Elections tend to bring out both the best and the worst in people, and, sometimes, they cause people to do irrational things they would avoid otherwise. We're all just humans, after all, and we don't always act in our best interest when we become passionate.

I guess, then, that irrational passion is to what I'm tossing the Religious Right's recent decision to actively violate the law and run the risk of losing the tax-exempt status for churches across the country because of it.

For years, Religious Right groups have complained about the federal tax law that forbids houses of worship and other tax-exempt groups to intervene in political campaigns by endorsing or opposing candidates.

Several organizations pushed Congress to change the statute, without success. The Religious Right suffered another setback in 2000, when a federal appeals court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the tax law.

Now the nation’s best-funded and most prominent Religious Right legal group is gearing up for another go in court – once it finds a plaintiff who will knowingly break the law and spark an Internal Revenue Service penalty.

Every poll made public in the race between George Bush Cover-Up Artist Pat Roberts and Jim Slattery so far have said the same thing: Roberts is in significant trouble. A new poll, conducted by experts in Kansas polling Cooper & Secrest Associates, makes that recurring theme that much more clear, and enhances the case that Jim Slattery's race against Roberts is going to be the dark-horse upset campaign of the year.

Pat Roberts has lived in Washington since before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. On his> watch, gas prices have soared to record levels, the economy is in the tank, he has given George Bush his proxy in terms of whatever independent judgment he once had, and Kansas voters are increasingly ready for a change. Here is a true upset in the making. Is there precedent? See two-term Governor Kathleen Sebelius.

Don't believe them? When asked if they would prefer to vote for a Democratic or a Republican candidate for the United States Senate, 41% said they'd prefer a Republican, while 40% said they'd rather vote for a Democrat.

That's a 10% surge for the Democrats since 2007, and that's Democrats & Republicans tied- in Kansas!

It is wrong for me to be so gleeful about the Republican Party's stunning lose in the Mississippi First yesterday, isn't it? And about the ones in Louisiana and Illinois, too?

I mean, it just doesn't seem seemly to me to take this much pleasure out of someone else's misfortune.

But it isn't really that I'm reveling in any single person's failure - I'm sure the three Republican losers are perfectly nice people with perfectly nice families. And while I am certainly quite glad they haven't found themselves Members of Congress, my great pleasure comes from the fact that the National Republican Congressional Committee and the minority party's leadership are just so beautifully and so elegantly screwed going into November.

When talking about our rights as individuals, it is nearly impossible to not quote Thomas Jefferson:

"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."- Thomas Jefferson, 1799

It was all to protect us from tyranny.

Senator Pat Roberts might do well to take some of his memory pills.

For whatever reason, he and the Kansas Republican Party have decided to go down a path that certainly didn't work very well for Jim Ryun in 2006 as they threw up a barrage of negative radio ads and ad hominem attacks against former Congressman Jim Slattery on the day Slattery made his run for the United States Senate official.

It's just too bad Roberts remembers so little attention of his own party's recent history. Jim Ryun proved in '06 you've got to talk up your own record, because people aren't going to vote for you just because you say your opponent is the bogeyman. It always leaves people with the question, "You've been in office for how long and you don't have anything good to say about yourself?"

After two terms - twelve years - in the United States Senate, it's really kind of shocking Roberts has nothing good to say about himself and has to try to save his backside by lobbing off-base attacks at Congressman Slattery.

We probably shouldn't be surprised, though, because Pat Roberts, the man who has been in Washington, DC since before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, would certainly rather attack Slattery instead of the issues important to Kansans.

My experience with politics and activism makes me certain I'm not overreaching when I say one inescapable part of the process is attending conferences of many types, lengths, and of varying qualities. Many of them end up being the sort of mind-numbing, eye-crossing torture fests that make you want to find a spoon, get under the table, and start digging a tunnel to freedom.

I just got back from a conference - a convening, if you will - that was about as far in the opposite direction from the aforementioned miserableness as anything could settle. It was without peer the best organized, best planned, and most useful and invigorating three days I've had since I became a city councilmember.

I shouldn't have been surprised, though - it's amazing what a couple hundred young elected officials can do when they put their hearts in it.

In three days I will stand for a Federal-level election.

No, nothing as grand as House of Representatives or the Senate (I’m not old enough for either one). Nope, on Saturday, Kansas Democrats will elect our state's delegates to the Democratic National Convention, and this city councilman’s hat is in the ring.

As a 24-year-old progressive, I wouldn’t be surprised if you just assumed I’m hoping to have the chance to cast my delegate ballot for Senator Barack Obama. After all, he’s the candidate of young people and I’m certainly a young person. Also, since I’m from a state that he carried overwhelming, it’s certainly a fair assumption.

But it wouldn’t be a correct one. I’m proud to say I’m a young, progressive Democratic Party activist who is 110% behind Senator Hillary Clinton - I even have her sign in my yard. Yes, in Kansas - and no one has firebombed the house.

The eyes of the political establishment in Kansas are all fixed on one race this year, the re-election battle of Congresswoman Nancy Boyda, with good reason, of course, because it promises to be hot. The Republican primary might actually reduce the district into the state of nature up until August, with one candidate's political life ending up being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and brief.

With that said, though, Boyda's race isn't the only one I'm predicting to be exciting in Kansas, because I think Kansas Democrats have found a nearly ideal candidate to face off against United States Senator Pat Roberts.

His name is Representative Jim Slattery, and he's something of a familiar face in the Great State of Kansas- and certainly did a better job in his time in Congress representing Kansans than Roberts has in his.

If I might quote today from a document all of us should know better: The Constitution of the United States of America, calling particular attention to the Forth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Never. Without any exception.

Why is it, then, that we allowed the Radical Right Wing and this President to scare us into allowing warrantless wiretaps of American citizens? How in the world did we let them make us so afraid we were willing to shred the Constitution just to feel safe again?

People expect government to do ridiculous, stupid, or off-the-wall things sometimes. The taxpayers have watched for years as pointless bills are debated and projects are funded that either benefit only the elected official’s reelection campaign or a flock of Blue-Footed Boobies living off the coast of southern California.

For example, take Senator Ted Steven’s (R-AK) infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”- a $220 million project connecting an island with 50 people on it to the mainland.

That, at least, would have benefited the folk that live on Gravina Island, Alaska. Sometimes, though, our elected officials get bees in their bonnets that end up resulting in legislation that not only doesn’t directly effect anyone’s life, but it also distracts them from tackling problems that actually matter like heath care, education funding, or repairing our crumbling infrastructure.

I wish I didn’t have an example this early in the Kansas Legislative session, but crazy conservative Kansas State Representative Peggy Mast (R-Emporia) has found something to champion that pales in comparison to the important problems at hand, an issue that changes nothing, helps no one, and makes her, and the state of Kansas, look radical, backward and foolish. Rep. Mast is introducing a resolution to condemn “gangsta” rap.