Leadership gets to the heart of the question. 3 syllables, easy enough to say, but elusive and even fleeting to find in practice. Saturday morning, people came to find it, to see it in the flesh. As one Republican put it to me later that day, in hearing the candidates dialog he was expecting to find a compelling reason to change commissioners. He expected the challengers to make a passionate case that something with the current commission had gone horribly wrong. He wanted to hear the compelling reason the commissioners should be ridden out of town on a rail, perhaps trailing tar and feathers. You know, a reason akin to the situation facing us with Obama in the presidential race. [Read more…]
Archives for 2012
Meet the candidates
Commissioner candidates answer questions at an Elbert County Republican Breakfast on Saturday, 5/12/12.
We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now!
“Table 2
Members of victimhood groups as a percentage of total population,
% adjusted for multiple discrimination
Female gender 51
Ethnic minority 8
Disabled 22
Non-Christian 5
Elderly 18
Gay or lesbian 5
Grand Total 109
How was the estimate of 109 per cent reached? 51 per cent of the population are women and ethnic minorities make up another eight per cent, according to the 2001 Census, and some 22 per cent of the population of Great Britain are said to be disabled. Eighteen per cent of the population are pensioners. And at the time of the 2001 Census about five per cent belonged to non-Christian faiths. A similar proportion were gays and lesbians.”
We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now! by David G. Green [Read more…]
The Desire for Substitutes
“The Desire for Substitutes
There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.
People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has it roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movement.
To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources.”
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
What irremediably spoiled past life is Obama substituting?
Obama and Ayers
“Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’s home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association.” Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools, Stanley Kurtz WSJ
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candidate positions
A couple things in Candidate Ross’s recently published campaign statements raise concerns. He said, “Elbert county government should not be in the business of facilitating the export of this precious water.” Fair enough as a political sentiment, but Elbert County really only has a legitimate authority over water properties underneath land it holds in the name of Elbert County. In Colorado, water is not the community’s property. It doesn’t sound like a Commissioner Ross would limit the scope of his water reach to county owned properties. This raises a concern of government overreach from aggressive water zoning and other county approvals and licensing that could become politicized. That’s just not a conservative, rule of law orientation.
Candidate Ross goes on to say, “Decisions regarding any development project must make economic sense and be of true benefit to Elbert County.” Hold on there. Since when is it government’s role to decide winners and losers in the market? In a free country private citizens take economic risks with their property and capital. What’s the constitutional basis for county government deciding beforehand what the prospective economics of a private project will be – and predicating licensing on that decision? Oh that’s right, there isn’t one. So, this is another big problem.
Turning to Candidate Rowland’s recent statements – which requires the turn of a page in this weeks’ Prairie Times, thank you to the Bishops – more effluvia from the tea-drinking upholder of “conservative values and principles” rises to the surface.
Skimming off the top layer, Candidate Rowland’s position appears to be that commissioners Schwab and Shipper intended to bankrupt the county, sell vast amounts of Elbert County water, pollute the pristine water they didn’t sell with dirty Arkansas River water, deny citizens a place to dump their garbage locally, and wrongly direct business to a struggling local employer. Then they succeeded in shutting out a clamoring mob from a non-policy making commissioner business meeting, and wrongly supported county employees in a harassment case.
I don’t see it that way at all. The commissioners I know have no such malice, short sightedness, or incompetence in their direction of Elbert County government.
On the contrary, people who exacerbate circumstances in favor of their personal political ambitions are a big problem in this Elbert County political season. These meeting occupants grab the limelight every other week to sling innuendo and mudballs at decent public servants doing a fine job for the county.
Someone asked me yesterday what I thought the biggest problem in the county was. I said jobs, but a close second would be political self-aggrandizement because it clouds everything and makes reality based decision making much more difficult.
The circus sideshow of public sharing at BOCC meetings does nothing to elevate discussions or add information that could be used to solve a real problem — which was the commissioner’s intent in giving them a microphone. Instead, they self-aggrandize with impunity and permit their lust for power to overcome all shame. As difficult as it is to witness these occupant monkey shines, I’m glad the commissioners put them on the web so we can see what our government is up against.
Occupy’s Attack On Democracy
Occupy’s Attack On Democracy Posted 05/01/2012 07:10 PM ET
The Left: After a day of mayhem, Occupy protesters have shown themselves to be little more than a dangerous mob. Democrats coddle them even as their outrages escalate. Criminal behavior has no place in a democracy. [Read more…]
the loopy left
Republican committeepeople are expected to find unaffiliated voters to sign up as Republicans. Apparently it’s what we do. Except, what we’ve been doing has brought a heavy contingent of RINOs into the Elbert County Republican Party. And now we’ve got this hybrid party working that’s half liberal and half conservative. And I don’t mean just a little bit liberal. There are committed leftists calling themselves Republicans around here. I’ve been writing about this for years. Rather than potentially bring more RINO voters into the party before the primary election, I thought it would be best to focus on conservative people to try to bring into the party. So I wrote the Are You A Republican? blog item yesterday. The blog is an effective way to reach people since it gets about a thousand hits a day.
I really didn’t expect that the post would drive the New-Plains boys over the edge. But it did. Click on their editorial below.
Anyway, science, I love it! Now we have evidence that Republicans don’t have to be progressive-light to effectively campaign against the left. If Republicans just speak the basic messages and values they stand for, the left melts down. This stuff is like droplets of water landing on the Wicked Witch of the West, or a puff of air on a hillside of quaking aspen leaves. Simple truth has a mysterious power over them.
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Are you a Republican?
- Do you think people should try to help themselves first before they ask for help from others?
- Do you think it’s wrong to game the public treasury for your own personal advantage?
- Do you think government entitlements discourage individual initiative?
- Do you think as taxes go up, charitable giving goes down?
- Do you think death should be tax exempt?
- Do you think business taxation is just another way to tax consumers through higher prices?
- Do you think everyone should pay the same tax rate?
- Do you think unfunded government mandates should be eliminated?
- Do you think private enterprise based on the opportunity for profit is the fairest way to allocate scarce resources?
- Do you think government force is a negative power that leads to corruption when used to control private enterprise?
- Do you think it’s wrong for government bureaucrats to use law to force private property owners to use their property in certain approved ways?
- Do you think zoning laws and regulatory laws should be proven with demonstrated outcomes before they are allowed to become law?
- Do you think that government codes, regulations, statutes, and zoning have choked off way too much creativity from the private sector in a vain attempt to achieve utopia?
- Do you think the earth is far more vast and resilient than environmentalists have shown?
- Do you think private property owners are the best stewards of the environment?
- Do you think there’s too much government in America?
- Do you think government is the least desirable place to look to find a real solution to a problem?
- Do you think the ends do not justify the means?
There are a million ways to ask these questions; this is no official list. It’s just a few things that come to mind as I think about expressing some Republican values. Republicans hold values like these because they lead to a robust, creative, evolving, sound, reality based, equitable, and peaceful society where everyone benefits. Ironically, the beneficiary model the Left promotes benefits precious few beneficiaries and a whole bunch of bureaucrats.
If you answered yes to the above questions, then you believe in fairness, freedom, individual responsibility, non-socialist solutions for successful living, and you’d make a good Republican. You can register as a Republican before May 29th to participate in the Republican primary election. Do it online, just Google it.
Schlegel v Pippin
I went to the Schlegel v Pippin permanent protective order hearing today, 4-27-2012. The Denver Post’s immediate coverage of the hearing seems to be scripted to a narrative the Post is comfortable with. I have some different take-aways. [Read more…]
paranoia will destroya
In today’s BOCC webcast, Commissioner Schwab once again admonished that the BOCC’s open mic segment was not to be used for political campaign purposes. Shortly thereafter candidate Rowland led off with a little campaign number that could have been titled, “I’m Transparent And You’re Not.” [Read more…]
2012 YTD open records requests
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Look at all the fishing expeditions. Look at those making the requests. County employees who could be engaged in productive work on behalf of taxpayers instead must serve these partisans in this blatant abuse of process. It does Elbert County no good. The sole beneficiaries are the selfish few who think government exists to satisfy their personal entertainment desires.
public policy
Supreme Court of Colorado, En Banc.
BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, COSTILLA COUNTY, Colorado,
Petitioner, v. COSTILLA COUNTY CONSERVANCY DISTRICT and Michael McGowan, Respondents.
No. 02SC743.
April 19, 2004To resolve this dispute, we now turn to the language of the [Open Meetings Law] OML and our case law construing it.
D. The OML Applies to Meetings that are Part of the Policy-Making Process
Based on our reading of the statute as a whole and our case law construing it, we hold that a meeting must be part of the policy-making process to be subject to the requirements of the OML. A meeting is part of the policy-making process if it concerns a matter related to the policy-making function of the local public body holding or attending the meeting. If, as a threshold matter, a meeting is part of the policy-making process, then the requirements of the OML must be met. If not, nothing in the OML prevents some or all members of a local governing body from attending a meeting, even if public notice has not been given.
public policy:
Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th Ed.
1. Broadly, principles and standards regarded by the legislature or by the courts as being of fundamental concern to the state and the whole of society. 2. More narrowly, the principle that a person should not be allowed to do anything that would tend to injure the public at large.
Notwithstanding the heroic image promulgated by the band of New-Plains brothers and sisters currently harassing the Board of County Commissioners, this tribe in no way represents the interests of the whole of society or of the public at large in Elbert County. They claim to, but they’ve never been elected, never achieved a plurality of votes in Elbert County. Most of them don’t have the substance to admit their true political philosophy by presenting themselves to the public at large in a political party that accords their agenda. These self-anointed inquisitors occupy their meeting seats at the BOCC with intent to find any grounds whatsoever — factual, legal, interpretive, procedural — to excuse speaking their truth to power to bring down the ruling conservative candidates.
Theirs is a non-stop political campaign that shoehorns reality by any means possible into their ongoing narrative.
what makes life worth living
“People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned—it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned—and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing. People need intimate relationships with others, but intimate relationships that are rich and fulfilling need content, and that content is supplied only when humans are engaged in interactions that have consequences. People need self-actualization, but self-actualization is not a straight road, visible in advance, running from point A to point B. Self-actualization intrinsically requires an exploration of possibilities for life beyond the obvious and convenient. All of these good things in life—self-respect, intimate relationships, and self-actualization—require freedom in the only way that freedom is meaningful: freedom to act in all arenas of life coupled with responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The underlying meaning of that coupling—freedom and responsibility—is crucial. Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards. Knowing that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a major part of what makes life worth living.”
Charles Murray, Coming Apart, 2012.
things change
We took a short ride this morning on Evans between Monaco and Broadway, up Broadway to Alameda, then over on Leetsdale for a bit. On this short drive we found a thriving medical marijuana dispensary industry. Here are some of the sights we saw today. They represent only a fraction of the dispensaries in operation.
The medical marijuana dispensary industry serves 89,646 registered Colorado patients with 13,815 in Denver. Presumably the dispensaries shown below serve only a fraction of registered Denver patients. Colorado patients have an average age of 42.
I’m sure medical marijuana helps people with chronic pain in a way no other drug does. But is it necessary to have a dispensary on every block? Somehow we’ve managed to survive without a Walgreen’s on every block and there are far more consumers of prescription medications than there are of medical marijuana.
Maybe recreational marijuana use should remain illegal, maybe it should not. But this green-cross farce masking recreational marijuana use under the guise of wellness and compassion makes jokes of statutory law and the legislature. I doubt the legislature intended to create a hippie urban renewal of small business marginal commercial properties throughout Colorado through medical marijuana. This sort of thing makes our present ruling generation — people my age — look, well, stoned.
health insurance claim denials
Who would go into a business where 15% to 25% of gross revenue is lost out the back end? Medicare is worse but commercial is almost as bad. The beneficiary model of health insurance is broken. No regulation the government is selling at either the Federal or State level is fixing or will fix this situation. Only market reforms that re-connect health care buyers to health care sellers, that re-establish supply and demand based pricing directly between market participants, that remove government regulation and payment systems from the entire process, and that stop empowering third parties to distort the health care transaction, can fix this market.
Pleasantville
Not long ago here in the basement of the Lions Hall I sat many Wednesday evenings listening to the penumbral emanations from the infiltration of country-in-county no-growth western Elbert County RINOs into Republican Central Committee meetings. More than a decade later, the names have changed but the game remains eerily familiar — hardball politics in the softball park of our dearly beloved local Republican Party. [Read more…]
Congress v. Court
Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution states, “In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
In Ex parte McCardle (1869), the Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to withdraw appellate jurisdiction from the Supreme Court over a pending case. Congress had repealed the statute which gave the Court appellate jurisdiction in McCardle and the Court acquiesced in the repeal.
The McCardle opinion of the Court did not rely upon the Marbury doctrine of judicial review to reach a decision. The above plain language of the Constitution stood without tortuous chains of lawyerly reasoning to make the point. And despite occasional cases which have attempted to narrow the reach of the above constitutional clause through the years, it is still settled law today. Congress may exercise this power under the Constitution to limit jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
Today, if Congress did not want the Supreme Court to decide the constitutionality of Obamacare by using the Marbury doctrine of judicial review, it could pass a law tomorrow to remove the subject of, say, the insurance purchase mandate, from the Court’s jurisdiction. [Read more…]
drilling rig near Silt
to zone or not to zone
ELBERT COUNTY REPUBLICAN PARTY
RESOLUTIONS FOR PLATFORM
2012
(partial list – all passed at Assembly 5/24/2012)
12. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party support and encourage responsible growth, respecting the rights of all county residents consistent with the goal of preserving the unique rural and natural character of Elbert County.
15. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party requests that the elected Board of County Commissioners implement the noxious weed control plan as directed by State Law.
16. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party request that the elected Board of County Commissioners adopt, implement and enforce a 300 year water supply plan based on actual water usage.
17. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party request that the elected Board of County Commissioners adopt responsible planning and development measures to ensure that growth pay its own way and ensure that new infrastructure demanded by new development is not subsidized by the taxpayer without a vote of said taxpayer.
– OR –
21. Be it resolved, the Elbert County Republican Party object to the expansion of Elbert County zoning laws.
~
Which will it be? You can’t have it both ways.
This schizophrenic disconnect in the Republican Party Platform, approved yesterday at the 2012 County Assembly, is another symptom of our Elbert County uni-party implementation of the Republican Party.
Now, you could say the Resolutions Committee for the assembly failed in their mission to provide an internally consistent set of resolutions for the platform, however, it’s not really their responsibility to resolve this political question.
And, you could say that the Executive Committee of the Party is responsible because they suspended debate on the resolutions by assembly delegates, and thereby precluded the assembled body of Republicans from reaching a compromise. But after tolerating season after electoral season of mixed-use Republicanism, it would have been highly contentious, perhaps even violent, for a bunch of lefties and conservatives to work their substantive differences out in the space of a few minutes of polite assembly “dialoging.”
Besides, these issues cannot be legitimately resolved by a set of self-selected delegates numbering less than 1 hundredth of 1 percent of the population. Without a causal connection between voters and voting objects, be it candidate or issue, consent of the voters is cut off.
Enfranchised voters are the only interest group who can legitimately resolve this political question.
The Founders labored and argued for years to conceive constitutional methods to enfranchise voters and permit them to be governed legitimately. Sadly, our caucus assembly system which disenfranchises voters at large does not meet that standard. And muddying the preliminary waters by empowering a single party to clear both left and conservative candidates is a giant step further away from voter enfranchisement.
The way to fix this conundrum is to return Elbert County to a two-party system. Would the Democrat Party tolerate a bunch of conservatives diluting their precious social and entitlement agendas? Absolutely not! Why then do conservatives around here allow the left to tromp all over their Republican Party?
The way to fix this problem is to nip it in the bud. Make the change here:
ELBERT COUNTY REPUBLICAN CENTRAL COMMITTEE BYLAWS
Article III. POLICY
Section 4. Endorsements. The ECR acting as an entity, or the ECR elected officers shall not publicly support or endorse any Republican candidate that is involved in a primary who could represent Elbert County residents in a partisan race.
Change it to read something like the following:
ECR elected officers shall substantively analyze all Republican candidates with respect to information publicly available in local history as it relates to each candidates alignment with the Republican Oath and the Elbert County Republican Party Platform. Officers shall report their findings to Precinct Committeepeople in a timely manner as the findings become known.
As things currently stand, ECR elected officers must withhold a relevant body of knowledge from the rest of the caucus and assembly process. While done in the interest of fairness, the left games that good intention and turns it against the Republican Party from the inside.
Playing fair only works in an ethical environment. The left have never played fair and Republicans should stop fooling themselves about it.