An ongoing spat between supporters of Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Ron Paul flared again Thursday, when pro-Paul dissidents were kicked out of a Pasco County GOP Executive Committee meeting.
Sofie Lefebvre, a Paul supporter, said a sheriff’s deputy escorted her and her husband out of the Land O’Lakes Senior Center, where the meeting was held.
Their offense?
They are Republicans who don’t support presumptive nominee McCain. Though McCain’s nomination is all but assured by delegate count, Paul is still in the race.
“It’s this little nasty game going on,” Lefebvre said. “This isn’t America where you don’t let your own people into meetings. This is absolute fascism.”
Bill Bunting, the committee’s chairman, said it was a “special” meeting open only to precinct committee members, and he did not want any disruption of a busy organizational session.
“We had a limited number of seats,” he said. “Sheriff’s deputies will be hired from time to time. We’re not going to have interference from people who are not members yet.”
Lefebvre thought she saw two deputies, and guessed that about 10 people got the boot. Doug Tobin, the sheriff’s spokesman, said only one off-duty deputy, hired by Bunting, was present. Tobin said two people were asked to leave. A third showed up and left on his own accord when told it was an executive committee meeting, he said.
Bunting couldn’t recall the last time the committee hired deputies for such purposes, and acknowledged such meetings used to be open to all registered Republicans, even those who aren’t precinct members. He said Thursday’s meeting saw a “record crowd” of about 115.
“If you’re trying to focus on work, and four or five people come in and throw your routine off, I don’t think you’d accept that,” Bunting said.
Lefebvre has no issue with the Sheriff’s Office. She said the deputy told her he was hired to “keep certain people away.”
“The deputy was so sweet,” she said. “He said this isn’t right.”
The feud isn’t new. In late March, during an executive committee meeting, Bunting publicly questioned the party loyalty of three Paul supporters and wouldn’t give them precinct appointments they had applied for.
He later told the Pasco Times that he wanted unity behind McCain.
The state GOP signaled Friday it was behind Bunting.
“I’ve heard the chairman say that the time has come for unity in the party, and we’re all now united behind McCain,” said spokeswoman Katie Gordon. “If you’re cooperative and want unity, then you’re more than welcome.”
Lefebvre said GOP elders Mike Bilirakis and John Renke II told her they felt she had been mistreated at Thursday’s meeting. Neither man replied to calls from the Times on Friday.
Toward the end of his interview with the Times, Bunting took a parting shot.
He said Lefebvre still owes his committee $2,100 for 70 tickets to the Republican straw poll in St. Petersburg in December.
Lefebvre said it was $1,400, not $2,100. She said the way votes were counted at that straw poll didn’t turn out the way it was advertised, so she doesn’t feel she owes Bunting any money, though she’s tried returning the balance of the tickets.
“What I bought was not what was communicated when I bought them,” she said. “I don’t owe them anything.”
Washington - U.S. lawmakers have a financial interest in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a review of their accounts has revealed.
Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces, say nonpartisan watchdog groups.
David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, is to brief the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees on Tuesday and Wednesday. The latest findings are unlikely to have a significant impact on this week’s proceedings but could stoke anti-incumbent sentiment in this year of presidential and legislative elections.
Lawmakers charged with overseeing Pentagon contractors hold stock in those very firms, as do vocal critics of the war in Iraq, says the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Senator John Kerry, the Democrat from Massachusetts who staked his 2004 presidential bid in part on his opposition to the war, tops the list of investors. His holdings in firms with Pentagon contracts of at least five million dollars stood at between 28.9 million dollars and 38.2 million dollars as of Dec. 31, 2006. Kerry sits on the Senate foreign relations panel.
Members of Congress are required to report their personal finances every year but only need to state their assets in broad ranges.
Other top investors include Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican with holdings of 12.1 million - 49.1 million dollars; Rep. Robin Hayes, a North Carolina Republican (9.2 million - 37.1 million dollars); Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin (5.2 million - 7.6 million dollars); and Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat (2.7 million - 6.3 million dollars).
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat and former governor of West Virginia who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, invested some 2.0 million dollars in Pentagon contractors, CRP says.
Other panel chiefs who invested in defence firms include Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent who presides over the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
In all, 151 current members of Congress - more than one-fourth of the total - have invested between 78.7 million dollars and 195.5 million dollars in companies that received defence contracts of at least 5.0 million dollars, according to CRP.
These companies received more than 275.6 billion dollars from the government in 2006, or 755 million dollars per day, says budget watchdog group OMB Watch.
The investments yielded lawmakers 15.8 million - 62 million dollars in dividend income, capital gains, royalties, and interest from 2004 through 2006, says CRP.
Not all the firms deal in arms or military equipment. Some make soft drinks or medical supplies and military contracts represent a small fraction of their revenues. Many are leaders in their industries and, as such, feature in the investment portfolios of millions of ordinary people who invest at least a portion of their savings in mutual funds, which in turn hold stocks in up to hundreds of companies.
“Giant corporations outside of the defence sector, such as Pepsico, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson, have received defence contracts and are all popular investments for both members of Congress and the general public,” says CRP.
“So common are these companies, both as personal investments and as defence contractors, it would appear difficult to build a diverse blue-chip stock portfolio without at least some of them,” the group acknowledges.
If some of the stocks appear innocent, aides say legislators also are. Some did not buy the stocks in question but inherited them. Many hold them in blind trusts, so called because the investments are handled by independent entities, at least theoretically without the politicians’ knowledge of how their assets are being managed.
Even so, according to CRP, owning stock in companies under contract with the Pentagon could prove “problematic for members of Congress who sit on committees that oversee defence policy and budgeting.”
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees held 3.0 million - 5.1 million dollars in companies specialising in weapons and other exclusively military goods and services, it added.
Critics have assailed President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney for their ties to companies seen as benefiting from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Bush was characterised as pushing conflict in the interest of the oil fraternity whence he hailed.
Before becoming vice president, Cheney headed Halliburton, a major player in the oil services industry and the object of controversies involving political connections, government contracts, and business ethics.
Halliburton’s subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, was given multi-billion-dollar contracts to provide construction, hospitality, and other services to the U.S. military following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The contracts drew fire because of Cheney’s history and then-ongoing financial relationship with the firm, and because the company did not have to compete for the Pentagon’s business. The firm was renamed KBR Inc. after Halliburton spun it off last year.
‘Violent Bible’ movie to counter Wilders’ “Fitna” gets Axed
Note: Production of this film was not stopped because of death threats by ‘fanatic’ Christians. It was scrapped because of the LACK OF VIOLENCE by Christians.
One downside of being the in the current administration? You have to talk about terrorism. A lot.According to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, DVD piracy and illegal downloading are funding terrorist networks around the globe. Which ones? He won’t say.
<blockquote>Five sentences into a speech on Friday at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Attorney General Michael Mukasey was already waxing eloquent about how technology could help an “international terrorist looking to advance a murderous plot.” Moments later, he was outlining the ways in which “criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities.”
Who are these terrorists that fund operations by selling DVDs from the side of the road? Mukasey, who presumably knows, isn’t saying, so you’ll have to take his word for it. The examples that he did give were about criminals who wanted to make a boatload of cash, not finance the death of innocents in crowded squares, but we’ll cut Mukasey some slack here for one simple reason: he managed to make it through an entire speech on crime and intellectual property without suggesting that noncommercial P2P file-swappers are somehow equivalent to criminal gangs running huge Asian stamping operations.</blockquote>
Recent video obtained by CNN gives an inside look at the renewed conflict in Tibet. A new generation of Tibetans are starting to believe a path of non-violence does not work and threaten guerilla warfare against China.
Many allege that the killing of RFK was a conspiracy rather than the actions of a lone disturbed individual. Having analyzed audio recordings of the assassination, The authors of a new book say that at least 13 shots were fired. The convicted Sirhan Sirhan’s gun could hold only eight bullets, and the angle at which he stood in relation to RFK makes it unlikely that Sirhan fired the fatal shot. http://waronyou.blogspot.com/2008/04/second-shooter-in-assassination-of.html
