WE’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE TOTO

Hmm, hmm, hmm! Look what Massachusetts has wrought! Monongahela Democrat rises amid the racist rednecks in Western Pennsylvania to rage against the machine.

I.M. Kane

 

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Bucchianeri hopes to unseat Murtha in primary

By Amy Revak

A Monongahela man with ties to Fayette County is seeking the Democratic nomination for Congress for the seat currently held by 36-year incumbent U.S. Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Johnstown.

Ryan Bucchianeri, a seventh-generation Pennsylvanian who was born and raised in the district, has announced he will seek the 12th Congressional District seat, and held his first rally earlier this month in front of supporters in his hometown of Monongahela.

Bucchianeri said he is “running a traditional grass-roots campaign.”

That campaign will include a meet-the-candidate event in Fayette County at 7 p.m. today at AMVETS Post 103 in Hopwood. He said he plans to travel to all areas of the district, which includes portions of nine counties, during the next few months.

The primary will be held May 18, and the first day to circulate nomination petitions is Feb. 16.

Bucchianeri, 34, is a former naval officer and Harvard Kennedy School graduate. After graduating from Harvard, Ryan worked in international business development as a manager at Lockheed Martin to enable the responsible trade of American technology and sustain American jobs.

In South America, he worked on a proposal to reduce the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, and in Eastern Europe he worked to strengthen regional security with NATO partners.

His mother, Rosemary (Rich) Bucchianeri, is a native of Uniontown and graduate of Uniontown Area High School. Bucchianeri’s grandparents were Dominick and Virginia Rich, and they owned and operated the Fayette Institute of Technology in Uniontown.

“I’m running for Congress to serve people of southwestern Pennsylvania, not the special interests of high-powered lobbyists who continue to maintain their power at our expense. Until we send new representation to Washington, we will continue to suffer the financial and ethical consequences of irresponsible earmarks and a power-structure designed to keep incumbents in office,” he said.

Bucchianeri, who wasn’t even born when Murtha first took office, said he looks forward to a competitive race and spirited debate this spring.

“I’m not going to be able to outspend (Murtha) but I will outwork him,” Bucchianeri said.

“Voters I talk with throughout the district are ready to turn the page and elect new leadership,” he said. “I’m running for Congress to bring a new voice to Washington and return responsible leadership to western Pennsylvania.”

Bucchianeri said he has a long family lineage of coal miners and educators in Fayette and Greene counties. He said he proudly followed in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather, Dominick Rich, who served in the Navy Seabees in World War II in the Southwest Pacific in the very same waters that he sailed years later as a naval officer.

“Public policy is a true passion of mine because I believe that responsible policy and good governance are the most effective ways to help others and have the greatest impact to improve our world,” Bucchianeri said.

The first-time candidate said he decided to run for this office because most of his background is on a national or international level.

He said while Murtha has had a long history of service, he believes people of the area are ready for a change.

“I will work to bring opportunity to a region that has suffered too long from economic decline.

“Most of my contemporaries have long left the district for opportunities elsewhere and our hometown streets and storefronts, once vibrant and bustling centers of commerce, are emptying at an alarming rate. This trend has to be reversed or we will continue to face the dire economic consequences of high unemployment and an aging population with little opportunity,” Bucchianeri said.

He said through infrastructure development, a well-trained workforce and innovative marketing, he would work to create and sustain jobs “throughout the district, not solely in a single city or a single industry.”

In addition to a better-educated and properly trained workforce, Bucchianeri said he would fight to bring the necessary infrastructure into western Pennsylvania to attract industry and ensure our workforce remains competitive in a global economy.

“With a vibrant economy and new opportunities, young people will stay in the region, energizing it for generations to come, instead of leaving for opportunities elsewhere,” Bucchianeri said.

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A STAKE THROUGH THE BLACK HEART OF MCCAIN-FEINGOLD

Laws aimed at controlling money in politics can lead to censorship.

“Because speech is … the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it …”—Justice Anthony Kennedy

Under McCain-Feingold, the government could prevent the publication of corporate-funded books that promoted a candidate’s election or defeat.

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A Free Speech Landmark

From The Wall Street Journal

Campaign-finance reform meets the Constitution.

Freedom has had its best week in many years. On Tuesday, Massachusetts put a Senate check on a reckless Congress, and yesterday the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision supporting free political speech by overturning some of Congress’s more intrusive limits on election spending.

In a season of marauding government, the Constitution rides to the rescue one more time.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote yesterday’s 5-4 majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which considered whether the government could ban a 90-minute documentary called “Hillary: the Movie” that was set to run on cable channels during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Because it was funded by an incorporated group and was less than complimentary of then-Senator Hillary Clinton, the film became a target of campaign-finance limits.

The 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act, aka McCain-Feingold, banned corporations and unions from “electioneering communications” within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. Yesterday, the Justices rejected that limit on corporate spending as unconstitutional. Corporations are entitled to the same right that individuals have to spend money on political speech for or against a candidate.

Justice Kennedy emphasized that laws designed to control money in politics often bleed into censorship, and that this violates core First Amendment principles. “Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” he wrote. The ban on corporate expenditures had a “substantial, nationwide chilling effect” on political speech, he added.

In last year’s oral argument for Citizen’s United, the Court got a preview of how far a ban on corporate-funded speech could reach. Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart explained that, under McCain-Feingold, the government had the authority to “prohibit the publication” of corporate-funded books that called for the election or defeat of a candidate.

That was a shock and awe moment at the Court, as it also should have been to a Washington press corps that has too often been a cheerleader for campaign-spending limits. Mr. Stewart was telling a truth already familiar to campaign-finance lawyers and the speech police at the Federal Election Commission. Former FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky recalled yesterday that in 2004 the agency investigated whether a book written by George Soros critical of George W. Bush violated campaign laws. Liberals as much as conservatives should worry about laws that allow such investigations.

The Court’s opinion is especially effective in dismantling McCain-Feingold’s arbitrary exemption for media corporations. Thus a corporation that owns a newspaper—News Corp. or the New York Times—retains its First Amendment right to speak freely. “At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure, would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue,” wrote Justice Kennedy. “This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment.”

For instruction and sheer entertainment, we also recommend Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurring opinion that demolishes Justice John Paul Stevens’s argument in dissent that corporations lack free speech rights because the Founding Fathers disliked them. “If so, how came there to be so many of them?” Mr. Scalia writes, in one of his gentler lines.

The landmark decision—which overturned two Supreme Court precedents—has already sent the censoring political class into orbit. President Obama was especially un-Presidential yesterday, putting on his new populist facade to call it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies” and other “special interests.” Mr. Obama didn’t mention his union friends as one of those interests, but their political spending will also be protected by the logic of this ruling. The reality is that free speech is no one’s special interest.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer vowed to hold hearings, and the Naderite Public Citizen lobby is already calling for a constitutional amendment that bans free speech for “for-profit corporations.” Liberalism’s bullying tendencies are never more on display than when its denizens are at war with the speech rights of its opponents.

Perhaps one day the Court will go even further and overturn Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 decision that was its original sin in tolerating limits on campaign spending. The Court did yesterday uphold disclosure rules, so a sensible step now would be for Congress to remove all campaign-finance limits subject only to immediate disclosure on the Internet. Citizens United is in any event a bracing declaration that Congress’s long and misbegotten campaign-finance crusade has reached a Constitutional dead end.

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TAKING ON THE CLIMATE CHANGE ESTABLISHMENT

Is there not one person among the 535 members of the U.S. Congress with enough conviction and courage to stand before the Senate or House and call this Global Warming/Climate Change “crisis” a hoax and a scam, denounce the little toad Algore as a lying, thieving charlatan, and expose the climate-change scientists as two-bit whores offering junk-science for grant money?  

I.M. Kane

 

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Godfrey Bloom exposes more global warming tax scammers

Godfrey Bloom, a Member of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom, obviously enjoys pissing in the leftist punch bowl. The following are but a few of his memorable quotes regarding the global warming scam:

“I take the opportunity of wishing the east European cities well in the coming of the very early skiing season, and snow and ice, which is indicative of the fact that, as independent scientists have now confirmed, that the globe is actually cooling and has been cooling since 2002 and broadly flat since 1998.

“So we’re all talking about something here which isn’t happening. I’ve heard time and time again members talk of CO2 as a pollutant — a pollutant that’s a life-giving natural gas. It gives me the impression that some of our members haven’t had the benefit of a formal education.

“Isn’t this really just about the state being able to get its hand in ordinary people’s trouser pocket and still get more tax from them? Isn’t this all about political control? Isn’t this all about politics and big business? The whole thing’s a sham, this bogus hypothesis that man-made CO2 is causing global warming.

“Enough, please, before we damage irrevocably the global economy.” 

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