Ronald Reagan has passed away...

Things are not looking too good for Ronald Reagan right now.

The White House was informed that the 93-year-old former president's health had changed significantly in the past several days, a person familiar with Reagan's condition said Saturday.

Reagan has been out of the public eye since disclosing a decade ago that he had Alzheimer's disease. He has lived longer than any other U.S. president.

Rumors about Reagan's health arose Friday and his office in California said it had received more than 300 calls over the past two days.

"He's 93 years old. He's had Alzheimer's disease for 10 years. There are plenty of rumors. When there is something significant to report I will do so," the Reagan family's chief of staff, Joanne Drake, told The Associated Press on Saturday.

White House officials also checked on Reagan's health Friday. The White House was told his health has deteriorated and "the time is getting close," according to the person familiar with Reagan's health, who did not want to be identified out of sensitivity to the family. "It could be weeks. It could be months."

Pray for Ronnie and his family.

John Kerry has once again let down our troops.

Last month, Kerry issued the following statement regarding President Bush's request for $25 billion for our troops in Iraq:

“I will support the Administration's request for emergency funds for our troops. The situation in Iraq has deteriorated far beyond what the Administration anticipated. This money is urgently needed, and it is completely focused on the needs of our troops. We must give our troops the equipment and support to carry out their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The past few days on the Kerry site have been completely silent on the vote this week on the $25 billion dollars to support our troops. Curiously absent indeed - just like Kerry was when the vote for the $25 billion occurred.

Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman is equally disappointed in John Kerry, "We believe that actions speak louder than words on winning the peace," and he noted that Kerry missed the vote "to give a political speech."

John Kerry has gone from saying he supports the funding for our troops, to snubbing the troops completely. To make this even worse, Kerry has spent the past few days following Memorial Day trying to woo Veterans and trying to play the role as a friend to the military. And in between that, his blog has a number of sophomoric posts on Enron, some of them featuring a "masked man" named "Enron Ed."

Last month, I was highly suspicious of Kerry's "support" for the $25 billion in extra funds for our troops:

... is Kerry going to actually vote for the $25 billion, or is he just not going to show up for the vote, (just like with the unemployment benefits extension vote) so he can claim that he supports the troops, but doesn't have to support a request by President Bush with his vote.

Looks like I wasn't too far off...

While John Kerry is going around the country saying the economy is bad, nearly a million jobs were created in the past 3 months - and over 1.2 million since the beginning of the year.

U.S. employers added an unexpectedly large 248,000 jobs in May, according to a government report on Friday that confirmed a strengthening economy likely to soon bring higher interest rates.
The May tally exceeded Wall Street expectations for 216,000 new jobs and followed an upwardly revised total of 346,000 jobs in April and 353,000 in March. The 947,000 jobs created in the March-May period made it the strongest for any three months in four years.

The cascading evidence of accelerating economic activity is certain to reinforce expectations that Federal Reserve policymakers will ratchet U.S. interest rates up from current 46-year lows when they meet June 29-30 and may prove a boon to election-bound President Bush.

Bill Hobbs over at Blogs For Bush points out how at the current rate of job growth, the Bush economy would create even more jobs than Kerry pretends he could create in his first term:

At the current rate of job creation, 238,000 per month so far this year, the Bush economy would create only 11.424 million jobs over four years. That's fewer than the 10 million Kerry's policies would create in his first term. Er, um. Never mind.

The fact is, the Bush Boom is now creating jobs at a faster clip than the job growth John Kerry promises if he is elected president and allowed to enact his policies of higher taxes and higher government spending.

In fact, at a rate of 238,000 new jobs per month this year, the economy would create 11,424,000 jobs over four years. John Kerry is promising his economic policies would create only 10 million jobs during his first term.

Deborah over at Blogs For Bush has a great write up about why Jews should vote for Bush.

I expect at some point Kerry will be pushing his "Jewish heritage" again during the campaign... I would guess around the High Holidays (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur) we'll be barraged with the whole "I have Jewish blood" thing from Senator Flipper himself.

One has to ask, are we Jews supposed to fall for Kerry's "I'm one of you," act when we've seen Kerry gone through the whole controversery of whether or not he should receive Communion? Are stories like that supposed to make us empathize with Kerry?

Humiliated frontrunner-turned-loser in the Democrat primaries, Howard Dean, has taken his abortion-performing skills to the media by starting a new syndicated column..

His first topic was electronic voting.

Only since 2000 have touch screen voting machines become widely used and yet they have already caused widespread controversy due to their unreliability. For instance, in Wake County, N.C. in 2002, 436 votes were lost as a result of bad software. Hinds County, Miss. had to re-run an election because the machines had so many problems that the will of the voters could not be determined. According to local election officials in Fairfax County, Va., a recent election resulted in one in 100 votes being lost. Many states, such as New Hampshire and most recently Maine, have banned paperless touch screen voting and many more are considering doing so.

Without any accountability or transparency, even if these machines work, we cannot check whether they are in fact working reliably. The American public should not tolerate the use of paperless e-voting machines until at least the 2006 election, allowing time to prevent ongoing errors and failures with the technology. One way or another, every voter should be able to check that an accurate paper record has been made of their vote before it is recorded.

Personally, I am against eVoting, today, tomorrow, next week, next year, or anytime. The moment voting becomes electronic it becomes that much easier for the Democrats to tamper with votes. It's basd enough that dead people can still vote for Democrats, and that they want kids as young as 16 to vote legally for Democrats, but paperless voting? Electronic voting? The next step would be voting via the Internet, which gives Democrats even more oppotunities to cheat.

When it comes to voting, I'm a traditionalist. I believe eVoting will cause more problems than it will solve.

I wonder if John Kerry will say that this was supposed to be off the record:

Democratic senator - and certain presidential nominee - John F. Kerry gave the middle finger to a Vietnam veteran at the Vietnam Memorial Wall on Memorial Day morning, NewsMax.com has learned.

Ted Sampley, a former Green Beret who served two full tours in Vietnam, spotted Kerry and his Secret Service detail at about 9:00 a.m. Monday morning at the Wall. Sampley walked up to Kerry, extended his hand and said, "Senator, I am Ted Sampley, the head of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, and I am here to escort you away from the Wall because you do not belong here."

At that point a Secret Service officer told Sampley to back away from Kerry. Sampley moved about 6 feet away and opened his jacket to reveal a HANOI JOHN T-shirt.

Kerry then began talking to a group of schoolchildren. Sampley then showed the T-shirt to the children and said, "Kerry does not belong at the Wall because he betrayed the brave soldiers who fought in Vietnam."

Just then Kerry - in front of the school children, other visitors and Secret Service agents - brazenly 'flashed the bird' at Sampley and then yelled out to everyone, "Sampley is a felon!"

Is that behavior appropriate for someone who wants to be President of the United States - the Commander-In-Chief of our Armed Forces? We all should know by now that John Kerry is a Vietnam Veteran, and he 's been trying to portray himself as a veteran's veteran, but clearly, all veterans are not equal to Kerry. Only the ones who campaign with him, or appear in his campaign ads, or who act as his surrogates matter to him.