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%

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
November 24, 2021 06:56 AM UTC

Wednesday Open Thread

  • 34 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.”

–Molly Ivins

Comments

34 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread

  1. From politicalwire.com:
    Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) challenged Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who is paralyzed and in a wheelchair, to a “sprint,” with the winner getting Kyle Rittenhouse as an intern.

    Colorado wins!
    OTOH – Cawthorn would probably whip her ass.

  2. Holiday gatherings will be a tad bit safer due to a large number of county mask mandates. It will not help the 45% of hospitals expecting staff shortages and the 40% expecting ICU bed shortages next week.  But perhaps it will help quell the increasing numbers in the weeks after that.

  3. In other news, Judas (yes, that Judas) was discovered to have joined with the Oath Keepers (corrected) to be part of the January 6 insurrection. Apparently, he was wearing a Michael Jackson jacket which gave him away.

  4. The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.

    John 10:10

    Happy Thanksgiving to my PoleCat friends. May this Thanksgiving be filled with abundance for you.

    You have my permission to be happy for at least one day if you can manage it.wink

    1. We’ll be sitting around a table where six of our seven generations of Coloradans have shared a Thanksgiving meal at one time or another. We’re anticipating the seventh member of the seventh generation shortly after Xmas so we have much to be thankful for! Happy Thanksgiving 🍁 to all! 

      1. We will gather three generations for the only holiday the hucksters haven't ruined yet.  Have a blessed day, my polster friends and — one day anyway — even my foes.

        !

      2. Thanks Tree. As a small carrier I have to satisfy the insurance company. They require 2 years of experience.

        The mega carriers can hire from school because they self insure. By the time the student is done with them, many are done with the industry.

        1. Sorry, V. It’s just about perfect. I was nervous about it because it’s a brand-new pan I got with some of that money the Feds were sending people to goose the economy. Frosting wouldn’t have helped, JiD. It’s a Bundt cake with a glaze. But it’s pretty. Maybe I’ll post a photo tomorrow before it’s sliced into. 

  5. A good read from Bloomberg Green this morning: 

    Good Business (aka “the case for Build Back Better”)

    The clock is ticking for banks, insurers and asset managers still providing support to oil, gas and coal producers. It’s not just the moral imperative—that fossil-fuel use is destroying the atmosphere and life on Earth with it. It’s that their financial health requires leaving such companies behind. 

    According to Moody’s Investors Service, financial institutions in the Group of 20 leading industrial and developing nations have $22 trillion of exposure to carbon-intensive industries. That’s equal to about 20% of their total loans and investments. So unless these firms make a swift shift to climate-friendly financing, they risk reporting losses, Moody’s said.

    Banks, insurers and asset managers need to adjust their “business models toward lending and investing in new and developing green infrastructure projects, while supporting corporates in carbon-intensive sectors that are pivoting to low-carbon business models,” the credit-rating company wrote in a report last week. This is how Moody’s breaks it down: 

    Exposure to Carbon-Intensive Sectors

    • Banks: $13.8 trillion (19% of on-balance sheet loans)
    • Insurers: $1.8 trillion (13% of cash and invested assets)
    • Asset managers: $6.6 trillion (28% of equity holdings)

    The warning from Moody’s was followed this week by the European Central Bank, which said most lenders have yet to produce concrete plansshowing how they will change their business strategies to account for the climate crisis. While about half of the 112 institutions overseen by the ECB are “contemplating setting exclusion targets for some segments of the market, only a handful of them mention actively planning to steer their portfolios on a Paris-compatible trajectory,” Executive Board member Frank Elderson said in a blog post Nov. 22.

    When combined, the statements underscore the business urgency for the financial-services industry to end its role as an enabler of dangerous carbon emissions.

    On this issue, things have been getting worse rather than better. Banks, for example, have organized almost $4 trillion of bonds and loans for the oil, gas and coal sectors since the 2015 Parisclimate agreement, compared with only $1.6 trillion of green-labeled bonds and loans, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

    Earlier this month, it was announced that more than 450 firms are now part of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. The signatories have pledged to targeting net-zero CO2 emissions by mid-century across their lending and investment portfolios. Taking global warming seriously is turning into a litmus test for the financial industry, with those failing to meet the moment at increasing risk of being publicly shamed. But such promises have repeatedly been made—by nations, companies and financial institutions—and repeatedly broken.

    Public shaming hasn’t seemed to move the needle. But money might. 

    The credit impact of “a delayed and disorderly carbon transition” is the greatest threat to financial firms, as the increasing frequency of catastrophic weather events will lead to loan defaults and rising insurance claims, Moody’s wrote in a report published last month, adding that scrutiny of the industry’s interim climate targets is likely to intensify in the second half of this decade.

    “Banks that adopt a rapid but predictable shift towards climate-friendly finance will best preserve their credit quality,” said Alka Anbarasu, a senior vice president at Moody’s.

    For banks, having a high credit rating is paramount because they rely on low funding costs to make loans at higher interest rates and profit from the net interest spread. Additionally, almost no one will want to have their money deposited at a risky financial institution.

    The Energy Transitions Commission estimates that more than $1 trillion of financing investment may be required each year to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century, and bank lending, together with green capital markets, are key to attaining this goal. 

    Separately, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said $6.9 trillion a year is needed through 2030 to meet the climate and other objectives of the Paris agreement, with developing countries requiring two-thirds of the funds. The U.S. has indicated it will invest $2.3 trillion this decade in climate-resilient infrastructure and China expects to allocate $3.4 trillion to reduce carbon emissions in the same period.

    Banks in Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, India and China are most exposed to carbon-transition risk, with three sectors—manufacturers, transportation companies, and power producers and other utilities—accounting for more than 75% of the potential bad loan exposure, Moody’s reported.

    Banks in Australia, the U.K., U.S., France and Germany are least exposed.

    1. It’s worth remembering the men who killed Ahmad Aubrey originally faced no charges. It took cell phone video of the murder being leaked online (by one of the murderers) to put pressure on state officials to intervene.

      1. People who would commit crimes like these need to start assuming that someone nearby has the whole thing on video. If basic humanity doesn't stop them, the understanding that they will be caught might. 

  6. It hard to argue much with this . . .
     

    Watch a Historian Eviscerate the Climate Justice Movement

    “The United States [is] four, five percent of the world’s population,” historian and journalist Vijay Prashad told the conference earlier in November in Glasgow, “[and it] still uses 25 percent of the world’s resources!”

    Prashad didn’t hold back any of his contempt for the US and Europe, calling out the irony of their self-appointed climate stewardship in the face of the “colonial structures and institutions” the West left behind in their former imperial holdings that “reproduce themselves” over and over.

    “The climate justice movement is a movement that says ‘we’re worried about our future,’” Prashad seethed. “What future? What future? Children in the African continent, in Asia, in Latin America — they don’t have a future! They don’t have a present. They’re not worried about the future, they’re worried about their present… that’s some middle-class bourgeois Western slogan. You’ve got to be worried about now.”

    https://futurism.com/the-byte/watch-historian-climate-change

    The industrial nations have done a great job fucking humanity’s only planet, . . .

    . . . it’s past time now for some serious and urgent unfucking

    (Hint: That new EV ain’t gonna’ be nearly enough sacrifice to save the planet or its inhabitants . . .)

    Maybe it’s time that our Thanksgiving celebrations be less about thanks (for be so “blessed”) and more about the giving part — as in, giving others something to be thankful for, for once??

     

    1. I can easily argue with it. Prashad is part of the International Peoples’ Assembly, a socialist grouping of various organizations. One of the current IPA projects is to stand in solidarity with the “peoples’ revolution” in Cuba and its people.

      Yeah, right. Over 50 years on of the Castro brothers’ dictatorship, and their chosen tinhorn successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, the Cuban people are no better off than they were under Batista.

      IPA is also “anti-zionist,” which is the usual soundbite for being anti-semitic.

      “more about the giving part…..” That I agree with. In this calendar year, I’ve given over 20% of my gross income to various charities that have .501(c)3 tax classifications from the IRS..

      1. CHB, I didn't see you argue with the point of his statement…just his organization.

        And, if I may be so bold as to ask. What does your tax deductible giving history have to do with his point?Just seeking clarification..

        1. I guess his point is that it could have been much, much worse . . .

          . . . Prashad could’ve been affiliated with a terrorist group, shamelessly hellbent on spreading misinformation, chaos, and destruction — a (real? or fake?) Republican??!

          wink

          Happy Thanks and Giving to you both! . . . 

           

        2. I interpreted Diogenes' point as people need to be givers, not takers. 

          Actually, I will take issue somewhat with Prashad's statement. Reading in the link given, Prashad blames colonialism for much of the world's problems. There is something to that. But the major colonial era ended in the early 1960s. After a while, it's the independent countries that have screwed things up for themselves. Looking just at Africa, for every success story like a Botswana or (most of the time) a Ghana, one gets a Somalia and a Central African Republic. 

          1. I'm not sure colonialism is really over; just metastasized.

            It is easier to have local strong-men with guns manage the banana plantations or Chromium mines. That's the thing with kleptocracy: the corruption and the taking.

            Even in the old colonial days you might be thinking about, local managers were always part of the system.

      2. If you don’t like one position of the IPA, it doesn’t mean that Prashad is wrong on this issue ( that major industrial nations that created a climate refugee crisis should not be taking more responsibility and doing more). 

        Personally, I tend not to trust socialists, having seen them in action as a teen and young activist-  their opportunism, any-means-to-an-end, self-righteousness and sexism, as well as historic oppression of people in socialist countries- Cuba, Venezuela, USSR, China- has left  me determined to never be recruited to a “Party”. 

        However, there is need in the climate crisis for “all hands on deck”- capitalists and communists and socialists and anarchists and more.  I’d like to see all ideas evaluated on their merits- but we do have to also evaluate ideas based on the actual organizational practice.

         

        1. Interested persons may want to review the December, 2021 issue of Reason Magazine. Almost the entire issue is devoted to the legacy of Communism, 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Part of the issue is an interview with chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. On socialism, Kasparov quotes Winston Churchill: “socialism is the religion of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” Kasparov also notes the difference between Social Democrats (like in Scandinavia) and Democratic Socialists (like Bernie Sanders). 

          Much of the issue looks at each of the parts of the former Soviet Union and how they have done in the 30 years since the Fall. 

        2. "Personally, I tend not to trust socialists, having seen them in action as a teen and young activist- their opportunism, any-means-to-an-end, self-righteousness and sexism, as well as historic oppression of people in socialist countries- Cuba, Venezuela, USSR, China- has left me determined to never be recruited to a “Party”." 

          yes

          1. I still support social programs that build the “Commons”, as Thom Hartmann called it. 
             

            That includes programs like subsidized healthcare /Medicare for all, and universal pre- K, that are part of everyday life in most of the industrialized world. These programs are often called “socialist” in an effort to red-scare people away from supporting them. 
             

            Party- Builders- whether Socialist Worker’s Party, Democrats, or Republicans- always take building the Party as their prime directive. In the case of Democrats, because I agree with Democratic aims, I’ll overlook the party building, or even help build it, as a necessary evil.I guess that makes me a Social Democrat. 

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

107 readers online now

Newsletter

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