March 20, 2008. From Senator Obama: “Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t’ want them punished …. With an STD.”

That’s punished with a baby, conception as a mistake.

The blogs and talk radio were all over the remark, of course, but it’s an indication of how protective the national media is of their chosen candidate that this disturbing comment went mostly unnoticed by them. After the initial outrage, nothing in the past two weeks. If words matter, as Obama has famously said, then “punished with a baby” should matter.

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Rutgers Brian Leonard in a drill

I’m trying to step off the emotional cloud of my Giants’ indescribably glorious Super Bowl win and get back to reality. Euphoria is a great place to live, but life is an insistent creature that wants to move on and has a way of kicking you in the jujubes if you don’t. Wearing a cup won’t help, so I’ll start making the transition.

Which brings me to the upcoming NFL combine in Indianapolis. Okay, okay, it’s still football, but it’s not the Giants.

Pat Kirwan’s blog at NFL.Com has some interesting observations on the value of the combines, which is not a gathering of John Deere equipment; it’s where top college football prospects perform rigorous physical tests for NFL coaches and scouts to demonstrate their strength, speed, agility and flexibility in the hopes that they’ll be drafted as high as possible.

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Back in the sixties, during my singing/dancing career in New York, a dancer friend, Bill B., was asked to choreograph the act of a Pat Suzuki wannabe in Vegas. Ms. Suzuki was a young Japanese who rose to modest fame in the Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway production of Flower Drum Song singing I Enjoy Being A Girl. (Incidentally, Flower Drum Song was directed by Gene Kelly and starred perennial Asian actors like Keye Luke — Kung Fu’s blind master Po, and the late Jack Soo of Barney Miller fame.)

San Francisco born Suzuki had a clear, vibrant voice and she sang with great verve. Asian girls then became the flavor of the day and many less talented Suzuki imitators were booked in lounges and clubs throughout the world of lounges and clubs.

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The famous question seventeen-year old Laetitia Thompson offered Bill Clinton on the Washington D.C. set of MTV’s Rock the Vote during the 1992 presidential campaign should never have been answered. She asked, “All the world’s dying to know — boxers or briefs?”

I doubt the world was really dying to know. The question was chosen to titillate and to draw attention to Ms. Thompson. We weren’t aware at the time how obsessed Clinton was with what goes on below his belt so instead of ignoring her with a polite “Thank you, next question,” he gave the moment traction and answered, “usually briefs.”

Thus the trivialization of the process began, demeaning the presidency to a degree Bill himself exceeded with Monica Lewinsky. If Monica ever runs for office might we expect an MTVer to ask, “All the world’s dying to know — circumcised or not circumcised?

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How many of us have seen some driver weave in and out of highway traffic to gain a few car lengths, causing others to swerve or jam on brakes and muttered “I hope he gets into an accident.” Then good conscience steps in and we quickly add that we don’t mean for anyone to get hurt. We just want this guy to pay for his reckless driving behavior. Hell, we’d be happy if only we could phone a cop on the spot to catch the guy. It’s human nature to want people to be taught a lesson.

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A remarkable New York Times editorial titled A War We Just Might Win is being reported by the media with unaccustomed gusto. This is made more remarkable by the fact that the writers are from the liberal Brookings Institute.

Usually, positive news from the war has been downplayed by the liberal media, invested in they are in Bush hatred and driven by liberal pussiness when it comes to laying down the law. These are the kind of people who tell their kids to report a bully to the teacher rather than teaching them to knock his lights out and get the problem over with.

This reversion to more positive reporting is not altruistic, however. The Dems are beginning to realize that the surge is probably working and that the country is filled with people who don’t want to lose, despite the pain involved.

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A recent editorial in our local newspaper, the Durham Herald-Sun, titled Rocking For the Earth, has pushed me to the tipping point, which is the fancy way of saying “I’m fed up,” fed up with editorials, politicians, government, pundits, the U.N. and assorted global warmists haranguing me to change my carbon emitting ways.

Get off my back, please.

While the editorial rightly, but only lightly, observed the preposterous irony of the excessive energy output of Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts as pleas to reduce carbon emissions, it concluded by saying that “everyday people [need] to make adjustments in their personal lives and demand action from their governments.”

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I dropped my nephew off at the condom distributing table of his high school the other morning. Business was brisk, as you can imagine whenever the potent combination of sex and freebies is offered to a teenager.

The condom distributing table is — no sacrilege intended — a godsend for adolescents like my nephew. He’s easily embarrassed when he tries to get a condom the old fashioned way — from a pharmacist. He even blushes when he tries to buy them anonymously from a dispenser.

He was thrilled when he heard through the hormone grapevine that some high schools across the country were distributing the little devices to students to prevent disease or unwanted pregnancies. His circle of friends hoped they wouldn’t run out of adolescence before their school instituted the same policy. Sure enough, they didn’t and my nephew’s school did.

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I never got any self-esteem when I was a kid.

Not today’s kids. Society showers them with self-esteem for anything they do, and my mantle has ten last place little league trophies to prove it. I’m still laboring under the notion that kids should accomplish something before getting a reward, but kids these days get trophies just for signing up. All I got was an education and I’m feeling deprived.

I got a trophy once, but I had to win a race first. I felt great and I assume my opponents felt lousy. All they got were handshakes. It must have been a situation like this that prompted the self-esteem inventor to think, Why should my kid feel lousy because he lost a race?

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Spent another Sunday afternoon at Holy Family Nursing Home in Philadelphia visting my mother, who is a ninety-four year old resident there. Though in a wheelchair, her health is excellent. She’s like that old commercial for Timex that put the wristwatch through a destructive test, after which the sonorous spokesman, John Cameron Swaze, picked it up and said, “Takes a lickin’, but keeps on tickin’.”

That’s mom. Her body’s been tested and ravaged by age, but it’s still ticking. This depresses her. With no trace of the martyrdom Italian mothers have in their interpersonal arsenal she asks, “What am I still doing here?”

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