In soccer, as most of you don't know, the superstar on a team is often awarded the No. 10. If you're of a certain age, you might remember this guy, for example.

Well, it looks like the Eagles have their No. 10!

DeSean Jackson has just exploded into the National Football League. True, true, he was a beneficiary of the godawful St. Louis Rams. The idea that he will  be able to do this every game, every week, is folly. But this kid was obvious, and an obvious factor, every time he stepped on the field today in the Eagles' 38-3 demolition of the Rams.

What was already a runaway bandwagon of public sentiment in favor of Jackson just became an unleashed rocket.

By the way, there's another Philadelphia sports team worthy of discussion but I am not able to mention them right now.

Only in America, where free markets aren't really free:

Remarkably, the country that prides itself on being the beacon of free enterprise finds itself with a financial system that needs government money to finance the most important asset most Americans will ever own.

Really? In America in 2008, there's no event -- except maybe for today's Eagles' game -- that I would consider remarkable.

Does anyone else believe they really wanted this to happen AFTER Nov. 4, but it just became unavoidable?

Like a lot of TV viewers last night, I was utterly baffled by the stately mansion-like structure that flashed on that big screen behind John McCain a couple of times last night (above) -- my first thought was that maybe it was one of John and Cindy's seven or eight or dozen or so houses. But as you might expect, folks were using the Google through the night and what they learned was rather odd.

Turns out the building is Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, Calif. So -- what was that all about? Was McCain promising to transform education for Hollywood liberals, so they would learn the virtues of low taxes and free markets? Maybe, but the best speculation is that the GOP's AV Club members wanted a shot of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and they goofed.

McCain himself wouldn't have made that mistake, since he's visited wounded troops at Walter Reed and elsewhere on many occasions, and God bless him for that. But it's a sad metaphor when the party that's running the convention this week and running the country for eight years -- during which conditions at Walter Reed deteriorated to an appalling level until exposed by the Washington Post -- can't even tell the difference between the hospital for our troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and a middle school that's 3,000 miles away.

The McCain campaign belatedly endorses the concept of a "cone of silence"....for Sarah Palin.

"I would immediately close Guantanamo Bay, move all the prisoners to Fort Leavenworth and truly expedite the judicial proceedings in their cases."

-- John McCain. March 19, 2007.

"                            "

-- John McCain, Sept. 4, 2008.

“Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great.”

-- John McCain, May 13, 2008.

          ...."restore the health of our planet"

-- John McCain, Sept. 4, 2008.

"You well know I've been called a maverick, someone who marches to the beat of his own drum."

-- John McCain, Sept. 4, 2008.

Yeah, right. Did anybody else notice that the maverick's drum missed a major beat and a half tonight? That's the problem with so much newspaper coverage (like the current New York Times headline, "Acceptance Speech Highlights Record of Defying G.O.P.") and TV blather, that so much attention is focused on what the guy (or gal) said -- and such little is noted of what he or she didn't say.

Let's consider the "maverick" John McCain. He has taken some bold political risk in the past -- sponsoring the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms and opposing the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 spring to mind -- but to get the GOP nomination this week he had to spend the last 19 months chucking these down the memory hole, so it wasn't exactly a shocker when they weren't mentioned tonight to burnish those maverick credentials. So how'd he justify his claim?

He slammed his own party on graft -- "we lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption" -- but that's pretty easy when Jack Abramoff isn't in the room and everyone who is there thinks he's talking about somebody else. Both parties didn't cut the size of government enough? -- hardly a bold challenge to a house full of GOPers.

There were two major maverick stands that John McCain took this year, two fairly brave positions that actually bucked the majority of the Dittoheads in his own party. One was his promise to close Guantanamo, and the other was his pledge to respect the scientific evidence that climate change is a major problem.

But tonight, on the big American stage, the maverick pretty much left those in the saddle bag. OK, his reference to "restore the health of the planet" was his straight talk, I guess, on global warming, but I pretty much missed that line the first time around, and I promise you that 95 percent of the nation missed it, too. The thing is, the best way to tell the electorate that you take the problems known as "global warming" or "climate change" or "greenhouse gases" seriously is to show people that you weren't afraid to use those very terms in a room dominated by Limbaugh-loving science skeptics.

But you were afraid.

And the failure to mention closing Gitmo -- or the fact that when you were actually still a bit of a maverick you bucked the White House with anti-torture legislation in 2005 -- is unconscionable, in my opinion. The fact that McCain had been tortured himself -- as he so eloquently recounted again tonight -- and, once upon a time, stood as a moral force in this country who would stand up to make sure that we never stooped to that level, was once a compelling argument for a McCain presidency. Now that argument is long gone. Was the problem that it was a cross-current with his Hanoi narrative, or was it just too much of a challenge to a right-wing audience that would gladly follow Bush's torture policies to the gates of hell, and right on through them?

Either way, John McCain was a "safe" maverick tonight.

Which means he was no maverick at all. 

You betcha.

I can't give the "full Palin" to John McCain's acceptance speech because a) he wasn't as interesting and b) I'm too exhausted. His story of his years in the Hanoi Hilton is a compelling saga of courage that anyone would belittle at their own risk, but I do wonder if that's what 30 million Americans were really tuning in to hear tonight. His call for "change" was shockingly light on detail -- could that be because his program of never-ending tax cuts, school choice, health care for Americans who can afford it, etc. -- wasn't so different from the two terms of the two words this maverick dare not utter, "George" and "Bush."

Reminder: I would have liked a lot more details from Obama, too. On the reality-based front, I'd give Obama a B- and McCain a C+. I hope the debates can fill in some of the blanks but I'm not holding my breath. America has too many problems that don't have bumper sticker solutions.

Stay tuned for one more important point about the man who was hailed on one poster as a "mavrick."

Yes! September baseball has been one big downer in this town. Barring a sweep of the Mets in NY (as they did last year around this time, but still...), the day will come to dissect the 2008 Phillies, but not today.

Sad -- sports has always been a diversion from politics, but the last couple of weeks politics has become a diversion from sports.

The Daily News' Fatimah Ali wrote an op-ed column this week that frankly I didn't see until late in the game because of everything else this week -- it was way off base including a bizarre suggestion that there'll be a "race war" in November if Obama loses, which is a highly inflamatory thing to say without any evidence to back it up. So the piece deserved criticism.

Except when the response is to make fun of her name:

On his syndicated radio show, Jim Quinn referred to the National Organization for Women as "the National Organization for Whores," and said of Philadelphia Daily News columnist Fatimah Ali: "[Y]ou know, Fatimah, what's your real name? Come on, seriously. I mean, get an American name, will you, if you want to be an American." He then asked: "You don't suppose she's a liberal black Muslim, do you?"

Stat classy, talk radio. That's why I have to laugh when the president of the United States speaks on national television with a throwaway line about "the angry Left." He's the leader of all the people, but only one ideology possesses this most basic human emotion. Puhleez. On the very day that President Bush said this, I wrote what I think was a pretty level-headed post when it came to Ronald Reagan -- I did criticize his energy and tax policies but noted he was pragmatic about picking a veep and that he was able to connect with voters in ways that Barack Obama has not mastered.

In response, a former functionary in the Reagan administration who now works inside the Beltway as a "communications specialist" wrote a potty-mouthed (and substance-free) response on Free Republic and emailed it to me with the heading "hey douchebag." And yet our president thinks only the Left in America is angry. In 2000, he promised to be "a uniter, not a divider."

Remember that when this year's crop of candidates promises how they'll be.