from Landusewatch.com
Though he is from Idaho, Laird Maxwell works in Montana, and is campaigning in Nebraska, while in Idaho collecting signatures for a ballot measure passed in Oregon, over land use regulation that will be on the ballot in all those States plus California and Washington this November.
Using tactics such as dumping $380,000 on a campaign for a spending cap Measure in Nebraska (which has received less than $2,000 from all other sources), Laird Maxwell has assisted in bringing in large sums of money from distant real estate interests to severely tilt how property is developed in delicate areas around the country.
Meanwhile, he’s been accused by the Boise City Attorney of having organized illegal campaign phone calls on the eve of the recent Boise mayoral election as part of an illegal smear campaign against Boise Mayoral Candidate Chuck Winder. The phone calls themselves inaccurately tried to blame Winder for a land-use scandal involving ex-Boise Mayor Brent Coles and Chief of Staff Gary Lyman, when that administration allowed a Seattle company to use public space for an extended period without having to pay rent to the City. Winder has often been a target of Maxwell in the past, largely for not being conservative enough, even earning Maxwell’s “RINO” award (”Republican In Name Only”) in 2001 for presenting President Bill Clinton with an award from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, of which he is President. The illegality of the phone calls aside, they are only one part of a pattern on Maxwell’s part of misrepresenting how local government uses public space, though the City Attorney’s investigation into his group’s campaign activities continues.
Operating under the pretense of “tax activism”, his clear interest in money alone is obvious, and it should come as no surprise that Maxwell assisted in the passing of Measure 37 in Oregon in 2004, the land use ballot measure which has gutted one of the best working land use policies in the country.
Mike Groene of North Platte, Nebraska, the leader of the spending cap initiative Laird Maxwell has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars toward, has never spoken with or met Laird Maxwell personally, according to the Associated Press, and would conceivably have no idea why someone from another state would donate so much money.
Meanwhile, opposition to the spending cap Measure has raised only $66,400 so far, despite support from such informed entities as the League of Nebraska Municipalities and the Nebraska State Education Association.
So the people who run the cities involved, and the people who run the schools in the affected areas, seem to be in the process of getting squashed by suspected criminals, all so that local landowners can have more “freedom” to do what they’re already doing.
One logo Maxwell likes to use in online writings about his personal economic principles happens to be an image of a pig, which is fitting due to his long struggle to guarantee the right of rogue landowners to build actual pig farms amid some of the most scenic and environmentally sensitive areas in the western United States. Perhaps pig farms are more sightly and appropriate than a gravel pit or trailer park and we should be thankful for his suggestion.
- July 29, 2006
You know how Gov. Rockefeller died, right?
I am so sick of sex scandals, they are just so fucking stupid. They only serve to wreck enourmously important governments and economies and are never there when you need them when people actually do act like cheap whores in their real lives.
Spitzer’s wife though, well. I think she’s cute. Poor lady, she probably believed in the power structure that gave her all of New York to play with, though maybe she’s just as cynical as anyone else. When Mitterand died there was a whole row of seats for all his girlfriends, they were all sobbing in their little veils, no one gave a shit, because it wasn’t important, and it’s not.
My friends list on livejournal is filled with pictures of this prostitute lady Spitzer found and it’s just making me sick about all the attention paid to this thing which is just so damn unworthy. Albany is a sleazy town, it is so corrupt that there are thousands of layers to it, no matter what station in life you have the will to do something illegal is the rule, it is expected. Prostitution isn’t shocking there, it’s a plague you have to run from if you’re caught outside late at night, it’s the norm, and it’s the basic food group of anyone in charge of anything. I have no idea how Cuomo got through with his soul intact. That guy was one of the very few exceptions to the sleaze rule in that town, perhaps the only exception.
If anything, Spitzer was brought down by the cheap standards of his surroundings, finding a girlfriend-for-hire on the internet is so AOL it’s funny, anyone could do better than this Emperor’s Club thing, and look at the name of that group anyway, playing on the client’s vanity to justify the hilarious overcharging involved. Sure sure, you’re not a scumbag, you’re an emperor, you’re Caesar, you’re not some loser trolling for Jersey chicks online.
Albany gets you by having such low standards, it’s one of the white trash capitals of the universe, anything of substance is eventually destroyed by imported greed or the tenacious denial of beauty. The whole place is polluted, the river is made of death, the food is made of old circuitboards, the schools are where brains get bruised and beaten by thugs, everything good there flees, everything.
All nice people are inevitably punished for their niceness, my fake family through Brendan’s Mom had their house burn down just because they were in danger of being happy. Both my brothers had serious birth defects because of environmental damage, all my relatives are corrupt or are being hidden from corruption by other relatives, all that’s left is television and a sense of ignorance so profound you can actually ignore how nasty everything is after just a few sips of water.
Albany cries whenever I leave, it says “no come back”! They need the new blood, they need any kind of inspiration at all and the State University there is so far the only way to get that stuff. So of course, the State University is thriving. Students find cheap rent in the abandoned downtown and the beer is almost free as long as you have college ID.
The State Legislature is there, so of course criminal lobbyists all over the place. The Courts are there, so the mafia does what it can to creep into every surrounding crevice. They’re paid by private interests and big business also to influence the electoral process, thugs on all levels hired by the elite on all levels to get whatever is needed at any time. The result is an army of disaffected poor people all across downtown, and toothless brain damaged freaks in every park and convenience store and available public place.
It is tempting to want to take the place over, this is the appeal of the Dark Side. It is tempting to look at the effect of Rockefeller’s wealth and the giant marble buildings and the sense of gravitas that lawmaking creates and want to just rule everyone there like the tiny bugs they are. But then when you give in to the Dark Side the Dark Side defeats you. If you rose to power fighting corruption you have to stay in that mode, aggressively, you can’t let the low culture drag you back to caveman status like what happened to Eliot.
Billions upon billions of dollars float through government channels in Albany, it is the home of much of the U.S. biowarfare safety net, it’s where the Articles of Confederation were first written before Philadelphia stole the show and gave birth to this country. Now except for this one dude Ryan it is all porn and bird shit and uncontrollable fires. The only person from Albany to ever win a Pulitzer did so by truthfully documenting the crime and desperate poverty that plagues the mind of that town, the foul thoughts so deeply rooted in Albany’s modern history. They made a movie of his book which launched the acting career of Tom Waits, what does that tell you? Who are you going to get to play a typical Albany resident? Fucking Freddie Prinze? What?
The people of Albany are absolutely apeshit with glee over the attention they’re getting now, and the new Governor Dave is the first African-American Governor New York has ever had, with his one good eye and amazing sense of patience.
The reason why he’ll be an admirable leader of that State is because he can’t see the ugliness that inevitably poisons everyone else around there. He can’t physically see the ads on cable and he can’t see the insulting Barbie Doll women on every television channel, he can’t be taken in by whatever pretty face organized crime puts in his path, he doesn’t have weaknesses like others do just because it’s physically impossible.
Stevie Wonder had a sex scandal too I guess, he promised a girlfriend money for giving her a virus and then never paid, she had to sue him to get any attention at all. So it’s not that blind people can’t have moments of weakness. I write to you from the Assistied Living lab at PSU this afternoon, the computer lab for students with physical handicaps, the wave of the future for all schools in this country where the genome is being worn to shit by pure greed and that mineral in cell phones.
None of the people in the lab here have ideas about the white collar crime or even that it should be stopped, none of them here can see past the pictures of the bikini babe the media finally located yesterday.
IBM has been poisoning Broom County for 80 years and making mutant babies crawl out of every hollow stump in the land, BASF and General Electric doing the same thing to Albany, the Technology Park in North Greenbush where I used to work alongside actual robots, everywhere in between now a biosphere for dollars to breed with each other, and even the dollars are dying out. The ironworks in Troy which brought that city down in the 80’s, the rustic homes of Loudonville now humming from the tritium sewage, the leaves turning red in the Autumn now due to actual metallic rust.
There are serious problems in this world, and few leaders capable of going after the wealthy who cause them, but instead the power falls on some chick who dots her i’s with little hearts.
This is where I grew up.
Hi Mom!
Nothing Lasts Forever…
Guns n’ Roses CRACK ME UP.
In retrospect their arrogance is about the most absurd thing that’s ever happened in modern music, the bloated monstrosity they became belies the central flaw of the “pay-to-play” concept in the Los Angeles metal scene in the late 80’s. Mercenary bands live and die by the financial sword, and when these guys were given a lot of money and began acting “independantly” they became ridiculous. Excuse me if you’re a fan though, I don’t mean to offend.
The racist homophobic bullshit of some of their songs grew into beautiful karmic revenge as time wore on, and now Axl Rose has so much trouble trying to play in public without people laughing that I almost feel sorry for him sometimes. His embracing of strange religious views is kind of interesting to a certain extent (at one point he believed he was possessed by the spirit of John Bonham), but in the late 80’s when I was in high school the people I knew who were Guns n’ Roses fans were about the worst people available, their songs were like an anthem of pure stupid in the pure stupid of the Albany suburbs. The way sports are often viewed as a way out of the ghetto in some towns, or joining the military just to get out of some dustbowl hell somewhere, had an analog in Albany where there were thousands of kids who hoped to join the metal bandwagon and get famous with big hair and leather pants and it was a disaster, those people still live in Albany and they’re destroyed human beings now, telling people about the glory days of playing the biggest bar in Balston Spa in 1990 and how awesome it was to snort their IQ away before the local economy collapsed in 1991.
The story of this video is kind of interesting. Axl Rose was dating a model named Stephanie Seymour and was all worked up into a big metal god frenzy about the mighty metal love he had for her, and about the mythic implications of her being his big metal queen and everything, but he was always getting drunk and smashing things and she would always leave him and he would always get depressed about it and write slow sappy songs to demonstrate that he was actually a nice guy.
After the biggest blowout those two ever had, he wrote this song called November Rain which was supposed to be his magnum opus, they hired Michael Kamen to conduct a big overwrought string section and Axl made some ultimatums about how this song would be borne out. He was in charge of all writing and all arrangement and he would play the piano dressed up like Elton John so people could check out his big metal sensitivity for once, and a bazillion dollars would be spent filming the perfect video and the video would include all sorts of compelling visuals which would surely communicate his awesome emotional range, and if the song and the video AND the marketing didn’t work out exactly as he wanted, then he would quit the band and there would be no more Gun n’ Roses. Well, the song bombed completely and he left the band and there was no more Gun n Roses.
In the early 90’s this whole breed of L.A.-inspired hair metal would die out quickly after Nirvana got popular and people started expecting some depth in their angry delinquent destructo-noise. Songs like November Rain certainly didn’t help the case for 80’s hair metal, and anyway, Stephanie Seymour left Axl Rose for good one day, and must surely be baffled by the person he’s become.
The song is over 9 minutes long, and might be construed as excruciating.
However! Aha! Yes, there’s a however!
Why did Axl make such a big deal over a song about rain? What was he thinking? There is love and death and the churchified setting of a marriage and a funeral, Axl having nightmares, and there’s lots of rain, what’s the deal with this? What does this mean?
Well, apparently the video is based on Without You by Del James, which is not worth reading, it’s misogynist crap about a rock star and his suicidal girlfriend and his big deep Budweiser feelings about the whole thing (Axl, if you ever read this please forgive my harshness), and quick text searching tells me there’s no rain in this story, so what’s the deal with the rain? Is it just a pretty word or a reference to a specific day in his adventures with Miss Seymour or what?
Well, maybe it’s “what”. The bar in the video is called the Rainbow, which is at least repetitive use of “rain” if not a personal reference or part of the “what”, but the “what” is encouraged by the drivel he sings about time.
“Do you need some time…on your own
Do you need some time…all alone
Everybody needs some time…on their own
Don’t you know you need some time…all alone”
Yes, EVERYBODY NEEDS SOME TIME, and sometimes this time is spent skulking in the November Rain, but of course nothing lasts forever, even cold November Rain, but wait, there might be some walking involved, and the possibility of some sleep if we’re lucky with this “time” stuff.
“Walking away
If we could take the time to lay it on the line
I could rest my head”
“So if you want to love me
then darlin’ don’t refrain”
…
I’ll have you know I feel very dirty talking about this band right now, and also that I don’t want it to rain.
Warning/Guarantee
Greetings from the Haymarket Cafe in Northampton, MA, where I start over again with another blog in another town with the ongoing adventures in not being dead yet, though my aliveness is apparently debatable still.
I am a little dissatisfied with some of the things Livejournal has become, and MySpace was never any good in the first place and frankly I have something approaching pity for the people still using Friendster as a way to communicate though I guess we were all good people once, yes?
Blogspot seems promising in that there are no communities filled up with the kind of dreck that American teenagers typically excrete all over livejournal, and just short of using web software on my own domain I thought I would explore the rest of the places Night of the Living Dave could go, and it looks at the moment like WordPress will be a nice neighborhood.
Also, as soon as I understand WordPress a little better there will be paying work for me so there you go, my little Franciscan vow of poverty is going to suffer a little bit so I can afford smokes, I will still try to stay as broke as possible however.
When I made my first post on Livejournal, in something also called a “Warning/Guarantee”, I promised to make innovations in grammar, psychology and physics as well before I was done there, and though I am not done there yet it seems to have worked, to my surprise.
Now I seem to control the weather via thermodynamic emotional interface, over the last many months I’ve been trying to figure it out and now have it down, and no one is more surprised than me. I don’t know what to promise for this blog, except perhaps content that I can’t put anywhere else because of various social pressures. A blog I had as a place to put news links has now become all social and I can’t just post garbage from the web there like I used to because I don’t want to bore my friends.
We’ll see what happens here.
The government is watching now by the way, because they want to watch me being watched by various otherworldly forces.
I’m sick to death of satanists though I relate to rebellious sorts in general, I would like to practice buddhism more perfectly so as to rein in my abilities and no longer put others in danger, and I think I will refrain from flying on airplanes until I can learn to keep my emotions in check and therefore pose no risk to the passengers. I nearly killed us all on the flight from Oakland to New York a few weeks ago and have to figure out the problem before I fly again.
Northampton is absolutely awesome by the way. I have never been more instantly comfortable in a new place before.
Now I grab a smoke while my coffee is still hot.
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