HUGE PROPERTY TAX INCREASE COMING!

Details will be announced after the November election!

Why are you surprised? If you thought last years 20% increase was bad then just wait for this one. It will be a beauty!

WOW, WAS I WRONG!

I don't have a stake in the California recall but like everybody else I couldn't help but be aware of what was going on out there. I thought from the beginning that Grey Davis would pull it out in the end. My reasons were simple: I thought it would be difficult to get people to come out and vote for a negative, the recall. And I thought negative campaigning worked. I was wrong on the first and I hope on the second. Perhaps this California election spells the end of negative campaigning and wouldn't that be nice. Maybe just talking about the positive side will work better. We'll have to see if that is the case nationwide or even in Preble. Can't hurt to give it a try anyway.

FrontPage magazine.com

FrontPage magazine: "DAVID KAY: Well, we certainly found that - have not yet found illicit arms. But that's not the only thing the report says. In fact, I'm sort of amazed at what was powerful information about both their intent and their actual activities that were not known and were hidden from UN inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news."

transcript from FOX News Sunday, Oct. 5, 2003.

: : LEONARD COHEN : :

I have both the inability and the desire to be profound. I just stumbled across Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" and it has me in a mood. A mood to be profound. Pity that's all it will ever come too. Oh well. I don't blame you for not knowing who Leonard Cohen is. Cohen is a somewhat obscure artist who recorded a whole bunch of stuff but never became a big star. However, his lyrics and way of singing are infectious, to me at least. I've always been impressed by songwriters and their ability to get an idea across with the fewest amount of words possible. Anyone can write, but to write complete thoughts in a few words is a special gift. It is said that brevity is the soul of wit. That applies to everything written. Songwriters do it best and Cohen is very good at it. I've been working hard at being brief and I feel that I am half way there. I guess that means I have the soul of a half-wit.

The Insidious World of PC (Political Correctness)

Some years ago I started thinking that political correctness (PC) was evil. That it could be the thing that destroys America, not terrorists, nor some other super power.

We enjoy freedoms, freedoms that other people envy. On the top of the list of our freedoms is the freedom of speech and that implies the freedom of thought. We are all guaranteed to think and say what we think by god and our constitution affirms that. If you can take away our freedom of speech then our freedom of thought is stifled and after that one by one we will lose it all. If you can prevent someone from saying anything, anything at all, then you have made the first step in destroying their freedom of speech. Political correctness is an idea, created by no one, governed by no one, that controls speech. By saying that someone is politically incorrect you can shut them up. You take away their freedom of speech and by so doing their freedom of thought. Because if they shut up then they will think about what they should not say for fear of political correctness and the beginning of the end has happened. Political correctness has worked, there are words we cannot use anymore, areas we cannot discuss for fear of being politically incorrect. What is next in the planners mind that thought up political correctness as a tool to destroy America? For that matter who started it in the first place? My first memory of it was a column in Newsweek or Time about 20 years ago where they outlined what was and was not PC. But who today is the governing agent for what is or is not PC? It's not the government. There is no congressional committee that overseas it. There is no cabinet position. There is no commercial company whose job is to track and report on what is or is not PC. There is nowhere you can go to get a PC list or to suggest things to put on or take off the list. PC started in the media and is fostered by the media. We never got a vote on whether they could do that. We never agreed to be governed by PC. Yet there it is and if you say something that is politically incorrect you will be warned by those who hear it that you better be careful, that what you said was bad and you will suffer some unnamed consequence if you don't behave. We are not far from PC becoming the law of the land and when that happens it will spell the beginning of the end for all of us because once you agree to stifle the free speech of someone else... you're next.

We have to recognize PC for what it is. A way to undermine our freedom of speech and we have to take steps to eliminate it now before it gets out of control.