Posted on 04/23/2004 10:47:01 AM PDT by GOPcapitalist
Why should I do that? Hanging chads were a fabrication of Dems. The fact that my ballot was stolen by metro-supporting liberal democrats in the Houston post office is not and I notified both the state authorities and USDOJ accordingly when I discovered that it happened last November.
If you have any REAL evidence of corrupt practices by STV, such as providing kickbacks to the bureaucrats who awarded the contracts, go ahead and present the facts.
Their kickback was to the Metrorail PAC, sanctioned by Metro chairman Art Schechter and run by Metrorail organizer Ed Wulfe, who developed the Metrorail expansion project to bolster the property values of an adjoining strip of land where his company just happens to be building a mall. Want documentation? Follow the links I gave in post 1 to the reports.
It takes an extremely selective mindset to look at this thread full of such mature and humble comments from the likes of mac_truck...
"Only to a pinhead" - post 63
"You're pathetic... Did you flunk math in high school as well as civics?" - post 121
"Just becaude your alter ego" - post 164, implying without evidence that freeper YCTHouston is a pseudonym
"some sh**kicker" - post 179
" -btw feel free to respond in whichever persona you prefer" - post 205, again making attacks upon YCTHouston's existence
" -btw I think its great that your alter ego sticks up for you." - post 239, again attacking YCTHouston's existence
...and Willie Green...
"your biased sensationalism on this issue is as whacky is that practiced by morons like Sarah Brady and PETA" - Post 228
"obstructionists, such as yourself" - Post 229
"disenchanted, sensationlist, crybaby whiner" - Post 232
"ven the chemtrail and black helicopter crowd had more credible evidence" - Post 232
"just another SoreLoserman. How sad." - Post 234
...and then accuse the guy they're directing all that sort of name calling at of the very same thing.
What has offended me the most are your egotistical opinions that you raise to a percieved level of fact and when challenged on them you adopt an almost girly-boy feigned attitude of "how dare they challenge me."
My only "crime" here is to note a clear conflict of interest on Metro's part and defend that point with those who are willing to discuss it. In this case that has meant debating two individuals who are neither genuine about their motives here nor honest enough to examine the evidence of Metrorail when presented with it - the same two individuals you pinged in your post.
Mac_truck is a ne'er-do-well who has been following me around obscure Texas politics threads via the "find in forum" button so that he may pick fights over issues that are unfamiliar to him and in which he has no intention of honestly considering any issue (case in point: a couple weeks ago he tried to start a "debate" me over what level of health insurance I should personally purchase for myself after he observed me discussing insurance politics with another freeper while he was doing his weekly cyberstalk of my posts).
Willie Green has never met a railroad that he doesn't have a love affair with and would intentionally ignore empirical evidence of flaws and wrongdoing on a transit system and would probably defend the devil himself so long as he was advocating mass transit.
How dare anyone challenge the great GOPcapitalist's "facts" and reasonings
How dare what? I don't recall ever telling anybody that they can't challenge me. I only expect that they be able to back it up when they do so. If you're gonna respond to an argument put forth by one of my friends and fellow freepers by telling him he doesn't exist and spreading the lie that he is my "alter ego," you better be able to back it up. Mac_truck has not and cannot. If you're gonna accuse somebody of plagiarizing a newspaper article when he in fact provided the material for that article to the same newspaper, you better be able to back it up. Again, mac_truck has not and cannot. If you're gonna claim that by simply appearing on a campaign finance disclosure automatically makes any contribution both legal and ethical, you better be able to back up your reasoning for doing so. And if you're gonna pull a Willie Green and insist that an unethical conflict of interest that sticks out as a conflict of interest by any sane and reasonable definition of the term is not so simply because it involves mass transit and therefore gets a free pass, you better be able to back that reasoning up with some logically sound demonstration of why mass transit should get a free pass.
Here's the bottom line, for at least me: If you are so sure and smug that what you are saying is true and beyond a reasonable doubt, when are the guilty STV personnel going to be doing the "perp walk"?
In a just world they'd have been in jail the moment they colluded with Art Schechter and Ed Wulfe to finance the Metrorail PAC last summer. But our criminal justice system is not perfect and often times thieves and much worse walk free for political reasons even when the evidence is damning beyond a reasonable doubt: Clinton, OJ, Janet Reno, just to name a few. In other words, simply saying "well, they didn't go to jail for it" or some equivalent of the same doesn't cut it. The fact that they didn't go to jail for it indicates one of only two things: (1) that they didn't do it, which we know to be false since they did indeed collude on a political campaign in which they had a clear conflict of interest, or (2) that they got away with it.
If not (and I do not believe they ever will), then I suggest you tone your accusations down because you are insulting many fine Americans who work at companies that you accuse of wrong-doing
Throughout history there have been many "fine" individuals who work for firms that whore themselves to governments, that contract for blood money, that aide and abet in the robbing of entire populations, that cause the disruption and destruction of property and careers and even lives of innocent people, and that generally perform the work of scoundrels and thieves under the guise of simply "doing business." There were many "fine" Europeans who worked for major European companies that colluded with Hitler and built his concentration camps (come to think of it, Siemens was one of em). Does that make what those companies did any less horrible, immoral, objectionable, or wrong? Does that make those companies any less guilty? Absolutely not, and I won't downplay or soften valid attacks upon a corrupt company simply because some of its employees might be "good people" or could possibly become offended.
Granted, unethical political collusion does not make every single employee who works for a corrupt company equally guilty, equally wrong, and equally contemptible as the company itself becomes through its behavior (and neither does the excuse of "but I was just doing my job" make those employees completely free of guilt). But did I post any lists of STV employees and say "they're all guilty" in reference to each? No. Did I say "everybody who works for STV is scum" just like I have essentially said of STV itself? No, though I have implied and do maintain that participants in an unethical organization do at the very minimum and in some small part share in some of its guilt (as the old saying goes, when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas). That said, I have asserted and will continue to assert that STV's contract came about by way of a BLATANT conflict of interest. And I will also say that their behavior as a company constitutes nothing less than the knowing and willful exploitation of the taxpaying citizens of Houston by ethically suspect and legally questionable electoral collusion for the purpose of making a few bucks off the public treasury.
as well as many well intentioned and mature posters at FR who enjoy a good and honest discussion.
If you want an honest discussion, discuss. I only ask that you support your arguments with sound reasoning or data as applies. If, on the other hand, you think that Willie Green or mac_truck are either honest or well intentioned or mature then I may only conclude that your judgment over that matter has become clouded by naivety or a preexisting subjectivity that biases you away from their deficiency in all of those items.
As you well know, the very basis of our government is an exercise of consent by the governed. This is the principle from which our government professes to obtain its legitimacy and the basis upon which policy is said to be made. I object to Metrorail so fervently because it has been crammed down our throats without consent in virtually every single step of the process by which it has been adopted. Metro has taken its desired policy of light rail and raped the populace of Houston to achieve those desires. The incidents are many:
About six years ago, give or take a few, Metro started toying with the Metrorail idea for Houston. As any major public policy and taxpayer investment of that scope should necessitate, it was desired at the time that Metrorail be put to a popular referendum. The need for a referendum is heightened by the fact that Metro at its very core is an undemocratic and extremely autocratic agency - that is to say it governs on the whims of one man and one man alone, the mayor of Houston. Under current statutes Metro maintains jurisdiction (and taxing authority) over virtually all of Harris County including over a million residents in unincorporated regions, yet the City of Houston has a monopoly on EVERYTHING that Metro does. They have an unbreakable majority of votes on the board and they use them to get their way. Those votes are all controlled by mayoral appointment, so the only people who can even legitimately claim to have electoral representation on the Metro board must do so indirectly through their ability to elect a mayor. Everybody outside of Houston-proper gets the shaft. By giving the mayor of Houston a monopoly control over the board, those residents - again over a million people - are completely written out of the process. Their few voices on the board are a permanent and powerless minority with no ability to ever set the agency's agenda on anything. As a result the ONLY way that the fundamentally autocratic Metro agency could ever claim political legitimacy by consent of the governed is to hold a referendum on their rail projects.
Well, 6 or 7 years ago we tried to get them to do that with Metrorail. Tom DeLay imposed federal provisions that pledged to fund Metrorail IF voters approved it but also blocked federal funding if voters did not or were not given that opportunity. Metro, or more specifically the mayor of Houston who controls Metro, decided back then that he did not want the voters to have a choice. So Metro started building Phase I by circumventing DeLay's provisions - they dipped into revenue reserves to build a small startup line and in doing so got the proverbial foot in the door without any form of public vote or public display consent period.
As one might expect, several of us didn't take too kindly to that maneuver. OUR taxes were at stake and would be funding the thing in perpetuity. OUR roads and OUR public treasury would be used to implement it. So a group of city of Houston voters (which I was at the time - I have since relocated back to the suburbs in unincorporated Harris County) got together and drafted a petition under the city charter's provisions to force a referendum. In short order that petition reached the signatures needed and was presented to city hall and a lawsuit was filed to make the mayor of Houston comply with the petitions and put the measure on the ballot. Two separate state district judges issued injunctions against Metro at the time to halt their construction until the lawsuit was settled - a perfectly standard move. Metro, seeing its autocracy threatened by this move, jumped in and threw every legal manuever in the book to circumvent the judges. The case dragged out a while until they eventually got the injunctions removed in an appellate court and began building again, still without consent.
That took us to round 2 of the referendum battles. Since they refused to recognize a simple citizen referendum petition we decided to amend the city charter itself, also by petition. I went out and collected signatures along with hundreds of others and in short order we got it on the ballot for 2001 - a charter amendment that again halted Metrorail Phase I (main street) construction until a public referendum was held. Again seeing its autocracy threatened, Metro resorted to undemocratic maneuvering to plow ahead unimpeded. Knowing our charter amendment had a strong chance of passing, the Mayor of Houston and Metroturned to political trickery to defeat it. They drafted up a competing charter referendum with near-identical language to our own except for one thing: it lacked an enforcement clause against Phase I of Metrorail. Mayor Brown stuck his charter amendment on the ballot for one purpose only: to confuse voters about our amendment. This also involved pushing our amendment from the "proposition 1" slot to "proposition 3" (proposition 1 then became Brown's competing amendment that was overtly intended to confuse). Election day came and sure enough - confuse it did! Brown's toothless amendment easily passed while ours narrowly lost 53 to 47% and Metrorail continued.
The next election was in 2003 - the recent bond election in which STV, Siemens, and all the other Metrorail contractors made ethically conflicted high dollar contributions to Art Schechter and Ed Wulfe's Metrorail PAC. As you know, it passed on the narrowest of margins - a margin that is attributable to (a) millions in taxdollars being illegally spent by Metro on political advocacy TV ads and (b) hundreds of thousands of ethically conflicted cash from Metrorail contractors used by the PAC to fund mailouts, campaign literature, signs, and the sort. This victory was also achieved by political trickery. Knowing that Metrorail Phase I wouldn't open until 2004, they pressed ahead with the expansion referendum in 2003 before anybody had a chance to try out Phase I and learn how poorly designed and inefficient it is.
The trickery continued as they also intentionally chose an election date that they knew would correspond with the City of Houston elections at a time when there were no simultaneous elections on the ballot in unincorporated Harris County. This is an old trick from segregationist days that they used to employ to keep the blacks from voting, only Metro used it in reverse. It preys upon voter turnout in the desired constituency in order to defeat the position favored by the other constituency. They used to do it in segregated areas by holding elections on days when the white political subdivisions, cities, school boards etc. were voting and the black ones were not. Metro did it when Houston proper - which tends to be more liberal - was voting and when unincorporated Harris County was not. The results were just what they expected - voter turnout in Houston was twice that in unincorporated Harris County because Houston proper had a mayor's race and a dozen other propositions to vote on while Harris County had only one - the metrorail bond. Also note that in the case of election date manipulation of this sort that I am NOT trying to argue that this was done illegally - only immorally and in an intentionally undemocratic fashion designed to diminish the political clout of unincorporated Harris County.
Illegal activity occurred elsewhere in that election and unfortunately I was a victim of it. By then I had moved to unincorporated Harris County, but I was also going to be out of state on election day and had to cast my ballot by mail. As I have indicated previously on this thread, I never got that opportunity. Despite filling out all the proper paperwork and taking extra steps to ensure my ballot would be delivered (i.e. calling to check up on my form being processed, calling to confirm that my ballot was mailed), I was defrauded of my vote and disenfranched from participating in the bond due to ballot theft at the Post Office. By the time this was discovered it was too late for them to mail me a new ballot so I did not get to cast my vote. Considering that Harris County usually mails tens of thousands of ballots by mail in any given election, there is little doubt that others were victimized by this same crime.
So in a referendum, the will of the majority of people in a densely populated urban area outvotes those on the more sparsely populated fringe. So what else is new?
I was defrauded of my vote and disenfranched from participating in the bond due to ballot theft at the Post Office.
Proof?
No, of course not.
Just another baseless accusation from a malcontent who's disgruntled by the outcome of the referendum.
No Willie. They rigged the election date to correspond with the City of Houston's mayoral election. As a result the percent of registered voters who participated in Houston was TWICE that of unincorporated Harris County (where over a MILLION people live - hardly "sparse" by any measure). Had they held it on an election day that was common between both the city and the county turnout would've been the same and the narrowly adopted bond would've failed.
Proof?
It's all in the records of the Harris County Clerk's Office. USDOJ's voting rights division also probably has a log of the complaint I placed with them by phone.
So your "proof' is citing the recording of YOUR OWN complaint?
LOL! If you enjoy portraying yourself as being THAT moronicly absurd, who am I to argue?
Considering that the complaint refers to the records of the County Clerk, which indicate that my absentee ballot was mailed and never recieved at its destination address (i.e. me), yes. And if I didn't consider you to be a nutcase I would tell you how you could verify with the County Clerk yourself to see that my ballot was requested and mailed yet intercepted along the way. It's all public record.
Bottom line: STV's contribution was neither illegal or unethical as had been suggested, and in a well funded campaign against the Metro bond (including a nice chunk of TRMPAC cash), STV's twenty five thousand dollar contribution to the pro-side was not determinant to the outcome.
If you check you'll see that I first posted up to this thread about thirty minutes after the post preceding mine Post 42 . That's how long it took me to read the article, the forty odd coments that followed, and formulate my own response, after seeing this thread while scrolling the Latest Posts (a feature commonly used by freepers to find discussions).
Of course I duly noted the numerous anti-New York, yankee-hater comments made by yourself and some of the other hayseeds that preceded, and factored those into my response.
Now if you want to pretend I'm following you around FR and picking on you thats your business. It fits nicely with some of your other bizarre behaviors.
Sure. And I bet you found the last one one while randomly searching for posts about personal health insurance preferences. Face it, mac. You followed me onto a thread about an issue in which you have absolutely zero personal interests beyond the fact that I posted it. You couldn't resist shooting your mouth off. You made an @$$ of yourself in doing so. You got caught and the fact that you showed up and posted here 30 minutes after somebody else has no bearing on that reality.
Testing, testing...mohammedanism is heretical...so is Lincoln worship...#3psycho is a stalker...testing.
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