonuses for knocking opposing players out of the game, i.e., hurting them badly enough to gain an “edge.” Quarterbacks knocked out of a game represented an especial accomplishment, removing the most key player. A coach and player were actually suspended for a year but other players in on the butchering just received suspensions for a specific number of games. A broken limb means 6 weeks on the sidelines but a concussion, a favored outcome, while a short-term disability, can ruin a player's life.

Why all the hubbub about the deflated ball? MONEY! The average yearly player's salary in the NFL is a paltry $1.9 million, much less than in the NBA, MLB, and NHL at $5.15 million, $3.2 million, and $2.4 million, respectively. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers is guaranteed $110 million 2015-19 while Patriot quarterback Tom Brady (deflated football) will make $24 million 2015-17. The 2014 Super Bowl winning player's (Seattle) bonus was $157,000 counting the playoffs, too. Compare that to the 2014 World Series winning player's bonus of $388,606, not counting the playoffs, which bumped it closer to half a million.

Just as Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing about the coal miner selling his soul to the company store, the professional athlete, especially in football, sells his body for the highest bid. The use of all kinds of drugs that enhance short-term skills cause long-term problems including everything from suicide to Alzheimer's to broken bodies. The baseball scandals of the last few years are just the tip of the iceberg—human-growth-hormone and other drugs pumping up the bodies of folks like Barry Bonds (artificial hitting records) and Alex Rodriguez, suspended for the entire 2014 baseball season. According to Baseball Reference.com, A-Rod's career salary is at $356,285,104.

Neither Patriot coach Belichick nor quarterback Brady had any knowledge of anything as dastardly as “fixing” a football for a game played in the driving rain, according to what both said in separate press conferences. A while back, Belichick—or at least the organization—was fined a half-million for spying on another team in order to discover its defensive signals. I believe spying on other teams doing anything is considered part of the game, so I was surprised at such outrage by the NFL, which lately has been trying to make itself responsible for punishing domestic-violence offenders in its ranks, something that belongs to law enforcement and the courts—another sham.

Players DO strive to win games and honors, as they often claim, though sometimes sanctimoniously; however television, the driver of the huge amounts of money for both players and organizations, corrupts everything it touches. The winning-player's share in the 1968 World Series was $10,937 as opposed to that of 2014, $388,606. That says it all. Players and organizations DO cheat. Spectators know this and generally don't care.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

S-O-T-U...Much Ado about Nothing

Under Article II(3) of the U.S. Constitution, the president is required “from time to time” to inform Congress of the state-of-the-union and make recommendations as to what should be done. Early in President Obama's speech on 20 January, he announced that he would send Congress a budget. According to Article I(7), however, all bills for raising revenue (actually the budget since spending is a determinate) are to originate in the House of representatives, with the Senate proposing or concurring with amendments.

S-O-T-U could be done without the ballyhoo connected to a speech delivered to Congress, the SCOTUS justices, the military head honchos, a balcony with “guests” of the president's wife, a royal promenade in and out, etc. The state-of-the-union address, as is, comprises a circus meant to give everyone involved—with video coverage throughout—an extra 15 minutes of fame. It could be far more concise and detailed if simply delivered in a document and presented to everyone involved, who could then advance it to the media of choice for nationwide perusal.

Until the early twentieth century (pre-Wilson), most presidents merely submitted a written report. With the advent of radio and TV, the temptation to use this constitutional requirement as a purely political ploy has been too great to overcome, thus the s-o-t-u propaganda-machine, complete with all the trappings of a monarchy, even to the bellowing of the sergeant-of-arms that his highness is about to favor the unwashed with his presence, sort of like “h-e-r-e c-o-m-e-s B-a-r-a-c-k, reminiscent of the Carson talk-show intro back in the day.

I stopped listening/viewing this circus some time ago, preferring to simply read the transcript although, admittedly, watching and listening to Ronald Reagan was rewarding just as an opportunity to observe an art-form, actual rhetoric as opposed to mere speechifying. By comparison, Obama has about as much speaking ability and charisma as a bear in hibernation, but then so have most other presidents. Watching grown people clap and act like jacks-in-the-boxes is simply comedic.

I wondered if Nancy Pelosi might not break something in her frantic up-and-down gyrations in a speech I at least partly watched a few years ago. One watched then to see if Veep Biden fell asleep. I tuned in the other night (after reading a book with ballgame ended, sound muted) at 9:54 to catch the end (I thought) of the great speech of 2015 and determined to suffer it through until it ended at 10:11—seventeen boring minutes in which nothing was speechified about the state of the union, while a SCOTUS person slept a bit, or so I thought.

What I heard was what one might expect a coach to say to his team—35 points down—at halftime. It was a colossal pep-talk and had little or nothing to do with how substantive things stand in the nation. Obama spoke of exterminating partisanship and gridlock but has already established gridlock with his executive orders and veto-threats. He spoke of comforting grieving families but didn't mention the humongous lie he perpetrated on the grieving families vis-a-vis the Benghazi massacre. He heralded same-sex marriage as being promoted from a wedge issue to “a story of freedom.” Perversion as freedom? Egad!

Predictably, Obama brought up Ferguson and New York and the son who can't walk around without being harassed, but not his hometown, Chicago, where murders happen well over once a day and “sons” are killed in gangs and girls in cross-fires. Ironically, it has just been announced that the army of prosecutors Obama and Holder sent to Ferguson to create civil-rights charges against Officer Wilson found no grounds for any action.

Obama said that every child should know that he/she matters. Well...as Gomer would say—Shazzam! At least he didn't mention Trayvon Martin, his son if he had one. As a railroader with layovers in Chattanooga back in the day, I discovered that a white guy had better be careful where he walked, although the worst that happened to me was being the target of rock-throwers.

Both the substance and the delivery of this sophomoric 17-minute epilogue/sermon were poorly chosen, poorly done, respectively. I've been though the transcript, a hodgepodge of two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage. I didn't see the term al Qaeda. What I saw was the same old class-war approach and I don't remember seeing the term Benghazi, either, or IRS or Fast-and-Furious or the salvation of Libya...but in my scan I might have missed some things.

But it was great political theater...meaning nothing, except, maybe that the emperor has no clothes.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie

“Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) has been the rallying cry of people in both the U.S. and Europe regarding the “Charlie Hebdo Massacre” in Paris a few days ago. However, “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (I am not Charlie). This has nothing to do with what actually happened, but with the victim/cartoonists who created the horns of their own dilemma, whether by malice, honest opinion, artistic endeavor, atheistic philosophy, attempt at comedy/entertainment or anything else. It's abundantly obvious that the Muslim jihadists, ipso facto, must be exterminated.

The cartoonists' viewers can decide—if they even care enough—about the motivation for creating unflattering depictions of Mohammad. Examples of their work are available on the Internet, one such location being here: Je Suis Charlie. Just a cursory examination will indicate that the Hebdo gang reveled in denigrating not just Mohammad/Islam, Christianity/Jesus, Jewry, Catholicism, religion-in-general, government and people. They did it through depicting hate, obscenity and porn, some of it so sophomoric as to cause giggles more than reasoned reaction.

In this country and in Europe, Christianity and Jesus Christ can be lampooned, insulted, denigrated and demeaned, with the public's (including the Christians') managing a ho-hum. Freedom of speech is a Constitutional right and, no matter how offensive it is to some people, cannot be abridged. Moreover, Christians are not disposed to “protecting” God or his good name because they understand that God needs no protection. A feeble Homo-sapiens attempt to either prove or defend God on any basis other than personal faith or scripture is wasting his time. People can't prove God empirically to any greater extent than scientists can empirically disprove God.

Cartoonists and other commentators who make a constant effort to ridicule God and people of faith never realize that they score points only when a reader/viewer rises to the bait. For instance, Herald-Leader resident atheist Larry Webster lampooned Jesus in the 18 January issue, using Christ's physical appearance as the vehicle for ridicule, something completely unknown and therefore eligible for comparison to everything from Popeye to the junk-yard dog. As a person of faith, I just laugh. I'm not the least bit offended. A Charlie Hebdo cartoonist would have compared Christ to the north end of a southbound mule or to Beyonce's derriere if she had bent over while lip-synching the national anthem at the last inaugural.

The same is true with the scientists who claim to know what they can't even imagine. When they tell me the earth is 4.6 billion years old, or 5 billion or any billion, I just laugh. They do well to merely conceive of recorded history of a few thousand years. If they claim the Grand Canyon was carved out by river-erosion over billions of years, that's fine with me, but I reserve the right to believe that the “big split” happened in a minute...a gigantic eruption of some kind perhaps. Even though the data they derive from the data inputted to their computers indicates the earth to be much warmer a thousand years ago than now, I view the exercise as merely interesting, though damning to global-warming alarmists who think they can change the climate and bring-on universal AC.

I'm not a “flat-earther” believing that mankind is only 6,000 or so years old but I believe others have the right to believe otherwise, especially since none of us was around then. When the “big-bangers” write scholarly papers about earth's origins but never locate earth's origins, I grin a bit, yet admit that man is created to and should strive for understanding. When the evolutionists describe how a chimp became me after trying for a billion years...or two...or three, I applaud their effort, hopeless as I believe it to be. Sometimes I wonder if the chimp might be insulted.

Je ne suis pas un fou (I am not a fool). Perhaps this separates me from the Parisian cartoonists, who see what they do as freedom of speech sort of like yelling “incendie en le théâtre” (fire in the theater). Freedom of speech is not foolishness of speech. If the cartoonists want to risk suicide over a smutty adolescent depiction of Mohammad—fine—but only up to the point at which they do not endanger others, like innocent non-cartoonists or police killed in protecting what is actually their non-right to lunacy.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Baptist Editor Blasts Franklin Graham

Baptists Today is a liberal magazine published in Macon, Georgia. Its editor is John D. Pierce, a Baptist minister, who in a recent blog wrote this: “Recently, Nikolai Novikov has been repeatedly fined, jailed, and restricted in his freedom to travel, according to Forum18. His crime: Holding worship services in West Kazakhstan without government permission. Like Novikov, Maksim Volikov is also a Baptist Christian in Kazakhstan. He was fined the equivalent of one’s month’s average salary according to the news service.

These examples — and worse — of real religious discrimination and persecution occurring around the world (to people of various faiths) need to be contrasted with the silly claims that flow from many American Christian leaders who love to play victim. Franklin Graham is such an example with his continual thoughtless commentaries — which, thankfully, he is free to express in this great country.”

Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham and president and CEO of Samaritan's Purse, located in Boone, NC, perhaps the nation's largest worldwide charity, is an ardent participant in the Southern Baptist Convention, accused by Baptist liberals of being “fundamentalist” and therefore ensconced in theological ignorance. Baptists Today is aligned with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a relatively small denomination (actually a consortium of churches not listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches as a denomination) that is an outgrowth of the “split” in the Southern Baptist Convention occasioned about 1979 through 1991 over questions of theology, primarily the ordination of women.

The SBC, with some 16 million members, is the largest non-Roman Catholic denomination in the U.S. At least half of its members are female and apparently satisfied with the SBC position, but liberals view it as not politically correct, therefore heretical. Theologically, the jury is out—disagreement on all sides, including those with Ph.d.s—but liberals can't tolerate disagreement when it clashes with PC, the new norm doctrinally. The fact that Islam is the driving force currently behind genocide in especially the Middle East and Africa doesn't signify to the PC-crowd as enough to make one wonder about mounting the prayer rug and facing toward Mecca, not to mention the carnage of 9/11.

Pierce's angst was occasioned by his belief that Duke University recently reversed a decision to allow its chapel “bell tower” to be used to call Muslims to prayer on Fridays because Franklin Graham spoke out against it. However, according to the Charlotte Observer of 16 January, Michael Schoenfeld, a Duke vice president, said the university had received hundreds of calls and emails, many of which were quite vitriolic. Translated, some big contributors to Duke financially, as well probably as many others, viewed that decision with enough jaundice to turn off the dollar-faucet. That gets the attention of any college administrator.

Graham did have something to say in a post: “I think it's wrong [muezzin in the bell tower]...I think many people have a problem with it.” Graham mentioned the raping, butchering, beheading of Christians and Jews and anyone not submitting to Sharia Islamic law. While liberal Christian-tourists take vacations worshiping God in the Holy Land—with side-trips to maybe Greece and Italy—Graham shows up in places like northern Iraq and ebola-country in Africa or anywhere there's been an earthquake, tsunami, tornado or displaced refugees.

Unlike most if not all large charities, Samaritan's Purse places its entire financial status on the Internet for everyone to see. According to its federal form 990 for 2013, Graham oversaw a budget of $460 million with 87% of it going directly to ministry (doctors, hospitals, churches, schools, drilling pure wells, housing, disaster relief, etc.), only 8% for fund-raising, and 5% for administration. Perhaps the next largest charitable agency is the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which had a 2014 budget amounting to $299 million that supported 4,793 foreign missionaries.

Liberal Christians in many denominations and churches expend much hot air talking the walk but Graham and the IMB walk the walk, making actions much louder than words. They also take strong stands on other questions such as the absurdity of men marrying men and engaging in deviant behavior, another PC no-no, but while the liberal churches are dying on the vine, these conservatives, if not exactly flourishing as the faith is demeaned from the White House through the media to the man on the street, are at least doing good and holding their own.

As for Pierce and his wholly gratuitous slandering of Graham, he's not alone in that activity. Actually, Graham should be flattered.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Paris March Eligibility?

This is from Aljazeera of 22 August 2011: “Gaddafi repeatedly blamed the unrest on al-Qaeda and a 'colonialist plot.' He called those opposed to him 'rats,' and alleged that they had been influenced by 'hallucinogenic drugs'.” Gaddafi was fighting the U.S and NATO at the time and had mentioned in his infamous UN speech in 2009 that al Qaeda operatives were being held in Libyan jails. In 2003, Gaddafi began turning Libya's weapons of mass destruction over to the U.S. In that UN speech, he also lionized Obama for the obvious reason, a black man as a U.S. president.

Okay...Gaddafi was weird and did strange things like sleeping in a tent when he traveled abroad, though one as susceptible to assassination as he was would be expected to take precautions. His precautions didn't help him in October 2011, however, when Obama's attempt at assassinating him was successful, sort of like the assassination of bin Laden, for which Obama never misses an opportunity to take credit, as commander-in-chief, of course.

It isn't too big a stretch to connect all this with the absence of any high-ranking U.S. representative, especially the president, at the solidarity march of world leaders against Islamic jihad in Paris, France, on 11 January. Gaddafi was about the only Middle East Muslim head honcho in 2009 and 2011 actually fighting al Qaeda, the primary consortium of Islamic jihad butchers at the time. Al Qaeda butchers were trying to take over Libya then but Obama and NATO and the UN threw in with the butchers, who finally did take over Libya and then transported their murderous legions/weapons to Syria.

In Syria, where are those mercenaries now? Who knows? Are they fighting Assad, whom Obama unsuccessfully ordered to leave his presidency in 2011 and turn Syria over to whoever could grab it and keep it? Or, are they a part of ISIS, now in the process of horrifically and incomprehensibly terrorizing northern Syria and most of Iraq, featuring genocide especially of Christians and other religious adherents, and displaying be-headings on the Internet to cow whole populations into submission?

Where did these Muslims, for whom former State Secretary Clinton orated in December (one of those $100,000 speeches/conferences?) we must exercise empathy and respect, get their weapons—both small arms and big stuff? The small arms went from the U.S. to Libyan “freedom fighters” (what a laugh!) and to the freedom fighters in Syria. The big stuff was given by the U.S. to the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, which turned tail and ran before the ISIS onslaught and simply gave ISIS all those big guns, vehicles, rocket-launchers, missiles, RPGs and on and on.

Considering his Libya fiasco, it would have been embarrassing for Obama to take part in the Paris march since he was on the wrong side in 2011. He didn't even send old “God love ya” Biden or State Secretary Kerry (busy in India) or UN Ambassador Power (probably hunting for another Libya to liberate). Attorney General Holder was in Paris but not in the march, although he had time for five TV appearances that day, in which he explained that the terrorists were not Muslim terrorists; rather, they were terrorists “using Islam as their apologetic for murder,” or something like that. People like German Chancellor Merkel and British Prime Minister Cameron do not agree, marched, and prefer calling a spade a spade.

Many of the jihad Muslims in Europe are “home-grown,” i.e., citizens born in Europe. There are an estimated 750 “no-go-zones” in France alone, in many of which insulated neighborhoods the police or fire-fighters dare not go, and where “Sharia Law,” prevails, under which women, particularly, are turned into chattel. From these zones come the young religious fanatics, who ARE driven by Islamic directives in the Hadith and Koran (the words of Mohammad), as well as by the radical mosque functionaries who preach hate and murder. Europeans understand the threat all too well, as should Americans who have become too complacent about 9/11.

The time has come to absolutely forbid entrance to immigrants from any Muslim-dominated country (that's all Middle East countries and many African), including even tourists. There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, or 23% of total population. There are about 6.7 million Muslims in the U.S., 2.11% of its total population.

This is from Pew Research of April 2011: “Roughly two-thirds (65%) of adult Muslims in the U.S. were born elsewhere. A relatively large proportion of Muslim immigrants are from Arab countries, but many also come from Pakistan and other South Asian countries. Among native-born Muslims, roughly half are African American (20% of U.S. Muslims overall), many of whom are converts to Islam.” The enemy is in the land, especially the young converts, as in Europe (sleeper cells), who mean harm on the basis of their religion. Paris ignored notwithstanding, this is the problem for the U.S.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Professor Skewers Voter-ID Laws

The Lexington Herald-Leader presents on at least a monthly basis a column prepared by a University of Kentucky professor in the interest of making sure that neither UK nor the newspaper (McClatchy-owned) is ever accused of being middle-of-the-road, conservative, or anything other than far-left-fringe. The column in the 10 January issue by history professor Ron Formisano dealt with undue hardships placed on blacks in certain states regarding their ability to vote. The states he picked for enlightenment: Alabama, Texas, Mississippi. The subject: voter ID.

To make his point, Formisano used university football games in those states, noting that most of the players are black but most of the spectators, as well as (gasp) the alumni, are white but didn't mention that 74% of the U.S. population is white. He conceded that the white spectators showed enthusiasm for the playing of the blacks but noted grimly “the efforts of its elected representatives [Alabama in this case] to prevent the young players, black and white, from voting.” The reason: those awful Voter ID laws, though he didn't mention that the laws apply to everyone, black and white, not just football players.

Formisano mentioned other southern states with the abominable, unfair ID-laws on the books, and even conceded that some non-southern states (implying that one might expect better of them) had those laws. His state, Kentucky, whether considered southern or non-southern, has had voter-ID laws for many years, but Formisano didn't describe the hardship it places upon him and others, black or white, football players or not, to cast a ballot.

Most of Kentucky's football players are black and the basketball team is so black that a white guy, if in existence, can expect to play only when UK is ahead by 40 points in the final two minutes. The coach uses a two-platoon system in which all ten starters are black. Though not as boisterous as Alabama's, UK's fans are nevertheless quite supportive of blacks who risk concussions and assorted broken bones every week. The basketball fans' arena-elevators vis-a-vis sanity are one floor short of the top—frenetic! Formisano didn't mention how the skewed numbers of blacks vis-a-vis the demographics are due to to the ID-punished majority white voters. No quotas in sports, just everything else!

Formisano opined that viewing stadiums packed overwhelmingly with whites jogged his memory as to how most of those whites voted in recent presidential elections: 10% for Obama in Alabama in 2008; 10% in Mississippi in 2012; 14% in Louisiana in 2012. He didn't suggest that attendance at football games had any influence on the voting where he claimed “football is a religion,” but one infers that to be his standard for dissing Obama, or maybe mixing metaphors is just his style. He didn't mention that about 93% of the black vote throughout the entire nation went for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, but that fact had nothing much to do with football anyway, so why bother?

The strangest twist that Formisano gave the subject, though having nothing to do with football, was the claim that southern white democrats in the 1960s began becoming the “bedrock of the modern Republican Party,” thereby deserting Lyndon Johnson, civil rights, and all the rest. Well...no! The democrats deserted because of racial prejudice while the republicans were Johnson's supporters, just as they were Lincoln's supporters in the 1860s. But Formisano wrote that republicans moderated the tirades of Alabama governor George Wallace and began using “coded racial language,” whatever that is/was. He gave no examples.

Predictably, Formisano connected all those social upheavals in the South, presumably including the worship of football, with the religious right becoming a “force among southern evangelicals.” Actually, the evangelicals are a force among the religious right. To a committed liberal, southern evangelicals are roughly equivalent to Attila's Huns and would never worship Harvard football.

In finishing, Formisano wrote that everything he had written is well known with regard to “what is now a solid republican South,” and added, “Less remarked upon are the ironic contrasts that now exist between Southern football and the politics of the white South.” So, thanks to the professor, now we know. Hypocritical white southern spectators should be booing instead of cheering in those sanctified stadiums.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

Newest Lunacy—Dating Laws

The latest big news in Kentucky (front-page above-the-fold in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 05 January) is that Governor and Mrs. Beshear are (again) pushing the enactment of laws in the new legislature establishing domestic protection for mostly teenagers and 20-somethings who have a problem, defined as “dating couples—people who have not been married, lived together or shared a child.” One wonders what “sharing a child” is but the governor and wife probably mean the conception of a fetus through normal sexual intercourse.

If two unmarried teenagers conceive a child in the backseat during a date and get in a fight some time after the child is born, does one of them apply for a protective order, or would such order be available after their fight only if they hadn't conceived a child? The appropriate definition of domestic: “of or relating to the household or the family.” Since domesticity is not an issue in either case above, what kind of protection do the Beshears have in mind? The legislature has been tied up with this nonsense for ten years, with no action, and there likely will be none this time around.

In 2008, Steve Nunn and Amanda Ross lived together for about six months and were supposedly engaged. They were not married, had a fight(s), and the affair went very sour, with Nunn moving out and Ross filing a domestic-violence petition against him. Nunn was forced out of his state-job in Frankfort in February 2009 and in March 2009 a judge ordered Nunn to neither have any contact with Ross for a year nor possess a firearm during the order's duration. The suggested new legislation would not have been effective in this case.

In September 2009, Ross was shot to death and Nunn was charged with violation of the protective order and murder. In June 2011, Nunn pleaded guilty to murder with aggravating circumstances and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In the meantime, there was a hue and cry for more laws presumably to stop people like Nunn from committing murder and the legislature's time was eaten up over this matter, just as it will be with this new “domestic” matter. The result was “Amanda's Law,” which featured electronic monitoring of people violating domestic orders under certain circumstances such as assault. Would this monitoring have stopped Nunn at six in the morning (with whereabouts unknown) before he could have driven a few minutes and done the deed?

Apparently, Amanda's law is not enough to curtail violence/murder, at least regarding people, young and old, who are just “dating” and get into a fight. How will “dating” be defined in the new law...“going steady” for a certain number of days or weeks? Cohabitation is vaguely definable, whether for short or long periods, though it lacks documentation and therefore actual definition. What will be the age parameters effected by the new law? People vote at age 18, so will the new law involve just people who are minors? Apparently not, since people date when in their 70s-80s and at the time are not married, living together or “sharing” a child. The same is true for people of any age.

Imagine two “dating” teenagers getting into a fight. If the 17-year-old guy has been guilty of assault and the judge orders electronic monitering when the 17-year-old girl blows the whistle and gets a petition authorized, what happens to school-attendance? Will a policeman have to check out the guy every day to see if he actually is in school, or does he just have to quit school or continue as an object of curiosity/derision? If monitoring was vital to Amanda's Law, won't it be vital to the “dating” law?

In KET's Kentucky Tonight program of 05 January, there was no non-partisanship on this subject, Senate majority leader Republican Stivers against it and House Speaker democrat Stumbo for a “dating” law, mentioning that the House has passed such a law for ten years. The progressive (democrat) position is that government must control the “daters,” apparently of any age, while the conservative (republican) position is that current laws are good enough, as was the case before Amanda's Law was enacted.

College “date-rape” is at the core of much of this waste of time, though nobody believes that 20% of all coeds, the current insistence, are violated in some way. Co-ed dorms are a huge part of the problem and girls getting drunk at frat houses are another. The legislature might do some good if it outlawed co-ed dorms and did away with fraternities altogether. Even better, parents should teach their teens that animals “do it instinctively,” while people are given the power of brains over hormones. Instead, the big deal is free condoms—and WHOOPEE!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark