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State Senate 
Fri Aug 26, 2011 at 10:30:40 AM MST
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The New York Times' Tim Eagan has been lost (if he ever wasn't) to Barak Obama.
As president, he's been a sober, cautious, tongue-shackled realist - a moderate Republican of the pre-crazy, pre-Tea Party era. Having failed to come up with a Big Idea to guide his presidency, he will sink or swim now on strengths that don't lend themselves to large rallies or passionate enthusiasm. Sobriety and moderation, by definition, are boring.
Urban liberals, labor, blacks and Hispanics, environmentalists, the young - the core of Obama's army in 2008 - are disappointed in the president of August, 2011. They're right when they say he caved on the debt talks: the evidence is House Speaker John Boehner's boast that he got 98 percent of what he wanted from the president.
Instead of staying home he suggests we focus on electing allies in the House and Senate.
But instead of waiting for an arm-flapping populist to emerge from the genteel summer redoubt on Martha's Vineyard, the left should focus on the coming ground war, and try to fill Congress with new people who can at least tell fact from fiction.
I agree.
We have our legislature up for election in 2012 and we can now put up candidates who can move the Overton Window from the crazy right, which we now are experiencing, toward a more rational middle right and toward a desirable centrist or center left position. I think this will take 3-6 cycles or a very big event which isn't on the horizon.
If as one writer has noted, that some Democratic Senate leaders are not willing to support a candidate in a marginal-swing district, others need to help win the seat...or, at worst, make the R's spend resources defending it.
We have 4 Congressional seats which can be filled by people who are allies or will, at least, listen to us. Now is the time to find viable candidates in the three districts: CD3, CD4 and CD6. They can be taken back.
So, if you don't like our Eisenhower-era President, work down-ballot and come together to elect those who will support a House which doesn't crash the economy, the government and the people and which will make the governments responsive again.
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Sun Apr 25, 2010 at 18:22:53 PM MST
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(I'm seeing more and more derision for SB191. What's going on? - promoted by Fong)
I don't know what it is that attracts them, but people who want to run experiments on other people's kids seem to like Colorado. Maybe it's the scenic vistas, maybe the skiing - more likely that we're a profoundly purple swing state with a lax ballot initiative process and no statewide collective bargaining agreement - but regardless, sometimes it seems like every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a plan to bust the unions and fix the schools eventually makes an appearance here. What's even worse is when the barn-burner turns out to be a native son with a - on the surface, anyway - spotless resume.
Michael Johnston, an "idealocrat" school "reinventor," former Obama advisor, and recently-minted state senator, is Colorado's designated water-carrier for a faction of reactionary school reformers with dark, data-driven plans for the future of schools. He has recently introduced Senate Bill 10-191 (pdf), the just-as-evil cousin of the odious Florida Senate Bill 6. Though we did not seek the battle, it seems it's the turn of Colorado educators to fight off a vicious, mean-spirited power grab by a gang bent on blaming and punishing teachers for every ill in the public education system.
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