This is supposed to be a conservative blog, where we crush Democrats and praise conservatives, right?

Right.

The only problem is Governor Hicken-Ritter keeps acting like a pour man's Chris Christie, cutting budgets and the like. Yesterday he took it one step further, asking for the resignations and resumes of the highest paid members of the state's bloated bureaucracy.

From Lynn Bartels:

Nearly 100 senior managers in state government have been told they must reapply for their jobs as part of what Gov. John Hickenlooper describes as an effort to deliver efficient services…The senior executive service, or SES, employees are contract workers who receive up to 25 percent higher pay than other managers. In exchange, they give up protections afforded classified state employees. Their contracts must be renewed annually.

In elections, as in private business, new leadership means new people. Unfortunately, for most state governments it just means more people. But Hickenlooper is a businessman at heart and sees something wrong with that proposition. He thinks it's worth challenging the status quo and looking under the hood to see if all those parts are needed to make the engine run.

John Salazar, addicted to a government paycheck, thinks otherwise. Publicly flipping off the Guv, Salazar says he'll treat this opportunity to review his top salaried staffers as mere paperwork shuffling, saying:

“I talked to them, and they're fine. I plan to rehire them unless there's some superstar out there I don't know anything about.”

Maybe Hickenlooper might want to think about asking Salazar to reapply for his job as well.