I chanced upon a website the other day that has left me wondering. It’s the site for an Amish restaurant in Indiana called The Black Buggy.

To refresh your memory, Amish own horse-drawn buggies, not cars. Their farm machinery is generally horse-drawn.

They don’t have phones or electricity, because both of these technologies would literally connect them to the world through their wires. Electricity and gas power are used in barns for work purposes. Shared telephones are available outside houses in business premises or telephone booths.

Televisions, radios and stereos are not used, which helps keep the Amish unpolluted by the values distributed by the media. For similar reasons, computers with Internet access are banned, although Amish can use a computer at an outside workplace. They don’t use cameras because photos break the biblical ban on making “graven images” (Exodus 20:4).

Hence my surprise to find a website, complete with photos, devoted to promoting an Amish restaurant. Apparently it’s true what they say … the Internet is everywhere.

* If you haven’t been paying attention, or like me, don’t really give a darn, it’s time to remind you that later this summer our neighbours to the south will choose two men to represent two political parties in the last lap of the race to the White House.

Most of us realize the race has been underway for at least four years, ever since George W. Bush was re-elected to his second term as president. Have you noticed we don’t call the U.S. president the leader of the free world as much as we once did? Is it any wonder, with a guy like Dubya in charge?

The Democratic National Convention will be held in Denver in late August and everyone expects Barack Obama will be the candidate of choice. The Republicans get together the first week of September in Minneapolis-Saint Paul to rubber-stamp the candidacy of John McCain.

If Obama wins in November, he will be 47, one of the youngest men ever elected to the top job. If McCain gets the keys to Air Force One, he’ll be the oldest man elected prez at 72. Plenty of people believe McCain is too old to be president while others think Obama is too young. I’m of an age that is halfway between each of them so I suppose I could view Obama as a punk and McCain as a geezer.

If I was an American voter, I might be concerned more about McCain’s age because I know a lot of old men and they are frequently angry. I don’t think the world needs a nuclear-armed leader who is fuming much of the time. Despite his claim to have forgiven his Vietnamese captors, I don’t believe anyone can completely forgive people who tortured him while he was a prisoner of war for almost six years. I’ll bet he would love to get even. I know I would.

The most obvious characteristic about Obama is that he is black and it is neither racist nor patronizing to suggest that getting a black person elected U.S. president is an uphill struggle. I remember my grandmother telling me that Americans would never elect a Catholic when John Kennedy was running for president, but she was proven wrong.

It might be time to prove wrong the belief that only a white man can be elected president.
I can’t decide who is the best man for the job, but either one has to be an improvement on the guy currently mishandling the position.
On the other hand, I have to grudgingly admire someone who calls Stephen Harper “Steve,” if only because it likely irks the PM.