The Elbert County Left’s on-line venues continue in silent mourning over Commissioner Schlegel’s announcement that he’ll not seek a second term. The news must have completely overturned their strategy for the next election cycle. [Read more…]
Ezra Levant on professional protestors
Power
The Bishops, Mr. Blotter, Mr. Brown, Mr. Corrado, the Duvalls, Mr. McShay, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Thomas, Mr. Thomasson, and friends, share an orthodoxy.
A little background is in order for any of the 3000+ daily hitters here who may not know Elbert County, Colorado. The above individuals fuel and publish the counter culture press in Elbert County at New-Plains.com and Prairietimes.com with weekly writings promoting their shared orthodoxy, and trashing any who might contemplate a dissent. [Read more…]
the taboo of freedom
From the American Left, the Obama administration, and the Washington bureaucracy, one hears frequent lip service to freedom, but sees little substance about freedom in practice. Too often, a discussion of freedom begins and ends with the Constitution, whence the discussion should only begin. The Constitution establishes the essential foundation for free behavior, but it remains up to us to decide how to use that freedom. [Read more…]
the clueless Left
Ezra Levant shares his, and other Sun News experiences dealing with professional anti-oil protesters.
the turning point
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.
When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
“When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.”
Eric Hoffer
I observe Elbert County governing elites build their fortress of zoning legalese to control the fabric and future of Elbert County. At once, they’re possessed with a superior foresight that transcends the creative efforts of tens of thousands of citizens, but at the same time, they enforce their permits and grafted approvals with all manner of penalty and punishment, just in case a pronouncement should lack persuasive content.
As night follows day, these planning monuments will foreclose a prosperous future for Elbert County. That one is easy to predict. The only possible consequence from impossible law is stagnation. People will move away from stagnation if only to get upwind from the smell of it.
But grandiose planning documents, fêted by their writers, adoring cults, and subversive leadership, will do more than chill Elbert County’s prospects. As a corpus of dead weight over the heads of Elbert County governors, these procedures will crush any administrator, elected or appointed, who presumes to control them.
They’ve built the weakest links that will be their undoing.
B_Imperial
winners and losers
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
Left protect tyrants money source
The Global Plot Vs. U.S. Fracking
Investors.com Posted 10/03/2012 06:39 PM ET
Geopolitics: What do Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, Gulf oil sheiks and President Obama have in common? They all want to halt the U.S. energy revolution in fracking. No wonder so many of them are endorsing Obama. [Read more…]
condolences
Critics painted me as a defender of the old guard. Ha! The only things I defended in this election cycle were competence, sound management, realistic thinking, and the rule of law. Tragically, these bedrock principles did not win today in the Elbert County Republican Party primary. Well, the principles still exist, and it appears I will have plenty more opportunities to defend them in the future.
Come November, commissioner choices will be between agenda driven liberals and, um, agenda driven liberals. I’m sure this prospect has the New-Plains democrats, populists, and leftists, dancing in their switch grass patches tonight, however, consequences for the county will be grim.
We’ll see ubiquitous zoning and higher taxes. We’ll see environmentalism and its basket of unfounded mythologies unleashed in a flurry of ersatz relevancy as they consume the public discourse. We’ll experience these mythologies fail in an expensive protracted drama full of denial and blame. We’ll see none of these agenda progenitors take responsibility when their no-growth, anti-industrial, country-in-county ideas further impoverish Elbert County. We’ll see the few of us who use their 1st Am. right to dissent from these prevailing insanities called more names, if that’s even possible at this point.
I never wrote for the sake of the old guard. I wrote for the sake of limited sound government. A voting minority of Elbert County voted for bigger more intrusive government. They made a big mistake, and the county government they’ve chosen for all of us will make us pay dearly for it. That’s what unbridled government does to people and these people are all about the unbridling of government power.
The left has won. You’re not going to like these new-strange bedfellows when they start implementing their plans for you.
B_Imperial
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
(click to enlarge)
misconceptions
Message to New-Plains leftists, and all leftists for that matter: You are way over-thinking the problem in your Lincoln Day Dinner Opinion.
It’s your politics that depend on conspiracy, elaborate design, subterfuge, underground networking, militancy, belief structures without supporting cause and effect, collective force, and activist imposition. You, evidently, think your politics are worth breaking a few eggs to make your utopian omelet.
Of course all that misspent energy begs questions about what on earth led you to such methods because they’ve never led to anything but poverty, misery and death. But then you dissemble about the poverty, misery and death that come from your totalitarian methods by saying, “Oh that’s the natural condition of things before we arrived and we just haven’t done enough yet. Give us more time and we’ll get it right.”
The problem here is that after you first claim that the natural state of things is horribly wrong in some way, your solutions invariably attempt to return us to conditions that you leftists always use to justify more intervention! If things were so bad, why in the name of progress do you always try to return us to conditions when things were worse? Apparently progression is really regression in the leftist skew.
And though you don’t know where your regression/progression is really going, you believe that whenever and wherever you arrive, the end will justify the means. Your terrible tenacity that spawned so much poverty, misery and death will be forgiven by the few who survive to cross the threshold to walk hand in hand through the gates of utopia. The awe of the perfectly sustainable, fair and clean human society will wipe their memories clean of all the horror spawned from your mythology.
Now pay attention. You really should learn to stop projecting this sort of thing on to conservatives. We’re not like you. We don’t use these techniques, these conspiracies, these impositions, or these forces. Look around you at one of these Elbert County Republican gatherings. The conservatives are the ones in the room not doing any of that stuff. You look really stupid when you paint us with those brushes.
Truth is, the only time we even think about such devices is when we’re forced to describe you. Think about this if you dare. Liberty is like a ship without a captain. It’s a massive rudderless force that takes no direction whatsoever to find the correct path. And only when you attempt to steer the ship does it go off course and crash into something.
You leftists have crashed the ship so many times in history that you’ve lost sight of how the whole thing operates.
I can’t imagine how to fix your conceptual framework. You are so broken.
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