Guest Column

Senior Senator John F. Kerry of the Commonwealth of Mas­sachusetts has launched an of­fensive to get the Federal Bureau of Investigation to open up all its files related to Martin Luther King. Boston’s largest newspaper has gone the erstwhile, but rather forgetful, senator one better and has asked lawmakers to press the FBI to open all its files on the “civil rights era.”

As much as I support this re­lease of the goings-on during the J. Edgar Hoover era, I believe the senator has the cart before the horse. Predating these events was another event, and darkly cloaked in secrecy is a body of ev­idence surrounding the assassi­nation of President John F. Ken­nedy in 1963. All of the facts, all of the cover-ups, all that is known needs to be taken out of that dark vault of secrecy and brought out into the sunlight for all to see. He was our president and we have every right in the world to see and examine every single ounce of evidence surrounding this hei­nous crime. I get a huge laugh out of the current buzzwords being ban­died about, “transparency in government.” We have no prob­lems laying bare all the details of crimes and of every single detail in a victim’s or a perpetrator’s life, yet when it comes to this national tragedy the royal family along with their sycophants have managed to shroud this event as in the darkness of night. I would urge us all to contact the sena­tor’s office with a reminder of the importance of the assassination and the fact that it predates the MLK era. Or look, there’s plenty of room for compromise here, as I am indeed a very flexible fellow. What say we get the masters of secrecy at the FBI to work on both, mach schnell! (For the benefit of you parochial, one-language folks, that’s German for “make it quick.”)

From the interesting facts de­partment: Europe now has taken the lead over the United States in the rather dubious category of il­legitimate births. Even though it seems as though we’ve been bus­ily breeding like gerbils here in the Colonies our friends across the pond have really picked up their pace and have zipped right by us. Iceland leads the contest with six of every ten births being to unmarried women. Sweden and Norway are running about fifty percent while here in the United States we are at about forty percent. Also ahead of us in this affair are France, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.

I love guys like demographer Carl Haub, who explains it thus­ly: “the values surrounding fam­ily formation are changing and women are more independent than they used to be. And young people don’t feel they have to live under the same social rules their parents once did.” The problem with this drivel is that these “au­tomatic

breeding machines” do not accept responsibility for their offspring and who is left holding the bag? Why, we are, of course. We, the unfortunate, hapless tax­payers have to assume the bur­den. It falls to us to pick up the tab for the youth, the irrespon­sible, and the welfare breeders. The worst part of this mess is that here in the United States, a large portion of our unwed mothers are likely to be on their own, are poor, and are poorly educated. Now with those facts before us it’s easy to see why the children of these happenstances do poorly in school, are unemployed later in life, and end up as square pegs trying to fitinto round holes. Is it any wonder our prisons are full? In a similar vein, in a new study in the Journal of Mar­riage and Family, researchers have found stepfathers are rated higher than biological fathers by the moms. This makes sense be­cause the study only covers “frag­ile families,” which are defined as low-income urban families prone to nonmarital births. If we think about this, the biological father in many instances is merely the instrument by which the mother gets pregnant, while a stepfa­ther moves in and becomes part of the family structure, making some sort of commitment to the mother and the children. The re­searchers also found stepfathers have to work harder to fit in and to have a useful productive role. They were also rated as being more cooperative with the moth­ers then the biological fathers. What a fine kettle of fish this country has become. Here’s an interesting news note. President Barack Obama has ordered a crackdown on fed­eral contractors that don’t pay their taxes. He signed an execu­tive order telling federal agency chiefs to bar those companies from getting new contracts. What a great move! Maybe now he’ll go after cabinet members, congress­men, and high-powered lobby­ists. Hello Tim Geithner, Charles Rangel, and Tom Daschle.

Reginald Hill is a great Brit­ish mystery writer. His latest, The Price of Butcher’s Meat, is not his greatest but it’s still a darn good read. It’s out in paperback. If you can’t find it give me a call and I’ll lend you my copy to read. One more service from Norfolk’s number-one columnist.

Tell me something, do you think Frances Ethel Gumm would have gone on to the fame and fortune that she enjoyed, had she not changed her name to Judy Garland? Here’s some sobering news for you “Henny Penny, the sky is falling” global warming cry­babies. For the year past let me share with you the following observations of the weather in Boston as compiled by the Na­tional

Weather Service: average temperature 2009, 50.9 degrees Fahrenheit; normal, 51.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Heating degree days 2009, 5630; normal 5656. Cool­ing degree days 2009, 591; nor­mal 777. So there! I’ll hear no more nonsense and moaning and groaning about global warming.

And finally here’s a nice sto­ry. Fox News is the most trusted news operation in the country, according to Public Policy Poll­ing,

which reports 49% of the folks surveyed trust Fox News. Trailing miserably are CNN, with 39% trustworthiness; NBC, with 35%; CBS, with 32%; and ABC trails the field with 31%. Good news indeed, fair and balanced!