Right Minded Online

The Republican presidential candidates held a debate in Iowa on December 12 that really turned out to be a dud, primarily because the candidates (with the exception of Fred Thompson) are so unwilling to consistently put forth conservative ideas. The debate was hosted Carolyn Washburn of the Des Moines Register, a liberal, which presents another area of frustration. The GOP keeps allowing mainstream media liberals to moderate their debates. What I wouldn’t give to see just one debate moderated by Ann Coulter. At any rate, here are some of the questions that were asked of the candidates, followed by the answers that I would have given had I been a participant.

Q: The comptroller general has said the U.S. faces a tsunami of debt that is a great threat to our national security. Do you agree our country’s financial situation creates a security risk? And why or why not?

A: Not at all. We face much larger security risks from terrorists, those nations which harbor terrorism, and tyrannical nations that either have or are pursuing nuclear weapons.

Q: What sacrifices would you ask Americans to make to lower the country’s debt?

A: None. Elected officials will have to be the ones to make sacrifices by giving up some of the power they have accumulated in creating our entitlement system. We have spent more money fighting the War on Poverty just in the last 42 years than the entire national debt. We must therefore dismantle the liberal government programs that have wasted so much of our resources while accomplishing so little.

Q: Are there programs or situations that are so important that you’d be willing to run a deficit to pay for them?

A: Yes, defending the freedom and autonomy of United States of America.

Q: Who in this country is paying more than a fair share of taxes relative to everyone else: the wealthy, the middle class, the poor or corporations?

A: Very few Americans actually pay a fair share of taxes. Most either pay a disproportionately large share of their income, or little to no share at all. This is why I support the fair tax, which is based entirely on consumption, or at least a flat tax that would ensure that everyone pays the same percentage of their income.

Q: How many of you believe global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity?

A: I don’t. Humans are incapable of altering the climate, and those changes that do occur are purely the result of natural cycles that would occur with or without us.

Q: What impact on the economy would be acceptable in order to reverse global warming and greenhouse gas emissions?

A: Ignorance is our most expensive “commodity.” Global warming is nothing more than an attempt by leftists to gain more control of our lives and our paychecks in the form of government regulation and higher taxes. I say that, because every solution that is advocated by global warming alarmists involves more government control and higher taxes. They have been able to advance their hokey theories only because of the ignorance and gullibility of others. Zero impact is the only acceptable impact on the economy with respect to global warming.

Q: What educational standards does the U.S. need to adopt or improve to compete in the global economy, and what will you do to move us toward those standards, and what’s your timetable?

A: None. The federal government does not belong in the business of establishing educational standards. Schools and curriculum are best controlled at the local level — not by lawmakers and bureaucrats sitting in Washington, D.C. My goal as president would be to abolish the Department of Education and cut taxes accordingly.

Q: What’s the biggest obstacle standing in the way of improving education in the United States, and how would you address it?

A: Government and teachers unions, both of which protect the status quo at the expense of effective education. The best way to improve education is to get the federal government out of education and promote school choice. I would do this by offering tax credits (or, in the very least, tax deductions) for families who send their children to private schools or homeschool. No person or entity has a greater interest in a child’s education than that child’s parents, and I trust parents to make those decisions. Competition works in the free market, and it would work in the education market if we only allowed it.

Q: Do you think it’s more important for the next president to be a fiscal conservative or a social conservative?

A: Both. President Bush’s three greatest achievements have been 1) executing the War on Terrorism, 2) cutting taxes, which have spurred economic growth, lowered the unemployment rate, and lowered federal deficits, and 3) getting two conservatives placed on the Supreme Court. All of these will yield long-lasting benefits for the United States, and these achievements reflect a blend of both fiscal and social conservatism. Conservatism, after all, works every time it’s tried.

One of the most heated battles between the U.S. Congress and President Bush this fall has been over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-CHIP. S-CHIP is a $5-billion-per-year program that was originally designed to provide health care for children of families who make at or below twice the poverty level. Roughly 83% of the 7.3 million recipients are, in fact, children whose families fit that economic category. But 9% of recipients are low-income adults, and the remainder are children whose families earn more than 200% of the poverty level.

When S-CHIP came up for renewal a few weeks ago, President Bush proposed a $5 billion, 20% increase over five years that would push spending to $30 billion during that time, and indicated that he could go even higher. Democrats, however, passed a bill that would have increased spending by $35 billion (a 140% increase) over five years and eventually covered 10,000,000 Americans. The Democrats’ plan would have included “children” up to age 25, and “poor” people up to four times the poverty level. In other words, if you were a member of a family of four who was 25-year-old with an annual income of $82,600, you would have qualified for the Democrats’ health insurance program for poor children.

President Bush vetoed the legislation, and the Democrats failed to override, which sent them into full demagoguery. The veto enabled Democrats to claim “President Bush vetoed health care for 10,000,000 poor children!” even though not all those covered would have been poor, and some would have been adults. Remember, the President himself had originally agreed to increase spending for S-CHIP by 20%.

Showing Americans who the Democrats really are, Congressman Pete Stark went to the floor of the House of Representatives in the veto aftermath, where he remarked “You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.”

Democrats also trotted out Graeme Frost, a 12-year-old boy from Baltimore, to do their bidding for them. Frost is a recipient under S-CHIP — both before the veto and after it. Democrats used the boy as a human shield, so to speak, by giving him airtime on a recent weekly radio program in order to plead “I just hope the president will listen to my story and help other kids be as lucky as me.”

Conservatives decided to check into the Frost family, and Rush Limbaugh went to the air waves himself on October 8 with the information that the family owns a house in a neighborhood of homes valued in the $400,000 to $500,000 range. Limbaugh further observed that “They send the kid out to lie. He’s 12-years-old! They will use anybody! They’ll corrupt anybody to get where they’re headed. That’s who they are, folks.”

Limbaugh’s criticism prompted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to charge that “hate radio has made a vicious attack” on their 12-year-old human shield, and that the allegations were “beneath the dignity of the debate.”

In reality, no attack was launched against Graeme Frost. It was launched against the Democrats. You see, here’s what the Democrats do. They’ll take some victim, such as Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s, or a 12-year-old kid, and outsource their side of the debate to that victim. They believe that since their spokesperson is a victim, he is immune from criticism. He might be, but they are not.

The Democrats’ monolithic expansion of S-CHIP wasn’t designed to help “the children.” In reality, Democrats don’t care one whit about the children. If they did, they would not endorse an institution (abortion) that wipes out more than one million of them per year. Democrats do care about government, though, and if pretending to act on behalf of poor children can get them bigger government, then that’s what they’ll do. Make no mistake, the Democrats’ S-CHIP expansion was designed to set the table for HillaryCare, which is universal, government-controlled health care for all of us. It must not be permitted.

It has been two years since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, and Democrats are still trying to gain political points from that disaster.

Let’s begin with Barack Obama, who was in the Big Easy last Sunday to deliver a sermon, or a political speech, depending on your perspective.

Speaking at the First Emmanuel Baptist Church, Senator Obama referenced Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, remarking “He said, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock.” Obama then transitioned from the Sermon on the Mount to political attacks by asserting “Something was wrong in America. Our foundation wasn’t built on the rock.”

From there, the senator criticized government response to the disaster, calling for, among many things, improved health care.

(A brief aside: Why is it that Democrats can go campaigning in black churches on Sunday mornings, and it’s no big deal, but let James Dobson go into an evangelical church for a marriage rally, and suddenly liberals get righteous about mixing politics and religion?)

Time magazine ran a story on August 27, “Healing Katrina’s Racial Wounds,” noting that “Far from helping ease the tension, politicians have sought to exploit it. Mayor Ray Nagin has tended to downplay racial tension in his few public comments on the subject. But many blame him for exacerbating racial disharmony during his successful bid for reelection last year by alluding to unnamed power brokers who were seeking to prevent displaced black residents from returning and, most famously, in his vow that New Orleans would once again be a ‘chocolate city’….”

Nobody has been criticized more for the disaster than George W. Bush. He’s the only Republican the Democrats had to blame. The governor of Louisiana is a Democrat, so you can’t blame her, and the city of New Orleans is run lock, stock, and barrel by Democrats, so you can’t blame them, either, including Mayor Ray “School Bus” Nagin.

Really, there are about as many Republicans in the Big Easy as there are penguins, which means everything that’s happened has happened with Democrats in power. You’d think with Democrats in charge, New Orleans would have been a Garden of Eden. But it isn’t. It’s a long way from paradise, which shows how ineffective Democrats are when they’re in power.

On August 29, the Associated Press ran a story on the two-year anniversary, quoting one displaced resident, who remarked “Bush was down here again making more promises he isn’t going to keep. The government has failed all of us. It’s got to stop.” The AP also described a march that began in the Lower 9th Ward in which protesters carried signs accusing the Bush administration of murder.

There wasn’t much said about it in the mainstream press at the time, but a famous aerial photograph of a parking lot full of empty school buses that could have been used to evacuate citizens, but were instead standing in water, circulated widely among conservative websites. The obvious implication is that despite all the criticism heaped on the federal government for stranding the citizens of New Orleans, the city failed its citizens miserably, but escaped blame because the city is run by Democrats.

John “Two Americas” Edwards, who is also running for President, was in New Orleans in April, presumably on his poverty tour, where he slammed the subprime mortgage industry for “shameful lending practices” that, in his words, threaten millions of working-class homeowners. “While Washington turns a blind eye, irresponsible lenders are pulling a fast one on hard-working homeowners,” he remarked.

Yet in 2005, the perfectly-coiffed Edwards, perhaps the biggest hypocrite in American politics, went to work for Fortress Investment Group LLC, a subprime lender that paid Edwards $479,512 in 2006 for part-time work. (Not a bad gig.) It was recently revealed by the Wall Street Journal that Fortress, in whose funds Edwards still has about $16 million invested, has filed foreclosure suits against 34 New Orleans homeowners.

If John Edwards were a Republican, this revelation would have been covered wall-to-wall by the mainstream press, but because Edwards is a Democrat, his overt hypocrisy was quietly buried.

When confronted with the fact that Edwards worked for and is invested in a company that has foreclosed on New Orleans homeowners, the Democrat claimed he was going to divest from any Fortress funds that have a stake in the subprime lenders that filed the foreclosures. “I will not have my family’s money invested in these firms.”

He cares about the poor. Really. He does.

The people of New Orleans have been shortchanged by the people they keep voting for. For instance, Congressman William “Cold Cash” Jefferson (D-LA) was indicted last June on corruption charges after $90,000 in alleged bribe money was discovered in his freezer. Jefferson supporters played the tried and true race card, and Jefferson won re-election last November. You get exactly what you vote for.

The political fallout from Hurricane Katrina, which the Democrats continue to exploit for their own gain without actually helping anyone recover from the disaster, isn’t about results, but about blame. And Democrats have mastered the art of blame. Even in places where Democrats are in power they still manage to deflect criticism onto Republicans. When the truth of New Orleans is laid out, however, one finds a voting block that is beholden to the Democrat Party, which has failed its voters at every conceivable turn.

The reason is simple. Democrats teach their constituents that government is the solution to every problem, and when you train people to rely on government, they become less self-reliant and more dependent on politicians and bureaucrats. And when government fails, which it is prone to do, you are left with a citizenry that has been rendered helpless.

A 33-year-old female teacher in Norcross, Georgia was recently arrested after being accused of having sex with a 17-year-old male student.

A 42-year-old English teacher and cheerleading coach in Wythe County, Virginia has been indicted on four counts of carnal knowledge and one count of nonforcible sodomy. She also is charged with two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a 13-year-old boy.

A 48-year-old male former high school science teacher in Connecticut, who exchanged explicit e-mails with a student and then tried to meet her for a sexual rendezvous, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and five years’ probation.

These stories weren’t collected over a period of weeks or months. They all ran over a two-day span just last month, indicating how widespread teacher-student sex has become.

The rash of teacher-student sex would have been unheard of by those of us who were still in school twenty years ago, but it isn’t at all surprising given the length to which the National Education Association (NEA), educrats in many of America’s school systems, and other academics have striven to sexualize our youth.

To illustrate, at the NEA’s 2006 convention, the nation’s largest teachers union refused to pass an amendment designed to protect students against sexual misconduct by teachers. The amendment read “To protect the rights of all students, the Association believes sexual contact between education professionals and minor students is unacceptable.” The NEA refused to pass this amendment! The strongest language the NEA used with respect to teacher-student sex was that it is “unprofessional.”

Furthermore, among the resolutions the NEA adopted at this year’s convention were several that dealt with sexuality.

With respect to sex education, for example, the NEA “…believes that to facilitate the realization of human potential, it is the right of every individual to live in an environment of freely available information and knowledge about sexuality and encourages affiliates and members to support appropriately established sex education programs. Such programs should include information on sexual abstinence, birth control and family planning, diversity of culture, diversity of sexual orientation and gender identification, parenting skills, prenatal care, sexually transmitted diseases, incest, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, homophobia, the effects of substance abuse during pregnancy, and problems associated with and resulting from pre-teen and teenage pregnancies.”

To add to this, if you recall, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a fallacious ruling last year that “there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children” and that “parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students.”

Sex education and other values-based instruction belong in the home. It is the duty of parents to instruct their children in these matters — not school teachers. However, if we absolutely must have sex education in school, then the best instruction that can be given is that abstinence indisputably works every time it’s tried. Unfortunately, abstinence-only sex education is often met with ridicule by academic elites (smartest-person-in-the-room types) more than rank-and-file parents.

For example, Linda Klepacki, analyst for sexual health at Focus on the Family, relates her experience at the 2006 National STD Prevention Conference that was presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (a federal agency).

“In the opening minutes, this ’scientific’ gathering began the attack upon those of us who believe in conservative values and God. Dr. Sander Gilman of Emory University started us down the liberal highway with his opening plenary session. He said results from the abstinence-based True Love Waits campaign have been ‘catastrophic’ (lie). He went on to smear the very idea of abstinence education and marriage. He mockingly stated that conservatives think there are only two ways to prevent STDs — abstinence and the marriage bed. And then he sarcastically sneered, ‘Because humans never lie.’ He continued saying that the celibacy movement is a false intervention (lie) and that abstinence is the most controversial issue in our field today.”

This is, unfortunately, how most liberals in the education establishment view abstinence. Is it any wonder, then, that a growing number of teachers at high schools and even middle schools have become sexual predators? It shouldn’t when one considers the efforts that have been made to sexualize our youth. The cynical “rationale” is that kids are going to have sex anyway, so we might as well teach them how to use condoms.

Whether or not kids engage in sex, to the chagrin of the NEA and other elites in the education system, has a lot to do with how they are raised. Parents who take a great interest in their kids’ lives and monitor their friends and activities have a better-than-average chance of becoming adults with their virginity intact, even though they must swim upstream against a culture that barrages them with sex. Given that so many schools teach values that counter the wishes of parents, is it any wonder that homeschools and Christian academies are flourishing?

Back in September, Wal-Mart announced that it was going to begin offering 291 different generic medicines at $4 for a 30-day prescription. The program began in Florida, has quickly spread to Wal-Mart pharmacies in most other states (including Tennessee), and has since been expanded to 331 different medicines, including 14 of the 20 that are most prescribed.

Not to be outdone, Fred’s has matched Wal-Mart’s selling price, and they have been followed by Target.

In other words, Wal-Mart has singlehandedly lowered the price of prescription medicines using our free market system. In doing so, the retail behemoth has just done more for senior citizens and low-income patients than any government program at any level ever has.

If a 30-day supply of medicine can be purchased for $4, then there is absolutely no need for any taxpayer-funded program to pay for those prescriptions. They are no longer unaffordable.

Despite this, the left remains defiant in its attacks upon Wal-Mart. It does this for at least five reasons: 1) Wal-Mart does not have a union, 2) Wal-Mart earns obscene profits, 3) Wal-Mart is perceived as paying wages and benefits that are too low (ignoring the reality that no one is forced to work for Wal-Mart), 4) Wal-Mart does more to benefit low-income shoppers than any government program, which really frosts liberals, and 5) Wal-Mart is perceived as running mom-and-pops out of business.

Columnist George Will nailed the left’s war on Wal-Mart in one of his recent op/eds, in which he noted that “Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots, and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by … liberals.”

Indeed, Wal-Mart’s positive effect on the American economy and the wallets of low-income shoppers cannot be underestimated. You see, the median household income of Wal-Mart shoppers is under $40,000. Wal-Mart has created 1.3 million jobs (which is very nearly one percent of the U.S. workforce). Wal-Mart accounted for 13% of the nation’s productivity gains in the second half of the 1990’s, which, according to a McKinsey company study, probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation.

Furthermore, by lowering prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among its competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates. In effect, Wal-Mart saves shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).

Notwithstanding, the left’s abhorrence of Wal-Mart remains unabated.

For example, former candidate for vice president John Edwards spent part of his summer on the Wake Up Wal-Mart tour. In Pittsburgh on August 4, the former senator from North Carolina remarked “We want every single consumer in America, every person in America, to know that if they walk into a Wal-Mart, that first of all their tax dollars are subsidizing Wal-Mart employees. Their tax dollars are helping provide health care for Wal-Mart employees, because Wal-Mart’s not doing it. Their tax dollars are going to provide housing and food stamps for Wal-Mart employees.”

Ironically, on November 16, a blog post at Townhall.com quoted a Wal-Mart press release which reported that “Yesterday, a staff person for former Sen. Edwards contacted a Wal-Mart electronics manager in Raleigh, North Carolina to obtain a Sony PlayStation3 on behalf of the Senator’s family. Later that night, Sen. Edwards reportedly re-told a homespun story to participants of a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union-sponsored call about how his son had chided a fellow student for purchasing shoes at Wal-Mart.”

Eleven days later, we learned that Mr. Edwards, who remarked at the aforementioned Pittsburgh rally that “Wal-Mart makes plenty of money” and that “They need to pay their people well,” was holding a book signing at a Manchester, Iowa Barnes & Noble, which pays starting employees $7 an hour. The Wal-Mart that sits just yards away pays $7.50 an hour.

Some things you just cannot make up.

Next Tuesday, Tennesseans have a clear choice between Democrats and Republicans and liberalism and conservatism on a broad range of issues.

First, tax-and-spend issues are once again on the table. The state of Tennessee finished the 2005-2006 fiscal year with a revenue surplus of $411.2 million. Combining the last three years, Tennessee taxpayers have overpaid their taxes by $1.052 billion. The government has kept it all, with Democrats refusing to refund that money back to the taxpayers, and refusing to cut the 6% sales tax on food items.

On the one hand, Democrats complain that the food tax is regressive and hurts the poor disproportionately, but when given the opportunity to lower the food tax while not affecting one, single government program, Democrats refuse to consider it.

Senator Mae Beavers has led a Republican effort not merely to trim the food tax, but to eliminate it altogether. She sponsored a bill earlier this year (SB2785) that would phase out the food tax over a period of 12 years. By the end of the 2006 legislative session, SB2785 had drawn 13 co-sponsors — all Republicans. It only takes 17 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.

Also at issue is illegal immigration. Democrats in the House have coddled illegal immigrants by refusing to pass legislation that would help demagnetize the state. Republicans, currently on the short end of a 53-46 balance of power, have fought the Democrats for years by trying to legislate common sense regarding illegal immigration, but have been consistently rebuffed.

Just within the past two years, Democrats have killed Republican-led efforts to require proof of citizenship to vote and receive certain taxpayer-funded services. Democrats killed a bill that would have abolished the practice of giving driving certificates to individuals with no proof of citizenship or legal residency. Democrats also killed a legislative amendment that would have prevented illegal immigrants receiving a driving certificate from also being offered a voter’s registration application.

The Tennessee GOP has made illegal immigration a centerpiece of their election campaign, while Democrats either try to provide cover for their coddling, or run from the issue altogether. Illegal immigrants in the state will continue to be coddled as long as Democrats are in power.

The issue of ethics is also in play this election season. On August 22, Senator Jerry Cooper became the fifth senator in the last 15 months to be indicted on criminal charges. All five indicted senators are Democrats. Thus, of the sixteen senators who made up the Democrat Caucus following the 2004 elections, nearly a third are currently under conviction or indictment.

Indeed, the long-standing Democrat control of the Tennessee Senate has fostered a culture of corruption that is rarely seen elsewhere in society. That the Governor (a Democrat), the Speaker of the Senate (a Democrat), and the Speaker of the House (a Democrat) have not called on even one of their indicted senators to resign reveals the nonchalance Democrats have toward corruption among their own party members, and these are the people who make the laws the rest of us must live by.

What hasn’t received a lot of ink this campaign season is the opportunity Tennessee voters have to amend the state Constitution to forever limit marriage to the union of one man and one woman. Don’t be fooled into believing that voter approval of this amendment would be discriminatory. After it passes, all adults, gay or straight, will still have the right to be married to one person of the opposite sex. The amendment will also prevent unelected Tennessee Supreme Court judges from redefining marriage.

Democrats are running their campaign primarily on jobs, healthcare, and education. Democrats always run campaigns on jobs, healthcare, and education. Their solution to all three is more government, more spending, and, if need be, more taxes.

On the other hand, the GOP is running their campaign on less spending, lower taxes, no state income tax, and the promise to demagnetize the state as a haven for illegal immigrants. Republicans in the Senate have also proven themselves to be more ethically sound than their Democrat counterparts.

Democrats have controlled the Tennessee General Assembly with scant interruption since Reconstruction. If Democrats tell us how much things need fixing, such as healthcare and education, then those things fell into disrepair with them in charge. Therefore, solutions to whatever problems face the state of Tennessee won’t occur until the Democrats are relieved of their duties.

My, how the times have changed. Bob Rochelle has signed an anti-income tax pledge as part of his effort to assure the voters across Mae Beavers’ senate district that the six years he spent advocating a state income tax are gone with the wind.

Let’s begin with the text of Bob Rochelle’s pledge:

“The income tax is a dead issue. If it comes up again, I will use my expertise in the legislature to make sure it doesn’t pass without a vote of the people. I am signing this pledge because I will kill an income tax if it comes up in the legislature and is not submitted to a vote of the people.”

Don’t be fooled by that first sentence. Income tax advocates typically declare the income tax dead before an election in order to disarm voters. Only after they are safely elected does the income tax come alive again. Remember, the last time Bob Rochelle ran for the Senate (1998) he told the voters he opposed a state income tax. Eight years later, Bob Rochelle is again running for the Senate in opposition to a state income tax. Between those two campaign years, Bob Rochelle was the state’s most passionate, prolific, persistent, and consistent advocate for a state income tax while serving as a member of the Senate and, later, the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Commission.

Also, consider that there is a bill filed in the Tennessee General Assembly (HB2120) cleverly disguised as the “Tennessee Investment and Economic Development Act” that would implement a graduated income tax on Tennesseans. The bill is sponsored by Mike Kernell, a Memphis Democrat.

With respect to HB2120, Representative Stacey Campfield, a Knoxville Republican, recently noted on his website that “All it needed was a willing senator to carry it and it could have been crammed through during the last session. The gov[ernor] has said he will not push an income tax, but he will not fight against one either. … Now he has endorsed Bob Rochelle. The father of the income tax. The language in H[B]2120 will be introduced again in the next session, because it is introduced in every session ‘just in case.’ This year we could have a gov[ernor] who will not stand in the way of it and, if Rochelle returns, a senator who loves the idea and will carry [it] in the senate. … Rochelle has a reputation of saying and doing anything he can to get what he wants. He was known as a bully in the senate who abused and punished those who dare[d] dissent his view.”

Therefore, the best way to ensure the income tax remains dead is to deny Bob Rochelle a seat in the Senate.

Second, Bob Rochelle wants the voters to know that he will not let a state income tax pass without a vote of the people. This is vintage Bob Rochelle.

During his last term in the Senate (1999-2003), Bob Rochelle tried to pass an income tax that was indeed attached to a vote by the people, only the vote would come AFTER the income tax was implemented. In his pledge, Bob Rochelle says nothing about the vote of the people coming BEFORE the income tax. Remember, Bob Rochelle is an attorney, so you have to parse every single word. His “pledge” leaves him a loophole through which he could propose the same legislation he proposed before — an income tax that is linked to a vote of the people — although he cleverly avoids disclosing which would come first.

Third is the hypocrisy of the pledge itself. During the income tax war that marked Bob Rochelle’s last term in office, authentic income tax opponents signed the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” promising to “vigorously oppose and vote against a state income tax” and “actively oppose and vote against any and all efforts to impose any tax on the wages or earnings of the people of Tennessee.”

That was an anti-income tax pledge with actual teeth. The hypocrisy is that then-Senator Bob Rochelle, who was also a member of the Senate Ethics Committee, raised ethical concerns about members of the Tennessee General Assembly signing such a pledge.

According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press on August 14, 2001, Rochelle remarked “People expect your positions to evolve. If the Senate is to be the deliberative body that decides issues on the merits, that goal is not promoted by making up your mind and signing pledges before you even get there.”

Just as Bob Rochelle was for an income tax before he decided to challenge Mae Beavers for her senate seat, he was opposed to senators signing pledges. Now, the former senator has done what he criticized others for doing just a few years ago. Not only has his position on pledges “evolved,” Bob Rochelle’s position on the income tax is in such a constant state of flux (against it, for it, against it) that it is impossible to know how long his current income tax opposition will last. You know how the saying goes. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

(This column was written on August 16, 2004, but was never picked up by the Lebanon Democrat. It is part of a forthcoming series of unpublished work I’m calling “The Right Minded Bootleg Collection.”)

Last year, U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Boykin went on tour speaking at various Christian churches across America. The general typically minced no words from the pulpit, making such remarks as:

“Why do they hate us so much? Ladies and gentlemen, the answer to that is because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian.”

“But who is that enemy? It’s not Osama bin Laden. Our enemy is a spiritual enemy because we are a nation of believers.”

“You think about how [President Bush] got in the White House. You think about why he’s there today. As Mordecai said to Esther, ‘You have been put there for such a time as this.’ And this man has been put in the White House to lead our nation in such a time as this.”

But the clincher came in response to a Somali Muslim terrorist’s publicized claim that the U.S. could “never get me because Allah will protect me.” Boykin remarked “Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” When the Somali was captured by U.S. Special Forces three days later, Boykin told him personally “You underestimated our God.”

That sent the left over the edge.

A cadre of seventeen Democratic congressmen subsequently introduced a resolution calling on the President to censure and reassign General Boykin for committing what to liberals is THE unpardonable sin: religious intolerance.

The resolution claimed, in part, that Boykin’s remarks “have impaired the image of the United States worldwide and threaten to endanger United States forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Talk about intolerance. And that the general made his remarks while in uniform further enraged the easily offended political left, thereby prompting cries of “separation of church and state.”

Now, let’s fast-forward to the present, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign. On July 18, John Edwards was in Orlando, Florida, where he addressed the congregation of St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church. Referencing the vote-counting debacle that Democrats still believe cost Al Gore the White House, Senator Edwards told 700 parishioners “We will get voters to the polls. We’re going to make sure that all those voters that go to the polls and cast their votes, that their votes are counted this time.”

Back on March 7, John F. Kerry addressed a church in Jackson, Mississippi, giving an over-the-top political speech during which at one point Senator Kerry compared civil rights for blacks to gay and lesbian rights.

Kerry also stated from the lectern that “[Bush is] a walking stack of broken promises, and I’ll lay them out to you over these next days. And he’s got two positions on everything. We’re going to create 4 million jobs; he hasn’t, he’s lost 3 million. He says we’re going to have health care for Americans. Well, we’re not, he doesn’t have a plan for them.”

After Bishop Phillip Coleman laid hands on John F. Kerry, the senator remarked that he had been “anointed the next President of the United States.”

To date, I have heard not one peep from Democrats denouncing their own brethren for using churches as political soapboxes, nor howls of “separation of church and state” from the congressional group that was so outraged over General Boykin’s “religious intolerance.”

I can only be left to assert that liberals deem it okay for Democrats to walk into churches and preach politics from the pulpit. But for an Army general to use the pulpit to advance a Christian message smacks of “religious intolerance.”

Personally, I don’t care that Democrats make political speeches in churches. I am going to be consistent here and argue that “separation of church and state” doesn’t exist for Democrats the same way that it doesn’t exist for the Christian right. Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion I can make is that politics really is the religion of the Democratic Party.

I was all set to pen my annual “Grinch List,” where I chastise various companies, schools, governments, and civil libertarians for their hostility toward all things Christmas.

Then I came across something that offended me more than Target’s stubborn adherence to the politically correct “Happy Holidays,” more than schools that ban Christmas songs mentioning Christ, even more than the busybodies who roam the countryside looking for Nativity scenes to shut down. Instead, this year’s irritants are churches that aren’t opening their doors on Christmas Day.

On December 7, for example, FoxNews.com ran the headline “Some Megachurches to Close on Christmas.” One spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, told FoxNews that church leaders there have decided that holding services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was 1994, and only a small number of people showed up.

“If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don’t go to church, how likely is it that they’ll be going to church on Christmas morning?” she said.

I guess that chance is zero if the doors are closed.

Christ Fellowship Church in Palm Beach County, Florida will also not be holding worship services on Christmas Day.

Yes, on the day we celebrate the birth of Christ, which falls on a Sunday this year, Christ Fellowship will close its doors to give members more time to spend with their families. Pastor Todd Mullins said that Christmas — Sunday or not — is set aside for family time, and “Christ Fellowship is all about supporting the family.”

I’m all for supporting the family, too, believe me, but Scripture calls on believers to prioritize Christ above all, including the family. So you just open the presents, get dressed, pack up the family and head to church, the way we do every Sunday. We can celebrate Christmas at home, for sure, but we can really jazz it up at church.

Still, Mullins did say there will be thirteen services in observance of Christmas in the two days prior to December 25, the philosophy being that people will hear the word, take it home and talk about the Christmas story at home with family. “We have the best of both worlds. We will be celebrating that together as a church family the evening before then allowing them to celebrate at home on Sunday morning.”

At a time when Christmas is being steamrolled by political correctness and lost in materialism and selfishness, Christian churches that do not hold services when Christmas Day falls on Sunday are allowing themselves to be led by our culture.

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul instructed the faithful to “be not conformed to this world.” Yet churches that close on December 25 are doing just that: conforming to a world in which Christmas has far greater secular meaning than spiritual.

Most of us indulge ourselves and our families during the Christmas season. But celebrating the day of Christ’s birth also demands that we think outside ourselves. The best way we can honor Christ is to put away at least some of our selfishness and dedicate ourselves to our fellow man and to Christ.

Christians who complain about the secular attack on the second-most important day on the Christian calendar, but don’t open their churches when Christmas falls on a Sunday, really don’t have an argument against those who trash Christmas. If the genuine spirit of Christmas is to be maintained, then don’t look to Target or the ACLU to make the first overtures. The place to start is in the churches of those who call themselves “Christ-centered” to ensure that we aren’t conforming to this world, but to a world that is greater than ours.

The left had the perfect opportunity to let Pat Robertson be a one-man parade of fools last week, but they just couldn’t resist jumping on that bandwagon, too.

To start off, on his show “The 700 Club” last Monday, Robertson asserted “I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

Two days later, Robertson made an even bigger fool of himself by reacting to the left’s outrage this way: “I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’ ‘Take him out’ could be a number of things including kidnapping.”

Well, that’s not what he said. But at any rate, the left had its table set. Robertson was flailing on the mat, and all they had to do was stand by and watch. But then they went and messed it up by going on the offensive. This, in turn, prompted conservatives to play tit-for-tat and do a little digging of our own.

In 1997, George Stephanopoulos penned a column for Newsweek entitled “Why We Should Kill Saddam.” Unlike Robertson, who holds no position in the U.S. government, Stephanopoulos was serving as a senior advisor to President Clinton at the time. In his column, Stephanopoulos asserted “We’ve exhausted other efforts to stop him, and killing him certainly seems more proportionate to his crimes and discriminate in its effect than massive bombing raids that will inevitably kill innocent civilians.” The media voiced no objection at all.

Pat Robertson, determined to self-destruct in the public eye, has instead been effectively neutralized by the left’s hypocrisy, which would never have bubbled to the surface had they simply allowed Robertson to flap in the breeze.

The proper way to maximize Robertson’s foolishness would have been to air Robertson’s original “assassination” comment, followed by his cover-up two days later in which he claimed to have merely said “take him out,” followed by the original “assassination” comment. Sometimes, a person says or does something so absurd that no editorializing is required. Absurdity speaks for itself, and most Americans are smart enough to know absurdity when they see it.

This fracas illustrates the difference in the way conservatives and liberals deal with their respective fringe elements. Pat Robertson is the right’s version of Howard Dean. Robertson is the crazy aunt we keep in the attic. He was long ago marginalized by conservatives, because a) we don’t take Robertson seriously enough to put him anywhere near the spotlight, and b) we don’t come to his defense when he says dumb things.

But Howard Dean is different. Not only does the left not keep their crazy aunt in the attic, they elected Dean as the chairman of the Democratic Party. Since his rise to national prominence during last year’s presidential primary, Dean has left a trail of absurdities a mile long. And conservatives know how to deal with him. Rather than react with indignation, we simply hand the guy a microphone and urge him to keep talking.

At any rate, the left has missed an opportunity to allow Pat Robertson to self-destruct on his own. Their reaction simply gave conservatives the motivation we needed to illustrate the left’s own hypocrisy in the “calling for assassinations” department. Here’s the lesson: if a political and/or ideological enemy says something foolish, give him the spotlight and watch him implode. Then stay quiet lest your own inconsistencies be revealed.

With all the news being generated along the Tennessee political front, you’d think the General Assembly was still in session. In fact, following state politics right now is like reading an epic novel where the author juggles a half-dozen subplots. It’s that complicated.

Despite the indictments and unbelievable revelations that have come out of Operation Tennessee Waltz, there are many unanswered questions that have arisen out of the ethics minefield into which the state legislature morphed during the eventful 2005 session.

For example, on the last day of session (May 28), Representative Frank Buck ran an ethics bill through the House. The new law will require companies that pay legislators or their spouses out-of-state consulting fees over $200 to disclose it if the company also does business with Tennessee. The irony is that the bill (HB1133) was sent to the State and Local Government Committee on February 15, where a vote was delayed six times before it was deep-sixed on May 18. The Senate version of the bill sailed through 32-0 six days later, but it took Operation Tennessee Waltz to resurrect the House version. Call it a case of “carpe diem” for Buck.

Here’s my question. HB1133 was heavily opposed by lobbyists, and the aforementioned committee responded accordingly. Why did the House of Representatives suddenly find this bill appealing on the last day of session, only ten days after it had been killed in committee?

Also on May 28, the day former Senator John Ford resigned, Senate Majority Leader Ron Ramsey announced that the Senate Ethics Committee had a six-count complaint against Ford, and that he probably had the votes in the Senate to throw Ford out.

Senator Ramsey, what were you waiting for? Were you afraid that Ford would play the race card? That left-wing editorial boards would write mean things about you? That the Democrats would accuse you of being — gasp — partisan? That John Wilder would launch into an incoherent tirade from the well of the Senate? You’re a day late and a dollar short.

Here’s another sub-plot. Sometime in 2003, Senator John Ford approached Governor Phil Bredesen and asked that OmniCare — a company from whom Ford was being paid “consulting fees” — be granted a bigger share of the state’s TennCare patients. OmniCare was awarded an additional 20,000 new TennCare patients and $2.5 million more in TennCare contracts in June, 2003.

Last month, the governor’s press secretary asserted that the governor “never contacted TennCare” about Ford’s query. On June 1, however, Governor Bredesen could not say whether he had passed Ford’s request to the TennCare director at that time, but suspects he didn’t.

Governor, why are you not working overtime to have your administration sort this out? It may be coincidental, but it’s also a political hand grenade. You have to know that GOP strategists are quietly filing this one away for future use. (Now will someone from the Republican Party PLEASE run against this guy?)

It was also announced on the day of the indictments that John Ford may seek a public defender because he cannot afford a lawyer. Excuse me? What about the hundreds of thousands of dollars in “consulting fees” and the bribe money he is shown on video stuffing into his pockets? Why do the taxpayers have to keep paying for John Ford? And why does he still get a lifetime pension from us?

Finally, the ill-fated HB37, the bill that was introduced into the legislature as a result of the sting operation that led to seven indictments, had more sponsors than were indicted.

State Representative Larry Miller says that he and fellow Representative Ulysses Jones were offered bribes by Charles Love (a Chattanooga lobbyist who turned out to be a bagman in Operation Tennessee Waltz) and two representatives from E-Cycle Management Inc. who came to his Memphis home in October to discuss a bill that would benefit that company. That bill became HB37. Of course, E-Cycle was a fictitious company set up as part of the sting, and Love was one of those indicted.

I have to commend Miller and Jones for turning down the bribes, but why did they still sign onto HB37? What about Representatives Charles Sargent, Paul Stanley, Joe Armstrong, and Senator Jeff Miller? None of them were indicted, but all signed up for HB37 (or its Senate companion, SB94). What prompted these lawmakers to add their names to a bill set up by a sting operation to benefit a fictitious company?

Answer: Senator Miller and Representatives Armstrong, Jones, and Miller all received campaign donations from E-Cycle lobbyists. So this begs another question. Why would Representatives Miller and Jones accept campaign donations from an individual or organization that had offered them bribes?

Getting such information from our representatives and other public servants may be like pulling teeth, but at least the fallout from Operation Tennessee Waltz has helped grease the wheels. Indeed, there are some observers who say the FBI has cleaned house in Tennessee, while others speculate that what we’ve seen is only the tip of the iceberg. At any rate, with the threat of more indictments looming, one can only wonder how many of our representatives are losing sleep at night.

A group of extremists is patrolling our southern border. That’s according to Mexican President Vicente Fox. Actually, the extremists are members of the Minutemen Project, a grassroots organization of citizens from Arizona who are fed up with the U.S. government’s lackadaisical yawning at illegal immigration. So they have decided to help patrol the border themselves.

Frustrated by the Democrats’ unprecedented filibustering of several of President Bush’s judicial nominees, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is floating the “nuclear option,” whereby the advice and consent role the Senate plays in judicial confirmations would be exempt from filibusters.

On March 15, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote Senator Frist, serving notice that Democrats, who only make up 45% of the Senate, would counter the nuclear option by slowing or stopping most Senate business. Senator Reid did exempt military and national security legislation from the threat, and said Democrats would assure continuation of critical government services, but “Beyond that very limited scope, however, we will be reluctant to enter into any consent agreement that facilitates Senate activities, even on routine matters.”

Much like a child who threatens not to play with his mates if he doesn’t get his way, the Democrats are behaving like children, which brings me to the gold nugget of this column: in our political system, liberals are the children, while conservatives are the parents.

Consider the left’s views on personal responsibility. In short, they try to construct enough safety nets that individuals can behave irresponsibly and still get along. Again, dealing with liberals is a lot like dealing with children, because it’s a difficult task to properly teach a child responsibility. It’s not something they want to learn.

If you don’t want to work, liberals will gladly direct you to public assistance. If you want to engage in promiscuous sex, get a condom and practice “safe sex.” If that doesn’t work, and you get pregnant, that’s okay, too. Just get an abortion.

If you are a minority or suffer from any number of disadvantages and commit a crime, don’t worry. The left will tell you it’s not your fault. You’re a victim of something insidious, whether it’s a poor education, rotten parents, alcoholism or drug addiction, or the evil free market. And you don’t need prison time. You need rehabilitation.

It is left to conservatives to point out that if you are able-bodied, then you can and should earn your own paycheck. And, yes, you can still get pregnant or contract AIDS even with condoms, and it’s better just to remain abstinent. If you commit a crime, it really is your fault, and you deserve to be punished.

Like a child that views his parents with disdain because he thinks they are foolish old fogies and don’t understand, so do liberals view conservatives.

Children also tend to push against the behavioral boundaries set by parents. They’re wired that way. So are liberals. The left has turned morality upside-down. To them, what has traditionally been good is considered immoral, and what has been considered immoral is good.

To the left, gay marriage, abortion, and promiscuity are admirable. The liberation of Iraq, the Ten Commandments, and abstinence are scorned. Indeed, liberals rebel at the suggestion that there is a clear right and wrong, and react with the same disdain whenever conservatives try to establish some sort of moral boundaries.

Children tend to be impatient and often want things or status without having to work for it. Liberals are the same way (affirmative action, for instance). Liberals have little concept of the difference between wanting something and actually earning it — much like a child who expects an allowance without having to do chores.

In the same way, liberals try to cash in with regards to high-earning CEO’s, SUV owners, and anyone who, to them, gives any appearance of being “one of the winners of life’s lottery.” It’s sort of like the kid down the street who has nicer toys. So liberals set out to punish the “winners” for their achievements.

Children are naturally self-centered, while their parents are naturally self-sacrificing. Likewise, liberals use political demagoguery and class warfare to construct social programs whereby wealth is transferred from those who have it to the “underprivileged.” Liberals don’t really care about social program recipients. They only use them because they help maintain the left’s political power. They’re self-centered. It’s all about them.

Like a spoiled child in a toy store, liberals see what they want, and demand that someone else pay for it. Instead of toys, they set their eyes on other people’s paychecks, and demand the redistribution of that wealth to those who will vote for them. In other words, liberals believe in “helping” individuals, but only with other people’s money. Conservatives, who are the self-sacrificing parents, believe in helping people with their own money.

Name-calling. Children are famous for it, and so are liberals. In fact, the saying goes that you know you’ve won an argument with a liberal when he or she starts calling you names. Recall the things that were said about President Bush by left-wing organizations and Hollywood stars before the election. Liberals do this because liberalism cannot compete with conservatism in the arena of ideas. So liberals have to use character assassination and name-calling to shroud the fact that they shoot blanks intellectually.

There is one caveat. While liberals ought to grow up, conservatives are missing one necessary parental attribute that liberals do have: a spine. Indeed, the left consists of strong-willed children, while conservatives play Mr. Nice Guy and tend to make wimpy parents. Allowing the Democrats, who are the minority party in Congress, to continue to block President Bush’s judicial nominees, for example, is akin to parents who allow their children to run the household.

Conservatives could learn one valuable lesson from their politically savage counterparts by playing hardball. Doing so would polish the parental skills of conservatives and enable them to finally get things done politically.

In Tennessee, voters will have the opportunity to approve a constitutional ban on gay marriage in the 2006 election. But there is also a movement afoot in the General Assembly to ban adoption by homosexuals, although that movement has been set back this legislative session.

A bill sponsored by Senator Jim Bryson and Representatives Chris Clem, Paul Stanley, and Nathan Vaughn would have forbidden homosexuals from adopting children in Tennessee. The legislation was later watered down by Representative Clem “…to simply state that an ideal marriage — a husband and a wife — should be given priority when adopting children.” But even the watered-down version of this bill died in the House Children and Family Affairs Committee on March 16 in the face of heavy opposition from Democrats.

Tennessee liberals were predictably horrified by the suggestion that heterosexual couples should be given preference, much less that homosexuals shouldn’t adopt at all. They argued the bill’s sponsors were attempting to write hate and discrimination into state law, and that orphaned children would be denied loving homes and caring parents.

Despite this feel-good political correctness, every child needs a mother and a father — not two mothers and no father, nor two fathers and no mother. There is simply no alternative equal to a home that’s headed by one man and one woman who are committed to each other. This is not a slam on single-parent households, nor even a slam on households that are headed by homosexuals. It’s simply the undeniable reality.

This is not unsubstantiated discrimination. There is a basis for preventing homosexuals from becoming foster or adoptive parents. A six-year study in Illinois has found that 34% of sexual abuse cases in foster homes were committed by homosexuals, whereas no more than 3% of the general population engages in homosexual sex. Illinois is the first state to disclose such details.

Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, who analyzed the data presented in a Psychological Reports study this month, nailed it with the statement that “Professional societies are so taken with gay rights they are ignoring the evidence.” Dr. Cameron believes it’s likely the Illinois figures reflect the situation among the nation’s estimated half-million foster children.

Even Representative Glen Casada (R-College Grove) correctly argued in the aforementioned March 16 committee hearing that “the gay lifestyle does suffer from a high incidence of suicide, disease and instability.”

Yet those who are sympathetic to gay rights will point out that there are some homes headed by heterosexual couples who are abusive and/or neglectful toward their children, just as there are some households headed by homosexual couples that otherwise provide a favorable environment for children. True, there are some cases of both, but overall, homosexual couples provide less-than-optimal conditions in which to raise children. Thus, moving orphaned children, or those in state custody, from less-than-optimal environments into other less-than-optimal environments doesn’t exactly provide a panacea.

In addition, and despite it’s “for the children” mantra, the left would ignore the fact that placing children in homosexual environments greatly increases their risk of being sexually abused. That political correctness trumps this finding indicates that the “for the children” hand-wringing is nothing more than political cover for homosexual advocacy.

There is no perfect solution for orphans and those who must be taken from their parents due to abuse and/or neglect. Placing children in the care of homosexuals, however, does not alleviate their need for a home headed by a mother and a father. True, there are some homosexuals who otherwise make great parents, just as there are heterosexuals who make lousy ones. But two wrongs simply don’t make a right.

In the overall scheme, society must consider the risks children face when placed in the care of those who pursue alternative lifestyles that are rooted primarily in their sexual tendencies. Sweeping such evidence under the rug of political correctness may be the left’s way of handling their side of this debate, but in preserving the dogma of gay rights, those who are smitten by that agenda end up spreading harm to those whom society is obligated to protect.