by Alex Gimarc                                Mon., February 11, 2008

Interesting Items 2/11 -

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

In this issue:

1. McCain
2. What Next?
3. Alaska Caucus
4. Garnishment
5. Global Cooling

1. McCain. I had a couple correspondents that took me to task for going after John McCain ( RINO, AZ) last week via what they described as a Clinton-esque character assassination. Perhaps a better explanation is in order. The first two reasons I gave – the Keating 5 and the POW stories – are going to be used to smear, assassinate his character and eventually to defeat him in the general election. The third story is the vehicle the left will use to defeat any conservative initiative should be he elected. My bottom line is still that he has been compromised and cannot be trusted. His positions on the issues fall well below the 80% agreement level for conservatives. Positions such as opposition to opening ANWR for oil production, adoption of the entire manmade global warming mythology, McCain – Feingold, McCain – Kennedy, McCain – Lieberman, class warfare, anti-business rhetoric, opposition to tax cuts, and the Gang of 14, etc. are all big deals.

2. What Next? Now that Mitt Romney has dropped out, what is next? What do we conservatives do? Do we suck it up and support McCain? Do we sit this one out at the presidential level? Do we continue to fight? Perhaps the best choice is to continue to fight, as this one is not over yet. Romney has not released any of his delegates. Mike Huckabee remains in the race. Conservatives can still defeat McCain in the remaining states, support Huckabee, and shoot for a brokered convention in August. The numbers may there, and there are not enough eastern states left for McCain to sew up the nomination with liberals and moderates alone. The second best choice is to fight it out until the bitter end at the convention and then support wholehe artedly whoever is the nominee. Why? Because that nominee will appoint a few SCOTUS judges, and lots of Circuit Court judges. Along with that, we do our level best to elect the most conservative congress possible. We conservatives made a mistake by sitting out the 2006 election. Granted, we tossed out a lot of slugs on our side of the aisle. But we put the nation at risk by giving the democrats the keys to the kingdom. We also empowered McCain, as predicted by Limbaugh in October of 2006, to be the next nominee. Leftists play the political game well. They spent the entire year up to the 2006 election making things just a loud, nasty, unpleasant and ugly as possible. People want quiet rather than loud chaos, and an appreciable number of them are not a bit uncomfortable with the notion of giving the dems what they want simply in order to shut them up. Well, like giving a spoiled brat what he wants to shut him up, this never works and only serves to make things worse. The dems think they are on the verge of having their hot little hands on all the levers of power again. I think we conservatives have a reasonable chance of taking back the House of Representatives. The senate is more problematic, but not outside the realm of possibility to retake. Why? Because a sub-20% public approval of a democrat congress has to count for something – despite all the polling you may hear this year predicting electoral disaster for conservatives. It was certainly enough to get the last congress tossed. Public disgust with congress may make it easier to toss this one in November. We have a potential nominee in McCain that loves crossing the aisle and making deals with democrats. It is our job to make that game just as difficult for him as humanly possible. The fewer democrats that there are in congress, in the various governor’s mansions, and sitting in state legislatures, the harder it will be for McCain to make yet another of his self-serving little deals with leftists. We simply box him in and remove his wiggle room on the left. By doing so, we also make his time in the presidency just as unpleasant for him as he made life for conservatives in congress over the last eight years, and remove his ability to grandstand against conservatives in the media. This will be sufficient payback and punishment for what he had done against conservatives for the last several years. Sometimes you get what you want. Usually, it is not at all what you expected. Our job is to do what we always have done: Support and vote for the most conservative candidates for office at all levels. We do not sit this one out. We do not whine, snivel, or wring our hands. We roll up our sleeves and get the job done. We must NEVER AGAIN sit out an election, for doing so hands power to the leftists who would impoverish and enslave us just as soon as they could. Buck up guys and gals, this is going to be fun. And a volcanic McCain on public display in the presidency will be just as fun to watch as a volcanic Clinton (either one) was in the 1990s. Who knows, we may be on our way to electing a Republican version of Andrew Jackson, who also had a reputation for a legendary temper.

3. Alaska Caucus. Alaska held caucuses last Tuesday. ON the democrat side, it was a Obama night, with 74% of the votes and 302 delegates. Senator Clinton had 24% of the vote and got 103 delegates. The democrats had a record 5,000 people p articipating. On the Republican side, we had a very pleasant surprise, with around 13,000 people p articipating. This turnout is a bit larger than the largest historic years of 1996 and 2000. Results of the caucuses were Romney with 44% of the vote and 12 delegates; Huckabee with 22% of the vote and 6 delegates; Ron Paul with 17% of the vote and 5 delegates; and McCain with 15% of the vote and 3 delegates. As with elsewhere in the nation, democrats and their cheerleaders in local drive-by media think they will be steamrolling to majorities in one or both Houses of the Legislature. They also think they have a chance to unseat incumbents Don Young and Ted Stevens. That remains to be seen, for if we found out anything from Tuesday night, it was that Alaskan conservatives are fired up, ready for battle, and fully engaged. This ought to be a great fight.

4. Garnishment. Senator Clinton’s muscle-bound Nanny State inclinations came out in the light of day last week when in response to a question about younger Americans and health care. The question noted that younger Americans typically think they are indestructible and will not sign up for health care insurance. Her answer? Why, she will simply garnish the wages and wealth of those younger Americans and force them into a system as unwilling p articipants. To his credit, Senator Obama came out and blasted the forced entry as an attack on the young. Interesting that Obama is positioning himself to the right of Clinton, especially when both of them embrace the notion of universal health care mandates nationwide.

5. Global Cooling. A few stories about the return of colder weather st arted rattling around the Internet last week. First one has China experiencing the coldest, most brutal winter in a century. The second has the Midwest experiencing the coldest winter in a decade. The third has us up here in SouthCentral Alaska experiencing the coldest winter in the last five years. I have had a great time noting that this is what the Global Warming doomsday crowd wants us to have more of, for if it is doing this sort of stuff when the global temperatures are supposedly increasing, what do you think it will be doing when they decrease? The final story comes out of PowerLine, Saturday, with a solar prediction of quiet, which normally leads to lower solar heat output and colder temperatures in the solar system. If you look at the sun these days, you will be hard pressed to find any sunspots. We are at a solar minimum in the 11 (or 22) year long sunspot cycles. There is a 200 year cycle superimposed upon this that some solar astronomers also have tracked. The prediction reported in PowerLine, Investors Business Daily and American Thinker has the sun moving into a period of quiet not unlike and hopefully not as bad as the Little Ice Age, centered on the Maunder Minimum of 1645 – 1715, st arting in 2020 and lasting throughout the rest of this century. If so, Boys & Girls, things are going to be getting a bit colder for a while. Survivable? Absolutely, but we will be wishing for the temperate days of the recent past when Global Warming was running rampant. I expect the Global Warming fans to figure out how to blame a decrease in solar activity on what we do in our SUVs. Then again, one reaction to a solar cool down would be to build as many coal-fired power plants as soon as possible and dump as much soot and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as possible so as to hold the heat. One final interesting tidbit here is a possible connection between changes in solar output, volcanic eruptions and the st art of ice ages. There appears to be a correlation between major volcanic eruptions and the three coldest periods of the Little Ice Age. We already know that massive volcanic eruptions that inject tens to hundreds of cubic miles of stuff into the atmosphere cool the planet down for years afterward. Should such an eruption happen just as the sun is decreasing its output due to a naturally occurring cycle, and you set the stage for a real tipping point into some serious global climate change in a very, very cold direction.

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.