Larkin Poe performs The National Anthem for @NASCAR on April 22, 2021, live from a rooftop in downtown Nashville. Larkin Poe is sisters Rebecca Lovell on lead guitar and lead vocals and Megan Lovell on slide guitar and harmony.
My Top 3 Issues (All #1 in Priority):
Traffic and Roads – Many areas of the state have massive traffic congestion which is dangerous, wastes time, wastes gasoline, and causes pollution.
Day 1 of My Administration I will appoint a board to review the problem and provide me a list of action items within 4 months. It will be prioritized as to what can be done immediately and what requires a longer planning period for approvals, revenue, permits, etc.
Economic Recovery – Many businesses have been damaged by the Covid-19 pandemic and the actions the federal and state government have taken in response to the pandemic.
On day 1, I will ask the leaders of both parties in the General Assembly and the Senate to meet with me to go over my plan for recovery. I will ask this plan be given priority and that action is taken within 30 days.
Civil Rights – I agree with Thomas Jefferson “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. From the Declaration of Independence
I also agree with Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. – “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”” From MLK’s I Have a Dream Speech
In Virginia, we are all equal under the law, we are all equal in the eyes of God, and in Virginia, we will judge people based on their character.
I will address the issue of Civil Rights in 3 ways:
We are all Virginians, period. I will ask all the major newspapers in the state to print a quarterly review of where we stand on these 3 priority items. None of these 3 priority items are political issues, but Virginia issues. Addressing them will benefit the entire state.
I won’t be voting for any of you for Governor and here’s why:
I have been researching whether conservatism is a philosophy or an ideology and came across a speech by Jordan Peterson that he presented in Carleton Place, Ontario, Canada in 2017. Peterson suggests that “conservatism be presented as a manifesto of fundamental values instead of “Thou Shall Not” statements”. Dr. Peterson presents a philosophical view of conservatism rather than the dogma that typically is espoused.
The main benefit I see is these tenets provide us with a positive way to talk about conservatism. Instead of it seeming to younger adults that liberals are for things and conservatives are against things, these tenets of conservatism give us a way to explain conservatism as a positive philosophy based on real-life experiences over hundreds of years.
These are the 12 tenets of conservatism discussed in the presentation:
The one thing I would add to his 12 tenets is this one from Russell Kirk:
I think reconciling change is the biggest weakness of the Republican Party. They are always in reactive mode to the Democrats wanting to change things. We should be changing things that need to be changed, but using a conservative philosophy. We have to be on offense as much as we are on defense.
Are there any tenets you think need to be added?
The Republican party is a failure and the Conservative movement is leaderless. Why is no one stepping forward? Why are Republicans in Congress not fighting for Conservative or even Republican ideals? Do you believe any of the official Republican leaders such as Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell, John Thune, John Barrasso, or Ronna McDaniel are standing up for Conservatives?
This country was founded by brave men of ideas, of intellect, and of principle. Where are our George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Sam Adams, and Thomas Paine? Are there no Conservatives with intellect, ideas, and principles brave enough to fight the current battle against socialism, progressivism, and tyranny? Are we so weak that we can allow intellectual lightweights like Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden to set the agenda without putting up a fight?
Many of our new conservative members of Congress are brave people of principle who went to Washington to fight for conservative principles, only to be pushed aside by GOP leadership. The media trashed these brave people and GOP leadership never stands up for them or for us.
It is time for a revolution, either within the Republican Party or by the destruction of the Republican Party. It’s only reason for existing is to serve the interests of big money and globalists. McConnell was wiling to lose the 2 Georgia Senate seats rather than allow the 2 candidates to say they supported President Trump. McConnell and Rove lost the Senate to spite Trump. It was obvious to anyone paying attention that Trump supporters were not going to show up in large numbers unless Perdue and Loeffler said loudly and clearly that they supported Trump’s efforts to make sure the election was fair and honest. Evidently they were being told that if they did that it would cost them the election. Talk about GOP leaders and consultants who don’t understand their own base.
The media, the Democrats, Big Tech, and even parts of the government are determined to destroy the conservative movement and the new populist Trump movement. GOP leadership is doing nothing to fight against these unconstitutional actions. News reports say that people who simply entered the Capitol on January 6 are being arrested as if they just killed 20 people and are armed and dangerous. Yet, we also read about people involved in violent protests who are released on bail and later have the charges dropped. We have gone from having a 2 tiered justice system (privileged and everyone else) to a 4 level (privileged, far left, conservative, everyone else).
I don’t see any urgency by GOP leaders to get ready for 2022. I don’t see any urgency in President Trump to provide leadership to his voters. Why isn’t he leading a movement to take over every possible elected office we can? Why isn’t he pushing for us to take over the Republican Party by becoming precinct chairmen?
I wish I was such a person who could help lead this fight, but I’m not. I’m trying to do what I can by building a website that is education, motivational, and actionable. I ask everyone who reads this to find something they can do. It could be as simple as getting one person to vote for a conservative. If enough conservatives did just that one thing, we would win a majority in the House and Senate.
There is one thing I hope you don’t do. There are enough “conservative” websites that are primarily negative stories about the left. While it may get clicks and subscribers, it does little to advance the conservative agenda or win the next election. Do something positive that moves the conservative movement forward. Educate yourself as to what conservatism really means. I recommend The Real Thomas Jefferson which you can pick up used for about $6.50. People say we are the party of Lincoln, but I think we are and should be the party of Jefferson. We are the party of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
I was looking forward to this speech, but I have to be honest and admit I was disappointed. Millions of his supporters were waiting for direction and he failed to provide it. He could have challenged us to take over the Republican Party at the local level by becoming Precinct Chairmen. He could have challenged us to run for local office and to run for school boards. He could have asked us to run for state offices and for the US House. He could have asked us to be become poll watchers and poll workers.
While some may have been happy to hear President Trump talk about the 2020 election, I thought it was just old news being rehashed one more time. I was disappointed he had no new news to share, no new research that had been done, no proof to back his statements up. To me, it came across as sour grapes. If there was any benefit to anything more than a brief comment about the election, I don’t see it.
Attacking Joe Biden and the Biden administration? Probably a smart move as no one else on the Republican side can command any media time. It will probably only be played on conservative media, but at least he is on record. It would have been good if he had attacked Biden in a way that Democrats might agree with such as flooding the country with illegal immigrants having an immediate impact on jobs for working class African Americans and further stressing poor school systems.
His speech preached to the choir and maybe that is all it was intended to do. I think it froze everything in place and that was a mistake. President Trump could have mobilized 5-10 million supporters guaranteeing him control of the Republican Party and being ready for the midterms. I think he lost an opportunity to give an inspirational speech that laid out the conservative agenda for the future. He had a world-wide audience, yet he didn’t take advantage of it.
I guess it’s obvious I’m not a presidential speech writer!
I have been fascinated by the work of Jonathan Haidt on the difference in the moral viewpoints of liberals and conservatives worldwide. Haidt’s work can be found in many online videos and in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
There are at least 2 areas where this information is extremely helpful:
Moral Foundations Theory
Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. wikipedia
The 1st premise of the theory is we are all born with a draft version of morality that is modified by experience. The 2nd is that we react morally, not logically. Let’s take a simple example like brussels sprouts or any food you really dislike. If someone was to offer you some, you would first have an almost instantaneous feeling of disgust and then you would start coming up with justification for your disgust. Now imagine that we are all going through life being driven by our moral instinctive behavior, followed by our attempt at justification.
Haidt determined there were 5 pairs of morals that are found in all cultures, to a more or lesser degree:
I’m going to include a Ted Talk video where Haidt explains this, but I wanted to first explain a slide he uses in the presentation.
Haidt conducted hundreds of interviews asking people several questions to determine where they fell on the Liberal – Conservative spectrum, the x-axis of the graph, and had them evaluate several stories based on their moral views, the y-axis of the graph. Notice that Liberals were extremely high on the Harm and Fairness moral channels, but extremely low on the Authority, Ingroup, and Purity channels. Conservatives were almost perfectly balanced among the 5 channels.
One thing not obvious from the graph is that even though both liberals and conservatives react to Harm and Fairness, they view them differently. For example, Liberals view Fairness as it relates to a disadvantaged group, while Conservatives think of Fairness as being proportional.
The first 4 minutes of the video are setting the stage, so keep going. I think he did it that way because he was talking to a mostly liberal audience.
This is Part 1. I will be adding Part 2 soon.
This headline is all over the Internet:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raises $1 million for Texans
“Team AOC is launching relief efforts for Texas starting today,” Ocasio-Cortez tweet on Thursday, linking to the fundraising page. “Our first effort is a partnership w/ 5 Texas orgs getting on-the-ground relief to Texans ASAP. If you’re able, please donate here – it’ll split your contribution to all 5.”
Ocasio-Cortez said 100% of donations will go to The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, Ending Community Homeless Coalition (ECHO), Family Eldercare, Houston Food Bank and Feeding Texas.
About two hours after tweeting about the fundraiser, she had an update – it had raised $325,000 “for food, housing, elder care & direct relief straight to vulnerable Texans.” (MSN)
I first saw the story at Breitbart and most of the comments were vile and mean-spirited. I don’t like what much of the right-wing Internet presence has become. Whether you like AOC or not, she did a good thing and deserves our appreciation. I haven’t seen any Conservative groups stepping up to raise money. Why didn’t Breitbart take it as a challenge and ask their readers to raise $2 million?
It seems every day I become more disillusioned with my fellow Conservatives. Hopefully, people who post comments at Breitbart aren’t representative of most Conservatives, because if they are we are in bad shape. I expect commenters on liberal blogs to make nasty and hateful comments, but I expect better from Conservatives.
With the death of Rush Limbaugh, we have lost a great Conservative thinker and leader. While no one person can fill Rush’s shoes, collectively with everyone making their contribution, we can try.
These are just some of Rush’s accomplishments. I’d like to challenge everyone to come up with one thing they can do to carry on Rush’s legacy. Please add your ideas in the comments.
Parties are supposed to be fun, but has there ever been a political party that was fun? I don’t mean stripper in the tidal basin kind of fun, but fun for party members.
What might make a political party fun? For one, how about if political leaders didn’t take themselves so seriously? They have serious work to do, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a politician on TV who looked and acted like he or she enjoyed their job? How about if they actually represented the people in their district and not the big lobbyists? What if we the people felt that our representatives were actually our friends and working for us?
What if a political party had no boundaries and everyone was welcome? Instead of having a right wing way of solving a problem and a left wing way of solving the same problem, we offered the best solution to the problem?
Take trying to move people out of poverty as an example. The conservative solution is pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the liberal solution is to provide people with financial assistance. Are these the only 2 solutions? Has either succeeded in getting rid of poverty?
The only rule book should be the Constitution. We need to start doing pilot projects and finding out what works and what doesn’t. We have 50 state laboratories and we will most likely find that what works in one state, doesn’t work in another. Take the $15 minium wage proposal. It makes no sense to have a federal standard for minimum wage. It should be up to each state to set one if they so choose. Having the same minimum wage in NYC and a small town in Arkansas doesn’t make any sense.
I think the new political party should be called The American Funkadelic Party and I already have our theme song. It’s called Stars by Bootsy Collins and Emi Sunshine. Emi is the young girl that sings much of the song in the video.
Bootsy was interviewed in Rolling Stone and said this about the song:
What exactly did you want to say with the song?
It’s about how people are really the same and we all hurt, and when tragedy strikes, that’s the time we all really come together. We need to try to change that way of thinking and just be together, period. The song kind of says that in a traditional way, “Let’s come together, y’all. It’s time to quit joking now. We all are human beings and we all want to live.” It just feels right; the lyrics feel right. It’s not messing with nobody’s religion. It’s not messing with nobody politically. None of that is necessary. As a matter of fact, it’s better to do without all of that and just talk straight up with people.
What I hope is that this gets you thinking about possibilities. Instead of just thinking in terms of liberal and conservative, what else could a party be based on? How could we create a political party that is inspirational? How could we create a political party that encourages people to be their best? How could we create a political party that the majority of the American people would want to be part of?
Covid-19 has been terribly handled by the government – local, state, and federal. The way they have handled it has been destructive, uncaring, and incompetent. Lives have been destroyed. Businesses destroyed. Children’s futures have been destroyed. The American people would flock to a new party that offered real hope and a solid plan to return to normalcy.
We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to create the greatest political party the world has ever seen. We take what’s good about Democrats and Republicans and reject everything else. We rethink how we select candidates. Maybe we require they sign a term limit agreement. Maybe we require financial disclosures during the time they are representing us. We have to make sure our representatives represent us, not lobbyists.
