How I get a kick when I hear the vocabulary of not all, but many, black athletes use when being interviewed during or after a football or basketball game.  “What’s so amusing James?” some might ask.  Well folks, almost always these guys use this line repeatedly “You know what I mean,” when they’re unable to express themselves.  Just once, I’d like a TV or radio commentator when asking these professional black athletes a question and they give the aforementioned response the interviewer would respond, “No, I don’t know what you mean.  Please explain it to me.”  Folks, the reason I find these pitiful responses by black professional athletes so comical is that these guys are mostly college graduates!  “How sad is that?” I ask.  To be honest about it, it’s not difficult to explain why so many black professional athletes have such poor vocabulary skills.  Most, from high school through college have been rewarded with passing grades regardless of whatever pitiful grades they made.  “Why James?” again some might ask.  Folks, please don’t be so blind to the reason, the skills and talents of these gifted black athletes spells money to school districts and colleges when their athletic talents fill football and basketball stadiums with fans.  After they graduate from college and not picked up by a professional team (most don’t get drafted) many go on to live a life of poverty due to them, though college grads, have not acquired any marketable skills while in college.

Some years ago I heard two black famous ex-Cowboy players, Billy Joe DuPree and Robert Newhouse, while interviewed that when they were in college they made sure they were going to take advantage of their football scholarships and learn a skill to help them after they left the National Football League.  Sadly, many black athletes don’t heed these two-football greats advice.

At my St. Paul’s Catholic parish, there are two young Hispanic ladies who often read scripture during the mass.  Sadly, the ladies butcher the English language to where it is almost laughable.  I sometimes cringe when they horribly mispronounce words.  But, I must in all fairness, applaud them for their unwavering effort to continue their role as ministry readers.  Recently, after mass while drinking coffee with a friend, one of the Hispanic lady ministry readers, who is married to an Anglo, and her daughter sat at our table.  My friend and I welcomed her and asked her to please tell us the name of her pretty little girl.  In articulate Spanish she said, “Her name is Aaa-maa-lee-aaa.”  Without thinking I quickly said, “Oh, Amelia is such a beautiful name.”  “No James,” the Hispanic lady quickly scolded me.  “I told you how her name is pronounced and you pronounced it like Americans want it to sound.  You remind me of my brother Gilberto, who now living in the United States says that his name is Gilbert.  How insulting and shameful for one to change one’s name when they come to this country.”  I then told her that my name in my baptismal certificate is Higinio (E-he-knee-o) and I’d be crazy as hell if I was going through my life in the United States explaining to almost everyone how to pronounce my name.  And for that reason, I gladly changed it to James.  Had I not been in the church’s cafeteria, I would have told the lady that if she was so concerned how Americans pronounced her daughter’s Spanish name, why didn’t she try to learn how to read and pronounce English words correctly instead of butchering the heck out of them when she read.

Last month President Obama, like countless of other politicians again announced to Americans what a poor job our public schools are doing particularly to minority students throughout the country.  Man, where has President Obama been?  For decades, public schools have steadily declined in providing a sound education to American students, and yes, particularly to minority students.  Public school graduates are so lacking in reading skills that many students planning to attend college have to take remedial reading classes.  Someone please explain that to me.  If one does not have good reading skills, how in the world can one comprehend what’s in a textbook of whatever subject?

On a study, Public High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates in the United States funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation revealed this startling stats:

1. Students who fail to graduate high school prepared to attend a four-year college are much less likely to gain full access to our country’s economic, political, and social opportunities.

2. Only 70% of all students in public high schools graduate, and only 32% of all students leave high school qualified to attend four-year college.

3. Only 51% of all black students and 52% of all Hispanic students graduate, and only 20% of all black students and 16% of all Hispanic students leave high school college-ready.

4. Due to their lower college readiness rates, black and Hispanic students are seriously underrepresented in the pool of minimally qualified college applicants.  Only 9% of all college-ready graduates are black and another 9% are Hispanic, compared to a total population of 18-year-olds that is 14% black and 17% Hispanic.

5. The portion of all college freshmen that is black (11%) or Hispanic (7%) is very similar to their shares of the college-ready population (9% for both).  This suggest that the main reason these groups are underrepresented in college admissions is that these students are NOT acquiring college-ready skills in the K-12 system, rather than inadequate financial aid or affirmative action policies.  By comparison, graduation rates for Whites and Asians are 75 and 77 percent nationally.

“James, any advice to fix this broken school system?” one might ask.  “Yes!  I suggest going back to basics:  Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and I might add two more. English Grammar and Spelling.  And, make ALL students learn these subjects well and don’t promote them if they fail to do so!”

A new book by Tom Pauken, Bringing America Home (Rockford, Illinois: Chronicles Press, 2010) covers many varied topics ranging from the economy and foreign policy, to politics and culture. As the book's sub-title, How America Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back suggests, it offers a veritable platform for guiding these United States back safely as it were, through crisis and challenges, by implementing a series of common sense and traditional conservative policies. One chapter in particular makes the book entirely worthwhile, even if one reads nothing else. Namely, Chapter 5 details the ongoing destruction of the American Middle Class through both poorly devised economic policies and outright failure of political leadership in Washington.  

Unlike many on the Republican side, Pauken is not a mouthpiece for big business or the corporate elite. His sentiments are with populist Main Street, admitting what many liberals have sounded from the hills for quite some time, that the rich are indeed getting richer while the Middle Class grows poor. His solution is not a resort to socialism or to government takeover, however, but a return to free market capitalism and to limited constitutional government run in the interest of Americans. Pauken explains that what has caused existential inequality, as well as the hardship on the Middle Class is not free market capitalism but a corrupted form or crony capitalism. It is the self-serving alliance between Big Government and Big Business, and between the corresponding drives for both power and profit.  

Pauken is highly critical of the lack of business ethics and humanity evinced by modern American business practice. Some in business at the highest levels of management raid their own corporate assets for personal gain and pass off the wreckage to others. Similar behavior gave rise to the recent housing bubble that burst and to instability in what amounts to a "bubble economy," with originators of loans and mortgages deliberately and sometimes deceitfully evading responsibility for risky financial behavior. The business culture in this respect mirrors a decline in standards of morality throughout the broader culture. For all the obscene bonuses and exploitive practices on Wall Street, however, these do not explain why manufacturing jobs have left or why real income for the Middle Class has shrunk.  

According to Pauken, "A central reason for.[the] huge trade deficits and the shift of economic power from Main Street to Wall Street is a business tax system that gives private-equity moguls incentives to take such risks with the companies they control." They have an advantage over U.S. company owners who might otherwise run businesses in a conservative fashion. Simply stated, business debt is encouraged because it can be written off on taxes, whereas the 35% corporate tax rate discourages business savings and investment. Except for the U.S., every major trading country in the world provides tax advantages for domestic manufacturers. Information technology companies are outsourcing now at an alarming rate for a similar reason.    Moreover, U.S. goods shipped overseas carry an average added 18% tax burden compared with most foreign competitors, and this keeps trade deficits widening every year. According to Warren Buffet, the trade deficit is possibly of greater worry than the budget deficit or consumer debt burden near-term, because we have to borrow from other countries to finance it. The annual account deficit is now more than $800 billion. The politically chic idea that the U.S. would somehow sustain its quality of life for the Middle Class while giving up its manufacturing base and transforming into the world's premier 'knowledge-based economy' was a sheer fantasy. The competitive global environment and rampant trend towards American outsourcing has gone on unabated and continues, while elective politicians mouth empty promises and defend a principle of "free trade" amidst the uneven playing field and structural disadvantages created by America's own stupid business tax system.  

Americans are clinging to their Middle Class status, living paycheck to paycheck, mired in consumer debt and finding it difficult to find good jobs or to work the requisite number of hours needed to pay their bills. Meanwhile Pauken says, "We are passing out money we do not have through a Keynesian stimulus package designed to revive the economy." Moody's has declared the United States runs the risk of losing its triple-A credit rating within a decade if the federal government does not bring soaring levels of spending down. Imagine what this will mean if the U.S. has to finance its debt at dramatically higher interest rates owing to the loss of most favored bond rating status!  

In part it was this sobering recognition, which led Jim Bunning (R-KY) to bravely though ineffectually remind his colleagues in the Senate that even unemployment benefits have to be paid for. Lawmakers couldn't find the $10 billion to do so. The annual budget deficit is running $1.35 trillion this year, and the national debt topped $12 trillion and is set to double in less than ten years-and when it does the U.S. will lose its triple-A credit rating. One economist remarked that America today resembles less the developed economic superpower we have come to think of, and more like something of an emerging market having both a weak currency and huge deficits. America is headed for the perfect economic storm, as well as destruction of its vaunted Middle Class inside the decade unless we reverse track resolutely and swiftly.  

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

So reads the title of the third chapter in Tom Pauken’s excellent new book, Bringing America Home (Rockford, Illinois: Chronicles Press, 2010). Pauken chronicles how Nixon/Ford retreads had begun to reassert influence over the Republican Party during the single term of George Herbert Walker Bush after Ronald Reagan left office. Dominance of a big business, “corporate liberal” elite grew during George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Worse, while the elder Bush held by and large to a realistic, balanced, and security-driven approach to international relations, a coterie of former liberal Democrats who joined the Republican Party in the late 1970s literally began running American foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11. These neoconservatives believed in global democratic revolution, as well as preemptive and indefinite warfare to accomplish that aim.

Many were former Marxists, who transformed their communist paradigm into a similarly utopian vision for imposing democracy everywhere. If one searches for an American precursor, one may fairly conclude that it is Wilsonian. It is therefore true that progressivism had reentered the Republican Party even before the more recent emanations so apparent in the Democrat Party. By the time George W. Bush left office, a Big Government domestic crowd and a Big Government military-expansionist crowd had virtually assured runaway spending and the near financial collapse. President Obama really did inherit a mess, notwithstanding his penchant for making things worse.

The Republican Party is still digging out from shambles, but it was never the conservative principles of Goldwater/Reagan that failed. Pauken opines the Republican Party must reassert basic conservative principles, not only to do well in the next election but in fact to save the country. The past, à la Goldwater and Reagan offer salient policy positions for a course correction, as do recently popular libertarian-conservative expounders of limited government and constitutional conservatism, such as Ron Paul. Paul supporters were instrumental in igniting the Tea Party movement. Paul may even be this generation’s Goldwater in terms of being the intellectual progenitor, giving rise to a fresh articulation of conservative principles and to future realization of conservative political ascendancy. How soon that ascendancy happens depends as much on what the Democrats do as Republicans, and also on how bad things get.

Pauken points out what is now widely understood across conservative ranks, that “Federal spending and unfunded federal mandates on state and local governments are completely out of control.” He then asks rhetorically, “Is there any hope whatsoever that a true federalist could actually get elected president, reduce the growth of federal spending, and return power to the states, local communities, and the people?” Sadly the question is now unanswerable, because it may depend on what emerges from the shambles of the Republican Party and whether the GOP rediscovers its conservative root. It depends as well, as it always does, on the people—whether they give in to having stirrups at their sides, and saddles cinched to their backs and Big Government riding herd.

According to Pauken, “The Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan was a conservative party of limited government. That all changed in the post-Reagan era of Republican politics.” During the first eight years this century, Republicans came to embrace big government conservatism, but this had more in common with the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt or the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson than with the conservative philosophy of Goldwater and Reagan.  

Neoconservative Fred Barnes lauded George W. Bush for pursuing conservative ends by traditionally liberal means, a.k.a. activist government. Barnes noted that neoconservative Republicans were favorably disposed towards a conservative welfare state. As Pauken sums it up, “A cynic might suggest that what Barnes was really saying was that there is nothing wrong with big government so long as ‘our guys’ are in charge.” Of course from the standpoint of the economy, big government conservatism still bankrupts the country and stifles recovery. From the standpoint of liberty it matters only by degree, if one master happens to be more benevolent than another. From the standpoint of the Constitution, however, it matters not one whit.

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Almost once a month my wife and I head down to our favorite get away spot, San Antonio.  Being Hispanic we find San Antonio (a city was a large Hispanic population) a city that offers us many of our cultural way of life that we thoroughly enjoy, particularly in the area of music and food.  Believe me, if you love Mexican food, San Antonio offers in my opinion, the best in the state of Texas.  I’ve eaten Mexican food throughout Texas and other southwestern states and have not found any Mexican Food that compares to how San Antonio’s Mexican restaurants prepare their food.  I rate it even with the way my beautiful mom cooked, and man was she great at preparing all the Mexican delicacies many Texans are accustom to devour.

Though I thoroughly enjoy driving to San Antonio, there is one thing that I hate going down there — slowdowns due to highway construction.  For years, it seems, Interstate 35S is always under construction.  Though it takes me 4-1/2 hours to drive to San Antonio, a highway construction area can slow you down up to an hour or more.  As an ex-heavy equipment operator for Tarrant County and well aware of how troublesome and hard it is to repair roads, I find myself cussing at the highway road workers.  Folks, I, along with many of you should be ashamed for insulting and cursing these unappreciated road workers who try to keep our roads and highways safe.

I’ll never forget when as a heavy equipment operator working for Tarrant County and were rebuilding a major thoroughfare in an affluent community how daily work commuters would swear and shoot us the bird as they slowly drove by.  “When in the hell are you SOBs going to get the hell out of here?” many would shout.  Here we were, rebuilding a road that was in terrible shape, working in the hot sun, with dust and dirt blowing in our faces and drivers cussing at us.  I just didn’t get it.  Yet, after we finished rebuilding the road, I don’t recall anyone living in that area calling Precinct Four and thanking us for making the road wider and safer for them and their families.  They like me, when I drive to San Antonio, were inconvenient and took out their frustrations on the road workers.

A few days ago I read in the Star-Telegram that a homeowner was angry with Oncor, my electric delivery provider, because they didn’t trim his trees, which he believes caused him to lose his electrical power due to a recent record snowfall.  The homeowner had been without power for 2 days before they restored it.  Meanwhile, my nephew, who lives in Hurst, lost his electrical power due to the snowstorm for almost a week, as did many of his neighbors.  Having a small baby, he moved in with his mom, my sister, until his power was restored last week.  Sort of uncomfortable at his mom’s house, my nephew would daily go to get his mail and check to see if his power was back on.  He told me that he never saw such a great group of workers cleaning up the mess, downed trees, and working almost around the clock to restore electricity to his community.  In other words, though uncomfortable, my nephew in his unfortunate situation was thankful for the Oncor workers and their job performance.

When the snowstorm hit here in Lake Worth, my daughter an RN who works the graveyard shift in the ER room at JPS that evening left our grandkids with us.  Her husband, who works in Dallas, was forced to stay with his mom in Hurst due to the icy roads.  Around 9 pm that evening our electricity in our neighborhood went out.  Our house being total electric in a relative short time felt like the inside of a refrigerator.  However, two of my grandson jumped in bed with me and with our body heat we slept comfortably.  Around 3 am the next morning and snow still coming down with a harsh north wind, I could hear trucks and men talking.  When I peek out my bedroom window I could make out that they were Oncor repairmen.  Through the bitter cold I saw the repairmen climbing up a utility pole to replace a damaged transformer and down electric power line.  Around 6 am I heard the heating unit kick on.  Soon, our house and my family were very comfortable.  At that moment I thought of what a great bunch of guys these electric repairmen are and how many of us do not take the time to thank them for their dedication to making us comfortable in our homes as they weather the harsh elements in repairing all the damage a snowstorm can caused.  Folks, I don’t know how much these guys make, but seriously, how many of you would take a job to clean up streets littered with downed trees and climb up a utility pole to repair a down electric cable in the bitter cold around 3 am?  Not many I’ll bet, but there’s always that element of individuals that have a profound dedication to do what is good for his fellow man without getting any gratitude in return — policemen, firemen, ambulance workers, medical professionals, utility repairmen and those in the Armed Forces quickly come to mind.

Next time you are slowed down due to some road construction or are left without water or electricity due to a storm our drought (which cause underground water pipes to break), don’t curse or swear at those dedicated workers who are doing their best under harsh conditions to restore our roads or our utilities as soon as possible.

A whopping million thanks to the electrical repairmen at Oncor!  Keep up the good work guys.