Archives for 2012
Paul Ryan rally at Lakewood HS
I met former Boulder County Republican Party Chairwoman Marty Neilson, now head of CUT, and her colleague/chauffeuse LeMoine, at the Paul Ryan rally yesterday. They really know how to work a rope line!
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“Our” water
In Elbert County groundwater aquifers, there is no such thing as “our” water. “Our” water is a political myth built on a fantasy. Obviously, this absence-of-foundation gives no pause to politicians who use “our” water to justify all sorts of self aggrandizement to gain office, and all sorts of regulation once in office. Let’s explore the fantasy.
Groundwater rights in Colorado are gifts to landholders from the government that come with restrictions. They are government grants that can take the form of well permits, water court decisions, and various decrees from the Colorado State Engineer.
With them, the State of Colorado conveys limited rights to parties to (a) use defined amounts of water each year for 100 years, from (b) in the case of groundwater, defined depths in the ground known as aquifers, that are (c) in the case of groundwater, underneath specific areas of land, for (d) specific types of uses, on (e) specific surfaces of land. Those elements combine to make a water right, a grant given by the state to a grantee, usually a landowner.
A water right gives the holder a license to put some of Colorado’s water to a beneficial use. Moreover, unless that water is actually put to that beneficial use, the right cannot be defended or protected.
A grant from a state regulatory authority is not a permanent or absolute form of property. For example to contrast, after an owner of a house pays off the mortgage, they own a perfected title to that house. No one can take it away or dispossess the owner of it, unless it’s done through a court action in satisfaction of some other debt or obligation.
Water rights, however may be revoked or modified if the conditions of their usage are violated. Title to them is never “perfected.” It’s always contingent and subject to change. Considering their source — a political authority — this should come as no surprise. But not only are water rights contingent, there’s no guarantee that the water permitted to be extracted will even exist for the life of the water right. This makes them contingent and speculative.
Water rights are given through transactions between surface landholders in Colorado and the State of Colorado. Whether the grant comes directly from the Colorado State Engineer, or through a water court consulting the Colorado State Engineer on how much water to adjudicate, they all come from the same place.
There are no other governing parties such as local and county governments who define a water right, however, Elbert County uses zoning authority to modify and reduce state-granted water rights for property owners through their county subdivision regulations. Subdivision owners have their water rights reduced to a third of the state grant.
The Colorado Legislature has determined that the Colorado State Engineer will use a 100-year aquifer life when it delegates water rights. Elbert County divides those water rights by 3 to translate them into 300 year conveyances, though a recent court decision found that zoning time-frames beyond 50 years were subject to strict scrutiny. I suppose this was the courts way of admitting our inability to see the future.
It is common knowledge to most people in Elbert County that the water produced here comes out of non-renewable aquifers. Once it comes out of the ground, it doesn’t go back in. We consume it, and unless we recycle it in some way, that consumption is a one-way trip to evaporation.
Sidebar: Dr. Ken Carlson discussed water recycling in the context of hydraulic fracturing in a recent talk at an Elbert County Conservative Breakfast.
Scarcity is the soul of economics. Scarcity causes value to exist. The threat of scarcity causes value to go up. So, we have this scarce resource, becoming more scarce because it has a finite supply because most people foresee humans to be around, needing water, much longer than the supply is projected to last. Add a dash of politically motivated emotion, and you have a guaranteed vote-getter made to order for any political race, however tangential to water.
Vote for me, I’ll save “our” water, otherwise you’ll die of thirst. It’s a powerful message and it’s used to some degree every day in Elbert County.
So what’s wrong with this notion of “our” water? Back to the Colorado State Engineer, grantor of all water rights, either directly or through connected water courts, in Colorado.
Denver Basin groundwater aquifer rights are not allocated from a pool of aquifer water. They are allocated based on overlaying surface land.
I’ll say it a different way. When a 100-year water right is calculated by the Colorado State Engineer, the calculation is done according to the amount of overlaying land. It does not take into account how much water might be available in the vicinity as a product of historical nearby withdrawals.
Our individual water rights are not calculated from a model of the aquifer pool. They’re just not. Legally, they don’t connect to each other. The rights are derived as stand-alone, quantity of land, calculations.
So when someone comes along after the fact, mostly for a political purpose, and purports to address “our” water, that person is treating a disconnected set of things as if they were a uniform thing. Yes, those rights all concern water, but that’s where the similarity ends. Legally, in public policies, in private dealings, in what can be enforced in a court, there is simply no pool of “our” water in Elbert County.
A zoning law with a purpose of extending Elbert County’s aquifer lives to 300 years, has no more chance of accomplishing its purpose than the initial grant did based on an overlaying land calculation driving a 100 year aquifer life assumption.
I was very surprised to learn that in this computerized age with our massive computational capacities, that the State Engineer does not model the Denver Basin aquifers in a pool, or use previously granted rights in order to arrive at a water right determination — a pooled calculation that might try to account for adjacent depletions.
Everyone talks about depletion, local politicians build their political lives on the assumption, hundreds of people will come out to occupy a county commissioners meeting and demonstrate about the potential threat of it, but our water rights, and the laws surrounding them, simply don’t anticipate it.
Perhaps it is time for our zoning law and our politics to adapt to this reality — time we use science to address this issue, and leave the parade of shamans screaming about “our” water alone.
B_Imperial
Fascism
Wed 8/8 5:00 p.m. @ Lions Hall
This film documents the socialist conquest of America. Whether Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis or not, the history of the totalitarian movement they both dedicated their lives to is an on-going American tragedy that must be seen, must become known, by all Americans.
WND EXCLUSIVE
Filmmaker reveals ‘deeply disturbing’ Obama background
‘Gap between his public narrative … and reality’
Ever wonder why presidents before Barack Obama didn’t feel the need to publicly berate the U.S. Supreme Court during a State of the Union address, even when they disagreed with a decision, as Obama did over the campaign finance ruling?
Did you think why earlier presidents did not demand ranks of unaccountable “czars” in the White House, to address everything from water use to executive pay?
And did you notice the reams of orders emanating from the Obama White House regarding immigration policy, social welfare programs and terrorism policy, issues that logically should be addressed by Congress?
There’s one man who’s noticed it all: Filmmaker Joel Gilbert, who has directed the new “Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception,” about Obama and his past.
Gilbert purports in his production that Obama’s biological father was not the “Kenyan goat herder” Barack Obama Sr., who visited the United States as a student and later returned to Kenya.
Instead, his evidence suggests that Obama’s biological father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist, and who has prevailing influence over White House actions even today.
Gilbert told WND that his background in Middle East and Islamic studies had him working in 2010 on “Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad’s Coming War and Obama’s Politics of Defeat.”
He reviewed hundreds of Obama speeches during that research and noted an “odd” pattern of behavior in Obama.
“When speaking of issues relating to the rich and the poor, Obama became very excited, speaking rapidly and louder, always in a higher pitch. On other subjects, he was quite calm. Why would Obama have an inner passion for class struggle? From my knowledge of his background, exclusive prep school, Ivy Leagues, Harvard Law – it didn’t seem to fit,” he said.
But for Gilbert, a film director, writer, and musician who creates documentaries through his Highway 61 Entertainment, the light clicked on when he read Obama’s book, “Dreams from My Father.”
There were multiple references to Obama seeking out Marxist individuals, pursuing socialist events, and advocating for a “community” lifestyle.
His investigation then turned to Davis, whose name repeatedly was mentioned in Obama’s writing.
“His close physical resemblance to Obama was shocking, while Obama little resembled the Kenyan Obama. How could this be?” he wondered on his website about the new “Dreams” production.
“I unearthed two film archives of Frank Marshall Davis, one from 1973, the other from 1987, as well as Davis’ photo collection. I then acquired 500 copies of the Honolulu Record, the communist run newspaper where Davis wrote a weekly political column for eight years. I also obtained seven indecent photos of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, taken at Frank Marshall Davis’ house, suggesting an intimate connection between Dunham and Davis.
“I concluded that to understand Obama’s plans for America, the question was ‘Who is the real father?’”
Gilbert, who previously challenged Hollywood’s comfort zone with “Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam,” said the bottom line is that Obama’s “story” of an inspiring childhood is just not real.
Gilbert told WND, “I felt I could build a case that Obama in fact had a very deeply disturbing family background.”
And Obama is, in fact, pursuing the “dreams” from his “father” – his real father, a “likely Soviet agent,” Gilbert said.
There is an ever-present set of themes about which Obama revolves, he said, including a “top 1 percent taking advantage” and “a proletariat being taken advantage of.”
There are “evil straw men preventing the working class from upward mobility,” he said. “This is classic Marxist ideology.”
Even Obama’s recent claims to small business owners that “You didn’t build that,” align with the ideology of Karl Marx.
“This is all the justification for taking over, redistributing wealth. It’s preliminary talk for telling people they are being oppressed by evil straw men,” he continued.
Gilbert felt he had to tell the story – especially as the primary major media outlets in the nation are isolating and ignoring the issues at hand regarding Obama – and he turned to film.
“My ‘Dreams’ provides the first cohesive understanding of Obama’s deep rooted life journey in socialism. It includes Obama’s indoctrination in Marxism by Frank Marshall Davis, his college years, his job as ‘organizer,’ his involvement with Project Vote and the subprime mortgage crisis, the Ayers family, Alinsky and Reverend Wright, all the way to his campaigns and presidency,” he said.
He said it is “shocking” how the long-independent media in the United States has decided to “support this false narrative” of Obama’s Kenyan father and typical childhood.
He said as part of his effort to get the message out, he’s working on delivery of copies of his DVD to members of the public.
Gilbert told WND his goal is based on the fact that Americans are a great people, and they “deserve to elect … a president on a truthful and honest depiction of both his political foundations, his background and his plans and what he will do.”
“We deserve and must have honesty from candidates as to what they intend to do,” he said. “Barack Obama has violated that trust to their votes.”
Gilbert said Obama needs to speak honestly about those issues.
“Obama must come clean and admit his real background, who is his real father,” he said, so that voters can vote based on who he really is and what he wants to do.
“Obama’s election was not a sudden political phenomenon. It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that Frank Marshall Davis nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades,” Gilbert warned.
“‘Problem solving’ and ‘fair play’ are the new code words that socialists employ in a determined strategy to move the Democratic party to the far left, and embrace socialism as their natural ideology. Obama’s anti-democratic behavior, including consolidation of power through Czars, going around Congress, intimidating the Supreme Court, and class polarization tactics can be better understood after viewing ‘Dreams from My Real Father.’”
Prairie Slimes
Prairie Times Editorial Policy:
“Be respectful: stick to issues, not personalities. Name calling is not allowed. We want considerate, respectful dialog. You can disagree without being disagreeable.”
Except Jerry and Susan Bishop, two of our not-so-faithful Republican Committee people, will print anything our local leftists have to say — and whether or not they used their real names to say it.
The Editors of New-Plains.com writing in the 8-1-2012 Prairie Slimes:
- “…or their verbose blogging bloviator, Brooks Imperial.”
- “Blind faith and ignorance may loom larger than it should among the voting public. If the uninformed citizen….”
- “…Party officials….a bunch of two-year olds…”
- “…GOP….jaded old crocks….”
- “…and kudos to the judge for not bitch-slapping Schlegel for stupidity.”
- “…a bloviating blogger…”
If you happen to miss a defamatory article on the New-Plains on-line website, don’t worry, Jerry reprints most of their work in his advertiser-funded fishwrap he mails out to all property and business owners in the area. Now that Jerry’s established his paper as the print version for the New-Plains left, I wonder how long it will take for his advertisers to get hip to the yellow journalism readers may now associate with their products and services.
Take a good look Elbert County. These are the people you elected to run things around here for the next 4 years. They’re going to give me way too much to write about.
B_Imperial
Obama veritas
freedom forestalled
Our betters at the Planning Commission were supposed to consider the following last Thursday evening, 8/26/12.
The Site Development Plan process ensures compliance with:
- Conditions of approval (unlimited)
- Planned Unit Development requirements
- Platting restrictions
- Elbert County Zoning Regulations
- Elbert County Subdivision Regulations
- Elbert County 1041 Regulations
- Elbert County Master Plan
- Elbert County Design Standards for Non-Residential and Multifamily Developments
- Elbert County Construction and Specifications Manual
- Circulation and traffic
- Landscaping
- Parking
- Signage
- Lighting
- Sidewalks
- Storm water drainage and detention
- Water and sanitation facilities
This plan, consisting of a myriad of subordinate plans, must be submitted before a permit to construct will be considered for issuance for any use or change in use of a platted or un-platted parcel for:
- Any business
- Any commercial facility
- Any industrial facility
- Any multi-family dwelling
- Any recreational facility
- Any institutional facility
- Any government building
- Any library
- Any fire department facility
- Any law enforcement facility
- Any church
- Any school
- Any major utility facility
- Any cell site
- Any utility service facility larger than 500 square feet
- And facilities contemplated under Planned Unit Development regulations
Plans must be provided by Colorado certified engineers and must include a guarantee bond payable to the County should the plan fail in some way.
Look around you. See all those cows? They’re nice enough, to be sure. But to raise them you have to be either a multi-millionaire looking for a hobby, or a descendent from a pioneer family with inherited land, because there’s not enough profit in the animals to pay for the land on which they feed. That’s a pretty exclusive club, and it’s not growing.
Elbert County’s Community and Development Services Department makes sure this situation stays exactly the same. Of course they’re just a well intentioned bunch of bureaucrats doing their bit to bring about a perfect world, which they’ve apparently decided looks exactly like the world we already have.
They’re giving services all right. Bend over, touch your toes, and make your checks payable to Elbert County.
As for the common people who moved here to build a family and a life? Don’t worry about them. There’s federal TANF welfare funding, Food Stamp credit cards from the Feds, and all sorts of Social Services to deal with their wrecked circumstances after their economic hopes come crashing down. They don’t need jobs. They can look at the pretty cows.
Svetlana Kunin summed it up recently in Perspectives of a Russian Immigrant No. 24
- When more workers joined the federal government’s disability program in June than the number of jobs created by the economy — were we rising or falling?
- When enrollment in the food-stamp program increased by 44% from 2009 to 2011, were we rising or falling.?
- When in a very dangerous world the U.S. military is weakened and the borders are not protected — are we rising or falling?
- When a growing web of government agencies and tsars are taxing, penalizing, mandating, forbidding and limiting citizens’ liberties, and when entrepreneurship is demonized — are we rising or falling?
- For those who study world history, the difference between government planners vs. private entrepreneurs is dramatically apparent.
“You are free to argue that certain government interventions are justified. You just need to acknowledge this truth: Every intervention that erects barriers to starting a business, makes it expensive to hire or fire employees, restricts entry into vocations, prescribes work conditions and facilities, or confiscates profits interferes with economic liberty and usually makes it more difficult for both employers and employees to earn success. You also don’t need to be a libertarian to demand that any new intervention meet this burden of proof: It will accomplish something that tort law and enforcement of basic laws against force, fraud and collusion do not accomplish.” Charles Murray – Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem
B_Imperial
Psalm 140
I’ve known Keith casually for more than a few years now. We’re actually related on some not-too-long shirt tail. I kid around with the Abbey’s because they seem to enjoy it so much. If you aren’t smiling they’ll figure out a way to change that. Maybe they’re just generous to an old kidder. Anyway, Keith became a pastor at Graceway Church in Kiowa. I don’t know if he was speaking to me in an official capacity, but assuming he was, Pastor Keith pointed a biblical passage out to me yesterday while we were visiting with each other at a commissioners meeting:
I think he’s on to something.
B_Imperial
Anita Moncrief at C-PAC
Ministry of Truth
by Joseph Farah
There was a rather low-key confession made in the New York Times last week that deserves to be blared throughout this country so that every American understands what they are reading in the establishment’s ultra-controlled, government-managed “press” – and I use that last word loosely indeed.
The admission came in the form of a story by Jeremy Peters on the politics page of the Times July 16. I’ve been waiting for others to point it out, discuss it, debate it, express shock and exasperation over it. But I’ve waited for naught.
What this shocking story reveals is that even I – one of the kingpins of the new media and a refugee from the state-controlled spin machine – underestimated the utter and total corruption of the euphemistically called “mainstream press.”
It shows that most – not some – members of the print media establishment with access to the White House submit their copy to government officials for review, “correction” and approval before it reaches the American people!
Even “progressive” WND columnist Ellen Ratner agrees – media under a spell!
Here are some key excerpts from the piece, if you think I’m exaggerating:
- “The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.”
- “They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.”
- “Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review. The verdict from the campaign – an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script – is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.”
- “Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.”
- “Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all mid-level aides in Chicago and at the White House – almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.”
- “Many journalists spoke about the editing only if granted anonymity, an irony that did not escape them.”
- “From Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, interviews granted only with quote approval have become the default position. Those officials who dare to speak out of school, but fearful of making the slightest off-message remark, shroud even the most innocuous and anodyne quotations in anonymity by insisting they be referred to as a ‘top Democrat’ or a ‘Republican strategist.’”
- “Those [reporters] who did speak on the record said the restrictions seem only to be growing. ‘It’s not something I’m particularly proud of because there’s a part of me that says, Don’t do it, don’t agree to their terms,’ said Major Garrett, a correspondent for The National Journal.”
- “It was difficult to find a news outlet that had not agreed to quote approval, albeit reluctantly. Organizations like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters and The New York Times have all consented to interviews under such terms.”
I could go on and on. I urge you to read the entire story. This may be the most important story broken by the New York Times in years.
What it means is this: When Americans read these reports – whether in newspapers, wire services or on the Internet – they are not really reading news stories at all. They are reading approved, pre-packaged press releases from the government and politicians. But, even worse, they are not labeled as such. They are labeled as actual news.
That’s how low the national press establishment has descended. And, when you read the story in its full context, you will understand that the concerns expressed about this practice by those submitting themselves to it are not ethical concerns. They are not concerns for the truth. They are concerns about their own convenience and for the loss of “color” in their stories.
Let me state what I hope is obvious to all reading this column: This sort of willing capitulation to government censorship was not the norm five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 30 years ago. This is a new phenomenon – chilling and alarming to an old-timer like me who would never agree to submit his copy for approval to politicians.
These so-called journalists are selling their ethical and moral souls for access to politicians. And this practice raises expectations by politicians that they can routinely manipulate the press to their advantage. That makes the job of real journalists – independent reporters faithful to their craft – even more difficult, because they will be shut out from access.
It reminds me of the fact that, just last week, WND was denied credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention. Why do you suppose what has become one of the largest and most influential news agencies in the country would be denied access to the convention floor? Simply because the Democrats know we won’t play by their rules of control like the members of the establishment press club.
All I can say about these people I once considered “colleagues” is that I am so ashamed of them. I am mortified. They are humiliating themselves and a vital institution for any free society.
It seems the biggest threat to the American tradition of a free and independent press is not government coercion. It’s the willing submission of the press to being handled and managed by government and politicians.
Ayatollah you what?
Paul Kengor IBD Viewpoint
Media Cover Up Obama’s Ties To Communist Davis
By PAUL KENGOR
Posted 07/16/2012 06:34 PM ET
He blasted Wall Street, big business, big banks, big oil, “excess profits,” “corporate profits” and “fat contracts,” “millionaires” and the “wealthy.”
He called out the “corporation executive” for not paying his “fair” share.
He attacked “GOP” tax cuts that “spare the rich” and “benefit millionaires.”
He trumpeted the public sector over the private sector.
He advocated wealth redistribution from greedy “corporations” to “health insurance” and “public works projects.”
He favored taxpayer-funding of universal health care. He supported government stimulus to rescue America from (allegedly) another Great Depression.
He wanted to rid America of “huge funds” finding their way into the “pockets” of “Wall Street.” “Instead,” he declared, “money should be spent for the benefit of the people instead of the corporations.”
He supported nationalization and singled out General Motors for government action.
He favored the Russians at the expense of countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
He rejected Winston Churchill, and wanted the heralded prime minister nowhere within the White House.
He insisted that American foreign policy was about “big profits” for big oil.
He cited the American Founders and the U.S. Constitution, and described himself and his policies as “progressive,” while his detractors accused him of being a communist.
He adopted slogans like “Forward” and “Change.” He wanted to transform America through what he called “fundamental change.”
Who is this man?
If you answered “Barack Obama,” you’re only half right. The answer is Frank Marshall Davis, Hawaii mentor to Barack Obama, and Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member No. 47544.
And only now, four years into Obama’s presidency, are we finally learning about this mystery man ignored or downplayed by sympathetic Obama biographers and journalists.
Frank Marshall Davis (1905-87) was a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, literal card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
He edited and wrote for Party-line publications such as the Honolulu Record and the Chicago Star, which included contributors who actually served as agents to Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Soviet Support
Davis did outrageous Soviet propaganda work in his columns, at every juncture agitating and opposing U.S. attempts to slow Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.
He favored Yalta and Red Army takeovers of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.
In China, he urged America to dump the “fascist” Chiang in support of Mao’s Red forces. He wanted communist takeovers in Korea and Vietnam. He was adamantly, angrily anti-NATO, anti-Marshall Plan, anti-Truman Doctrine.
He argued that U.S. officials under President Harry Truman and under secretaries of state George Marshall and Dean Acheson were handing West Germany back to the Nazis, while Stalin was pursuing “democracy” in East Germany and the Communist Bloc.
He portrayed America’s leaders as “aching for an excuse to launch a nuclear nightmare of mass murder and extermination” against the Soviets and the Chinese.
Moreover, in what ought to be an eye-opener to President Obama’s Democratic base, Frank Marshall Davis’ targets were chiefly Democrats, especially President Truman.
Why target Truman? Because Davis’ peak period of pro-Soviet propaganda work was the latter 1940s, when Stalin’s Red Army was rampaging through Eastern Europe. Standing in Stalin’s way was Harry Truman.
And so, Davis’ Chicago Star trashed Truman with headlines like “White House to white hoods: KKK hails Truman’s policy as its own” and “TRUMAN KNIFES HOPE FOR PEACE.”
Davis excoriated the Democratic president as trigger-happy Truman, pursuing “a new world war,” a “program for World War III,” in a bloodthirsty bid to “rule Russia.”
He framed Truman’s Marshall Plan as a new form of “colonial slavery,” intended “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.”
Truman was not Davis’ only target. Davis harbored a special hatred for Winston Churchill. He warned of Churchill teaming up with Truman in a two-nation U.K./U.S. alliance seeking “Anglo-American world domination” and “super-imperialism.”
When Churchill came to Fulton, Mo., in March 1946 to warn the world that an “Iron Curtain” was closing across Europe, Frank Marshall Davis was livid.
He and his CPUSA comrades mocked Churchill; they maintained that the only “Iron Curtains” were those being erected by Davis’ worst demons: anti-communists in the American press and General Motors.
The problem was not Stalin’s Iron Curtain, scoffed Davis, but “G.M.’s iron curtain,” being raised by “General Motors’ Hitlers.”
In short, Frank Marshall Davis’ work and writings were irresponsible and outrageous.
Congress certainly noticed. In December 1956, the Democrats who headed the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned Frank Marshall Davis to Washington to testify on his pro-Soviet activities. He pled the Fifth Amendment.
The next year, the Democratic Senate, in an official report titled “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States,” publicly listed Davis as “an identified member of the Communist Party.”
Davis’ political antics were so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index, which meant he could be immediately detained in the event of a national emergency, such as a war breaking out between the United States and U.S.S.R.
Influence On Obama
All of that is troubling enough, but how does it relate to Barack Obama?
Frank Marshall Davis influenced Obama throughout Obama’s adolescence in the 1970s. It was Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who introduced Davis to Obama for the purpose of mentoring.
In my research on Davis, I quote over a dozen biographers and associates of Obama and Davis describing Davis as a vital, lasting influence. One Davis biographer and close friend, a University of Hawaii professor, says that Davis instilled in Obama a belief that “change can happen.”
In fact, we know about Davis because of Obama’s own lengthy acknowledgment. In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama notes that Davis offered him advice at several significant levels: on race, college, women, his mind, his attitudes, on life.
“I was intrigued by old Frank,” writes Obama, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”
Obama directly mentioned “Frank” 22 times over the course of thousands of words and every section of his bestselling memoir, from Hawaii — the site of visits and late evenings together — to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Africa, from adolescence to college to community organizing.
Frank is always one of the few (and first) names mentioned by Obama in each mile-marker upon his historic path to Washington.
When Frank is not physically there with Obama, Obama literally imagines him there. Obama felt a connection to Frank that he painfully concedes he was unable to find in anyone else.
Tellingly, though Frank Marshall Davis’ influence on Obama is acknowledged in “Dreams from My Father,” Obama never once disclosed the CPUSA member’s full name. No doubt this was because Obama knew about Davis’ extreme past.
I believe that Davis is reflective, and helps explain, how and why America’s current president is further to the left than any president of our generation.
He sheds light on how our president developed into a man of the left, ultimately ranked the most left-leaning member of the Senate by National Journal in the final year before he ran for president.
And yet, this radical influence on our president has been thoroughly ignored by the media. No Republican president with a mentor this extreme to the right would escape such scrutiny.
Not many presidents can count a card-carrying CPUSA member among their mentors.
The man now in charge of history’s mightiest economic engine was influenced, to some notable degree, by a pro-Soviet communist.
That is unprecedented; a relationship that at long last merits our attention.
• Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and author of the new book, “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.”
Dreams From My Real Father
This film documents the socialist conquest of America. Whether Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis or not, the history of the totalitarian movement they both dedicated their lives to is an on-going American tragedy that must be seen, must become known, by all Americans.
I’m ashamed to be called ‘newsman’
by Joseph Farah
After watching the press reaction and “questions” following Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s breathtaking news conference yesterday, I have to tell you I’m embarrassed to call myself a newsman.
If someone asks me what I do for a living, maybe I’ll identify myself as an Internet entrepreneur.
Or maybe I’ll say I’m a “writer.”
Or maybe a publisher or businessman.
I never thought it would come to this. Being a newsman was all I ever wanted to be as far back as I can remember. It’s really all I’ve ever done through adulthood. It’s all I really know and love.
But I don’t ever want to be associated with that pack of jackals from Phoenix who jumped all over Arpaio and his investigator, Mike Zullo, for courageously presenting overwhelming evidence – I would even use the term “proof” – that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent and that the state of Hawaii is not only a willing accomplice in this scandal but perpetrating an even bigger one as a virtual factory for phony documents giving noncitizens instant citizenship with a stroke of the pen.
Some 50,000 people across the globe watched the live presentation on WND TV. If you didn’t get a chance to see it unfold, I urge you to take the time to review on demand, at your convenience.
In another era, with another occupant of the White House – someone like Nixon or Reagan or Bush – such an event would have been carried live by ABC, NBC and CBS. The New York Times would have had a half-dozen reporters on the scene. CNN, FOX and CSPAN would have carried coverage and offer instant analysis and debate over the issues raised.
But that’s no longer the America in which we live.
Today, without the Internet, we live in a 100 percent controlled media environment. There are more sacred cows than edible ones. The watchdogs are now lapdogs. The “reporters” are propagandists for the political establishment and the status quo.
I watch in horror as my chosen profession collectively disgraces itself.
Can our nation even survive without a free and independent and inquisitive, watchdog press?
Thomas Jefferson said, “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Are we “safe” in America today?
On the other hand, Vladimir Lenin said, “When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the ‘freedom of the press’ goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.”
Is that where we’re headed in America today – forward to socialism and tyranny?
I feel sympathy for Arpaio and Zullo for the abuse they have endured. I understand it well, because I’ve experienced it firsthand for the last four years in my own commitment to the pursuit of truth regarding Obama’s life story.
The easiest choice to make is to go along with the conventional wisdom, not ask the hard questions, not relentlessly pursue truth. Kudos to Arpaio and Zullo, who didn’t take the easy way out like those clowns in the local Phoenix media and all those in the national media who just ignored what the only law-enforcement investigation of Obama’s birth certificate found.
I may not want to associate myself with the media anymore out of sheer humiliation. But I promise you one thing: I’m not going to stop being a real journalist. I’m not going to stop doing what I’ve been doing for 35 years. I’m not going to stop supporting intrepid, independent renegades like the WND team who make me believe there’s still hope for redeeming the media.
we’re all racists now
As more people learn the embarrassing truth about Obama’s lack of credentials, the traditional liberal media keeps doubling and redoubling down on their last refuge—the claim that it’s all racism. Every voice counter to their prevailing politically correct gestalt is racist. Every criticism of multicultural thought, racism. If politics is the last refuge of a scoundrel, racism is surely the last refuge of a politician.
What an insult. Racism, racism, racism. Everywhere you look, racism. We’re all racists. We can’t think, we can’t see facts, we can’t reason, we can’t form conclusions. Half the country, basically all the non-leftists in the country, are now classed by the liberal media as mindless racists.
So this is the new big lie. Obama, the narcissistic most important person in America forever, has the Left totally invested in him. In this game, they’re “all in.” But Obama not only deflated the American dollar, he deflated whatever real reasons the Left may have once held to legitimately support him. The chips they had in this game became worthless, and they have no hole cards. So it’s pound the table and scream racism, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, cover your ears with your hands and mouth “na na na na na….” Were this an old west barroom they’d have their six guns out and blazing.
Peter Boyles is correct. We’re witnessing the self-destruction of the American media. They’re de-legitimizing themselves, there doesn’t appear to be any way of slowing them down, and they’re not going quietly into that good night. Looks like it’s going to get a lot messier before it’s over.
In the long run, the destruction of the American traditional media will become the bigger story. The most important narcissist of all time will be seen as only one catalyst in that fundamental change — which is certainly not the change he had hoped for.
frack you
I ran across this paper: Using Market Incentives to Protect Water Quality in America from the Environmental Defense Fund. Not surprisingly, it contains a number of concepts I consider quite unworkable.
For example, fee schedule government price controls. This device, which presumes a governing market price intelligence can exist that is superior to supply and demand in fitting a market to consumers, has done a great deal of damage to American healthcare — made it far more expensive that it would be without government price controls. As a market device I think it fails miserably and I wouldn’t recommend government price controls for any market.
Similarly, this notion that a water pollution credit market of trading fiat rights, much like the failed carbon credit concept, can accomplish anything beneficial to society, is another fail point in my assessment.
But the last section of the paper, “Require Assurance Bonding and Damage Liability,” looks like it might hold some promise.
The Elbert County Left [ECL] march around the county, in and out of various meeting halls, issuing the words “frack” and “fracker” as if they were f-bombs — ultimate mudballs. To be so labelled means you’re a neanderthal environmental idiot worthy of public scorn. In their lexicon, the words are so defamatory that quite often the ECL use fake names on the internet and in local papers when issuing them.
Unfortunately this is about as far their economic analysis usually gets. Issue the ad hominem and then leave the room. I always consider the source before assessing the content of their remarks because nothing they do is off tangent from their (using a whispered reverential tone here as if speaking in church) agenda.
Back on point though, markets find real value, voluntary transaction price points where two people agree that what they each hold is of an equivalent value and worth trading with each other. The system requires property ownership and freedom to function. The rest of it occurs quite naturally, until you inject government into the transaction. A government price control interferes with valuation and voluntary decisions of the traders. It spoils a market at the onset and creates an endless downstream of negative market dislocations for every subordinate transaction to follow.
The ECL is correct that clean water has a value to us all. But the ECL don’t understand how markets work. Anything that has a value also has a price and can be traded.
I’d like to see a discussion of using surety bonds between parties for water quality protection proximate to drilling operations. Such devices would;
- flesh out the measurable triggering mechanisms,
- they would provide for remedies,
- they would evaluate and price real risk to the operations,
- they would be voluntarily executed between concerned parties,
- they would resolve a political issue with a concrete market device,
- they would not require unworkable government intervention, and
- they would demonstrably step back from socialist thinking in vogue today.
And let’s not forget the bonus point of leaving ECL zealots with one less unresolvable issue to bay about at public meetings.
B_Imperial
the poverty of socialism
To those who complain about the free market’s inability to overcome the systemic failures of socialism, the free market works very well without socialism. Discovering and producing a profitable market transaction is enough of a challenge without also handicapping businesses by forcing them to carry the dead weight of socialism on their backs.
Imagine how much extra we pay for goods and services in America from the unnecessary overhead costs of bureaucratic compliance, arbitrary process regulation, arbitrary labor regulation, arbitrary environmental regulation, arbitrary esthetic regulation, arbitrary design regulation, anticipatory legal maneuvering to ward off predatory lawsuits over regulatory compliance, and the elimination of market alternatives through the exclusion of marginal participants unable to compete when loaded up with all the socialist transaction costs of participating in a socialist-controlled market.
No one sees the opportunity costs of socialism – all the wealth and transaction activity that gets systemically preempted by it. Socialism gets a free pass in this leftist dominated time. It is judged solely by its intentions, never by the inadequate beneficial outcomes it actually leads to, and absolutely never by the injustice of it.
The socialist myth attempts to make people what nature did not: of equal capacity. Since people do not have equal capacities, the socialist system attempting to impose equal outcomes on everyone is fundamentally unnatural, essentially unjust, and continually disruptive to human relations.
Who would choose such a system?
- Sheltered academics who don’t have to live with the real-world consequences of their pretty social theories, and
- Politicians who need a disruptive problem set that can never be fixed to provide constant demand for their intervening political tinkering, and
- Bureaucrats, planners and statists because that’s all they know, and
- Lawyers who live off the carnage.
Now, imagine if all the manpower and brainpower currently engaged in the non-productive control of the rest of society, were instead engaged in self-sustaining productive endeavors. Imagine a least-cost framework where everyone made a real economic contribution — where the half of society currently sucking the life out of the other half produced real goods and services without coerced funding from the other half.
Socialists aren’t helping us. They never did. They never will.
Americans are buried in a tomb of city, county, state, federal, zoning, and regulatory law built by non-representative bureaucrats without the consent of the governed. Our only hope is to remove all of it, wipe it off the books, and re-engage freedom. Those vested in these systems will scream bloody murder. We owe it to ourselves to turn a deaf ear to their fear mongering.
B_Imperial
re: ELCO Primary Election
As a member of a family whose roots in Elbert County date back nearly 140 years, it saddens me to witness the transformation of the county from its rich rural ranching history to an increasingly urbanized populace with corresponding philosophies more attuned to the Denver-Boulder demographic axis. Perhaps the changes were inevitable considering the influx of people from urban centers from other states relocating to our wonderful corner of the world. Over the long haul however, I believe this has led to a creeping, corrosive effect upon Elbert County’s traditional agriculture-oriented culture.
With the election of the two new county commissioners, what can we now expect? If we can use as a guide, the friction-interface between the outgoing commissioners and the newly elected individuals over the last several years, I believe that we can expect the emergence of more stringent and restrictive policies geared more toward satisfying the urban lifestyle. This may appear as new policies discouraging the development of the county’s oil and gas resources, ever more restrictive use of water for agricultural purposes (read greener lawns in the northwest part and drier pastures in the rest of the county). Certainly not the least of the policies may be the imposition of higher taxes.
Through the late 1950’s and 1960’s, I had the privilege of serving as the only resident veterinarian in Elbert County. And as a result of that experience even today, nearly sixty years later, I value my relationships with my clientele at that time with their basic decency and honesty, as being my most treasured memories. While some of the children and grandchildren of my clients from that era are still ranching in the county, I fear that the remnants of that shining phase of the county’s history may be gone forever.
Sincerely,
Marvin O. Maul, DVM
8320 Ashford Court
Colorado Springs, CO 80920
(719) 593-1290
hee hee