I found this quite by accident – it appears Carroll County (MD), the epicenter of the fight to liberate US communities from the evils of ICLEI and sustainability/Agenda 21 has (gasp!) hired a conservative blogger as their media consultant! YES, that’s right. (And it wasn’t even me!) Carroll County has hired James Simpson/Alex Grace LLC to do their media consulting work. As expected, people are outraged!
Hugh McLaurin is concerned that Simpson formed a LLC in MD just nine days before it got the contract and got a bid-free contract with the county. As an attorney (not licensed in MD but certainly in VA) I can say that people form LLCs for individual businesses regularly to protect that new concern from liability as well as old concerns, too, especially if they are different (like for example mug making). Nothing nefarious here. No one has charged the county with violation of bid procedures. In fact, the Carroll County Times cited the county attorney that this was beneath the $25,000 miminum for competitive bidding. But that does not stop McLaurin from misleading his readers by implying wrongdoing.
Then the Southern Poverty Law Center gets in the act, calling Simpson an “extremist blogger” on its blog Hatewatch:
So what do you do when you’ve successfully saved the planet from efforts to save the planet? If you’re ultra-conservative blogger James Simpson, the answer is: Get paid. And by government no less.
The author of this blog entry, Robert Steinback, accuses Simpson of peddling a nefarious plot against the wonderful Agenda 21 and innocent ICLEI:
Simpson, who has written numerous articles for conservative websites including American Thinker, has railed against what he and other right-wing conspiracy buffs claim is an odious plan by the United Nations to undermine capitalism and U.S. sovereignty while prodding for One World Government. The program is called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), based on a U.N. sustainable-development plan approved in 1992 known as Agenda 21. It endorses global strategies to protect air quality, stop deforestation, protect fresh water sources, maintain biodiversity, and more.
But wait there’s more:
Most of the world sees Agenda 21 as a sensible recognition of the fact that the planet cannot sustain development globally unless the planet, collectively, lives within the means of its resources. No participating community is compelled to follow any of the plan’s principles. Still, many on the right read into it an anti-American bias: Given that the United States consumes energy and natural resources far in excess of its share of the world’s population, American overconsumption could be presumed a principal target of the initiative. So while some 600 American communities and 600 others worldwide have signed on to the initiative, a fledgling reverse trend has emerged that implicitly casts America’s resource gluttony as patriotic.
Most of the world is not governed by US Constitutional principles, either! People like this forget that the United States is the economic engine that runs the world. Perhaps they would rather we be in poverty and lose our sovereignty and liberty. NEVER! A superficial review of this blog’s ICLEI columns will show otherwise; a number of other communities have renounced ICLEI (as many as 39 according to this posting) although not all have renounced Agenda 21. (I cannot speak to other issues cited in this article as I do not usually blog on gay or immigrant issues. I find it interesting that the SPLC calls Simpson a “extremist blogger” but they push tolerance.)
Now it is okay for say the SPLC to have a stable of bloggers to write their stuff for them but when Carroll County dares to hire a conservative blogger, it is a parade of horribles! James Simpson, I’m on your side here. If you need my help, let me know!
