Upcoming lecture in the Reagan Series

The Ronald Reagan Lecture Series
Will present:
The Virtues of Free Market Capitalism
Why Government controls and new legislation risk damage to our free market system

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 7:30pm
Town Hall, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va.

I invite all to come out and explore the benefits of the free market system, and how it has seperated us from the rest of the world as an economic leader among nations.

The dangers of socialism, with it's government oversight in national business matters and the suppression of competition, is of grave concern right now. Wayne Abernathy will lay out the case for maintaining the financial model that made us strong and enviable.

Even if you lean towards a more liberal point of view, this is a chance to do your research on the down-side of removing the free market from business.

PATH opposition fundraiser is huge success

Thanks to Bob Lazaro for the picture



Many thanks to Hosts Robert and Luciana Duvall for their time and their efforts. This guy is pretty cool in person. And as General Lee in "Gods and Generals" , who better to speak to the placement of unnecessary blights thru the "Hallowed Ground"?

Update:
Video is now available for the event. Here

Site additions and traffic

Many avid readers will have noticed the addition of my Stat Counter under my profile, and the redesign of the blog.
I added the counter back in 2008, a couple of months after the creation of the site.
Then on February the 23rd, exactly one month ago, the site achieved a statistical high point. I logged 500 visitors in 22 days...a little under a month.
Two notable occasions have been observed since that month. On March 17th, I can only assume that people were feeling the Irish spirit, because I logged 56 unique visitors that day. I've come close to that number a couple of days before that, and have received visitor numbers in the low fifties a couple of times since.

I've been challenged on other sites as to the validity of my claims on visitors.
So, a couple of days ago, I reset the counter and decided to make the numbers public.
Visitors can see the number of page calls, but won't be able to see the IP addresses, or the number of returning visits, but will see the actual number of "hits" the site receives.

Keep in mind that when the actual "page calls" hits 500, I usually copy the log for posterity and reset the counter.
UPDATE:
The site appears to have logged 202 unique hits in a wee bit over a week. I stretched the graph out to encompass March 21st traffic on one end to traffic up till 13:49 HRS on March 29th...
And I had 68 returning visits over those 8 days. At this rate, and provided I do indeed update the material on the front page, I could beat my 500 visit mark inside of 30 days. We'll see.

Meet Robert Duvall on March 25th

As Honorary Chairs of PEC's Transmission Line Campaign, actor Robert Duvall and his wife Luciana will host an evening at Grandale Farm Restaurant in Neersville on March the 25th.

I worked with the Farm and other rural operations (horse training facilities, vineyards, B&B's, and restaurant/grower co-ops together with plain old farmers who grow thousands of acres of soy and corn) back in 2007 in getting out their message that the rural economics were strong out here.

As I've told readers here (and that page includes a link to the first piece) the lines are not needed, and are only connecting a 20-30 year old coal-fired plant to a customer base that cannot receive half of what is produced on the Ohio-WV line. The plant will now fire up twice the production to get half the power to NJ. All while New Jersey's power needs are actually being met by Solar and other renewables, and studies of their actual traditional power usage show that it's declining.

I'm also happy to report that I caught up with Del. Joe May and Del. Tom Rust at a recent event, and one passed on that the Commercial ability to feed into the grid was passed in this last Assembly Session. Many of you know that I've been a proponent of getting the companies who are more likely to invest in Solar Arrays on their sites to recieve the benefit of feeding it back into the grid...which until this Session -- was not an option under the law of the Commonwealth. Homeowners have had the ability since a win several years ago.

Hopefully, New Jersey and New York are already allowing companies to feed excess photo-voltaic electricity back into their local grids. I know the push from citizens is on, but I haven't heard how their State governing bodies have reacted.

Joe also led the fight to allow a public/private partnership that will capture the methane from landfills. This has two potential benefits. It will capture methane that's just escaping into the atmosphere right now unabated, and it will give us the ability to refine that into a methanol, or just plain old methane.. one used in treating vegetable oils that gives them durability to colder weather (ala deisel/true biodeisel) and the other being explored as a replacement to natural gas.

I met with some Supervisors at a recent Party, and although we still very much disagree that "climate change" is man-made (Where were we to cause it when it happened two mllion years ago??) ...
I do believe that our energy autonomy is necessary, in that right now, we are at the mercy of foriegn entities who do not have our best interest at heart. Better to have our own technologies and replacements in place , so we can dump the huge amounts of fuels we do import before it comes to that.

So, back to the babysteps...
RSVP by: March 24, 2009 at 12:00 pm and Come on out and meet Mr Duvall, and a whole bunch of other great people for the evening.

So, let me get this straight.....

It's perfectly fine to blast McCain when he says the "fundamentals of the economy are strong", but shouldn't raise a pulse or an eyebrow when the Messiah does it??

Am I one of a small number of Americans who see the double standard applied here by the White House? It comes on the heels of FIVE appointees that have tax problems (and I'm not even counting two minor appointments that had the same tangle), on top of a tax and spend House and Senate with no particular steady hand at the reigns to hold them back...

WASHINGTON - The economy is fundamentally sound despite the temporary "mess" it's in, the White House said Sunday in the kind of upbeat assessment that Barack Obama had mocked as a presidential candidate.

Obama's Democratic allies pleaded for patience with an administration hitting the two-month mark this week, while Republicans said the White House's plans ignore small business and the immediate need to fix what ails the economy. After weeks projecting a dismal outlook on the economy, administration officials - led by the president himself in recent days - swung their rhetoric toward optimism in what became Wall Street's best stretch since November.

During the fall campaign, Obama relentlessly criticized his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, for declaring, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." Obama's team painted the veteran senator as out of touch and failing to grasp the challenges facing the country.

Emphasis, mine.

You can't have it both ways, kids. If it plays for you now, and was selectively fired at McCain in the election cycle...and the American people don't know the difference is hypocritical...then we really are more akin to the movie "Idiocracy" than I thought we were.

WHY we are WHERE we are

Well, well, well... I foretold this travesty all of 5 months ago. Because history supports the reasoning, I knew exactly where we were headed with this President's policies and their effect on economic conditions. Democrats do not understand even the simplest economic discussion, and the particular inner workings of one piece on all the others.

This , coupled with having to IGNORE the past, and the lessons that PROVE how best to avoid what we're having to endure these days. Will they look at real history, see FDR and Carter policies that drew out rough periods and caused lengthy recessions...or continue down this path of destruction and leave the Country in dire straits for a Republican to step in and fix in 2012?

Spending like drunken sailors pails in comparison to what Obama and a democrat controlled Congress are doing.

Loudoun to get Green Energy?

Seems Green Energy Partners/Stonewall LLC is moving forward on producing local power, and in fantastic news, is going to pursue green initiatives as the proponents of the facility.
Listed as alternatives are natural gas, Solar and waste water from nearby Leesburg to steam .
Local developer John Andrews, with his father, propose to spend $800 MIL to build the 600 -megawatt plant. It would also use Solar Arrays to add 300-megawatts to peak hours delivery.
And finally, it would use waste water from Leesburg to power steam turbines instead of merely flowing downriver into the Chesapeake Bay. Andrews has predicted an approximate $10 MIL in property taxes to the County.

More importantly, some readers know that I'm all for local power generation that defies huge interstate transmission lines that merely pass through the County, never yeilding so much as a volt to Loudoun.

Here's to John and the others who have taken the challenge and embraced "green" power.