Right Minded Online

That’s a quote from revenue commissioner Reagan Farr. I got it from Stacey Campfield who has a post this morning on a new effort by the Tennessee government to raise taxes. Campfield writes there “may be up to $20,000,000.00 or more in new taxes. Included in the new taxes are increases in the tax on some food, increases in taxes on small farmers…, increases in taxes on small business and many others.”

Democrats can never get enough of our money. Whether times are good or bad, they love taking more of our money. Last year, when we were running a surplus, they raised the cigarette tax. This year, with the state government running a deficit, and food and energy costs rising, they want to raise taxes on food and energy, among others. This is who Democrats are.

Ben Cunningham posts some numbers relevant to Ohio’s lottery which show, once again, that lotteries prey primarily on the poor.

I’ve heard of the food police, nanny-state government, and all the other things liberals have devised to regulate what we eat, but this is going a bit too far:

Amid the hustle and bustle of downtown Los Angeles, there exists another world, an underground world of illicit trade in-not drugs or sex-but bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Street vendors may sell you an illegal bacon dog, but hardly anyone will talk about it, for fear of being hassled, shut down or worse. Our camera caught it on tape. One minute bacon dogs are sold in plain view, the next minute cops have confiscated carts, and ordered the dogs dumped into the trash.

Elizabeth Palacios is one of the few vendors willing to speak publicly. “Doing bacon is illegal,” she explains. Problem is customers love bacon, and Palacios says she loses business if she doesn’t give them the bacon they demand. “Bacon is a potentially hazardous food,” says Terrence Powell of the LA County Health Department. Continue selling bacon dogs without county-approved equipment and you risk fines and jail time.

Palacios knows all about that. She spent 45 days in the slammer for selling bacon dogs, and with the lost time from work, fines, and attorney’s fees, she fears she might lose the house that bacon dogs helped buy. She must provide for her family, but remains trapped between government regulations and consumer demand. Customers don’t care about safety codes, says Palacios. “They just want the bacon.”

This is what liberalism gets you. You can kill an unborn child, and it’s not even a crime, but selling a bacon-wrapped frankfurter will land you in the slammer.

A reader has passed along a news story describing the heroics of Raoul Wallenberg, a young Swedish diplomat, who was responsible for saving tens of thousands of European Jews during WWII.

Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus “passports” that extended Sweden’s protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on, dumbfounded.

Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and gentle manner. Recruited and financed by the U.S., he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in Budapest’s ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a war criminal.

Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, days after the Soviets moved into Budapest, the 32-year-old Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, drove off under a Russian security escort, and vanished forever.

I’d love to see the movie.

Barack Obama cannot be trusted with the reigns of power. First, he’s a liberal, and liberals endeavor to assume as much power as possible, including running the U.S. economy. Given Obama’s ignorance of economics, nothing good could possibly result from an Obama presidency.

While campaigning in Indiana, Obama remarked “If the economy’s growing and your incomes are going down, what’s happening? It means that somebody’s making out like a bandit.” Obama cited tax cuts under the Bush administration that he claims benefited the wealthy and not the middle class.

First, incomes are not going down. Average hourly wages in January were $17.75. In February, they were $17.81. In March, they were $17.86. The increase from February to March extrapolates out to a 3.4% annual increase.

Second, the Bush tax cuts benefitted not only the wealthy, but every single American worker who pays income taxes. Even the bottom wage earners saw their income tax rate cut from 15% to 10%, and saw the per child tax credit doubled from $500 to $1,000.

Now, Obama also spoke out against halting a tax on gasoline during the summer months, a move supported by Hillary Clinton and John McCain, saying it may not bring down prices and would deplete a fund used for building highways.

“The only way we’re going to lower gas prices over the long term is if we start using less oil.”

Wow. Such glaring ignorance. Such glaring liberalism.

If Obama were truly concerned about the supposedly shrinking incomes of the non-wealthy, why not suspend the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal tax on gasoline? After all, the poor pay a higher percentage of their incomes on the gasoline tax than the wealthy. It’s a regressive tax, which liberals typically deplore.

Indeed, Obama’s unwillingness to suspend the gasoline tax is evidence that Obama may care about the poor, but he cares about the government even more. Tough economic circumstances notwithstanding, Obama believes the government needs that money more than poor people do. So the Bush tax cuts benefited the wealthy and not the poor. Okay. Let’s suspends the gasoline tax and do something for the poor. Obama doesn’t want to do that either. His concern for the poor is mere window dressing for Obama’s sympathies toward government.

But perhaps Obama’s complete ignorance of economics can be summed up by the line “The only way we’re going to lower gas prices over the long term is if we start using less oil.” By that logic, the only way we’re going to lower food prices is if we start eating less food.

Lowering consumption (i.e., lowering economic activity) is NOT the way you go about lowering prices. The way to lower the price of oil is to provide more supply. That would require that the left get out of the way and allow for more domestic drilling in more places. It’s that simple.

Folks, like it or not, oil is the lifeblood of the economy. In a free market such as ours, Americans of all economic classes benefit from a strong economy. Those who are hurt most by a recession are the poor. If we start using less oil without a suitable replacement — and as yet, we don’t have one — it will result in a decrease in economic activity, which would affect a great deal more than just gas prices.

The sad thing is, there is a sizeable number of the American electorate who are mesmerized by Obama, and believe this stuff hook, line, and sinker.

More Obama in the news:
McCain calls Obama insensitive to poor people
Official Obama blogger flies Communist Party flag

Remember Matthew Shepard? Of course you do. How could you not after the way the mainstream media played up his murder. Matthew Shepard was a young homosexual man who was beaten and left for dead in Wyoming several years ago. The case was so hyped that some on the left tried to use the murder to advance hate-crimes laws.

More than ten years ago, there was a reverse of the Matthew Shepard case in Massachusetts, where a ten-year-old boy was raped and murdered by two homosexual men. It’s in the news now because the victim’s parents have dropped a lawsuit against NAMBLA, an insidious organization that advocates, well, unnatural acts between men and boys.

Jeffrey Curley was abducted in East Cambridge after he was lured into a car driven by a neighborhood resident, Salvatore Sicari, and Jaynes, of Brockton. Authorities said the men promised Curley a new bike.

When Jaynes made sexual advances toward the boy, he fought back in a struggle that authorities said lasted about 20 minutes in the back seat. Jaynes subdued and smothered Curley, stuffing a gasoline-soaked rag into his face.

The child’s body was sexually assaulted in Jaynes’s apartment in Manchester, N.H., before he and Sicari placed their victim in a 50-gallon plastic container, filed it with lime and concrete, and dumped it in a river in southern Maine.

Both men were convicted of murder charges and are serving life sentences.

You would think such a crime would have warrented the same wall-to-wall coverage granted Matthew Shepard. But those of us who don’t live in Massachusetts heard little, if anything, about the murder. Why? Homosexuals committing crimes against minors doesn’t interest the mainstream press, and doesn’t prompt the left to demand hate-crimes laws. That’s because there’s a movement on the left to promote homosexuality at all cost.

We have another shining example of liberal tolerance, this one from a public school. Public schools, of course, are the largest, single repository of homosexual activism in the nation today.

A principal in a Massachusetts school district with a well-established reputation of promoting homosexuality to students has written to parents to tell them distributing “religious materials” during the school’s annual observance of the pro-homosexual “Day of Silence” is not appropriate.

The letter from Michael Jones of Lexington, Mass., High School also confirms “hate speech” is “subject to legal constraints” and messages communicated through slogan T-shirts, buttons or stickers that express “condemnation” are “discouraged.” Students with such a message will be counseled by school officials to meet the guidelines of the school handbook, he wrote.

I wonder if academics has a role at that school, or if it is nothing more than a training facility for the next generation of liberals.

Related news story: Court Rules Unanimously: Illinois School Must Allow “Be Happy, Not Gay” T-shirt

Here’s a couple of news stories on the war that you likely won’t hear from the mainstream press, because they refute everything we’ve been told about the war in Iraq.

‘Torture’ ban blamed for prolonging war: U.S. military deaths in Iraq skyrocketed after Abu Ghraib, interrogation limits

WASHINGTON – U.S. military casualties in Iraq skyrocketed during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and following a ban on coercive interrogation of prisoners 18 months later, shows an analysis of monthly Defense Department reports on troop deaths conducted by Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

Only two times during the course of the war do statistics show combat deaths significantly increasing:

The first came just as the Abu Ghraib scandal was breaking in April 2004, casting international doubt upon the American-led mission and, say U.S. military sources, giving encouragement to terrorist forces on the ground.

The second came in 2006, following the implementation of new rules of engagement and a congressional ban on so-called “torture” that strictly limited interrogation techniques by U.S. military personnel.

In addition to being the month the world first heard of Abu Ghraib, April 2004 was also the second-highest month for U.S. military deaths in Iraq, and it set off a period of significant instability.

U.S. military deaths below 26-year average: Annual toll in Bush years down despite 4,000 fatalities in Iraq

WASHINGTON – Despite suffering 4,000 deaths in Iraq, annual U.S. military casualties overall during the first six years of the Bush administration are well below the average for the 26-year period beginning in 1980, a WND investigation has revealed.

Even in 2005, the deadliest year of the Iraq campaign, U.S. troop fatalities around the world, including Afghanistan, were lower than the first nine years of the study – when the Cold War was still raging in a time of relative peace.

In 2005, a total of 1,942 U.S. military personnel were killed in all causes, including accidents, hostile action, homicides, illnesses, suicides, etc. That compares to 2,392 in 1980, the last year of President Jimmy Carter’s administration. In fact, twice as many U.S. military personnel were killed in accidents in that one year than were killed in hostile actions in any year of the Bush administration.

The analysis of statistics compiled by the Department of Defense also shows, despite a major increase in deaths due to hostile actions beginning in 2003 with the advent of the Iraq war, the annual toll on U.S. troops did not skyrocket above peacetime norms as many might expect. For instance, in 1993, the first year of the peacetime Clinton administration, 1,293 U.S. servicemen lost their lives – just 649 fewer than in 2005, the hottest year of the Iraq war.

Those who would use military deaths to advance themselves politically will certainly turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to these facts.

Abstience works every single time it’s tried. You cannot contract an unwanted pregnancy or an STD by practicing abstience. This simple biological fact frosts the left. They are flummoxed that God has provided a better solution than anything they have ever conceived, which is why they ridicule abstinence education and, often, those who practice it.

Yesterday, a House committee heard what is being called biased testimony on abstience, which isn’t altogether surprising. The left has for years been trying to undermine the superior practice of abstinence in favor of their same-sex ideology and its holy grail: the condom.

“Dr. Weed stated multiple times, to a mostly deaf committee, that the same evaluation standards need to be applied to contraceptive-focused sex education as to abstinence-until-marriage education,” she said.

“He went on to say that of 115 peer-reviewed studies of contraceptive-focused education, not one was found to decrease sexually transmitted infection rates. Additionally, Dr. Weed clarified that consistent condom use has been shown to be a 100 percent failure.”

The latest research by The Heritage Foundation supports abstinence education. In a review of 21 abstinence-education programs, 15 showed positive behavioral results in the students, including the delay or reduction of sexual activity.

Never mind that, though. The promotion of safe-sex (with all of its risks) over abstience is perfectly consistent with the left’s determination to sexualize America’s youth with its hedonistic, godless agenda. On top of all this, abstience is bad for the abortion industry, and, as we all know, abortion is the sacrament of the Democrat Party.

Story here.

Terry Frank points out that Democrats like Bob Tuke are blaming the GOP for high gas prices, when it is, in fact, the Democrats and their energy policies that have contributed far more to the high cost of oil.

Memphis juniors Antonio Anderson and Robert Dozier are filing for the NBA draft, joining Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts, who have already left early for the draft. They join Joey Dorsey and Andre Allen, who are seniors, as members of the 2007-2008 basketball team who won’t be around next year. If Anderson and Dozier do get drafted, the Tigers will have lost all five starters plus their backup point guard. However, the two juniors have not hired agents, and therefore retain their NCAA eligibility should they not get drafted.

I am now into my second spring season as the head coach of a Little League baseball team. We are now in the ten-year-old league, light years away from the tee-ball we were playing just a few years ago.

There are eight teams in our division. We are 4-4 and tied for third place. It is the most competitive league I’ve ever been involved with. When we were 3-3, we were tied for second place. A loss dropped us back to sixth. A win Monday night vaulted us back into a tie for third.

We won our first game 10-1. It was the first time any spring baseball team I have coached or assistant coached won its first game. We lost the next game 12-5. It remains our only blowout defeat. We played horrible. It was a Murphy’s Law game for us. I wanted to line them up against the dugout wall and shoot them.

We lost our next game, too, 7-6, against the first place team. We then won 12-10, lost 5-2 in another Murphy’s Law game. That was the game I let them see me get angry. I never get angry with them. Sometimes I get frustrated, but never angry. We were in the field and just kicking the ball around, not seeming to care. So I called timeout, went into the infield, called them in, and applied some tough love. On the bright side, even as poorly as we played, we were still in that game until the end. It could have been another blowout. We won our next game 11-4, lost the next 6-5, and won Monday night 5-4 against the team that had previously beaten us 12-5. Through Monday night, we had scored more runs than any team in the league. Our guys can sure hit.

This is my sixth year to be involved in Little League. As the players get older, my role as head coach changes. I am less of a coach and more of a manager now. Some of our players literally need no coaching. Some need a little, some still need a lot. I feel like a psychologist now. The more advanced their skills become, the more mental the game.

(Some of these kids have also gone through some hard times at home. I generally know who they are, and try to be considerate of that when dealing with them on the field.)

In that 6-5 loss, my relief pitcher hit three batters. He throws hard, and getting hit by him is painful. They cry while limping down to first base. He’s a great baseball player. In fact, he ended up being my second-round pick. (I have 11 players on my team.) After his second inning on the mound was over and we came up to bat, he got on base and wound up on third, where I was coaching. He more or less asked me to put in someone else to pitch. I told him I wouldn’t make him go pitch if he didn’t want to.

I talked to his dad a couple of days later. He was so discouraged after the game that he told his dad he didn’t want to pitch anymore. Ever. So we concluded the best thing we could possibly do would be to put him on the mound the very next game. I usually tell a kid before the game if he’s going to be used in relief later on. But I didn’t do that this time. I started him at shortstop and let my starter throw the maximum number of pitches (75), then, by rule, I had to pull him. There were two outs in the fourth inning, and it was a tight game. I believe we were tied 3-3 at that point. I then sent my starter over to shortstop and called my formerly discouraged pitcher over to the mound. I had talked to him a little a couple of innings before when we had a few spare moments, but never alluded that he would pitch later that game. I told him I believed in him, and handed him the ball. He was lights out. He pitched the remaining 2 1/3 innings, and gave up only one run. We scored twice in the bottom of the fourth, and held on to win. I gave him the game ball. It was the biggest win of the year by far. I took them to Dairy Queen after that and bought them all ice cream.

One of my players has played on four teams of mine — both of my fall league teams, and my two spring teams. He’s always been a good hitter, good fielder, an excellent baserunner with a daredevil attitude, and he even started pitching some in the fall. But he’s having a tough spring. He can’t hit. He knows how to hit. I’ve seen him hit before. But he just can’t hit this spring. His parents have even started getting him private batting lessons in order to help straighten him out. He’s a good kid who loves to play baseball, and he has good, supportive parents. It breaks my heart to see him get discouraged.

The game before last, the one we lost 6-5, we were in the last inning. We had already scored three runs and the tying run was standing on third base with two outs. He came up to bat and struck out to end the game. Afterwards, he was crying.

His dad called me last night on his cell phone to tell me just how discouraged his son had become. He’s not hitting, not getting to pitch very much, and doesn’t like playing center field as much as he has been. We talked for several minutes, and I told him I’d talk to his son privately before the next game. But I couldn’t wait that long. So I picked up the phone a few minutes later and called him at home. We talked for a while. I told him he was going through a batting slump. He’s hit the ball before, and he’ll hit the ball again, but that he’s just going to have to play through this until the hits start falling again. Even major leaguers go through slumps.

Hitting is a strange thing. As Yogi Berra once said, 90% of hitting is half-mental. Hitting is all about hand-eye coordination and timing. It’s all in your head, and when the hits stop falling for a while, it messes with your head. It weighs on you like an elephant. And there’s only one way out of a batting slump — to keep on swinging.

Anyway, I assured my player that he’ll have the opportunity to pitch again. (I told his mother that we’ve had so many close games lately that I’ve had to rely on my more experienced pitchers to carry us. She understood.) And he plays a couple of innings in center field every game because I have to have someone in that position who can do three things well: catch fly balls, run fast, and make long, accurate throws. He was in center field during that 6-5 loss. It was the bottom of the 4th inning and we were already down 6-2. The bases were loaded and there were two outs. The batter hit a fly ball to center field, and he caught it for the third out. If he didn’t catch it, at least two runs would have scored, and the game would have been over for us right there. I reminded him of this during our conversation last night. I think he felt encouraged after our talk.

Then there is my first baseman, The Stoic. He was the highest rated player in our draft, and I snatched him up as my #1 pick. He’s a lefty who can pitch, but prefers first base. And when he isn’t pitching, he’s at first base every single inning. He’s very good in the field, but spectacular at the plate. He may be the best pure hitter I have ever coached, and there’s absolutely nothing I can tell him about hitting, because he knows as much as I do. So I leave him alone and let him do his thing. I call him The Stoic because he never gets overly-excited during a game, but also never gets down when things don’t go right.

I have a red-headed catcher I’ll call The Comedian. He’s the life of the party, a truly funny kid who is sort of the ringleader of the bunch. He loves baseball, and is a smart player. My #1 pitcher, for example, really gets down on himself when things don’t go well. Things usually do go well when he’s on the mound, but not always. The Comedian knows this. Just when I’m about to make a mound visit to calm him down, The Comedian already has his mask off and is trotting off to make the visit himself, so I stay put. I have no idea what they’re talking about, and don’t care. This is teamwork. The more hands-off I can be, the better. This is their game, not mine. I am content to let The Comedian run the show on the field for the moment. I’d rather them hear from a peer, anyway. It has more of an impact.

There are other players, too, of course. My other catcher is a good-natured kid who owns his own catching gear. My part-time second baseman, part-time center fielder is also a gymnast who can do back flips. He’s a fast, reckless baserunner who can hit. I have a kid who plays golf, has excellent hitting mechanics, can wear it out in practice, but cannot hit in an actual game for whatever reason. I can’t quite figure him out. He’s also a good kid with a kind and supportive father.

I also have a couple of twins who look exactly alike, and I have never learned to tell them apart. I always have to look on the back of their uniforms to tell who is who. They are a couple of the fastest runners in the league, and when they get on base, they can do some real damage.

And then there’s my kid. Right now he’s our #2 pitcher, who also plays second base, third base, and center field. He was also having difficulty hitting until the last couple of games, so I had to drop him in the lineup from #2 to #6, and now #5. He was mad at me, but I told him I also have ten others players to consider besides him, so he swallowed his pride and went out there and started hitting. We ended up having to consult his hitting coach, who made a couple of adjustments in his mechanics. Lo and behold, he’s 2-for-4 the last two games with three runs batted in.

So these are my 11 players. Eleven different personalities. Eleven sets of skills. Eleven different opinions. One coach who wants to shoot them sometimes, and buy them ice cream other times.