Interesting Items Alex Gimarc <[email protected]> Monday, 5 October 2009
Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy - In this issue: 1. Palin 2. Unemployment 3. Countrywide 4. NIE 5. Cramdown 6. McKitrick 1. Palin. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin announced publication of her memoirs a couple weeks ago. It only took a week for the book to shoot to the top of the Amazon and Barnes & Noble lists, where I expect it will stay for the next month or so until it released on November 17. The book is supposed to contain the product of notes she took while on the campaign trail last year. She reportedly got a seven figure advance for the book. Palin is sifting through over 1,500 requests for speaking engagements, and stands to make a very good living off of speaking fees for the next few years. Watch her closely over the course of the next year, for if she goes the Nixon route and chooses to campaign for conservative candidates in the run-up to the 2010 campaign, she will have substantial political capital in her back pocket for a presidential run in 2012. Palin’s problem is going to be to defend her record here in Alaska. The natural gas pipeline has not been built; though there will be an open season for the producers sometime next year. Worse was her support for the ACES legislation that jacked up state excise taxes and royalties on the North Slope producers to the extent that new exploration and development has all but shut down. Granted, the democrat majority in the state senate took her proposal and rewrote it into something far worse than her original proposal, but she did not fix the damage during its time in the legislature and ended up signing the bill without making any line item changes to clean up the worst problems. Alaskan governors are quite powerful and have the line item authority to strike a lot of things from legislation that ends up on their desks. She did not show much interest in working with the legislature while in office. While her political instincts and skills are phenomenal, she needs basic education in the fundamentals of small government, free market economics, and foreign affairs over the next few years should she want to run in 2012. We will hope she is hooked up with the right group of folks on the right and that education is proceeding apace. Should she be elected, one of her great tasks will be to deconstruct the leviathan that the left has turned the federal government into. That leviathan will need to be dismantled and most powers returned to the many states where they constitutionally belong. Sooner would be better than later. 2. Unemployment. Last week, the Labor Department reported that teen unemployment was now at a post-WWII high of 52.2%. Congratulations to the democrats, the unions that have supported them, and the State Run Media for creating conditions in which our children and grandchildren cannot get their first jobs. Nothing like putting an entire generation on the public dole if your goal is to get elected and reelected from now until Doomsday. Only I don’t think it is going to work out quite like the unions and the leftists think it is going to work. Overall unemployment is now at 9.8%, and if you include the people who have quit working, that number is above 17%, the highest since 1983. Add to this a large number of early retirees, and you have a devastating picture of what congress and this administration has done to the non-government economic sector. Once conditions change, I do expect the economy to come off the floor, roaring, as Americans for the most part tend to self sufficiency and have a significant entrepreneurial streak. Things change pretty quickly in this world. Once we get Washington DC and congress out of the way, we will do well. 3. Countrywide. Last week, the WSJ reported that Country Mortgage which ran the Friends of Angelo program, kept audio tapes of their transactions. Unfortunately, Countrywide, now under new management – federal management – managed to destroy the tapes without notifying the regulators or congress. Rep. Darryl Issa (R, CA) has been tying to subpoena the remaining records of the program. As usual, the democrats have been stymieing the request for subpoenas. His committee chairman, Rep Edolphus Towns has been systematically blocking that request. Interestingly enough, Rep. Towns, received two mortgages from Countrywide’s VIP program. Of course, the democrat denies any influence peddled while he uses his position to block all investigation into Countrywide. 4. NIE. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s capability to produce nuclear weapons released in 2007 has once again been revealed to be a political fraud written by the CIA Weasels who fought President Bush on the wars in the Middle East for eight solid years. This particular NIE analyzed the Iranian nuclear program and reported that it would be years and years before the Mullahs and Ahmadinejad and the girls had the capability to produce nuclear weapons. This NIE severely undercut the ability of the Bush administration to actively take on the Iranian nuclear program during his final two years in office. Now that we have a waffling, dabbling, girly man in charge of national security and the “discovery” that the Iranians had a second nuclear processing facility buried deep near Qom, the threat of a nuclear Iran, aided and abetted by Russia, China, the French and appeasing democrats, the world has become a much more dangerous place. The US stands to do nothing. The intelligence community has been hopelessly compromised and politicized and congress is too busy playing the standard “mine’s bigger than yours” game to notice. I expect Israel will do something about the problem before too many months pass. But the work of the intelligence community against our Islamist enemies has been astoundingly corrupt and lacking. We will hope the next administration and congress will do something about it before a lot of Americans get killed. 5. Cramdown. Limbaugh notified his listeners last week the technique that Harry Reid (D, NV) will use to cram ObamaCare thru the senate. This is moderately creative, but fundamentally corrupt. Reid has three pieces of House passed legislation on the senate legislative docket. He is expected to get two versions of ObamaCare passed out of senate committees next week. Expect Reid to combine both versions of the legislation, rewriting what he wants to rewrite, and offer it as a replacement amendment for any one of the three House passed pieces of legislation. Reid will then offer the replacement up for a vote. There will be a Republican led filibuster, which Reid and the 59 senate democrat majority will most certainly break. Reid will then call the legislation up for a vote and pass it out of the senate with between 50-60 votes, all democrats except perhaps Olympia Snowe. The legislation will have a bunch of garbage in it that will attempt to hide the ball regarding single payer health care – co-ops and trigger mechanisms, for instance. Once out of the senate, the legislation will go to the House, where Pelosi’s people will either support it as written – and it is being written in the back rooms of the senate and house as I write this – or amend it. If the House passes it as written, it will end up on Obama’s desk in less than two weeks. If the House chooses to amend it, it will end up in conference committee and require yet another vote in the senate. This is cramdown. They are cramming it down our collective throats. Should they pass it over our objections, tar and feathers ought to be once again part of the political arsenal of any sensible American patriot. The sooner we use it, the better. 6. McKitrick. Ross McKitrick is a climate data researcher that has been trying to get to the underlying data behind the IPCC / Mann “Hockey Stick” for over a decade. Last week, he published results of an analysis of the underlying data behind the original IPCC Hockey Stick graph in 1999 and the most recent Arctic Warming Hockey Stick graphs. He found that the researchers cherry-picked datasets from the northern Ural mountains, in one case, carefully choosing datasets from 12 trees rather than taking the entire set of collected tree cores. The carefully selected dataset showed unequivocal evidence of global warming over the last 30 years. However, if you take the entire dataset, it shows an overall cooling trend. The entire dataset also shows the existence of the Medieval Warm Period from 800-1300, which was the time the Vikings colonized Greenland and Iceland. The science behind manmade Global Warming is at best a hysterical fraud. At worst, it is the death of government funded science forever. More later - - AG "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776. Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations: The Alaska Standard http://thealaskastandard.com/ MatSuValley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com District 28 http://www.dist28.com/ subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress.com/ and the home page: http://home.gci.net/~agimarc Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column: http://www.thevanguard.org/ Washington is Broken Corruption Reigns Supreme Tea Party Commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkFFwyyjZC8 Oath Keepers http://www.oilforimmigration.org/facts/?p=2694 Nov 4, 2009 - National Strike http://accdf.com/blog/2009/07/21/national-strike-against-the-dictator/ Rich Martin . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To join RichsRants, send email to: [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
