Today's Katherine Harris Thread; Campaign Issues 3/21/02

Katherine is organizing policy committees and town hall meetings, and has initiated a door-to-door effort in the District, to set her issues agenda and priorities for her run for Congress. Over the coming months, Katherine will publicize what she has learned, and what she intends to do, if elected to serve as Congressman Dan Miller’s successor. Areas of interest and discussion include:

Bill Clinton and Al Gore have allowed our armed forces to sink to an irresponsibly low level. Defense spending has been reduced by over $100 billion since 1990 – the only part of the federal budget that has witnessed a decline for fourteen straight years! In fact, while defense expenditures were 5.9% of GDP in 1989, under the Clinton-Gore Administration defense spending has fallen to just 2.5% of GDP, the lowest level since before Pearl Harbor.

Incredibly, the decline in defense budgets occurred at a time when more frequent deployments stretched the services perilously close to the breaking point. Almost 100,000 Americans are serving overseas today in an unprecedented number of contingency, peacekeeping, and humanitarian operations. Our armed forces are deployed to more countries in greater numbers for these purposes than at any time in our history.

Like President George W. Bush, Katherine Harris supports increasing our military budget to ensure that our armed forces remain the finest fighting force in the world. That commitment involves more than ensuring the latest and best technology and military armaments; it also demands that we more fully fund the quality of life of our servicemen and women to improve the rate of retention. It is both unconscionable and unacceptable that nearly 12,000 of our military men and women must rely on food stamps to feed their families.

Katherine also supports building a defense against ballistic missile attack. Many Americans are unaware that right now the United States is totally defenseless to a ballistic missile attack. The Rumsfeld Commission reported that within the next few years rogue terrorist nations like Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Libya could have the ability to launch missile strikes against the mainland of the United States. We need to move ahead with deployment of a missile defense system now!

What Katherine will never support, however, is putting American troops under the command and control of the United Nations. Just as the United States is spearheading the assault on terrorism today, our nation will never relinquish its leadership role in ensuring the security of freedom-loving people everywhere.

Providing a solid, quality education for each and every American child is crucial to our nation’s future. That’s why Katherine Harris believes that education is too important to be left to Washington bureaucrats. She believes in empowering parents, teachers, and local school boards to make these decisions at the local level, closer to home.

Since 1979, the Washington education bureaucracy has become a maze of 760 programs, spanning 39 different agencies, at a cost of nearly $100 billion a year. Believe it or not, only 65-70 cents of every federal education dollar makes its way to the classroom to fund instruction. The rest goes to feeding the bureaucracy.

This explains why Katherine supports giving local school districts the freedom to spend federal education dollars as they see fit – without meddling from Washington bureaucrats.

Katherine also believes that we need to increase teacher quality. The last Administration focused exclusively on hiring 100,000 teachers nationwide without considering teacher quality. Katherine supports President Bush on this score, and will support any reasonable legislation that allows local school districts freedom to use federal funds to improve teacher quality without forcing them to hire teachers they may not need. Katherine also believes that local school boards should have the power and money to weed out problem teachers while rewarding good ones.

For years, Democrats, consistently proposed cuts in funding for disabled students. Katherine will support congressional efforts to increase federal funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Katherine is also committed to targeting education dollars to other programs that work, like charter schools and college scholarships, while providing additional tax relief for education expenses.

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson combined Social Security with the rest of the budget to help fund the war in Vietnam. Since that time, big-spending liberals in Washington have raided the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for more and bigger government – dollars that should have been locked away for retirement security. In fact, in the last decade alone the government has spent over $600 billion of your Social Security taxes on other programs

She believes America has a moral obligation to lock away Social Security funds to ensure the solvency of the program.

For over 50 years, Social Security has ensured a decent living standard for millions of older Americans. However, Social Security is now threatened by rising costs and rapidly changing demographics. The pending retirement of 76 million "baby boomers" will put tremendous financial pressure on Social Security. It is estimated that in 2014 Social Security will start paying out more than it takes in. By 2034, the program won’t be able to pay all the benefits older Americans have been promised.

Simply put, if we don’t save the program, it will go bankrupt…and the word of government, your government, will forever be challenged.

Commonsense conservatives in Congress insisted on passing budgets that don’t allow your Social Security taxes to be used for anything other than Social Security. Because of the work of likeminded members in Congress, Social Security is once again a trust fund, not a slush fund for more wasteful Washington spending.

Katherine Harris believes that our veterans have put their lives on the line for us, and that we have a moral obligation to ensure their health and well-being.

Katherine will lead the fight to add money to the VA’s budget request. This extra money will be used to improve critical VA programs, head off predicted closure of much-needed VA facilities, and end crippling VA hiring freezes.

Katherine also supports new transition benefits, which would provide military veterans who have served a minimum of four years the dream of a college education.

If these men and women were willing to fight for us, we must be willing to fight for them.

The pristine environment of Southwest Florida is a major contributing factor to the incredible quality of life we all enjoy here. Katherine Harris has always been a strong supporter of protecting Florida’s natural resources and fragile ecosystem both as a State Senator and Secretary of State. She will continue that legacy if elected to the United States Congress.

In fact, Katherine led the fight, along with several environmental organizations, to fight the importation and use of Orimulsion. This dirty fuel, in the event of a spill, would have been disastrous to our beautiful backyard that is home to numerous unique and sometimes rare wildlife and plants.

We must not rest on our laurels… and Katherine has not and will not. That is why we must all be diligent and prepared to fight any offshore oil drilling plans that may be too close to our world-renowned beaches and estuaries.

There hasn't been any new photos or news about Katherine recently. We're still awaiting the decision by the Senate on the disabled voter bill, after that decision I'm sure we'll hear some comments from Katherine. Yah so this post is kinda boring, I was filling in for katherineisgreat, and I just thought I'd post some of Katherine's main issues and goals for her campaign. I tried loading some older photos, but my computer is deciding to be evil and not allow me to load them, so please forgive me, but we'll have some tomorrow~!

Katherine, how are you doing?

I'll send in a photo of Katherine and my hubby and J.D. Hayworth, a Representative in AZ. I'm going to ping him to this now.

Sure, please send the photo, I'd love to see it! I'm doing well, hope you are as well. I'm still getting the gist of loading all this stuff, and am having one heck of a time with the photos and stuff..haha..

Does Katherine Harris really need TWO staffers posting TWO separate threads about her every day here on FR?

Between katherineisgreat and KatherineHarris4Congress... oh forget it.

Anyway, these threads really belong in the "Campaign 2002 forum," that's the whole point of establishing it. Maybe tomorrow you could post this there.

Rolly & Wells: Perhaps ID Got Lost With Those Chads

Friday, March 22, 2002

By PAUL ROLLY and JoANN JACOBSEN-WELLS
TRIBUNE COLUMNISTS

...Near the end of our Winter Olympics, a woman entered the Olympic Family Hotel Accreditation Center near the Grand America Hotel for her credentials. She was told by volunteers that she needed to show an ID that revealed a birth date. All she had was a military ID, which did not include the date of birth. After the volunteers repeated the rules, the woman huffed: "Well, this is good enough to get me into the White House." She eventually got her credentials.
The woman was Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, perhaps in town to show Utah officials how to run an election...

Link to this unbiased Olympic tidbit

Actually, we aren't staffers.

we're just teenage republicans in North Carolina and Maryland trying to drum up support for KH on fr.

Meredith is my contingency and only posts when I can't (which can be freqently)

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