Interesting Items 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 May 2, 2011 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Dead 2. Lizard 3. Westboro 4. Shell 5. Lawyers 6. Twisters 1. Dead. Obama released a statement Sunday night that Seal Team Six had killed Osama bin Laden in a firefight at his house in Pakistan. The house was substantially larger than surrounding houses and was in a town that had a Pakistani military academy. Here in the US papers carried banner headlines reporting the killing while people danced in the streets. The intelligence came from interrogations of captured terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and reportedly identified one of his couriers. The carcass was buried at sea, hopefully with a bit of bacon of a few pork rinds to make sure he makes it to Allah. This is very good news, which will undoubtedly be used at a centerpiece of Obama’s reelection campaign. It does raise a few questions and observations. First was bin Laden’s health. He was reportedly suffering from kidney failure in the years after the attack on 9-11. Normal lifespan with that particular organ failure is measured in weeks to months. Either the report was wrong (likely disinformation) or he got a transplant. Second is the existence of his compound in a large city in Pakistan. This is yet another indication that terrorism cannot survive without support of a government, whether funded by the Saudis via oil money paid to its Wahhabis or special protection and support from the Islamist friendly Pakistani ISI. Governments are always involved at some level and those governments should pay a significant price for participating. Finally, the fact that the interrogations at Gitmo yielded intelligence that led to this operation demonstrates once again the common good sense that President Bush and SecDef Rumsfeld had in setting up the operation there and the utter foolishness of Obama, Holder and Hillary’s attempt to shut it down. 2. Lizard. The US Fish & Wildlife Service is about to shut down oil and natural gas exploration – along with everything else – in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico to protect a three-inch long lizard that has just been discovered as threatened. The dunes sagebrush lizard apparently only exists in order to destroy jobs, property rights, livelihood of people living in the region. The green excuse to list it as endangered is due to “habitat fragmentation” – a bogus term invented to justify this legal theft. The area centers on Midland – Odessa and includes the Permian Basin, one of the largest oil producing counties in Texas. Should the greens at USF&WS be successful in listing this lizard, they plan to immediately follow with listing the lesser prairie chicken next year. The Endangered Species Act is seriously flawed both in concept and in execution. It should be immediately repealed and every single species delisted. 3. Westboro. Two weeks ago USMC Staff Sgt Jason Rogers was laid to rest in Brandon, MS with full military honors. The Alinskyite vermin that calls themselves the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS, also planned on making an appearance, fresh from winning their court case last March. They felt emboldened by the win. The locals in Brandon thought otherwise and finally responded to these vermin in the appropriate manner. An Ole Miss sports blog had a message that described what took place. A couple of days before the funeral, one of the Westboro guys – complete with Kansas plates – started running his mouth at a local service station. He got thumped pretty badly. When the cops showed up, nobody could remember much what had happened; neither could the Westboro guy. On the day of the funeral, county vehicles were parked behind every auto with Kansas plates at local motels. It took a long time to move those county vehicles because the county wrecker was busy that particular day. The few Westboro protesters that made it to the funeral were taken in for questioning due to a crime they might have been involved in. There were a lot of questions and it took until after the funeral for them to be released. This is the way to deal with these vermin. We will hope they see this again. Here’s the original article: http://thehayride.com/2011/04/westboro-baptist-church-goes-to-mississippi-and-loses/ 4. Shell. The EPA Air Quality Appeals Board shut down Shell Oil’s attempt to drill exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea this summer by denying their air quality permit. The excuse by this 4-member panel was that diesel emissions from boats offshore would negatively impact air quality at Kaktovik 70 miles away from the drill site. As summers are very short, this decision puts Shell off for at least another year. So far, Shell has spent over $4 billion jumping through myriad hoops and harassment from federal agencies, green non-profits, and local natives with their hand out. The Chukchi is very important, as we believe that there is 2.5 times as much oil available for production than we have already pumped down the Trans Alaskan Pipeline System over the last 35 years. Between the shutdown offshore Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration and the greens infesting it have shut off a significant step toward energy independence for this nation. There are also some up here that are coming to believe that the feds are intentionally obstructing new wells via the regulatory and permitting process in order to shut down the pipeline. Once production falls to the vicinity of 500,000 bbl/day, there is not enough oil flowing through the pipeline to keep it open. This is an operational limit rather than an economic one. And once shut down, by law it must be dismantled. 5. Lawyers. Political correctness in the legal community blew up in the face of a prestigious national law firm, King & Spalding (K&S) last week. The Atlanta firm is best known for bond counsel in many, many states. They were hired by the House of Representatives to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) before the SCOTUS now that Obama and Holder announced they would no longer defend this law in front of the federal courts. Apparently they got pressure from some liberal clients in Atlanta, with Coca Cola being speculated as the largest, to drop defense of DOMA. When they dropped the case, the lead counsel publicly left the firm. Last week VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli publicly fired K&S for failure to perform according to their legal ethics. The letter was pointed, nasty and very, very public. You can read it at the Legal Insurrection blog here: http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2011/04/map-which-should-make-king-spalding.html K&S is bond counsel nationwide, and if it cannot be counted on to provide vigorous defense in support of every single client, no matter how onerous (and they have defended terrorists in court) it will be destroyed in the marketplace. The legal world has turned hard left over the last several decades when it became apparent that a large, intrusive regulatory state would employ lots and lots of lawyers. But with all things left, ideology trumps everything, and when it does, nobody is going to trust the lawyers. When that happens, laws will start changing back to a world that does not require so many. Be careful what you lefties wish for, as the Laws of Physics continue to apply. 6. Twisters. Finally out of Think Progress and the Soros-funded left, comes the claim that skeptics of manmade global warming were responsible for the tornado outbreak in the south last week. The blame game was played early and often. As of this writing, over 300 are dead and many billions of dollars of property destroyed. What is really going on? This is a typical La Nina weather pattern, where the cool water on the surface of the Pacific Ocean at the equator influences the polar jet stream over the center of North America in such a way as to force cool dry air from the north to collide with warm, moist air from the Gulf. Result of this meeting: severe storms. You also get drought conditions in the southwest. Best explanation I have found of this was at Watts Up With That last week. URL is here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/29/the-folly-of-linking-tornado-outbreaks-to-climate-change/ 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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