With the state covered under almost two feet of snow, Kansas' senior senator announced his candidacy for the the Presidency of the United States in the Topeka Agriculture Expo Hall. A fitting choice of venue for the man whose family has farmed in this state for four generations and who himself was once the state's agriculture secretary.

The theme that jumped out of the announcement was pure Ronald Reagan: America is great because she is good, and not the other way around. When she ceases to be good, she will no longer remain for wrong. It is this good in the heart of America which Sam Brownback wants to harness to make ours a society that secures itself, protects the helpless, feeds the hungry, eradicates 'Killer Cancer', dumps the Internal Revenue Code in the dustbin, and gives the world another reason for Hope.

Arrayed against this humble effort are the billion dollar juggernauts of limo liberalism (Giuliani), foolhardy opportunism (McCain), and multiple choice Boston Brahminism (Romney).

Will my candidate make the cut for the Republican nomination? I do not know. What I do hope is that he lives up to the belief that Churchill had that 'somethings in life are worth fighting for, no matter what the chances of immediate success.'

So here we begin in snowy Topeka, Kansas..in the heartland of America. I am one of those rational, coldly calculating people in placing political bets (what else do you expect from someone who used to do risk management for banks). This time, I make an exception. This is too GOOD of a man to ignore, and I shall stand by his campaign until he becomes President of the United States or withdraws from the race.

Let's Roll!!!!!!!!

Today I am headed to the state capital to hear the formal announcement of candidacy by the 44^th President of the United States, Sam Brownback! So my entry will be a little less creative and intense. But, just so you know, San Francisco is concerned about this phenomena to the point that its city council is thinking about upping the railing size.

So there was this nice, decent, ex- Navy man, God fearing Presbyterian taking his morning stroll on the Golden Gate bridge when, to his horror, he sees a rather distressed looking man ready to jump into the ocean to end his life. Our good Samaritan had to intervene. Approaching the suicidal maniac gently he says ‘My friend, can we not talk this over?’

Terse comes the reply, ‘No! I don’t want to talk it over. You would never understand me. Just go away and let me finish this miserable life of mine.’

Not one to be told off, our strolling friend says, ‘How can you be sure that I wont understand? Maybe we have much in common!’

‘Oh yeah!’ sarcasm drips from the distressed fellow, ‘How so?’

A quick thinker from his days commanding torpedo boats, the sailor ventures ‘Well, say church! I am a Presbyterian, what are you my friend?’

‘Well, I am a Presbyterian too,’ the maniac is a little puzzled

‘Wonderful! See, I told you we are not that different,’ the boat commander presses his advantage, ‘Are you a PCUSA or a PCA Presbyterian?’

‘PCUSA was how I grew up’, came the halting reply

At least there was a conversation going, the sailor reasoned ‘Me too! PCUSA, Baltimore Convention or PCUSA, Nashville Convention?’

‘Baltimore Convention, that’s the real stuff man,’ the man at the railing was impressed with his own latent zeal for church

‘No way! I am a Baltimore Convention man too’, the sailor was excited now, ‘tell me my friend, are you PCUSA Baltimore Convention Confessional Group or PCUSA Baltimore Convention Reformed Movement?’

‘Are you silly?’, came the vibrant reply, ‘the Reformed Movement is the real church, dude!’

‘Amen, brother, amen!’, the Navy man knew he did the right think stopping this good man from taking his life. This very well could be what God had sent him for this morning. Just to be sure he pressed on, ‘PCUSA Baltimore Convention Reform Movement World Ministries or the PCUSA Baltimore Convention Reform Movement Covenant Ministries?’

The suicide guy looked at the sailor with another look of an emerging sure faith and shot back ‘World Ministries my brother!’ Maybe the samaritan and he had something in common after all and could talk about.

The ex-Navy guy became deathly silent, his face contorted, the joviality suddenly gone as he looked closely at the man he had apparently just saved from taking his life.

‘World Ministries, huh?’ he spewed out his words in red hot anger, ‘THEN DIE YOU HERETIC!’

You see, our good samaritan Navy guy was Covenant Ministries guy!

 The other day Senator Ted Kennedy was waxing eloquent about speaking truth to power regarding the continued prosecution of the war in Iraq. Funny because far from being a David fighting Goliath, the Bostonian gentleman is the shining example of how power can shield from the consequences of truth…Chappaquiddick, Miami Beach,..no need to go on.

Truth has been spoken to power in Boston before…in our lifetimes and Kennedy was there along with many others who make up our social, cultural, and political power structure. For it was not that long ago at Foxboro Stadium that one solitary shepherd from faraway Poland looked into the eyes of his flock and said what almost none of them wanted to hear. At that huge open air mass, with the glitterati of the Northeast in attendance along with tens of thousands of others and the rest of the powerful eagerly watching, Karol Wojtyla said words that boldly proclaimed the humanitarian tenets of his faith, in words that were sure to have offended both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the traditional and the reformists. Half of his statement certainly offended me as standing face to face with America, the Pope minced no words in taking on two pet causes of the powerful: The Church stands with the unborn and the undocumented. In one fell swoop John Paul the Second had managed to affirm his unshakeable belief in the basic humanity of all human beings. I could only imagine how liberals like Pelosi and Kennedy were squirming as were conservatives like Tancredo and Santorum. If the Roman pontiff cared what these men and women of power thought of his speaking the uncomfortable, unvarnished, unabridged truth, he certainly did not show it. Sure, the liberals wished that he had soft-pedaled on abortion and the conservatives fervently hoped he did not bring up immigration. Leave it to a pesky Pole to upset the applecart of hedonistic hallucinations.

Was it not Jan Sobiesky who stopped the mighty Turks at Vienna when the rest of Europe was shaking in its boots? Was it not Cardinal Prince Adam Sapieha who defied the Nazis and kept hope alive in secret schools and seminaries?

Yep….merely offending just about everyone in the political galaxy in the most powerful country in the world, and pouring water on their smug self-righteousness was not about to stop a Pole from saying it as he saw it.

 This guy charged with the kidnapping of the kids in my neighboring Missouri brings up an interesting phenomena in our social dynamics. We want to appear to be tough on those who harm children. But as often as not, we wink an eye for the politically correct kind of child abuse and let it go. You can molest (and even kill children) as long as you are an attractive woman…Debra Lafave, Mary Kay LaTourneau, Susan Giles, Kerri McCandless, and most recently Mary DeLuca in Utah (see your local paper tomorrow and there be another one of these child rapists there too). At most you’ll get a few months of probation and then a nice book deal to tell the world about your sick perversions against children. Society generally grants you the same general immunity from being punished for child abuse if you are the boyfriend or live-in partner or spouse of the mother, unrelated to the children.

Or take the most recent liberal heartthrob Barak Obama….the man voted against an Illinois law, when he was in the Illinois senate, that would have required breathing, live infants born of induced deliveries to be given the full protection of law and cared for medically. How cruel and sick can you get? I would want a man like that hundreds of miles away from any children.

But then, what do we expect from a bar and a bench that is convinced that a child’s best interest lies in being allowed to see his/her father no more than twice a month, a judicial system that holds that children are best protected and taken care of when taken away from their fathers and given to unrelated boyfriends, stepfathers, and any other sexual partners the mother has?

Every child molester should serve hard time in prison. Sometimes I think so should a lot of the judges and prosecutors who are oath bound to protect children but are more concerned about their standing in the notoriously libertine, egotistical, and self-serving bar association.

 From: Office of Management and Personnel

To: All civil service and contractual personnel (Non-appointees)

Please be advised that this office has been tasked with implementation of the Executive Order 6660666. While fully respecting the right of all Americans to their own religious beliefs, the government is obliged to make sure that the Republic’s civil servants are completely non-discriminatory in the discharge of their duties. Thus it is necessary to remove all perceptions to the contrary. Therefore, as of January 1 of the next year, all civil servants will be required to affirm on Form 216OPM that they do not belong to or donate to any organization that does not subscribe substantially to the Equal Opportunity and Gender Non-Bias Guidelines (NOGNG) of the administration. Because this may affect certain employees more than others, our legal counsel has informed us that at this time the Roman Catholic Church, the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and the Rabbinate of Orthodox Judaism does not meet the criteria set forth for in NGONG,  though this list is neither complete not exhaustive. Any civil servant belonging to the groups mentioned herein are advised, therefore, to sever their relationship with the said organization(s) or face disciplinary action. This administration remains committed to the principles of the First Amendment and is working hard to remove any bias from all facets of American society.

Another reason I am proud to be a Brownback-er is his fight to replace the disaster of our tax code with a simple, fair, flat tax. One of most powerful economic ideas of our times, championed by conscientious people on both Left (Democrat Gov of CA Jerry Brown) and Right (Republican Congressman Bill Archer and Secretary Jack Kemp), is indeed the flat tax on income. Simply put, the flat tax exempts the first several thousand dollars of income from taxation and then imposes a loophole-free flat rate on anything above that. This allows for the poor to keep most (or all) of their income, earnings that are usually all consumed in basic necessities like food, shelter, medicine, and clothing. On the other hand, the flat tax gets rid of the immense headache, long hours, preparation fees, and frazzled hunt for those little receipts and documents that is a staple of middle class life between January and April each year. As important, this kind of tax closes the loopholes that rich folks have their lobbyists write into law and their lawyers and accountants exploit, come tax time. The more complicated the tax code, the more hidden giveaways for the rich to exploit and their retainers to share.

The United States tax code is 900 percent (yes, nine hundred percent) bigger than the entire Bible!

The opposition will deadly and swift, as it has been in the past. The reason is simple: any idea of a flat tax is lethal to the huge tax bureaucracy (with a flat tax, we will need a very small IRS, if one at all), the tax bar, the accounting industry, and the pork barrel congressmen who love writing tax benefits for big donors. As many Democrats as Republicans will line up to oppose it..after all a Republican tax lawyer wants to send his kid to Harvard just as much as a Democrat tax attorney does.

The flat tax is an idea that is truly precipitous of a David vs. Goliath battle.

 Far be it from me to criticize the Pope. Nonetheless his call for migrants to ‘respect’ the norms of their hosts is rather puzzling. I certainly hope that he means respecting the laws and regulations of host societies rather than cultural norms. Immigrants, like all others in a society, are honor bound to protect that society and obey its duly promulgated laws. Societal customs, however, are a different matter and the Holy Father is arguably the most cognizant individual about this phenomena. For if the migrants in Western Europe coming from Eastern Europe, Anatolia, and North Africa were to follow the cultural norms of their hosts, whatever is left of faith and family in France and Britain and Germany and Denmark would be long gone.

Does the Pope want migrants to adopt the Western European cultural norms of rampant tax-payer funded infanticide, subsidized drugs and prostitution, celebratory homosexuality, and widespread promiscuity? Does he want Latino immigrants in the US and Canada to pick up the prevailing culture of North America which holds adultery and destruction of families is something to be not only tolerated but considered an ‘alternative lifestyle choice’?

I would have much rather wished that the Bishop of Rome had clarified his point and insisted that migrants to formerly Christian countries of Europe and America put their values and faith to work towards renewing the embattled Judeao-Christian heritage of their new homes. Frankly I am much more comfortable in the culture of an El Paso barrio than the hedonistic pagan atmosphere of Boston where a Catholic has to check with the ACLU and NOW before admitting to being a Catholic.

 It is a matter of individual choice and conscience. The government should not only not interfere with it but actively protect that choice from the religious zealots. If you do not believe in it, fine, but you have no right to preach your morality to me. Personally of course I am against the whole thing and wish it did not exist, but I will never want to impose my beliefs on others. Most scientists and doctors of the day agree that they cannot confirm that the issue at hand involves another actual ‘human being’. One has to be thankful for the fact that the Democratic Party generally sees the wisdom of this enlightened position as do the prominent lawyers, leading newspapers and, thanks to that landmark case in the Supreme Court, the federal judges.

Reflect carefully on the above paragraph. Can you tell if it is written about slavery or abortion?

Neither can I.

From: FCC

To : All Stations

Pursuant to the recently passed Equity in Reflection of All Families Act, please be advised that pre-clearance is required for any prime time shows that depict the nuclear family without portraying its inherent oppressive nature. Effective January 1, all broadcasts on air, cable, and satellite depicting social or family situations will need their scripts vetted and be certified as Class A (Family Unit Judgment Free) or Class B (Exemption for re-run of old shows). Necessary forms and procedures will be available at the newly created Office of Standards of Broadcast Non-judgment. Failure to comply may result in fines and/or imprisonment the specifics of which are being developed by Commission staff.

Taking a cue from the news parodies but with a serious premonition of what may come if we keep going in the current direction, I will be posting a series of ‘memo’ type briefings on trying issues of today as they evolve tomorrow. This is the first one in the series.

To: All State Employees

From: The Office of the Governor

Pursuant to the decision handed down by the federal magistrate in the ACLU vs. Attorney General case, please be advised that effective immediately employees of the state are forbidden from sending their children to parochial schools. The decision, which the supervising federal district judge has graciously suspended till the end of the school year, has been refused a hearing by the 9^th Circuit Court sitting in San Francisco. As such, the employment by the state of any individual who sends his/her children to a religiously affiliated school is considered a violation of the Establishment Clause and thus deemed unconstitutional by the honorable magistrate. Therefore, any employee of the state found to have children enrolled in a parochial or church-affiliated school after September 1 of this year will automatically stand terminated from his/her job.

Nothing the President said tonight ,or for that matter the response of the liberal opposition, was a surprise given the fact that all the key elements of each sides' perspective has been leaked to the press at least a week ago. I hope, pray, and desire that the President's plan succeeds. It must if we are to save face in a world where impressions count at least as much as, if not more than, reality.

I am also afraid, however, that our society has largely lost the will to fight prolonged wars..whether in Iraq or anywhere else. From that angle, maybe it is better to fold and pull out to save American lives and assuage popular discontent with a war that is keeping tens of thousands away from their families. Perhaps the President would have been wiser to realize that he presides over a nation that, unlike the one presided over by the country's first Republican president, is made up of people many of whose length of commitment for any sturdy endeavor lasts until things become dicey. Technology can do only so much to overcome a commitment gap between us and the enemy.

It is anecdotal but certainly reflects the spirit of a different time to relate the story of Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War Stanton who had sent a letter of condolence to a woman who had lost three boys in the ongoing Civil War. Her response, rather unlike that of CIndy Sheehan, went  'thank you for writing Mr. Secretary and sharing the grief that only a parent can know. But rest assured that had the Good Lord blessed me with two more boys, I would have gladly broken my heart and offered them too on the altar of thie Union ".

I saw with delight the Discovery channel documentary on Tai Shan and his parents Sunday night. Now, he and his parents seem to be nice, adorable, family values oriented people who stay out of the business of others and have a lot of love for each other. Tai is bi-racial (black and white to boot), is a second generation immigrant, and has no skeletons in his closet. And the guy is more popular, specially amongst the young, that just about any politician of either party on the East Coast. He would inoculate Republicans against any charges of bias against the minorities or immigrants or being soft on nature conservation. Not to mention, Tai has strong connections to East Asia which may help our case in trade and security negotiations in the Pacific Rim.

Tai Shan, of course, is the panda cub at the National Zoo.

And I am proposing his name for nomination as the Republican candidate for Congress from any of the adjoining VA or MD districts.

Both with disgust and disbelief I saw the MSNBC show ‘Broken Vows’ tonight. It detailed the case of a Boston area Roman Catholic priest (Father James Foley) who broke his vows of celibacy (hence the title) to have a long term affair with one of his married parishioners with whom he fathered two children. During one of these adulterous liaisons, the two ended up having an arguments and the woman swallowed a lot of sleeping pills to end up dying. Recently the Boston Archdiocese settled a wrongful action suit brought by the woman’s children against the priest for an undisclosed amount of money.

The Church was shamed, humiliated, and dragged through mud as it richly deserved for being oblivious to the action of this priest. But what about the woman, Rita Jennings Perry? Not a word was said about her equally blatant breaking of her vows as a wife and a mother.

Married to a very decent man, this was a woman who had a decade long affair with a priest. While married to her husband she begged the priest to impregnate her and eventually carried two of his illegitimate children. The husband was fooled into believing these two were his offspring, cared for them, raised them, spent his time and resources in bringing them up. The children themselves were denied the fundamental right of knowing their parental heritage and put their physical and mental health thus put at risk.

How unethical, selfish, and dishonest can a woman be? And how blind are we to place all the blame on one person rather than both?

As I look at it, Father James Foley and Rita Perry deserved each other. While it is fashionable to blame the Catholic Church and its priests for a lot of wrongdoing, let us be fair here in this case. Father James Foley is a disgusting blemish on the Catholic Church. And Rita Perry was one of the lowliest, dishonest, adulterous women that ever roamed Boston.

There was a time in the fifties, sixties, and seventies when the only difference between Republicans (where they existed north of the Mason Dixon line) and the Democrats was this: Republicans wanted to do all the good, 'progressive', nice things that Democrats wanted to do as well but with a two percent less of a tax burden and six fewer bureaucrats. After all, someone had to pay the country club dues.

It was also a time when a handshake meant a contract and when parents thought of their children's safety and happiness rather than their own self-'fulfillment'.  People got a real education in schools, schools that reinforced the values of the home.

Those days were good...and they are long gone. It is a reality rather lost on the self-proclaimed 'traditional' Republicans in the Midwest. If only we could return to 'civility', they bleat and blather. In other words, they want the party to go back to being the permanent junior partner to the liberal Democratic establishment that already runs the bar, the bench, the print media, and the civil service.

Thanks, but no thanks. It is too high a price to pay for a civility that borders on subservience.

KsReaganite is sick of hearing RINOs quote the late Barry Goldwater ad nauseum. Be it some limo liberal in Kansas City upset with the involvement of people of faith in politics or some condescending publisher of a Midwestern daily, you alwway hear "Oh, I am a Barry Goldwater Republican who is not happy with the Religious Right"...blah, blah, blah. These idiots simply want to use an icon of the past to insulate themselves against their own weak hearted pseudo-liberalism.

Let me remind them what a Barry Goldwater Republican said in accepting the presidential nomination of 1964: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

That was, er, Barry Goldwater himself. Of course, that was way before he found affection in the arms of a young woman who was an extreme liberal feminist. What a man would not do for an attractive woman.

The Mr. Republican of a previous generation had become the icon of RINOs in his old age. Let nobody ever doubt the power of womankind in America.