We have a new conservative blog in our midsts, the State of Franklin. It just got started, but be sure to bookmark it and check it out.

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

My favorite blogospheric 2nd Amendment advocate is celebrating his Blog Birthday this week. Go check him out, and join the party.

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.

I’ll see you there

Please Join Juan Borges

Candidate for the 60th State House and

Special Guest Congressman Marsha Blackburn

At Maggiano’s Little Italy on 3106 West End, Nashville, 37203 Tuesday, August 29th

7:00pm to 9:00pm $100 suggested minimum/person or couple

To Discuss Local/Federal Immigration Issues Beer/Wine & Hors D’oeuvres will be served

John Ambrose, Treasurer

Visit us at www.voteborges.com

Please make checks payable to

Juan Borges for State Representative

Borges for State House

4441 Stoneview Drive

Antioch, TN 37013

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).

Ben sent out the notice on the weekend he was launching his own blog. You can find it here. And as a community service, Ben provides an address to send extra money to the federal government if you feel “undertaxed” (so naturally now, liberals can put their wallets where their collective mouth is).

Ben is a good man, who has fought to keep the tax burden low in Tennessee, in Nashville, and around the state. He’s going to have good things to say.

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.

The measure as to whether or not to give the citizenry the ability to vote on increasing property taxes in Nashville will be on this November’s ballot

If approved by voters in November, and if it passes legal challenges that may arise, the measure would require a public vote to raise property taxes from their rate, which is $4.69 per $100 of assessed value in the higher-taxed district of Nashville and $4.04 in the suburban areas that don’t receive garbage pickup, among other services from the city.

Cunningham said a new group, in which he serves as treasurer, the Committee to Let the People Vote on Property Taxes, has not decided what means they’ll use to promote the measure in the coming weeks.

“We haven’t really formalized that at this point, (and we are) just waiting to be sure that it was on the ballot before we proceeded further.”

I think it will pass - it would have been better to have it on the August 3rd ballot, where there was more significant Republican turnout, but that would have required more signatures on the front end.

United States Congressman Lincoln Davis has been attempting to lay some groundwork for Harold Ford, Jr. This may not be the best way to go around convincing people. From the AP today

Davis said he recently convinced a small-town pastor to support Ford despite the pastor’s concerns about Ford’s family, several of whom, including his father, have been caught up in political and legal scandals.

 “He said, ‘U.S. Rep., I don’t know that I can be for Ford because of his family.’ I said do you realize in your family you had a brother who killed his brother?” Davis said, referring to the biblical story of Cain and Abel.

I’m not sure that’s the best way to go about it.

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.

Before I begin, doesn’t “quandary” look like it is spelled wrong?  That second “a” seems wholly unnecessary.  But, spell check says otherwise.

Catherine and I went to Kroger today to pick up a few items … no major volume, just some wings and beer as requested by my husband for tonight’s Titans game and a few sale items that grabbed my attention along the way.

There were three regular lanes and one express lane (15 items or less) open when the time came for me to check out.  I counted up my selected items and came to a grand total of eighteen.  A stickler for the rules, I took my place in line behind people with carts overflowing with groceries and settled in for the wait.

A woman in the line next to me noticed my sparse cart and pointed me to the express line.  I replied, “Thanks, but I have eighteen items and I would feel guilty if I didn’t follow the rules.”  (Would you be surprised to learn that I was labeled part of the “nerd herd” and ran the school store in middle school?)  The woman gave me a strange look and returned to reading the “In Touch” cover story about Nicole Richie’s frightening weight loss.

As Catherine grabbed her feet with utter fascination, I thought about the true intent of the express line.  I didn’t really have eighteen distinct items.  For example, I had five yogurts, three cans of tuna and three boxes of pasta.  Some would argue that the yogurts could be considered one item, but I disagree because each flavor requires its own scan.  On the other hand, I could get behind the fight for my tuna counting as one item because the cashier could scan one can and then hit the “3” key for quantity.  Quick and easy!

Since I had the support of a fellow customer and since the two carts in front of me each had at least fifty items, I decided to be bold and move to the express line.  I will admit, pangs of guilt swept through my body.  When I put my items on the conveyor belt, I kept them as close together as possible to make the number appear smaller (the opposite of the time-tested “scoot your vegetables around to the corners of your dinner plate” technique).  There was a very nice father of three (I learned this information during our conversation … I don’t have any weird “I can tell how many children you have” ability) in line behind me.  We talked about children’s sleeping patterns and their tendency to find electrical outlets and I was grateful for this common interest because it kept him from peering at my groceries and doing a mental count!

Catherine and I left the store and I avoided direct eye contact with her so that she couldn’t see my shame I felt over my dubious express line activities.

Your condolences to Nathan for having to live with my crazy worries can be sent to the left side of this blog.

Are you there, God?  It’s me … Sarah. (hat tip to the esteemed Judy Blume)  I am starting to think that You don’t want me to write on my own blog, and that hurts my feelings!  It’s a lovely Saturday afternoon.  Nathan is out with friends for the entire day and graciously trusted me with his computer.  Catherine actually fell asleep for her afternoon nap at 1:00pm, right on schedule.  I prepare to sit down with my nutritious lunch of Ramen noodles (Oriental flavor … yum, salt!) and a Diet Pepsi to get some writing done (finally) and …bang!  The power went out.  It is now closing in on 2:30pm and the power just returned.  However, our phone and internet access is still down.  So, I am typing this entry in Microsoft Word in the hopes that my online world will soon be rehabilitated.  My productive technology-reliant plans for the day are dashed.  Since I can’t catch up on my blog reading and return e-mails that have waited several days for my attention, I am actually considering scrubbing the bathroom floors and cleaning out the papers in my office this afternoon.  Yes … it has come to this.

When I go to church tomorrow morning, please give me a sign.  What can I do to make my writing more pleasing to You?  I use too many parentheses, don’t I (I know my habit of sharing side thoughts in my head through parenthetical statements can be a bit much sometimes)?  Should I stop being sarcastic and critical towards other people?  Are You really a Democrat, after all?

UPDATE: It’s now Sunday afternoon at 1:30pm.  We just got our internet access back!  I can finally post a few entries I’ve left in a holding pattern in Word.

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.

From Representative Susan Lynn

Would you like an opportunity to volunteer for the GOP?

We need your help making get out the vote phone calls in Wilson County starting next week.

I promise the work is easy and fun.  We’ll provide you with dinner and a phone.

Come join us, meet new friends, and help the GOP win in November!

For more details click here

Each participant will become an official aide-de-camp of the GOP!

Thank you, 

Susan

State Representative Susan Lynn

www.repsusanlynn.com

615-596-2363