.

“If they are not going to put themselves on the line to ask for that, then how can we as commissioners?” asked Commissioner Kevin Ensley.

• Taxes – Poor people don’t pay income taxes or tourism taxes. Government gets the poor people’s money through the lottery, which should be abolished, and taxes on vice, which makes people poor. I am not aware of any pigmentation taxes.

• Public Education – I hear the General Assembly is trying to increase school choice, so if people live near a run-down, crime-ridden school, they may send their kids somewhere better and put the den of iniquity out of business.
• The Racial Justice Act – I haven’t heard that any bills on the topic are active in the General Assembly now, but I understand last year’s revisions by Paul Stam were intended to help get dangerous people off the streets by refining definitions of what constitutes profiling. Maybe poor people are supposed to like having minority killers at-large.
• Hindering Access to the Voting Booth – The laws are designed to prevent people from voting more than once, and I support this level of hindrance. They also support the votes of people semi-active and semi-engaged enough to make some sacrifice and effort to get to the polls, rather than those of people hanging out in the middle of the day interested in taking a free ride on a bus whereon volunteers pass out pre-marked ballots. Are poor and minority voters supposed to like the choices of puppet voters?
• Healthcare – Obamacare will nationalize another fifth of the economy. Socialism makes everybody equally poor. Those initially footing the bills for free healthcare for everybody will have less to donate to poor people for other causes, or might continue to add to the number of poor people scrambling for limited resources with layoffs.
• And More – As they say on the commercial, “Come on, sheeple!” Don’t take the advice of people who want to hold you down to make you their little booboo. Find friends that encourage creativity and encourage you.

  Two things I do not expect are (1) upholding of IRS tax code prohibitions on candidate endorsements by 501(c)(3) organizations, and (2) dupe-makers who read this refraining from alleging I am the paid robot of some rich white guy.

I didn’t touch the WLOS coverage of Buncombe County Schools not pulling permits for electrical work done for a few reasons. For one, I am no fan of regulation. I used to live and work in Madison County where you could jerry-rig things as necessary to get them running, and nobody would ever find you. Getting a government employee to take money to say it was safe seemed like a racket. And so, if the school fixed things without permitting delays and expenses, it was probably safer for the kids in the end, and it saved money, too. As an added bonus, maybe some of the electricians got to be creative and inventive, realizing greater efficiencies than the framers of the code considered in the way back when.

But if I wanted to join the human race, I would realize there are children in schools, and any sentence with the word “children” converts me into a caring individual worthy of extended tenure in elective office. If I really care, I will don a straight face and start spewing screwy sentences like, “We must get to the bottom of this to ensure safety and sustainable quality of life for all children of our 21st-century school community.” If enough of us play the game with enough emotion, maybe we can justify the creation of a few more positions for “overseers to oversee the overseers.”

What we learn from this story is that if the schools survived without the permitting and inspections, then probably the rest of us don’t really need the hassle, either. The only pity I feel here is for the contractors who are getting in trouble for following instructions to forego the rigmarole.

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The city has temporarily lowered bus fares and waived capacity restrictions to help.

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The event was kick-started with a multimodal cross-town race featuring three members of Asheville City Council. Jan Davis drove a car, Marc Hunt bicycled, and Gordon Smith rode a bus. Buncombe County Commissioner David King was going to ride a horse, but he got tied up at the farm. As you might expect, the car won, but the news story is that all vehicles arrived at the finish line within four minutes of each other.

Continuing down the path of boring you, here’s more. Local hero Billy Graham and his son Franklin have added their names to the list of the persecuted. Franklin said they had to waste time and money donors had sacrificed to help homeless, starving people in devastated parts of the world on servicing IRS auditors.

“Mr. President, the IRS has already publicly acknowledged it operated in a less than neutral and nonpartisan way,” [Franklin] Graham wrote. “We also now know that the target of their improper actions was much wider than political or Tea Party organizations. Will you take some immediate action to reassure Americans we are not in a new chapter of America’s history — repressive government rule?”

According to the Cato Institute, groups were singled out not only for the use of trendy political hype phrases like “tea party” and “patriot” in their names. They were getting roughed up if their organizations purported to pursue the objectives of “limited government” or “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” (Granted, those who educate on need education.)

Political Analysis: It appears the hassling arose as Democrat operatives instigated Republicans to egg on Democrats to do the dirty work so they could get caught. Democrats calculated Republicans would not anticipate the public would perceive the obvious attribution of error to the Democrats as a thinly-veiled coup by the Republican Dirty Tricks Committee. But, since mom never sees who threw the first punch, the Republicans were probably the ones who fooled the instigating Democrat operatives in the first (which was technically the thirty-first) place.

Nondisclaimer: We’re not supposed to get political at the tea-partying, patriotic John Locke Foundation as we advocate for the principles of limited government outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. However, if said attitudes are now considered partisan, then one party is unabashedly advocating over-reaching government, higher taxes, and treason.

The Wednesday meeting offered little discussion of what had been major MSD news during the past month — the accidental spill of millions of gallons of raw sewerage into the French Broad River on April 30. No audience members spoke or raised questions during the public comment period, and the general manager referred to the incident only briefly. He noted that he had sent ongoing reports to board members during and after the incident, and a “lessons learned” session had followed.

Following this line of logic, if we really want to get smart, we should discharge lots more sewage so we may revel in the corrective action reports – or was that the other way around.