The Missouri Primary

One lesson we can learn about sports is that you can’t always know who is going to win until the game is over.  If you watched the Superbowl, you saw two very skilled teams work as hard as possible, yet in the end, one team wins and we hopefully saw great sportsmanship.

Football fans know that they don’t get to select the players.  It was up to the coaches and the management to decide who would be on the team.  Likewise, it is up the to political parties to determine who they want to nominate, not the people.  If you don’t like the party’s nomination, you can vote for the person who best reflects your values from another party.

This accidental touchdown illustrates how political parties tend to function.  In most football games, the goal is to get touchdowns.  Who could have guessed that during this play, they were actually trying to not get a touchdown so they could take more time off the clock?

Mandates are another form of taxation because they force you to accept decisions that you otherwise would not have made and you will pay for something you did not want to purchase.  You are being compelled to support a product or viewpoint that was so unpopular that without the iron fist of government, you would not want it.  The Obamacare mandate is a new tax on life.  Anybody who has a life is now forced to pay for existence.

Want to know what you are paying for this time?  The White House just announced it made a new law mandating all medical insurance companies to pay for contraceptives, abortifacients and sterilizations starting in August. Furthermore, they are prohibited from receiving any co-payments or deductibles. This is un-American on many levels.  This administration is on the wrong side of the constitution once again.

We love the idea of a fair tax—especially since very few people think our current methodology of taxation is fair!  The Declaration of Independence was written and a war was waged in part because of concerns over the fairness of how we were being taxed.  Our method of taxing ourselves is a core issue that affects all of us.

The old expression goes, “If you want less of it, tax it.  If you want more of it, subsidize it.”  At the beginning of our country, the Constitution prohibited direct taxation of  anyone’s income.  In 1913, the Constitution was amended to legalize income taxes.  “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

“Every year for the eight years I served in the legislature, Missouri Right to Life brought a long stemmed rose to my office the third week of January with a note memorializing the unborn. It means a lot to me to show you my Right to Life roses with our message of honoring life.”

The majority of our citizens are pro-life, yet our laws still allow abortion.  This dichotomy leaves people confused about life issues, so I offer you my thoughts to encourage you and lend some clarity to the ongoing debate.

1.)     I am pro-woman:  Abortion is degrading and disrespectful to women.  They deserve better than to be ushered into the abortion clinics.  Many feminists agree with me on this point.  http://www.feministsforlife.org/

How would you feel if the government told you that the land on which you built, on which you paid taxes and on which you have a clear legal title, is not really yours?  How would you feel if you built a house, deck, garage or boat dock with a valid building permit, and you were told you could only have the use of it if you leased it back from the shoreline management company every year?  How would you feel if environmentalists in Washington D.C. wanted to turn your lake back into a wilderness and fight those who seek to make improvements?

That is happening right now to the owners of over 4,000 structures at the Lake of the Ozarks.  

If we didn’t pass any additional legislation this year, we already have enough laws.  The only annual obligatory bills are the ones that spend our tax dollars.

Two Missouri senators already pre-filed resolutions to change the constitution so that the citizens will never be able to vote for a Lieutenant Governor who is not from the same political party as the governor.  This appears to be a reaction to my candidacy for this office.  The entire eight years I was in the Missouri House, nobody ever questioned if the Lt. Gov. should be from the same political party as the governor.  It is beyond coincidental that after I announce I am running for Lt. Governor, this suddenly is a concern for the Republican Party.  Sen. Lamping said, “By combining the offices of governor and lieutenant governor, it encourages the two positions to work in tandem and accomplish more while hopefully being more efficient and fiscally prudent for the state,”.

Greed Trumps Helping Addicts 

A few years ago, I was shopping at Famous Barr.  A man standing in front of me was returning over $400 worth of Christmas presents.  When the clerk asked him why, he told her he just lost a lot of money at the casino.  Now his family was suffering because of his bad decisions.

The insatiable interests of the State and the gambling brokers have found a way to entice addicted gamblers back to the casinos.  A non-elected commission with no accountability to the public made a decision this month allowing those who voluntarily chose to put themselves on a lifetime exclusion list to get back onto the casinos after five years.

by Former State Representative Cynthia Davis
December 19, 2011 Editorial

The insatiable interests of the State and the gambling brokers have found a way to entice addicted gamblers back to the casinos.  A non-elected commission with no accountability to the public made a decision this month allowing those who voluntarily chose to put themselves on a lifetime exclusion list to get back onto the casinos after five years.

The nature of addictive behavior is that the addict will always have a propensity to return to the destructive behavior.  The only “cure” is to avoid those situations entirely.  An alcoholic cannot return to being a “social drinker”.  A drug addict cannot limit his drugs to whatever the family budget will allow.  A smoker cannot just have one cigarette a day.  They have to make the choice to avoid situations that feed their addictions for the rest of their lives.

It’s time to clean up Missouri politics. Being a good citizen and living in a civil society requires all of us to look at the behavior of others and call a foul play when one occurs. For too long people have been looking the other way and tolerating bad behavior, nearly expecting it to be the norm.  We must fight back against those who seek to pervert the political process.  It is incumbent on all of us to hold all of our elected officials accountable to an expectation of honor.

I recently filed a 425 page ethics complaint detailing 68 serious ethics violations.  This involved an extensive amount of research, but there is no other way to protect ourselves except to expose their misdeeds.  We have done the homework for the Missouri Ethics Commission and now they only have to apply the law to those who are laundering money and defying the purpose of having any laws.

Since leaving office in January, I have continued on my mission of doing whatever I can to impact our culture for good.  One of our accomplishments culminated in launching the Center for Marriage Policy.  There are many good reasons why the Center for Marriage Policy is necessary: