Poor Richard

pro·gres·sive [pruh-gres-iv] - noun

1) An immature person who would like to drag everyone else down to his/her low standards of personal behavior.

2) A person so blinded by immaturity that commonsense is no longer common.

3) A person locked into a juvenile outlook on life.

4) A chronically immature person of any age.

Recently, New York Senator Hillary Clinton (D) had been supporting a request that the federal government pay $1,000,000 for a Woodstock Museum commemorating the 1969 music festival in her state. This is a corrupt usage of our federal system as this museum has nothing to do with the responsibilities of the federal government as defined in the constitution of our republic.

To be fair, corruption exists on both sides of the aisle whenever any such local project, no matter how worthy, is included in the federal budget. But wrong is wrong wherever it happens.

Essentially, a federal "pork project" (or, earmark) is a spending item for which a state cannot justify the expense and so a federal politician asks the other 49 states to pay for it. Its a "Rub my back and I'll rub your back" situation to bring home the pork in order to buy votes from their electorate.

This collusion in corruption is rampant in our congress and needs to ...

Rudy Giuliani said the following at the Republican Presidential Debate on October 21, 2007:

"It seems to me the thing that's wrong right at the core of No Child Left Behind is the enforcer of standards should not be the bureaucrat in Washington or on the board of education. It should be the parent. We should have choice. We should empower parents. They should decide - private school, parochial school, public school, charter school, home school."

".... I think its the single biggest civil rights issue that we face in the 21st century."

Leftists do not want you to be able to choose the quality of education you want for your children. They want to impose their minority point of view on you and they can only do so by forcing everyone into a government-run school.

Its time we let those with high standards of personal behavior send their kids to schools of high standards of personal behavior and let the left send ...

The following was said by candidate Mike Huckabee at the Republican Presidential Debate on October 21, 2007:

"And, we don't have a health care crisis. We have a health crisis. 80% of the two trillion dollars we spend in health care in this country is spent on chronic disease. If we don't change the health of the nation by focusing on prevention, we're never going to catch up with the costs...."

If everyone lead healthy lifestyles, health care costs would be very low in comparison to today. But our diets, lack of exercise, and other elective behaviors are the top causes of death.

A core conservative concept is that you don't transfer the costs of your own behavior onto another person. In other words, if you eat your way into a coronary bypass, its wrong that you pass that cost onto another person. To do so is to steal. Under our current system, the person who refrains from self-destructive behavior has to also help pick up the tab for your bypass in the form of higher insurance premiums.

Its time that we institute what are called sin taxes. That is, you tax behaviors that currently put a cost burden onto others. But this money would not go to the government. Instead, it would be rebated to each person's own private health care account from which you would buy health insurance and health related expenditures.

Theses taxes would mainly ...