Interesting Items by Alex Gimarc, June 2007

1. Mat Maid. We have a state chartered, controlled and operated dairy here in the MatSu Valley north of Anchorage named Matanuska Maid, or Mat Maid. It is controlled by a state Creamery Board which in turn sits under the state Agriculture Board. The dairy is yet another one of those attempts by the State of Alaska to own and operate a business that fails in the marketplace. The dairy was originally set up in the mid-1930s as a congressionally ch artered co-op. For a number of reasons, it did not make a significant amount or money nor was p articularly successful in the marketplace. By the mid-1980s, it was in bankruptcy. The state of Alaska under Governor Sheffield put the dairy under the control of the state government via the board structure earlier described, appointed a CEO, and gave it an infusion of money. This worked for a little while. However, over the last several years, the dairy has not competed well with other local sources of dairy products. It’s operations have essentially turned into a subsidy for local dairy farmers (yes, we have a few up here). The Creamery Board finally gave up and announced the closure of the dairy last month, even though Governor Palin and the Legislature both wanted it to remain open and have approved an additional $600,000 for its operation for the coming year. The announcement was met with condemnation and cries of outrage, for nobody involved – p articularly the subsidized dairy farmers – knew the closure order was coming. Governor Palin shoed up at the dairy to talk with management and was left to cool her heels with the company receptionist for nearly an hour. Nobody in management or on the Creamery Board managed to take the time to meet her even though they knew she was coming to talk with them. That was a mistake. The Creamery Board is not appointed by the Governor, so she couldn’t touch them. However, she did fire the entire state Agriculture Board, which had a couple Creamery Board members sitting on it. The newly constituted Agriculture Board amazingly voted a few days later to keep the dairy open for another year. This governor is going to be interesting to watch. I do like the notion of tossing out entire state agencies – especially ones that have managed to lose touch with reality and believe they can not be touched. Following the firings, the local coffee company, Kaladi Brothers (local Starbucks clone), told the local paper they wanted to buy $1 million of milk and cream for their lattes and other products last year and found little interest from Mat Maid management. Ignoring a million dollars worth of new business and keeping a new and very popular governor cooling her heels in your waiting room for an hour are signs of a rather poor business model which may explain a bit their problems in the marketplace. What ought to be done now? If they are sm art, and I expect they will be, both the legislature and the Governor ought to set a date next spring for complete privatization / sale of the Mat Maid dairy and remove it completely from the public trough. This will give the subsidized dairy farmers sufficient time to adapt to a new business model in the private sector. It will also eliminate a drain on the state treasury. It will also eliminate the need for a state Creamery Board. All in all, this is shaping up to be a nice, small government win for everyone involved.

2. Ethanol. We have st arted seeing the blow-back against President Bush’s idiotic decision to st art using corn-based ethanol as a replacement for gasoline. For a free marketer like Bush, this decision is awful, as it not only distorts the marketplace for energy by governmental fiat, but it will also have a significant upward impact on food prices. Why? Corn is the foundation of our entire food industry. Not only is corn used in a huge number of products, but it is also used as food source for beef, poultry and pork. The more corn you shove through the injectors of our autos, the less corn is available for our tables. This is a decision that the marketplace has not made, and as such, it distorts the marketplace for liquid fuels and imposes an artificial solution. Basic economics will tell you that if you do anything to the marketplace other than compete in it freely, prices will go up. Ethanol also has a direct impact on the operation of our current gasoline engines, making the mix burn a bit hotter and decreasing MPG by 10-20%. Is there a better way to reduce dependence on foreign oil? Absolutely. There are any number of things we can do to st art breaking the reliance on foreign oil. Most of these things are all regulated and legislated out of current play. They shouldn’t be. What would I do? I would roll back every single regulation / regulatory impediment to the discovery / production of new oil and natural gas sources. I would st art building a serries of small to medium sized, high tech refineries. I would roll back Clean Air Act requirements for designer blends of gasoline. I would st art looking at coal gasification / liquefaction. I would build as many reactors for primary power as possible, decreasing one of the primary users of fossil fuels. Reactors end up being as cheap as coal and natural gas per kilowatt hour to build and operate. I would get the hell out of the way and let the marketplace operate and see what comes out the other end. It isn’t that hard. We have more coal and natural gas than we know what to do with. We need not import anything from the Middle East, which in turn will help defund the Mullahs, Wahhabis, Islamists and other anti-American vermin.

3. Capital. Captain Ed reported Friday that House democrats were busily crafting legislation to raise capital gains taxes for hedge funds, venture capital funds and other private equity firms. The tax increase would more than double existing capital gains taxes on the portion of the economy that is at the forefront of funding breakout, high and low tech new businesses. The net result of this awful bit of legislation would be to strangle new business creation. The tax increase represents the largest capital gains tax increase in decades and as such stands to profoundly damage the vibrant, growing and competitive US economy from the day the tax increases are proposed. Elections matter, folks. The democrat majority in congress is poised to damage this economy for years by removing the incentive to invest in new things.

4. Dirt. The Clinton War Room is in full operation as we have st arted seeing little stories dropped in various Clinton-friendly newspapers, magazines and online media outlets that are damaging to her opponents. For instance, there have been a few stories about John Edwards’ personal finances that have appeared out of nothingness. There are stories about Barack Obama’s dealings with shady land deals and attempts to shake down investments firms that wanted to do business in Illinois. Finally, there was a story about Fred Thompson’s old girlfriends still loving him and supporting his candidacy. Given that Fred Thompson is not yet a declared candidate, the fact that someone is out there researching his old girlfriends and printing stories about the research is a telling indicator of the Clinton smear machine in full operation. The only thing that makes this machine work well is the willing compliance of leftist media that prints the stories dropped on their doorsteps without question. This is going to be a brutal campaign, pitting the Clinton-friendly drive-by media against the talk shows and internet. Hillary and her supporters are setting the stage for the personal and professional destruction of her opponents. We will hope Our Guys – whoever they may be – are up to the fight, for they are going to have to be. It ought to be interesting to see if the Clinton machine is capable of taking some return fire during all of this, because they will.

5. Canadians. Finally, House Squeaker Pelosi posted a photo on her official we site showing how much she cared for the military troops at war. The photo was of a nice young lady chatting with a doctor in an office. The uniform was clean, well pressed and worn. The tags on the epaulets had the word “ Canada” printed. Yes, the Squeaker supports the troops all right, unfortunately they aren’t American troops. Captain’s Qu arters, Fri.

1. Moose. I wrote last week about the rice bowl protecting bureaucrats infesting Alaska Dep artment of Fish & Game versus the Alaska Moose Federation. The story heated up nicely last week with the announcement that Matt Robus, the ADF&G Wildlife Conservation guru sicced the state troopers on members of the Moose Federation for trying to save moose calves after their mothers were killed by local bears. The state employees take issue with non-state people playing with moose. Interestingly enough, they don’t have problems with other non-state employees playing with other wildlife. For instance, Channel 2 News here in Anchorage announced a joint effort between ADF&G and the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center to create a population of wood bison and release them into the wild by 2010. There are also a number of conservation groups around the state that save injured birds and nurse them back to health before releasing them into the wild. ADF&G likes this just fine as it frees up resources for them to use elsewhere. There are also green groups that work on oiled animals here in the state, cleaning them up and releasing them after they are recovered. Question here is why can only the green groups allied with ADF&G play with the fuzzy little critters? Answer probably has a bit to do with whose rice bowl is being spilled and how many connections exist between people who work for ADF&G and local greens. This ought to be a most interesting discussion, as the greens up here are almost universally despised by local hunters, fishermen and others that spend a lot of time out of doors, mostly because the greens are at the forefront of all efforts to restrict access to areas where people hunt and fish, restrict or shut down stocking programs, restrict or shut down construction of new roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure that makes it possible for people to go where the animals live and kill them. It is quite an instructive event for ADF&G to go after a citizens group that only wants to increase numbers of moose to hunt statewide. As the locals, the legislature and the governor st art realizing that ADF&G is simply defending their own turf and that of the greens rather than doing what they have been hired to do which is to maximize the number of animals available on a sustained yearly basis for hunting and fishing, there are going to be some substantial, structural changes made there. Ought to be fun to watch. ADN, Fri.

2. Yupik. Our fine friends from the ACLU along with some native activists from Bethel filed a lawsuit against the State of Alaska, Governor Palin and a number of other state election officials demanding assistance during elections be given to local natives in Yup’ik, one of the area native languages. The filing and requisite arm waving for the media goes down the same path as other minority voters have been demanding in federal courts for decades as they move away from English as our national language. This lawsuit has an interesting twist, as Yup’ik does not have a written tradition. It was first translated into written form 20-30 years ago. If successful, expect the ACLU and native separatists to extend the precedent statewide, imposing yet another cost on Alaska taxpayers while they carve yet another group of our neighbors away from the English-speaking mainstream of this nation. ADN, Tues.

3. Chuitna. Another week, yet another report in our increasingly green, anti-mining fishwrapper, the Anchorage Daily News. This one was a report of public opposition to a proposed large coal mine some 45 miles west of Anchorage in Chuitna. At least three local environmental groups filed a petition with the State Dep artment of Environmental Resources opposing the mine. They claim the mining company will be unable to clean up and reclaim the mining site. Interesting that these greens can look a generation into the future, predict it accurately, and use that prediction as a vehicle to shut down a highly profitable mine planned to remove some 300 million tons of coal from a 20,000 acre site over the course of a couple decades. The state has 30 days to respond to the petition, which will likely be followed by the standard blizzard of opposition to the Environmental Impact Statement, permits, and lawsuits against everybody involved with the mine over the course of the next decade or two. ADN, Fri.

4. Fourth Circus. The formerly reliable Fourth Circus Court of Appeals (Federal) handed down an opinion last week that overturned over two centuries of judicial and military precedent. The opinion, authored by the usual Clinton appointee, was joined by a Bush appointee, Judge Gregory, a gentleman from Missouri that Bush appointed to the federal bench his first year in office as a peace offering to democrats in the senate. The opinion found that the President can no longer designate anyone on American soil as an enemy combatant and put him into the military tribunal system for trial and punishment. The case involves a citizen of Qatar, Al Marri, who was working here in the US on behalf of Al Qaeda. He was identified, captured and has been held in a military brig in Charleston for a few years. The fools sitting on the federal bench still do not understand that we are at war. They do not care about past precedent. They do not care about either the threat or what we have been doing for a mere 200 years of warfighting here in the US. In their zeal to damage the Bush administration, they are undercutting and subverting the tools used to prosecute the war and making us less safe. They ought to be removed from office as quickly and as harshly as possible. Captain’s Qu arters, Tues.

5. Pop-ups. A Connecticut Judge ordered a new trial for a substitute teacher convicted of exposing her students to inappropriate sexual content on her classroom computer. She had been previously convicted and faced up to 40 years in jail. The new trial was ordered after computer security experts demonstrated that she had been convicted based on false information by local police. In this case, the substitute, who is not p articularly computer literate, showed up for class with the classroom computer already powered up and logged in by one of the full-time teachers. The substitute turned her attention to the computer early in the school day after the kids were looking at it with more interest than they should and found sexually inappropriate pop-ups on the screen. She shooed the kids away, and called for help from the school administration. She got no help. The cops showed up a few hours later and arrested her for exposing the kids to porn. The cursory police investigation accused her of visiting porn sites and did not investigate the desktop much deeper. The defense found a decent set of computer security experts and analyzed the desktop. They found that it did not have current anti-virus, pop-up blocker or a firewall and was infested with viruses, trojans and spyware. The pop-ups came from a music download site the kids had visited a week or so earlier. This case demonstrates not only the wild-west nature of the internet today, but also the high threat environment that public employees work in today. The school administration and their IT staff had not taken adequate – even basic – steps to lock down their systems, putting both their students and their employees at risk. One would think that the local teachers union would understand the threat to their members by this incompetence, though I haven’t read anything about union play in this story. Local law enforcement was also completely incompetent, failing to take normal steps to isolate the computer, take a forensic backup of it, and conduct a full analysis of what was installed and when it got installed – things that would have immediately exonerated the accused. Expect the second trial to go a bit better for the substitute, though she is not out of the woods with this yet. She may have grounds to file and win a wrongful arrest suit against the local police and parallel complaint against the school district to recover court costs for her defense. Window’s Secrets, Thurs.

1. Immigration. The democrat leadership of the senate allowed the immigration bill to die, albeit temporarily, last week. The vehicle for the takedown was reconsideration of an amendment by Byron Dorgan (D, ND) to sunset the guest worker program after five years. The amendment was defeated in a previous vote. Word on the blogs is that the pro-enforcement senators were st arting to be successful attaching amendments to the bill that would have forced the administration to enforce existing law against illegals, build the fence, and not reward those that are in the country illegally. At that point, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) killed the bill via reconsideration of the Dorgan amendment. This legislation was yet another example of an out of control congress. We have the leftists wanting to manufacture 12-20 million new democrat voters by importing and naturalizing a new underclass of poor, non-English speaking people. We have the old country club Republicans wanting cheap labor. And we have President Bush, who in his Christian he art truly believes this is the right thing to do. Well it isn’t. And the country doesn’t believe anyone involved in the legislation, with nationwide polling running nearly 80% against the bill. This bill was cooked up in secret. It completely bypassed the normal legislative process in congress – the process that ensures that everyone plays and that everyone has a voice in its creation and passage. The supporters decided to cook it up in secret, bring it directly to the floor of the senate, limit both debate and amendments, and cram it down our collective throats. Well, it hasn’t worked out very well for the supporters, as opponents have been flooding congressional phone lines, fax lines, e-mail inboxes with messages of harsh opposition. And the opposition breaks across p arty lines, as a number of minority groups normally on the left are also in strong opposition to this bill, as they are perfectly ready, willing and able to “do the jobs that Americans don’t want to do.” I don’t think that this has p articularly split the conservative movement, though we do have the editorial page of the WSJ and National Review on opposite sides of the debate. It also hasn’t p articularly split the blogosphere on the right, as most conservatives have been strongly in opposition. A few moderate bloggers like AJ Strata’s Strata Sphere have st arted name calling conservative opponents as Immigration Hypochondriacs. Strata believes that defeat of this legislation sounds the death knell for the Republican p arty. He may be right, for the Republican P arty is not necessarily the conservative movement. But he needs to be careful, for when the conservatives stay home, like they did in 2006 when our guys in the congressional majority went native, Republicans lose. When conservatives turn out in huge numbers, Republicans win. It appears the democrat strategy is to get Republicans to pass this bill or blame them for not passing it. I believe this issue ought to be a central issue in the upcoming presidential campaign, and that the leading candidates on the right are saying and doing all the right things (yes, this means that I do not consider McCain as a leading candidate on the right). WH play has been moderately heavy-handed in support of the bill. Last Monday they floated a couple stories intended to bolster support among skeptical conservatives. The first was a little piece that they were planning for a SCOTUS retirement this summer. The second was a Washington Post poll indicating that nearly 60% of the general pubic did not oppose amnesty for illegals. Neither planted story worked. The best thing to come out of this mess is that nobody on either side of the political aisle living outside the Beltway trusts the politicians in Washington DC any more. Congressional approval ratings are at an all time low – with Harry Reid (D, NV) clanging in at a stunning 19% approval rating. The legislation is not completely dead yet, and will be resurrected as soon as the WH and congressional leadership believes they have sufficient votes to ram it through the process. We will continue to do what we can to kill it. Keep your wooden stakes, tar and feathers ready.

2. ADF&G. We have a growing fight between senior people at the Alaska Dep artment of Fish & Game (ADG&G) and a group of citizens here in Anchorage who is trying to grow moose populations statewide. Over recent years, Fish & Game wildlife biologists have allowed the populations of wolves, brown and black bears to grow to the extent that they are wiping out moose and caribou in large sections of the state. This has also been fueled by greens here in state and out of it that have fought predator control for years. Typically what happens is that the predators take out the calves in the spring, so moose and caribou numbers never increase. Anchorage is surrounded on the east by the Chugach State Park and National Forest. There is water on the south and west. To the north are two military bases. We have a population here in town of roughly 2000 moose, a population that has been slowly growing over the years because there is no hunting for moose in town. Anchorage also has one of the thickest concentrations of moose per unit area statewide, simply because there are few predators for the moose. Well, the predators are st arting to show up, p articularly in the spring when the brown bears come out of the hills and hunt moose in town. This usually happens in the neighborhoods close to the forest and produces nice front page photos of bears munching on the remains of freshly killed moose in the front years of local homeowners. The homeowners are not allowed to shoot these bears and ADF&G does absolutely nothing to remove the dangerous animals or the kill from close contact with people, which in turn tends to train the bears to be more aggressive and more comfortable around people – something that will eventually end up getting someone killed. We have a local organization called the Alaska Moose Federation that is a grass roots group of people dedicated to growing the population of moose statewide. One of the things they do is try to rescue calves of freshly killed moose, raise them and release them into the wild. ADF&G doesn’t like that a lot, as it intrudes on their turf on several levels, so they have been fighting the Moose Federation every step of the way. Calves turned over to ADF&G in recent months have not been released into the wild. They have been euthanized. The combination of rice bowl protection by state employees and refusal to do something about bears coming into town does not set well with most of us that have been watching this mess unfold. There is going to be a real hot time in this town should a bear hurt someone. Expect a major change within ADF&G should that happen. This thing is heating up nicely and should quite loud throughout the summer. Hopefully Governor Palin and / or the Legislature will step up and do something before it gets completely out of hand.

3. Nome. A federal judge ruled Friday that a small gold mine near Nome had complied with all permit requirements; that all permits were lawfully and reasonably issued; and that all permits were complied with. The complaints against the mine were based on wetlands that were filled by mine developers a year before the initial formal complaint was made. Given that Nome is about 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle and underlain by a thousand feet or so of permafrost, the notion of “wetlands’ is a seasonal concern – and a short season to boot. The judge ruled that everyone had complied with all environmental rules and permits both in spirit and to the letter of the law. The mine owners spent over $75 million in environmental studies and complying with permit requirements, all in an effort to build and run the cleanest project possible. Neither this nor the 135 jobs this project is expected to bring to Nome was sufficient to placate the anti-mining people in Nome. For once, the judiciary has done the right thing for the right reason. They are to be congratulated. ADN, Sat.

1. Bethel. Some anti-development residents of Bethel, a small Alaska town in Southwest Alaska, sitting on the Kuskokwim River, have come up with a scheme to derail operations of a open pit gold mine 150 miles upstream from the town. The mine, an open-pit gold mine on Donlin Creek, needs to import cyanide to use in the leaching process that separates gold from the ore. Bethel NIMBYs are proposing a ban on transport of cyanide through Bethel, using the excuse that it is a dangerous substance, will pollute the river, and that they cannot allow it to be introduced into the region. The proposal is expected to come before the city council next week for a vote. Economic ramifications of this move will be interesting to watch, as Bethel, a small town of 6,000 or so is the closest town to the mine. There is no road connecting the mine to Bethel, so anything that gets to the mine either goes upriver on barges or is flown into a 5,000 foot long airstrip. Like most (if not all) small towns in bush Alaska, Bethel has an huge unemployment problem. There are mining and support jobs that will be based in Bethel. If the mining company is forced to improve their airstrip so things are flown in directly from Anchorage, and improve the barge dock and supporting infrastructure so that barge traffic bypasses Bethel, there will soon be little economic traffic between the mine and the town. Should the locals make it too expensive to do business with them by imposing this smarmy little, feel-good, poison-pill piece of local legislation, they and their neighbors will be left in the dust as economic development in Southwest Alaska goes elsewhere. Additionally, it is not like we have any problem with industrial cyanide poisoning here in Alaska. If you look at the death statistics for the Bethel area, the most recent statewide report posted is 2004, there was exactly one – count ‘em, one – death by unspecified poisoning in the Barrow census area that year. In contrast, there were two drownings, making immersion in cold water exactly twice as dangerous as poisoning in Bethel. Look a little deeper, and you discover that there were also 11 suicides in Bethel in 2004. If the Bethel city council is really interested in saving lives of their citizens, they ought to concentrate on the suicide rate rather than the transport of industrial materials through town. And people tend to suicide less if there are decent jobs and a real economic future available to them and their children. But as always, the choice it theirs. ADN, Fri.

2. Exxon. The Chairman of Exxon Mobil tossed a hand grenade into the effort to build a natural gas pipeline from the Alaska North Slope last week by observing that the increasing estimates on pipeline construction from the Arctic to the distribution hub in Alberta no long make those pipelines economically viable. Exxon is considering p articipating two pipelines. The first is from Canada’s Mackenzie oil and gas field near the Arctic Ocean in Canada. Estimated cost for this pipeline according to Exxon Mobile is $20 billion, and Exxon wants to construct the pipeline and st art producing those fields before they begin here in Alaska. Exxon estimates that the natural gas pipeline from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields will cost upwards of $30 billion, and they simply do not that kind of investment dollars on hand. The estimate of the Alaska pipeline varies wildly, as the Murkowski administration estimated a 2,000+ mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay and along the Alaska Highway into Alberta would cost in the neighborhood of $15 billion. Our experience with the Trans Alaska Pipeline 35 years ago demonstrates that things always take longer and cost more, so the Murkowski estimate will be low. It is very clear that Exxon is not real interested in building a natural gas pipeline at this time. Perhaps it is because Alaska NIMBYs are still pursuing $5 billion in monetary damages following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Fortunately the other producers are interested in producing natural gas. The state had passed and governor is preparing to sign legislation that will allow that process to move forward. We are closer to a natural gas pipeline than we were a year ago, though we are not there yet. Current betting up here is that a Warren Buffet backed-company, Mid American, is interested in building the natural gas pipeline from the Slope. ADN, Thurs.

3. Carbon Credits. Captain’s Qu arters Saturday related a Guardian ( London) story about companies trading in carbon credits adding to the problem of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The EU has bought into the notion of carbon credits, the purchase and sale of the right to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There are 17 companies engaged in the trade between Europe and the developing world. According to the Guardian, there is rampant corruption, incompetence, rule-breaking and fraud in the program, which ends up adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (assume for a moment that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem – which it isn’t) than would otherwise be added. The entire program rests on two bogus assumptions: First, is that the entire system can be properly bounded and audited; second, that anyone can improve the environment by trading carbon credits. When the foundation is set on sand (or something worse), it is not a great surprise that the entire structure ends up creating a larger problem than it is supposed to be solving. If you want a market based solution to environmental issues, ensure property rights are tightly held and vigorously defended; keep taxes low; keep regulations few and far between; and shut down the lawsuit machine so that owners, operators and shareholders (redundant, as they are owners) can get on about the business of producing goods and services and taking very good care of their customers. The customers today want a clean product with a clean manufacturing and support tail, and are willing to pay for it. This is more than sufficient push to be environmentally friendly.

4. Evangelicals. Ran across a blog report of an interview with Bill Clinton strategizing on Hillary’s presidential campaign. Didn’t copy the citation, so I can’t properly reference it. Apologies. The first thing Clinton said was that democrats had done a poor job with evangelicals over the last couple of decades. That wasn’t going to happen in a Hillary WH. This probably explains why we have st arted hearing from left-wing Christian organizations in recent days. The second thing was that he expected there to be a well funded anti-immigration challenge to the Republican candidate from the right. This will be a third p arty candidate, likely someone similar to Tancredo or Buchannan, whose run will be financially supported by the Clinton machine and intended to split conservatives during the campaign next year. Take a look at both initiatives, and you see a very well thought out attempt to split off the evangelicals and anti-immigration folks from the conservative movement, which will put us right back into the 1992 campaign, and elect a democrat with 40% of the popular vote.

5. JFK Terror Plot. Yet another week, yet another plot by worshipers of the Religion of Peace to blow things up, murder innocents, spread death and destruction as far as humanly possible. And yet another decision by the editorial board of the NYT to bury the entire story, this time on page 37 of Sunday’s paper. Fortunately the other two major NYC papers carried the story via screaming headlines on page one of their papers. This plot was centered on JFK airport in NYC, where the terrorists planned to blow up fuel lines that fed jet fuel into the airport. They hoped to take out the airport, fuel storage facilities at the airport, and as much of Queens as they could with the burning jet fuel pipeline. Plotters included a baggage handler at the airport, a couple of people from Trinidad, and a very dangerous bin Laden connected bad guy named Adnan Sukrijumah, who is wanted in conjunction with Al Qaeda attempts to smuggle live nukes into the US and use them. Don’t know yet the extent of the plot, as it is still being investigated. Expect to see more of this, as the Bad Guys aren’t going to rest until we are either all converted to Islam, give up and accept Dhimitude, or we kill enough of them so that the Wahhabist infestation of Islam is no longer being practiced. This is going to be a long war. The actions of the NYT in burying this story on page 37 of Sunday’s paper will further cement their position as chief apologist and supporter of the Islamists here in the US.

"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 at the following locations:
Debate USA, http://www.debateusa.com/ ;
MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com
and the home page: http://home.gci.net/~agimarc
Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column. You can find it at: http://www.thevanguard.org/

If you would like to join II's mailing list, have comments or suggestions, please contact me at: agimarc@ak.net