CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
February 06, 2010 07:27 PM UTC
79 Comments
From a
And then sales taxes at the store and the ability to pay the property taxes?
Wow, that was a tough one…..
FASTER & Dirty Dozen?
It looks like employment was starting to turn up, and unemployment maybe was starting to turn down, just as those graphs ended in Jan. 09, as Obama was taking office….
You mean the 95% of us for whom Obama lowers taxes? But back to state government issues: For showcasing the success of the shrink it and drown it crowd, we give you Colorado Springs, the anti-tax epicenter and well on its way to becoming a little piece of the third world right here in Colorado.
…it’s that you make no sense at all, SEE: non sequitur.
That graph looks different than this one.
That’s because Bush dishonestly kept things “off the budget.” Things like a war of convenience in Iraq. A war in Afghanistan. Etc.
As soon as Obama took adult leadership, all of these items were included in the budget.
Most people consider cooked books and lies to be distasteful.
But some people consider cooked books and lies to be bringing honor and dignity back to the White House. Maybe because they wore tuxedoes when they submitted the cooked books?
Those are total deficit numbers, right?
Sorry you feel like funding troops on the battlefield is such an extravagance.
What is cooked about the numbers above?
You get really indignant, I will give you that I respect the opinion that going to war in Iraq was not wise, but once we’re there, it’s not an optional expense.
I think that putting them back on budget so that Americans can see what they really cost was brave.
You can choose to use the numbers any way you want. But at least now we have numbers.
But unless I’m mistaken (certainly possible) I think the chart I posted is deficits, all spending included.
The numbers Heritage used were budget deficit projections and actuals (the image name even says ‘budget’). The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts were extra-budgetary under the Bush Administration. It also dishonestly ‘credits’ the Obama administration with the ’09 budget, which was mostly passed under Bush. Typical for Heritage, but sad that they have to use hand-picked numbers to tell the tale they want to sell.
The Obama budget also includes the AMT tax that has to be adjusted every year. I believe that it is about 70 billion this year.
No prior President has included this in the budget. Hopefully at some point the AMT will be dealt with with some kind of permanent solution. Maybe including it in the budget instead of off-budget will get it more attention and more chance of a fix?
Who knows the history of the ATM? Which party is most responsible and why was it not adjusted for inflation from the beginning?
Or, rather, AMT. It’s been around since 1969, when it was created to target only 150 or so high-income individuals and families that used tax breaks to pay, effectively, no income tax. It was overhauled substantially in the Reagan years, under the first Bush presidency, and again in the first Clinton budget. When regular income tax was indexed to inflation in 1985, the AMT was not (it never was), so lots of taxpayers who got significant tax cuts over the last 25 years instead fall into AMT territory — that’s as significant as the lack of AMT indexing. Both parties are equally responsible, most changes to the AMT have been done with Republican presidents and Democratic congresses, or vica versa, though changes under Clinton and Bush II occurred when the presidents’ parties also had a majority in Congress.
Those were good times. Remember the FlyII teleportation boom of 2017? Made a lot of money off that.
If $7.5 billion were 0.25% of our operating budget, that must mean our operating budget is $3 trillion. Pretty sure someone screwed the pooch on that one. And since Republicans didn’t write the article, surely…
That’s the total, not the fraction.
Are you helping Penry with his math too?
There’s no really definite way to say what the antecedent to “that” was.
I stand corrected, though.
Penry and his fellow travelers have no credible “plan” or solution to the budget crisis, nor do they care about one.
Their only “plan” is to let things go from bad to worse so they can blame the Dems. Stevie Wonder could see that.
52 to 48!! 52 to 48!!! Scott Brown!!!!!
Do you think the Colorado GOP has contacted him to headline a fund-raiser yet?
in other states for a while, rather concentrate on representing the great people of the commonwealth of …
But if he did, do you think the Romanoff people will demand to appear at another fundraiser with Brown, the way they are with Obama? I mean, it’s only fair …
Republican abs of the month? Are there enough for 12 months?
Nevermind.
Take that back or else!
Oh, wait, you’re on my side …?
Er,
I wish people would use more respectful language in discussion. The poorly-sighted can’t see your side of the argument. (Oh damn!)
So true.
Great stuff CoPols, keep it coming please.
.
I know what John Morse looks like, and I don’t think that’s the same person.
.
Are you maybe thinking of El Paso Dem Chairman John Morris?
Morse is a totally stand up guy. We need more people like him in public service.
people in Colorado, with maybe the exception of Gary Harmon and Lynn Bartels, know that Penry has never been concerned with competent governance or what is good for the people of Colorado. Partisan political, mealy mouthed flimflamry, at the cost of hurting the people of Colorado, is what his political career has been about from the get-go.
To be honest, I guess I had held out some hope that lame yuck Penry would want to do something for the people of Colorado and salvage a little honor and respectability for his disgrace filled legacy. But Penry has chosen to be nothing but a two-bit partisan hatchet man, yet again. The result of all that time spent with Tom DeLay and Scott McInnis, I suspect. Penry has yet to learn, as Governor Owens did with his advocacy for Ref. C, that there are more important priorities for the people of Colorado than playing the dim-witted partisan. Why not just give it a try, Josh, and grow up to be a responsible adult in your last few months in the senate?
And while Penry worries about the numbers for people on the east coast, here are the numbers which the people of Colorado have determined are best for our own state:
State Senate: 20-15 D
State Representives: 37-27-1 D
US Senate: 2-0 D
US Representatives: 5-2 D
And those numbers come because of people like Penry shrinking the R Party down to far right extremists. If they would try moderation and compromise at some point, instead of just determining that they will be the party of NO!, then they might have a chance of making gains. But with politicos like Penry, McInnis and Wadhams calling the shots, do not look for much to change.
Kudos to Sen. Morse for calling out Penry’s CSB. Scratch the thin veneer of Penry’s slick facade and you will always find the weak powdery substance. His desire to throw even more people out of work in the depths of the Bush recession is reprehensible. And when his numbers do not add up, just say that you didn’t really mean what you said. Penry has been called out for his arrogance and ignorance even by people in his own party, like Owens and Marostica, who know that you cannot govern from extremist idiocy. But such will be the Josh Penry legacy.
“Is anyone else here tired of the flimflam, mealy-mouthed Republican?” –Josh Penry
The people are tired of your bullshit and know you can cut the fucking budget if you have the fucking political will. Period.
Damn right it’s posturing, by the losing majority against the will of the people!!
Where should your boy Penry cut the budget? Specifically.
Saying the governor ought to pick is wussing out.
So go for it, or put a cork in it.
Though I didn’t know we had a budget specifically for the purposes of fucking. I thought that was more of a Nevada thing.
n/t
Former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and former Fed chief Alan Greenspan called for both spending cuts and TAX INCREASES to solve the federal deficit problem. We can’t solve the budget problems at the federal or state level with just cuts or just tax increases.
In 1986, before TABOR, we were in the bottom of a recession and the General Assembly temporarily increased the sales tax to see the state government through the next fiscal year. I don’t remember the exact period but the increase had a sunset after six or nine months. The sky did not fall and the state recovered from the economic slump with basic services intact. But, of course, with TABOR such practical and common sense solutions are no longer available. That is why you see the eleven revenue bills in the General Assembly at the moment. The futility and silliness of TABOR is showing through again.
Politically- they’re toast.
They’re R’s so the D’s won’t want to follow them. They’re failed R’s so no D’s can follow them
They still won’t call for sensible regulation, even though both have admitted mistakes were made in the runup and bust.
And as soon as they deviate fromt he “cut taxes” mantra, the R’s won’t follow them either.
I was at the news conference and two things were obvious:
1. His numbers are silly and made no sense.
2. The Penry-Republican plan is a set-up. They ask the Governor to make additional cuts but of course they weren’t specific where the cuts could be made because they want the Governor to do it so they can then criticize the specific cuts. Anyone who has ever followed the state budget knows the Joint Budget Committee submits a budget to the House and Senate based on a detailed evaluation of every executive department down to how many employees each program should have. The two Republican members of the JBC have access to all of that information. Surely, Sen. Penry, as minority leader, has access to the same information and could surely announce the specific cuts he wants to see in the state budget.
His news conference was a political gimmick, not a serious statement about the budget.
Governing, not quite so easy.
Republican talking points: NSFW and definitely don’t let the children hear them
unless they can find a way to make the taxpayers pay for it. First, it was banking. Now…
but the Dems apparently won’t try to do that either.
is that you also cut services and jobs which who knew could have an impact on our economy.
What are you going to do with all those out of work state employees who also pay taxes and buy things in our economy?
There is also that issue with plowing roads during snowstorms and educating our workforce. You willing to drive through the blizzard on unplowed roads? How many basic services are you willing to get rid of to feed your fat ego?
I can tell you I’m spending signficantly less right now.
Once again, the state Republicans engage in distortions and, once again, the newspapers in SW Colorado don’t report it. Rep. Roberts says the Democrats don’t play nice at the state house but won’t answer a basic question: Who do you stand for? the local taxpayers or the power brokers? She authors a moratorium on insurance reforms but doesn’t say a word about the shenanigans in the State House. Now she wants to join the state Senate this fall. Which will it be, Rep. Roberts, will you support the bad math of the Republican Party or its worse policy?
(What is really disappointing is that I figured I would vote for her in November. Now, I’ve swung from being a sure vote to a probably not.)
I hope Sen. Morse properly reports the “book” as a gift from Michael Hutner.
He’s not clever enough to have created it himself.
So he’d have to be the one reporting.
I imagine Senator Morse has the receipt. He probably bought it at the book store across the street from the Capitol.
picked it out of the “free bin” that’s in front of the store.
…your chart stops pre-Obama. You’re going to run out of blue ink after last year.
What in nature outside of man shows a liberal bias? Isn’t evolution the most poignant demonstration of an extreme free market?
http://pewforum.org/surveys/or…
Hank Paulson, Colin Powell
drummed out? And would either of them call themselves liberal? Heck, there are hardly any Dems willing to associate with the word “liberal” and certainly no R running for anything would dare to.
is a fairly liberal guy, regardless of party. And no, Paulson and Powell probably wouldn’t describe themselves that way, but we’re talking comparatively.
You’d have to call old line conservatives moderate and the center right liberal in the context of today’s GOP in order to call any R “liberal so I don’t believe liberal Republicans exist any more.
Look ’em up.
Evolution is a poignant demonstration of a combination of coordination mechanisms, one of them being market exchange. It also has produced hierarchical organization, and normative organization (defined as mutually enforced rules of conduct, found frequently in mammal populations), as well as an array of anatomical technologies (eg, stingers, wings, legs, hands, claws, brains, other organs, fins, mimicry, etc.). Human societies are in many ways echoes of biological evolution, produced by a similar but far more accelerated dynamic (involving packages of information, whether genes or memes, which reproduce, mutate, compete for reproductive success, and thus evolve).
Human genius isn’t defined by favoring any one of the various institutional (and technological) models that we have reproduced in remarkable similarity to nature, but rather by drawing on the full array, and combining them most effectively.
This truth is reinforced by the study of economics, which shares not only a linguistic root with ecology (“eco” being Greek for household or habitat), but, not coincidentally, an underlying mathematical structure as well. And our two 2009 Nobel Lauriets in Economics both made their mark in institutional economics, one (Oliver Williamson) analyzing the efficiency trade-offs under varying conditions between hierarchical and market structures, and the other (Elinor Ostrom) analyzing very effective normative controls of common pool resources in various times and places.
Even though the analogy you invoked militates strongly against any absolute privileging of markets, carrying the analogy too far isn’t a good idea. Evolution doesn’t necessarily produce “good” outcomes according to human values (which is precisely why Social Darwinism is so odious; it mistook a descriptive reality for a normative prescription). That’s why modern market economies are so deeply in need of complex regulatory architectures: Because they don’t necessarily lead to humanity-serving outcomes on their own, a fact well-exemplified by the Enron-induced California Energy Crisis of 2000, and the near economic collapse of 2008.
You drive the bus off the road and then complain when someone has to pay the tow truck to get you out. How come you weren’t concerned about deficits when President Cheney was driving this economy into the ground with his tax cuts for the rich and off the books wars? Such selective outrage and derision.
I’m just not in the Keynesian school. I do have faith that eventually the economy will come around, but it’s a question of how to make that happen quickly.
Ardy – thanks for that. Don’t you think that survival of the fittest makes up much more of the natural world than the relationships you’ve mentioned?
not all of them were captured in Canto 56 of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.:
You might look up kin selection too. (OK, I’ll help out here: helping to raise the offspring of your siblings and other relatives increases your fitness if those offspring carry some of the same genes that you do.)
Being “fit” (in a Darwinian sense) is not restricted to eating, fucking, and killing more than your neighbors. It is much more complex, especially in social organisms.
Indeed, most male organisms in the natural world spew their seed out indiscriminately into the air or water, and that’s all the effort they put into rearing their offspring. If this “natural” model is what you recommend for people, you ought to practice what you preach and stop worrying about the education of your daughters. You bleeding liberal you!
(Really, though, please DON’T practice this. Please, worry about your children and their friends and the children of all your relatives. Make sure you raise them to the best of your ability. Don’t let the fact that this makes you a “natural world” liberal for doing this influence you into doing something stupid like what most starfish do!!)
Science is cool (and real!). In general, poems (even really really long poems), are not the best source for reliable scientific information.
Thanks Ardy.
Btw..
I have a buddy like this. What a jackass. 🙂
This spring (if it ever arrives), when you are outdoors and there is pollen wafting everywhere, that you are walking through a giant botanical circlejerk, and that stuff you just inhaled up your nose is …
OK, maybe not such a good thing to keep in mind. 😉
You and Steve have jump-started my brain. Just hope I can keep it running, hard to do on a gray, cold, snowy day.
You generated a big grin with
Must say, as a bit of poet myself and friend to a very good poet, that fine poetry is also good brain food, very “whole-brain,” you might say.
I did not mean to imply that poems and all the other arts do not offer incredible insights into the human condition and do not offer opportunities for us to more critically evaluate the natural world.
I would be much less of a scientist, not to mention human, without the arts to cause my neurons to fire in totally unexpected ways!
There are multiple ways of understanding the same thing. For instance, a river can be examined and appreciated through the lenses of fluid dynamics, chemical composition, and light reflection and refraction, or through the lenses of painting, music, and poetry. I wouldn’t consider any understanding of that river complete without being able to see and hear the spirits within it, singing and dancing their way to the sea….
You started off bitching about how the graphs of deficits were unfair because it didn’t show the Obama years but when it was pointed out that he inherited a 1.2 trillion dollar deficit from Republicans and his deficit spending was in direct response to an enconomy circling the drain due to Republican misrule, you change the subject to talk about evolution. What a nonsensical reply.
The trends show that Republicans love to borrow and spend money because then they can brag about not raising taxes but they are being disingenuous because the borrowed money comes with interest so the taxpayer will have to eventually have to pay the original amount for the goods or services and then the interest so no Republicans don’t do better with the deficit than Democrats. As all the graphs show, the trend line is that Republicans abuse deficit spending to a greater degree than Democrats. If you are going to complain about Obama and the deficit then you should also hold your partisan politicians equally responsible for this mess.
Quit blaming Obama for the deficit when it is obvious it started before he came into office and his response to the economic crisis was neither radical or unprecedented. It was a middle of the road approach that probably prevented an immediate collapse but was too tentative to snap the country out of this economic crisis.