December 08, 2015 10:30 AM UTC
Get More Smarter on Tuesday (Dec. 8)
1 Comments- by: Colorado Pols
“Gun stamps?” Only from the mind of Tancredo. It’s time to 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…
► The Supreme Court on Monday decided not to overturn the ability of cities and states to institute their own bans on high-capacity assault weapons. As the Washington Post reports:
Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia said the court should review the ban, which “flouts” the court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence. They criticized lower court decisions that have allowed jurisdictions to impose what Thomas called “categorical bans on firearms that millions of Americans commonly own for lawful purposes.”
The court’s action Monday continues a pattern. After deciding in District of Columbia vs. Heller in 2008 that the Second Amendment provides the right for an individual to keep a weapon in the home, the court has avoided all cases that might clarify whether that right is more expansive…
…The decision that the Supreme Court decided not to review came from a divided panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling noted a statement in the Heller decision that said legislatures retained the ability to prohibit “dangerous and unusual” weapons, and Judge Frank Easterbrook said the guns banned by Highland Park qualified.
“Why else are they the weapons of choice in mass shootings?” he wrote. He said a ban might not prevent mass shootings “but it may reduce the carnage if a mass shooting occurs.”
► Former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo has his own plan for dealing with gun violence in the United States, and it makes as little sense as any other policy change Tancredo has suggested in the last decade. Tancredo thinks it would be a good idea to subsidize gun sales for lower-income Americans through a proposal that would work kind of like “food stamps” for guns.
Get even more smarter after the jump…
IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…
► Former President Vice President Dick Cheney was in Lakewood on Monday to speak in front of a group at Colorado Christian University. In an hour-long talk, Cheney focused much of his time on bashing President Obama on foreign policy issues.
► The gunman accused of killing three people in a terror attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs may have moved to Colorado because of marijuana. From the Denver Post:
Robert Dear Jr.’s arrival here was part of a frenetic migration some locals derisively call the “green rush.”
Just as people rushed haphazardly into the Rockies for gold in 1858, many of Hartsel’s newcomers moved here from across the country after recreational marijuana was legalized in 2012, rancher Keith Wells said.
Locals identify Dear, the man accused of killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, with the marijuana migration because he and they often live in squalid, makeshift homes on the high plains. They worry that bad publicity stemming from the Dear case will damage the area’s tourist interests and hurt land values…
…The discovery of Dear’s living conditions also triggered calls for zoning enforcement in Park County. After seeing Dear’s trailer, Undersheriff Monte Gore toured miles of crisscrossing dirt roads and found 287 marginal dwellings, including tents, homes built with driftwood and ramshackle old campers.
► Colorado newspapers have been too quick to jump on a messy proposal for changing the annual reapportionment/redistricting process in the state.
► Colorado’s health insurance exchange is gearing up for a busy couple of weeks, as David Olinger reports for the Denver Post:
Kevin Patterson, chief executive of Connect for Health Colorado, told the state Legislative Audit Committee on Monday that about 42,000 people have signed up for 2016 health insurance coverage through the exchange so far.
“We’re feeling really good about where we are,” he said, because that’s about twice the number at the same time last year.
But it’s a long way from the exchange’s goal. The deadline for gaining coverage on Jan. 1 is Dec. 15, a week away, and Patterson told the committee he hopes to see 179,000 to 190,000 people insured through the exchange.
► State Senator Leroy Garcia (D-Pueblo) was named to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday. The Colorado legislature will reconvene on January 13, 2016.
► The first recipients of the Colorado Governor’s Citizenship Medal will be honored on Thursday, as Joey Bunch reports for the Denver Post, Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers, the former Attorney General of Colorado, will be among the inaugural class of honorees.
► A potential 90-day “time out” session on oil and gas development in Colorado appears to be off the table as oil company executives are predictably beating the “sky is falling” drum. From Cathy Proctor of the Denver Business Journal:
On Monday, one of the biggest issues for the state’s oil and gas industry — the “time-out” issue — appeared to be taken off the table.
Matt Lepore, the COGCC’s director, told the commissioners that he was pulling it from the proposed rule, because he believes he already has the authority to call a time-out under the agency’s existing rules as a “condition of approval” on individual drilling permits. Jake Matter, the Assistant Attorney General who is assigned to the COGCC, has issued an opinion supporting Lepore’s contention.
“We pulled duration limits out of the rule, with the understanding that we do have the authority to impose a duration limit under existing rules,” Lepore said.
► Jefferson County Commissioner Don Rosier plans to squeeze into the clown car of Republican candidates seeking their Party’s 2016 U.S. Senate nomination. We hate to ruin the suspense, but we feel pretty safe saying that Rosier has zero chance of making it onto the General Election ballot next November.
OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK
► Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump refuses to back away from his proposal to temporarily ban all Muslim immigrants from entering the United States.
► The “House Freedom Caucus” is trying to throw a wrench into the decision-making process for approving a new federal budget, as Politico reports:
With government funding set to run out in just three days, divisions within the House Republican Conference are surfacing yet again.
Speaker Paul Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy are determined to wrap up a yearlong spending bill this month, but the conservative House Freedom Caucus is starting to suggest pushing the spending fight into next year. They say the holiday season time crunch is hurting the GOP’s leverage in negotiations with Democrats.
The government is slated to run out of spending authority on Friday and Republican and Democratic leaders are at an impasse over an omnibus-spending bill. At issue are several policy riders, including a proposal that would increase scrutiny of Iraqi and Syrian migrants. House conservatives are pushing to include that language in the spending bill, but the White House is opposed to it, despite widespread support on Capitol Hill…
…Ryan and McCarthy (R-Calif.) said they would attempt to pass a short-term spending bill, keeping the government open for a “handful of days.” Republican leaders plan to reassess where negotiations stand by the end of Tuesday and plot a course forward.
ICYMI
► Donald Trump may be holding onto the headlines for his strange proposal to bar Muslim immigrants from entering the United States, but as Vox reports, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will not be out-crazier:
If you’re not paying close attention, Cruz’s tax plan can just look like a more extreme version of every other Republican tax plan — a big, budget-busting tax cut for the wealthy. But in reality, it contains an idea so obviously politically toxic that his entire agenda for selling it seems to be to obscure the fact that he’s proposing it.
But let’s be clear: Cruz is calling for a 19 percent federal sales tax that would apply to all purchases of goods and services made in the United States. This is possibly the single least voter-friendly idea one could imagine.
It’s so toxic that he doesn’t call it a 19 percent federal sales tax at all.
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Well this definitely doesn't break the don't compare anything to Nazis rule since it's from someone who can actually speak for…. wait for it….. American neo-Nazis. And he loves him some Trump:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-neo-nazi-support_56660b92e4b079b2818fcd36