Interesting Items Alex Gimarc [email protected] Monday, Sep 20, 2010 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Gangsters 2. Koran 3. Rage Boy 4. Lawsuits 5. Dispersants 1. Gangster. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took the gloves off late last week and issued a threat to Karen Ignagni, President of America’s Health Insurance Plans. The threat was contained in the last line of a letter to the chief lobbying group for private health insurance companies. Sebelius wrote: "There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases." Basically, the HHS Secretary, who has been given responsibility for executing ObamaCare, has told the private health insurance industry to sit down, shut up, or they will be dropped from the system when it kicks in completely in 2014. And she has the authority to do this. It is the Chicago way. Congress had best defund and then repeal this awful, fascist travesty, this affront to the Constitution. And it had best do it next spring. Or we will elect one that will. 2. Koran. On a happier note, the pastor of a small church in Florida had his week of fame after he announced he would conduct a public torching of the Koran. As expected, this spun up adherents of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage to spin rates unseen since the last Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. As the week progressed, the preacher morphed his announcement into a vehicle to get the Ground Zero Mosque (GZM or Rabat ) moved from Ground Zero. At weeks’ end, he said he had an agreement from the GZM Imam to move the mosque, and announced there would be no Koran burning. Of course immediately after this, the lying sack of pus Imam claimed he had made no such deal. As of last weekend, the pastor had not torched anything – yet. Everybody expected the wildly over the top overreaction by Wahhabis worldwide – and they did not disappoint. Nobody expected the Obama administration to get involved to the extent they did. Obama himself commented. SECDEF Gates personally called the preacher. CINCCENT Petraeus publicly asked that the Korans not be burned, saying it would harm the safety of the troops, a message that Sean Hannity picked up for an afternoon as be browbeat the preacher on the air for a half hour. Limbaugh picked up the theme the following day and ridiculed the notion by asking if this were so, why aren’t the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan completely safe today when we aren’t torching Korans. The FBI visited the church and the local fire department denied a burn permit. In a related story, we were reminded of a shipment of Bibles into Afghanistan that were burned by DoD. These bibles were shipped to a military member by a church. They were translated into the local language and intended to be handed out to the locals. Apparently the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Afghanistan government prohibits this, so they were destroyed. The action contrasts nicely with the high-level care and deference we are expected (demanded?) to have for the Koran. I hear it burns well in a hibachi, and is especially good when frying up a nice slab of bacon. It is long past time for Islam to play by the same rules as every other religion, and I think that they are about to get a long overdue lesion in tolerance. I do not think they will enjoy it a lot. Too bad. 3. Rage Boy. The reemergence of Muslim Rage Boy was met with all the usual concern by the Ruling Class. It was met by the non-elites as a “bring it on” moment. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that 9-11 be turned into International Burn a Koran Day, so that we can identify all the players and deal with them. I think that we are not going to screw around with Muslim Rage Boy a lot more and their amusement value has long since disappeared.
4. Lawsuits. As Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Bill Walker contemplates a third-party run for governor, a killer issue for this campaign has surfaced – that of a series of State of Alaska lawsuits against the feds. In 1994, conservatives in this state split a solid 55% voting majority three ways and elected (Phony) Tony Knowles (D) with just over 40% of the total vote. He also needed some voting fraud in Bush Alaska via chits for up to ten gallons of snowmachine fuel to get to the polling places to seal the deal. We have on the democrat side, a strong candidate, who is saying all the right fiscal things, and positioning himself to the fiscal right of the sitting governor Sean Parnell (R). If Walker runs as a third party, he may very well do the same thing as conservatives did to themselves in 1994. The first thing that Knowles did upon taking office was withdraw from a state lawsuit against the feds over their control of subsistence for hunting and fishing on federal lands – essentially turning over control to the feds. And the way he withdrew from the case did not allow any future litigation on the subject. Today, the State of Alaska is fighting the feds on permitting for bridges over the Colville River into NPR-A; fighting the listing of Cook Inlet belugas as endangered; fighting the listing of polar bears as endangered; fighting to delist stellar sea lions in the eastern Aleutians; suing the feds over ObamaCare. There are more lawsuits in the queue. Given that the fight for liberty will be fought at the state level over the next several years, which candidate do we want in office? The last democrat we elected dropped the Katie John lawsuit, as democrats don’t fight democrats in court. Walker has not mentioned the subject at all. The only one left is the sitting governor, who has aggressively fought the feds and can be expected to continue to do so. This makes the choice for the next governor of Alaska very clear. 5. Dispersants. One of the little games the left and greens play is questioning basic industrial processes, substances and their use. Once properly questioned, they then go on to the next step of raising environmental concern and eventually banning the use of the substances, banning the process, and significantly jacking up the cost of basic things we have been doing for safely and cleanly decades. The assault on the downhole fluids used in hydraulic fracturing is one such example. Fracing is a basic tool used to produce oil and natural gas. It has been used for over half a century with no environmental harm. The EPA completed a review of fluids and process five years ago and found nothing. Yet the greens are back again with an attempt to shut it down. They are also going after fire retardants sprayed from aircraft as a way to fight forest fires and wild fires as being environmentally unfriendly. Apparently a forest fire or a wild fire is far more environmentally friendly than spraying the fire with something to stop it from burning. Latest target in this anti-industrial jihad is the use of dispersants to clean up and mitigate the damage of oil spills. Last week the LA Times published an article questioning the use of dispersants in the Gulf oil spill during August. The local McClatchy fishwrapper joined in the festivities and contributed to the article. Whenever the LA Times and the ADN work on something together, you would be best to start looking for co-conspirators rather than actual information. The article went as expected, quoting all manner of “experts” questioning the use of dispersants in spill mitigation and cleanup. And as usual, they got the basics wrong. Dispersants are related to soaps, things that lessen the surface tension of the oil so that it will break into tiny, tiny droplets rather than remain as a large glob in the water. The more surface area available to the bacteria in the water, the quicker those bacteria can eat the oil into oblivion and eliminate the spill. The article repeated the leftist canard about a huge plume of oil underwater that is somehow lurking like a massive shark, biding its time before rising up and befouling a pristine beach on the Gulf. This notion violates the very laws of physics, as oil is lighter than water per unit volume and floats on the surface. The only physical way to keep a plume of oil underwater is to bag it and attach it to the sea floor – and nobody (other than the greens and their sycophants in the media) is idiot enough to do that. The greens and the left rely on poor knowledge of the physical world, poor education into science and technology, and old fashioned scaremongering to do their damage to the economy of this nation. And stories like this attacking the use of dispersants are only intended as another vehicle to shut down oil and natural gas exploration and production in this nation. If you can’t clean it up after you spill it, why allow drilling or production in the first place – which appears to be the plan of the Obama administration and Secretary Salazar. 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. 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