Right Minded Online

Glen Dean described a real-life example of what happens when Atlas shrugs.

Does anyone out there remember the campaign of 2006? Of course you do. You recall how Democrats were calling on Americans to vote for change (them), and how they threw Joe Lieberman overboard because he was a bit too hawkish. The day after Election Day, Democrats declared that America had voted for a new direction.

The Democrats have since held symbolic votes in the House and Senate in an effort to force the GOP to stand either with them or the President — a move that seeks to isolate the President politically on the war.

The Democrats have long struggled to take on the President’s war handling without being perceived as defeatists. It’s too late. The Democrats have already invested themselves in our defeat. In fact, a Fox News poll was conducted right after President Bush announced his plan to send an additional 20,000 troops to Iraq. One of the questions was “Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed?” Only 51% of Democrats answered in the affirmative. Remember, these are people who oppose the war, but support the troops, and who bristle whenever their patriotism is questioned.

Furthermore, during the recent State of the Union address, President Bush declared “On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.” Half the audience applauded. Half the audience did not. You know which was which. It’s not enough to say that Democrats don’t think we can win this war. The truth is, a great deal of them don’t want us to.

Despite the toothless resolutions that have been passed, the Democrats, who convinced a majority of the American people to vote for change and elect them to power, do not have the courage to pass any legislation that has some actual teeth.

Bear in mind that the Democrat Party’s modus operandi on the war has for years been to simply oppose whatever President Bush is for. For example, back on December 5, Newsweek ran portions of an interview with incoming House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, who is a Democrat. The story began “In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq,” Congressman Reyes “said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a ’stepped up effort to dismantle the militias.’”

So the President has come out with his plan to ship an extra 20,000 troops to Iraq, and guess what? Within hours, Congressman Reyes told the El Paso Times that such a troop buildup was unthinkable. I guess you could say that Mr. Reyes was for a troop buildup before he was against it.

The Democrats, although they control both houses of Congress, do not have the constitutional authority to order troop movements or affect war policy. Those powers belong exclusively to the Commander-in-Chief. The Democrats do have the power to cut funding for the war, which would, in effect, force the President’s hand, but all indications are that when the chips are down, the Democrats will continue to fund the war.

In other words, the Democrat Party, which promised the American people that changes were coming on the war front, are going to continue business as usual. This has the liberal anti-war base up in arms, but I, for one, am grateful. I don’t expect the Democrats to be cheerful about the war, but I do expect them to at least allow our President to finish what we’ve started and eliminate the terrorists.

At any rate, we Americans have invested several hundred billion dollars and the lives of more than 3,000 servicemen in fighting terrorists. That’s a small price for freedom. I don’t want to diminish the life of even one serviceman, because that one serviceman is also someone’s son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife, father or mother.

Remember, though, that we lost more than 400,000 servicemen in World War II — 20,000 in the Battle of the Bulge alone. Our war in Iraq is the most sanitized war we’ve ever fought, but it’s still war, and you know what they say about war.

While we wring our hands over the rights of terrorists in Guantanamo Bay and fret about wiretapping telephone conversations of suspected terrorists, the terrorists are still committed to the destruction of the United States and our way of life, and they are very clear about their mission. George W. Bush has not created more terrorists. He is the first U.S. president with the courage to finally take them on. Neither has George W. Bush emboldened the terrorists. Years of pretending Islamic militants didn’t exist emboldened them until they finally pulled off 9/11.

Despite the promise of a new direction, Democrats, now that they actually share power in Washington, do not have the courage to follow through on changing course. They can only pass meaningless resolutions as window dressing. In the meantime, we have a lame duck president who does not fare well in public opinion polls, who is finding himself increasingly isolated from members of his own party, and who is scorned by the U.S. media and foreign leaders. Unshaken, President Bush’s priority is not to find favor with his enemies, nor to boost his poll numbers. He instead remains committed to protecting the American people from terrorists. For that, history will judge him well.

The right side of the web has put up some excellent coverage of the left’s Bush hatefest in Washington D.C. over the weekend. We’ll start with Right Wing News (I | II) and Stop the ACLU.

Rush Limbaugh has particularly thorough coverage, including Hanoi Jane Fonda’s appearance at the anti-war rally. The Maha Rushie notes that “Jane Fonda, the darlings of the anti-war sixties, after 40 years and lots of Botox, after hitting the jackpot, marrying wealth, now reliving their gory years….”

Hanoi Jane in Vietnam

Hanoi Jane protesting Iraq

Plus, Rush has a hilarious audio clip of some Code Pinko chick screaming “Pull out now!” I believe she is referring to our troops in Iraq, but since I try to maintain some level of decorum here, I can’t write what really comes to mind when I hear this.

Hot Air covers the anti-war protesters who vandalized the Capitol. I guess these would be the “peace activists.”

World Net Daily: It’s nice to see ‘Hanoi Jane,’ Snow says

Yesterday, I accomplished a personal best by running 6 miles in 45:03. I did it the easy way: on a treadmill. I absolutely cannot run outside during cold weather, so during the winter I am relegated to the indoors. The good thing about a tradmill is that there are no hills, no curves, and no hard pavement. (But then you’ve got no scenery, either.) I just set the thing on 8.0 mph and start running. It has taken quite a long time and conditioning to get up to where I am now. If I lay off for so much as a week, I can tell it. You have to do this 3-4 times a week in order to maintain your conditioning. I always start off with a minimum goal of three miles. Even when I get cramps, I can still endure three miles. Usually I can make four miles. Sometimes I can even last five. But yesterday was my first six-mile run at that speed. The last mile was excruciating.

I couldn’t do it without music. I bought my wife one of those new iPod clip-on shuffles for Christmas, and I inherited her old shuffle — the kind that looks like a stick of gum. I hang it around my neck and crank it up. Without that, I would really struggle. I have to have the music. My playlist is really short: a few Rush songs, some Jars of Clay, FFH, two or three Journey tunes, a little U2, and the Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Yesterday when I was squeezing out that last available molecule of energy trying to get to six miles, I was thinking with disbelief about the athletes who run marathons. And when I say “athletes,” I do so with great reverence and esteem. You see, a marathon is 26.2 miles, or 20.2 miles more than I ran yesterday. And they don’t run them on treadmills, either. I honestly don’t see how the human body can churn out 26.2 miles at one time. I’ve been running for years and am sitting here celebrating a six-mile run.

The world’s record for running a marathon is 2:04:55, set by Paul Tergat of Kenya. You might think that’s a long time, but it averages out to one mile every 4 minutes, 46 seconds. Folks, I’d probably have a heart attack if I tried to run even one mile in that short a time, but imagine running at a pace of 12.6 mph non-stop for slightly more than 2 hours. That guy’s body fat must be about 2%. He’s almost super-human.

Sharon Cobb and I kinda sorta agree on something, which is noteworthy, because our areas of agreement so far are limited to four things: our support of Israel, rock-and-roll, sports, and photography. On everything else, we’re about 180^o out of phase.

Ms. Cobb left a comment to a blog post I made on Saturday about John Edwards’ new digs, which I used to make the point that rich liberals really don’t care about the poor. They just use the poor for political leverage.

At any rate, Sharon disagrees with that assertion, but does note that “What Edwards is saying is a lot of people don’t get the chance to obtain what he did.” Perhaps that is what he believes. The idealist in me hopes so.

Ms. Cobb further opines that “When we are all on equal footing for the basics, then we all have a chance of the American dream. But if you’re too sick to go to school and have no health insurance and your mother is beating you because she never wanted you to begin with, then that child is facing a lot more obstacles. I know I am getting redundant about this, but every child in America must have an equal chance to have love and happiness and education and health care. Invest in these things while they are young, and the vast majority of these kids will more than pay their fair share of taxes which we need to pay for initially.”

I sort of agree with that summation. The problem is that we Americans are never going to be on equal footing for the basics. But I would argue that we’re closer to such equality than any other nation on earth.

I wish more than anything that every child had the benefit of love, happiness, education, and health care. While one can make the argument that the taxpayers are already providing the latter two, the government can never supply love and happiness. The only guarantee is the right to pursue happiness, not happiness itself. I wish Congress could pass a bill today that would effect love and happiness upon everyone, but that, of course, is an impossibility. The best thing government can do is clear the pathway of obstacles that otherwise bar our pursuits.

I once wrote in an op/ed that you can trace just about every social ill we face as Americans back to the failure of men to be fathers to their children, and husbands to the mothers of those children.

And in one of my favorite op/ed pieces, “It’s time to end the war on poverty,” that I published on October 3, 2005, I noted that:

According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate in the U.S. in 1959 (the first year for which data are available) was 22.4%. By 1965, the year President Johnson declared war on poverty, the poverty rate had already fallen to 17.3%. The next year, it was 14.7%. In 2004, it was 12.7%. Since 1965, the poverty rate has never risen above 15.2%, or fallen below 11.1%. Clearly, the War on Poverty hasn’t worked. It’s time to end it.

A lack of wealth is not the problem. Going back to the Census Bureau, per capita income in 1967 (again, the first year for which such data are available) was $2,464, or $11,500 in 2003 dollars. In 2003, that figure was $23,276, having more than doubled during the intervening 36 years. So if our wealth production continues to increase, then why hasn’t the poverty rate been appreciably lowered?

The answer lies in the breakdown of the two-parent family. Using 2004 data, the poverty rate for people in married-couple families was 6.4%. The poverty rate for people in families with no wife present was 13.8%. And the poverty rate for people in families with no husband present was 30.5%.

In other words, a person living in a home headed by a single woman is nearly five times as likely to be impoverished than in a home headed by a married couple. And, of course, the percentage of families headed by married couples has fallen considerably since 1965. In that year, 87% of all families were married-couple families. By 2004, that number had fallen to 75%.

Thus, as per capita wealth has increased in the U.S., the number of individuals living in single-parent homes has increased so that our wealth-building has been offset by the breakdown of the nuclear family such that the poverty rate during the past four decades has remained largely unchanged. Throwing money at poverty has only treated its symptom — not the disease itself — and has instead produced unintended side effects, namely single parenthood.

We therefore do not need more government. We need more married-couple families. It’s so simple a concept that it’s often dismissed.

This finally brings me to the topic of this post — namely that education matters more than just about anything else if one is to even come close to realizing his God-given potential. (And everyone has God-given potential to do something useful.) Of course, the government guarantees a public education to every child in American, but not every child is guaranteed to receive a good education. You can drag a child to school, but you can’t make him learn. That’s where parents come in, and without a stable home headed, preferably, by a married man and woman who are committed to each other and their children, then, yes, those children will most likely face obstacles that really shouldn’t be there.

Why does education matter? A story that ran in the Tennessean last Thursday gives a perfect example. It has to do with businesses that offer high-fee or high-interest payday and tax refund loans, usually to low-income people. I’m a free market guy, and realize that such businesses wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a demand for their services, but payday loan businesses are insidious for the same reason that the lottery business is insidious; they prey primarily on low-income people who aren’t good at math, and they take advantage of the ignorance and gullibility of others. Here are a few key points from the article:

She gets her W-2, takes it to H&R Block and then applies for the fastest refund method available, a refund anticipation check that helped Brooks take care of bills and other little emergencies last year.

“I don’t really think about it,” Brooks said, waiting to catch a bus at a downtown Nashville bus stop. “I think about my refund, the things I need. And even if I wanted to, I don’t know how to do my own taxes. Where would I start?”

…

Count Germaine Williams, a taxpayer in southern New Jersey, in that number. Williams said she paid $304 to have her taxes professionally prepared this year. That included a fee to create a temporary bank account into which the Internal Revenue Service will electronically deposit more than $3,000.

For $304, I think I could learn how to do my own taxes. Indeed, the quote that bothers me most is “I don’t know how to do my own taxes. Where would I start?” Folks, I’m not a CPA, but I can read and do arithmetic. And I am a product of public schools. I’ve always done my own taxes, even though it continually gets more complicated.

For years, even after I got married, I used the 1040EZ. Then after my wife and I bought our first home and started itemizing, we switched to the 1040 and Schedule A. Then came along the tax deduction known as “our son,” and I started having to do the worksheet that tells us whether or not we can claim him as a tax credit. Then, as our income increased, I started having to figure the alternative minimum tax (which, fortunately, hasn’t hit us yet). Then came the sales tax deduction, for which I am grateful, but it requires even more calculations. Now that my wife is self-employed, we have two more forms to do for the insidious self-employment tax. It’s cumbersome, but it isn’t brain surgery, either.

There are several things I’ve learned along the way, the most significant of which is that if you get back a huge refund every March, then you’re having too much money taken out of your paycheck and are, in effect, giving the IRS an interest-free loan every year. So, a few years ago, I jacked up our deductions to have less money taken out with the goal of having the bottom line on our tax form add up to as close to $0 as possible.

Simple things like doing your own tax forms are the result of having the invaluable abilities to read and write. When I did my first tax form back in 1988, I, too, didn’t know where to start. So I asked someone who did know. I can now keep my $304 and do the forms myself.

This leads me to a comment that Sharon left to a separate post regarding the lottery.

Yes, it is mainly poor people who buy the tickets. However, that is indicative of a much bigger problem where poor people are feeling hopeless and don’t think they can obtain the American dream. Now I won’t blame it all on that. (Almost) everyone is looking for a way to get rich quickly. That comes down to pretty poor values in our country.

Oprah Winfrey recently said it better than I ever could. When asked why she spent 40 million on education in Africa instead of America, she said, “In Africa when I ask young people what they want they tell me they want to go to school and becomes doctors and build up their communities. When I talk to young people in America, they tell me they want a new IPOD or new name brand sneakers.”

First of all, if these kids have iPods and $100 sneakers, how poor can they be? Indeed, I, too, believe our values are misplaced. Again, I look back to the breakdown of the family.

I also agree that almost everyone is looking for a way to get rich quickly, rather than build wealth slowly over the course of one’s lifetime. As Dave Ramsey says, “live like no one else now so that later on you can live like no one else.” What he means is that “normal is broke,” but that even those who live on relatively modest incomes can, if they start saving at an early age and stay out of debt, retire as millionaires after 30 or 40 years.

The fact that the lottery preys primarily on the poor is less the result of hopelessness, and more the result of ignorance. Again, education matters.

I did the math for my op/ed back on December 15, 2005, “Lottery is regressive.” Here’s an excerpt that illustrates my point:

If more people understood the math behind lotteries, there would be far fewer tickets sold. Some do know the math, and choose to play anyway. But some don’t know the math, and play because they honestly believe they are going to win a huge jackpot that will change their lives. The latter is perhaps the lottery’s saddest story.

Minority Wealth Magazine did a survey earlier this year, and discovered the following:

“A larger percentage of men questioned noted they felt playing their state lottery was the best way to build wealth, as compared to women. …[Forty-eight] percent of minority men preferred playing the lottery in lieu of savings as a financial design, compared to 41 percent of minority women surveyed.”

It looks like someone got some bad financial advice. According to the Tennessee Lottery, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1-in-146,107,962. The odds of winning even the $200,000 prize are 1-in-3,563,609, while the odds of winning $10,000 are 1-in-584,432.

Let’s say a person puts $50 a month into Powerball tickets. He does this for 30 years. He will have “invested” $18,000 in the lottery. Since each ticket produces a 1-in-146,107,962 chance of winning, the odds of his winning the Powerball jackpot at any one time during that 30 years are still 1-in-8,117. Even his odds of winning $10,000 are 1-in-32. And that’s after buying 18,000 lottery tickets. But investing $50 per month for 30 years at 5% interest would give that person a 1-in-1 chance of ending up with $41,612.93.

To put this into even better perspective, you could buy 50 Powerball tickets a week and win the jackpot once every 56,000 years.

If you bought a ticket for every mile you drive, you’d have to make the equivalent of 300 round-trips to the moon before winning.

If you buy one Powerball ticket, you’re 27 times more likely to be killed by a wasp, hornet, or bee sting in the next year than you are to win the jackpot.

And now we come full circle.

Who was it that pushed the lottery here in Tennessee in the first place? It was former State Senator Steve Cohen, who was perhaps the most liberal member of the Tennessee Senate before being elected to Congress last November.

Who is standing in the way of reducing the food tax here in Tennessee? Governor Bredesen and the Democrats in the Tennessee General Assembly — the very same people who also argue that the food tax is too regressive and hurts the poor the most.

Who gave us the War on Poverty, which hasn’t changed the poverty rate but has contributed to a soaring illegitimacy rate, and fights tooth and nail to keep its social programs in place? Democrats.

Who stands in the way of school vouchers, which would allow parents of children who attend failing public schools to spend that money at private schools? Democrats.

Indeed, liberals may care about the poor. But when given the choice of siding with the poor or the government, they will side with the government every single time.

Sadly, the ones who tend to be the most adversely affected by the policies of liberals are the very ones who help keep them in power.

I was just looking at the 2006 population data for some of our cities, and I decided to compile a ranking of Tennessee cities with populations of 20,000 or more.

Memphis – 680,768
Nashville – 569,892
Knoxville – 173,890
Chattanooga – 155,554
Clarksville – 103,455
Murfreesboro – 81,393
Jackson – 59,643
Johnson City – 56,194
Franklin – 49,412
Bartlett – 46,954
Kingsport – 44,905
Hendersonville – 42,509
Collierville – 41,923
Germantown – 40,977
Cleveland – 37,311
Smyrna – 33,123
Columbia – 33,055
Brentwood – 30,617
Oak Ridge – 27,387
Cookeville – 26,052
Bristol – 25,435
Morristown – 25,402
LaVergne – 25,278
Gallatin – 23,917
Maryville – 23,120
Lebanon – 21,887
East Ridge – 20,640
Mount Juliet – 20,392

The U.S. Census Bureau lists Tennessee with 6,038,803 residents in 2006. That’s up 6.1% just since 2000.

The Tennessean is carrying the water for TDOT again, running a front-page story on a money shortage the agency is facing, and that several road projects are being delayed.

About half of the state’s roughly $1.75 billion transportation budget comes from the federal government, state officials said. Last year, Congress withheld billions in transportation funds, including about $80 million designated for Tennessee.

This year, Tennessee’s share of the federal funding shortfall is expected to range between $40 million and $125 million, state officials said.

Compounding the problem, about $66 million has been removed from the TDOT budget in recent years to help offset deficits in other departments, state officials said.

One caveat in TDOT’s situation was presented at the end of the story.

A prioritized list of projects will be presented to the General Assembly in the next two weeks, Nicely said. TDOT expects final word within a month or so on how much federal funding it will be short.

In addition to prioritizing construction projects, Nicely said, he has frozen hiring and is restricting non-essential travel for TDOT employees.

Some of the state money that would have been used as matching funds for the delayed projects could go to road maintenance and safety fixes instead, Nicely said.

He insists that while there are serious problems, the financial news is not all grim. Gov. Phil Bredesen has committed to restoring millions of dollars to the state highway fund that was shuffled to other departments, and since Tennessee is generally a pay-as-you-go state, TDOT doesn’t carry construction debt.

“In a lot of ways, we can manage this debt better than a lot of places,” Nicely said. “We just really need to make sure we tighten our belts in the next year or so.”

What the Tennessean did not report is that the state government is running another revenue surplus this year. Through December, that surplus amounted to $50.2 million. Since December is the fifth month in the fiscal year in terms of tax collections, this puts the coffers on pace for a surplus of $120.5 million. (In December alone, however, the state collected $113.8 million more than was budgeted.) This is a more modest surplus than the three previous years, when the state ran a cumulative surplus of $1.052 billion, but a surplus is a surplus, which makes it all the more surprising that Governor Bredesen is asking for tax increases on both cigarettes and gasoline.

State Senator Thelma Harper and I probably don’t agree on a whole lot. But we do agree on the lottery, and her one-sentence descriptor that “Poor people are paying for rich kids to go to college” is one I’ll be using in the future.

John Edwards, who complains about the existence of “two Americas” (one for the rich, one for the poor), isn’t doing two bad in his America. The wealthy trial lawyer, former U.S. senator, and vice-presidential candidate, is building a new home.

Knight approved the building plans that showed the Edwards home totaling 28,200 square feet of connected space. The main house is 10,400 square feet and has two garages. The recreation building, a red, barn-like building containing 15,600 square feet, is connected to the house by a closed-in and roofed structure of varying widths and elevations that totals 2,200 square feet.

The main house is all on one level except for a 600-square-foot bedroom and bath area above the guest garage.

The recreation building contains a basketball court, a squash court, two stages, a bedroom, kitchen, bathrooms, swimming pool, a four-story tower, and a room designated “John’s Lounge.”

Wow! That is one rich liberal. Actually, there are a great deal of liberal politicians, primarily white males, who parade around lamenting the dichotomy of rich and poor, denouncing greed and capitalism, who are famously wealthy because of capitalism.

Folks, people like John Edwards don’t care one whit about the little guy, except that the little guy gives them political power. Other liberals, such as John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Mr. & Mrs. Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi (the most powerful woman in America), and John Corzine, to name a few, renounce tax cuts for the rich and lament the wage gap between rich and poor, but won’t have anything to do with the individuals they pretend to champion. The cause of the poor is only an excuse for them, as lawmakers, to confiscate the earnings of one segment of society and give it to another. And to maintain political power, they win the votes of the lower classes by telling them that if Republicans get elected, they’ll take away their largesse. With Democrats, it’s always about power and control — not the poor.

If people like John Edwards truly cared about the “two Americas,” they’d sell all they have and give to the poor, or at least live far more modestly, but they are as isolated from the masses as an island in an ocean.

I was listening to my podcast of the Rush Limbaugh Show from yesterday, and, of course, much of it was dedicated to the President’s State of the Union address from the night before. Rush used the concept that the presidency requires an extraordinary individual, because an ordinary person would crack under the pressure and the vitriol that is aimed at him, and used that idea to launch into a brilliant monologue on George W. Bush’s performance Tuesday night.

Make no mistake about it, my friends: the Drive-By Media was hoping, and they still hope, that they can crack this man’s spirit and his emotions and his resolve and his confidence, and they hope to make that happen publicly — and they were hoping that last night Bush would finally realize just how ostracized and isolated he is and admit that he’s made all kinds of mistakes and beg people’s forgiveness and so forth, and he did just the opposite. He went into a room that is now controlled and dominated by Democrats. He went into that room during a crucial moment in the war on terror — not just “the war in Iraq,” a crucial moment in the war on terror. He went into that room last night, knowing that the left and the Democrats are emboldened beyond even their normal arrogance and condescension. He went into that room knowing that there’s a bunch of wobbly kneed, linguini-spined Republicans that are willing to sell him out within five minutes of his departure last night. He went into that room with a dozen-odd sharks circling the room, circling in the waters for his job in 2008.

Yet, take away the — well, you can’t take away the substance of the specifics. Yet he ended up dominating the room. He ended up controlling the room. He ended up getting the same kind of applause that presidents always do, and he got his message out, and he didn’t buckle and he didn’t waver on the thing that matters to him the most, and that is this nation’s national security and defense. He put the Democrats on the spot, and he forced them to sit on their hands when he mentioned the concept of victory, not just in Iraq, but in the war on terror — and then the guests of the first lady sitting up in the gallery there added to the warmth of the night. He opened up with his classy warmth and graciousness and introduction of Nancy Pelosi and making her the focal point of the beginning of a State of the Union. It was the kind of class that we have yet to see from anybody in the Democrat Party today in elected positions. They simply aren’t capable of it. They are too enraged; they are too twisted with venom, and in light of all these circumstances — and you can, by the way, see the proof of what I’m saying if you wanted to waste your time after the speech and watch the post-speech analysis and commentary.

[Link]

If you recall, Democrat senate candidates in a least three states (Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia) relied on actor Michael J. Fox to do their bidding for them. In his campaign commercial on behalf of Democrat Ben Cardin, for example, Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s, issued the following plea:

“Stem-cell research offers hope to millions of Americans with diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. But George Bush and Michael Steele would put limits on the most promising stem-cell research. Fortunately, Marylanders have a chance to vote for Ben Cardin. Cardin fully supports life-saving stem-cell research. It’s why I support Ben Cardin, and with so much at stake, I respectfully ask you to do the same.”

The implication was clear: Republicans are standing in the way of cures for these diseases. A vote for the Democrats is a vote for these cures. It was much like the campaign promise that vice-presidential candidate John Edwards made back in 2004: “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases…. When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

The problem with Congressional Democrats and stem-cell research is that they often don’t differentiate between the two types: adult stem-cells (ASC’s) and embryonic stem-cells (ESC’s). ASC’s are found in a variety of tissues in human beings of all ages, and are even plentiful in umbilical cord blood and placentas. Deriving ESC’s, on the other hand, typically requires carving up human embryos. In other words, obtaining ASC’s does not require the destruction of human life. Obtaining ESC’s usually does.

There have been a myriad of medical advancements in the field of ASC research. Mary L. Davenport, an ob/gyn and Fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, published an article in “The American Thinker” last October 25 that she titled “The Unconscionable Claims of Michael J. Fox.” She writes:

“The plain fact is that embryonic stem cell research is proving to be a bust. There are currently 72 therapies showing human benefits using adult stem cells and zero using embryonic stem cells. Scientifically-minded readers can review this medical journal article on the status of adult stem cell research. Adult stem cell therapies are already being advertised and promoted while no such treatments are even remotely in prospect for embryonic stem cell research.”

Since that article was written, scientists from Wake Forest and Harvard have revealed yet another breakthrough by using ASC’s derived from amniotic fluid to create muscle, bone, fat, blood vessel, nerve, and liver cells.

It is completely false that Republicans oppose stem-cell research. Those of us who oppose ESC research do so because it typically involves destroying human life, and oppose federal funding because, in 26 years of ESC research, it has yet to provide one therapy showing human benefits, with none even on the horizon.

On the other hand, there is whole-hearted support of ASC research on the right because it provides a myriad of practical medical applications while presenting no ethical concerns.

Congressional Democrats remain unshaken in their support of expanded federal funding for ESC research. In fact, when the Wake Forest/Harvard researchers announced their success, Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-CO) retorted “I do think that the study is fantastic news and [I] welcome it, but it’s not a substitute for embryonic stem cell research.”

ESC research has provided nothing but failure, yet Democrats herald the promises such research holds while downplaying the remarkable advances that have already been realized through ASC research, which illustrates the pitfall of politicizing science.

It boils down to one thing. Democrats who cling to ESC research do so in order to protect abortion, which is the sacrament of the Democratic Party. Step one to maintaining (or expanding) abortion rights is to dehumanize the unborn, which ESC research helps them to do. If Democrats ever let go of ESC research, especially for ethical reasons, then there goes abortion.

Let’s go back to Fox’s claim that “George Bush…would put limits on the most promising stem-cell research.” In 2001, President Bush became the first U.S. president to actually open federal funding for ESC research, which he did for a limited number of existing stem-cell lines.

Demand for taxpayer-funded ESC research is even greater now, because ESC research has proven such a failure that most of the private money used for stem-cell research is being directed to ASC’s. With private money for ESC research having dried up due to its lack of success, researchers are demanding that funding for their futile endeavors now come from the taxpayers, and have turned to the Democratic Party in order to make that happen.

The Tennessean offered a story yesterday on the offense that PC police are taking at schools that have Indian mascots. (Yes, I am aware of the risk I take by using the Tennessean as my lone source.)

Riverdale is one of at least two dozen high schools along with about 80 middle and elementary schools in Tennessee that have some reference to Indians in their team name, according to a group of Native American activists who want the names changed.

In Middle Tennessee several high schools have such names, including the Montgomery Central High Indians in Cunningham and the Harpeth High Indians in Kingston Springs. Metro Nashville has the Hunters Lane High Warriors.

The activist group plans to approach the state’s Human Rights Commission on Friday about joining its cause to ask the schools to change their sports team names.

“There’s racism going on when you have a school mascot called the Redskins,” said Tom Kunesh, an Indian activist in Chattanooga who plans to go to the rights commission.

“That’s Native American imagery used and controlled by non-native Americans and often used in satirical and non-flattering ways.”

My, what charmed lives we must live if that’s all we can find to get offended about. Seriously, anyone who gets offended over mascot names doesn’t understand the nature of sports. Teams choose mascot names out of R-E-S-P-E-C-T for whatever name they choose. You don’t find schools adopt mascot names such as “Pink Lizards” or “Butterflies,” because such names don’t exactly invoke respect. That’s why teams choose the names of fierce animals (lions, tigers, bears), or names such as the “Giants” or “Titans,” or names that use Indian themes (Indians, Braves, Redskins, Redmen, Chiefs, Warriors, etc.).

A few years ago, a basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado adopted the mascot “Fighting Whites” out of protest against those who employ Indian mascots. As a white person, I loved the idea, and have considered buying one of their tee shirts. I guess the intent was to jab back at whitie for using Indian mascots, but the Fighting Whites hasn’t changed my perspective on using Indian mascots.

Henry County courthouse, Paris, Tennessee

Having photographed 49 Tennessee courthouses, they are getting harder and harder to come by since there are some parts of the state I just don’t get to. But I did recently manage to photograph the Henry County Courthouse in Paris, Tennessee.

The anti-tax man, Ben Cunningham, links to a story from WDEF in Chattanooga on the growing support behind Mae Beavers’ idea of phasing out the state’s 6% sales tax on food items. As you know, advocates of “tax reform” complain that the food tax regressive and hurts the poor the most. If Republicans have their way, we’ll see just how much disdain Democrats really have for the food tax. We’ll get to see whether they are willing to phase the food tax out of existence, or if they believe government needs that money more. Some legislators favor coupling a food tax reduction with an increase in other taxes, such as the cigarette tax. But given the enormous revenue surpluses run over the last three years, we know that government can do without that money without having to replace it from another source. What we’ll probably find out is that although Democrats may care about the poor, they care about government even more. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if this legislation passes the House, and even more surprised if Governor Bredesen signs it. But it’s time that Republicans force the Democrats’ hand on that immoral food tax.

Several days ago, I took my son to a bowling alley on the far eastern side of Davidson County. While we were paying for our games, I noticed that an individual ahead of us was buying lottery tickets. That was nothing new. I’m often behind saps in line at the convenience store doing the same.

I don’t know if the lottery player at the bowling alley was, to put it nicely, mentally challenged, but rather than speak to the cashier, he simply pointed to the various lottery tickets he wanted. When it came time to pay, he appeared to empty his pockets of cash and dropped a handful of wadded-up bills on the counter. It was a rather odd transaction. I don’t want to get into stereotypes regarding public assistance, because I don’t know for sure. I’m just reporting what I saw.

At any rate, I wish that those who advocated the lottery, such as Congressman Steve Cohen, those who administer the lottery, and those who praise the lottery because it is “for education” could go to places where lottery tickets are sold and see some of the people the lottery preys upon. Perhaps they do. Perhaps, deep inside, they are bothered.

I have never played the Tennessee Lottery, and am committed to never playing it. The way I see it, the lottery is a voluntary tax on those who cannot do math. No dollar of mine will ever go into that netherworld. I am and always have been a critic of the lottery, and have published four op/eds in the Lebanon Democrat (one of which also appeared in the Tennessean) on the lottery.

The Nashville City Paper ran a story today that further damages the credibility of the Tennessee Lottery. The headline, “Lottery scholarship retention levels dropping,” says it all. Here are some facts:

* Half of all 2005 freshman lottery scholarship recipients had lost their awards by 2006.

* Students from lower income households tend to lose scholarships at a higher rate than students in higher income families.

* Forty-seven percent of students lost scholarships at four-year colleges, 65% at two-year schools, and 36% at independent colleges.

* Recipients of the General Assembly Merit Scholarship (a $1,000 supplement to the $3,800 HOPE scholarship) had the highest retention rate — 89%.

* Recipients of the ACCESS scholarship (a $2,650 grant for a four-year institution), were at the lowest retention rate — 11%.

* More than 56,000 students received lottery-funded scholarships for the 2005-06 academic year, with total awards in excess of $136 million.

The fact that sticks out most is that students from lower income households tend to lose scholarships at a higher rate than students in higher income families. In my last op/ed on the lottery, “Lottery is a regressive tax,” which appeared last April 25, I noted that:

An analysis of 2005 lottery data conducted by the Chattanooga Times Free Press shows just who that money is going to. In Hamilton County, for example, the average lottery scholarship recipient comes from a family with an annual income of $71,980. The median household income in Hamilton County is $38,930, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But Hamilton County is not an anomaly. In the state’s poorest county, Hancock, lottery scholarships go to recipients whose families make, on average, $34,146. The median household income there is $19,760. In Grundy County, another relatively poor county, where the median household income is $22,959, the average lottery scholarship recipient comes from a family that earns $40,540.

I hate to say that we lottery opponents told you so, but we told you so.

In his newsletter dated April, 1999, Focus on the Family founder Dr. James C. Dobson noted that “Lottery advocates are incredibly crafty and manipulative of the public. They link state-sponsored gambling programs to funding for education, which dupes people into believing that buying a ticket will somehow benefit children. It is a lie.”

Dobson noted that Georgia’s lottery, whose HOPE scholarship program provided the template for the Tennessee model, “sells $250 of tickets per person in poor neighborhoods compared to less than $100 per capita in affluent areas. Meanwhile, the average family income of Georgia residents receiving HOPE scholarships is $13,000 higher than the state average! No matter how proponents attempt to dress it up, the governmental sponsored lottery continues its shameless exploitation of the poor.”

…

Yes, the Tennessee Lottery has raised a lot of money for scholarships, but has it really been worth the cost? While we lament “tax cuts for the rich” and a regressive sales tax that “hits the poor the hardest,” the state government, at the behest of the voters, has sanctioned a program that exploits the poor far greater than any system of taxation. And all we can do is rejoice over what the lottery has done for relatively well-off college students.

And now we learn that lottery scholarship recipients from lower income families are more likely to lose their scholarships than those from higher income families — a fact that steepens the lottery’s upward transfer of wealth. But that sales tax on groceries sure is immoral.

James Spann is an AMS certified meteorologist who has fired back at Weather Channel climate “expert” Heidi Cullen, who called upon the American Meteorological Society to decertify any broadcast meteorologist who does not prescribe to the gospel of global warming. Spann writes:

I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them. Here are the basic facts you need to know:

*Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story. Even the lady at “The Weather Channel” probably gets paid good money for a prime time show on climate change. No man-made global warming, no show, and no salary. Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab.

*The climate of this planet has been changing since God put the planet here. It will always change, and the warming in the last 10 years is not much difference than the warming we saw in the 1930s and other decades. And, lets not forget we are at the end of the ice age in which ice covered most of North America and Northern Europe.

If you don’t like to listen to me, find another meteorologist with no tie to grant money for research on the subject. I would not listen to anyone that is a politician, a journalist, or someone in science who is generating revenue from this issue.

In baseball, we call that a grand slam home run. I especially appreciate Spann’s reference to grant money being the motivation for promoting the junk science that is global warming. It helps one understand why global warming alarmists –- and I mean the actual “researchers” and not their disciples -– advance their cock-eyed theories with a religious-like zeal. It’s just like embryonic stem-cell research, where science has been tossed out in favor of political demagoguery. In both cases, all you have to do to understand the motivation of these advocates of junk science is to follow the money.

I was reading Bob Krumm’s blog earlier this evening when I noticed that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s lobbying reform bill includes a provision that would require bloggers who draw more than 500 readers to “to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists.”

Fortunately, the legislation did not receive enough votes to overcome a GOP filibuster, but we bloggers are going to have to sleep with one eye open from now on as this bill will surely come up again later in the current session.

I’m not sure what would possess members of the U.S. Senate to extend their broad umbrella of control to bloggers like me, unless they just can’t stand for something as large and burgeoning as the blogosphere to continue to prosper without them exerting some kind of control over it. I guess Joe Public, armed with nothing more than a PC, Internet access, a blogspot account, and an opinion scares some politicians silly. I don’t get it.

I honestly don’t know what all is buried in the Democrats’ lobbying reform bill, but I have a hunch that it would end up much like campaign finance reform. Just as CFR was supposed to get the money out of politics, the lobbying reform bill proposes to more or less end corruption in Washington. Well, CFR didn’t get the money out of politics. It just routed it through different channels while criminalizing certain avenues of free speech. Likewise, although there may be certain parts of lobbying reform that may be worthwhile, it would inevitably produce the same result as CFR. Lobbyists wouldn’t go away. They would just have to operate through different channels. (Remember the simple axiom “follow the money.”) Really the only thing that would be regulated would be the freedom of expression currently enjoyed by average citizens such as us bloggers.

UPDATE: Michael Silence has more. And ACK suggests that the hoopla may not be what it seems. In addition, Focus on the Family has been against the lobbying reform bill from the outset, and included its defeat in its evening CitizenLink update. There was no mention of the blogging provision. Stay tuned. It may turn out to be much ado about nothing, but I also wouldn’t put it past Congress, either.

The Associated Press is breathlessly reporting today that the new lieutenant governor of Tennessee, Ron Ramsey, is guilty of…nothing.

In a story headlined “Study finds Ramsey’s PAC avoided contribution limits” that ran in the Tennessean, the AP gives the immediate impression that Lt. Gov. Ramsey did something unethical, if not altogether illegal. In fact, the first paragraph reads:

Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey’s political action committee avoided campaign contribution limits by giving money to another PAC, which then directed money to key Republican candidates, an Associated Press analysis of campaign finance records has found.

The AP makes it sound as though Speaker Ramsey deliberately circumvented campaign finance laws. But in the third paragraph, we are told that: “Officials with both PACs said they followed state laws because there was no explicit coordination between the two committees.”

End of story, right? Wrong. Reading further down, the AP notes that “About three-fourths of the money SALT PAC contributed to GOP candidates in the past two elections came from Ramsey and his committee, records show. RAAMPAC stands for Republicans Achieving a Majority PAC.”

Nowhere are we told about Democrat candidates and the PAC money they legally received. But the names of several other Republicans are listed who received SALT PAC money sure are mentioned. Then the AP goes over to Mark Brown, the Tennessee Democrat Party spokesman, who obligingly “called the contributions from Ramsey’s PAC a clear-cut example of using a conduit to avoid campaign finance laws.”

Well, no they don’t, Mr. Brown. Not when you’re doing things that are specifically allowed by campaign finance laws in the first place.

Readers, this is a perfect example of left-wing media bias in raw form. You have a Republican Lt. Gov. who has flouted the law in now way, yet the AP writes a story with the intent of making Speaker Ramsey’s campaign finances appear questionable.

It’s a good thing we have bloggers out here now who can point these things out.

Related links: Bill Hobbs, Rob Huddleston

It appears that some Democrats in Congress are wanting to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine (a.k.a. the “Hush Rush” bill), a law that was repealed back in 1987, thereby giving way to talk radio as we know it today. Democrats have been floating this idea for some time, and I penned an op/ed the last time an effort was made to breathe life back into this travesty. Here’s part of what I wrote:

In 1987, the U.S. Congress attempted to turn the Fairness Doctrine into law, but President Reagan vetoed it. The next year, Rush Limbaugh took his radio program nationwide, and AM radio was forever transformed. Rush pried open a market that had heretofore been untapped, and talk radio programs now proliferate as a result.

In 1993, Congress again tried to re-implement the Fairness Doctrine, then dubbed the “Hush Rush” bill, but the endeavor failed. Now, in 2005, Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) is trying to bring the Fairness Doctrine back in the form of the Fairness and Accountability in Broadcasting Act (HR 501).

Of course, HR 501 is aimed at conservative talk radio, and comes in the wake of repeated failed attempts by the left to find an answer to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. In fact, an online petition in support of Slaughter’s bill laments “News consumers, particularly those of talk radio, are overwhelmingly exposed to a single point of view. A survey conducted by Democracy Radio this year revealed that 90 percent of all broadcast hours on talk radio are fairly characterized as conservative.”

Honestly, are broadcasters holding guns to people’s heads to force them to listen? Hardly. People tune in because they want to. It’s their choice. If conservative talk radio didn’t make money, broadcasters would find something else that did, because they are more concerned with earning profits than advancing an ideology. If not, they probably wouldn’t be in business for long. This is the free market — supply and demand — at work.

Said Slaughter on the House floor, “When newspeople present political opinion as hard news with no accountability or fact for truth, I call that indecent. When it becomes common practice to pay members of the media to deceptively advocate a political agenda on public airwaves without disclosure to the public, I call that indecent.”

Just like a liberal, Slaughter believes the average American is too stupid to understand what he’s hearing. And Congress can surely fix all that by mandating airtime to more left-wingers, as though ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the mainstream print media aren’t enough.

Indeed, as Air America’s ratings plainly show, liberalism cannot compete with conservatism in the arena of ideas. So liberals in Congress are trying to do what liberals typically do when they cannot mount superior arguments: silence their opponents.

To illustrate just how afraid of debate global warming alarmists have become, Weather Channel climate “expert” Heidi Cullen is suggesting that the American Meteorological Society decertify broadcast meteorologists who question the gospel of global warming.

Meanwhile, global warming has just given us snow in Malibu.