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Guest Commentary: The Importance of Values and Principles

               Hope comes from the Great State of Tennessee

By Marilyn Barnewall                                        

A copy of Susan Lynn’s email came last Thursday. She is a member of the Tennessee General Assembly and serves on the Commerce Committee. She is Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and also chairs the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Commerce Task Force.

Guest Piece: The Long, Grey Line

By Marilyn Barnewall

We’ve all heard of the “Thin Blue Line.”  It suggests a thin line of policemen in blue uniforms is all that stands between civilized society and the chaos of predators descending upon us.  It is also a term used to express a sense of “brotherhood” that exists between police officers.

There are other lines… thin lines that stand between society and other forms of chaos.  I remember a movie about West Point cadets that referred to the military as The Long Grey Line.

TNA Piece: Senate Obamacare Bill Could Ban Guns

By Rebecca Terrell

The Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to vote on Chairman Max Baucus' socialized healthcare bill Tuesday, October 13, and Gun Owners of America (GOA) is warning the bill contains language that could be used to ban firearms.

In a statement Friday, GOA gave highlights of the unnumbered bill based on a summary of the legislation published recently. The pro-gun organization complains that the actual bill has not been released to the public yet. It is listed on the Senate Finance Committee website simply as "an Original Bill providing for Health Care Reform."

Read the rest here.

Guest Piece: How Democrats Win Senate Seats

By Bruce Walker

[Note from Selwyn: This is a piece you really should read.  Bruce does an excellent job of demonstrating how the Democrats have been shamelessly playing with the law in order to increase and maintain their power.]

The Democrats have done it again.  When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts and John Kerry was running for president, the ultra-partisan Massachusetts Legislature changed the law to remove from Governor Romney the right to appoint a successor to Kerry, if the senator should be elected president.  The new law required, instead, that the people of Massachusetts elect the replacement for a departing senator. There was no grand public motive behind this new law:  Democrats just did not want a Republican governor appointing a Republican to Kerry’s Senate seat.

Guest Piece: Islam is Misunderstood

By Amil Imani

Everybody just relax. Islam is badly misunderstood. The negative stereotype of Islam is the usual evil-doings of Zionists in America and their foolish fellow travelers, fundamentalist Christians. Please don’t listen to what these hatemongers say about Islam and hear us out. So implies the nationally-launched campaign of Muslim organizations in the United States.

Guest Piece: The Ugly American

By Bruce Walker

Five decades ago, during the heart of the Cold War, a term entered modern political vocabulary:  The Ugly American.  Based upon a 1958 novel of the same name, the phrase began to be used to describe the whole range of thoughtless mistakes which Americans made and which led to the loss of friendship among the peoples of the world.

Guest Piece: Why Obama Could Not Stage a Coup

By Bruce Walker

Some conservatives have begun to openly wonder if Obama is going to seize power in America.  Would he want to do this?  Perhaps so (which is a scary.)  No one dreamed that Carter, the worst president of the last century, wanted or planned to seize power.  Clinton wanted to win power, but the worst anyone expected of Clinton was Huey Long bossism.

Guest Piece: The Wages of Appeasemennt

By Bruce Walker

The world has known for many years that the wages of appeasement are the loss of moral high ground to monstrous villains.  During the Cold War, although America usually kept its military power adequate to deter Soviet aggression, the American Left (and European Left) blithely pretended that a regime which conspired with Adolph Hitler to start the Second World War, which instructed the Nazis about how to create massive camps in which millions of souls could perish – as millions had before the Nazis even came to power in Germany – and which preached as doctrine that any lie, any crime, any vice which advanced the cause of communism was morally on the same plane as America and the West.

Profundity: Chesterton on Philosophy

From G.K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas (1933):

Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.

Guest Commentary: And That’s The Way it Wasn’t – Walter Cronkite

By Bruce Walker

By all accounts, Walter Cronkite was a kindly, almost avuncular figure.  Many members of the journalist community have written eulogies of his decency and humility.  He had a long, happy marriage.  These things should count to us conservatives, who yearn for human life to be more about how it is lived than in the personal politics of each individual. We ought to respect, for example, the genuine marital love that Barack has for Michelle or, for that matter, the love that Jimmy Carter has for Roselyn.  If we fail to honor those good aspects of our political opponents, then we run the grave risk of becoming that hideous creation of the Left, homo politicus.