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

(R) Jeff Hurd

(D) Adam Frisch

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

52%↑

48%↓

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 15, 2012 03:10 PM UTC

Open Line Friday!

  • 27 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Okay, you have methane up there, lakes of methane on the moon Titan of Saturn. Is that from dinosaurs? Plants? Where the hell did the methane come from? Cows farting? Where are they? I mean, that’s the primary source of methane that most people know about. ‘Cows are creating global warming with greenhouse gases so we have to stop eating McDonald’s!’ Yeah, well, where are the cows on that moon?”

–Rush Limbaugh, yesterday

Comments

27 thoughts on “Open Line Friday!

  1. More people should get their protein from plant sources. It’s healthier for you and the environment.

    (My stupid translator is down today. But that was the general point, right?)

  2. How Congress is hurting jobs

    “If the deleterious consequences … are to be averted it must be done before the lame duck. Indeed, since most elected officials will spend most of the fall campaigning, the [cuts] must be dealt with by September,” according to a recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    Businesses and agencies need to plan for the year ahead, and they simply can’t because they don’t know how many contracts will be funded and how many programs they’ll need to cut back on.

    1. The idea is right but a bit like asking why people run red lights.  Good idea but ain’t gonna happen.

      The dark humor of the situation is huge.  Ronald Reagan said “govt is the problem” and Repubs have worked from that premise ever since.  Their goal is for government to fail and they really don’t comprehend the outcome of their actions.  As a plot line for a story no one would buy it.

    2. you’re casting blame too widely. A key Republican talking point is that businesses are sitting on their hands because of “uncertainty.” Republicans can make sure this is more than a generic talking point by gumming things up in Congress. Do you really think any of this is unintentional, or the byproduct of excessive partisanship attributable to both sides?  

      1. Solyndra!

        Squirrel!

        Union tugs!

        scary people who want your guns!

        Crazy people who have or want nukes!

        Foreingers!

        Credit downgrade!

        Death panels!

        And remember – if you ain’t rich – blame yourself. And then borrow some money from your parents and get into M&A LBO

            1. we hates them a little too (droning, tedious 1970’s bastards), . . . but what we really can’t stand is them foreingers.  Don’t be fooled by tiresome imitators.

    1. How did they decide that?  Were her kids the best prepared to move on? the most creative thinkers? Memorized the most facts?

      Or was it a popularity contest? ANd isn’t even possible that her peers knew the cuts were coming and tried to save her gig by making her TOTY?

      I’ll believe she’s a great teacher when ….she puts all her classes on line for  free for credit  and everyone uses them.

  3. 9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians

    For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school.



    This afternoon, Martha (who goes by “Veg” on the blog) posted that she will have to shut down her blog, because she has been forbidden to take a camera into school.

    Read full article for the happy ending 🙂

  4. Each year, licensed Colorado homebirth midwives (certified professional midwives, CPMs) are mandated to report their safety statistics…Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I looked for the 2010 statistics and learned that the homebirth midwives had failed to released them…

    How did I obtain the 2010 statistics? It’s not because the midwives publicly released them. No, they were required to hand them over after a Colorado citizen filed a CORA petition (Colorado Open Records Request). She shared those statistics with me, both the raw data and the summary data complied by the midwives themselves.

    I’ve created a table of mortality rates from 2006-2010.

    some_text

    As you can see, the perinatal death rate for planned homebirth with a licensed Colorado midwife rose from 11.3/1000 in 2009 to an astounding 16.4/1000 in 2010! Compare that to the overall perinatal mortality rate for the entire state of Colorado (all races, all gestational ages, all pregnancy complications, all pre-existing medical conditions) of 6.3/1000.

    Colorado homebirth midwives cared for fewer than 1000 patients and managed to lose 15 babies. It is difficult to convey just how appallingly large a number that is. Colorado licensed midwives have a perinatal mortality rate nearly triple that of the state as a whole. That actually dramatically understates the danger of homebirth in Colorado since the correct comparison (if it were available) would be to the mortality rate of low risk white women at term with normal sized babies…

    Now that Colorado homebirth midwives have been licensed for 5 years and had appalling and RISING death rates over that period, it is time to acknowledge the obvious. Licensed homebirth practitioners are grossly incompetent. They lack the education and training required of ALL other midwives in Europe, Canada and Australia and required of US nurse midwives (CNMs). It is time to end the experiment and declare it a resounding failure.

    Homebirth in Colorado (and everywhere else in the US) is not about babies, and it is not about birth. It is about a bunch of high school graduates who couldn’t or wouldn’t get real midwifery training and made up a pretend credential they award to themselves to fool an unsuspecting public.

    http://skepticalob.blogspot.co

    1. I was born as part of a study on the safety of home birth. They decided as a result of the study not to relax regulations on at-home delivery. Although my delivery went smoothly and rapidly, I suppose some did not in order for the study to be considered justification for continuing to prohibit home birth.

      That said, I do not think that it is necessarily appropriate in a country without universal health care to mandate that pregnant women deliver in a hospital setting. A friend’s normal childbirth recently, in a leading hospital, came with a $30,000 bill. The average assets of a person under 35 are currently hovering around $4,000. If we feel that the safety hazards of home birth necessitate hospital delivery, then this care should be free to families, including neonatal ICU care and extraordinary interventions for preemies as necessary. One little-discussed reason people choose home births is because they may not want a severely impaired baby to be saved only to have a shortened life expectancy, run up a bill of up to millions of dollars, and be unable to live a normal life. A live baby with serious birth defects delivered in a hospital will generally be saved if at all possible without much attention to the parents’ wishes.

      (I, personally, think that ablism is a scourge and that it’s foolish to think that a life with an impairment is worse than no life at all, but I can’t make that judgment for other people.)

      1. These are the statistics for “Direct Entry” Midwives, who have no specific medical training, and accredit themselves (like Rand Paul’s National Board of Ophthalmology.)

        CPM is a bullshit certification.  Let CNM’s do homebirth.

        1. I believe that at the time (1988) all home birth was illegal and remained illegal following the study I was part of. I believe I was also delivered by a CNM–all I know about her is that she moved to Alaska immediately afterward to deliver babies for women in remote areas without easy hospital access.

          1. Daft shouldn’t have assumed the rest of us know anything about CPMs or CNMs.  A few FYI pieces of info to introduce this topic would have been helpful.

            Glad your home birth went well. My cousin (same age, close friend) was going to have a home birth for #2 back in the early 80s because #1 went amazingly well.  She was, by all measures, a great candidate for an uncomplicated home birth. She chickened out as it got close to the date and opted for another natural as possible hospital birth instead. Number 2 didn’t go so swimmingly.  Long story short, if she hadn’t been in a hospital she would have bled out before she ever got to one. The baby would have been fine except for not having a mother.

            Also not calling for mandating. Just something I won’t ever forget.  

    2. Homebirth in Colorado (and everywhere else in the US) is not about babies, and it is not about birth. It is about a bunch of high school graduates who couldn’t or wouldn’t get real midwifery training and made up a pretend credential they award to themselves to fool an unsuspecting public.

      I’d like to know the basis of this claim. I don’t know what’s required for someone to become a licensed midwife, but it seems farfetched that those in the home birth movement have the clout to get states to go along with “made up credentials” for it.

  5. loudly enough and making it seem that your opponent does not favor liberty you can get elected to the legislature. Then you can go to the leg and get permitted to hang a shingle calling yourself a “counselor” with minimal training.

    Remember the tragedy in Evergreen about a dozen years ago when some “counselor” was practicing “regressive therapy” and suffocated a child? “Regressive therapy” is actually a pretty dangerous part of psychiatry that should only be practiced by a highly skilled team and what they did should have been charged as manslaughter at the least.

    I have no trouble believing that a group can gather enough energy to make up their own “rules” and get those adopted by a lame legislative body. Industry does it repeatedly

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

61 readers online now

Newsletter

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