Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Remember earlier this year when Birther Queen Sen. Judy Burges (R - Sun City West) was pursuing yet another tinfoil hat conspiracy theory against the controversial United Nations Agenda 21 “sustainable development” plan? Arizona Bill Would Ban UN Agenda 21 Within State:
The two-page bill, known as SB1507, would prevent the state, county, and city governments of Arizona from adopting any tenets of the UN Declaration and the Statement of Principles for Sustainable Development. It would block any other international schemes that violate the U.S. or state constitutions as well.
Under the proposed law, all public entities in Arizona would also be barred from cooperating with, funding, or implementing any programs linked to a controversial global organization known as ICLEI (formerly named International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives). The UN-backed non-profit organization, based in Germany, seeks to force the "sustainability" plan on the world by stealth.
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A Tea Party activist who testified at the hearing called Agenda 21 an insidious attack on American sovereignty in an effort to build a one-world order. He also said the Obama administration was using taxpayer-funded grants to prod state and local governments into implementing the "subversive" scheme.
The bill passed the state senate on a party-line vote, but died in the House where the bill was held until sine die.
It turns out that the Tea Party's newest darling, Senate nominee Ted Cruz from Texas, of whom the Washington Post's George F. Will recently wrote that Texas’s Ted Cruz gives tea party a Madisonian flair (the "patrician prevaricator" has abandoned his old money bluebloods for the Tea Party), is also a big fan of this tinfoil hat conspiracy theory against the United Nations Agenda 21.
Ed Kilgore writes at the Political Animal Blog, Defending the Suburbs—and Golf—From the U.N.:
In her New York Times column yesterday, Gail Collins took notice of the little-known fact that Texas GOP Senate nominee Ted Cruz isn’t just any old “constitutional conservative:” he’s an Agenda 21 conspiracy theorist:
In a blog posting early this year, Cruz vowed that as senator he would fight against “a dangerous United Nations plan” on environmental sustainability that he said was aimed at abolishing “golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads.” He blamed all this on the Democratic financier-philanthropist George Soros.
This is presumably a reference to an item on Cruz’s campaign web page that screeches about Agenda 21 as an effort to “leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind.”
I’ve written about the John Birch Society-driven Agenda 21 hysteria and noted it had popped up in GOP primary campaigns in Georgia and in the Alabama legislature. But now it seems it is likely to enter the United States Senate, too.
This stuff not only represents the mainstreaming of JBS-style UN-bashing, but also the growing demonization on the Right of that most boring but essential feature of municipal and county governance in most parts of the country: regional planning. The previously noncontroversial idea that local governments, particularly in metropolitan areas crossing many jurisdictional lines, needed to get together to ensure that their infrastructure investments, development policies, and demographic expectations were roughly on the same page, is now being regularly described as an assault on private property rights, and yea, even on golf. And what are essentially voluntary planning practices that maintain the ability of individual communities to exert some influence on the development plans of their neighbors, and to influence state and even federal policies together, are under attack as a nightmarish socialist assault on the good god-fearing people of the suburbs.
Think I’m exaggerating? Check out a brief sample from a long rant (and actually a book excerpt) from Stanley Kurtz at National Review that claims there is a Alinskyite cabal in the White House plotting to loot suburbanites on behalf of Obama’s urban looter friends and abolish suburbs altogether[.]
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Believe me, the piece gets crazier and crazier as you go along. And while Kurtz and people like him claim to be defending suburbanites from the socialist predators of the cities, it’s hard to imagine anyone benefitting from their hard-core opposition to any kind of regional planning, land-use regulation, or inter-jurisdictional cooperation other than developers and land speculators. It’s a pretty classic example of the worst kind of greed being promoted via appeals to—no question about it—racial fears and hatred of taxes. But it’s gaining amazing steam in Tea circles around the country, and before very long, it may be hard to find the kind of Republican elected officials who used to quietly sit on regional planning bodies and try to make their communities a bit more—yes—“sustainable.”
As I have said before:
New Rule: Anyone who has ever held or expressed a view held by the John Birch Society of whacko conspiracy theorists is disqualified from ever serving in the Arizona legislature. They are a threat to themselves and to society with the insane conspiracies they believe living in their alternate reality. Stop electing these crazy people to office!
That goes for the U.S. Senate as well -- even in Texas.
h/t The Last Word for the graphic.
UPDATE: The New York Times today has a feature on Cruz this morning, emphasizing his "intellectual heft." Steve Benen writes "'Intellectually and morally serious'? I'm afraid not." Defining intellectualism down.
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