Precinct Caucuses Causing Shifts in GOP-Controlled Utah

Cross-posted from the New Patriot Journal. Please visit me there!

UTAH (NPJ) – Around the country, there are grassroots movements getting involved in the political process at an early stage to influence the primary nominations of the two dominant political parties. In contests across the nation in places such as New York, Texas, Maryland, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Maine, grassroots political groups are influencing or even directly challenging party incumbents on both sides of the aisle.

In Utah, there is a system of party precinct caucuses that allow registered voters to cast a ballot for delegates who will ultimately decide who gets nominated to be put on the ballot for the Republican and Democrat parties in the Fall. On Tuesday, March 23^rd at 7:00 PM citizens across the state will gather in precinct meetings to decide who will vote for nominees in the party county and state conventions.

Normally, these meetings are attended by very few people, typically the politically savvy and connected. In the past, some precincts and even entire districts have had few or no attendees at their caucus meetings. People that show up at the caucus meetings in these precincts win state and county delegate seats at their parties’ conventions just by virtue of showing up. This year looks to be very different, with large numbers planning to attend.

A state-wide grassroots group, Utah Rising, is working to coordinate the efforts of a long list of local and state based conservative- and libertarian-minded grassroots and activist groups, including Tea Party groups, the 9/12 Movement, Independence Caucus, the John Birch Society, the Abigail Adams Project, the Club for Growth, the Sutherland Institute, the Eagle Forum, the Campaign for Liberty, Homemakers for America, and the Patrick Henry Caucus.

Together with Independence Caucus, Utah Rising has been coordinating a series of “mock caucus” training events helping local citizens understand the process and how to get involved. Neither group is endorsing a specific candidate, but urge all citizens to be involved in supporting constitutional government.

The person that is currently the target of these groups is U.S. Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT).  According to the Club for Growth, Bennett has “supported and voted for the massive $700 billion Wall Street bailout,” supported “amnesty for illegals,” has “[close] ties to [the government-backed home mortgage companies] Freddie [Mac] and Fannie [Mae],” “broke his term limits pledge,” and “sponsors and supports a trillion-dollar government takeover of healthcare.” The fact that Bennett’s healthcare proposal was a smaller alternative to the current bill being debated in Congress doesn’t impress his opponents, who point to the government-mandated insurance program, increased taxes and insurance premiums, and inclusion abortion coverage.

According to a video produced by Independence Caucus, Bennett’s largest donors have been the companies which benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a bill which appropriated taxpayer money that was redirected to prop up large banks and insurance companies in financial distress, and asserts that although Bennett was the fourth most successful fund-raiser in the Senate since the last election, over 80% of his donations came from interests or organizations outside the state of Utah.

OpenSecrets.org lists seven of his top eight financial backers as the political action committees (PACs) and employees of Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, the American Bankers Association,Fannie Mae, Bank of America and American Express.” Deseret News reports that most of Bennett’s recent fundraisers were “held in Washington, D.C., and were hosted or sponsored by individual lobbyists or large lobbying firms.”

These actions have earned him the ire of constitutional watchdogs who claim he has overstepped Congressional authority, and left him representing interests outside the state and not those of his constituents.

Bennett has alternately ignored and denied these claims. In his political advertisements, he references himself as “Utah’s Conservative.” Bennett serves as council to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, has a lifetime 83.6 percent rating from the American Conservative Union, and has supported measures most people would consider conservative such as supporting reduced, “flat” taxes, taking a pro-life position on abortion, and supporting increased energy exploration and development.

However, this is not enough for people such as Becky Pirente, a homemaker, mother of seven, and a leader of Utah Rising. “[My concern is] Senator Bennett’s lack of appreciation and respect for the Constitution of the United States which is the foundation of our society. His quote that the constitution is just an ‘antiquated document written for an agrarian society’ shows to me that he is willing to cooperate with those who are in power now in our government who seek to remake [it] according to the way that they would like it to be, according to whatever would benefit those who are in power right now. We're seeing the fundamental transformation of the nation.”

Back to the reason for the push to get people to attend the caucuses, regardless of Bennett’s hefty fund-raising: if just 60 percent of Utah’s Republican delegates (2,100) support a candidate other than Bennett, Bennett won’t be nominated for the Republican primary. In that case the nominee will run in the general election this fall and likely be elected in the strongly Republican state. Utah Rising claims that thousands of people have signed up to oppose Bennett in the caucus meetings. Bennett is working to mobilize supporters to vie for delegates at the precinct caucus meetings in hopes of heading off a primary challenger or being shut out himself.

The Republican and Democrat parties being impacted by the grassroots groups have mixed feelings about the involvement. On one hand, they encourage increased participation and support in the political process. On the other, the newcomers seem oblivious to the existing party structures and leadership and have agendas which are sometimes at odds with current party leadership.

Although often criticized by some as a radical wing of the Republican party, recent interviews with Tea Party groups “paint a picture of a genuine, amorphous, conservative grassroots movement united by three core principles: constitutionally limited government, free market ideology and low taxes. The American Constitution is a rallying cry and many now dub themselves ‘constitutional conservatives’.”

Regardless of their views, Pirente encourages everyone to get involved, learn about the political process, and participate in it. She sees Utah Rising, the Tea Party and 9/12 groups as educational institutions “for individuals who say, you know, I’ve had enough. I think it’s time that I want to get involved. Or I’m concerned about my kids future, what can I do? We’re there to help people find out what they can do and present them different avenues of involvement.”

Utah fights for states rights- land, money, and guns

Cross-posted from the New Patriot Journal. Please visit me there!

UTAH (NPJ) - State representatives stress state sovereignty, budget priorities, and citizen political involvement during a town hall meeting.

A group of state senators and house representatives and local citizens gathered over a breakfast of pancakes and eggs in American Fork this morning, eager to discuss and debate the issues of concern to their constituents and the bills which are currently working their way through the state legislature. The town hall meeting was held today on the one year anniversary of the tea party movement. Town hall meetings have come to represent a new level of involvement of citizens in government matters, and an avenue of communication from elected leaders to their constituents where political direction is argued, sometimes passionately.

The town hall panel comprised of Utah state legislators Senator John Valentine (dist. 14), Senator Howard Stephenson (dist. 11), Representative Craig Frank (dist. 57), Representative John Dougall (dist. 27), and Representative Ken Sumsion (dist. 56), and was attended by several prominent community and political figures.

Sumsion argued that a new approach, eminent domain, be used to force the federal government to cede control of public trust lands within state boundaries. “[Taking] those oil leases cost on estimate $140 million a year to the [education] trust fund and $720 million a year from the general fund, and that’s a billion dollars [a year] taken from the State of Utah.” Utah’s estimated state budget for 2010 is $4.4 billion. This bill was approved by the Utah house on Thursday.¹

Frank stated that the federal government controls 67% of the land in Utah, compared with percentages in the single digits among the eastern coastal states. Frank also stated that recently leaked documents reveal the current federal administration plans to create new monuments which would put even more state land under federal control.²

Of general concern among the panel and attendees was how federal mandates and regulations cost the state money, and when budgets are tight, and have been trimmed and trimmed again, there have to be ways to decrease the burden of federal expenditures, so that it doesn’t impact state programs such as education, health, and public safety.

The panel also expressed concern about federal gun regulation. Frank stated that new state legislation recently signed by Governor Herbert seeks to challenge federal control gun control.³ The law states that guns and ammunition manufactured in Utah, for sale and use in Utah, are not subject to federal commerce regulation. It is believed that the bill will likely be challenged as being unconstitutional and will incur substantial cost to the state to argue the case in the courts, but Frank quoted the governor who stated “There are times when the state needs to push back against continued encroachment from the federal government.” Speaking for himself, Frank stated “They’ve stomped on the tenth amendment, and they’ll continue to stomp on Utah unless we take a position.”

In response to those who claim the state legislature is wasting our time with “message bills”, Stephenson remarked, “There is no more important message that could be shouted today, given what the Federal government is doing in encroaching on states rights, in spending like drunken sailors. There’s no more important message that I know of. These bills are making a difference in reclaiming states rights, and reclaiming the rights of the people.”

When asked about the one year anniversary of the tea party movement and its effect on government, the panel insisted that the impact was being felt. Sumsion stated that the push back against the growth of government and reduction in liberties are directly because of grassroots organizations such as the Tea Parties, the 9-12 movement, and the Patrick Henry Caucus. “There will be so many people going to caucus meetings that have never been because of these groups. As citizens we’re tired of [recent government abuses].”

Valentine urged involvement, “I would really love to just have a groundswell from our community to the legislators.”

Although many attendees were of like minds and applauded when their representatives demanded more local control and less government intrusion, there were differences as well. One man interested in additional ethics regulation walked out of the meeting after the group applauded in response to a representative reading a study finding that there is no correlation between campaign contributions and political corruption, and stating that restricting campaign contributions is a violation of citizen’s rights.

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1 Associated Press. “Utah House OKs eminent domain on federal land”. Feb 25, 2010.

2 Davidson, Lee. Deseret News. “Hatch, Bennett seek to block more Utah national monuments”. Feb 23, 2010.

3 Raymond, Arthur. Deseret News. “Utah Legislature: Herbert signs gun measure that defies federal laws”. Feb 26, 2010

GM: Government Motors

On June 1st of this year, General Motors, the largest company in America and the world for decades declared bankruptcy. On July 10th, GM emerged from bankrupcty as the "new" GM. The stock ticker symbol "GM" which was synonymous with industry and jobs for over a century has been replaced with "GMGMQ.PK".

Now one can argue many reasons for the cause of GMs eventual demise. After all, the economy has been weak and sales are down.

For those of you who only think GM makes some trucks and big SUVs and wonder about all the fuss of this, you should understand what GM as a company has meant to America. GM led in global automobile sales for 77 consecutive years (1931 to 2007), longer than any other automaker. GM manufactures automobiles in 34 countries, and sells and services them in 140 countries.

A well-known saying was, "What's good for the GM is good for the country." Although some criticized this statement when made half-a-century ago, it could be made because of GM's size. Until recently GM had over 250,000 employees, some thousands of suppliers, and more than 6,000 dealerships. In 2008, 8.35 million cars and trucks were sold around the world.

Regardless of the media reports, the biggest problem that GM had was not making large cars when consumers decided to purchase more fuel-efficient ones. This was just the icing on the cake of their problems.

Just like the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme, the historic recession we are seeing doesn't as much create crisis in large companies and organizations as much as it reveals it. When bad financial decisions have been made, it's it lot harder to hide them in times of economic down-turn. The bigger the down-turn, the most transparent the financials of the company become.

No, the real problem that GM has had for some time now is the fact that GM's manufacturing labor costs were sky-high compared to almost every other automobile company in the world. In 2006, GM themselves reported in financial documents that their cost of hourly workers was $73.26 per hour. This figure is not what the workers were taking home, it was the combined cost of wages and benefits and promised benefits to retired workers. The only other company that had costs that high was Chrysler, and oh, by the way, they're now a division of the Italian automobile company Fiat.

To help give you some idea of what is competitive now in the world, compare wage costs with Toyota, now the nation's largest provider of cars, which has a cost of around $48 per hour worked. And, lest you think it's only because of foreign plants, most of the automobiles Toyota sells in North America are assembled here. To be blunt, any automobile company that wants to operate in today's markets can't have the kinds of costs that GM has and remain in business.

So how has GM magically managed to avoid being liquidated to pay its creditors, as our personal property most certainly would if we could not pay our debts? This is where things get rich, figuratively and literally.

The United States government has purchased 60% of the (new) GM along with the governments of Canada and Ontario buying 12% ownership, and the government-mandated GM health care system, now administered by the United Auto Workers' health care trust fund, which benefits by the way put GM out of business in the first place, picking up over 17% ownership themselves. The new GM owns all the "good" assets of the old GM, while the "bad" assets of the old GM, including loans it can never pay off, will rot in the investment scrap heap.

So after GM took $15.4 billion in loans from the taxpayers of the United States to stay out of bankruptcy in the past year, it has been purchased by the Federal Government, and other governments and psuedo-subsidiaries. Incidentally, the new owners of GM and creditors have, in effect, forgiven the $15.4 billion loaned to GM before the purchase. Isn't that generous? That's billions of taxpayers dollars flushed down the drain. Some $15.4 billion sold to the voters and their representatives of the nation as a "loan".

Now, tell me, what venture capitalist firm investors would allow those kind of losses and then throw additional money down that rabbit hole? So what's going on here? This government Madoff scheme is a simple payoff to the manufacturing unions by those in political power. Oh, and all you investors with 401Ks holding GM stock? Too bad for you. Consider it a hidden tax of government interventionism and irresponsibility. You now own a lot of worthless paper. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2009/07/10/gm-this-stock-is-worthless.aspx

The reason the Federal Government just doesn't rename the company to Government Motors and officially hire all of the union workers as government employees is the general resistance of the American public to socialism, and the administration thinks no one will notice this sleight of hand. And after spending a trillion or two on bank bailouts and health care, what's a hundred billion or so anyway?

GM will never make a profit until they do what has to be done, cut their costs to be competitive with the markets. I further predict that as long as the government stays invested in GM with bailouts, loans, and part-ownership, GM will never have to make the hard decisions that will have to be made to solve the problem. Does anyone really think it unlikely that GM will be coming back to get more money from the taxpayer? And when GM, under the Obama administration direction, brings out their new, under-powered, clean-green-skateboard-machine cars at premium prices, they'll find that consumers aren't so eager to purchase them.

The only question is what will the government do then? Pump more taxpayer money into the company, or enact prohibitive taxes on the "old, dirty" gasoline-powered cars to "incent" people to buy them? And when private companies, as they tend to do, outperform government-owned services and come out with something that performs better and costs less, does the government create a tax rebate for purchasing from government-owned automobile companies?

There was another saying that was common about GM. It went, "As GM goes, so goes America." Let's hope not, but based on this administration's track record I'm not optimistic.

Intrusion prevention in primary education

Why school systems need to jump on this network security bandwagon
David R. Bailey

As an information systems consultant who has been working with educational technology and security for nearly two decades, I have seen a lot of security breaches. I have seen students change their own or other students’ grades for a price, publicly post all of the teachers’ private information including social security numbers, break into other student’s accounts in order to frame schoolyard foes, and download files which forced a complete shutdown of a large metropolitan school district’s network and systems due to subsequent computer virus and worm activity. I’ve seen trusted WAN administrators set up unprotected personal servers on a school network and open it to the Internet, all without the knowledge of the school system, which concluded with the expected result of such actions. I’ve even seen security controls become the attack vector, such a compromised anti-virus update server saturating an Internet connection as a newly commissioned child pornography server.

http://www.techlearning.com/article/14906

Things I never thought I'd hear a Communist Leader in Moscow say...

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Condemns Socialism
Speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
January 28, 2009

Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state's omnipotence is another possible mistake.

True, the state's increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent.

The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123317069332125243.html

Hello,

I thought you'd be interested in this story. This is another good example of how court systems and politicians across the country are slowly chipping away at the rights of the parents versus the state to raise children.

This ruling appears to require state approval for a parent to school their child. Basically, the court ruled that homeschooling is not a constitutional right and therefore, the parent must have state teaching credentials to homeschool their own children. This case can be used by other legal cases as precident, unless depublished (to restrict the effect of the ruling to only this particular case) or alternatively have it overturned by a superior court.

California Court of Appeal rules parents must be credentialed to home school their kids
http://www.ksby.com/Global/story.asp?S=7984276

If you're interested in some ways to help stop this rampant growth of government intrusion into the family and information about the effects of judicial activism, I've found some resources that might be of interest.

Petition to Request Depublishing
https://www2.hslda.org/Registrations/DepublishingCaliforniaCourtDecision/

Home School Organizations - State and Local
http://www.home-school.com/groups/

Thanks and take care,

David

I admit that I love Thanksgiving. I, like most, also love to celebrate Christmas and Halloween, but I have to say that Thanksgiving holds an especially important place for me. I observe the shopping frenzies that surround Halloween and Christmas, even coming to define the holidays for many, and yet Thanksgiving has no such rush, unless you want to count the stacks of frozen turkeys and stuffing at the local grocery stores.

I was born on the 22 of November, a day that always falls on the fourth week of the month. Specifically, it falls on an important Thursday every six or seven years, although the period from 1990 to 2001 marked a twelve year departure from this cycle because of variations in the calendar. Thanksgiving Day is close at hand as I write this, and I often think about the holiday, it’s origins and what it means to us today.

As any elementary school child can tell you, Thanksgiving Day is a tradition in our country dating back to the early European settlers in Plymouth, Massachusetts, known as Pilgrims. Members of the Wampanoag tribe and the Pilgrims had a three-day feast in 1621, because they could. Life had not been so kind to the settlers in prior years, causing the starvation of many. Nearly half of their number had died of disease, starvation, and exposure.

The first official national day of thanksgiving was held in 1789 when President George Washington declared Thursday, November 26th to be a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” They had a lot to be thankful for, as the nation had just achieved what the world powers of the day had thought impossible. They had formed a new nation out 13 separate states and ratified a new constitution, which now has lasted for well over 200 years.

The uniform, regular national observance of Thanksgiving wasn’t started until 1863 when another President, Abraham Lincoln, issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation to declare a yearly holiday in late November. The nation had a lot to be thankful for then, too. The civil war, in which so much life had been lost, was nearing an end. Lincoln stated that “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. [This is] a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

To me, Thanksgiving is a time to gather those you love around you, family and closest friends, and spend some time discussing not the things which separate us, but the things that bring us together. It is a time to acknowledge the hand of a greater power than ourselves in the good things of life. Even the atheist can acknowledge that circumstances could be less kind and giving. It is a time of introspection, a time to forget strife and struggle, a time to cast off the negativity and bitterness, and a time to celebrate that which is worth celebrating.

It is hard to imagine a people more blessed than us here today. We truly enjoy a bounty unimaginable to most throughout the places and ages of the world. This is something worth recognizing and considering. And during the coming holiday season to remember to share the goodness in our lives with those who have less of it than us.

Ultimately, I love Thanksgiving Day because it celebrates the things that money can't buy... apologies to the turkey farmers.