U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
60%
40%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
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(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
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(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
30%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
50%
40%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
January 24, 2012 12:28 AM UTC
18 Comments
all of those R gun bills? Letting anyone carry a gun “in their purse” like Brophy ought to add about 5,817 new Colorado jobs in the first seven days after passage?
but the number of emergency room, funeral service and rehab jobs those bills will create is vast. It’s our ticket out of this recession.
Tinged with sadness.
then things like this would never happen…
OK, maybe they would.
Or, or they would happen a lot more if we get rid of those job killing fracking regulations.
Well, nevermind. Just remember that Obama is a job killer. Or something.
… the only one for whom you can make a credible case is Jared Polis, who co-founded TechStars. He deserves a lot of credit for an environment in which SendGrid can create the jobs they create.
Maybe the state could look at that and learn… Nah…
Techstars is a great success story in terms of economic development and job creation, and Jared Polis deserves a ton of credit for his part in it.
So it would naturally follow that innovative job creation efforts like these are to completely ignored by the Republican party. In their limited worldview the only jobs out there are the ones that contaminate air or groundwater, have something to do with oil and gas, or both.
Only if you first use out-of-state paper to draft legislation to allow the fallen tree to be made into Colorado-produced paper–because, per McNulty logic, if there is not a law permitting such use, it currently must not be allowed in Colorado.
although, to be fair, at least McNulty, unlike Gessler, has the power to at least try to rewrite law or write new law!
and there was some concern about using beetle killed trees for lumber but he states that there is no prohibition other than standard commercial building codes.
I suppose they could add 80 jobs to the lumber mill if they added another shift but that is small potatoes compared to leasing the forests to BP or Exxon and turn them into biofuel farms. That would make some serious sustainable cash of the future.
More proof that the Republican leadership in the state legislature is interested in legislation only as an opportunity for making dog whistle appeals to the base and/or grandstanding, even if it’s only grandstanding about non-existent issues. In fact, the more nonexistent, the better. You can make up whatever you want about stuff that doesn’t exist. Much harder to craft real solutions to real problems like encouraging job creation, which is what they keep promising but never get around to.
They could do this (shades of SendGrid) and they would both increase jobs and turn a profit. What’s not to like.
And here are a number of additional ideas – all of them would lead directly to more jobs.
And to increase quality jobs ling term – this is pretty much the only way to do it.
Speaker McNulty – you’re welcome 🙂
All the law does is get government out of the way, thus embiggening the local population to feel motivated to invest and create more jobs once the gov’t hinderance is out our way. In fact, we should subsidize them. Because people know how to spend their money and the gov’t’s better than the gov’t does.
What the bill does is to allow the State government to dictate to Local government. And it’s being run by “less government” hypocrites.
And there’s an even more dangerous companion bill, which would give timber companies tax credits for using beetle-killed timber.
I’m all for stopping bark-beetle infestations. But the last thing that Colorado needs right now is less revenue.
Their cycle runs its course. The idea that beetles aren’t subject to the laws of nature and will have extrapolating populations without interruption is bullshit. Not even climate change will eliminate the ebbs and flows of cycles. What humans need to do is make sure that Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) areas engage in strategic defensible space and wildfire mitigation programs. If you can reduce the risk of a mega-inferno then the next generation of trees will have a better chance of taking root in our lifetime. Mechanical thinning and reseeding is the best alternative in these areas to regenerative fire.
Where the Republicans are so fucked up is that the old paradigm of using timber for the housing industry is an obsolete market. Housing isn’t coming back to previous levels and the demand for lumber isn’t going to be there so encouraging lumber companies to make lumber out of beetle kill is pointless. They should be promoting wood pellets and biofuels from wood pulp to clean the forest of these fuel buildups and give tax credits to people who switch from propane to pellets. Republicans don’t get that the markets of the past are not going to be the demand of the future. They are promoting pointless laws to protect buggy whip industries.
There are now at least three wood pellet companies operating here in Colorado as a result of the beetle kill harvest under the existing tax code. They go wherever there’s cheap dead trees to be found; for years I’ve purchased pellets from wildfire clear-outs in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana, and now increasingly I’m buying local. (Not the least reason of which is that beetle kill doesn’t make for pre-burnt wood in the pellets – lousy Heat’r pellets from the Sho-Low fire are dark from the burn…)