https://voicesofmontana.com/podcast/john-driscoll-democratic-candidate-for-u-s-house-district-2/
Saturday, August 31, 2024
Learning About Integrity
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
My Labor Day Pledge
Labor Day was first observed 142 years ago as all my families were arriving in Butte to help punch thousands of miles of underground workings into the hard rock of the Boulder Batholith. In their honor and with great respect for our skilled work force:
1. If elected I pledge to build on the hard-learned skills of over 100,000 Montanans engaged today in energy, construction, mining and railroading, in order to help make Montana an electricity-producing powerhouse for our nation.
Toward this end much has already been accomplished with distributed solar, including two 80 MW solar farms commissioned this year, 22 wind farms consisting of 4024 wind generators, 32 private and federal hydroelectric dams, including the old Montana Power Dams in the Missouri and Clark Fork Basins that powered Butte’s massive and strategically important mines with 100% renewable energy during the whole of World War II, one natural gas-fired peaking plant and one natural gas fired wind-firming plant, and two legacy coal-fired base load plants being kept in service because the need for electricity has begun to skyrocket.
2. I will propose to the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that a site or sites in the Boulder Batholith suitable for use as a high level nuclear waste repository be assessed according to the newest procedures being recommended by the American Nuclear Society’s Special Committee on Generic Standards for Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste. See ans.org.
The Boulder Batholith underlies approximately 1.5 million acres managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Interior and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
3. I will monitor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review of Small Modular Reactors, particularly the 345 MW Natrium Reactor design being proposed by Terra Power at the Naughton coal-fired power plant near Kemmerer, Wyoming. See nrc.gov.
My greatest concern right now is that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 1920, will be challenged now that the Supreme Court has overturned the decades-old Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute. Order 1920 directs Regional Transmission Owners, including the Western Area Power Administration as part of the Southwest Power Pool to “right size” existing transmission lines and plan electricity transmission using 20 year time horizons with planning cycles every 3 to 5 years. See spp.org.
4. I will ask the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad to begin considering electrification, which in the Montana Department will require 4 Small Modular Reactors (SMR). Northwestern Energy will be colocating a fifth SMR at Colstrip by 2042. The 60 year lifetime waste of 5 SMR’s will be about 3,105 metric tons, compared with the 13.75 to 15 million metric tons of copper ore annually removed from the Boulder Batholith to supply America’s WWII war effort.
John B. Driscoll
Friday, August 23, 2024
Artificial Intelligence Guides on The Side
August 23, 2024
Contact Phone: 406-437-1526
Contact email: driscolljohn37@gmail.com
In Whitefish, Montana, this week Eastern Montana congressional candidate John B Driscoll recommended to members of The Montana Broadband Association that they help sustain rural broadband operations with a millage fee per kilowatt-hour on server farms used to store broadband users’ valuable data. “Conversion of energy from all of its primary forms to the expensive but versatile electricity form has continued as an imperative because benefits usually delivered by various electricity-based technologies usually outweighed the costs.”
He observed that value of all the gold found in Montana pales in comparison to the positive worth of electricity we’ve used since the first telegraph message arrived in Virginia City on November 2, 1866. “Our territorial Governor Green Clay Smith ten word response to President Andrew Johnson may have cost $40, but it was a bargain compared to the saved one-way stage fare of $120 to Salt Lake City, or $305 to Omaha, plus rail fare to Washington, DC, doubled for the return trip. Then there would have be the weeks of time spent traveling.”
Now Driscoll agrees with Johnathan Spalter, President of the Broadband Association, that the value of interconnecting the computers in our rural communities with a wide range of activities delivered by fiber optics is, “unimaginably high.”
Driscoll argued for including the cost “Guides on the Side,” trained and educated in the uses of Artificial Intelligence as needed.
The official website for Driscoll’s campaign is: johnbdriscoll.blogspot.com”
John B Driscoll, Candidate
U.S. Congress Eastern Montana
https://johnbdriscoll.blogspot.com/?m=1
https://www.facebook.com/john.driscoll.585112?mibextid=LQQJ4d
@steward-magazine
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Welcome To The Eastern Montana Open Rodeo
For Immediate Release
August 15, 2024
Contact Phone: 406-437-1526
Contact email: driscolljohn37@gmail.com
“Good for Ms. Neil for filing as an independent write-in candidate in this Fall’s general election for Montana’s Eastern Congressional District’s Representative. Clearly she feels strongly that Democrat voters should not have nominated me of the four of us running in the Primary. I get it but do not equate raising and spending lots of other people’s money to ‘campaigning” for public policies important to Montanans.
In 2002 after I got home from the Pentagon, having worked as Deputy Crisis Action Team Chief for Operation Enduring Freedom in the National Military Command Center, I already knew plans were afoot for a shooting war with Iraq. Like Ms. Neill I opted to file as an Independent to warn Montanans about the bad idea about to unfold, as it did in 2003. Without finding the nuclear weapons given as the excuse for war, 4,431 American servicemen and women lost their lives, and more than 31,000 were wounded in auction. Nearly 100,000 civilians died.
Though my efforts were ignored, I’ll never regret making them. Ms Neil’s entry into the eastern district race now means that a number of votes equal to what she gets plus the 30,000 open-minded Republicans I’ve been steadily trying to physically meet, will be necessary for me to win and send a big message to the political party elites that actual votes by people willing to get off the couch, not huge sums of money for advertising to the brainwash the passive are “free speech.”
The official website for my campaign is: johnbdriscoll.blogspot.com”
John B Driscoll, Candidate
U.S. Congress Eastern Montana
https://johnbdriscoll.blogspot.com/?m=1
https://www.facebook.com/john.driscoll.585112?mibextid=LQQJ4d
@steward-magazine
Thursday, August 8, 2024
Thursday, July 25, 2024
I Believe In Truth
In 1939 syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote in Let The Record Speak.
“This it seems to me, is the lesson of the news in the last three years, National Socialism, or Nazism in Germany, will become the most world-disturbing event of the century, though Nazism is not, in its nature, only a German phenomenon. Nazism is a fusion of elements that are present in the minds of men and women everywhere, and it does offer one answer to political, social, and economic problems that everywhere press for solutions.” She argued, “Americans must understand there is a fundamental incompatibility between any form of order based on political and economic freedom, and the dynamic aggrandizing of Fascism, or National Socialism. Nazism is a total Revolution. “In Germany Himmler was calling Nazism “Counter-Revolutionary” in that it aimed to reverse all the change, including the American Revolution, that had happened since the European Enlightenment. Thompson agreed, describing Nazism as “a break with Reason, with Humanism, and with the Christian Ethics that are the basis of America’s Liberal Democracy.” She thought Nationalism was worse than Communism, because it denies the concept of the inviolability of the Human Being. She saw Nazism, unlike Communism, as treating all of life as an unremitting struggle of tribal groups for biological survival. “In this struggle telling lies is openly accepted as a useful means to an end, which is dealing with what Nazis believe to be naive and decadent democracies.”
As her book hit the streets, Montana’s Army National Guard, 1750 members of the 163rd Infantry Regiment, received federal orders August 27, 1940. They were told to dischare those unfit for service and to be at full strength by September 16, 1940. That day of induction, initially for one year of active duty with the 41st Infantry destined to become for five years the Jungleers in New Guinea and the Phillipine Islands, happened as the first peacetime draft became law. Federalized, drafted or voluntarily enlisted, Montanans began flowing to Military Service.
In 1940 ourstate had only 559,456 people compared with our present-day 1,000,070. Along with a huge exodus of Montanans to coastal defense industries, 57,000 Montanans, including 567 women left for war. 1,869 of these were killed.
Jim R Ickes, age 22, of Big Horn was inducted December 4, 1941. From that date until August 1945, he wrote home over 200 letters, usually signing, “With Love to All from Jim.” Each letter was stamped with a censor’s approval, return addressed to PFC Jim R. Ickes, AT Company, 15th INF, A.P.O #3 c/o Post Master, New York, NY. All were addressed to Mr. and Mrs. C.C. Ickes, Big Horn, Montana and were later found among their effects. With his effects were found a metal box containing two German pistols, an SS Officer’s dagger, a handful of German medals, including several Iron Crosses, a photo album of his buddies and a handwritten list of the names and addresses of 83. Nine names were from Montana. On the last page of the list he wrote: “October 23 - 42- Left U.S. September 4 - 45 Left Europe”
The 15th Infantry was one of the three regiments of the 3rd Infantry Division. By Victory in Europe Day, according to the Saturday Evening Post, “Nearly 35,000 men, more than twice the original strength of the division, were dead, wounded or missing in action, across North Africa, Sicily, Southern Italy, the beach at Anzio, Rome, and across France and in Germany. The Third Infantry Division suffered more casualties than any other division in the American Army. ”The men of the division earned 31 congressional medals of honor, including that of Audie Murphy, one of World War II’s most decorated soldiers, who also served in the 15th Infantry Regiment. The Anti-Tank (AT) Company of the 15th Infantry neutralizes German and Italian armor in North Africa, repelled German counter-attacks by destroying tanks at Anzio and during the capture of Rome, and while advance up through Southern France into Germany during battles across the Voges Mountains, in the Colmar Pocket and past Nuremberg, pushing into Germany. They contributed significantly to the success of the 15th Infantry and the Third Division.
The nine names of other Montanans who made it back alive were:
Percy A Mielke, Hamilton, MT
Gene Vaught, Bozeman, MT
Eddie Novis, Anaconda, MT
Fred Deering, Laurel, MT
John S. Opheim, Wolf Point, MT
Harold Lester, Great Falls, MT
Harry Weber, Joliet, MT
Henry Maki, Belt, MT
Lloyd P. Wick, Sidney, MT
In 1946, the year I was born, 359 military cemeteries around the world contained the remains of 286,959 American WWII war dead. The number of identifiable remains was 246,942. Of the missing sets,18,641 had been located. Of the located sets, 10,986 remains were placed in overseas military cemeteries and 7655 remains were in isolated graves. In 1947 some relatives of the war dead wanted their loved ones brought back to the United States to be reburied in local or national cemeteries. That program was discontinued in the mid-1960’s. By then, 171,000 bodies of dead Americans had been repatriated. This left 97,000 others, including 935 Montanans, near their place of death.
These 935 Montanans, still overseas, are serving as one civilian, two merchant mariners, 32 marines, 191 sailors, 282 airmen and 427 soldiers. In total they wear 4 Distinguished Service Crosses, 44 Silver Stars, 70 Bronze Stars, 3 Legion of Merit, 28 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 4 Navy Crosses, 312 Air Medals and 714 Purple Hearts.
In his letters PFC Ickes told also of 2Lt Carroll G Johnson of Sarpy Creek, who was killed in anctuon October 8, 1943, in the fighting along the Volturno River in Southern Italy. His body was among those reinterred in the National Cemetery at the Custer Battlefield. He had been engaged to Dorothy Anderson who had attended the Tullock Creek Grade School with Jim Ickes, a close friend of Dorothy’s brothers’. She awaited the return of her fiance, who never came home, while teaching at the Big Horn School. She and Jim Ickes, who returned home after his girlfriend married someone else, were later married. Jim Ickes asked to be “buried with a he boys,” in the military section of the Billings Cemetery on Central Avenue. Dorothy chose later to be buried there with her husband.
These are facts about real courage, and real pain and sacrifice for our freedom. These facts deserve honoring. To guard against tyranny we must never abandon facts, less we abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no longer an basis upon which to make the criticism. As the book On Tyranny says, “When nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”
Michael Jackson once called Adolph Hitler the greatest entertainer in history, and now we have Donald Trump aspiring to be his apprentice. Because in elections the biggest wallet pays for the the loudest noises and most blinding lights, I am not seeking or accepting contributions, I ask for your vote, because I believe in truth and hope you will honor it as well.
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