Silver State Libertarian Leanings

The Washoe County Republican Party central committee voted last night to retain Heidi Smith as their chair. That decision, in and of itself, was a pretty good one. Heidi has done wonders for the organization of our county party.

Heidi was being challenged by Richard Disney for the chairmanship, which was a strange situation all together, since they are good friends and see eye to eye politically. So why would Richard challenge Heidi? He never intended to.

Heidi announced three weeks ago that she would like to step down, as she had promised when she accepted the position six months ago. Upon receiving this announcement, Ty Cobb Jr. did, as Junior does, and went ballistic.

Apparently, for the crime of daring to challenge the anointed one in AD26, Junior now feels Richard should be banned from politics in Nevada for life.  Junior expressed that in his own words by saying “any thoughts of a future political career (as slight a chance as that would be regardless) will be over.” (1)

The truth is, this kind of immature threatening and name call is standard operating procedure for Junior. When criticized by a local blogger for a decision he made his response was “I think that it is pretty obvious why his wife left him”. (2)Are you kidding me? This is the type of response that a legislator gives when questioned about his voting record?

The sad truth is the Republican party is so badly grasping for any crumb of power they can obtain, they will not only allow, but often times protect even the most deplorable of actions to avoid rocking the boat. Then they try to justify their actions under the shield of what they call “unity”.

In nearly the same breath that Mr. Cobb thought it was appropriate to attack someone’s love life, he had the following to say about Richard Disney “I look forward him or his friend Mr. (Richard) Disney running against me again. Considering that Disney received slightly over 1% of the vote against me in the last election, I’ll be sure to accord him the appropriate amount of attention”. (2)

First off, either Mr. Cobb paid so little attention to this race, knowing that daddy’s coattails would carry him into office, that he had no idea Mr. Disney withdrew. Or, he did, as Junior does, intentionally left that out of his statement to purposefully slander Mr. Disney.

Secondly, Apparently, the “appropriate amount of attention” includes whipping yourself into a frenzy, making not so veiled threats, and begging a tired county chair to run again to avoid Richard “the boogie man” Disney from obtaining a position he is highly qualified to do and has worked hard to obtain.

Make no mistake about it though, Junior can’t back these threats up on his own. Luckily for him, he has “big daddy” Bill Raggio to back him up. This was not my first central committee meeting I have attended. There are usually a dozen or a couple dozen people at these things. Most people at the meeting couldn’t remember there being a hundred plus people at a committee meeting in years, if ever. Many of course, attributed the high turn out to Heidi Smith’s great leadership. Nothing against Heidi, but she doesn’t command a turn out that size.

“Big daddy” Bill Raggio, however does. The Senate RINO leader managed to turn out every blue haired Republican who hasn’t shown up for a vote since they parked the horse drawn carriage for a model T. Must be kinda uncomfortable to have big daddy pulling the puppet strings to make you dance, huh Junior? They even flew people up from Vegas to speak on Heidi’s behalf. That seems to be quite an undertaking for someone who Junior supposedly doesn’t fear.

When is it enough? When are conservatives finally going to tire of the power mongers controlling the outcome of Nevada politics? When are conservatives going to tire of those same power mongers siding with the left and raising our taxes? (I’m looking at you Garn Mabey)

Ty Cobb Jr. uses constant and purposeful slander and threatening of those who oppose him reminisant of mob thugs forcefully swaying races. These tactics have no place in respectable politics. If Republicans want to continue to wear the badge of morality, they should call for Mr. Cobb’s resignation immediately.

If conservatives are tired of their elected officials walking lock step with the democrats for every tax increase they can think of, it’s time to stand up. Take action and don’t let the RINOs sway one more election.

(1) Obtained from an email that came into my possession.

(2) Obtained from this article on Dullard Mush.

Tonight the Washoe County Republican Party central committee will vote on their party chair. Some time back Heidi Smith announced an election to fill the position she intended to vacate. At that point, former AD26 candidate Richard Disney threw his hat in the ring. He was the only person to do so. It would now appear that Heidi has been encouraged from behind the scenes not to allow Richard to obtain that position and is therefore running against him.

NICPAC endorsed Mr. Disney early in his race in AD26 and we are endorsing him again for Washoe County Republican Party chairman. From Mr. Disney’s website:

Richard Disney is a former U.S. Army officer who served for ten years. Eight of the ten years were spent overseas. Richard settled in Northern Nevada after leaving the Army and became a licensed Series 65 Investment Advisor. Now, Richard is working to organize the Conservative Leadership Conference 2007 to be held October 11-13, 2007 at John Asquaga’s Nugget in Reno/Sparks, Nevada.

If you are member of the Central Committee please show up tonight to vote. It’s an important vote and Richard Disney could use your support. If you are not a member please show up anyway to voice your support. Richard Disney is a strong conservative with proven leadership skills. No one is more qualified than Richard Disney to lead the Washoe County Republican Party.

You can get the when and where here.

Yesterday’s shooting in Virginia was a tragic event, no doubt. The anti-gun lobby can be seen all over the news already blaming the gun and not the shooter for what occured. You can bet they will be attacking the second ammendment with renewed vigor.

What la la land do liberals live in that they believe if we outlaw guns the murders, criminals, and terrorists will gladly hand theirs over? Oh yeah, there was also that little incident a few years back involving some planes and some buildings. Seems to me you can kill more people with an airplane than a gun. We should probably outlaw those too while we’re at it.

Well, NICPAC never actually went anywhere, but our blog has been sadly neglected. No longer. We have a brand new blog on the Conservablogs network. We are still under construction, but the blog is up and running. Very shortly you we be able to access all the activites of NICPAC from the new blog. For now though, some of the links on conservablogs.com/nicpac may not be working properly.

I have been hearing these ridiculous commercials on the radio about fixing Nevada’s roads. Fixing our roads is not ridiculous, but the commercials sure are. So I started wondering who’s behind them. After RTC used tax payer money to lobby for emanate domain, I thought it would wise to find out what’s really going on here. 

It doesn’t look like there are any tax dollars involved here, but my next guess would have been right. You probably could have guessed it yourself. The Nevada Highway Users Coalition consists of nothing more than the unions that stand to benefit from a massive road construction initiative. Here they are: 

• National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, Northern Nevada Chapter 

• American Council of Engineering Consultants 

• Operating Engineers, Local #3 

• National Association of Women in Construction, Las Vegas 

• National Association of Minority Contractors 

• Framing Contractors Association 

• AGC, Las Vegas 

• AGC, Nevada Chapter 

• Laborers Union, Local 169 

• Nevada Association of Mechanical Contractors 

At least now you know who is trying to pull the wool over your eyes under the guise of looking out for your best interests. 

According to this article in the LVRJ, SB 415 passed committee today, with a five to one vote.

SB 415 would stop illegal immigrants from receiving Millennium Scholarships, college loans and in-state tuition.

I know, as a conservative, I should be celebrating this small victory, as most are right now. The truth is, I’m not sure how I feel about this bill. I like the idea of cutting off as many benifits as possible for illegals. I’m just not sure if this is the right benifit to start cutting.

The question becomes, do you hold children responsible for the mistake of their parents? Absolutely not. Do we take away government help for little Jonny because his dad is a loser methhead? Not at all. So why would we punish kids because their parents drug them accross the Arizona desert when they were 4 years old?

In case you are wondering, my opinion has shifted on this subject with the birth of my baby boy. What if someone where to hold him responsible for the stupid things I have done? There a long list of them, and he could be paying the price for a long time.

We have to take away the benifits of illegal immigration to reduce the flow of illegals, so the theory is sound. I don’t feel like this is the right benifit to take away. Especially because, as I understand it, Millenium Scholarships are for kids who have earned good grades in school. To me, these kids have done what we ask our immigrants to do. The have worked hard and integrated with our society, even if their parents are criminals.

If you want to stop them from going to school, stop it at the grade school, middle school, or high school level. Most parents bring their kids here illegally seeking a better life for them. It may be many years before they understand their kids won’t get college benifits. If they show up here and can’t put their kids in school at any age, they will realize quiet quickly they have not created a better life for their kids. That word will spread back to Latin America very quickly.

I really don’t think punishing kids for a crime their parents committed, quite possibly when the kids were to young to remember, is the way to fix our illegal immigrant problem.

David Limbaugh wrote an excellent piece on Pelosi’s treasonous visit to the middle east on townhall.com.

It is frankly astounding to me that people aren’t making a bigger deal of the colossal impropriety of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s unauthorized trip to Syria. Where is the outrage?

I realize Democratic leaders and those they answer to have unmitigated contempt for President Bush. I realize they believe the public rewarded their hatred and their antiwar posturing in the November congressional elections.

But according to the latest news reports, President Bush is still in office. This means he is still commander in chief and primarily in charge of U.S. foreign policy.

Democrats have long been opposed to the administration’s stern policy toward terrorist-sponsoring states like Iran and Syria. They apparently believe their evil tyrants mean well, and if we will just open a dialogue with them, we can build a lasting peace. After all, the vaunted Iraq Surrender Group recommended that very thing.

I highly recomend you read the whole thing.

I’m not the type of person that spends a lot of time watching tv. In fact, I don’t even have cable, which places me somewhere in the stone age. One of the few shows I really like is “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?”. Besides the entertainment value, I think it says something about our education system. I’ll explain what I mean a little later.

Yesterday, I saw Dina Titus is supporting this bill. Senator Titus and I don’t agree on much, but the theory behind this bill we agree on. The solution is where we disagree.

The bill she is proposing would put stop what is referred to as universal default clauses. The meat and potatoes of this clause gives the credit card company the right to raise your rates if you go deliquent on any bill, not just theirs. These things are pretty evil. My answer to this problem is education, not legislation. A government that protects you from yourself is a scary thing because that government gets to decide what you need to be protected from, whether you like it or not. Can you say Big Brother?

So this brings me back to “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?”. One of the questions that sticks out in my memory asked something like “what is the largest species of bear?”.  I may not be word for word on what the question was, but the point is, most or all of the fifth graders knew the answer, the adult contestant did not. The adult really had no good reason to know the answer, as he or she has probably never used that piece of knowledge after the fifth grade.

Now, I don’t claim to have all the answers to our education problems, but that’s where the “duh factor” comes in. What percentage of our adult population will ever need to know the largest species of bear? I don’t know exactly, but it’s probably a single digit number. Certain scientiest and such, but not most people. What percentage of our adult population will at some point need to understand how a credit card works? Nearly 100%. Almost every single person will, at some point after their 18th birthday, get one of those advertisements in the mail for a credit card. But yet we teach kids about bears, and not about credit cards. That’s a major “duh” in my book. If everyone needs to know something, it seems like a no brainer that we should teach it to them in school.

Another great question was “on which planet would you weigh the most?” Again, all or nearly all of the kids knew the answer. The adult answered correctly, but she admited to guessing. The vast majority of the population will never use that little nugget of knowledge again. They will, hopefully, need to understand how their mortgage works, but most schools don’t teach that. Again, this should be a no brainer. You have two options for today’s lesson plan. Something most people will never use again, or something that will impact the majority of adults. Which one should we be teaching? Duh.

Again, I don’t have all the solutions to our education problems, but it seems to me this country would be in much better financial shape if we spent just a few hours a semester teaching our kids the tools they will most definately use as adults. It’s all about prioritizing, and it seems to me we collectively have our priorities out of whack.

MSNBC reports The USS John C Stennis began training manuvers off the coast of Iran today. This is a perfectly normal operation for a carrier. They run flight ops in the gulf all the time.

Regardless of how routine the mission, I’m sure Iran must be at least a little nervous. If you have never seen an aircraft carrier up close, it is an experience you will never forget. When you stand on the pier and look up, you can’t help but almost fall over backwards trying to take it all in. I sure as hell would not want to see one of those show up in my back yard. Not to mention, an aircraft carrier battle group underway is one of the largest (I believe it’s sixth) militaries in the world.

Look at France. They just outlawed “citizen journalism”. So average Joe Frenchman can no longer video tape any type of crimial activity if they witness it. Why? To prevent inciting riots. But let’s be real here. The rioting problems France has had have been mostly a Muslim problem. Call it racist or facist or whatever you want, but it’s the truth. So France’s solution to Muslim terrorist, pretend they don’t’ exist and try to hide them from the public. Great plan. That will work out wonderfully.

How about Germany? They locked up a sixteen year old girl in a mental institution for what they call “school phobia”. And what exactly is school phobia? The fear of government run schools. The girl had been home schooled her entire life and didn’t want to attend public school. In Germany, that’s enough to earn you a love me jacket. This is an extremely communistic means of ensuring the entire population gets brainwashed for the “greater good”.

The Italians aren’t safe to travel anymore. They recently traded five terrorists for one of their journalists. There is a reason the United States doesn’t trade hostages. Terrorists are like little kids. If you reward their bad behavior, the behavior continues. What Italy has now done has re-enforced the idea that kidnapping will get the terrorists what they want. If I were Italian, I would be afraid to travel.

If that’s not bad enough, the Italians put Oriana Fallaci on trial for insulting Islam. How would you like to be put on trial for exercising a right you thought you had to free speech?

The United Nations happens to be one of the largest critics of the US. The same organization that placed Sudan (where the Darfur genocide is occurring), Somalia (the place President Clinton sent troops in to stop genocide), and Rwanda (where nearly 800,000 people have died due to genocide) on the Human Rights Council. If that’s not the fox watching the hen house, I don’t know what is.

The examples of moral inconsistency in the world are endless. It is human nature to dislike and criticize anyone who is not like you. So I’m glad the world hates us. That says to me, we are not like you. Thank God for that. Never take moral advise from someone more morally broke than you.