Interesting Items Alex Gimarc [email protected] Monday Mar, 7, 2011 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Oil Shock 2. Conspiracy 3. Retirements 4. Volt 5. Gunrunner 6. Lawfare 7. Chickaloon 1. Oil Shock. The anti-drilling policies pursued by the Obama administration finally kicked in last week as the nation experienced its largest spike in oil prices since the summer of 2008. Years of environmental harassment lawsuits, incomprehensible permitting and regulatory rules for exploration and production finally started working as the average price per gallon of gasoline nationwide approached $4. The state media and the administration were both blaming the price spike on the Libyan civil war, which was an exercise in CYA, as oil from Libya goes primarily to Europe. The bottom line is that this administration has illegally implemented a moratorium on offshore drilling nationwide since April 2010. And if you aren’t finding new oil to pump and refine, you end up importing it. Between the Gulf of Mexico and the Chukchi / Beaufort Sea known oil reservoirs, the US could go a long way toward being independent of Middle Eastern and Russian oil imports, and we can do this very quickly. These anti-oil policies are doing little except to purposely impoverish all Americans by artificially jacking up the prices of the fuels we use on a daily basis. In related news, Interior did approve a single offshore permit in the Gulf a couple weeks ago. Interestingly enough, it was to a British Petroleum affiliated company. Judge Feldman gave Interior 30 days to approve 7 new permits or he would do it for them. Interior responded last week that the timeline would force them to turn down all permits, as they would not have sufficient time to make it all the way through the approval process. Perhaps Judge Feldman ought to start jailing MMS higher ups and Interior higher ups who are obstructing new permit approvals. At the very least, he ought to consider removing permitting authority from the feds and giving it to the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to execute. I am sure the five Gulf States can come up with an agreed-upon procedure that will start producing the vast quantity of oil offshore. Perhaps even a statehood compact for permitting offshore drilling including Alaska will be in order. 2. Conspiracy. Late last week yet another example of democrat and union collusion in Wisconsin came to light. The democrat mayor of Madison has been in negotiations with public employee unions over new contracts. Provisions of those contracts will be necessarily changed if and when the Wisconsin legislature passes its changes to the ability of public employee unions to collectively bargain for benefits. It appears that one of the reasons that democrat members of the state legislature are out of state is to give democrats running Madison time to finalize the new contracts. The story came out midweek and was mostly ignored by the state controlled media. I expect it is not being ignored in Wisconsin. 3. Retirements. Two more sitting US Senators announced last week that they would not be running for reelection in 2010. In Hawaii, Daniel Akaka (D, Akaka Bill) unexpectedly announced he would not be running. John Ensign (R, NV) who is embroiled in ethics difficulties also announced that he was not going to run. We will hope Nevada Republicans do better this time around than they did with Sharon Angle. The Hawaiian seat will also be problematic, as Hawaii has long been quite liberal, which means that if a Republican wins it, he or she may end up being another Scott Brown. Still, two more incumbents out of Washington DC is not a bad week. 4. Volt. GM announced its sales number for the Chevy Volt last week. They are seeing monthly sales around 280 vehicles, which means that the government subsidized, government owned, union run corporation is no longer producing vehicles that Americans want. Perhaps the vehicle buying public is refusing to purchase these vehicles because the administration wants us to buy them, and rejects out of hand being forced to do want the government wants them to do. 5. Gunrunner. CBS broke a story about BATFE collusion in allowing firearms to make it illegally into Mexico over the last month or so. The story was picked up by the firearms blogs and shows. The effort is called Project Gunrunner and is intended to allow the BATFE to follow firearms purchased in the US into Mexico where they end up being used by drug cartels on the US border. Two of these guns were found at the location where a Border Patrol officer was killed recently. Given that the Obama administration has made a very big deal in recent months about guns from the US making their way into Mexico as an excuse to shut down firearms sales in the Southwest, one wonders if this project is really intended to provide grist for that particular mill. Note that through all of this, the firearms dealers have done everything according to the book, notifying the BATFE of suspicious firearms sales. The BATFE has responded by allowing the sales and the export into Mexico. The BATFE was a lawless agency when they went after the Branch Davidians in 1993. They have not improved any over the last 18 years. And if they are doing little except making life more dangerous for Americans on and near the border by allowing firearms into Mexico from the US, perhaps it is time to defund them completely and shut them down. 6. Lawfare. Lawfare is a term coined to describe the act of fighting a war in the courts. One of the problems we get when we try jihadis in US criminal courts and jail them here in the US is that they gain access to the courts for retaliation. And with the assistance of the ACLU and other leftist lawyers, they have filed a series of civil suits in federal court against officials in the Bush administration who conducted the war against them. In normal times, the (In)Justice Department is charged with defending former officials who are being sued for discharging their sworn duties. But the Holder (In)Justice Department is not all that interested and has not been vigorously defending the lawfare targets. This requires the targets to hire lawyers out of their own pockets to the tune of nearly $1,000/hr to defend themselves from frivolous lawsuits, eventually impoverishing them. Last week, Holder’s (In)Justice Department announced that they would be dropping defense of former SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz due to policy differences within the administration. Normally this means that they were not defending the former Bush administration officials to the best of their abilities. They did offer to pay up to $200/hour to assist a privately financed defense. These lawsuits are destined for the SCOTUS as there are two conflicting rulings out there. A Ninth Circus judge has allowed a similar civil suit against John Yoo, who wrote the memo allowing waterboarding as an interrogation technique. A federal Judge in SC tossed the suit against Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz by Padilla as frivolous. The jihadis are continuing their “struggle” against the infidel (and I am a proud and practicing infidel) in our very courts with the assistance of the ACLU and left-leaning, Islamist-friendly US lawyers. 7. Chickaloon. The battle against resource development here in Alaska continues with a local Athabascan tribe going to the United Nations with a petition against a proposed coal mine nearby. The petition went to the UN water and sanitation activity. It is an attempt to use the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a vehicle to shut down resource development near tribal lands. Given the complete mess that the feds and the greens have made out of resource development here in Alaska, I can hardly wait for the corrupt bastards of the UN to get involved in the festivities. Message to the Chickaloon natives: Be careful what you wish for, as Mugabe’s and Qadaffi’s representatives on the UN Commission on Human Rights may want to get involved in your lives, and they have done such a great job with the lives of their own countrymen over the 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. Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations: Our Home Page http://interestingitems.org/ Archives can be found at http://home.gci.net/~agimarc The Alaska Standard http://thealaskastandard.com/ MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com Subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress.com/ Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column: http://www.thevanguard.org/ Alex -- To join RichsRants, send email to: [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en
