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Interesting Items By Alex Gimarc Monday March 4, 2013 Interesting Items 3/04 - Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy – In this issue: 1. Sequester 2. Woodward 3. Prisoners 4. Polar Bear 5. Dragon 6. AK Gun 7. Norks 1. Sequester. Sequester Friday came and went. The sun came up the next morning. The world continued to turn, and babies were occasionally fed and comforted. After all the Nuclear Winter claptrap and caterwauling from Obama and his toadies it the media, Republicans in the House didn’t cave and the automatic cuts kicked in, all $44 billion worth; about one penny on the dollar. Obama told an Iowa newspaper before the election that he was going to force the sequester fight so as to roll the House majority into a grand bargain, essentially doing away with the notion of tax cuts and spending discipline for all time. He said it would be ugly but was (overly) confident of his success. The first piece of this was the complete repeal of the Bush tax rates during the Fiscal Cliff festivities. As of this writing, he does not appear to have won either fight. Note that we are not finished with these fights, as the debt ceiling runs out of money at the end of the month, possibly leading to a government shutdown – which if he has his way, Obama will gleefully embrace, blaming House Republicans the entire time. For their part, the House is already working on a continuing resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year. Expect it to pass out of the House later this week and put the heat squarely on Harry Reid and his democrat majority in the senate. For its part, the democrat majority in the senate defeated a Republican attempt to give Obama all authority to decide what to cut or not during the sequester – something Obama already has but has been lying about not having. 2. Woodward. Obama tried to made the run up to the sequester particularly painful. Most important to the WH, was the proper placing of the blame squarely on House Republicans for the whole idea in the first place – an out and out lie, as it originally came out of newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew when he was in the WH. Obama lied about the sequester during the third presidential debate and he has been lying about it for the last couple months. Up until last week, nobody in the state run media called him on that lie. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote in a new book documenting that the sequester originated in the WH and that Obama agreed with and supported it. Woodward was making the rounds of the cable shows selling the book and claimed that he had been threatened by the WH for writing the truth. He related a 30-minute long phone call during which a “very senior” WH aide (Gene Sperling) screamed at him. Sperling followed up with a threatening e-mail that Woodward was going to regret coming out with the story. As the Obama WH has now designated Woodward as unclean or infidel, a bunch of the hard core Obama toadies in the media started going after him as the week wore on. But the media onslaught against Woodward was not lockstep, as several other media people also confirmed that they had been screamed at by the WH and received threatening e-mails. Whether or not this leads to anything, I have no clue. But it is nice to see a little blue on blue fratricide. The key to Obama wining all of this is to cause as much pain as humanly possible and to successfully blame the Republicans for it. Woodward has ensured that case will be much more difficult, if not impossible to make regardless of how much pain Obama manages to cause. 3. Prisoners. The final bit of sequester news came out of DHS, which pulled a stunt previously confined to dictators like Saddam or Fidel Castro; that of dumping prisoners on the general public in order to ratchet up the pain level as high as possible. Saddam emptied his prisons in 2003 in the runup to the second invasion of Iraq. Castro dumped 125,000 people including former residents of Cuban prison and mental facilities on the US in 1980 via the Mariel boat lift. Obama’s DHS released at least 2,000 jailed illegals in AZ and TX who had been arrested for committing criminal acts under the excuse that there was not enough money to retain them in prison – yet another lie. DHS did not notify local law enforcement that the releases were coming. Nice. Chairman of a House committee sent an immediate letter to DHS asking why they were dumping illegals as they were at least 3,000 fully funded empty cells in the DHS detention facilities. This was a particularly ugly criminal act by this administration, intended for no other reason than to ratchet up the pain level as high as possible. And we have DHS employees going along with it apparently without question. DHS, like the EPA and NLRB has turned into a criminal activity funded by taxpayers. It needs to be defunded, shut down and its responsibilities transferred back to the states and private sector to execute. 4. Polar Bear. Yet another piece of bad news out of the federal district courts. This one had a federal judge on the DC Circuit throw out challenges to the listing of polar bears as endangered species. The grounds for the decision appear to be that US Fish and Wildlife did follow its procedures accurate with the listing. In other words, process trumps science. The judge also noted that there was no denial that the amount of ice on the Arctic Ocean was declining, a fact still in dispute. We are at a point in time where the courts are refusing to consider any challenge to the basic scientific foundation of politically motivated listing of species as endangered, new EPA rules and regulations, or anything else. They assume these lawless bodies have done their due diligence. And to be fair, the courts are not constructed as bodies that can weigh scientific arguments. That job instead belongs to congress which funds these agencies and gives them guidance and direction through enabling legislation. If the process for listing animals as endangered is sufficiently broken so as to allow an animal which has quadrupled in number over the last four decades simply by shutting down hunting of it (polar bear) based on some bogus expectation of lack of ice on the Arctic Ocean 50 years in the future, it is up to congress to fix it. And they should. Sooner would be better than later. 5. Dragon. SpaceX flew its second resupply trip to the International Space Station (ISS) last weekend. The Dragon capsule was launched Friday. After a successful launch, there was a problem with onboard thrusters. They lost three of the four banks of thrusters for a few hours and had to delay unfurling of the solar arrays for a bit. The thrusters were brought back on line and the capsule successfully docked with the ISS over the weekend delivering over a ton of supplies. Yet another flight. Yet another series of problems discovered and solved. Yet another demonstration that the commercial space community can and will deliver the goods. This is the future of manned spaceflight here in the US and it will be a robust and responsive one. In related news, Dennis Tito, who was the first person to buy his own ticket for a ride into space, proposed a privately financed, commercial trip to Mars. The proposal is for a 500+ day trip with a man and a woman with a flyby of Mars. The proposed trip is suggested to start in 2018. This is not outside the realm of possibility, though the flight time is a bit long. Good luck to everyone involved. 6. AK Gun. The Lower 48 states are not the only states working on anti-gun control legislation. The Alaska House passed HB 69 which states that any firearms or ammunition manufactured here in Alaska and not exported out of state are not subject to federal firearms laws. The legislation also subjects federal employees to felony charges should they attempt to enforce any new gun control registration laws here in Alaska. Of course the lawyers are all wringing their hands claiming the bill is unconstitutional, though they seem to have no opinion about the constitutionality of federal gun control legislation in the first place. This legislation is wildly popular in the House and should make it out of the Senate for the Governor’s signature. The fight continues. 7. Norks. There are some people scratching their heads about exactly what the Norks blew up in their most recent nuclear test a few weeks ago. The weapon appeared to be a miniaturized, enriched uranium device. This poses a couple problems, as the first two tests were plutonium based, leading some to speculate that the Norks tested the first Iranian nuclear bomb for them. The Iranians have been working enriched uranium rather than plutonium like the Norks. Note also that a miniaturized device is intended to sit on top of an ICBM like the Norks and the Iranians have both been developing. What better way to develop an ICBM than to dabble with launching satellites? This dangerous world is about to get a lot more dangerous if the Iranians now have a nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver it anywhere on the planet (which is what launching a satellite gives you). 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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