CO-04 (Special Election)
See Full Big Line
(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
See Full Big Line
(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
See Full Big Line
(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
See Full Big Line
(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
See Full Big Line
(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
See Full Big Line
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
November 12, 2018 12:12 AM UTC
51 Comments
Trump is a draft dodger.
He stinks.
Great God almighty.
That lying draft dodger stinks.
He stinks, in part, because he's unwilling to get into a shower.
Except, of course, for a golden shower by Russian prostitutes.
Of all the things to criticize Trump for, draft dodging is weak. Everyone should draft dodge whenever there's a draft to dodge, if they can. He did it selfishly, but, like, fuck drafts. His problem is more his fascism than his draft dodging.
Support our vets.
Funny comment seen on a Yahoo News thread this AM, about the mid-term election results:
"Democrats took the House. Russians kept the Senate."
Democrats just won resoundingly in Colorado and across the country. Now would be the perfect time to abandon all their promises to be bipartisan with those who voters just rejected.
Oh, yeah, there's nothing like telling voters "I lied!" to rebuild confidence in our broken politics. Why don't we invade Poland while we're at it?
Crazypants. It’s not just for GOPers anymore ?!? . . .
With the kind indulgence of my fellow Polsters, I would like to give a shoutout to my son, Dylan, who served two terms in the Army including deployments to Korea and Saudi Arabia. Thank you for your service, son. I am a very proud and grateful father and I love you.
There are, I heard, 20,000,000 veterans in the United States. Many need our help, all deserve our gratitude. Please reach out and touch a veteran today…and say to them…
Never Forget.
Honoring the troops who continue to show up and do their jobs — even when they are supporting inadequate and divisive civilian "leadership."
The units from Colorado currently serving on the US/Mexico border:
I haven't read of any Colorado National Guard units being deployed. And of course, there are probably Colorado citizens serving in the other military units deployed to the border.
My brother had two tours in Korea and one in Vietnam as well as multiple tours in Europe before retiring after 28 years as a master sergeant. I did two years on the staff at West Point, leaving as an E-5.
Thank you for your service, Dylan.
My great-uncle Duane fought at the Battle of the Bulge and still owns his Minnesota dairy farm. He has moved into town for the winter; he still is sharp as a tack and has kept his great sense of humor.
My father was (Army) Korean Conflict but didn't see battle.
My first cousin Bri flies for the Air Force. She recently brought home a casualty from the Afghan war.
Thanks to all veterans for your service.
Jared Polis steps in doo-doo before even a week has passed – appoints school privatization advocates to his education transition team including hardcore Republican Bob Shaffer:
Sorry, but no, Gorky. Listening to multiple points of view isn't the equivalent of "steps in doo-doo."
Let us know when there is a Polis-endorsed plan including any of the approaches to vouchers.
This is not just "listening to different points of view." Appointing Shaffer to this team is *promoting* that point of view.
If Polis had just appointed charter advocates (instead of Heritage Foundation water-carriers) I would have been unhappy but probably would have held my tongue.
In my opinion, school privatization is a third rail for Democratic leaders. Don't touch that.
And how many people from the education lobby did Polis also appoint to his committees?
And by the way, hearing from someone with a different point of view on an advisory (i.e., no authority to make binding decisions) committee is: (a) a demonstration that all viewpoints will be heard but not necessarily acted upon, or (b) a cynical ploy to give the appearance that all viewpoints will be heard.
Frankly given Shaffer rabid homophobic tendencies, I am a little surprised at this choice. Surely there must be other voucher advocates whom Polis could have selected. Oh well, politics does make for strange bedfellows.
I don't think school privatization is going to get any traction from a Democratic legislature even if Polis wanted to do it (which I do not believe he would even try).
School privatization is for the educrats what gun safety legislation is for the ammosexuals. Something with which to raise money and gin up the base.
To be more specific, school privatization, vouchers, and charter schools are about White parents who don't want their kids to go to schools with non-whites, and Christians who don't want their kids contaminated by science.
In all three cases, they are trying to set up a system that move public education funding away from public schools.
Well, school choice also attracts a lot of African American parents who want their kids to get the same opportunities white kids get.
Data, please? Studies I've seen show that charter schools perform no better than non-charter neighborhood schools of equivalent socioeconomic situation. And frequently perform worse.
Even if some specific charter situations are better than the same public neighborhood school, that is no reason to go for vouchers or other forms of government-subsidized privatization.
Joining the chorus here. Education policy isn't driven by the governor's office, but by legislation and the BoE. If Polis wants to cast a wide net in looking for ways to improve our education system, fine; he's not going to find a receptive audience in the legislature unless he really finds demonstrably good ideas.
He re's my education reform plan:
1.
Spend more money– especially in higher ed ucation.
2. Repea t
step 1.
I like that plan. Although we need to spend more money in K-12 and especially pre-K as well.
Definitely. The right always says we need to stop throwing money at a problem. Well, throwing poverty at it hasn't worked!
Without spending on education, the price really goes up. A year in a Colorado prison cell costs more than a year at a state college, room and board included. Kiddie jail costs more than a year at the state's ritziest boarding school.
OK read
https://www.westword.com/news/whats-cory-garderns-path-to-victory-in-2020-10983762
Gardner's path to victory is to move to Wyoming and run there.
Take just a moment to remember the great Stan Lee, 1922-2018. R.I.P.
Died today …. appropriate for a WWII vet
Stan Lee was an inspiration to me. The quality of writing in comic books took a skyward turn under his guidance.
If I have a good vocabulary, it is in large measure because of my addiction to Marvel comics as a kid.I always enjoyed watching for his movie cameos in recent years.
We will miss you, Mr. Lee. Give a greeting to the Watcher, when you see him.
Rest in Peace.
So, lots of people opining that "Trump's gonna win" in 2020.
So, how's he doing?
Gallup, 11/5 to 11/11 survey, +38% -56%, gap -18%. Quite a shift from 10/15 to 10/21 survey, +44 -50%, gap -6%.
How about Rasmusson, the Republican optimists of the polling world?
12-Nov-18 overall +46% -52% (back to normalish -6)
02-Nov-18 overall +51% -47% (peak Trump +4)
22-Oct-18 overall +47% -52%
He is banking on eeking out narrow wins in enough states the win the electoral college and saying F/U to the popular vote total which he should lose because there really are more Dems and Dem-leaning U's albeit all packed into states on the two coasts. Ask HRC.
And should he actually lose the electoral college, he will scream voter fraud, rigged system, yadda, yadda, yadda.
The senate races last week provide him with something of a roadmap for how he can do it.
Except that Florida did pass prop. 4, restoring voting rights to about a million ex felons. Those folks are heavily black and heavily Democratic. Trump won Fla. Last time by 112,000. Ex felons alone could add 200,000 ,300,000 to the Klobuchar/Booker ticket(I can dream!) In 2020. If Florida goes blue, Trump is toast.
"albeit all packed into states on the two coasts……." Citizens of Minnesota, Illinois, Colorado, New Mexico might differ with you.
And it would seem the pendulum is beginning to swing back in states that Trump narrowly won (WI, MI, PA). Of course, the likely Trump recession in 2019 and into 2020 won't help him either.
Touché! MOST are packed into states on the two coasts.
Spot on, CHB, and less so all the time, R&R. This is why:https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/0706/How-young-liberals-moves-to-Red-America-may-temper-political-divides
Dad would have been 100 yesterday. Born on Armistice day, he thought, as a child does,that the parades were all for him.
WWI was the "war to end all wars". We would learn our lesson. The brutality of mustard gas and trench warfare, shattered alliances and bones, all would fade in the light of peace and rationality when the Allies signed the Armistice agreement with Germany on November 11, 1918.
Then Dad also got to see how the WWI soldiers who desperately needed their promised "bonus checks" early were beaten, shot at and their tent city burned in Washington, DC in 1932. He saw the press as the bonus marcher's only friend, and it probably influenced his decision to be a "newspaperman".
He volunteered when Uncle Sam called in 1942. He worked as a journalist on a military paper, then on a boat in the North African arena, working as a weatherman. My aunt Marge was a WAC, and she also volunteered to serve. Mom was an Austrian refugee, fleeing the Anschluss, surviving the Blitz in London, who met Dad in New York in 1942. And when WWII ended with atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that was the ultimate horror; there could be no more wars. So people thought.
Until the Korean War, and the Vietnam War that left my ex with Agent Orange cysts and PTSD, and the Gulf War which killed a half a million Iraqis and left thousands of surviving Allied soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, and the War on Terror, and all of the sneaky little undeclared wars around the globe in which millions, mostly noncombatants, die uncelebrated and unremembered.
No one thanks the mother of children killed by Saudi air strikes in Yemen. No one thanks the children for their "service".
We don't study peace. We don't celebrate it. It's not glamorous or cinematic or sexy. We don't really understand what makes peace tick. We don't make video games about peace. (or they're not very popular games). Peace isn't profitable – at least, it isn't profitable for Dow or Xe or Raytheon.
Yes, we should thank veterans for their service. They went in to risk their lives for an ideal, or maybe just for a job and an education. Their ideals are often cynically used for private profits.
But I will also thank the peace activists – those who risk their lives and safety and security to work for the day when we'll "study war no more".
Hopefully, one day we can see an end to war, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and other such stains upon the earth. We all must do our part to fight for such a future. A future of peace, of prosperity, of equality, of liberty.
Getting rid of capitalism would simply doom us to poverty and ignorance. A mixed economy is the best and only hope of combining freedom and prosperity. Everything else ends up like Venezuela.
…You know that Venezuela has a mostly private economy and is more like a """mixed""" economy than a socialist one, right? Like, they're basically just a capitalist economy with a bunch of regulations, a bunch of welfare, and a nationalized oil industry.
Also, capitalism is in no way compatible with freedom, so we cannot have freedom with an economy even partly capitalist. Capitalist bosses are small tyrants, essentially, who destroy the liberty of those who work at their businesses. Only through the end of their control over the means of production, the dissolution of class division, and labor going under the direct control of the laborers can we be free or prosperous.
To put it bluntly, your ideas are too silly for serious discussion. Maoist China, Stalinist Russia are the end game of socialism. They didn't work and, as Orwell said, were essentially a boot smashing a human face, forever. As Milovan Djilas proved in "The New Class" the whole concept of dictatorship of the proletariat means in practice, dictatorship over the proletariat.
"Maoist China, Stalinist Russia are the end game of socialism."
No??? Like, to say that is to ignore, for example, Revolutionary Catalonia or the Free Soviets in Ukraine. Or even to ignore the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Also to ignore the Đilas was engaging in a socialist critique of planned economies as not actually socialist.
To ignore anyone arguing for socialism who doesn't toe the Stalinist line is to ignore the socialist resistance to the USSR and the PRC and to reject all the socialists the USSR and PRC had to kill in order to impose their image of "socialism" upon their societies, or, at least, to ignore the socialist nature of those people.
I'm not an anti-capitalist. I used to be, but got pretty cynical about the socialist parties in the US. Opportunists, liars, looking to suck off the energy of any grassroots movements they can – that's been my experience.
Communist governments appear to be pretty good at improving health care and education of their populations – but suck at freedom. When the state owns everything, the same old rich guys eventually own it, a la Putin and the Chinese hegemonies.
Democratic socialism, now, a la Sanders or Ocasio Cortez – that is socialism that accepts a free-market system, and thrives within it – I can get behind that.
I have no problem with Democratic Socialist parties operating within mixed economies.
certain goods or services — health care or at least health insurance, education, national defense, environmental protection, policing, etc. — are obviously best provided by government because it has a mechanism, the progressive income tax, to recoup its investment.
But if government gets too big, auschwitz, the gulag, slavery, segregation, the inquisition and even the, gasp, designated hitter rule seem to inevitably follow.
Deathpigeon's supposed exceptions only prove the rule. Catalonia in the Spanish civil war was governed by anarchists, not socialistts. Turns out that anarchists suck at government and war because,duh, they're anarchist. A government that can't defend its society is irrelevant.
I'm not familiar with the Ukrainian Soviets. I'm sure that the 20 minutes they lasted were a glorious epoch in human history.
Anarchists are socialists and the Zapatistas have spent the past 20 years defending themselves successfully and improving the lives of the people living in Chiapas, Catalonia increased production and improved conditions for workers massively during the revolutionary period while having more successful militias than the Republican government before the Nationalists were crushed, and the Black Army defended the Free Soviets for years against the Red and White Armies and the free soviets themselves were able to increase grain production while allowing the farmers to have control over the grain their produced. Two of them ended up being defeated militarily, but that doesn't show they suck at "government and war" since both times were defeated by larger militaries which they held out against way longer than other forces in the same conflict did (the White Army was defeated by the Red Army before the Black Army was and the Republican government fell before Revolutionary Catalonia).
Anarchists aren't socialists. They're anarchists. And the only reason they outlasted the main defeated force is that Franco and Lenin had to take care of the main threat before mopping up the side shows. I'll leave the Zappatistas to Zappaterro, he has seniority.
so yes anarchists suck at war and government.
Anarchists were some of the earliest socialists, Proudhon published What Is Property? defending anarchism and socialism, in the 1840s, for example, both the Black Army and the anarchist militias fought more effectively in battle than their governmental counterparts, while both being massively outnumbered, and you've not shown anything about anarchists "sucking at government" only losing specific military campaigns.
I'm no fan of any socialist party or ""communist"" government, to be fair, but, then, I don't honestly believe that any government or politician will bring about socialism, or even can. Only the workers ourselves can do that.
But all would be equal in poverty and ignorance. Except for those who would become more equal.
Thank you for a very thoughtful piece, mama. I agree with you, entirely.. Particularly about our reluctance or inability to wage peace.
I did not serve in the military though I was invited to attend the U. S. Coast Guard Academy. I declined that invitation and a successful college education kept me deferred until after the draft was over. (My number was 14.) I did not dodge the draft…but I did not volunteer.
I spent a great deal of time in the late sixties organizing war protests in south Florida. My brother was in the Navy and our friends were dying. No, I respect the service of soldiers for their willingness to endure hardship and face death. Certainly not for the glory of war.
If you are ever coming through Parachute, let me know. I play about 8 shows a month at a couple of local motel bars. I will play you a song I wrote called, "the Dogs of War". It will tell you my feelings about warfare and those who wage it.
Anyway, Peace and joy to you and yours.
Thanks, Duke, and peace to you and yours, too.
👍❤️