Jackson Free Press

Early in the college football season each year the “BCS” teams normally schedule cupcakes from the FCS (Football Championship Subdivision) and lesser FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) conferences. The idea being that teams open up, normally at home, with easy wins to start the season. If the trend from last week keeps up all season, those easy wins are not going to be so easy. Each of the “BCS” conferences struggled against lesser competition last week. Here is a quick look at each BCS conference last week.

Finally, the Saints can play football instead of talking about suspensions and bounties. Although, on Friday New Orleans got some good news when the players who were effected by "Bounty Gate" got their Suspensions lifted. That is not the end of the bounty situation but it does end it for week one. New Orleans opens the season at home against the Washington Redskins and their rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III. Facing a rookie quarterback is an advantage for the Saints in week one. Preseason games feature vanilla defenses and offenses so RG3 hasn't seen a complete NFL defense but more than likely the Saints didn't the Redskins full offense featuring Griffin in the preseason.

The story Friday was the Saints players suspended out "Bounty Gate" getting back on the field after appeals lift players suspensions. New Orleans had Will Smith on the field in the home opener against the Washington but Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III stole the show. Things started poorly for the Saints after they received the opening kickoff. New Orleans failed to gain a first down and was forced to punt after a three and out. Drew Brees opened the game 0 for 3 passing and the theme of the day was set with the Redskins defense harassing the New Orleans record-breaking quarterback all day.

Well, I just received my first piece of journalism hate mail, and it is certainly one for the record books. Filled with personal attacks against my intelligence and appearance (among other things) and a condescending tone to boot, it alleges that I am "confused" and filled with "self-hatred."

As a reminder, here is the editor's note that the author is responding to. To read the letter, click on the image or see the uploaded PDF here.

On the advice of such a notable clinical psychologist as M. Jane Williams, I have re-examined the argument in my editor's note. And I don't take back a word.

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2012/sep/10/8222/

Not a bad week for our college football teams. Overall, most of the state's college pulled off victories. The big winner last week was Mississippi State.

It was an exciting start to the NFL season last week. The first week of the season started with Dallas upsetting the New York Giants and ended the Raiders special teams handing a win to San Diego.

Things got very interesting quickly in college football last week. The near upsets from week one turned into upsets in week two. Several national championship contenders went down before we even reach the end of September. Biggest winner of week two has to be the Pac-12 (sans Colorado and Utah) from the pre-expansion teams. That means the Big Ten is the biggest looser this week and the conference laid an egg before their normal New Year's Day implosion.

I say all the time on the @jfpsports Twitter account that one of the biggest parts of sports is responding. If the other team scores can you respond with a score of your own or if your team scores can the defense respond with stop and so on. The New Orleans Saints got punched in the mouth (repeatedly) last week by the Washington Redskins. Washington dominated the New Orleans offensive and defensive line most of the game.

In the NFL if a team does something bad once it is an aberration, twice it is a trend and three times its a problem. Right now, New Orleans has a trend going on their offensive and defensive lines.

I swear: The last decade feels like a blur. It's been such a ride here at the Jackson Free Press. As we've been putting together the birthday issue that hit the streets today, we went through 10 years of issues. I also re-read our old business plan, mission, cause statement: even found rough drafts and old possible names for the paper. (We even considered "Jackson Weekly" early on; thank goodness we didn't go with THAT!? I mean, we're a daily now online and on mobile, so that would have problematic.)

One thing I found was this draft "mission statement" and this list of goals we set up in 2002 for the paper. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy now to know how many of these high-falutin' goal we managed to conquer. See for yourself:

September 2002: The JFP's Mission What: "Our mission is to provide straightforward, in-depth, well-reasoned and insightful reporting about news, politics and cultural events in Jackson."

1. We will entertain and challenge readers with knowledgeable and critical coverage of Jackson’s cultural strengths.

2. We will present a news voice that appeals to the under-served people of the community.

3. We will encourage civic participation and voting.

4. We will promote diversity through hiring, reportage and viewpoints, distribution and active solicitation of non-white businesses in our advertising pages, calendar, classifieds and one-to-one pages.

5. We will recruit and train journalists and other staffers and contributors from under-served communities.

6. We will promote locally owned businesses over corporate and big-box outlets and provide a marketplace for entrepreneurship and enterprise that improves Jackson and its neighborhoods.

7. We will encourage and watchdog intelligent redevelopment of downtown Jackson.

8. We will cheer on an artistic, creative, inclusive approach to quality-of-life improvements.

9. We will work to encourage health and wellness in the community every way possible.

10. We will play an active role in building a diverse and cohesive progressive community that will attract positive economic development and Mississippi’s best, brightest and most creative people."

Pew Research survey gives Obama an 8-point lead over Romney.

Fifty years ago today, Gov. Ross R. Barnett blocked African-American student James Meredith from enrolling at the University of Mississippi.

Meredith's appearance on the Oxford campus sparked violent protests and prompted President John F. Kennedy to dispatch federal troops to Mississippi.

Barnett was fined and, later, a body of water was named after him. Meredith got a statue erected in his honor, about which he told the Jackson Free Press in 2008:

Like all the other major schools in the country, they were put under heavy pressure to do a "Black Thing." The night before statue dedication, they did their "Black Thing," and asked me to come early and attend it. I've been trying for 20, 25 years to figure out how to bury James Meredith and go back to who God put me here to be. And I chose that night. And I told them in my presentation to them ... that for the last 10 or 15 years I've been fighting hard with the university to cut out the "black this, black that" thing. That is the worst thing in American education today, the "black this" and "black that."

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2012/sep/20/8555/

It’s Thursday, so you know what time it is for the JFP Sports blog. Every Thursday, we look back and look ahead at all the action for the college football programs in Mississippi. Each week we name our biggest winner of the week and there were several teams in the running. Mississippi State entered the AP & USA Today top 25 polls and Jackson State go win number one of the season.

Time for my weekly thoughts on the previous NFL week. My thoughts on the New Orleans Saints game against the Kansas City Chiefs will be posted tomorrow.

College football last week saw USC go down for a fourth straight year to Stanford, the Big Ten get behind the eight ball in the national championship race after Michigan State ran into a Notre Dame defensive wall. Virginia Tech might have the worse loss of the year against Pittsburgh (more on that later).

No NFL team has ever hosted the Super Bowl and played in the big game. The City of New Orleans was hoping to break that trend this season. That hope might be gone just three weeks into the the season if the Saints can't figure out a way to beat the Kansas City Chiefs. Making the playoffs after starting the season 0-2 is hard but trying to making the playoffs after an 0-3 start is nearly impossible.

Early today, word came down from the top of the JFP tower all the way down to the basement where I am located, that we could set up a pick'em game. I have gone out and set up an account for a few fantasy games.

Nobody tweets like Ward 4 Councilman Frank Bluntson

The website Remapping Debate has posted a story titled "Brother, Can you Spare $829 Billion?" On it, your can see just how much the top public corporations are hoarding ... er, holding.

So how much pump-priming could America’s largest corporations achieve if they were to dig into their cash and cash equivalents as well as their short-term investments? Remapping Debate examined the relevant quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission filings of the 100 largest corporations by revenue as ranked by the Fortune 500 in 2012 (looking only at publicly-held corporations, and excluding those in the financial sector). We looked at filing data for the period closest to June 30th in 2012, 2006, and 2000.

...each of three numbers calculated as a percentage of total assets for each of the three years: cash and cash equivalents (CCE) separately, short-term investments separately, and CCE and short-term investments combined (for 10 companies in 2000, comparable data were not available).

It turns out that more than 70 percent of the corporations listed in both 2012 and 2000 showed an increase over time in CCE and short-term investments combined as a percentage of total assets, including 15 corporations where the percentage point increase was 10 points or more.

Kind of makes me wonder how much faster the economy could recover if some of those companies would put some of their resources into hiring -- and creating additional consumers for their goods. Hmmm... What do you think?

Thanks to the economic downturn, it's a buyer's market for a lot of products: houses are cheap, food is relatively inexpensive (although experts are predicting a bacon shortage of apocalyptic proportions) and now, at Jackson-area Walmart stores, you can even get a pretty good deal on a weapon that shoots bullets faster than I can gobble down bacon, which is pretty damn fast.

Over the weekend, Walmart ran an ad in the Clarion-Ledger advertising deals on shotguns, rifles and MSRs. It's possible that the world's largest corporation understands that global chaos could ensue when bacon reserves dry up.

Anarchy is generally good for the gun business.

According to the ad, one might procure one of these MSRs -- modern sporting rifle more commonly known as an assault rifle -- for as little as $597 and as much $1,097 for a .223-caliber Colt M4 Rifle. If you're smart, you don't go cheap because when the bacon-takers come -- and, believe me, they will come -- you want a reliable weapon to protect your family's salted meats.

At the same time, you don't want to spend too much just to be sure you can afford to stock up on enough ammo to fend off the imminent roving hoards of pork-looters. To that end, there's a mid-level machine gun, a Sig Sauer M400 SRP with Prismatic Scope can be had for just $897 and, according to the ad, is available only at Walmart.

Only at Walmart indeed.

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2012/sep/26/8601/

Update: I deferred to the expertise of the firearmphiles and removed a reference to automatic weapons. Again, the gun people win.