Interesting Items
Alex Gimarc
<[email protected]>
Monday, March 8, 2010
Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. ObamaCare
2. EPA
3. Wolves
4. Bunning
5. Utah
6. Debt
1. ObamaCare. Captain Ahab, oops, I mean President Obama and congressional
leaders have decided to launch yet another assault on our liberties with
another try at the Great White Whale of ObamaCare. Last week, we saw the
Kabuki dance around the use of reconciliation. But this discussion was a
complete ruse, a head fake, intended to distract and annoy while the real game
is afoot in the House. If Pelosi’s democrats in the House pass the senate
bill, Obama will sign it and it will become law. Everything else is smoke and
mirrors. The only good news is that Pelosi is short of votes – anywhere from a
couple to as many as 100. And as we have seen with Ben Nelson in NE, what
democrats say is not what they end up doing, for after all, they are
democrats. Last week, democrat house leadership leaked results of an ethics
investigation against a single-term democrat from who voted against ObamaCare
in the House because it wasn’t sufficiently
left wing. Massa did the Mark Foley routine, going after his male staffers in
sexually suggestive ways. Because he was a no vote, the House leadership is
forcing him out. Obama nominated the brother of a Utah democrat House member
as a federal judge. No bribery here. Nothing to see. Move along; move
along. They are going to continue to clean house, continue to bribe House
members until they have enough votes to pass this thing. This is not yet in
the bag for the left, but they are closer than they have ever been.
2. EPA. Congressional action on a resolution prohibiting the EPA from issuing
regulations against carbon dioxide and other components of the atmosphere as
pollutants continued percolating through congress. And this action is
completely bipartisan, with congressional Republicans joining up with rust belt
and coal state democrats to push back against the EPA. At this point in the
discussion, if passed this will at a minimum place a two-year moratorium on any
EPA rule making regarding carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.
3. Wolves. The Alaska Board of Game repealed a no-trapping buffer zone
surrounding Denali National Park last week. The buffer zone was supposed to
help protect Denali wolves, which are not sufficiently intelligent to stay
inside their assigned boundaries. The Board of Game rightfully observed that
it was not up to the State of Alaska to manage animals just because the feds
choose to manage animals in a particular way. These hearings were particularly
caucus, with the head of Connecticut’s Friends of Animals, a long-time opponent
of both the Iditarod and our wolf control / predator control programs making
the trip to the meeting to put in her two cents worth. Now here’s the fun
part: Wildlife managers in Denali have done such a terrible job managing their
animals, that predators in the park have killed everything in sight, and are
now in the process of eating one another into oblivion. The entire park has
only 70 or so wolves left.
Park management, which supports the trapping buffer zone, blames the crash in
total numbers of wolves on the trappers. Congratulations on the Board of
Game. They got this one right.
4. Bunning. Senator Jim Bunning threw a wrench into the democrat wheels of
progress last week by objecting to a unanimous consent motion. The way
unanimous consent works, is that any single senator can object and then the
Majority Leader can schedule a vote on the legislation. The legislation was
yet another extension of unemployment benefits, yet another $10 billion that we
don’t have in the budget. The congressional leadership and the Obama
administration had passed a few weeks ago the Pay-Go legislation. Pay-Go
basically means that congress has to pay for new spending by either cutting the
budget elsewhere or raising taxes. Bunning was simply holding congressional
leadership to the law they passed a couple weeks ago. Democrats went nuts,
both on the floor of the senate and in the state controlled media. Rather than
immediately scheduling a vote on the legislation – which passed with more than
70 votes later in the week – the
senate leadership went into full starving women and killing little children
mode. Bunning was excoriated for four days and got little public support from
his cohorts in crime on the Republican side of the aisle. The deal cut with
passage of the legislation simply kicks the can down the road for a few weeks a
month or two. We will hope the rest of the Republicans in the senate have a
better argument in opposition to this extension when it comes up again.
5. Utah. The last three democrat presidents – Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and
now Barack Obama have stolen or are considering stealing lands from the many
states via the 1906 Antiquities Act, turning them into national monuments.
Jimmy Carter used the threat of using the act widely in Alaska to force passage
of the 1980 ANILCA legislation that transferred over 50 million acres from
state control into national parks, wilderness areas and monuments. Bill
Clinton stole over 10 million acres, most notably locking up superb coal and
natural gas prospects underneath the Grand Staircase – Escalante Monument in
Utah. Obama is rumored to be considering a similar action, locking up the
trillion-dollar Pebble Prospect and vast portions of the NPR-A here in Alaska.
The Utah House last week passed legislation that fights back. The legislation
suggests using the state’s power of eminent domain against the feds. The logic
here is that the infamous
Kelo decision allows states to use their eminent domain powers against the
feds. At the very least, this will force land management into the courts,
which will make a greater hash out of them than they already have done. Good
luck to Utah. May they be incredibly successful in this. LA Times, Weds.
6. Debt. Dr. Jack Wheeler’s To the Point web site is a subscription site that
I joined a year or so ago. It claims to be the home of rational conservatives
and the conversation and ideas are pretty good. For example, their approach to
the out of control federal spending is the Triple D strategy: defund, disobey
and default. They suggest defaulting on the foreign debt that is held by China
and other nations as a solution to the external debt. While I am not a great
fan of default as a solution, I do understand its power to defund the voracious
beast. But it got me thinking about the internal debt – the debt we Americans
owe ourselves, the National Debt. What do we do about that? What collateral
does the federal government, now operating without the consent of the governed
have that may be used to defease that debt? The feds have tens of thousands of
square miles that they have stolen from the states in the form of wilderness
areas,
national parks, national monuments, national forests, critical habitats and
military reservations. Every single square inch of that property ought to be
returned immediately to the many states to pay off that debt. The only
property the feds ought to retain would be the military reservations as they
sit today. Once the land is transferred, the feds abrogate the debt. This
will impact the western states a lot more than the eastern states, as the feds
didn’t get into thievery until about a century or so ago. For the coastal
states, the feds can give drilling rights to the outer continental shelf to
each state. Such a transfer must come along with repeal of federal laws
prohibiting use of those transferred lands, for they aren’t going to have any
value unless we can actually do something with them.
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/
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