Take the 1st Amendment, please…
Written Feb 3, 2017, in response to the 1st wave of Leftist anti-Trump “Resistors” and “Indivisibles”, before they scuttled underground to metastasize into more violent BLM and Antifa manifestations.
Our beleaguered Constitution, if it could think, might conclude, “The rule of law ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Take the 1st Amendment, please, before another group of masked idiots assemble and cite it while shouting obscenities as they hurl flaming projectiles and beat innocent bystanders while the police stand by watching, boxed out from law enforcement by a cohort of ACLU lawyers waiting in the wings for ripe circumstances to torture into a social justice legal crusade.
Take the 1st Amendment, please, before another third world religious zealot seeks to dismantle the entire Western legal system for a piece of cloth draped over her head and flowing robes that all symbolize a spiritual commitment so deep, that some righteously choose to destroy themselves and take as many innocent bystanders as they can down with them to satisfy their metaphysical requirements.
Take the 1st Amendment, please, before another elected official abandons all proportionality and connection to real causation, and misrepresents through innuendo and character assassination the persons with whom they disagree as they drip crocodile tears onto their prepared scripts.
Take the 1st Amendment, please, before another round of misinterpreted facts get shoe-horned by a televised media panel of experts, paid by the minute to deliver prejudgments in a telegenic manner according to program directions and their contractual requirements, who call themselves the free press.
On speech, the 1st Amendment codifies both a right and a remedy for the violation of that right. Except in a couple subjects, 1st Amendment rights and remedies compete equally with no legal advantage given to either side. The Founders, however, contemplated that the right to free speech needed constitutional protection primarily for political speech.
Enter militant mass demonstrations that threaten violence, political attacks on the Constitution hidden under religious veils, misrepresentations by elected officials, and media malfeasance.
Can any of these contemporary manifestations stretching the envelope of 1st Amendment protected speech be construed to somehow improve our political form?
Not in the least. They all dissolve the meaning of the Constitution like salt in water, where nothing grows thereafter.
Wake up to the wokesters
The Constitution was written and ratified in the context of Christian state governance and culture. To this day, it provides successful mechanisms for the governance and growth of America.
Constitutional language succeeded in curing the country from the Civil War because both Northerners and Southerners shared Christian religious foundations and a common understanding of the origins of God-given liberties memorialized in the Declaration of Independence. Their fight over slavery was subordinate to a common Christian foundation.
Now come the Left who have rejected our Christian religious foundation, and consequentially, rejected the principle of God-given liberties. The Left think the state is the grantor of liberty.
A grantor of liberty and a guarantor of liberty have fundamentally different powers. A grantor can withdraw their grant and thereby eliminate liberty altogether, whereas a guarantor can merely fail to guarantee liberty, but the right continues to exist.
This fundamental division between the Left and Constitutional adherents cannot be compromised. There is no middle ground between the two positions.
A similar irreconcilable division exists between Islamic and Judeo-Christian fundamental beliefs. There is no middle ground for compromise between the Common Law and Sharia Law.
Now that American Democrats have turned hard Left, their fundamentally irreconcilable positions have ripened to a relevant concern.
Previously, the Christian approaches to constitutional confrontations with deviant political and religious beliefs have emphasized tolerance – based on a Christian value of forgiveness and a belief in the strength of our constitutional system to provide resolution mechanisms – just as it did during and after the Civil War. But a common foundation no longer exists with the hard Left.
It’s become clear that the Left give no credence to Christian sensibilities, and, moreover, actually intend to dismantle the Constitution and all of its related fundamental liberties in favor of omnipotent governance.
Do you remember the scene in the movie Independence Day where the President shares a telepathic connection with the Alien, and the Alien says, “No Peace.” The President asks what the Alien expects us to do, and the Alien says, “Die.”
That about sums up the Left’s intentions for constitutional conservatives. Today, tolerance is a fool’s errand.
One does not require metaphysical certainty about religion – Christianity in this case – to appreciate the fundamental principles that make America possible and successful. The Left have nothing to offer that remotely compares to our constitutional framework grounded in the DOI and the Common Law in their systemic capacity to provide an orderly framework for American success.
It’s time every American awoke to the wokesters and considered what should be tolerated, and what should be intolerable. Dismantling our successful constitutional system is intolerable.
The Rule of Men
The Left’s devices for supporting their various agenda items share a common theme. They all have the effect of removing personal responsibility from their chosen [i.e. politically correct] behaviors.
You want to be gay? No problem. Consider yourself pre-destined to be that way through mysterious mechanisms. Anyone who disagrees with your position is a de-facto bigoted homophobic racist.
You want to abort babies? No problem. Define them as not babies, but inhuman fetuses, and sell their body parts to baby body part brokers.
You want to get stoned? No problem. Recreational drugs can be legalized and taxed. Don’t worry about health consequences, job consequences, impacts to families and children, etc. It’s all legal.
You don’t like a law? No problem. Just ignore it and wait for someone to sue you. You’ll probably get away with it. But if you’re caught, legions of lawyers looking to make names for themselves, write books, and get on the commentariat circuit will step up to defend you. And then you’ll probably get away with it.
Your guy loses an election? No problem. The 1st Am. protects the right to demonstrate to your heart’s content. Assemble a few like-minded friends and attempt to de-legitimize every possible aspect, feature, behavior, decision, family member, and characteristic of the guy who beat your guy, until the next election. Occupy all public spaces and keep doing it ad infinitum until your chosen [i.e. politically correct] result is achieved.
You don’t like the content of somebody else’s speech? No problem. Threaten violence at every venue that person attempts to speak at and make it too expensive for the host to risk allowing the speaker to be heard.
You don’t like what your neighbor does with his property? No problem. Go to your local government and instigate proceedings under any number of thousands of laws that will tie him up in court for the next century.
Talk about cultural misappropriation . . . The Left are masters at it. They issue non-revocable guilt-free licenses to themselves to do whatever they want. And in so doing they fracture and balkanize America into a set of contentious sects who will never get along with each other.
Diversity, as a flag of convenience for excusing the Left’s agenda, is nonsense. It makes a chaotic mess of the orderly society our Founders attempted to legalize with the Constitution.
Rights vs. socialism
The American Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to access healthcare, education, jobs, homes, transportation, travel, public speech, their government, and many other rights.
No other country guarantees to its citizens all of the rights that Americans have.
American government is limited, but its citizens’ rights are not. For Americans, rights are unalienable, and within the bounds of law, practicable.
In other countries where rights are limited, government power is correspondingly greater. There’s an inverse relationship between government power and individual rights. They don’t coexist.
Socialists would have us trade away our unlimited rights for a smaller set of rights limited by government regulation, and a much larger basket of government powers. They would have us exchange freedom for government overseers.
Socialists use all sorts of emotional arguments to justify these trades, but in the end, they all lead to degrees of slavery.
Socialists who give up on the market, who give up the right to practice their rights as they personally see fit, make a very poor bargain for themselves, and for all who come after them.
Do you want the option to buy the healthcare you actually need? Or do you want a government bureaucrat to tell you what healthcare you are allowed?
Do you want the option to educate your kids in a curriculum you choose? Or do you want a government bureaucrat to determine what your child may learn at school?
Do you want to practice your own choices about what is best? Or do you want the government making those choices for you based on unproven dubious theories?
Do you want an economy run by consenting makers, sellers and buyers? Or do you want closed markets resistant to invention and creativity regulated by bureaucrats who have no personal skin in the game?
For reasonable people, these types of questions have obvious answers. Why do Leftists appear to lack the common sense necessary to see them?
Justice Thomas on Leftist forum shopping
Cite as: 582 U. S. ____ (2017) 1
Opinion of THOMAS, J.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
[June 26, 2017]
Page 3
“Moreover, I fear that the Court’s remedy will prove unworkable. Today’s compromise will burden executive officials with the task of deciding—on peril of contempt— whether individuals from the six affected nations who wish to enter the United States have a sufficient connection to a person or entity in this country. See ante, at 11– 12. The compromise also will invite a flood of litigation until this case is finally resolved on the merits, as parties and courts struggle to determine what exactly constitutes a “bona fide relationship,” who precisely has a “credible claim” to that relationship, and whether the claimed relationship was formed “simply to avoid §2(c)” of Executive Order No. 13780, ante, at 11, 12. And litigation of the factual and legal issues that are likely to arise will presumably be directed to the two District Courts whose initial orders in these cases this Court has now— unanimously—found sufficiently questionable to be stayed as to the vast majority of the people potentially affected.”
a.k.a. Leftist forum shopping
Seems that where federal courts get used repeatedly for clearly political purposes under an intent to frustrate the exercise of constitutional powers by other branches of government, Congress could act well within its constitutional authority to bar those subject matters from federal jurisdiction.
Public Cyber Security
The most far reaching issue to surface in the recent election was raised by the Wikileaks disclosures. Not one of the documents they released to the public has been disputed or shown to be a forgery.
This mechanism pulled the covers off the communications of public officials to reveal unethical, criminal, fraudulent, self-dealing, graft, and corruption, by the scolds who, even today after all the disclosures, continue to lecture the rest of the country on a host of issues in order to lasso some future votes.
Imagine what’s in the communications of the rest of the political class. I’m sure some of it’s ethical, public spirited, selfless, and lives up to the highest expectations of the electorate. Just as I’m sure the character of the Clinton camp disclosures is not unique.
Wikileaks showed us what the Founders knew very well—the corrupting influence of power. They designed our system to frustrate this ubiquitous feature of human nature by creating a Constitution of limitations on government power, complete with a rigorous amendment mechanism to change that Constitution. They didn’t want it tampered with lightly, and they certainly didn’t want unelected judges to be able to effectively modify it with case decisions.
So, our government invests billions to keep the communications of public officials secret, and at the same time, to de-cloak the secret communications of citizens. If the secret communications of public officials could be relied upon to be ethical, public spirited, selfless, genuine, and in good faith, such expenditures might be justified.
But that is not human nature, not when the Founders wrote the system, and not now, thank you Ms. Clinton for reminding us. We must not lose sight of this important lesson.
Moreover, since it’s been shown that government communications can be used to hide the self-dealing of public officials from the purifying sunlight of disclosure, the goal of government cyber security must encompass this reality.
Public security without public accountability is a license to steal from the public treasuries of governments all over the world. This is a much bigger issue than who won the election and what their rhetoric promises.
The fabric of our constitutionally limited system has been breached. Securing the breach is a bandaid that may scab over the lesion, but not cure the underlying disease—because it’s human nature and incurable!
The answer that the Founders came up with was to not trust the government to cure itself. Their system created a tension of balancing interests to keep the various power centers in check.
Public cyber security introduced the ability for public officials to create new power centers not anticipated, or subject to balancing, by traditional constitutional devices.
So, how do we allow our government officials to keep bona fide secrets, while at the same time, not provide communications shelter for public official malfeasance? In other words, how do we fix what is happening right now?
That’s the most important issue we should be discussing after this election. We have a constitutional crisis already. This noise about the electoral college and the legitimacy of candidates is a sideshow.
post privacy
It seems like the world has quietly slipped into a technological status that is post privacy. The 4th Am. protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures, but as that constitutional protection has been re-litigated over time, it turns out the definition of what is reasonable is contextual to current technology. As technology expands, the domain of a reasonable expectation of privacy shrinks. This shifting context is, intrinsically, neither good nor bad. It’s just a fact of technological advancement.
The Clintons recently discovered, much to their chagrin, that their reliance upon the privacy of their unsecured email server was a mistake. Despite their attempts to scrub their email record from the servers they owned, at some point their email traffic went through an internet tunnel that allowed their communications to be copied and saved by persons unknown.
As it turned out, those persons evidently became offended over the unethical Clinton’s documented behavior, and released those emails to the public in time for the American electorate to vote in a more fully informed manner. Subsequently the majority of Americans did the right thing and voted against the pair.
An argument certainly exists about whether this diminished expectation of privacy should hinge on the discretion of unknown parties who come to possess ostensibly private communications.
But extensive systems of encryption and decryption exist precisely because the internet is a known system of public communications channels. The information highway is open to all traffic. Someone listening at any number of junctures will be able to see and copy unencrypted traffic that flies by with very little effort.
Moreover, from the Snowdon disclosures the public now knows of numerous devices and software programs that monitor the internet and continuously capture all communications therein. And many formerly secure encryption methods still in use have been defeated.
All of this leads to a prudent conclusion that the great majority of internet users probably have no reasonable expectation of online privacy. The 4th Am. became somewhat obsolete.
Shifting gears slightly, it appears that the same prudential concern extends for smartphone users. And as smartphone sensors advance – some now do 3D digitizing of nearby physical surroundings – many of us will soon carry around data collection tools that can be remotely controlled to capture audio, video, GPS position, owner biometric and legal information, local 3D matrix data, friend and associate contacts and email addresses, histories of our communications through various social media and browsing tools, even records of our travels.
We line up to buy the latest and greatest of these devices because they do so much. And much if not all of what they do can be exploited on the internet without our awareness. The digital map of our entire existence is constantly built, refreshed, saved, and viewed. We are data origin points and we produce tons of data.
Taking things a step further, predictive artificial intelligence engines exist to use this data and issue alarms when the signals indicate the potential for alarming events to occur. Who reads these alarms, in what public agencies, what anticipatory machineries get switched on when the signs come in, these questions and others like them are probably worth exploring.
Antonin Scalia
“It seems to me that that is where we are heading, or perhaps even where we have arrived. Seventy-five years ago, we believed firmly enough in a rock-solid, unchanging Constitution that we felt it necessary to adopt the Nineteenth Amendment to give women the vote. The battle was not fought in the courts, and few thought that it could be, despite the constitutional guarantee of Equal Protection of the Laws; that provision did not, when it was adopted, and hence did not in 1920, guarantee equal access to the ballot but permitted distinctions on the basis not only of age but of property and of sex. Who can doubt that if the issue had been deferred until today, the Constitution would be (formally) unamended, and the courts would be the chosen instrumentality of change? The American people have been converted to belief in The Living Constitution, a “morphing” document that means, from age to age, what it ought to mean. And with that conversion has inevitably come the new phenomenon of selecting and confirming federal judges, at all levels, on the basis of their views regarding a whole series of proposals for constitutional evolution. If the courts are free to write the Constitution anew, they will, by God, write it the way the majority wants; the appointment and confirmation process will see to that. This, of course, is the end of the Bill of Rights, whose meaning will be committed to the very body it was meant to protect against: the majority. By trying to make the Constitution do everything that needs doing from age to age, we shall have caused it to do nothing at all.”
“laboratory for a novel social or economic experiment”
“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
MR. JUSTICE BRANDEIS, dissenting.
New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 US 262 – Supreme Court 1932
You see this quote frequently relied upon these days by the pro-MJ crowd. It’s worth noting, however, that in New State Ice Co., the Court disallowed the state from acting as a “laboratory for a novel social or economic experiment.”
Moreover, Brandeis did not say “democracy,” but “novel social and economic experiments,” which is not at all the same thing as democracy – another example of progressive historicism?
Still, Go Arizona!
Every state should respond to the Obama administrations’ overreach with legislation to limit the effect of federal executive actions unsupported by congressional statute.
Article V of the Constitution
The Constitution of the United States
* * * * * * * * * *
Article V
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
2 views on rights
See: The New Road to Serfdom
See: The Lisbon Treaty
And see: Paul L. Poirot
Cloward and Piven takes on CO private property
Since 1876, the Colorado Constitution protected Colorado citizens from uncompensated property takings by the State of Colorado.
CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE OF COLORADO, ARTICLE II BILL OF RIGHTS – Colo. Const. Art. II, Section 15 (2013)
Section 15. TAKING PROPERTY FOR PUBLIC USE – COMPENSATION, HOW ASCERTAINED
Private property shall not be taken or damaged, for public or private use, without just compensation. Such compensation shall be ascertained by a board of commissioners, of not less than three freeholders, or by a jury, when required by the owner of the property, in such manner as may be prescribed by law, and until the same shall be paid to the owner, or into court for the owner, the property shall not be needlessly disturbed, or the proprietary rights of the owner therein divested; and whenever an attempt is made to take private property for a use alleged to be public, the question whether the contemplated use be really public shall be a judicial question, and determined as such without regard to any legislative assertion that the use is public.
HISTORY: SOURCE: Entire article added, effective August 1, 1876, see L. 1877, p. 30.
As a judicial question, this right has been extensively litigated over the years. A few of the more interesting findings –
- SECTION AFFORDS GREATER PROTECTION THAN FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. This section affords an aggrieved property owner a greater measure of protection than does the constitution of the United States. The fifth amendment of the United States Constitution requires compensation only where there has been an actual taking. The Colorado Constitution, however, provides for compensation where private property has been taken or damaged. Mosher v. City of Boulder, 225 F. Supp. 32 (D. Colo. 1964).
- PURPOSE OF THIS SECTION of the constitution is to provide a remedy in damages for injury to property, not common to the public, inflicted by the state or one of its political subdivisions; and this section is not limited in application to condemnation proceedings. Srb v. Bd. of County Comm’rs, 43 Colo. App. 14, 601 P.2d 1082 (1979).
- IT MARKS BOUNDARY BEYOND WHICH PEOPLE HAVE FORBIDDEN LAWMAKERS TO PASS and have commanded their courts to hold any such passage illegal. How inviolable that constitutional inhibition is, is demonstrated by the fact that the supreme court once inadvertently permitted its protection to be threatened (North Sterling Irrigation Dist. v. Dickman, 59 Colo. 169, 149 P. 97 (1915)), but at the first opportunity overruled the dangerous precedent and returned to the solid ground of strict construction. Bd. of Comm’rs v. Adler, 69 Colo. 290, 194 P. 621 (1920); San Luis Valley Irrigation Dist. v. Noffsinger, 85 Colo. 202, 274 P. 827 (1929).
These findings and many more may be read at the free reference site Colorado Legal Resources.
The Colorado Constitution was 20 years ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s incorporation of the 5th Am. Takings Clause under the 14th Am., which extended this limitation on Federal power to also limit all States’ powers.
In 2005 the Kelo decision expanded the range of acceptable reasoning a government could use to take private property under the 5th Am.
An eminent domain action requires that the government’s taking of property be for a “public use”. A public use is generally one which confers some benefit or advantage to the public. The term does not necessarily imply — and is not confined to — actual “use” by the public. Moreover, the purported benefit to be derived from the taking of property need not be available to the entire public; it may benefit a smaller sector of members of the public in a particular locality, i.e. a subdivision of the general public. In other words, it is not necessary that the intended users be all members of the public; rather, it is the purpose for the taking that must be for the public, and not for the benefit of any particular individuals.
The use (purpose) must be a needed one, which cannot be surrendered without obvious general loss or inconvenience. However, the parameters of such needed public use move along a spectrum, and defy absolute definition because of factors such as changing needs of society, increases in population, and developing modes of transportation and communications.
In Kelo v. City of New Landen (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court was called upon to determine whether that changing parameter was broad enough to include for-profit development of real estate which would ostensibly result in needed economic growth for the community. In a decision that surprised many, the Court agreed.
http://realestate.findlaw.com/land-use-laws/eminent-domain-public-use-requirement.html
Now come the Left to Colorado, nationally funded [see Wolves Among Us and Fractivist Laid Bare], promoting amendments to the Colorado Constitution to radically change the definition and scope of our private property. Radical change has apparently called for a radical strategy.
A Cloward and Piven strategy –
- “[W]ould produce bureaucratic disruption. . .and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among. . . [everyone]. . .to advance a federal solution. . .that would override local. . .failures, local class and. . .conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.”
- “[P]roposed to create a crisis in the current. . .system – by exploiting the gap between. . .law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed [outcomes]. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing [citizens] of their rights. . ., encouraging them to. . .overload. . .an already overburdened bureaucracy.”
- The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption[.] “Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute. . .and the strains on local budgets became more severe.”
Consider some of the amendments proposed –
Summary of proposed Initiative 103, filed by Phillip T. Doe & Barbara Mills-Bria (Current as of 3/13/14):
Initiative 103 would amend the Colorado Constitution by adding a new section to Article XVI, the provisions of the constitution that govern mining and water rights. This amendment would:
Establish an “inalienable right” of the people of Colorado to clean air, clean water (including groundwater), and the preservation of the environment and natural resources (called “Public Trust Resources”), as common property of all people including future generations;
Require the state, as trustee of these resources, to conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people;
Require state government and its agents, as trustees, to protect Public Trust Resources from substantial impairment including pollution, applying a “precautionary principle” that any action or policy with a suspected risk, absent a scientific consensus of harm, places the burden of proving no harm on the proponents;
Obligate the state to seek natural resource damages from entities causing substantial impairment to Public Trust Resources, and to use such funds to remediate the harm;
Authorize all Colorado citizens (as beneficiaries) to sue to preserve Public Trust Resources against substantial impairment and to enforce the State’s obligations as trustee, to obtain legal and equitable remedies, and to recover attorney fees and costs when a court finds the state has not met its duties as trustee;
Require the state as trustee to use best available science in any process or proceeding that may affect Public Trust Resources, and to refer for criminal prosecution anyone manipulating data or scientific information for private profit; and
Apply to all public actions or commercial transactions that would violate these provisions, “regardless of the date of any applicable local, state or federal permits.”
Summary of proposed Initiative 89, filed by Caitlin Leahy and Gregory Diamond (Current as of 3/5/14)
Initiative 89 would amend the Colorado Constitution by adding a new Article, declaring and providing as follows:
Declares that Colorado’s environment is “the common property of all Coloradans”;
Declares that conservation of Colorado’s environment (including clean air, pure water, natural, and scenic values) is “fundamental”;
Declares that Colorado’s environment should be “protected and preserved” for all Coloradans, including future generations;
States that the people of Colorado, including future generations, have a “right to Colorado’s environment” (including clean air, pure water, natural, and scenic values);
Designates the state and local governments as trustees of “this resource” (referring to Colorado’s environment), requiring them to conserve Colorado’s environment (including clean air, pure water, natural, and scenic values) “for the benefit of all the people”;
Applies these provisions to the state, as well as to every city, town, county, and city and county, notwithstanding the provisions of the constitution that provide for Home Rule cities and towns and for Home Rule counties;
Provides that these provisions are self-executing and severable;
Provides that local governments shall have the power to enact laws, regulations, ordinances, and charter provisions that are “more restrictive and protective” of the environment than those enacted or adopted by state government; and
Provides that if a locally-enacted law or regulation adopted pursuant to the new Article conflicts with a state-enacted law or regulation, the “more restrictive and protective law or regulation shall govern.”
Summary of The Right To Local Self-Government from the Colorado Community Rights Network.
As all political power is vested in and derived from the people, and as all government of right originates from the people, the people have an inherent and inalienable right to local self-government, in each county, city, town, and other municipality.
That right shall include, without limitation:
The power to enact local laws. . .by establishing the fundamental rights of individuals, their communities, and nature. . .
. . .[to] define, alter or eliminate the rights, powers, and duties of corporations and other business entities. . .
The first two proposals above invent new public property rights that necessarily imply the abrogation of currently held private property rights.
The third proposal above invents classes of rights held by communities and nature [who speaks for nature?] and explicitly abrogates rights, powers and duties of corporations and other business entities – and it does so on the premise of our individual rights!
To say the least, these propositions are tough sells in the Land of the Free. Each one contemplates a revolutionary overthrow of property, contractual, and ownership rights in Colorado. Without any obfuscation or subterfuge, these questions demand a sober and detailed analysis.
Enter Cloward and Piven, and consider the Facebook page Yes We Can Ban Fracking, subtitled Jared Polis and Dark Money Democrats detailed below –
About
JARED POLIS and his friends at RBI Strategies, which is affiliated with Hilltop Public Solutions – a Democratic PR and campaign management firm known for running dark money campaigns and funding faux grassroots groups (links below) – and which recently opened an office in CO, has LAUNCHED A FALSE CITIZENS INITIATIVE CAMPAIGN called COLORADANS FOR LOCAL CONTROL, with the intent to CONFUSE and DIFFUSE public backlash to fracking in Colorado. THIS INITIATIVE DOES NOT OPPOSE FRACKING!
Craig Hughes recently left RBI to open Hilltop’s Denver office. Hilltop employs former Polis campaign staffers, including Lisa Kaufman, Polis’s campaign manager of six years, who is an affiliate in the firm’s newly opened Denver office. Hilltop is running campaigns for candidates who support oil and gas extraction.
Polis and friends have co-opted language used in a ballot initiative know as the COLORADO COMMUNITY RIGHTS AMENDMENT, BALLOT MEASURE 75, which will be on the 2014 ballot and which is supported 100% by ACTUAL COLORADO CITIZENS.
Polis and friends, in attempting to drown out the voices of Colorado citizens, have introduced not one but NINE, yes NINE initiatives, all the same with slightly different language. They are attempting to confuse voters and drown out the public backlash against fracking in Colorado.
Who’s behind this masquerade to confuse the public and diffuse the public backlash against fracking in Colorado?
Well…aside from Polis and RBI Solutions, the NINE initiatives, including the Orwellian named Coloradans for Local Control, were submitted by Caitlin Leahey of Lafayette, longtime Fundraising and Events Coordinator for, you guessed it, Jared Polis. The other name on the ballot initiatives is Gregory Diamond, longtime Democratic Party political operative whose wife, Faye Diamond, is a partner at RBI Solutions. The tangled webs we weave! Gregory Diamond IS NOT EVEN A RESIDENT OF COLORADO. He owns a home in Colorado, but resides in Orange County, CA, where he is currently running for office.
Confused? Well, that is the objective!
Follow Colorado Frack Attack on FB (Facebook.com/COFrackAttack) and Twitter (@COFrackAttack) – use these links so you don’t wind up on a false site – as we unravel this tangled web. If you’re itching to know more right now, here are some links to get you started:
IN THE BEGINNING…PRESS RELEASE FROM RBI STRATEGIES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 3, 2014
Contact: Rick Ridder
rick@rbistrategies.com
303-832-2444
Coloradans for Local Control Introduce Ballot Language to Protect Coloradans from Impacts of Fracking
9 Potential Initiatives Explore Different Solutions to Coloradan’s Concerns with balancing Oil and Gas Development with residents’ quality of life and property values.
(Denver, CO) – Today, several Colorado citizens took a stand for better balancing oil and gas drilling, including fracking with residents’ quality of life and property values. Coloradans for Local Control introduced language for potential ballot initiatives that, if passed, would help citizens ensure that fracking and oil and gas drilling is done in a way that minimizes the negative impact on property values, health, safety and environment.
These initiatives aim to allow the oil and gas industry to operate safely while protecting homeowners from health risks and losses in property values that result from fracking taking place too close to where we work, live and play.
Introducing multiple initiatives recognizes that there are several ways to address this issue. Coloradans for Local Control acknowledges the importance of starting a conversation with the citizens of Colorado on the best way to make sure communities and citizens have the right to determine where and how oil and gas drilling and fracking is done – the same rights that exist for nearly all other industrial usages of land and water.
From schoolyards to backyards, these initiatives will give greater protection to Colorado families and neighborhoods.
Rick Ridder
Rick@rbistrategies.com
ARTICLE: Polis Backing Coloradan’s for Local Control (don’t be fooled, it’s PRO fracking)
http://kdvr.com/2014/03/05/polis-he…
FORMER RBI PARTNER OPENS COLORADO OFFICE FOR DARK MONEY FIRM HILLTOP PUBLIC SOLUTIONS
http://www.campaignsandelections.com/…
RBI AND HILLTOP COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIP
http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot…
ARTICLES ABOUT HILLTOP PUBLIC SOLUTION’S DARK MONEY OPERATIONS
http://www.propublica.org/article/i…
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012…
http://www.northernbroadcasting.com/…
The above Facebook event boldly misrepresents the initiatives as being for fracking, when in fact they’re all constructs designed to shut down fracking. Every link and reference points to a pro-Leftist issue, organization, individual, or opinion. Moreover, while perpetrating a grand confusion, the author blames others for sowing that confusion.
This intelligent propaganda overwhelms logical reasoning. It seeds the internet with the false assumption that the majority of Colorado is against fracking. It motivates activists to militate against fracking. It feeds them a set of can’t lose “alternative” propositions that all fundamentally accomplish their objectives, and it motivates activists to go out and argue about them.
This smells of a Cloward and Piven strategy to produce an outcome by confusing and overwhelming the electoral system in Colorado.
But it would be odd to expect the people who intend to dispossess Colorodans of much of their property to play fair. That’s just not something that truly fair minded people do, despite how they represent their motives.
It’s what con men do.
Rep DeSantis exposes Caligula
Obamacare unconstitutional
HRES 153 IH
Standing before the BOCC
By definition, complaints not grounded in an injury, an injustice, or a wrong, are groundless. [Read more…]
in search of founded conclusions
The digital information tools for citizen journalists today enable us to effectively pull the covers off the sordid details of public malfeasance, corruption, the self-dealing and aggrandizement of public officials, and the broken state of traditional media.
Conservatives, by the hour, chronicle details of the broken, politically captive and insular mainstream media. Alarming as this is, why do we assume that the mainstream media was ever objective, non-political, or an effective 4th-estate check on government power?
On the contrary, a better case exists for the proposition that the essential nature of mainstream media is unchanged today from in the past. Organizational cultures simply don’t invert their behavior over time. They tend to persist in the characteristic behaviors of their organization.
Rather than get overwrought about how wrong the mainstream media is, and thereby lose focus on solvable mainstream issues, perhaps we should just admit that the mainstream media is as it always was, and that we’re just coming to see it in a more objective light for the first time.
Alternative media showed that traditional media did not live up to the potential the Founders gave it in the Constitution. Now we can move on and consider what the Founder’s were actually trying to accomplish.
The Federalists contemplated a constitutional objective for the country to have a legally protected free press, and this became the 1st Amendment. As we have seen, allowance for it did not guarantee it would be practiced. A free press, apparently, remains an ideal objective today.
The order of freedoms protected in the 1st Amendment – religion, speech, press, assembly, petition government – is significant. Subsequent rights build on preceeding rights. God gives us our fundamental rights, and from there the Constitution guarantees our rights to speak, to publish our speech, to get together publicly to discuss our speech, and then to take our conclusions to the government.
Nothing within the 1st Am., however, guarantees the quality or content of that protected speech. Nothing protects us against ignoble motives of a speaker. Nothing protects us against speech that promotes the interests of one, a few, or a subset of citizens, at the expense of the majority of citizens. Nothing protects us from organizations, whether it’s the press or other groups, who promulgate self-interested speech at the expense of the majority.
Sound speech is the only means we have in America to offset unsound speech. If we don’t practice it, we have only ourselves to blame for the tyranny that will ensue, and has ensued.
Absence of hyperbole, adherence to generally accepted facts, absence of personal attacks and diminutions, adherence to observable causation, language that narrows into rather than leads away from both the intent and form of the subject, these are some indicators of sound speech.
The supported conclusions that come from fairly represented facts fed through the prism of logically sound reasoning, are for us to discover, not dictate. The Left is as subject to founded conclusions as the rest of us, and that’s the reality the Founders intended for Americans to practice. Ultimately, it’s not a politically determined reality, it’s a reality discovered in the nature of all things.
The Founders were essentialists. The Constitution protects the essence of matters, in this case, the essence of public speech. They gave us a legal framework for us to accurately discover and respond to the true nature of reality. They avoided the hubris of determinism. They knew that freedom would serve us much better in our self-government experiment than a futile mechanism for one group to control another. They’d had enough of that sort of government.
Today, however, the Left never stops working to replace the Constitution in America with political action. The Left think that politics can and should determine reality. This unrealistic, reverse causal direction of theirs — that attempts to dictate the nature of things rather than respond to the nature of things — never seems to give them a moments pause as they control, regulate, modulate, temper, fund, defund, and serve the higher masters of their agenda.
But it’s a free country. If the Left want to blind themselves to the true nature of reality with a blizzard of determinism, they are free to do so. Fortunately, the rest of us are free to avoid those pitfalls.
For too long the Left dominated public speech in America. With a complicit media they’ve built massive bureaucratic and regulatory structures at every level of local, county, state and federal government in America. Across the land thousands of pages of new regulations get added to the books every day by a cadre’ of lawyers, bureaucrats, public servants and assorted do-gooders — a happy class of jovial elites ever ready to congratulate each other on their magnificent regulatory creations.
The Founders gave us a tool to change all that, to unwind this enormous Gordian knot, to take back our lives. All we have to do is use it.
B_Imperial
California dreamin’
inalienable right to resist tyrants
Proposed Oil and Gas Taking
5th Am. to the U.S. Constitution:
No person shall be. . . .deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Oil and Gas Cover Letter from ElCo Webposting 1-2-2013:
An “Oil and/or Gas Development Permit” may be obtained following one of two Special Permit review Processes:
Major facilities will follow the standard Special Use Review process as provided for in these regulations. (Approximately 5-6 month process)
or
Minor facilities may choose to apply as a standard Special Use Review process or may choose to follow an administrative process, provided a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Elbert County is approved in conjunction. (Approximately 30-45 days)
It shall be Elbert County’s policy to encourage the use of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with individual oil and gas production companies that are active within the County and are proposing a Minor Oil and/or Gas Facility.
OIL & GAS DRAFT REGS – Final for Public Hearings SUR PERMIT ZR PART II SECTIONS 26 1-2-2013:
Section 26.2 – Application Review & Permit Processing
B. POLICY STATEMENT – MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING (for Minor Oil and/or Gas
Facilities only)For those oil and gas production companies that choose not to enter into a MOU with Elbert County; the requirements of Section “E”, below, will apply.
E. PROCESSING OF A SPECIAL USE PERMIT APPLICATION FOR A MINOR OIL AND/OR GAS FACILITY (When the production company does NOT have an executed MOU with Elbert County) & FOR A MAJOR OIL AND/OR GAS FACILITY
The Special Use Permit process for a Minor Oil & Gas Development Permit in Elbert County when the oil/gas production company chooses not to enter into a MOU with Elbert County, or for obtaining a Major Oil & Gas Development Permit is as follows:
MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING O&G 1-2-2013 Final for Public Hearings:
ADDENDUM “A”
1. There shall be a minimum of 1,320 feet between the wellhead and any residential structure, domestic well or platted building envelope.
5 . . . Only closed-loop drilling systems shall be permitted in Elbert County for drilling and completion operations rather than open earthen pits.
Summary:
Terms in Elbert County’s proposed MOU are more restrictive than COGCC regulations.
Nothing prohibits Elbert County from seeking a voluntary agreement between energy developers and the county for more restrictive conditions of development. But this is hardly a voluntary agreement.
The above scheme threatens a longer (5 to 6 months), and much more expensive planning process for companies that do not agree to the more restrictive conditions in the MOU for their minor Oil and Gas facilities–the majority of the facilities. Community and Development Services is proposing treating all minor facilities under the process for major facilities if the developer does not kow tow to the terms of the MOU.
Where is the “just compensation” to developers and mineral interest owners who do not agree with Elbert County’s more restrictive Oil and Gas development conditions? Not only is there no “just compensation,” there are in fact penalties–added procedural costs and the lost time value of potential earnings.
For those developers who accept CDS’s coercive scheme, the MOU appears to have a few weak links–the adhesive forced circumstances constructed by Elbert County government that create a take-it-or-leave-it superior bargaining position, the requirement of the additional expense of closed loop systems, and the opportunity costs from land taken out of production due to the greatly expanded setbacks. Where is the “just compensation” for these takings?
While paying lip service to the governing regulatory laws of the State of Colorado promulgated by the COGCC, this sham MOU contract is clearly intended to subvert state regulatory authority.
This proposed scheme appears ripe for legal challenges from developers, stakeholders and the state. Didn’t Rowland and Ross both campaign on the claim that the (then) current BOCC had a propensity for spawning litigation against the county? It seems they’re rushing headlong into a much deeper quagmire.
B_Imperial