Friday, February 26, 2010

Statement From Jessee Ring – Candidate for the Ninth District Nomination
Feb. 25, 2010

On January 31 when I decided to seek the nomination to run for the Ninth Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, I made a commitment to spend the time and effort needed to secure the nomination and to then campaign until the November election.

Since that time, I have been traveling all around the Ninth District to attend county committee meetings and other events. This experience has been very heartening. It has been a real pleasure to get to know so many more of the good, hard working, patriotic people of the “Fightin’ Ninth”.

People are fed up with big government and all that is going on in Washington.

People are concerned about jobs, but they see the government pushing a job-killing “cap and tax” scheme. People are concerned about having access to good, high quality, readily available health care, and they see the government pushing a massive take-over that would put bureaucrats in charge. They are concerned about taxes, and they see the government getting ready to raise everyone’s taxes by letting the Bush tax cuts expire.

I am proud of my deep, Ninth District Southwest Virginia roots. My high tech career took me across the country and around the world. A few years ago, I returned home to Southwest Virginia, and I will be here for the rest of my life.

I look forward to working hard for the good people of my home - the Ninth District. I ask for your support at the Ninth District Convention on May 22.

Jessee Ring
Feb. 25, 2010

Monday, February 22, 2010

JESSEE RING SUPPORTS THE COAL INDUSTRY
Opposed to The Cap and Trade Scheme
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Cedar Bluff, VA, Feb. 22, 2010 – Mr. Jessee Bane Ring, candidate for the nomination to run for Congress in November, attended the cap and trade town hall meeting at Southwest Virginia Community College today.

“I am totally opposed to the cap and trade bill because it is specifically designed to bankrupt the coal industry and to cause electricity rates to skyrocket,” said Ring. “This destructive bill is in response to the global warming scare, which we now know is based upon junk science”, Ring added.

At the meeting, Congressman Rick Boucher acknowledged that the cap and trade bill that passed in the House of Representatives was not a good bill, but said that he voted for it in order to help the coal industry. “I had to vote for this bill to help coal”, said Boucher. He said that if he had voted against the bill, then he would have been out of the discussion and would not have been able to “soften” the impact of the bill.

“Our goal should not be to ‘soften’ this destructive bill, our goal should be to stop it,” said Ring after the meeting. “When I go to Congress, I’ll fight for the interests of the Ninth District; I will not go along to get along.”

During the discussions at the meeting, it was noted that the cap and trade bill sets up CO2 emission allowances, which initially will be given away by the Federal Government, but which will have to be purchased starting in 2020. This will drive up the price of coal-generated electricity at that time, unless some as-yet-undeveloped technology becomes available by then. The bill also provides for “offsets” whereby industries can pay another company to plant trees, for example, to offset that industry’s CO2 emissions. The cost of these offsets will also push up the price of coal-fired electricity, as well as for any industry that has CO2 emissions.

Bob Blue, Vice President for External Affairs at Dominion Power and Jim McGlothlin, President of United Coal Company, said at the meeting that they endorsed the cap and trade bill because it was “the lesser of two evils”, the other evil being regulation from the EPA. Hal Quinn, President of the National Mining Association, the leading organization that speaks for the coal industry in the U.S., said that his group did not endorse the bill.

When the panel was asked how much electricity rates will go up if cap and trade is passed, they said that rates will go up, but it is not known by how much.

One meeting attendee noted that the Wall Street Journal has said that cap and trade will be the largest tax increase in American history.

Jessee Ring
Feb.22, 2010

Monday, February 15, 2010

Here Come The Federal Tax Increases

It was all so predictable. In fact, I did predict it several months back.

For the past year, Congress has been on a spending binge of unprecedented proportions: Massive bailouts for Wall Street, Detroit, banks, people who can’t or won’t pay their mortgage; billions thrown at people who want to buy a new car; a trillion thrown at social welfare programs under the guise of a “stimulus”; TARP, ------ and the list goes on.

Then we get the President’s new Federal budget for next year, which has a $1.5 trillion deficit. And Congress has now raised the national debt ceiling to $14 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the national debt will grow to $17.1 trillion by 2019.

Here a trillion, there a trillion, everywhere a trillion, trillion. My head is spinning.

Does anyone know how much a trillion is? Mathematically, the number is 1,000,000,000,000. In scientific notation, it is 1.0x10exp12. That much money will buy 10,000,000 ordinarily priced houses. Fourteen trillion - ?

To say that Congress is spending money like a bunch of drunken sailors is an insult to drunken sailors. At least drunken sailors are spending their own money, not ours like Congress does, and when the money is gone, drunken sailors have to stop spending. Congress doesn’t even have that much discipline.

This is all money that Congress has willingly, even gleefully, spent by their own decisions. The President cannot spend Federal money on his own; only Congress can authorize the spending of money.
And now, we hear Congress talking about the budget deficit.

A deficit occurs when one spends more money than they have. It is done with borrowed money, a loan, which must eventually, of course, be paid back. It is done consciously; it requires action on the part of the borrower. It doesn’t just happen.

The situation is that Congress has been blithely spending trillion after trillion for the past year, and now they are shocked, truly shocked, to discover that there is a huge Federal deficit. To hear them talk about it, you would think that the deficit appeared spontaneously of it’s own accord, that it was somehow sprung on them, that it popped through a space-time warp from a parallel universe, or that it somehow just wandered in off the street. “Oh my, we have a huge deficit inflicted upon us, poor us, what will we do?”

The solution that Congress wants to put in place to address the deficit is, of course, tax increases. This was their plan all along, as I predicted several months ago:

Step 1 (already accomplished): Scare the public with hysterical braying about the financial apocalypse now; that if we don’t take drastic action today (remember that), the economy as we know it will cease to exist; etc., etc., etc.

Step 2 (already accomplished): Now that you have succeeded in putting the public into a state of panic, push through massive Federal spending programs on every liberal wish list item of the last fifty years. In the process, achieve the added benefit of having the Federal government take over big chunks of the auto and banking industry, for future use.

Step 3 (in process): Decry the huge budget deficit that you have thus created, only be sure to blame someone else.

Step 4 (next): Massively raise taxes to solve the deficit problem.

We are now at step three of this strategy. Step four, raise taxes, is next, but Congress does have one problem with that. They can’t just propose raising taxes, because people won’t like it, and they may actually see through the whole scheme. Congress needs to find a way to get the tax increases in place but also provide cover to themselves in the process.

Here’s how they will do this. Congress will appoint a “bi-partisan” commission to address the deficit problem. They will pack this commission with liberals who want to raise taxes, they will throw in a couple of so-called “moderates” for cover, and they will rig the rules so that the commission’s recommendations can’t be modified. The commission will dutifully recommend big tax hikes plus a couple of minor spending cuts to make it appear objective. Congress will then implement the commission’s recommendations, saying that they are just doing what the experts have said must be done.

Voila! Congress will then have accomplished the liberal socialist’s dream of dramatically increasing social welfare spending by the Federal government, nationalizing major industries, and massively increasing taxes to pay for it all.

It has long been philosophized that the greatest threat to the American experiment would not come from foreign soil, but from within. This Congress and President are proving that to be true.

Jessee Ring
Feb. 9, 2010

Friday, February 12, 2010

Why Am I Running?

I am seeking the Republican nomination to be a candidate in the November election for Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

I am running because the country is rapidly heading in the wrong direction, Washington is out of control, and the nation is being spent into bankruptcy. We need a new direction based upon the Founding Fathers’ first principles of limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, personal responsibility, faith in God, and a strong national defense. In Washington, I will work to move the country in this new direction.

Jessee B. Ring
Feb. 1, 2010

Friday, February 5, 2010

Biography of Jessee Bane Ring

My father and grandfather were coal miners in Virginia and West Virginia. My father was born and raised in the coal fields in Dante, VA, where his father worked. My grandfather left Dante when he bought some land in Russell County near Castlewood where he started and ran a working, self-sufficient farm for many years.

My father worked at the mine in Caretta, WVA for twelve years before getting a job at the Virginian Railway power plant in Narrows, Virginia. I was born and raised in Narrows, Virginia. I mean literally “born in Narrows”; I was born at home, not in a hospital.

My parents saw education as the way to a better life for their children. All five of my siblings and I had an opportunity to go to college, even though money was very scarce. My father never graduated from high school, but was well read and realized the value of an education.

My mother was a teacher when only two years of higher education were required. Upon getting married, she became a housewife and raised six children. When my father lost his job, my mother went back to teaching in order to feed her family. She foresaw that the day was coming when a person could not be a teacher without a four year college education, so she took classes during the summer at Radford College and graduated at the age of 44.

I graduated from Narrows High School in 1965 and went to the University of Virginia. I received a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering with Distinction in 1969. After working for a year, I went to graduate school on a full fellowship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, receiving a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering in 1971.
Upon entering the work force, I quickly got into the emerging field of computer applications. I worked in Pennsylvania for ten years in the electric power industry. Then I was in California for twenty years working in the aerospace and semiconductor industries. I held various management positions and ultimately became vice-president of a small software company. While in the semiconductor industry, I traveled extensively in Asia, making multiple trips to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. I also started a company office in India.

In 1998, I decided to become an independent consultant/contractor, which I did for seven years. My consulting clients included Compaq Computers, Charles Schwab Company, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Tokyo Electron, and others. I also did work for software companies on-site in Vietnam.

In 2005, my wife and I decided that all the conditions were right for us to fulfill a life-long dream of moving back East. We now live in Pulaski County near Radford.

Since moving back to Virginia in 2005, I have started the first vineyard in Giles County, hoping to make it into a commercial operation. I also write bi-monthly columns for The Patriot, a local newspaper in Pulaski.

I have been active politically for many years. I have written letters to the editor, volunteered for campaigns, walked door-to-door, participated in phone banks, manned headquarters, hosted “meet the candidate” events, and contributed financially. I have worked hard for the Pulaski County Committee and attended Ninth District Committee meetings. I have campaigned tirelessly for all of our candidates, local, state, and national. I have been a delegate to state conventions, and I was a Delegate At-large for Virginia to the Republican National Convention in 2008. I am a member of RPV Chairman Mullins’ Chairman’s Advisory Council, as I was for John Hager when he was RPV Chairman. I attended the inauguration of Gov. McDonnell, Lt. Gov. Bolling, and Attorney General Cuccinelli.

My wife of 34 years is a registered Nurse Practitioner. She served in the Navy Nurse Corps during the Vietnam era and then in the Public Health Service. She is now a retired Captain and is currently teaching part time in the Radford University School of Nursing.

I have two children. My son, an Eagle Scout, will graduate from Longwood University in May of 2010, and my daughter, a 4H All Star, is a freshman at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.

I proudly serve as an Elder in the First Presbyterian Church of Narrows, which was founded by my great-grandfather.

I do volunteer work through Literacy Volunteers of the New River Valley where I currently tutor a student who needs to improve his reading and writing skills in order to be promoted to supervisor. This is one of the most meaningful endeavors I have ever undertaken.

Virginia's Ninth Congressional District

8205 Little River Dam Road
Radford, VA 24141
540-250-7291 fax: 540-639-2709
jessee-ring@att.net

January 31, 2010

Michelle Jenkins
Chairperson – Ninth District Republican Committee
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Dear Michelle:

As I have discussed with you, I am announcing my candidacy for the Republican nomination for the Ninth District Congressional seat.
I am a true Reagan Conservative and have been unwaveringly so for many years. I completely support the Virginian Republican Creed:

- That the free enterprise system is the most productive supplier of human needs and economic justice;
- That all individuals are entitled to equal rights, justice, and opportunities and should assume their responsibilities as citizens in a free society;
- That fiscal responsibility and budgetary restraints must be exercised at all levels of government;
- That the Federal Government must preserve individual liberty by observing constitutional limitations;
- That peace is best preserved through a strong national defense;
- That faith in God, as recognized by our Founding Fathers, is essential to the moral fiber of the Nation.

Attached is my bio that will tell you more about my background.
I would consider it an honor and privilege to represent the people of the Ninth District by bringing their values and principles to Washington.
I want you and everyone to feel free to contact me in this matter.


Very truly yours,

----signed on original-------

Jessee B. Ring
Attachment