Interesting Items
Alex Gimarc
<[email protected]>
Monday January 25, 2010
Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for
your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1.
Correction
2.
Interrogations
3.
Brown
4.
SCOTUS
5.
Fort Hood
6.
Glaciers
7.
Temperatures
1.
Correction. One of my correspondents pointed out that the Exxon
Point
Thompson leases mentioned last week were actually pulled by former
Governor
Murkowski’s DNR Commissioner Mike Menge shortly before Governor Palin
was
inaugurated. The leases were pulled on Nov. 27, 2006 and Palin took the
oath of office on Monday Dec. 4, 2006. The action was supported by
incoming DNR Commissioner under Palin, Marty Rutherford. Interesting
timing, that.
2.
Interrogations. Senators questioned the head of the FBI,
Homeland
Security and the National Intelligence apparatus last week about the
decision
to mirandize the Kinderbomber Abdulmutallab. Nobody claimed that their
organizations made the decision, essentially pointing the finger of
blame
directly at Attorney General Holder and / or the Obama WH. The timing
of
the interrogation was interesting, as the FBI was able to interrogate
him for
over 50 minutes before word came down from upon high that the terrorist
was to
be read his rights and given a lawyer. The CIA was not involved.
The new terrorist handling team in the WH set up for such an occurrence
was not
asked to participate or told of the action, leaving them completely out
of the
loop. The WH used the excuse that the group had not been completely
formed yet and was not operational. This sorry story gets even worse,
as
Holder’s has yet to explain his decision to treat this as a criminal
event rather than another attack in a war we have been pursuing since
9-11. Before he shut up, the terrorist claimed that there were dozens
more terrorists in the process of trying to do the same thing and had he
been
properly interrogated by the intelligence community, we would have been a
bit
safer. Sadly, we aren’t. The anti-terrorist group in the WH
appears to be outward focused; interested in terrorist incidents outside
the US
borders, completely ignoring terrorist acts within our national
borders.
Holder is also stonewalling congress on requests for information about
his
recent hires. Congress is trying to find out how many of the new hires
were involved in the legal effort to give detainees constitutional
rights. Holder has managed to quickly and thoroughly politicize the
(In)Justice
Department to a level unseen since the height of the Reno infestation.
3.
Brown. I am tempted to use the UPS advertising slogan: “What has
Brown done for you lately?” to describe the outcome of the MA special
election for US Senate. Republican Scott Brown won a 52-47% vote in
last
Tuesday’s special election. He ran as a fiscal conservative; he ran
against ObamaCare; and he ran against treating terrorists like common
criminals
and giving them constitutional rights in US courts. The election busted
the 60-seat democrat supermajority in the senate and set off a round of
recriminations within the democrat party and among elected democrats.
Over the week, it appears that recruitment of high quality conservative
opponents to incumbent democrat members of congress is picking up
nicely; as is
retirements of incumbent democrats. At this point it appears that
ObamaCare is mostly dead. Reid and Pelosi are still in negotiations and
are still fully capable of pulling the wooden stake out of its black
little
heart and shoving it through the House and Senate. We will see how
suicidal they really are, I suppose. For his part, the president went
to
Ohio the next day and did a rant against the rich corporate, fat cat
Wall
Street banks, promising to slam them with more rules, regulations and
taxes,
after which the stock market spent the last three days of the week in
free
fall. Bill Clinton was a sufficiently good politician to listen to what
the voters were telling him. I don’t think Obama is that good or
that flexible. He has been raised and trained as a doctrinaire
leftist. Expect him to continue to govern that way in the years to
come.
4.
SCOTUS. In another bit of good news for the body politic, the
SCOTUS
tossed out major portions of McCain Feingold as a violation of the free
speech
provisions of the First Amendment. The ruling essentially removed
dollar
and time limits on corporate advertising for individuals or issues. The
left went ballistic on the ruling, as it significantly levels the
playing field
and provides some conservative response to the Soros – union money
machine set up under McCain Feingold. The other thing that was
addressed
in the opinion was the notion of stare decisis – the notion that judges
should defer to precedent in their opinions. Chief Justice Roberts
wrote
an opinion that noted that stare decisis was something that judges used
when
they couldn’t come up with any fundamental foundation to base their
opinions upon. Some observers took it as a pot shot against leftist
members
of the SCOTUS. The opinion was 5-4 with Justice Kennedy as the swing
vote. Of interest, Justice Stevens read his opinion in open court.
He is over 90 and did not look well. He may be the next retirement if
his
health continues to deteriorate. This was a good opinion both on
constitutional grounds (First Amendment upheld) and procedural grounds
(a slap
at stare decisis).
5.
Fort Hood. DoD released its
report on the Fort Hood terrorist
attack. Ralph Peters described it as a disgraceful document, as it
documents precisely why the attack happened and politically correct
malfeasance
among the leadership and the officer corps that allowed the attack to
take place. Everyone in Hasan’s supervisory chain ignored his
increasingly militant Islamist actions. Nobody confronted him.
Nobody reported their concerns out of fear they would be identified as
opponents of diversity. The atmosphere within the Army and perhaps
inside
much of the armed forces today is that if anyone complains about a
Muslim doing
what Islamists do best, it is instant career suicide. Army Chief of
Staff
Casey’s observation that he thought a reaction to the attack that would
limit diversity in the Army would be worse than the attack is at the
center of
the self-defeating politically correct attitude within the Army and
describes
the problem we face. The report was singularly unable to even address
the
politically correct atmosphere within the Army or suggest any
solutions.
Indeed it was chaired by former Clinton Army Secretary Togo West, who
helped
institute the current politically correct atmosphere within the Army.
The
report does not even refer to Hasan as a terrorist. It refers to him as
an alleged perpetrator – legal language vice military language. As
the long departed Walt Kelly noted decades ago: We have met the enemy
and
he is us.
6.
Glaciers. The latest lie out of the UN IPCC to be debunked was
the
claim
that all the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 due to the effects
by
manmade global warming. The claim made it into the most recent UN IPCC
report and has been used as a vehicle to pass cap and trade legislation
in
Europe, the US and Australia. As usual, it is a completely false
claim. It turns out that the prediction came out of a telephone
discussion with an Indian scientist that was turned into a World
Wildlife Fund
(WWF) document. The WWF document was then incorporated into the IPCC
report. No science was done. No results were published. No
data was gathered. And there was no peer review of the claim. As of
last week, the IPCC was scrambling to excuse their malfeasance. Note
that
this is not the only WWF data that has made into parts of the IPCC
reports over
the last decade. Kind of makes you wonder how many more little time
bombs
are sitting out there in their reports waiting to go off. The IPCC
process is fundamentally flawed and corrupted. Time to shut it down and
pull the plug.
7.
Temperatures. In a series of related stories on Anthony Watts’
Watts Up With That web site, it appears that the various government
organizations in charge of deploying and monitoring temperature data
collection
in their nations have been massaging the data collection itself. Over
the
last 20 years, the total number of data collecting stations has dropped
from
around 6,000 to around 1,500 today. Most of the remaining stations are
in
urban areas, taking full advantage of the very well known urban heat
island
effect to jack up reported temperatures. Stations that have disappeared
are mostly gone from rural, high altitude and high latitude areas, areas
which
have measurably and historically lower temperatures than urban areas.
After data is collected, it is massaged – basically averaged - between
stations. Vast areas of Siberia and northern Canada are averaged
between
recording stations in warmer parts of the country. The climatologists
and
the governments using them to manufacture this hoax have successfully
managed
to corrupt even the data gathering. Nice job, guys.
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/
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