Category Archives: Presidential Primary

Info about presidential candidates – their campaigns, schedules, contacts, etc.

Phony war veteran who supported Obama to be arrested

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During the 2008 Presidential campaign, a “decorated Marine veteran” who had “served three tours” in Iraq, made impassioned speeches for Obama, founded a veterans group to raise money for Democrats.

It was all a fraud!

Dems red-faced over veteran impostor

Today the FBI has announced that there is a warrant out for him under the “Stolen Valor Act”.

He also “told his story in televised advertisements for Sen. Mark Udall and Hal Bidlack, a retired Air Force officer who lost his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District as the Democratic nominee” in 2006.

He claimed he served in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The duality of that day, the good and the bad that I saw that day, are forever etched in my mind and in my memory,”he said.

This Tuesday I will attend the burial of a high school friend at Arlington – who for twenty years after returning from the Viet Nam War kept silent about his Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross and his Purple Heart (twice awarded). We didn’t know that he was shot down twice or that he he carried the dying co-pilot of his helicopter 100 yard across a rice paddy under fire.

To me the greatest injury to real Veterans like my friend Mike is from people who lie about having served or being injured for personal or political purposes.

THE Funeral – Ted Kennedy

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Ted Kennedy has died. He is to be buried in Arlington cemetary.

My mother (at whose house I labored all day  today) taught me “to never speak ill of the dead” and “If you can’t say anything nice – don’t say anything at all!”

OK Mom.

A different spin on why McCain lost

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I don’t know if you have heard of the PUMA movement in the Democrat party – Party Unity My Ass. These are Hillary supporters who rebelled and voted for McCain. It seems like about 15% of the HRC supporters actually did vote for McCain. Here is one PUMA writing her take on how McCain lost.

Her contention is that the Conservatives stayed home. She may be right, but I am still waiting for the data on who actually went and voted (or stayed home but voted by mail).

What she and I both agree on is Obama did not mobilize a huge insurmountable number of new voters. Despite what he and ACORN did the number of votes he got was only about 2 1/2 percent more than Kerry got in 2004. McCain was down about 1 percent. That means only a little more than 1 percent more people voted over all. According to the CIA World fact book the US population is growing by about 1 percent a year so there should have been around a 4 percent increase in eligible voters. But the net increase was less than that.

I’m still thinking it was that neither candidate really inspired the middle of the road voters, but am willing to concede some of my Conservative friends could not hold their nose with one hand and mark the ballot for McCain with the other.

Back in February there was this piece on Politico:

But that’s not to say there’s not unrest on the right: In recent days many of the prominent voices of the conservative movement have rallied in an eleventh-hour attempt to keep McCain from winning the GOP nomination.

“It’s immigration. It’s limits on free speech. It’s not supporting tax cuts,” host Sean Hannity said, listing just a few of the issues where conservatives draw swords with McCain. “These are not small issues to conservatives.”

Indeed, they are not. Across the spectrum of conservative media there has been a forthright pushback against McCain as the party’s potential standard-bearer.

And immigration, taxes and campaign finance reform (the McCain-Feingold Act is viewed as an abridgement of free speech by many conservatives) are some of the points of contention.

McCain also faces a conservative insurrection over his opposition to interrogation techniques that border on torture and opposition to drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

President has right ideas on energy!

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Hillary wants to play with taxes this summer to give the illusion of “doing something” about gas prices.  She would increase taxes on the oil companies to “offset” the loss to the treasury (begs the question – how will prices go down if the taxes on producers go up?). McCain also wants to suspend collection of the fed’s gas tax (haven’t heard him call for new taxes though). Obama says turn more corn into fuel (I guess that is in line with the thought that when you have a head ache, smash your thumb with a hammer – then you won’t notice the head ache as much!) he also wants to increase taxes on energy producers. Do Democrats think we are all stupid enough to believe that taxing the people who produce the gas will convince those people to not only eat the new taxes but cut their profits further by cutting prices for consumers? Businesses do not pay taxes, the businesses customers pay those taxes. Increasing taxes on gas producers will increase the price of gas – not reduce it.

Obama also says reducing the purchases of oil for the Strategic Reserve will help. Maybe if he had ever served in the military he would understand something about strategy. It involves thinking past the next battle, the next election. It involves thinking about what will happen in the future because of actions taken now.

His idea of Siphoning money from current energy producers and giving it to people who may or may not ever produce viable alternative sources of energy is not a strategy that will lead to lower costs to consumers.

On the whole, a former adviser to Algore said in the WaPo:

“The smart people say ‘It’s stupid,’ and the people who aren’t as schooled say ‘At least it will do something for me,’ ” he said. “I don’t know that anyone connects the dots: that there have been a series of politically expedient decisions . . . that have added up to an economic picture that is not at all rosy and in fact fairly disastrous.”

President Bush said Monday that we should look at the real reasons for the gas price run up. A big part is the lack of domestic supply. Congress has prohibited drilling in ANWR. The oil industry estimates that the disruption of that area would amount to around 2000 acres -  which to someone living in Manhattan or in a 1200 square foot house might think is a lot of space – in comparison to the 8 million acres of ANWR it is tiny.  I Google Earthed the area and picked out a small rectangular forest area about 2000 acres. It is the little black speck in the first picture (which does not show all of the ANWR). The small brown square on the second picture (the bulk of the state of Alaska) is the area in the first picture.

Picture 1 - Part of ANWR
Picture 1 - Part of ANWR
Picture 2 Alaska
Picture 2 Alaska

The technology of oil well drilling has evolved considerably in the past few years.  So has the technology of transporting equipment over the frozen tundra. A well drilling location that 30 years ago disturbed some 65 acres today only needs less than 9 acres. Gravel covered roads of the past are now replaced by temporary ice roads – that do not disturb the tundra and totally disappear.

As an aside – I recently drove through Kansas and saw a new Wind Farm, thousands of acres of land covered with huge wind mills, far more impact on the land than is proposed for the drilling in ANWR.

There also is the problem of refinery capacity. Congress, state and local governments have placed so many roadblocks in the path of new refineries that none have been built is some thirty years and rebuilding those that do exist when they are damaged by weather or accidents is overly complicated. Thirty tears ago we exported refined petroleum products, today we import them.

If Congress and the people who would be President really intend to do anything to address the cost of energy and our dependence on foreign oil then they should take President Bush’s lead and pursue the known energy sources in this country first and let the alternative energy producers mature and prove that their production is viable – before the taxpayers and rate payers are hit with the bills for speculators’ theories.

Jenna Bush may vote DEM?

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Well, no she didn’t say that on CNN.

The quote is: “I mean, who isn’t open to learning about the candidates and I’m sure that everybody’s like that.”

Maybe not everyone is like that but she did not say she would not vote for McCain nor did she say she would  vote for either Dem. She was pretty non-committal. Maybe she is planning to write in uncle Jeb?

Or maybe Bloomberg will catch her eye. Or whatever. Now if she were saying that in 04 when her dad was on the ballot – that would be more of a story, this is a non story.

Obama naive or conniving?

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How can someone so woefully ignorant of World History from just the past century present himself as “the next US President”? Look closely at this Quote from Obama:

We should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force. In the past, it has been movements for freedom from within tyrannical regimes that have led to flourishing democracies; movements that continue today. This doesn’t mean abandoning our values and ideals; wherever we can, it’s in our interest to help foster democracy through the diplomatic and economic resources at our disposal. But even as we provide such help, we should be clear that the institutions of democracy – free markets, a free press, a strong civil society – cannot be built overnight, and they cannot be built at the end of a barrel of a gun. And so we must realize that the freedoms FDR once spoke of – especially freedom from want and freedom from fear – do not just come from deposing a tyrant and handing out ballots; they are only realized once the personal and material security of a people is ensured as well.

BARACK OBAMA, speech, Nov. 20, 2006

Does he really not understand that Germany, Japan, Italy and South Korea were ruled by tyrants that we deposed militarily and that we then created within these countries the that stable environment in which Democracy was able to take root and flourish? Does he believe that the Japanese people defeated their Emperor by revolution? That the German people rose up and overthrew Hitler? That if we had sat back and not entered the “civil war” in Korea that the people of South Korea could have survived the communists and come to be the economic powerhouse they are today?

Can he be that naive?  Or is he simply choosing to forget history and lying to the people to win their votes?

 

Guns on campus – why experience matters

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Joe at Joe’s Dartblog expounded on how he thinks gun laws can be improved. It shows how well meaning but inexperienced young people can miss important issues when trying to craft public policy.

Here are his proposed gun law revisions (remember his school is in NH ahnd borders Vermont. In NH any suitable person may obtain a concealed carry license and in Vermont any law abiding citizen can carry concealed with no license required).

The key is to properly manipulate incentives. Here is my proposal.

1. Any citizen of at least 25 years of age (the cutoff is debatable) who passes a basic psychological evaluation may obtain a gun permit, which allows him or her to own any number of guns and carry them anywhere, concealed or not as the carrier chooses.

As my good friend Sam Cohen points out the US Constitution guarantees me the right to own weapons and does not require a permit.

The Soviets routinely locked up in “psychological” facilities people who politically dissented against the government policies. Psychology is not an exact science and some practitioners might well see a desire to carry a gun as evidence of a psychological imbalance.

New Hampshire law already allows unconcealed carry.

2. Keep a national computer registry of all guns and their owners. Mandate that the government be notified whenever a gun changes hands from one permit-carrying citizen to another. This notification carries no monetary cost to the two citizens involved.

The Constitutional right to bear arms is grounded in the ability of the people to resist an out of control tyrannical government. The first thing a tyrant would do is use whatever list of gun owners available to remove as many weapons as possible. There are extremely good reasons why no national registry of firearms should exist.

3. All lost guns must be reported immediately to the gun registry. Loss of a gun results in a suspension of the owner’s gun permit—one year for the first loss, three years for the second, and a total lifetime revocation for the third.

OK so a draconian penalty is imposed on someone who voluntarily reports that a gun has disappeared. That makes lots of sense, will surely encourage someone to report. more likely will result in more unreported thefts and fewer voluntary registrations to begin with.

4. Non-reporting of a gun loss is a crime with an extremely harsh punishment.

As if losing your constitutional right to self defense for a year for reporting a loss is not in itself extremely harsh?

5. Owning or using a gun not listed in the registry is a crime with an extremely harsh punishment.

When all guns are registered only criminals will not register guns?

6. Here’s the crux of it. If a gun that belongs to you according to the gun registry kills anyone in any way other than out of self-defense, accident or not, you suffer an extraordinarily harsh punishment no matter who fired the gun. The only exception if someone stole the gun immediately prior to the killing, giving you insufficient time to notify the registry of your loss.

So criminals with guns don’t kill people – people who lose their guns do?

Maybe with a few more years to think these things through and some experience in life Joe will see the error of his suggestions. Experience matters. Which is why, as much as I disagree with him on lots of matters, John McCain needs to be the next president. Hillary and Obama would both be privately ecstatic if Joe’s policies were enacted, but even with their limited experience they would never propose this.