First of all, forget the labels.  Republican, Democrat and Tea Party mean nothing out here.  They’re all nominally Republican.

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On the right you have  Limited Government, Personal Responsibility, Protection of Private Property Rights, and Fiscal Responsibility.

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On the left you have New-Plains and Elbert-Grab.

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Candidates promoted on New-Plains: Larry Ross * Robert Rowland * Steve Valdez

Rowland “is running as a Republican” but “does not believe Party should matter at the County level.”  Valdez says, “Republican or Democrat-it doesn’t matter.”  Ross believes in government regulation and is active in trying to shut down oil and gas development in the county.

The three have made statements indicating openness to increasing taxes, increasing debt, favoring zoning control of private property and private resources, and growing government.

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Against these three candidates, real Republicans have opportunities to defend the actual conservative principles enumerated on their Lincoln Day Dinner advertisement above.

Now would be a good time to start.

A firm hand for a “nation of dodos”
6 January 2012

“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.

The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.

The tension between self-government and “good” government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism. Thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Randolph Bourne staked a claim to a priestly wisdom far greater than that possessed by the ordinary mortal. As Croly explained, “any increase in centralized power and responsibility . . . is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition” and the fact that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”

During the first two years of the Obama administration, the progressives persuaded themselves that favorable demographics and the consequences of the George W. Bush years would assure the consent of the electorate. They drew parallels with how growing urbanization and Herbert Hoover’s legacy worked for FDR in the 1930s. But FDR enhanced his majority in his first midterm election in 1934; the current progressive agenda, by contrast, was roundly thrashed in 2010. Obama may compare himself to Roosevelt and even to Lincoln, but the electorate does not appear to share this assessment.

After the 2010 thrashing, progressives seemed uninterested in moderating their agenda. Left-wing standard bearers Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies went so far as to argue that Obama should bypass Congress whenever necessary and govern using his executive authority over the government’s regulatory agencies. This autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority has strong support with people close to White House, such as John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, a left-liberal think tank. “The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy,” Podesta has written. “These authorities can be used to ensure positive progress on many of the key issues facing the country.”

Podesta has proposed what amounts to a national, more ideological variant of what in Obama’s home state is known as “The Chicago Way.” Under that system, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune explains, “citizens, even Republicans, are expected to take what big government gives them. If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss’ little brother, you write the check.” But the American clerisy isn’t merely a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucratic lifers, and the United States isn’t one-party Chicago. The clerisy are more like an ideological vanguard, one based largely in academe and the media as well as part of the high-tech community.

Their authoritarian progressivism—at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism—tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, “the priests of the machine.” Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in “progressive legal theory,” which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin—a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama “reason incarnate,” as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.

Despite the president’s clear political weaknesses—his job-approval ratings remain below 50 percent—he retains a reasonable shot at reelection. In the coming months, he will likely avoid pushing too hard on such things as overregulating business, particularly on the environmental front, which would undermine the nascent recovery and stir too much opposition from corporate donors. American voters may also be less than enthusiastic about the Republican alternatives topping the ticket. And one should never underestimate the power of even a less-than-popular president. Obama can count on a strong chorus of support from the media and many of the top high-tech firms, which have enjoyed lavish subsidies and government loans for “green” projects.

If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama’s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was “in a state of rebellion” against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue’s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren’t told deadpan or punctuated with “I really hope someone can agree with me on that.” Also: Nobody laughed.)

The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.

A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.

This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.

A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the “dodos” who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years—once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation—may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.

Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Joel Kotkin is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University.

What citizens should not do in a free country is run like helpless children to the government for protection when each new challenge comes along.

Governments are made up of people no more smart or capable than you and me.  What they have is rigid, uniform, arbitrary, black and white LAW, and power.  People are flexible, diverse, and subtle.

Citizens engaged in working the problem to make our land better cannot be sufficiently anticipated by a rigid code of government regulations, no matter how artfully drawn.

The Founding Fathers understood this so they wrote a Constitution of negative law to limit the power of government and leave men free to live and work.  They also knew that citizens in a pure democracy would push for ever more government to the detriment of freedom and our republic.  At the planning commission meeting last Thursday, many were there proving the point.

Citizens can and will protect their own interests and their own resources better than government can, and that applies to all issues including:  safety, the environment, health, maximum economic benefit, effective utilization, and preservation of all of our resources.

Citizens do this because it’s in their interest to do so.  Government is merely a third party with no stake—government is just not as motivated to protect our property as we are.

Don’t give them more power over us.  It’s a poor bargain.  You won’t get the protection you expect and they won’t ever relinquish the power they take.  You will burden us forever with more expensive, unproductive, and arbitrary bureaucracy.

This code of oil and gas regulations presumptively treats every citizen in Elbert County like a criminal.  We are not criminals, and we are not merely applicants.  We are free American citizens who can write our own contracts and protect ourselves.  And we don’t need a ruler to tell us what we can do.

Look how this oil and gas lessor protected his interest.  He wrote a one page addendum to his lease that fully protects his interests.  This is how adults solve problems responsibly.  Responsible citizens don’t run to government planners and clamor in public meetings for 60-page monstrosities of zoning law to provide environmental lawyers and planners with an endless pool of aggrieved litigants.

Audio here: Jerry Dahl at EC Planning Comm 1_26_2012.wmv

It is reasonable to conclude from his remarks that Mr. Dahl is promoting a county “right” to further regulate oil and gas development, and that he foresees the need for the county to litigate the question.

As an attorney Mr. Dahl represents his client’s interest, and the client is Richard Miller, the director of the Community and Development Services Department.  Mr. Miller introduced Mr. Dahl and it is fair to conclude that Mr. Dahl accurately represented Mr. Miller’s interest.

So, the director of planning wants to regulate oil and gas development at the county level, and he’s hired an adversarial attorney who shares that interest.

And who are the people to be regulated by these forces?  You and me.  The county has an attorney sworn to zealously defend their interest, because all attorneys take an oath to zealously defend their clients’ interests, against you and me.

Should our tax money be used to fund an adversarial legal process that is aimed at us?

“The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures…The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one.”

He also promised an end to unemployment and pledged to promote peace with France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. But in order to do all this, Hitler said, he first needed the Enabling Act.

Enabling Act, Article 1

In addition to the procedure prescribed by the constitution, laws of the Reich may also be enacted by the government of the Reich.

Enabling Act, Article 2

Laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution as long as they do not affect the institutions of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat.  The rights of the President remain undisturbed.

Barak Obama, State of the Union, 1-24-2012

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days.  A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything -– even routine business –- passed through the Senate.  (Applause.)  Neither party has been blameless in these tactics.  Now both parties should put an end to it.  (Applause.)  For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a simple rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.  (Applause.)

The executive branch also needs to change.  Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote.  (Applause.)  That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy, so that our government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.  (Applause.)

Locally it started with the Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse, a creature near and dear to our hearts that was uniquely threatened by evil developer bulldozers.  We awoke to find one day that this rodent species owns a whole basket of usurped property rights.  Based on this novel discovery, hundreds of green and left warriors combined with sympathetic government regulators to form the Circus and bring into existence, by mere presumption, thousands of pages of growth-stopping regulations.  They empowered the federal Environmental Protection Agency and all subordinate levels of government to save that mouse, and by their curious chain of cause and effect, us too.  The economic clout now wielded on behalf of that mouse makes it one of the most powerful rodents in the history of the universe, probably second only to Mickey.  And we were not saved.

The Circus rested for a bit and recharged its batteries.  Then along came an evil developer intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for a super highway complete with utility corridors and railroad tracks.  Imagine the environmental impacts–pretty much the worst things possible–the smog all that transportation would cause, the ancient trees to be felled, the noise, the light.  Don’t go toward the light!  Imagine the poor mice that would have to be relocated and provided similar habitat—if it could even be found—outside of the right of way.  The damages would surely be irreparable.  The Circus shifted into high gear and put the pedal to the metal.  They rented busses to carry occupants to the State capitol.  They saturated planning and commissioner meetings.  They filled the internet with a relentless onslaught of do or die hyperbolic predictions about the end of the world that this road would precipitate.  The end of the world was serious stuff.  No one wanted that.  The laws were passed, the court cases came in.  The Circus rested.  And still we were not saved.

One day an evil developer came along, intent on bringing water commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for long distance water transportation to quench the thirst of citizens in a sub-development in Colorado Springs.  The Circus double clutched their well-oiled machine and slipped it into gear.  Hundreds of loud clamorers filled auditoriums,  government meetings and state house offices with a new flag of presumed entitlement, “our water.”  The fact that not a drop of it actually belonged to them gave them no pause.  “Our water” was not actually “their water” but the mob has never been one to quibble about details like legal property rights.  They were all about momentum, sound bites and the persuasion of pure force.  Demonstrators and occupyers don’t wait for the subtleties of legal technicalities, unless of course a legal technicality can be found to put wind into their sails, that’s another matter.  The evil developer was persuaded to recede into the tapestry of the world, and the Circus rested once again.  And still we were not saved.

Then along came the evil energy developers, intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision of energy independence from the beneficial use of dormant oil and gas supplies lying ten thousand feet down in the ground.  The Circus kicked their machine into overdrive.  To save us once again, the green and left warriors sallied forth and wrote hundreds of pages of zoning laws incorporating every growth stopping agency and device ever conceived by statist man.  They employed lawyers to tune their language so those laws could only be challenged—never repealed—by endless years of impossibly expensive litigation.

The Roman government gave bread and circuses to the people to distract them from the messy details of their oppressive governors.  Today’s Circus combines the clamoring class of green and leftist warriors with a sympathetic regulatory class of unelected bureaucrats, to form the government itself.  Gone are those halcyon times when the mob could be placated by mere food and entertainment.  Perhaps conditioned by reality TV, the mob now insists on being part of the action.  They want a hand in actually creating the government fascism that will turn around and oppress them.  So long as they can applaud a victory, it matters not that the beast they create intends to dine on them.

For all their efforts put in to save our quality of life, our environment, and our property values, you’d think real estate around here would be getting more expensive.

The Jews have their Talmud, the Muslims their Hadiths, exhaustive rules of religious law and taboo to define every nuance of permissible human action.  Secular Americans have City, County, State and Federal regulations in a great fascist web waiting to entrap citizens, pending the whim of an invisible unelected bureaucratic shaman somewhere who may notice a non-compliant act, and who then brings down the wrath of government upon the citizen, er, applicant.

The applause is always deafening.

Excellent question, and it points squarely to the agenda motivating Elbert County greens in pushing through impossibly complex local oil and gas zoning. This zoning putsch masquerades under saving property values, sparing the environment, and smart growth, but those are just platitudes for the rubes.

This zoning would create a matrix of imponderable and unchallengeable laws administered by a czar, who would conduct numerous public planning circuses for green activists to attend and applaud, for the sole purpose of displaying oil and gas development blasphemers for the greens to ridicule.

The political decision has already been made by these people. Please, save us all a lot of time and money. We’re not stupid. We don’t need your sacrificial rituals to the green gods. Just ban it for the taboo that you’ve already decided it is.

And I want to see the Community and Development Services director wear a witch doctor’s headdress at future BOCC meetings, you know, something befitting a smartly dressed shaman.

Attorney General warns El Paso County on proposed oil and gas regs

ANDREW WINEKE

2012-01-17 16:26:51

The Attorney General’s Office last week sent a letter warning El Paso County that its proposed oil and gas drilling regulations conflicted with state regulations.

The letter, dated Jan. 10, cited proposed rules on setbacks, excavations, water quality, wildlife, visual and noise impacts and permitting that it argued are in the purview of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

“The county should reject the proposed rules discussed above as being in operational conflict with the (oil and gas commission’s) regulatory regime,” the letter concluded. “The county should reject the proposed rules discussed above for the additional reason that exhaustive local regulations are unnecessary.” (more…)

See this short youtube video at Episode Two: Economic Freedom in America Today.

Regulation is not only a Federal problem.  Regulation is pernicious, at every level of government.  Today Elbert County has a clear choice whether or not to greatly expand our county’s regulatory reach into energy development matters it knows next to nothing about.

At the county level the force of regulation is imposed through zoning law.  Our county’s Community and Development Services department works every day to write, refine, expand, detail and enforce their ubiquitous vision of a perfectable society.  They want to save this land and this county from its people because, essentially, they don’t trust the people.

They think they are wise stewards who, with a third-party steward’s interest, have a more valuable right to forecefully impose their vision about a sound local economy, than the stakeholders and property holders in the county have in doing so for themselves.

Zoning regulators think that by stopping people from the pursuit of economic activity, they serve a higher purpose of preservation of our local world.  This of course begs questions of preservation for what?  For who?  For when?  And for why?

Of course they have answers for all of these questions.  The answers are myths — myths consisting of more tenuous myths in a great pyramid of “smart,” sustainable, no-growth, enviro-jihad mythology.

The future beneficiaries of county zoning and regulation don’t exist.  They are a myth–not real–and unless you’re a believer, not even foreseeable.  The great probability is they will never come to exist because future unforseen circumstances will change everything long before these present day socio and eco myths can ever be tested, long after they are forgotten in favor of some future mythology as yet unkown.

Man took matters that used to be in God’s domain and invested them in Gaia, the environment and universe-trekking aliens. That’s what humans do at the margins of their knowledge where observation ends and speculation begins–we create mythologies–myths that we love.   And then we create the legalities to enforce those mythologies.

Regulatory zealots consider this sort of talk heresy.  They believe that the forced perfectibility of man and the environment is actually possible.  Just as the power that was - the Church - once defended Ptolemy’s geocentric universe against the heresy of Copernicus, so too the regulatory powers of today know, without a shadow of doubt, that they know best, and that they can sufficiently describe, legislate, and enforce a set of rules to govern our behavior, for our own best interest.

To even imagine they could succeed at such a task is a pinnacle of hubris.  When has an authoritarian process ever led to a best outcome for its subjects?  When have a small minority of minds ever created the economic output of a diverse population acting in their own interests?  The regulatory model cannot succeed.

Regulation makes inevitable change much more costly.  The regulatory parties in government who do this to us have no personal skin in the game–only myths and the iron fist–a deadly combination.  Ironically, the regulatory mission of governing progressives is about the most regressive thing they could do.

If we can’t stop creating mythologies, at least we should learn to stop legalizing them.

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“In that same spirit, we intend to work with counties and municipalities to make sure we have appropriate regulation on oil and gas development, but recognize the state can’t have 64 or even more different sets of rules.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2012/01/12/text-hickenloopers-state-of-the.html?page=all

Perhaps the tide of regulatory proliferation of the myth of a perfectable society has turned around on all the would-be czars and county potentates in Colorado’s planning and zoning departments.

Our freedom depends on it.

“[R]esolutions introduced by registered Elbert County Republican participants at the precinct caucus are eligible for action by each precinct caucus.  A majority vote by the caucus shall advance that resolution for consideration of the Resolutions Committee, and must include name, address, phone and if available email of the person submitting the proposal.

The Resolutions Committee shall meet after the precinct caucus and prior to the county assembly for the purpose of confirming the precinct caucus action and to determine if the resolution conforms to the requirement of expounding a fundamental principle of the Republican Party.  A two-thirds majority vote by the committee shall advance that resolution for consideration of the county assembly.”

Caucuses are February 7, 2012.

Note: The Resolutions Committee has 5 people on it.  That means it will take 4 out 5 affirming committee votes to pass a precinct caucus resolution on to the the county assembly.

No one remarked about how regulations suppress economic activity.

No one mentioned how county zoning is an authoritarian process for imposing government takings in a heavily tilted playing field where the government holds practically unlimited power and the citizen is treated as a serf.

No one informed him that a pro-regulation position is an inherently unconservative and unRepublican stance.

And no one asked him why in the world he’s running as a Republican.

Even though there wasn’t time for it last night, these things needed to be mentioned.

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By the way, all Republican caucus attendees should pre-register for the 2/7/2012 caucus at http://www.caucus.cologop.org  This is quick process that simply verifies your Republican party voter registration, a requirement to vote in the caucus.  Pre-registration is not mandatory but it will help those running your caucus speed things along that night if you are pre-registered.

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