John Vincent Atanasoff Book

 

March 2, 2009 Kirwan Cox and a crew from EyeSteel Films (www.eyesteelfilms.com) visited Hunter's Club in downtown Rock Island, Illinois. The Canadians were here to film a portion of a documentary they are producing for the Canadian version of History Channel about John Vincent Atanasoff. Atanasoff testified in the seminal 1970's Rand Sperry patent trial over the rights to the fundamental elements of modern computing. Atanasoff, a mathematician professor from Iowa State in Ames testified that he conceived of the four principles of the modern calculator as it was known at the time.

Here are the ABCs of the Davenport Promise.

A. Promise is a scheme to take city taxpayer money from improving Davenport streets, sewers, and other infrastructure and use it to try to attract residents with children to bolster enrollment in Davenport schools.

B. The Upjohn study funded by Promise backers says the likelihood of the plan working as hoped has "a high level of uncertainty." Those are fancy words for "don't hold your breath."

C. The plan contains no commitment by Davenport schools to improve graduation rates and student academic performance, measures currently below neighboring Iowa districts. It divides students within the district between Davenporters who are eligible for scholarship help and those in the district but outside the city who are not eligible. That doesn't sound right.

Summary: A. Unwise, B. Unlikely, C. Unfair.

Vote "No" for the Davenport Promise referendum March 3.

Keith Meyer

Davenport

The Quad-City Times endorses the Promise program in Sunday's edition. "Put Faith in Davenport's Kids" is the editorial's title. One commenter noted that this endorsement was from the "Staff" and not the "Editorial Board," suggesting dissent between the staff and board.
The Times' all-percieved-growth-at-any-cost/risk-if-it's-taxpayer-funded record is consistent here. They admonish opponents who spent too much time on spreadsheets.  "Astute analysts have poked and prodded Promise to assert it cannot pay for itself. That's a standard we've not applied to other government functions and won't apply to this one." This comment brings into focus the proponents' acceptance that providing for one's college education should be a municipal "government function."

A diverse crowd of protesters gathered at the corner of Brady and Locust streets in central Davenport today, unified in their contempt for last year's bailouts and this year's stimulus bill approved by Congress and signed by Obama last week. (The bill is the H.R.1?American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and can be read at http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h1/show.  The following story includes a 4 minute video log of interviews at the protest.)

Between 60 and 75 people, in all age brackets from 10 years old and up, gathered with handmade signs signifying their disapproval of the recent legislation that they believe seriously threatens and undermines the country's future. Protesters came from Davenport, Bettendorf, and Buffalo, Iowa, and from as far away as Hampton, Silvis, and Rock Island, Illinois, to participate. The protest signs ranged from "Bailout is Robbery" and "Commander in Thief" to "Teaser Mandates" and "I Love My Country But am Afraid of My Government." Many people stressed that this was the first time they have ever attended such an event.

Between noon and 1pm, many drivers and passengers in cars honked and waved to the cheering crowd who were making their presence known on this sunny, but cold February Iowa. Occasionally, passing cars rolled down their windows screaming "Obama, Obama!" One Davenport Police officer appeared briefly to remind people to stay off of private property and out of the street. Protesters were present on all four corners with the majority on the southwest and south east corners.

Anti-stimulus protest rallies have been popping up nationwide ever since CNBC's Rick Santelli's harsh criticism of congress' out-of-control-spending was heard around the world last week. He unleashed his rant from the Chicago Board of Trade floor, calling for a Chicago Tea Party ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA ) to protest the bailouts in July.

Susan Frazer, a Scott County resident, said she had planned to go to Chicago in July for the Tea Party, but was excited to hear that communities were already organizing their own Tea Parties this weekend, including one in the Quad Cities. Word about the protest was primarily spread via blog postings and email networking. When asked what she would have happen other than the bailouts and stimulus bill, Ms. Frazer said, "I would like a return to the Constitution."

One Rock Island man's sign read, "Braley Hare Out in 2010", referring to Bruce Braley, Iowa's First District congressman and Phil Hare, Illinois' 17th District congressman. "I see several long time democrats I know here. They have had enough too," he observed.

Chris Sweatman recently moved here from South Carolina for a new job and had only been in the Quad Cities for a month. He held a sign that read: "Obama Stimulus Destroys Dollar." "I think the economy has proven that it will rebound on its own, if the government stays out," said Sweatman. He encouraged people to read the book The Forgotten Man as evidence of Roosevelt and Hoover's mistakes and their prolonging of the Depression. "To say that we need to do what Roosevelt did is a big mistake," he warned.

Iowa Senator David Hartsuch, Davenport 5th Ward Alderman Bill Lynn and 2nd Ward Alderman candidate Bill Edmonds were the handful of politicos present amongst a mostly non-partisan protest.

Local artist John Bloom said, "All my so called Liberal artist and musician friends... they think they're all liberal. But they know this is wrong, they're really moderates." Bloom pointed out his friend's sign as a good summation of how he thinks most people feel. It read: "I love my country, but fear my government." "That's true," said Bloom. "I do. Right now, I really do."

One protester stated, "The lean towards socialism is so obvious. To not respond in some way [is wrong]. The irony is at my age, I retire and then do this? I got money, I don't need to be here. There's something wrong. To not see it, to not smell it?"

His friend stated, "I look after my kids and grandkids. I can't see them having this burden on their shoulders. They say no taxes, but you know it's coming. Somebody's got to pay for this. There's no free lunch."

Many people questioned out loud if there was going to be another Tea Party protest and how could they find out when and where. James Getmann and Mike Angelos shared with several attendees that their local group, SuperLiberty.com, meets the first and third Saturday's of each month to educate citizens about the Constitution and encouraged Tea Party protesters to come to the next meeting.

It's time to lift the fog of denial and party pride to restore our patriotic footing and all that it requires of each of us. We have strayed so far from the core founding principles that distinguished our country and made it great. We must acknowledge our errors and correct them on several critical levels?politically, economically, and in no small measure, morally. Americans have to embrace that it is with this generation that the fix must begin in earnest or we will lose our freedom forever.

Political Errors

First we must accept that the current two-party system is no longer in our best interest as a nation. We can no longer indulge our political/socioeconomic troubles as the fault of either the Democrats or the Republicans. The fault belongs to both parties in equal measure. It is both democrats and republicans who have tandemly legislated Americans into the mess we are in.

In the past decade alone, Clinton's administration commingled the Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid funds with the general fund allowing him to declare a budget surplus. This act was an accounting trick, but one that allowed congress to spend our retirement and healthcare savings into oblivion. Clinton's congress sacrificed the futures of the elderly and disabled, then boasted it had not only balanced the budget, but also had a surplus. Now Wall Street has been doing the same thing to us ever since. In other words, Clinton's congress set the precedence for ponzie scheming?robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Shortly after, when the Bush administration and Republican controlled congress were elected, they did nothing to reverse this deceitful act, instead doubling the budget deficit in eight short years. It was his administration that began serious excesses with executive orders, defying the US Constitution he promised to protect. However, it was a feckless congress that turned a blind eye to it, giving Obama the same opportunity to continue this disgraceful betrayal of political trust.

And make no mistake: it took both democrats and republicans to thrust us into an expensive and, if one goes by the facts, unwarranted war, and to sanction the beginning of stimulus/bailout spending that did nothing to stimulate the economy. Instead, the Republicrates have rewarded obscene excesses on the part of executive management of both private and public entities that went largely unchallenged and when exposed, unpunished. Democrats and republicans are equally culpable for the lack of accountability, but why should that come as any surprise? Neither have voters held them remotely accountable. As Congressman Barney Frank recently stated on Meet the Press, after being asked how to stop corruption in Washington, "The voters have to get tougher. After all, we didn't just parachute in [to office]." Mr. Frank exemplified the Congress' contempt for American voters with those few arrogant words.

In the last two years of the Bush administration, when democrats controlled congress again, it enacted a string of unprecedented bailouts of billions of tax dollars that benefited an elite list of favored financial entities, most of who contributed tremendous sums to the political coffers of many, if not most, of the legislators in office then...and now.

Now we must suffer the same outrageous activity by Obama and his same democratically controlled congress by nearly matching the same dangerously expansive financial bailouts for favored entities, including a huge percentage allocated strictly to governmental departments?in just one month! Coupled with additional expenditures Obama is seeking beyond the recent $787 billion, his congress will do in six months what Bush and his congress took eight years to accomplish.

Economic Errors

The deadly part of all this spending is that all of it?100 percent?is borrowed either from the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) or from foreign countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. Common sense tells us that more borrowing does not solve money problems of this magnitude. Curtailing spending is mandatory for fiscal soundness, yet neither democrats nor republicans even pretend to support such policy. It is so irresponsible, so inane that it begs the question: What is really going on here?

Americans are being told that the solution is to nationalize/socialize banking and healthcare in order to stabilize the economy. Recall that first we were given ownership stakes in AIG (80% ownership for $85 billion), then we bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for $200 billion ($100 billion each?an entity already owned by taxpayers). Following these three subsidies, which merited none of it to begin with, Congress passed the Bush-backed $825 billion bailout on October 3, 2008 (The Economic Stabilization Act of 2008?$700 billion dedicated to banks and financial institutions and the remaining $125 billion were last minute bribes in the form of earmarks for democratic support). None of that unprecedented spending improved a thing. In fact things only got worse. Even with 400 of the nation's top economists' collective recommendation against the October bailout, congress, ignoring their warnings, fast-tracked the bailout to no avail. So why didn't the new leadership learn from this monumental mistake?

Instead, this Congress again fast-tracked the Obama-backed $787 billion with 9,000 earmarks for over $5Billiion in pork. Reports are difficult to confirm, but this may have been reduced down to 4000 earmarks.  This additional bailout (referred to as a "stimulus" bill in the same way that Bush's bailout was referred to as a "stabilization" bill) came on the heels of another $20 billion bailout for the auto industry weeks earlier. Some are forecasting the auto bailout to exceed $100B eventually.  To add to what has now become incoherent spending, another $50 billion is about to be given to the banks again in an effort to encourage home mortgage relief. This reckless legislation has no rational basis, therefore stands to reason that all this urgency reflects the covert continuation of what Clinton and Bush started?a transfer of wealth and power so enormous and irreversible to advance a globalists' new world order agenda. Even the mainstream media is finally admitting that this is the case. Sadly, it seems to have no problem with the end of a sovereign America with the new world order's plans for the North American Union, much like the European Common Market, delivering such horrifying news with business-as-usual apathy.

This legislation passed without a single congressman having even the read the bill before he/she voted on it. That is because it wasn't made available to them until 11pm the night before the vote. So much for Obama's promise of transparency, or a mandatory five-day review period for the public before voting on any bill before Obama's congress.

Ask yourself, where is the money going to come from to pay this mind-bending debt back? Obviously from taxpayers, but there are only so many of them?182 million at last report?and that will not cover it, folks. So the government must tax future generations' earnings for the next millennium to just make the interest payments on the national debt it is creating today.

Add to that the unconscionable burden of the ever-burgeoning size of government thanks to both Bush and now Obama. Bush created the largest governmental agency in the history of the Union with the Homeland Security Department, and Obama's stimulus package has just added exponentially to a majority of government departments. (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or 2009 can be found at www.Thomas.loc.gov/ under bill H.R.1.)

Since federal withholding income taxes are strictly reserved for paying the interest on national debt, taxation will have to come from other places.  Therefore, the government intends to collect mainly from unprecedented increases in usage, manufacturing, and other such indirect taxes. For example, in addition to increased gasoline taxes, cars are being manufactured whose GPS systems will act as a reporting device for mileage, allowing for drivers to be taxed on the actual miles they travel. If drivers don't pay, their engines can be shut off.

The concept of nationalizing the banking and healthcare systems comes from European and Asian economies, which are taxed in one way or another, taking nearly 80 percent of each citizen's income. 80 percent! Do you honestly believe that under such a system that corruption will be less, or that the wealth gap will get any smaller, or that individual standards of living will be better?  To the contrary, there is abundant evidence demonstrating the stagnation of such economies, more often than not.

Capitalism gets much of its criticism from its inability to account for greed. Well here's a flash: there isn't an economic model in the history of man that accounts for greed. It can be argued that the more socialized an economy is, whether through communism or fascism and everything in between, the more corruption thrives.

Capitalism is the only economic model that has a prayer of evening the economic playing field for an entire society, clearly evidenced by the foundation and growth of the American economy. There isn't a more inspiring economic history anywhere, but could not have occurred without free market competition embraced and protected by a republic of laws. And there is the heart of all of it?the United States Constitution, with its Declaration of Independence the Bill of Rights, and Proclamation of Emancipation.

Not only is this document profound in its intellectual understanding and reverence for individual life and freedom, it is deeply spiritual in its express acknowledgement of a Creator and man's rights as more than privilege bestowed, but as divinely endowed. The US Constitution openly declares the immutable connection between God and man, and constructs its principles from this core belief. It is an inspired document that built a country of deep patriotism and rare moral character.  How is it conceivable that we have a congress that no longer considers the US Constitution sacrosanct?

Had we practiced capitalism, and other enacted legislation by measuring each via the US Constitution, rather than by the whims of the countless self-serving agendas that plague our nation, perhaps we could have avoided all this loss.  Corruption of capitalism, or of the Constitution itself, happens as a result of government interference through legislative intervention and influence by special interests because it undermines fair competition, the non-negotiable ingredient of capitalism.

Moral Errors

Think. Every generation, until this one, had a chance for a better life than the one before it. Until now, we enjoyed an upward trajectory relative to increased standard of living per capita.

Suddenly we've devolved our economy so much that we are actually considering abdicating our US Constitution in favor of some hybrid economy referred to as the New World Order, controlled by an international government comprised of primarily of central bankers and their military and corporate loyalists, who have been planning this scenario since at least 1913, when President Wilson and that congress handed its constitutional authority to print and control the US money supply over to the Federal Reserve Bank. That act, done in virtual secrecy, was 100 percent unconstitutional, but has never been reversed, and rarely even challenged. I doubt most of our current congress even understands the magnitude of this historical treachery.

What most Americans do not know is that the Federal Reserve Bank is not a government institution. It is essentially a private bank, whose ownership is made up of private shareholders, many of whom own positions in the central banks of other countries. It is time for Americans to wake up and learn the truth about some of the fundamental realities of the current American Economy. A lot falls into place once you do.

For example, you will learn that the primary purpose of the Revolutionary War with England was to free the American Colonies from the tyranny of the central banks of Europe, which imposed a grinding control over the lives of the citizens of that time.

You would also learn that when congress handed over its constitutional mandate to print and control the money to the Fed, it also gave away the ability to earn the interest on federal loans made. Think about it. If the Congress still held that authority, all governmental loans would actually initiate from the US government, thus we would earn the interest instead of a privately held bank acting as a federal facility?the Fed. Interest on many of the billions of dollars that constitute our national debt would actually be coming back into our own national coffers as revenue! Instead, we owe it all to the Fed, who prints the money as it sees fit, constricting or expanding credit to all of us in whatever way it chooses?without the backing of gold or silver or anything concrete value. That is why our currency is referred to as "fiat," because it is baseless.

As the founding fathers explained in numerous documents, whoever controls the money, controls the people. What I cannot fathom is why our own congress gave this authority away except by some insidious agenda so foul and corrupt as to be beyond the comprehension of most all the other lawmakers from then, even through today.  They had to know it was unconstitutional, so why it went unchallenged is a complete mystery to me, especially when it was done in secrecy with the thinnest quorum possible.

It is said that signing the 1913 Federal Reserve Act was the single worst, emotionally crippling, regret of President Wilson's life.

Every two years, the Illinois Republican Party tears itself apart over a piece of legislation that supposedly would allow rank-and-file party members to have more say in party affairs This year may be worse than usual, however.

Senate Bill 600, sponsored by Senator Chris Lauzen (R-Aurora), would stop the practice of allowing Republican township, ward, and precinct committee members to elect the state central committee. The bill would instead force the GOP to adopt the same rules as the Democrats and allow primary voters to elect the state central committee.

Most people don't care about this, and I can understand if you're with them. But since this tiny little change has been one of the most divisive issues in the Illinois GOP's recent history, it's worth a closer look.

Lynn CampbellIowa courthouses will close an additional eight days between now and June 30 if the $3.8-million cut to the judicial system approved Thursday by the Iowa House is also approved by the Senate and signed by the governor, State Court Administrator David Boyd told a panel of lawmakers this week.

That's twice a month, or once a pay period, Boyd told the legislature's joint justice-system budget subcommittee. Beginning in March, the courts would close on each day that the state's 1,600 clerks of court and other judicial employees take a furlough, or unpaid day off, for a savings of $335,000 a day.

On the Monday morning following the Oscars, U.S. news Web sites splashed the announcement that the "little film that could," Slumdog Millionaire, had garnered the Best Picture of 2008 award. Buried on many of the same Web sites was the news that 48 children had been rescued from prostitution and several pimps had been arrested during the previous week in an FBI sting operation. The juxtaposition and implied importance of the two news stories was striking.

I just wanted to provide an insight from a family that left Davenport because of the schools. I grew up in Bettendorf, moved to Davenport, and after having children moved them to Geneseo, as I refused to put them in the Davenport school system. As a parent, I would not subject my children to 13 years in that school system to earn money for college. Not only is the crime rate in that school system high, but the schools do not adequately prepare the kids for college.

I was chairman of the board of the Davenport Chamber of Commerce when it successfully promoted passage of the one-cent sales tax. There was enthusiasm for infrastructure improvements then and, clearly, that enthusiasm remains.

The most recent Davenport Community Survey finds residents give their highest priority to continue improving the city's streets and infrastructure. That is fact.

Approving the "Promise" proposal would divert millions of dollars from such work. That, too, is fact.

The various claimed benefits of Promise are not facts. They are estimates and questionable ones at that.

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