Limiting terms and candidates
Republican Congressional candidate Ilario Pantano promised this week only to serve six terms in Congress if he elected to represent the 7th District and says he will donate $250,000 to a charity that helps veterans if he breaks that pledge and serves longer.
The promise called bonded term limits is the latest rage on the Right. There's a group promoting the idea called the Alliance for Bonded Term Limits based in Pinehurst.
Term limits themselves are a bad idea. We have ways now to limit how long people stay in office. They are called elections. It's curious that people on the Right so eager to talk protecting freedom want to limit who voters can elect based on an arbitrary number of years.
It's also interesting that when they cite long-serving legislators as examples of why term limits are needed, they almost always name liberal Democrats. Senator Orrin Hatch has been in the U.S. Senate for 34 years. North Carolina Congressman Howard Coble is now serving his 26th year in Washington.
One of the staff members of the conservative N.C. Free Enterprise Foundation cheerfully tweeted this week that Republican state Senator Austin Allran has served in the General Assembly for 30 years and is unopposed for reelection.
Are the term limit supporters on the Right upset that Hatch, Coble, and Allran are still in office?
The only thing worse than term limits would be the absurd bonded variety that Pantano swore allegiance to this week. Apparently you should only run for Congress if you have $250,000 to give away.
The Alliance should change its name to "Advocates to elect millionaires to Congress for 12 years."
Refudiation and reloading
Speaking of Congressional races, Republican Renee Ellmers won the support of Sarah Palin this week in her race for NC's 2nd Congressional District. In endorsing Ellmers, the former governor of Alaska also criticized seven-term Congressman Bob Etheridge as being a "truly out of touch incumbent."
On the very same day, Palin tweeted her support for Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Her advice to the conservative radio show host: "Dr.Laura:don't retreat…reload!"
Of course, Dr. Laura has been in the news for using the N-word on the air 11 times in a five minute period.
Judging who's in touch and who's out of touch these days, Ellmers might just want to "refudiate" Palin's endorsement.
The Old Well on eBay
It's hard to keep up with all the interesting comments made by political candidates as the campaigns heat up as Labor Day approaches. One idea worth noting this week comes from Harry Warren, Republican candidate for the state House from Salisbury.
Warren was asked by the N.C. Tea Party how he would balance the budget next year with the state facing a $3 billion shortfall. Calling his answer vague would be giving him a little too much credit.
His main concrete suggestion was that the state could sell some of the buildings it owns. It's not clear which group of buildings would sell for $3 billion but you have to figure the Capitol, the Old Well at UNC, and the N.C. State Bell Tower would be on the list.
Of course whatever could be raised from selling a few buildings would be one-time money that would not be there the next year. It would be like using federal stimulus money to balance the budget, you know the one-time money that Republicans blasted Democrats for using this session
Keeping kids free from education
The folks at the Locke Foundation gave us another peek inside their real agenda for public schools this week in their education update newsletter from staffer Terry Stoops. Stoops included two quotes at the end of his usual public school bashing.
One of them was this from G.K. Chesterton in the Illustrated London News in 1929.
"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense."
Apparently Stoops doesn't believe that children should be required to go to school. Time to end that dreaded "compulsory education."
Let's leave that entirely up to the parents. If children don't want to go to school, they shouldn't have to. That would require amending the state constitution of course, since the founders the Right always speaks so fondly of mandated that kids get an education.
But it's nice to know where the Lockers want to take the state.
Shut down the colleges and take government back
Finally this week, From the Fringer George Leef is at again, uncovering more socialist plots in his never-ending quest to protect us from the demons on the left.
Leef has a theory about why liberals encourage kids to go to college. It's not to get a better education, to expand their minds, even to improve their job prospects. It's all part of a subversive plot by the liberals to enrich themselves and most importantly, to preserve their power.
"Putting more kids through college means more money in the pockets of the overwhelmingly leftist administrators and professors. Furthermore, since the intellectual influence on college students is much more apt to drive them toward statism than toward individual liberty and free markets, the more young people go to college, the bigger the voting bloc for leftist candidates."
In other words, if we could just keep kids out of college, conservatives would win more elections. You can draw your own conclusion from that one.
