Here are the details from the campaign. The event is on Friday, two days from today

Margo and Richard Cammeron

Representative Charles and Nancy Sargent

Representative Glen and Jill Casada

Representative Beth and Sam Harwell

Representative Phillip and Allison Johnson

District Attorney General Ron and Brenda Davis

Williamson County Trustee Joey and Lena Davis

Williamson County Sheriff Ricky and Melissa Headley

Chairman, Wm County Republican Party, Doug and Rose Grindstaff

Monty and Shalia Lankford

Ralph and Kathy Drury

Colonel Ret. Richard and Phyllis Streiff

The Host Committee Invites You to a Cocktail Buffet Reception Honoring:

Jack Johnson for State Senate

 

Friday, September 1, 2006

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

At Songbird, 1008 Monroe Lane,

Brentwood

$100 per person

Reply Card Enclosed

Please RSVP August 28, 2006

(615) 376-8168

Business Attire

Paid For By Johnson for State Senate

The Tennessee Democratic Party has created a parody website dedicated to Jim Bryson. The mumbling audio is bad enough, but the entire doubletalk premise is rather weak. Jim is a conservative, and has been his entire 4 years in the State Senate. Either as Roger Abramson posits, the Democrats are wasting money on projects like this, or else Bryson is viewed as more of a threat by the Democratic Party and Phil Bredesen than the rest of us realize.

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A large part of my support for the measure mentioned earlier allowing voters to decide property tax rates lies in my belief that the Metro Council in Nashville is too large, and under current rules, impotent to affect the budget process.

So, I ask your opinion this week (and it’s no secret I think 12 is more than enough to handle city affairs).

Over at Terry Frank’s place, we have Drew Johnson’s take on how to fix the succession problem in Tennessee.

I guess it would be helpful to actually have a lieutenant governor first (no, that’s not a Wilder quip, it’s a Tennessee constitutional one).

Meet the Bryson team on Wednesday, August 30th

2:30pm

Bryson for Governor Headquarters

1808 West End Avenue

Nashville

Please call if you have questions or need directions.

Kimberly Pitt

Bryson for Governor

615-727-0941

Looks like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been taking some tips from Harold Ford, Jr.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposes having a televised debate with President Bush on world issues. 

No word yet on whether or not Ahmadinejad will call President Bush a chicken for not agreeing to enough worldwide debates.

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This weekend was action packed and consequently, long. There will be fresh stuff tomorrow, both here and at Blogging for Corker, to include a nice debunking of this Wal-Mart issue many on the left are lobbing at Bob Corker.

I truly wonder whether the problem is more Corker, or Wal-Mart, because honestly, having seen the suit, and read the documents surrounding it, there’s nothing illegal or unethical to be getting excited about.

On second thought, I guess it’s not fair to pigeon hole the ire of liberals onto one source. My utmost apologies for that.

UPDATE In addition to taking care of clients, I offer my apologies for not writing yesterday as promised. Thanks to lightning, I’m working on a new computer, and need to parse some documents with Acrobat, which I’m going to have to go out and buy.  I will address one non-sequiter which doesn’t require software, though

The claim now is that all myths about Bob Corker’s involvement in the Wal Mart deal will be debunked tomorrow on the Blogging for Corker blog as well as the Moore Thoughts blog. My question is this: if everything in the deal was above board, why did Corker and his attorneys request that all documents relating to this case be sealed? Or perhaps we, the people of Tennessee, are too inept to understand legal documents. Seems to be the case with his tax returns…..

Filing under seal and sealing the record can be for a variety of reasons – it’s not an uncommon activity. But hiding criminal activity is not one of those allowed reasons. In short, the other side plays with this like it means something, but without any proof to back it up.  This has been out there for some time, even before the suit, which was originally dismissed, was revived. You’d think if there was something to it, Ed Bryant or Van Hilleary would have latched on in the primary.
The easement was built into this property. Further development in the area was already envisioned in the mid 1990s.  As such, the process to get the necessary approval for the Wal-Mart development began before Bob Corker became mayor.  This is something the pro-Ford folks don’t seem to recognize.

Seeming that they claim to want to talk about issues, I’m not sure why they keep bringing it up.

Catherine is already showing signs of proficiency at organized protest.  Is my daughter the next Cindy Sheehan?  Wait … just a moment … OK, I think my shuddering has just about stopped.
When my mom was in town a couple of weeks ago, we spent a couple of hours making and freezing some baby food for Catherine.  Since then, I have tested the squash, peaches, sweet potatoes and apples with great success.  I decided the time had come to break out the peas.  She liked the canned baby food peas, so I was certain that peas pureed by the loving hands of Mommy and Grandma would be met with even greater eagerness.

As soon as the first spoonful entered her mouth, she stuck her tongue out as far as possible in an attempt to remove the unwanted vegetable and shook her head back and forth while perfecting a furrowed brow.  I tried again, and this time Catherine let out a loud scream as the spoon got ever closer to her lips.  I took a break from my attempts with the legume and switched to peaches for a moment.  Then, I figured the third time would have to be the charm.  So, I again placed some peas on a spoon and made my approach.  Catherine grabbed at her velcro bib, ripped it off her neck and forcefully threw the bib down on her food tray.  She left no room for confusion concerning her feelings about peas.

Instead of the standard nursery rhymes, perhaps I should be teaching her some protest chants, such as:

“Ankles, elbows, wrists and knees — I don’t want your stinkin’ peas!”

or

“One, two, three, four — Giving me peas will mean a war!”

and, finally

“Ho, ho, hey, hey — Bush and Cheney lied today!”  (Wait … I think that’s from something else completely unrelated to vegetables.  Forget about that one.)

Hat tip to my hours of watching anti-war demonstrations on C-Span

On Friday, The Tennessean had an article about the two victims in the Opry Mills shooting and how they are refusing to testify against the suspect.  Fear of retribution is greater than the desire for justice, and it’s hard to hold blame for this decision.  Unfortunately, this is a common problem when violence between rival gangs occur, making it difficult to get these criminals off the streets.  Why is it always “off the streets”, by the way?  How often does a person commit a crime while actually on a street?  It would make more sense to get criminals “off the sidewalk” or “out of the convenience stores” or “far away from bars in Murfreesboro late on a Thursday night”.  These shooting victims are probably far from being choir boys (an interesting determination for good behavior, I’ve always thought) since they were taking part in the “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine” gang flashings, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the opportunity to pin the person who happened to be guilty on this particular evening.

To me, the saddest part of the story was the sentence,

The teen was rearrested Tuesday after officers went to his Seymour Avenue home for a curfew check and said they found a loaded gun in his room and his mother smoking marijuana. 

At some point, each of us must be responsible for our actions regardless of our upbringing, but my heart can’t help but ache for the young man just a bit.  The mother should be arrested, not only for possession of drugs (about which, if she wasn’t responsible for a minor, I couldn’t care less … kill all the brain cells you want), but for the shootings as well.  We hold parents legally accountable when their kids are truant from school.  Parents must sign permission slips for field trips and for kids to learn about sex. Why not hold the same accountability for crimes?

Smoking pot when the cops show up to check on your kid … brilliant.  This is just the type of story that makes me want to pop my own head off, just temporarily, to let out some of the frustration.

Why in the new Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ad is Bob Corker in technicolor, and Harold Ford, Jr. is in a smudged and blurred black and white? Odd. Red State has more.

Double posted at Blogging for Corker.

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The real nature of Iran’s president revealed – yet again.  Let’s never forget how motivated and doubly insane Muslim fundamentalists actually are.

Democrats and lasers. First they opposed SDI in the 1980s – now they claim they’ve been blinded. From the Chattanooga Times – Free Press

    The Tennessee Democratic Party’s Victory 2006 campaign poked at GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Bryson in an e-mail last week about laserpointer attacks.

     Tenth in a series of “big fact” e-mail statements about state Sen. Bryson, of Franklin, Tenn., the release said Bryson campaign workers “harassed Victory 2006 field staffers by pointing pocket laser beams directly into their eyes.”

     Bryson campaign spokesman Lance Frizzell said some of the Democrats were harassing GOP workers. He said the allegations of Bryson workers pointing lasers at eyes are false, but he said some Bryson staffers were pointing the lasers at cameras used by the Democratic staffers.

     “We’ve told the boys on the bus to put their laser pointers away,” he said.

     Sen. Bryson faces Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen in the Nov. 7 general election.

With laser-like precision, I can safely say it is clear that the Democrats don’t have much of anything on Jim Bryson.

Bill Hobbs is on overtime this week. Earlier, he caught Harold Ford in a out-and-out lie in an on-air debate piece with Marsha Blackburn.  Yesterday, he noted blatant misrepresentations regarding the Taxpayer Bill of Rights from the benignly named Center for Policy Alternatives. The report these untruths are found in is rather malignantly named – Progressive Platform for the States 2006. Let’s cut through the newspeak though. Properly entitled, it’s the Socialist Platform for the States 2006. Using a word rooted with “progress” implies, well, progress. I take offense.

Here’s the most blatant lie from the report

TABOR increases unemployment.
Economic studies show that any private sector jobs that may be created by cutting taxes will be more than offset by the loss of public sector jobs caused by corresponding reductions in spending. That theory became reality in Colorado, which suffered a net loss of 68,000 jobs between 2001 and 2004. Only three states lost a larger share of employment during the 2001 recession.

I think my edit and insertion of “socialist” is self authenticating at this point. Any organization that equates public sector jobs with private sector employment is no friend of small government, and no advocate for freedom. Hobbs aptly explains

Colorado’s job losses during the 2001 recession were inflated by large losses in the tech and telecom sectors, which were big in Colorado. That had nothing to do with the TABOR provision and everything to do with the bursting of the tech bubble.

Additionally, it is simply ludicrous to equate public sector jobs with private sector jobs when the discussion is about taxes. Public sector jobs are funded largely by taxes paid by people who work in the private sector. It has to be that way. A job lost in the private sector results in the government having less money as tax revenue declines. A job lost in the public sector results in the government having more money as it its payroll shrinks.

Economic reality is optional when abdicating truth in a cynical pursuit of ideological advocacy. TABOR must frighten them. Colorado did back off the restrictions, but not because the concept failed (actually Hobbs has a lot on Colorado’s TABOR experience on his site).

In short, people who write what the Center for Policy Alternatives did and present it as fact are dangerous. The nation was not founded on the belief that our collective success depended on the size and growth of our government.  In fact, it’s the contrary that is true. We conservatives need to take back the reigns. If we don’t, a lot of the successes we’ve seen since Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 will evaporate like the morning mist. It takes 10x the energy to shrink government than it does to grow it. If we’re not diligent, one bad election cycle will set us back another 25 years.

Deputy Governor Dave Cooley has set up a transfer of power taskforce.  It’s proper we ask and get answers as to what’s actually going on.

Today, Steve Gill has a comprehensive article on the subject.  Any transfer of power would most certainly have to involve John Wilder, the eccentric Lieutenant Governor, who in addition to enjoying vivid recollections of the Mayflower, may also be the last person alive who has seen the Ark of the Covenant.  The state of the Tennessee government would be sorry, indeed. The state bureaucracy would devolve into some sordid combination of the Neverending Story and Weekend at Bernie’s.

So, two things. We need a method of power transfer, and we need another lieutenant governor. Two birds, one stone sounds good to me.

From the New York Times

In fertility clinics, where the embryo is available outside the mother in the normal course of in-vitro fertilization, one of these blastomeres can be removed for diagnostic tests, such as for Down’s syndrome, and the embryo, now with seven cells, can be implanted in the mother if no defect is found.

Many such embryos have grown into apparently healthy babies over the ten years or so the diagnostic tests have been used.

Up to now, human embryonic stem cells have been derived at a later stage of development when the embryo consists of about 150 cells. Harvesting these cells destroys the embryo.

Last year, Dr. Lanza reported that embryonic stem cell cultures could be derived from the blastomeres of mice, a finding others have confirmed. He now says the same can be done with human blastomeres.

I’m pro-life, but recognize the science behind stem cells, and the lives that could be saved through the research. I hope this proves feasible, and that my fellow conservatives will latch onto it and promote it. Stem cells are source cells – the diseases and maldevelopment that can be cured is endless. We just need an ethical way to do it – this may be that way.

Read the article.

I’m not sure how many George Mason University Law students read this blog, but Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy has an RA opportunity for you. The details are here.

Though I must note the word “lucrative” is used. If there were any lucrative RA opportunities when I was at GMUSL, I surely missed them.

My blogging quantity has never been impressive compared to my husband’s contributions on the left-hand side of this blog, but my recent hiatus was worse than usual.  I have a reason, though!

A couple of months ago, I left my laptop in a less-than-smart place — namely, on the ground hidden by some newspapers.  Nathan understandably tripped on the charger plug.  Since then, the plug has become increasingly fickle in its willingness to charge my computer.  More and more wiggling has become required as the weeks wore on.  By last week, I practically had to stand on one leg at a slight backwards angle while singing showtunes and pressing the charger into the computer with the fourth finger on my left hand in order to get any juice.  Today is the first time in three days that I have managed to charge the computer at all.

Some of you might be thinking, “Why don’t you just use Nathan’s computer sometimes?”  Well, Nathan took a drastic and expensive measure several weeks ago and had his computer surgically seared to his body until the end of the election season.  The man and the machine are one.

With my computer charged but draining battery as I type this, I wanted to take a moment to apologize for my prolonged absence.  Catherine is actually napping on a rather regular basis (although she still finds sleep at 4:00am to be an unnecessary component to her schedule) and finds ways to amuse herself when awake, so I should be blogging more, not less.

Assuming my charging success continues, I’ll be back with more later tonight and as the week progresses!

So says notable blogger Bill Hobbs. And he has the proof to buttress his claim

U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., the Tennessee Democratic Party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate, is a liar. A serial liar. Back on August 4, Ford and U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, debated deficit reduction on the Kudlow & Co. show. As the transcript shows, Ford essentially agrees with Marsha that voting against the Deficit Reduction Act would be wrong – but then says he voted for it. That’s a lie. The record shows that Ford voted against the Deficit Reduction Act twice. He voted against the House version and he voted against the final conference report. Could Ford have simply “forgotten” his votes against the Deficit Reduction Act? Not likely for, as Leon Wolf, writing at RedState.com, reminds us, Ford filed filed an amicus brief challenging the constitutionality of the Deficit Reduction Act when it was challenged in court.

Click through. Hobbs notes this isn’t the first time Ford has lied about his record. And seeing how he’s running just to the left of Atilla the Hun, I’m wagering it won’t be the last.

Double posted at Blogging for Corker.

on Ned Lamont’s 15 minutes.

Enjoy it now, Kos it’s going to be over soon. My prediction come November is that you’ll just have to MoveOn, and take the Democrats Underground.