Funeral services for Vernita Stone, 56, will be held Monday, April 28, 2008 at 2:00PM in the sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church with Rev. John White officiating. Burial will follow in Ridgecrest Cemetery.

Mrs. Stone died Friday, April 25, 2008.

Vernita was born January 1, 1952 in Jackson, TN the daughter of Vernon S. Smith and Mamie Taylor Smith. She was the director of Pharmacy for Milan General Hospital and was a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, TN.

She was 28 days older than I.

Dear members of the news, friends, :

There is one thing I don't have that Jerry Gist does and that is a staff of 6, or is it seven or maybe eight plus the largest staff of attorney’s the city can muster, any of number of who that stand before you and provide multiple arguments for one position or another. Well, since I am limited in resources and I am not sure how these next couples of weeks are going to go, I can not guarantee any discussions over issues till after June. I have some other things that I am trying to finish before June budgets.

During the last couple of late nights and early mornings, I have been trying to place my thoughts on paper (not literally). Now I have been conflicted over this issue for over sixteen years. I have studied and read and talked with scholars and professors as well as neighbors and friends. Below is a collection of those some of those ideas and the impressions I received from those discussions.

First of all, whether I actually support term limits or not is not the real question.

The real question is whether we should have faith in our electorate to decide the direction of our government. To some I suspect this to be a dangerous prospect, but I tend to believe that the majority of the electorate still tend to know the difference between righteous governmental power versus one that is not.

Two (2) years ago, in a court case involving Knox County’s term limits, the Tennessee State Supreme Court ruled in favor of term limits. While this was an important ruling, it is what the court said that is more important:

“…we note that Article I, section 1, of Tennessee’s constitution provides that the people have an “inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform, or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper.” The constitution is the truest expression of the will of the people, and it is their intent in adopting a constitutional provision that must prevail…”

I’m not a lawyer, but I think that means that if we want to impose term limits on our elected officials or change our form of government, we have, under the state constitution, the right to do just that.

Why we should enact term limits?

• Power and Money run hand in hand with government these days. Government paychecks and power are terribly addictive. Mayors and Governors fully realize the attraction that jobs offer to those without work and use this as leverage to convince these representatives to vote for their policies.
• The only way to dislodge entrenched politicians is with mandated term limits.
• A better way to distribute new ideas and greater representation.
• To remind everyone that there is a beginning and an end to everything. From a Jackson Sun article by Mr. Bohs, he said: In theory, voters can easily set the term limits they desire by simply voting someone out of office. It is the essence of the American way of handling elections and elected officials. But in actuality, history tells us the method doesn't work very well. Term limits would not preclude people from pursuing careers in politics. But they would have to move on from one elective office to another. A city councilman or mayor could run for a seat in county government. A local official could run for state government. A state representative could move up to the state Senate or even run for governor. Then there would be the opportunity to serve in Congress. Essentially that is the problem; Politics was never supposed to be a career but a temporary service contribution by its citizens, therefore a citizen government.

Why we should not enact term limits?

Let’s take a good look at the Sun’s discussion on the point.

“they rob public bodies of experienced people and institutional memory”…”Making people rotate off after two terms creates a steep learning curve for the people who come on board”

It is true. There is a learning curve. How “steep” it is depends solely on the individual and their commitment to learn the system. It didn’t take me a great deal of time to learn how this present form of government works, give or take a couple of months and I am certainly not exceptional. Secondly, those that run for a governmental position have some idea already how the process works. I doubt very much that the public good suffers in any case.

Let us look at another point. “Councilman Johnny Dodd, who is in his third term, said “he thinks Neudecker's proposal would stifle his and other leaders' attempts to counter long-term problems such as crime.” Mr. Dodd is basically telling you that without him crime will continue to rise. In my opinion that is rather vain statement on Councilman Dodd’s part considering that crime has been on the rise during those same 8 years that he has served on the council.

There are good reasons for not enacting term limits but these are not those. The best reason for not enacting limits was sent to me in a letter in 1994 by George Detweiler. He said:

“by throwing everyone out of office after a fixed number of terms, we rid ourselves of the task of deciding who is doing a good job and who is not. The finest and the worst are discarded by the calendar. This quick-fix nature of term limitation is superficially appealing not only because of the perceived speed with which it appears to remove an offending official, but also because it does not require much thought, research, or analysis on the part of the voters.”

This discussion on term limits is not new; they were considered by the Founding Fathers during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, No. 72:

"Nothing appears more plausible at first sight, nor more ill-founded upon close inspection."

Those of us who are attracted by the concept of term limits generally fail to understand is we would restrict the voter franchise and emasculate the power of the ballot. The goal -- ridding our government of the bad while keeping the top performers -- would be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.

Now I have explained to you what I think are the best reasons for and against enacting term limits. What I hope is the same cautious consideration is taken by our voters toward directing our city.

May God be with you and yours.

Additional reading

Term limits proposal tweaked

Clean up politics with term limits

I have been talking about the government's involvement in the telecom industry since the inception of the idea in Jackson. The financial strength of this enterprise was always weighted by the taxpayers ability to pay. After 6 years that strength is being challenged and stretched to its limits.

Let us review the rape of your taxes this week in Nashville.....

ON THE HOUSE FLOOR

HB 1421/ SB 1933 (McDaniel/ Ketron), as amended and effective July 1, 2008, allows all providers the opportunity to choose either a local or state franchise; requires AT&T to apply for a state franchise within a year and requires AT&T or any other new entrant to begin offering service in the state within 24 months of receiving a state franchise; includes a build out requirement as well as strong prohibition against discrimination; requires all providers to abide by local rights-of-way ordinances and allows municipalities to enforce such ordinances; grants local government authority to regulate the placement of facilities for aesthetic purposes; allows a municipality, on behalf of an individual, to bring a complaint to the Tennessee Regulatory Authority (TRA) concerning noncompliance with the customer service requirements or other applicable requirements; requires AT&T and any other new market entrant to pay a franchise fee equal to 5% of its gross revenues within the municipality; allows cities to increase incumbent cable operators franchise fee rate to 5%; allows a municipality to audit franchise fee payments annually; provides TRA the authority to enforce many key provisions; and preserves PEG channels and funding for PEG channels.

ON THE SENATE FLOOR:

Independent Appraisal Prior to Purchasing Real Property: SB 3363/ HB 3306 (Beavers/ Lynn), as amended, requires a municipality to obtain an independent appraisal of the fair market value of real property prior to purchasing or entering into a contract for the purchase of real property.

$50 Fine: SJR 724 (Wilder) allows the General Assembly to establish the maximum fines that can be levied by municipal courts, up to $500.

Open Records: SB 3280/ HB 3637 (McNally/ McDaniel), as amended, deletes all provisions included in the original version related to open meetings; makes several changes to current open records laws, including creating the office of the ombudsperson to answer questions and provide information to public officials and the public in general regarding public records; creating an advisory committee consisting of six (6) members, including TML. The bill also requires a municipality, within five (5) business days of the receipt of an open records request, to either: provide the requestor either the information, deny the request, or advise when the request will be granted.

Ron Paul supporters make mark- Some are still marching on.

With all the self-congratulatory backslapping going on around Friday, it might be wise for somebody to keep a rotator cuff specialist on speed dial.

President Bush started things off at the White House Friday, saying the tax rebate checks that start going out Monday will help cure the country's economic woes. "This money is going to help Americans offset the high prices we're seeing at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and will also give our economy a boost to help us pull out of this economic slowdown," he said.

Not to be outdone, Speaker Pelosi, House Majority Leader Hoyer and House Minority Leader Boehner scheduled a noon news conference so they, too, can claim some credit for the fact that the checks will soon be in the mail.

From the Maddening Crowd (Thank God For Them)

Yesterday, in Jackson, Tennessee, members of our group worked a busy intersection and passed out 450 envelopes containing flyers, and a loose sheet that people can copy and send to their representatives and Senators (it has a neat Jesus-Caesar discussion on the flip side, suitable for congressional reading). In addition, we distributed perhaps 100 DVDs of Aaron Russo's movie documentary "America: Freedom to Fascism" and maybe 100 of Larken Rose's mini-CD "The 861 Evidence."

The envelopes seemed like a good idea. We put labels on them which read:

The Federal Income Tax
What "they" don't want you to know.

The cost of the envelopes and labels, plus the labor to prepare them, can be saved by simply stapling all the flyers together with the "demand" letter on top, and not using envelopes at all. All the flyers are attached hereto in MS Word format, and should be printed back to back as they are in the three files. That will save some on printing/paper costs.

The purpose of this email is to (1) let everyone know the event was more successful than we had even hoped it would be, and to (2) encourage people across the country to do it Saturday after Saturday after Saturday. I can think of no better way to get the attention of both the people and the Congress than this. We passed out all this material in just under an hour and a half, from 2:15 P.M. to about 3:40.

The "demand" letter to Congress was the top item. I had copied the format and essential contents from somewhere on the Internet, perhaps TruthAttack.org, and I revised it a bit in order to make it immediately "grab" the reader, and quickly "educate" him/her to the fact that "rapidly-growing numbers of Americans are learning that the revenues collected as U.S. Individual Income Taxes do not fund any of the benefits and services the people get from their government." Not in my wildest dreams did I expect to see what I saw.

I sat in a folding chair on the sidewalk, near the corner of the intersection, about where the back bumpers of the first cars stopped at the red light. We had adults and children passing out packets. The children worked the line of cars next to the sidewalk and we restricted their movements to the sidewalk, allowing them to step off the curb only to hand packets to front seat passengers and then right back onto the sidewalk. Adults worked the center lane of traffic and helped the children too.

Because of my position, I could observe all the vehicles as they moved forward each time the light turned green. In EVERY case where there was a front seat passenger, the passenger was reading the cover letter (the demand letter) as the vehicles passed me. In the vehicles occupied by drivers only, almost all the drivers began reading the letter while they waited for the light. Many continued reading even as they moved forward. AMAZING, to me at least.

Considering the number of super Internet urls listed in the flyers, recipients have at their disposal the potential for getting a pretty good grasp of the enormity of the fraud that is the income tax. In all the years I have been studying and researching this subject, I have not seen anything with the potential I believe this effort has, provided we can encourage people across the United States to jump in and help.

Yes, reproduction of the flyers does cost a few dollars. But where there are groups of ten or more adults, five hundred of these can be printed for a cost of seven or eight dollars per person. Just imagine having events like this for perhaps four consecutive weekends, with 500 going out each week. Think of the friends and neighbors and co-workers that will get copies from people we manage to excite. Then think of the demand letters flooding Congress over a period of a month. Imagine where groups have 30 members, they can distribute 1,500 per weekend, working in groups of ten. Eight bucks times four weekends is pocket change compared to what we pay in taxes (and waste on little things we regret having bought before we even get home).

Damn, I'm excited. Surely each group will have at least one member who has the time and is willing to handle the printing and stapling, and bring them to the handout site each week. Or maybe two people can share the duty, with each doing 250 of them.

The only additional thing I can suggest is to make a couple of sizeable signs that read something like "RestoreTheRepublic.org" and "TruthAttack.org." We didn't have any signs at all. Well, we had Ron Paul signs but opted not to use them because so many people mistakenly believe Ron Paul is no longer in the race. Since there is so much Ron Paul stuff included in the flyers, we hit a home run on that too, without Ron Paul signs (which we have but just didn't use).

With some imagination, other attention-grabbing signs can be used. I suggest avoiding anything that could be mistaken for a bunch of radicals pushing the global warming hoax or environmental issues because so many people would be repelled by them. I was surprised at how effective it was to use children. People who wouldn't normally take things from strangers rolled their windows down and eagerly took whatever the children were handing out, without having a clue what they were accepting.

We also learned to approach cars in a positive manner, walking briskly with an eager look on our faces. When the approach is too casual, especially with raised eyebrows, it appears you are asking "Do you want one of these?" and that will insure many people will say "no" or shake their heads and not roll down their windows. Salesmen know to never ask a question the customer can answer with a "No." Head for each car conveying the silent message, "Here, you gotta have one of these."

Readers, what do you think? Look over the handouts and give me a yell. Title your emails "Feedback" so I won't mistake any for spam and delete emails from unfamiliar senders. I purposely removed the underlining and made all the links into non-clickable urls. The reason is that people receiving them in printed hard-copy form can better read them in black, plus there will be no confusion in urls which contain the underline character, such as "watch?video768_youtube_reg.htm." I want to be sure people are able to copy the urls correctly so they don't miss a single one of them.

Fred Marshall

IRS Demand - Abolish Income Tax

May God Bless and  Keep You This Day Till Tomorrow