Right Minded Online

Concierge has a list of 13 of the world’s creepiest places.

My ten-year-old and I had one of special those evenings on Friday that don’t come around that often. It was high school football night, and we followed Friendship Christian School up to Hartsville for what was probably the single most important regular-season game in the three years we’ve been there. Last year, the Commanders went 10-0 in the regular season, and drove all the way to the 1A state championship game before losing, thus finishing 14-1. We lost a ton of seniors off that squad, so we knew we wold not be the powerhouse we had been. But we still have a good team. On Friday, we played at Trousdale County, having to win in order to make the playoffs. We were 5-3, having lost two of our last three games. We were tied for fourth place in region 4-1A, but were on the short end of the tiebreaker. Since only the top four teams from each region make the playoffs, a loss would have dropped us to 3-3 in the region, and out of playoff contention.

Trousdale County is not an easy place to play. When we beat the Yellow Jackets last year in Lebanon, it was our first win over them since 1987. But we had never won a game in Hartsville, where football is king. They have won five state championships just in the last 17 years (1990, 1993, 1997, 1998, 2005). We drove to the high school, which is just west of town, arriving about 45 minutes before kickoff. There was no one there. No cars. No lights. No stadium. Thoroughly confused, I crossed the street to a Mexican restaurant and asked someone where the football stadium was. “Down to the red light, make a right, four blocks, can’t miss it.”

I followed the directions and found the stand-alone football stadium, which sits right across the street from the courthouse. I actually have a picture of that courthouse, and still can’t believe I didn’t remember the stadium was right there in downtown Hartsville.

For a 1A team, the stadium is enormous. The visitors bleachers have more capacity than our home bleachers back in Lebanon. The field was well-manicured and pristine. Even the bathroom was sparkling.

We drove down for a field goal on our opening drive, then promptly gave up a touchdown on the ensuing drive after blowing a third-and-fourteen on the 18 yard line. Then the Commanders and Yellow Jackets punted the ball back and forth for more than two full quarters (less one fumble we recovered inside our own territory in the third quarter), so we were still down 7-3 entering the fourth period. It seemed as though half of Hartsville was on the other side. It was also their homecoming. They were noisy.

Unable to heretofore accomplish much on offense, we drove the ball down to the 33 yard line early in the final period before our quarterback broke several tackles in running for our only touchdown of the game. It was the one big play we needed. After a botched snap for what would have been a key extra point, we were ahead 9-7 with about ten minutes remaining in the game.

More punts, followed by an interception, and we had the ball back with time ticking away. Another punt, and the Yellow Jackets gained position with a little over a minute remaining. After our fourth facemask penalty of the game — this one a 15-yard flag — Trousdale County had the ball first-and-ten on their 40 yard line. A long completion put them down to around our 25 yard line, and the crowd erupted. There were now about 45 seconds left, and after a couple of short runs put them down to the 20, the Yellow Jackets called a timeout with 4 seconds left on the game clock.

In a close game, missed extra points often come back to haunt you, and this one was going to kill us. After lining up for a potential game-winning 37-yard field goal attempt, Friendship iced the kicker with a timeout of our own. So they lined up again. A good snap, a clean kick, but it sailed wide to the right, preserving the season-saving victory for the Friendship Christian Commanders — their first-ever win in Hartsville. Players stormed the field, and we were able to breathe again following those few tense minutes. It takes guts to win a game like that.

So FCS moved to 6-3, with a regional record of 4-2, which puts us into a 4-way tie for second place. Our opponent Friday night is much easier. We will win, and will finish no worse than fourth-place, so, despite heavy losses in personnel, the Friendship Christian Commanders are playoff-bound once again.

Thank goodness John Edwards has a 0% chance of becoming President. That’s because the programs he would seek to implement would put us maybe one step to the right of Hugo Chavez.

John Edwards says if he’s elected president, he’ll institute a New Deal-like suite of programs to fight poverty and stem growing wealth disparity. To do it, he said, he’ll ask many Americans to make sacrifices, like paying higher taxes.

Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina, says the federal government should underwrite universal pre-kindergarten, create matching savings accounts for low-income people, mandate a minimum wage of $9.50 and provide a million new Section 8 housing vouchers for the poor. He also pledged to start a government-funded public higher education program called “College for Everyone.”

“It is central to what I want to do as president to do something about economic inequality. I do not believe it is okay for the United States of America to have 37 million people living in poverty,” he said in a meeting with Monitor reporters and editors this week. “And I think we need, desperately need, a president who will say that to America and call on Americans to show their character.”

At every stop, Edwards said, he tells voters he’ll ask them to sacrifice. Asked to describe what he means, he described his plan for increases in capital gains taxes, saying taxes on “wealth income” should be in line with those on work income.

At least we know the liberal playbook hasn’t changed in much in the last 75 years. We have wealth disparity (which isn’t a bad thing, contrary to conventional wisdom), and so we’ll just tax the rich and redistribute that money to the poor. Gee, there’s an idea we’ve never heard before from a Democrat.

Meanwhile, the former senator from North Carolina says he would demand corporate responsibility, including limits on executive compensation packages. I’m not sure what part of the Constitution grants a President the power to tell a private sector employee how much money he can make, but I wonder if he would similarly seek to place limits on how much money trial lawyers could earn from lawsuits they win in court.

I’m telling you, John Edwards is the biggest hypocrite in American politics — even more so than Al Gore.

Related news story: Edwards Demands Video of Posh HQ Be Pulled

Terry Frank pointed out a fine piece by Ed Lasky over at American Thinker, “The South Rises” that warmed my heart to a near-boil. Writes Lasky:

Their views are, of course, paranoid and disdainful. They are an expression of bias against the South, for there is no doubt that the South is the beating heart and exhaling lungs of the evangelical community. The South should wear such a designation as a badge of honor.

Southerners are more religious than the rest of America, and we should be thankful that they are, for the religious impulse has led to many good works around the world. The community dispenses a huge amount of foreign aid each year directed toward the poor and needy of the world. It offers drug counseling and marriage therapy in cities across America; theirs is a community whose churches teach literacy, feed the hungry and minister to the needy; they offer succor to the ill. A superb op-ed ran in the Washington Post last year “Let’s Stop Stereotyping Evangelicals” provides a wonderful overview of all the good works the evangelical community is doing around the world.

Evangelicals who attend religious services weekly, when compared with average Americans, are less likely to cohabit as young adults (1% versus 10% of other young adults), to bear a child outside of wedlock (12% versus 33% of other moms), and to divorce (7% versus 9%) and are likelier to be happier. Frequent churchgoers have an average 9 percent higher income than those who do not attend church, are less likely to be on welfare, and live longer. Given that many of the social problems that beset our nation are directly related to the number of people who score poorly according to these measures, perhaps we should be less contemptuous of people of faith and seek to emulate them.

Amen. Hallelujah. And praise the Lord!

At any rate, Lasky’s piece had me digging through my extensive archive of Lebanon Democrat columns for a gem of mine that ran back on February 16, 2004, “South crucial to winning presidency.” I am reprinting the entire column here:

Who among us doesn’t love living in the South? I certainly do. One of the greatest experiences of my life was the three years I spent in the Navy as a young adult. I was stationed in Naples, Italy for two-and-a-half of those years, and was privileged to visit nine different countries during that time. But when it was over, I chose to come back to Tennessee. It’s where I wanted to be.

I don’t get offended very easily, but when Americans start running down the South, the hair on the back of my neck bristles. I’m not claiming the South is better than any other region of the U.S. But I am a proud Southerner, the same way New Englanders love New England, Midwesterners love the Midwest, and Alaskans love Alaska.

This is why I don’t understand Southern Democrats who support those liberal candidates from outside the South who look down their noses at Dixie and its people. It has become fashionable, I suppose, for liberals to make snobbish wisecracks about the South, such as Howard Dean (before his free-fall in the polls), who stated “I’m tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God, and gays.” I know Howard Dean doesn’t speak for all liberals, but his attitude toward the South seems to be the prevailing view held by the left.

During the Democrat debate on January 29, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry verbalized his own disdain for the South by stating “Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South. Al Gore proved he could have been President of the United States without winning a Southern state, including his own.” First, I hope some of Kerry’s people have reminded the Senator that Al Gore made no such proof. He lost that election.

(By the way, I find it curious that Democrats, who have turned the wealthy into a whipping post, have rallied behind John Kerry — the U.S. Senate’s wealthiest member. Despite a net worth of $675 million, Democrats believe he is “in touch” with average Americans.)

Foremost, I believe the chief mistake to be made in the forthcoming Presidential election — especially for Democrats — is writing off the South. I have never claimed to be a political strategist, so I’m going to rely on the precedent of recent history to validate my point. It is a fact that no Democrat from outside the South has won the Presidency since John F. Kennedy in 1960. And it is even arguable that he wouldn’t have won that razor-thin contest without the appearance of Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, on the ticket.

Since 1960, the only Democrats to win the White House — Johnson, Carter, and Clinton — were all from the South. Likewise, all non-Southern Democrats — Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis — lost their elections, the latter three by landslides. Thus, for the Democrats in the ten elections since JFK, Southerners are a combined 4-2, non-Southerners are 0-4. The same rule does not apply to Republicans. (Although the last two Republicans to win the Presidency were from Texas, Presidents Nixon and Reagan were from California.)

In the not-so-distant past, a candidate really could write off the South and survive. In 1960, the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas constituted just 116 electoral votes. In 2004, they will make up 140 — more than half of what’s needed to win. In 2000, Al Gore lost them all, and the election.

I realize Democrat voters are going to gravitate toward the candidate they think can most likely defeat George W. Bush. But for Southerners to support John Kerry, whose voting record in the Senate is even farther to the left than Ted Kennedy’s, just doesn’t make sense.

At any rate, if I were a Democrat, I’d be wary of throwing my support for a non-Southern elitist liberal who is contemptuous of the South. But it seems, at the moment, that John Kerry has momentum and broad support across the United States, and that Southern Democrats are ready to fall in line. I sincerely hope they do.

As Charlie Daniels sings, “You can be proud here, be proud you a rebel/Cause the south’s gonna do it again.”

It has come to the point that any natural disaster will at some point be politicized — usually by liberals who want to pin the blame on George W. Bush, the GOP, and, of course, global warming, which is the source of all human suffering. And so it goes with the California wildfires. Senate Majority Harry Reid has declared that “One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming.” He says this with no scientific evidence. It’s just the politics of the left. It’s been unusually dry in the fire region, which has made Southern California more susceptible to forest fires, and so it has to be the fault of global warming. Never mind that much of that region is a desert climate, where it’s ALWAYS dry, and never mind that forest fires have occurred naturally since the beginning of time. This time, it’s different. As a result, Senator Reid has cited the fires in stressing the need to pass the Democrats’ energy legislation. Yes, folks, these Democrats can control future weather by passing legislation. They are simply amazing.

Bonus links:
LA Times: Forest thinning spared homes
The Wildfires and Global Warming
Disgusting Democrats, Drive-Bys Politicize the California Wildfires
Drive-Bys Hype the Wildfires<

On top of wanting to deep-six President Bush’s tax cuts, which have helped to ignite the U.S. economy and expand revenue into the U.S. treasury, the Democrats want to raise taxes on the rich.

Middle and upper-middle income families would benefit under the plan by a repeal of the alternative minimum tax starting Jan. 1, 2008.

Upper-income families, however, would pay for that repeal with a 4% surtax on incomes above $150,000 for a single earner or incomes above $200,000 for a married couple. That surtax would grow to 4.6% for incomes above $500,000.

The surtax will also make possible an expansion of the earned income tax credit, an increase in the standard deduction, and an increase in the value of the child tax credit for those earning too little to owe federal income taxes.

A third section of the plan would address a number of pressing tax issues, including a temporary patch of the alternative minimum tax prior to Jan. 1, 2008, and the extension of a number of expiring tax provisions.

Absent a patch, the alternative minimum tax will expand to hit roughly 25 million taxpayers, up from 4.4 million in 2006, increasing their taxes by a total of nearly $50 billion, according to congressional estimates.

I’m all for repealing the AMT, believe me. It’s a great idea. Since the Bush tax cuts have resulted in such great success, as they did when JFK and Ronald Reagan cut taxes, why don’t we just get rid of the AMT and let that be it? Because the Democrats, who are such great uniters, have to play class warfare in order to advance their economic policies. Divide and conquer. They cannot help themselves. With Democrats, it’s always whites vs. blacks, men vs. women, and rich vs. poor. In this case, Democrats want those of us who are not rich to unite against those who are, and give them support in cutting our taxes and “pay for it” by sticking it to the rich. So, if eliminating the AMT is such a great idea — and it is — then why not just do it and stop there? After all, tax cuts work every time they’re tried.

But you wouldn’t know it from the non-reporting by the mainstream press and the pessimism of the Democrat Party. Both remain fixated on defeat in Iraq, and find it unable to cheer the latest good news from Iraq.

The best news out of Iraq is that these successes have led to a massive reduction in violence. People are now walking the streets in Baghdad neighborhoods which used to be danger zones, they are traveling through a city no longer choked by check-points, and areas like the Anbar province which used to be in open warfare have become remarkably safe and peaceful. Overall violent incidents are down 70% since June. Car bombings are down 67%. Roadside bombings are down 40%. Violence is down so much that one article reports complaints from workers at a major Shiite cemetery that burials are down below pre-war levels, which means less revenue and fewer jobs for cemetery workers.

The American people remain tepid in their support for the war in Iraq — not because things are going badly, but because the mainstream press continues to paint the war as going badly. When there is a setback, the media amplify it. When things go well, the media bury the news, such as that excerpted above. Public approval of our execution of the war in Iraq would be much better is the media would simply report the news as it is instead of angling their reporting according to its agenda. And that agenda is for us to lose this war so Democrats can hang that defeat around the neck of George W. Bush.

Terry Frank has more.

Problem is, it was later shown that MacBeth was never an Army Ranger, and never witnessed any of the atrocities he claimed he had. He was never in Iraq. He never made it out of boot camp. He washed out after 44 days. He is a phony soldier, because he made bogus claims about his military service.

But that’s not the way it got reported.

Media Matters, a Clinton front group which monitors conservative talk radio, reported that Rush Limbaugh had applied the “phony soldiers” label to American servicemen who oppose the war. Democrats in Congress and the left-wing blogosphere went nuts.

For starters, 41 U.S. senators — all Democrats — affixed their signatures to a letter to Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays. In the letter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asserted that:

“…Rush Limbaugh’s recent characterization of troops who oppose the war as ‘phony soldiers’ is…an outrage.”

“It is unconscionable that Mr. Limbaugh would criticize them for exercising the fundamentally American right to free speech.”

“Thousands of active troops and veterans were subjected to Mr. Limbaugh’s unpatriotic and indefensible comments on your broadcast.”

“We call on you to publicly repudiate these comments that call into question their service and sacrifice and to ask Mr. Limbaugh to apologize for his comments.”

One of the signatories accusing Limbaugh of making “unpatriotic and indefensible comments” was Senator John Kerry, who, a year ago, quipped “You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Senator Kerry is certainly not the only Democrat who has besmirched the U.S. military.

Back on April 19, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asserted “I believe…that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything….”

(Mr. Mays subsequently forwarded the original letter, autographed by 41 Democrat senators, to Rush Limbaugh. In a stroke of genius, the Maha Rushie auctioned the letter on eBay last Friday for $2.1 million, matched that figure himself, and donated the $4.2 million to the Marine Corps – Law Enforcement Foundation, a charity which provides education assistance to the children of fallen Marines and federal law enforcement officers.)

Again, the problem for the Democrats is that Limbaugh never characterized troops who oppose the war as phony soldiers, only those who make bogus claims about their military service. Limbaugh has also never criticized servicemen for exercising their free speech rights. And, as scores of subsequent military callers reiterated following the phony soldiers smear, there is no bigger patriot that Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh spent two weeks trying to help the Democrats get this right. All transcripts are available on his website — both written transcripts and audio files. It didn’t matter. Democrats had their story, and they weren’t about to let the truth get in the way.

Other Democrats who perpetuated the lie were Wesley Clark, who used the occasion to try to get the Rush Limbaugh Show kicked off Armed Forces Radio.

Congressman Mark Udall introduced legislation to condemn Limbaugh, referring to “the personal attacks made by the broadcaster Rush impugning the integrity and professionalism of Americans serving in the Armed Forces.”

Udall’s resolution had 19 co-sponsors.

The “phony soldiers” smear may have deeper political implications, though. For years, Democrats have been trying to figure out a way to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, the abolishment of which back in 1987 made conservative talk radio possible. For twenty years, liberals have not been able to compete with conservatives on the radio. Even though the left owns the mainstream press, they want to do away with the one piece of turf conservatives actually dominate, and so Democrats were all too glad to jump onto the phony soldiers smear in order to beat the drums for the Fairness Doctrine.

In order to make their case, Democrats set up a detour around the truth, and instead went with what they wanted the truth to be — that Rush Limbaugh had referred to U.S. servicemen who oppose the war as phony soldiers. It was a typical exercise in groupthink exhibited by the left, which, ironically, labels Limbaugh listeners as mind-numbed robots who engage in groupthink. The most insidious aspect of the phony soldiers smear is that Democrats, who now control Congress, will do whatever it takes to cut the legs out from underneath conservative talk radio, because liberals cannot otherwise compete with conservatives in the arena of ideas that the radio airwaves currently afford.

“In case you missed it, a few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend one million dollars on the Woodstock Concert Museum. Now, my friends, I wasn’t there, I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time….”

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A tragedy has struck one of our wounded servicemen.

Caption in the Denton Record-Chronicle: Army Spc. John Austin Johnson and wife Lisa’s children Ashley, 5, and Logan, 2, died in a car wreck last week. Tyler, 9, was on life support Saturday.

That’s what the Harry Reid smear letter brought on eBay yesterday — a figure that Rush Limbaugh will match — with the proceeds going to the Marine Corps – Law Enforcement Foundation. Congratulations to the Maha Rushie for making Harry Reid (who actually tried to take credit for the charity auction) and 40 other Democrat senators look like fools, all the while raising gobs of money for charity. It was the highest price ever fetched charity item on eBay.

I’m wondering why the mainstream press and other Democrats aren’t praising the charity auction more. After all, it contains five hallmarks of liberalism. The $4.2 million donation to the MCLEF 1) supports the troops — and we all know that liberals support the troops, 2) rich people have been separated from their money, the money goes toward 3) education and 4) health care, and 5) it’s for the children. The left should be jubilant.

If this were true of a Republican candidate for President, the mainstream press and Democrats would have already gone to 24/7 coverage. But since the candidate in question is a Democrat, and the media provide cover for Democrats, we don’t hear too much about it. (Congratulations, though, to the Los Angeles Times for reporting this information.)

All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.

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Check out this video of Congressman Pete Stark, showing America who the Democrats really are.

“You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.” — Democrat Congressman Pete Stark

Just when I think liberals cannot possibly do anything more to amaze me, they do something that amazes me.

The law at issue went through the California legislature as SB 777, and now bans in school texts and activities any discriminatory bias against those who have chosen alternative sexual lifestyles, Meredith Turney, legislative liaison for Capitol Resource Institute, said.

…

“It will prohibit anything that suggests that the natural family — a man and a woman, married, with children — is normal or typical,” said Carlson. “Thus, under this latest advance toward a Brave New World of polymorphous perversion, California textbooks will no longer be able to use words like ‘mother and father’ and ‘husband and wife,’ because they suggest that heterosexuality is the norm — even though that is manifestly the case, even in California.”

The organization’s statement called it “unbelievable” that teachers and students who oppose same-sex marriage and suggest homosexuality isn’t innate, or disapprove of cross-dressing and sex-change operations, could be disciplined as “harassers,” and students may use the restrooms designated for the gender with which they identify.

The most stunning thing about this is that liberals typically accuse conservative Christians such as myself of trying to force our beliefs onto others by our support for traditional marriage and opposition to abortion. They also say we are intolerant. Yet it is liberals who are the most intolerant, and who are trying to force their godless ideologies onto the rest of us by trying to normalize deviant behavior in our public schools.

Speaker of State Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful woman in America, is lashing out at Rush Limbaugh for “a vicious attack” on a 12-year-old Baltimore boy who receives coverage through the program.

I wish these Democrats would listen to the program, or at least read the transcripts, before they pretend to know what was said on the air. The “vicious attack” was not made against the 12-year-old Baltimore boy in question. It was made against the Democrats for using said 12-year-old Baltimore boy to do their bidding for them.

Fortunately, NewsMax gets it right.

Democrats enlisted Frost to speak on a recent weekly radio program, where he said the children’s insurance program allowed him to get medical help after suffering brain injuries in an automobile accident.

“I just hope the president will listen to my story and help other kids be as lucky as me,” he said at the time.

One blog, Free Republic.com, posted a report that said Frost attended a private school where tuition was $20,000 a year, that the family lives in an area where one home recently sold for nearly $500,000, and that a photo and “shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass-front cabinets.”

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh also commented. “This family owns a house in a neighborhood of homes valued in the 400,000 to 500,000 range,” he said on Oct. 8.

“They send the kid out to lie,” Limbaugh said of Democratic supporters of the legislation. “He’s 12-years-old! They will use anybody! They’ll corrupt anybody, to get where they’re headed. That’s who they are, folks.”

With all the attention Democrats are giving to Rush Limbaugh these days, you’d think he was on the presidential ballot.

One middle school in Portland, Maine is considering making contraceptives available to its students without notifying parents.

If the committee approves the King proposal, it would be the first middle school in Maine to make a full range of contraception available to some students in grades 6 to 8, said Nancy Birkhimer, director of teen health programs for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. Most middle schoolers are ages 11-13.

Although students must have written parental permission to be treated at Portland’s school-based health centers, state law allows them to seek confidential health care and to decide whether to inform their parents about the services they receive, Belanger said.

And so, the sexualization of America’s youth continues at the hands of public educators. Pretty soon they’ll be handing out condoms at Head Start.