Squarestate - Recent Comments

Republicans in disarray

Zappatero — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:31:46 GMT

Didn't catch that the Post endorsed Romney prior to the caucuses. This schism within the right is not going away - at least not by November 6. Listen to Richard Viguery on the Ed Schultz show every week or so. Santorum is a radical, despite how the radicals describe him, and can only come off as reasonable if Democrats let him. That will be their failure.

vinyl windows

safina95 — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:11:20 GMT

vinyl windows

No we do not have to keep voting for them!

COgator95 — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:53:45 GMT

Please don't think that Bennet and Udall are the only two Democrats in CO that could win a state wide election. We can always primary them with better Democrats. Obviously the party insiders won't allow that to happen easily, but it can be done. Also, there are third party candidates from the Green Party. I know... I know "A third party?" Well, yes since the Democratic party is completely corrupt with big interest money we may need to look at other alternatives, because I'm sick and tired of so called Democrats like Bennet and Udall selling out the middle class every chance they get.

The part I don't understand is,

peacemonger — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:19:53 GMT

why is it a pilot cannot deliver "stuff" sleepy, but an medical resident or intern can practice medicine for several days in a row without any sleep. Oh wait, now I remember -- one has a very powerful union -- the AMA.

But we have to keep voting for Udall and Bennet

WeatherDem — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:20:09 GMT

because we all know if we don't, the truly evil Republicans will then be in a position to vote against union rights again and again and again. Oh, wait...

I actually don't know what's more pathetic about these events: the fact that Udall and Bennet continue to vote against what used to be a core constituency of the Democratic Party or that the unions keep helping these clowns get elected, despite their sorry histories. It's an over-used cliche, but it's Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football - except for they're starring in Groundhog Day.

The point is this: when will the unions, or Democratic voters, hold their elected officials accountable?

This is what voting for the lesser of two evils gets us: a creeping evil instead of a sprinting evil. But it's evil all the same. It's not as if citizens and workers are gaining more rights; they're having them slowly stripped. If there were some gains, I could acknowledge the logic of the evils-argument.

Too nice

One Fly — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:56:52 GMT

Square State runs a real clean place and these two who will never get my vote again deserve much more than they got here.

We are losing and the Dark Side continues to come out on top.

Mike Coffman loves his Government-paid health care

Zappatero — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:28:19 GMT

The hypocrisy will never end while politicians can say just about anything with zero accountability:

Coffman, a former Marine who keeps buff at age 54, was jogging on the golf course bordering his home in Aurora, Colo., when he stumbled on a rock or some other obstruction hidden in the snow. He fell, cracking his ankle.
The congressman and his wife went to an urgent care clinic in a strip mall, where he paid $30 for a temporary cast and a prescription, and later he went to the famed Steadman Hawkins Clinic in Vail, where he paid $350 for an expert opinion, he told The Denver Post.
"I successfully tested our health care system," he said, with a laugh. "It works,"' he told the Post.
Of course the health care system worked for him, many Coloradans undoubtedly thought when they read the item in Saturday's Post. Coffman, a Republican member of Congress who voted against the health care reform bill in the House last year, is covered by the Cadillac of American health-care plans, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.

Manning challenged the legitimacy

Fong — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:42:08 GMT

of the military and the war. Whoever does that is going to pay a huge price until the thing is smashed. What they've done to him is totally unnecessary. Terribly sad, terribly not shocking.

Posturing

Chuck Crowley — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:52:15 GMT

The extended day is all about posturing for the next school bond request. DPS has a mere two billion, with a B, in bonds to date. Their most valuable real estate is already "mortgaged" off for those bonds. The spending and dependence on federal grants needs to stop. The so called businessmen running the show need to start acting like they have skin in the game.

You are very welcome.

Fong — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:31:43 GMT

Thank you for posting.

Hi Sarah - Thanks for promoting this n/t

Gypsy Chief — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:08:16 GMT

It's very simple

Fong — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:50:26 GMT

You take carbon, burn it and pump it into the atmosphere, it will be re-captured through processes older and wiser than Kevin Lundberg will ever be.

And very possibly he will never be older and wiser because of global warming. It's not ironic, it's how things should be.

I wish I could ignore the rest of my species that denies very simple science but nay, assholes in bumfuck elect them. FML!!!

Agree Shaffer should stay in CD4

Gypsy Chief — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:46:48 GMT

Conventional wisdom is that Cory Gardner is unbeatable in the new CD4 focused as it is on the eastern plains and without Boulder or Fort Collins. I think Cory will be vunerable on Post Office closures in the new district. USPS released a study of CO post office closures, 63 are being studied for closure. Source: CBS4 Denver. Did you know that 30 of those to-be-on-the-chopping-block post offices are in CD4? Did you know that 23 are in CD6 if my numbers are correct. How will these avowed opponents of wasteful government spending keep their constitutents happy? I wrote to Mr. Gardner about the Darrell Issa post office plan. What I got back is nothing but right-wing talking points. Hard to actually put into practice when the locals get up in arms. Some people think that plans for Post Office downsizing is an attack on rural America, the America that Gardner and Coffman represent.

We'll see.

Bill Simpson — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:25:05 GMT

"Winning" doesn't mean getting knifed in the back by some blue dog a couple months after the election. Over the years, Steve Farber and his 17th Street cabal have foisted numerous corporate Dems on us from Cheri Jahn and Sue Schafer in Wheat Ridge to Ken & John Salazar, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper and Mark Udall higher up on the ticket. Until the Colorado Democratic establishment regains the trust of the progressive base, don't expect party unity. Repeated betrayal works that way. If Joe Miklosi wants the support of the progressive base, then he needs to court us respectfully. "Shut up and get in line or else you'll make me loose" won't cut it anymore. If you want my vote, ask nicely and convince me that the candidate deserves it.

PACs

AmiJames — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:54:34 GMT

I just hope that candidate should get chance to prove themselves, and the best one get selected.

passing a drug test

actually I thought he was quite efficient

Zappatero — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:41:53 GMT

on KOA. He could repeat the standard-issue modern Republican talking points into very many conversations, not just the political ones.

One question I always had: if the Free Market is so awesome, and his duties as President of II so great, wouldn't that work provide him the income of a full-time job and make similar demands to his schedule.

If anything, II probably used his slot on our airwaves to their advantage.

imho, though, he will not be missed.

Extreme weather

WeatherDem — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:14:35 GMT

was certainly in the news in 2011 and that has continued into the early part of 2012.

That said, the temperatures in the northern tier this winter are more a cause of concern than the storm affecting Norway (which is impressive, for sure). The reason I say this is that some conditions (i.e., temperature and glacial melt) are changing at statistically significant rates while others (precipitation, hurricane strength/frequency) are not.

Unfortunately, the latter are easier for the media and public to grab onto because they're more tangible than the statistical analyses and interpretation required for the former. I have followed developments of the NAO and AO for the past couple of winters with intense interest. It is important to note that their relationship to other weather or climate variables is at this point almost nonexistent. Neither are the oscillations currently predictable.

No, the Plant's Did Not Hold Up "Reasonably Well"

saindenver — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:03:08 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Here Is More on the Current Year

saindenver — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:52:39 GMT

This is extremely troubling.

There has never been a 60 degree temperature recorded during the first week of January in Minnesota's modern climate record. The warmest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota during the first week of January is 59 degrees, occurring on January 7, 2003 in Amboy, MN. The warmest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota on January 5 is 57 degrees, recorded at Crookston in 1902.
...
Atmospheric circulation patterns were the most extreme on record for December measured by an index called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) according to Dr. Jeff Masters. A strong positive NAO has cold air in Canada moving offshore into the Labrador Sea while the U.S and Europe are warm. A Strongly positive NAO produces a tight pressure gradient and intense storms in the north Atlantic.
...

And, On Christmas day Norway was battered by major-hurricane strength storm Dagmar.

December 26, 2011
One of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit Norway hammered coastal areas during the Christmas weekend and left a wide path of destruction throughout the south, west and northwest. Winds were clocked at more than 200 kilometers an hour, terrifying residents in many areas and leaving more than 100,000 homes without power.

Of course, know it's just an Al Gore political lie. What utter tripe.

What about other industries?

WeatherDem — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:46:11 GMT

Extractive industries certainly hold a good deal of sway in this state, as Gov. Hickerlooper's & others' actions clearly show.

But what about tourism and sportspeople? Those industries bring in extremely large sums of money to the state. If they're made to suffer, I can't see the extractive industries maintaining that condition for very long. There are simply too many people that sincerely enjoy the resources of Colorado in ways that don't involve extraction.

Given the choice

WeatherDem — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:43:16 GMT

between economic concerns and environmental concerns, economic concerns will always be addressed. Whether that choice actually exists is another topic altogether - I don't believe that it's that stark a choice as often as it is presented.

If we want environmental concerns addressed, we have to find ways to tuck them into policy solutions meant to address other problems that seem more real. An information deficit doesn't exist in the public, contrary to what I used to think. If we work to solve other problems, the environment can and will be a beneficiary.

Overt Voter Fraud in New Hampshire and Being Paid for It

saindenver — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:16:38 GMT

This may have been another shark jump by Mr O'Keefe and his band of merry men and women. What happens when he or one of his buddies pay some dimwit to do more?

James Vega of the Democratic Strategist offers this

In principle, the perpetrators' actions are no different than walking into a church and robbing the minister at gunpoint (while covertly filming the crime) in order to "prove" the need for metal detectors in church doorways.
As it happens, the perpetrators in O'Keefe's criminal conspiracy didn't even get away with it. A poll watcher recognized one of them as using a false ID and alerted the authorities. The debate is now whether O'Keefe's criminal "perps" should be prosecuted for committing a serious crime that carries a jail sentence.
But the deeper issue that has not gotten any attention yet is the profound moral red line that the O'Keefe gang has now crossed. To understand it, one just has to look back at the past.

He goes on to conclude:

There is no reason to mince words: these are nothing less than right-wing extremist attacks on American democracy itself. The perpetrators can be called with perfect justice both "subversives" and "un-American." Democrats should not only demand that they be punished to the maximum extent of the law but that conservatives and Republicans should publically denounce these acts and join in the demand for forceful prosecution. Anything less on their part will represent a shameful wink of tacit approval and repugnant evidence of moral complicity.

It's worth reading.

Regulation Helps Level the Playing Field

saindenver — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:08:43 GMT

As principal stockholder and chief executive of a growing manufacturing corporation operating in North America and headquartered in Colorado, I must take issue with what appears to be a blanket rejection of safety, environmental and financial regulations, especially among those subscribing to the principals of the Republican party and one of its enablers, the National Federation of Small Business.

As one who has built several companies, both in manufacturing and in services, I find it amazing that the meme of mine (or plant) safety is even challenged. Employees are expensive to train and their loss due to unsafe operations is simply unacceptable. So is the loss of expensive capital equipment, such as a mine. Safety is not something we should have only when "we can afford it". If you want a perfect example of the costs of an unsafe operation, consider the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 5000 feet of water, due to very preventable circumstances and condemned by the president of NYSE-listed Sampson Oil in the Wall Street Journal about a month after 13 lives and untold damage was done, and, incidentally, a $250 million offshore platform was lost. To object to operations safety and the regulations implementing them is a fool's errand, in my opinion.

The water supply for those of us living in a desert, as we do here in much of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California, is heavily dependent on its purity as it melts in the mountains and is transported to the distant population centers or is extracted from underground aquifers. To challenge the idea of regulating this life-enabling resource in order to permit private pollution of it, is simply uneconomic...unless you're the polluter or one of its stockholders who cares not a whit about the damage environmental mishandling can do. Ditto for the air: should we promote acid containing stack effluent or smog creating NOX and SOX to be once again as prevalent as it was in 1968? Ditto for hazardous chemicals into the land and waterways.

Not only is this monumentally against the people of the US, including our children and grandchildren, it is also bad economics. I recall sitting in numerous meetings with top engineering executives of heavy industrial companies in the years immediately following the establishment of Nixon's EPA. There was great gnashing of teeth and renting of garments during those meetings, and I was told that all capital equipment projects would be abandoned by 1975 since "no one could afford" the processes needed to clean up the pollution. But, that was wrong; those same corporations found that they saved a lot more by burning their fuels more efficiently and recovering their effluents for reuse in the form of nitric and sulfuric acids and other chemicals and materials. There was even a profitable "clean air" solution to what American Electric Power's CEO called drowning in "lime slurry", a low energy use project which converted the slurry to inert aggregate used in road and railroad beds in the Northeast. DuPont found it could clean up its super sites by making them in to wetlands, which dropped their costs for cleanup by orders of magnitude. Should regulations of the mining and processing of asbestos be removed, thereby substantially shortening the lives of any living nearby? Who would pay for the damage to their lives and property values? To say that environmental regulation needs to be suspended so we can have jobs, is simply shortsighted and is very likely not going to result in additional employment, rather in less.

If I can have the public or my neighbors absorb the cost of some of my processes, is that not a stealing from my neighbors? How on earth can misbehavior by managers, seeking to maximize their quarterly bonus, be prevented in the absence of government regulations?

If I can destroy a fishery in the Gulf of Mexico at no cost to me so that I can exploit a resource that even Jim Bob Moffet, of Freeport McMoran fame, has said was possibly a danger (which he did in the Oil & Gas Conference here in 2010--look him up, including the very nasty things said about him with his Freeport McMoran company in the past few decades to verify that he's not a tree hugger).

If I can dump the waste from my paper mill into a river, I don't have to pay for its reprocessing, but those living down stream have higher water and food costs as a result of my tort upon them.

If I permit my hydraulic fracturing chemicals to leach or leak into the ground water of a town, that town will have to import its water at great expense to the residents, but not to me, while I see profits from 1,000,000 cubic feet per day of gas production at $3.50/1000 or 10,000 barrels of oil per day at $75 or more per barrel at a capital cost of about $4.5 million to drill and frack the hole. There is doubt that fracturing-related accidents, largely preventable by good engineering practice, have polluted the ground water in Pavillion, WY, and surface tributaries of the Susquanna River in Pennsylvania, the latter, by the way is the primary water supply for more than 2 million residents and drains into the Chesapeake Bay and its great fishery.

In the absence of regulations of such industries, who decides who has damaged whom and who determines if the process was a safe one, following the best engineering practices?

"Fat cat bankers" have taken advantage of a lowered regulation environment for their industry which began with Ronald Reagan's Administration deregulating the S&L industry. We all know what happened then. Its reoccurance with the repeal of Glass-Steagel in 1999. Some of us thought it was a good idea since the large European and Japanese banks would have an advantage over American firms in North America and world-wide. But now, even Randian Alan Greenspan has noted that he may have been a bit naive in promoting this unfettered casino, operating on inside information and unstable debt instruments which crashed our once world-wide envied transparent financial system. The financial crash of 2008 came as a result of inadequate regulation of the capital to loans outstanding, aided by unfettered insurance policies, some by AIG and others within the firms themselves which permitted excessive leverage. Derivatives are unstable and have brought down economies since the great Asian failure of the mid-1990's and the near total destruction of our financial system in September, 2008. The failure of Enron and its enabler, the once sacrosanct Arthur Anderson accounting reporting giant, in 2001 came about from the removal of regulation of the electric power generating, transmission and distribution industry and the deregulation of public stock markets.

Perhaps this election will turn on regulation and the need to free the markets. I certainly hope it won't, as a short term result of further regulation destruction would very likely create an America livable in the same way as Shanghai with substantial infant and elderly mortality due to air and water pollution and unsafe workplaces which can and do impinge on those nearby.

As for the 150 miners at the Hanna mine in Idaho losing their jobs because the mine can't keep its operation safe, perhaps they and their families are better off than those of the two killed in accidents there, just as the coal miners in Massey Energy's Utah and West Virginia coal mines which were operated in knowingly unsafe ways are now better off that the Mine Safety Administration and the courts have taken action.

If some would remove these protections, let them do so, but make them pay for any and all damage caused with no exclusions, including bankruptcy.

There is!

Fong — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:54:51 GMT

Do you not see it?