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Sometimes they make it too easy. Here's the story:
At Tom Tancredo's request, Mike Rosen dedicated his 850 KOA pit bull, err, talk show this morning to attacking a first grade public school teacher in Highlands Ranch; Miss Jill Bell of Arrowwood Elementary School.
Her crime? Her first graders drew pictures of clean water and, as part of a civics exercise, sent them in a bundle to Tom Tancredo's office. Who is, by the way, their United States Representative.
And who happens to support Bush' effort to roll back the Clean Water Act.
There are a million things wrong with this assault on this public school teacher, but here are two:
1. Rosen nine days ago had Guv Bill on, and said 'we have to have legislation that strips Colorado's colleges of their funding if they do not hire more Conservative faculty members'. Ideological quotas.
But G.. forbid that a public school teacher have her kids draw pictures and send them to their elected representative!!!!
Hypocrisy, thy name is......
2. Hey Tancredo -- DON'T YOU HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO??? This 'ranks' right up there with his effort to deport the Hispanic honors student last winter (remember that gem??)..
Anyhow, Rosen and Tancredo have tag-teamed to attack this public school teacher, ginning up a public campaign to her superiors. (That'll encourage those kids to take civics responsibly!)
So let's help Jill Bell.
E-mail and phone Jim Christensen, the Superintendant of Public Schools for Douglas County. (Click here or enter jim.christensen@dcsdk12.org in your email, or call him at 303-387-0034) Tell him you're happy that teachers have their kids draw pictures and contact their congressperson. And you're outraged at the Rosen/Tancredo attack on his public schools.
And contact Darlene Dougherty, the Principal of Arrowhead elementary school, (Phone: 303 471 3160, email: click here or enter Darlene.Dougherty@dcsdk12.org) Tell her that you support our public schools and Miss Bell and are outraged that a U.S. Congressperson is using militant talk show hosts as a channel to attack them.
Owens' failure to fund higher ed adequately, while seeking to micromanage what goes on in the college classroom, shows only how out of touch he is with the university community. The real ideological menace facing higher ed in Colorado is not the allegedly "liberal" faculty that the governor despises, but Owens himself, who seems incapable of anything other than knee-jerk conservatism.
We'll talk later about how you can help during the upcoming Horowitz' Tour of Colorado College Clients ... ...
Owens-Illinois will build a state-of-the-art, $119 million bottle plant east of Windsor in Weld County, which state and local officials are calling the biggest economic plum for northern Colorado in years.
The 545,000-square-foot facility will employ about 150 people making an average salary of almost $50,000...
The Owens-Illinois deal will bring $481 million to the region over the next 10 years, according to Ron Klaphake, president and CEO of Greeley Weld Economic Development, a key player in the negotiations.
..."I wish they were creating 1,500 jobs, instead of 150 jobs," he mused. ...
Xcel Energy on Tuesday requested an $88.8 million increase in prices for its Colorado customers, a proposal which would raise January's residential heating bills by about 70 percent.
Typical small-business customers would see an increase of 86 percent on their January bills compared to the same period this year, or about $242.87.
Now this isn't like Enron gaming the California energy markets, right? Energy producers wouldn't artificially constrain supply and inflate prices in cahoots with the authorities to pump up (sic) the case that we need more gas drilling....
We had a great first day. A huge thanks to everyone who has overwhelmed us with responses in the last 24 hours. We'll be in touch as soon as we can. And one big shout out to our expat friends in Mexico and Thailand. We'll get the place back in shape for your return, promise!
The Horowitz Watch continues. He was on "Fair and Balanced" Fox last night(there's no vast conspiracy, there's no vast conspiracy...). When they circle the wagons round, we're on target. Watch for the Act Now! campaign soon, revolving around Horowitz' upcoming paid tour of Colorado campuses.
In Economy, props to Greeley for winning the bottling plant competition. But prospects for the Colorado economy still look difficult -- and Excel's huge increase in natural gas costs won't help. We know Greenspan warned us but why, exactly, do gas prices have to double suddenly?? This right-wing rudderless economy forces Hick to cut 10% from next year's Denver City Budget -- anyone else living on the same amount as in 1998?
And You! You are all wonderful; a rainbow of creative, frustrated (nay, angry!) citizens who know our future can be so much better than the past we're being sucked back into by the current regime...
Not until the 24 Republican leaders who met with Horowitz at the University Club and at the Brown Palace in June publically state that they will NOT introduce legislation in Colorado on this topic.
Why?
Not just because these leaders are wrong to interfere with the free market.
And not only because it's wrong to set up students to set up faculty to snitch on other faculty. Note to the News; you should read the SAF's organizational pamphlet -- which is much more pointed (and not public) than the Academic Bill of Rights you quote. Here's what students are to do, according to the Pamphlet (we have the .pdf....):
If a professor expresses partisan opinions with non-scholarly passion, the effect is to create a negative learning environment for students who do not share these opinions....
....If a professor posts partisan cartoons on his or her office door – a place where all students come for guidance -- that is unacceptable.....
Lead a delegation to the President of the University (always go to the highest level possible) with a list of documented abuses. Demand a redress of grievances to include an apology from the offending authority and a policy to correct the abuse, preferably the adoption of “The Academic Bill of Rights” as an official university code...
And not even because of these code words dictating what coursework is acceptable on college campuses (also from the organizational pamphlet);
4. Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences will respect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas and provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints.
Ichthyus, not Darwin, you Pinko! (Well, that language comes close to justifying the 'rhetoric'...)
And really really not even because Horowitz' effort is primarily designed to buy him more furniture for the Malibu Manse.
No, we're sticking with this one because it's part of the Republican leadership's pattern.
A radical interest group from outside the state sneaks in to test-drive unacceptable ideas on widdle Colorado. Karl Rove's redistricting. Bill Owens' opposition to the right-wing Supreme Court on affirmative action. Andrews' Academic Quotas. The Governor and Leg then try to ram it through, regardless.
The independent citizenry of this great state expects its leaders to address today's problems now. Jobs. The budget. Health Care. The Environment.
So we're sorry, News-folk, but we'll stop once we've heard The 24 (names soon!) say they've stopped, and have dropped this issue altogether.
Former top officials in the Colorado Division of Wildlife are blasting Gov. Bill Owens' administration for what they say is a pattern of favoring businesses and groups that want to use the forests over protection of wildlife.
This is all part of an ongoing tussle between the Guv, who wants to unilaterally reorganize (read: downsize) the Department of Natural Resources, and DOW's supporters, who are sure the effort to save $15 to $20 million will mean even less environmental concern from the state agency.
"It just seems to me that the amount of political control that is exerted at the decision-making level is just being blown way out of proportion by this administration," (former DOW Director) Olson said. "And I'm a Republican, damn it."
(The tactics are Bushian:
(Current DNR Director) Walcher has acknowledged that in 2000, he edited DOW comments on the federal government's White River National Forest Plan to omit concerns from district wildlife managers about the impact of illegal roads, logging and proposals for new ski lifts on wildlife. )
Guv Owens politicizing ostensibly independent oversight organizations??!! It's not as if he's done it at Metro State. Or tried with the CSU Presidency. Or the Commission on Higher Education .... No pattern here, nope.
One of the better analyses we've seen of this perfect furball storm is this June, 2003 piece.
"...it is the perverse interaction among many policy choices and events that have converged to create, in Colorado, the nation's most severe state fiscal problem..."
Conclusion? TABOR plus Gallagher plus Amendment 23 plus neocon federalism mean that schools suck up more and more of the shrinking state revenues, and unfunded federal mandates the rest. A formula now branded by referendum into the hide of the Constitution.Buh bye, all the other services we think our State is here to provide....
(Kudos (and queries and comments) to author Jim Zelenski of the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute of the Colorado Center on Law and Policy.)
The Bighorn and the Bell are both pounding on this complex issue but while we hope for the best, consider us cynics.
We need extremely strong, focussed leadership to untangle it all. A head-banging Governor, for a start. The Washington Post talked to former Clinton Chief of Staff Panetta, who suggested,
... the next governor should harness the initiative system to thwart it. Draft an entirely new budget for the state, ignoring the electoral mandates, Panetta said, then submit it to the voters as an initiative.
Oh, we have Bill Owens... (whom recent commentators on the DailyKos weblog called 'Bush Lite', and 'A Pale Pataki'...), who would rather wait the hard ones out until he graduates up to Grover's corners in '06. And who else will pound the TABOR hard-liners' heads on this one?
For our part, we'll look at what Colorado will be like in five years with no progress on this issue. That may help focus the minds...
I was all set to 'virtually' attend Bill Owens' 4th Annual Colorado Tech Summit this Friday. As the web site iinstructed, I'd tuned up my Windows Media Player hours before, to insure I'd reserved one of the few live links to the event. I checked and re-checked during the long hours prior, and sure enough, at the 1:30 PM kick-off, I was still being streamed jazz and new age music with a 'Stand-By!' slide on screen. I was in!
Then I was out. The music abruptly cut off and a pop-up appeared indicating that I'd lost the server connection.
I tried to connect again about 20 times in the next ten minutes, the only result from which was that my computer's performance slowed and slowed and slowed until, you guessed it, the only way to continue was to re-boot.
All of which seemed to me a fine metaphor for (to steal from Al Franken, this is irony, now) the Governor's efforts over the last four years to build Colorado's technology industries. Lots of promo, no performance.
Accountability -- tell us how many jobs, from which target industries and companies, you will deliver to Colorado from these jaunts, Governor.
Me? I'll be standing by with my Windows Media Player ready, hoping to catch a live feed of Owens hitting the never-Sun-setting Scottish links with McNeally.
Blank check for Governor and the Water Board (which Governor can politicize)
Can become taxpayer liability if projects don't pan out
Storage only -- no conservation specified
Siphons water from West to Front Range
Other issues on this one ... .... More conservation -- (WONK ALERT! -- if only 50% of the Denver homes with bluegrass lawns replaced that grass with drought-tolerant lawns and foliage we'd save 80% of what we need to meet Denver-area demand through 2040). More specific projects. And why trust Governors and their appointed boards with big blank checks...
No one wants to touch health care reform. But as Bush's radical Federalism expands, states are having to confront more of their citizens left without insurance, and Medicaid costs about to bankrupt their budgets.
"We see little evidence from Washington that the current administration and current Congress are going to do anything about the huge number of uninsured people in the country," said E. Richard Brown, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, who consulted with drafters of the California bill. "I think there's growing sentiment that states need to do something."
So we were struck this weekend by the differences between the approaches some states are taking (as laid out in the LA Times article quoted above), and the, uh, non-approach in Colorado.
If this trend continues, and there's no reforms in any health systems, long-term care will bust this state's budget. Right now, it's 35 percent of our Medicaid budget, and once this little recession is over with, it'll just eat us alive.
But he is, like all of the radical right running the State, such a free-marketeer that he's unwilling to suggest anything. He is knowledgeable about all the options, but says;
....To fully insure the uninsured in this state it would cost us over $1 billion. Right now the state can't afford that kind of money.
Others in the roundtable push back:
Kleinke((economist): You said no one wants to pay more taxes to cover the uninsured. But as Joe said, we are implicitly paying taxes all the time for the uninsured through cross-subsidies. We have to mark up a hospital bill to (someone who has insurance) to cover someone who comes into the E.R. without insurance....
Why not come up with some sort of program which, unfortunately, would have the "T" word attached to it, that taxes health plans or taxes providers directly, rather than do it through this horrendous, incredibly inefficient mechanism?
Create a fund that provides very basic and catastrophic coverage for the uninsured so when they show up at the hospital, chances are their disease hasn't progressed horribly.
There are ways to do it. This is exactly the essence of a plan that Maine is looking at right now. The state of Washington has toyed with it for a couple of sessions.
Pollock (health care consultant): Dave, why don't we just put everybody in the state in one (insurance) pool, like the federal government employees? That would really drive down costs. You'd have a huge pool and the risk would be spread out.
Owen: Well, the question is, do you want a government pool, or do you want a private sector pool? I would say if you're going to go this way, you create a non-government private sector kind of a pool, and that's something that the private sector certainly should look at.
Which catches the problem in our state perfectly -- no leadership from our right-wing government, on so many critical issues. Leave it to Mikey/ "the private sector"/consumers/le marche.....
Which just bankrupts the state while leaving millions in the lurch.
States with leaders who work --- like Maine and California and about a dozen others -- are tackling the issue directly.
No one wants to touch health care reform. But as Bush's radical Federalism expands, states are having to confront more of their citizens left without insurance, and Medicaid costs about to bankrupt their budgets.
"We see little evidence from Washington that the current administration and current Congress are going to do anything about the huge number of uninsured people in the country," said E. Richard Brown, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, who consulted with drafters of the California bill. "I think there's growing sentiment that states need to do something."
So we were struck this weekend by the differences between the approaches some states are taking (as laid out in the LA Times article quoted above), and the, uh, non-approach in Colorado.
If this trend continues, and there's no reforms in any health systems, long-term care will bust this state's budget. Right now, it's 35 percent of our Medicaid budget, and once this little recession is over with, it'll just eat us alive.
But he is, like all of the radical right running the State, such a free-marketeer that he's unwilling to suggest anything. He is knowledgeable about all the options, but says;
....To fully insure the uninsured in this state it would cost us over $1 billion. Right now the state can't afford that kind of money.
Others in the roundtable push back:
Kleinke((economist): You said no one wants to pay more taxes to cover the uninsured. But as Joe said, we are implicitly paying taxes all the time for the uninsured through cross-subsidies. We have to mark up a hospital bill to (someone who has insurance) to cover someone who comes into the E.R. without insurance....
Why not come up with some sort of program which, unfortunately, would have the "T" word attached to it, that taxes health plans or taxes providers directly, rather than do it through this horrendous, incredibly inefficient mechanism?
Create a fund that provides very basic and catastrophic coverage for the uninsured so when they show up at the hospital, chances are their disease hasn't progressed horribly.
There are ways to do it. This is exactly the essence of a plan that Maine is looking at right now. The state of Washington has toyed with it for a couple of sessions.
Pollock (health care consultant): Dave, why don't we just put everybody in the state in one (insurance) pool, like the federal government employees? That would really drive down costs. You'd have a huge pool and the risk would be spread out.
Owen: Well, the question is, do you want a government pool, or do you want a private sector pool? I would say if you're going to go this way, you create a non-government private sector kind of a pool, and that's something that the private sector certainly should look at.
Which catches the problem in our state perfectly -- no leadership from our right-wing government, on so many critical issues. Leave it to Mikey/ "the private sector"/consumers/le marche.....
Which just bankrupts the state while leaving millions in the lurch.
States with leaders who work --- like Maine and California and about a dozen others -- are tackling the issue directly.
In June, Maine Gov. John E. Baldacci, a Democrat, signed a law that aims to provide health insurance to all state residents by 2009. It also seeks to rein in medical costs by establishing voluntary price caps for providers, hospitals and insurers. Lawmakers in several states, including Maryland, Illinois, New Mexico and Wisconsin, are conducting studies or drafting legislation to expand health coverage that could be considered as early as next year...
...The California legislation, approved early Saturday, would require employers to either purchase private health-care policies for workers or pay into a statewide pool that would purchase insurance on their behalf. The requirement would apply to employers with 200 or more workers on Jan. 1, 2006. Businesses with 50 to 199 workers would have until 2007 to comply, and employers with fewer than 20 workers would be exempt.
Employers with 20 to 49 workers would be exempt until the state provided them with a tax credit subsidy to help offset the insurance cost. Supporters believe the legislation would provide health coverage to 1 million of the 6.3 million uninsured Californians....
Is any approach perfect? Nope -- some remain uninsured, others may have to give up some benefits to insure that more get some coverage before things turn 'horrible';
...."The Medicaid rate of growth is not sustainable and will destroy states," said Nelson J. Sabatini, secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Even so, Sabatini said, he is working on a plan to give all Maryland residents basic health coverage. That can be done, he said, by limiting benefits but providing them to more people.
But you cannot get anywhere on a critical furball issue like this one (just as we can't get anywhere on Tabor/Amendment 23/Gallagher) without clear, decisive leadership from the party that runs the place.
One thing we've discovered; how the guy makes money.
First, have compliant local right wing leaders drop a stink bomb in some state to stir up the media. Next, sign-up paid operatives at local colleges and universities to register your entity as a 'student group', thereby making it eligible for $$ from said college's student fees. Then, have said operatives invite 'noted speaker' to campus to talk about the issue. For a very substantial honorarium/err fee. Who best as speaker?
Why, David Horowitz!
Who will, surprise surprise! be speaking for a tidy sum at near-bankrupt Metro State in late September! And three other Colorado campuses!!
What a scam.
Much more coming on Mr. Horror-Witch. Advice to the 24 folks who attended his breakfast in June; sever all connections now! It's gonna get ugly...
We're tired of it, and we're not going to take it any more.
And we need your help. Angry at opening up the nation's parklands to oil and grass drilling? Out of work and wondering why we're net LOSING jobs to California? Worried that our great state is bankrupt, yet the radical right-wing in power is too busy redistricting to address the Tabor budget furball, or exploding Medicare costs?
You've come to the right place. Please join the Network now. Get regular e-mail updates as illustrious folks from all over the region offer solid, middle-of-the-road solutions. Sign on as a voice for the network. Drop us a 'hot tip', and we'll get on it right away.
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