Interesting Items Alex Gimarc <[email protected]> Monday January 11, 2010 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Brown 2. Geithner 3. EPA 4. Felons 5. Yon 6. Retirements 1. Brown. Republican State Senator Scott Brown has pulled within either a single point or is losing by double digits to the democrat candidate in the special election to replace Ted Kennedy. Over the course of the last week, the democrat, Coakley has dropped from a double digit to a single digit lead. One poll came out over the weekend that showed Brown up by a single point. The Boston Globe immediately responded with an in-house poll showing him losing by 15%. The election is a week from Tuesday. We will see how it works out. Brown is running against ObamaCare which is hugely unpopular in MA. He is also running on fiscal sanity, which is very popular. The passion in this election is all on the conservative side of the race, as Coakley enjoyed a huge lead early on and has been coasting to her coronation for weeks. Democrats in both the senate and in MA state government appear to be worried, as they are preparing to slow-rill Brown’s swearing in for weeks so that he will not be the 41st vote against ObamaCare, allowing a filibuster to kill the package. It would be a fitting tribute to Teddy Kennedy for MA voters to replace him with a conservative who would vote to kill his signature legislative achievement. Mary Jo Kopechne would have been proud. 2. Geithner. Ed Morrissey in Hot Air Monday wrote about how the Tim Giethner-led Federal Reserve in NY told AIG to withhold details of money transfers to other banks and financial institutions including Goldman-Sachs during the financial bailouts. It appears that AIG was used as a vehicle to launder taxpayer dollars which bailed out politically connected financial institutions like Goldman. Unlike GM and Chrysler bondholders who got pennies on the dollar for their investments, the $62 billion laundered through AIG paid Goldman and other banks and lending institutions 100 cents on the dollar for their bad investments. In true Animal Farm fashion, all animals are indeed equal. But there are some animals that are more equal than others. In a related story, I ran across a description why there is no commercial or business related lending going on these days. I don’t understand the details as well as I should, but will make the attempt to lay it out as I understand it this morning. There are two reasons there is no commercial / business lending going on today. The first is that the administration which now controls the banks is laundering all federal money through the banks and using that money to finance the burgeoning federal debt. TARP and Stimulus money intended for business and home loans goes into the banks and financial institutions which then loan it out back to the Treasury for a 3% interest rate. There is no risk at all for the banks and lending institutions, and the 3% from Treasury wipes out all competition. Ergo, no commercial lending. Obama and congress get an endless supply of loans to finance the staggering debt they are running up and the banks and lending institutions, most of which are now owned by the US government make free, no risk money. The second reason there is no lending to commercial customers is the great fear of new taxes, new regulations, new constraints from this congress and this administration. Business is not hiring or expanding, so no new money is needed. 3. EPA. The Obama EPA announced new limits on ozone production last week. Ozone is one of the emissions that create smog, reacting with nitrogen and other atmospheric gasses. The Bush administration had revised the upper limits from 85 to 75 parts per billion. The Obama administration proposes revising that number downward another significant notch to between 60-70 parts per billion. Cost in human lives should this not be done is completely unknown. Unfortunately, the cost to comply with this new standard is expected to be tens of billions of dollars per year. It will also expand the reach of the EPA anti-smog jihad previously confined to the larger metropolitan areas like California, Texas and the Northeast to the entire country. Aside of all the usual discussion points of greens shoving their vision of a perfect world down our collective throats, this episode demonstrates that every single federal agency ought to have a sunset clause after it is set up and operating. The EPA was set up 40 years ago when we had some real problems with air and water quality. Over the last generation, the vast majority of those problems have been solved. But you need to keep all those regulators employed. You have to keep them writing new rules. You have to keep the scientists discovering new substances to regulate under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. And they are impossible to stop, for the argument is always that anyone who wants to put sensible limits on the regulators is only interested in poisoning children. It is long past time to sunset the EPA and prohibit them from writing new rules and regulations. Declare victory. Send them all out for a well-deserved retirement. At the very least, force a cost-benefit analysis based on actual lives lost for their new rules. Somewhere down the road, we will also need to consider significant revisions and eventual repeal of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. 4. Felons. A three judge panel from the Ninth Circus decided last week that felons in Washington State were being deprived of their voting rights on a racial basis and the State of Washington was in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The panel included the odious Stephen Reinhardt who somehow is able to get on every hot button leftist case the Ninth Circus sees. Their logic is that given that there are more convicted felons that are black or Hispanic than the general populace, and as such, depriving them of their ability to vote is racial discrimination of the worst form. Should this decision stand, it will quickly be extended nationwide and we will see millions of new democrat voters in future elections. Dafydd in Big Lizards Thursday wrote a long opinion piece on this bizarre opinion. 5. Yon. Michael Yon, who has done yeoman’s work reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an imbedded reporter was detained and handcuffed at the Seattle airport last week by the Homeland Security bullies working the screening checkpoints. Yon travels the world as an imbed. He is a former Green Beret who knows how to travel, what to carry, what not to carry, and what to answer when questions are asked. He also carries all his proper identification papers. In this case, the bullies working the screening pulled him aside for additional screening. Perhaps the last name of “Yon” is too close to “Muhammad, Ahmed, Al Libi” or whatever for these rocket scientists. They asked Yon a number of questions which he answered. When the questioning got to the point when they were asking who he worked for and how much he made, he refused to answer. This upset the bullies who got agitated and handcuffed him. He was rescued by Seattle Port Police but not after he had missed his flight. Homeland Security is the perfect example of an organization that was created for a bad reason, has become completely unaccountable and overly intrusive. And they aren’t doing their job all that well, for they pick out obvious non-threatening Americans to hassle and ignore people who want to kill us. 6. Retirements. Last week two long-time incumbent democrat senators announced they would not be running for reelection. They are Byron Dorgan (D, ND) and Chris Dodd (D, CT). Dorgan is a self-described “moderate” who has long ran as a conservative at home in conservative ND and voted as a leftists while in DC. Dodd was one of the fathers of the financial meltdown and has long profited handsomely from his contacts with the financial sector while Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Both were in significant trouble in the upcoming election, running behind announced candidates in recent polling. Dorgan’s seat is expected to easily flip in November. Dodd’s retirement opens the door for Connecticut’s Attorney General, a very nasty, popular, Elliot Spitzer wannabee who has been making populist headlines going after “corporate fraud” in the state. I am always hesitant about democrats loudly pontificating about corporate fraud, for those corporations targeted (like Microsoft was during the Clinton years) are normally those corporations that have decided for whatever reason not to play the political game, refused to pay protection money, and are then targeted for destruction by the left. What these retirements do is allow both democrats for vote for ObamaCare without suffering the wrath of the voters afterwards. They both believe they will get cush jobs, ambassadorships, as rewards for their service to the left. And in normal times, they would be correct. But these are no longer normal times, and if the democrats have managed to destroy the economy of this nation, the retirements of hundreds of millions of their countrymen, do you really think that those same democrats will be left to live in the lap of luxury after it goes to hell for everyone else? I do not think these two will have as much fun as they expect in their golden years. 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/ MatSu Valley 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/ To read Alex Gimarc’s columns, go to http://home.gci.net/~agimarc/ To stay abreast Pro Life news, go to http://www.listcast.com/x?oid=20000g For News with Attitude, email [email protected] with subscribe in the Subj. For REAL NEWS, send email request to [email protected]. For They Western Center for Journalism, fill out form @ http://fs7.formsite.com/C4Strategies/form377795450/index.html
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