Right Minded Online

It’s time to announce the winners of the 2004 Right Minded Awards. There are 14 categories that summarize this tumultuous political year. The votes are in, and it’s time to open the envelopes.

Leading off is the Right Minded Quote of the Year. It comes from the Maha Rushie himself, Rush Limbaugh, for this gem: “To be a liberal you have to think it’s a religion. You have to accept all this stuff on faith because factual analysis destroys it. So we need separation of liberalism and state as part of separation of church and state.”

The Right Minded Bad Timing Award goes without contest to Al Gore. On January 15, Al was in New York City to give a speech on global warming. It was the coldest day in the city in more than a decade. Wind chills in parts of New England plunged to 100 degrees below zero. Gore explained “The extreme conditions are actually the end result of the planet warming. The Bush policies are leading to weather extremes.” Gore’s claim that global warming produces extreme cold also lands the former Vice-President into a tie with the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” for the Right Minded Weird Science Award.

Al Gore earns his third trophy by taking the Right Minded Kiss of Death Award. On December 9, 2003, Gore endorsed then-frontrunner Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination for President. On January 19, 2004, the full impact of Gore’s endorsement was realized when Dean came in third at the Iowa caucus, effectively tanking his campaign.

Howard Dean also gets the Right Minded Name-that-State Award for his meltdown following the Iowa caucus, during which the former Vermont governor raged “Not only are we going to take New Hampshire, we’re going to South Carolina and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico and Oregon and Washington and Michigan! And then we’re going to Washington D.C. to take back the White House! AHHHHH! We will not give up! We will not give up in New Hampshire! We will not give up in South Carolina! We will not give up in Arizona or New Mexico, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan! We will not quit now or ever! We’ll earn our country back for ordinary Americans! And we’re going to win in Massachusetts! And North Carolina! And Missouri! And Arkansas! And Connecticut! And New York! And Ohio!”

The Right Minded Armchair Quarterback Award gets handed off to John F. Kerry for his endless critiques of George W. Bush’s national defense strategery. Of course, Senator Kerry was generous in sharing how he would have handled the War on Terrorism differently, but only after the outcomes were known. Great hindsight.

And now for the Right Minded Wizard of Oz Awards:

The Scarecrow Award goes to Dan Rather for mindlessly using forged documents to levy an AWOL charge against President Bush in his National Guard days. The disgraced and soon-to-be former anchor of CBS News, who credits himself with taking down Richard Nixon thirty years ago, himself became an embittered shadow of Nixon while shedding any pretense of objectivity.

The Tin Man Award goes to John Edwards for his statement on October 11 that “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases…. When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.” Indeed, giving disabled or otherwise incurably diseased Americans the false hope that a John Kerry presidency would see them healed or cured was cold and heartless.

The Cowardly Lion Award goes to the House GOP for voting to delay the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Commission’s reporting deadline until after Election Day. The income-taxers don’t take “No!” for an answer, and they will never give up. It takes guts to beat these guys back every time they come for our paychecks, and the House GOP couldn’t muster one single vote to make the commission’s report public in time for the campaign season.

Meanwhile, the Right Minded Superhero Award provided a difficult choice this year. In the end, George W. Bush narrowly beat out two healers, John F. Kerry and Benny Hinn. President Bush is this year’s top superhero for causing a string of four hurricanes to hit Florida. Hey, if the left can attribute these powers to a man it otherwise portrays as feeble and incompetent, it must be true.

The Right Minded Comeback Award goes to the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox, down three games to none against the New York Yankees, came from behind to beat the Yankees in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, then won the final three games to become the first team in major league baseball history to win a best-of-seven series after losing the first three games.

The ignominious Don Sundquist RINO Award is shared by State Senators Tim Burchett and Curtis Person for pledging their help to retain John Wilder as Speaker of the Senate, even though the GOP has gained majority status. These guys are definitely Republicans-in-Name-Only.

Given that various Women-of-the-Year are famous actresses, politicians, athletes, executives, and working mothers who are praised for their ability to juggle work and family, the 2004 Right Minded Woman-of-the-Year is every stay-at-home mom. These are women who have elevated their families above money and career status, and somebody ought to give them public recognition for doing so. I’ll gladly be the one to do it.

Finally, the prestigious Right Minded Conservative of the Year, for the second consecutive year, is George W. Bush. Despite the formidable opposition to his reelection provided by Kerry/Edwards and the DNC, the 527’s, Dan Rather and the mainstream press, Michael Moore and Hollywood, Bush became the first presidential candidate in 16 years to capture a majority of the popular vote. He won re-election simply by being a conservative. It works every time.

With the Tennessee General Assembly getting set to return to Capitol Hill next month, both the Democrat and Republican Caucuses will soon present their legislative agendas to the taxpayers.

Governor Phil Bredesen has already hung his 2005 goals on the door. They include creating a voluntary universal pre-kindergarten program for 4-year-olds, limiting the sale of some cold and sinus medications that contain pseudoephedrine, and spending more money to recruit industry and create quality jobs.

In other words, Governor Bredesen, who is distinguishing himself as a Democrat for once, is proposing more government, more government, and more government. The GOP could do a lot better.

With the help of two turncoat Republican senators, Tim Burchett and Curtis Person, the upper chamber is expected to return John Wilder to the Speaker’s position, despite the GOP’s elevation to majority status on Election Day. It’s not a good start for the Republicans. This means the long-standing tag team of Wilder and Jimmy Naifeh will retain control of the legislature. Thus, whatever agenda the GOP takes, it won’t have the teeth it would have if Burchett and Person were as loyal to their party and their constituents as they are to John Wilder, but that’s another column for another day.

TennCare is going to be front-and-center this year, given that the taxpayer-funded health care program is on the rocks. Governor Bredesen is still threatening to scrap the program and return to Medicaid, and has already spent the potential savings on paper. If Bredesen has his way, the taxpayers won’t see a dime.

This is where the Republican Caucus could distinguish itself. The taxpayers stand to save roughly $600 million by ending TennCare. Of course, Governor Bredesen, education lobbyists, and many in the legislature are already planning to transfer that money, at least most of it, directly into a statewide pre-kindergarten program. Universal preschool is a program into which the state ought not to drag the taxpayers, but this, too, is another column for another day.

Toward the end of the 2004 legislative session, Representative Glen Casada proposed using $70 million of last fiscal year’s surplus to reduce the sales tax on groceries by a penny on the dollar. It failed — no surprise there — but Casada’s maneuver should have stirred the passion of conservatives. So far it hasn’t, but here’s the idea: If the taxpayers can save $70 million for every one-cent reduction in the food tax, then we could save $420 million by abolishing the state’s 6% portion of the sales tax on food items altogether. This would make the taxpayers very happy, and the legislature would still have approximately $180 million left to throw to the wind.

Abolishing the food tax would serve two purposes. First, of course, is that every consumer in the state would get a tax cut. The Democrats couldn’t spin it as a “tax cut for the rich” no matter how hard they tried, because, as we are frequently told, “Tennessee’s sales tax on groceries is hardest on the poor.”

Second, eliminating the sales tax on groceries would be a debilitating blow to income tax lobbyists. After all, who gave us the phrase “fair tax, not food tax?” It was income tax enthusiasts, and it would be interesting to see them react to abolishing the food tax without getting their state income tax in the process. We would find out which is more important to them: eliminating the food tax or enacting an income tax.

So, the Republican Party has a big fat pitch to hit out of the park and the chance to distinguish itself from Democrats by pushing tax reformers against the wall. Unfortunately, most Republicans (in the House, anyway), will tag dutifully behind the governor and the Democratic leadership in transferring TennCare savings — if indeed there is any — directly into an ill-advised statewide preschool program in order to give the appearance that they care about education.

The GOP will do so not because it wants a preschool program, but because Republicans fear the name-calling from the education community if they don’t. This has been standard operating procedure for Republicans in the General Assembly, particularly in the House, since their valiant stand against the income tax nearly three years ago. They vote for bad legislation because they don’t know how to take their case to the people, and they fear bad publicity.

Perhaps the best example of Republicans voting for bad laws came last year when the General Assembly passed a bill which mandated that children up to 80 pounds be placed in booster seats when riding in vehicles. The object was child safety, and who, after all, could be against child safety? Never mind that this was an intrusion of government that took the decision-making process out of the jurisdiction of parents and into the realm of legislative control. The GOP could have easily taken a stand for parental rights, but it chose to go along with the bill because it didn’t want to be labeled as “against child safety.”

Now, with the General Assembly drooling at the prospect of having $600 million more to spend, the taxpayers are likely to be left out of yet another opportunity to save money. Unless the Republican Caucus is willing to take a stand for limited government — a concept from which it has taken a three-year sabbatical — then Tennessee’s taxpayers will be saddled with another government program that will never go away.

And you thought the income tax was a dead issue in Tennessee. That’s what income tax proponents and their cheerleaders in the mainstream press said before the election, but now that the election has passed, it’s on the table again, sort of.

Yes, the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Commission has released its findings, and to the surprise of no one it has recommended a state income tax to solve Tennessee’s “antiquated” and “regressive” tax structure.

There are several points to the TTSSC’s recommendation, which has already been pronounced dead-on-arrival by Governor Phil Bredesen. But to be fair, among the commission’s numerous suggestions are a couple of surprisingly reasonable ideas.

First, the TTSSC’s tax reform plan is revenue-neutral, meaning that the total amount of revenue raised would not change. This is a refreshing change of course from previous tax reform plans introduced by Don Sundquist, Bob Rochelle, Jimmy Naifeh, and various other legislators, all of which were tied to massive tax increases.

Also, the commission recommends accountability measures whereby any revenue surpluses would be put into the state’s rainy day fund or returned to the taxpayers. At face value this is a good idea. In reality, the devil may be in the details.

The state already has an accountability measure in place called the “Copeland Cap,” which limits the amount of money that can be appropriated by the General Assembly from year-to-year. Again, this is great in theory, but becomes problematic in practice because the Copeland Cap can simply be overridden by a majority vote in the legislature. That’s exactly what has happened in 12 of the last 20 years, with the General Assembly exceeding the spending cap by a cumulative $3.2 billion.

So, on the blind chance that the TTSSC’s findings should ever become law, any accountability measures would have to come in the form of a constitutional amendment which the legislature can’t simply push out of the way by a majority vote. Otherwise, no thanks.

Now, the meat of the commission’s recommendations come in the form of a graduated income tax, with brackets ranging from 3.5% to 6%. Predictably, the TTSSC’s plan is modeled after the Rochelle-Head graduated income tax bill that was introduced several years ago, but never voted on.

The income tax would be offset by reducing the sales tax on groceries to 4% and non-grocery items to 6%, reducing business franchise taxes, and eliminating the Hall income tax.

Income tax proponents often remind the taxpayers that most would save money under tax reform, and blame the failure of tax reform on voter ignorance. True, most taxpayers probably would save money in the initial few years after tax reform, but a) somebody is going to end up paying an awful lot more, and b) enacting a state income tax creates another stream of taxation. And as records are made to be broken, so taxes are made to be raised.

But we taxpayers are really smarter than they think. After all, when was the last time you saw the Tennessee General Assembly cut taxes? Indeed, there would be nothing carved in stone to prevent the legislature from increasing sales taxes back to pre-tax reform levels in order to solve the next budget crisis. We’d be fools to believe those tax rates would stay in place forever.

Of course, the TTSSC was supposed to release its recommendations by July 1, but the Tennessee General Assembly, with the full compliance of House Republicans, pushed the report date back to December 31 — conveniently after Election Day. This is so income tax proponents could pronounce the income tax dead during the campaign season, only to resuscitate it once the voting was over.

Ironically, the TTSSC’s report has actually renewed interest in a constitutional ban on the income tax. Actually, it’s already banned, but since income tax proponents have been honing in on redefining the word “income” in order to get tax reform past that pesky Constitution, select members of the GOP are seeking to spell it out letter-by-letter.

Even Senator Joe Haynes (D-Nashville), who supported the bill in 2002 that created the TTSSC, then said he would sponsor the panel’s recommendations as legislation, now says he’s “inclined to support” a constitutional ban on the income tax. Senator Haynes remarked “I’ve thought about doing that myself, and I’ve talked to some Democrats about it. You may see that come from the Democratic Caucus, as a matter of fact.”

I’d be surprised to see a constitutional ban on the income tax come from the Democratic Caucus. In fact, Vanderbilt will win the SEC football title before that happens, but it’s nice they’re talking about it. If nothing else, Senator Haynes’ about-face illustrates just how the culture on Capitol Hill has changed in the two-and-a-half years since the Naifeh income tax vote. Since then, voters have picked off income tax supporters en masse, and Tennesseans now sport a governor who has pronounced the TTSSC’s income tax recommendation DOA.

Christmas appears to be another word the left has come to find deeply offensive. Now is the time of year not just for joy for those who find a deeper meaning in Christmas than lights, presents, trees, and egg nog, but also the time when the easily-offended spread their gloom by trying to expunge Christ from our holiday vocabulary.

For example, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a group of “non-theists” — the politically correct word for “atheists” — in Wisconsin have posted a “Winter Solstice” sign in front of the State Capitol that reads “At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

The back of the sign reads, “State/Church: Keep Them Separate.” Ironically, a taped-on caveat reminds readers, “Thou shalt not steal.”

In the South Orange/Maplewood School District in New Jersey, the forty-member Columbia High School brass ensemble will be, for the first time, limited to musical numbers such as “Winter Wonderland” and “Frosty the Snowman.”

Superintendent Peter P. Horoschak explained “Rather than try to respond to all the various religions and try to balance them, it’s best to stay away from that and simply have a nonreligious tone to them and have more of a seasonal tone.”

At Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, Washington, even Ebenezer Scrooge is no match for political correctness. The Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol” has been banned from showing there because it would have prompted a “secondary discussion about public school and religion,” says the principal, Mark Robertson. He uses the absurd reasoning that “Teaching about religious holidays is permissible, but celebrating them is not.” Indeed, we certainly don’t want students having secondary discussions about public school and religion.

Meanwhile, the superintendent over Lakehoma Elementary School in Mustang, Oklahoma has banned a nativity scene and the song “Silent Night” from a school play, citing fears that non-Christians might be offended and file suit against the school.

Superintendent Karl Springer said “I just could not break the law. We may have sins of omission occasionally, but we won’t have sins of commission. If I know about something that I believe to be against the law, [then] we will take action on it.”

Brent Olsson, an attorney affiliated with the Alliance Defense Fund, retorted “Including Christmas in the play does not violate any law. It is a myth that the so-called ’separation of church and state’ requires officials to suppress the celebration of Christmas in the public schools.” Olsson further noted that “Ninety-six percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. If the superintendent is truly concerned about offending someone, then he just made a very wrong decision.”

However, this year’s top Grinches are undoubtedly the organizers of Denver’s Parade of Lights. A Christian group is not allowed to participate in the city’s parade this year, because church members planned to sing Christmas hymns and proclaim a “Merry Christmas” message on their float.

So what is acceptable? Santa Claus gets a pass, along with gingerbread houses, toy soldiers, and an “international procession to celebrate the cultural and ethnic diversity of the region” (to include everyone except Christians, of course).

The Two Spirit Society of Denver, which is a support group for American Indians who are homosexual, bisexual, or transgendered, will be honored as “holy people.” Performers of the Lion Dance, a Chinese New Year tradition “meant to chase away evil spirits and welcome good luck and good fortune for the year,” will also parade.

So, although pagan worshippers are allowed to participate, parade spokesman Michael Krikorian said the event does not allow “direct religious themes.” Krikorian reasons “We want to avoid that specific religious message out of respect for other religions in the region. It could be construed as disrespectful to other people who enjoy a parade each year.”

You’d think by the reaction of this year’s Grinches that those of us who believe in the Christ-centered celebration of Christmas are a dying breed. Yet a recently-taken Newsweek poll found that 93% of all Americans believe Jesus Christ really lived, and 82% believe Christ is the Son of God. Nearly 80% believe Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, and 67% believe the entire story of Christmas, including the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, the angels, and the wise men.

There is one heartwarming story to conclude this year’s Grinch roundup, however. It comes from our nation’s capitol, where the conservative group Public Advocate of the United States, “not dissuaded from ‘bah, humbugs’ to groups like the Boy Scouts of America and pro-family Americans in general,” sang traditional religious Christmas carols in front of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Christian Wire Service reported that even a few ACLU staffers joined in, proving that Christmas, when celebrated as it was originally intended — to mark the birth of Jesus Christ — can overcome even the hardest of hearts.

The scandal that was the United Nation’s Oil-for-Food program is unraveling, with results of a congressional investigation letting loose a tidal wave of information revealing the deep corruption of that sordid program.

First, let’s lay some groundwork before we get to the goodies. The Oil-for-Food program began in December 1996 and officially ended in November 2003. It was established so that Saddam Hussein’s government could sell unlimited quantities of oil provided the money received went primarily to buy humanitarian goods and toward reparations to 1991 Gulf War victims. Yet the Oil-for-Food program was hardly the humanitarian endeavor for which it was intended.

According to Representative Christopher Shays (R-CT), who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Relations, which investigated Oil-for-Food, the United Nations essentially shut its eyes to a system in which Saddam Hussein “undersold the oil and got huge kickbacks and then he overpaid for commodities and he got huge kickbacks.” Shays says there is little doubt that some of the money ended up in the hands of terrorists. In the end, the Government Accounting Office estimated in March that the Iraqi government pocketed $5.7 billion by smuggling oil to its neighbors and $4.4 billion by extracting kickbacks on otherwise legitimate contracts.

We’ve known for a long time that Saddam Hussein, who the left says posed no threat to American security, paid from $15,000 to $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers. The House Committee’s findings have revealed that Hussein got part of the money from 10% kickbacks he demanded on the contracts of companies that did business under the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program.

Now, there were 248 companies that participated in Oil-for-Food. Most are Middle Eastern, while others are located in Pakistan, India, Italy, France, Russia, and China. The latter three are permanent members of the Security Council that opposed U.S. action in Iraq. There were four American companies that received Iraqi oil. They are Texaco and Chevron (now ChevronTexaco Corporation), Mobil (now Exxon Mobil Corporation), and Phoenix International.

This is going to be a tremendous disappointment to the left, but Halliburton is not among those companies. However, one former American fugitive was identified by shipping records as a middleman in several of Iraq’s suspect oil deals in February 2001. The former fugitive is Marc Rich, who had been pardoned by Bill Clinton only a month earlier.

The Duelfer Report, which gave the findings of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, suggests that French businessmen and politicians close to Jacques Chirac may have received bribes from Saddam Hussein. It also said that French companies may have sold weapons to Iraq in 2003. In a separate report, French government officials, perhaps even Jacques Chirac himself, have been implicated as bribery targets by Saddam Hussein.

All this was going on while “[The Iraqi people's] suffering increased, their mortality increased,” said Dr. Khudair Abbas, Iraq’s health minister. “Everybody knew that the Oil-for-Food, it was an embargo on the ordinary Iraqi people…Saddam’s regime was not touched.”

Even U.N.’s former head of Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevan, is accused of receiving bribes in the form of vouchers allowing him or companies tied to him to purchase 7.3 million barrels of oil, which would have netted $700,000 to $2 million, depending on oil prices.

Representative Henry Hyde (R-IL) wrote in a letter to Kofi Annan “If there is truth to allegations that the Iraqi regime, with assistance from U.N. officials in some cases, wrongfully acquired $10.1 billion through oil smuggling, oil sale surcharges and illegal commissions on Oil for Food contracts, this represents a scandal without precedent in U.N. history.”

The September 11 commission, which was covered extensively by the mainstream media because it supposedly found no link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, did find evidence of contacts between Hussein and al Qaeda that continued after billions of Oil-for-Food dollars began pouring into Hussein’s coffers and Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States.

So did Oil-for-Food money support terrorists? Consider that some of the money went to buy a missile system — specifically, a $174 million Russian anti-aircraft missile system that could shoot down American and British pilots then patrolling Iraqi “no fly” zones.

Oil-for-Food money may also have ended up in the hands of terrorists looking to strike in the United States — particularly al Qaeda. The September 11 commission dispelled the myth that Osama bin Laden financed al Qaeda with a $300 million personal fortune. Indeed, the commission’s report says bin Laden had nowhere near the money required to fund al Qaeda’s $30-million-a-year budget.

It has also been revealed that the deposed former Iraqi dictator bankrolled various al Qaeda terrorists in the late 1990’s, during which time the group was planning 9/11 and Hussein was scamming the U.N. program. According to Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, “Saddam had given $300,000 in cash to Ayman Al Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s number two man, in the spring of 1998. It’s likely that Saddam was giving some of his [Oil-for-Food] money to al Qaeda.”

There’s a lot more to this story, but you get the picture. In the minds of liberals, those who were aligned against us and were pillaging a humanitarian endeavor for personal gain, such as the French and the U.N., remain the paternal figures from whom we are supposed to seek permission to defend ourselves. At the same time, despite the terrorist attacks on us and others, despite the bribes, kickbacks, and cover-ups, according to the left, the mainstream press, Europeans, terrorists, and Hollywood, George W. Bush and the United States of America remain the bad guys.

TennCare is hanging by a thread as Governor Phil Bredesen and TennCare advocates find themselves caught in a staredown.

After years of keeping TennCare reform tied up in court, the Tennessee Justice Center, a left-wing advocacy group and by far the biggest roadblock to TennCare reform, is retreating from several court settlements it has won on behalf of TennCare’s 1.3 million enrollees. In response to Governor Bredesen’s recent announcement to dismantle TennCare and return to Medicaid, the TJC has asked for a two-year moratorium on various settlements in order to allow the governor to move forward with TennCare reform.

Keep in mind that the Tennessee Justice Center exists solely to milk the taxpayers for as much as the court system will allow. In addition to the enormous sum of money forced into TennCare by the courts, judges have awarded $3.2 million of taxpayer money directly to the TJC as part of its settlements. That money has paid for operating expenses and future legal fees for staff and contracted attorneys. On top of that, taxpayers have paid approximately $1 million to a special master assigned by a federal district court to oversee numerous consent decrees.

And on top of that, taxpayers are shelling out $350 per hour to Washington-based law firm Cooper and Kirk for legal representation. Michele Johnson, Managing Attorney for the TJC, says the $3.2 million it has received from the taxpayers is a small fraction of the fees paid to private attorneys by the taxpayers.

The legal maneuvering has continued nearly non-stop since 1998. Bredesen’s TennCare reform, which is currently on hold in Washington, would mean benefit cuts and increased co-payments for those currently on TennCare, with no decrease in enrollment. But it’s not good enough for the TJC, which apparently believes the taxpayers’ only purpose is to provide an infinite stream of money to throw into the black hole TennCare has become.

Governor Bredesen’s reforms would have produced some $2.8 billion in savings over the next four years. If left alone, TennCare will consume 91% of all state revenue growth by 2008.

So in the end, it appears that the Tennessee Justice Center, funded by the taxpayers, exists for one reason only: to sue the taxpayers. Its endless string of lawsuits “in defense of the poor” is on the verge of putting TennCare out of existence, and costing 430,000 Tennesseans their taxpayer-funded healthcare.

The TJC is now waving the white flag in an attempt to save the TennCare program it has all but killed. But Gordon Bonnyman, the TJC’s director, doesn’t believe the consent decrees the TJC has won in court are to blame for TennCare’s problems. He argues “It is a grave disservice to the public, to taxpayers and to patients to scapegoat those consent decrees because it’s simply pointing to the wrong diagnosis.”

Bonnyman instead insists the problems the governor must fix are mismanagement by state officials running TennCare and the managed care organizations that actually administer the health care claims.

The TJC, which has had TennCare in court for the last six years, and has used the judiciary to block every meaningful attempt to reform TennCare to keep it from collapsing, is blaming everyone but itself for the demise of TennCare. Indeed, Bonnyman’s organization has done the taxpayers the gravest disservice of all. It’s another irony to this whole story.

Meanwhile, pressure is being exerted from all sides, with TennCare now facing a $130 million shortfall in next year’s budget as the cost of the program is expected to jump by $650 million.

In addition, a federal judge on November 24 opened the door for another civil rights attorney to join the legal battle over TennCare. Attorney George Barrett argued that he ought to be allowed to intervene on behalf of the 430,000 TennCare members who would lose all benefits if the program were dismantled.

U.S. District Judge John Nixon agreed, saying those who would lose benefits are “deserving of a voice solely committed to protecting their interests.” I wonder what part of the Constitution that’s in.

Judge Nixon’s decree should put the last nail in TennCare’s coffin. Indeed, conservatives typically get the blame for dooming the social programs liberals dream up. But this time, TennCare is having its legs cut out from underneath by a liberal advocacy group and a liberal judiciary, leaving a Democrat governor little choice but to pull the plug.

Amid all the legal bantering, there is one group of individuals whose own interests appear to have been forgotten: the taxpayers. Other than Governor Bredesen, there is not a single player involved in the TennCare battle who cares one whit about those who are actually paying the bills. Most are instead focused on the supposed “right” to taxpayer-funded health insurance without regard to the burden it places on the taxpayers.

TennCare’s demise could be averted if only its advocates weren’t determined to overload the system. Indeed, the fate that TennCare may soon meet is a glowing example of liberalism collapsing under its own weight. As Margaret Thatcher once said, eventually socialists will run out of other people’s money.

By far the most attention-getting post-election Cabinet maneuver was President Bush’s nomination of Condoleezza Rice to succeed Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Her confirmation would make Dr. Rice the highest ranking black woman in our nation’s history, as Secretary of State is fourth in the presidential line of succession.

Now, one might think the diversity and affirmative action people on the left would be pleased that a minority woman has been tapped for this position. One would be wrong. The left has met Dr. Rice’s nomination with derision, proving that politics trumps diversity and affirmative action.

First on the docket is an editorial cartoon drawn by Pat Oliphant on November 16. The editorial depicts a grossly exaggerated caricature of Dr. Rice as a parrot perched atop President Bush’s finger. The caption quotes President Bush asking Dr. Rice “How woodums wike to be Secwetawy of State?” Dr. Rice then replies “Awwrk!! OK, chief! Anything you say, chief! You bet, chief! You’re my hero, chief!”

Even worse was a cartoon by Jeff Danziger dated October 4. Here, Dr. Rice is depicted as a perpetually barefoot and pregnant black welfare mother, with a collection of WMD canisters representing her supposedly numerous children. She is holding one of the canisters like an infant, with a bottle held up to his mouth. The caption reads “I knows all about aluminum tubes (correction) I don’t know nuthin’ about aluminum tubes…”

Of course, the mainstream press was mum on these editorial cartoons, the latter of which is blatantly stereotypical of black welfare mothers. You could even call it racist. But can you imagine the howls of protest that would have come from the left had a conservative similarly depicted a liberal black woman? Indeed, the media would have done wall-to-wall around-the-clock coverage. But Jesse Jackson, diversity-minded liberals, hyper-sensitive icons of political correctness, and the mainstream press have remained tuned out.

Meanwhile, on November 17, Milwaukee radio personality John Sylvester used his morning airtime to refer to Dr. Rice an “Aunt Jemima,” and this after calling Colin Powell “Uncle Tom.” During a phone interview the next day, Sylvester announced he was planning a giveaway during his show of Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup. “I will apologize to Aunt Jemima,” he said. Sylvester later did apologize for the entire setup, but, again, can you imagine the vitriol that would have come from the left if the tables had been turned?

Well, the tables were turned on October 29, 2003, when Rush Limbaugh, who was doing NFL commentary for ESPN, stated his belief that Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback Donovan McNabb was “overrated…what we have here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well — black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well.”

Rush was skewered by the mainstream media for his comment, and he subsequently resigned from ESPN to take the heat off his fellow commentators and the network. Indeed, one needed earplugs to drown out the noise from the press following Limbaugh’s comment, but required a hearing aid to pick up mainstream news of Sylvester’s likening of Dr. Rice to Aunt Jemima. (Fortunately, the NAACP did condemn Sylvester, but it really was a lone wolf.)

This is one of the many ironies about the political left. You see, Democrats have long touted themselves as the party of minorities, the spokesmen of those persecuted by racism, or so they say, but when a conservative minority such as Condoleezza Rice is publicly derided, they suddenly find themselves occupied with other things.

The reason, of course, is that Dr. Rice does not fit the template the left has created for minorities, and that template is two-fold. Minorities should either be on public assistance and voting Democrat, or, if they have become successful, must pay homage to the diversity and affirmative action programs that got them there…while voting Democrat.

But minorities who succeed on their own, without the aid of diversity and affirmative action, are a threat to the left because they prove they are just as capable as whites, are not in need of liberal “compassion,” and show that the supposed roadblocks erected by white conservatives to keep blacks down simply do not exist. In short, successful minorities such as Dr. Rice prove that minorities don’t need liberalism.

Condoleezza Rice’s nomination for Secretary of State has provided the left another opportunity to flex its bigotry, while proving that the Democrats’ supposed status as the party of minorities is about as hollow as its labeling of the right as exclusively racist. Indeed, the left’s belligerence toward Dr. Rice is proof that when liberals accuse others of being racist, they are telling more about themselves than anyone else.

Parents of some schoolchildren in Cobb County, Georgia are in a huff over warning labels that have been placed on science textbooks in that school district. The labels read “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

They were placed on books two years ago after more than 2,000 parents complained that the schools were teaching Darwinian evolution as fact, ignoring evidence that is critical of evolution as well as the competing theory of intelligent design.

Michael Manely, an ACLU lawyer who is representing the pro-evolution parents in a lawsuit, illustrates the over-the-top reaction to the warning labels by accusing the school board of “doing more than accommodating religion. They are promoting religious dogma to all students.”

This is certainly not the first textbook controversy regarding the evolution versus intelligent design debate. Such controversies have stirred elsewhere, although the circumstances in most cases are similar. Parents are simply asking that evolution be taught as a theory — not as a set of proven facts — and that Darwinism be presented side-by-side with counter-evidence and/or intelligent design theory.

The idea is that students should be allowed to weigh the evidence of competing theories themselves. It’s called “critical thinking,” and is normally encouraged in scientific disciplines, Darwinian evolution being one of the few exceptions.

A CBS poll released on November 22 showed that more than half of all Americans do not believe in human evolution. Only 13% of those polled believe that God was not involved in the process. Breaking it down, 47% of Kerry voters believe God created humans as we are now, compared with 67% of Bush voters. Furthermore, more than half the Kerry voters — and two-thirds of all those polled — want creation taught alongside evolution. Predictably, belief in evolution is greatest among those with more education and among those who attend religious services rarely or not at all.

Darwinism’s dirty little secret is that it is science’s equivalent of the pyramid scheme in finance. Evolution, which argues that life on Earth began and has evolved through a complicated process of random events and genetic mutation, has never been observed. Therefore, the empirical evidence normally required to validate scientific theory has never been gathered. The fossil records Darwinists typically cite as proof are filled with missing gaps that are only explained by piling theory on top of theory. At the base of this pyramid, where a collection of credible evidence should exist, there is only more theory.

To illustrate this point, I have listed five questions I’ve always wanted to ask Darwinists. These questions are answered very simply under the intelligent design explanation of our origins. The task isn’t quite as simple for evolutionists, because they view our origins through the prism of science, and science, which is nothing more than man’s understanding of the physical world around him, cannot explain the origins of the universe and life on earth. If Darwinists were to answer the following questions honestly, they too would have to concede that something quite supernatural occurred at our genesis — an admission for which Darwinism has made no room.

Question #1: The big-bang theory typically cited by Darwinists states that all matter in the universe once existed as a single super-sphere which at some point exploded, its fragments coalescing into the stars, planets, and other celestial objects we observe today. If this is true, which random process created that original super-sphere out of nothing?

Question #2: How did the human race evolve from single-cell organisms, such as amoebae, and become randomly separated into two equally-populated genders which are mutually attracted to each other? Furthermore, how is it that only females are uniquely equipped to bear and nourish offspring?

Question #3: Gravity is an invisible, non-magnetic attraction between two physical objects. It’s what keeps the Earth in a nearly symmetrical orbit around the sun, and prevents us here on Earth from flying off into space. Please explain how gravity came into being without an intelligent designer.

Question #4: Which random processes produced the human brain? This complex organ is not only capable of the computer-like functions of logic, memory, and computation, but also such emotions as love, hate, joy, and fear, which artificial intelligence engineers have heretofore been unable to duplicate in laboratories.

Question #5: If evolution is the fact-laden, open-and-shut, slam-dunk case Darwinists make it out to be, what’s the harm in placing it side-by-side with intelligent design? If indeed Darwinism is above reproach, then the facts should easily tilt the scales in its favor. But they don’t.

That’s why those hostile to Christianity, or at least intelligent design, must protect evolution by censoring counter-evidence and counter-theory. Darwinism is a fraud — a crutch, if you will — which its advocates use in order to explain our origins without having to admit there is a God.

Evolutionists ridicule the idea of intelligent design as being the product of a primitive, flat earth-type religious dogma. Ironically, and despite the self-proclaimed “science” label that Darwinists have assigned to their belief system, it requires far more religious faith to believe in evolution than the creation story described in Genesis.

You’ve probably heard the oft-repeated claim that liberals are generous and conservatives are greedy. It’s an easily refutable lie. One of the fundamental distinctions between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives believe in helping individuals with their own money, while liberals believe in helping themselves to other people’s money.

The Catalogue for Philanthropy has assembled income and charitable contribution data which provide solid support for this observation. The organization has published its annual “Generosity Index,” which ranks each state not only by how much its citizens give, but by how much they give relative to how much they have.

The Generosity Index takes into account the average adjusted gross income for each state, and its average charitable donations. By ranking these two variables, the Catalogue for Philanthropy is able to produce the Generosity Index. (This year’s chart is based on data from 2002, and is available on the Internet at http://www.catalogueforphilanthropy.org.)

The state with the highest Generosity Index is Mississippi. Coming in second is Arkansas, then Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alabama. Tennessee is sixth. Ranking last is New Hampshire, followed by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.

Do you see a pattern?

The top twenty-five states in the Generosity Index are all “red states” which George W. Bush carried on Election Day. Of the nineteen “blue states” that John Kerry won, New York ranks highest �- in twenty-sixth place. In other words, every blue state ranks in the bottom half of the survey. The seven lowest-ranking states are all blue.

This is not what your average liberal would expect from such a survey. After all, liberals maintain that conservatives are selfish and blind to the plight of unfortunate others. They lecture the American people on the need for compassion, while believing that very little charity would exist if it weren’t for them.

Indeed, the left bases its tax policies on the Marxist/Leninist principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” In modern lingo, this translates to “the rich must pay their fair share.” Of course, liberals operate on the blatantly false assumption that conservatives �- particularly wealthy ones �- cling stingily to every dime with no concern for their fellow man, when the reverse is irrefutably true.

Liberals measure generosity using different variables than conservatives. To a liberal, a society’s compassion is directly proportional to the amount of tax revenues collected by government and the size of its social programs. In other words, generosity must be legislated and enforced under threat of prosecution.

On the flip side, the conservative definition of compassion and generosity is determined by an individual’s willingness to give from his own resources to another individual or charity WITHOUT government coercion.

In other words, liberals see a need, and attempt to fulfill that need by forcing citizens (usually wealthier than them) to pay higher taxes. Conservatives see a need, and voluntarily open their wallets in order to fulfill that need without anyone telling them they have to.

That the twenty-five most generous states are all relatively conservative drives a stake firmly through the heart of the myth that liberals are more generous than their selfish conservative counterparts.

Well, perhaps that’s not altogether true. Liberals do tend to be quite generous, but only with other people’s money.

When conservative talk radio emerged with the onset of the Rush Limbaugh Show sixteen years ago, it marked the beginning of the end of the Old Media’s stranglehold on what was aired over the nation’s airwaves and read in its newspapers. Conservative media became popular because they satisfied a need in a population which had felt disconnected from the Old Media for years. That conservatives have enjoyed unprecedented success in national elections during the past decade owes largely to the rise of this New Media.

Of course, the New Media isn’t confined only to talk radio. Conservative news sources also proliferate across the Internet. And even some newspapers, such as the New York Post and Washington Times, while not necessarily slanting conservative, have certainly eschewed the liberal bias obvious in such monoliths as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. And viewers also have Fox News to turn to for more even-handed reporting, as opposed to those bastions of liberalism, ABC, CBS, and NBC — the “Big Three” — plus CNN, PBS, and MSNBC, which also lean leftward.

But aside from talk radio, nothing has proven as valuable to conservatives as the Internet. Granted, liberals have climbed aboard the Internet, too, but the wealth of information available on the Internet has provided a chisel conservatives have used to chip away the smoke screen the left has used to shroud itself from the American people for half a century. Facts are far easier to find now, and often expose fraud from all political directions if one has the desire to search for them.

Websites such as the Drudge Report, which reports news often snubbed by the mainstream media, averages more than 8,000,000 visits per day. Other sites, such as NewsMax.com and WorldNetDaily.com, keep the mainstream media more honest by reporting news that is sometimes condemnatory of the left — and which the Old Media used to ignore altogether.

Then there’s Townhall.com, which posts a plethora of op/ed pieces –- several a day, in fact — from syndicated conservative columnists. In other words, readers seeking conservative commentary are no longer at the mercy of newspaper editorial departments. They can simply go to Townhall.com and read columns from Robert Novak, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schafly, Walter Williams, and Mike Adams, for example, as well as the highly-illumined conservative patriarch Thomas Sowell.

However, one phenomenon that has exploded during the past three years, while flying largely beneath the mainstream media’s radar beam, is the spread of weblogs (or “blogs”). Blogs are websites run by individuals (”bloggers”) who make frequent posts and provide information and commentary on their favorite topics. Blogs allow individuals with certain expertise, but no formal connection to established media, to provide useful information to an audience they could never have otherwise reached.

Of course, liberals have used Internet blogs to their advantage, too, but conservatives have run such a marvelous detour around the mainstream press that they possess a far greater share of the blog market (”blogosphere”). There are far more noteworthy conservative bloggers than can be listed here, but they run the scale from the nationally-known Michelle Malkin, to Nashville journalist Bill Hobbs, to your humble Right Minded columnist.

Just during the election cycle, it was the conservative blogosphere that spread the message of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — a group of Vietnam Veterans who served with John Kerry, but had a far different story to tell — who were ignored by the mainstream media.

Bloggers picked apart the fraudulent Dan Rather story of President Bush’s supposed National Guard AWOL, exposing the fake memoranda cited by Rather and holding CBS’ feet to the fire long before the fraud emerged as a mainstream news story.

It was also the blogosphere and alternative media which defused and rendered impotent the October Surprises launched by the New York Times and Osama bin Laden just days before the election.

In his column on November 27, 2003, Thomas Sowell shared the keenest statement ever made about liberalism: “A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.” The harvest reaped by conservatives through alternative media is nothing more than an ocean of information — the very evidence, in fact, needed to destroy the agenda of the political left. Indeed, the Internet has become such a mode of success for conservatives that Al Gore is probably wishing he’d never invented it.

On October 28, Republican lawmakers and GOP candidates for office announced they would pursue a constitutional amendment during the next legislative session to ban a state income tax. Actually, it’s already banned, but Republicans want to nail the door shut on this thing once and for all. With liberals and income tax advocates, you have to spell things out with a big crayon in very simple words.

Of course, Democrats were frosted at the timing of such an announcement, and complained that it was only an election scheme while reminding us the income tax is dead. Yeah. Heard it before. (Just call it the GOP’s “October Surprise.”)

But the income tax won’t be dead for long. That’s because the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Commission is scheduled to offer its recommendation for a state income tax next month. At that time, income tax advocates, especially the misnamed Tennesseans for Fair Taxation, will hail the commission’s report as the Second Coming of Das Kapital, and the left-wing editorial boards of the state’s big-city newspapers will demand that we take the commission’s grave findings seriously. Debate will fire up once again, and the income tax will be far from dead. (After all, it’s only dead when income tax advocates are running for re-election.)

Revisiting the Constitution, which is necessary from time-to-time, there are two sections which declare the income tax illegal. Article II, Section 28 reads “The Legislature shall have power to levy a tax upon incomes derived from stocks and bonds that are not taxed ad valorem.” And Article XI, Section 9 states “The General Assembly shall not authorize any municipality to tax incomes, estate, or inheritances, or to impose any other tax not authorized by Sections 28 or 29 of Article II of this Constitution.”

State Representative Rob Briley (D-Nashville), who is one of the income tax’s loudest cheerleaders, typifies the thinking that goes on in the minds of liberals. Briley countered the GOP’s October 28 announcement with the absurd claim that no court has ever ruled on the constitutionality of a state income tax.

Ahem.

There have been three unanimous rulings by the Tennessee Supreme Court which have reinforced the unconstitutionality of the income tax. In 1932, in Evans v. McCabe, the Tennessee Supreme Court held that a tax on personal income enacted by the Legislature was unconstitutional. In 1960, in Jack Cole Co. v. MacFarland, and in 1964, in Gallagher v. Butler, the Supreme Court quoted with approval and followed the ruling of the Supreme Court in Evans v. McCabe.

Unfortunately, the constitutionality issue always gets lost in this debate, and the tax commission will likely not even address the Constitution in its eagerness to recommend a state income tax next month.

Still, the income tax continues to produce fruit for the GOP. Republicans picked up another seat in the House of Representatives when Tommy Head (D-Clarksville), a nine-term lawmaker and, as chairman of the Finance Committee, one of the most powerful Democrats in Nashville, was defeated on November 2. Head, of course, was co-author of the Rochelle-Head graduated income tax legislation a few years ago, and his defeat represents a major victory for income tax opponents.

Meanwhile, Tennessee voters made their opinion of higher taxes known on November 2, as well. Tax initiatives were on the ballot in twelve counties. Eleven of them were thwarted by the voters. In Knox County, a wheel tax increase passed, but only after the Knox County Commission and Mayor passed a property tax increase contingent upon the failure of the wheel tax. Thus, advocates of higher taxes were 0-11 when voters were given an up-or-down option. The cumulative margin against higher taxes was 73-27%.

The most interesting referendum occurred in Memphis, where a payroll tax was on the ballot. Now, “payroll tax” is merely a euphemism for “income tax,” which is illegal in Tennessee, but that didn’t stop the city government from putting it on the ballot. Memphis, of course, is Tennessee’s liberal Mecca. John Kerry received 58% of the vote in Shelby County, and his percentage in Memphis was likely much higher. So one would think Memphis voters would be most receptive to an income tax. But they weren’t receptive at all. The initiative failed 73-27%.

The Memphis payroll tax referendum represents the first time an income tax has been placed on a ballot in Tennessee, and that it was rejected almost 3-to-1 by the state’s most liberal voters says something about taxpayers’ feelings toward having another layer of taxes taken from their earnings. This is devastating for income tax advocates.

In closing, the GOP picked up two seats in the Senate to claim a majority for the first time since Reconstruction. Still, a handful of turncoat Republicans (Tim Burchett, Curtis Person, and possibly Mike Williams and Randy McNally) have stated they will vote for John Wilder for Lieutentant Governor.

Of course, voters have income tax-proofed the Senate during the past two election cycles, owing to the replacement of Bob Rochelle, Bill Clabough, and Jo Ann Graves with conservatives Mae Beavers, Raymond Finney, and Diane Black. But John Wilder supported a state income tax two years ago, which has left frustrated Republican voters shaking their heads. Ron Ramsey, the Senate’s top-ranking Republican, is expected to oppose Wilder, but it appears to be in vain. If the Senate GOP ever wants to act like the majority party the voters have made it and put the state income tax six feet under with a constitutional amendment, the rest of us are certainly ready.

I am not an unreasonable guy. Sometimes it behooves conservatives to vote for a Democrat. Conservatives living in Tennessee’s 5th congressional district were presented with such an opportunity this Election Day. So let me explain why I voted for Jim Cooper.

First, Jim Cooper did not have a conservative opponent. The candidate occupying the Republican line on the ballot was Scott Knapp, a mixed-bag who had few conservative credentials. Knapp lists the #1 issue in our district as “energy policy,” and on Iraq, Knapp’s viewpoint descends into the pessimism of a liberal.

He states “I do not think we should have gone to war in Iraq. Now that we’re there, we’ve got to do something. I’m not 100% sure what. I think it will deteriorate into chaos. Let it go back to what it used to be, three separate countries. Let the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis have their section. Hopefully, we’ll get along with the Kurds, best-case scenario the Shiites won’t hate us, and the Sunnis are probably a lost cause.”

On the Bush tax cuts, Knapp also apparently reads from the DNC’s talking points, stating “If [Bush] wants to make them permanent, he needs to find where to cut the spending.” Knapp is correct in his argument that government spends too much, but he ignores the positive effect tax cuts have on the economy and revenue collections.

Therefore, as a conservative, one had to turn to Jim Cooper to see what he offered.

Mr. Cooper, who is a little more grounded in reality, lists the #1 issue in our district as “a tie between the war and jobs.” Although Cooper does not agree with the President on Iraq, he still has the sensible outlook that “It’s no good looking backward. We need to support our troops and try to get them home safely and as quickly as possible.”

The American Conservative Union has given Jim Cooper a 36 rating (out of 100) based on his voting record. That’s more liberal than conservative, but among Cooper’s fellow Tennessee Democrat congressmen, he’s more conservative than Bart Gordon and Harold Ford, Jr., and more liberal than Lincoln Davis and John Tanner.

Despite his rating, Jim Cooper has hit several home runs. He was one of only 36 House Democrats who voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment, and one of 62 Democrats who voted for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. This is huge.

In addition, Jim Cooper was one of 48 House Democrats who voted for the American Jobs Creation Act, which extended three components of the Bush tax cuts: easing the marriage penalty, creating a 10% tax bracket on the bottom end of the income scale, and doubling the per child tax credit to $1,000.

He voted against Gun Manufacturer Liability, which would have allowed negligence lawsuits against gun manufacturers, sellers, and trade associations when criminals use firearms illegally. Cooper also voted for Class Action Lawsuit Reform, a bill that moves many national class-action lawsuits out of local and state courts and into federal courts in order to stop “court shopping.”

Congressman Cooper voted for a “Death Tax” repeal, which makes permanent the now-temporary repeal of the death tax on family inheritances and businesses passed in 2001. He voted against using taxpayer funds to pay for overseas abortions, voted in support of saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, and voted against the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

All of these are conservative votes on high-profile legislation, and in almost all cases, Jim Cooper bucked the Democrat Party’s position. No, Jim Cooper is not a conservative, but that he willing to go against his party and vote conservative on legislation that is of paramount importance to conservatives earned Mr. Cooper a Right-Minded vote this year.

Conservatives agree that our philosophy succeeds whenever it’s applied, and it shouldn’t matter who applies it. Conservatism works for Democrats as well as conservatives. Honest conservatives aren’t afraid to lift substance over style, and adhere to ideology more than a political party. This means that sometimes it’s okay for a conservative to vote Democrat.

It’s time once again to empty the cache of random ideas from the right — a collection of thoughts that for various reasons never matured into full column-hood, but are too valuable to simply be discarded.

When Democrats scratch their heads wondering why the working class sometimes votes Republican, they reveal their disbelief than individuals can actually be motivated by something other than jealousy and class envy.

How many times have you heard a liberal tell the religious right to “stay out of my bedroom?” Fine, how about if we let privacy beget privacy? I’ll stay out of your bedroom, and you can keep your hands off my paycheck.

To a liberal, a law-abiding citizen who exercises his Second Amendment right by purchasing a firearm is deserving of scorn and ridicule, but a criminal who uses a firearm to commit a crime is someone who requires understanding and rehabilitation.

Bill Clinton recently benefited from prompt heart surgery in a system that he attempted to replace with a Canadian-like socialist health care monolith. Had he been successful in doing so, he would have had to wait several months, if not years, to receive the surgery that probably saved his life.

A bad day on the baseball field is still better than a good day at work.

Whenever a politician uses the phrase “for the children,” go ahead and insert the word “government” in place of “children.” This is because anything that is supposedly for the children is really for the government, and any politician who says he or she is looking out for our children’s future is really looking out for government’s future.

It’s only a matter of time before the hypersensitive icons of political correctness start demanding that we replace the meteorological phrase “Indian summer” with “Native American summer.”

Why do we teach our children that if they are hit at school, they shouldn’t defend themselves? There are few things I’d rather do than get into a fistfight, but if someone physically attacks me, I’ll do everything possible to defend myself rather than stand there and get pummeled. I believe most people would instinctively react the same way. We should allow children the same option.

When listening to Christian radio, I sometimes wonder what the lyrics have to do with Christianity. It is obvious that some artists parade under the “Christian” label for notoriety while offering music that is blatantly secular.

Most of us carry memories of our grade-school teachers well into adulthood. We easily recall those who treated us unjustly, and those who either encouraged or inspired us. The turning point for me as a student came early in the 11th grade when my English teacher told me I was a good writer. And because my American History teacher the following year was such a marvelous lecturer, I began pursuing additional knowledge through reading that to this day has not abated. Teachers really do matter — both the bad and the good.

A little nonconformity never hurt anybody.

To borrow a pearl of wisdom from Dave Ramsey, many people drive themselves far into debt because they buy things they don’t want, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.

When Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners broke the single-season record for base hits this year, it renewed debate on whether seasonal records set during the current 162-game schedule should be separated from those set during the old 154-game schedule by the proverbial asterisk. Leave it alone. Baseball record books are already filled with statistics parsed every conceivable way. Why obfuscate things further?

Do liberals have an exit strategy for the War on Poverty?

Rather than debate evolution on religious or scientific turf which in the end changes very few minds, creationists should concede the argument to their counterparts, and then be quick to note that conservatism represents the pinnacle of Darwinian evolution.

The left seems to report the rising number of American casualties in Iraq almost gleefully. It cannot get past the politics of the War on Terrorism and see that our service members are sacrificing their lives for the same reason they always have: so that others may live and enjoy liberty. Indeed, politics really is the religion of the Democratic Party.

Here’s an old Soviet joke: What is socialism? It’s the longest road from capitalism to capitalism.

I have to shake my head when I hear someone protest “Israel’s occupation of Muslim land.” The Muslim world covers at least 34 nations across northern Africa and the Middle East, comprising more than 8,000,000 square miles. Israel’s land area is approximately 8,000 square miles. To put it another way, the Muslim world covers an area more than twice the size of the United States. Israel is smaller than New Hampshire.

It is true that there are more Americans without health insurance than ever before. But there are also more Americans — almost 250 million, in fact — with health coverage than ever before. That’s because there are more Americans than ever before.

With the finality of President Bush’s re-election barely hours old, Democrats were already talking in near-unanimity about Bush’s obligation to “reach out” and “heal our land.”

I agree that it is the job of a leader to make the first overtures toward reconciliation following such a bitter political campaign in which the stakes were enormously high. But who are the Democrats, who were buried even deeper into minority status this election, to tell the majority party and its head what it must now do?

It would be nice if the President could reach across the aisle and bring all of his political opponents into the fold, and some will no doubt be willing to accept the olive branch, but it’s naive and foolhardy to expect political peace to replace the vehemence that has marked Bush’s first term and the campaign that produced his re-election.

Consider that prior to the November 2 election, the left spread fear and panic regarding the substance of a second Bush term. Indeed, hysterical Bush-haters were predicting a repeal of civil rights laws and a return to Jim Crow, an end to Social Security checks, money being taken directly out of the pockets of the middle class and into the hoards of the wealthy, legalization of rape, a right-wing theocracy, more destructive hurricanes, etc., even though there is nothing remotely similar to these fanatical predictions in the GOP’s agenda or its track record.

It is incumbent upon a political victor to try to make peace with his opponents, for sure, but beware when the left begins demanding that President Bush and his fellow conservatives initiate “healing.” What they really mean is that the GOP capitulate its own agenda and adopt theirs in the name of bipartisanship. We’re simply not gonna do it. It’s been tried, and got us nowhere.

President Bush received 51% of the popular vote, the GOP controls 55% of the Senate, and 53-54% of the House of Representatives, depending on the outcome of three undecided races. There’s a reason the GOP is the majority party on the national level, and the conservative agenda has a lot to do with it. Therefore, President Bush’s message to Democrats should be “Here’s how we’re going to do business the next four years, and I would love to have as many of you on board as are willing.”

If anything became evident during Bush’s first term, it’s that capitulation still won’t score any points with Democrats. His first year in office, President Bush more or less allowed Ted Kennedy to author the legislation that created “No Child Left Behind” as part of the “new tone” the President promised to bring to Washington. He also signed onto Campaign Finance Reform and gave seniors a prescription drug benefit. Yet Senator Kennedy and his fellow Democrats are even more contentious now than four years ago.

There is little President Bush can do to relieve the bitterness and hysteria embodied by the Democratic Party and those who support it. Individuals such as Al Sharpton, for example, who have predicted that some of the 1960’s civil rights achievements are now going to be squandered, simply aren’t going to smoke the peace pipe with President Bush. True, there are cool, reasonable heads on the other side who will occasionally stand with the President, but most simply will not be persuaded to do their part to heal the rift that exists between them and the GOP.

Therefore, you can expect President Bush to reach out to those on the Democratic side and accept those who reach back. But it will have to be on the GOP’s terms, and not the minority party’s. There is a reason the Republican majority in Washington, D.C. continues to widen. It’s because the American people have seen that conservatism works, and they want more of it.

It appears that the mainstream media weren’t the only ones who had an October Surprise up their sleeves. Osama bin Laden had one, too.

I had been bracing for an earth-shaking October Surprise from the mainstream media and/or Kerry campaign — it’s really one and the same — but it appears to have turned out to be a backfire on the liberal establishment.

The October Surprise, defined here as “a perfectly timed news story designed to cripple the GOP candidate for president right before the election,” has worked for Democrats in the past. The 1992 announcement of an Iran-Contra indictment against Casper Weinberger more or less sealed Bill Clinton’s first election, and George W. Bush’s DWI story in 2000 very nearly tanked his campaign.

On Monday, October 25 — eight days prior to Election Day — the New York Times reported that the Bush Administration allowed 377 tons of high-explosives to fall into the hands of the enemy by failing to secure a weapons depot from looters after the fall of Iraq. The NYT revelation turned out to be nothing more than a re-hashed news item that had first appeared on its pages on February 15, 2003.

The NBC Nightly News helped play spoiler after the Times October Surprise, acknowledging: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army’s 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing.”

Note the date. April 10, 2003 was more than 18 months ago. In other words, the explosives were already gone by the time U.S. troops arrived. But, as if on cue, John Kerry jumped on the Times story, blaming Bush for failing to secure the weapons cache. (Perhaps if we hadn’t wasted so much time trying to get permission from the French, Germans, and Russians to invade Iraq, we might have secured them.)

Still, it is noteworthy that U.S. forces in Iraq have to date either secured or destroyed some 243,000 tons of Iraqi ordinance — nearly 650 times the amount that is missing. Yet the Times didn’t bother reporting that.

The New York Times congratulated itself the next day by running the headline “Iraq explosives become issue in campaign,” but it isn’t an issue at all. It’s a news story that’s a year-and-a-half old, and merely got recycled in order to create the perception that the Bush Administration had flubbed it again.

The hilarity here is that the NYT’s “October Surprise” has blown up in its face. It’s as though the Times pulled the pin, but forgot to toss the grenade. You see, this is perhaps the first time since the presidential campaign began that the left has conceded that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s. For months, John Kerry and the Democrats told the American people “See, I told you so. There were no WMD’s. Bush took us into Iraq on a lie.” Now, just days before the election, their line has become “See, there were WMD’s, and Bush lost them.”

Oops. Those darn unintended consequences.

Folks, this is nothing more than a naked attempt by the New York Times to sway public opinion in favor of John Kerry at the 11th hour. The NYT — that bastion of journalistic integrity — merely flipped through its archives looking for a story it thought was condemnatory of President Bush, while hoping the American people wouldn’t recognize the news item as old hat. In fact, the Times reported the story as if the weapons had disappeared only the day before.

In the old days when the news media were dominated by a handful of newspapers and the “Big Three” networks, the NYT’s October Surprise would have stood, and Americans would have been none the wiser. But it’s 2004, and we have alternative media as a counterweight. Indeed, the real news came out as Rush Limbaugh opened his program at 11:00 a.m. on October 25 by pointing out the discrepancy, and by the next morning, the alternative media had picked the Times story as clean as if it were a school of piranha.

On Wednesday evening, the Drudge Report, acting on a story broken by the Washington Times, posted the news that “Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein’s weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation.” Of course, Russia was one of those nations the left said we had to have in our pocket before going into Iraq, but it turns out the Russians were in cahoots with Saddam Hussein.

What the New York Times has shown, perhaps even more vividly than Dan Rather’s use of forged National Guard documents to smear President Bush, is that the mainstream media long ago abandoned any pretense of objectivity, and has become as partisan as the political parties it claims to cover with impartiality. Fortunately, the rise of talk radio and Internet media has enabled those desiring the truth to effectively check-and-balance the mainstream press and expose the traditional media for the partisans they really are.

As a result, the congratulatory cigar the New York Times lit eight days before the election blew up in its face, and the result has become far more condemnatory of the left than President Bush.

In the waning days before the November 2 election, Democrats are busy positioning lawyers to manipulate the courts and recruiting activists to register Democrat voters any way possible, even if it includes subverting the rule of law.

Just consider that U.S. District Judge and Clinton-appointee James Carr ruled recently that “Ohio voters who show up at the wrong polling place on Election Day can still cast ballots as long as they are in the county where they are registered.”

Democrats and the NAACP then succeeded in convincing another Clinton-appointed judge to rule that Michigan must count provisional ballots even when cast in the wrong precinct(s), as well. Fortunately, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the Ohio and Michigan rulings, but it illustrates the lengths to which Democrats will go in order to tilt the voting process in their favor.

Meanwhile, an Ohio man was supposedly given crack cocaine to register voters, and has been arrested for false registration. The man, Chad Staton, had been hired by Georgianne Pitts, who admitted to paying Staton crack cocaine for the registrations in lieu of money. Pitts, in turn, says she was recruited by Thaddeus J. Jackson, II, of Cleveland, to obtain voter registrations. Jackson is the Assistant Ohio Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund.

A Denver, Colorado television station has documented 719 cases of forms at five different county election offices that show fraudulent names, addresses, social security numbers, or dates of birth. Some registration drive workers earn $2 per application. One woman admitted to forging three people’s names on about forty applications. She was helping her boyfriend earn more money from an organization called ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a far-left, pro-Democrat organization.

In Berks County, Pennsylvania, Director of Elections V. Kurt Bellman says there have been flagrant attempts at voter registration fraud, noting blatant duplicate voter registrations. Some of the registration drives are being conducted in violation of the law because they are paying incentives to sign up voters. Bellman said his office has had numerous calls from people who were registered through ACORN, complaining that those recording voter information deliberately recorded inaccurate information on the forms.

Hamilton County, Ohio election officials are dealing with a rare case of election fraud there. Board of Elections Director John Williams subpoenaed those named on questionable voter registration cards after similar handwriting and false addresses raised election workers’ suspicions. The cards were turned in by an individual affiliated with ACORN.

In St. Petersburg, Florida, the state attorney’s office is investigating allegations that ACORN fraudulently changed party affiliations on voter-registration applications. ACORN is also under investigation in Miami-Dade County for registering ex-convicts to vote. A former field director for ACORN told investigators that efforts to rig votes for the 2004 election were “routine.”

“There was a lot of fraud committed,” acknowledged Mac Stuart. His allegations include that ACORN “quality control” workers routinely kicked back Republican voter registrations while paying for Democratic ones, using the excuse that “they had enough” new voters for the GOP. Stuart said “boxes” of Republican voter registration cards were tossed while “thousands of invalid voter registration cards” were submitted in their place.

Stuart also admitted that ACORN “eagerly sought” to register convicted felons, even though they’re not allowed to vote under Florida law. He recalled setting up registration tables outside the Miami police department and Dade County jail.

Back in Ohio, ACORN registered al-Qaida member Nuradin Abdi to vote. Abdi was indicted earlier this year as part of a conspiracy to blow up the Columbus Mall.

ACORN also added Iyman Faris as a new Ohio voter. Faris is serving a 20-year jail sentence for his role in surveying potential al-Qaida targets, including the Brooklyn Bridge. Abdi was registered by ACORN employee Kevin Eugene Dooley, who was indicted earlier this year for false election registration and submitting false election signatures to the Ohio Board of Elections. Only after Abdi’s case was exposed did Ohio officials strike his name from the voting rolls due to his status as an illegal alien.

Allegations of voter fraud are also under investigation in Nashville, Tennessee. About 200 “citizens” who don’t exist registered to vote in Davidson County for the presidential election, and now the TBI is investigating the individual who submitted those forms on behalf of Tennessee Citizen Action (TCA), another liberal group.

There are many more examples of voter fraud that have popped up in the news this election season, nearly all of which have been perpetrated by those friendly to the Democratic Party. Although voter fraud isn’t new to elections in the U.S., it appears that fraudulent efforts are indeed more prevalent this year.

At the same time, Democrats such as Jesse Jackson and John Edwards are falsely scaring minorities into believing that the GOP is plotting to suppress their votes this year, even though evidence points to the contrary. In fact, a 66-page Kerry-DNC manual obtained by the Drudge Report on October 14 instructs operatives that “If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a ‘pre-emptive strike.’”

Desperation has fully set in on the Democratic side, and they are pulling every trick out of their hat — even accusing the GOP of planning what Democrats themselves are already doing. Just as liberals have to rely on activist judges to accomplish what they cannot at the ballot box, so too must they attempt through fraud and manipulation what they cannot achieve in the arena of ideas — namely to convince a majority of the electorate to vote for them.

George W. Bush has made one of the greatest political comebacks in American history. For years he was cast as a simpleton and intellectual lightweight. But now Democrats are attributing supernatural powers to the President. It’s been an amazing turn of fortune. Before, President Bush could barely tie his shoelaces. But just this year, so Democrats say, Dubya has caused a string of hurricanes to batter Florida, has kept the crippled such as Christopher Reeve confined to wheelchairs, and now the President is credited with the shortage in flu vaccinations.

Consider that on October 19, John F. Kerry released a radio advertisement which stated, in part, “If you’re an elderly man or woman, if you’re a young child, if you’re a pregnant woman, George Bush and the Republicans have this to say on health care: Don’t get sick.”

During an NPR interview, Kerry also asked “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program are you running?” (Hopefully the answer would be “none.” Presidents shouldn’t run health care programs. It’s the job of the private sector. It’s also a curious answer coming from someone who insisted during the final presidential debate that his proposed government-run health care program isn’t government-run.)

The shortage in flu vaccinations also prompted Senator Hillary Clinton to remark that President Bush is “more interested in tax cuts for the rich than for flu shots for everyone who needs them. This administration has their priorities wrong, and we’ve really paid a big price for their negligence.”

Hillary Clinton is that last person who should talk. In reality, she and her husband are a root cause of our perennial flu vaccine shortages.

In 1993, Hillary Clinton’s “Vaccines for Children Program” was first implemented. This was a program designed to make vaccines more available to the poor, uninsured, and underinsured children, even though, reported the Wall Street Journal last year, child vaccination rates in U.S. at that time were considered relatively high by medical experts.

The program turned the government into the major purchaser and distributor of vaccines. Not only did Clinton’s idea fail to result in any noticeable increase in childhood vaccination rates, but it also drove prices so low that the financial incentive for private companies to develop and produce vaccines was largely removed, making business unsustainable.

There’s still another reason we aren’t producing flu vaccinations in this nation: trial lawyers, such as John Edwards, and the legal concept of “liability without fault.” Notes the October 25 edition of The Weekly Standard, “Under liability without fault…the manufacturer can be held responsible for harm from its products, whether blameworthy or not. Add to that the jackpot awards that come from pain-and-suffering and punitive damages, and you have a legal climate that no manufacturer wants to risk.”

For example, when an epidemic occurred at Fort Dix, New Jersey in 1976, the government took it upon itself to vaccinate the entire nation against the swine flu. Insurance companies refused to participate, so Congress, under the urging of Ted Kennedy, decided to provide the insurance. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated at the time the 45 million inoculations would yield 4,500 injury claims and 90 damage awards amounting to $2 million. In reality, there were 4,169 damage claims filed and 700 damage awards totaling in excess of $100 million. Indeed, the insurance companies knew better than the government.

Like the price controls resulting from the Vaccines for Children Program, the outcome of “liability without fault” has meant disaster for the vaccine industry. In 1967, there were 26 companies making vaccines in the United States. Today there are only four that make any type of vaccine, and none making the flu vaccine. And although vaccines have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for recently emerging illnesses such as Lyme disease, no commercial vaccine exists, because no one is willing to take the enormous risk of producing and distributing it.

The combination of Clinton’s program and “liability without fault” has been so disastrous that the United States is now looking to companies in Britain and France to supply the 100 million flu vaccines to be administered here this year.

Democrats are making a campaign issue out of the flu vaccine shortage now that the Kerry campaign has shifted into crisis gear, and are now blaming President Bush for every ill — perceived and real — our nation faces. Ironically, it was a Democrat program which helped paved the way for the chronic shortages we face, illustrating once again that liberal ideas might be noble when conceived, but are disastrous when applied.

The Democratic Party is throwing everything it can at President Bush hoping to generate some traction for John Kerry. And as usual, Democrats are relying on the ignorance of the American people to shift blame onto the President that rightfully applies to them. Indeed, the lame excuse that President Bush is more interested in tax cuts for the rich than flu shots, when the real reasons are far more complex and condemnatory of the left, exposes a party that is desperate and generally bereft of ideas. Our perennial shortage of flu vaccines is the direct result of failed liberalism the left won’t own up to, and the Democrats’ only response is to hold President Bush “liable without fault.”

First it was John Kerry, war hero. Now it’s John Kerry, the healer. That’s essentially what his running mate, John Edwards, claimed on October 11, the date that news broke of actor Christopher Reeve’s passing. Since Reeve was an advocate of embryonic stem-cell research, I had braced for a revival of that debate, but Senator Edwards exceeded even my high expectations of the shamelessness of the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the senator from North Carolina claimed that “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases…. When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

I know Senator Kerry was campaigning in black churches the day prior to Edwards’ medical revelation, but he must have been working on his Benny Hinn shtick, too. However, you would think John F. Kerry would pursue faith healings, because he has to know that if he goes the medical route, John Edwards will be waiting to sue his pants off.

In truth, this all has to do with embryonic stem-cell research and the Democrat myth that President Bush is standing in the way of a potential cornucopia of landmark medical breakthroughs. It’s all hearsay created by Democrats to frighten people into voting for them. Do right-minded individuals actually believe that electing John F. Kerry to the White House will cause the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk? As usual, John Edwards is relying on the stupidity and blind faith of others to get votes.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, who is a paraplegic, remarked that “…one of the great mysteries in medicine is why the spinal cord does not regenerate, and no one has any idea of the answers, no one is in any way sure that we’re going to learn the answer from stem-cell research. We might, but I’ve heard a lot of hype over the last 30 years about the keys to the kingdom here in this issue and all of that have proved false. For Edwards to make the claim he did is the worst demagoguery I’ve heard in Washington in a quarter century. To imply that Christopher Reeve was kept in the wheelchair because of the policies of the Bush administration on stem cells is ridiculous and insulting.”

During an August 7 radio address, Senator Kerry three times referred to “the ban” on stem-cell research levied by the Bush Administration. First, there is no ban on either embryonic or adult stem-cell research. In fact there is only one president in U.S. history to allow use of federal money for stem-cell research: George W. Bush. If you recall the President’s speech in August, 2001, he decided to allow federal money be spent on research using existing embryonic stem-cell lines, but not for creating new lines of embryonic stem-cells because these must inevitably involve the destruction of human embryos.

Embryonic stem-cell research is perfectly legal in the United States. Individual states and the private sector are not prevented by the federal government from conducting such research. So anytime you hear a Democrat or an advocate of embryonic stem-cell research refer to President Bush’s “ban,” it’s a lie, and the Democratic Party is relying on your ignorance to maneuver the issue in their favor.

Even more egregious is that a man running for Vice-President of the United States would politicize the death of a fellow human being for his own purposes. Indeed, the notion that Kerry’s election would somehow bring hope to the afflicted is nothing more than a cruel hoax, and demonstrates the depths to which Democrats will slither and the unfortunate people they will use in order to get elected.

You’d think with all the maneuvering going on that the election for Senate District 17 is this November. Mae Beavers is still less than halfway through her first term as state senator, yet there is already some jockeying underway more than two years hence.

First there was talk of Don Fox running for the Democratic nomination. In fact, he has already helped raise some $60,000 for Governor Phil Bredesen’s re-election in 2006. But Mayor Fox has since stated that he has no desire to run against Beavers.

Throughout all this, one overriding observation has occurred to me: the Democrats don’t have a viable candidate. Although Democrat voters still slightly outnumber Republicans across the district, the day when the Democrats could stick anyone on the ballot and still expect to win has passed. Sherry Fisher proved that two years ago. The GOP has a formidable candidate in Senator Mae Beavers, and Democrats are scrambling to field someone who can provide a legitimate candidacy for them.

Since Wilson County boasts more than half the population in the district, it is only natural that the next Democratic candidate will have to come from this county. That candidate cannot afford to waste time and resources trying to build name recognition while simultaneously running against Beavers. The Democrats therefore need a candidate who is already known.

There are only three Democrats in the county who have that appeal: Don Fox, Bob Rochelle, and Stratton Bone. Don Fox says he’s out, so that leaves two Democrats who carry the enormous baggage of income tax advocacy. Don’t look for the Democrats to run Bob Rochelle again, because he never ran for office on a pro-income tax platform, and wouldn’t be able to overcome his income tax record now. Of course, Stratton Bone also bears the ignominy of having voted for the income tax two years ago.

The Democrats, therefore, need a well-known candidate without the burden of having supported a state income tax. There isn’t one, and that’s where Wilson County Democrats find themselves in a Catch-22.

In short, the good ol’ boys’ allegiance to a state income tax inevitably represents its undoing. The Wilson County Democrats need an upstart if they are going to seriously challenge Beavers, yet good ol’ boy networks are by their nature designed to keep upstarts down.

Of course, local Democrats will look to Phil Bredesen for his support in 2006, which is probably why Don Fox lent his name to an event raising money for his campaign. Getting Bredesen involved may be like pulling teeth, because the governor will likely reiterate his opposition to a state income tax during his re-election endeavor, and will be loathe to openly endorse a pro-income tax candidate.

Local Democrats are also counting on a divided GOP going into the 2006 election in light of this year’s contentious Republican primary in Representative District 57.

The only way Democrats can field a winning candidate is ultimately through deceit; denying all through a campaign that one supports an income tax, then “discovering” immediately after the election that the state is in dire need of an income tax.

That local Democrats are already making noise for an election that is more than two years away is an indication that they are looking toward the future and coming up empty. Unfortunately for them, however, the most viable candidate — whoever it is — will likely never see daylight due to the expectation that the eventual candidate adhere to the good ol’ boys dogma of supporting a state income tax.