Miscellany: 10/21/12

Quote of the Day
One's first book, kiss, home run, is always the best.
Clifton Fadiman

New American Saints

There are less than a dozen saints that were born, lived/worked and/or died here. This is a big deal for my fellow American Catholics.

Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks 

The daughter of a Mohawk chief and a Roman Catholic Algonquin ,  Saint Catherine was the only family survivor of a smallpox outbreak that left her with some scarring. She refused marriage in her early teens and after instruction in the faith through French Jesuit missionaries in her New York village was converted at 20. Many of the local Mohawks did not like her conversion, and she emigrated to a settlement near Montreal for the last 4 years of her short life. Among other signs, her smallpox-scarred face allegedly became flawless within an hour of death  She is the first Native American saint.

Coutesy of http://blessedmariannecope.org/

Saint Marianne Cope is especially known for ministering to the legendary Belgian saint. Fr. Damien whom worked with Hawaiian lepers and eventually contracted the disease himself,  Miraculously.Mother Marianne never contracted the disease herself

McGovern: RIP

I was too young to vote in the 1972 election, but I do recall the campaign--Nixon made a reelection campaign appearance at the San Antonio airport. I was maybe 3-deep in the crowd, as close as I've ever come to a living President.  I didn't shake his hand but I did shake the First Lady's when she reached into the crowd.  It had nothing to do with being a supporter of Nixon. It was clear from the get-go that McGovern  was too left-of-center to win, never mind to beat an incumbent President. If I had been a Nixon strategist I would have wanted to fund McGovern's winning the nomination. I never understood the unforced error, the stupidity of Watergate; and McGovern was his own worst enemy, including the fiasco of initially selecting poorly vetted  Eagleton as Veep. I know that many libertarian remembrances fondly  remember his pacifism, but I also remember  remember seeing some very hawkish fliers supporting Israel at the time. I ended up supporting a pro-life third party candidate.

I was too young to be part of the anti-war movement; I still remember as a kid that the war seemed to go on forever  I pretended to be a junior Walter Cronkite reading off the latest casualty report. When Dad got his orders, initially cut for Vietnam, it was no longer abstract numbers, I was 12 years old with 6 younger siblings. I was in a state of denial; I refused to go to the airport to see my Dad off. What if Dad didn't come back? I was too young to be man of the house.  In Kansas, I was wondering why I didn't see my neighbor  friend around, and my mom pulled me aside to tell me that his dad was killed over there.

There's a lot about Afghanistan that reminds me of the sad involvement in Vietnam: propping up a corrupt, unpopular government, collateral damage of bombs (including neighboring countries), massacres, etc. I remember I had tough questions for my Dad later on: was he proud of the missions his (non-Army) role supported?

Then there was my resident assistant in the OLL men's dorm, Tom, whom I believe lost a  leg at Hamburger Hill--as I recall, it was one of those pointless things where the sides swapped possession on multiple occasions. It chewed up men.

What I remember about McGovern is that he was a fundamentally decent fellow. (I thought the Dems would have been better off renominating Humphrey. Unfortunately his overall policies were too statist for a center-right nation.) Hearing in the Reason commentary, that McGovern started to distance himself from progressive excesses of  centralized "solutions"; you wonder if at some point before he passes away whether Obama will be honest with the American people over his disastrous term in office.

Obama Campaign Funding: Scandal 

I don't  know what. if anything, the US or state/local governments are reimbursed for Obama's personal or political purpose travel-related  expenses(vs. official business) but as far as I'm concerned it should be reimbursed  from campaign funds or his political party. Billing the taxpayer, if it's not outright illegal, is at minimum unethical.

Every 4 years  the Democrats bitch about alleged voter suppression while they promote illegal double voting, outright vote buying with liquor or cigarettes,  as if pandering with free government stuff isn't bad enough, while fear-mongering over alleged corporation election buying ; the figures I've seen to date show individual contributions dominating, all business under 20% and of those little by publicly  held companies.

The Obama campaign plays games with the rules. For example, the NY Post reported  a British man was able to donate (illegally) $10 to the Obama campaign (and then got solicited for another $188--what you need to know is they have to report donors $200-above). So they wouldn't have to report him. He couldn't do the same on the Romney site because of tougher standard verification (including a 3-digit code). There are anecdotal reports of foreign  bloggers reporting they contributed to the Obama campaign. (Foreigners cannot contribute to American political campaigns, recently confirmed unanimously by SCOTUS.)

According to Breitbart.com:

China is a particularly timely topic, given that a recent Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report that found Obama's campaign website may be vulnerable to foreign donations--and deliberately so. 

 Last month, GAI found "Obama’s reelection campaign took in $130,867 from donors who provided no ZIP code and $2 million from those with an incomplete ZIP" while "Romney’s campaign recorded $2,450 from donors without a ZIP code and $2,500 from those with incomplete ZIPs."

GAI discovered nearly half of the traffic to Obama's campaign website comes from foreign IP addresses (on average, other campaigns receive less than 10% of their traffic from foreign IP addresses). 

For example, the study found “the Obama campaign regularly and aggressively posts solicitations for donations and campaign memorabilia on Facebook,” and “the campaign does not make clear in these postings that only U.S. citizens or permanent residents are allowed to contribute.” Fundraising solicitations from the Obama campaign have gone out to foreigners, asking them to contribute in amounts of less than $200. Similar solicitations have been posted in Arabic, Taiwanese, and Chinese on Facebook and on Middle Eastern and Asian websites. 

In 2008, the report discovered that an individual using the name “Doodad Pro” made at least 791 contributions totaling $19,065 to the Obama campaign while others named “Good Will,” “Test Person” from “Some Place, UT,” “gjtjtjtjtjtjr, AP,” and “QWERTTYYU” also contributed to the campaign. 

The most interesting -- or suspicious -- site is Obama.com, which the campaign strangely does not own. According to the report, nearly 68% of internet traffic to Obama.com comes from foreign locations. And the website is connected to Robert Roche, who lives in China and co-founded a Chinese company called Acorn International. Roche, the report found, made 19 visits to the White House since 2009, including being seated at the head table during a State dinner with Chinese president Hu Jintao in 2011. 

 And according to the study, BarackObama.com, the campaign’s main website, receives approximately 43% of its traffic from foreign IP addresses.

The GAI report recommends election officials: 

• Integrate safeguards to limit the solicitation of money from foreigners by requiring donors with foreign IP addresses to provide proof of U.S. citizenship before they can proceed to the donate page 

• Immediately require campaigns to use industry-standard anti-fraud security technologies including, but not limited to, the Card Verification Value (CVV) and a rigorous Address Verification System (AVS) 

• Immediately require all campaigns to retain and disclose identifying information on all online campaign contributions, including those falling under the $200 nondisclosure threshold currently allowed under federal law 

• Address the threat of "Robo-Donations": The absence of industry-standard anti-fraud credit card security features render campaigns more vulnerable to so-called “robo-donations.” Robo-donations are large numbers of small, automated donations made through the Internet to evade FEC reporting requirements. 

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

The Four Tops, "You Keep Running Away"

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