Interesting Items by Alex Gimarc
Alex Gimarc <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Jan 30, 2013 Interesting Items 1/28 Monday January 28, 2013 Interesting Items 1/28 - Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Ignore the Law 2. Combat 3. Inside the Cave 4. NLRB 5. Firearms 6. Hillary 1. Ignore the Law. The democrat rocket scientists infesting the political class in NY fell all over themselves passing a new gun control law requiring immediate registration of firearms, turn-in of newly illegal firearms, and limits on size of magazines, expecting the firearms owning citizens of NY to do the same thing following the new law. Early indications are that they aren’t and they won’t, opting instead to simply ignore the new law and the idiots that passed it without reading it. This would not be the first time that citizens of NY ignored leftist legislation. In an article in Hot Air Monday, it appears that NY smokers are working their way around unnecessarily high tobacco taxes passed in 2008 and 2010 by smuggling cigarettes into the state. Jazz Shaw writes that nearly 61% of all cigarettes smoked in NY do not have taxes paid on them, meaning they have either been smuggled in from somewhere else or sold off the reservations where the taxes are not levied. One of the reasons that Prohibition was repealed was that federal prosecutors could no longer get convictions under the Volstead Act. It appears that the same dynamic is in place with cigarettes and firearms in NY. Perhaps we are not nearly as close to the leftist nirvana the Obamaoids want us to be as they think we are. 2. Combat. SECDEF Leon Panetta, on his way out the door, made a sweeping change to current policy governing women in combat. While I thought they had already done this in the 1990s under the Clinton administration, apparently it did not go far enough for the Obamaoids. Panetta, acting without the support of a single combat commander in the field, unilaterally determined that women can now be part of all front line combat units from infantry to artillery to Special Forces to Marines. As all of these have special and stringent physical requirements, also expect the leftists in the Pentagon to write a series of dual physical standards for the newly opened jobs, something that will go over well with the men currently serving (/sarc). This is also typical of the high handed actions we have come to expect from this administration in particular and from the left in general – making an important decision as you slither out the door, and do it without any discussion, buy-in from those most impacted by it, or anyone else. And most importantly, get a free pass from a supposedly objective media which has in recent years turned into a full throated supporter of this administration and the democrat party. 3. Inside the Cave. Bryan Preston over at the PJ Tatler posted a 10 meg pdf entitled “Inside the Cave.” This was a 98-page document that detailed much of the Obama IT effort. This effort was fully integrated into the campaign and was used for fundraising, get out the vote, and micro-targeting of issues to potential Obama voters. It also had a significant analytics component. About 30 – 40% of all campaign headquarters staff were technology, analytics and digital IT people. The democrats set up a pair of training institutes in 2007. One trained community organizers. The other trained analytics people. Both were fully integrated into the 2012 campaign. While spending about the same money as the Romney campaign, the Obama campaign had four times the people. Most of these were heavy hitters, experts in their particular fields. Micro targeting of ads was particularly effective. A friend of mine noted that the typical minority single mother in Cleveland would be watching Oprah, seeing a small, very inexpensive series of ads every day terrifying her about the end of her world as she knew it should Romney get elected. This sort of stuff worked and worked well. The other thing they did was continually test their message. Most of their fundraising e-mails, and their e-mail list was over 16 million people, were tested, with as many as 18 different versions being tested before the typical ad was sent. Testing on target audiences was also used to optimize web sites, twitter, Facebook and other online ways the campaign contacted supporters. The analytics effort was basically the polling arm of the campaign, and they did it in house, with a continual rolling polling effort. This allowed the campaign to be far more accurate in predicting final outcome than those working the Romney campaign. They claim about a 3% delta due to the growth of cell phone use and the end of land lines. We here on the right have nothing approaching this. And we better build one and build it fast, as it is the face of campaigns to come. Here is the Preston article. The link to the pdf is embedded in the piece. Enjoy. http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/01/25/hey-look-at-how-the-obama-machine-crushed-the-romney-campaign/ 4. NLRB. One of the things that the Obama WH has been doing is stacking the agencies with political appointees that support his leftist point of view. The higher level appointees need to be confirmed by the US Senate. Outrageous nominees, like union lawyers appointed to fill open seats on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have received significant push back by conservatives in the senate. It got so bad that Harry Reid refused to schedule hearings on nominees so those seats went unfilled. It is possible for Obama to appoint people to fill open seats while the senate is not in session. The senate took this option away from the President during the Bush administration by refusing to gavel out of session, opting instead for a series of pro forma sessions. The NLRB is something of an odd duck, unable to function without a quorum of three members. They are currently down to a single legitimate member. Membership is supposed to be balanced; with the president appointing those who agree with him, so the direction of the body changes from pro union to pro business depending which party is in office. In this case, due to resignations and failure of the senate to hold hearings, the NLRB no longer has a quorum and can no longer hold hearings and write pro-union rules. Obama did an end run and appointed three people during the time of senate pro forma sessions, claiming that the senate was not in session. Last week a federal appeals court found that these appointees were illegal and that is was not up to Obama to determine whether the senate was in session or not. The ruling also invalidates every single ruling, opinion and rule written by the NLRB since those appointments were made. The union lawyers infesting the NLRB announced that they would essentially ignore the court ruling while they appeal to the SCOTUS. This is a very big win for the rule of law and if upheld shuts down one of the vehicles being used by this regime to shove forced unionization down the throats of small and not so small businesses nationwide. It could be very good news if upheld by the SCOTUS. 5. Firearms. Last week saw the effort to pass new gun control legislation, rules and regulations percolate along nicely. Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) held her assault weapons ban show, complete with her idiotic brandishing of a weapon with her finger on the trigger. Online group coupon web site Groupon abruptly suspended all firearms related traffic, angering a lot of their users. A huge outdoor show in Pennsylvania was abruptly cancelled after it announced that it would be banning the sale of modern sporting rifles (so-called assault weapons). The word of the ban spread quickly among the public, vendors and advertisers of the show, with a significant backlash. Over a few days enough backers of the show pulled out that the outdoors show had to cancel and shut down completely. Note to outdoors shows: your customers are not going to put up with any obeisance to the Obama administration, political left or the media regarding firearms. Why do you think they are buying them in such numbers these days? 6. Hillary. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally gave her testimony on Benghazi in front of the US Senate last week. It was a classic Clintonian performance, full of lies, half truths, tears, and prevarications. All questions and responses appeared to be fully known before they were asked with the possible exception of Senator Ron Johnson (R, WI) who pushed Hillary on her failure to do anything about the attack. She got sufficiently flustered that she cried out “What does it matter….” when asked about the death of the CIA operatives and State Department employees during the attack. What does it matter? What does it matter? It matters that the CIA was running guns through Libya to Al Qaida affiliates in North Africa. It matters that the WH got to watch the festivities for over seven hours in real time and failed to make any move to protect the lives of the Americans under attack. It matters that the WH, State Department, DoD and the UN Ambassador all spent weeks blaming the entire affair on a video nobody ever knew existed. It matters that this administration arrested the film maker as a political prisoner, convicted him of a parole violation and is holding him in jail as I write this. It matters because we allowed Islamists to murder Americans without doing a bloody thing about it. And finally it matters because once again this administration projects weakness to the Islamists, which will endanger us all the more as the weeks, months and years pass. OTOH, the Joe Biden for President 2016 campaign got a nice sound bite for anti-Hillary campaign ads in a few 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. 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