Ted Ankrum For U.S. Congress 10

Thank you (2.00 / 1)

You did a great job setting up ankrum2010.com

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by: LSadun @ Sun Jan 24, 2010 at 01:41:15 AM UTC

ABSOLUTELY! (2.00 / 1)

   Ted is a great candidate, and Democrats NEED to rally behind our great candidates now, more than ever!  I'M FIGHTING MAD, AND I'M NOT WAITING FOR THE OLD MEDIA TO START TELLING THE TRUTH!  My voice and my money are at work for this great candidate, what are you ready to do?

Don't default to the bastards!

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by: rwcold @ Sun Jan 24, 2010 at 18:56:29 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Comment/Questions (0.00 / 0)

First and foremost I have the utmost respect for Mr . Ankrum's service to our country.  

I do wounder how he would have voted on the bailouts.  He seems to think Congressman McCaul votes with Wall Street "fat cats" however the most recent bailouts he voted against the Democrats and Wall Street.

Unfortunately most of Mr. Ankrums solutions to problems seem to be government based.  He seems to take a skeptical view of the free market. i.e. "we need to directly employ people to do necessary work, instead of giving out tax cuts in the hope that maybe, somehow, jobs will be created".  I can only assume his bureaucratic background in NASA,the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dept.of Energy, EPA, and as a US Diplomat has fostered this view.  I would hope he will begin meeting with business ans Chambers of Commerce in District 10 and seeing first hand how they can and do create jobs on their own versus how the government creates jobs via our taxes.

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by: sdhook @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 11:55:27 AM UTC

My experience (5.00 / 3)

has shown that the role for government is to do things that individual citizens cannot do for themselves, and no more.  Few of us are equiped to inspect a nuclear powerplant to see if it has been properly constructed and operated.  Few of us are able to pay for a new road or bridge on our own.  Few of us can design, build, and launch a weather satelite.  These require collective action to both fund and then do.  A modern society organizes this collective action through a government, which taxes it's citizens and then acts on their behalf for the common good.  Therein lies the rub.  Most will agree that our government is not working very well.  Why is that?  

I think it's because we have lost sight of the common good.  Our Congress is full of members who are looking out for something other than the common good.  It is full of members that view everything from a win or lose perspective; members (such as my opponent) that just vote no to anything that might be viewed as a win for my Party, whether it is for the common good, or not.  It is full of members of my Party that horse trade for special "cornhusker" benefits and hold up action which would be for the common good to meet their own parochial interests.

I believe in a limited government which stays out of people's personal lives and acts only when a public purpose is at stake.  I listed some of those things above.  National defense, the police function, and all manner of safety inspections are others.  Deregulation theory says that a private business will not do something that will threaten it's survival, and therefore regulation is not necessary.  That's demonstrably false.  I was recruited to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when the Marble Hill nuclear power reactor in Indiana was cancelled at 90% complete, with a loss of billions, because the owner had ignored safety requirements and the NRC, relying on owner self-inspection, had done no inspections of it's own until the very end.  Who paid those billions?  The stockholders of the utility owner and the utility's customers in their rates.  Did any of them have a part in the decision to ignore safety rules?  Does anyone think that the financial institutions that got us into this current recession were self-regulating?  They invented complex financial instruments which they sold back and forth to each other, taking a commission at each sale.  And to keep making more and more sales with commissions, they offered more and more mortgages to more and more people that would never have gotten a loan in the days when there were standards for who qualified.

We need to get our people back to work.  A recent NBC newscast reported that nearly 20% of our citizens are unemployed, part-time employed when they want a full-time job, or have given up looking.  That's a death spiral, with every job lost causing others to be lost because there are fewer people buying goods and services.  George Bush gave us the greatest tax cut in history early in his 8-year term; yet private sector job growth went from 2% per year in 2001 to 0% in 2009 in a straight line (New York Times, Aug 7, 2009), and it's now negative.  Those tax cuts are still in effect.  So, the idea that tax cuts will flow through to job growth is demonstrably false.  It is the private sector that makes jobs, and it isn't making any.  We need to jump start job growth by using tax revenues to pay for public works projects that build things.  When people are back at work, they can buy goods and services that will be produced by other private sector employers.  But we have to reverse this death spiral.  As I have advocated, we should pay for those public works projects with a tax on the complex securities the big financial institutions sell back and forth to each other, rather than funding real businesses.  And if the big financial institutions stop the esoteric deals and fund real businesses, so much the better.  We won't need the public works projects.

Don't forget that it was the Bush administration that started the bailouts.  There are aspects of the bailouts that I profoundly disagee with.  Allowing the banks that got us into the fix we are in to pay back the loans with a few dollars in interest and go right back to what they were doing before was wrong.  They exist,now, because of taxpayer-funded bailouts.  Instead of simply voting No, it would have been better if my opponent and his party had worked with the majority to make the bailout legislation better.  But, that would have been viewed as a win for my Party, so the result was simply to obstruct, rather than work for the common good.  As I said in my issues, I favored the GM bailout because the government quite properly forced out the hidebound management that put the company in it's dire straits.  GM is one of our largest manufacturer of things, rather than services, and it's closing would have been catastrophic for our country.  

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by: Ted Ankrum @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 17:30:46 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

"We need to get our people back to work" (5.00 / 1)

Ted that's the key to your message.  People do need jobs - the economy/jobs are the most important thing right now.  

Everything else will follow if Texans see a good plan for creating jobs.  And if the financial institutions get zinged with a tax all the better.  Those bankers aren't very popular right now anyway.

Thanks for stepping up to run in CD10 again!

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by: sonia @ Wed Jan 27, 2010 at 04:35:57 AM UTC

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Psst! (0.00 / 0)

I get an "Under Construction" message when I visit ankrum2010.com. How's the site coming?

And yes, I too am looking forward to TX-10 turning blue!

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by: derby378 @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 19:52:57 PM UTC

Works for me (0.00 / 0)

I'm seeing a full site now.

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by: sonia @ Wed Jan 27, 2010 at 04:30:50 AM UTC

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It's an evolving thing. (0.00 / 0)

Kernan and his partner, Michelle, got it up quickly with the intent to make additions and corrections.  For instance, McCaul spent $1.1 million in 2006, not $2.5 million--My mistake, I relied on my memory, rather than going to the FEC.  The $2.5 million was what he spent on his primary campaign in '04.
Check back periodically.

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by: Ted Ankrum @ Wed Jan 27, 2010 at 15:55:48 PM UTC

[ Parent ]