Democrats for John Kasich

Checking the location of CIA safehouses on your personal Blackberry, are you?

Many Democrats may be relishing the prospect of a Hillary v. Donald matchup. His insanity and propensity for grandiose and irresponsible comments would turn off mainstream voters on both sides of the aisle, making Hillary look moderate and even-headed by comparison.

However, what these voters must realize is that she is facing the real risk of being forced into a plea agreement over her use of a personal email server, leading to her disqualification from the race.

From my point of view, her decision to install a personal email server with which to conduct official State Department business indicates that she is unfit to serve as President.

In the time I worked as a middle school teacher I wanted to use a Gmail account and set up Google Drive folders for my students to facilitate the distribution and collection of work. However, I quickly realized my potential liability in the event of allegations of inappropriate communications, and nixed the idea. How is it that I, as a classroom teacher, understood this, but not Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State,? Not someone I want as Commander in Chief.

Which gets to my main point -- if any of the current crop of Republican candidates, other than John Kasich, wins the nomination, we could be in for some serious trouble.

So, I encourage Democrats to contribute to the Kasich campaign, just in case federal charges are leveled against Clinton.

To get started, please click here: www.johnkasich.com/donate

Heil Donald

We must be careful with Donald Trump, now that he has gained real traction in the primary race. Based on the overall tenor of his campaign, I view him more as a force for evil than as a force for good. If America is great, it is great because of the values of freedom and equality enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. His hostile, xenophobic and verbally demeaning approach is threatening to lead us down a road that will prove corrosive to the moral fiber of this country.

Ironically, I don't believe that he really expected to be the frontrunner in the Republican primary this late into the race. His primary objective in this race was to be a spoiler to Jeb Bush, who, as Governor of Florida, had blocked his efforts to set up a casino in Miami. In fact, Trump had overwhelming support for his casino projects in Florida, and Bush was just about the only one standing in his way with the power of the executive veto.

It seems to me that he is actually surprised, in a kind of ironically funny way, that Republican voters have taken to his clownish antics, hyperbole, and use of the same campaign tricks that launched Hitler from obscurity and led to the Third Reich. I think that he is privately laughing at those that support him for being idiots and fools.

At the time Hitler entered the race, the German people were demoralized by years of economic hardship. Hitler's demonization of Jews, Gypsies and other "lesser races" fed the need of a frustrated and angry populace for someone to blame.

And, it does not seem to be by accident that Donald Trump is following in Hitler's footsteps: in fact, one of his ex wives has stated that he often read Hitler's speeches, apparently in preparation for a future campaign run.

No matter how serious the problems our nation faces we must not take even one step down a road in which we begin to place blame at the feet of vulnerable minority groups who do not have a voice. If we begin to unleash those evil forces we may not be able to control them. For this reason, Trump must be stopped. He has summoned the Devil by launching his campaign in a tirade against illegal immigrants from Mexico, and then later by suggesting that we should be afraid of all Muslim immigrants.

In 1932 the Germans could have saved the world great pain if more of them had taken the time to think about what Hitler was saying, instead of focusing on how what he was saying made them feel.

Let's hope that the American voter can have the common sense to see through Trump and his manipulative game.

Get the NSA to Church

The NSA Needs to get some Religion in the Form of Congressional Oversight

The executive branch is conducting expansive domestic and global surveillance operations, unprecedented in scope and means, to collect and analyze information and communications of millions of people. These operations have raised serious questions about whether these activities are necessary, proportionate, and legal.

Given that neither Members of Congress nor the public were not — and still are not — adequately informed about these programs, Congress should form a special joint investigatory committee to conduct a full investigation and issue recommendations. Americans have confronted these issues before. Today’s Congress should learn from historical examples and form a new investigatory committee modeled after notable and relevant past successes.

In the early 1970s, the public and Congress learned that the CIA was collecting millions of Americans’ communications. In response, Congress created the Church Committee as a special investigatory committee and adopted a bipartisan approach to independently investigate activities conducted by both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Church Committee also formed a cooperative relationship with the intelligence community to access relevant information, while undertaking rigorous scrutiny of intelligence programs and maintaining the objectivity and credibility to assess them.

The investigation is still considered one of the most successful in U.S. history. It provided a significant accounting of the executive’s activities, led to meaningful reforms that governed surveillance law for more than three decades, and restored public confidence that Congress was conducting its constitutional oversight role. The Church Committee demonstrated that a special investigatory committee can, with political will and good leadership, effectively investigate executive surveillance and intelligence activities—and their abuses.

Source: https://www.eff.org/files/2015/12/14/a_new_church_committee_final.pdf

Common Sense Gun Reforms

Stymied for 7 years -- it is enough to make a man cry!

Obama and the Democratic leadership are perplexed beyond words over their inability to leverage mass murders in support of gun control. No matter how horrific the crime, they seem to be unable to rally public opinion to the notion that increased gun control will make us safer.

Of course, that is for good reason, since keeping weapons out of the hands of law-abiding citizens will not make us safer, and the Democratic leadership has shown a predilection for legislation that directly infringes on the rights of legal gun owners, which has cost them the trust of the majority of Americans when it comes to this particular topic.

They support measures such as legislation that would permit the victims of gun violence to sue the manufacturer of the weapons used as well as a 50% levy on ammunition, two measures that would effectively put the gun industry out of business.

Which is a shame, because there are basic, common sense steps that can make us safer, and on which our representatives should be able to reach a consensus.

For example, it is clear that the mentally ill, as defined as anyone who has been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or deemed unfit by way of legal proceeding, should not be permitted to own a gun. However, as demonstrated by the mass shooting at a Lafayette movie theater, all that a shooter has to do is cross state lines in order to conceal the fact that he is mentally ill. Therefore, it is imperative that we establish a national registry of the mentally ill so that this information can be made available to the federal background check system and law enforcement, with penalties for those states that do not comply with the law. A provision must be put in place for an individual to petition a judge for removal from this list once they can be deemed fit.

Similarly, anyone who has been the subject of a protection order should be immediately added to a national database which would prevent them from owning a gun until they can convince a judge that they are no longer a threat.

Finally, it seems clear to me that all gun sales, including transfers of ownership between individual owners, should be subject to the background check provision. A system that effectively keeps guns out of the hands of convicted felons, the mentally ill and those who have been subject to protection orders must not be compromised by loopholes that facilitate straw purchases and transfers.

Such measures would do little to infringe on the rights of the vast majority of law-abiding citizens, but would go far to help keep guns out of the hands of those who should not have them.