Mark Pody Favored to Win Special Election to State Senate on Tuesday

State Rep. Mark Pody (R-Lebanon), the Republican nominee in Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee’s 17th State Senate District, is heavily favored to defeat the Democratic nominee Mary Alice Carfi in the traditionally conservative district.. The seat was vacated by longtime incumbent State Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mt. Juliet), who resigned the seat in August to run for the Republican nomination for governor of Tennessee. Pody is favored in a district that elected Beavers to four consecutive terms in the Tennessee State Senate. In her most recent General Election matchup, she won 62% of the vote in 2010, winning the race by a margin of 24 points. After that resounding defeat, the Democratic Party did not field a candidate against her when she ran for re-election in 2014. Tennessee’s 17th district is heavily Republican, but that is not the only reason to expect a Pody victory. He has also been endorsed by The National Federation of Independent Business, a leading Tennessee small-business association, as the group announced in a statement: “Mark Pody is the clear choice for small business in the special election in Senate District 17,” said Jim Brown, state director of NFIB/Tennessee. “He has earned NFIB’s endorsement with his fiscally responsible approach to managing…

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Lee Thomas Miller Drops Out of Congressional Race One Month After Announcing Candidacy

Songwriter Lee Thomas Miller dropped out of the 7th Congressional District race on Monday, one month and four days after announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination. “I looked forward to this race and the opportunity to change things that I think are broken. But as a husband and father it quickly became obvious that this campaign would require me to compromise far more of myself than I would ever be willing,” Miller said in a statement released by his campaign on Monday. “So, I will end my campaign for U.S. House of Representatives while taking with me the desire to protect faith, family and freedome that I have always had. I will also go back to using my voice and experience to defend the American songwriter,” Miller added. Miller’s abrupt departure from the race leaves State Senator Mark Green (R-Clarksville) as the only GOP candidate in the running to replace Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07), who is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). “Lee Thomas Miller is a great American who captures in song the emotions of life’s challenges,” Green told The Tennessee Star on Monday morning shortly after Miller’s announcement. “I…

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‘Trumpvangelicals’ Are Number One of 10 Most Important Faith Stories of 2017

For the second year in a row, President Donald Trump and his conservative evangelical supporters topped the list of the 10 most important religion news stories of the year as compiled by the country’s largest organization of religion journalists. These so-called Trumpvangelicals are enjoying unprecedented access to the Oval Office both through Vice President Mike Pence, a conservative Christian, and an informal presidential advisory panel consisting almost entirely of conservative evangelical Christian leaders.

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Wealthy NYC Elites Prepare To Flee The City Under De Blasio’s Tax Burden

Wealthy New York City elites are preparing to flee the state because the Republican tax bill is going to make them face the full brunt of Mayor Bill de Blasio and Democratic state leadership’s tax rates. “Everybody I speak to brings this up. Every NYC resident I speak to asks about the feasibility involved in doing it,” Wall Street tax expert Robert Willens told Yahoo Finance. “I’ve been doing this more than 40 years, and never heard more discussion about relocating than recently.”

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Commentary: How Marx Got on the Wrong Side of History

by Richard Ebeling   Those who speak about being on the “right side of history” have, knowingly or not, adopted a central element in Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism: the idea that the capitalist system follows a particular course of historical development that is open to scientific explanation and prediction, and which presumes to be placing humanity on a road that leads to a higher and better form of society – socialism. (See: “Marxists Are Not on the ‘Right Side of History’“). Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The first volume of Marx’s three-volume, Das Kapital (Capital), was published in 1867 (the other two volumes were edited and published after Marx’s death in 1883 by Frederick Engels). Marx was convinced that those middle decades of the nineteenth century were the twilight years of the capitalistic epoch of industrialization. His writings make it clear that he believed that the socialist revolution was right around the corner in his own lifetime. From the perspective of 2017 – almost 170 years after The Communist Manifesto went to press – his view of the nineteenth century seems as nothing more than wishful thinking by an anti-capitalist revolutionary who wanted…

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US Adds New Requirements for Visa Waiver Countries

The United States is expanding the requirements for dozens of countries taking part in the Visa Waiver Program, demanding that the countries check traveler information against U.S. counterterrorism information. Trump administration officials said Friday that the countries will have to use U.S. information to screen travelers crossing their borders from third countries. Many countries in the program already do that, one administration official said.

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