Slick Hick in action
Gov. John Hickenlooper (brand trademark pending) once again is trying to push himself as a moderate by coopting the themes of fiscal conservatism without actually delivering results. Then again, as liberal-loved brands like Apple have shown, you don’t actually have to live up to any ideals as long as you have slick enough advertising to go along with it.
Take Hick for example: Yesterday, he tweeted out this video from Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies, claiming it was proof of him “cutting red tape & making state gov’t more efficient…” Let’s roll this tape, and see this evidence.
While it does warm the cold cockles of our fiscal-conservative hearts to hear a prominent Democratic appointee like Barbara Kelley, Executive Director of DORA, speak like she’s a moderate Republican when she says stuff like, “The core purpose… is to cut red tape in Government.” The fact that see reads the statement as well as a hostage reads their captors demands, reveals to us just how hard it is for her to fake it (Hick to Barbara: it reads the lines or else it gets the hose again).
As for the evidence of cutting this red-tape?
Narrator: “The result: Executive agencies responsible for everything… reviewed more than 13,000 rules and regulations…”
You heard that right PeakNation™, DORA didn’t actually cut any red-tape, they just “reviewed” it. We here at the Peak “reviewed” a Constitutional Law text yesterday, now we’re ready to be a Supreme Court Justice. We “reviewed” our TV remote set-up guide this morning, now we know as much about computers as Bill Gates. We “reviewed” all of Moby Dick in the past fifteen minutes; we expect our Nobel Prize for literature to arrive any day in the mail now. It’s quite revealing that while DORA claims to have reviewed 13,000 regulations, they don’t bother bringing up in the rest of the video how many regulations they cut of those 13,000 they reviewed.
But, it gets even better. Around the two-minute mark in the video they bring up “Colorado Business Express,” an online system aimed at streamlining business registration. Unfortunately for Hick and DORA, according to sources familiar with it, the Colorado Business Express project was started in 2007, a full four years before the statewide initiative that is claiming the credit for it.
Likewise, DORA is claiming they have helped cut wait times at Front Range DMVs to an average of 15 minutes for at least 94% of customers. Yet, just in June, Hick needed a $90 million new law because he claimed the DMV wasn’t efficient. Their end goal? 15 minute wait times. Clearly, there is some disconnect here as Hick’s administration seems to be trying to have it both ways. Hick claimed an inefficient, outdated computer system needed to be overhauled to reduce the average wait time at the DMV from 60 minutes to 15 minutes. At best, this means Hickenlooper is using $90 million of taxpayers money to help just 6% of people at the DMV achieve the same time that the other 94% already do. And, Hick wanted us to trust him with an extra billion dollars? Sounds completely fiscally conservative to us.
Like we said, no need for substance when you have slick advertising.
In the end, this propaganda by DORA only proves how fast and loose Hick and his administration play with things they like to call “facts.”