Interesting Items 01/23

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

In this issue:

  1. Inauguration
  2. Jacksonian
  3. Commutation
  4. Tillerson
  5. Pardon
  6. Hot Year
  7. LL Bean
  8. Lewis

  1. Inauguration. Donald J Trump was sworn in at the 45th President of the United States just after noon on Friday, Jan. 20.  The act was the cause of much celebration on the right and among people who were not in the democrat ghettoes of the coastal cities.  For the democrats, not so much.  They celebrated by loosing the anarchist mobs on Washington DC to smash, loot and assault.  The ceremony was solemn and very, very spiritual.  For his part, Trump was fierce and gave a shortened version of his basic campaign speech as the inaugural address.  The collective media was horrified.  Most of the rest of us thought it was a good start, as he told those listening that he going to turn Washington DC back over to the people it is supposed to serve.  And I expect he will do everything humanly possible to make that happen.  http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/full-text-donald-trump-inauguration-speech-transcript-233907
  1. Jacksonian. If you want the most succinct description of Donald Trump and his rise to power, that term would be “Jacksonian” – as in Andrew Jackson, founder of the current democrat party.  Both ran as populists.  Both denounced the existing corrupt system.  Both painted themselves as the leader of people who had no voice in Washington.  How they arrived was different, but the fierce viewpoints were similar.  Neither apologized.  Neither made any attempt to get along with the establishment awaiting them.  Other than Reagan’s first inaugural address, Trump’s was the bluntest Jacksonian message heard in Washington for many decades.  There are still doubters, as Mark Levin continued his blistering criticism against Trump.  In Levin’s experience, Trump is not a conservative (he isn’t).  Limbaugh has continually painted him as completely non-ideological, which would help him understand the nature of the leftist assault on him.  Instead, Levin paints him as a nationalist and a populist, both of which have been tied to eventual big government solutions.  While the outcome remains to be seen, Levin’s warning ought to be heeded.  http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/trump-and-andrew-jackson/508973/
  1. Commutation. The oddest pardon / sentence commutation handed out by O’Bama on his way out of office was the commutation of one Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, an Army PFC who downloaded some 400,000 classified files on the Iraq war and another 90,000 on Afghanistan, along with some 250,000 diplomatic cables, e-mails, airstrike videos and other classified including classified assessments of Guantanamo detainees.  He then put it all on a SD card and delivered it to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks sometime in 2010.  He was charged with aiding the enemy, something that should have gotten him the death penalty.  He was eventually sentenced to 36 years hard time.  Once in prison, he embraces his inner woman and decided that he too was one and started down the gender reassignment path changing his name to Chelsea.  Now here’s the funny part, not that there is anything particularly funny about what he did:  For the last three solid months, democrats have been in high dudgeon about WikiLeaks harming Hilly’s election chances.  Yet when O’Bama commutes Manning’s sentence, he also for all intents and purposes damages any prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing the leaked documents in 2010 and the hacked DNC docs last year.  It puts the democrats and the media carrying their water at somewhat of a tight spot as it completely undermines their argument that what WikiLeaks did in both instances was unacceptable.  Worse, it teaches all of us that going after the security of the United States of America is forgiven while going after democrat perfidy during a national election requires instant punishment.  http://dailysignal.com/2017/01/17/obamas-commutation-of-manning-sentence-sends-a-horrible-message-to-service-personnel/
  1. Tillerson. Fun story out of Exxon while SECSTATE nominee Rex Tillerson navigates the self-serving shoals of senate grandstanding.  It seems that Tillerson was in charge of Exxon when Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez decided to nationalize (a diplomatic term that means theft via government) non-Venezuelan oil patch assets in 2007, an action that cost Exxon $10 billion.  While Exxon could not do a lot about the nationalization (theft) of their property, the most certainly could send a message to future thieving ba$t@rds on a global basis.  Exxon announced a major discovery in the deep blue waters off the coast of French Guiana in 2015.  The discovery was 1.4 billion bbl of high quality crude, the largest oil find in the world that year.  The problem was that the Venezuelan socialist government claimed the find as their waters.  Venezuela and Guiana have been haggling over the region for a century to no resolution.  Following the announcement, Venezuela claimed the field.  El Presidente Maduro did his level best with sabre rattling announcing military exercises along the border, claiming Venezuela was a victim of imperialist aggression.  Exxon ignored them.  It turns out that Maduro’s sabre rattling drove a wedge between carefully cultivated agreements between Venezuela and other Caribbean nations, further damaging their support in the region.  How do you embarrass a dictator?  Remove revenue right under their noses, embarrass them, and turn their allies against them.  Seem like a great resume for a fledgling SECSTATE.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/16/rex-tillerson-got-burned-in-venezuela-then-he-got-revenge/
  1. Pardon.  Demonstrating once again the absolute need for a defenestration of the entire agency, the EPA decided it is not responsible for paying the 73 damage claims arising out of its breathtaking incompetence in the Gold King mine spill in 2015.  There over a billion dollars of claims outstanding.  The EPA cited an opinion out of the O’Bama Lynch (In)Justice Department that the $1.2 billion in claims cannot be legally compensated by the EPA.  The EPA’s notice reads that the relevant legislation “… does not authorize federal agencies to pay claims resulting from government actions that are discretionary – that is, acts of a governmental nature or function and that involves the exercise of judgement.”  The EPA then went on to limit the appeal time for claimants in federal court to six months.  Should any private or commercial user trash the watersheds of four states through sheer incompetent buffoonery, the EPA would be on them (along with the O’Bama – Lynch (In)Justice Department) like stink on brown stuff with multiple criminal complaints, perp walks, and orange jump suits for the owners / Board members.  But because they are our Lords and Masters, they are not responsible for environmental damage due to their own incompetence.  Somehow I don’t think this particular ruling will hold up very much longer as there is a new team in town and it is moving very quickly.  http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/epa-stiffs-the-people-it-injured.php
  1. Hot Year. The last gasp from the publicly funded climatistas last week was a breathless article in the NYT that 2016 was the hottest year on record.  Funny thing is that the article in question did not publish any numbers.  In addition, there are not a whole lot of independent temperature measurement stations in the Arctic, having been caught up in the retirement of rural station program over the last few decades.  So what happens is a nearby station is used as a proxy and the closest 5 – 6 stations are averaged to produce the real and actual data.  If all of those stations are farther south (which they are), nothing in the Arctic will be actually measuring ambient temperatures as there are actually no recording stations present.  If you plot the satellite data, the most recent months show a sharp cooldown, which most certainly doesn’t fit in with the government funded narrative of impending climate doom.  The final thing that happened is even with its corrupted dataset, NOAA plugged the data into its models, chugged mightily and ejected a result about 1/100 of a degree over the largest temperature ever recorded.  The problem with this output was that the margin of uncertainty for the data output was only 1/10 of a degree, which by definition renders the new temperature result totally and completely irrelevant as it is well within the margin of error for the new data.  Not only did the NYT lie, but they told us how they did it.  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/19/noaa-data-demonstrates-that-2016-was-not-the-hottest-year-ever-in-the-usa/
  1. LL Bean. LL Bean is a business that produces lot of outdoor gear, mostly clothing.  One of the grandchildren of the founder who now sits on the Board of Directors made the mistake of writing large caliber donations to the Trump campaign.  This grabbed the attention of the anti-Trump fascists who merrily lit their torches and grabbed their pitchforks and went after her and her company.  As an aside:  the anti-Trump people call themselves warriors against fascism here in the US, yet they are the ones who continually use classic brown shirt tactics.  This bullying got the attention of President Donald Trump who wielded his Twitter account and urged his supporters to do business with LL Bean.  This made the collective heads of the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) explode.  LL Bean caters to the outdoors marketplace.  These aren’t spandex-wearing metrosexual girly men.  They are hunters, fishermen, people who get outdoors, get cold and get wet, prototypical unsafe places for the snowflakes doing the bullying.  As a result, the leftist boycott was broken and the business’s sales ticked up a bit.  This won’t be the last time Trump defends a business under leftist assault.  If the left wants to operate in a battlefield where everything is political, we Honey Badger conservatives would be pleased to play the same game.  Numerically, there aren’t a lot of people on the left, though they have great weight in social media, and they will be overwhelmed by numerical superiority of those of us who will relish returning fire.  Be careful what you wish for snowflakes, as the world most certainly has changed, at least for a little while.  http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/01/the-art-of-the-no-deal/
  1. Lewis. GA Congress Critter John Lewis got himself beat up by a bunch of democrats in a civil rights march 50 years ago.  Over his political career, he has waved that particularly bloody shirt as a vehicle to deflect criticism when he does his dirty work as a partisan democrat political hack.  One is not supposed to criticize an icon of the civil rights movement.  Only now we have a president who does and will.  Lewis’ latest bloviation was a promise not to attend Trump’s inaugural because he viewed Trump’s election as illegitimate.  Trump immediately responded with a deadly tweet suggesting Lewis pay attention to his own congressional district which has poverty, crime and other endemic problems common in the Gerrymandered democrat inner city congressional districts.  If your constituents will continue to vote for you because you are one of their tribal members, you really don’t have to produce many results, and Lewis most certainly hasn’t.  The democrat cheerleaders and enablers masquerading as independent media were shocked, simply shocked that Trump take after a civil rights icon.  As it turns out, Lewis also refused to attend the inauguration of Bush 43, for precisely the same reason.  He got called on that after the initial exchange, forcing his congressional office to acknowledge the fact.  A real cynic would observe that a black congress critter refused to attend the inauguration of the last two Republican presidents.  Were they illegitimate because they were Republicans?  Or were they illegitimate because they were white?  This is going to be a lot of fun.  Perhaps Congressman Lewis ought to take the President’s suggestion and pay attention to his own district.  I cannot tell you how nice it is to finally see someone on our side fight back against the left.  http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/01/lewis-vs-trump.php

More later –

– AG

 

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