A Layman's Look

Well, here we are in the off-season for the NFL and all teams are heading towards free agency and the draft, perpetually preparing for bettering the roster and the team.  I read an interesting article recently that the Dallas Cowboys have actually drafted more defensive players than offensive players in recent drafts.  They have been spending their premium picks, however, on offense.  Now it seems to be time to reverse that trend and start building the defensive front. Something important to keep in mind as we prepare for 2017 is that the Cowboys drafted two young defenders last year who never saw the field.  One, Charles Tapper, shows great speed and seems to have a pretty high ceiling as a DE in Dallas's 4-3, but it remains to be seen if he will live up to the hopes and expectations from the coaches and front office.  He was a fourth round pick last year, so chances are good that he could materialize and be a difference-maker on this defense. The other pla...

I just finished and published the article about how the SBC can be an instructor for the Democratic Party in how they act and react to moves made by the GOP.  I just want to quote David Leonhardt here as support for my sentiments and link you to his article in the NY Times. "I understand that all of these options sound aggressive and partisan, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable to make such an argument.  But Democrats simply cannot play by the old set of rules now that the Republicans are playing by a new one.  The only thing worse than the system the Republicans have created is a system in which one political party volunteers to be bullied." Check out his article  here .

When I was a boy, something important happened in the Southern Baptist Convention.  Three men got together and devised a plan to gain control of the leadership of the convention.  As far as I know there was nothing that they did which was technically out of bounds as seen through the SBC Constitution and bylaws, but part of what they did was definitely ethically questionable. I don't know how it is today, but at the time, the president of the SBC could appoint a certain number of people, unopposed, each year to leadership positions.   That wasn't generally a problem since the leadership of the SBC shifted from conservative to moderate on a regular basis.  These three men, however, and here comes the questionable part, realized that if they had enough people present to elect their candidate for the presidency at the opening meeting of the convention, and then have those people leave before the next sessions began the next day, they could create a large enough mass o...