Yesterday a 40-year-old Dearborn, Michigan man who e-mailed two separate death threats within one minute of each other against ultra-conservative columnist and over-exposed blogger Debbie Schlussel was sentenced to eight months in prison.

That's good, right? Right! Here's hoping that the rest of the community, in Dearborn and anywhere else in the 50 great states and the District of Columbia knows that freedom of speech is protected in this great country, even when free speech is exercised by those who abuse it.

I'll admit Schlussel speaks the truth about many issues when it comes to the extremists and radicals from the East that have declared war by any means necessary in the West and anyone who assimilates life in the West. She's also as rambunctious and over-the-top as any warlord has ever been portrayed, and when she portrayed Dearborn's Fordson High School as 'Hezbollah High', she specifically drew my ire. I thought she was being grossly unfair and I e-mailed the Michigan native and University of Michigan graduate. I didn't get so much as a 'No Thanks'.

Schlussel points to the school's principal, a person she paints as radicalist-friendly. Schlussel goes on to identify all of Fordson with this label because she's 'discovered' that some of the Arab community at Dearborn Fordson have ties to terrorist organizations, although not all methods of discovery have been disclosed. When the school's wrestling coach was fired last year for cause due to a religious disagreement, Schlussel hung the hateful moniker around the school's neck.

Now it's my turn.

Is Fordson's community squeaky clean, upstanding and beyond reproach? I don't know. Is Fordson a pit of lawless, angry war lords hiding behind religion to further a directive of destruction against America? I don't know that, either.

What I do know is that Fordson is a place where school spirit soars. It's a place that seems to field a lot of good teams, year after year, in many different sports. The Tractors have been good for over 80 years, spanning the school's early all-white, European-based population to the days from 1950-1980 when it was a mix of Poles, Italians, English and Arab to today's near-exclusive population of Arab and Muslim students. In researching Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, I discovered that Fordson has as faithful and passionate a following as any school. This group is not bound by age, religion, gender or economic status. They're bound by their common heritage as Fordson Tractors.

I do know that a lot of good teachers, coaches and administrators care a great deal about Fordson High. They care about their students, about their school's reputation and their ability to mold a lot of different kids into graduates potential of success beyond the football field, algebra or the school yearbook, the Fleur De Lis.

Doesn't sound like a place that perpetrates hate if you ask me.

So what am I, or anyone for that matter, to think of terrorist ties? Am I to believe that because Fordson has been labeled as 'Hezbollah High' that this type of link is only to be assumed at Fordson? Does anyone really believe that just one school, one restaurant or one office in the metropolitan area can be linked to terrorism? I suppose because 9/11 terrorists flew out of Boston's Logan Airport that terrorism can be sufficiently linked to the entire Boston airport? Of course not.

And what if a teacher is found to be embezzling funds, like what happened in the mid-1990s where I went to school? Does that mean we should have renamed the school as Enron High? What of sexual assault? Does that mean we rename a school as Pedophile Preparatory? I'm not saying all the students and faculty at Fordson, or any other high school for that matter, is of upstanding conviction. What I am saying is labeling an entire high school like Fordson as 'Hezbollah High' is completely irresponsible for a journalist of any ilk.

And despite Schlussel's impressive credentials, education and credits, when a blogger takes a hateful position like Schlussel has, bloggers everywhere are discredited as a whole rather than in part. I've written some things that have been unpopular, but I've never hung that label on any entity.

Why? I'm simply not that irresponsible.

Schlussel is brilliant, intelligent writer and reporter who, sadly, sprinkles a healthy amount of hate and labels it as passion into her work as it relates to Fordson High School, and a Dearborn native, albeit wrong to threaten her life to be certain, let Schlussel know that calling Fordson 'Hezbollah High' won't get her invited to the Tractors' homecoming.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, and is working on a follow-up title, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries!

This weekend I get an up-close look at the destination of many an Oakland County prep student, Rochester's Oakland University. The Golden Grizzlies welcome Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne (IP-FW) for a four-game set this weekend.

The neat, professional-looking campus is a reflection of the county footprint it's nestled within. The tony stores and quaint retail districts of Rochester and neighboring Rochester Hills, plus the manicured lawns and jaw-dropping residential communities that surround Oakland University are unique to just about any collegiate campus in the state. In short, there's no 'student ghetto' at OU. In fact, I've yet to see a fraternity or sorority house on or near the campus, although I do see the letters BMW, SAAB, and H3 quite a bit. I'm fairly certain nearly any college student would take that over what a beer-stained frat house could offer.

Yesterday's first game was rained-out, meaning four games will be played in the next 31 hours, starting with today's first pitch at 12:00 p.m. Oakland's varsity field has long been known to be a liability to just about every coaching staff the school has empowered since the days the school was better known as the Pioneers and was a Division-II powerhouse in many sports. Per usual, the weekend will be played with fingers crossed and eyes wandering to the sky, hoping prayers for no more rain will be answered.

It shouldn't be like this. I know Michigan is in the midst of a one-state depression and even mighty Oakland County feels the pain. That doesn't mean progress can grind to a halt, too. In my near-10 years within college baseball, I've watched three different head coaches struggle to recruit the best talent available in Oakland County to OU because of facility offerings. Nate Recknagel was a freshman team All-American at OU; He's at the University of Michigan now. This week he had a single, double and home run for the Wolverines in a mid-week victory over Western Michigan. Several county student-athletes like Recknagel have chosen schools like Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan and Central Michigan because of facilities.

Players don't chose the aforementioned schools over Oakland because of academics. OU's got tremendous offerings in the undergraduate programs it features. Three years ago the University of Detroit canned their baseball program, giving Oakland a better pool of players to pick from against the other five Division-I schools in the state.

Oakland needs a new facility, a legitimate facility, if they expect to compete for any of the county's best baseball players. Oakland County is chock full of collegiate-quality baseball players. Look at the most recent statewide poll from the Michigan High School Baseball Coaches Association, at http://www.mhsbca.org/, dated 4/30/08. Four of the top 10 teams in the Division-I poll pull their players from Oakland County, including top-ranked and defending state champion Lake Orion, also ranked No. 26 of the top 50 teams in this week's nationwide poll at Rivals.com. The state's No. 10 team in Division II is Madison Heights Lamphere.

Times are tough -- I get that. College baseball is not a revenue-producing sport in this part of the country for any school, that is also fact. I don't pretend to have all the answers and the truth is, the answers are hard to come by. None of what I'm saying is news to the leaders at Oakland University and I'll be the first to admit I'm not going to be the one the writes the check to solve the problem. But as an Oakland County resident, I can also say that OU is a jewel in the rough, tucked away behind the glam and glitz of a well-to-do county. The school could be a regional, collegiate powerhouse at the Division-I level.

Oakland has a tremendous swimming facility and a perfect basketball facility, one that helped Coach Greg Kampe's Grizzlies to a win over the University of Michigan a few years back. Oakland's won conference championships and NCAA invites in other sports, proving it can be done.

Here's to hoping there's a way to create a better opportunity for the county's best players to stay at home and play college baseball at OU.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th, 2008 from Arcadia Publishing