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Archives for 2008

Brophy’s Ballot Pics

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From: Senator Greg Brophy
Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 10:12 PM
Subject: The Amendments 2008

The Amendments 2008

The cheat sheet here at the top with my recommendations on the left; make yours in the blank and take it with you to the polls.

A46    yes  ______
A47    yes  ______
A48    yes  ______
A49    yes  ______
A50    yes  ______
A51    no   ______
A52    yes  ______
A53    no   ______
A54    no   ______
A55    no   ______
A56    no   ______
A57    no   ______
A58    no   ______
A59    no   ______
Ref L  yes ______
Ref M yes ______
Ref N  yes ______
Ref O  yes ______

(analysis below)

[Read more…]

poverty of the left

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RE: abe21.net GOP Strategy

“Our water resources are under siege. The Master Plan is being made irrelevant by BOCC policy moves. No prospects, no jobs, no leadership. Elbert County Republicans have risen to the occasion by coming out with three uninspired candidates with no detailed platform to solve our problems.”

Lets look at this lament.

Water resources are under siege by who?  The Left who want to regulate water resources in Elbert County.

The Master Plan is advisory and when the BOCC moves to clarify this fact in county regulations, who complains?  The Left.

Who have stonewalled and fought all economic development in Elbert County for as long as anyone can remember?  The Left.

Who thinks they can plan and design the best solutions for Elbert County?  The Left.

We need candidates who will shrink government, reduce and remove regulations, and prevent government from impeding the private sector in doing what it does best – capitalism.

To the Left, capitalism is the “C” word, never to be uttered in polite company.  Candidates who do not exhibit signs of totalitarian tendencies are “uninspired.”

The Left got exactly what they fought for – a stagnant local economy that is hardest on the middle class (the poor don’t stand a chance here.)

Elbert County must move beyond the Left’s failed country-in-county utopia and embrace a prosperous future.  We’ve reached a dead end with the Left’s empty visions.  It’s time to admit that mistake and dump the Left’s failed ideology with all the prejudice it deserves.

Mudballs-R-Us

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“In response to Schwab’s allegations, Thomasson said to hear that he is out of control is hurtful, but he refuses to fling mud at them.”

“This is absolute character assassination,” he said.  “They just don’t care.”  ElbertCounty News, 10/2/08 Page 1.

Mr. Thomasson refuses to fling mud?

Indeed.  Since the inception of his website Abe21.net, a day has not gone by that Thomasson ever stopped flinging mud.  Talk about unclean hands.

A Better Mudville

Port Huron Thomasson

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan. It begins:

“ We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit… ”

The main concerns of the statement included racial bigotry, nuclear weapons, and the gulf between ideals such as “all men are created equal” and the “facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North.” Overall, poverty and the civil rights of African Americans were the main concern, while Cold War and peace issues were secondary. Opposition to the war in Vietnam became a central concern of SDS only a few years later. In 1962 it was generally viewed as a US advisory effort. It is mentioned just once.The statement popularized the idea of participatory democracy: a democracy rooted in the principles of decision-making being carried on by public groupings, politics being defined as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations as well as having the function of bringing people out of isolation and into security, and the political order being focused on providing outlets for expression of grievances. It was to provide channels relating men to knowledge and power so that private problems are formulated as general issues. This idea later was translated into “community control” and led to school decentralization in New York, Detroit,San Diego, Parma and other places, with mixed results.

the failure of planning

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“The individual’s ability to decide for himself how to use specific things, being guided by his own knowledge and expectations as well as by those of whatever group he might join, depends on general recognition of a respected private domain of which the individual is free to dispose, and an equally recognized way in which the right to particular things can be transferred from one person to another.  The prerequisite for the existence of such property, freedom, and order, from the time of the Greeks to the present, is the same: law in the sense of abstract rules enabling any individual to ascertain at any time who is entitled to dispose over any particular thing.” F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 1988.

Elbert County’s Current Master Plan Vision Statement:

Master Plan Vision Statement

Elbert county schools have significantly lower CSAP scores than Douglas County schools.  Elbert County has no “diverse employment opportunities.”  Elbert County has no reasonable levels of “recreation, commerce, and industry” to balance.  Development does not pay its own way.  Individual property rights are subordinate to the intentions of county planners.  Commerce and industry are not encouraged.  Take home pay in Elbert County is lower here than in surrounding counties, and commuting expenses are substantially higher.

By most measures, the original Elbert County Master Plan has totally failed.  The magnitude of this failure provides no hope whatsoever that future planning efforts will succeed where this one has not.  It is time Elbert County cut loose the albatross of managed growth and planning regulation.  These fatal conceits have cost us the future they promised.

“Hume noticed clearly. . .how the maximum freedom of all requires equal restraints on the freedom of each through what he called the three ‘fundamental laws of nature’: ‘the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises’.” ibid.

Regulatory planning substantially impedes all 3 of Hume’s fundamental laws of nature.

Antelope above Kiowa 9/28/08

BOCC – does the right thing

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RE: Recommended Changes to Elbert County Regs to affirm the advisory Master Plan

In response to the SVV case regarding the authority of the county Master Plan,

see: http://elbertcounty.net/blog/2008/02/13/spring-valley-vistas-case-docs/ ,

and see: http://elbertcounty.net/blog/2008/02/03/is-master-plan-regulation-or-advisory/ ,

the BOCC affirmed the advisory nature of the county Master Plan by directing all Master Plan language in county Zoning Regulations, Subdivision Regulations, and 1041 Regulations, to be changed or removed to reflect this fact.

Well done Commissioners! Thank you for doing the right thing by rescuing the county from Judge Holmes’ judicial activism.  His attempt to direct county regulatory policy from the bench was wrong headed and the BOCC was absolutely correct to nullify it.

Moreover, the ambiguity of the Master Plan question has been a festering thorn in Elbert County’s side for years.  This BOCC of John Metli, Suzie Graeff and Hope Goetz, has done the county a great service by resolving it, and by resolving it the correct way.

* 9/25/08 update *

Comments to Elbert County Planning Commission

Commissioners engaged in some dialog with me after I read this statement.  I was able to reinforce the point about the inconsistency between general planning directives and regulatory law, and how the former due to its ambiguity should never become law.  One commissioner brought up the new master planning efforts and I was able to make the point about how the transportation master plan contains language that is quite extraneous to transportation.  This commissioner expressed favor for the master plan and said that the planning commissioners could make it regulatory if they chose.  I think he over reached on that comment.  In an effort to understand his favorable disposition toward planning in general, I asked him how the existing master plan had benefited Elbert County since its inception in 1996.  I believe the answer was, “a lot of arguments.”  The point was made.

After my bit, the planning commission heard a subdivision application.  The application entailed a novel use of an existing category of subdivision regulations applied to a new set of circumstances, with the intent of cutting down on bureaucratic red tape.

Many provisions of this regulation set were held to not apply to this particular application, and many provisions of the application were repeated verbosely numerous (5 or 6) times in different sections of the application.  After hearing the entire thing, my guess is that if you took out the redundancies and the inapplicable provisions of the application, a 20 page document could have been narrowed down to one or two pages, and a tremendous amount of time and expense could have been avoided by the Elbert County Community and Development Services Department, the property representative, the planning commissioners, and those attending this meeting.  So much for one-size-fits-all governmental solutions.  It’s a real tragedy to see so much brain power wasted on mind-numbing redundancy and inapplicable details.

Early 9/26/08

empathy

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I feel for you Mr. Thomasson. I admire your efforts to bring accountability and transparency to Elbert County.

Please understand, your party’s derivative Marxist philosophical basis is deeply flawed. The left’s economic system is doomed to failure, and the left’s theory of historical progress through dialectic confrontation is complete baloney. That doesn’t take away, however, from the honesty of your attempt to improve the political process around here. [Read more…]

1 man’s statewide ballot picks

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2008 Colorado Statewide Ballot Initiatives

YES on Amendment 46, Nondiscrimination by the State. It’s time to end the mistake of affirmative action.

YES on Amendment 47, Colorado Right to Work Amendment. Unions should not be able to monopolize labor available to employers.

YES on Amendment 48, Life Begins at Fertilization.  Obviously it does, and our laws should reflect this fact.

NO on Amendment 49, Limits on Payroll Deductions for Public Employees.  This is an unnecessary limit on public employees contract rights.

YES on Amendment 50, Increased Gambling Limits in Central City, Black Hawk and Cripple Creek.  If you’re going to allow gambling at all, the degree to which a person chooses to engage in it should be a matter of personal choice, and not kept artificially low.

NO on Amendment 51, Increase Sales Tax to fund state services for developmentally disabled people.  This looks like a bad law that contains many escape clauses for funding to be directed away from the intended beneficiaries of the law.

NO on Amendment 52, Reallocate Fuel and Mineral tax revenues to I-70 highway construction.  In effect, this law appears to create new subsidies for the highway construction and ski industries.

NO on Amendment 53, Change Business Executive Liability rules.  This law creates a loophole to excuse an executive from liability if the executive discloses an offense to the attorney general prior to the onset of criminal charges.

YES on Amendment 54, Political Campaign contribution limits by government contractors.  After observing how special interests bought themselves a sales tax in Elbert County last year, this measure seems like a very good idea.

NO on Amendment 55, Cause for Employee discharge.  Colorado should remain an “at-will” employment state.

NO on Amendment 56, Employers Required to provide health insurance.  With the volatility in the insurance and health care markets, these benefits should be freely negotiable between employers and employees, and not mandatory.

NO on Amendment 57, Additional workman’s compensation requirements.  Existing workman’s comp rules are sufficient.

NO on Amendment 58, Increase state oil and gas severance taxes.  No new taxes.  Tax revenues will continue to rise without the addition of new taxes.

NO on Amendment 59, Give Tabor refunds to an education fund.  Colorado should keep Tabor in effect.

NO on Referendum L, Lower the age for serving in the Co. legislature to 21.  The current age requirement is 25 and that is already too young.

NO on Referendum M, Land improvements no longer exempt from property tax.  Tax exemptions should be increased.

YES on Referendum N, Liquor purity laws in Colorado constitution.  No point in keeping this law in the constitution.

NO on Referendum O, Revise Citizen Initiative process.  Citizen Initiatives should not be further encumbered.

2008 Colorado Statewide Ballot Initiatives

imperious

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“Social Issues in Local Races” by Patty Sward, Commissioner Candidate

With smug indifference, Candidate Sward dismisses all questions in her bid for higher office about “social issues” as “irrelevant.”  Before even hearing the question, her answer is “irrelevant.” Talk about dictatorial hubris.

The left turned our county commission into a battleground where every issue, no matter how trivial, devolves into Gaia’s last stand in Elbert County — a huge “social issue.”

But don’t ask don’t tell Ms. Sward, as if there’s any doubt about which way she’ll jump on the question, and as if we should not know.

Help Wanted

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County Job Analysis

Conclusion:

Elbert County workers are at a significant competitive disadvantage in finding local work compared to workers in neighboring counties.  County Commissioners should do everything possible to bring jobs of any and all kinds to Elbert County.

Marginal solutions promoted by Democrat commissioner candidates such as farmers markets and tourist shops, even if they succeed where previous attempts have failed, won’t begin to solve this problem.  Elbert County needs thousands of new jobs, not a few token offerings to the “smart growth” gods.

Data Sources:

Elbert County Labor

Douglas County Labor

El Paso County Labor

Arapahoe County Labor

politics by any means

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“The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” in Elbert County has become a license to infer magisterial malfeasance in every official set of circumstances, and to wantonly publish an unending stream of innuendo.  Much as the left suffers from OBS (Obsessive Bush Syndrome) at the national level, the Elbert County local left also suffer from a deviant strain of that national illness, OCS (Obsessive Commissioner Syndrome).

Those so afflicted know no political season.  For them, elections have the weight of a comma, not a period.  Elections are merely momentary pauses to take the pulse of the electorate, after which, campaigning and the relentless pursuit of agenda immediately recommence.

The left have taken a noble constitutional protection out of the 1st Amendment, one intended to be used responsibly for the benefit of the entire republic, and turned it into an excuse for non-stop politicking.  They prejudge with reckless abandon as they search for any detail to parse into the constructions of their prejudgments.  Never mind the tedium of observing and developing conclusions as facts are presented, their conclusions are too important and long foregone to be seriously questioned.  Facts that don’t fit their bias are held de-minimus, are ignored, or are attacked.  And those who dare to propose inconvenient facts are openly reviled.

This naked lust for power and control gets prettified with concepts like “transparency” and “smart growth” but I think people see through these petticoats to their totalitarian heart.  Just as the courts have become venues for non-representative leftist obsessive compulsive political aspirations, so have our local executive chambers gone.

With every right comes the responsibility to use that right judiciously.  Rights are not licenses to be abused for personal gain or personal agendas.  Habitual disrespect and abuse of our rights will lead to the loss of them for all.    The left seem genetically incapable of understanding this.

The Engine of Change

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Straight Talk ExpressMcCains and PalinJet CenterDog sniffersGreetingsCenter of attention

PalinMcCainSprings PoliceCandidates on lineJet CenterB-25engine-of-change.jpg

—————————————————————————————————

For us, the event lasted over 5 hours.  At the end, my family and I had a chance to each shake hands and exchange words of thanks and encouragement with Senator McCain, Mrs. McCain and Governor Palin.  Law enforcement and secret service agents were professional and extremely courteous.

A guide to academic newspeak

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by a student at Harvard Divinity School, 1989

Gender: Radical feminism

Oppressors: White male heterosexuals

Bias: Basing scholarship on reason and evidence

Patriarchal models: Objectivity, logic, rational discourse, mathematics, science, the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, family values, motherhood and apple pie

Politically aware: Politically far-left

Being divisive: Deviating from the beliefs of the politically aware (see politically aware); synonymous with being hostile

Liberal arts education: Political indoctrination

Guilt: Feeling bad about your genes, but not about your actions

Women and men: The forces of good and evil in the dualism of gender (see gender)

Diversity: The gathering together of as large a group as possible of discontents, deviants and social misfits while excluding, suppressing and bashing conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, adherents of historical religions, serious students and anyone resistant to indoctrination

Sensitivity: Being deferential toward and extraordinarily circumspect around those included in diversity while gratuitously attacking those excluded from diversity (see diversity)

Greater diversity: Doing a better job of weeding out those excluded from diversity (see diversity)

Being exclusive: Providing equal opportunity and equal protection under the law, regardless of race or sex

Hermeneutics/Deconstructionism: Interpreting texts from the perspective of gender (see gender) with a rationalization by anyone with a French name

Victims: All those not fitting the definition of oppressor (see oppressors) and officially recognized far-left groups; does not include refugees from leftist totalitarian countries, such as Vietnamese boat people, Cuban immigrants, etc.

Sexism: The discrimination against and stereotyping of women or the failure to discriminate against and stereotype men

Racism: The belief held by white oppressors (see oppressors) that their race is superior to that of non-white victims (see Victims) or the failure to apologize for one’s own race if that race should be white; term is not applicable to non-whites

Moderates: The Sandinistas, Castro, Lenin, Mao, Hillary Clinton and all those who are politically aware (see politically aware)

Ultra-conservatives/the far right: All those to the right of moderates (see moderates)

Leftists: The empty set; exist only in the rhetoric of ultra-conservatives (see ultra-conservatives)

Inclusive language: An ostentatious form of new speak which seeks to remove the generic use of ‘man’ and ‘he’ (along with common sense and eloquence) from the language, e.g. “What are persons, that thou art mindful of her/him? and the child of persons, that thou doest care for him/her?”

Censorship: A good thing when done by politically aware (see poltically unaware), e.g. punishing owners of baseball teams for alleged comments made during private conversations; a bad thing when done by ultra-conservatives (see ultra-conservatives).

Iconoclasm: 1. An activity self-righteously pursued by the politically aware; 2. an activity considered criminal when the icons of the politically aware are involved (see politically aware)

Iconoclast: One who can dish it out but can’t take it

The Really Inconvenient Truths

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“Marxism as a serious political system came crashing down with the Berlin Wall in 1990. Aspects of it certainly linger in European-style “social democracy” and in surviving elements of the New Deal in America.  Every time you suffer an energy blackout, for instance, you are probably suffering from the Depression-era laws that let to a fragmented electricity transmission grid in the name of preserving jobs.

Yet the instinct to broadly and aggressively apply the tools of Marxism–central planning and government control–lives on.  The instinct is the same as it was when Marx articulated it in the nineteenth century, but the old justification just doesn’t fly.  Free enterprise has proven itself not to oppress the working man, but to free him.

If the working man is no longer oppressed, the central tenant of Marxism no longer applies, but surely there must be another victim of capitalism to take its place?  Women and minorities have advanced themselves under free enterprise just as surely as have the working man, and so they are not ideal candidates.

Luckily for the Left they have a victim ready on the shelf.  This time it is one that will not exercise free choice in rejecting the ministrations of those who claim to speak for it.  In the leftist’s world view, the worker has been replaced by “the Environment.”

Iain Murray, The Really Inconvenient Truths, Regnery 2008, pp 210-211.

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”