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 Dec 12, 2011 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue:
1. Drone 2. Fort Hood 3. Holder 4. Corzine 5. Rain Water 6. Militarization 7. Initiative 1. Drone. We lost one of our RQ-170 unmanned drones over Iran last week. The stealth drone went down in eastern Iran after the flight team at Creech AFB in Nevada lost contact with it. Obama refused to approve an option to either recover it or destroy it before the Iranians captured it. The drone landed intact and apparently unscathed, giving rise to speculation that it was electronically captured by either the Iranians or more likely the Russians. By the weekend, it was on display in Iran. Expect it to be shortly crated up and shipped to Russia for analysis. The Belmont Club had a pretty good thread on the capture. Best guess this time is that the virus that has busily been logging keystrokes and passwords at Creech for over a year was used by the Russians to allow them to pick and choose which drone they wanted. The Russians do not have the ability to manufacture drones and have been getting that technology from the Israelis. Read the article and comment string here: http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/12/09/who-said-no-to-destroying-the-rq-170/ 2. Fort Hood. DoD changed its description of the Islamist attack on Army troops preparing to deploy to the Middle East as “workplace violence” rather than a terrorist attack. The Obama administration has bent over backwards to do everything to pander to the Islamists and refuse to recognize them as the very real threat they are. If you cannot even call a terrorist attack what it is, you will have a hard time keeping it from happening again. The Army and everyone involved in this ought to be ashamed of this. 3. Holder. Eric Holder went before Daryl Issa’s House Committee to explain himself on Fast and Furious, the program by which his (In)Justice Department, the FBI and the BATFE actively armed Mexican drug cartels with thousands of automatic weapons. Holder was not under oath during his testimony, and lied through his teeth continuously. He and democrats on the committee used the hundreds of deaths via Fast and Furious as a vehicle to demand more gun control laws. James Sensenbrenner (R, WI) got so fed up with the obvious lying and evasion that he threatened Holder with impeachment. This is real serious. Hundreds of people are dead because Holder and the Obama administration wanted more gun control. They need to be removed from office immediately. This was a very tough hearing and I do not expect Holder to survive. 4. Corzine. MF Capital’s head John Corzine went before congress last week to explain what happened to the $1.2 billion of investor money his company managed to lose. He did the Clintonian routine and said he simply didn’t know where the money went. To explain what I think happened, I need to digress a bit. It has become clear to me over the last several years that the global financial marketplace game has become a rigged game, skewed by governments so that the big players profit handsomely while normal investors get hosed. A caller to Limbaugh last week claimed to be a well connected mortgage dealer. She described the runup to the Crash of 2008, where the feds were giving snap credit approvals to buyers who could not otherwise get approved. The underwriters approved these buyers and they signed 30 year mortgages they never could repay. She claimed that everyone involved knew the crash was coming and knew when it would hit in the fall of 2008. If you know when something will crash, you can make a great deal of money on that crash. And a lot of people did. She pointed the finger at Fannie and Freddie as the sources of the fraud. Fast forward to Corzine: Corzine was Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He was a US Senator and Governor of New Jersey. He is the consummate democrat financial insider. He is not taking the fall for anyone. Some of the black helo guys and tinfoil hat wearers believe that the failure of MF Global was a test run for the next money making opportunity – the orchestrated financial crash of the European Union, which is expected late summer or early fall 2012; just in time for Obama’s reelection. 5. Rain Water. Yet another reason to dissolve the Ninth Circus was reported in Powerline last Friday. The Ninth Circus issued a ruling that determined that rain runoff in forests that passed through one or more pipes or culverts constituted a point source of pollution that would require an EPA Clean Water discharge permit – one for every single culvert or pipe. The ruling reverses over 35 years of interpretation of the Clean Water Act and threatens to shut down all logging in the Western US for over a decade. Note that it currently takes over a decade to get a discharge permit from the Forest Service. And this does not include the blizzard of green lawsuits expected against repairing logging roads. The lawsuit was brought by the Northwest Environmental Defense Center and is likely paid for by your tax dollars as it is a public interest lawsuit. Fortunately the decision is in direct conflict with an opinion out of the Eighth Circuit that found that rainwater runoff was not a pollutant. Now here’s the funny part. Given that there is not a single discharge permit for any culvert under a logging road anywhere in the nation and given that it is now snowing and raining in places nationwide, one would logically assume from this opinion that land owners are illegally discharging polluted water onto the pristine watershed. Who pays for the cleanup of this pollution? Who will get fined for this industrial discharge? The opinion points out everything wrong with the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. It points out the ongoing problem of environmental lawfare against people who are out trying to make a living, working to harvest a renewable resource, and giving us all access to the wild areas in the western US. It points out the problem with the Ninth Circus. All of these will need to be addressed by the next administration and congress. Sooner would be better than later. 6. Militarization. One of the areas of growing concern among conservatives is the increasing militarization of local police forces. As it turns out, it is all about following the money. Local police gets what amounts to free federal money for drug arrests. That free federal money is then used to purchase SWAT team training, paramilitary equipment and fully automatic weaponry. Once local police have the equipment and training, they have to use it in order to stay proficient. This has led to a dramatic increase in no-knock raids and a subsequent increase in armed assaults into homes and dwellings of innocents. Now we find that DoD is also getting into the act by supplying local police departments with military equipment that they no longer need. The so-called 1033 Program transferred over $500 million to local police departments nationwide in 2011. This is up from $212 million in 2010. The next administration will need to do something to stop this very bad trend in law enforcement, as law enforcement has a completely different mission from military. Read the article here: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/12/05/120511-news-militarized-police-1-6/ 7. Initiative. The Children of the Rainbow gathered sufficient signatures for an equal rights ballot initiative here in Anchorage. It is planned for next April’s Municipal election when the current conservative mayor is up for reelection. He vetoed a similar measure out of the Assembly shortly after taking office two years ago. The Assembly hearings on the gay rights ordinance were incredibly nasty. Expect this to be used for the election campaign of the union-backed candidate for mayor this time around. While supporters are calling it an equal rights initiative, it is better referred to as the Jerry Sandusky Memorial Equal Rights and Lifestyle Tolerance ballot initiative. That lifestyle sure turned out well for Penn State, didn’t it? 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 AnchorageDaily Planet http://www.anchoragedailyplanet.com/ MatSuValley News http://matsuvalleynews.blogspot.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/ -- To join RichsRants, send email to: [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en
