Colorado Luis

Maybe I'll visit Austin now

I see Austin-based bloggers are pissed off that the city passed a smoking ban.  I say, congratulations -- Austin is now on my list of places I want to visit.  And jeers to the Colorado legislature for wimping out on this issue.

A cousin of mine recently got to visit Paris for the first time, fulfilling a lifetime dream.  So what happened?  She got sent to the hospital with an asthma attack from all the second hand smoke.  Yeah, we're a bunch of asthmatics with tobacco allergies.  Second class citizens in a world where people claim they have a "right" to go out in public and do things that will put us in the hospital.

As I've said before, feel free to go kill yourselves in the privacy of your own home.  I'll be on your side if anyone tries to enact real tobacco prohibition.  (If you think about it, a smoking ban world will look a lot like a realistic post-drug war world.)  Just don't act like you have a right to go around blowing toxic waste on everyone else.

CIA Move a Beauprez Campaign Contribution?

Hold on to your wallets -- it looks like the Bush Administration is about to have the federal government make a gigantic, in-kind contribution to the Bob Beauprez for Governor campaign by moving the headquarters of the CIA to the Federal Center in Lakewood and making it look like the whole thing was Beauprez's idea.

Beauprez was allowed to make the announcement about the move, and the Bush Ranger-owned Denver Post obligingly played along with Sunday morning front page treatment -- with nary a question about why this junior Congressman was making such a major announcement.  (Somebody really should give the Post the Lisa Jones treatment.)  And don't tell me it is because the Federal Center is in Beauprez' district -- they've had him make announcements about federal spending at DIA even though the airport is actually in Dianna DeGette's district.

They also tried to showcase Beauprez by letting him run the Bush Bamboozepalooza event at Wings Over the Rockies Museum, even though that is in DeGette's district too.  Although that one didn't work out so well.

Hey, if Bill Owens could make his mark by presiding over one of the largest public works projects in Colorado history, why not have Beauprez make his name through a heaping helping of federal pork?  What's funny is that Beauprez and Owens will probably both say in their next campaigns that they are small government conservatives.

Now that I think about it, no need to hold on to your wallet just yet.  They'll pay for the CIA move the way they pay for everything else -- by putting it on the national credit card.  Somebody should start factoring in the interest payments every time the Bushies propose some new spending that they don't want to raise taxes for (at least under their watch) to figure out what these things really cost -- or in this case, just how big of a Beauprez campaign contribution we are being asked to pay for.

Saturday Beer Blogging 05.07.05

Didn't they claim the Coors-Molson merger wasn't going to cause jobs to be shipped north of the border?  I never believed that, and check this out:  Molson to brew Blue Moon beer in Montreal.  Blue Moon is Coors' craft beer label (they created their own brand, while Anheuser-Busch got into craft brewing by buying Red Hook) and is currently brewed in Memphis.

Molson Coors told the CBC that the Montreal production of Blue Moon products is just to help take care of peak summer demand for Blue Moon's signature wheat beer.  However, the company has already announced it intends to close the Memphis brewery permanently in 2007.  (Interestingly, Coors Memphis had a Black female executive, which is very rare in the industry.)

Look, I'm not against international trade.  Canadians need jobs too, and I'm sure the (unionized) employees at Molson's Montreal brewery do good work.  But why not be up front about it?  Just say, part of the benefit of this merger is going to be Molson Coors' ability to move production from the U.S. into Canada, where costs are lower, and in the future Blue Moon is going to be made up there instead of in Memphis.  It's almost as if they don't believe in their own case for free trade.

18 Months

The Bush administration announced yesterday that it will repeal Bill Clinton's January 2001 "roadless rule" and open up 4.4 million acres of currently roadless national forest land in Colorado to development, and millions more acres in eleven other Western states.  Only the governors of the affected states are authorized to protest, and they have eighteen months to do so.  That puts us at the tender mercies of Bill Owens, whose term will not quite be up 18 months from now.  However, all may not be lost:

    [T]he Colorado House passed a bill Thursday to create a task force to advise the governor on the future of Colorado’s roadless areas.  Dan Hopkins, spokesman for Governor Bill Owens, said Owens had worked with the Legislature on the bill and “very much supported” the legislation.  The bill, Hopkins said, would put Colorado “well along the way in creating a process for the public to comment and contribute.”

    . . .

    Colorado environmentalists, who largely favored the 2001 roadless rule and its nationwide approach, said the state probably won’t face pressures from the timber industry under the new rule. The state simply doesn’t have large trees most timber companies log.

    What the state does have, however, is a burgeoning oil and gas industry that requires roads to reach well pads and other industry operations.  Those roads, if Owens decides to allow them, could carve up a large chunk of Colorado’s 4.4 million acres of roadless forest land formerly off-limits under the 2001 rule.

As distateful as it may be, we're going to have to lobby Owens hard for the next eighteen months.  I think he still harbors senatorial ambitions, and he must know that in Colorado even a conservative like Wayne Allard has to at least pretend to be in favor of environmental protection.  Does Owens want his legacy to be a Colorado scarred by thousands of miles of new forest roads?

Election Day in Denver

Don't forget to vote today if you live in the City and County of Denver.  I'm voting yes on both ballot measures, 1A (the new jail) and 1B, which will allow the merger of the Denver and Glendale fire departments.  I live close enough to Glendale to actually care about 1B -- I think it will help fire protection in both Denver and Glendale and while it is too late for Glendale to ever actually merge into the city that surrounds it, we can at least cooperate on safety issues.

Jeralyn at 5280 predicts that 1A will pass by a wide margin and feed the Hickenlooper mystique.  I think it will be pretty close but that 1A will squeak by.  By making "no new taxes" the centerpiece of the Yes campaign, Hick's people have actually played into the hands of the No crowd, for whom cost is really the only issue they have -- although they have tried to stoke anti-lawyer sentiment by saying the lawyers should be forced to drive out to a new courthouse on Smith Road by the old jail and that we only want the new criminal court downtown so we can still have our sushi lunches or whatever.

The yes-on-1A campaign has also been shortsighted in encouraging anti-tax sentiment when lots of the same people who support 1A will later be asking voters to reform TABOR in November.  I also think that bringing 1A to a vote in this special election makes it more likely to fail, because cranky No voters will show up while other people who probably would vote Yes if they were voting anyway might not bother.  But with all that, I still think it (and 1B, which has no real opposition) will probably pass.

Update:  At 9:00 p.m., with about 85% of the vote counted, 1A is passing by a 56.7 - 43.3 margin, and 1B is passing 73-27.

The Irreligious West

This probably could be one of those Western Democrat "West Is Not The South" pieces, and maybe it already has been.  While doing some research for my last post, I came upon this report about the increase in the percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation -- and it points out that of the six states with the highest percentages of non-religious people, five of them are located in the West.

Using the nifty USA Today interactive map, it looks to me like those five states are Washington (25% have no religion), Colorado (21%), Oregon (21%), Nevada (20%) and Wyoming (20%).  (The non-Western state on the list is Vermont at 22%).  Just after that would be California and Idaho at 19% non-religious.

So think about it -- Focus on the Family is trying to throw its theocratic weight around in a state that is tied for third in the percentage of people who claim no religious affiliation whatsoever.  Proof positive they moved here just to take advantage of our favorable laws for non-profit corporations, if you ask me -- they would have been much more at home in a place like South Dakota (8% non-religious), Alabama (6%) or even Pennsylvania (12%).