Interesting Items by Alex Gimarc – July 16 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] Interesting Items 7/16 In this issue: 1. Begich 2. Unions 3. Voter ID 4. Salazar 5. Freeh 6. Felon 7. BLM 1. One of things I do is on a regular basis it to toss an e-mail comment at the offices of our congressional delegation and wait on the response. It is important that we get in touch with our congress critters regularly so as to remind them who they work for and more importantly to remind them that we are watching them. In the latest, I complained about Obama’s decision to quit deporting young illegals under the age of 30, essentially implementing the DREAM Act without benefit of congressional action on it. Received an e-mail from our Boy Senator’s (Mark Begich (D, AK)) office that was remarkable in what it did not say. The heart of my complaint was the utter lawlessness of Obama’s action on this – creating new law while refusing to execute existing federal law on immigration. I ended it with a reminder that if the Rule of Law no longer applies to the Executive, and if Congress won’t hold him to account, then it does not apply to any of the rest of us either. Senator Begich’s office responded with a nice little piece explaining why the policy change was a Good Thing for young illegals, who were dragged into a life of lawlessness by their parents, and “… it is not the American Way to punish them for their parents’ actions.” He then goes on to explain why the DREAM Act currently stuck in committee is the solution and goes on to call for comprehensive immigration reform. In short, it was a completely unresponsive note. The real issue here is lawlessness of the Executive. And these democrat twits need to be very careful with the precedent they set, as a free pass to a member of their party will be translated into a free pass for the next member of the other party when, not if, he or she is elected president. Apparently for democrats, party loyalty trumps the Rule of Law. 2. Unions. It turns out that the $1.1 billion spent by unions on elections between 2005 – 2011 to elect democrats as reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was low by a factor of three. Additional reports to the Department of Labor document union expenditures on political activities document union political expenditures – 92% of which are spent in support of democrat candidates at all levels of government. The largest political expenditure was not unexpectedly out of the SEIU, which is at the heart of the Obama Chicago machine. You can read the Fox News article here: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/10/political-spending-by-unions-far-exceeds-direct-donations/ 3. Voter ID. Eric Holder’s (In)Justice Department and Texas are fighting it out before a federal judge in Washington DC over the Texas voter ID law. Holder’s opposition is intended to maximize voter fraud in support of democrat candidates this November. And if he can get a federal court to rule in his favor, he believes he will have the precedent to overturn similar laws in a number of states before the election. Andrew McCarthy writing in PJ Tatler initially wrote that Texas was getting their clocks cleaned by judges who appeared looking for a reason to toss out the photo ID for voting law. As the week wore on, it became apparent that Holder’s feds simply had nobody who had been discriminated against by the new law. Additionally, they trotted in witnesses from Texas who had photo IDs in their possession simply in order to make the airplane trip from Texas . As of this writing, there are those who believe the feds are doing poorly. Unfortunately that is what we all thought about the SCOTUS on ObamaCare. The contradictions are too large with this for the feds to prevail, as photo IDs are simply required too many places. Interestingly, should an appeals court or the SCOTUS itself toss out photo ID laws for voting, then that precedent can also be applied to other things where the feds require photo ID in order to proceed. Message to Holder: be careful what you wish for. 4. Salazar. The ObamaOids are pushing forward on all fronts in their effort to shut down energy development here in the US. The latest is an effort out of Salazar’s Department of the Interior to lock up the majority of the outer continental shelf (OCS) and deny federal leases from development for the next 30 years. The first bite of this is a new federal leasing plan for the OCS from 2012 – 2017. Such a plan will lock up future administrations from opening the OCS without congressional action. Malin wrote about it Friday: http://michellemalkin.com/2012/07/13/obamas-interior-department-still-going-rogue/ 5. Freeh. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh released an investigative report over 250 pages long detailing the internal cover up of Jerry Sandusky’s child molestation spree at Penn State University . While I am not interested in discussing the details of what happened, I do want to note the reflexive coverup of malfeasance by the University. I want to remind all Interesting Items readers of the internal investigation at Penn State that exonerated climate fraudster Michael Mann of malfeasance in his hockey stick fraud. All bureaucracies reflexively protect their own. It takes an exceptional bureaucracy not to do so. And Penn State is no longer exceptional on any level. The Sandusky cover up was not the exception it was the rule. 6. Felon. The latest series of attacks out of the Obama campaign is an assault on Mitt Romney’s end time at Bain Capital. Romney left the company in 1999 to run the 2002 Olympics. He formally sold his stock and left the company following the Olympic games in Utah . During the three years at the Olympics, his name was included on SEC paperwork as an officer who did not participate in any of the corporate operations or decision making. During this three year period, Bain had companies fail under it with the resulting loss of jobs for those distressed companies as they were shut down. The Obama campaign desperately wants to wrap that period around Romney’s neck so as to destroy his business credentials, his strongest positive while running for President, thus the attack from last week. It culminated with a female campaign operative opining that Romney was a potential felon because he may have lied about his business relationship with Bain during the three years he was running the Olympics. And the state run media picked up the charge and spent four or five days running with it, all to benefit the Obama campaign. Now here is the funny part, if there is anyone out there that is a potential felon it would be Obama himself for passing around drugs to his cohorts in crime while a pot head and cocaine head at high school in Hawaii. Giving another person illegal drugs is a federal felony, one which Obama brags about doing in his autobiography “Dreams from my Father.” Inhabitants of glass houses ought not to be tossing large caliber objects at the walls. 7. BLM. Laws are only for the little people. The latest example is a growing fight between the Alaska congressional delegation and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over 136 gas and oil exploration wells in the National Petroleum Reserve ( Alaska ) (NPRA) drilled between 1940 – 1980. To date, only 19 of these wells have been capped to current standards with 13 of them being capped at standards acceptable to the State of Alaska . BLM promises to cap the remaining wells at the rate of 13 per year until they are finished, a rate that is unacceptable to both Senator Lisa Murkowski (R, AK) and Alaska legislators. BLM is using the argument as a vehicle to angle for more funding via the excuse that they do not have enough funding to properly cap wells at a higher yearly rate. Contrast this lack of interest in a timely response to bringing their past activities up to existing environmental standards with what the EPA, OSHA, and a hundred other federal regulators would do to a state or corporation that lackadaisically responded to their orders to clean something up to existing standards. The feds would be on the state or corporations like stink on fecal matter – which may be the reason that the delegation and the state are pushing this cleanup so hard. If this works out right, we may be on the way to taking back control of environmental regulation, permitting and enforcement from the feds and doing it ourselves here in Alaska, which is far more important than 133 improperly capped legacy wells. 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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