Denton's Anti-Fracking Protester Violet Palmer Is A Jeffersonian American Hero

Carved on his Washington, D.C. memorial is one of the third American President's most remembered quotes.

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

What would Thomas Jefferson think of the 2015 version of the country he worked so hard to found?

On the day Jefferson replaced John Adams he immediately moved to correct Federalist abuses of power by freeing everyone who had been imprisoned or was being prosecuted by Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson freed everyone without asking what the accused had supposedly done or against whom they had supposedly offended.

The Federalists were sort of a precursor to modern day reactionary conservatives. Thomas Jefferson was the first Democrat president, though at the time his party was known as the Democratic-Republicans.

What would Jefferson think of Texas? And the Republican controlled Texas legislature, with the Republicans controlled by the gas and oil industry lobbyists who got their stooges to pass HB 40, banning towns like Denton, Texas, or any other town in Texas, from enacting local regulations regulated gas drilling activity in their towns?

Denton's voters had voted to ban gas drilling and fracking in their city limits.

But, in modern day Republican controlled Texas you can not have that sort of citizen empowered democracy determining what happens in your town.

Well.

Denton has given us a new American Hero.

A 92 year old woman named Violet Palmer, hard of seeing, but strong of conviction.

Violet Palmer, a woman Thomas Jefferson would be proud to call an American, believes it is ones moral responsibility to disobey the law when the law is wrong, when the law is impinging upon ones right, when the law is corrupted by a corrupted system.

Violet Palmer staged a protest at a Denton gas pad site that was back fracking after the Republicans took away Denton's right to self determination.

Violet Palmer was taken into custody and booked into jail on Tuesday.

What would Thomas Jefferson think of American police arresting a 92 year old partially blind woman engaged in peaceful protest, that being one of the rights Jefferson labored to have included in the American Constitution?

I suspect Thomas Jefferson would have suggested that the Denton police and other citizens of Denton join Violet Palmer in her non-violent protest.

Arresting any person engaged in exercising their right to peacefully protest anything their beliefs compel them to protest is anti-American in the Thomas Jefferson version of America.

To arrest a peacefully protesting 92 year old semi-blind woman, is, well, evil and embarrassing.....

How Come The People Of Denton Have Not Shut The Town Down Protesting Abbott's Ban of Anti-Fracking Bans?

A couple days ago in a blogging titled In Seattle Protesting Pot & Impeaching A Mayor I mentioned something along the line of the fact that I will be reading a west coast newspaper online, like the Seattle Times or Post-Intelligencer or San Francisco Chronicle and think to myself, well, that is something I would never read in the Star-Telegram regarding such a thing happening somewhere in Texas.

In that same blogging I also opined, "Protesting is something I have long made note of being absent, for the most part, at my current location on the planet, where there would seem to be so much to protest about. Fracking earthquakes come to mind."

Well, this morning it happened again. That which you see above is a screen cap from this morning's Seattle Times. Yesterday, thousands of teachers, and others, staged a protest march in Seattle during a one day strike.

Over the weekend hundreds of kayakers protested a Shell Oil rig being floated into Seattle's Elliott Bay before heading north to poke holes in the Arctic seabed.

Meanwhile, in Texas, yesterday the new governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, signed a bill into law which he claimed "protects private property rights from the heavy hand of regulation".

Last year a Texas town made national news when that town's voters voted to ban fracking in Denton. This upset the oil and gas industry, which pretty much controls Texas state government and so the oil and gas industry got their Republican lackeys, that they'd installed in Austin, to pass a bill banning Texas towns from banning fracking.

Denton banned fracking when that town's people  got tired of the heavy handed gas industry abuse of their private property due to shoddy operations causing things like a well explosion, and noisy drilling near homes and schools. Along with earthquakes and air pollution.

So, why are not freedom loving, independent, free-thinking Texans who live in Denton not staging massive protests over this heavy handed gas industry usurpation of their right to have a say over what is allowed in their town?

Denton is a college town, for gawd sakes. Why have the college students in Denton not shut the town down in protest?

Greg Abbott is already a national joke. Achieving that status far faster then his two predecessors.

If the people of Denton staged a massive protest march, such as you see above, it would get national attention, with the nation's outrage focused on the outrageous bill which yesterday the Texas governor signed into law.

Come on Texans in Denton, don't be sheep.

PROTEST.....

Behind the Barnett Shale

Very good info from Don Young......

Starting Sunday in the Denton Record Chronicle:

"Editor's Note: Behind the Shale, is a five-part series exploring urban gas drilling and one Argyle-area neighborhood's struggle against it."

Denton is a mid-sized university town just north of Fort Worth. (Argyle is a nearby small town.) Gas drilling started in the Denton area about two years before Fort Worth. The DRC has been has been at the forefront in reporting on the many dangers associated with natural gas drilling. They were the first to report on the presence of NORM in drilling wastes. The next four parts of this series should equally as educational.

Click here to read the first part of the five-part series....

Below is an excerpt from the Denton Record Chronicle article...

Jennifer Cole stepped across the parched ground of a North Texas autumn, past her dirt-caked backyard swimming pool, inching closer to a roaring machine. She watched it force its way through the earth, pushing dirt from side to side in waves like an ocean’s tide. Day by day, the bulldozer was remaking the lot behind her home on Britt Drive near Argyle, changing a sloped meadow dotted with oak trees and cattle into a flat and lifeless expanse. She shivered when she thought about what would fill the void.

Since the dirt-moving process began, dust clouds became so thick that her boys couldn’t make sense of them. “Mom, look! A sandstorm,” one said. Her sons didn’t understand why she wouldn’t let them use the pool or play outside after school. She looked down at the pool where a layer of grime clung to the bottom like black frosting, then back to the rolling bulldozer on the other side of the barbed-wire fence.

Cole didn’t know that what was happening behind that fence would consume the next three years of her life. She did know what the bulldozer meant, though. A gas rig was coming. It was Dec. 4, 2005 — a Sunday.

“Sunday,” she said above the roar, “is no day of rest.”