The chronic inability of Colorado’s appointed U.S. Senator Michael Bennet to take a position on the union card check bill (also known as EFCA) has moved deep into the realm of bizarre self-parody. It’s a political joke that has lasted so long that the label of “Both Ways Bennet” has been branded permanently on his (hopefully brief) career.
A member of the Denver Post editorial board, Chuck Plunkett observes that the long-awaited seating of Al Franken as Minnesota’s U.S. Senator has once again ratcheted up the pressure that EFCA could come to a vote and force Michael Bennet into the uncomfortable position of, well, having to take one:
I’ve asked Bennet’s office whether he wants to come on with his position on card check. (We oppose it.)
As observers are aware, he’s been more than coy on the question, and our board is among those who’d love to know where Bennet, who faces re-election in 2010, stands on this important question.
Update: Bennet’s office says the senator isn’t prepared to comment at this time. So we’ll keep waiting.
Then again, Michael Bennet still isn’t quite ready. It’s been nearly six months we’ve waited thus far. What’s a few weeks more at this point? In honor of the never-ending saga, here’s a quick trip down memory lane 2009 for Mount Virtus readers: (more…)
The Ryan Frazier for U.S. Senate campaign is drawing more attention inside the Beltway — this time as noted on the “Washington Whispers” blog of U.S. News and World Report’s Paul Bedard:
We’re hearing lots of buzz about another Republican who plans to challenge Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, named just this year to replace Ken Salazar, who was plucked from the Senate by President Obama to run the Interior Department. The word is that this potential candidate, Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier, is part Obama, part Reagan.
That would be the charisma of Obama, the philosophy of Reagan. Not a bad combination.
As Bedard goes on to point out, Frazier’s “New Way Forward” video is helping to introduce more Coloradans to this rising political star.
A few days ago Mr. Bob reminded us that Bill Ritter’s car tax was a-comin’. Well, count me among the lucky ones who has a vehicle due to have the license renewed in July, and be hit by the tax first.
Yesterday the notice came in the mail from the Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder. Usually, as the car ages and depreciates, the registration fee drops from year to year. This time it increased by more than 31 dollars. We’ll find out what the damage is on the family van in a couple months — probably about the same, methinks.
The signs of Bill Ritter’s sagging popularity should only proliferate at this point — especially among those with newer cars and/or farm tractors.
In the meantime, Bill Ritter is soliciting applications for more state employees amid the phantom “hiring freeze”. Thank you, Governor!
Earlier today Representative Ed Perlmutter responded to my letter urging him to vote against the Waxman-Markey massive energy “cap and tax” (no doubt with boilerplate language):
As you may know, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is important legislation to help build a new clean energy economy. This bill will create millions of clean energy jobs, put America on a path to energy independence, and help limit carbon emissions which contribute to global warming. As a supporter of green energy initiatives, I am fortunate for the opportunity to represent Colorado’s 7th Congressional District, which is home to the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) located in Golden. I am a proponent of wind and solar energy as well as other forms of renewable energy and will continue to do all I can to work toward the advancement of a sustainable energy policy to meet our nation’s growing energy demands. It is essential to collectively move in the direction of energy sustainability.
Pleasant words unencumbered by economic realities. A Heritage Foundation analysis released today finds that Colorado’s 7th Congressional District — represented by Perlmutter, where I live — would be in for a major economic shock if Waxman-Markey is enacted. (more…)
Update, 1:00 PM: Not surprisingly, as Politico reports, there is more to the story: With news of the affair and bizarre cover-up, down goes Sanford. Very sad.
Republican South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford did what? For eccentricity’s sake, I almost want to hear someone uncover more to the story than the governor of a state dashing off to South America on a whim without telling anyone.
Or maybe we’re just left to wonder why his staff told the media he really was hiking along the Appalachian trail (and may have “flat out lied” about the Argentina story).
To think, just last week I was musing about a possible presidential candidate to support for 2012, and Mark Sanford by default rose to the top of the unofficial and utterly inconsequential list. Now, perhaps, not so much. I’m not exactly sure what the public’s threshold for strange behavior in a potential commander-in-chief is.
When Democrat Colorado Governor Bill Ritter takes week-long international jaunts, he does so during crucial budget debates or travels first class on the taxpayers’ dime. But at least Ritter let people know where he was going.
Simply weird.
El Presidente has posted the slick new video from the Ryan Frazier for U.S. Senate campaign. Check it out. It’s really worth the 2+ minutes to view. Kudos both to the person(s) who recorded the raw video footage of Ryan’s speech and to the person(s) who edited it into a high-quality product.
It looks like “A New Way Forward” is going to be the theme for the Frazier campaign, and if continued to be presented as in this video, it will be effective. After all, who can deny that the Republican Party needs to forge a new way forward?
On a side note, this afternoon only 20 minutes after I received the Frazier campaign email announcing the release of the video I received a fundraising “personal message” from another Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Ken Buck.
Two different fundraising messages from two different Colorado Republican candidates for U.S. Senate in the span of 20 minutes. It’s what … 400-some odd days until the primary?
I’m just saying, the game has changed….
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter screwed up with his handling of the Senate Bill 180 veto. Stumbling across a good public policy decision, he provoked the wrath of labor union special interests.
Since Bill Ritter has found himself on this sensible path, perhaps he could continue a little longer and throw his weight behind an idea which time has come: financial transparency for labor unions representing state and local government employees.
Of course, in doing so, Ritter would have to buck the trend of Big Labor cronyism being advanced by his party leader, President Barack Obama. From my recent Independence Institute op-ed: (more…)
I go out of town for a week, miss an edition of Liberty on the Rocks – Red Rocks, and organizer Jeff Sacco outdoes himself. Face The State reported on the growing political heft that attended last Monday’s meeting. If you live on the west side of the Denver metro area, and you haven’t dropped by to one of the meetings yet, now is your chance to get connected.
Colorado Democrats … arrogant? Can’t exactly say I’m shocked. But the brazenness of using taxpayer dollars for a Democrats-only team-building retreat only heightens my desire to make Brandon Shaffer’s term as state senate president as short as possible.
The least we can hope for (and work for) is divided government. Republicans should have their sights set on the governor’s mansion and one of the two house of the state legislature in 2010.
In the meantime, Mr. DNA at Rocky Mountain Right has some good advice:
I hope every reader of this blog will join me in calling their leadership office and telling them that I am not going to stand for this kind of pork.
Update: It’s also worth noting that EFCA supporters have engaged in a full-fledged campaign of deception. Someone should ask Senator Michael Bennet if he’s buying it.
We know the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (aka card-check):
Now, thanks to a new report released by the Workforce Fairness Institute, we see more clearly and concretely the real beneficiaries of this three-headed monster legislation: (more…)
Update, 6/11, 10:30 AM: Impressively, HR 1207 now has 208 Congressional co-sponsors. But only two from Colorado: Republican Doug Lamborn and Democrat Ed Perlmutter. Open government is an important non-partisan issue.
I recently brought readers’ attention to the need to persuade Republican Congressman Mike Coffman to sign on in support of transparency for the nation’s Federal Reserve bank. It’s good to see Face The State join the cause and raise the stakes by urging members of Colorado’s delegation across the political spectrum to back HR 1207.
I asked before if Bill Ritter called the bluff of Big Labor with his veto of Senate Bill 180. If we’re to judge by last Friday’s union-organized rally, then Ritter made a mistake. To see what I mean, take a step over to Face The State’s slideshow, and see signs like “Why does Ritter hate fire fighters?” and “Ritter lied to my dad” (or just Senator Lois Tochtrop’s angry expression).
Of course, Ritter didn’t make a mistake from the standpoint of choosing good policy over bad policy. But he has made four mistakes surrounding this issue:
- Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep. Backroom campaign promises can come back to burn you. As observed at ColoradoPols and demonstrated by the little girl’s “Ritter lied to my dad” sign, Colorado’s Democrat chief executive apparently promised something like SB 180 (and probably even stronger) to the fire fighters union to win their support. Whoops.
- If you intend to veto a bill, tell your party to kill it earlier. With Democrats in charge in both the state house and state senate, Ritter could have conveyed that he didn’t want to be forced into make a very public and politically damaging decision on SB 180.
- Don’t keep harping on the veto to the media. From today’s Denver Post: “The bulk of Ritter’s end-of-session news conference revolved around his vetoes of the labor bills.” (H/T Rocky Mountain Right)
- When you get called on your mistakes, don’t get caught astroturfing to save your hide. Again, Rocky Mountain Right made a great catch here. A minor offense compared to the first three, to be sure, but it keeps the fires stoked (no pun intended) in the blogosphere and gives the story more traction than it otherwise would have.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to sit back, prop my feet up, and enjoy the show. Will there be more mistakes to come?
Update, 9:30 AM: AFL-CIO press release in response to Ritter’s SB 180 veto pasted below the fold. Also, Amy Oliver notes that several legislators from northern Colorado went against the will of the people in voting for SB 180 — having benefited from thousands in labor campaign contributions.
Yesterday I gave Governor Bill Ritter kudos for the veto of SB 180. Today’s Denver Post follow-up by Lynn Bartels is headlined with the statement that Rep. Edward Casso and organized labor interests see the decision as a “tipping point”.
It could be my imagination, but I got the impression from reading the story that Ritter essentially is saying something like this to the unions:
So yeah, I have this penchant of making a wide spectrum of different groups really mad at me. But you guys are labor, and I’m a Democrat. Where are you going to go? I had a better chance of creating an open enemy in the Chambers of Commerce and the Municipal League, so I decided to keep them happy. Go ahead. Deal with it for now. I may try to find a way to make it up to you later. But if not, what will you do about it? Seriously?
In other words, Bill Ritter’s decision to veto SB 180 was good policy, but promoting good policy may not have been his primary motivation. But is it a dare? How far will he go before Big Labor takes him up on it?
Honestly, though, it’s hard to figure out. Was Bill Ritter really indecisive about this issue enough to wait to the last minute to make his intentions known? Was he waiting for something to change his mind? Why string along the labor unions?
From the standpoint of good politics it doesn’t make sense, even if the final outcome prevented bad policy. (more…)
It’s not often I laud Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, but he is to be commended today for choosing good public policy over political pressures by vetoing Senate Bill 180 — the firefighter collective bargaining legislation.
While Ritter’s official statement put the matter more diplomatically than I have, he didn’t buy the phony argument about firefighter safety:
Third, the debate on this bill raised important issues about firefighter safety, but there are better ways to address these issues than mandatory collective bargaining in certain communities. We must address firefighter safety at the state level. Doing so ensures that all areas of Colorado can benefit. Under this bill, however, the safety issues would only be addressed in the jurisdictions required to engage in collective bargaining, which would unfairly limit the scope of the needed reforms to protect firefighter safety. I have heard from Colorado fire chiefs who have urged me to veto this bill since it would not create a statewide standard for firefighter safety.
Unfortunately for Democrats, this decision is only likely to escalate intra-party warfare. The question of the hour is how long it will take for the Big Labor LIAR to open fire against the incumbent governor. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem too likely that Bill Ritter will gain much politically (except sparing the wrath of the Colorado Municipal League) from today’s veto announcement.
Today’s Denver Post news story on Governor Bill Ritter’s signing of Senate Bill 228 offers the generous headline: “Colorado’s fiscal knot loosens”.
I’ve taken the liberty to complete the thought with my own sub-headline: “Noose nearly large enough to fit around taxpayers’ necks”.
The article is correct insofar as it points out that the impact of this bill in repealing limits on the growth of discretionary government spending likely won’t be felt for a couple years. But that provides little solace, especially when you listen to the righteous confusion coming from the Democratic cast of characters behind this anti-taxpayer legislation. (more…)
Update, 6/4: Thanks to a comment left by Politically Correct Death author Francis Beckwith, I refer you to his newer and more relevant book Defending Life. I’ll have to check it out myself very soon.
Update, 9:30 PM: My final thought (for now) on the matter, from Doug Wilson: “The question is whether you would be willing to reduce a society to anarchy for the sake of saving that kid, when you (should) know that the anarchy you introduce is going to be responsible for the deaths of far more children than you managed to save.” And for further edification, I will commend the thoughts of Dr. Albert Mohler as being squarely right on the matter.
Thanks to one of the more thoughtful liberals I know, David Thielen, a link to this morning’s post about Dr. George Tiller and Private William Long was added in a ColoradoPols diary. Here are some of the more colorful comments it generated, along with my replies. (more…)
No two events are perfectly parallel, but seldom are two such similar and terrible stories juxtaposed for our edification. Within 24 hours and within 500 miles from each other, two notable murders occurred — both evil acts perpetrated in public by two different men, but both for apparent ideological reasons, both sudden and horribly unexpected events for the families and loved ones of the victims, both suspects quickly brought into custody.
That’s where the parallels end. What’s most informative is some of the prominent responses to the two incidents: (more…)
I am relieved to learn that U.S. Senate candidate Cleve Tidwell was not posting bizarre online comments himself.
As Mr. Tidwell joins us for tonight’s Blog Talk Radio show, I hope to hear what the campaign learned from this episode. I also hope today’s revelation marks the end of the online astroturfing.
Inquiring minds will be left to wonder who the campaign volunteer was who had access to Mr. Tidwell’s private email address and “might have stepped over the line”.
