Amateurs need NOT re-apply

39-59% Gallup Pole Today  Business Leaders Approval/Disapproval of the Obama Adinistraion

Promises kept--0

Earmarks - Congessional Cooperation 0

Mount Rushmore's Tough Guys

Clinton - Carter -- soon Obama -Mos Successful Ex Presidents

The October 2012 Surprise

Here are: 35 short little words to return to infastructure employment under a straitght Respublican Majority in the Whitehouse and Congress.  It's the ADOPT A BRIDGE to Someplace SPECIAL campaign (as opposed to the old corrupt Alaskan bridge to nowhere thanks to form4er Senator Ted Stevens)

1. Repeal Dodd Frank

2 Restore Community Development Block Committees on the Local Level

3/ Make Municipal Bonds the Patriotic Alternative  to Tax Increases

4. Initiate ADOPT A BRIDGE Campaign for Spring of 2013

5.GET AMERICA Back to Work

1. Repeal Dodd Frank

THe one page legislation rammed down the American People's throat in the closin days of the Dick Cheny administration --) could not be amended like a Christmas Tree  or vetoed  should it come to that .

2 Restore Community Development Block Committees on the Local Level

In 1976 when our Jeffery was born I worked for a while as Administrative Assistant to the late M. Russll Gantge, Mayor of Provo Utah.  I had been a radio news reporter and he had sold adveertising, though we were from two different generations of Provo Radioactives.

3. Make Municipal Bonds the Patriotic Alternative  to Tax Increases

My friend Starley Bush spotted this hole in my reasoning after a career orf investing in the stock market and running K-TALK Radio in Salt Lake City:  Municipal Bonds pay the lowest rates in the market.  (So did Government Savings bonds during WWII, but kids picked up bottles and grew svictory gardens to buy savings stamps and supported the war effort with every fiber in their being.

4. Initiate ADOPT A BRIDGE Campaign for Spring of 2013

Ronald Reagan coined the term  "Government is not the solution, Government is the PROBLEM!"   (maybe it was Peggy Noonan his lovely Irish Democrat speech writer wrote READ MY LIPS NO NEW TAXES for George H.W. Bush)  A little history here:  Ben Franklin's only concern with a national gogernment was to make sure the post office system had some central control.   General later President George Washington used a salty term to refer to a standing army:  He called it an "erect membeer" with nothing to do in time of peace.  

Washington believed as Dick Cheney does that the National Government would best be defended by a national milita--the guard and reserve.   Patrick Henry smelled a rat at both continental congresses and advised delegates to be very careful unleashing the TAX MAN....and yet today we spend money on Brazilian Butterfly Studies and think little of it....because some well meaning representative of our pocket book traded away tax resouces for a few ear marks and somebody elses's idea of what is laughingly called NATIONAL DEFENSE.  ( P.R. experts for the Eisenhower White House got him to label the Interstate Highway system THE NATIONAL DEFENSE HIGH WAY SYSTEM and congress funded it with virtually no quesions asked.

When Ameica was climbing out of a depression created in large part by the unchecked excesses of Wall Street, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic patrician from New York had the good sense to nationalize American will and do busy work in the name of tax funded job creation.   Every President Since has had their New Frontierrs, their Great Societies, New Covenants and Moral Equivalents of War.  The incumbent has been far less effective at coming up with a name for anything with the possible exception of Obama Care...but the pendulum of Government solving the problems of America has just agout run it's string.

THE SACRED VISIT OF THE BOND TRADERS TO CITY GOVERNMENT

I was there one Tuesday morning in 1976 when Ron Madsen, the Provo City Staff member in charge of Community Development Block Grants hosted a Brooks Brothers tailored Wall Street type in a three piece suit into the Mayor's and Commissioner's Offices.  It was about 9:30 AM and most voters were hard at work when this ceremony took place.

No matter.  What happened was a matter of public record.  The fair haired, red faced, freckle faced professional brought a briefcase filled with official paper work to allow Mayor Grange, Commissioners Hillier and Miner and the City Clerk to sign on the dotted line to Guarantee Provo's full faith and credit to several million dollars worth of Muncipal bonds at then 1976 prices to be paid back with 1996 value-- not a penny in new loxal taxes!

5.GET AMERICA Back to Work!!

Jon Robert Howe

Peter Davidson IS the Naysayer!

Peter Davidson is not his real name...and yet he, himself, is as average a member in a big metropolitan Utah community.  He is faithful to a fault--and so are his wife and kids.  He's a leader--and worked his way up from the day he bought his house in the suburbs and he did it by creatively saying NO to most things.

Mormons call it Vitamin N--

Parents work to apply it by stopping outrageous creativity, even if they discourage initiative .

Church leaders apply it by watching their membership gently and curbing excesses

Oh, don't get me wrong.  There's a lot of creativity going on in metropolitan Mormondom.  Creative dating, for example.  Our son got a big block of ice on the lawn with an invitation to a girl's choice prom mixer  carefully crafted and slipped into a transparent baggie.  We all had fun holding the big two foot block of ice under hot water until we had chippe out the message, red it with curiosity and decoded it enough to know the neighbor girl who had creatively invited our son to "Sadie Hawkins"

You see it's hard to parent under any circumstances--but in most corners of the known Kingdom, Mormon parents are enlightened.  As long as he creativity is "acceptable" the naysayers can relax the naysaying and everybody's happy.  

Actually Brother Petersen got where he is by holding the line on administrative excesses inside the Kingdom among the faithful and keeping the lid on according to his enlightened view of "propriety"   

The righteous "No" in just the right setting with the tenacity to make it stick, signals a promising innovator to the guardians of the Kingdom.  Making budgets stretch is only part of it.  A young Elder's Quorum President who has just the right balance of leadership and holding the line--in no time a well balanced leader can rise steadily higher and acquire a little more responsiblity.

By the time I heard about Daniel Petersen he was making a quiet name for himself on a Stake High Council gently but firmly bucking the system with a well reasoned argument and always scripture to back his conclusions. Fellow naysayers cheered him on (without  being obvious about it, but the odd hand shake and pat on the back after ground gained.   

Oh, yes--a bright young naysayer will rise in the kingdom.  A Mormon Leader like Gordon B. Hinckley or Thomas S. Monsen is a balanced product of the system--obedient, even innovative when the necessity demands, but never taking a risk to innovate beyond established guidelines.  Always deferential to senior priesthood, quietly learning the system, gradually being given more and more responsibility to preside by senior brethren with the hope that the traditions would be observed.

Gordon B. Hinckley became THE prophet at a time when the Mormon Church was experiencing a growth surge that required innovation, creative thinking well beyond the administrations of his predecessors.  The massive Conference Center, the expansion of the Quorums of the Seventy to administer more than 15 million members and beyond; The innovative design of the Hong Kong Temple, the elimination of the auxiliary budgets of the church and depending on Tithing alone--all these innovations demanded superior leadership by a man who had been a careful student of the process.

Daniel Petersen knew a lot about process, rules, regulations, obedience and a careful knack for knowing just when to apply the right amount of pressure to a lazy colleague's half baked plans to send them back to the drawing board--likely indefinitely.

He never had the blockbuster .  He loved church sports and the historic TREK experience that gave young people a chance to literally walk where the Willey Handcart Company froze to death in 184?.  When a member of the revered Highest Councils of the Church came to address his grand daughter's fireside, he called on Brother Petersen to educate the congregation and thanked him with a good natured, smack on the knee as the two sat together during the postlude.  Daniel Petersen had adroitly sucked up to the highest--and that couldn't have hurt him in his High Council skirmishes the next week  His positive interest had coincided with his naysaying ability--and his timing couldn't have been better--TREK coincided with the sesquicentennial of the Days of '47.