Minnesota Commonsense Conservatives look for candidates who understand the basic needs of government. Ones who oppose bloated, over sized, big government bureaucrats. Now we recognize that there are few perfect candidates. But, this list is a reflection of individuals who are hitting the marks or are closer to them than their opponents.
United States Senate - Kurt Bills (R). This guys understands how economies work better than most any Senate candidate I have ever heard speak before. Now while I recognize that he may not bake as good a cookie as his opponent, he definitely gets that government needs some "Econ 101". After many years of teaching high schoolers these basic principals, I am sure he can get into the minds of his Washington counterparts. Not voting for this guy should be a crime!
United States Congress (8th District) - Chip Cravaack (R). Most of us know Chip by now. He has been working hard to represent his district. A true man of courage, who also supports his wife's career and future. I admit he has made some votes that made me scratch my head. But, considering that he is a Republican in one of the biggest Democrat hotbeds in the entire state of Minnesota, it isn't fully a surprise.
Minnesota Senate (32) - Sean Nienow (R). I cannot think of a better representative to give his constituents a full understanding of what St Paul's "inside baseball" looks like. This man knows the way it works and has no problem pointing out the issues. A true champion for the tax payer. Sean fought tooth and nail against the wasteful spending in our state managed healthcare system. That alone deserve your vote.
Minnesota Legislature (32A) - Brian Johnson (R). The most soft spoken of the group yet, one of the most rigid conservatives you will ever know. Brian has served his community well for many years as an officer of the peace. He has seen the best and worst in people. He truly is a candidate who wants to make his district a great place to live. That has been proven by his service to Isanti County.
Minnesota Legislature (32B) - Bob Barrett (R). Not only do I like to say his name. I am proud to list him as a friend. It may seem biased that I would talk well about a friend but, his accessibility to the public is what created that friendship. A deeply honest guy who wants to help shape a good future for not only his family but mine as well. Top that with his strong working relationship with Sean Nienow and you have the makings of top shelf representation for Chisago County.
Chisago County Board (D1) - Rick Smisson. New ideas, new face and clear vision. Rick Smisson has the making of a game changer in the County. His real life experiences matched with a tenacity. Rick could bring a nice balance to a board that needs a face lift.
Chisago County Board (D5) - Darrel Trulson. Talk about a candidate who knows how to bring people together, this is that one. Darrel has a great blend of political understanding and likeability. He has a way to make people listen and often change their minds. He would be a great balance to Smisson.
........further endorsements to come.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Monday, October 29, 2012
MNCC Election Picks
Starting tomorrow (Tuesday) I will be posting Minnesota Commonsense Conservative picks for the elections. This would include the State Supreme Court Candidates everybody forgets to check before going to the election boxes. Stay tuned all week!
Letter to the employees.
This is a fairly long article. Rather than post it here is the link. I wonder what people would do if more "bosses" wrote this type of letter to their staff. Maybe people would pay a bit more attention?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceo-workers-youll-likely-fired-131640914.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceo-workers-youll-likely-fired-131640914.html
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Petraeus Throws Obama Under the Bus
Breaking news on Benghazi: the CIA spokesman, presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus, has put out this statement: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ”
So who in the government did tell “anybody” not to help those in need? Someone decided not to send in military assets to help those Agency operators. Would the secretary of defense make such a decision on his own? No.
It would have been a presidential decision. There was presumably a rationale for such a decision. What was it? When and why—and based on whose counsel obtained in what meetings or conversations—did President Obama decide against sending in military assets to help the Americans in need?
The Weekly Standard: William Kristal
Friday, October 26, 2012
Women Decide for Whom the Buck Stops
There's a new woman voter out there. Empowered women are holding
themselves to the same standard they hold men to, and it's showing up in
the public opinion polls. Female concerns over the debt and the deficit,
not the usual gender issues, have dramatically increased as the Nov. 6
election bears down upon us.
The Gallup Poll now shows Mitt Romney trailing the president by only a point among women who are likely to vote in 12 swing states. This follows a Pew Research Center poll taken after the first presidential debate showing that President Obama's 18-point lead among women had shrunk to a tie, 47 percent to 47 percent.
"In every poll, we've seen a major surge among women in favorability for Romney," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told USA Today after the first debate. These polls find women increasingly concerned with the deficit and debt, just like men. The social issues continue to be more important to women than to men, but these issues no longer dominate the discussion.
Hillary Clinton's famous needling of Barack Obama four years ago -- "the buck stops in the Oval Office" -- suggested that he didn't have the leadership qualities required in a president. She reprised the theme this week, inadvertently or not, when she fell on the president's sword to take the blame for the national-security fiasco in Libya.
Her attempt to rescue the president with her declaration that "the buck stops with me" follows the litany of mixed metaphors in search of someone to blame for the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The president stands accused of "throwing Hillary under the bus," she's accused of "getting Obama off the hook," and the State Department has become the "broken link" in "the chain of events" of a major security failure. The "failure of intelligence" contributes a new definition of incompetence at the highest levels of government.
When a president hides behind the skirt, or actually the pantsuit, of his secretary of state, it's enough to tempt even a feminist to put national security above the social issues.
http://townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/2012/10/19/women_decide_for_whom_the_buck_stops
The Gallup Poll now shows Mitt Romney trailing the president by only a point among women who are likely to vote in 12 swing states. This follows a Pew Research Center poll taken after the first presidential debate showing that President Obama's 18-point lead among women had shrunk to a tie, 47 percent to 47 percent.
"In every poll, we've seen a major surge among women in favorability for Romney," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told USA Today after the first debate. These polls find women increasingly concerned with the deficit and debt, just like men. The social issues continue to be more important to women than to men, but these issues no longer dominate the discussion.
Hillary Clinton's famous needling of Barack Obama four years ago -- "the buck stops in the Oval Office" -- suggested that he didn't have the leadership qualities required in a president. She reprised the theme this week, inadvertently or not, when she fell on the president's sword to take the blame for the national-security fiasco in Libya.
Her attempt to rescue the president with her declaration that "the buck stops with me" follows the litany of mixed metaphors in search of someone to blame for the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The president stands accused of "throwing Hillary under the bus," she's accused of "getting Obama off the hook," and the State Department has become the "broken link" in "the chain of events" of a major security failure. The "failure of intelligence" contributes a new definition of incompetence at the highest levels of government.
When a president hides behind the skirt, or actually the pantsuit, of his secretary of state, it's enough to tempt even a feminist to put national security above the social issues.
http://townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/2012/10/19/women_decide_for_whom_the_buck_stops
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Pay gap between government, private sector widens to 34 percent
The gap in pay between federal employees and private-sector workers has jumped 8
percentage points since last year, according to new data presented at a Federal
Salary Council meeting Friday.
On average, federal employees earn 34 percent less than their private-sector counterparts, according to the council's analysis.
The pay gap, which is calculated using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics based on pay in 34 locality pay areas, was 26 percent last year.
The council, which is made up of labor representatives and pay experts, makes recommendations on federal pay to the President's Pay Agent.
Over the last several years, the council's analysis has shown the pay gap increasingly widening.
Still, two years after President Barack Obama proposed a two-year pay freeze for civilian government employees, the issue of whether and how much feds are underpaid remains contentious.
A Congressional Budget Office study released in January found, overall, federal employees actually earn about 2 percent more in wages compared to private-sector workers, with wider differences based on education level.
But a June 2011 report from the the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, indicated government pay outstripped private-sector pay by 14 percent.
In reviewing various statistics on federal pay, the Government Accountability Office said the widely divergent results were due to the different methodologies the various studies used. Attempting to compare or extrapolate from them would be "potentially problematic," GAO auditors said.
http://www.federalnewsradio.com//189/3085581/Pay-gap-between-government-private-sector-widens-to-34-percent
On average, federal employees earn 34 percent less than their private-sector counterparts, according to the council's analysis.
The pay gap, which is calculated using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics based on pay in 34 locality pay areas, was 26 percent last year.
The council, which is made up of labor representatives and pay experts, makes recommendations on federal pay to the President's Pay Agent.
Over the last several years, the council's analysis has shown the pay gap increasingly widening.
Still, two years after President Barack Obama proposed a two-year pay freeze for civilian government employees, the issue of whether and how much feds are underpaid remains contentious.
A Congressional Budget Office study released in January found, overall, federal employees actually earn about 2 percent more in wages compared to private-sector workers, with wider differences based on education level.
But a June 2011 report from the the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, indicated government pay outstripped private-sector pay by 14 percent.
In reviewing various statistics on federal pay, the Government Accountability Office said the widely divergent results were due to the different methodologies the various studies used. Attempting to compare or extrapolate from them would be "potentially problematic," GAO auditors said.
http://www.federalnewsradio.com//189/3085581/Pay-gap-between-government-private-sector-widens-to-34-percent
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
GAFFNEY: The real reason behind Benghazigate. Was Obama gun-walking arms to jihadists?
President Obama’s once seemingly unstoppable march toward re-election hit what he might call “bumps in the road” in Benghazi, Libya,
late on Sept. 11, 2012. It might be more accurate to describe the
effect of the well-planned and -executed, military-style attack on a
diplomatic facility there as the political equivalent of a devastating
improvised explosive device on the myth of the unassailability of the
Obama record as commander in chief.
Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting — notably by Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge at Fox News, Aaron Klein at WND.com and Clare Lopez at RadicalIslam.org — and information developed by congressional investigators, the mystery is beginning to unravel with regard to what happened that night and the reason for the subsequent, clumsy official cover-up now known as Benghazigate.
The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.
One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Stevens was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj.
Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.
What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.
Investigative journalist Aaron Klein has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such thing. He observes that although administration officials have done nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility where the murderous attack on Stevens and his colleagues was launched, they call it a “mission.” What Mr. Klein describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” that lacked any “major public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern security official, “routinely used by Stevens and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”
We know that Stevens‘ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. It also may have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Mr. Klein reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security, our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”
It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy senior fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never know for sure whether they housed — and were known by the local jihadis to house — arms, perhaps administered by the two former Navy SEALs killed along with Stevens.
What we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”
In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies as well. That would explain his administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy (SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for The Washington Times and host of Secure Freedom Radio on WRC-AM (1260).
Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting — notably by Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge at Fox News, Aaron Klein at WND.com and Clare Lopez at RadicalIslam.org — and information developed by congressional investigators, the mystery is beginning to unravel with regard to what happened that night and the reason for the subsequent, clumsy official cover-up now known as Benghazigate.
The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.
One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Stevens was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj.
Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.
What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.
Investigative journalist Aaron Klein has reported that the “consulate in Benghazi” actually was no such thing. He observes that although administration officials have done nothing to correct that oft-repeated characterization of the facility where the murderous attack on Stevens and his colleagues was launched, they call it a “mission.” What Mr. Klein describes as a “shabby, nondescript building” that lacked any “major public security presence” was, according to an unnamed Middle Eastern security official, “routinely used by Stevens and others to coordinate with the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments on supporting the insurgencies in the Middle East, most prominently the rebels opposing Assad’s regime in Syria.”
We know that Stevens‘ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria. It also may have involved getting more jihadi fighters there. After all, Mr. Klein reported last month that, according to sources in Egyptian security, our ambassador was playing a “central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”
It gets worse. Last week, Center for Security Policy senior fellow and former career CIA officer Clare Lopez observed that there were two large warehouse-type buildings associated with the so-called “consulate” whose purpose has yet to be disclosed. As their contents were raided in the course of the attack, we may never know for sure whether they housed — and were known by the local jihadis to house — arms, perhaps administered by the two former Navy SEALs killed along with Stevens.
What we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”
In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies as well. That would explain his administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy (SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for The Washington Times and host of Secure Freedom Radio on WRC-AM (1260).
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