One day last week I visited the Subway on Penn Avenue in Wilkinsburg. It is one of the extremely limited number of franchises owned by Blacks, and the owners are Marlin and Wanda Metz.

I had been procrastinating for some time about paying them a visit and doing an interview about the difficulties they encountered and how they addressed them. Throughout the first half hour as Marlin explained some of the business problems and how they overcame them, he mentioned his wife, Wanda, six times. It was obvious that he loved and respected his wife and partner and men are generally not that open about their feelings.

(NNPA)—Dear Brother Greg: You and I have had fun sparring over the years and judging by your recent column in the Washington Examiner attempting to take me to task for taking Juan Williams and Frances Rice to task for their support of Rush Limbaugh, that’s an exchange you’d like to continue. So, I’ll happily oblige you, my friend.

Interestingly, you chose to quote two Limbaugh comments that I stated up front were unproven and only one from the long list of documented derogatory comments made by him. For example, you didn’t dare quote a comment that Limbaugh confirmed making to an African-American caller: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”

(NNPA)—I do not understand those people who criticize the president for taking his time to get public policy right, when much of the misery that has come to visit their lives is a result of public policy, in both the domestic and international arenas, formulated by the previous administration, that was founded on distorted information, tunnel vision and hasty judgment that produced ill-conceived decisions.

In fact, Vice President Dick Cheney said that with respect to the time being taken to arrive at a policy for Afghanistan that President Obama was “dithering.” But President George Bush’s response to 9/11 was to trash careful deliberation and hastily proceed to initiate a conventional war against Iraq, when it was not at all certain that this kind of war would lead to the destruction of al-Quaida or the capture of Osama bin Laden. And despite Bush’s failure to achieve his policy goals, he never rendered his decision to the kind of deliberative process Barack Obama is using.

Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States a year ago yesterday and I wasn’t there to see it. Oh, I have a pretty good idea about how everyone felt that night, my Democratic friends were cheering and crying and high-fiving all over the country. My friends from abroad were sending e-mails of shock that Americans weren’t crazy cowboys after all and maybe there was hope for the planet. I could see my Republican friends that night, too, even though most everybody predicted that McCain was going to lose the electoral vote, they were still bummed. They were collectively like a 20-something-year-old guy who loses a game of one-on-one to a woman on a public basketball court. Yes, everybody knows that women can ball, and that theoretically any woman can beat any man on the basketball court, he just didn’t think it’d happen to him.

That’s how McCain and most Republicans felt, losing to the first Black candidate for president of the United States. What’re the chances that that would ever happen? Interestingly enough, I missed all of this revelry and self-reflection that night, which allows me to have a more detached view of Obama’s election one year later. I was, as I often am politically, traveling through the middle.