The fate of Jon Huntsman’s candidacy for president will go a long way toward determining whether sanity prevails in the Republican Party and whether it has any chance of wresting the presidency from the grasp of Democrat Barack Obama. Huntsman, whose last two jobs were ambassador to China and governor of Utah, does not need to win his party’s nomination for Republicans to pass those two tests. But if Huntsman’s 1 percent support level doesn’t radically improve and if he quickly is drummed out of the primary field because he espouses moderate to traditionally conservative positions, held by the vast majority of U.S. general election voters, then the Republicans will lose the election and be relegated, at most, to the role of “Drs. No” in the House of Representatives. […]

Today is the first day of Sukkot, the Festival of Tabernacles, at the little synagogue in Chatham Center and at Jewish and certain so-called “Hebrew Roots” Christian houses of worship throughout the world. Sukkot, a harvest holiday, also commemorates the 40 years when Israelites wandered the desert after emancipation from slavery in Egypt. The Sukkah, a hastily made grass or straw hut, symbolizes the temporary structures that sheltered the Israelites during those four nomadic decades. It’s a sweet holiday, worthy of everyone’s respect, if not active participation, being a celebration of agriculture, freedom and an autumn thanksgiving as well. […]

For this column, The Weekender briefly descends from the heady heights of presidential politics to the wetlands on the Chatham Village/Ghent border. I attended the public hearing held on the evening of Sept. 19 at Tracy Memorial Village Hall concerning two competing visions for the development of about a dozen acres abutting Route 66. As one now dead politician frequently intoned while in office (free large latté at Ralph’s to the first reader who sends that president’s name to me at lloydconstantine@gmail.com), “let me make one thing perfectly clear, I am not,” suggesting by the title of this column that the best use of the building currently housing Price Chopper, should it leave, is a 23,000-square-foot Burger King. But there were many whoppers, little lies and ludicrous pronouncements made at this public hearing. Without categorizing them, my favorites were the overarching claim to competence and trustworthiness by the Price Chopper contingent and the equally absurd assertion of objectivity and civic mindedness by the Chatham Plaza team. […]

Republicans who are Evangelical Protestants (and make up a majority of likely voters in the key early Iowa and South Carolina primaries) are worried that candidate Mitt Romney is not a Christian and more specifically that he’s a Mormon. However, a broader group of voters, including The Weekender, increasingly focus on the distinct possibility that Romney is reptilian and specifically, as the Culture Club crooned, a “Karma Chameleon” who “comes and goes” depending upon which way the wind blows. […]

President Obama’s Midwest bus tour and the Republican straw poll in Iowa marked the beginning of the 2012 campaign. However, neither the president nor any of the Iowa contestants commanded the attention paid to the entry of Texas Governor Rick Perry into the contest for the Republican nomination. In the first of a periodic series of columns on the presidential candidates, The Weekender examines Perry and whether his intemperate criticism of Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are merely Texas tough guy talk or an important indication of what this candidate really stands for and the path he would follow if elected. […]

“Ford to New York: Drop Dead.” That Oct. 30, 1975 headline in the New York Daily News was thrust into focus again, twice, in recent days. Once was with the passing of Gov. Hugh Carey, widely credited with saving New York City from financial death after Congress and unelected President Gerald Ford rejected all pleas from New York state and city officials to prevent the bankruptcy of the Big Apple during its darkest days. The federal government has bailed out numerous auto manufacturers, banks, insurance companies and other “indispensable” private entities over the years. Presumably, the financial and cultural capital of the world was not deemed indispensable, although President Ford made clear that certain functions in New York City essential to the United States would be maintained. These did not include public education for New York City’s children. […]

The irony embodied in the sign could not have been more nearly perfect (The Weekender learned in grade school that “perfect” was the superlative and in Sunday School that is was reserved for God) telling shoppers in the village of Chatham that the adorable little perfume and essential oils shop “Chatham Makes Scents” was closing with some of its best selling items still available nearby at “The Grainery” natural stuff emporium. The announcement that this store was closing, as always, provoked “too bads,” but also spotlighted the incoherent and commercially unrealistic offerings that have occupied a sizable share of Main Street and contiguous commercial blocks within the village over the last quarter century. This, while our beautiful village lacks stores selling things that virtually everybody wants and many people need. […]

If a time comes when the United States no longer is the, or merely a, world superpower (we should all strive for that not to happen or at least anytime soon), let’s resolve not to become like the English. When The Weekender column launched in January, I committed to send back columns from the many places, foreign and domestic, I travel to, but relate them to the communities the column primarily concerns, Chatham and Manhattan. […]

The news that same sex couples can marry in New York state and that Steve Saland, our district’s senator, had cast the decisive vote reached The Weekender in Amiens, France at 4:57 a.m. June 25 in an email from The Chick in the Black Dress. I was up early to begin the third and last day of a bike tour from London to Paris and for a few minutes was liberated from the obsessive focus on hydration, carb-loading and pain suppression that is the fabric of such extreme endurance events. […]

As New York’s legislature moves to conclude this session, same sex marriage dominates the lawmakers’ and public’s attention (and will be the subject of The Weekender’s next column) and overshadows much other important business, including proposed legislation affecting the State University’s vitality and future. As every year since its founding in 1948, SUNY’s fate is being determined by the legislature instead of teachers, students and college administrators. SUNY is treated like, and de facto is, a state agency. Its budget and many of the most important details of its educational offering and agenda are determined as if SUNY were the Department of Transportation or the Department of Motor Vehicles. That model hasn’t, doesn’t and won’t work, condemning SUNY to a future of mediocrity when it has the capacity to ascend into the elite of national and world public universities. […]