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by Alex Gimarc Mon., August 28, 2006 Interesting Items 8/28 – Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy - In this issue: 1. Palin Campaign 1. Palin Campaign. Things got off to a quick st art last week following the primary elections last Tuesday. Democrats went into attack and whining mode against the Palin Campaign. Kay Brown, a former democrat state legislator who is now the p arty’s spokesman filed a complaint Wednesday about a sticker on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News by the Palin Campaign urging voters to select the Republican ballot in the primary. Brown and the democrats are attempting to reprise the sniveling lunacy in Palm Beach County, Florida the day after Bush won the state in 2000. Of course, the fact that sitting Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich also used a similar sticker on the front of the paper on Election Day last April is not a problem to this democrat – probably because Begich is a democrat. Democrat gubernatorial candidate (Phony) Tony Knowles spent an hour sparring with conservative talk show host Rick Rydell on KENI 650 Thursday. Knowles came out in strong opposition to the proposed Pebble Mine in the Illiamna Lake region. He also came out in support of universal health care for all Alaskans. These alone ought to be sufficient ammunition for the Palin campaign to whack him around for a while and draw some real blood. By Friday the state AFL/CIO endorsed Knowles. They had previously supported Palin during the Republican primary, claiming that she was a fresh face. Apparently their oath of fealty to democrats overrides any notion of support for a fresh face in office. As of this writing, it appears that the national environmental organizations have chosen this race as the Big Enchilada for the fall campaign. For if they win, and if Knowles gets back into office in Juneau, they will have a free hand to continue to lock up this state for another four years and hopefully (in their minds) for decades to follow. Expect a lot of non-Alaskans to travel up and run his campaign. I hope we have an early and properly harsh winter so they will enjoy themselves nicely. 2. Subsistence. The Ninth Circus threw out a challenge ANILCA that limited subsistence hunting and fishing to only rural residents of Alaska. Subsistence is a race-based goodie passed by Congress in 1980 as p art of the Alaska Native Interest Claims Act. It grants customary and traditional access to fish and game for rural residents. This grant of special privileges and rights is completely at odds with the notion of equal rights under the law for all Americans. It is also at odds with the Alaska Constitution’s provisions that direct fish and game be managed for the maximum benefit of all Alaskans. Former governor (and current democrat nominee) Knowles dropped a lawsuit in 1994 brought by the state in an attempt to regain state management of fish and game. He dropped it with prejudice, meaning that the state cannot bring the complaint on those grounds again. The feds have used this provision of ANILCA as a vehicle to gain control of fish and game management across large p arts of the state. Management is done without regard to need, as the only requirement is whether or not the locals close to the resource had at one time taken it anytime in the distant past. This is a festering sore in the body politic that has been exploited by race-baiting democrats for decades. So far, the Ninth Circus has refused to provide any relief. The case will be appealed to the SCOTUS, where hopefully it will be heard. To date, those filing these lawsuits have not lost in court. They have been undercut by the refusal of state Attorneys General to back them. 3. Kensington. The Ninth Circus also issued an injunction to stop construction of a dam for a tailings pond to be used by the Kensington gold mine between Juneau and Haines. Greens in Southeast Alaska have systematically fought owners of this mine at every step to keep them from st arting mining operations. This injunction is simply another step in that effort. The mine has permits from the Army Corps of Engineers for the tailings pond. Greens are fighting the construction on clean water grounds. 4. Conflicted. Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, the ACLU-loving political hack Jimmy C arter appointed to the federal bench as he left office turns out to be a trustee of one of the organizations that funded the ACLU-led challenge to the NSA surveillance program she tossed out a few weeks ago. According to Captain’s Qu arters Weds, Taylor was a Trustee for the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan in 2003 through the present. That foundation donated $45,000 to the Michigan ACLU, which is one of the organizations that brought suit against the federal government. Taylor wrote a wildly p artisan screed – pardon me – she wrote a highly reasoned opinion, determining the program was unconstitutional. Imagine that. She helps fund the lawsuit, gets to hear it, and then gets to write the opinion. It is Good to be King. 5. Plame. A book written by David Corn and Michael Isikoff has named Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s number two at the State Dep artment, as the original source of the Valery Plame leak. It also goes on to note that Armitage was interviewed by Special Counsel Fitzgerald within weeks of the leak, long before he st arted going after Rove and Libby. Apparently for this entire time, Fitzgerald has known who leaked the name. He has known that no crime was committed, yet he chose to continue the prosecution. Armitage for his p art did nothing to stop the unwarranted and unfounded investigation into something he did. He let a reporter go to jail for months. He allowed Libby to be hounded and get to pay tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Yet he did not come out in public and he did not allow Robert Novak use his name and report what actually happened. Nice guy, this. 6. Profiling. A planeload of Brits nearly two weeks ago took their inflight safety into their own hands and tossed a couple Arabic-speaking people off a flight. The flight of 150 was in the midst of boarding. Two of the passengers st arted behaving suspiciously, speaking in Arabic and the passengers rebelled, demanding they be removed from the flight. The flight crew got involved and the couple was escorted off the jet. As it turns out, there was nothing amiss with these two, but nobody knew it until afterwards. Of course the talking heads on Brit media were all aflutter with the notion that passengers would actually profile bad guys on their own, without the assistance of the multicultural, politically correct, Islamic-sensitive government screeners. On the other hand, the passengers got home safely and comfortably. Expect more of this as the Islamists continue to figure out new ways to kill us. For if the governments won’t profile the potential Bad Guys, the general public certainly will. Unfortunately the general Muslim population will endure some poor treatment while all this goes on. But they have stood idly by and allowed other Muslims to commit murder, mayhem and terrorism in the name of their religion, and we are fast approaching the time where you are either p art of the problem or p art of the solution in this war. 7. Plan B. Pro-aborts infesting the FDA approved RU-486 – Plan B – for over the counter sale to women over 18. Of course the pro-lifers were aghast and spent a couple days blasting both the FDA and President Bush himself. I urge another strategy. We have seen in trials that there are some very serious side effects from the use of Plan B. These include, but are not limited to excessive bleeding, septic infections, septic shock, and occasional death. I’d say turn the trial lawyers loose on the manufacturers. If they can manufacture multi-billion dollar settlements against things that are not dangerous, imagine what they can do against people who manufacture and distribute something that actually is dangerous like RU-486. And an especially creative set of trial lawyers will also be able to drag in Planned Parenthood to the class action lawsuits as an organization that is knowingly pushing manufacture and distribution of a known dangerous substance. This will sort itself out in court and in the marketplace in short order. More later – - AG Interesting Items Interesting Items 8/23 – Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy - In this issue: 1. AK Governor 1. AK Governor. Alaska Republicans selected former Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin as their nominee for governor in the Republican Primary Tuesday. Sitting Governor Frank Murkowski did not get more than 19% f the total vote. Palin outpolled both Murkowski and former State Senator John Binkley, who had spent nearly a half million of his own money on his campaign and received 30% of the vote. The campaign was bruising, with Murkowski and Binkley going after Palin on charges of hypocrisy after using her office as Mayor for political purposes when she sent out a few e-mails connected to a run for Lt Governor four years ago. Palin positioned herself as a reform candidate, standing firmly in opposition to the Republican insiders in the state and mostly refused to p articipate in the mudslinging, though she did respond to most of the attacks. Murkowski blasted away at Binkley for supporting former Governor (Phony) Tony Knowles, democrat, in his second run for governor in 1998, which effectively sunk a very well run and well funded campaign. Murkowski lost for many reasons: Lingering anger for appointing his daughter to fill his old seat in the US Senate; purchase of a business jet for the state over the opposition of the Legislature; out of control increases in state spending for education; a perception that he had sold out to the oil companies with his proposed natural gas line contract; and finally, the fact that he had not immediately replaced all the Knowles appointees sitting in state offices. As it turned out, these people undermined his administration for four solid years. Murkowski was superb in the areas of resource development, infrastructure expansion and improvement, environmental sanity, and many fish and game issues. His manner was blunt, abrupt, stubborn and insular, refusing to listen to those sitting outside his inner circle of friends. Democrats nominated former governor (Phony) Tony Knowles, who essentially sold out this state to the environmentalists, unions and trial lawyers during two terms as governor. The Anchorage Daily News ran a photo of Knowles and former Clinton appointee, Bruce Babbitt’s Special Assistant for Alaska Deborah Williams, who now shills for Alaska Conservation Solutions taken at Election Central Tuesday night. During the latter p art of the Clinton infestation of the WH, Williams p articipated in most environmental assaults on business, hunting and fishing in Alaska. Nice of Tony to out himself so early. Murkowski spent much of the last four years in office cleaning up his mess. It is still unclear at this time exactly how the democrats, greens, Anchorage Daily News and local television will come after Palin, but it is worrisome that she was the chosen candidate on the Republican side for governor by the Anchorage Daily News - something that normally means the leftists think she will be easiest to beat in November. The good news is that she survived (prevailed?) in a pretty dirty campaign. The bad news is that what the Republicans manage to do to one another during a campaign doesn’t hold a candle to what the greens and the democrat smear machine is gearing up to do to her. We aim to not only head that off, but to flip it and use it against the Knowles campaign, the greens, the unions and the Anchorage Daily News. Palin will do well in the campaign if she keeps things really simple. If she st arts supporting controlling out of control increases in education spending by pursuing a voucher program for the public schools, and if she st arts pushing some version of Medical Savings Accounts to cover promised and unfunded increases in state retirement spending, she will go a long way toward solving uncovered spending obligations in the outyears and will be a hero to the fiscal conservatives. If she continues Murkowski’s resource development, infrastructure expansion and improvement policies, she will be golden. She also needs to tie Knowles directly to anti-development environmentalists, out of control unions suckling on the public teat, and trial lawyers. Palin also needs to move quickly to reunify a split Republican P arty following this bruising campaign. She has a personal problem with sitting P arty Chairman Randy Ruedrich and has called for his resignation. Taking up this fight at this time is a mistake and should be dropped immediately as Ruedrich is not her enemy – Knowles and the leftists supporting him are. Her job right now is to put the p arty back together, st art the business of destroying Knowles, the greens, the unions and lawyers that support him and get herself elected governor. 2. AK Legislature. There were no large surprises in the primaries for seats in the state legislature. All House seats were up and half the state senators were up. There were two interesting local campaigns. The first was to replace State Senator Ben Stevens, son of US Senator Ted Stevens. He had become a favorite target of the Anchorage Daily News over the years and finally got tired of the continual personal attacks and decided not to run for reelection. Two sitting State House members in his area – Lesil McGuire and Norm Rokeberg – jumped in to run for the seat. McGuire has been a pretty decent representative over the years. Rokeberg has not done a whole lot while in office, and chose during the last two weeks of the campaign to go after McGuire by attacking her husband and family as lobbyists. Most of his attacks were factually wrong, something that McGuire responded to with a nicely timed series of fliers last weekend. McGuire won with over 57% of the vote. This is not a lady to play poker with, as she demonstrated a deft political touch and a nice sense of timing. This is a Republican district, and I expect she will be elected in November. The other race was in Eagle River, where long time Republican Pete Kott, who had announced he was not going to run for reelection and changed his mind at the last minute was defeated by Anna Fairclaugh, a member of the Anchorage Assembly. Fairclaugh is a lady that gets the notion of personal liberty and responsibility right – being one of three votes against an onerous and obnoxious anti-smoking ordinance coming out of the Anchorage Assembly a couple weeks ago. Kott burned his bridges with local conservatives a couple years ago by leading a mini-revolt a couple Decembers ago, making a deal with the majority of the democrat caucus and several Republican dissidents in an attempt to form a majority caucus in the legislature. He was elected speaker for a day or two before the Republican caucus reeled in their wayward members and dissolved Kott’s speakership. 3. Prudhoe. British Petroleum (BP) has been sucking up to the greens in recent years in an attempt to stay out of court. It’s not working. Following the large spill in the Prudhoe Bay field last spring, they st arted looking at feeder lines between well pads and gathering centers and found significant corrosion in some of the larger feed lines. BP is the operator, rather than the owner of the entire field. They purchased that role from ARCO several years ago. Most of the damage is on the old ARCO side, the oldest p art of the field, which has been producing oil for over 30 years. When you produce an oil well, you get several things out of it: oil, natural gas, water, sand, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and some level of biological contamination (bacteria). The combination of stuff is highly corrosive and over time, will eat away at steel and steel alloys (pipelines), eventually putting holes in them. BP is spring-loaded toward being environmentally friendly, so their first reaction was to shut down all production from Prudhoe – around 400,000 barrels per day, or half of the production from the entire North Slope. As they analyzed the problem, they backed off on that announced closure, and as of today it looks like they will not shut down the field entirely, but instead produce well pads in Prudhoe at a lower level and rotate the replacement of the spine feeder lines in the field. There are four of these main lines running parallel through the field and it looks like they will shut down one or two at a time, drained, and replaced. The problem will be exacerbated by the discovery of asbestos in the insulation around the lines. P art of this is BP’s own fault, for they have gotten too green for their own good – and it forces over the top, PR-friendly responses to problems. P art of this is due to the simple age of the field. P art of this is due to the care (or lack of it) that ARCO took of the field. And the rest of it is simple bad luck. The lesson here for the rest of the country is that had we been drilling ANWR and/or NPR-A for the last decade, like Congress wanted to do, this field shutdown would not have removed nearly half of what goes down the pipeline each day. It would have only removed a qu arter to 20% of that total daily volume. We make poor environmental choices at our peril, and the best environmental choice on the Alaskan North Slope is to drill, build, produce, and make money. 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."
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