Interesting Items 03/27

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

In this issue:

1. Repeal
2. TRO
3. Gorsuch
4. Nunes
5. Satan Club
6. Gara
7. Kodak
8. Death Penalty
9. DAPL

1. Repeal. House leadership pulled Ryan Care Friday after failing to get enough votes to pass it.  As of this writing, finger pointing and blame gaming is going early and often.  Some call this a debacle, which it is.  But it is not Trump’s debacle.  Rather it belongs to the House leadership which attempted to do what the democrats did with O’BamaCare itself – hide the ball, write a one size fits all bill, and attempt to cram it down the collective throats of the conference.  Unlike democrats, House Republicans don’t do that game real well.  The failure here is the House leadership, which still has a perfectly acceptable piece of legislation that all Republicans voted for in 2015 to repeal O’BamaCare.  Instead, they chose to keep Medicaid expansion, the IPAB and the O’BamaCare mandates.  What should they do?  Chunk it up.  Pass a repeal.  The 2015 legislation is as good as any and it already passed.  Then pass a series of small bills to get the popular pieces – insurance sale across state lines, fully portable MSAs / HSAs, block grants of Medicaid and Medicare to the states, pre-existing conditions.  There are a lot more pieces, but this is a good start.  And if anything doesn’t pass, blame the democrats.  As long as O’BamaCare is out there, it will remain what it always has been – a festering carbuncle on the carcass of the body politic here in America.  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-24/trumps-obamacare-ultimatum-vote-today-or-im-done-healthcare

2. TRO. A federal judge in Hawaii wrote a 43-page opinion that was a nationwide injunction against President Trump’s latest travel ban.  The boy must have been a quick writer as the document was issued hours after the arguments were made.  It’s like the arguments made no difference at all.  The judge was an O’Bama personal friend, classmate, appointee, and O’Bama was in Hawaii when the case was argued and opinion rendered.  Essentially this judge found that anyone in the world has the constitutional right to travel to and enter the US and has full constitutional rights before and after they get here.  It effectively removed the President’s right and power to control the border.  In parallel, another O’Bama judge in MD is weighing an order to force the Trump administration to jack up the number of refugees accepted from 50,000 to 100,000 / year.  To counter the revolt of the O’Bama judges is going to take action from congress and Trump himself will have to go all Andrew Jackson on the courts, slapping them down harshly and embarrassingly.  Perhaps it is time remove these two clowns as no longer being fit to serve as they have violated the good behavior requirements of their position.  http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/03/16/robert-barnes-trump-could-go-full-andrew-jackson-ignore-interference-activist-judges/

3. Gorsuch. SOCTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch sat for hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.  The hearings were sufficiently uneventful that the networks mostly ignored them.  Senate democrats to a man (and woman) generally beclowned themselves early and often asking idiotic questions and getting those questions swatted back in their individual and collective faces.  Gorsuch was loaded for bear.  He gave straightforward, traditional, easy to understand responses.  If his logic continues while on the bench, he will be a superb Justice who will not allow himself to be Mau-Maued by Sotomayor the next time she pitches a fit like Kennedy did.  https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/03/21/the-real-story-about-neil-gorsuch-and-the-transam-frozen-trucker/

4. Nunes. House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes took a stroll to the WH early last week after a discovery that the Trump transition team had indeed been under surveillance by the O’Bama regime before and after the election.  Nunes said there was no direct wiretap of Trump tower, there was most certainly surveillance and information picked up conversations between people close to Trump and perhaps Trump himself incidentally.  Where this all falls apart is the release of the names of the Trump people whose conversations were leaked to the media.  The NSA slurps up everything, literally everything.  Those conversations are all held in their database and mined as the agency or its political masters see fit.  It was that data mining and leaking of information and names by O’Bama officials that broke the law.  And it is that leaking that will see 8 – 10 of them in Club Fed in the not so distant future.  In response, the democrats and their cheerleaders in the media went after Nunes with a bit of messenger shooting.  This is just beginning.  http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/22/nunes-unmasking-report-vindicates-trump-claims-surveillance/

5. Satan Club. Just another example of the perverse impact of the IRS on normal Americans comes from their approval of the After-School Satan Club tax exempt status only 10 days after it was filed in 2014.  The club was set up as a counter to a similarly named Christian Good News Clubs at the school.  Contrast this near record breaking approval of non-profit status with the years long Lois Lerner led gauntlet conservative non-profits have been forced to run since the regime took office.  As of two weeks after the non-profit status was granted, nobody had signed up for the club, but the IRS did get to feel good about themselves in taking a little chunk out of the hide of the civil society via fast-tracking the Satanist request.  http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/03/irs-gives-school-satan-club-tax-exempt-status-10-days/

6. Gara. One of the leaders of the democrat majority in the Alaska State House is Les Gara, a screaming left winger from Anchorage.  House democrats a year after they warned the Republican led majority not to touch any of the earnings of the Permanent Fund went ahead and appropriated every penny of it in their proposed budget, which was their feeble attempt to close a $3 billion spending hole.  Not only that, but they are pushing a state income tax just to make sure everyone outside Bush Alaska gets equally gouged.  They also managed to swat away at every single attempt to cut the budget.  Here’s where it gets funny.  One of Gara’s stock excuses not to cut the budget is that it will put Alaska into what he calls a “10-year recession.”  Perhaps Gara hasn’t noticed that we here in Alaska are mired in a deep recession already and we are a good two years into the festivities.  And it wasn’t budget cuts that caused the recession.  It was the worldwide glut of oil coupled with a governor that chooses to war on the producers.  http://mustreadalaska.com/les-garas-10-year-recession/

7. Kodak. Ran across this story last week that first ran in Popular Mechanics in June 2016.  Kodak discovered the secret test of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity site near Socorro NM.  At the time, Kodak was the prime supplier of sensitive x-ray film.  They had a batch that was marred by fogging, black exposed spots on the film, making it unusable.  Kodak had already went through a similar issue earlier when they discovered they needed to be very careful reusing packaging during the war years of the 1940s.  Some of the packaging was salvaged from wartime manufacturing plants that used radium on instruments.  The radium would also cause flecks and fogging when in contact with the sensitive x-ray film for a period of several weeks.  They had figured out how to deal with the problem and were suddenly faced with the same problem from a new source.  Fogging was discovered in a batch of film manufactured from a mill in Vincennes, Indiana in August 5, 1945.  The radioactive material was in the strawboard, manufactured packaging and was not due to radium.  Instead it was a new type of radioactive material.  Kodak had discovered radioactive fallout from the Trinity explosion and were downwind from the test site, a mere 1,900 miles away.  The investigator looked at a second run manufactured within a month from a plant in Iowa.  Both mills strawboard had significant beta-particle radiation and little to no alpha.  Estimated half-life was 30 days which ended up being Cerium-141.  The source of the radiation ended up being river water next to the plants.  Kodak alerted the AEC about fallout following the first atmospheric test in Nevada in 1951.  They threatened to sue the US government for “considerable damage to our products resulting from the Nevada tests or from any further atomic energy tests…”  They did arrive in an agreement with the feds. The feds would provide a schedule of future tests so Kodak could protect its products.  In return, Kodak agreed to keep silent about everything they knew about testing and fallout.  http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-kodak-accidentally-discovered-radioactive-fallout/

8. Death Penalty. Florida Governor Rick Scott finds himself in a battle with a Soros-backed state prosecutor who refuses to prosecute a death penalty case against a guy who did an execution style murder of his pregnant girlfriend and a police officer who attempted to apprehend him.  In Florida, the State’s Attorneys are elected for each of the 10 districts.  This gal, Ayala, had her campaign heavily financed by George Soros and claims to be a death penalty opponent.  Upon her announcement that she would not be pursuing a death penalty conviction, Scott stepped in and appointed a special prosecutor to handle the case.  State law allows this.  Ayala who previously said she would step aside and obey any lawful order decided to fight the order, calling it unprecedented and claiming the Scott “overstepped his bounds” and would be appealing the order in court.  There is an ongoing argument in Florida over use of the death penalty.  Unfortunately for Ayala, she did take an oath to uphold and enforce the law.  The situation has gotten pretty ugly with a court official opining that Ayala ”should be tarred and feathered if not hung from a tree.”  Ayala’s problem is not with this case, it is with her position that she will not seek a death penalty in any case.  Perhaps she ran for the wrong office.  http://hotair.com/archives/2017/03/21/a-florida-state-attorney-is-defying-rick-scott-over-a-death-penalty-case/

9. DAPL. Environmental vandals made attacks on the Dakota Access pipeline in two states last week, burning holes in above-ground sections of the oil pipeline at a valve site.  The torch attack near Sioux Falls caused between $30,000 – 60,000 damage.  A similar attack took place earlier this month in Iowa.  Looks like a torch was used to burn hole which demonstrates the jaw-dropping stupidity of the environmentalists.  Using a torch on an active pipeline is a lot like using one on a full tank of gasoline – something that will end up making you eligible for a Darwin Award where you self-select out of the gene pool.  This sort of pipeline vandalism is not all that common in the US, though it has been more common in Canada.  The DAPL is expected to start delivering oil this week after months of delays caused by protesters and their O’Bama regime supporters.  http://hotair.com/archives/2017/03/22/dakota-access-pipeline-sabotaged-in-two-states/

More later –

– AG