Interesting Items - Monday Apr 9, 2012 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 Apr 9, 2012 Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue:
1. Prop 5 2. Polar Bears 3. Girl Scouts 4. Credit Cards 5. Endangered 6. Race Wars 1. Prop 5. Anchorage voters defeated a ballot initiative that would have added gays, lesbians and the gender confused to a list of people who needed special protection from discrimination. The initiative was follow-on to an ordinance that a leftist dominated Anchorage Assembly passed three years ago and was vetoed by the newly elected Mayor. This time around, the gay rights crowd really did a good job keeping most of their obnoxious, in your face elements in check right up until the last week of the campaign when they commenced whining about an anti-Prop 5 ad featuring gender confused. The ad triggered Prop 5 backers to hold a whineathon and demand it be pulled. The ad was pretty nasty. It was also effective. Right up until the last week of the campaign, the initiative was polling with at least a 10% win. During the last week, campaign expenditures were also released and showed Prop 5 supporters outspending the opposition by 4:1 to 5:1. The majority of the money in support of it also came from out of state, which did not set real well with locals. Supporters of the initiative did their homework this time around by lining up several local liberal churches in support. The more conservative churches were strongly opposed. Reaction after the election has been the predictable accusations of hatred, intolerance, and the usual whining. Over 100 of the ballot initiatives similar to this have passed in various cities, towns and counties nationwide. And every one of them that I know about have been used as a vehicle to bash Christians, shut down faith-based charities (all in the name of tolerance, don’t you know) and employ lawyers. Congratulations to the voters of Anchorage for doing the right thing for the right reason. It worked this time around. 2. Polar Bears. It is always difficult when reality confronts the manmade global warming crowd. The latest example comes out of Canada where the numbers of endangered polar bears around the “environmentally sensitive” Hudson Bay region have nearly doubled over the last several years. They are estimated to be over 1,000 bears. The greens expected the numbers to fall to just over 600. We can take a lot of lessons from this little story. The first is that the greens will refer to all regions of interest as “bellwethers”, “environmentally sensitive”, “critical habitat” regardless of where they are and what is in them. And if everything is a bellwether, critical and / or sensitive, then nothing is. Second lesson is that the listing of polar bears as endangered is a fools’ errand, as their numbers were only endangered by hunting. Once you control hunting, the apex predator of the region (other than humans) will revert to doing what it always has done: hunting, killing, and making new bears. The problem we will have with polar bears is going to be too many of them killing off the seal populations they prey upon – which has been the result of the feds protecting apex predators and having them wipe out all prey species in the national parks and wilderness areas here in the US. Denali is one such example. Finally, treating polar bears as a separate species is a fraud, as they can breed with brown bears and create fertile offspring. 3. Girl Scouts. Alaska State Representative Wes Keller (R) asked an impolitic question during a hearing on a resolution in honor of the 100 year anniversary of the Girl Scouts of America. Keller asked what connection the Girl Scouts have with Planned Parenthood. With the question, supporters of the resolution went into conniptions, with the suggestion that there could be anything possibly wrong with the Girl Scouts. The right to life community is of the opinion that there is a close relationship between the Girl Scouts and Planned Parenthood. Nancy Pelosi on February 1, 2012 celebrated that relationship as “very valuable.” Pelosi wouldn’t be celebrating it unless there was an actual connection. The local McClatchy fishwrapper here in Anchorage ran an article denying all connection between Planned Parenthood and the Girl Scouts and calling Keller names a few days after the he asked the question. They would not have done that unless there was some public relations damage to Planned Parenthood (which interestingly enough also supported Prop 5 that I discussed earlier). Congratulations to Representative Keller for asking the inconvenient question. 4. Credit Cards. One of the ways the Obama campaign laundered illegal campaign donations in 2008 was by simply turning off security for credit card campaign donations over the internet. This allowed them to take donations from prepaid credit cards that were untraceable. It was such a good trick that they are doing it again. The Obama reelection campaign once again turned off the security and once again refuses to match donations with names and addresses to verify that each donation is legal. They claim that it is too difficult. According to the Ulsterman Report, the current Attorney General of California ran the Obama fundraising operation in 2008, bringing in tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from California . This sort of setup allows the Mexican drug cartels with billions of dollars on their hands to once again fund Obama’s campaign via their connections among the illegal community in California . She is thought to be on Obama’s short list for the next SCOTUS opening – which would be bad, very bad. 5. Endangered. Did you know that you could legally hunt endangered antelope in Texas , at least until the greens, the courts and the US Fish & Wildlife Service shut you down? There are over 5,000 ranches in Texas that have imported a few tens of endangered African oryx, addax and the dama gazelle starting in the mid-1970s. Over the years, they have raised the antelope for big game hunting opportunities, vastly increasing their numbers and health. Today, the numbers of animals total over 17,000. The ranches set up sport hunts for the antelope, thereby providing an economic incentive to increase their numbers. Costs for a hunt range upwards to $15,000. Most of the ranches are located in the Texas hill country. Since 2005, the ranchers have been waivered from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), leading to a free market approach to saving them and increasing their numbers. As usual, the free market works spectacularly well as long as the feds can stay out of the way. Friends of Animals and the US Fish and Wildlife Service have been in court to remove the exemption from the ESA. As of Wednesday, according to the Hot Air story Monday by John Hawkins, the hunting business shuts down under the weight of USF&WS permitting requirements. Once again the feds, the greens and the courts stand in the way of profit-making and a free market approach to increasing the numbers of animals. One could make the case that the feds, greens and courts are well on their way to making the three species of African antelope more endangered by their actions rather than less. The problem of course, is that they do not want anyone to hunt anything. Yet those animals we own and eat are never endangered, as they provide value, property rights and ownership. If the USF&WS is more of a problem than a solution, perhaps it is time to shut it down completely and transfer all responsibilities for management of the ESA back to the many states. 6. Race Wars. The Obama campaign and the media supporting his reelection have been very successful stoking the fires of racial hatred as incident after incident of black of white attacks continues to be reported. In Sanford , FL , a white walking home from a bar was tailed, jumped, beaten and stabbed by several blacks who were shouting Trayvon as they sped off afterwards. There was a brief and bogus report of armed neo-Nazis starting to patrol the streets of Sanford . A blog connected to a Miami paper carried the story and had over 5,800 angry comments in less than 48 hours. The only disappointment was not having a meeting between the bogus Nazis and the democrat party terrorist arm calling itself the New Black Panther Party. Would have been worth bringing popcorn to watch. A pair of whites angry at the lack of prosecution of blacks who shot a family member of one of the dirtbags took matters into their own hands and gunned down several blacks in Tulsa . The dirtbags were both arrested. There were also arrests connected to the black on white student shooting on the Mississippi State campus a couple weeks ago. The media typically does not cover the black on white violence while giving front page coverage to any white on black, thereby artificially skewing the numbers. Should they keep this up, things will get very, very ugly by summertime – which is just what Obama and the (In)Justice Department want. 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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