Day: December 5, 2005

It’s DoD Opening and Closing Your Garage Door

Buck Banks

Nobody told me my opener was unlicensed: In another instance of Homeland Insecurity, Congress has asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the Department of Defense’s recent deployment of Land Mobile Radios to military bases around the country. Seems the LMRs operate in the same frequency range as garage door openers.

According to the GAO, there have been between 1,300 and 10,000, but probably more, complaints from consumers in the vicinity of military bases because of interference with the operation of their electronic garage doors. Unfortunately for folks either locked in the garage or whose garage doors open unexpectedly, they’re just going to have to get used to it.

According to Federal Communications Commission regulations, garage door openers are unlicensed devices that use the 380-399.9 MHz signal range. The DoD is, of course, licensed to use that range, though it has only started to do so since deploying the Land Mobile Radios.

Sez DoD to the garage-door impaired: “My clicker trumps your clicker!”

Poll: Bush’s Bounce May Turn Out to Be a Pratfall

Buck Banks

Desperate conservatism: In today’s PollTrack by the National Journal, most folks don’t expect the Worst President Ever to get an infusion of “political capital” from the favorable economic news coming out this week. At least not enough to bring his approval rating out of the toilet.

Time/SRBI pollsters put his overall approval rating at 41 percent, 1 point lower than Time’s September poll. Of the 53 percent who disapproved, more than three-quarters said they were unlikely to change their minds about Bush’s performance.

And a 49-percent plurality said the president isn’t likely to recover from the blow to his approval ratings. Forty-six percent predicted he could regain his higher numbers, but when asked if a series of nine issues were driving down their opinions of Bush’s performance, pluralities of respondents said yes for every one.

Majorities frowned on his work on the economy, Social Security and the budget deficit. His Iraq policies and higher energy prices were least popular, with about two-thirds saying those issues pushed down their assessments. Forty-five percent said those two areas had a very negative impact on their ratings.
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Another Idiotic E-Mail from the Florida Democratic Party

Buck Banks

Clueless and useless: Karen Thurman, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, is at it again. Please, stop her before she e-mails again! Here’s her latest:

I am writing you to make a correction in my previous email about the 2006 Florida Democratic Conference. US Senator Barak Obama will be the only featured speaker at our dinner on Saturday, December 10.

Also, if you are interested in signing up to be a delegate at the 2006 Conference,please cut and paste this url into your browser: www.fladems.com/donate/ConferenceHome.php
and scroll down the page to the link marked “Apply online to be an appointed delegate”. This link will take you to signup page. If you plan to sign up to be a delegate, please do so by 5 PM Friday, December 2.

The www.fladems.com website occasionally has problems with congestion when registering people for meal tickets. You can register or buy meal tickets by phone. Just call us at 1-800-925-3411 between 8:30 AM and 6:30 PM.

Have a great weekend and then join us in Orlando next Friday!

Karen Thurman

If I wanted to be a delegate to a function that Ms. Thurman doesn’t seem to be very clear about, I would have been out of luck because her e-mail was dated Saturday, Dec. 3, at 10:16 a.m. — nearly 17 hours AFTER the deadline to apply. With Dems like this, it’s little wonder that Florida is a red state.

Worst President Ever: Bush Vs. Buchanan

Jon Ponder

Worst of the worst: Whether through gross negligence or malfeasance (or both, probably), President Bush has driven the country into a war that has caused the deaths and dismemberments of tens of thousands U.S. service personnel and innocent Iraqi babies, children and men and women – at a financial cost of $250 billion (that we know of). No other president has anything like this besmirchment on his record.

Now the assertion that Bush is the Worst President Ever has even started to trickle up into the mainstream media. Here is Richard Reeves on the subject:

The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record… This is what those historians said — and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came from self-identified conservatives — about the Bush record:

  • He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;
  • He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;
  • He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;
  • He has repeatedly “misled,” to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;
  • He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign (Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);
  • He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;
  • He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;
  • He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic’s oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Reeves also compares the failed Bush presidency with the presidency of the man who, until now, was considered by many historians to be the worst president ever – James Buchanan:

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