Thunder Pig

Macon County Commissioners

Coverage of the meetings of the Macon County Board of County Commissioners.

Franklin Town Board of Aldermen

Coverage of the meetings of the Franklin Town Board of Aldermen.

Macon County School Board

Coverage of the meetings of the Macon County School Board.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

WWNC-AM: Stories of Malia Obama's spring break trip to Mexico disappearing from the web

3/20/2012 08:00:00 AM Barack Obama , censorship , citizen journalism , WWNC 0 comments

(Erica Ritz) -- Have you heard that Malia Obama, the president’s daughter, is reportedly spending her spring break in Oaxaca, Mexico? Allegedly, she’s jetting off with some of her classmates and 25 Secret Service agents to a country that the State Department has said all Americans should avoid. But something is different about the latest “Obama vacation controversy:” references to it are disappearing from the Internet — and fast.

Source: WWNC-AM

I'm posting this mainly as a test to see if I get a request to pull the story or if it gets pulled for me by Blogger.

The media did not the Bush daughters any privacy when they went places, so I'm giving the media a bit of of their own medicine.

**10.17am** I've found an article on Politico [link] that addresses the situation:

A spokesperson at the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though given the late hour that can be forgiven. I will update here if and when I hear back from the White House, and when I hear back from spokespeople with the various websites and news agencies.

UPDATE: Kristina Schake, Communications Director to the First Lady, emails to confirm this was a White House effort:

From the beginning of the administration, the White House has asked news outlets not to report on or photograph the Obama children when they are not with their parents and there is no vital news interest. We have reminded outlets of this request in order to protect the privacy and security of these girls.

Franklin Aldermen 03-19-2012

3/19/2012 06:29:00 PM citizen journalism , Franklin Aldermen , local government 0 comments

Franklin Aldermen Agenda 03-19-2012

The Franklin Town Board of aldermen met briefly this afternoon to pass a resolution accepting a loan offer of $5,350,300 and an ordinance adopting a capital project fund for the capital improvements at the Wastewater treatment plant, Phase II.

The amounts appropriated for the project are as follows:

Line Item	$ Amount
Construction	$5,496,000
Contingency	$274,800
Preliminary Engineering & Design	$382,800
Construction Administration	$166,700
Legal	$30,000
Loan Closing Fee	$107,006
TOTAL	$6,457,306

The following revenues are anticipated to be available to complete this project:

Revenue Source	Amount
State Revolving Fund	$5,350,300
Rural Center Grant	$1,000,000
Local Funds	$107,000
TOTAL	$6,457,306

The Aldermen will be meeting at the Town Hall on Saturday at 8:30am until 11:00am for a retreat to discuss plans for the coming year. I will not be attending this meeting.

The next regular meeting of the Franklin Aldermen is on April 2, 2012.

Note: Barbara McRae, representing the Franklin Press and myself, representing this blog, were the only people present in the audience for this meeting.

Rick Santorum Takes Missouri (Again)
Mitt Romney Dominates Puerto Rico
Ron Paul Supporters Sabotage Missouri Caucuses

3/19/2012 06:19:00 AM 2012 , Barack Obama , Concepts , Idiot Ron Paul Supporters , Mitt Romney , Newt Gingrich , Primaries , Republican Party , Rick Santorum , Ron Paul 0 comments

Delegate Math 03-19-2012 Edition
Chart by Bobby Coggins

It is presumed that Rick Santorum has re-won Missouri (despite sabotage attempts by Ron Paul supporters) the state is scheduled to have another caucus on April 21st, where delegates will be chosen at the congressional district conventions. There are two more votes scheduled for Missouri. Here is an explanation of how the confusing caucus system in Missouri works:

How do the caucuses work?
County Caucuses, March 17, 2012: Attendees will select delegates and alternates to the Congressional District Conventions and State Convention. Delegates selected at the county level will not be bound to a specific candidate unless a rule is passed by participants of the caucus. (See below for a list of county caucus locations.)

Congressional District Conventions, April 21, 2012: Delegates chosen at the county level will select 3 delegates and alternates to the National Convention and 1 presidential elector. These delegates and alternates will identify their candidate before being chosen. They will be bound to that candidate on the first ballot at the national convention. (For Congressional District Convention location information, please see the bottom of this page.)

State Convention, June 2, 2012: Delegates chosen at the county level will vote on a slate of 25 at-large delegates and alternates to the National Convention and 2 at-large presidential electors. These delegates and alternates will identify their candidate before being chosen. They will be bound to that candidate on the first ballot at the national convention.

Source: Missouri GOP

The results of the previous Missouri caucus.

More on the attempts to sabotage the Missouri caucuses by Ron Paul supporters is after the section on Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico

Mitt Romney won over 50% of the Puerto Rican vote, meaning he gets all 20 of the delegates. It is expected that he will get 2 of the 3 superdelegates as well.

The Puerto Rico Results with 83% of precincts reporting:

Candidate	Votes	Percentage
Mitt Romney	98,375	88.0%
Rick Santorum	9,524	8.5%
Newt Gingrich	2,431	2.2%
Ron Paul	1,452	1.3%

There are no victory speeches available, so here are a couple of other videos relating to the Puerto Rican primary and a look at the way at least one candidate got the results of the vote...

Tablet News Delivery

Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuño greets Mitt Romney

Ron Paul Supporters Sabotage Missouri Caucuses

St Charles County

An account from a caucus participant in Christian County, Missouri:

Hubby and myself were in the Christian County Republican caucus today. It was insane.

Nobody got arrested like in St Charles, because our sheriff was the sargent in arms--but it got nutso from the get go....

The Ron Paulites tried to take over the process by bastardizing Robert Rules of order, objecting to every teeny tiny thing.

Their leader stood up and threaten to take their votes to Obama if the the majority did not respect the Ron paul minority and elect the chosen Ron paul delegates.

Source: Atlas Shrugs (read the whole thing)

Here is an account by a Ron Paul Supporter of what he observed in St Charles County:

GOP voters began showing up at the high school two hours before the caucus was set to begin at 10 a.m. Though the meeting didn’t start on time as organizers worked to accommodate the near-overflow crowd, attendees would get more than they bargained for before the day ended.

The caucus began shortly after 11 a.m. with an invocation and pledge of allegiance. It was followed by a reading of the rules by County GOP Central Committee Member Bryan Spencer and an introduction of County GOP Chair Eugene Dokes.

Dokes reiterated the importance of the rules and emphasized the ban on recording devices before pausing to implore a man in the bleachers to turn off his video camera or face arrest.

Source: Bob McCarty Writes (he also links to other coverage of the chaos)

Video from Christian County

A Ron Paul Supporter describes the plan to subvert the caucus process by putting forth delegates as Trojan Horses

I, as a conservative, am disgusted by the unruly and anarchistic behavior of the libertarian supporters of Ron Paul. Perhaps the events of this weekend will encourage the Republican party to move away from a voting method that is easily sabotaged by a handful of organized bad actors. Primaries are not so easily sabotaged and they allow for the participation of more people in the process of selecting the nominee of their party.

Delegate Math

The nomination of the Republican party candidate for President is essentially a numbers game. The 2,286 delegates who attend the RNC 2012 Convention in Tampa, Florida will select the nominee of the Republican party based on the varied (and often confusing) rules of the state or territory they represent. The candidate who will be the nominee of the party has to receive the votes of 1,144 of the 2,286 delegates.

In past election cycles, most states were winner take all and the nomination was usually acknowledged before March by a majority of the serious candidates and they would drop out in order to clear the way for the candidate who had demonstrated they had a plurality of support in the party.

This year, things are different in two ways. First, the RNC voted to change the calendar and made most states give out their delegates in a proportional manner in order to prolong the nomination contest. This, in my opinion, was an important ingredient in a recipe for disaster. The second change, is the unwillingness of candidates to acknowledge they cannot win the delegates necessary to be the nominee of the party. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are running as spoilers, hoping to deny the front runner the number of delegates necessary to be nominated. The reason I don't include Ron Paul in this category is because he has never been a threat to upset the process; he simply does not have the level of support necessary to pull it off and...the majority of his supporters are not likely to vote for the Republican nominee if that nominee is not Ron Paul.

Here is the state of the nomination contest to date: (March 19, 2012)

Candidate	Delegates Won	% Delegates Won	Delegates Needed	% Remaining Needed
Mitt Romney	513	44.84%	631 of 1328	47.52%
Rick Santorum	239	20.89%	905 of 1328	68.15%
Newt Gingrichl	139	12.15%	1005 of 1328	75.68%
Ron Paul	69	6.03%	1075 of 1328	80.95%

The numbers are stark. It is virtually impossible for anyone other than Mitt Romney to win the nomination and, at this point, to stay in the race is a destructive act that adds nothing to what has previously been said. All it does is increase friction and discord within the various ideological factions within the party. All this when we will be facing a very well funded candidate (Obama) who will be enjoying an unprecedented army of organized supporters who will be building on their 2008 campaign experience.

I've used the numbers from CNN for this table. Most of the "guesstimates" of how many delegates each candidate has is within 20 delegates of the numbers used above and, if those other numbers are used, change little in the look of the table.

Wearing of the Orange on St Patrick's Day

3/17/2012 05:44:00 AM Christian , Facing Evil , Holiday , Resistance to Socialism 0 comments

The Orange Order flag, also known as the Boyne Standard, consisting of an orange background with a St George's Cross and a purple star which was the symbol of Williamite forces.

Formation: 1796 in Loughgall, County Armagh, Ireland

Type: Fraternal organisation

Purpose/focus: To promote and propagate "Biblical Protestantism" and the principles of the Reformation. To commemorate via Parades and Orange Walks on The Twelfth the life and the accession of the Protestant William of Orange to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland, during the Glorious Revolution and his victory over Roman Catholic, Jacobite, forces led by James II at the Battle of the Boyne ensuring a Protestant succession to the monarchy.

I always wear Orange on St Patrick's Day to protest the Irish Catholic connection to Communism and Terrorism.

Plane Crash Kills Five at Macon County Airport

3/16/2012 06:33:00 AM Aircraft Crash , Airport , citizen journalism , Local News , Macon County , Social Networking 0 comments

**update** Some of the regional TV Stations have uploaded video to the internet that is embeddable on other websites and here they are...

Fox Carolina

WSPA

The "local" TV Station, WLOS has video, but it is not embeddable, so I won't link to it. The same with WYFF.

**update** Macon County News has an article and a video interview with Neil Hoppe, the manager of the Macon County Airport. [link]

Photo of plane crash posted on Facebook by Taylor Fenoglio at 2:09pm. [link]

I was monitoring my scanner yesterday afternoon and noted a radio communication at about 1:45pm on 123.050 Mhz, the frequency used by the Macon County Airport. The communication was brief, most of it unintelligible by me due to the accent of the pilot. The only words I could make out were "runway two five" and I tweeted about the radio traffic on my Twitter Account I use for reporting what I monitor on the airwaves.

A couple of minutes or so after I tweeted, the Macon County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) dispatched the Franklin Fire Department to a report of a plane crash at the Macon County Airport. I immediately pulled up an online scanner feed for Macon County that is run by a friend and started recording. I've posted the entire chain of my tweets in reverse chronological order at the end of this post.

Here is a recording of the public safety radio traffic with all the long pauses and other non-related radio traffic edited out of the first 15 minutes after the plane crash:

I also updated a Facebook Page I maintain with details of what I learned during the course of the event. [link]

According to information I gleaned from Facebook (by far and away the best source of quick information during this event due to the large number of locals using the social media platform) there were two couple and a small female child aboard the plane. My heart goes out to the families who lost loved ones and to the responders who had to sift through the wreckage to discover the remains of those killed in the crash.

Here is the flight altitude and speed profile of the last flight of N7700T as recorded by Flight Aware, an online flight tracker:

Here is what other media outlets reported about the crash:

WLOS-TV

Authorities now say five bodies were recovered from the wreckage of the plane crash in Macon Co. The plane was registered to a Bogdan Jakubowski of Venice, Florida. But the identities of those killed have not yet been released.

According to the Macon Co. 911 coordinator, the plane was attempting to land around 1:45pm, but appeared to approach at too steep an angle. The pilot tried to correct, but one of the wings dipped causing the plane to flip and explode.

Fire News also reported on the crash, but erroneously reported that Burningtown VFD was the lead agency.

ABC News (via the AP) also reported on the crash.

Initial Twitter Coverage of Events

WNC Scanner ‏ @WNCSCAN

#WNCscan Franklin VFD dispatched to report of plane crash at the Macon County Airport. Plane fully involved. cc @RussBowenNews13