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July 28, 2015 09:46 AM UTC

Get More Smarter on Tuesday (July 28)

  • 6 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

MoreSmarterLogo-SunscreenIf you don’t want to get traded, you might want to avoid Coors Field this week. Let’s Get More Smarter with Colorado Pols! If you think we missed something important, please include the link in the comments below (here’s a good example).

 

TOP OF MIND TODAY…

► Parents and activists in Jefferson County will submit 90,000 petition signatures to the County Clerk today on what supporters are calling “Turn-In Tuesday.” Proponents of  recalling three right-wing Jefferson County School board members needed less than three weeks to collect 30,000 signatures (for each member; by completing the signature-gathering process so quickly, there should be plenty of time for the recall questions to appear on the regular November ballot for all Jeffco voters.

► The Colorado Rockies traded star shortstop Troy Tulowitzki on Monday night, sending the 9-year veteran to the Toronto Blue Jays in exchange for shortstop Jose Reyes and — more importantly — two top pitching prospects. This has nothing to do with politics, of course, but Tulo is a big enough name in Colorado to warrant a mention here.

 

Get even more smarter after the jump…

 

IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…

Congress is not particularly effective these days, but they can still pass legislation when they make an effort (and there is a news peg for the right-wing to shout about). Congressman Mike Coffman (R-Aurora) emerged from hiding to vote YES on a bill intended to punish so-called “sanctuary cities.” As Colorado Pols wrote yesterday:

Defending Thursday’s vote, Coffman said “it cannot be seen as anti-immigrant, as anti-Hispanic.” But with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump demagoguing the tragic yet anecdotal incident universally cited as the reason for rushing this bill through the GOP-controlled House, making this a focus of a campaign that has already outraged Hispanics over Trump’s unapologetic racist overtures…how can it possibly be seen as anything else?

► Another day, another opportunity for Republican infighting. Senator Mike Lee
(R-Utah) really wanted to demand another pointless vote to repeal Obamacare, but as the Washington Post reports, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was not pleased:

Lee gave up his plan to seek an amendment to the must-pass highway bill with a simple-majority vote — a tactic known as the “nuclear option” — after serious backlash from Republican colleagues, including McConnell.

Republicans were angered by an e-mail sent by a Lee staffer to outside groups, including the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, encouraging them to “score” the amendment vote. That would have forced Lee’s colleagues to support his Obamacare gambit or risk criticism from the right.

Lee’s actions prompted McConnell to call an hour-long closed-door meeting Monday night to bring the party together on a central strategy after weeks of infighting. Lee at first proposed pulling the amendment in favor of getting a later vote during budget reconciliation.

► The Boy Scouts of America have decided to change a rule that prohibited openly-gay men from serving as scout leaders.

The family of one of the Aurora Theater Shooting victims is likely to declare bankruptcy after unsuccessfully suing an online ammunition dealer.

► When you have 16 candidates seeking the Republican Presidential nomination, it’s only a matter of time before some of them start to fade from lack of support. It is a bit of a surprise, however, that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is cratering so early. From Politico:

Rand Paul, once seen as a top-tier contender, finds his presidential hopes fading fast as he grapples with deep fundraising and organizational problems that have left his campaign badly hobbled.

Interviews with more than a dozen sources close to the Kentucky senator, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, painted a picture of an underfunded and understaffed campaign beaten down by low morale.

► The City of Aurora and Adams County are finalizing a deal to allow Aurora to house more jail inmates.

Aurora Sentinel editor Dave Perry explains why raising the minimum wage affects everybody — whether you realize it or not.

 

OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK

► Congress is discussing a GMO-labeling bill that proponents of GMO-labeling don’t like very much.

► Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has installed a low ceiling for his own ambitions.

 

ICYMI

The Vice-Chair of the Colorado Republican Party seems to think that the most wanted criminals in Los Angeles are all Hispanic. We don’t know why he’s talking about this, either.

 

 

Get More Smarter by liking Colorado Pols on Facebook!

Comments

6 thoughts on “Get More Smarter on Tuesday (July 28)

  1. The Dave Perry piece "Preventing a Colorado minimum-wage hike funds Denver-metro shanty towns", about  homeless families camping along the Platte in Aurora is powerful. People read Perry's stuff because he's usually hilarious. When he and gets serious, it has an impact.

    Perry makes the point that minimum wage needs to be at least $12 / hr, because so many working poor families just can't make ends meet.

    It's also worthwhile commenting on Perry's piece, because he's getting spammed like crazy.

  2. It's perhaps not surprising that Rand's campaign is cratering for lack of funding. When you say that perhaps Big Business doesn't need so many subsidies from the government, your Super PAC will not see love from the big donors…

  3. Bad politics? Leaving your "fiscal responsibility" policy page unchanged, with outdated assumptions and Republican rhetoric, is.

    Michael believes we need to work together and start making the tough decisions necessary to put our nation's fiscal house in order. Putting the country on a sustainable, long-term fiscal path and bringing our debt under control is incredibly important to our economy and our standing in the world.

    Kinda presumptuous there, but that's our Sen. Bennet.

    Michael has been leading the fight for a comprehensive, bipartisan solution to our nation's unsustainable debt since joining the U.S. Senate in 2009.

    Oh, the Bipartisans shall save us.

    He's pushed for a balanced approach that materially reduces our deficit and demonstrates we're all willing to make the sacrifices necessary to reduce spending and reform our outdated tax code. 

    Some would say that the middle class has been sacrificing for years to both maintain functional and funded social infrastructure and to systematically transfer our nation's wealth to those at the top of the heap. But then that person might be called a socialist or an "unreconstructed liberal". Egads!

    These problems won't be fixed quickly or easily. But for the sake of future generations, we must set the course now toward fiscal responsibility. And Washington must rise to the moment.

    Well, while no one was watching, something happened:

    Yesterday Paul Krugman's NYTimes column, Zombies Against Medicare, explains the Republican unending antipathy towards the social safety net. 

    Medicare turns 50 this week, and it has been a very good half-century. Before the program went into effect, Ronald Reagan warned that it would destroy American freedom; it didn’t, as far as anyone can tell. What it did do was provide a huge improvement in financial security for seniors and their families, and in many cases it has literally been a lifesaver as well.

    But the right has never abandoned its dream of killing the program. So it’s really no surprise that Jeb Bush recently declared that while he wants to let those already on Medicare keep their benefits, “We need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others.”

    The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels.

    What Medicare’s would-be killers usually argue, instead, is that the program as we know it is unaffordable– that we must destroy the system in order to save it, that, as Mr. Bush put it, we must “move to a new system that allows [seniors] to have something– because they’re not going to have anything.” And the new system they usually advocate is, as I said, vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance.

    The underlying premise here is that Medicare as we know it is incapable of controlling costs, that only the only way to keep health care affordable going forward is to rely on the magic of privatization.

    Now, this was always a dubious claim. It’s true that for most of Medicare’s history its spending has grown faster than the economy as a whole– but this is true of health spending in general. In fact, Medicare costs per beneficiary have consistently grown more slowly than private insurance premiums, suggesting that Medicare is, if anything, better than private insurers at cost control. Furthermore, other wealthy countries with government-provided health insurance spend much less than we do, again suggesting that Medicare-type programs can indeed control costs.

    Still, conservatives scoffed at the cost-control measures included in the Affordable Care Act, insisting that nothing short of privatization would work.

    And then a funny thing happened: the act’s passage was immediately followed by an unprecedented pause in Medicare cost growth. Indeed, Medicare spending keeps coming in ever further below expectations, to an extent that has revolutionized our views about the sustainability of the program and of government spending as a whole.

    Right now is, in other words, a very odd time to be going on about the impossibility of preserving Medicare, a program whose finances will be strained by an aging population but no longer look disastrous. One can only guess that Mr. Bush is unaware of all this, that he’s living inside the conservative information bubble, whose impervious shield blocks all positive news about health reform.

    Meanwhile, what the rest of us need to know is that Medicare at 50 still looks very good. It needs to keep working on costs, it will need some additional resources, but it looks eminently sustainable. The only real threat it faces is that of attack by right-wing zombies.

    But we shouldn't absolve certain Democrats of their tacit approval, or wholehearted support, of the idea that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are unaffordable give-aways to an undeserving segment of our society that needs to sacrifice just a little bit more so the rich will never have to see a tax increase.

    Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are all easily "fixed". Some fining tuning to the tax system, with the richest paying their fair share once again, along with Obamacare's helpful provisions and we're almost there. The main thing lacking is elected Democrats who aren't afraid to support the programs and who can explain to their constituents the many reasons we should all support them.

    1. I quit watching them when they went on one of their long losing streaks…

      Tulo got traded? At least he'll have a chance to win a ring. Monforts REALLY needs to sell the team to someone who knows what the hell they are doing as a owner of a baseball team.

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