Amaesing Gubernatorial failure, Dan Maes, intent on further proving the point that he was one of the most embarrassing candidates in Colorado's history, sent a blast email out today insinuating he was Lincoln to Tancredo's John Wilkes Booth. We get it, Dan, you're bitter that you had the worst approval ratings of any Governor candidate in the country.

From the email:

Well, the bully of the 2010 election has decided he wants to hang out with the popular kids and he just is not feeling the love (tissue please). That's right, Tom Tancredo has friends trying to grease the skids for him at Lincoln Day Dinners. "Uh hem, Mrs. Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth would like to join you for dinner. He asked me to speak for him because he felt a little uncomfortable asking for himself". History buffs, just go with it.

Yes, Dan, you are Lincoln — if Lincoln shot himself in the foot and used the US Treasury to pay himself mileage for his ride to Gettysburg. Tancredo as John Wilkes Booth? Well, yes, Tancredo is a straight shooter, but a Presidential assassin, we think not. Just a guy who felt that conservatives should have a candidate they actually like running on their platform.

Tom Tancredo is an American stinkin' hero. We at the Peak love him, and so do Colorado conservatives. He made a valiant fight in the Governor's race, and gave conservatives a reason to vote. That was a huge boost to state house, state senate and even statewide races like Treasurer and Secretary of State. Far from castigating the Tanc, we owe him a debt of gratitude for giving Colorado conservatives a reason to turn out at all last fall. 

The Amaesing One used most of his diatribe to go after everyone he felt slighted him, in a tone reminiscent of a 7th grade girl on MySpace, that only ensures even less people will retain a modicum of respect for the man. 

What Dan fails to understand is that no one gives a rat's ass what he thinks anymore. He thoroughly embarrassed the Republican Party, and himself, throughout the campaign and conservatives have moved on. In a time of debates on the rising national debt, the last person with credibility is someone who had to rob a nice elderly lady to cover his mortgage deficit.

Dan, stop sending out childish rants about people who don't like you and go back to being a secret agent. We need more people like you to pull illegals off of the trains and shut down gambling factories in their in-laws house. 

UPDATE: The liberal online media and their sibling “think tanks”, who get a huge amount of cash from anti-payday lending groups, are all hot in the drawers over the House asserting its prerogative to rewrite the rule. Progressives really can’t come to terms with the fact that voters rejected their stranglehold on the Legislature. We say: Get Over It and Learn to Compromise.

Brandon Shaffer finally stormed out of one too many meetings, intent on holding the Capitol hostage to his control. As we mentioned last night the Capitol was governed by one-state Pyongyang politics for years and Democrats are struggling to adjust to the new balance-of-power reality. But Shaffer has had a particularly rough time adjusting to sharing the sandbox. 

Speaker McNulty finally had enough with Shaffer's incompetent leadership of the Senate and decided to cross the legislative finish line rocking his steel-toed boots. Sine Die will now come with either Shaffer learning legislative compromise or killing a rules bill in spite.

Shaffer could actually look to his own party in the House to see the bipartisan support the legislation, without Shaffer's interference, has for passage. From the Denver Post's political fabricator reporter, Tim Hoover:

The amendment Republicans pushed Tuesday night onto the annual rules bill essentially resurrected the [$75] origination-fee issue as a rule.  

Two Democrats, Reps. Edward Casso of Commerce City and Sue Schafer of Wheat Ridge, initially supported attaching the amendment but later flipped their votes.  

Because the Senate had already passed the rules bill, the House would be sending it back with the payday-loan amendment, meaning the Senate could either accept the House change or simply adhere to its earlier position.  

House Speaker Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, said that if the Senate didn't accept the amendment, that would kill the bill.

There is no way that a $75 origination fee amendment, which was supported by two liberal Democrats in the House, is a legitimate excuse to kill an entire rules bill and force a special session at a cost of $21,000 a day to taxpayers.

We know John Morse has no problem charging that kind of money for his "hard work" outside the legislative session, but with Shaffer intent on running for Congress, we wonder if he'll want to explain to voters why he wasted more of their money. Not a good way to start convincing people you belong in Washington.   

With the intellect and temperament of a bar rooom bouncer, it's not going to be easy for Shaffer to bow to reality and compromise, but for his political future he must. Pushing flower shop regulation, cutting up the Eastern Plains, and risking wasting taxpayer dollars at a rate of twenty large a day — all in the last week of the session — is no way to begin a campaign for the 4th Congressional District.

Don't worry Brandon, we'll make sure to let your future voters know about your long list of legislative accomplishments.

Sniveling sycophant freshman Democrat Rep. Dan Pabon has been caught on tape saying he thinks it's better homeless people are murdered rather than survive beatings. Check the tape:

During a hearing on Senate Bill 4 in the House Judiciary Committee, Pabon was caught on the record saying in some cases "it might be better off that these [homeless] people would have been murdered than to live and sustain the injuries that they did by result of these acts of beatings…"

Pabon's profile has risen recently in his role on the redistricting "I-got-your-Kumbaya-right-here committee," infamously playing the role of Julie Wells' little stooge, reciting talking points as if a freshman in the school play desperately trying to get his lines right. 

His remark came in the context of him bloviating, in Biden-esque fashion, on the need to pass his bill adding homelessness to the list of hate crime designated classes.

Pabon, in his usual smug and sanctimonious way, was perorating about the crimes committed against homeless people by trying to conjure up emotional images to argue for legislation that both the Colorado District Attorney's Council and Colorado Criminal Defense Bar opposed. 

The law was so poorly thought out that it could potentially make threatening a panhandler who is begging a little too aggressively a hate crime. Not only would the law make threatening speech a hate crime, but it would mark the first time a circumstance, not a belief or biological trait, was considered a protected class. 

It’s clear Pabon is not ready to legislate on his own. In exchange for being a good little lemming on the redistricting committee, the Dems let him sponsor legislation. And he advocates the death of homeless people who’ve been assaulted. We predict shady 527 Dem operatives, like Julie Wells, will be looking to keep his training wheels on for a while.  

Give him time, Democrats, for with enough coaching and motivation he could grow up to be another Max Tyler.

UPDATE: Guv Hick has come out publicly against the amendment. Nice to know he's alive. We just find it a bit odd that he would break his vows of legislative silence to weigh in on a rules amendment, but avoid publicly participating in, you know, big issues like redistricting. We've heard of selective hearing, but this is a new one. Selective leadership.

Senate Prez Brandon Shaffer thinks he is the only one in charge in the Capitol. After years of Democrat control of all levers of the legislative process, Shaffer and Democrats have gotten a little too used to their one-party state in the Capitol. The problem for Shaffer and gang is that the voters of Colorado decided they were sick of Pyongyang politics and put Republicans in charge of the House.

With redistricting melting down over Shaffer's lack of interest in compromise, the Republicans have decided it's time to play hard ball. Case in point: the rules bill. Normally a staid and unexciting process, the rules bill got heated just in the last few hours as Republicans added an amendment that would alter payday lending rules promulgated by bureaucrats that Republicans felt exceeded the authority granted to them by the Legislature.

Democrats and Progressives practically crapped their pants and have been ranting about how Republicans are trying to attack poor people. They do this by selling their disingenuous argument that payday lenders are all evil succubi looking to prey on poor people. The problem with that argument is that, as is often the case with Democrat talking points, the facts don't play it out. 

Take a look at a study done by Donald Morgan of the New York Federal Reserve on payday loans. His conclusion is quite interesting in regards to North Carolina and Georgia who chased the payday lenders out of the state:

Georgians and North Carolinians do not seem better off since their states outlawed payday credit: they have bounced more checks, complained more about lenders and debt collectors, and have filed for Chapter 7 (“no asset”) bankruptcy at a higher rate. The increase in bounced checks represents a potentially huge transfer from depositors to banks and credit unions. Banning payday loans did not save Georgian households $154 million per year, as the CRL projected, it cost them millions per year in returned check fees.

People balk at the idea of high interest rates for payday loans. But reality doesn't conform to people's gut emotions. As Morgan points out, those high interest rates are still cheaper than the bounced check costs. Payday loans are for people with bad credit. Anybody with a credit card, car payment or mortgage knows that bad credit equals a bad rate.

On top of the essential role that payday lenders can play in assisting people with bad credit avoid harsher penalties, they also provide a little thing called J-O-B-S. Democrats haven't concerned themselves much with that issue this session, instead focusing on government revenues, not citizen and business revenues. If a company can only make their business work at a certain percentage of interest and you force them to charge a lower rate, basic economics tells you they'll have to shutter their shop. And lay off people.

But that won't stop Democrats from sticking to their talking points.

So Democrats can continue to demagogue the issue, when at the end of the day Republicans would probably have been willing to compromise if Shaffer and his minions had felt the need to show a little bipartisan spirit on redistricting.

Guess Shaffer is just going to have to go pound sand.

We don't like Massachusetts healthcare plan, and we aren't convinced one way or the other that Mitt Romney is the right choice for the GOP's nomination.

But we can't help but note that Romney seems to have a very powerful adversary — the Wall Street Journal's influential editorial division — who seems to go out of its way to create linkage between Romneycare and Obamacare.

In today's editorial they take new figures about the state of healthcare access and affordability in Massachusetts and use it to warn that Obamacare will reek similar havoc.

Massachusetts health regulators also estimate that emergency room visits jumped 9% between 2004 and 2008, in part due to the lack of routine access to providers. The Romney-Obama theory was that if everyone is insured by the government, costs would fall by squeezing out uncompensated care. Yet emergency medicine accounts for only 2% of all national health spending.  

Another notable finding in the Medical Society survey is the provider flight from government health care. Merely 43% of internists and 56% of family physicians accept Commonwealth Care, the heavily subsidized middle-class insurance program. The same respective figures are 53% and 62% for price-controlled Medicaid. Government health insurance may be great, but not if it can't buy actual health care.

There are a few outlets that can be deadly adversaries in a Republican primary, like Fox News or Redstate, and Romney seems to have found a prime obstacle in his path in the form of the WSJ ed board.  

That's not to say that this opposition will necessarily derail Romney's candidacy, but he is going to have to find a way to woo the WSJ ed board back to his corner, or at least convince them there are significant enough differences between his plan and Obamacare.  

How he handles that could end up defining his candidacy, much as McCain's immigration stance shaped his primary bid. 

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

For the last several weeks, all of the political air has been sucked up by issues large (the death of Osama bin Laden) and small (Obama v. Trump in the case of the magically appearing birth certificate).

But we predict, and polls say, that 2012 will be about two closely related issues: the economy and government spending.

On the latter, Republicans have moved a bold plan to cut spending by trillions of dollars, including a plan to revamp Medicare that is set to go bankrupt in a few short years.

The Democrats and Progressive bed wetters can't help but revert to scare tactics in the wake of all this.

Colorado Pols pounded Congressman Scott Tipton just yesterday, saying he broke his campaign pledge not to cut or privatize Medicare.

We will leave the ridiculous demagoguery about Medicare "privatization" for another discussion. Instead we would like to point out the simple and elegant genius of the Ryan plan… while enacting important reforms that save Medicare (and the nation) from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the Ryan plan also leaves current seniors totally untouched.

If you are 65, or 64, or 63, or 62, or 61, or 60, or 59, or 58, or 57, or 56, or 55, Medicare as you know it won't change. Medicare spending as a percent of GDP also won't change under the Ryan plan for anyone. 

Ergo, Scott Tipton's promise made is a promise kept.

Future seniors of course, will see a different, smarter and still very generous Medicare, even though it will be in a different form. But current retirees and those nearing it get the same Medicare tomorrow as they did today.

By the way, without changes to Medicare — pay attention Progressive bed wetters — Medicare will be insolvent before the end of the decade. Meaning that for those under 55, there really is no choice — reform or nothing.

We know that most Progressives are too busy protesting the War on Terror and hugging trees to do much in the way of studying economics and accounting, so we will make it simple.

Medicare insolvency = bad for Medicare recipients.

Tipton/Ryan plan to ward off insolvency of Medicare = good for Medicare recipients, future and present.

Or to alter an oft-used saying, a bird in hand is better than none in the bush. 

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

UPDATE 2: We missed this earlier from Fox 31′s Eli Stokols who reported that, in fact, no one did care about the endorsement.

UPDATE: We got an email from a Mike Hancock sympathizer pointing out that Ritter’s sister-in-arms, former Treasurer Cary Kennedy, had endorsed Romer at a point previous in the campaign. We missed that one, as it could have been similarly dismissed with a “who cares.” So with the exception of noting that Ritter has no business doing politics while at CSU, we’ll call it a Hancock-Romer tie when it comes to endorsements from leftist leftovers.

Yesterday, the only endorsement that really matters in the Denver Mayor's race happened, with third place finisher James Mejia endorsing front-runner Chris Romer. That endorsement mattered not only because Mejia almost made the run-off, but because it took the wind out of the sails of an anti-Romer coalition.

After the endorsement, many observers predicted the race was all but over. 

And now in steps Bill Ritter to endorse Michael Hancock. We have news for Ritter and Hancock: NO ONE CARES.

Apparently, Ritter wanted a break from having his ass handed to him on debates on renewable energy. Or maybe it was a favor to his former spokesman, Evan Dreyer, who is now running Hancock's campaign.

We're also a bit confused as to why CSU is even letting Ritter play in politics. After all, Bruce Benson had to swear off partisan politics when he took over at CU. Why in the name of Cam the Ram is it any different for a lousy former Governor at CSU?

This endorsement doesn't seem to make much sense to us. It's not like Ritter is a beloved figure in the Democrat Party. He was a one term Governor who was unable to get anything done in his single term other than give a bunch of speeches where he put a backdrop saying "New Energy Economy" behind him. Which we all now realize was just a ploy for a post-government job funded by the George Soros set of Colorado.&nbsp

It's like a Republican being endorsed by Dan Maes. Endorsements by failures don't matter. 

NBC News is out with a new poll this morning showing that Barack Obama has received a statistically insignificant bounce of three points from the strategically significant capture and kill of 9-11 Jihad, Osama bin Laden.

The reason for such meager political rewards? Obama is weighted by overwhelming distrust of his handling of the economy by the American people.

Recall our historical look at the bounce POTUS' of days past have found after major foreign policy wins. Obama's bounce puts him at the bottom of the list.

We predicted a 10 point bounce lasting through the Fall, but apparently the American people have less trust in Obama than we thought. Bin Laden being dead is a wonderful thing, but if you're unemployed and struggling to pay your bills, the euphoria of that event washes away pretty quickly. Bill Clinton was right — it's the economy, stupid. 

We poked fun at nominal GOP front runner Mitt Romney for trying to switch the subject back to jobs in the immediate wake of Osama's slaughter, thinking that such a "subject change" would be hard to effect in the short run.

Apparently, we were wrong, even now, only eight short days after Osama was euthanized.

From Politico:

The president’s overall approval rating is at 52 percent in an NBC News poll released late Monday – a gain of three points since last month – while his disapproval rating dropped four points to 41 percent. The post-bin Laden bounce wasn’t quite as pronounced in this poll, conducted Thursday through Saturday, as it was in some polling done in the first two days immediately after the terrorist leader was killed.

…But views of how the president is handling the economy have dropped  since April to their lowest levels since Obama took office. A month ago, 45 percent of Americans said they approved of his handling of the economy. That number is now down to 37 percent, while disapproval has risen six percentage points to 58 percent. Before this month, his lowest  ratings on the economy came last August, when 39 percent approved and 56 percent disapproved of his job performance on the issue.

The garage-band over at Colorado Pols has been noticeably quiet about the entire event, scarcely even commenting on the day-to-day saga that gripped the attention of a nation. The most notable exception was a Pols suggestion that Obama's pummeling of Osama was the antecedent to 4 more years.

This morning, NBC News pollsters paint a very different picture.

Shakespeare said it best. First, kill all the lawyers. Since we can't do that, the least we could do is keep the scumbag plaintiff pimps, also known as trial lawyers, in check. Trial lawyers are a powerful and deep-pocketed constituency of Democrats, who are more than happy to do their bidding in exchange for a nice chunk of change come election time.

Senate Bill 72 was a good example of this legislative payback. The bill would have expanded the ability for trial lawyers to sue for compensatory and punitive damages and attorney's fees over cases involving employment discrimination in small businesses. Employees of small businesses already have the ability to seek "back pay, front pay, interest on back pay, reinstatement or hiring, and other equitable relief." Sounds like Bangladeshi sweatshops, eh?

Former Senate Majority Leader Mark Hillman wrote an op-ed detailing the economic devastation this bill would cause, to the benefit of trial lawyers who take upwards of 40% of settlements and awards, and the clear case as to why this bill is in itself frivolous and unwarranted. 

Lawsuits are expensive for businesses to defend, with costs exceeding $100,000 if the case goes to trial. That is not something that a small business can easily afford. In fact, it's enough to bankrupt a business whether the claim has any merit or not. 

Not only are lawsuits expensive to defend, but the claims that have already been before the Colorado Civil Rights Division were found to be frivolous 92% of the time! Imagine if the incentives to sue were increased by offering a bigger pot of gold for successful litigants (and especially their lawyers). You could practically hear the trial lawyers chomping at the bit during the bill's hearing. 

Hillman's well argued piece stirred the pot over in trial lawyer land, inviting a response from a VP of the Trial Lawyers Association, James Croshal. As the old saying goes: If the facts are your side, bang on the facts. If the law is on your side, bang on the law. If neither is on your side, bang on the table. And that is what Mr. Croshal did.

In his response, he urges Hillman to check his facts, yet magically forgets to produce any of his own, or even a reasoned refutation of the facts Hillman employed in his case. Instead he whines that big business can afford these lawsuits, while little ol' employees cannot, forgetting that the law was about small business, not big business: 

It is not enough that [Hillman's] large corporate clients frequently have the money to try to bankrupt the consumer or the employee suing them. What they want is to take away these people's rights as Americans to seek any redress of their grievances against them.

Yes, those opposed to frivolous lawsuits capable of ending small family businesses must really hate the little guy.

If the current system, which disincentives frivolous cases by reducing the financial reward, is yielding cases without merit nine of out ten times, then clearly there is no vast section of society being fired by small businesses in illegal ways.

All the law would do is pad the pockets of trial lawyers, who in turn would give Democrats their cut at election time. 

Thankfully the bill, like Croshal's unreasoned assault on Hillman, failed. The scumbag plaintiff pimps in the Colorado Trial Lawyer Association will scrounge their dollars wherever they can, law or facts be damned. They will just have to scrounge elsewhere while the majority of reason and common sense reigns in the Capitol. 

Thank God for the GOP House Majority.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The bar-room-brawl known as redistricting in Colorado is down to the final 3 days.

Kumbaya? I got your Kumbaya right here.

With House Republicans and Senate Democrats at an impasse that is starting to look more and more difficult to unwind, we still haven't a faint clue where John Hickenlooper stands on the last outstanding issue…or for that matter, on any of the major issues debated at any time during the redistricting punching match.

Sure we cheered him for his late entry into the debate, but at this point leadership means rolling up your sleeves and hammering out a deal on the details.

Unfortunately, leadership is the exact opposite of what Hick has given on redistricting…it has been true from the start, and it is true now, in these final days of tough negotiation.

Uppermost among the remaining disputes is whether the rural counties that are home to the proposed expansion of Pinon Canyon bombing range should be gerrymandered into the same district that claims the military stronghold of El Paso County.

We are not entering the fray over the proposed Pinon Canyon expansion one way or the other, but if John Hickenlooper is as impassioned about protecting the interests of those ranchers in S.E. Colorado as he says he is, shouldn't he tell the Senate Democrats to stand down and remove these rural counties from a Congressional district dominated by El Paso county?

The answer is obvious…of course.

If Hick is the sworn friend of the ranchers in the way he has said he is, the Governor should settle the score on behalf of the ranchers…and House Republicans.

If Hick continues to sit on the sidelines while the Senate Dems plays games on Pinon Canyon, though, Hick's allegiances to party (at the expense of these ranchers) will be clear for the world to see.

The clock is ticking and, on this issue, memories are long.

So which one will it be Governor; your political party, or the ranchers you claim to support?

Image: Bob Lowe / FreeDigitalPhotos.net