My Thanksgiving Memories

Thanksgiving was always a special time for my family when I was growing up. My father worked very hard to give us an upper middle class lifestyle, but he never wanted us to forget the type of poverty that his father used to pretend he came from.

On Thanksgiving, we didn’t have a fancy feast. We used to go down to the local kitchen where we would see those much less fortunate than ourselves and we would stand in line to eat their simple fair. It wasn’t fancy, but you could see that for some of these people it was the only real food they’d get that day and maybe that week. My dad taught us not to complain as we sat at the folding tables and dined with these poor and simple folk. My dad would give them colorful nicknames like “Harmonica Bob” or “Crazy Cat Lady” or “Black Comb Head”

At first my sister and I were frightened by the odd people around us. I remember one year we sat across from a guy who was having a very loud argument with himself. Instinctively my sister and I recoiled, but my father taught us we didn’t need to be afraid of the man because he was one of God’s children too and it was alright for us to laugh at him. My dad would even offer his piece of pumpkin pie to the person who did the best trick for us. Sometimes we’d get thrown out, but mostly we just sat there enjoying Thanksgiving as a family forgetting how much money we had in our Cape Cod in that exclusive neighborhood where we lived.

We’d be home by 7PM and my parents would tell us we should go right to bed and think about the people we had met. They’d remind us that if the Democrats got elected we could all be living in a homeless shelter for real and then we’d be asleep by 7:30. It was only by accident that I later discovered that when my sister and I were asleep, mom and dad would go out to a very nice restaurant and have an elegant Thanksgiving dinner together.

I had wanted to keep this tradition alive with my own daughter Ayn, but my wife would have none of it. She insisted that we have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner like families do. Though calling us a family was certainly a stretch. After all, in a family one of the spouses isn’t flirting with the neighbor across the street while the other spouse is working in Washington to do the people's business. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving from the Kimble family such that it is to your family.

Jack Kimble's Veteran's Day Message

Today, millions of Americans were off from work because of Veterans Day, but I wonder how many really thought about why they were off. Veterans Day is a day to think about those brave few who gave so much for this country. I do this in the way I have since I was a small child, by watching war movies. Nothing says “thank you” to our country’s veterans like watching their exploits dramatized on ...cable television. One of my regrets in life is that I was unable to serve in the military. Unfortunately for me, my family was well off and I really had no option other than college, but I like to think I would have been a great soldier. The American fighting man is the best in the world and we do them a grave disservice when we don’t use them. To our veterans who served when their country needed them, I thank you. I am not a soldier, but I have been wounded in our cultural war and I continue to try and fight the good fight. Isn’t that what Veterans Day is all about?

New Prosperity for Americans Ad

Jack Kimble's Speech Reannouncing his Campaign for President

Ronald Reagan once said, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”

Today I find myself at the precipice. Since I announced my candidacy in April, I have been able to meet many great people across this country. From the oil executive from Texas who just wanted government regulation out of his way so he could provide the oil to fuel the economy, to a gay man married to a member of Congress from Minnesota who counsels other gay men to avoid sin and temptation, to everyday folks who just want the economy to work for them again.

My campaign has floundered at times, but now that you've had a chance to look at my opponents, I hope you'll give me another look. I hope that by reannouncing, I'll give you a chance to take a fresh look at me. As a member of Congress for the past 6 years, I've dealt with important legislation. Just this week, we'll be voting on keeping In God We Trust (or E Pluribus Unum in Latin) as our national motto. Coming to grips with issues like this has left me uniquely poised to assume the mantle of government.

Please, visit www.kimble2012.com and look at my 888 plan. It makes Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan look like Obama style socialism. I believe the best way to get America back to work is to get rid of the regulations strangling our businesses and let the banks go back to making wealth for us all.

I have heard your call American and much like when a parent hears a crying baby in the middle of the night, they can only ignore it for so long. I am coming and I will make everything alright. God bless and stay free America!

Congressman Kimble's Address to Value Voter's Summit

I am honored to be here speaking today before such a respected and well known organization. I will keep my comments brief, but as this is Columbus Day Weekend, I thought it most appropriate today to talk about Christopher Columbus.

Way back in 1492, there was no cable, no video games, no Ipods. What people used to get through their day was faith. It was this faith that lead Christopher Columbus to discover America so that we might all worship God as we saw fit. Columbus was a great hero, but I wonder what he'd say if he was alive today.

Would Columbus recognize America today. How would he react to seeing a country he worked so hard to discover becoming completely overrun with illegal aliens? What would he feel about Americans having to learn Spanish just to be able to communicate? If Columbus knew these things would he even bother to sail across the Ocean to come here?

In the name of Columbus, we must take back our country. We can begin doing it in November by voting for politicians who have zero tolerance for the tide of illegal immigration that threatens us so. Let's return this country to the way it should be. Let's make this country one that Christopher Columbus would recognize.

Make no mistake about it. The topic of Columbus Day has become controversial because of a radical atheistic movement to strike Christ from Columbus Day, but we will not; we cannot let them win. Did you know that Columbus Day Weekend is the most holy weekend in the entire Jewish calendar? I heard it on the way over here. Jews remember just what Columbus did for them and we should do the same.

God watches what we do and even little symbols mean a lot. I listened earlier as Douglas Fischer pointed out that singing God Bless America at ballgames had protected us from terrorism. There are no facts to back this up, but my faith tells me it's true, just as my faith tells me that telling people God Bless You when they sneeze has protected us from another Smallpox outbreak.

The tiny things we do have big consequences. Gay marriage threatens our country unlike any other time in our history. Homosexuals point to young children of 2 or 3 who are clearly gay to show that homosexuality isn't a choice, but I say that homosexuality is to dangerous a choice to be left to 2 and 3 year olds. We must move now to forever ban marriage. I am in awe of the state of Alabama who has created a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage, but has not infringed on anyone's time honored right in that state to marry their 14 year old first cousin. We must show that same courage. God bless you and God bless the United States of America.

Congressman Jack Kimble on Empowering Parents Through Quality Charter Schools Act

[Reprinted from the Last Stand for Children First Blog]

Earlier today, I came off the campaign trail to sign important providing education choice for millions of parents across the country. Charter schools are the wave of the future in this country by providing the selectivity of private schools, but doing it at tax payer expense. Charter schools are freed up of the bureaucratic nightmare of environmental and fiscal regulation and aren't required to grant their teachers due process as a result fully 17% of charter schools perform better than public schools and some of them have become multi-million job creators.

One of the greatest things about charter school supporters like hedge fund operator Whitney Tilson is that they don't limit their contributions to one political party. It's not unusual to be at a pro-charter cocktail party and find liberals like Jared Polis socializing with strict conservatives like myself. It's this spirit of putting children first across party boundaries is one of the reasons that this bill had such huge bipartisan support. Of course, a lot of wining and dining on vintage wine and one and a half pound lobsters stuffed with one pound lobsters didn't hurt.

Charters have been under an increasing microscope lately after test scores in Chicago and Los Angeles both showed them as doing considerably worse than the neighborhood schools so hopefully this extra cash will help them to put the nasty press behind them. Above all, this act was for the kids. It isn't so much choosing a better alternative as much as it is providing a choice and isn't that really what we all want. While charters will take money away from neighborhood schools, that may enable 20 or even 25% of charter schools to start outperforming neighborhood students and isn't that something we can all get behind, even if we're not getting a large check to cover our campaign expenses?

[If you care about children please visit www.laststand4children.org]

Congressman Kimble's Historic Path Forward Speech

At this year's Heritage Valley Corn Dog Festival, Congressman Jack Kimble outlined his path forward for this country before Picture This took the stage. While Picture This is America's best Huey Lewis and the News Tribute Band, it was truly Jack Kimble who connected with the audience on that night.

I have built my Presidential campaign around moving American into the 21st Century, while retaining the strength it showed in the 20th century and the morality it showed in the 18th Century. However, in this chapter, I offer a way for our country to move forward freely given to all candidates regardless of political party. While these ideas may sound like a stump speech or State of the Union address, they are in fact good common sense conservative solutions to the many issues that plague us from our place in the world to the strength of the economy.

In the previous chapter I laid out some pretty grim information on the sorry state of our country. The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way. There is a way forward and that way is being embraced by conservatives all across this country. From the board rooms of Fortune 500 companies to the tea party activists assembled in peaceful protest, America is crying out for new leadership in this time of crisis and turmoil. In Congress as well as in my run for the White House, I am pleased to answer their call.

The first thing we need to do to get this country back on the road to recovery is to put it back to work. An active and vibrant workforce is the lifeblood of our economy and it is the can do spirit of the American worker that has always driven America forward. That's why I've proposed H.R. 929 which would extend full employment rights to all citizens regardless of age. I do not have to tell you that many Americans under the age of 18 are wasting their lives playing video games when they could be helping their families pay the bills and learning a valuable trade. Unfortunately, employers are barred from hiring qualified children due to antiquated work rules that prohibit child labor. Every year America imports #*R#U(#@@$ worth of goods from countries that use child labor. Those goods should be made by American children.

As I have traveled across this great big country of ours campaigning, I have met many job creators who tell me the same heartbreaking stories of wanting to employ children, but being treated like criminals for even attempting to do it. In a previous chapter, I mentioned a great restaurant that I love to go to with my friends from the oil industry. It just so happens that the owner of that restaurant, Gerard, is a friend of mine. Gerard found out years ago that when it comes to declawing a lobster, nobody has the small hands and manual dexterity that the job requires like small children do. He has tried to work with parents and school districts, but he is constantly handcuffed both literally and figuratively because of child labor laws.

Let's face it, not every child is cut out for academic rigor. Even in the best neighborhoods school can be a waste of time for some children. What better way to accommodate the needs of every child than by allowing them all the option to work for a living. Extending full employment rights to all Americans is common sense and it should be the law regardless of the age of the employee.

In addition to helping the very young, I am drawn to the plight of the elderly as well. There is nothing more tragic than when the state teams up with a senior citizens own family to deprive him of the right to drive his automobile. For many of these seniors, they've been driving for 60 or 70 years. Now, just because they don't see too well or their reaction time is slow or their decision making has gotten a bit fuzzy, they're supposed to surrender their drivers licenses. This is one of America's greatest shames.

H.R. 2781 would eliminate all driving tests for senior citizens who already have a license. It is a bill whose time has come and I am very proud to be its sponsor. If we can pass this important legislation, seniors will once again be able to drive to their job at Walmart, to play bridge, or to visit their grandchildren in peace. I know that I speak for many seniors when I say, "you can have my driver's license when you can pull it from my cold dead hand."

We must not only improve the economy through job growth, real recovery will require us to end the problem of repossession and foreclosure. Throughout this country, there are thousands of vacant homes, which are a magnet for crime, vandalism, and other urban blight. To move forward we must eradicate these pockets of blight. To do that, we must work with state and municipal zoning boards to take areas with large numbers of vacant and abandoned homes and rezone them for commercial development. Give me any 3 abandoned homes and I'll replace them with strip mall containing a currency exchange, a Seven-Eleven, and an insurance broker. This is progress and this is what makes America great.

Businesses will not expand until they are free from the tyranny of the ban on incandescent bulbs. As Michele Bachmann is fond of saying, "Thomas Jefferson did a pretty patriotic thing for this country when he invented the light bulb." I couldn't agree more. What Jefferson did was to help propel Americans into the 19th century, a time of wonder and electric lighting. It is criminal for the government to renege on this promise of science. In a survey conducted by Osram Sylvania, they discovered that many Americans are worried about the end of incandescent light and 13% of Americans said they would horde the light bulbs.

It is death by 1000 paper cuts and needless government regulation such as the light bulb ban that has American business reeling. To save American business we must reduce regulation and red tape wherever possible. When businesses have to close, they create a blight on our nation's economy. Nobody wants to move into that pizza parlor that has gone through 8 owners in 6 years because it keeps shutting down.

I propose that we work with zoning boards to take these vacant business properties and replace them with single family housing. The American dream is home ownership and nothing will help Americans to pursue this dream more than an increase in the number of homes for sale. Supply and demand and the invisible hand of the free market, will make this piece of the American dream just a bit closer to reality by rezoning failed commercial property into thriving single family homes. The statistics on what home ownership does are overwhelming. People who own their own homes are much more likely to take care of them than renters are.

The middle east continues to change at an alarming rate. Revolutions in the region have overthrown the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, and at the time of this writing potentially Syria. It almost makes our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem expensive, futile, and even a little counterproductive. However, I believe an aggressive United States foreign policy is a good United States foreign policy. There are several middle eastern countries that are not currently in the midst of revolution. Iran comes to mind. We need to get in there and overthrow these governments before their own people stage an uprising and get all the credit for it. I have no doubt that if we pick an unpopular enough government, we will not only not have a guerilla war waged against us, but we will be greeted as liberators.

The reason that George Bush was willing to be aggressive in his foreign policy while President Obama seems content to sit on the sidelines is that George Bush was a man of faith. He knew that if weapons of mass destruction weren't found in Iraq, God would give him another reason why we should be there. This faith is something we have lost in this country.

Our country was founded by deeply religious men like George Washington, Thomas Paine, and James Madison. Their faith moved them to leave England on the Mayflower so that they could worship in peace in the United States. Over the years, we have lost this faith in a big steaming pile of tolerance and multi-culturalism. If Middle Easterners want to come here that's fine, but they should do so as Christians. You don't see Americans going oversees and trying to impose our lifestyle on other countries.

Until we return to our religious roots, I fear that this country will remain headed in the wrong direction. When you think of it, God is the ultimate free market capitalist. He was the first deity to give his followers free will so that they could profit from their success or be punished for their failure. In fact, what is God's love, but the ultimate in trickle down economics?

I'll let you in on a little secret. I like to think of the invisible hand of the free market as being an actual invisible hand that belongs to the Holy Spirit. When God sees that things are off balance, he steps forward to bless us with precious balance. I have no doubt that God moves through capitalistic forces and I have America's continued prosperity as proof. It isn't that I don't think God loves socialists, it's simply that I think he finds it much easier to take care of capitalists as we have a system already in place that doesn't look to the state for help, but looks to God instead. We must not lose that. I am sure that a few centuries from now our great job creators will become Saints. It'd be nice if the Pope would also remember those of us who worked in Washington to keep a pro-business environment in this country.