REFLECTIONS

In this issue:
1. Corrections 2. Interrogations 3. Brown
4. SCOTUS 5. Fort Hood 6. Glaciers 7. Temperatures

Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –

1. Correction. One of my correspondents pointed out that the Exxon Point Thompson leases mentioned last week were actually pulled by former Governor Murkowski’s DNR Commissioner Mike Menge shortly before Governor Palin was inaugurated. The leases were pulled on Nov. 27, 2006 and Palin took the oath of office on Monday Dec. 4, 2006. The action was supported by incoming DNR Commissioner under Palin, Marty Rutherford. Interesting timing, that.

2. Interrogations. Senators questioned the head of the FBI, Homeland Security and the National Intelligence apparatus last week about the decision to mirandize the Kinderbomber Abdulmutallab. Nobody claimed that their organizations made the decision, essentially pointing the finger of blame directly at Attorney General Holder and / or the Obama WH. The timing of the interrogation was interesting, as the FBI was able to interrogate him for over 50 minutes before word came down from upon high that the terrorist was to be read his rights and given a lawyer. The CIA was not involved. The new terrorist handling team in the WH set up for such an occurrence was not asked to participate or told of the action, leaving them completely out of the loop. The WH used the excuse that the group had not been completely formed yet and was not operational. This sorry story gets even worse, as Holder’s has yet to explain his decision to treat this as a criminal event rather than another attack in a war we have been pursuing since 9-11. Before he shut up, the terrorist claimed that there were dozens more terrorists in the process of trying to do the same thing and had he been properly interrogated by the intelligence community, we would have been a bit safer. Sadly, we aren’t. The anti-terrorist group in the WH appears to be outward focused; interested in terrorist incidents outside the US borders, completely ignoring terrorist acts within our national borders. Holder is also stonewalling congress on requests for information about his recent hires. Congress is trying to find out how many of the new hires were involved in the legal effort to give detainees constitutional rights. Holder has managed to quickly and thoroughly politicize the (In)Justice Department to a level unseen since the height of the Reno infestation.

3. Brown. I am tempted to use the UPS advertising slogan: “What has Brown done for you lately?” to describe the outcome of the MA special election for US Senate. Republican Scott Brown won a 52-47% vote in last Tuesday’s special election. He ran as a fiscal conservative; he ran against ObamaCare; and he ran against treating terrorists like common criminals and giving them constitutional rights in US courts. The election busted the 60-seat democrat supermajority in the senate and set off a round of recriminations within the democrat party and among elected democrats. Over the week, it appears that recruitment of high quality conservative opponents to incumbent democrat members of congress is picking up nicely; as is retirements of incumbent democrats. At this point it appears that ObamaCare is mostly dead. Reid and Pelosi are still in negotiations and are still fully capable of pulling the wooden stake out of its black little heart and shoving it through the House and Senate. We will see how suicidal they really are, I suppose. For his part, the president went to Ohio the next day and did a rant against the rich corporate, fat cat Wall Street banks, promising to slam them with more rules, regulations and taxes, after which the stock market spent the last three days of the week in free fall. Bill Clinton was a sufficiently good politician to listen to what the voters were telling him. I don’t think Obama is that good or that flexible. He has been raised and trained as a doctrinaire leftist. Expect him to continue to govern that way in the years to come.

4. SCOTUS. In another bit of good news for the body politic, the SCOTUS tossed out major portions of McCain Feingold as a violation of the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. The ruling essentially removed dollar and time limits on corporate advertising for individuals or issues. The left went ballistic on the ruling, as it significantly levels the playing field and provides some conservative response to the Soros – union money machine set up under McCain Feingold. The other thing that was addressed in the opinion was the notion of stare decisis – the notion that judges should defer to precedent in their opinions. Chief Justice Roberts wrote an opinion that noted that stare decisis was something that judges used when they couldn’t come up with any fundamental foundation to base their opinions upon. Some observers took it as a pot shot against leftist members of the SCOTUS. The opinion was 5-4 with Justice Kennedy as the swing vote. Of interest, Justice Stevens read his opinion in open court. He is over 90 and did not look well. He may be the next retirement if his health continues to deteriorate. This was a good opinion both on constitutional grounds (First Amendment upheld) and procedural grounds (a slap at stare decisis).

5. Fort Hood. DoD released its report on the Fort Hood terrorist attack. Ralph Peters described it as a disgraceful document, as it documents precisely why the attack happened and politically correct malfeasance among the leadership and the officer corps that allowed the attack to take place. Everyone in Hasan’s supervisory chain ignored his increasingly militant Islamist actions. Nobody confronted him. Nobody reported their concerns out of fear they would be identified as opponents of diversity. The atmosphere within the Army and perhaps inside much of the armed forces today is that if anyone complains about a Muslim doing what Islamists do best, it is instant career suicide. Army Chief of Staff Casey’s observation that he thought a reaction to the attack that would limit diversity in the Army would be worse than the attack is at the center of the self-defeating politically correct attitude within the Army and describes the problem we face. The report was singularly unable to even address the politically correct atmosphere within the Army or suggest any solutions. Indeed it was chaired by former Clinton Army Secretary Togo West, who helped institute the current politically correct atmosphere within the Army. The report does not even refer to Hasan as a terrorist. It refers to him as an alleged perpetrator – legal language vice military language. As the long departed Walt Kelly noted decades ago: We have met the enemy and he is us.

6. Glaciers. The latest lie out of the UN IPCC to be debunked was the claim that all the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 due to the effects by manmade global warming. The claim made it into the most recent UN IPCC report and has been used as a vehicle to pass cap and trade legislation in Europe, the US and Australia. As usual, it is a completely false claim. It turns out that the prediction came out of a telephone discussion with an Indian scientist that was turned into a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) document. The WWF document was then incorporated into the IPCC report. No science was done. No results were published. No data was gathered. And there was no peer review of the claim. As of last week, the IPCC was scrambling to excuse their malfeasance. Note that this is not the only WWF data that has made into parts of the IPCC reports over the last decade. Kind of makes you wonder how many more little time bombs are sitting out there in their reports waiting to go off. The IPCC process is fundamentally flawed and corrupted. Time to shut it down and pull the plug.

7. Temperatures. In a series of related stories on Anthony Watts’ Watts Up With That web site, it appears that the various government organizations in charge of deploying and monitoring temperature data collection in their nations have been massaging the data collection itself. Over the last 20 years, the total number of data collecting stations has dropped from around 6,000 to around 1,500 today. Most of the remaining stations are in urban areas, taking full advantage of the very well known urban heat island effect to jack up reported temperatures. Stations that have disappeared are mostly gone from rural, high altitude and high latitude areas, areas which have measurably and historically lower temperatures than urban areas. After data is collected, it is massaged – basically averaged – between stations. Vast areas of Siberia and northern Canada are averaged between recording stations in warmer parts of the country. The climatologists and the governments using them to manufacture this hoax have successfully managed to corrupt even the data gathering. Nice job, guys.

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 also at the following locations: MatSu Valley News and the home page. Rod Martin’s The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column. Alex Gimarc is a long-time member of the Town Hall Conservative group.