Leisurely Drive Through San Francisco

Shot on the actual streets of San Francisco, California, GYM5 features a focus on fast, raw and precise driving action. Filmed over four days, director Ben Conrad and his team are back to work on their second Gymkhana production and delivered the entire city of San Francisco as Ken Block's personal gymkhana playground. DC Shoes also provided fellow DC athlete and longtime Ken Block friend, Travis Pastrana, to make a cameo appearance on his dirtbike, and S.F. resident Jake Phelps of Thrasher Magazine fame also makes a cameo as Block hoons S.F. in his most incredible Gymkhana yet.

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Austin Hill - Equal Opportunity Destroyers: Politicians Of All Types Damage Small Business America

It’s not just an out-of-control IRS or EPA. And it’s not merely the punitive demands and restraints of the new federal healthcare law.

American enterprise is being stifled and squelched by state and local governments, in ways that most Americans don’t even see. With increasing propensity, elected officials nationwide are at times suffocating private businesses with regulations, and at other times competing directly against them – and it happens among both Democrats and Republicans.

A striking reminder of this emerged last week, when it was reported that Democrat San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was contemplating some sort of “ban” on alcohol sales during the Super Bowl. Drunken vandals got out of hand last year in “the City by the Bay,” when the Giants swept the World Series. The same thing could happen on Super Bowl Sunday this year, with either a 49ers win or loss. So, therefore, the city should step in and try to keep the booze away from the bad guys – at least that’s how the official reasoning went.

The news first emerged with local newspaper and radio websites reporting that the Mayor was seeking a ban. By the time global publications like “International Business Times” had picked up on it, the Mayor had tempered his rhetoric a bit, saying that he was “seeking input from business owners” on how to prevent alcohol-induced vandalism.

The irony here is obvious. This is, after all, San Francisco, a place where, in terms of social and cultural “norms,” almost anything goes. It’s the city where elected officials almost did not pass a ban on public nudity for the first time last November, and yet city officials now want to control liquor consumption.

But here’s the part of the story that nobody reports: such mandates by local governments, arbitrary and unexpected as they often are, damage businesses. Restaurant and bar owners all over the country are naturally banking on steady foot traffic and lots of food and beverage sales on Super Bowl Sunday. No doubt some owners craft their monthly or quarterly budgets around an expected uptick in sales on that day. When politicians disrupt this, they hurt small business owners.

But travel northward some 1200 miles or so from San Francisco, and a less imaginable, more difficult to understand phenomena is happening with private enterprise the worse for it. The state government of Idaho has actually developed a voracious appetite for buying and owning for-profit small businesses of a variety of sorts, and competing against private owners.

Language in that state’s Constitution declares that the land originally granted from the federal government for the creation of Idaho must be managed “in such manner as will secure the maximum long term financial return to the institution to which granted.” From that language, Idaho politicians down through the ages have determined that they have a “fiduciary responsibility” to produce investment returns. So once the first of the original endowment lands were sold, a trust account was established, and state politicians have been “investing” the money in for-profit businesses ever since.

In the past four years alone, the state government of Idaho has purchased everything from a neighborhood beer pub to commercial office space, all under the leadership of Republican Governor C.L “Butch” Otter. This controversial practice came under national criticism back in 2010 when the Idaho government bought “Affordable Storage,” a small self-storage business in the capitol city of Boise, and then began telling would-be customers that “our rates are lower because we don’t have to pay taxes.” Ask residents of “red state” Idaho what they think of President Obama’s forced acquisitions of General Motors and the Chrysler Corporation, and they’ll likely tell you it was wrong. Yet most are unaware that their own state government is doing much the same as the President has done, and is competing against their business-owning neighbors.

While it’s hard to find an American politician who will tell you that they are anything short of “supportive” when it comes to small business ownership, it’s even more difficult to find one that really understands what it means to be that type of leader. The change in government policies that our nation needs won’t begin to happen, until American voters start paying attention and making better choices on election day.

Austin Hill

Austin Hill is an emerging American voice, addressing culture-defining questions through books, talk radio, web, speaking, and interviews. His recent books "White House Confidential" and his new title "The Virtues Of Capitalism" show his range from whit-infused writer to thought-provoking expert on the intersection of philosophy, religion, politics & culture. Hill helps to make the complex seem simple when exploring capitalism, socialism, and other "Isms".

He is an editorial contributor to national publications such as U.S. News & World Report, a columnist with TownHall.com, and is a popular expert-host on radio from leading stations in Washington DC, Chicago, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and nationally with networks such as Fox NewsTalk Radio.  He hosts the "Austin Hill Show" weekday mornings at Fresno, California's Talk Radio 105-9 KMJ-FM,  and weekday afternoons at Boise, Idaho's Newstalk 580 K I D O radio.

Hill holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, and a Master's Degree in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics from Biola University in California.

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Michael Brown - Ted Haggard, Larry Brinkin, And Glaring Media Bias

According to published reports, when Larry Brinkin was arrested two weeks ago, the police found “images of year-old infants subjected to sodomy and oral sex, and perverse racial comments (Brinkin’s email: ‘I loved especially the 2 year old n----- getting nailed. Hope you’ll continue so I can see what the little blond b---- is going to get. White Power! White Supremacy! White D--- Rules!’).” Yet the media has barely reported this terribly disturbing incident.

But, you ask, who was Larry Brinkin? He was “a central figure in the gay rights movement,” a man who was so influential that, “The San Francisco board of supervisors actually gave a ‘Larry Brinkin Week’ in February 2010 upon his retirement.” It was Brinkin who first used the term “domestic partnerships” in a legal dispute, marking a watershed moment in gay activist history, yet news of his alleged crimes against infants and children, not to mention his alleged White Supremacist leanings, has received very little media attention.

Is there a double standard here? Imagine what the media would be doing if Brinkin had been a conservative Christian leader.

When evangelical leader Ted Haggard fell, the media was quick to pounce, suggesting that this exposed the corrupt nature of evangelical Christianity as a whole. And media leaders have done this repeatedly whenever there has been a scandal connected to an evangelical (or Catholic) leader, and the news is blared from the headlines. But where, I ask you, is the outrage or the front page news when a gay leader commits atrocities such as those allegedly committed by Larry Brinkin? And why isn’t the media claiming that Brinkin’s transgressions expose the corrupt nature of gay activism as a whole?

The failure of a Christian leader is considered endemic and representative; the failure of a gay leader is considered an aberrant exception. Why the unequal treatment?

Personally, I do believe that ministry leaders should be held to high standards, and if we fall short in a serious, public way, we deserve the disappointment (and even scorn) that comes with it. After all, we are supposed to be moral and spiritual examples, even serving as faithful representatives of Jesus, and we have no business preaching morality while living in immorality. And while I absolutely believe in God’s mercy and the possibility of restoration (we all need His mercy), I do agree that the stakes are high and that there will often be heavy fallout when a prominent Christian leader sins in a serious and public way.

My question, though, has to do with Larry Brinkin, who allegedly enjoyed watching infants as they were being sexually abused (yes, infants!). Where is the national indignation? Why isn’t the name of Larry Brinkin on the lips of every news commentator in the nation? And why, two weeks after his arrest, does a Google search for his name yield just 111,000 hits? More importantly, why hasn’t his arrest caused the public to stand up and say, “We must do something to stop the vicious exploitation of little children!”?

The answer is that Brinkin’s arrest has received relatively little media attention because he was a gay activist leader, not a conservative Christian leader, and there is no hiding the mainstream media’s pro-gay, anti-conservative Christian bias. And because Brinkin’s arrest has not been widely reported, the general public has not been confronted afresh with the horrors of child pornography.

(On another note, there was a shocking case in England a few years ago where social workers had evidence that a gay activist couple was sexually abusing the boys in their foster care, but the social workers were afraid to report the couple lest they be accused of homophobia. Not surprisingly, the case received limited coverage in the UK and almost no coverage here in the States. What if this had been a conservative Christian foster care couple?)

To be sure, Ted Haggard was a better known figure than Larry Brinkin, but there have been other Christian leaders of much less notoriety than Haggard (like an otherwise unknown Catholic priest), and that didn’t stop the media from making their failings into a national scandal. Brinkin, for his part, was no smalltime player, with the San Francisco Examiner describing him as an “iconic San Francisco gay activist who brought the nation’s first domestic partnership lawsuit in 1982.” And he was, after all, a respected, long-term leader within the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest gay activist organization. Why hasn’t the HRC been tarred and feathered the way evangelicals (or Catholics) are after one of their leaders falls? Why the inconsistency?

To this day, the name of Ted Haggard, is used to mock evangelical leaders (in the form of emails and comments we frequently receive, telling us that we will be the next Ted Haggard) while the name of Larry Brinkin is being forgotten as quickly as possible. Why the double standard?

Dr. Michael Brown

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and is the author of 20 books. He has served as a professor at a number of seminaries and hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire.

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Jeannie DeAngelis - Moral Relativism and the Plight of a Pedophile

Originally posted at American Thinker

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Larry Brinkin, 22-year retiree from the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and veteran gay rights advocate from San Francisco, has been arrested for felony possession of child pornography. Following his arrest, Mr. Brinkin was released on bail after spending the night among friends in a San Francisco jail.

According to a search warrant served by San Francisco police, after seizing two laptops, a desktop computer, videos, a floppy disk, and flash drives from Brinkin's home, his computers were found to have "pornographic images that show children as young as 1 and 2 or 3 years old being sodomized and performing oral sex on adult men."

Allegedly, the human rights/gay rights advocate also had messages linked to his AOL account that included attachments that depict "exploitive sex acts" as well as links to a discussion group that approves of "sexual exploitation of young boys and girls."

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Brinkin was best known for "championing equal rights for gays and lesbians. He helped craft San Francisco's groundbreaking Equal Benefits Ordinance, which became a national model for workplace equality."

When Brinkin retired, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was so grateful for the work he had done on behalf of human rights for gays that they approved a "resolution declaring the week of Feb. 1, 2010, 'Larry Brinkin Week' in San Francisco." According to the board, and despite his alleged penchant for pedophilia, after retirement, Larry's "dedication to advance the civil rights of all people ... never stopped."

Former supervisor Bevan Duffy, who authored the board's resolution for "Larry Brinkin Week," said he was shocked to learn of San Francisco gay icon's arrest. Duffy said, "I have admired and respected his work for the LGBT community. I respect and am confident that there will be due process."

Due process will ultimately determine whether or not the human rights advocate considered the sexual mistreatment of tots a right worth pursuing. In the meantime, regardless of the outcome, it's clear that both Larry Brinkin and the tiniest victims of his alleged crime have all been damaged by a liberal lie called moral relativism.

The children in the photographs notwithstanding, based on what was found on his computer, Brinkin is just as much the result of a philosophy which preaches that there is no set standard for right or wrong and that human decency is a passé concept that hinges on personal conscience, not social mores or outdated religious criteria.

Brinkin thrived for almost a quarter of a century in a setting that promotes the false premise that moral behavior is subject to individual judgment. He was well-respected in a community that makes heroes of people whose primary goal is to undermine traditional values such as marriage, portray as out-of-date the belief that heterosexuality is normal, and endorse all manner of perverse behavior by putting it all under the umbrella of "human rights."

So in Mr. Brinkin's case, after making a name for himself advocating for the right to individual sexual expression, it could be that he had convinced himself that pedophilia also meets the necessary criteria. The North American Man Boy Love Association marched in San Francisco Gay Pride Parades early in Brinkin's career.

Before retiring from the equitable workplace he had helped create and retreating to his e-mail account and his NAMBLA-like discussion group, Larry Brinkin lived and gained fame in a world where the lines that define decency are oftentimes ambiguous. Brinkin attained star status in a city where people pride themselves on being their own moral judge and jury, where individuals are the subjective arbiters of their own behavior and the sole captains of carnal vessels that are encouraged to set sail in any direction they desire.

Then Brinkin, at 66 years old -- old enough to be someone's grandpa -- is caught with child pornography on his computer and participating in an online chat that approves of sexually molesting innocent children. The question arises: who, then, in a secular culture determines the ethical norms? After Brinkin spent 22 years working to eradicate a line of moral demarcation, does someone or some system with different measures now get to draw a new line in the sand?

Moreover, don't the tenets of the "what's right for me might not be right for you"-and-vice-versa school of thought teach that no one has the authority to impose personal standards of morality on anyone else? Should that principle change just because it has been revealed that the person responsible for advancing the civil rights of San Francisco's LGBT community may also turn out to be a degenerate who approves of having oral sex with toddlers?

If moral relativism is a valid argument, then Brinkin is innocent regardless of what he's done. And any man or woman with small children should accept the fact that if, in his mind, Mr. Brinkin believes it's acceptable to sexually abuse a child, and the child being abused should happen to belong to a fellow moral relativist, then that morally relativistic parent is duty-bound to pardon Larry's amoral behavior.

However, if Larry Brinkin is found guilty, then so too are all the moral equivocators who have promoted a debauched philosophy whose lack of boundaries has led to the corruption of society and, more tragically, been part and parcel of the irreparable harm that has befallen the helpless and most innocent among us. As for a dupe like Larry Brinkin, if proven guilty of pedophilia, it's because he's just another deluded predator who believed the lie that all morality is relative. Then he acted upon that conviction and, by doing so, became another one of its victims

Jeannie DeAngelis

Jeannie DeAngelis writes almost exclusively for American Thinker and has been published on the conservative website Pajamas Media, as well as hosting a blog. See Jeannie's Blog

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