Come visit us at our new web site: www.interestingitems.org Leave your thoughts, comments and opinions. We look forward to hearing from you. Interesting Items Alex Gimarc [email protected] Monday Mar 19, 2012 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue:
1. Stevens 2. Pools 3. Santorum 4. Licenses 5. Dorm Room 6. Oil 1. Stevens. The court-appointed Special Prosecutor looking into prosecutorial misconduct by the (In)Justice Department during the Ted Stevens case released a 514 page report late last week. The report details significant information hidden by federal prosecutors from the Stevens defense team. This included but is not limited to Bill Allen having sex with underage girls (something the defense would have used to impugn his character). Allen also got the girl to lie about the relationship to the court and prosecutors (Scooter Libby? Martha Stewart?). Allen (in)famously said he would do anything to keep federal prosecutors from doing anything to his family. This included lying while on the stand, and the prosecutors did nothing while he did so in court. The report covers up a bit for the prosecutorial team, claiming that their actions in hiding evidence from the defense team did not rise to the level of criminal conduct. (In)Justice Public Integrity Section did themselves proud in this one, pointing the finger of blame to federal prosecutors working in Alaska , though the case was run out of and tried in Washington DC (where they could get the right jury empanelled). Note that this was the second incumbent Republican US Senator these vermin took out, the first being Conrad Burns (R, MT) via a bogus indictment in 2006 that was dropped weeks after he lost his reelection bid. Had either Burns or Stevens been in the senate, we would have never seen ObamaCare. The (In)Justice Department is hopelessly corrupted. Time for some serious cleanup by the next administration. Perhaps it will even include a RICO prosecution and some serious time in Club Fed. 2. Pools. Yet more good news out of Eric Holder’s (In)Justice Department. This one is a reading of the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires all community and commercial swimming pools to install a permanent lift for handicapped users. The ADA language on accessibility is (as usual) a bit unclear. Pool owners have been using portable lifts to comply with the ADA . According to the ambulance chasers at (In)Justice, that is no longer acceptable and permanent lifts to the tune of $8,000 - $20,000 per each of the over 300,000 pools nationwide. Now that this “clarification” has been handed down from on high, expect a number of these facilities that cannot afford the new capital investment to close under threat of harassment lawsuit by Obama donors from the trial lawyers’ bar. 3. Santorum. Latest attempt to brand Rick Santorum as a right wing social fanatic came last weekend with a report that as president, he would declare a war on internet porn. I have no idea whether or not this is accurate, but would rather go another direction with the discussion. One blogger over the weekend noted that the War on Poverty LBJ declared in the 1960s led to rampant destruction of the family structure in the inner cities and ostensibly more poverty. The War on Drugs led to the rise of the Mexican drug cartels and more drug use. He wonders what a War on Internet Porn will lead to. Perhaps the next president and future congresses ought to strongly consider declaring victory and stopping the internal wars. Shove all responsibility for poverty down to the states and cities. Shut down the increasingly militarized federal drug enforcement structure and move the entire mess down to the states. Feds would only be responsible for the import or export of drugs into or out of the nation. If we have been doing these things for half a century and they are making the problems worse, why keep on doing them? 4. Licenses. In yet another assault on small businesses, the IRS wrote and promulgated new regulations requiring all 350,000 mom and pop tax preparation businesses to obtain a license from the IRS in order to operate. The new regulations were written with the full support of big tax preparation corporations like H&R Block as a way to put their competition out of business – economic fascism at its most blatant. When the government gets into the business of selecting winners and losers via taxes and regulation, this is fascism of the Italian or Argentinean flavor. Congress has not given the IRS the ability to regulate tax preparers. Expect lawsuits; lots of lawsuits. 5. Dorm Room. Last week a New Jersey jury found a Rutgers student guilty of parts of 15 charges including “bias intimidation based on sexual orientation” which is the NJ hate crime statute. The student used a web cam and Twitter to televise a sexual tryst between his roommate and a 32 year old gay guy. The roommate found out about the broadcast and committed suicide a week or so later by jumping off the George Washington Bridge . Gay rights activists were in high dudgeon over the so-called invasion of privacy of the gay couple. But imagine the problem from the standpoint of being a freshman in college. Your roommate is bringing in an adult that you don’t know into your private space for homosexual sex – your temporary home, the room you are living in for nine months of the year. Most of us would (and have) set some rules of engagement (ROE) with roommates. One of the reasonable rules would be no sex in the dorm room. And violation of the ROE would lead to pushback. Nobody would have said a word had the student broadcast a tryst between the roommate and a girlfriend. Yet when gays are involved, they are to be treated like children – never responsible for their own actions or choices. The tryst was broadcast via web cam on a laptop (note to self: put a towel over the laptop) and the convicted student Tweeted to his friends and followers daring them to watch. Some of them did. The suicide left three suicide notes on his computer which the Judge refused to allow the defense access to. As I understand it, the family of the suicide did not agree with or support his new lifestyle choice, which was likely a factor in his decision to take his life. The hate crime conviction carries up to ten years in jail and a deportation of the convicted after he has served his time. Expect an appeal based upon the exculpatory evidence of the suicide notes withheld from both the defense and the jury. 6. Oil. Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron announced last week that they would be dipping into the Strategic Oil Reserve as a way to control high gasoline prices here in the US . Expect that dip to happen this fall, so the small decrease in gasoline prices at the time can be used in Obama reelection ads. The price spike in gasoline has really damaged the Obama reelection campaign, leading to all sorts of interesting claims, excuses, name calling and finger pointing. We have the claim that the US has only 2% of the proven oil reserves yet uses 20% of the world’s oil. That is a bogus claim, as it does not include any of the known, recoverable oil reserves. It also does not include any of the newly available oil using new technology for getting it out of the ground. Nobody is talking about the refineries closing in the Northeast due to new EPA emissions requirements. These closures have also served to increase the cost of gasoline nationwide. While the next president can move quickly to undo a lot of the restrictions on drilling on federal lands, it will take strong congressional action to undo the new rules and regulations out of the EPA over the last six 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. 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