Private businesses have had to cutback, lay off and slash jobs while desperately trying to stay in business during the Obama administration, all while paying more in taxes and watching the government bloat with newer and higher paying jobs.

Well, the piper is calling and now it’s time for bureaucrats to line up for pink slips. And yes, we will feel that out here in the West.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said this week he wants to cut 4,000 jobs from his department that hosts 70,000 jobs, with about 1,000 coming from the BLM that has nearly 12,000 employees.

But not to environmentalists who want to kill private sector energy jobs, and they need these government sheep to do their dirty work for them.

To PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, the prospect of cutting Interior Department jobs is just one step short of murder, a “starvation diet.”

“According to Trump’s fantasy plan, BLM is supposed to achieve energy independence before its coffee break, stimulate rural job creation by lunch and do it with substantially less resources,” Ruch said. He predicted that reductions of that magnitude would likely require layoffs.

The Park Service is dealing with proposed cuts in a typical manner — through emotional blackmail and threats of closing parks early or eliminating some visitor services.

Government workers have avoided cutbacks and losses for decades by pleading to the media to convince the public those jobs are needed or it’s the public who will suffer.

But after eight years of Obama administration job loses in the private sector, we don’t expect to see much sympathy.

I hate you, Colorado Peak Politics

On May 5, the Colorado State Senate voted down the re-appointment of Heidi Hess to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. So, then, why is Hess still on the commission? That’s the question that Senate President Kevin Grantham is grappling with.

“It’s mind-boggling that the governor would just choose to ignore the (state) constitution’s plain language. It calls into question the governor’s respect for the institution.”

Republican legislators originally voted her down because she advocated for suing business owners instead of finding positive resolutions to civil rights issues. Hickenlooper’s response to the head scratching? Come up with a convoluted legal response that still allows him to keep this trial lawyer advocate his pick on the Commission. Here is what his spokesperson said when pushed on the matter:

“A spokeswoman for the governor said that state law says ‘when an appointee is not confirmed by the Senate, the last person to hold the seat … continues to serve until the governor appoints a successor.'”

So, the governor, in theory, could just never appoint someone else and keep his person on the Commission in perpetuity, which is clearly not in the spirit of the law.  But whatever it takes to make Democratic donors happy.

At today’s Focus on the Family visit from Vice President Mike Pence, activists dressed up as pilgrims and ambled about looking at their cell phones. Just kidding, the women at the protest were dressed as characters from the Handmaid’s Tale, a feminist tale of male-dominated dystopia. Or something. We’d probably know if we watched it. We were more interested when we thought it was a historical drama like Downton Abbey. But we digress.

Apparently, dressing as the oppressed women from this fantasy movie? TV show? activist webinar? was meant to show the Vice President that women were passionately displeased by his existence. Instead, they showed him that their passion for equality (is that what they’re protesting?) can be tamed by one thing – their cell phones.

Check out the footage that Revealing Politics caught here:

Note the woman with an “Abort Mike Pence” sign – and what’s up with the cat ears? This must be a Laura Chapin production. Nonetheless, what loving and compelling arguments from a group of desperate losers who continue to lose because their message is so tone deaf.

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner came out swinging against critics of the Better Care Reconciliation Act Thursday who criticized the plan about five minutes after it was released.

It’s so annoyingly partisan and we’re glad he called them out, and not just Democrats, but a few members of his own party.

“It’s frustrating that instead of actually reviewing the legislative text some have decided to immediately oppose the bill before it was even introduced. This deserves serious debate, not knee-jerk reaction.”

According to the Denver Post, “reading the bill — let alone understanding it — is a process that could take hours, given its length of 142 pages.”

But not for wannabe Democratic governors like U.S. Reps. Jared Polis and Ed Perlmutter. We grabbed these tweets more than eight hours after the plan was distributed.

Senate #HealthcareBill was written in secret by a small group of GOP senators, ignoring the democratic process.The end result is disastrous.

— Rep. Ed Perlmutter (@RepPerlmutter) June 22, 2017

Does anyone including the media really think senators are all gathered around computers typing up the bill, proofing it, and then making 535 photocopies of it to distribute?

We’re pretty sure it’s compiled by committee staffers, and then actually goes to the congressional printer and then distributed.

Congressmen should know better. And then there’s Polis:

At its heart, #Trumpcare is a tax cut for billionaires and special interests disguised as a healthcare plan.

— Rep. Jared Polis (@RepJaredPolis) June 22, 2017

Not only is this tired rhetoric just that, but the big tax cut is that people who can’t afford to buy insurance won’t be taxed for it.

What else is actually in the bill? To be honest, we haven’t read it beyond the tax cut so we’ll have to get back to PeakNation™ on that.

Vice President Mike Pence will be in Colorado Springs Friday for the 40th anniversary celebration of Focus on the Family.

It won’t be a public event because of security concerns, but KOAA News 5 will carry the event live at 11 a.m.

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner will also get some face time with the vice president during an evening reception.

Pence will also swing by Schriever Air Force Base and tour the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

We expect his reception will be warm, and the news coverage negative.

We started an office pool to bet on which national activist group will interrupt the day’s events with a pathetic PR stunt. We pulled the only name out of our fishbowl and expect it to be a winner.

Here’s a hint, it starts with D-E-M-O-C and ends in R-A-T-S.

As we first reported, Bloomberg-backed gun grabber Shannon Watts is considering a run for U.S. Rep. Jared Polis’ seat in Congress, but from her Twitter account, it would appear that she’s feeling a little pushback from the powers that be in the Democratic Party. Here is her response to a Daily Camera opinion piece critiquing the Democratic Party’s historically bad loss in Georgia titled, “Have Democrats Learned Nothing?”:

In the response, she quoted author Jim Martin who sharply critiqued the Democratic Party: “So instead of encouraging good people to run, having robust debates about important issues and engaging more voters in the process, the Democrats tightly controlled the process by crowning Neguse now.”

She sounds…trying to put our fingers on it…jealous?  But she shouldn’t be surprised. This is the same party that tried to trick Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his team into thinking they received fewer delegates than they did in Colorado. This is a party with superdelegates, approximately 102% of which voted for establishment candidate Hillary Clinton. Why would the Democratic Party have changed over the past year or so? Well, why besides the massive loss of the Presidency and going 0 for 5 in special Congressional elections. But we digress.

Maybe the Democratic establishment is simply not comfortable with how close Watts is to former Nannystate Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who turns every candidate in Colorado that he touches into an untouchable?

Either way, we are enjoying the drama unfolding in the Democratic Party in the Second Congressional District election. It’s about time Democrats turned on each other.

Five Obama-appointed members, including a professor from Denver, quit the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS last week “in protest of Donald Trump.” They alleged that the President’s plan would be detrimental to those with the disease. This sounds an awful lot like every single other time someone who was appointed by Obama, but remained in the Trump administration, left their post. In each instance, the departees, instead of simply leaving their post, used the opportunity inflict maximum damage to President Trump. Denver’s Dr. Lucy Bradley-Springer makes no attempt to hide that this is in fact her intention, according to her statement in the Denver Post:

“I made the decision to leave because I thought that making this kind of statement might make a bigger impact than staying on. It was not an easy decision to make.”

A bigger impact for whom? If Dr. Bradley-Springer was serious about her accusation that President Trump was going to be detrimental to those with the disease, as a doctor, doesn’t she have an ethical responsibility to stay on and try to advocate for those patients? But, really, this makes a bigger splash for her to feed her ego, which must be enormous because she was so offended that she did not have direct access to the top dogs anymore. Here was one of her complaints:

“We sent a letter to the secretary of health, which is how the council talks to the administration, and we didn’t immediately hear back. When we did hear back, it was from someone on a rather low level.”

Awww, sorry you feel ignored. It’s almost like she’s a millennial whose boss does not drop everything to hear her every whim.  Look, this is not a story. Obama appointee (who presumably agrees with President Obama) leaves after Trump takes office? That’s just the normal course of events.

The latest Democrat jumping into the primary race for state Senate District 32 has a criminal record, and he’s proud of it.

Glitter Bomber Peter Smith made his entrance into politics when he was arrested for “throwing a missile” at Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and tells Colorado Politics that he is still driven by the same passions, but without the glitter.

Smith’s competition to take the seat being vacated by state Sen. Irene Aguilar of Denver because of term limiting includes Robert Rodriguez, Zach Neumann and Lance Wright.
Sounding the siren call of the entitled millennials, Smith says he should be elected because it’s his turn.

“I’m running mainly against a wealthy entrepreneur and an established party insider who is the son of an established party insider,” Smith said, referring to Neumann and Rodriguez, respectively. (Rodriguez is the son of Colorado Democratic Party Deputy 2nd Vice Chair Mannie Rodriguez, a former Democratic national committeeman for Colorado.)

“I think it’s time to turn the page and pass the torch and let a new generation take charge,” Smith added.

After his stint as a glitter bomber at age 20, Smith decided he should be a state Senator after working in the failed campaign of Morgan Carroll against Mike Coffman for Congress.

Democrats including Gov. Hickenlooper are criticizing for Republicans for writing health care legislation behind closed doors. Not because they believe in transparency, they are accusing Republicans of being hypocrites because the GOP criticized Democrats for crafting Obamacare behind closed doors.

But here’s what’s really ironic.

Republicans weren’t upset because some legislative aide at a computer was not put on public display while actually typing up the law, it was why Democrats were being secretive.

Remember MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber who was promoting Obamacare for the administration

In the first, most widely publicized video, taken at a panel discussion about the ACA at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2013, Gruber said the bill was deliberately written “in a tortured way” to disguise the fact that it creates a system by which “healthy people pay in and sick people get money”. He said this obfuscation was needed due to “the stupidity of the American voter” in ensuring the bill’s passage. Gruber said the bill’s inherent “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” in selling it.

Remember when Democrats refused to let Republicans actually read the bill before voting on it?

Hickenlooper seems to have completely forgotten about that when he criticized Republicans this week. Or he’s just nervous that Republicans act like Democrats.