As the task of scrubbing Senator Tom Libous’s name and image from the public square progresses in hushed haste, the right-center field wall at the NYSEG baseball stadium spells out his name over the clichéd expression, “actions speak louder,” the sad irony of a campaign slogan turned into an epitaph.

And so the mad scramble begins to save the seat of power, held firmly and in seeming perpetuity by Binghamton’s finest sons; only three men since 1943, Floyd Anderson, then his son, Warren Anderson and finally Tom Libous, title and power handed down in a ceremonious fashion not unlike the accolade of knighthood or succession of rank in a royal family, a long ago paid wretched dowry that assured upstate got its share of the pork fest that is business as usual in New York.

So now the line forms to join the former royal trio, now becoming the quartet of characters, a select and dubious club pushing 72 years of continuous membership, preserving and protecting that which is our apparent birthright; the unbreakable grasp on Albany and her purse so to continue our meager allowance up here in the hinterlands.

Astroturfing every high school track, building swimming pools, field houses, ice rinks, this was not done with chump change fellow voters, no that was done with influence, chicanery, deceit and most importantly, others peoples money, your money and mine.  Who will be anointed to assure us that projects will be built tomorrow that we can’t afford?

Predictably, the line of 30 or so wannabe candidates formed quickly on the Republican side, apparently all for show as the Broome County Republican party chairman trumped his hand mistakenly by expressing publicly his intent to painstakingly review candidates while simultaneously plucking the under-sheriff out from his law enforcement duties, trading his police uniform in exchange for a shiny new suit and red power tie, the uniform for Albany.

Is replace a convicted felon with a high ranking police official a strategy Republican leadership thinks will quell the under current of queasiness voters are feeling for a system so resplendent with felons and others under indictment?  Does a history of some 40 state level elected officials succumbing to criminal acts, arrest, incarceration, probation and shame somehow hope to go unnoticed?  Should a career lawman mingle with such miscreants?

Apathy combined with ignorance may once again win the day.  Human beings are inherently flawed.  Our systems of governance were originally designed to check and balance one against the other, in light of those human frailties.  James Madison tells us in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

Whether King Andrews endorsed Democrat wins or Republicans prevail, it really matters little when the system itself has become such a corrupting force, redesigned and in part disassembled to serve the wants and desires of flawed men, far from angels.

What was once the Empire State is now but a failing and corrupt empire, devoid of angels and ruled by tyrants.

Conflicting opinions about same-sex marriage need not be contentious given the differences between civil and religious ceremonies.  Civil unions take their authority from the State whereas religious ceremonies take their authority from God.

The religious form of marriage is also the original version, as outlined in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.  Religiously married couples are graced as such under ordination from God.  Civil marriages are something quite less; simply vesting rights from a secular state authority under a man-made law.

While true that certain religious sects are performing religious ceremonies for same-sex couples, this requires a tortured view of scripture, even a disregard for the word of God as he clearly instructs against homosexual behaviors.  To conclude otherwise requires either ignorance, obstinance or outright rejection of widely known biblical teachings.

The simplistic beauty of this “argument” is that God himself settles the matter by disallowing procreation by same sex couples.  Only a man and a woman can form a union that results in birth and therein lies the answer to the question of what constitutes a marriage in the eyes of the Lord.

As for non-believers, I guess for them anything goes and without rules, guideposts and firmly held beliefs, they’re free to make up their own definitions.

The act of a premeditated, cold-blooded mass murder, administered at the hand of a mad-man is somehow rendered as addressed and repaired by exiling a 150 year old flag into the ever expanding world of the never-can-be-talked-about-or-mentioned-ever-again archives of the liberal secret police; mind control division.  Such is the emotionally driven thought process of the modern American liberal.

Where was this supposed outrage for this flag the day before the shooting?  Had this sociopath been wearing an NPR tee shirt and a rainbow hat, would these same knee-jerk jerks be picketing their local public television stations or bad-mouthing homosexuals?  As usual, the liberal response is always that, a response, a reaction, never a thoughtful action-plan, but always a re-action, with the snide sureness that comes with the clarity of smug second-guessing, recollections only after something has happened; seldom a plan for what might be good policy before hand, but a condescending condemnation of what has already taken place.

Symbolism driven by emotion is the one-two punch of liberalism.  Never a thoughtful, reasoned response motivated by insight, observation and experience, quite the contrary, the liberal mind has a “vision” of the world in their minds eye and then molds their emotions around the outcome that they hope for, not the reality of what actually is.  In the liberal world, intentions are as valuable as results, even those unrealized.  “It’s the thought that counts.” is the mantra of the liberal, never requiring accountability but simply admiring and celebrating the effort, even in its failed form because in failure rests their imagined importance in continuing their failed policies in search of solutions that never come.

The key reason that liberals and conservatives can never find common ground is because the conservative is actually standing on that ground while the liberal is hovering above it all, in a rose-colored fog of good intentions that are never to be impeded by cruel reality.  Symbols over substance, intentions over outcomes, once formed as solid opinion, whether it be on the basis of reason and logic or feelings and hoped-for-outcomes, never the two shall meet when the basis for such conclusions is so incompatible with a method in which to merge them.

Positions and viewpoints formed on the basis of reason, logic and experience can never be used to counter a contrarian viewpoint that has been fashioned in the emotional, anecdotal, gut-feeling realm.  Expecting logic to unravel emotion is like churning milk and expecting coffee.

The emotional component of any position is in direct conflict with reason.

In most cases, liberal positions are rooted in the emotional while conservatives find their comfort in the reasoned and experiential.  Public policy, regulations, laws and decisions affecting us all should be formulated in logical and thoughtful fashion.  Emotion is fine for affairs of the heart and family matters, but it is misplaced in determining public policy.  If the liberals point of view cannot stand up to the examination that a logical, thoughtful and reasoned review provides, then the notion cannot carry the day on the concept of the teary eyed and heart-broken, seething with emotion and reasonably empty.

Symbolism is not interchangeable with substance.  The murderous act of a 21 year old mad-man somehow equating to a 150 year old battle flag is simply emotional justification to find cause without effect.  If this psychopath was wearing an NPR tee shirt, these same critics would be silent.  Of course, shifting the focus to an old flag steers thinking away from the real issues of the mentally ill being allowed to roam free.

And now, thanks to complacency, fear and the threat of running afoul of the self-anointed politically correct secret police, a historically significant symbol of the south and of the history of the United States, will forever be maligned for being as offensive as the swastika, not because it is true or just, but because the many who see this as asinine will do nothing to defeat the few who wish to force everyone into the same restrictive cubby-hole they view as the only correct way in which to see the world and subscribe to you how you live your life.  Your thoughts are not your own; conform or be marginalized.

The third murder trial of Cal Harris has ended in mistrial.  The saga of this case, now spanning nearly 14 years, has burnt through millions of taxpayer and private dollars, hundreds of jurors spending tens of thousands of hours in difficult deliberations in three counties and shines a bright light on what happens when a justice system goes haywire.

Michelle Harris was last seen either on the evening of September 11, 2001 or the morning of September 12, depending on who you believe.  While many people saw Michelle on the 11^th., only one has come forward that claims to have seen her on the 12th., Kevin Tubbs, local farmer and Harris neighbor.  Tubbs came forward after hearing that Cal had been found guilty, realizing that the time frame for Michelle’s disappearance, according to the prosecution, was at odds with Tubbs own observations.  Not only did Tubbs testify to seeing Michelle on the early morning of the 12th, he also stated she was with a “young, clean-cut man”, standing together at the end of the Harris driveway, the very spot in which Michelle’s van was later found abandoned.  Tubbs testimony caused Judge Martin Smith to vacate Harris’s guilty verdict in the trial.

The following facts are not in dispute.

Michelle Harris has seemingly disappeared.  The Harris’s were in the midst of a contentious divorce at the time of her disappearance.  Cal Harris is charged with her murder.  No murder weapon has been identified.  No body has been found.  Both Michelle and Cal had extramarital affairs.  It’s complicated.

The following statements, while not facts, are widely held as true.

Cal Harris was generally disliked in his hometown of Owego and Tioga County.  The Harris family is rich while most Tiogians are poor.  Original prosecutor and now Tioga county judge Gerald Keene saw the Harris case as his moment in the sun and took the proceedings personally.  It became the Harris money against the will of Gerald Keene.  Giant egos, political aspirations and machismo combined to forge a fight to the finish.

Michelle Harris could be on a beach in Madagascar.  She could have walked away, fled or been carried away, we just don’t know.  She could be dead at the hands of someone, anyone else, again we just don’t know.  And all of that is not enough to assume
Cal Harris is a murderer.  This is what Judge Martin Smith wrote in vacating the murder verdict of Harris in 2007.  “The evidence at the trial of this case was entirely circumstantial. The proof of guilt, although legally sufficient, and establishing guilt to the jury’s satisfaction beyond a reasonable doubt, was far from overwhelming.”

“Overwhelming” should be the standard when you’re contemplating sending a man to prison for the rest of his life.  If ever there was “reasonable doubt” in a case with no body, no weapon and complicated lives, this is it.

The ”system” ought to stand down on haunting Cal Harris and his family.  A forth trial would be justice delivered by blunt force trauma.

What happens when the truth collides with political correctness, (PC)?

The following statements are the truth, each referenced to its fact source.

1. Blacks in America commit overwhelmingly more crime than do their white counterparts.  By “overwhelming”, I mean at approximately six times the rate of incarceration for crimes committed as compared to the representative proportion of the white population.  Ref.  US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
2. Blacks in America commit more than 50% of all homicides yet represent less than 13% of the population.  Ref. US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
3. Of nearly 1 million violent crimes committed in the US every year, approximately 85% of those are committed by blacks.  Ref. New Century Foundation.
4. Of the nearly 8,000 black homicides committed in 2007, approximately 93% of those killers were also black.  Ref. US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

This is what the critics say and I will demonstrate why they too are incorrect.

The PC crowd says that because blacks are unfairly singled out by police, they occupy more jail cells than do whites.  To swallow that argument, you need to assume wide spread racial animus amongst the police, which is unfairly provocative and completely unproven and furthermore, this argument forces one to conclude that hundreds of thousands of whites, having presumed to have committed hundreds of thousands of un-solved crimes, are free in the streets of America.  This is patently preposterous.

Once you offer this counter argument to the PC worshipper, they usually come back with the old faithful race card, claiming decades of mistreatment, discrimination, impoverishment and hopelessness have created circumstances so dire that crime is the only outcome.

This old shoe is the most easily cast-aside because it traps the worshipper in a snare of their own making.  For 50 plus years, the aftermath of The Great Society has been supposedly addressing these woes by throwing billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of social workers at the problem, all consisting of PC theory and social solutions.  50 years later and still no meaningful change, yet the PC savant sees no irony in this colossal failure?

Now if from this data you draw the conclusion that blacks are more prone to crime and violence than are whites, you would be possessive of common sense and statistically correct while being presumed a bigot simultaneously by those who worship at the PC alter, not because you are wrong, but because you are failing to ignore the facts and the truth.  You see, being PC is about the concept of clicking your heels three times and hoping to awaken to a new world, created in the utopian concept so hoped for in the PC’s mind.

But to keep these facts in proper perspective, let’s look at some other interesting statistics.

1. According to activist Richard Lapchick, 78% of all National Basketball Association, (NBA) players are black.
2. The National Football League, (NFL) census states that 68% of those players are black.
3. Men commit more than 90% of all crimes than do women, according to the US Department of Justice.
4. Men commit over 90% of all homicides as opposed to women, according to the US Department of Justice.

If the PC crowd was consistent in their logic, they would be questioning why whites are so under-represented in professional basketball and football.  And if men and women are each 50% of the population, how is it possible that nine times out of ten it’s the men committing the crimes?

But these facts are not dilemmas to the PC crowd because they only see their demons where they want them to be.  The PC worshipper begins with the premise that whites are evil and blacks are downtrodden.  Beyond that beginning supposition, critics needs to dig out from that basis point before any meaningful conversation can begin, and the point is, the PC crowd is not looking for insight, information or illumination, they are seeking validation, vindication and unwavering obedience to the illogical church they have built on the foundation, ironically, of atheism reconstituted as surely as any religion.

Blacks commit more crimes by far than do whites.  Blacks are better at professional basketball and football.  Women are very unlikely to commit crimes.

The world in which we live is not of a utopian nature.  Tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and lava flows kill millions all over the world.  The playing field of life is not a controlled environment nor is it level.  It is not possible to have assured outcomes when dealing with human behaviors and an infinite number of variables.  Personal responsibility is the key to all of our futures.

This is the best I can offer to my PC friends and to the world of folks who see themselves more as victims than as the most fortunate people on the face of the Earth, spoken from one the greatest cheerleaders the United State of America has ever known, former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

As a founding member of a local not-for-profit government watchdog group, I have learned some very telling lessons about government and human nature and in neither case can I report to you anything remotely encouraging.

What began as an effort to shed light on governmental activity and to assure accountability, fairness and efficiency resulted in unexpectedly painting a bulls-eye onto the organizations own back.  While I expected to find some limited examples of corruption, I was stunned to discover wide-spread examples of it, along with the methods to mislead, lie and justify built into the systems themselves, in anticipation of exposure.  These weren’t examples of good systems built with good intentions gone bad; these were bad systems built with fails-safes and greedy intent gotten worse, proved unsustainable and finally exposed.

In hind-sight I should have known better than to expect overwhelming support when so many rely upon the continuation of the dysfunction, secrecy and malfeasance to sustain themselves either through their employment, political affiliations or in many cases both.  This is one of the by-products of the continued lowering of the bar when it comes to matters of integrity, honor and honesty; an endless supply of excuses, justifications and lies necessary to lend credence to the behavior becomes the mantra of those so engaged.  Eventually, the lies repeated become the truth when all involved are profiting; that is

until it all comes apart when the reality of the schemes unsustainability slaps everyone along side the head.  When pointing these realities out, the organization became the object of scorn, so to distract from the truth and away from examination of the cancerous systems themselves.

Like the Wizard of Oz, “Don’t look behind the curtain.”  Nothing to see here but malfeasance, dishonesty and greed, all nicely packaged as public services.  And when you have the temerity to expose such things, you get threatened.  Threatened with boycotting, ostracized in certain areas of the professional community and excluded from certain circles of influence, based on positions and opinions.  Some of the threats have actually been carried out, resulting in tortious interference with business commerce and contracts.

The rot in the system runs to the core because the rot was a component of the systems very creation.

226 years ago, in Federalist 51, James Madison, writing as Publius says,  “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.  A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Today, some of us embrace the task of exercising “auxiliary precaution” and we won’t stop seeking the truth, even while fear chases courage into silent hiding.

Fear is fomented and catalyzed by political correctness, (PC.)  As the PC movement gains temerity by tormenting everyday people with threats of ostracisation and marginalization, they have set their sights on the outright attack to be waged against Christianity in general and Christians specifically.  Prior to this new-found boldness fostered by success in Indiana in cowing the political class into re-writing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, the PC gang, while clearly holding Christians in contempt, stopped just short of frontal attacks on the core values of the institutions and concentrated instead on the individuals.

That strategy has clearly changed just recently and I for one am glad for it.  Let’s get this battle started right now.  My gloves are off and my mission is clear;  I’m here to bloody the nose of the PC crowd and push it back into the closet in which it hid for so many years.

The new goal of the PC crowd is clear, it is brilliant, and if successfully will succeed in bringing down society as we knew it.  In short, a PC victory here will mean, “game over.”  This is a battle between atheism and the religious world.  This is the battle of our lifetime.

Once the concept of God is negotiated away or prohibited from consideration, swept into quaint obscurity or otherwise relegated to the concept of fable or relic to the past, then all is lost in the name of the secular decree of man as god.  With that loss goes all hope for concepts of honor, valor, dignity, humility and humanity, all internal gages provided to us by a living God.  Making this mistake ignores the compass God gives us all in favor of the politically correct GPS that navigates by way of convenience, convention and ease.

Our entire reason for existence as a nation was the pursuit of religious freedom.  Not freedom from religion, not an exiled colony devoted to atheism, but a place where religious practice was tolerated without edits dictating affiliation to a religion of the State. The signers of our formative documents were overwhelmingly religious men, mostly Protestants, four were actually preachers.  The creation of the documents themselves were then and now widely considered, “instruments of Providence..” this according to Benson John Lossing’s work, “Biographical Sketches of the Signers of the Declaration of American Independence”, (1848), generally considered the seminal work on the subject.  Even a more-or-less casual awareness of these documents leaves the thoughtful in awe of the inspirational magnitude of the beauty and polished symmetry of the words.

The fifty-six signers of our Declaration of Independence were truly awe-inspiring men of character and honor almost impossible to imagine by today’s standards of acceptable mediocrity.  Knowing full well that in signing this decree they were in effect signing their own death warrants, this is how they ended their treatise.  “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

In today’s, “Oprafied”, homogenized, metro-sexualized America, the concept of a pledge of this gravity, made to one another using such daunting words, makes little sense so bastardized is our modern language, but in 1776 they were counting heavily on God and on each other, no matter what the costs or obstacles, up to and including fiscal ruination and death, but what did they save for the very last word?  Honor.

No greater honor have we than in defending this great country and the inheritance these brave men died giving us.  Only a God fearing people can be entrusted with that which God provided.  It is ours to lose or ours to treasure, but impossible to keep without a renewed commitment that would make god and our founders nod fondly in approval.

My favorite eatery in my hometown of Binghamton, NY is the Norman Rockwell example of an immigrant Greek family perfecting the art of the traditional American breakfast.  Every day, the cops and the manual labor crowd hits first, just after 5AM sharing the diner’s copy of the local newspaper.  About 7, the office workers roll in, mulling their own Wall Street Journal’s over coffee.  Last to arrive are the college kids; hung-over in sweats and sandals, cell phone obsessed and getting all of their information from tiny hand-held devices 6 inches from their noses.

I have my breakfast there every day and depending on my schedule, I will plug into any of these shifts of patrons seamlessly, but not so this past Saturday.

As I squeezed into the only 2-person table in the small, crowded dining room, the table of 4 behind me were a group of three young men and a woman I had never seen before.  They were in the middle of what must have been the funniest story ever told because they were laughing and carrying on so loudly that it was impossible not to notice.  Usually moments like that have a short duration, but not in this case.  These kids carried on and drowned out every other potential conversation in the place.  This went on for their entire stay; loud, obnoxious, guttural, profane and markedly racist.  Every other word out of the mouth of the loudest and most obtuse boy was the N word.  In the 20 minutes or so it took me to eat my breakfast, this boy said it loudly and proudly no fewer than 50 times.  In every sentence describing people, he was clear to define it in terms of race in its rawest description.

I was one of 50 or so people who witnessed this behavior.  With the exception of a few very subtle and short in duration looks in their direction, the crowd was otherwise silenced into self-assigned roles as unappreciative and disgusted observers, their breakfast conversations stifled and their day started with unwarranted and unwanted racist rantings.

This group of mouthy, racist malcontents were black.  Had the same racially charged rhetoric been coming from the mouths of whites, someone would have called 911 and a hate crime arrest would have been contemplated.  The only reason this behavior is tolerated is because of the poison of political correctness which has demanded that the unacceptable be embraced.  If a group of white kids had the bad judgment to have breakfast in a predominantly black neighborhood in a predominately black town and carry on the way these kids did, they would not have walked happily out of the diner into the morning sunshine as this group of jerks did, they would have been beaten bloody into silence, perhaps worse.

The 50 or so folks who witnessed this took away with them an impression and to those 4 young people who provided that impression I would like to know, what do you expect?

A recent article outlined what the Binghamton Human Rights Commission, (BHRC) described as a “trust gap” they say exists between the Binghamton Police Department and the minority community.  The commission outlined proposed legislation that outlaws racial profiling, requires more data collection and analysis, mandates training in anti-racism and cultural competency and compels a plan for diversifying the police department.

A speaker in favor of the legislation at the city council meeting said, “It’s about preparing our police force to be more fair and more just…”  Fairness and justice are absolutes, there is no such context as “more fair” or “more just”, you’re either fair and just or you’re not.    Another attendee, stating she has a black, 6 year-old son and said, “ ..it is sad to think about having to sit him down to explain how to interact with the police. When you see a police officer, it should be a sign of safety, a sign of comfort, a sign of someone’s here to help me, not a sign of being tense and being nervous and not understanding what to do.”  That’s right and it’s a conversation every decent parent has with their kids, black or white, as they describe the enlarging world around them as they grow up.  It’s called responsible parenting

Existing federal law has outlawed racial profiling for years.  For the BHRC to suggest a redundant local law needs to reinforce existing federal law betrays the unstated yet undeniable assertion by the BHRC that the Binghamton Police Department must be currently violating federal law.  The BHRC should retract that portion of their proposed legislation or go on record and make the specific allegations that demonstrate this alleged offense.  As for data collection and analysis, the department has already begun to outfit officers with cameras as funding permits.  This should go a long way in showing the public exactly what a night out in the streets of Binghamton really looks like.  The BHRC might not like what they see from a camera focused closely on those folks suffering from this so-called “trust gap.”

Cultural understanding and anti-racism training is currently a large part of every officers training at the academy.  Perhaps BHRC members ought to consider attending the academy as interested citizens to become better informed.  And finally, a plan for diversifying the police department.  How is it that hundreds of individuals somehow manage to find this well publicized information already?  Perhaps the commission might better spend their time doing recruitment drives on their own if they think that’s productive.

The undercurrent of the proposed BHRC legislation smacks of accusing the Binghamton police of racism and cultural insensitivity.  I think the commission would be more productive by educating the minority community on how to affirmatively adjust their behaviors and their attitudes about police, authority and acceptable social norms.  Quit breaking the law, stop challenging authority and assimilate into normal, working-class, law-abiding, family centered society and this “trust gap” issue magically vanishes.

The BHRC legislation has the tail wagging the dog.