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November 06, 2015 10:51 AM UTC

Get More Smarter on Friday (Nov. 6)

  • 8 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

Get More SmarterIt’s getting more colder, so you might as well 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…

 

► Fox Business Network announced the lineup for the next Republican Presidential debate, which takes place on Tuesday, Nov. 10 in Milwaukee. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee are being demoted the the “Less-Than-One Percenters” debate, where they will be forced to try to make conversation with Rick Santorum and that talking muppet from Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal. Fox has decided that George Pataki and Lindsey Graham don’t meet the requirements to gain a seat at the kid’s table anymore, so they’re off the stage completely. Yay, Democracy!

 

► Congressional Republicans voted for a defense spending bill that would bar President Obama from moving Guantanamo Bay prisoners to anywhere in the United States. As the Associated Press reports:

The House overwhelmingly backed a $607 billion defense bill that would bar President Barack Obama from moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. prisons, setting up a showdown with Congress over his 2008 campaign pledge to close the Cuban facility.

The long-running dispute heated up on Capitol Hill on Thursday just hours after the House passed the bill, 370-58. Three Republican senators from Kansas, Colorado and South Carolina — states where the administration has explored housing Guantanamo terror suspects — held a news conference to make it clear they will fight to prevent moving them to U.S. soil.

Closing the prison was a priority of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and he promised during his first days in office that he would eventually shutter the facility, which he argues is costly and gives extremists a recruiting tool.

Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Yuma) was among the grandstanding Senators who held a press conference yesterday to do some serious fist shaking at Obama. Gardner talked at length about his own plan for…just kidding, he doesn’t have a policy solution of his own. Wouldn’t it be nice if more politicians showed some backbone and actually tried to solve this issue instead of telling scary stories?

 

Get even more smarter after the jump…

IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…

► Chris Christie may be having a genuine “moment” in his campaign for President. Unfortunately for Christie, he needed that “moment” about a week ago if he was going to remain at the big-kids’ debate table.

 

► John Aguilar of the Denver Post reports on the final school board meeting for the recently recalled trio Ken Witt, Julie Williams, and John Newkirk. If you thought Witt, Williams, and Newkirk would take the high road on their way out of the Jeffco Administrative Building…well, let’s be honest, nobody thought that would happen:

Sharp policy disputes that have marked the past two years carried right on into the board’s final meeting. By a familiar 3-2 split, the board approved a charter application for  Doral Academy.

Opponents express concern that Doral, which would be in northern Jefferson County, would be run by Academica Inc., a for-profit charter management company in Florida.

The board also wrangled over suggested performance bonuses — totaling $9,500 — for Superintendent Dan McMinimee.

One of the final acts of a board majority thrown out by their ears by angry constituents was to ram through a bonus for their hand-picked Superintendent Dan McMinimee. Talk about making your opponent’s argument for them; the right-wing trio went out with the same single-minded indifference that they started with in 2013.

 

► Somebody, please, put a stop to all the stupid! Republicans are having a difficult time trying to make coherent sense out of their support for Attorney General Cynthia Coffman dragging Colorado into a lawsuit about the Clean Power Plan.

 

► Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, among the frontrunners for the Republican Presidential nomination, has a tax plan that he says will really benefit the wealthiest 0.0003 percent of Americans. We don’t even know how to say “.0003” percent.,

 

► Senator Michael Bennet (D-Denver) is teaming up with his colleagues from New Mexico to push for reforms to the General Mining Act of 1872. From the Durango Herald:

The proposed legislation – the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2015 – will make mining companies pay royalties for extracting resources from public lands. The money would be used to help clean up abandoned mines that are continuing to leak waste into waterways, and ensure that future spills like the Gold King Mine disaster are not rectified at the expense of taxpayers.

 

► Congress has approved a short-term funding bill for highway and transportation needs (no thanks to Colorado Republicans who voted against the measure, including Rep. Mike Coffman). From the Summit Daily News:

Following several short-term extensions, the U.S. House of Representative passed a bill on Thursday that would extend transportation funding for six years. Summit County will benefit from the bill, as an amendment proposed by Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colorado, would designate Interstate 70 between Denver and Salt Lake City as a high-priority corridor.

With transportation funding set to expire Nov. 20, the U.S. Senate passed a similar six-year funding bill in July before the House passed the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform (STRR) Act this week.

While the House bill allots about $340 billion for federal transportation funding, it is only intended to rely on three years of guaranteed funding.

“Roads and bridges are frequently multi-year capital projects. You need a reliable source of revenue,” Polis said. “Part of the flaw in the bill is that it only has funding for about two years … What we really need to do is have a robust funding mechanism to make sure we can invest in infrastructure — not contribute to the deficit — but do it in a sustainable way.”

► The editorial board of the Denver Post is finally coming around to understanding that Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson is crazier than a bag full of cats.

 

► Don’t look now, but Carson might be imploding.

 

► Draft ballot language has been revealed by Colorado grocery stores seeking to change the law to allow them to sell full strength beer and wine inside their big box chains.

 

OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK

► The Keystone Pipeline is dead. Like, really dead. As in, “we can stop talking about this now” dead.

 

► What happens to all of those special interests when Congress won’t actually do anything? Their lobbyists go local, putting more pressure on state legislatures and municipal governments.

ICYMI

► Some good news for your weekend: The national unemployment rate is down to 5%. Some 271,000 non-farm jobs were added to the U.S. economy in October.

 

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8 thoughts on “Get More Smarter on Friday (Nov. 6)”

  1. Stuff Michael Bennet (he's the Senior Senator from Colorado and a Democrat) would never do:

    2016 will mark only the third year since 1975without a cost-of-living adjustment for seniors, veterans, and disabled people. Elizabeth Warren is trying to fix that.

    Warren's bill, dubbed the SAVE Act (short for Seniors and Veterans Emergency Benefits Act), would offer a one-time 3.9 percent increase. Why such a specific percentage? Warren points to a study showing that pay for CEOs at the 350 largest companies increased by 3.9 percent in 2015. Warren's bill would pay for this one-time benefit hike by eliminating a corporate tax exemption for performance pay packages—which would also extend the solvency of the entire Social Security program.

    It would extend the solvency of the program because any excess taxes collected from CEOs would go into the Social Security Trust Fund. It would give an average benefit increase of $581 per recipient.

    "While Congress sits on its hands and pretends that there's nothing we can do, taxpayers will keep right on subsidizing billions of dollars' worth of bonuses for highly paid CEOs," Warren said in a statement.

    She's joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders and 16 Senate Democrats. It should have every Democrat on board, because there couldn't be a more important thing for Congress to be doing for seniors, veterans, and the disabled, and there couldn't be a better way of paying for it. Taking care of this problem for this year would also start a necessary conversation about just how cost-of-living adjustments are calculated.

    Too bad, because it is smart politics, but he's looking for something he and Gardner can get bipartisan with. And, as usual, the Mongo Rule™ will apply.

    1. The Mongo Rule™ says Bennet is super-smart and it's perfectly fine his name is nowhere to be found on this:

      WASHINGTON, DC – Today, United States Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawai'i), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) introduced legislation to boost Social Security and other critical benefits for seniors, veterans and other Americans following last month's announcement that there will be a zero cost-of-living adjustment in 2016.

      Doesn't want those stupid voters to confuse these Commie/Socialist/Warren/Sanders Dems with Real Middle Amurcan Dems like Good Ol' (Wesleyan) Boy Bennet.

  3. And one more before wishing all Pols-sters a happy and beneficent weekend!

    Something Obama should've done years ago but not for the undue influence of Big Energy and the undue cowardice of Certain Politicians:

    For the historical moment, it appears, there will be no continent-spanning death funnel bringing the world's dirtiest fossil fuel from the environmental hellspout of northern Alberta down through the most arable farmland in the world to the refineries of the Gulf Coast, thence to the world. The president has decided this will not be the case. ​

    …

    The real story involves an alliance between liberal environmentalists and conservative farmers, between Native Americans and white people, between Democrats and Republicans. The real story involves a grassroots victory for a lot of people you've never heard of who pushed and yelled the national government into reversing a project that seemed almost unstoppable five years ago. The real story involves a defeat for faceless corporate power, and for the money that is poisoning our politics at all levels, and for the corrupt alliance between corporate power and poisoned politics that is so much of our national life these days.

    The president moved because people moved him. The president moved because landowners in Nebraska bridled at the bullying of a foreign corporation, against the misuse of eminent domain by an unaccountable Canadian corporation. The president moved because people moved him. The president moved because people like Bill McKibben turned the pipeline – and the planet-killing goop it was designed to carry – into a symbol for the ongoing and worsening climate crisis, and they did such a good job of it that the president now sees a vigorous response to the crisis as an essential part of his legacy. This is a victory that began in farmhouse kitchens and local coffee shops. This is a victory that began on reservations and in small local law offices. This is a victory that began with a thousand conversations about how things just didn't feel right, and about what people thought they could do about it.

    Duh. Or no duh!

    I don't expect the No Labels crowd to applaud what happened today. (They're too busy finding soft words to explain the evisceration of Social Security.) But this is the way it's supposed to work, a truly bipartisan populist project that, through sheer indomitability, beat the power of a multinational behemoth and turned an entire administration around, and on an issue that ultimately affects us all.

    I am certain our 2 senators will not see it that way.

    But hey, Bennet helped stop Obama's TPP deal…… he said lied so!

    Major climate action groups, including 350.org and the Sierra Club, were quick to point out that the text was notable as much for what it didn't say as what for what it did. “The TPP is an act of climate denial,” said 350 policy director Jason Kowalski on Thursday. “While the text is full of handouts to the fossil fuel industry, it doesn’t mention the words climate change once.”

    What it does do, however, is give “fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground,” Kowalski continued. “If a province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them. In short, these rules undermine countries’ ability to do what scientists say is the single most important thing we can do to combat the climate crisis: keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

     

  4. Did somebody re-route I70 north to SLC??  I70 doesn't even come close to SLC.  No closer than i80 to Denver.

    What the State's newspaper forgot to mention about the Doral charter was staff, the citizen review committee, and the charter oversight committee all recommended against approval.  Not to mention 2/3rds of the county.  Hubris runneth over.

    Oh, and the glowing quotes from the woman about how fabulous the majority was, that was Newkirk's sister.  Reporting is hard, I get it….

    1. Wow.  Thanks for the heads up re Newkirk"s sister.  I just sent an email to Aguilar asking if he knew that.  I'll follow up when I return from Mexico.  This should  not stand.

      1. So Aguilar tells me that he doesn't need to print a correction to his story because Newkirk's sister is a "resident".  Doesn't the first W in reporting stand for "Who"??

        I told him he needs to be fired and I will follow up next week.

  5. The story above about Rubio and the top .0003% is a stunner!

    We already know Rubio can wear out any credit card he gets his hands on.  If he gets his hands on the National Credit card like George Bush did, Katie bar the door on deficits!

    Either way, we can be certain that the Rubio plan will hemorrhage revenues while bequeathing a massive gift of wealth to the top 0.0003 percent. Apparently, he’s decided that America’s big economic challenge is that those rich people aren’t rich enough. And damn it, he’s gonna fix that!

    I'm sure Moddy will just agree that once we have a Republican in the Oval Office, deficits won't matter anymore.

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