MaxRedline

Round Two

Opponents of efforts to fluoridate the Portland water supply won handily in Tuesday's election, but they're not stopping; they've had just about enough of the underhanded, big money, back-door schemes that have been employed by fluoride backers to get the City Council to implement mass fluridation (Portland City Council unanimously voted to do so after months of behind-the-scenes and undocumented lobbying by proponents; prompting voters to overrule their decision).

Opponents have already filed an initiative petition to amend the City Charter in order to prevent any recurrence of such shenanigans, and they're also calling for investigations into official misconduct:

Opponents also are pressing for an investigation into officials at the Oregon Health Authority, whom they accuse of illegally aiding the pro-fluoride campaign on public time. Clean Water Portland, the committee that fought the fluoride measure, released a collection of emails from OHA officials obtained through the public records law the day before the election.

According to campaign chairwoman Kimberly Kaminski, the emails prove the officials worked behind the scenes with the pro-fluoride campaign to pass the measure. She is calling for an Oregon Department of Justice investigation.

Two current City Council members who voted along with then-mayor Sammy Adams and his sidekick, Randy Leonard, to fluoridate the water supply are up for reelection next year; Dan Saltzman can always return to his family's property development business when he loses, but the future's less certain for Nick "Dead" Fish. Their only hope for continuing to feed at the public trough would be the failure of anybody with credibility to step in to challenge them.

And assuming that opponents can get their Charter amendment onto the ballot next year, things will only get stickier for these two.

 

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105-Year-Old Confederate Statue Suddenly Intimidating

A statue of a Confederate soldier that's stood outside an historic courthouse in Virginia for over a century is now under fire because some folks claim that they find it "intimidating". What poor, poor, albeit precious, little snowflakes we have today.

Suspicions Aroused

Margaret Sanger 

After lo these many years, an awakening of sorts is stirring:

“Abortion is the number one killer of black Americans,” said Rev. Arnold Culbreath, the Urban Outreach Director of Life Issues Institute, said, adding that the black community is “being targeted by Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry.”

According to Culbreath, 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are “intentionally placed” within walking distance of minority neighborhoods.

“Since 1973, abortion on demand in black America has taken more lives than homicides, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and HIV/Aides combined and become the number one cause of death in the black community,” Rev. Walter Hoye, president and founder of the Issues4life Foundation in Berkeley, California, said.

Pastor Stephen Broden, Fair Park Bible Fellowship Church of Dallas, Texas, further decried the lack of black leadership of this issue.

“The NAACP, and the Urban League, and the Congressional Black Caucus, are complicit in the Gosnell clinic if they cannot stand on behalf of the community and push back against this culture of death,” he said.

Over two dozen black religious leaders got together in Washington DC to demand that Congress open investigations into the abortion industries, which they noted have been more efficient at killing black Americans than the KKK ever was. It's odd that they're only now starting to get it; Planned Parenthood was, after all, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger as a means for removal of "inferiors".

It certainly took the "black community" a long time to discern the obvious. But they're finally starting to get perturbed: Why, they wonder, did the legacy media devote so much coverage to the Jodi Arias trial than to the Gosnell trial? Why, indeed.

At some point, now that they've awakened to the fact that they're being targeted for genocide, it may begin to occur to them that Democratics have been targeting them all along: the KKK was founded and populated by Democratics, they who created the Jim Crow laws, and it was Democratics who tore apart their neighborhoods and replaced them with Cabrini Greens. It was Democratics who created the welfare state, and it was they who crafted rules promoting the disintegration of families as a means for entry into the welfare state.

If they're starting to get angry now, wait until recognition of the other stuff begins to dawn on them. 

 

 

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DOD Didn't Need No Steenking Permits

In the Brooks Range, Alaska, rather a large mess lies amid the otherwise picturesque setting. Been there since the 1940's and 1950's. Left there by the government. Now the natives are thinking it's long past time to clean things up.

The fuel drums, an estimated 130 of them, have been sitting there for more than 50  years, left by the Department of Defense when it did work in the area in the 1940s and ’50s. In addition to the fuel barrels, there are 700 five-gallon fuel cans piled up, along with other miscellaneous debris that was abandoned when researchers ended their studies in the late 1950s.

All in all, there's about seven tons of junk out there. The Natives have been pushing for a decade, now, to get rid of the stuff, but the wheels of government today grind slowly, if at all:

A temporary labor camp must be built to Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s specifications, which includes a 12-foot-by-20-foot shed, he said. The cost of flying in the lumber for the building is $10,000 alone, Lynn said.

Several permits were required from several agencies to get the project approved and an archeological survey of the proposed summer campsite still must be conducted because the area is home to archeological remains, Lynn said. The amount of red tape required for the project was surprising, he said.

“I couldn’t believe all the permits we needed to get just to pick up some garbage,” he said.

Back in the day, the feds didn't need permits; they just dropped it all down and left it. Of course, that was before GreenPeas and the Sierra Club and the EPA. And OSHA. It's a whole 'nother ballgame, now. Reckon so.

 

The Great Porkland "Arts Tax" Scam

Susie Nielsen over at The Zero bemoans the difficulties plaguing the Porkland "Arts Tax" and wonders whether it can be saved. After all, it sounds so easy: everybody in Porkland kicks in $35 to support "the Arts". But the question isn't whether it can be saved, the question is should it be saved?

As presented in the propaganda, it was For The Children™; a ruse for which the average low-info Porkland voter has been repeatedly demonstrated to fall. It passed with 62% of the vote. Doubtless, many Porklanders giddily imagined the schools hiring more art teachers and turning their precious snowflakes into celebrated artistes. But now, a few little details have started to emerge, such as: everyone who makes $1000 in a year is supposed to pay $35 to the city. Make a million, pay the same. and as many households have two income-earners, the low-income household pays at least $70.

And it gets better: PERS and So-So Security recipients don't have to pay the tax. Better yet, some 60% of funds thus raised go not to schools, but to organizations with already-generous endowments, such as Porkland Symphony and the Opera. In other words, to the black-tie crowd. That whole "It's For The Children" thing sucks them in every time.

Oh, and it's retroactive: if you lived in Porkland at some point in 2012 but moved elsewhere, you're supposed to pay up.

The lunacy is abundant.

Benghazi And Media

A pretty good take on the media lack of coverage, the Barky administration's efforts at damage control, and the blogosphere, right here.

Dem. Rep. Claims Republicans "Politicize" Benghazi

In another example of the way Democratics twist things to suit their equally twisted mind-set, Rep. Cummings of Maryland lambasted Republicans in general and Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), for what he believes was the congressman using the Benghazi attack for his own political gain.

As is so often the case, Mediaite gets it wrong: Cummings doesn't believe it; he merely claims it. There's a difference, and it's a particularly ironic one in view of the fact that Barky and his administration deliberately lied to the American people for personal political gain.

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Cover of The Second Amendment

Gun murder rates have dropped by nearly half in the USA since the mid-1990's, along with other crimes, yet thanks to mainstream media, more than half of Americans believe that gun crimes have risen.

Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show.

Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.

The drop in gun murders, which peaked during the Clinton administration before declining under the reviled (by Leftists) Bush administration, occurred despite the fact that the USA has more guns per capita than any other nation on the planet. Further, running contrary to the image painted by the Left:

Though violence has dropped, the United States still has a higher murder rate than most other developed countries, though not the highest in the world, the Pew study noted.

Key words: most, not the highest. Such data conflict with the desire of folks like Oregon state senator Ginny Burdick and other Leftists to eviscerate, or better yet, to eliminate entirely, the Second Amendment rights of U.S. citizens. Thus, their approach is to peddle a different narrative in the hope that nobody will notice. They routinely call, for example, for "civil discourse" - which to the Left has but one meaning: see things my way. Yet they're the first to engage in ad-hominem attacks and derogatory terminology; labeling opponents "extremists" or "tea-baggers" or gracing them with other terms of endearment.

They call for "sensible" gun-control measures, which translated means that anyone who disagrees with them is an "extremist" - when in point of fact, the Second Amendment clearly states that the rights of citizens to own and bear arms shall not be infringed. The wording is unambiguous; in order to undermine it, they appeal to "sensible, common-sense" infringement - as if those who disagree with them lack common sense, and are therefore dangerous "extremists".

No, the real extremists are to be found, in virtually every case, among the Left. How else can they claim, with a straight face, that "nobody needs more than six bullets to go hunting"? That's not what they're after - yet. But since the Second Amendment doesn't refer to hunting, they're simply taking baby steps, under a false flag, to eviscerate it by convincing their gullible base otherwise.

And as the majority of "journalists" are Leftists, they play right along with intentional distortion and deception.

Palm Beach Sheriff Bradshaw: Turn In Your Neighbors

Stasi spy camera, from the Stasi Museum in Berlin 

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said.

Didn't the Stasi have a similar program? Apparently, if you don't like the government, you best keep it under your hat; in Bradshaw's county, theyll be sending folks to your door if they hear about it.

Without invoking Godwin's Law, his new program seems to bear a striking resemblance to those enacted by the Nazis, the Soviets, and others of that ilk. Perhaps Gov. Rick Scott will whip out his veto pen. If not, Bradshaw has a million dollars to play with.

Wasn't this country founded by a bunch of fellers who hated the government at the time?

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The Glories Of Rail

TriMet's ticket machines are notoriously unreliable, which may account for part of the reason why comparatively few bother to pay to ride their trains. Some machines have had reported downtimes of over 35%, and today, local media reports that as many as 2,000 people a month, attempting to pay with a credit card, have had the card rejected and an electronic cancellation message sent to the issuing banks - though Oregonian guy Joseph Rose claims that those were "fraud alert" messages, so apparently there's some confusion amongst our crack media professionals in this regard.

And while Clackamas County residents got started too late in the game to prevent an unwanted light rail line from being constructed into the suburban Milwaukie area, Clark County residents are set against running a line from Portland into their county, in Washington state, despite cajoling and threats from various politicians - so much so that Oregonian's Mapes referred to the county as "Clarkistan"; a takeoff on the popular term, the "Clackistani Uprising" resulting from that county's efforts to stop "Portland Creep".

Left unmentioned in Mapes' article is the fact that what's happened in Clackamas County has also motivated people in Washington County to take preemptive action against plans for yet another light rail line; this one planned for Hwy. 99W. Notably, citizens in suburban Tigard and King City voted to require their approval before the folks who've been tossing money around can bring their plans forward. Probably, "Washingtonstan" just doesn't have that "ring" to it.

In any case, Portland's ill-advised foray into the streetcar business has also been going through some rocky times: not only did the folks in Lake Oswego (Clackamas County) shoot down the city's carefully-crafted plan to run a streetcar line into that suburban town, but "United Streetcar" has been a complete bust. "United Streetcar" was formed as an offshoot of Oregon Iron Works to build streetcars right here in the good ol' USA, and has been an integral part of Portland's dream of being a global leader in "green technology".

United Streetcar, a subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, was supposed to manufacture five new Portland streetcars and have them in service in 2012. None was ready.

They were initially supposed to build six, but after it became clear that they're completely inept when it comes to building 19th-century transportation vehicles, Portland cut the order to five cars - but at the same price as they'd agreed to pay for six. Hey, it's just taxpayer money. "United Streetcar" also inked deals to build cars for Tucson, Arizona and Washington, D.C. And who knows? It's entirely possible that Tucson and D.C. will eventually get the cars. Perhaps in, say, 2050. They wer four years late in delivering the first car to Portland, and that one's had so many problems that it's due to be taken out of service for at least six months if "United Streetcar" ever manages to get another one operational.

Better yet, it's been proven on a couple of occasions that a middle-aged guy can actually get from point A to point B faster by walking, rather than taking the Portland Streetcar. But Portland Streetcar, run by long-time Friend of Neil Rick Gustafson, is in it for the long slog. Neil Goldschmidt may be gone, but the tentacles of his network run deep and strong in Portland and Salem to this day.

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