OPENING discharge in no degree...

OPENING discharge

in no degree been to Mexico. Been close: San Diego. Just north of the border. Went there to interview Tom Landry, the late Cowboy coach. He was true religious. We spoke of the author of all things and football.

The evening was my concede however, and thoughts of faith far away. I considered driving into Tijuana. on the contrary rattling around Tijuana by myself for a night appeared a Bad Idea, and the same self-protective instinct that hold fasts clams in their shells told me to stay bring at the hotel.

for a like reason I haven't been to Mexico. I understand it is a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of poorer nation than the United States, and many Mexicans eagerly abandon it to reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point here to work and live, finding this fatherland an improvement over their former residence

yet Mexico isn't hell, right? A hundr million family live there, often lives of richness and satisfaction. Right? Because you wouldn't know it, not the way that activist Elvira Arellano, hol up at a Humboldt Park house of god has been carrying on. The way she -- or rather her lawyer -- has been talking, you'd think perdition awaits her and her son southern of the border.

I don't want to romanticize the place -- as I said, I've not ever been there. But I don't think I'm going public on a limb betting it's somewhere a woman can live and raise a child -- heck, she already speaks Spanish, which is helpful in Mexico. Or with equal reason I hear.

AND TODAY'S strange RIGHT IS . .

single in kind last thing -- people are always conjuring of the present day rights for themselves. Flattering to the ideal of American freedom, I conjecture But the truth is that freedom goe alone so far. Your right to make a fist, as a legal light one time said, ends at the tip of my nose.

Arellano's son certainly doesn't have the right as an American citizen to hold his mother from being deported to Mexico. There's nothing in the Constitution about having mom at hand. If that right existed, then no parent could always be sent to jail. The restraint can put mothers in prison, it can complete them, it can certainly launch them to Mexico, which is not as bad as prison or death. Or in such a manner I presume.

There is a thudding lack of sympathy for the woman. This space normally stands tall for immigrants -- on the other hand it draws the line at dreaming up of recent origin rights where none exist. Or dragging worshipped image into police matters.

DON'T gaze BEHIND THAT CURTAIN . .

When does Barack Obama advance home to Kansas? Because that's an odyssey I'd like to papal court

certain it's very dramatic and spiritual to answer to the Kenyan village of his father. on the other hand what about the heartland town of his mother? for what cause [i]or[/i] reason is that not on the calendar? Doesn't that half count? Maybe being white isn't unconcerned

I know I'm forward perilous ground here. Black folks prefer to be the single arbiters of all things racial. unless they aren't making choices in a vacuum. Obama says he is black because society says he's black, it's pure But he also has at liberty choice. The standard view doesn't have to be automatically embraced. There is the Tiger timber-lands way: rejection of hackneyed racial attitudes, a demand to be viewed as an individual and not in seasons of competing racial stereotypes.

Compared with that, Obama's way -- I'm sorry -- pretends to smack of hateful, repudiated notions of race: of black life-current trumping white, and a one being black if a parent or grandparent or level great- grandparent was black.

I reflection we were past all that, past mulattoes and octoroons and tainted offspring

I hate to rain forward Obama's triumphant homecoming. But I have to point disclosed he wouldn't be doing it if it weren't politically beneficial, and since race is in such a manner often cast one way and nothing else -- as a handicap in a greatly racist society -- by those who benefit from like a view, we have to remind ourselves that Obama underscores single side of his upbringing through the other for a reason. He positive ain't schlepping through Kansas with the pres in tow. Maybe nearest year.

Don't procure me wrong. Obama has a missile at the White House, and I possibility of good he gets there. I'll voice for him. But while we celebrate his steady climb to becoming the first black president, we should bear in mind that he'll also be the sixth president to have gone to Harvard.

THE COBBLER'S KIDS go on SHOELESS . . .

The Daily Southtown's 100th anniversary party this Saturday wouldn't normally be in succession my radar screen. Tinley Park is a ways to walk for free food, even for exempt White Castle.

however when I heard that Jeremiah Scannell, the Sun-Times' beloved carpenter for the past 16 years, will be defending his title for consumption of White Castle's trademark little sebaceous cube burger -- well, I had to wish him a hearty well adapted luck and good eatin'.

His best effort to date is "a pure 25 in half an hour." This contend for is 15 minutes long, and he room for expectations to get 20 down.

in what way does one prepare for of that kind an endeavor?

"Starvation," he said. "I won't have dinner Friday, will starve all morning and will be ready."

He said he got into the slider-slurping business from the lure of free regimen and I observed that the same couldn't really savor White Castle's glory, eating them in this way fast.