“She is a nice enough person, but she is not ready to run a company.”

“She is not the most qualified candidate – so it would not be fair to let her have the job now.”

These are the excuses that women have faced for years. There always seems to be a good excuse for why women have been denied the right to lead lines, teams, departments, companies, and the country. For the next several weeks, Americans will get to hear those excuses and more as Governor Sarah Palin attempts to become the first woman to shatter the last and hardest glass ceiling in the United States.

She has not been alone in this quest. In 1984, Democrat Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro blazed a new trail when Vice President Walter Mondale chose her as his running mate. She honored her country and her party.

In 2006, San Francisco Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi moved women one step closer as she led Democrats to capture control of the United States House of Representatives and became the first female Speaker of the United States Congress. The Speaker is second in line for the Presidency, behind only the Vice President of the United States.

In 2008, Democratic New York Senator Hillary Clinton advanced the fight for women one more step. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton hammered millions of cracks in the glass ceiling as she challenged Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for the President of the United States.

When Senator Barack Obama passed over Senator Hillary Clinton as his running mate, it appeared that the political climb for women in America had temporarily stalled just short of the two highest offices in the land. But then came maverick Arizona Republican Presidential nominee Senator John McCain.

Just when it appeared that the 2008 Presidential Election could not get any more historical, the Republican Presidential nominee selected the first woman as the GOP Vice Presidential nominee – Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. His selection guaranteed that the 2008 Presidential Election would be a first in American history regardless of whether the Democrats or the Republicans won on election day.

If the Democrats win, then Americans will elect the first African American as President of the United States. If the Republicans win, then Americans will elect the first woman as Vice President of the United States.

Shortly after Senator McCain’s selection, the excuses began. “She is a nice enough person, but she is not ready to run the country.” “She just does not have enough experience yet to lead.” “She needs just a little more time.” “She has a family to raise, and a husband to take care of.” “It is just not her time yet.” “She is not the most qualified candidate – so it would not be fair to let her have the job now.”

Sound familiar?

Of course, Governor Palin served as the Governor of the largest geographical state in the United States. Alaska sits as an isolated state without a border with any other American state. So, Alaska, and its leaders face unique challenges.

For one, as Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin serves as the Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard. Among other challenges, she leads the one state in the country that actually borders with Russia. Unlike any other governor or politician, she looks across a two mile strait and faces Russian troops.

On the other side of her state, Governor Sarah Palin deals with Canada – a country that could easily overwhelm most countries, much less states.

Yet, Governor Palin has navigated the international trade waters to protect Alaskan industry and citizens.

Meanwhile, Governor Palin has balanced a multi-billion dollar budget and shattered the corrupt “good ole boy” network that has dominated Alaskan politics for decades. But for many, none of that is good enough.

Instead, Democratic opponents insist that if she only had more foreign policy experience, longer service in public office, and greater exposure on the national level, then she would be ready to serve at the highest level. But if that were true, then why did they themselves not pick someone with greater foreign policy experience, longer service in public office, and greater exposure on the national level – namely Senator Hillary Clinton?

Barriers are built over time and they do not fall easily. Sometimes, it takes a political earthquake. Hurricane Hillary meet Earthquake Palin – it is a new day in American politics.

J. Randolph Evans, Esq.
McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP
Suite 5300
303 Peachtree Street, N.E.
Atlanta, GA 30308

The debate is over, Folks. Sarah Palin rocked tonight! John McCain will rock tomorrow night! AND, the Dimocrats are just plain F*CKED and will lose their butts this November 4th.

Watch them go into a panic overdrive. Watch them flop all over themselves as they get ZERO traction on their issues.

Hockey Moms are SMART and HOT!

PREAMBLE

Ladies and Gentlemen, goose bumps are going to rise to the surface of your skin after you finish reading what has been done to a fellow citizen of these United States.

Over the last 3 days, I have see-sawed from having a knot in my stomach to being so outraged that I could not form cogent thoughts. However, as you will see, I have reined-in control over my senses and my emotions well enough to deliver to you what you, and many others, need to know.

A Return to Gwinnett County FUBAR

Last Thursday, July 31, a press conference was called in Gwinnett County by Sheriff Butch Conway and State Senator Renee Unterman. During the press conference, Sheriff Conway held a tape recorder and played an excerpt (likely, doctored) from a conversation he had with George Anderson in his office on Tuesday, July 29.

In that press conference last Thursday, Conway and Unterman spoke out against “the politics of personal destruction”…ONLY to then proceed with actually waging war to personally destroy a man who uncovered the corrupt land deals that Lorraine Green had been behind.

The fact is, Conway was not himself “personally attacked” when ethics complaints were filed against him by George Anderson. An “ethics complaint” is a legal presentation of the observance by someone who has personally witnessed a violation of the LAW. That is NOT a “personal attack,” but a LEGAL ACTION!!!

That Senator Unterman and Sheriff Conway would first act indignant and claim someone else to be “personally destroying” Conway, and then proceed for their OWN separate, individual reasons, to attack a private citizen who was NOT running for office goes beyond the pale of what is acceptable behavior from our elected officials.

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WASHINGTON, July 14, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — In response to the many people who have called and asked how they could help, the “Tony Snow Family Trust” was set up today at the Wachovia Bank in Bowie, Maryland, to help with Tony Snow’s children’s education and expenses.

Jill Snow, Tony’s wife, will serve as the Trustee with Tony Snow’s three children (Kendall, Robbie and Kristi) as beneficiaries. Donations can be made directly to the Tony Snow Family Trust by either: sending a check made payable to the “Tony Snow Family Trust” to: Center for Health Transformation, Attn: Tony Snow Family Trust, 1425 K Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20005 or going to www.healthtransformation.net, which is the website for the Center for Health Transformation. Tony was working with The Center for Health Transformation on a cancer project with Geraldine Ferraro to help eliminate cancer as a cause of death.

Randy Evans, the grantor of the Trust, stated that, “Serving our country at times means sacrifice. Tony did just that. At a time when he was at the pinnacle of his career at FOX News, he was asked to serve his country and he gave up the financial rewards his future held. Having served his country well, Tony left the White House to earn money to help secure his children’s future. Unfortunately, fighting cancer did not give him much time to do that, and so, the purpose of this Trust is to help achieve Tony’s goal of securing his children’s future including their college educations.”

SOURCE J. Randy Evans, Partner with McKenna, Long and Aldridge

http://www.healthtransformation.net

Checkout this story in the AJC a few weeks ago. It pretty much explains it all:

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/metro/stories/2008/05/18/barr.html

If you are running for any public office in Georgia, or in any state, please checkout my new Website devoted to providing various and sundry campaign promotional products and services. I developed the Website as a site separate from my normal business website (IDBuilders.com) to focus more on helping candidates deliver their message and build their name ID more effectively.

A brief list of ways I can help you get your message out is to provide your campaign with:

Campaign Promotional Products

Polls & Surveys

Keep TheCampaignEdge.com in mind for helping you with ideas and services to deliver your campaign message more effectively!

– Bill Simon

Door Hanger Magnets

Rumors have it that current Gwinnett County Commissioner/Candidate for Gwinnett County Chairman Lorraine Green has explicitly informed any business or legal entity that is trying to get a rezoning passed by the Commission WILL either write a check to her campaign for commission chair or get an immediate no-go vote from her for their requested re-zonings.

This explains a LOT of her maxed-out contributions from building supply and real estate developers. Green is by far the most arrogant, self-presumptuous, snot-nosed commissioner to likely EVER sit on the Gwinnett County Commission…and, demanding contributions for favorable rezoning votes is certainly well within her realm of modus operandi.

First, a resounding THANK-YOU to the House for demolishing Senator Joseph “Stalin” Carter’s (R-Gulag, Georgia) Senate Bill 506 by a resounding vote of 103 to 61.

Frankly, I cannot believe THIS bill actually made it out of the senate. Those folks are always pompously declaring themselves to be “the deliberative body” of this state. They would have better luck deliberating where the lint in their navels come from (and WE would probably be a much better state) than having this balderdash legislation pass.

Senator Joseph “Stalin” Carter’s original bill (the one the Senate madcappers passed) required the following from the state’s public school system:

1) Every student would have to have their BMI calculated twice per year. “BMI” stands for Body-Mass-Index, and it is a measure of how healthy or how obese someone is.

2) The BMI scores would not be identifiable by anyone for any one kid, but, each school’s collection of BMI values would be aggregated and averaged and compared to the state’s aggregated values. Those schools found to have an average BMI that lies outside the “state school norm” would be designated an “unhealthy school zone.” (No more cookies for any school designated as “unhealthy”…backpacks and lunch bags would be searched at the door and any food deemed to be unhealthy by Senator Stalin would be confiscated and the student marched-off to the gulag. Just kidding…but, I’m not very far off in using absurdity to make the point about this legislation, am I?)

What constitutes the BMI? A person’s height and their weight. Period.

To those of you who like to consider yourselves as having a basic ability to think, tell me…what makes a child 18 or under so significantly different than most adults?………………..

Give up? No, you know the answer…I just can’t hear you respond. The answer is CHILDREN ARE GROWING HUMAN BEINGS!

Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to presume it is valid to apply the BMI to a person who is growing? Not “growing old,” but growing as in getting taller, getting wider, growing in bone density, etc., etc., etc.

The BMI is only a valid measurement of someone’s physical state if that someone has reached a steady-state of not growing any taller. Duhhhhhhh…

With Joseph “Stalin” Carter’s line of thinking, a whole school that happened to have a lot of lower-than-average-height kids one year could be designated as an “unhealthy school zone” and cause THAT school’s parents to suddenly spend their time worrying about something they might not have ot worry about as time goes on. (Damn! That biology stuff is a REALLY difficult concept for state senators to grasp, isn’t it?)

I understand Stalin Joe’s “good intentions” here. He thinks physical education is a good thing and he wants schools to re-introduce it into their curriculums, and he thinks offering-up a statistic will help goad the schools into focusing on it.

But, you know what? The reason why PE has been driven OUT of the public schools is because of dear old George Dubya Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Under this federal legislation, your state can only “measure-up” to one federally mandated statistic: the scholastic competency of the students. Anything else must be discarded in the curriculum to make sure the students study, study, study, and…don’t forget, study in order to do well on federal tests. If Carter wants to find someone to blame for obese kids, he can look to his federal government heroes…those Republicans who voted FOR this legislation.

Now, far be it for me to just bitch about something without offering a viable, practical solution. And, it is a non-state-legislative idea: There are physical fitness trainers in private practice who would LOVE to volunteer their time to help educate kids on eating healthy and exercising and living healthy lifestyles. This could be done after school, or somehow worked into the day (maybe during the time the students would have been tasked with having their height and weight taken by the school nurse). I hear that all a school system has to do is just ask for volunteers from their community (Doh! What a concept! A school system asking for help, rather than having someone shove something down their throat) to help set-up a health and fitness program.

Maybe a Senate Resolution would have been a better step. Maybe just an idea that Carter started offering op-eds to be printed in local newspapers would have been a better start to educating the public on obesity and how the epidemic can be slowed down.

But…to ram a state-mandated, socialist-centric bill down the throats of school systems, the kids, their parents, etc. is to demonstrate a clear lack of understanding on what it means to be a Republican. Senator Joseph Carter flunks the test on having the ability to claim he is a “Republican.” This guy and his ideas should be considered to be quite dangerous. I can only shudder to think what his next idea will be…?

P.S. The following State Senators are my heroes for voting against this legislation back on February 29…and, they are not all Republicans:

BROWN, 26TH
CHAPMAN, 3RD
COWSERT, 46TH
DOUGLAS, 17TH
HENSON, 41ST
HUDGENS, 47TH
JACKSON, 24TH
MULLIS, 53RD
MURPHY, 27TH
SCHAEFER, 50TH
SEABAUGH, 28TH
SMITH, 52ND
WILES, 37TH

Think what you want about Georgia Speaker of The House Glenn Richardson, but on the issue of tax reduction this past session, his point of view trumps Lt. Governor Casey Cagle’s by 10 horse lengths.

At issue was what kind of tax-reduction should take place? The main component of the House side was to give the voters of Georgia a chance to vote to eliminate the ad valorem tax on our vehicles. I don’t know about you, but I’ve paid around $235 per year on the ever-so-slowly-declining-assessed value on my car. I imagine folks who buy SUVs at prices $10,000 above my Accord pay a few hundred more per year.

Cagle and the Senate’s proposal was to “reduce the state income tax by 10% over 5 years.” Cagle and his merry band of math flunk-outs really thought this was THE way to go. However, faced with the following statistics I wonder how long he’s willing to hold onto this point of view:

According to TaxFoundation.org the combined tax rate for Georgia local and state income tax is around 10.3%. I don’t think we have a “local” income tax, so, I think we can safely assume the 10.3% is all state income tax.

Now, the Tax Foundation site goes on to state that the per capita income for Georgia is on the average of $35,210. I think that number is high and may be way off, but, for conservative estimating purposes that give the Senate side of this equation the most benefit of the doubt, we’ll stick with $35,210.

So, approximately how much state income tax does everyone pay yearly? Multiply .103 times $35,210 and you get $3,627.00 in income tax the average Georgian pays to the state.

Cagle thinks that 10% of this amount, phased-in over 5 years will amount to something really, really substantial for your wallet. Let’s continue with Math 001 (“001” is a math course designed for those who flunked-out of Math 101) and see if Cagle is right:

10% of 3627 = $362.70
Divide $362.70 by 5 (as in “5 Years”), and what do you get?
$72.53 per year in less taxes to pay. (And, again, this is based on the high estimate of $35,210 being anywhere near the correct value for Georgia’s per capita).

Did you go “WOWWWWwwwwwwwwww…! That’s a lot of money! I can use that to go buy 2 bags of Nutro Dry dog food! I can use that money to fill-up my Honda Accord 2 times! Wowwwwwwww-eeeeee….”

I don’t think Lt. Governor Cagle knows a whole lot about what his “policy issues” really mean in the real world. Who the heck did this research for him and said it would amount to a better savings for the Georgia taxpayer than cutting-out the ad valorem tax on vehicles? Who thinks $72 is a larger number than $200? Maybe Casey got tax policy mixed-up with golf scores.

One can only wonder if the same researcher who drew the Cagle tax-reduction plan up was related to the policy researcher who took a flawed research study on the effects of allowing Sunday alcohol sales in New Mexico to give to the Governor and the Senate used as the basis to vote-down the Sunday sales bill from the House…

Due to discussions with the folks who are for this amendment, I have now changed my mind: I believe the Human Life Amendment should be put to a vote in both the House and Senate, and those legislators should pass it out by the required 2/3 majorities, and it should be placed on the ballot in November 2008.

Like so many others involved in politics, for a time there, I wrongly presumed the voters are not educated enough on something like this to be able to make a wise choice. That was arrogant on my part.

In much the same way that I was arrogant on my presumption that people should not be given the chance to vote up or down on the human life amendment, THOSE people who continue to block the legislation for selling alcohol on Sunday are also being extremely arrogant in their fight against putting THAT legislation to a vote.

If the Republican and Democrat legislators who represent Georgia are truly interested in “life, liberty, AND the pursuit of happiness” for all citizens, both those who are living now and future citizens, they should come together and allow the voters of Georgia to have a say on this ballot initiative, as well as pass the bill regarding local control of alchol sales on Sunday…and let people decide for themselves (Is Governor Sonny Perdue THAT arrogant as to continue to threaten a veto if it passes the Legislature?)

Again, my apologies to those who wish to have the Human Life Amendment on the ballot. I was wrong to try to block you, in much the same way that the Christian Coalition continues to try and block me from making a choice on whether or not I can choose to purchase alcoholic beverages (like a nice bottle of wine) to go with my hastily prepared steak on Sunday.

I really don’t have the desire to debate the issue contained within the text of Georgia HR 536, The Paramount Right To Life Amendment. Most of you know where I stand, and I know where most of you stand. To debate what you believe and what I believe about when human life begins will end-up exactly where we both started: a lot of disagreement and exasperation. Let’s skip that feeling all together, okay?

However, a rather interesting post I read on PeachPundit.com tonight sparked my mind to start thinking about this legislation in a completely different light. AND…it is a light that actually may cause a lot of the pro-life legislators to become quite against HR 536, and for the pro-choice legislators to actually turn in favor of it.

Or, it might not do either. After all, I do, on occasion, think that the people we elect to office possess and practice the same basic commonsense that I have…and I’ve been more and more disappointed in the validity of THAT presumption over the past 4 years.

The blog post I read concerned someone celebrating the “birth” of their new baby…and the fact that on this year’s tax form, that new baby gets to be a deduction: Two people filing jointly become three deductions on the 1040 Form…all because a baby was “born.”

Now, I am putting the words “birth” and “born” in quotes because although we currently have definitions of what those words mean, if HR 536 were to pass on the ballot, those words would actually become meaningless in this state.

The text of HR 536 states the following:

(a) The rights of every person shall be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life. The right to life is the paramount and most fundamental right of a person.

(b) With respect to the fundamental and inalienable rights of all persons guaranteed in this Constitution, the word ‘person’ applies to all human beings, irrespective of age, race, sex, health, function, or condition of dependency, including unborn children at every state of their biological development, including fertilization.

Now, if you bestow “personhood” on the human zygote in the womb (or, even the amoeba) at the moment of conception, then that means the following can, and, as it often is in our system of laws, WILL happen:

1) The legal birthday of that “person” becomes the date of conception. (I guarantee you even the most average of lawyers would be successful in arguing that to be the correct interpretation of the law.)

2) At that date of conception is when the parent(s) can begin deducting that “person” on their taxes. (Again, even the most average of tax attorneys could successfully argue that to be perfectly valid.)

3) All of the “welfare moms” who now receive monthly checks from the government for their children will be able to start receiving those checks right after the date of conception. What’s that? I’m hearing mumblings from pro-life conservative Republicans who don’t feel like allowing these 9-months-prior-to-normal-birth-welfare-moms to start collecting money on their new “persons” in the wombs. (What’s that? You’re going to pass another law that disallows this money until the zygote actually forms into a fetus and gets “born” the old-fashioned way? Well, that’s okay, we’re used to your continual and consistent demonstrations of sheer hypocrisy.)

4) At the moment of conception, the “person” will be assigned a social security number, and be eligible for anything a regular, air-breathing “person” is eligible for now.

5) If this were to become a constitutional amendment, either in Georgia or on a national basis (Huckabee supporters, pay close attention here), that would mean that in the event of any cessation of the life of the zygote, the blastocyst, the fetus, etc., that death would be immediately subject to a law enforcement examination into whether the “death” was involuntary manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, or murder. Those are three very possible categories of causation of death that could be applied to explain the death of the “person” in the womb.

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