Report From Freedonia

Bezos' company joins Ron Paul web conspiracy

Alexa ranking for the Ron Paul '08 site is crushing those of the three GOP "front" runners.  Check out the graph.  The steady decent of John McCain's traffic is enjoyable to note as well.

PARTing with our tax dollars

When I took this shot of a PART Van way west of Winston Salem on 421 on Tuesday, I thought I might have caught a local government employee doing their best to follow the lead of Thomas Wright.

But alas the truth is much worse.  I discovered that since the start of school last August someone in our cash stretched government system has arranged for mostly empty PART vans to travel round-trip twice-a-day from Greensboro to Boone...7 days a week. [update: see comments section - the van captured in the photo is most likely for a yet another PART service.]

Cost for a one-way ticket on the new "Mountaineer Express" is only $10!

The PART promo calls this pricing "affordable."  I call it "laughable" -- if it weren't for the fact we are talking real money here.

These PART vans get at most 15 miles per/gallon without passengers; less if they are filled to their maximum of 14 passengers.  At $3/gallon for gas or diesel the minimum 115 mile trip to Boone costs $23 in fuel.  Adding in a driver for 2.5 hours at $10/hr plus minimum $3/hr in benefits and pension plan costs tacks on another $32 in minimum costs.  That brings the driver and fuel costs to $55 for the one way trip.

The tinted windows in the van precluded me from determining how many passengers were on this particular trip, but I would be surprised if it was the 5.5 passengers necessary just to cover the best-case cost of fuel and a driver. 

Apparently PART administrators have decided they have been so successful driving empty vehicles around the Triad, it was time to expand the waste of our tax dollars out to Boone.

No doubt there was great excitement in arranging to give ASU students in the TRIAD a transportation subsidy.  But, I wonder if anyone thought of running the service on Friday's and Sunday's to see how much ridership they could build before immediately making this a twice-a-day 7 day a week waste of our money.

PART planners seem to be working their hardest to give new meaning to the word partake. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, while county residents face a huge tax hike to keep essential government services flowing to us, PART board chairwoman Sandy Carmany says the PART trustee team has just logged in one of their most productive meetings in a long time; complete with more tax assessments, more staff additions and a bigger operating budget.

Sidebar for math wizards (warning don't try this if you went to public schools less than 40 years ago):

Taking the numbers posted at Sandy's place: a new PART operating budget of $13.7 million with 247,810 boardings in 2006 and an average increase of 3000 boardings/month in 2007, results in a projected average cost of $48 to carry a single passenger one time on a PART bus in 2007...and they charge $10 for the longest trip in the system: Greensboro to Boone.  (And this is based on the operating budget.  We haven't even gotten to the capital budget costs!)

We should just take the names of the handful of PART users and give them free cars to have friends drive them around in. 

Brad & Britt - News Blackout or honest self-censorship

Going into their interview with Congressman Howard Coble this morning, Brad and Britt read a letter from Roxane Premont of the ad-hoc grassroots group North Carolinians to Stop the North American Union.

Roxane had complained that the screener for their show was not letting calls come through that were trying to link the pending amnesty sell-out by our US Senate to the larger effort to effectively erase our borders with Canada and Mexico via the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) launched by the Bush administration in March of 2005.

While it was an honorable gesture to read Roxane's letter on the air, Brad and Britt went on to say that trying to equate the SPP to a EU like North American Union sounds too much like a "conspiracy theory."  The "C" word being employed, no further explanation was apparently necessary.   

In defense of Brad and Britt's current opinion on the matter, I can concede this much: 

Yes, the effort to expose the North American Union scheme is rife with members and sympathizers of The John Birch Society as well as avid supporters of Ron Paul, who Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin have on their black list.  Peter Brimelow, who is supposedly on Brad's own black list, is also saying mean things about the North American Union scheme.

However, here are the facts that Brad and Britt continue to ignore for some reason or other:

18 states have introduced resolutions calling on their federal representatives to halt work on the North American Union.  (They include Virginia and South Carolina)

3 of these states (Idaho, Montana and Oklahoma) have passed their resolutions.

Oklahoma, which is in the path of the NAFTA superhighway component of the North American Union passed their resolution in the Senate 97-0. (Basic Search Form link - top left - type in SCR10)

22 US Congressmen, including NC's Virginia Foxx and Walter Jones, along with all three Republican Congressmen running for President, have signed on as co-sponsors of HCR40, which calls on the executive branch to end all work on the North American Union and NAFTA superhighway.

Even the Sierra Club of Canada is sounding the alarm against the North American Union.

I could go on, but I'll close on this:  Lou Dobbs, who has been talking non-stop on the North American Union for almost two years, has watched his rating double over that time period.  And, he has just landed an additional gig on CBS.  Really, it is not like discussing this topic occasionally is going to sink the ratings of Brad and Britt in the Morning.

Against all this though, Brad and Britt seem willing to stand their ground on nothing better than the arguments of fact vs. myth put out by the same Bush Administration apparatchiks who told us to trust them on WMD.

As a Go Blue guy, I am obliged to suggest that in Brad's case, his logic on this one might be impaired from a slug to the head he may have taken back in his college days, but so far I haven't been able to come up with a possible excuse for Britt's position. 

I would like to think that, in the end, their commitment to pursuing issues in a fair-handed way will bring them around to at least allowing a peak at the SPP topic. 

If they can bring a young upstart Muslim author on the air to talk freely about what the Koran really says, there is hope for the rest of us.

Where have I been?

My changing role at the John Birch Society from boots on the ground coordinator in the Carolinas to fledgling director of membership activity in our virtual world region, is the cause of my hiatus from Report from Freedonia. 

Rather than postings of local fare, I have been doing work for our flagship magazine, making postings in our homepage news commentaries, interviewing Presidential candidates and other stuff.

My first Birch commentary posting on Lou Dobbs at the end of last year did net 15 minutes of blogger fame over at Romensko.  My last posting on one of America's few honest politicians, Ron Paul resulted in my first reference on Wikipedia.  WooHoo!

So, while I have been away, it's not like I haven't been busy in cyberspace.  I'll try to get back to local commentary on a regular basis.  I feel bad that I missed the chance to point out that looking at the timing and speed in hiring at Japanese companies, Sandy Carmany really should have recused herself from voting on the Honda bribe.

The Japanese are not stupid negotiators.  They know how to play the political game as well as anyone.  That is why Japanese car manufacturing plants are spread out across as many Senate votes as possible.  Honda/Ohio-Alabama, Nissan/Tennessee, Toyota/Kentucky-California-Texas, Mazda/Michigan, Mitsubishi/Illinois, Suburu/Indiana, etc..

That the husband of a city council vote ended up on the payroll of Honda Jet, is par for the course.   To simply not vote on something that passed unanimously anyways would have played the best.