MaxRedline

Hypocrisy Illustrated

Over in the little Michigan town of Walker, 65 high school seniors organized a mass bike-ride to school on the last day of their high school experience. And it was well-organized:

The senior students took part in the morning ride, which began at the Walker Fitness and Ice Center and ended at the high school. The students had police escorts and enjoyed donuts provided by Walker Mayor Rob VerHeulen, who rode in a police cruiser leading the group.

Parents lined the 3-mile route, taking pictures and cheering for their sons and daughters.

But upon arrival, the reception was beyond frosty: the Principal assembled them in the school auditorium, chewed them out, and suspended them all.

At a school board meeting that evening, a local DJ showed up with a brand new bicycle, donated by a local shop, which he presented to the board to give to the Principal, who was, oddly enough, absent from the festivities. With luck, one day she may learn how to safely ride.

Closer to home, the stink of hypocrisy emanating from Metro Oregon Zoo just reached overwhelming proportions. We mentioned previously that the place is grossly over-managed, by Oregon state standards. It's been a while since we looked over that way, but as far as we know, the trained professionals have yet to figure out how to get their new giraffe - which arrived about a month ago - to enter the barn. They may not know much about working with, and effectively managing, captive wild animals - but by golly, they're big on telling you all about saving the polar bears from "man-made global warming", the importance of recycling, and so much more. 

Forget the animals - it's all about image (and money).

Now the Oregonian's Joseph Rose (thankfully! Katy Muldoon seems incapble of writing anything more than regurgitated press releases and other fluff, which is why she's usually assigned there) writes that the Zoo's vaunted expert middle managers have concerns about repairing the Sunset Highway at a time when one of their elephants is "with calf". Oh, how very touching! Obviously, they Really Care™!

Repaving on highway 26 must be done with caution, if at all: 

When Oregon Zoo elephant curator Bob Lee heard of the Department of Transportation's plan to rev up the project in June, he raised a caution flag on Rose-Tu's behalf.

Elephants, Lee said, "are so tuned into the environment that they'll feel the vibrations in their feet and they have great hearing. We need to be careful."

The hypocrisy level is unbelievable, yet people buy into it.

Do you believe for one second that they'll halt the Zoo's summer concerts - held right on the elephants' doorstep - based upon some concern over loud drums and amplified bass and other vibrations? Of course not!

To paraphrase Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: They're Only In It For The Money.

Oregon Tackles The Tough Issues

Florida's Secretary of State has gone through the databases, located, and purged some 53,000 dead people from the voter rolls. Here in Oregon, Secretary of State Kate Brown has other things to do: willfully misrepresenting election law in order to favor her fellow Democrats, trying to force Republicans out of the voters' pamphlet, and refusing to destroy unused ballots as required by law, among other things. Small wonder she's been given the #KorruptKate tag - she's been working hard to earn it.

Unlike Florida's SoS, Katie's too busy to bother with trivialities; voter fraud, after all, is simply a nonissue in Oregon -  folks like Lafayette Keaton notwithstanding.

Keaton not only voted for a dead person in Oregon, he voted for his dead son.  Making Keaton’s fraud easier was Oregon’s vote by mail scheme, which has opened up gaping holes in the integrity of elections.

But the integity of elections isn't nearly as important to Oregon's SoS as rigging them. Oregon has very critical issues facing it, such as requiring schools to eliminate mascot names like "Indians," "Chiefs" and "Braves." Presumably, the next step will involve eliminating things like "Fire Chief" and "Chief of Police". Mustn't risk offending our Indian compadres, after all. Troutdale will soon be home of the "Fighting Smelt", who will battle the Sandy Spotted Owls in epic high-school sports action.

These are critical issues which demand immediate, hard-hitting approaches for successful and sustainable resolution. Election integrity? Not so much.

Portlandia Rambles Greenly On

 

A lady in Portland's Department of Transportation sent a defense of their propaganda in response to a query. She claims that 

Portland residents have made it a priority to create livable and safe streets. There are important and critical safety issues that having a multimodal transportation system address. Part of that means getting information, tools, ideas and strategies into the hands of residents and employees that want to lead a more active and healthy life - through bicycling, walk, taking transit and driving less.

Portland Smart Trips accounts for an annual decrease in driving trips by 9%....

Evidently, Linda also works for the Department of Pulling Figures Out of Our Butts, as there is no reason to accept her statement that each and every year, nearly 10% more decrease their driving as a result of the City's glossy pamphlets touting bicycles and walking.

Moreover, according to The Zero, after six decades of seemingly inexorable increases, traffic peaked nationally in 2004. The total vehicle miles has been flat or down each year since. In 2011, the average American drove 6 percent fewer miles than in 2004.

Unsurprisingly, it appears that Portland bureaucrats are simply trying to take credit for trends that have been apparent nationwide for years. How else would they shore up their "green, progressive" credentials and justify their cushy "jobs"?

 

Corruption Continues As Usual In Oregon

John Kroger is conveniently stepping out of the Oregon Attorney General office and into a much higher-paying office as president of Reed College, and no sooner was the move announced than a Marion County Circuit judge ruled that the good AG intentionally withheld documents related to a 2010 criminal investigation.

"This court finds and believes there was a deliberate choice not to produce documents during the time period... at a time when it would have been useful to Mr. Long," Judge Thomas Hart ruled from the bench on Friday.

The judge said he would order the state to pay Long's six-figure legal fees. He also said he would order the state to produce certain additional documents related to the case.

Conveniently, though, Johnny has a cushy slot all lined up at Reed.

Meanwhile, in squeaky-clean Portland, where Ellis McCoy (former parking manager and, yes, from the infamous Gladys McCoy family) remains under federal investigation, comes another question - and lawsuit:

Portland, Ore. -- "Can the government protect you from cheap fares and innovative service merely to shield politically connected businesses from competition?

That is the question the Institute for Justice and its clients want answered in a federal lawsuit filed today in Portland, Ore, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. Their lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of Portland's limousine and sedan regulations, which punish small limo and sedan companies that offer discounted rides through online deal sites like Groupon.com.

In 2009, the city passed a law requiring a $50 minimum fare for limousine and sedan rides to or from Portland International Airport. The law imposes a city-wide minimum fare that requires limos and sedans to charge at least 35 percent more than what taxis would charge for the same route and imposes a minimum wait time of at least one hour before customers can be picked up.

"These laws amount to nothing more than naked economic protectionism; they are designed to protect the profits of Portland's taxicab companies, and now they are being enforced at everyone else's expense," said Institute for Justice Attorney Wesley Hottot, which represents the plaintiffs. "Portland's minimum-fare law and minimum wait time have nothing to do with protecting the riding public. They have everything to do with protecting the city's taxicab companies from competition and driving up prices for consumers."

Oh good heavens, how could that be? Cronyism at Portland City Hall? There must be some mistake!

Or not - when even The Zero gets involved enough to print an article about it, the stench has to be pretty bad.

 

Related articles

• Oregon Attorney General John Kroger will leave office early to be Reed College president (oregonlive.com)

Bad News For The High Priests

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

The fact that there has been no temperature rise over the past 12 years has convinced the man who wrote just a few years ago that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” He has been quoted in The Guardian that 80% of humans will perish by 2100 AD, and this climate change will last 100,000 years. According to James Lovelock, by 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine. Indeed “[t]he people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain”.

He now concedes that his views were unduly alarmist and that available data don't support his earlier prophecies. Even worse, he singled out AlGore's "Inconvenient Truth" and material by Tim Flannery as others presenting alarmist prophecies.

Not that any of that matters; the Obama administration's EPA continues to push to regulate coal out of useful existence, and is attempting to regulate lead out of ammunition and fishing tackle, prompting House Republicans to write legislation intended to rein them in. The bureaucrats and environmeddlists have this whole Gaiia and Global Warming thing that they've been using as a club; don't believe for a second that they're going to give it up without a fight. Don't expect to hear much from most of the media nor from "academics", either, because they're fully vested in the Religion.

As noted previously, the extremely intelligent, lovely and charming professor Kari over at University of Oregon has publicly stated that those who are skeptical of "man-made global warming" should be viewed as racists, rounded up and forcibly "treated" for their mental disorders, and that democracy should be suspended until the Really Smart People such as herself can Save The Planet™ and get the world back on track. That could take years; possibly generations. But Kari and her colleagues at UO and elsewhere will persevere.

Doubtless, they'll hook up with Steve Zwick and burn down the homes of a few "deniers", just to make the point.

Related articles

• Daily Benefactor News - Climate Alarmist Calls For Burning Down Skeptics' Homes (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• Green Fascism: The Growing Threat of Eco-Tyranny (mountainrepublic.net)
• Tim Flannery: High Priest Of Gaia (garyware.me)

There Must Be An Election Coming Up

Barry's offering up another illusory bail-out: this vote-buying scheme is directed, supposedly, toward so-called "underwater" mortgage holders. The idea, here, is to give such over-extended folks a measure of what Barry peddled last time so successfully - Hope.

The way the latest scam works is pretty straightforward: take the taxpayers' money out out of one "pot" (in this case, from what's left of TARP) and put it into another, then use that to "write down" the outstanding principal on qualified mortgages. The new "pot", here, once again involves our old friends, Freddie and Fannie, so you know it's all good. Heck, it won't even add to the deficit....

There is, however, one minor little hitch involved, because TARP supposedly has about $135 billion left in its pot - while the negative equity that they claim they'll write down is on the order of $720 billion. In other words, most of these underwater mortgagees won't receive anything more than hope; their principal won't be written down, and Barry knows it. It's a great campaign ploy, though. Given his ratings and his performance to date, if there's one thing Barry knows all about, it's negative equity.

It might be less expensive if Barry just bought them all a hybrid car. After all, according to his fellow Democrats, buying a hybrid or - better yet - a plug-in car will help stop tornados. On the other hand, there's one teeny problem with that strategery as well: people don't like them. Maybe he should just buy everyone a toaster in exchange for their votes.

Related articles

• The Possibility of Home Loan Principal Reductions (loans.org)
• U.S. regulator feels pressure over Freddie, Fannie: report (news.yahoo.com)
• Fannie and Freddie: Slashing Mortgages Is Good Business (propublica.org)
• Housing secretary pushes mortgage write-downs (news.yahoo.com)

Everybody Loves Us

We seek out the good, uplifting news, here - and so we're happy to report that foreign relations have never been better. Obama's constant bowing and apologizing has worked magic!

According to Barry, our country today has many close allies, who all "punch above their weight", as this glowing report from Denmark illustrates:

Two Years Of Obamacare

And as Governor Gary Herbert of Utah notes, we still don't know what's in it.

Gov. Herbert used the often quoted Obamacare prediction of then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when he said, “The idea that we have to pass it to find out what’s in it–we’re still trying to find out what’s in it.  And the more we look and the more we learn the more we don’t like what we’re finding.”

Among other tidbits, it appears that limits may be placed on the number of times you can see your doctor.

Already, some 4 million Americans who had healthcare coverage prior to interference by Democrats now no longer have it. Yet Nanny Pelosi paints a rosy picture in today's op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which she opines that recognizing health care as a right for all is somehow going to build a better country.

Judging from the comments following her blather, people aren't buying.

Related articles

• Pelosi: Obamacare Is Like Declaration of Independence (usamericanfreedom.com)
• Obama reelection campaign urges supporters to say 'I'm for Obamacare' (thehill.com)
• Shock: Hapless Hack Jay Carney Distances White House From Previous Claim That ObamaCare Was a Jobs Bill (minx.cc)
• Obamacare with the Smoke Cleared and Mirrors Cracked (pjmedia.com)

Would you like to play a game?

Sometimes it's like living in a movie - like "War Games", in which a kid gains access to a DOD computer called WOPR and is congenially asked if he'd like to play a game: Global Thermonuclear War. As it turns out, it's not a game. So, what does that have to do with anything? So glad you asked: doubtless, you've run across some of these right-wing whack-jobs who rant endlessly about the United Nations and Agenda 21 and Global Governmental Dominance. You've got to wonder if these folks are on drugs, or just living in a movie; anybody with half a brain is going to look at those loons, shake their head, and long for a return to sanity.

But then, if you take a moment to look, some troubling patterns emerge: what if the loons aren't loons? Could it possibly be that a battle for control is already underway, and you never got the memo? When formerly reputable publications such as Scientific American advocate global governance in order to Save The Planet™, perhaps the loons aren't loons at all.

Consider this: the federal government owns 1 out of every 3 acres in the U.S. — 1 out of every 2 acres in the West - yet the US Senate has passed a "transportation bill that would allocate $1.4 billion to the Land and Water Conservation Fund; a considerable leap from its current $323 million funding level. And what is the purpose of this fund? Its sole mission is to buy and "protect" land. The government already owns half of the land in the West, and 1/3 of all land in the USA, yet apparently the Senate believes that there is a pressing need to grab even more.

And when they do that, it removes property from the tax rolls forever. This is how the federal government now "creates jobs and boosts the economy". 

Still think there's no agenda of control? Drill down to your local level:

In Portland, Oregon (whose leaders seek to portray the city as a national model), Portland City Council has banned plastic bags, issued slop-buckets to all households with a concommittant demand that all "food scraps" be composted, and cut garbage service to once every two weeks - without a vote of citizens, and all in less than a year. By the way, although garbage services were autocratically reduced by half, residential rates increased slightly.

But that's not enough: Portland has a website devoted to telling you how to live (along with the innumerable mailers sent to residents, all printed with soy ink on recycled paper). You need to walk or ride a bike. Better yet, the City even tells you what to eat, advising you to take meat off the table, and "don't worry about protein". The exhortations are fundamentally flawed, but that doesn't impact their endless efforts to modify your behavior.

Clearly, there is a strong desire at all levels of government today to control citizen behavior, to limit their choices, and to impose unprecedented restrictions upon their freedom.

The aforementioned right-wing nutjobs have actually been ahead of the curve on this: there is an Agenda 21, it really is about control and global governance, and implementation is underway. And if you're not seeing the pattern, it's because you're not paying attention.

 

Related articles

• Scientists Call For Stronger Global Governance To Address Climate Change (chimalaya.org)
• Agenda 21: Science mag calls for steps toward global governance (junkscience.com)

$top-$ign Cameras In The Park

The Santa Monica Mountains near L.A. are set aside as a series of large parks, with trails for hiking, biking, or just absorbing the views. They also house seven cameras, unobtrusively set up near stop-signs which happen to be located in parking lots and scenic pull-outs. Failure to come to a complete stop, even in such bucolic settings, means you get snapped and eventually sent a $175 ticket.

Of course, the cameras are there purely as a $afety mea$ure, and they just happen to generate some revenue for the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA). It's piddly, really - there are, after all, only seven cameras in these out-of-the-way locations. In FY 2010, MRCA's cut of the resulting fines came to $2.4 million. Arizona-based Redflex Traffic Systems Inc. gets the rest.

PR flack Dash Stolarz insists that the seven cameras are crucial to keeping park roads safe.

Yet the MRCA, which can afford to send a team to court to fight a single $175 ticket, cannot produce any records to back up its claims of actual danger.

How very odd. They make the claim, and rake in over $2 million a year, but they can't produce any documentation to establish that it's merely a safety precaution. Surely they wouldn't lie about such an important matter....