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Two new sections for the Issues page, Bob on the Issues where Bob Kelleher responds to questions from Montanans and Interesting Questions which are emails from Montanans which really don't require an answer.  Let's start with Bob on the Issues.

BOB ON THE ISSUES:

Several of you have written to ask "Do Your Support Health Coverage for All Children?".  Well Bob has a simple and straight forward answer to this question, he supports health for everyone.  He certainly wouldn't exclude children!  See the section labeled "Health Care" below.

Many have asked about an energy policy.  Here is a brief outline of Bob's energy policy.  The first part is specific to Montana, Bob plans to find funding to locate and exploit geo-thermal sites in Montana to produce electricity.  He plans to use this electricity to power a Montana owned rail system of passenger and freight trains.  The second part of Bob's energy policy will be national in scope and consists of two major initiatives.  The first will be the "Manhattan Project for Energy Independence".  This project will fund research into alternative energy sources such as photo-voltaic to develop technologies that are clean, safe and inexpensive.  These technologies will then be licensed to manufacturers to produce and install.  The second part involves building alternative fuel stations that will fuel vehicles that run on hydrogen, bio-diesel, natural gas and others that might be identified later such as fast charge electric.  These stations will be built close enough together that alternative fuel vehicles can drive coast to coast without fear of not having a fueling station.  The stations, once built will be leased to small business owners to operate as independent businesses.  For more on the Montana rail project, see the Vision page.

What about Coal and Oil people ask?  Shouldn't we be drilling in the ocean and anywhere else there might be oil? Can't we supply all our electricity by burning coal?  Well it boils down to this, for many millions of years after the earth formed, plants grew and then became coal and oil.  This went on for a long time before the planet was habitable for animals; a lot of CO2 had to be removed from the atmosphere to bring the temperature down.  God went to all this work to make the world a place where people could live, and Bob is pretty sure we should just leave the coal and oil where God put them lest we undo all of Gods hard work.  Bob is only willing to consider natural gas as a stop gap measure while hydrogen fuel-cells are developed because it is locally available (we don't have to pay the terrorists for it) and its combustion is actually pretty clean.  Once the efficiency of solar is high enough, we can replace all of the uses of oil with hydrogen and chemistry.  This includes plastics and fertalizer and anything else that comes from oil.

How can we bring down the price of gasoline in the short term if we don't drill in the Ocean?  The price of gasoline is determined not by drilling for more oil but by oil companies refusing to increase refinery capacity plus market manipulation that would have been illegal ten years ago.  We could try to force the oil companies to re-open the refineries they have closed, or build new ones, or we could just make the oil companies oboslete.  That last one is Bob's preference, and it will likely be faster.

(We actually paraphrased the last three from questions we received in an email from "Rural Montana" magazine.  See the News page for more info on the magazine.)

Jan writes to suggest that it would be cheaper and acheve a better result if the government sent each of us a check for $1Million rather than the $700 Billion Wall Street Welfare Plan.    Actually, though the idea is interesting, the math does not work out.  You may have heard on talk radio that the Wall Street Welfare Plan will cost each of us a quarter million or even a million, but people on talk radio tend not to be very smart or good at math.  To give $1 Million to each of 300 Million people would in fact require $300 Trillion.  Almost 500 times as much as the $700 Billion in the Wall Street Welfare Plan that Baucus pushed through the Senate.  Since the national debt has just exceeded $10 Trillion (forcing the national debt clock in NY Time Square to overflow), you can see that trying to do this would increase the national debt by a factor of 30 to about $310 Trillion.  To put everything into visual perspective:
              3,500 - what the Wall Street Welfare Plan costs each of us
            233,000 - the cost of a modest house in Eugene OR
          1,000,000 - the number of $ you are suggesting we each get
        300,000,000 - the number of us (estimated)
    700,000,000,000 - planned cost of Wall Street Welfare Plan
  2,000,000,000,000 - what the Iraq war will eventually cost all of us
 10,300,769,433,075 - the national debt @ 10:57:19 AM MDT on October 16, 2008
300,000,000,000,000 - the cost of giving us $1 Million each

  Those zeros really start to add up.  Such debt would be such a massive burden to leave on those great grand children (and great great and so on), that the government would simply have to default on the debt.  The economic disaster created by this would make the great depression seem small by comparison.  A better path is to put back into place the controls that were enacted after the meltdown of the late 20's.  Those controls that were dismantled by Baucus and his friends over the last 28 years with the big one coming with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.  This bill gutted the Glass-Steagall act that has protected us since the 1930's and opened the door to the avarice behaviors of the banking conglomerates.

INTERESTING QUESTIONS:

Shawn writes to ask: "Anyone seen Max Baucus? You'd think that the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee would peek out during a financial meltdown.   Guess there are probably 10 million reasons we haven't heard from him."  We say: "Good question?"

Priority

Bob Kelleher has always had as his political priority the desire to work toward a more accountable Federal Government.  Bob has always used the example of the British Parliament as a way to describe what is meant by government accountability.  His plan today to achieve this is through a series of reforms such as the Question-and-Answer time sessions suggested by Presidential nominee John McCain on May 15 in Columbus, OH. 

Bob believes governmental accountability can only be achieved if the party that controls the legislative branch also controls the departments of government.  History has proven that the legislature and executive constantly 'pass the buck.'  Bob is also committed to elimnate the influence of lobbyists in the federal government.

Iraq

Bob retired from the Army as a full Colonel.  His grandson was wounded in Iraq.  Another of Bob's grandsons is in the active duty Air Force. 

He therefore is committed to supporting our troops in the field.  He feels that it is time, however, for the United States to transfer control of Iraqi security to the Iraqi government.

Health Care

Bob spent 9 years in a monastery studying to become a Carmelite Priest before earning his law degree.  Today, he believes that Health Care, including reasonably priced prescriptions should be available to everyone. 

Bob considers this to be a Christian ideal.

Gun Control

Bob does not support any changes to the Second Amendment.