Category — Politics

Colorado gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper arrives at KBDI studios for a debate Thursday. (click to enlarge)

For anybody who watches politics, the 2010 Colorado gubernatorial race has everything. Just when you think it can’t get any juicer, it does.

This is mostly due to the Republicans, who voted for unknown Dan Maes in the primary after the original frontrunner, former Congressman Scott McGinnis, was found to have been paid $300,000 by a foundation for some articles on water rights, which McGinnis stole from a researcher and presented as his own work.

As Party leaders found out more about Maes – he called Denver’s bike-sharing program part of a U.N. conspiracy to take over our cities, for starters — they began to jump ship in droves. Just this week, after more stories that indicated Maes wasn’t being truthful about his past, prominent Repubs like former Sen. Hank Brown, and John Andrews took back their original endorsements.

Tom Tancredo, the infamous anti-immigration former Congressman, called for McGinnis and Maes to step down before the primary so the party would have a chance to win. If they didn’t, he threatened to run himself. Both declined to quit, so he’s running as a third-party candidate for the American Constitution Party, whatever that is.

This leaves most observers of the political scene here to believe that, beyond a sex or corruption scandal or a horrible miscue or gaffe, Hickenlooper, whose first TV campaign commercial show him fully clothed in the shower stating that he won’t run any negative ads, is a shoo-in to move from City Hall to the Governor’s office in two months.

Hickenlooper fans arrived early to greet motorists and light-rail riders.

By 11 a.m. Thursday, a spirited advance phalanx of supporters of Hickenlooper, was lined up below our offices along Welton and 29th streets, cheering and chanting their candidate’s name to passing motorists and light-rail trains. He was arriving early for a candidate’s forum at KBDI, which occupies the first-floor offices of our building.

At quarter to twelve, I came out of the back door and almost ran into Hickenlooper on the sidewalk, where he was approaching the cheering throngs gathered at the front door. There were TV cameras and Tancredo For Governor placards juggling amidst the sea of Hickenlooper signs. Hick was trying to not notice the man behind him with a microphone,  screaming at the mayor to acknowledge him because he was a candidate for governor and asking why he wasn’t being allowed to join the debate. This turned out to be Jason Clark, one of two unaffiliated candidates running.

I took a couple of photos as Hickenlooper took in the adulation of his army of supporters. As I turned the corner to catch the light rail, Hickenlooper was heading in for the debate, leaving Clark on the street with his loudspeaker.

This AIG ad, in the Dec. 2005 issue of National Geographic, claims "50 million customers" who rely on AIG to secure their financial future.

Fairfield, Conn. — Longtime pillars of the community are now pariahs living in fear, hiding behind locked gates and security guards amid the public outrage over bonuses paid with taxpayer bailout money.

Payouts by American International Group Inc. appear to have put a face on the economic struggles the country faces, and the anger targeting AIG executives living in this ritzy area of Connecticut is palpable. Death threats have been pouring in since the brouhaha broke, the company said, and its workers are taking no chances.

“It’s scary,” one executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution. “People are very, very nervous for their security.”

– Associated Press, March 21, 2009.

A couple of newspaper articles caught my eye this morning. Jonathon Berlin writes of his years at the recently shuttered Rocky Mountain News. Berlin came of age at the Rocky during the first years of this century, when the newspaper relentlessly covered Denver and its politicians, winning awards and Pulitzer prizes for its efforts, and he wonders what will fill the gap left by newspaper closings.

Rep. Polis: A bit full of himself?

“As more journalists move on, who will do this kind of work? And how will the world be affected as less of it is done,” Berlin asks. “It’s not cheap, it’s not easy and it takes a very special collection of people and skills that budget-minded companies don’t often have the tolerance to incubate.”

Well, my congressional representative, Jared Polis, for whom I voted, answered that question in another story: bloggers. The Denver Post, the still-standing newspaper in that city, quotes Polis telling the Denver Young Democrats on Sunday: “The media is dead and long live the new media.”

I generally expect my congressman to know that media is plural, but I have given up on that one. But then he adds that since bloggers “killed the newspapers” and now “own the media,” they have a responsibility: “It’s important for all of us to reach out to some of those on the other side and present the progressive point of view.”

Bloggers killed newspapers? Replace newspaper reporters with progressive bloggers? Can Polis be serious? There are many reasons for the collapse of newspapers, but they have to do with numbers and corporate ownership and declining advertising, and despite what some bloggers want you to believe, little or nothing to do with bloggers.

Now perhaps our freshman representative, full of himself and the current progressive hegemony, was just trying to bump up his hip quotient with his young Democratic constituents, but it’s equally easy to say that Polis is pleased to see that newspapers like the Rocky, which often watched politicians like himself through a less-than-glowing lens, are going away, replaced with bloggers who praise his progressivism. If Polis has his way, there soon won’t be a Denver Post to print the idiotic things he says in public forums. Instead, “citizen journalists” will help push his agenda.

A personal note about “citizen journalists.” I am by trade a journalist and I write this weblog, so I guess you could call me a “citizen journalist.” What that means is that I write about subjects in which I am interested or passionate about. I don’t have an editor to challenge what I write or question how I write it. So I am not a “journalist,” and bloggers who say they are journalists are simply not being honest with themselves. Like me writing this post, they are advocates, not journalists. There is a place for both, but one won’t “replace” the other. And certainly not Rep. Polis and his blogging advocates.

MLK and LBJ confer in 1963 in this Life magazine image.

Watching the concert Sunday night at the Lincoln Memorial, it really began to sink in that Barack Obama will be sworn in as the forty fourth president of the United States tomorrow morning. I’m far too much of a cynic to put my hope in government solutions to our country’s problems, but that’s the way it is right now, and I feel encouraged by the fact that Tuesday we will see something that, at least for this white man who grew up in the shadow of segregation, never dreamed would happen in my lifetime.

I was in third grade when the schools were desegregated in 1954, but it had no immediate impact on me; my suburban classrooms were still almost all white. We moved back into Kansas City in 1957, and after a black kid rode his bike into the neighborhood one afternoon, we were told that night, in no uncertain terms, that we couldn’t play with him again. My aunt and uncle weren’t what I would call racist, but segregation was the law, and though blacks and whites could work alongside each other, they could not live so. I was never taught to hate anybody, but the implication was to keep to  your own.

This struck me as inherently wrong morally and significantly at odds with my then-Christian beliefs. While the battles of the civil rights movement played out on the pages of Life magazine and on television newsreels, I read Black Like Me, the story of John Howard Griffin’s trip to the deep South disguised as a black man, and Dick Gregory’s memoir From the Back of the Bus. But the clincher was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a scathing indictment of institutional racism in the little town of Maycomb, Alabama, as seen through the eyes of children my same age. With Tom Robinson’s trial, the veil was lifted.

This coincided with my first political stirrings, beginning in 1959, when, as a seventh grader, I gave a stump speech over the Calvary Lutheran School intercom for candidate John F. Kennedy. (He lost overwhelming in our classroom 13-2 to Richard Nixon.) I knew nothing really of his politics at the time, but I was stirred by his enthusiasm and his powerful calls to action. His murder, along with Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the war in Vietnam and a host of other tragedies snuffed out that particular flame. Today, I feel some of that same enthusiasm, but it is now tempered with a skepticism born of decades of cynicism.

Remembering the outrageously partisan rule of the last eight years, the particular nastiness and racist overtones of the campaign and the ultimate election of a mixed race black man by a majority of American voters is worth savoring along with King’s memory.

Yours for only $9.99. Are there velvet paintings yet?

Meanwhile, I just got an email advertising, for only $9.99, an Obama commemorative plate. Come Wednesday, all bets are off.

Having decided to vote for him many months ago, I am pleased as hell that Barack Obama will become our next president come January.

And yes, part of it is that as an aging white man who grew up in the civil-rights years, participating in the election of a black man to the presidency of the United States is deeply satisfying in a primal way I can’t put into words. I’m not naïve enough to believe this will end prejudice or mend race relations, but hopefully white hegemony in America ended forever on Tuesday. I don’t know about you, but I kind of like the ring of Black House.

One of the many great stories of this campaign is how the Obama team succeeded in putting its candidate into the presidency at a point where he seems ready for the position. Everybody talks about how brilliant the Bushies were in their 2000 and 2004 victories. But the Obama team didn’t need to resort to the slimeball tactics that destroyed war-hero John McCain’s chances in the primaries of 2000 and war-hero John Kerry in 2004.

This time, since they couldn’t attack his race directly, the 2008 Swiftboaters attempted to brand Obama a secret Muslim, a cokehead, a terrorist sympathizer, even a socialist, for god’s sake. He was portrayed as soft on crime and untrustworthy because of his associations.

Because none of it was true, none of it stuck. This time Americans saw the subterfuge, and the 2008 Swiftboaters had their asses handed back to them. Obama and his wife endured the months-long onslaught with a quiet dignity, and the Obama team, right from the first attack (remember the one about him being schooled in a radical Muslim madrassa), began offering real evidence to refute each and every claim.

Score one for us and for common sense, and kudos to the Obama team. I can hardly wait to read the book that compares how each side ran this campaign. Presidential politics will never be quite the same again.

As relieved as I am, there isn’t much time to celebrate what amounts to a historic moment in American history. Barack Obama can’t live on promises and speeches any longer, and to pick up the pieces of the Bush administration’s scorched-earth policies, he needs to hit the ground running on many fronts.

As Thomas Friedman points out in Sunday’s New York Times, all this candidate babble about how the government, with a few tax cuts and trillions of dollars of bailout cash, will somehow bring things back to the point where we can all start buying shit we can’t afford to keep the economy running has to end as well.

Can Obama become a leader who transcends the partisanship of Washington? He has certainly shown great restraint and intelligence during the a brutal campaign, and his inner circle is expanding to include disparate people for whom I have great respect (Warren Buffet and Colin Powell, for example). Obama has been given a mandate that no president has seen since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and a set of tasks as daunting as any president has ever faced entering office. More than ever, we need a real leader. Gobama.

Reading the Daily Camera earlier this week, I came across a half-page ad that strongly reminded voters not to retain a Boulder district judge on the grounds that he is an activist who doesn’t share the values of our community.

Judge James Klein, you might remember, was the jurist who decided last year in favor of former judge Richard McLean and attorney Edith Stevens in an adverse possession case against Don and Susie Kirlin in our fair city. Yeah, that case.

Unfortunately for Judge Klein, who rendered a decision based upon a careful reading of Colorado law and the evidence presented, the case would be seen by many in the public as an affront to general civility. The good news is that it resulted in the state legislature closing the loophole in Colorado law seized upon by Stevens and McLean.

The bad news is that, because he made the correct decision based on a careful reading of the law, there is a good chance Klein will lose his position.

A Longmont man, Randy Weinard, spent more than $2,000 for the attack ad, and it appears that he also might have violated campaign finance laws by not identifying himself on the ad.

Weinard got a double bang for his buck. You can’t buy better position than the Daily Camera‘s story yesterday, which ran across the top of the front page, with a photo of Judge Klein to boot. “An anonymous advertisement that ran in Thursday’s Camera urging voters to dump a Boulder district judge who made a controversial ruling in a land-use case a year ago violated campaign finance laws.”

That sentence is misleading. The judge did nothing more than make the correct ruling based up on the law as it was written. The “controversy” came up after the ruling, when it appeared that the plaintiffs used the letter of the law to misuse its intent and take one-third of their neighbors’ property.

The irony, of course, is that were Klein an activist judge, he would have ruled for the Kirlins, who seemed to be taken advantage of by two wily law vets. Earlier this year, the Colorado statute was amended. If Judge Klein got that same case next year, he would no doubt rule the other way if presented the same case.

But I’m guessing that irony will be swept away by the same self-righteousness that flowed through the streets of Boulder last winter, and people will probably feel better about themselves by voting him out of office.

Why does that old John Prine song keep going through my head?

It don’t make much sense
That common sense
Don’t make no sense
No more.

I filled in my ballot and took it to the Clerk’s office yesterday. I feel like a great weight has been taken off my shoulders and the noise level is subsiding. Don’t know about you, but the election has been driving me crazy. Vote for this amendment. Vote against that candidate. Mostly the latter. You might think that campaign advertising would have hit rock bottom long ago, but you would be wrong.

The TV commercials from both our U.S. Senatorial candidates from Colorado are so slimy I was tempted to vote for neither. Ads for and against state amendments don’t explain what the amendments are about, just that you should or shouldn’t vote for them. They aren’t just misleading; in most cases they are just plain lies.

If you’re voting on Nov. 4, make sure to familiarize yourself on the issues and take a cheat-sheet with you to your polling place; it could save you a lot of time and keep you from making mistakes, easy on a ballot that take up four large pages.

A lot has been made of the twenty months that Barack Obama has spent pursuing the presidency. Think of it. More than a year and a half in full-time quest of a four- or possibly eight-year job.

But there is a scarier element. You just somehow know that, come November 5, there will be people already making plans for 2012, first steps on the long, now endless road to the White House.

Illustration from Fufu Snax.

The federal government has been trying to turn over management of gray wolves to the individual states where the restored carnivores reside. One of the stumbling blocks to getting them under state control is that Wyoming’s management plan placed wolves in two categories, depending on where the wolf was at a given time. Inside Yellowstone National Park, they would be managed as trophy game animals, with hunting seasons and regulations like any other hunted animals. Everywhere else they would be listed as predators, and could be killed for any reason by anybody who could get close enough with a rifle.

Utah and Montana, the other two states with wolves, classify wolves as trophy game animals. Wyoming’s insistence on the two classifications was a major reason that a federal district judge recently overturned U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s delisting plan. The judge rightly noted that classifying 90 percent of Wyoming wolves as predators might isolate them from other wolves, a genetic guarantee that wolf populations would plummet below the numbers necessary to keep the species thriving, which would trigger another listing, etc. ad nauseum.
The solution seems so simple, yet opinion is split in Wyoming over what to do. Rep. Keith Gingery of Jackson has actually proposed the sensible solution: Make the wolf a trophy species state-wide. But there are others, says the Casper Star-Tribune , who would prefer suing the government to force it to accept the state’s plan.

Evidence that Gingery’s proposal is the right choice and his opponents are still living in a 19th-century mindset can be found in federal government records, which I found through Ralph Maugham’s indispensable Western news aggregator.

The Wyoming Wolf News Report for Oct. 13-17, includes this item: “On 10/18/08, Wyoming Wildlife Services investigated a dead calf in the Big Horn Mountains near Ten Sleep, WY. The calf died from causes unrelated to wolves; however, a wolf was seen scavenging the calf carcass. One set of wolf tracks was found near the carcass. A local resident recently took a photograph of a single black wolf walking through his cattle in the same area. Trapping efforts to radio collar this wolf will proceed after big game hunting season ends.”

This seems a reasonable response, from the perspective of the rancher and the wolf alike. But under the management plan that the state of Wyoming had in place after delisting, the outcome likely would have been different; that wolf could have been killed by the resident who took the photo or anybody else, for that matter. And since the wolf was scavenging the carcass, the killing of the calf could be blamed or at least associated with the wolf, in this case guilty of nothing more than following its nose to a possible meal site.

Here’s another item: “On 10/18/08, Wyoming Wildlife Services confirmed a calf injured by wolves in the Upper Green River drainage. On 10/20/08, WGFD confirmed a second calf injured by wolves in the same area. The calf was later euthanized due to the severity of the injuries. Control actions are ongoing to remove the 2 wolves that were involved in several depredations in the Upper Green River drainage this summer.”

Again, this would seem to be a sensible way to proceed. But under Wyoming’s management plan, the entire pack could have been hunted and exterminated and branded cattle killers.
Or this: “On 10/11/08, a local coyote trapper caught a yearling female wolf in the Upper Green River drainage, and reported the incident to the WGFD warden in the area. Wildlife Services was able to place a radio collar on the wolf and release it unharmed. The USFWS appreciates the help and coordination between the trapper, WGFD, and Wildlife Services.”

Again, the outcome would almost certainly have been different under the state’s management plan. The trapper could have legally killed the wolf as it struggled in the trap.
The Billings Gazette reports  that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to have another plan in place by next year.

If defies common sense that Wyoming wouldn’t draft a proper management plan that balances protection and management. Then again, don’t hold your breath, either.

I don’t claim to know any more or less than anybody else about the current financial mess, who is to blame or how it gets solved. But at least one reason why lawmakers, most of them Republican, rejected the modified bipartisan proposal to save the economy Monday is because George Bush couldn’t convince the country that action in less than a week would doom us.

Not that the ploy wasn’t painfully obvious. The original document presented to Congress last week — the one that apparently even I read before John McCain – asked for extraordinary executive power to contain the credit crunch and promised complete collapse of the financial markets if not enacted with as little deliberation as humanly possible.

As Jon Stewart reminded us on a Daily Show sketch, the president’s speech mirrored the one he gave to talk Congress into invading Iraq before Saddam took out Denver with weapons of mass destruction. His words were as vacuous as the ones he used to tell us to go shopping in the wake of the 9/11 attacks while he and the boys took care of the terrorists.

Television commentators, each one as clueless as the rest of us, kept reminding us throughout the week of the grim consequences if Congress didn’t pass some version of the Bush plan. But bullshit detectors went off in all corners of the country and even, thankfully, in the halls of Congress.

And guess what? On Monday, Congress blinked. It took almost eight years, but today even Republicans see the Bush administration for what it is, bankrupt, in its death throes, crying wolf again, hopefully for the last time.