The Carroll County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold three work sessions to review comments received on the draft comprehensive plan, the farce known as Pathways to Carroll's Future Landscape. Regardless of how the plan is finalized, the Pathway boondoggle once approved and implemented, will fluctuate with special interest steering and commissioner interference through the next decade. The proposal is just a blueprint put together by overpaid staffers to satisfy the Smart Growth proponents on a state level and to give the public a limited view into how bad social engineering transpires under the direction of uneducated elected representatives and government devotees and acolytes.

County government under the terrible haphazard leadership of Julia Walsh Gouge has circumvented previous master and comprehensive plans making the county a hodgepodge of mixed land use, low-income housing and slumlord-run shopping and strip centers. Zoning changes and land use steering that no longer resemble the county's original master plan or intent. The county's Airport and its surrounding industrial parks are a testament to Gouge's inability to manage anything larger than a dog pound. The entire area has the look and feel of a third world country.

The quagmire that is Hampstead is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with government planning guided by Gouge's poor grasp of what a community should look like in a free enterprise economy. Entrenched incumbents that become self-serving and no longer able to represent and serve are destroying the quality of life for citizens everywhere. Hampstead, once a fine little community and destination has lost its charm because of Gouge as a former mayor and now multi-term commissioner. Hampstead has the look and feel of a Detroit suburb in desperate need of a bulldozer much like Flint, Michigan. The community cannot subsist without stealing water from private landowners and traffic bypasses it as if it had a plague. Government forced growth without understanding the consequences.

Westminster and Mt. Airy are both poorly designed and laid out retail and traffic nightmares and have very little resemblance to the quaint country communities they once were peppered with home grown enterprises and specialty shoppes. The result of government forced retail and industrial zoning that have turned main streets into inaccessible ghost towns. Killing off small business to garner the big bucks of regional and international box stores to satisfy the exponential growth of government. The community suffers, small business suffers and minimum wage jobs spawn government dependence.

Eldersburg is undefinable, the streets are dirty and overgrown with weeds and trash, slum like strip-centers and a half abandoned so-called mall managed by a slum-lord adorn its main thoroughfare. The community has no representation with the county's largest concentration of residents which pays the bulk in taxes to pay for government largesse elsewhere in the county. Special. Very little of the tax proceeds collected by the county finds its way back into the community or infrastructure. Water rates are the most expensive in the state and roads are the most poorly kept. South Carroll's best opportunity for industrial growth, the corner of Rt. 26 and 32 has been turned into a retail quagmire dotted with big box retailers haphazardly plopped to and fro with the most dangerous ingress egress in the county. It's sad but Eldersburg is near a lost cause. County planners will not be satisfied until there is a filling station at every intersection along Liberty Road and there in between. The Rt. 26 plan to widen and improve Liberty Road from the Reservoir to just past Rt. 32 was nixed to dump piecemeal improvements on Rt. 32  at the behest of Del. Susan Krebs the counties second worst representative. For a modern design planners failed miserably and have produced what will eventually be known as the most dangerous stretch of highway in the state.

Rt. 32's non-improvements from Sykesville/Warfield to Bennett Road have made Eldersburg the route to avoid in Carroll County.

Alternative routes proposed in previous plans are being redesigned and redirected to benefit a Delegate and her neighbor and lap dog, a member of the BZA, so traffic does not pass their homes. Liberty High, the smallest school lot in the county will lose a quarter of its property for the realignment of Johnsville Road to allow traffic to feed into an industrial park, connect into the extended Georgetown Blvd and feed out onto Bennett Road well past Krebs' neighborhood. The planned intersection on Bennett Road that would have connected across from Krebs' Street will be moved a half-mile down the road. An incumbent protecting her own self-interests and that of her followers. Tax-payers will be footing the bill for her selfishness and privacy wants. Millions of tax dollars will be required to foment the changes Krebs proposes.

The Pathways Plan as proposed will turn Taylorsville into an Eldersburg post haste. Mt. Airy already on the brink of third-world status will lose whatever dwindling hope it has for its surviving residents with its rezoning proposal.

As far as the current plan goes, each and every pre-planned zoning change in the new Master Plan will require individual public hearings for each proposed zoning change in order to implement the industrial plan that will never happen in the land locked communities of Carroll County. They may propose it, but industry will not come without highway access or infrastructure. Infrastructure that must be paid for with ever increasing residential taxes. Residents will pay for the changes and never see the county bear industrial fruit. Even if the County does happen to develop an industrial base, residents will not get a rebate for infrastructure improvements, the county will continue to collect the higher taxes and fees for the gamble. Industrial growth does not bring lower taxes or tax equity for the residential community.

The only beneficiaries of commercial growth are government hacks and incumbents that live on the taxpayers backs. Country roads will need constant repair dealing with the overweight trucks rolling over roads that were not designed to take on the additional weight and commercial traffic. Water shortages and restrictions will become the norm. Crime and unemployment will become Carroll's legacy. Government will grow exponentially and property values will plummet. What do they care, they have their taxpayer subsidized pensions to live out their meaningless lives on some remote island or beach yet to be ransacked by their peers.

Carroll County is/was a farming, bedroom community that had an unobtrusive small and benign government and the commuter population was satisfied with that. It's why many moved here. High growth plans give bureaucrats more control and more staff to shield them from public conversation and accountability. A larger government that will have very little to do with quality of life issues for the community at large. Commercial growth, a supposed larger tax base, only brings larger plush offices for bureaucrats, increased salaries and taxpayer funded jaunts around the country for government personnel and elected officials that have no guilt living off the backs of taxpayers.

Regardless, during the posturing sessions, Planning Commission members will decide on any changes they would like to make to the plan. It's all about what they want, failing to understand they are servants to the people, not the other way around.

Each session will be televised, to show the public that county government is really trying to appear transparent, on cable channel 24, to which the majority of residents don't subscribe, and streamed and archived on the county's poorly designed web site, http://ccgovernment.carr.org with Gouge's painfully smug mug plastered on the page next to the video. The work sessions will disallow any additional time for public comments, as the focus will be to review comments received during the 60-day review period. Planners have worked on the plan for a couple of years, the public was allowed 2-minutes for rebuttal with no redress after planners have tweaked the plan. Transcripts of a single public hearing and three earlier Planning Commission sessions on the plan are included in the public record, along with written comments that were submitted between May 11 and July 10 in limited public sessions.

• Monday, August 10, from 6:30-9 p.m. in Room 003 of the County Office Building.
• Tuesday, August 11, from 6:30-9 p.m. in Room 003.
• Tuesday, August 18, following the 9 a.m. regularly scheduled monthly meeting of the Planning Commission in Room 003.

If you believe the times are not 'a changin,' bury your head and stay oblivious. If you believe the America as you knew it is in statist hands read on.

With a new report out by DHS, (below) attacking the American Right, clear thinking Americans must respond. I am not an extremist and frankly I have had enough of being labeled and will defend my beliefs to the end.

The fact of the matter is that minority fringe groups such as kool-aid drinkers, gays, transexuals, environuts, animal rights groups, immigration reformists, abortionists and a plethora of other left wing-nuts out there with an agenda are the real extremists, deviants and radicals. These groups having banded together--still a minority fringe group under the banner of 'change'--are being allowed to effectively control the conversation.

The column below the fold is a must read for conservatives that have given up in confronting liberal talking heads airing on left leaning media. Andrew Breitbart's appearance on Bill Maher's HBO program last Friday night is an example of a class act standing tall in the midst of bigots and simple minded pundits with superiority complexes.

The hostility and disrespect Breitbart was shown by the host, who is an idiot, the Georgetown professor, a racist, and the shows clueless and classless audience shows us that liberals are loathsome partisans with little desire to be fair and balanced. When interviewing conservatives with principles and solid facts, liberals never fail to show their bias, displaying their true colors, blathering uncontrollably with distraction and obfuscation.

Actually, the Governor has an entire notebook full, but this is over the top. The governor is either taking psychotropic drugs or Al Gore's psychoactive Kool-Aid mix has seeped into the states water supply. Regardless, the green initiative has brought out the most ludicrous statements ever delivered by the Free State's moonbat governor.

Fundamentally, the whole Climate change myth has been debunked, but the alarmists still persist, and O'Malley and his ilk