Idaho Freedom Foundation vs Republican RINOs

Why is it that two supposedly conservative Republican’s Senator Chuck Winder and former Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones have launched such a fierce attack on the Idaho Freedom Foundation? We have a theory and would like to put in our two cents worth to give you our impression of why this is happening. Winder is a known RINO who has been doing both Governor Otter and Governor Little’s bidding for many years. He lives in district 20 and was first elected to office in 2008. He served as a member of the ADA County Highway District, The Boise Design Review committee and the Boise Planning and Zoning Commission.

You might say that Chuck having served on all of these committees is partly responsible for the mess we have with our current infrastructure. He also took a run at being Mayor of Boise in 2003 but lost to Dave Bieter. When you look at Winder he has spent much of his life in politics which some would assume has somehow benefited him as a commercial real estate agent. Being on those committees gives members advanced notice of new projects and roadways. While we would all like to think that politicians get into the game to serve the people we know that is not always the real reason as many of them get into the political arena pretending to serve the people but serve themselves first. While Chuck has an outstanding military history as an aviator we think he has been flying a bit too high and is not getting enough conservative oxygen.

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Senator Pro-Tem Winder has been a stumbling block for getting good legislation passed and votes too many times along with the wishes of our governor Liberal Little. The Freedom Foundation is one of the only institutions that tries to carefully rate our legislators on their voting record as conservatives and does a pretty darn good job of it in our opinion. Unfortunately, people like Senator Winder don’t like the fact that they are so bloody honest with their ratings as he received a miserable 44% conservative voting record this past year from the Freedom Index. That rating puts him in the RINO category as far as we are concerned and I would not be surprised to see him challenged in the primaries.

While Chuck is and has been a member of more community and political organizations and commissions than we can count it does not change what he has become when it comes to serving the interests of Idaho’s citizens. His rebuke of the Idaho Freedom Foundation was nothing more than a retaliatory tactic because they were calling him out for how he was voting and killing bills in the Senate. Nobody likes to be criticized but for some reason the longer someone is in office the less likely they are to notice how they have changed from serving the people to serving their puppet masters and themselves. So Chuck if you want to get back in the game of being a conservative take a good look at yourself in the mirror and wake up to the fact that you have grown a horn and look more like a RINO than a conservative.

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On the subject of former Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones and his diatribe on the Freedom Foundation, we find that Justice Jones has also gone to the dark side with his comments in a recent article published on June 12^th. Jones accuses the Freedom Foundation of being “one of the biggest threats we have to our democracy in our state.” We beg to differ with Justice Jones and in fact admonish him for his derogatory comments about this worthwhile foundation. Mr. Jones should be reminded of his past history and a comment in the Lewiston Tribune in January of 1990 in an article by Bill Hall talking about the politicization of the Attorney Generals “Jones is not above placing his own driving ambition ahead of the best interests of the people of Idaho. And maybe he is even worse in that respect than most political attorney generals serving with a governor from a different party.

As we have said previously, just about all politicians if they stay in office too long become self-serving and Jim Jones is no different. They all start out as conservatives but too many turn on the citizens they are supposed to serve and if it weren’t for organizations like the Freedom Foundation no one would ever be the wiser.

Jones said, “Some of the most disruptive legislators in the recent session have the highest scores on IFF’s Freedom Index.” Well it is just a fact that we don’t want yes men or women in our legislature who just rubber stamp anything the governor or lobbyists want. We need free critical thinkers, people who are going to serve the interests of the people not themselves. I have watched the Idaho Freedom Foundation under the direction of its president Wayne Hoffman become a vital part of giving the people of Idaho a scale from which they can actually judge who are the conservatives and who are the self-serving RINOs with their Freedom Index. It would be impossible to read and assess every bill that the legislature brings up each year. This is why we believe Idaho needs an organization like the Freedom Foundation to inform us of how our legislators are voting and what bills are going to be a danger to our freedoms in the future if passed.

Mr. Jones also complains that “One of the primary goals of IFF is to dismantle Idaho’s public education system. Nothing could be further from the truth and in fact they have been protecting the system of education in Idaho through their intervention in the legislative process making sure the bills that are passed benefit our children’s education. It is the job of parents to make sure their children are getting a proper education not the state and if we were smart as a state we would give the parents a choice of where to educate their children. In fact, we understand that there was a bill written by Representative Priscilla Giddings and former Senator Dustin Durst that would have taken money from the state-run schools and given it to the parents and allow them to decide on where their children are educated.

We as a state spend enormous amounts of taxpayer money to educate our children and we believe we have been getting short-changed for quite some time. Why not allow the parents to decide what school their children should attend and why not give them the money to make that decision. There is an enormous amount of wasted taxpayer money in our education system and it needs to be addressed and the simplest way is through competition. Does anyone remember Props 1, 2, and 3 or the Wi-Fi scandal which cost taxpayers 10’s of millions of tax dollars only to find out that we were being overcharged in many cases by 50%, How about Common Core which we still haven’t gotten rid of which is nothing more than a costlier way to educate our children while making it more difficult for them to learn. It’s time to give our education system back to the citizens of our state so they can make the proper choices for the education of their children.

Let me quote Justice Jones one more time. “The time has come to dispense with IFF’s legislative zealots in next year’s primary and general elections. The future of our State depends on culling the legislative herd. The only ones that need to be culled from the legislative herd are those who constantly vote below 60% on the Idaho Freedom Foundations Freedom Index which are getting to be too many to count.

We say it is time to dispense with RINOs like Jones and Winder who have been the blockades and firewalls for passing legislation that will help our children and give Idaho a brighter future. It’s time we weaned ourselves from Federal Funds with too many strings attached. It’s time we revamped our education system. It’s time we saw these legislative RINOs for what they are, leeches who have been sucking the lifeblood out of Idaho for way too long. We beg the citizens of Idaho to stop the bleeding and take back our state in the next republican primary. Get rid of the RINOs and bring in some new people with some fresh ideas. We need to turn over the current political apple cart and build a new one with citizens who are not looking to become lifetime politicians but are willing to serve one or two terms and make a difference serving the people of our state.

“We Get the Government We Deserve”.