President (To Win Colorado) See Full Big Line

(D) Kamala Harris

(R) Donald Trump

80%

20%

CO-01 (Denver) See Full Big Line

(D) Diana DeGette*

(R) V. Archuleta

98%

2%

CO-02 (Boulder-ish) See Full Big Line

(D) Joe Neguse*

(R) Marshall Dawson

95%

5%

CO-03 (West & Southern CO) See Full Big Line

(D) Adam Frisch

(R) Jeff Hurd

50%

50%

CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado) See Full Big Line

(R) Lauren Boebert

(D) Trisha Calvarese

90%

10%

CO-05 (Colorado Springs) See Full Big Line

(R) Jeff Crank

(D) River Gassen

80%

20%

CO-06 (Aurora) See Full Big Line

(D) Jason Crow*

(R) John Fabbricatore

90%

10%

CO-07 (Jefferson County) See Full Big Line

(D) B. Pettersen

(R) Sergei Matveyuk

90%

10%

CO-08 (Northern Colo.) See Full Big Line

(D) Yadira Caraveo

(R) Gabe Evans

70%↑

30%

State Senate Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

80%

20%

State House Majority See Full Big Line

DEMOCRATS

REPUBLICANS

95%

5%

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
June 04, 2011 03:02 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 62 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.”

–Frank Herbert

Tweet
Share

Comments

62 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

  1. Mesa State College will receive the only raise in state financial aid next year among Colorado’s public, four-year institutions.

    http://www.gjsentinel.com/S=51… (subscriber only)

    …this year’s allocation was 12.5 percent enrollment growth, the highest in the state among public, four-year schools. The next-closest average was 10 percent at Metro State College,

     

  3. I am apparently the only person on Pols and in the entire state of Colorado who does not know who ellbee is, by this name or any previous incarnation, or in real life. Just want to make that clear…. again.

    1. he’s Sheckie Koch.  (Although I really think he’s actually Shemp, and that he and MADCO are in cahoots just to screw me outta my two dollars . . . )

    2. Elbee = LB (you figure out the rest as to previous incarnations.)

      Beyond that all I know is he’s an obnoxious troll who pretends to be tongue in cheek.

      In real life he’s apparently someone very important who many Polsters know personally and swear he’s a much nicer person in the flesh.  For what it’s worse, so am I probably.

      2. Whatever else may be said about EllBee, he is deeply committed in his beliefs (and the positive contributions he makes to Colorado) — even if his preferred style on this blog is to provoke rather than simply engage.

        If this is the person I believe it to be, all I’ll say is that I have never met them personally, and only jousted with that person a couple of times on this blog (but was an accidental witness to their outing).

        But I believe thoughtful opposing points of view, no matter where on the political spectrum, should serve to sharpen and strengthen arguments, not weaken them.

        If it is possible to understand a person’s point-of-view in one sentence, perhaps this one sums it up best about EllBee and his political perspective:  

        There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

        You’re welcome, EllBee.  (Sorry, couldn’t resist 🙂

      3. My initials are RD and I know damned well that I’m not Ardy because I run into him in the grocery store now and then and he doesn’t look a damned thing like me.

        Best not to talk about people’s identities.

        1. That’s as much as I knew about his identity (it wasn’t hard to figure out, since it sounds exactly like ellbee). Beyond that, I have no clue who LB is, was, will be, or wishes to be. Every post I made yesterday was to an anonymous person as far as I was concerned — one who started his diary “Union Thugs”, which is what got my goat.  

          LB/ellbee/union-hater/teacher-basher/otherwise good person (the latter is what everyone seems to be saying about you today, which describes half of Colorado)/whoever you are — Any guesses I made about you I derived from your diary, which made it clear in the first three words how you feel about unions. I apologize if you thought I was trying to out you. I cannot out people whose identities I do not know, NOR WOULD I. If you misunderstood my confrontation and questioning your credentials to mean I was trying to “out” you, I am sorry you (and at least one other reader here) thought that was the case.

          I condemn out-ers, and was the victim of it myself when I used a previous name (yesterday on the same thread again, in fact!) I can simultaneously despise someone’s political viewpoint and respect their right to privacy. If you divulged your education credentials, or lack thereof, that would have been your doing, not mine.I would not “out” someone, even if I could. My word is good. You can believe me, or not — that’s your choice. I really don’t care.

          1. You want to apologize to someone for something you not only did, but continue to do?

            And you condemn people who do the same damned thing?

            You need some work Nancy.  Some serious work.

            You need a timeout.  You SERIOUSLY need a timeout.

    4. Now off to bed. Tomorrow is whole new  opportunity to make mistakes.

      For what it’s worth, after a tough day on the blogs (get a life, Nancy, right?) my husband and I went to see “Bridesmaids”. It was hillarious. Night all!

    5. If you go on every thread and tell people that you don’t know who I am, eventually, someone will probably tell you.

      Thank you for doing this.  Over, and over, and over again.  I’m glad you have such a high respect for anonymity on this blog.

      1. I got beat up pretty well yesterday by MOTR (“F*ck you” were her exact words on one of many posts) for asking you about your credentials to make broad, sweeping statements condemning thousands of hard-working Coloradans — teachers. You claimed to know what you were talking about, and until well into the thread when MOTR said I am supposed to know who you are, (and apparently treat you with some special deference no one else here deserves), as far as I was concerned you were just some new anonymous corporate shill sock-puppet, or young kid with no world experience whatsoever. The thread was turned into “Be nice to ellbee because he was outed before and you know it”. Actually, no, I didn’t know it. Until she said that, I had no idea WTF she was talking about.

        I don’t care if you are the President of the United States. You are not only wrong about education, you are arrogant to think your supposed fame gives you a right to trash teachers and get away with it. Being famous, or wealthy, (if you are) does not mean you have special intelligence, insight, or knowledge about education. From your posts, it is obvious you have not stepped into a classroom (except for maybe a photo op now and then?) to volunteer, in decades.

        What’s wrong with America’s schools (note I said America, because unlike you, I am concerned with our entire country, not just one specific school in Denver)? A big part of the problem is with ethnocentric Republicans who don’t understand that other countries where kids perform better academically than ours actually respect the other languages and cultures the children bring with them. They teach in a variety of languages and value adding to that rich cultural pot. The teachers are expected to be multi-lingual and they are. Kid’s rich personal backgrounds are valued, not minimized or suppressed. Schools in Europe actually encourage kids being exposed to other religious and national ideas, unlike here. Kids naturally are drawn to learning about people other than themselves, and in this bigoted, ethnocentric country, that natural curiosity is squashed like a bug. If you actually spent time teaching kids, you would know kids get turned on by learning when they feel affirmed, valued, treasured, and cared about.

        In Europe, where kids perform better than in the United States, teachers are better prepared, better supported, better paid, and highly appreciated. A kid would never argue with a teacher because they are taught from an early age that teachers are at the top of the respect scale. Parents treat them with respect, and then the kids follow. In the United States, teachers have to not only do their incredibly demanding jobs under hostile circumstances, they have to put up with schmucks like you who blame them for everything.

        In Europe, there is also a higher value placed on learning in general — not just becoming future corporate drones, but on criticial thinking skills, learning classic literature, and understanding cultures other than ones own. In America, kids are treated only like future employees, and their actual brains are not respected. Kids are not challenged in the park enough by outside mentors who ask them to play chess, by outside mentors who encourage them to play musical instruments in their communities, by outside mentors who encourage them to debate in cafes. In the extreme right-wing capitalist United States, children are treated like property of their parents, rather than the pride of their entire communities. Property to be trained like animals, to perform some mindless corporate bean-counting, instead of actually being creative, eloquent, thoughtful, or original.

        Have a good Sunday, Elbee. I don’t give a rat’s behind who you are. I never did. Why don’t you go change your blog name to something where no one will know who you are, and your bullshit will smell like everyone else’s.

        2. any book about education by Rianne Eisler. She wrote The Partnership Way, and Tomorrow’s Children. She designed a Masters in Education program called Partnership Education. Her books explain why extreme capitalism hurts children and undermines education. I think anyone who has an opinion on the public schools should read her books first.  

        3. I really hesitate to post any comment because I don’t know what is going on in this particular thread.  I don’t know who anybody really is……like I say, I never got the password, the secret handshake or the decoder ring.

          Having said that, let me disagree with your assessment of European Schools.  You are simply ignorant of the triage in education in European Schools. Students are ability grouped, early on and only the very brightest receive a college prep education.  That means that “all” our kids in the US are compared to the very brightest of European kids.  It is unfair.

          In England, there is a competing school system called “public” that is really “private.”  It reinforces the very strict class structure in England.  

          Your infatuation with Europe is based on false information….made all the more alarming based on your long term involvement in US educational circles…

          1. typical the world over.  Here in the USA we claim universal public education , i.e., for everyone.  And most districts do not filter out college prep from everyone.

              1. Kids in other countries that perform well are taught to respect teachers. I stand by that statement. Perhaps my saying “Europe” was too general or too specific — I will grant you that.

                I know many teachers who have taught in numerous countries overseas. One friend taught in China. She said the kid’s behavior was close to perfect. The parents respected the teachers, and and modeled that respect to the kids. The kids valued what the teachers were teaching, and they remembered it. This friend told me the first year she was in China, she made the mistake of being honest at parent-teacher conferences, and told a family their child could have worked harder. The child was beaten at home. I had the same experience with a Jordanian family myself (parents were English-educated), once.

                I do not condone violence against anyone, but the point is, these families made it clear the teacher is to be respected as an authority figure. The parents showed deference to the teacher, and it showed in the student’s performance.

                That is just one of the systemic issues we need to face as a culture if we want to be serious about education reform. (Or, we could be lazy and just blame everything on the teachers, I guess, like we do now.)

                1. My kids would come back from school some days talking about a major disagreement in class between the teacher and one or two students over what they are studying. And in that discussion it was clear that my daughters learned a lot more because they were talking about the two sides of the argument when they got home.

                  Effective teaching does not depend on well behaved robots, although that would make the teacher’s job less difficult.

          2. “all” our kids in the US are compared to the very brightest of European kids.  It is unfair.”

            You are right. I did forget about that.

        4. Let me leave it that you should be ashamed for posting the above comment to anyone. And while you may disagree with Elbee, reasoned political discussion never deserves a response like this.

          1. He can trash teachers, call union members thugs, get away with it, and get everyone to turn on the people who call him on it. Glad I don’t know who the coward is.  

  6. Elbee’s diary on unions/teachers/mayor’s race has disappeared.  I was late to the party (slug fest)yesterday and now it seems to have disappeared.

      2. in a post where, ironically, she was falsely accusing Nancy of trying to out Ellbee. Apparently that’s why the whole thing was deleted. (Plus, Elbee’s anti-labor rantings were total fanatical right-wing nonsense anyway.)

        So I’ll restate the proposition here that I stated in the now-deleted thread:

        How’s about we establish a firmly enforceable law forbidding all unions and corporate interests from spending resources on the influencing of electoral politics?  Sound fair? [insert crickets here]

          1. Just because the diary is deleted, doesn’t mean the comments with the timestamps are.

            Three hours before my unfortunate comment, you posted the following:

            “Please don’t out Ellbee all over again. We just went through all that.

            by: Arthur2ShedsJackson @ Sat Jun 04, 2011 at 13:19:52 PM CDT “

            And since you just signed up on May 16th, it’s downright amazing that you would know that at all, isn’t it?

            I’d say we both owe ellbee a major apology, no?  

            1. It scared the crap out of me when I worked for Change That Works (affiliated with SEIU) a couple of years ago, and someone tried to poison SEIU workers with mercury (they broke in and poured it all over the carpet). It took Hazmat to clean it up, and the carpet had to be removed and replaced.  What was on Fox news constantly that week? Baseless clips accusing SEIU employees of being “union thugs“.

              Combine that with me sitting at the funeral of my family’s friend Randy, a union organizer in Chicago (I caught the bouquet at his wedding when I was just a little girl, and our Dads were best friends in Detroit), knowing he was murdered by someone who hates unions. I’ll never forget his mother crying, his children crying, his father handing his mother the phone saying, “Jesse Jackson is on the phone. Here take it”. Only knowing that Randy gave his life for something bigger, something more noble than himself, something lasting, made her stop crying.

              Yeah, I get a little jumpy when I hear or read someone calling my friends “union thugs”.

              1. who posted at SquareState under the same name and then claimed to have stolen his/her own identity and swore to get even with him/herself.  Have you already recovered from your self-humiliation in that fiasco?  Frankly, I figured you would just retire the “Bullshit” handle and crawl under a bush for quite a while. Do you still claim someone else stole your identity for the express purpose of posting the exact same mindless drivel there that you post here?  

                1. Should I go back to your worthless site to see if I’m still being impersonated? I would hate to double your traffic by doing so.

                  Thanks for confirming who you are, though. Just another two-bit psychotic from the Permanently Disaffected Club. Please go masturbate somewhere in private so you imagine yourself popular.

                  1. What are you, a Mini Me version of “Ralphie”?

                    By the way, speaking of your eloquent word selection, what do you mean “Should I go back to your worthless site …?”

                    Do you recall that you denied being the same “Bullshit!” on both sites?  In fact, you claimed that you had never created an account there at all. So what do you mean in asking whether you should go back there?

                    1. I do not need to create an account at your worthless blog in order to read it. Are you really this stupid? Really?

                      So you know, it’s a classic symptom of mental illness that you are not aware of how ridiculous you appear to others.

                    2. Are you seriously still trying to maintain this fiction that it wasn’t you posting under your name at SquareState?  … Perhaps an even more eerie question — do you yourself really believe you’re not you?

            3. And your comment was far more specific and made Ellbee readily identifiable, whereas my comment was deliberately vague and cryptic.

              So, if you agree that you owe Ellbee a major apology as you say, are you offering that apology or not?  

              Moreover, MotR, if you really are sincere in your supposed belief that my comment outed Ellbee, and if you really actually care about whether or not Ellbee is outed, why did you just copy and paste that comment and resurrect it into this thread from the deleted thread?  … Does the word “duh” mean anything to you? How about “hypocrite”? Ring any bells?

        2. If corporations couldn’t contribute to the political process, unions could actually spend their money on bargaining that benefitted everyone. I could get behind that, I think. The problem is, our democratic republic is getting bought and sold by corporate America more every day, last year’s SCOTUS ruling making it even easier. How do we sell your idea?

        3. I’ve been trying to figure out who ellbee was since the near-outing before, and now I had my chance to find out, but I was too busy trying to scratch out a living to stay glued to that cluster-fuck of a thread.

            1. During the earlier outing attempt by sinister outside forces, it sort of sounded like some CoPols commenter was some kind of famous person, which piqued my curiosity.  That’s all.

  8. I don’t even know what to say except that it was pretty nice outside this weekend and I think next weekend maybe we should all have a picnic instead of a brawl.

    1. I personally was on a boat all weekend, cataloging bird sightings, trying to catch elusive fish, keeping my honey’s back slathered with sunscreen, and the like. It was glorious.

      What a waste of time on “elbee”, who is generally a waste of time, and certainly not glorious.

      I’ll go further. I agree with nancyc. Anti-worker, anti-teacher, anti-intellectual ellbee deserves to be called out whenever he/she postulates what readers on this site believe to be bullshit.

      1. but I do agree that referring to teachers as “union thugs”, if that is what occurred is false and untruthful. Further, I have always found Nancy and MoTR to be bloggers who posts accurate information. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that those attacking them have some score to settle.

        I don’t have any idea who either LB or ellbee are and don’t much care. I’ve only met a couple of folks who post here and interacted with a few more by email. I’m inclined to think that any outing was entirely a stroke of bad luck since I don’t think Nancy or MoTR are bent that way.

Leave a Comment

Recent Comments


Posts about

Donald Trump
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Lauren Boebert
SEE MORE

Posts about

Rep. Yadira Caraveo
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado House
SEE MORE

Posts about

Colorado Senate
SEE MORE

112 readers online now

Newsletter

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!