For months we watched media chronicle the events of the Republican Party wrangling for who they would nominate for president.  It would have diminished the suspense and drama had we known earlier that Mitt Romney was the chosen one.  Nevertheless, many good  citizens received a glimpse into partisan character as well as a grand civics lesson through the exercise.

There are more lessons yet to come.  Imagine if after sustaining an election defeat, you embarked on a quest for how you could change the rules to improve your odds of winning in the future.  Our founding fathers set up a system where all the states would be fairly represented.  In 1913, the states took a major blow by losing their rights to select their senators and now this idea would block our state from being able to choose the president who wins in our state.

There’s no substitute for parental involvement

HINT: You can’t fix it with more money or more bureaucrats.  The only way is to get the parents involved. When I was a child, attending Logan Elementary School in Willmette, IL, my fellow students and I were sent home for lunch every day for an hour.  The school expected our parents to give us a meal of whatever they thought was appropriate and send us back in the afternoon.  It was the responsibility of the family to see to it that our needs were met.

What a change from today when some schools can replace a home packed lunch if the “school lunch inspectors” deem it to be outside USDA standards.

“What really happened in St. Charles County”

My mother-in-law saw it on the news in Michigan.

As an eyewitness to the debacle which occurred at the Republican Presidential caucus in St. Charles County Saturday, it was shocking to see how quickly the pretense of openness and adherence to the Bill of Rights is dismissed by the current leadership of the Republican Party.  The crisis, which made national news, involved calling in about 20 police officers, having a helicopter fly overhead and with two law abiding citizens being arrested—one was a Republican committeeman.

This caucus epitomizes what is wrong with the Republican Party.

Who Really Owns the Roads?

After being in government for nearly 17 years, I observed that all governments tend to be greedy and will seek to extract the maximum possible.  The idea of making I-70 a toll road is another ploy to get more money from the taxpayers.  It would be the same as our government asking us to pay more of our hard earned dollars if we want to continue receiving the same benefit we currently enjoy.  Whenever government extracts more money, it has to come from us making other sacrifices elsewhere.  It’s time to ask our government to make some sacrifices elsewhere.

What We Are Doing About It!

I took the train to Jefferson City as a symbol for how we will get our train back on the tracks.  Many wonderful supporters came out to cheer me on as I departed to correct the direction of our government. Private sector jobs are diminishing as the government has been growing.  We need to get government back into its proper proportions so that our state can flourish once again.

How do legislators decide?

It’s the ultimate game of “gotcha”.

Both the Democrat and Republican parties like these laws because they allow the operatives to humiliate the office holders from the other parties.  Sadly, if an ethics bill comes up for a public vote, it will always pass because the office holders want to give the appearance of voting for harsher restrictions.  However, a myriad of new laws are completely unrelated to ethical behavior.

When I served in the House of Representatives, the ink wasn’t dry before the members had calculated how to get around the new laws they just passed.  You can’t make people behave ethically unless they have a heart to do so.

The New Boundary Fiasco

Justice wasn’t even pretending to be blind.  Redistricting shouldn’t have caught anyone by surprise.  We knew it was coming for ten years.  In fact, it happens every ten years like clockwork based upon the census.  Redistricting provided us with a classic example of how the two major political parties can make a disaster out of something that should have been easy.

The committees were charged with the duty of making the districts compact, contiguous and keeping communities of interest together.   Anyone looking at the result would have to conclude they failed at their mission.  People from two political parties had one goal in mind:  Making sure it would be easier for their party’s candidate to win elections.  This agenda polluted their ability to approach the task objectively and doomed the committee to failure before it even began.

What We Can Learn From Santorum’s Victory

Although the election results were of no value to determine who would be nominated, it was an expensive anthropological study.  The taxpayers paid around seven million dollars to take this poll.  That comes out to around $21.45 per voter.  Here’s what you bought for your money: Poll Results

Political parties who want to use this process to gain political information should have to pay for their portion of it just like other taxing jurisdictions are required to pay for their portion of the election costs.  If they had to foot the bill, they would probably find it more cost effective to conduct a phone poll, and the State could use the seven million dollars for more pressing needs or give it back to the taxpayers.  The legislators were supposed to correct this waste during the special session in the September, but failed to do so.  While some blame the Lieutenant Governor for reneging on his constitutional obligation to break the tie, it is mysterious how the senators could be so confused that they deadlocked.