Interesting Items Feb 14 Alex Gimarc [email protected]
Interesting Items 2 / 14 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Egypt 2. Blackouts 3. Retirements 4. Budget Cuts 5. National Forest 1. Egypt. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down last week following nearly three weeks of street protests. The Vice president, Omar Suleiman made the announcement. Suleiman was the head of Egyptian intelligence, very smart, and well regarded by both US and Israeli defense and intelligence. He appears to be one of the Good Guys in the region. The Egyptian military suspended the national constitution and took control of the government. Mubarak left Cairo and retired to his home in Sharm el Sheik where he is reportedly making plans to depart for Dubai. Mubarak has prostate cancer and is not a well man. He will not long enjoy whatever monies he took out of Egypt over his 40 years in office. The next several months will be most interesting as Suleiman and the military navigate the treacherous waters of putting together a constitutional republic in Egypt. The problem they have will be keeping radical Islam from taking control of the government. The latest example of how not to do it right is taking place in Turkey, where the Islamists have been guiding a secular Muslim nation since the 1920s into the unforgiving jaws of the Islamic ummah. The Obama administration was all over the map with their reaction to this event. There are reports that the State Department and Google are active participants and pushed the protests in the background. Some stories have blamed Soros–funded NGOs for the protests. Some have tied this entire thing to the Bush administration’s success in turning Iraq into a constitutional republic. The fact is that nobody knows what is going on. And with riots and protests breaking out in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, some of the Gulf States, and Iran, it does appear that the Middle East is changing very quickly. Our job will be to ensure that the Islamists are not the ones who pick up the pieces afterwards. 2. Blackouts. Jeffery Folks writing in the American Thinker last Friday described the complete mess that environmentalists made in Texas over the last decade. That mess contributed to the rolling blackouts the week leading up to the Super Bowl in Dallas. A cold front with extremely cold air, snow and freezing rain hit Texas that week. The air was so cold that it did significant damage to vegetable crops in northern Mexico. And there was enough cold air so that it spiked electrical use for a week. Unfortunately, there was not enough electricity to go around. Environmentalists have long fought fossil fueled power plants, demanding new energy be produced by “renewable” energy which is supposed to be “clean” and “environmentally friendly.” In 2007, the Environmental Defense Fund managed to force an agreement with TXU Energy Corporation in which TXU dropped plans to construct eight new coal-fired electrical generation plants. In short, TXU rolled to the green pressure, and did not have sufficient backup energy available when it got really, really cold outside. Over the same period of time, Texas aggressively pushed for green, renewable wind energy in west Texas. Today, wind accounts for nearly 9% of installed generation. Unfortunately, after the storm passes and when the blades are covered in ice and the wind is not blowing for days while it is very, very cold, that generation is not available either. The backup generation plan was to pipe in natural gas and fire the plants, but there was not sufficient electricity to run the pumps and the natural gas sat in the pipelines, not available for electrical generation. Folks, this is what we get when we kowtow to the greens. We get less reliable, less robust electricity. And when it gets cold outside – which it does during the winter – the nice, fuzzy sounding green, renewable energy will not hack it. Perhaps this disaster will encourage Texas residents and electrical consumers nationwide to ignore the demands of the greens and take appropriate steps to keep the lights on – even if that means coal is in our future – which it must be. You can find the American Thinker article here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/ no_coal_no_power_no_gas.html 3. Retirements. We are up to five incumbent US Senators not running for reelection this year. They include Kay Bailey Hutchison, (R, TX), Joe Lieberman (I, CN), Kent Conrad (D, ND), Jim Webb (D, VA) and John Kyl (R, AZ). Webb and Kyl announced their intentions not to run last week. Both were facing very tough reelections, with Webb in big, big trouble in VA due to his votes in support of ObamaCare and Kyl in AZ with his dalliance with comprehensive immigration reform. Kyl was expected to face a significant primary challenge. Of these seats, Republicans have excellent chances to pick up North Dakota and Virginia. Roger Hedgecock, who does a talk show out of San Diego, believes that injured democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who is undergoing rehab treatment in Houston was looking into filing and running against Kyl in 2012. Hedgecock believes that if she progresses sufficiently and runs in 2012, she will be unstoppable and win the seat. We will hope he is wrong. 4. Budget Cuts. Last week, we got to start watching the initial round of budget cuts in the House. The festivities blew up nicely when the House leadership proposed a pro-rated share of the promised $100 billion. Newly elected House freshmen rebelled, and demanded the full amount, which appears to be the way. The other difficulty came with the effort to defund ObamaCare. Normal legislation is a two part dance, with legislation setting up the program – whatever it is – followed by legislation authorizing the spending. ObamaCare had both pieces included, which authorized $100 billion of mandatory ObamaCare spending every single year. Expect to see an amendment to the continuing resolution offered up in the next week or so to shut off that spending. Democrats were very sneaky in writing and passing ObamaCare, and made it very difficult to defund and repeal it. But that is a two-edged sword, as it will force vote after vote after vote on the hated legislation, something that will not go well for the democrats. 5. National Forest. The local McClatchy fishwrapper ran a story about an announcement out of the US Forest Service that they would be changing the way they would be managing national forests. The claim is that they are changing the rules to allow forest managers to find more common ground between environmentalists and those that want to use the forests according to congressionally mandated multiple uses. Expect the unilateral use revisions to be written in such a way as to implement the Clintonoid roadless forest rules, eliminate all commercial use of the forests, and limit human use of the lands. This will fit in nicely with Interior Secretary Salazar’s Order 3310, signed Dec 22, 2010 directing BLM to conduct wilderness resource inventories aimed at creating new wilderness areas out of the maximum acreage of BLM lands. Although the AP article last Friday was literally giddy with the prospect of greens and other forest users finally getting along, taken with the BLM actions, I am not hopeful of anything other than more property rights thefts via bureaucratic fiat by Salazar, the BLM and the USFS. 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. 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