To the ramparts!
Prepare the boiling oil! Even Ruben Mamoulian has been released from the dungeon for active duty.
Stately Blaska Manor, historic and gracious seat of the Blaska Policy Research Center and Experimental Work Farm, is in the gun sights of the collectivists.
The control freaks are afraid that the squire of the Stately Manor may make a free choice decision without their parental guidance.
The Kathleen has deployed government bureaucrats like flying monkeys to cast a wide net - 57,000 residential and commercial properties throughout Dane County! As always, the besiegers invoke the name of that higher god they worship: The Environment! For any depredation can be justified in her holy name.
This time, the forces of freedom have mobilized before it is too late. On Saturday, the squire of Stately Manor was given possession via the Postal Service of two large-format (11 x 6") full-color postcards personalized with my name on the cover.
Both bore the same alarum: That my property rights were at risk.
I have reproduced the mailing address side of one of the cards, which announces "David J. Blaska - Dane County Politicians are TARGETING YOU."
Your BlaskaBlogger is accustomed to being targeted. But I can imagine someone less hardened by the slings and arrows of outrageous politics getting the same message in their name.
I am reproducing the obverse side of the second postcard, the one with the calendar. Its mailing side, too, was personalized with my name, urging "Don't Forget ..." accompanied by a full-color photograph of a red ribbon tied around a finger (think Uncle Billie in the holiday movie It's a Wonderful Life.)
This card was sent to 32,000 property owners throughout Dane County by a collaboration of four membership organizations: Madison Area Builders Assn., Realtors Assn. of South Central Wis., Smart Growth Madison, and the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce.
Huzzah! The Chamber has landed!
I was surprised that I own shoreland property, to say the least. However, it appears my friends in Progressive Dane and the Sierra Club who control the Dane County Board would like to change the rules.
In their grab for more government control, the likes of John Hendrick (PD-Willy Street) and Brett Hulsey, a former paid operative of the Sierra Club, would extend shoreland zoning from its current 75 feet to 1000 feet from any lake or pond, including some retention ponds, and 300 feet from a river or stream.
Sure enough, there's a retention pond down the way from Stately Blaska Manor.
What's more, county zoning would, for the first time, supercede municipal zoning.
The county proposes that all properties within this expanded shoreland zone could be regulated when there is new construction or when a property owner makes improvements such as an addition, construction of a garage or accessory building or other such improvements. Property owners would have to conduct various activities such as installing special vegetation buffers, painting their houses or removing existing structures to earn the necessary 100 "points" to obtain a building permit.
These regulations go far beyond what the State of Wisconsin requires. Requests for an economic impact study to justify such legerdemain have been ignored by an increasingly arrogant county.
Two hearings are coming up this week, both from 7 to 9 p.m.:
- Tuesday, November 17 at the Verona Senior Center, 108 Paoli St., Verona
- Wednesday, November 18, at the Sun Prairie City Hall, 300 E. Main St., Sun Prairie
Consult Dane County Property Rights for more details.
Hey, Obama, straighten up and fly right!
Quit bowing and scraping to foreign potentates! Quit kowtowing to your equals. Here he is, bowing to the emperor of Japan, the son of World War II's Hirohito!
Doesn't Hillary Clinton's State Department do briefings any more? The chief of protocol on unpaid furlough? Power Line, notes:
Obama's breach of protocol is of a piece with the substance of his foreign policy.
He means to teach Americans to bow before monarchs. He embodies the ideological multiculturalism that sets the United States on the same plane as other regimes based on tribal privilege and royal bloodlines. He gives expressive form to the idea that the United States now willingly prostrates itself before the rest of the world. He declares that the United States is a country like any other, only worse, because we have so much for which to apologize.[Powerline: Why Is This Man Bowing?]
How can we break Barack the Obama of his obsequiousness to foreigners? A small electric shock? (Dance, community organizer!)
Allahu is not so Akbar
Charles Krauthammer:
What a surprise -- that someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" (the "God is great" jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan's religious beliefs.
... The popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
... They suffered. He listened. He snapped. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one.
... Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It's a danger, clear and present. [Explaining Away Mass Murder]
No democracy without accountability
Credit where it is due. Jim E. Doyle vetoes the Sierra Club takeover of the DNR. Hey, kids! If you don't like what your governor is doing with the environment, vote him out of office and elect someone better. That's called "democracy." It IS our environment, after all. Not enough votes for a two-thirds override.
Yet one more example of Tommy G. Thompson being proven correctemundo!
Here is Spencer Black, the unelected and unappointed secretary of the DNR:
"We should now act again on our word in the face of the Governor's most disappointing veto. I will ask Speaker Sheridan to quickly schedule an override vote. Decisions about our outdoors should be based on science and what is best for our environment, not on what is best for politicians and special interest groups."
Science? Wasn't Marxism supposed to be a "science." Folks, you and I are corporeal beings. We share the earth with the brown bears, the gypsy moths, and the lady's slippers.
If H1N1 and other health matters can be regulated by a governor's appointee, if speed limits can be regulated by a governor's appointee, if the tax code can be interpreted by a governor's appointee, if highway safety can be controlled by a governor's appointee ...
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- A major state agency will continue to be accountable to the people. Hooray (however briefly) for Gov. Jim E. Doyle. (Hint: remember when they used to call it "Damn Near Russia?")
- Terence Wall is serious. The candidate for the U.S. Senate has hired Ryan Murray as his campaign manager. Murray helped get Randy Hopper elected state senator from the Oshkosh-Fond du Lac area, succeeding my friend Carol Roessler.
Lauren Stousland has signed on as T. Wall's chief of staff. She previously worked for both GM and Chrysler executives, in particular Lee Iacocca. Campaign treasurer is well known attorney Eric McLeod. - Hurrah to the appointment of the Bishop of La Crosse, former military man Jerome Listecki, as archbishop of Milwaukee. Not only is this bishop very friendly and caring, according to our pastor here on the SW side, but count him as one who believes the Catholic Church stands for something more than the church of "Whatever." Willing to call, let's hope, nominal Catholic Jim E. Doyle on his state-ordered complicity with the Liberal Sacrament of Abortion. [WI State Journal: Catholic employers balk at mandate to cover prescription contraceptives]
- "Deke Rivers" over at Caffeinated Politics says that he has "no problem" that Guantanamo Prisoners May Head ToIllinois. What about come June when they're crowding Door County and Al's Swedish Restaurant?
- Tom Barrett is in the race. His excuses for "the Hamlet Act?" The State Fair pipe attack that left him with a concussion and damaged hand and the city budget. Fair enough.
