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Table of Contents: January

On the River
J. Ward Moorehouse: On Boredom: Putting the Span in CSPAN
Larry Parrish: A Letter on Public Morality
Steven Hefner: On Finances: Generation X and Retirement

On the Road
Nicholas Carraway: Rush Limbaugh

Judith’s Picks
Judith Conroy

Lead Article
Jonathan Lindberg: The Race for Memphis Mayor: How the Biggest Race of 2007 is shaping up

Feature Articles
Michael Roy Hollihan: One Beale Street: How Memphis Landed its Newest Exclamation Mark
John Stossel: What Will They Ban Next

Ties that Bind
Alan M. Dershowitz: President Carter’s Distorted World
A Memphis View of Israel

On the Shelf
Jonathan Lindberg: The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

On the Money
Chuck Bates: Taxes, a New Congress, and Your Partnership in Government

25th National Prayer Dinner for Israel
Tuesday, March 8 - 7PM

Marriott Memphis East - Grand Ballroom
Thousand Oaks Blvd, off 1-240 - 901.362.6200
Special Hotel Rate: $89 - Mention this Event

Featured guests include:

• Ben Kinchlow, Former Host of the 700 Club
• Earl Cox, Israel Always
• Memphis City Councilwoman Carol Chumney
• Rabbi Micah Greenstein, Temple Israel
• Nina Katz, Holocaust Survivor

Tickets on Sale Now $45 per person. $90 per couple. Seating is limited.

For more information, or to reserve your tickets, please call 901-729-2396 or email mainstreetj@aol.com.

The following is an excerpt from our January issue:

By: Larry Parrish

The foundation of our freedom is a nation ruled by law and not by men. The cornerstone of our rule of law is precedent. For hundreds of years precedent has guided judges in administering justice. That stands in stark contrast to the administration of ‘justice’ in Communist countries, where judgment is established not on precedent but on the whims of those in power. Unfortunately, our system has been corrupted by judges who ignore the rule of law if they don’t like the outcome.

When judges to whom the public trust has been granted use their office to dictate rules instead of announcing rules that already exist, they become unelected, unaccountable rulers. We have seen the consequences. For instance, the “right to an abortion” is not in the Constitution, yet judges made it law, even mandating federal funds to pay for it. Our guaranteed right to own and keep property has been breached by the recent Supreme Court decision allowing the City of New London, Connecticut to take land from one private owner and transfer it to another who could bring more taxes into city coffers.

President James Garfield once said, “The people are responsible for the character of their elected leaders. If the next century does not find us a great nation . . . it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.” Today we are living with the consequences of not having controlled those political forces, and our rule of law has been up-ended.

Those who have engineered the law instead of enforcing it have exempted preserving public morality from one of the primary purposes for which the law exists. The root of all law in Western civilization is public nuisance law. It was around before the existence of the United States and was adopted on the founding of our country. The existence of a public nuisance requires public officials to react in emergency fashion to stamp out eminent threat to public safety (burning building), health (botulism outbreak), or public morality. Public nuisance cases in court are required to take first priority over all other cases.

Rule of law demands that public officials treat an imminent threat to public morality exactly the same as an imminent threat to public health or safety. But they don’t. Cultural elitists, who don’t want to be held accountable for their own behavior, think morals are a subject for personal interpretation – not public enforcement. Those same elitists have characterized morality as ‘backward thinking’ and used judges to unhook public morality from public nuisance law. The result is a society with no standards of behavior.

As much as cultural elitists don’t like it, the rule of law is grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics and precepts. When those precepts are followed, society as a whole is better served. Judges, who have rejected that foundation and replaced the law with their own situational ethics need to be held accountable for not following the rule of law. Understanding the importance of these distinctions is imperative for the future health of our nation.

The following is an excerpt from our January issue:

By: Michael Roy Hollihan

One Beale Street is already the most daring skyscraper to ever grace the Memphis skyline, and it has not yet been built. The hotel, condominium, and commercial center, which should be completed in 2010, is primed to become Memphis’ new exclamation mark along the Mississippi – our point of emphasis –a strong statement of a faith in the future of commerce and growth in Memphis.

One Beale, which was introduced to the public last August, is bold and post-modern in style. Gone are the traditional angles found in most downtown buildings. Instead, there are sharp cuts along the main glassy tower. The focal point is not the peak, but rather the middle, where the angles come to a point. The effect is much like a flash of light emanating from the center of the building. Like the daring designs behind the new Opera Memphis and the downtown Cannon Center, the concept behind One Beale pushes downtown architecture into the new twenty-first century.

Chance Carlisle, Director of Special Projects for the Carlisle Corporation, developers of the One Beale, calls the sky-scraper sky-altering – a building of stature that sings. “It is a prominent piece of land,” Carlisle says of the site. “The ground itself has history. It deserves something of stature.”

To achieve this stature, the Carlisle Corporation is hoping to make One Beale the tallest building on the Memphis skyline, barely edging out 100 North Main Street. The final design will boast of two towers, one reaching twenty-seven stories, the other a neck-wrenching thirty stories. The wow-factor, both in design in reach, is exactly what Carlisle is banking on to lure tenants and investors.

In 1980, Gene Carlisle, Founder and Owner of the Carlisle Corporation, took on development of the One Beale site, home to the Beale Street Landing. During the eighties and the early nineties, downtown was stuck in a period of neglect and decay. During that time, Carlisle explored a number of options to develop the land, but nothing would come to fruition. (more…)