by Alex Gimarc                                Mon., April 28, 2008

Interesting Items 4/28 -

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

In this issue:

1. Snowfall
2. Texas
3. NC
4. Planned Parenthood
5. Famine

1. Snowfall. Anchorage got another foot and a half of Global Warming Friday. The official snowfall was 15.5” at the Anchorage International Airport. Most of the town got between 18-22”. This was the heaviest single day snowfall in the month of April ever recorded. It was the third largest single day snowfall since records st arted being kept up here in 1917. When I was young, it snowed when it was cold. Now that I am old and cranky, it snows when it is supposed to be getting warmer out. If this Global Warming stuff continues, I may have to get a bigger snowblower.

2. Texas. The State of Texas conducted an armed raid on a religious compound in San Angelo, Texas on April 3. They conducted the raid at the behest of Children’s’ Protective Services based on telephonic allegations of child abuse. The LDS offshoot sect was polygamist in nature and prepared young women to marry older men. In all, over 460 children – including nursing babies – were removed from their mothers. Give the leaders of the religious sect credit for learning something from Waco, as they didn’t shoot back and in return, the state didn’t lock them up inside their homes and burn the homes down around them. The state held a preliminary hearing that put all the children – including nursing infants into foster care. As the days have gone by, it turns out the phone call was not made by a 16 year old young lady from the sect, but a 30+ Obama super delegate from Colorado Springs, thereby making the arrest warrant fraudulent. The entire thing is a mess and will get a lot worse as more and more lawyers get involved and the bureaucracy goes into CYA mode to defend their actions. The State of Texas is acting very poorly here, as they are treating all members of the sect as a whole rather than individuals who may or may not have done something illegal. As this mess continues, it appears that Texas CPS has been watching the sect for a number of years, looking for any excuse to intervene and remove the children. It does make you stop and consider how we came to the point where the State can exercise such sweeping powers in such an arbitrary, capricious and vicarious manner. What is indeed the best thing for the children involved? Is it better to leave them in a group where the girls will be married off and impregnated before they turn 18? Or will it be better to put them into foster care, where they will be in the public schools, have no parents on hand, and learn how to p articipate in the over-sexed, hook up culture of the public high schools where they will be unmarried and impregnated before they are 18? Whatever happens with this, I find it most troubling, especially the notion that the State of Texas can remove children from members of a church – or any other organization for that matter – without finding any individual crime. Should this stand, the State of Texas Child Protection Services has just set the precedent that membership in a group can be used as an excuse to remove your children at a time an place of their choosing, which is a very dangerous precedent indeed.

3. NC. The North Carolina Republican P arty ran an ad connecting the democrat candidate for governor to black liberation theologist Reverend Jeremiah Wright last week. The ad used Wright’s photo along with Senator Barack Obama’s endorsement of the democrat candidate for governor as a wedge against his candidacy. Apparently Wright’s angry, anti-American racial tirades don‘t play all that well with the voters of North Carolina. It was a devastating ad against the democrat. And like all successful conservative campaign efforts, it was instantly denounced as racist by both the democrats and the McCain campaign. The leftists have set up a regime under which should you say anything negative about a leftist candidate who may be black, you are instantly branded as a racist, for how could you say anything negative about a black liberal without having race as the foundation of that criticism? On the other hand, leftists are free to do whatever they want to do, say whatever they want to do about any conservative candidate of any race at any time. In military terms this is known as unilateral disarmament. Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain demanded that the North Carolina Republican Party pull the ad on the grounds that it was racist in nature. The Chairman of the state party smiled sweetly and noted that this was an old criticism, and she was not going to be pulling the ad. McCain immediately came under withering criticism from conservatives skeptical of his candidacy and by weeks’ end, had changed his position on the ad. Interestingly enough, in the days before his criticism of the North Carolina Republicans, McCain was polling ahead of both democrat candidates in national polling. He immediately dropped even to slightly behind in the days afterwards. The other interesting outcome of this event is that money has been pouring into North Carolina Republicans in the form of donations after they refused to buckle in the face of leftist criticism. This means that the conservatives are still out there, waiting for a proper conservative response to the political wars. It also means that McCain still – and probably always will – have a tin ear when it comes to dealing with conservatives. It also means that the real game this election season is at the state and local level, where our job is to elect as many strong conservatives to office as humanly possible. The best revenge against John McCain and the democrats who got him nominated is to give him a conservative majority in both Houses of congress to deal with. If nothing else, it will be fun to watch.

4. Planned Parenthood. Captain Ed writing in Hot Air last week reported on the latest Planned Parenthood controversy and protest. Planned Parenthood was founded as a way to execute the goals of the Eugenics movement of the 1920s. The goal of its original founder, Margaret Sangar was to remove as many undesirables from the gene pool via abortion as possible, thus improving the gene pool. A student magazine earlier this year did a series of calls to various Planned Parenthood offices offering to donate money specially targeted for the abortions of black babies. Planned Parenthood allows targeted donations of this nature. Laura Ingraham played several of the phone calls on her show last week in the run-up to a protest against Planned Parenthood by pro-life conservatives of all colors. Given that Planned Parenthood is tax exempt, with reported revenues over a billion dollars last year, gets a substantial amount of its funding in the form of federal grants, and yet engages in the sort of ethnic cleansing envisioned by Margaret Sangar nearly 80 years ago, is it not time to start a public investigation into it? Yet with all of this, Planned Parenthood remains an icon of the left. This is very sad. It is also very predictable.

5. Famine. Congress and the administration can always muck thing up for the economy much faster than they can fix anything. And when they muck around with energy, they do the worst of all. 35 years ago, congress and the Nixon administration decided to fix the problem caused by OPEC shutting off oil imports to the US by capping prices at the pump. The result was predictable: instant shortages and lines at the pumps in late 1973. The price controls stayed in place until 1981 when they were removed by President Reagan. Those eight years were the worst performance by the American economy since the Great Depression which was, interestingly enough also deepened and lengthened by government action. Today’s economic problems with spiking gasoline process and spiking food prices can be directly linked to congress and the Bush administration mucking around with the energy marketplace – partly by over regulating it, and partly by mandating ethanol as a fuel. The ethanol mandate has led directly to a worldwide food shortage, with the worst problems in the developing world. The spike in oil prices can be directly tied to failure to build new refineries, bogus clean air requirements, and the failure to open any new domestic areas to drilling. This is an opportunity for conservative candidates for congress this year, as they can run against their newly elected democrat majority incumbents and point out that under their short term as a majority, they have managed to wreck both the price of gasoline and the price of food. This is a huge opportunity for conservatives. We will hope they take advantage of it this summer and fall.

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.