Sunday, July 25, 2010

I have a booth at the Village Fair

Located down by the Bingo at the South end of the Green. Please come by and say hello.
Remember the Village Fair runs this Friday and Saturday and does not run on Sunday.
As well as Green Party and campaign literature, Rebecca's friends will be selling green bracelets "RIP Becca" to benefit the National Athletic Trainers Assocation Region 1 (New England) scholarship fund, to benefit an Athletic Training Junior or Senior Student. Also paintings by Karen Cohen the mother of one of Rebecca's best friends, commemorating Rebecca to benefit the same fund will be on sale
The Rebecca Paintings

I have a website

green67.org
This links to the Green Party, as well as showing you how to donate to my campaign.

Why am I running anyway

As some may know the initial impetus was the murder of our daughter Rebecca an 04 graduate of NMHS who went to Northeastern Univiersity and was shot dead in her apartment in Mission Hill, Boston, May 20th 2008. As the police investigation progressed, it became apparent that whe was not the intended target and was mistaken for someone else and she was not involved in any way in any illegal activity. People being sent to kill people they do not know is a feature of the illegal drugs business and if her killing was not directly related to that business, the illegal guns used almost certainly were. I have always been sceptical as to whether simply prohibiting drugs, while being perhaps a laudable aim is actually effective policy. But it had always appeared it was the sort of thing that governments do and there was not a lot that could be done about it. Now I have researched extensively on the subject and asked people what they thought about the War on Drugs and discovered two things. One is that academics and others who study it conclude that it is a waste of time and money and almost everyone I talk to agrees too.
New Milford is largely spared the violence connected with the War on Drugs, but we certainly pay for it. We pay for it three times. We pay for investigating crimes and locking up offenders. We pay for the social dysfunctiona and poverty caused by all the violence and we in effect make a down payment to make sure that we continue to pay for all these things well into the future, by creating the next generation of drug dealers. Now in 2010 we are in the middle of a recession and money is tight. This is the time we must stop wasting money on things that don't work and start doing things that do. There are a lot of things that need doing in Connectiuct in order to move forward with a vibrant economy and there is much more in the Green Party platform than ending the War on Drugs, but ending the War will give us the money to pay for all the good things we need. This is why I am running.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

News Times article and Green mopeds

http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Father-of-homicide-victim-challenges-Republican-577177.php.
It has been suggested that electric mopeds are not green. Up to a point that is true, because the electricity is likely made from coal, but it can be three times as efficient to burn fuel in a power station than in an internal combustion engine, There are of course losses in transmission and in the battery, so the efficiency and so the carbon footprint is only somewhat better than the internal combustion engine. However in the future electricity will come from mostly renewable and nucleat energy. But that day is far ahead and in the meantime battery technology needs to significantly improve. The electric moped is a very useful platform to help that happen. The Chinese appear to understand this better than we do. They have 22,000,000 electric mopeds, so on 22,000,000 batteries they have honed their technology and manufacturing skills. Watch out for their electric cars ! As your Green Party candidate I will push for these green technologies to be developed in Connecticut not China.