Colorado Politics: CU Chair; Environment vs. Jobs; Ozone Pollution; Oil & Gas Poll

It’s interesting that this piece of news didn’t garner much discussion: The University of Colorado is looking to hire an endowed chair in conservative thought and policy.  This is the result of something the Cons have perfected: play the refs and get the bonus.

CU is currently developing a $9 million program which will bring nationally recognized conservative scholars to teach on the Boulder campus. The program will allow CU to create an endowment for a visiting chair in conservative thought.

What exactly is the push for this crazy idea?  It all arises from the Republican penchant for self-victimization.  The whole world is out to get every singe Con-servative, according to them.  The push is coming from entities like the American Enterprise Institute and the Independence Institute who have conducted “studies” demonstrating how crazy liberal every public college in America is.  What doesn’t get related by the corporate media is AEI and II are funded exclusively by conservatives.  Their “studies” are slanted from the start to show what they want them to show.  Because they’re so well funded and organized, they can push things like hiring a “chair of con-servative thought”.  How then, you might ask, could a place like CU in “ultra-liberal” Boulder even consider such a thing?  This is what happens when a partisan like Bruce Benson is hired as University President.  I haven’t read any stories about how CU is suddenly swimming in cash due to Benson’s superior fundraising abilities.  But CU is suddenly getting a chair in conservative thought.  Gee, I wonder how that happened.  Can you imagine the screams from the Cons if CU were to hire a chair in progressive thought?

More topics below.

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Random Stories 6/10/08

Salmonella in tomoatoes across the U.S. Sounds like a silly B-movie, doesn’t it? Nope, just par for the course in recent years. Do you know what salmonella is?

Salmonella can be transmitted to humans when fecal material from animals or humans contaminates food.

Isn’t it disturbing in this day and age of super-duper antibacterial soaps being advertised everywhere that our food supply is constantly having problems with E. coli, salmonella and others? The FDA is supposed to be in charge of maintaining the safety of our food. The FDA, under the advancement of conservative ideology over the past 30 years, has had its powers slowly stripped away from it. It is a shadow of its original self. They have neither the money nor the personnel to adequately oversee our food. But Republicans have prioritized $12 billion per week to occupy another country. Is any of that in the news? Of course not. Because the liberal media has decided not to cover it, apparently. Yeah, that makes sense.

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The soil that NASA’s Phoenix lander dug up last week is more dense than expected. It’s clogged up what’s essentially an oven on the lander. Soil samples will be heated and the resultant gases released will be analyzed. The soil has been vibrated on the screen above the oven, but didn’t cause enough of it to fall into the oven. If similar efforts continue to fail, scientists said they will try to vibrate the next soil sample before it reaches a different instrument.

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Child poverty in Colorado “leads” the nation.

Roughly 180,000 of the state’s children — infants through high schoolers — lived in poverty in 2006, according to the report. That is a 73 percent increase since 2000, researchers concluded by using census and community survey data for the annual statistical review, KidsCount.

Keep those dates in mind. Who was President, who was in charge of Congress, who was the Governor, and who was in charge of the state legislature? Not Democrats, that’s for sure.

Additionally, TABOR was in full effect for this entire time period. What’s TABOR? It’s a mis-named initiative, the TAxpayers’ Bill Of Rights. It doesn’t grant rights to taxpayers as much as restrict the state government from levying taxes. After the 2001-2002 recession, Colorado had severe limitations placed on it by TABOR and other measures so that spending couldn’t be maintained for things like education, transportation and services. So in 2005, a group of people helped pass Referendum C, which gave TABOR a five-year time-out from spending limitations. Under Ref C, funding has been redirected to programs that were in danger of shutting down.

Referendum C went into effect starting in 2006. Will child poverty levels decrease as a result? It’s obviously too early to tell. But this is just one more example of why TABOR and other constitutional restrictions on tax collection and spending need to be completely repealed. In addition, amendments to Colorado’s constitution need to have higher standards to meet before adoption. It’s far too easy to mess things up, as competing interests have easily demonstrated in the past 15 years.

Colorado Transportation Solutions Stuck in Neutral

Leslie Robinson at Colorado Confidential wrote a very good piece regarding Gov. Ritter’s Transportation Panel, their recent findings and a meeting on the West Slope. The quote that sums up everything is at the end:

“People say they don’t want toll roads; they want free roads,” [Jennifer] Schaufele [from the Denver Regional Council of Governments] said. “Unfortunately, there are no such things as free roads.”

Or how about this one:

“People take our roads for granted,” added Colorado Transportation Commissioner Doug Aden. “So unfortunately, they won’t react until the crisis is upon us.”

As usual in Colorado, the problem with finding solutions boils down to the crippling effects of TABOR. The problems don’t stop there: in addition to being unable to raise taxes to fund maintenance, federal dollars have dried up and driving miles have only increased since 1992.

As Jennifer’s quote summed up: here’s what’s going to happen: people will continue to insist on driving on roads for free until they fall apart. Then it will be all the big, bad government’s fault for not keeping them up to date, despite the hamstringing they imposed on said government. The right-wing’s talking points on taxes sure worked out well, didn’t they?