Loyalty Oath

From the Washington Post:

Voters in Virginia's Feb. 12 Republican presidential primary will have to sign an oath swearing loyalty to the eventual GOP ticket. But there is no way to enforce it, because a voter's actions in a booth are secret.

The State Board of Elections has approved a state Republican Party request that all who apply for a GOP primary ballot vow in writing to vote for the Republican presidential nominee next fall.

Voters in Virginia do not register by party. Since the mid-1990s, the state's Republicans have fretted that Democrats might meddle in their primaries, which are open to all registered voters.

A little further research finds that the oath will be as follows: “I affirm that I intend to vote for the Republican candidate in the general election."

This is surprising and disturbing to me. It seems to me this is aimed as much at Social Conservatives who won’t vote for Giuliani in the General Election as it is at Democrats creeping over for the Primary. I realize there’s no way to “enforce” this, but I might remind the Washington Post that some of us like to actually keep our promises. A novel concept inside the Washington Beltway to be sure, but still… All this is going to do is have the effect of reducing social conservative participation in the primary, and maybe that’s the point. I fully understand the concern of a “split party” should Giuliani become the nominee. I don’t think it would serve anyone’s interests for a social conservative like Ron Paul to run on a third party ticket splitting votes from the Republican nominee and handing the election to whoever the Democrats put forward. Even as a staunch Social Conservative I’ll take Giuliani over Hillary or Obama any day… That being said, I really think trying to bully and intimidate those voters before it even becomes an issue runs the risk of alienating them over a potential non-issue, not to mention the fact that I think it’s just plain wrong…

English Just Wasn't His Subject...

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m skipping town tomorrow and heading south to Puerto Rico to spend Thanksgiving with my parents and sister.  To everyone out there, Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.  We truly have so much to be thankful for. 

Mark Steyn had a good article on some of the things we should be thankful for…

“Three hundred and 86 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.”

The Chavez-Hess Connection

Back last year when Hugo Chavez, the Marxist President of Venezuela, started making his anti-American statements, there was a large outcry over how CITGO was a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). What I don’t understand is why nobody is saying a word about Hess Stations. The Hess Corporation also owns HOVENSA, “a joint venture between a subsidiary of Hess Corporation and a subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA)”. PDVSA owns a 50% share of HOVENSA, which has a crude oil processing capacity of 495,000 Barrels Per Day (BPD), making it one of the largest refineries in the world. HOVENSA is located in St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, 550 miles from Venezuela. So guess where HOVENSA gets its crude? You guessed it; Venezuela. So not only does Chavez get money from refining the oil at HOVENSA, he also gets money selling the oil to HOVENSA to refine. Then that gasoline (over 175,000 BPD) gets shipped to the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and sold in more than 1,300 Hess locations from New Hampshire to Florida. I understand that you can’t track every drop of oil to make sure it doesn’t come from PDVSA, but it seems to be pretty simple to figure out that Hess Oil is really PDVSA oil and PDVSA oil is money in the coffers of an anti-American, Marxist government.

Just another reason to get off oil and find alternative sources of fuel, like nuclear power…

EDIT: All of this information may be verified on Hess Oil's Website.

Friday Headlines

Just some great stories I ran across today…

Tip to Parents: If your car’s about to be repossessed, don’t leave your children alone in it…  Now I don’t know much about the repo business, but do they normally stalk you to the grocery store and grab your car while you’re grabbing a bag of hot dog buns and a paper? 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard, reinforces the belief that they’re populated by nothing but nut jobs… They shut down the Boy Scouts’ Care Package Drive for American Soldiers because it was a “political statement”.  Apparently the local Boy Scout troop had set boxes at local polling places on Election Day to collect supplies for Care Packages to send to Soldiers in Iraq.  Not so fast my friend…  Obviously, supporting the troops is an implicit endorsement of Republicans (surely this wasn’t supposed to be a benefit to the Democrats, but I don’t know) and so would constitute campaigning, which is not allowed at polling places.  I always thought you could support the troops, but not the war.  No?

And from Howstuffworks.com (in the interest of full disclosure, my sister works there), the 19^th of this month is World Toilet Day.  So please, this weekend, clean your toilet.  You wouldn’t want it to be dirty for World Toilet Day…

Finally, it’s a sad day for baseball, as Joe Nuxhall has died at the age of 79.  Mr. Nuxhall first played in a Major League game in 1944, at the age of 15, making him the youngest player ever in a MLB game.  He started doing Reds’ broadcasts in 1967 and in 1974 teamed up with Marty Brenneman, with whom he spent the next 28 years doing broadcasts.  Having lived in Lexington, KY, I used to pick up the Reds games on 700 WLW and always enjoyed Joe and Marty.  To me, they’re what sports casting should be…  It seems so many of these old broadcasters are either hanging it up or dying and it’s really sad.  There’s something about that familiar voice on the radio when you’re teams playing.  “This is the old left-hander, rounding third and heading for home…”