What is best in life?
Thunder Pig: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their metrosexuals.

PRESS RELEASE








Fairfax, Va. -- The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) has neither made an endorsement nor given out ratings to candidates in the Republican primary race in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District. The rating mentioned on congressional candidate Dr. Dan Eichenbaum’s recent mailer was not given to him by the NRA-PVF.


Candidate ratings and endorsements in this race will be released at a later date and will come from the NRA-PVF directly.


-- nra - pvf --


Established in 1871, the National Rifle Association is America’s oldest civil rights and sportsmen's group. Four million members strong, NRA continues to uphold the Second Amendment and advocates enforcement of existing laws against violent offenders to reduce crime. The Association remains the nation's leader in firearm education and training for law-abiding gun owners, law enforcement and the armed services.




**4.52pm** 


Mountain Xpress also has posted this statement [LINK], and will have a statement from  the Eichenbaum Campaign. I'll link to it when that becomes available.  --Thunder Pig




**7.40pm**


Here is the text of the reponse of the Eichenbaum Campaign: 
[LINK to website]



It has recently come to the attention of the Eichenbaum campaign that there may be some confusion pertaining to a recent mailing espousing Dr. Dan’s unequivocal support of the 2nd Amendment.
On April 13th at 9:57am, prior to sending the mail-piece in question, the campaign contacted Jeff Freeman, Senior Federal Lobbyist of NRA Federal Affairs, at the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) both to ensure that the NRA’s candidate questionnaire had been received and also to assess what rating, if any, had been given to Dr. Eichenbaum. During the call, which lasted approximately 8 minutes, Mr. Freeman confirmed receipt of the candidate questionnaire and stated that Dr. Dan Eichenbaum’s questionnaire had received the highest possible rating, an “A”. In addition, Mr. Freeman said that the NRA would not be making an express endorsement within the primary election.
Dr. Eichenbaum was pleased to have had the NRA rate his questionnaire with such high marks and was surprised to learn of the apparent miscommunication within the distinguished organization, of which he is a proud member. “I remain proud of the NRA’s “A” rating on my candidate questionnaire”, Dr. Eichenbaum stated, “I am also proud my 100% score by “Grassroots North Carolina”, our state’s leading advocate and defender of 2nd Amendment rights.”
In conclusion, Dr. Dan stated, “The real testament of my unwavering position on the second amendment can be evidenced by the incredible outpouring of support, volunteers, and votes that I have received by the men and women of this district who feel as strongly about the protection of our right to bear arms as I do. As your next congressman, I understand that the most important words in the 2nd Amendment are “…shall not be infringed.” and I will vigorously advocate for the protection of this important right.”
Dr. Dan Eichenbaum is, and will continue to be, the strongest of advocates for the 2nd Amendment and the preservation of our right, as Americans, to keep and bear arms.


**May 1, 2010 at 4.43am** 
(allow me to clarify the clarification)


The National Rifle association has endorsed Congressman Heath Shuler in this race. [LINK


Here is a record of the grades they've given to candidates in the North Carolina Congressional Races. Endorsements are indicated with a red check mark: (Note that hey've not released grades in the Republican Primary in our district.)








U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
District 3
(R) *WALTER JONES JR.A
(R) BOB CAVANAUGHAQ
(R) CRAIG WEBERAQ
District 5
(R) *VIRGINIA FOXXA
(R) KEITH GARDNER?
District 6
(R) *HOWARD COBLEA
(R) CATHY BREWER HINSONB
(R) JON MANGIN?
(R) JEFF PHILIPS?
(R) JAMES TAYLORB
(R) BILLY YOWAQ
District 8
(D) *LARRY KISSELLA
(D) NANCY SHAKIR?
District 10
(R) *PATRICK MCHENRYA
(R) DAVID M. BOLDONAQ
(R) SCOTT KEADLEAQ
(R) VANCE PATTERSON?
District 11
(D) *HEATH SHULERA
(D) AIXA WILSON?



An organization I trust far more than the NRA is the GOA. 


The GOA has given Congressman Shuler a C grade on Second Amendment issues. Here is their grade for members of the North Carolina delegation to Congress:



1 BUTTERFIELD....F
2 ETHERIDGE.......F
3 JONES..............A
4 PRICE...............F-
5 FOXX...............A
6 COBLE..............A-
7 MCINTYRE........A-
8 KISSELL............B-
9 MYRICK............A
10 MCHENRY........A
11 SHULER...........C
12 WATT.............F-
13 MILLER...........F-







We are now in the final days of a hotly contested race, with six good men vying for an opportunity to take on Congressman Heath Shuler. Early voting has been taking place for the last few weeks and Judgement Day is May 4th, 2010. By sometime that evening, we'll find out if we have a clear winner, or if none get over 40%, if we will have a runoff election on June 22, 2010. 


In my personal opinion, none of them have shown an ability to raise money commensurate with taking on an entrenched Congress Critter. Here are the latest numbers that have been filed with FEC:


Total Raised


$691,209 Heath Shuler
$128,930 Jeff Miller
$123,694 Dan Eichenbaum
$37,045  Greg Newman


Total Raised from Individuals


$297,471 Heath Shuler
$116,930 Jeff Miller
$21,117  Dan Eichenbaum
$17,045  Greg Newman


Total Candidate Self-Financing


$102,577 Dan Eichenbaum
$20,000   Greg Newman
$12,000   Jeff Miller
$0             Heath Shuler




Also, Heath Shuler has raised $365,171 from PACs. His current cash on hand dwarfs all his Republican challengers put together.


A lot of attention has been paid to the money race on this blog as a kind of barometer of public support and the ability (desire?) of the candidates to go out and get the type of money that will get their message out to potential voters in the district. Several of the candidates (and campaign staff) have shown an unconscionable level of incompetence in this area.


Fundraising is just one of the tools we have available to us as a way of looking at the candidates and their staff as they audition for the job of taking on our resident Congress Critter.


Another way of looking at candidates that can tell us about their political journey is to look at what candidates and political causes they've given to in the past. It can provide us with another piece of the puzzle.


Here is what I've been able to find in the FEC data regarding the above candidates (in alphabetical order):




Dan Eichenbaum [Campaign Website]




Date of Donation Amount Donated Recepient of Donation
7-12-2000 $250 Libertarian National Committee
10-12-2002 $250 Libertarian National Committee
1-24-2008 $250 ORTHPAC 
2-12-2008 $125 ORTHPAC
8-26-2008 $250        Libertarian National Committee
10-20-2009 $2,000 Dr Dan 4 Congress
11-18-2009 $250 Republican National Committee
12-27-2009 $250 Dr Dan 4 Congress
1-12-2010 $10,000 Dr Dan 4 Congress
2-28-2010 $285 Buncombe County Republican Party
3-01-2010 $20,000 Dr Dan 4 Congress
3-31-2010 $70,000 Dr Dan 4 Congress


ORTHPAC is Political Action Committee,  namely promoting the interests of eyecare providers and ophthalmologists in the field of politics.


List of candidates ORTHPAC donated to in 2007-2008 Cycle
List of candidates ORTHPAC donated to in 2009-2010 Cycle, including:


Heath Shuler $2,500 [2007-2008]; Nancy Pelosi $5,000 [every cycle]; Harry Reid $10,000 [2009-2010] along with many other Democrats [45%] and Republicans [55%].


This is one reason, as a general rule, I do not donate to PACs, because you never know who they'll be giving money to, and I don't want some of my money going to politicians I disagree with on so many issues.


There also seems to be a national trend among Republican candidates who are challenging established incumbents to not accept donations from PACs.


Jeff Miller [Campaign Website]




Date of Donation Amount Donated Recipient of Donation
2-23-2005 $250 George W Bush
8-02-2005 $200 Charles Taylor
7-27-2006 $200 Charles Taylor
10-20-2006 $500 Charles Taylor
10-18-2007 $1,000                             Spence Campbell
3-27-2008 $500 Spence Campbell
10-30-2008 $500 Elizabeth Dole
9-30-2009 $1,000 Richard Burr  
2-03-2010 $12,000 Jeff Miller for Congress
2-28-2010 $375 Buncombe County Republican Party




Greg Newman [Campaign Website]




Date of Donation Amount Donated Recipient of Donation
7-21-2006 $200 Charles Taylor
4-19-2009 $2,000 11th Congressional District Republican Party
2-17-2010 $490 Buncombe County Republican Party
3-16-2010 $20,000 Greg Newman for Congress




Heath Shuler His Campaign Website is not up yet, but I expect it be shortly


If he has given to a political campaign, I've not been able to find it. Seems this guy never cared enough to give to a political cause or candidate.








The other candidates, save James Howard, in this race have virtually no record of donations that I can find outside of donating to the BCGOP in order to attend their Lincoln-Reagan Dinner this year.


Conclusions and Commentary







Data for this post came from a number of sources, including Open Secrets, Congress.Org, the Federal Elections Commission and News Meat. Any errors from the original sources are mine [I'm bad to transpose numbers], so if you see any glaring errors, please drop me a note in the comments, and I'll correct them.


What do these numbers tell us? I think that they tell us what a candidate has cared deeply about in the past, and from that, we can trace a history of donations and draw some generalized conclusions. 

Generally, about half the people eligible in this country vote. Less than a quarter of eligible voters (I'm being very generous here) tend to vote in primaries. Even fewer people give to political causes or campaigns. I've seen no hard numbers, but from what I've seen during my time of crawling the FEC database, I'd have to say that figure is around 1%. 

The people who give to campaigns are either the most ideologically driven, or wealthy enough to hope for gaining some influence in policy if their candidate, or roster of candidates, wins.






Previously:







NC-11 Congressional Fundraising Race
April 21, 2010 Update








NC-11 Congressional Fundraising Race
April 20, 2010 Update



Plasma Rain Falling on the Sun

Posted by Thunder Pig Wednesday, April 28, 2010 0 comments

Continuing the trend of science-like articles today, I'm posting this video and a link to the Science at NASA website for a fascinating look at the sun as revealed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been billed as a Hubble for the Sun. So far, that has been upheld as the orbiting observatory has been showing us new things about the sun every week since it became operational. The discovery this week: Plasma Rain.

The movie, recorded on April 19th, spans four hours of actual time and more than 100,000 km of linear space. "It's huge," says Schrijver. Indeed, the entire planet Earth could fit between the plasma streamers with room to spare. 

Astronomers have seen eruptions like this before, but rarely so large and never in such fluid detail. As science team member Alan Title of Lockheed Martin pointed out at last week's press conference, "no other telescope comes close to the combined spatial, temporal and spectral resolution of SDO." 

Schrijver says his favorite part of the movie is the coronal rain. "Blobs of plasma are falling back to the surface of the sun, making bright splashes where they hit," he explains. "This is a phenomenon I've been studying for years." 

Coronal rain has long been a mystery. It's not surprising that plasma should fall back to the sun. After all, the sun's gravity is powerful. The puzzle of coronal rain is how slowly it seems to fall. "The sun's gravity should be pulling the material down much faster than it actually moves. What's slowing the descent?" he wonders.
For the first time, SDO provides an answer. 

"The rain appears to be buoyed by a 'cushion' of hot gas," says Schrijver. "Previous observatories couldn't see it, but it is there." 

One of SDO's game-changing capabilities is temperature sensing. Using an array of ultraviolet telescopes called the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), the observatory can remotely measure the temperature of gas in the sun's atmosphere. Coronal rain turns out to be relatively cool—"only" 60,000 K. When the rains falls, it is supported, in part, by an underlying cushion of much hotter material, between 1,000,000 and 2,200,000 K.





The above photo is of the International Space Station flying northeastward of the constellation Scorpius this morning. It is a 16 second exposure captured by my Kodak Z950 camera.






This photo was taken before the first one, as the space station left the constellation Canis Major. The silver glow of the moon can be seen in the lower left portion of the photo. It is behind the small hill, below the local horizon.


There will be a series of passes visible over the southeast during the next few days, both in the morning and in the evening. Here is a table of pass predictions for my location near Franklin, NC:


Search period start:00:00 Wednesday, 28 April, 2010
Search period end:00:00 Saturday, 8 May, 2010
Observer's location:Chestnut Cove, 35.5000°N, 83.2792°W
Local time zone:Eastern Daylight Time (UTC - 4:00)
Orbit:342 x 356 km, 51.6° (Epoch Apr 27)

Click on the date to get a star chart and other pass details.
DateMagStartsMax. altitudeEnds
TimeAlt.Az.TimeAlt.Az.TimeAlt.Az.
28 Apr-0.504:24:2019ENE04:24:2019ENE04:25:4610E
28 Apr-2.205:56:0810WNW05:58:3524SW06:01:0010S
28 Apr-2.120:46:0010S20:48:2423SE20:50:4910ENE
28 Apr-0.822:21:0810W22:23:3623NW22:24:3819N
29 Apr-0.504:51:2912SE04:51:2912SE04:51:4110SE
29 Apr-3.221:10:3610SW21:13:3278NW21:16:2910NE
29 Apr0.422:49:0010NNW22:49:1410NNW22:49:2810NNW
30 Apr-0.621:36:3110W21:38:5422NNW21:41:1710NNE
1 May-2.920:25:5110SW20:28:4570NW20:31:4310NE
2 May-0.520:51:4710W20:54:0520NNW20:56:2410NNE


I got the table from Heavens Above, and I highly recommend that website to you. 


I'll be taking photos of some of the coming flyovers, and will share the interesting ones with you.

Double Rainbow Near Franklin, NC

Posted by Thunder Pig Tuesday, April 27, 2010 1 comments





This is a photo and video of a double rainbow I spotted outside my house this afternoon as a rain shower passed by headed Southeast. It's the best one I've seen in a while!!!






Here is the full video from yesterday afternoon's Macon County Commissioner Meeting. It is about an hour and 37 minutes long. I recorded it in 320x240 (QVGA) resolution in order to speed up the video processing time. I will post my notes below the video when I find the time to type them up. Meanwhile, enjoy the video, and learn first hand what the county commissioners are doing...





I'll be in the Macon County Commissioners Boardroom by 2pm today, and will be tweeting and uploading photos during the meeting. You can follow the progress of the meeting on Twitter under the hashtag #macongov, or here on the embedded widget below. If you have a Twitter account, feel free to jump in and participate. The agenda for the meeting is at the bottom of this article.


**4.29pm** Here is a short clip from the meeting, a demonstration of a CPR Machine called an Auto Pulse:


I'll have more later.





MACON COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
APRIL 26, 2010 - 2 P.M.

AGENDA

  1. Call to order and welcome by Chairman Beale
  2. Announcements
  3. Invocation
  4. Pledge of Allegiance
  5. Public Hearings

    1. Community Development Block Grant (Rick Norton)
    2. 911 Road Names (Angie Kinsland)

  6. Public Comment Period
  7. Adjustments to and approval of the agenda
  8. Reports/Presentations:

    1. 2010 Census update (Derek Roland & Rhonda Blanton)
    2. SCC/CPR machine demonstration by Todd Doster,
      Southwestern Community College EMS Facilitator/Coordinator

  9. Old Business:
  10. New Business:
  11. Consent Agenda
    All items below are considered routine and will be enacted by one motion. No separate discussion will be held except on request of a member of the Board of Commissioners. 

    1. Minutes
    2. Finance
    3. Tax releases
    4. EDC Guidelines

  12. Appointments
  13. Closed session - Contractual & Attorney/Client Privilege
  14. Adjournment/Recess 

Candidates in the Congresssional Primary at the 2010 Convention of the 11th District Republican Party


Republican delegates gathered in the Charles M. Beall Auditorium on the campus of Haywood Community College on Saturday for the 2010 Party Convention this past Saturday to conduct party business. Thankfully, there were no party leadership elections, it wasn't a presidential election year, and there weren't a lot of resolutions that tend to bloom on presidential election years that make a convention drag on until there is no longer a quorum to conduct business because delegates get tired and go home. 


Here are the speeches made by the candidates for Congress at the end of the event, in the order in which they were made:




















Slide Show of the 2010 NC-11 GOP Convention

Posted by Thunder Pig Sunday, April 25, 2010 0 comments



Lighting conditions in the Charles M Beall Auditorium were low, and rough on taking pictures. I often had to try two or three times to get a good shot, and even then, it was dicey.

I hope you enjoy seeing the photos!






Photo Slide Show of Convention





.




I'll be Clyde, North Carolina for the 2010 Convention of the 11th District Republican Party. Instead of attempting to webcast the event from a shaky and unreliable WiFi connection, I'll be tweeting, uploading pics to TwitPic and short QVGA (320x240) videos during the event. I'll be using the twitter hashtag #NC11 as the official hashtag of the event. If you are planning to be there and have a twitter account, please feel free to participate and share your impressions and pitch for your candidate. The convention is scheduled to start at 2pm and I'll be there before then, hopefull providing coverage as early as 1pm, if not before.


I've embedded a widget below that will allow you to follow the event from here if you wish. I think that Mountain Xpress is including the #NC11 tag today as part of their #avlelect election coverage, and may be sending someone to cover the event as well. [Scroll down to see their tweets]


This year's Congressional Race has six good men running in a crowded field. So far, only three of them have raised enough money to levels that require reporting to the FEC [link to report], so I'm going to treat these men as the top tier candidates. The others have their good points, but without a proven ability to raise money, I'm afraid I can't support them in the primary. It will take large amounts of money in order to stand a chance of defeating Congressman Heath Shuler this fall. It may not even be possible to do that even then given the state of anarchy in the Republican Party and Congressman Shuler's ability to portray himself as a social and fiscal conservative to the voters of the district. 


The quick videos I will be uploading today will be low resolution videos designed for quick posting to the Internet. I will add them to the end of this post in the order that I upload them, and will provide a link to the YouTube Page they can be seen on in the Twitter Stream. Any HD resolution videos will be posted (at the earliest) Monday morning.


The twitter feed below is not moderated in accordance with my philosophy of Free Speech. So, today, anyone with a twitter account can contribute to coverage of the event as citizen journalists. If you are at the event, please come up and introduce yourself, I'd be glad to put a face to some of my friends, political allies and even political foes today!






VIDEOS AND PHOTOS WILL BE ADDED BELOW HERE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER:









Photo Slide Show of Convention

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