Category Archives: Front Page

The Dambuster Mission — 71 Years Ago

This weekend marks the seventy-first anniversary of one of the more famous operations of World War Two, the British attempts, over the course of two nights, to destroy the three main dams supplying hydroelectric power to Nazi Germany. The mission was code-named Operation Chastise, and the objective was not only to deprive the German economy of electrical power, but to cause massive disruption of the German war machine as a result of flooding in the Ruhr and Eder valleys.

The mission succeeded in inflicting severe damage on two of the three dams (image at left of the Mohne dam), but in the final analysis it resulted only in delaying the Nazi war machine, as the Allies had not yet established air superiority over the German heartland, and so Hitler’s engineers were able to quickly repair the damage.

The mission has been highly publicized in the decades since the war ended, with at least one movie (“The Dam Busters”, from 1955, HERE), several books, and many articles and television shows. Since it was only marginally successful, the interest in the mission was centered around the unique bomb that was used. It was an unconventional design, based essentially on an explosive-packed 55-gallon steel drum laid on it’s side, that was dropped from a British Lancaster bomber only after a reverse “spin” had been imparted to the drum, and from a very, very low altitude.

The spinning (or bouncing, or skipping) bomb concept was necessary to defeat the defensive measures that the Germans had devised to protect the dams. The had essentially hung a submarine net some distance away from the inside (impoundment) face of each dam, the idea being to snare any conventional bomb or torpedo before it could get close enough to inflict significant damage to the submerged dam wall. To overcome this, the chief British designer, Barnes Wallis, came up with the idea of a bomb that would skip along the surface of the water until it hit the impoundment face of the dam, then would sink straight down until it reached a pre-determined depth, at which time it would detonate like an anti-submarine depth charge. The force of the explosion would be contained and magnified by the pressure of the water, and by the close proximity to the dam wall.

Aside from the herculean task of designing, perfecting, and transporting these bombs through Germany to the heavily defended dam sites, there was also the problem of the altitude. After much testing, the British realized that the only way to get the bombs to skip when they hit the surface of the water, rather than to immediately sink, was to drop them from a height so low that they would have much more horizontal momentum than vertical momentum. The optimum height was eventually determined to be sixty feet. SIXTY FEET! At night, at about 240-mph, and with German anti-aircraft fire saturating the airspace!

The Lancaster crews initially intended to rely on their aircraft altimeters, but they soon realized that at sixty feet the altimeters were erratic and unreliable. They finally came up with a simple and ingenious solution illustrated by my crude graphic, at right. They mounted a spotlight at each end of the Lancaster bomber, and angled the projected beams until they would intersect at exactly sixty feet below the plane’s fuselage. As the plane descended over the impoundment behind the dam, the bombardier would watch the two spots on the surface of the water through the open bomb bay doors. When they converged into a single spot, he knew to tell the pilot that the altitude was perfect.

For more on this fascinating episode, the WikiPedia page is HERE, and a great article on the mission posted this week by the Royal Canadian Air Force is HERE.

Iranian Nuke Talks — The Charade Resumes

Top-level staffers in both the Bush-43 and Obama administrations have said that both Presidents are in agreement that Iran cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. So, as diplomats assemble in Austria this week to continue going through the motions of negotiating an end to the Iranian effort to develop that capability, the underlying question looms larger with the passage of time. After the negotiations fail, as they most certainly will fail, and there is consensus among the experts that Iranian success is inevitable, as there is already, what will President Obama do to stop them?

Matthew Kroenig is associate professor of government at Georgetown University, and a former advisor on middle eastern policy in the offices of the Secretary of Defense. He is also the author of the just-released book A Time to Attack, which details the history of the Iranian nuclear program and explains why it’s termination is so vital to the west, and to the middle east as well.

To promote the release of his book, Kroenig has up an article at the online Spectator magazine, HERE, in which he states his belief that Obama will eventually bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. The article is well worth reading, but I have my doubts as to Kroenig’s conclusion. I think that the end result of the negotiations will be, as another writer recently characterized it, that the Iranians will pretend to discontinue their nuclear weapons program, and Secretary of State John Kerry will pretend to believe them. What seems certain is that President Obama will take no action, nor aid the Israelis in taking action, until after the fall elections.

For a full hour after the start of the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the Japanese diplomats in Washington continued the pretense to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull that they were still engaged in efforts to forestall an armed conflict between the two nations. We can only hope that Israel does not experience a repeat of that scenario.

General Assembly Adopts New Rules for Citizen Visitation

Laura Leslie of WRAL news is reporting on new rules that were adopted earlier today by the NC legislature, rules that will affect citizens visiting the Legislative Building while the General Assembly is in session, particularly activist groups. Among the highlights of the rules adopted for immediate effect by the re-activated Legislative Services Commission (LSC) are:

Some of the changes address old rules that judges have ruled unconstitutional, such as a prohibition on hand-held signs in the building. A judge ruled the ban was a content-based restriction on speech, which violates the First Amendment. Another discarded rule bans the public from the second floor of the Legislative Building.

Other changes, backers say, are simply a reflection of current practices, such as the codification of the reservation procedure for groups wishing to protest at the front of the building.

But there are additional changes that go further.

Under the new rules, any group making enough noise to interfere with conversation at normal conversational levels is creating a “disturbance.” Singing, clapping, shouting, and using a bullhorn are offered as examples of disturbing behavior. All were common during Moral Monday protests in the building last summer.

The new rules also allow police or staff to order people to leave the building if they think those people pose an “imminent threat” of a disturbance, even if they haven’t done anything. If the visitors don’t leave, they can be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor. The term “imminent threat” isn’t defined in the rules.

Representative Tim Moore (R-Cleveland), the Chairman of the LSC, emphasized that the citizenry will continue to have full public access to the building and to their elected representatives, while ensuring that the legislators and their staff members are able to work effectively on the public agenda. He also said that:

“We can’t allow situations where folks would crowd the doors and keep folks from getting onto the House floor or the Senate floor.”

To the predictable protests from the Moral Monday activists, Moore responded:

“Folks can gather all around this building anywhere they want. In fact, it’s good to see people here. That’s not what this is designed to do. Folks will still be here protesting on Monday. They’ll be able to protest lawfully in the way they’ve done in the past. The issue with the Moral Monday protest for the few that got arrested was that they were in an area creating a disturbance at a particular time.”

For the full article, click HERE.

Let’s All Go Over The Cliff Together

On Monday, the Washington Times reported that liberal journalist Eleanor Cliff has drawn a very fine line through the language commonly used to describe the demise of Ambassador Chris Stevens at the hands of the Benghazi attackers in September of 2011, saying this to her fellow McLaughlin Group panelists:

“I’d like to point out that Ambassador Stevens was not ‘murdered’, but died of smoke inhalation in a CIA safe room.”

Kudos to Ms. Cliff for setting the record straight. And in that same vein, it seems long overdue to bust a few other myths, such as:

The passengers on board the airliner that died over Lockerbie, Scotland, were not murdered, they actually died of an unfortunate fall. A very long fall.
The occupants of the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001 were not murdered, they actually died from having something heavy dropped on them.
The passengers on United Airlines Flight 73 that crashed into a meadow near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, also on September 11, 2001, were not murdered, they actually died from rapid deceleration.
The 191 people who died in the March, 2004 Madrid Train Bombings were not murdered, they actually perished as a result of a massive train derailment.
In November of 1997, the 68 foreigners who were massacred near the pyramids in Luxor, Egypt at the hands of the Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya islamist terrorist group were not murdered, they actually died of tourism.
The seventeen USS Cole sailors who were killed in the Yemeni port of Aden in October of 2000 were not murdered, they actually died as a result of a leaky boat.
The passengers on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 airliner, if current reports are to be believed, were not murdered, they actually died from drowning in the Indian Ocean.

Oh, and by the way, Ms. Cliff also cleared up the misconceptions about the impetus for the Benghazi terrorist. It was all due to an internet video.

Sarah Palin Shares Taylor Griffin Picture

As is widely known by now, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin endorsed Taylor Griffin earlier this week for his campaign to replace Representative Walter Jones as the Republican representative from North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. Governor Palin has now posted to her Facebook page, HERE, the photo at right, which is of Griffin on one of his trips down east to talk to the voters. This image was taken at a fish house in Cedar Island earlier this spring when Griffin was meeting with some commercial fishermen.

When Election Advocacy Morphs Into Prevarication

Now that we are in the closing week of the primary campaign for the NC 3rd Congressional District, the pitch of election advocacy is rising, sometimes to the point of prevarication, but quite often to the point of deception. I therefore wish to clear up some of the more outrageous things being said of Taylor Griffin in his effort to unseat the incumbent, Representative Walter B. Jones.

Amongst our fellow Tea Partiers, the CCTPP is known for the degree of research we put into vetting the candidates that will appear on our local election ballots. We put a lot of effort into determining which aspirants have the political ideology and policy prescriptions that are most closely aligned with the Crystal Coast Tea Party Patriots, and with Tea Party organizations nationwide.

Taylor Griffin first appeared before the members of the CCTPP meeting in early October of 2013. Because several of our officers had other obligations to meet later in the evening, the meeting was very short, only about an hour. Griffin spoke only briefly to introduce himself, and the meeting was adjourned with little opportunity for Q-and-A. The general impression was that his conservative views were solid, but that he would need to improve his public speaking skills to make his effort viable.

Since then, Griffin has appeared before our group three more times. Each time, the interest of our membership in his candidacy grew, and with it the intensity of the scrutiny we applied to his political ideology, to the positions he had publically taken on the issues of the day (mostly via his website), and to his policy prescriptions on issues that we deemed relevant, but that had not garnered much focus in the media. The Q-and-A of our members was augmented by the research that I, as webmaster for the group, did to undergird the several posts I put up on our website in support of his candidacy. With the exception of the opposition research professionals hired by the respective campaigns, I doubt that anyone can be more comfortable in their assessment of a candidate than I am about Taylor Griffin.

Now to the various deceptions and prevarications: MORE …

Benghazi: If this gun ain’t smokin’, it’s definitely getting hot.

In response to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests from Judicial Watch, the Obama administration has, after nineteen months of hedging and stone-walling, released some new e-mails that shed light on how the White House went about damage control in the period between the attacks in Libya and the appearance of Susan Rice on the Sunday talk shows. At the moment, I think the most informative of the several articles written today about the e-mails is one posted yesterday afternoon by John Hindraker on the PowerLine blog, HERE. The article is informative, even containing screenshots of the incriminating messages.

UPDATE: Sharyl Attkinson has a post up, HERE, that contains more information, including this bit:

Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told me today that the government apparently tried to keep the Rhodes email out of Congress and the public’s hands by classifying it after-the-fact.

“They retroactively changed the classification,” Chaffetz says. “That was an unclassified document and they changed it to classified.”

Ah, yes, the cover-up.

NEWSFLASH !! Sarah Palin endorses Taylor Griffin

From his campaign headquarters in New Bern, Taylor Griffin released this statement on the morning of Tuesday, April 29th:

Taylor Griffin’s congressional campaign got a big endorsement today from an old friend. Former Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her husband Todd Palin endorsed Griffin’s run for the Republican nomination in North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. Griffin worked with Governor Palin and Todd in 2008 during Palin’s Vice Presidential campaign.

“I am incredibly honored to receive the endorsement of Governor Sarah and Todd Palin. I consider Governor Palin to be the epitome of a principled conservative and her endorsement reinforces my message that I will give Eastern North Carolina the conservative representation we deserve.” Griffin said after receiving the news of the endorsement.

Griffin also added the endorsement carries with it a great responsibility. “When a local veteran or commercial fisherman tell me I have their support, I feel the responsibility to represent them in a manner befitting their trust. I feel the same way about the endorsement of Governor Palin and Todd. I can assure them and the people of Eastern North Carolina that my conservative principles will not waiver after I get to Washington.”

Earlier in the campaign, Griffin had written this to Governor Palin and Todd requesting their support for his candidacy:

“I chose to launch my campaign last year because in my time in politics and government I have watched our country, and at times my own party, veer so far off course from the fundamental constitutional values and free market ideals that made our country great. My time working with you and your family in Alaska was one of the most important experiences of my life. Like Alaskans, Eastern North Carolinians believe that the solution to our nation’s problems lie in its people rather than in ever expanding edicts from Washington.”

Palin responded yesterday with the following note:

“Taylor – Thank you for your note and for putting your name on the line to help restore our country. Todd and I are happy to honor your request and support your candidacy. In Washington, we need you to stay true to your beliefs of smaller government, protecting life, and furthering conservative principles. America needs fighters in Congress – go to DC remembering the good patriots of Eastern North Carolina who put their trust in you to fight for them. You have our support – we have directed SarahPAC to make a financial contribution to your campaign today. Thank you for your patriotism and commitment to our cause! – Sarah Palin”

The imprimatur of former Republican Governor and 2008 Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is an important development in the vetting of Taylor Griffin’s conservative credentials, second, of course, to that of the Crystal Coast Tea Party Patriots.

What Sasha Obama Does Not Have In Common

Rebecca Steinitz has a doctoral degree in English, and she knows about primary education. She is a literacy consultant in the Massachusetts school system, and she happens to have a daughter who is the same age as Sasha, President Obama’s daughter. In that connection, she recently put up a “Open Letter To President Obama” piece on the Huffington Post about her frustrations with Common Core, and with the fact that the Obama children are insulated from it. Here are her opening words to the President:

We have something very important in common: daughters in the seventh grade. Since your family walked onto the national stage in 2007, I’ve had a feeling that our younger daughters have a lot in common too. Like my daughter Eva, Sasha appears to be a funny, smart, loving girl, who has no problem speaking her mind, showing her feelings, or tormenting her older sister. There is, however, one important difference between them: Sasha attends private school, while Eva goes to public school …

An interesting perspective on Common Core from an education professional, worth reading in total, HERE.

UNC Chancellor Carol Folt — The Dartmouth Connection

I have written several posts (HERE, HERE, and HERE) calling attention to the corrupt practices within the UNC system as regards the educational sham of college athletes, and particularly on the revelations by Mary Willingham, the academic advisor to the UNC Athletic Program. Now, the scandal has drawn the attention of PowerLine co-blogger Paul Mirengoff, a Dartmouth College alumni, because of the fact that Willingham’s chief antagonist in all this is Carol Folt, the current UNC-CH Chancellor and former Provost at Dartmouth. Mirengoff points to a telling quote from a UNC history professor that seems to summarize the situation nicely:

The aggressiveness and the tenor of the attacks on Willingham. . .betray an anxiety -– a kind of panic — that goes far beyond a disagreement over [literacy] numbers [for UNC athletes]. The all-out assault reflects a fundamentally cynical strategy to discredit and defame someone who has embarrassing facts to reveal.

For the entire post at PowerLine, click HERE.

Diane Rufino’s Outstanding Essay on “How A Republic Dies”

As some of us will remember from our history readings, the Roman republic was, after the much earlier coalition of Greek city-states, the best known experiment in democratic government from the ancient world. And to the progression of Rome from a republic to an empire, even setting the stage for it’s eventual destruction, the reign of the Roman general and dictator Julius Caesar was pivotal. Today, historians recognize Caesar as a military genius. Through force of arms, he expanded the republic northward all the way to the English Channel, and eastward to the Rhine river in what today is west-central Germany.

The death of Julius Caesar in 44-BC coincided roughly with the period in which Rome was transitioning from a republic to an empire, from a democratic form of government to an autocracy, but together, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire lasted almost a thousand years.

Late last year, Diane Rufino posted a very good, very entertaining essay about the years between the reign of Julius Caesar and the demise of the Roman Empire about five hundred years later. Here is an excerpt:

… Caesar left Rome after his term as consul ended to take up a governorship he demanded in southern France. Ignoring the orders of the Senate, he raised his own army, and led a path of conquest throughout all of Gaul. Marc Antony, another brilliant general, was with Caesar at this time in Gaul and was making a name for himself.

After eight years, word grew that Julius Caesar was returning home. The Senate was afraid that he would bring his army and march on Rome and pleaded with Pompey to organize resistance. But Pompey was torn. Caesar was his friend. His wife was Caesar’s daughter and he loved her deeply. But Pompey did as asked and began to build an army. Unfortunately he could not do so in time and when Caesar marched into Rome, Pompey was forced to flee. Caesar eventually bought off, threatened, or intimidated members of the Senate, and at his command, they crowned him Emperor and gave him concentrated powers for a period of ten years. The people began to call him a tyrant. Senators called him a tyrant. Caesar countered by assuring them that he needed the power “to save the republic” and that after the ten years was up he would turn control back to the Senate. He didn’t trust the Senate …

Settle in, and read the whole thing at Rufino’s blog, HERE.

In New York, Common Core Is Used To Sell Your Kid Stuff

Today’s article by Eric Owens, in the Daily Caller, in it’s entirety:

Across the state of New York, this year’s Common Core English tests have reportedly featured a slew of brand-name products including iPod, Barbie, Mug Root Beer and Life Savers. For Nike, the tests even conveniently included the shoe company’s ubiquitous slogan: “Just Do It.”

The brands – and apparently even some of their familiar trademark symbols – appeared in tests questions for students ranging from third to eighth grades, reports The Post-Standard of Syracuse. Over one million students were required to take the tests. Parents, teachers and school administrators have speculated that the kid-friendly brand names are a new form of product placement.

Education materials behemoth Pearson, which has a $32 million five-year contract to develop New York’s Common Core-related tests, has barred teachers and school officials from disclosing the contents of the tests. Students and parents are not so barred, though, and many have complained.

“‘Why are they trying to sell me something during the test?’” Long Island mother Deborah Poppe quoted her son as saying, according to Fox News. “He’s bright enough to realize that it was almost like a commercial.” Poppe said her eighth-grade son was talking about a question about a busboy who didn’t clean up a root beer spill. It wasn’t just any root beer, though. No sir! It was Mug Root Beer, a registered trademark of PepsiCo (current market cap: $129.7 billion).

Another question about the value of taking risks featured the now-hackneyed Nike slogan “Just Do It.” “I’m sure they could have used a historical figure who took risks and invented things,” observed displeased dad Sam Pirozzolo, also of Staten Island, according to the Daily Mail. “I’m sure they could have found something other than Nike to express their point.” Pirozzolo has a child in fifth grade.

Nike, one of America’s best known and most heavily advertised companies, boasts a current market cap of $65.01 billion.

A number of baffled and angry New York teachers have anonymously complained about the branding and much else on blogs and websites.

Representatives from the New York State Education Department have flatly denied involvement in any novel marketing agreements. “There are no product placement deals between us, Pearson or anyone else,” Tom Dunn, an Education Department spokesman, told Fox News. “No deals. No money. We use authentic texts. If the author chose to use a brand name in the original, we don’t edit.”

To the credit of Pearson and the named companies, it does seem like an unusually stupid move—even for greedy brand managers. “If any brand did try to place there, what they would lose from the outrage would surely trump any exposure they got,” Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a marketing professor at Golden Gate University, told Fox.

At the same, some people are perfectly happy about idea of mixing for-profit merchandising and mandatory Common Core tests. “Brands are part of our lives,” Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York brand consulting firm Landor Associates, told Fox. “To say they don’t belong in academia is unrealistic.”

The Daily Caller article is HERE, and the original report from the Syracuse, New York Post Standard is HERE.

Mary Willingham Goes Under the UNC Athletics Bus

WRAL is reporting today (with no byline) that Mary Willingham, the academic advisor for the UNC football team players, will leave UNC-CH after her teaching assignments are wrapped up for the semester. The report, HERE, also said that:

Willingham was the subject of national media attention after she questioned the literacy level of athletes who were admitted to the school. She said that most of the 183 basketball and football players she reviewed from 2004 to 2012 read at an eighth-grade level or below.

In a separate article by Sara Ganim on CNN about ten days ago, these excerpts:

The University of North Carolina says that three independent experts in the field of adult literacy have finished a university-commissioned review of whistleblower Mary Willingham’s research and found flaws in her claims that some athletes were reading at elementary-school levels.

Willingham’s research, described to CNN in January, was based on a sampling of about 180 student-athletes who Willingham personally worked with over an eight-year period.

Each had taken a 25-question reading vocabulary test on the Scholastic Abilities Test for Adults (SATA) — an aptitude test used by many universities to gauge the learning level of incoming students.

Without actually naming her, UNC released a summary report that implied she incorrectly deduced that 60% of the sample were reading below a high school level, and that 8% were reading below a fourth-grade level. “Outside experts found no evidence to support public claims about widespread low literacy levels,” UNC said in a statement.

Well, I dunno, there was this …

The CNN article, HERE, goes on to say that:

Willingham and her research were disavowed by the university almost immediately …

<snip>

On Friday, Willingham said she was “disappointed” by the report … “The fact that they engaged in this exercise without ever seeking input from me or my research partner, and without the raw scores, or an examination of the full battery of tests … speaks volumes about the true motivations behind today’s press release,” she wrote in a statement. “UNC personnel with the knowledge and expertise to verify my claims continue to remain and/or are being forced to remain silent.”

And on another matter involving student athletes in the UNC system:

Since the CNN report aired, UNC has asked for a new investigation into the yearslong “paper class” scandal, in which student-athletes allegedly were taking classes in which the only requirement was completing a single paper.

Attorney Kenneth Wainstein, who had worked at the U.S. Justice Department for 19 years, is reviewing whether it was widely known among staff in athletics that student-athletes were sent to no-show classes where little or no work was required.

CNN first reported this week that California Rep. Tony Cardenas is also demanding the NCAA answer questions on why UNC was never sanctioned for having paper classes.

Willingham told CNN that the paper classes were widely known and talked about in athletics, where she worked for seven years. She also said the paper classes were used to keep eligible some of the student-athletes who were reading at low levels.

DDG-1000, the US Navy’s new destroyer USS Zumwalt

On Monday, April 12th, the US Navy christened the first of the three planned Zumwalt-class destroyers. The vessel will be delivered to the Navy later this year, and should enter the Pacific fleet in another two years. Then, and only then, will the Navy learn whether this new hull design is a triumph or a disaster.

The Zumwalt class destroyers are meant to supplement, not replace, the Arleigh-Burke class. At present, there are plans to build only three, and the home port for all three will be San Diego. These are special-purpose ships, designed to be stealthy, with the capability of operating in littoral (shallow, roughly 60′ or less) waters. Their focus will be on getting in close to shore undetected in order to support special forces operations and to conduct bombardment of targets along the coastline, as well as the traditional destroyer function of attacking enemy shipping. After becoming fully operational, they are expected to spend a lot of time patrolling the East and South China Seas, the contested zone between mainland China and Japan, in order to monitor the growth of the Chinese Navy and their territorial ambitions in the region.

The Zumwalt class is big. At 610-feet, they are better than 100-feet longer than the current Arleigh-Burke class of destroyers, and about 50-feet longer than the older Spruance class. They are even slightly larger than the Ticonderoga class of cruisers. Although displacing 15,000 tons, the ship draws only 28-feet of water, two feet less than the Burke class. And, despite it’s size, the crew will number only 142 officers and men, about half of what an Arleigh-Burke class destroyer needs.

The armaments of the Zumwalt and each of her two sister ships will eventually include two of the Navy’s 6″ Advanced Gun System, an electromagnetic rail gun that will fire rocket propelled warheads at 5,000-mph plus out to a range of over 60 miles, with a rate of fire of ten rounds per minute. She will also be equipped with laser weapons. A related feature incorporated into the Zumwalt class is the ability to take on water ballast, which can lower the ship deeper into the water in order to add vertical and lateral stability when the gun battery is being used.

Both of these weapons systems are still in the last stages of development and will not be installed for another two years or so. When they become operational, however, they both will require a great deal of electricity. On top of that, the Zumwalt class ships all employ electric propulsion. To handle this mammoth electrical generation requirement, these vessels will be equipped with generators powered by two 40-megawatt gas turbines and two 78-megawatt gas turbines, which adds up to about 318,000-horsepower. By comparison, the powerplants in the Arleigh-Burke class developed about 108,000-horsepower. The combination of gas turbines driving electric motors is expected to produce a level of operational quietness that approaches that of modern nuclear submarines. One of the measures that will be used to dissipate the heat from the gas turbines is “sleeting”, in which water is taken in from below the waterline and then pumped out onto the outer hull plates in a sort of continuously cascading “waterfall”, a technique made possible because of the tumblehome hull.

The Navy intends to be slow and cautious in bringing the Zumwalt into front-line duty, partly because it is the first of a new class of ship, and partly because of it’s controversial hull design. As can be seen in the photo above, the Zumwalt’s waterline to weatherdeck form is opposite of conventional ships. It has a “tumblehome” stern, as well as what can be termed an overall tumblehome contour. The difference is illustrated in the graphic at upper left. While this design has been used before by the 19th century Russian and French navies, it was associated even then with instability problems. Seven years ago, when news of the Zumwalt-class hull form first became public, the online Defense Industry Daily newspaper questioned it’s suitability, HERE, by writing this excerpt:

“At least eight current and former officers, naval engineers and architects and naval analysts interviewed for this article expressed concerns about the ship’s stability. Ken Brower, a civilian naval architect with decades of naval experience was even more blunt: “It will capsize in a following sea at the wrong speed if a wave at an appropriate wavelength hits it at an appropriate angle”… “

“…Brower explained: “The trouble is that as a ship pitches and heaves at sea, if you have tumblehome instead of flare, you have no righting energy to make the ship come back up. On the DDG 1000, with the waves coming at you from behind, when a ship pitches down, it can lose transverse stability as the stern comes out of the water – and basically roll over.”

So, triumph or disaster, only time will tell.

Laura Ingraham does a Call-In Interview of Taylor Griffin

On tax day, April 15th, conservative author, FoxNews contributor, and television personality Laura Ingraham conducted a call-in interview of 3rd Congressional District candidate Taylor Griffin on her radio show. She really put Griffin on the hot seat, boring in, pressing for examples of how his views differ from incumbent Walter Jones’, scrutinizing his every answer for nuance, particularly on his policy prescription for the illegal immigration problem. The interview was lengthy, over seventeen minutes, but the immigration issue is discussed from about the 2:10 mark to 16:35 or so. As readers will know from my post earlier this week, the CCTPP believes that Taylor Griffin is the candidate most closely aligned with our views. Check out this audio if you want to know why.

Today is the 72nd Anniversary of the Doolittle Raid

Way back in the previous millenium, when I was a mere babe in arms, “airmen of the US Army Air Forces, led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. (Jimmy) Doolittle, carried the Battle of the Pacific to the heart of the Japanese empire with a surprising and daring raid on military targets at Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, and Kobe. This heroic attack against these major cities was the result of coordination between the Army Air Forces and the US Navy, which carried the sixteen North American B-25 medium bombers aboard the carrier USS Hornet to within take-off distance of the Japanese Islands.”

Most of the brave men that were involved in that long-ago operation are dead now, but they should be remembered along with the millions of others who served in that conflict.

For details on the entire operation, there is THIS article at the website for the National Museum of the US Air Force. For still more, there is also THIS New York Times article, and the official Doolittle Raid website is HERE.

A New Slant on the Bundy Situation — the Hage Affair

As most who have followed this story know, Cliven Bundy’s forebears settled the area where his ranch is sited in the 1880’s. He claims that, although he may owe money for grazing rights to the land upon which his cattle were grazing, any such monies would be owed to the sovereign state of Nevada rather than to the Federal government.

The Washington Examiner has up an article written by Ron Arnold, in which he explains why Bundy’s notion may not be so crazy after all. A brief excerpt:

Private rights in federal lands were recognized in an 1866 water law. It says, “… whenever, by priority of possession, rights to the use of water have vested and accrued, and the same are recognized and acknowledged by the local customs, laws, and the decisions of courts, the possessors and owners of such vested rights shall be maintained and protected in the same.”

For the full article, click HERE.

Obama Administration Hides the ObamaCare Ball

Remember back in the first month or so of the Obama Administration, when the President had the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau functions moved to the White House, to be overseen by his henceman Rahm Emanuel? If not, you can refresh your memory HERE.

At first, it was thought to be all about micro-managing the 2010 national census, but it now looks as if another shoe has dropped. The recently announced changes to how the Obama Administration’s Census Bureau will henceforth determine a count of the nation’s uninsured has dismayed many, and roused at least two pundits to commentary, as it is a painfully obvious attempt on the part of President Obama to prevent fact-checking on one of his fundamental contentions about the merits of the ACA, to wit, the declaration that it would greatly reduce the number of Americans who lack health insurance. Obama wants to avoid the embarrassment of having the routine Census health insurance numbers give the lie to his promise.

Here is an excerpt from THIS piece on Obama’s executive order, by well known economics writer Megan McArdle:

I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered, and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report is supposed to be “people who lacked insurance for the entire previous year,” but people tend to answer with their insurance status right now.

But why, dear God, oh, why, would you change it in the one year in the entire history of the republic that it is most important for policy makers, researchers and voters to be able to compare the number of uninsured to those in prior years? The answers would seem to range from “total incompetence on the part of every level of this administration” to something worse.

Robert Pear also wrote a piece in the New York Times on this subject, and the full article is HERE.

A Pathetic Attempt To Re-Indict the Duke LaCrosse Players

When it was all over and the lawyers had wrapped up the case, Duke University was forced to cough up about twenty million dollars to compensate the members of the Duke LaCrosse Team for the outrageous behavior of Duke’s faculty and administration in the aftermath of Crystal Gail Mangum’s rape allegations in March of 2006.

Now comes author William Cohen with a new book that plays devil’s advocate, strongly suggesting that Mangum was telling the truth and that justice was ill-served by the time the whole affair ended. Stuart Taylor, Jr., the book reviewer for the New Republic, has written an extensive review of the books numerous errors and fallacies.

I was living in Raleigh when this occurred, and took the same casual interest in the case as most who lived in the area. Unlike most of the Duke faculty and administration, I was unpersuaded, from the outset, of Mangum’s story and of the guilt of the LaCrosse team members. I remain so, and think that Cohen is using a bull**** alternate history to make a buck.

For any among you who continue to have an interest in the case, Taylor’s book review is HERE.

More 47% Folks In The Wagon Than Ever Before

From a post this morning by Terry Jeffrey at CNSNews.com on further analysis of the updated Census:

Of the 103,087,000 full-time, year-round workers, 16,606,000 worked for the government. That included 12,597,000 who worked for state and local government and 4,009,000 who worked for the federal government.

The 86,429,000 Americans who worked full-time, year-round in the private sector, included 77,392,000 employed as wage and salary workers for private-sector enterprises and 9,037,000 who worked for themselves.

and

In the last quarter of 2011, according to the Census Bureau, approximately 82,457,000 people lived in households where one or more people were on Medicaid. 49,073,000 lived in households were someone got food stamps. 23,228,000 lived in households where one or more got WIC. 20,223,000 lived in households where one or more got SSI. 13,433,000 lived in public or government-subsidized housing. [ NOTE: Totals to 188,414,000. ]

Of course, it stands to reason that some people lived in households that received more than one welfare benefit at a time. To account for this, the Census Bureau published a neat composite statistic: There were 108,592,000 people in the fourth quarter of 2011 who lived in a household that included people on “one or more means-tested programs.”

Those 108,592,000 outnumbered the 86,429,000 full-time private-sector workers who inhabited the United States in 2012 by almost 1.3 to 1.

For all the gory details, go HERE.

More Volunteers Needed for the Carteret County VIP Effort

As some readers know, after the appearance at a recent CCTPP meeting by Jan Delancy, Director of the North Carolina Voter Integrity Project, I volunteered to head up an effort to do a preliminary analysis aimed at determining whether there was a significant voter fraud problem in Carteret County. The first, automated, cut of the analysis is now done, and I need more volunteers to help apply human intelligence in order to complete the next step.

If you or anyone you know is interested in volunteering, send an e-mail to me at VMT@Salacia.com with the following information (“Me” is Verne Thompson, CCTPP Webmaster):

1] Do you have a computer (desktop or laptop) that you can use for this effort?

2] What is the computer’s Operating System (Windows-XP, Windows Vista, Windows-7, Windows-8)? This is sometimes abbreviated to the term “OS Name”.

3] Do you have an installed copy of Microsoft Excel?

4] How much memory (RAM, or Random Access Memory) does your computer have? This is also known by the term “Total Physical Memory”.

If you need help in answering questions #2 and #4, here is a convenient way to do so if you already have Microsoft Excel installed:

Begin by bringing up your Excel application. Next, in the menu bar, click on “Help”. Move down the selections shown in the drop-down box and click on “About Microsoft Office Excel”. A dialogue box entitled “About Microsoft Excel” will come on-screen. Then, in the lower right of the dialogue box, click the “System Info …” button, after which another dialogue box will appear, with “System Summary” as the default selection.

Within the “System Summary” panel, the information I will need is on your “OS Name” and “Total Physical Memory” lines.

The Crystal Coast Tea Party Patriots ELECTION BALLOT

The attending members of the CCTPP have completed their vote on candidates for the upcoming May 6th primary election, and our evaluations are reflected on the sample ballot accessible via the About-Us / Tea Party News-Views / Our Ballot Choices menu path, or simply by clicking HERE.

A condensed version is at right.

My Assessment of the 3rd Congressional District Contenders

One week ago, I put up a post that enumerated much of the personal history, conservative credentials, and policy prescriptions of Taylor Griffin, who is one of the three candidates and a second challenger for North Carolina’s 3rd District Congressional seat currently held by Representative Walter B. Jones, Jr.

The third candidate (and second challenger) is Al Novenic. Although Novenic has appeared before our group and seems like a likable guy, he is a political novice, and his ideology, though basically conservative, is heavily tinged with Populism. For that reason, I believe him to be an unlikely contender and he will not be included in this assessment.

That leaves the incumbent, Walter B. Jones, Jr. As many readers know, Jones first ran for office as a Democrat, following in the footsteps of his father, Walter B. Jones, Sr. The younger Jones served in and was re-elected to Congress until he lost the 1992 Democratic primary election to Eva Clayton, who went on to win the general election, forcing Jones into a two-year hiatus. In the run-up to the 1994 mid-term elections, astutely assessing the rising Gingrich-engineered wave that swept so many conservatives into the House of Representatives, Jones switched parties. Running as a Republican, he was elected to the seat for North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District, in which he will soon complete ten consecutive terms for a total of twenty years, and with no primary challenge in the first seven of those ten terms. In fact, he has had a primary challenger only twice before, by Joe McLaughlin in 2008 and by Frank Palombo in 2012. He is now, in 2014, being challenged for a third time by Griffin, who is Jones’ third primary challenger out of the last four election cycles.

Since Jones did not have any primary opposition in his first seven terms, and since primary challengers tend to appear when the voters are getting restless, it seems fair to ask why the Republican voters have become so dissatisfied with him in the last eight or so years. What is different?

I suggest that the answer lies in Jones’ shifting ideology. Although he seemed to be sufficiently conservative in the earlier years, he has gradually moved toward a more Libertarian view as opposed to a conservative Republican view. To examine that process, let’s look first at the voting records.

VOTE SCORING BY SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS

Project Vote Smart (PVS) maintains the ratings for a number of special interest groups that wish to track and score the congressional voting records of elected officials, and I looked at the PVS records for several of them. I looked first at the scoring of the National Rifle Association (NRA) from 1994 to the present, and found that Walter Jones had an overall lifetime rating of 92% on the issues that were scored by the NRA (see the NRA column in the table below). This sounds impressive, until you make comparisons to other members of congress. I picked 2004, the last year of lifetime ratings, and counted how many congressmen were rated in what brackets. Of the 209 incumbents that were rated, 90 (or 43%) were in the 92% bracket (including eight Democrats), which was by far the largest single grouping. There were only five that made the 100% bracket. Based on this, my assessment is that Congressman Jones is somewhat above average on Second Amendment issues, but not outstanding.

I next looked at the PVS records for the scoring of the National Journal (website is HERE), a non-partisan weekly magazine that reports on political events and trends, and one that, according to their WikiPedia page, HERE, is “mostly read by members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers, the White House, Executive Branch agencies, the media, think tanks, corporations, associations, and lobbyists.” National Journal has been scoring Congressional voting for many years, but is has only been since 2005 that the vote scoring has been comprehensive and consistent. Since then, they have scored all members of Congress (House & Senate) in the three areas of economic, social, and foreign policy. In addition, they also compile a composite score that averages the scores from the three specific policy areas. I included these composite scores in the table below. Walter Jones’ scores for the nine years from 2005 to the present started out low, climbed to their zenith of 66% in 2008/2009, and have been low since. By comparison, Jones’ scores are considerably lower than the nine-year average scores for NC Republicans Richard Burr (81.5%), Howard Coble (74.1%), and Patrick McHenry (87.6).

Project Vote Smart also administers a Political Courage Test, derived from the public positions taken by elected officials on the key issues of the day. The test measures a candidates “… willingness to provide citizens with their positions on key issues.” When I looked up Walter Jones’ score, the page, HERE, said that “Walter Jones, Jr. refused to tell citizens where he stands on any of the issues addressed in the 2012 Political Courage Test, despite repeated requests from Vote Smart, national media, and prominent political leaders.”

Beginning in 2012, the Heritage Foundation has maintained voting records at their Heritage Action Scorecard site, measuring votes, co-sponsorships, and other legislative activity, and their composite scores are updated weekly when Congress is in session. The page for North Carolina congressional members, HERE, rates all fifteen members of the NC delegation, including the five Democrats. For 2013, of the ten Republicans, Walter Jones ranks sixth at 73%, roughly midway between Representative George Holdings’ 89% and Representative Howard Coble’s 51%. His two-year average is 67.5%, about the same as Burr (68.5%), better than Coble (57%), but worse than Patrick McHenry (74%). Not bad ratings, to be sure, but not particularly impressive.

The American Conservative Union (ACU) “… tracks a wide range of issues before Congress to determine which issues and votes serve as a dividing line to help separate those members of the U.S. House and Senate who protect liberty as conservatives and those who are truly liberal.” The overall ACU ratings are incorporated into the table below (below left, click to enlarge), but beginning in 2012, the ACU also began compiling a House Conservatives list each year that enumerates all the House members who have attained an average score of 80% or more. In the graphic at right (click to enlarge), the two most recent years are depicted. Note that Walter Jones made the 2013 list, but did not make the 2012 list. Jones’ nineteen year average (1995-2013) is a respectable 83.9%, but the most notable thing about the ACU ratings is how Jones has become progressively less conservative over the course of the nineteen year incumbency. For the first twelve years, his average score was 92.2%, but for the most recent seven years, his average score has been only 69.7%. This is plain evidence, I think, of Jones’ movement away from a strictly conservative ideology.

For the last several years, since 2005, the Club For Growth (C4G) has conducted “a comprehensive examination of each lawmaker’s record on pro-growth policies and computed an Economic Growth Score on a scale of 0 to 100.” Again, the scores for Walter Jones are incorporated into the table above, but C4G also ranks members of the House based on where they fall in the rankings. Jones lifetime ranking is 76, meaning that there were 75 members with better lifetime rankings, and 352 with rankings either equal to Jones’ or worse. His actual vote scoring by the C4G was consistently low for the first seven of the nine scored years, but have improved dramatically in 2012 and 2013.

FALTERING SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL

Many conservatives, myself included, would argue that President Obama has been the least supportive of Israel of any U.S. President since the nation of Israel was founded in the aftermath of the 1948 war with the Arab states in the Middle East. In a post from last week entitled “Ranking the RINOs”, the blog at OpenSecrets.org noted, HERE, the increased funding by Israel support groups of efforts to unseat members of Congress who are seen as being non-supportive of Israel. An excerpt:

Jones’ bid for reelection became a lot more competitive after he was hit by a $78,000 ad buy from the Ending Spending Fund, a super PAC backed by hedge fund multi-millionaire John Ricketts and mega-donor casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. In total, the fund has spent $197,230 in its efforts to toss Jones from office.

The Emergency Committee for Israel has also weighed in with a $151,075 ad hitting the congressman for being the only Republican to vote “present” on a 2012 resolution that reasserted the Obama administration would continue to furnish Israel with military supplies amid the American withdrawal from Iraq. It appears his offenses also include a vote against the Republican budget plan devised by Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

A few days earlier, Breitbart published an article, HERE, that also noted the new television ads paid for by the Emergency Committee for Israel, and elaborated on the disillusionment that many Israel supporters have experienced with Jones. Here are some excerpts from that article:

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) dropped a brutal new television ad against Representative Walter Jones (R-NC), the first time the group has waded into a primary that has become something of a proxy battle in the Tea Party war against the establishment.

The ad, backed by a “six figure” buy, takes Jones to task for his liberal views on foreign policy, including opposing sanctions on Iran and refusing to back a non-binding House resolution expressing support for Israel’s right to defend itself in 2012.

and

Jones has an unusual record in the House. A former Democrat, he is deeply conservative on spending issues but has veered far to the left on foreign policy in recent years, joining libertarians like former Representative Ron Paul and current Representative Justin Amash as part of a small group of dissidents on many votes.

Jones was removed from a plum committee assignment in late 2012 and participated in an ill-fated coup attempt against Speaker John Boehner.

In the vote against the Israel resolution, for example, Paul was the only Republican to vote no, while Jones was the only Republican to vote present. Democratic Representative John Dingell voted no and eight Democrats joined Jones in voting present.

JOINED THE DEMOCRATS IN URGING MORE NEGOTIATIONS WITH IRAN

In mid-February of 2012, Jones joined Muslim Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), along with three North Carolina Democratic representatives (G. K. Butterfield, David Price, and Melvin Watt) and thirty-two other congressmen as signatories to a letter sent to President Obama, which stated, in part:

We have supported your Administration’s efforts to unite the international community to bring about the strongest sanctions on Iran to date. Now, we must redouble our diplomatic efforts to achieve robust transparency measures that can verify Iran’s nuclear program is strictly a civilian one.

and

We strongly encourage your Administration to pursue bilateral and multilateral engagement with Iran. While we acknowledge that progress will be difficult, we believe that robust, sustained diplomacy is the best option to resolve our serious concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, and to prevent a costly war that would be devastating for the United States and our allies in the region.

While no sane person would want war when there is a alternative way to achieve a good outcome, the foolish persistence by the Obama administration in continuing these interminable negotiations with an Islamic state, Iran, that sees negotiations much like North Korea sees them, as only a tactic to forestall action on the part of it’s adversaries while it pursues it’s private goals, may come at a high cost to Israel if Iran succeeds in producing nuclear weapons.

MISCELLANEOUS

On the Budget: On April 15, 2011, Jones was one of four Republican members of congress to vote against The Path to Prosperity, which was the Republican Party’s budget proposal for the United States federal government in the fiscal year 2012. In December 2012, Jones was one of four House Republicans removed from their committees by Speaker of the House John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor for defying party leadership. Jones was removed from the Financial Services Committee, a plum seat for fundraising, as reprisal for not raising money for the Republican Party. [Wikipedia, WBJ]

On the War In Iraq: He contends that the United States went to war “with no justification.” <snip> On June 16, 2005, he joined with three other members of Congress (Neil Abercrombie, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul) in introducing a resolution calling for the start of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq to begin by October 2006. [Wikipedia, WBJ]

Loss of Sub-Committee Assignment: Jones’ views on the war in Iraq did not ingratiate him to [President George W.] Bush or to the Republican leadership, which prevented him from succeeding the late Jo Ann Davis as ranking Republican on the Readiness Subcommittee of the Armed Forces Committee. He was passed over for Randy Forbes when the 110th Congress convened because the full committee’s ranking member, Duncan Hunter of California, didn’t agree with Jones’ change of heart on the war. He had been approached by some Democrats about bolting the GOP and either becoming an independent caucusing with the Democrats or switching back to the Democratic Party outright. [Wikipedia, WBJ]

Caucus Memberships: Jones serves on the Liberty Caucus, a group of libertarian-minded Republican representatives in the House. However, he never joined the Tea Party Caucus, first launched and chaired by Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann on July 16, 2010. The caucus was dedicated to promoting what it considered fiscal responsibility, adherence to the movement’s interpretation of the Constitution and limited government. The idea of a Tea Party Caucus originated from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul when he was campaigning for his current seat.

IN SUMMARY

While it is true that Walter Jones served us well in his earlier years, his ideological drift has all to often put him at odds with conservatives in his recent terms. It is time, I think, to look for a more traditional conservative, a candidate who is willing to go out of his way to express his alignment with the values and ideology of the Crystal Coast Tea Party Patriots.

This Week’s CCTPP Meeting Highlights (04/08/2014)

This week’s meeting was well attended, but very short due to the necessity of many members needing to attend another meeting that began at 7pm. Nevertheless, the members were able to hear again from Board of Education candidate Janiece Wall, and to get in some informative Q-&-A with her.

The highlights, according to my notes, recollections, and follow-up:

Mrs. Wall is opposed to Common Core, and is particularly opposed to the curriculum changes that will be a consequence of it’s implementation.

She said that she was concerned about the Carteret County Schools budget, and that she would delve into the system’s budgets in an effort to understand them and to glean cost savings therefrom.

Although she could not think of any specific instances or issues with which she has or would disagree with Superintendent Dan Novey, she declared her willingness to do so when necessary.

When I posed subsequent questions on the issues of tenure and salaries her responses were as follows, with my slight editing for brevity and clarity:

CCTPP-QUESTION: We have been told that North Carolina is “46th in the nation” in teacher pay. It is a misleading statistic, however, as … no adjustments are made for state and regional costs of living, for differences in benefits, or for miscellaneous supplements. So the question is, do you believe that the teachers in Carteret County are underpaid?

JW-ANSWER: Yes, I believe all competent teachers in NC are underpaid. Teachers are expected to go beyond the classroom every day in their duties. Some examples are lunch duty, bus duty (morning & afternoon), teacher’s meetings, seminars, and parent conferences (without any comp time being given).

CCTPP-QUESTION: The NC General Assembly enacted legislation last year that included … an attempt at converting teacher remuneration to a more merit based system that offered … bonuses to higher-performing teachers. A condition was that teachers would have to give up … the tenure system over a period of time. The two questions I have are, first, do you consider tenure to be a vested property right of teachers who have been awarded it, and second, do you favor or oppose the abolition of teacher tenure?

JW-ANSWER: I believe we can continue to reward great teachers with tenure while removing unqualified teachers from the classroom. Tenure should be earned by the teacher and given as a reward for excellence in the classroom — not guaranteed to all teachers after a few years of service. A new teacher in NC is not considered for tenure until she enters her fourth year of teaching. During the first three years, a mentor is assigned to evaluate the teacher with an assessment tool provided by the State. If during this time, the teacher does not meet the State standard, tenure should not be given. If a teacher is given tenure and becomes complacent in the classroom, there are legal alternatives to terminate her contract.

This account will conclude the posts devoted to assessing the ideological alignment of the primary candidates with the values and preferences of the Crystal Coast Tea Party Patriots. Our members will vote soon, and our selections will be named in about a week or so.

A final thanks is in order to all the candidates who were willing to appear at our group meetings to expose their personal backgrounds and policy beliefs to the scrutiny of our members.

Charlotte Observer / N-&-O / TWC Cave, Agree to add Mark Harris to Debater List

At approximately mid-afternoon, yesterday, the three co-sponsors of the scheduled April 23rd debate between the Republican candidates for the Hagan U.S. Senate seat announced that they had reconsidered and would include Mark Harris after all.

In related news, I was told today in a telephone call with a WRAL spokesperson that the debates would be broadcast live, which allayed my concern that they might tape and edit the debates in order to produce a later telecast that was biased toward Thom Tillis.

The debates will begin at 7pm, and will be viewable along the Crystal Coast on Time-Warner Cable Channels 14 and 200. In addition, it may be streamed from the internet at TWCNews.com and newsobserver.com.

Schedule Set for 1st NC-GOP Senate Candidate Debate — But Is Harris Included? [ BUMPED ]

The Charlotte Observer has posted notice of the first scheduled debate between the primary candidates for the Republican nomination, all of whom hope to be the Republican challenger this fall to NC Senator Kay Hagan. The debate, which is also co-sponsored by the Raleigh News-&-Observer and Time-Warner Cable News, is to be held April 23nd on the campus of Davidson College in Davidson, NC, about 20 miles north of Charlotte. The line-up of debaters is to include Greg Brannon, ~~Mark Harris~~, Heather Grant, and in the cow’s tail position, Thom Tillis.

The online notice, HERE, includes additional information to include the time and specific location for the debate, parking information, an online registration form, and a space for those who might wish to pose a question to one or more of the debaters. Note that attendance is free, but attendees MUST PRE-REGISTER.

UPDATE

As you may have heard, one of the three sponsors for the debate, WRAL, has dismayed many conservatives by shutting candidate Mark Harris out of the debates on the grounds that, according to one of their polls, he had less than the requisite 7% share. The Harris campaign is determined to get WRAL to reconsider, however, in light of the following:

1) Candidate Harris has exceeded WRAL’s polling threshold three times since November 2013, most recently in March immediately following WRAL’s anchor poll.

2) Real Clear Politics averages every poll conducted for the race, and Harris finishes a close third in that average by just 2.7%. And this is before any of Harris’ planned political advertising hits the media!

3) Two polls since WRAL’s anchor poll show that Harris is the only candidate on the rise, while others are sitting stagnant or slipping. In fact, the most recent polling shows Harris above WRAL’s threshold, and it was even conducted by the same polling firm, Survey USA.

I think it is likely that WRAL is excluding Mark Harris in order to help Thom Tillis get the requisite 40% share of the primary vote. If you want to help persuade WRAL to reconsider their exclusion of Harris, here is the contact information:

Telephone the WRAL Assignment Desk: 919/ 821-8600
E-Mail them at AssignmentDesk@WRAL.com
Berate them on their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/wraltv
And if you are a twit, tweet them at: www.twitter.com/WRAL

Arise, tea partiers, and loudly voice your outrage at this transparent liberal attempt to sway the upcoming Republican primary election! Also, pre-register for the debate if you think you would want to attend in the event that Mark Harris is one of the debaters.

FURTHER INFORMATION

I am not a twit, but I contacted WRAL by all the other three methods. Below is the text of my e-mail message, Facebook post, and my telephone rant. Feel free.

Dear WRAL Management:

You people should be ashamed of yourselves for so blatantly displaying your favoritism toward Thom Tillis by excluding Mark Harris from the April 22nd Senate primary debate. Harris is a viable contender and among the frontrunners, so you are excluding him in order to help Tillis reach the magic 40% vote total. Your actions indicate a disgraceful bias, and you ought to reverse this decision.

If you telephone, state the subject matter (Exclusion of Candidate Mark Harris from the Senate Primary Debate) when the operator first answers. She will immediately connect you to a recording. After the recorded message is done, wait for the beep, then speak your piece.

Is This Why the Guvmint Needs All Those Guns & Ammo?

As regular readers will know, the graphic embedded in this post means that I consider it an example of the abuse of the government police power, either at the Federal, state, county, or municipal level of government. If you read the material at the link, keep in mind that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is most likely correct, and justified, in their view that the Endangered Species Act warrants measures to protect the desert tortoise. And they are probably also correct in their contention that western ranchers must pay fees in order to graze their cattle on Federal land.

What I find to be abhorrent, however, is the extreme and militarized actions taken by the BLM in enforcing their position against Clark County, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, a man whom his neighbors, and most other people, would consider a law abiding citizen, not to mention the fact that this is a civil dispute that dates back almost two decades.

Consider this excerpt from an Infowars post, HERE, by Paul Watson:

None of the family members were armed, but as soon as Dave Bundy began filming the cattle in the distance, eleven BLM vehicles each with two agents arrived and surrounded him. “They also had four snipers on the hill above us all trained on us. We were doing nothing besides filming the area,” said Ryan Bundy.

and

When Dave Bundy didn’t immediately heed the warning and return to his vehicle, a dog was set on him and he was subsequently arrested. “He was filming and talking on the phone, I don’t know to whom,” Ryan Bundy said. “It happened pretty fast. They came down on him hard and had a German Shepherd on him. And then they took him.”

When Dave Bundy’s father Cliven attempted to contact emergency response in both Mesquite and for Metro in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of his son, he was told to, “get off the phone or he would be arrested,” according to Ryan Bundy.

This episide has been the subject of much local media attention, so for more detail and background information, check out THIS local Nevada newspaper account, or THIS account from the newspaper in nearby St. George, Utah.

Affirmative Action in Higher Education: How Do We Stand?

The SCOTUS is currently considering the merits of last fall’s arguments before the court in Fisher versus University of Texas, a new case centered on the reverse discrimination that results from collegiate affirmative action policies. Journalist Gail Heriot has written an informative article on the case and on the nation’s experience with the long-term effects of such policies. According to Heriot, there is:

… mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

Her article goes on to explore the reasons behind the reality of affirmative action failure, including the problem of “mis-match”. Her entire National Affairs article, HERE, is lengthy but well worth reading. And for more, consider THIS article (in PDF format) that Thomas Sowell wrote thirty-eight years ago, in which he came to essentially the same conclusion about the merits of affirmative action.

“Acts of Love” and other Rubbish from Jeb Bush

Tell you what. The dentist says my son needs braces, and since straight teeth will help him advance in the world as an adult, I steal your wallet and use your cash and credit card to pre-pay for the dental work. That would be okay with you, right, ’cause the crime was motivated by an “act of love”?

Or maybe my wife is extremely depressed because we can’t afford to replace the automatic dishwasher that conked out last fall, so I sneak into your yard in the wee small hours of the morning to cut the copper coils out of your HVAC system, then sell the copper to get money to buy her a spiffy new Whirlpool. You would be willing to sweat it out this summer, right, knowing that your discomfort was in support of an “act of love”?

No less ridiculous was this rationale offered yesterday by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a possible Presidential candidate, now pathetically kissing up to the Hispanic community in hopes of cornering their votes:

Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime that there should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families.

But does Bush really want our votes, at least for his own candidacy? Political pundit Mickey Kaus says no, that Jeb is just being “John Alden” to Marco Rubio’s “Miles Standish”:

He’s not running, but he’s making space for Marco Rubio. Look at it this way: The GOP establishment is desperate to suppress Tea Party conservatives and also obtain the immigration amnesty they believe will win Latinos and relieve them of the need to do too much rethinking in other areas. P.S.: The need to rehabilitate Rubio–-which means avoiding a big immigration fight, at least in 2015 and 2016–-would be one more reason the GOP establishment might feel it’s now-or-never for passing an immigration reform bill. That would help explain the increasingly desperate and sneaky (but possible successful) efforts to keep amnesty alive.

Jeb Bush, also a Common Core supporter by the way, has said that he will make a decision on whether he will be a candidate in the 2016 Presidential race by the end of this year. But if he does, he can forget about getting my vote.

Senate Intelligence Report: Torture didn’t lead to bin Laden. Jose Rodriguez says different. [BUMPED]

Earlier this week I posted the paragraph below under a title that was comprised of the first sentence in the current title.

That’s the title of THIS piece from Bradley Klapper of the Associated Press. However, the article does not reveal what I think is a critical question when evaluating the conclusion of the Senate Intelligence Committee: How many of the fifteen Committee members were Democrats, how many were Republicans, and how did each member vote on the conclusions in the report and in the 400-page summary, which is to be released today?

To clarify, the Senate Intelligence Committee is composed of eight Democrats and seven Republicans.

UPDATE

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is the former head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and the author of “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.” Appearing as a piece on the editorial page of the Washington Post, Rodriguez has written a rebuttal to the Associated Press article cited in my first post, referred to above. The entire text of his rebuttal is reprinted below:

People might think it is wrong for me to condemn a report I haven’t read. But since the report condemns a program I ran, I think I have justification.

On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify and release hundreds of pages of its report on U.S. terrorist interrogation practices. Certain senators have proclaimed how devastating the findings are, saying the CIA’s program was unproductive, badly managed and misleadingly sold. Unlike the committee’s staff, I don’t have to examine the program through a rearview mirror. I was responsible for administering it, and I know that it produced critical intelligence that helped decimate al-Qaeda and save American lives.

The committee’s staff members started with a conclusion in 2009 and have chased supportive evidence ever since. They never spoke to me or other top CIA leaders involved in the program, or let us see the report. Without reviewing it, I cannot offer a detailed rebuttal. But there are things the public should consider.

The first is context. The detention and interrogation program was not built in a vacuum. It was created in the months after September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 men, women, and children were murdered. It was constructed shortly after Richard Reid narrowly missed bringing down an airliner with explosives hidden in his shoes. It continued while U.S. intelligence learned that rogue Pakistani scientists had met with Osama bin Laden to discuss the possibility of creating crude nuclear devices.

When we captured high-ranking al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaida in 2002, we knew he could help us track down other terrorists and might provide information to allow us to stop another attack. Those who suggest we should have questioned him more gently have never felt the burden of protecting innocent lives.

Second is effectiveness. I don’t know what the committee thinks it found in the files, but I know what I saw in real time: a program that provided critical information about the operations and leadership of al-Qaeda. Intelligence work is like doing a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box top and with millions of extra pieces. The committee staff started with the box top, the pieces in place, and pronounced the puzzle a snap.

The interrogation program was not flawless. But we identified and rectified our mistakes and, where appropriate, reported suspected wrongdoing to the Justice Department.

Third is authority. This program was approved at the highest levels of the government, judged legal by the Justice Department and regularly briefed to the leaders of our congressional oversight committees. There was never any effort to mislead the administration or Congress about the program. In 2006, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden expanded those fully briefed on the program to include all members of the intelligence oversight committees. It is a travesty that these efforts at transparency are now branded insufficient and misleading.

When portions of the report are released, I hope the CIA’s response, pointing out its flawed analysis, is also made public. But before anything is released, authorities must ensure that we don’t make the job of my successors, who are trying to prevent future terrorist attacks, any harder.

Nancy Pelosi once insisted that she had never had a briefing on the CIA’s interrogation program. The Obama White House insisted that the Benghazi attacks were a mindless reaction to an internet movie. The Senate, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, are both still firmly in the grip of the President’s party. You be the judge of who to believe on this issue.