by Alex Gimarc                                Mon., August 31, 2009

Interesting Items 8/31 -

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

In this issue:

1. Teddy
2. UAW Health Care
3. Show Trials
4. Denver
5. VA ALS
6. Kookesh

1. Teddy. There are only five polite words to describe the passing of Ted Kennedy. They are: “Mary Jo Kopechne” and “Robert Bork.” Any other discussion would have to include his destruction of American power on the foreign stage st arting with the loss in Vietnam that directly led to two million dead in Cambodia. It would have to include the two immigration reform acts he sponsored that changed the mix of people immigrating into the United States from primary European to third world; specifically the massive illegal influx over the last four decades. It would have to include his virulent anti-Second Amendment legislation and serial attempts to ban gun and ammunition ownership. It would have to include the Waitress Sandwich sexual assault on a waitress in a DC restaurant with Chris Dodd. It would include him covering for his nephew William Kennedy Smith on rape charges in 1991. Good riddance.

2. UAW Health Care. From Sweetness & Light Wednesday we get a Detroit Free Press story describing yet another public bailout for the UAW medical care fund. This fund gives UAW retirees health care coverage and is one of the primary reasons that Chrysler and General Motors failed in the marketplace. The first bailout was the federal seizure of both corporations, the shafting of bondholders of those corporations during bankruptcy proceedings, and awarding substantial ownership shares of the post-bankruptcy corporations to the UAW, portions far in excess of what the UAW owned in stocks and bonds. The second bailout was the recently defunct cash for clunkers program, which was intended to primarily benefit Chrysler and GM. Fortunately, the general public refused for the most p art to purchase vehicles from those corporations. The UAW bailout in the health care legislation is around $10 billion. This amount of money still does not cover all fiscal responsibilities for the UAW to its retirees, as there are an awful lot of retirees and insufficient monies in the UAW-managed fund. How many more public bailouts of fiscally irresponsible union retirement plans are we going to have to pay for? How many more transfers of our hard earned tax dollars to democrat voters, big dollar donors and supporters will we endure before we stand up and say “Enough. No more?” I say the time is now. It is time for the unions themselves to go into bankruptcy rather than continuing to suckle from the public trough.

3. Show Trials. The Obama WH decided to change the subject once again as their attempt to nationalize medical care and health insurance is being rejected by the general public. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate detainee abuses, torture, and other unpleasantries committed against captured terrorists. The political calculation here is to get the hard left on board with the administration once again after a very tough summer. The actual result will be to target career CIA employees who conducted the interrogations in good faith for banana republic style investigations, hold show trials, and impoverish them with crushing legal bills as they defend themselves. Given the highly politicized nature of the CIA these days and the war they conducted against the Bush Administration over the conduct of the War on Terror over the last eight years, I am not p articularly sympathetic, as they now have the administration they wanted all along and ought to be enjoying its tender mercies. Late in the week, Limbaugh passed along thoughts from Andrew McC arthy on the investigation. McC arthy, who writes for the National Review Online and prosecuted the original World Trade Center terrorists in the early 1990s believes that the democrats will not have the intestinal fortitude to actually hold the trials here in the US. Rather, he expects that the Obama administration will release the results of the investigations to the public and let the International Criminal Court and European national courts do the trials and convictions in abstentia of the targeted CIA employees and Bush administration appointees. These investigations are a sop to the hard left and will do significant damage to the CIA. Perhaps it is time to shut down the CIA and set up a new intelligence organization, which would solve the immediate problem of both the right and the left with what the CIA has become today.

4. Denver. One of the things the left is very good at doing is projection, the act of blaming others for doing the very things they are currently doing or planning to do. With this definition in mind, we can turn to a vandalism attack on a democrat p arty office in Denver last week where a pair of club-wielding bozos broke 11 windows causing over $11,000 of damage. The head of the state democrat p arty instantly blamed it on the Tea P arty crowd, anti-Obama haters and other conservative ne’er-do-wells. Interestingly enough, there was video shot during the attack that led to the identification of a long time democrat, transgender activist doing the dirty deed. He / she was arrested and charged with felony mischief. This person also worked for a democrat politician, was a member of a SEIU-affiliated 527 group called Colorado Citizens Coalition. He / she was also arrested at the 2008 Republican convention in Minneapolis – St. Paul. The Colorado state p arty chairman refused to apologize for charging conservatives with the crime and for creating an “atmosphere of hate.” As usual, the atmosphere of hate exists mostly on the left.

5. VA ALS. In our universal health care story of the day, we have the Veterans Administration (VA) which notified 1,200 veterans that they had Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), a 100% fatal condition. The notifications were blamed on a “coding error” that led to mailed notifications from the VA to the vets. The letters also contained a description of assistance provided by the VA for the terminally ill, including access to the pamphlet “Your Life, Your Choices” – the VA death book. Kind of makes you wonder how many of the wrongly notified vets took the VA up on the suggestion. Note that this is what governments do – screw-ups on a massive scale; scaring the ever loving tar out of thousands with just an “oopsie, it’s a coding error” excuse afterwards. If these vets had the ability to opt out of the VA system and take their medical benefits in the form of a Medical Savings Account that could be used to go out into the economy and find their own medical care, this sort of thing would never have happened en masse. It may have happened to one or two of them, but never to 1,200 at once. And every single one of them would not have been subjected to the tender mercies of the VA Death Book after the mis-diagnosis. Think of this as we continue down the road to Sweeney Todd Medicine, ObamaCare. Hot Air, Tues .

6. Kookesh. Democrat state senator Al Kookesh and others were busted in July for taking 73 more red salmon with a net than they were allowed to take. The excuse to the state trooper who cited them was that a friend who had a permit for 100 additional fish was not there yet but would be there Real Soon Now – the functional equivalent of “a dog ate my homework.” Rather than paying the $500 fine, Kookesh is going to take the case to court and attempt to get a federal judge to say that state troopers do not have jurisdiction to enforce limits on fish and fame taking on federal lands. Essentially, Kookesh is going to try to expand federal control over hunting and fishing in Alaska using the 1980 ANILCA legislation and the courts as his vehicle. This has potential to do great harm, as the feds do not have sufficient manpower to enforce fish and game limits, and subsistence hunters and fishermen have not demonstrated the discipline or integrity to police themselves. Evidence of this are the 70+ caribou shot near Point Hope last year left to rot; Kookesh’s p arty taking 70+ more fish than they were allowed in July; and the native protest on the Yukon that took nearly 100 king salmon this summer after the river had been closed due to a poor return of salmon. Eventually, this “I’ve got special rights to do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it and to whomever I want do it because I am a native and I have a right to live a subsistence lifestyle” garbage has got to stop. Either we are all equal in the eyes of the law or we are not. And if we are not, that means we are living under a different set of rules; rules that are created and enforced out of the end of a gun. I do not think our native activist neighbors want to live in that world as much as they think they do.

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.