Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of the new program announced by the government whereby contracts would be formed with 300 colleges and universities to train officers for the armed forces in lieu of regular college credits. The program was intended to train 250,000 men, a third of the collegians then in school across the country.

Admiral Darlan had agreed with the Allied commanders to fly the flag of the Allies on French ships at Dakar and Alexandria and other points in Africa. Controversy, however, still swirled around the Admiral's position as leader of the French forces in North Africa. Secretary of State Cordell Hull backed away from the controversy, but provided general support for Darlan’s position.

The fact that Admiral Darlan had announced the surrender of the French ships to the Allies just a week before he was killed, supposedly by French Resistance, leads to some natural speculation as to whether these supposed Resistance members were that in fact or simply Vichy sympathizers in masquerade responding to orders from within the Reich.

Il Duce was reported by reliable London sources to be suffering from stomach cancer. At the same time, another London report surfaced that Hermann Goering had ordered Nazi control of the Italian train system, indicating that it was not providing efficient enough transportation for Nazi defenders in Italy. It would appear that the notoriously brandished statement through history to the effect that at least Mussolini got the trains to run on time was, by 1942, no longer true. Even his one accomplishment, it would appear, in twenty years of effort had gone to seed. Either that, or the Nazis were using his lack of popularity as an excuse further to undermine his authority, providing him conveniently with a case of cancer, one from which soon enough he might inconveniently expire, that is when the time came for the cancer to spread to his Duce.

We think we somehow might be able to hear the conversation in his office: "Il mio Duce, c'è un cancro crescente sulla sua direzione. Dobbiamo la lancia il bolle. Capisce?"

On the editorial page, "Out of Order" tells the sad tale of one William Wellman, an African-American convicted of an assault on a white woman in Statesville and sentenced to death, based solely on identification. It turned out that he had signed a payroll slip two or three hours before the crime, some 400 miles away in Virginia. Governor Broughton had stayed execution pending further investigation.

The editorial bristles, however, at the statements made by various trade and labor organizations in support of the man’s release, and particularly notes its objections to what it considers a superfluous statement of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties working closely with the NAACP, suggesting that the man’s release would instill confidence among African-Americans in the war effort and promote unity in the country.

Well, we have to ask first what in the world anyone was doing on death row over an assault. But, such were the times.

Second, we observe that this editorial appears overly prickly on this issue and perhaps betrays a bit of the old Southern defensiveness of which Cash wrote in The Mind of the South. But, such were the times.

The editorial was certainly on the right side of the issue morally and with respect to justice, in terms of exoneration of the man. That, it seems, was all that was needed to be said.

The case points up the old problem of the unreliability of identification testimony, especially cross-racial identification. Many a person, no doubt, has gone to the executioner innocent of the capital crime of which they were convicted based on improper identification. The case out of Winston-Salem in 1984 of Darryl Hunt, African-American, who wrongfully remained in prison for two decades for a rape and murder of a white woman he never committed, readily leaps to mind. The case out of Dallas in 1976 of Randall Dale Adams, Caucasian, wrongfully convicted of killing a police officer during a routine traffic stop, is another. Both cases resulted in gripping documentaries, the latter being elevated, in "The Thin Blue Line" by Errol Morris, to a philosophical and psychological plane anent the human mind’s inherent problems in perceptual discernment under stress, macadamized further by the rhythmic insistence suggestion's power may have, post-trauma, to conform dissonance to the metronomic scale and fill the void of culpability with virtually any human form which shows up generally fitting the bill of splintered particulars formed in the rush of the road's cinders, that compounded further once the tiger's paw has sunk its grip into the tar and found its irrevocable toe-hold to exact instinctive vengeance.

The annals of American jurisprudence are full of such sad matters. DNA has intruded itself on the jurisprudential landscape over the last two decades to exonerate many falsely accused; but DNA is not left at the scene of the crime in all situations. At least in the three referenced, the truth showed itself before it was too late.

"Old 77" provides that which we feebly sought to provide yesterday, a recap of the historic 77^th Congress, longest in session at that time in the history of the country, longest since the Congress which impeached Andrew Johnson in 1868.

"Correction" finds refreshment in the view expressed by Governor Frank Dixon of Alabama in populist style, rearranging the debate between New Deal advocacy of social programs for labor and farm and the counter thrusts to it by the industrial sector, to incorporate small town America, that which the Governor termed the “crossroads”, as having likewise a principal stake in determining the direction of the country and whether anymore it should tolerate the bureaucracies of Washington growing fat while the Treasury waxed lean distributing the fruits of social welfare programs.

Whether the Governor took his wording from the spot where Robert Johnson met the Devil and learned to play his instrument in the neighboring State of Mississippi, we don't know. Whether Harper Lee ever read this day's print before writing her best known novel, we also don't know. But there it is in the wording of the piece for you to consider.

Perhaps, there is some glint of recognition of this ever ongoing debate through the history of the country, right up to the present contentions over health care. Many a populist silver-tongued, silver-footed devil has taken up the shrill cry of no new taxes, no more big Washington government, no more government giveaways, all the way down the road to Depression.

Well, Robert Johnson may have had a Tea Party with the Devil; we don't know that either.

But we do know that the Tea Party does not speak for America, that is, unless America truly is a bunch of fascist nuts.

So any Senators and Congressmen out there who are staking their political futures just about now around Christmas on these loud-mouthed nuts of the Summer Past while ignoring the interests of the health of the people, continuing conveniently to line their campaign coffers with insurance company money on the rationalization that their constituents really don't want a bloated bureaucracy and increased taxes but would instead prefer to die and watch their neighbors die without adequate health care or lose their homes when the catastrophic illness strikes without sufficient coverage or with cancellation of that which they did have, to you, sir or madam, we are keeping a list and checking it twice, and come next year, your Royal Highnesses, we’ll be seeing who's been naughty and who's been nice. Best think thrice before you sell the country down the river and ship us a load of goods in the guise of a Trojan Horse, that which is apparent in the current feeble, febrile, watered-down Senate version of the health bill--and especially you, you recalcitrant Republicans, who won't vote for anything except that which continues to offer lineaments to your coffers. If your own elephants tend to forget, we won’t. If it can’t be done with 59, we shall try for a safer number next year. Caveat emptor, Mr. and Ms. Hotshot, today. It's your seat at risk, tomorrow, which creeps in its petty pace.

Anything goes, with Ol' St. Nick.

And speaking of problems in the realm of perceptual discernment, another piece from Coronet relates the strange phenomenon of falling warm stones over Chico, California in 1922. It seems fish had fallen from the sky there in 1878. Perhaps the stones were hurled by Il Duce as he began his Fascist regime. The fish, maybe, by President Grant after the end of his graft-ridden tenure in office.

Or, could it have been that the stones had come from the two WAAC's twenty years before visiting Charlotte a few months earlier, leaving with unkind sentiments expressed in The News, branding the town as comprised of rubes?

Whatever the case, they there in Chico in 1922 need not have felt so all alone.