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special district approval transparency?

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The proposed zoning law (General Standards of Approval) duplicates much of the approval criteria contained in state statute. Such duplication would appear to be unnecessary and needlessly expensive to maintain.

In addition, the thrust of CRS 32-1-203 appears to contemplate a service plan decision made at a public hearing by a BOCC where opposed views can be openly discussed.

The proposed zoning law seems to remove the evaluation of new special districts to off-line Review Committees who do not operate in public hearings and whose findings cannot be challenged in public by petitioners. [Read more…]

the Democrat way: Trail of Fears

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Politics Under Democracy, H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926, pp. 41-44.

Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. [Read more…]

corruptions of power

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Would it be too much to expect an objective administrator who writes laws from founded science, rather than according to his predetermined personal agenda?

“It is time for facts to replace rhetoric; Science to replace faith. . . .Critical thinking needs to become the basis for moving this county forward. Bigotry and ignorance will not change the culture of Elbert and will not lead us to a better future for the next generations. We need to move forward with a coalition of concerned citizens that who are neither ideology nor political party biased.”

All of the Democrat Party leadership turned out for this non-ideological, non-political-party-biased process:

Democrats in attendanceElbert County Democrat Party Leadership

And on Mr. Crisan’s comment, would it be too much to expect more than lip service to private property rights when those rights exist at the “surface” where we all live, rather than a naked assertion that private property at the surface is the county’s to control?

B_Imperial

Hijacking Elbert County

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“It is both breath-taking and disheartening to witness the speed with which this has all happened.  I refer to the near-total hijacking of Elbert County government by the Democrat party over a relatively short period of time.

This takeover is reflected in several ways but the most evident is the ongoing deliberations by the committees and commissions assembling the new oil and gas regulations, and the county’s new venture into regulating water use. I have listened to several of these meetings and one can easily conclude that the main objective of the groups is to craft the new regulations in a way that their complexity will discourage petroleum exploration firms from ever developing the county’s oil and gas resources. [Read more…]

WAC becomes regulatory

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Water Advisory Committee Meeting

From Ms. Meece,

Agenda:

  1. Consideration of Draft Regulation for Special Districts
  2. Mission Statement
  3. Task Delineation and priorities
  4. Additional membership

Zoning a Gordian Knot

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Planning commission workshop on special districts

“Your comments are appreciated in terms of developing a process that protects the health, safety, and welfare of Elbert County citizens.” (from Cover Letter)

The Recommended Financial Plan is all about collecting taxes by and for government.  Nothing in here protects the health, safety and welfare of Elbert County citizens.

The Draft Special District Regulation will determine that “The creation of the proposed special district will be in the best interests of the area proposed to be served.”  How will a group of government third party non-stakeholders know what is in the best interests of private citizens, let alone what will protect their health, safety and welfare?

The Draft Special District Information Requirements contains a process with no foreseeable end for encumbering applicants, perhaps subjects is a better word, to the whim of county regulators.  No standards, no absolutes, nothing in here might commit a bureaucrat to stamp an application approved.

The  Staff Report posits that the county shall be the arbiter of economic, financial, and market viability, of proposed special use districts.  Government bureaucrats who have never actually made a profit lack qualifications to make such assessments.

In sum, this process is a bundle of socialist clap trap commissioned by Rowland and Ross.  It is a make-work recipe for government bureaucrats and their contractors that is intended to stop the private sector in Elbert County from making any changes.  It protects the health, safety and welfare of Elbert County planners whom we apparently exist to serve.

B_Imperial

Rules

The Regulator

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The Regulator

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887
 
Whose interest does this regulator represent?  Who empowered this regulator?  Is this how a republic is supposed to operate?
 
B_Imperial

ElCo Oil & Gas Edit committee

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If you missed the broadcast, what I saw behind the video camera was kind of interesting from a sociological perspective. At a gross level, there were 3 interests – the county regulators, the environmentalists, and the industry proponents.

The county regulators were difficult to observe. Their job appears to consist of taking any fact pattern that they can conceive might some day occur, and plumbing it for every opportunity they can imagine might provide an excuse to make some sort of regulatory process for controlling it. It’s a very low standard, subject only to their flights of fancy, political whims, prejudices, malleable linguistic flyers, and a firm belief that what they do will lead to a more perfect society.

The environmentalists were also difficult to observe. Their shtick was to load as many hyperbolic expressions into short sound bites, and never to allow a reasoned rebuttal to put them off track from their prejudgments.

Probably the easiest to observe were the industry proponents. With their abundant experience, they walked a fine line between the other two groups, stroking the vanity of the regulators as necessary to keep them happy, and skillfully avoiding confrontations with the environmentalists who never stopped trying to provoke them.

The game was interesting, but definitely not for idealists.  The regulators have no clue of the unintended consequences they ambitiously set in motion. The environmentalists are reality challenged. And the industry proponents actively sell to both of these groups somewhat like used car salesmen.

And so went the sausage factory writing the law last night that we will all have to obey some day. This was government in action. It was not a pretty sight.

Next installment next Tuesday the 12th.  Same time, same channel.

B_Imperial

trust and verify

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Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain spoke in the Senate this morning and called a concern about a domestic killing of a non-combatant [one not engaged in an act of expressing imminent force] in the war on terror, whether by drone or other means, an offensive question that cheapens the debate.  They said that any President at any time in the future who ordered such a killing would be guilty of murder and would be tried for such an act.

Meanwhile, many executive branch agencies, engaged in an international war on terror, collect extensive dossiers on people throughout the world, including American citizens, in an attempt to stay out in front of and head off future terrorist acts.  In some international theaters of war preemptive drone strikes have been used to kill those targets, presumably on probable cause conclusions enabled by military and other executive branch data collection.

The question of jurisdiction that Senator Paul and others raised yesterday is entirely relevant.  We have an overlay of a war-fighting capacity, from information gathering to summary execution, that persists as targets travel throughout the world.  Presumably some of those targets have or may travel into and out of the United States.

Moreover, persistent data collection about future potential targets while inside the U.S. puts both the 4th and 5th Amendments squarely on the table.  Graham and McCain cannot simply waive off those analyses as unnecessary.  Constitutional questions are well within the purview of the Senate and of Congress.  Why would Senators Graham and McCain try to avoid even asking the questions?  Aren’t such issues at the heart of the reason they hold those jobs?

The war doesn’t stop at the U.S. border, but the methods for prosecuting it do change at the border.  For enemy combatants who have, by federal statute, constructively abrogated their U.S. citizenship, constitutional protections turn on at the border, and turn off once they leave the country.

Senators Graham and McCain may be correct to reduce this matter to a simple criminal law murder question, but it would be naive for the other branches of government to turn a blind eye to massive war fighting and law enforcement agencies while they temporarily suspend the prosecution aspect of their operations while hovering over American soil.

Similarly, when you connect the dots of the vigorous citizen gun suppression campaigns currently underway in numerous states and at the federal level, with reports that domestic drones are being outfitted with sensors to identify U.S. citizens carrying a gun, and with reports of massive Homeland Security purchases of armored vehicles, weapons and ammunition, Senator Paul’s line of inquiry is not at all naive.

I don’t distrust the intentions behind the federal forces tasked to protect us in this war.  It’s the unintended consequences that will end up hurting us.

B_Imperial

Filed Under: War

winners and losers

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When the Democrat-controlled Colorado Legislature gets through imposing restrictive gun laws upon law-abiding citizens, will we be any safer?  No, we won’t, because none of the prescriptions contained in any of these new bills address any element of the crimes committed with guns that will have motivated the bills’ passage.

In the instant case, losers will be law-abiding citizens.  Winners will be Democrat politicians, their adoring liberal media, their captive voters, and the criminals who will have an easier time of it going up against a less-armed law abiding citizenry.  But that’s only in the instant case.  There’s also winners and losers in the larger scheme of things.

The country’s Founders designed a system they hoped would protect minority rights under the governance of a majority.  They contemplated that with all the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, the 4th estate of the press, and the people, that enough pauses to consider would exist in the public discourse over new law, that the best argument, the best philosophy, the best solution, the mostly soundly reasoned answer, would tend to carry the day.

They did not anticipate ruthless progressivism with its will to win at all costs, and notwithstanding the soundness of their argument.  They did not expect that all of the checks and balances in our country would fail in their primary function and become the captive organs of a single cult mythology.

Wherever progressives get a political majority, they ram through their agenda.  Sound arguments to the contrary are not rebutted, nor debated.  Opposed parties are procedurally silenced, crowded out, shouted down, ridiculed, overwhelmed, and ignored.

Sure, we have instant winners and losers as each issue comes up under the progressive agenda.  But the bigger loser is our system, the one that brought us to this point of social evolution, the one responsible for our success.

And perhaps the biggest losers of all are the progressives themselves.  The ones who have no idea what they’ve lost by damaging their fellow American minorities, whom they take such joy in suppressing.  The ones dancing in the streets after each victory, the ones shouting in the streets when they’re not dancing.

They’ve lost their minds.

B_Imperial

absolute power absolutely corrupt

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GOP accusation confirmed: Obama out to break it

By Jennifer Rubin , Updated:

The [Washington] Post reported: “[President] Obama, fresh off his November reelection, began almost at once executing plans to win back the House in 2014, which he and his advisers believe will be crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as president. He is doing so by trying to articulate for the American electorate his own feelings — an exasperation with an opposition party that blocks even the most politically popular elements of his agenda.”

This confirms what Republicans have been saying (despite liberal pundits’ scoffing): The president is interested in breaking the back of the opposition not accommodating or passing centrist legislation. A senior GOP House aide was mattter-of-fact: “It’s been clear since December that President Obama is more interested in leading his Organizing for Action campaign than leading this nation.”

The acknowledgment of the permanent campaign is quite an admission, casting most of what the president does in a more realistic light. He is engaged in bare-knuckle campaigning, not governing, when he engages in faux negotiations and goes around the country to hammer Republicans.

Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), took the high ground. “Our country faces real challenges: cutting spending, fixing our debt and deficit, getting our economy moving and creating jobs. Hopefully, those challenges — not partisan politics — will be the focus for the White House. The American people gave us a divided government, and we all have to make it work.”

Indeed it is an odd approach only two months after the last election. Aside from dropping the mask and conceding the high ground, the revelation about the president’s 2014 strategy appears just at the time that he has been revealed to be untruthful with regard to the sequester. Now he wants the country to give him virtually unlimited power with a Democratic House? Moreover, in a midterm election the electorate is generally whiter, older and more conservative.

Is this the electorate (without Obama on the ballot) to hand him the House? Don Stewart, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) answers, “Let’s not forget, we’ve already seen what happens when he has an unchecked agenda: Stimulus, Obamacare and trillions in debt.”

Socialism’s all about the money.

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Uncle Sam Now Wants Your 401(k) And IRA

Investors Business Daily Editorial, Posted 03/01/2013 06:44 PM ET

 President Obama stands with Sen. Chris Dodd Rep. Barney Frankafter signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection financial...

President Obama stands with Sen. Chris Dodd Rep. Barney Frankafter signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection financial… 

Dodd-Frank’s new “consumer protection” agency wants to “help” Americans manage their nearly $20 trillion in retirement savings, and President Obama has tax loopholes in his sights.

It’s mattress-stuffing time.

You probably thought the Dodd-Frank Act was all about reining in greedy big banks and Wall Street predators.

Well then, what is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau it established doing planning to “help” people manage the $19.4 trillion they’ve managed to save for their retirement?

CFPB director and longtime Democratic politician Richard Cordray earlier this month told Bloomberg News that managing retirement savings is “one of the things we’ve been exploring … in terms of whether and what authority we have.”

Every such new creature legislated into existence by our elected officials wastes little time before seeking to expand its power — always with the best intentions, of course.

There always ends up being an excuse to do things the law doesn’t give you any authority for, and the CFPB’s Office for Older Americans being headed by another big government Democrat, Hubert H. Humphrey III, is further cause for worry.

What business, exactly, does a U.S. government that has rung up over $16.6 trillion in red ink have giving consumers advice on how to save money?

Americans Pay Record Taxes

Uncle Sam, Spendthrift

What can a consumer learn about frugality and responsibility from a corrupt, insatiable Washington leviathan that screams about the sky falling when just 2% in automatic spending cuts kick in?

In this context comes the release of a report from the liberal Brookings Institution last week suggesting a 28% cap on “the rate at which deductions and exclusions related to retirement saving reduce a taxpayer’s income tax liability.”

Don’t worry, Brookings says, because “the (mostly high-income) individuals that do alter contributions in response to changes in the return on these investments tend to simply offset these adjustments with changes in other forms of saving.”

And “the available evidence from studies of 401(k)-type programs with automatic enrollment suggests that many would stay with the program and, in turn, increase their saving.”

Elsewhere, the think tank recently argued that “New research suggests that the tax subsidy for contributions to retirement accounts only affects the behavior of certain financially sophisticated households and does not raise overall saving significantly.”

Savings Tax?

As American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries CEO Brian H. Graff charged last week, such a cash grab “would more accurately be described as double taxation” in which “a small-business owner in the 39.6% bracket would pay an 11.6% tax on contributions made to the 401(k) plan today, and pay tax again at the full rate when they retire.”

But 401(k)s come behind only the mortgage interest deduction and the employer health insurance exclusion as federal tax breaks go, amounting to “$429 billion in foregone revenue from 2013 through 2017,” as Employee Benefit News points out.

It was inevitable that these popular retirement nest eggs would be targeted for raiding.

We even have the unreal spectacle of the mutual fund industry frantically justifying its existence in the wake of President Obama talking up the closing of tax loopholes.

Investment Company Institute President Paul Schott Stevens said, “we’re trying to counter all of the doom and gloom about the 401(k) system being a failure and that it doesn’t work.”

Doesn’t work?

Mutual funds, especially when shielded from taxes, have, like discount brokerages, opened the door of successful investing to millions of ordinary Americans.

They have brought the American Dream to new heights.

What doesn’t work is the government, which should be told to stuff its offer of help at managing people’s money. Better to have Typhoid Mary run the Centers for Disease Control.

It’s all about the money, boys. . .

myth addicts

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“A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it, in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire state.”

James Madison, Federalist no. 10.

Examples of what the Founders considered improper or wicked projects have become the norm in America.  The division of interests built into our republic failed to overcome the appeal of beggar-thy-neighbor politics.

Does anyone really think the Republicans will stand up for the people at the 11th hour this Friday by drawing a line in the sand over sequestration?  Based on the evidence that they’ve never drawn such a line yet?

Republicans and Democrats both know that a spending cut, however insignificant, will undermine the central myth of federal necessity that keeps them in business.

Ask the storm survivors in New Orleans and the Jersey shore, the disarmed citizens in the big cities preyed upon by armed criminals, students in failed public schools, patients who rely upon medicaid, any of the supposed beneficiaries of federal spending, how well the myth of federal necessity is working out for them.

I wouldn’t bet on Boehner’s House this Friday.  They’re as addicted as Democrats to the myth.

P.S.  Well bowl me over with a feather.  Let’s see what they do with the CR next month.

doublethink

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“In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good[.]”

James Madison, Federalist No. 51

In the name of justice, the Left pursue social justice.  In the name of the general good, the Left pursue entitlements.

Much like Islamists hide behind English translations to mask their jihad, the Left hide behind un-mutated original concepts to deceive those who can refute their substituted deceptions.

The Left took what began as universal principles for all Americans, principles essential to the American order protected by our Constitution and responsible for America’s success, and turned them into narrow principles for the benefit of only those Americans in their voting block, and to the detriment of the rest of Americans with whom they disagree.

Madison was correct, but he did not anticipate the subversion of language that the Left now routinely practices.  He did not anticipate the level of malice that would make the corruption of language routine in America–that would take away our ability to speak a common language and understand each others real differences.

Now ask yourself, “Who does this imposed confusion benefit?”  It’s certainly not the people, whatever their economic condition.  So who does that leave?  Government.

And who runs government?  The schools?  The bureaucracies?   The regulatory agencies?  The planning agencies?  In every case, it’s the Left.

B_Imperial

Board Games

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The Board Game

Oops. . .that was the Borg Game.

Theory:

Power structures create gaming constructs that enable winners to impose their will upon losers.  Often this involves the transfer of wealth and power from losers through a quasi-judicial process.

Constitutional and Common Law principles get used in a manner that creates a manipulable game domain where winners and losers sort out according to rules of the game.  So long as rules and judgments follow objective rules of law and ethics, justice may be served.

But when rules and judgments become self-referential to the game’s purpose, the game departs from the pursuit of objective justice and turns toward satisfying its’ own pre-determined objectives.  When this happens, outsiders see a veneer of legitimate justice, while savvy players and empowered game operators prey upon the less powerful with impunity.

The existence of self-referential, non-objective rules, in a separate domain, suggest the existence of a game.

Games would not exist unless they served the ostensible purpose of their subject, a purpose we can assume is not served absent the game.  Therefore, games tilt the playing field in a way it would not otherwise tilt.  In other words, games serve the interests of a minority without requiring the minority to openly persuade the majority.

Reconsider the Borg.

Analysis for each game:

Construction:

  • Who structures a game and sets rules for the board?
  • What powers do game designers possess and how did they get those powers?
  • What authorities created the powers that enabled a game to be formed?
  • Were the circumstances that enabled a game to form intentional or accidental?
  • What balancing powers exist outside of a game to moderate that game?
  • What cost and benefit potentials accrue to those who avoid a game?

Performances inside a game:

  • Rights that all players share.
  • Rights granted to winners.
  • Obligations forced upon losers.
  • Who judges the execution of a game?
  • What constructs exist for game judges to decide outcomes?
  • What rewards flow back to game management as overhead costs of a game?

How are players brought into a game?

  • Voluntary players.
  • Involuntary players.

Example playing fields:

Class action litigation.

Government regulation:

  • Consumer – Healthcare, Food and Drugs
  • Industrial – Mining, Energy, Agriculture, Transportation, Communications, Labor relations
  • Land use – Commercial, Private
  • Federal agenda agencies, EPA, FDA, HHS, NLRB, Etc.
  • Quasi-judicial public governing boards.

Pierce the veil of the game.  Broadcast them.

B_Imperial

Gang Control

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Obama Touts Gun Control, Not Gang Control

Investor’s Business Daily, Inc.   Posted 02/19/2013 07:06 PM ET

Gun Control: On his way to a play date with the world’s most famous golfer, President Obama stops in America’s most violent city to push universal background checks that Chicago’s violent street gangs will totally ignore.

Janay McFarlane, 18, was killed late Friday just hours after her younger sister joined a group of teens onstage for President Obama’s speech in Chicago on gun violence.

McFarlane was shot to death hours after her little sister, Destini, 14, sat just feet away as Obama spoke in the aftermath of the similar murder of Hadiya Pendleton.

The 15-year-old Pendleton was gunned down in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, a few blocks from the high school she attended and a few days after she performed with her high school band at Obama’s inauguration. The park where she was killed is less than a mile from the president’s Kenwood home.

Pendleton’s death was one of more than 40 homicides in Chicago last month, a total that made it the deadliest January in the city in more than a decade, after more than 500 murders in 2012.

This carnage in the nation’s most gun-controlled city in America has been blamed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and others on the flow of guns into Chicago from elsewhere — notably suburban gun shops.

They do not explain why the areas outside Chicago don’t have anywhere near Chicago’s murder rate. The Windy City’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like America’s overall 4.2, the Midwest’s 4.5 or Illinois’ 5.6 rates.

As the president noted in his speech, of Chicago’s 2012 murder victims, 65 of them were 18 and under.

“That’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months,” he said. “That’s precisely why the overwhelming majority of Americans are asking for some common sense proposals to make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun.”

Yet, speaking of common-sense proposals, in 1999 when a bill came up in the Illinois Senate to charge anyone carrying out a firearm attack on school property as an adult, a law that would have largely affected gang members, our current president voted “present.”

The fact is that up to 80% of Chicago’s murders and shootings are gang-related, according to police.

By one estimate, the city has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of cops. A police audit last spring identified 59 gangs and 625 factions — mostly on the south and west sides — none of which is going to submit to things like universal background checks.

A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago in 2011 had criminal records. Nationally, 67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas.

The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average.

Among teenagers, the firearm murder rate is 14.6, or almost three times the national average.

These are not, as Obama said of rural Pennsylvanians, bitter people clinging to their guns and Bibles while being fearful of others not like themselves.

After his speech, worn out from his nonstop attention to the nation’s problems, Obama set off to vacation in Palm City, Fla., staying at the Floridian Yacht & Golf Club resort. And he hit the links with professional golfer Tiger Woods and resort owner Jim Crane.

We need gang control, not gun control, and policies that don’t result in 70% of African-American births being to unwed mothers, with the children growing up in fatherless homes.

The nation does not in fact face an epidemic of gun violence. No, it faces a chronic problem of urban gang violence in decaying gun-controlled cities like Chicago, which are largely run by liberal Democratic mayors who fail to create jobs and opportunities for their largely fatherless youth.

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.”