Harassing cops at Occupy Denver with chants of, "The police are the army of the rich!" In reality the police are the army of civilized society that lives by the rule of law.
In the interest of being “fair and balanced” my family and I recently stopped by Occupy Denver at Civic Center Park across from the state capitol. Back in 2009, we also attended the pre-Tea Party stimulus bill protest at the capitol, then the follow-up Tea Party protest.
This time around we were in Denver for the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Expo to enjoy the fruits of capitalism provided by evil corporations like Vail Resorts and Intrawest. I’m pleased to report that Colorado ski resorts and ski and snowboard retailers were doing a brisk business.
It’s strange how the free market works: People provide a product based on demand and then compete to make that product as economical and accessible as possible in order to profit from said product. Everyone wins who wants to win in this system. The catch is that you have to work, and work hard, to succeed.
Meanwhile, just around the corner at Occupy Denver, the dregs of society were gathered to protest that same system. They claim it’s Wall Street in particular they’re protesting, but by and large they blame capitalism in general for society’s ills.
What they haven’t figured out is that while Wall Street is certainly a problem, especially its cozy relationship with porky politicians in Washington, D.C., it is not the poster boy for capitalism. The poster boy, among many other poster boys, is the person exhibiting at the Ski and Snowboard Expo working hard to deliver a great product.
In one of my earlier eyewitness Tea Party posts, I wrote the following:
Another striking thing about the protest was how orderly and well-behaved everyone was. This was in stark contrast to your typical left-wing protest, where profanity, invective, and mean-spiritedness prevail. My hope is that the hard-working, family-oriented American wins the day and wins back our country.
An f-bomb throwing evangelist exchanges pleasantries with f-bombing anarchists at Occupy Denver. Nice.
Some objected to these general characterizations as being unfair to progressives, but the dichotomy between the Tea Party and Occupy protests I witnessed proved the theory, at least at the Denver versions of the protests.
Immediately upon arrival at Occupy Denver the onslaught of “profanity, invective and mean-spiritedness” began in earnest. A group of anarchists was harassing the cops, who were merely hanging around to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. They chanted, “The police are the army of the rich!” I asked one of the policemen if he was part of the army of the rich, and he just shook his head as if to say, “Yeah, right.”
Then, an “evangelist” approached the anarchists, waving a Bible and punctuating every other word with the F-word. They yelled at each other for awhile, the anarchists matching every evangelical F-word with their own F-bombs and some sacrilege to boot.
That scene got old rather quickly, so we wandered into the heart of the beast, a motley collection of 911 Truthers, punks with spikes and tattoos, neo-Nazis, hipster dufus wanabees, the homeless and a lonely man with a Ron Paul t-shirt. The area in which they congregated was dirty, disheveled and disorganized. We didn’t stay long; there wasn’t really much to see, other than losers with nothing better to do.
Running with the Devil: The motley crew of anarchists, communists, neo-Nazis, punksters, 911 Truthers, the homeless and other losers at Occupy Denver.
My overall impression was that those who were first attracted to the movement and who may have had a legitimate beef about the abuses of Wall Street likely abandoned the protest to the fringe elements. This reinforces my theory that anyone who’s really serious about reforming Wall Street should join the Tea Party. Tea Partiers, at least this Tea Partier, very much resent the immoral and unethical relationship between Wall Street and the Federal government whereby the largest Wall Street donors are ensured bailouts when their risky, shady deals go south. Everyone else can go to hell.
The system is rigged, but it’s rigged by big government. Banking regulations, for instance, favor the existence of giant banks. The regulations are designed to make it difficult for small banks to be competitive, thus capital and the risk associated with it are concentrated in very few hands. If that risk was spread out among smaller banks, systemic crashes would be averted. Now, when one giant bank collapses it threatens to collapse the entire system, but that’s how porky politicians like it.
Now that's more like it... People buying and selling goods and services at the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Expo. These ordinary, hard-working people were decidedly happier, enjoying the fruits of their labors, than were the bitchy baby Occupiers around the corner at Civic Center Park in Denver.
Therefore, why would one who doesn’t like the games Wall Street plays want to make the Federal government larger? So that it can continue to consolidate its political power with economic power? This is a recipe that will ensure the poor get poorer while the connected few rich get richer, which is why the likes of Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, George Soros and Warren Buffet are in favor of this disaster recipe arrangement.
There really is no rational reason to vote Democrat, the party dedicated to growing government at the expense of the individual. Leftist movements have historically left misery and destruction in their wake, from the French Revolution to the people’s revolutions in Russia, China, Korea and Cuba. The Occupy protest I witnessed was a microcosm of what happens when the left is in control, which is to say hell on earth.
The proverbial elephant in the room in Megan Feldman's ironically-entitled political piece in 5280 Magazine, The Elephants in the Room, was the obvious Progressive bubble bias that, among other things, created a Bizarro Arizona Immigration Law out of the thin freaking air.
Following is a letter to the editor I wrote to 5280 Magazine, Denver’s hip, urban and edgy city magazine geared toward Denver’s upwardly mobile Hipster Dufus crowd. As a little background to my letter, Megan Feldman wrote an article in the November issue of 5280 about the implosion of Scott McInnis’ campaign for governor of Colorado this past election cycle.
Being curious and hoping to glean some interesting and perhaps scintillating information about how and why the campaign went so horribly awry, I was sorely disappointed. It merely regurgitated what I already knew and what had been covered by local media and here at the Daily Plunge.
What did interest me were the little throw-away lines and descriptions sprinkled throughout the text that revealed a certain bias. Bias is obvious and expected in opinion pieces, but this one wasn’t floated to the readership as an opinion piece, but as a hard news expose.
When presented as news, bias is a bit more subtle, but you can pick it up if you have a keen eye. For instance, when a conservative was referenced in Feldman’s article, he was saddled with the additional adjectival baggage of “polarizing right-wing Republican,” but the liberal in the race was simply the “Democratic candidate.” But that’s not all, as you’ll see in my admittedly sarcastic letter to the editor:
I have a difficult time believing anything Megan Feldman wrote in The Elephants in the Room when she trots out the usual Progressive Urban Legends, such as, “…he became one of the first major GOP politicians to praise the Arizona law that requires law enforcement officers to stop people they suspect may be in the country illegally.” Seriously?
I’m not sure if Feldman or the editors of 5280 are familiar with a handy tool called Google. Had they simply Googled the Arizona law, they would have found that the law says no such thing. But I suppose fact-checking is no longer necessary, as long as you simply repeat what you hear in the Progressive bubbles in which you circulate.
If you’re willing to throw out whoppers like that, with nary an editor questioning the veracity of the claim despite the presence of Google and the ability to access it practically anywhere, any time, it makes me wonder about the believability of the magazine as a whole.
How many of the assertions made in 5280’s articles are based on Progressive tribal knowledge? I get the sense through reading the magazine that most of its writers and editors are of the tolerant and open-minded Hipster Dufus set who were taught in college that it’s tolerant and open-minded to close your mind to all things that are not deemed as tolerant and open-minded.
Megan Feldman’s article merely makes my point.
So there! Interestingly, and to my pleasant surprise, the editor wrote me back and said that 5280 would run a correction in the next issue. That’s a positive start to what I hope will be a keener eye toward eliminating “what I want to be true,” ala the 60 Minutes Bush National Guard story, with what really is true. I will continue to crusade against fake-but-accurate coverage in my local news media. I hope someday you’ll join me.
The other day I marshaled the evidence against democracy gone wild, where voters are asked to make decisions on a raft of amendments and initiatives they have no business voting on in the first place. As if to make my point, I found this initiative on the ballot I filled out today during early voting:
Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an Initiated Ordinance to require the creation of an extraterrestrial affairs commission to help ensure the health, safety, and cultural awareness of Denver residents and visitors in relation to potential encounters or interactions with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or their vehicles, and fund such commission from grants, gifts and donations?
The truth is out there, and Denver voters have a unique opportunity to prepare for the inevitable extraterrestrial visit scheduled for 2012.
Shall we? I said “no,” but I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Appropriately, it was the last item on the ballot; a surprise ending, if you will, that was the electoral equivalent of The Usual Suspects. It turns out that Keyser Soze was an alien all along. Fire the Grid, baby!
Hola! Me llamo Tomas Tancredo. Soy de Colorado.
In a previous post, dated July 24, 2010, Yours Truly predicted that Scott McInnis would be Colorado’s Republican candidate for governor, despite charges of plagiarism. I also predicted that Tom Tancredo would not end up running as a third-party candidate and that, ultimately, Colorado would be saddled with another liberty-killing, job-killing, tax-and-spend, regulating liberal, current Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.
Months later, it turns out that I was wrong on just about every count. And, my final prediction about Hickenlooper’s ascension to the governor’s mansion is increasingly coming into doubt. A recent poll shows Tancredo only four points behind Hickenlooper, which is within the margin of error, especially considering that six percent said they were undecided.
Meanwhile, Dan Maes, who won the Republican primary, is dropping into oblivion, fighting his own round of ethics problems. What those are, I’m not sure, but it is certain that Republicans are having buyer’s remorse and are moving in droves back to Tancredo.
In late August, the same Rasmussen poll had Maes at 31 percent and Tancredo at 18 percent. Now, Tancredo’s at 38 and Maes is down to 12, which shows that just about anything can and will happen in this election. Therefore, I apologize for my earlier post, which simply repeated the conventional wisdom.
Tancredo is well known as practically a one-issue candidate. Whatever the policy issue being debated, Tancredo is almost certain to bring it back around to illegal immigration. He’s been laser-focused on this issue for as long as I can remember, before, during and after his time as a U.S. Congressman.
Ironically, what has been Tancredo’s Achilles heel may actually be a boon in 2010. The Obama administration and the left in general have been so transparently dishonest about immigration that even Hispanics are starting to question the motives behind framing illegal immigration as a racial issue. It may not be a great idea to tell Hispanics who are playing by the rules to essentially step to the back of the citizenship line since we have tons of people breaking the law who are more deserving. And why are they more deserving? My guess is that they represent a gigantic and uneducated voting bloc that is less likely to starve the oxygen that feeds the fire of today’s Democratic Party: dependency and grievance mongering. Ignorance is the political elixir that keeps progressive/leftist ideology from completely falling out of favor in America.
Like me, a lot of people are exhausted by the constant racially-divisive demagoguery. Look around you; it’s 50 years after Jim Crow! Can we please move on and judge people by the content of their character, rather than this childish insistence on defining people by their ethnicity, sex or whatever the identity du jour might be? Progressives are wearing the ideological equivalent of plaid polyester as they, with dramatic irony, refuse to progress past 1972.
As usual, I digress, and will continue to digress in upcoming posts that officially endorse other candidates across our great land. Next time we’ll discuss the race in the 37th Congressional District in Los Angeles County where Star Parker is poised to help break the shackles of those toiling under the yoke of Uncle Sam’s Plantation…
Flush, Flush, Fizz, Fizz, and so forth: Club Soda is taking the the Daily Flush mantle and making it his own whilst Henshaw boozes his way across Idaho. The title of this temporary series, in lieu of the Flush, recognizes the fizz in Club Soda and the likeliness that it will be posted inconsistently.
Plagiarism Pays? Apparently it did for Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis, to the tune of $300,000. That’s $300,000, as in a 3 with five zeroes behind it. I need to renegotiate my contract with The Daily Plunge! McInnis “wrote” a series of essays about water rights that turned out to be written mostly by Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs years earlier. McInnis blames it on a research assistant; the research assistant blames McInnis, and so it goes. McInnis claims that when you’re a busy politician stuff falls through the cracks. Be that as it may, my vote in the Republican primary is going to Dan Maes. I’m exhausted by career politicians whose first priority is Me, followed by I.
Handicapping Colorado: Tom Tancredo, former U.S. Congressman best known either fairly or unfairly as a one-issue politician (immigration), is threatening to join the fray as the third candidate to vie in the Republican gubernatorial primary on Aug. 10. It’s probably not going to happen and it will still be the seasoned politician with a peppery past of questionable ethics, McInnis, against Maes, who has little to no name recognition. McInnis will win the primary because people can’t help themselves when they look at a ballot and see a name they’re familiar with. Why bother researching the candidates before you vote? That wouldn’t be the democratic way. The McInnis scandal virtually assures that the Democratic nominee, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, will be
Colorado’s next governor. Though Hickenlooper is sure to saddle Coloradoans with higher taxes and more intrusive regulations he can’t be all bad. He was one of the founders of the Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver’s LoDo district. The beer is fantastic, but I always keep a close eye on my wallet when I’m there.
Lohan Watch: Oops! I meant Lauper Watch… You may remember Cyndi Lauper from such one-hit wonders of the 1980s as Girls Just Want to Have Fun and True Colors. Okay, so that makes her a two-hit wonder and, apparently, an expert on foreign and domestic policy. Here’s a sampling of Ms. Lauper elevating the discussion in America. Ignorance and Intolerance Warning: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2010/07/23/cyndi-lauper-bush-a-criminal-evangelism-bullsht-nsfw/
Dude! It's another sign of the Apocalypse!
Around the corner from my home in Denver sits a fairly lonely mini strip center. About a month or so ago it consisted of a pizza parlor and a liquor store with a vacancy in between. Then, some genius drove by and had a brainstorm. “Dude, what’s the perfect business to complement the pizza and liquor purveyors who comprise this mercantile center?” Thus CannaMart was born, or at least that’s the way I like to imagine it was born.
If you haven’t guessed what CannaMart sells, it goes by many names: Mary Jane, ganja, reefer, weed, dope, smoke, grass, wacky tobacky, diggity dank, marijuana and, of course, cannabis. I learned of its existence via the mouths of babes, namely my children, who noticed the new sign heralding this weed-dispensing establishment. That should have been my first warning that maybe medical marijuana isn’t the best thing for my community, but of course my interest was piqued.
Colorado voters legalized marijuana for medical use in 2000. At that time, the dispensation of said weed was quite restrictive. In 2007 a court lifted the five-patient limit and the next thing you know they were popping up all over Denver and other points and places around Colorado to the point that one of Denver’s main streets, Broadway, is now known as Broadsterdam.
Though I’d known of its existence – that is, legal medical marijuana – I was somewhat confused. Why isn’t it dispensed in pill form at a pharmacy? After all, it’s not the weed itself that provides the so-called medicinal effect, but THC and Cannbidiol (CBD), the active ingredients.
I had lots of other questions as well. The whole thing just seemed, well… off, for lack of a better term. So I figured the only way to get a handle on medical marijuana was to visit my local CannaMart.
The first thing I noticed was that all the windows are darkened, covered by black foam so that you can’t see inside. The barely-legible window sign told me that CannaMart doesn’t open until 11 a.m., an hour or two later than most businesses, but I suppose it’s best to keep hours similar to those of your “patients”.
I have to admit that I expected more of a third-world hashish market feel when I walked into the reception area, but it was actually more like a regular doctor’s office. I spoke with the receptionist through a clear bullet-proof window slot and asked her if I could speak with the proprietor.
Fortunately, I guess, she’s a partner in this business and was happy, or at least neutral, about talking to me about medical marijuana, so she buzzed me in through the locked door and into the belly of the beast.
Though she was fairly talkative and willing to answer most of my questions, she refused to give me her name or the name of her partner. In an ironic twist of fate, further research seems to indicate that this proprietor/partner is none other than Natalia, the Russian temptress who exchanged a series of love letters with the host of this blog.
I was also refused a request to take a picture or two of the medicinal area where patients can choose between varieties of smoke-able, edible, drinkable and encapsulated versions of marijuana. Natalia told me that CannaMart has an exclusive photography arrangement with someone else. Is that someone else a site dedicated to the celebration of the marijuana plant called Nug Porn? You be the judge. By the way, the existence of Porn Nug ought to tell you everything you need to know about whether or not marijuana is treasured for its “medicinal” value or for some of its other attributes.
I asked Natalia what motivated her to get into the Cannabis business. Besides her desire to “help people,” Natalia saw a recession-proof business opportunity. After all, she said, “What am I going to do? Sell cars? No one’s buying cars. Sell insurance? There’s an insurance agency on every corner. Real estate? The real estate market sucks.”
- Waterworld – Quite Possibly the best movie ever…..EVER!!!!!
Like many Floridians and Americans in general, I am intently following the coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I have been fishing and diving in these waters for over 20 years, so it is infuriating to watch the mediocre response from BP, our arguably infallible federal government, and the unfortunately non-empowered local governments.
According to an article found on the always unbiased (see sarcasm) NPR website, Lisa Jackson, administrator of the EPA, says that the federal government is doing a great job so far. She goes on to say that we should not criticize their efforts for failure to do so would be “Monday-Morning Quarterbacking.” I hope someone is checking Jackson’s bank statements for a large direct deposit from John Q Taxpayer into her checking account made possible by the Karl Obama Administration.
BP has already dumped 655,000 gallons of a toxic oil dispersant into the gulf called Corexit. Jackson’s EPA gave BP 24 hours to use a less toxic, more effective dispersant, but BP outright refused… with no consequences. Way to stick to your guns, Fed and EPA!! Good thing there aren’t any wealthy oil lobbyists in Washington or I would be suspicious of this lack of consequences (see more sarcasm).
By the way, using a dispersant for an oil spill is the equivalent of someone defecating in your bottle of drinking water, dumping a bunch of toxic chemicals in the water that only make the feces break down into smaller chunks and then yelling, “Drink up!”
However, my anger over the lack of response and obvious corruption was temporarily curtailed by an article about Kevin Costner and his oil/water separating centrifuge. This brought to light a long series of crazy coincidences between Kevin Costner, the oil spill and the must-see 1995 blockbuster movie Waterworld.
1) Both the movie and the oil spill in the Gulf are disasters of epic proportions.
2) Kevin started the company Ocean Therapy Solutions after the Exxon Valdez spill. Coincidentally, the ship full of oil featured in the movie was the Exxon Valdez.
3) The bad guys in the movie were called smokers because all of their engines ran on nothing but oil.
4) Kevin Costner co-starred with Elizabeth Mary Mastrantonio in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (another must-see). Mastrantonio later starred in The Abyss, which is completely set under water.
5) The so-called Waterworld is created due to global warming melting the ice caps, which every actor in Hollywood, including Kevin, believes is caused by human influence… or should I say the “ancients”?
6) When Kevin dives down to see the submerged city in the movie, it is clearly the city of Denver because your can see the Norwest Building, which is shaped like a cash register. Club Soda currently resides in Denver, future underwater megapolis now sweltering in dry 60-degree temperatures.
7) Dennis Hopper plays the villain in the movie and his character’s name is Deacon. My name….the Deacon.
Finally, if Kevin’s oil-water separator (I find it hard to believe that it’s really difficult to separate two things that are notorious for not mixing) is embraced by BP or the Fed, he and his company will most likely generate millions in profit. This makes me think that the original explosion of the rig was a conspiracy created by none other than…
"With this arrow I will finally break even on that stupid movie" - KC
Once again, my family and I saddled up Old Blue and headed for Colorado’s state capitol for an old-fashioned protest. Last time, as you may recall, we joined a hastily assembled and relatively small crowd (maybe 500 or so) to protest the so-called Stimulus Bill, which President Obama was signing down the road at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
This time, we joined a much larger crowd estimated at around 3,000-4,000 as part of a larger grassroots movement and nationwide gathering on Tax Day to protest government spending and the tax policy necessitated by that spending.
They called it a Tea Party, in honor of the original American patriots who protested the British taxation of tea (without representation, which was their main beef) by tossing a bunch of it into Boston Harbor (a.k.a., Bastan Hawbaw). I’m not sure the analogy holds up very well to close scrutiny, but I suppose it’s a brand of sorts that people can identify with.
So, what’s our beef? Why bother? Isn’t the government trying its best to “stimulate” the economy? My reasons for supporting the movement are best encapsulated by James Madison, who wrote in Federalist #62:
“The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood…”
This is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today. These mammoth spending bills, which spend money we don’t have, are both voluminous and incoherent to the point that even those words fail to accurately describe their monstrosity. What we’re seeing is a massive transfer of wealth from the average person to the bottomless pit of political favoritism and cronyism, paid for in part by the current generation, but certain to multiply to future generations.
Any serious and ideologically-blind study of the economic consequences of this type of spending policy, and the term policy is being used very loosely here, shows that it is unsustainable. At the recent G-20 Summit, even socialist Europe balked a bit at America’s latest and seemingly unending spending spree. If America goes down that road, who’s left to support Europe and defend it from the crazies who are feverishly working to develop nuclear weapons so they can spring their version of Utopia on an unsuspecting, welfare-numbed, drug-addled, and American Idolized West?
Moreover, a government that grows outside of the bounds set by the Constitution is certain to infringe on our individual liberties. The state that takes on a parental role supplants the role of the individual and the family. What has made America exceptional is not the government’s ability to provide for every need, but to empower the individual to meet his own needs without governmental interference.
Thus the Declaration of Independence declares, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These unalienable rights are not derived as government handouts. I do not have a right to free medical care (which I’ll be on a waiting list to receive) or anything else from the public weal. Nor do I have an express right to “happiness”. But I do have the right to pursue happiness, unfettered by government dictating to me how I should pursue that happiness.
It’s important to remember that the founders did not dive headlong, willy-nilly into the creation of our unique governmental system. Instead, they wrangled over every jot and tittle. They painstakingly studied the history and form of every government since the dawn of civilization, marking their strengths and weaknesses to derive a form most suited for a free people.
It’s safe to say that the founders’ studious approach is not taken by our current leaders, either Democrat or Republican. The only studies they do are based on maintaining their power and filling the coffers of those who help them maintain their power.
So when a bill comes before Congress that’s piled three feet high in pork and partisan paybacks and sold as stimulus, thinking people begin to think that maybe we’re heading in the wrong direction. The majority of people I met at today’s protest were thinking people; average Joes, if you will, who want our government to exercise self-control and discipline in order to secure our right to pursue happiness. Happiness, as anyone knows, is not found at the DMV or any other government bureaucracy that makes you stand in line for hours and has no concept of customer service, nor does it care.
Another striking thing about the protest was how orderly and well-behaved everyone was. This was in stark contrast to your typical left-wing protest, where profanity, invective, and mean-spiritedness prevail. My hope is that the hard-working, family-oriented American wins the day and wins back our country.
Recent Comments