Month: April 2024

(Colorado Peak Politics)

The proverb that if something sounds too good to be true then it probably is, still holds true in politics today.

Like when Democrats spread stories about Republicans that are too horrific to be true, it’s usually because it is.

Case in point, it took three days for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to go from vice presidential contender to puppy killer.

The likely death of her political career is all thanks to a British tabloid that took liberties with her account of a vicious dog that could not be trained out of its dangerous behavior and had to be put down.

It was not a puppy, and it’s a sad story — in context.

Unfortunately for Noem, the U.S. media have zero intention of adding the context, of which The Guardian added just enough to see through the hype.

Jefferson County Republicans are embracing SD Gov Kristi Noem’s puppy-killing controversy, saying she’ll discuss “the animal killings” when she keynotes their Saturday fundraiser. #copolitics pic.twitter.com/k8T3W7I0Qs

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) April 30, 2024

Stripping away the emotion of the story, included in a yet-to-be-released book the tabloid claims to have obtained, it’s a tragic event Noem recounts about her hunting dog that turned vicious on too many occasions.

After the 14-month-old wirehair pointer turned on her, she faced a decision dog owners dread.

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

A Democrat state senator faces an ethics complaint for showing up drunk at a meeting packed with angry constituents about her bill that paved the way for the state’s plan to house sex offenders near a school.

The Northglenn City Council will vote Wednesday on whether to approve the ethics complaint against Faith Winter and forward it to the state senate majority leader for action.

The complaint said folks attending the meeting could smell alcohol on her breath and noted her slurred speech and glassy eyes.

“… (A)s a result she also appeared at various times disinterested, annoyed, and combative.”

Her conduct “undermined the integrity of her office as a senator representing the constituents of the city, and demonstrated an inability to perform her legislative duties in a manner that promotes public confidence,” the resolution states.

PeakNation™ will recall that Winter admitted the next morning she was intoxicated and claimed to have entered rehab for treatment.

And by rehab, it turns out she meant she was just staying home for a while “under medical supervision.”

Winter only missed six days of session, according to Senate voting records.

Meanwhile, the state finally agreed with Northglenn residents that a halfway house for sex offenders so close to their school was probably a bad idea and decided against that location.

Unfortunately, the new Polis administration rule isn’t much better,

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

The legislature is playing “Dems Gone Wild,” and the Republicans, having destroyed their own party, can offer no serious resistance. This is Colorado’s basic political problem. Is there still time to set Colorado back on the path of personal and economic liberty?

A heritage of liberty

Yes, a lot of Colorado’s history is decidedly non-libertarian, using that term loosely. Start with the abuse of Native peoples, including the Sand Creek Massacre. Original proposals for statehood did not allow black people to vote, and other racist policies continued into statehood. In 1880 a white mob rioted in Denver’s Chinatown. Colorado once was home to robust eugenics and Klan movements.

Still, Colorado culture also bears the deep grooves of liberty. Black leaders including William Jefferson Hardin, Barney Ford, and Joseph H. Stuart fought for equal rights. Colorado was the first state to achieve women’s suffrage, in 1893.

During the second World War, Republican governor Ralph Carr opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and spoke eloquently of equal rights for all. He said, “If a majority may deprive a minority of its freedom, contrary to the terms of the Constitution today, then you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill-will of the majority tomorrow. . . . An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. . . . If you harm them,

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

There will be free food at the revolution.

one group organizing the Auraria campus pro-Hamas idiocy is SDS (Students for a Democratic Society).
wait. wut?
no, not your grandpa’s SDS that birthed the 70s Weather Underground of Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn.
it’s a bunch of GenZ/millennial LARPERS. https://t.co/P9rqP3EqyK

— Larimer County Republican Party (@LarimerGOP) April 29, 2024

And yet the offer still didn’t draw more than a couple hundred students from a campus population of some 42,000.

Apparently, the revolution is very short-staffed in Colorado during final exams.

Denver Mayor Johnston made a brief appearance on the occupied lawn Friday night long enough to tell protestors their tents violated campus policy.

He gave them 30 minutes to disassemble the tents, assuring them, “We have no desire to make arrests.”

To which one protestor responded: “You fucking fascist!”

Democrat Mayor of Denver Mike Johnston went to the pro-Hamas encampment at Auraria campus yesterday and begged protesters to dismantle everything and just protest like normal.

Unsurprisingly, this accomplished nothing.pic.twitter.com/AEALjYu7jU

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) April 27, 2024

Throughout history, famous fascists like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were notorious for their ruthless assaults on the pop-up tents of privileged college students.

Despite Johnston’s anti-tent demands, the pro protest protesters remain defiant against The Man in their shaded encampments,

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

Colorado kids are celebrating student loan forgiveness by skipping classes to protest this election year’s social outrage — the plight of the Palestinian people who want to obliterate Israel from the river to the sea.

This is what happens when a generation declares history is white-washed garbage and then repeats atrocities because lessons learned where so quickly erased.

Lessons like WWII and socialist Nazi Germany exterminating Jews.

And Communism.

College kids camping in solidarity with Hamas were sticking it to the man over the weekend when noted communist, Black Panther, and celebrated former FBI fugitive Angela Davis stopped by the Auraria Campus in Denver to pump up the hate.

Davis urged the white saviors to do what those brown people have failed to since the Palestinian ethnicity was created 100 years ago; free them from the oppression of Jews who first settled that land more than 3,000 years ago.

“I want to emphasize what this means for history,” Davis told a crowd of more than 200 while visiting campus after speaking at Colorado College on Friday. “As you imagine this period being narrated 10 years, 20 years, 50 years from now, you will be the historical actors who made it possible for a breakthrough in the struggle against Zionism, the struggle to free Palestine.”

The event was ridiculously romanticized by the media idealizing the boomer as a freedom fighter, but her history is a little more complicated.

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

The clinical definition of “phobia” is a psychiatric disorder related to “an irrational, excessive, and persistent fear of some particular thing or situation.”  Examples are Acrophobia: a fear of heights, Claustrophobia: fear of confined spaces, Octophobia: fear of the figure 8, Cyberphobia: fear of computers, Ablutophobia: fear of bathing, Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia: fear of long words, and Phobophobia: fear of phobias. (I’m not making this up.)

A second definition is a fear or hatred of someone or something, that may not be a psychosis. It’s used as a suffix, “phobe.”  A Francophobe is one who fears or hates France or its people.  (A Francophile loves France or the French.)

The key points here are “irrational,” “fear,” and “hatred.”  You can dislike or disapprove of someone or something but not irrationally or hatefully.  Although fear can also be rational and justified, as can hatred.  This column isn’t just about semantics (the meaning of language), it’s mostly about the shrewd and manipulative use of contrived phobias as a tool of political propaganda.

First, some history.  In 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in New York City, triggered the Stonewall Riot, a protest that fired up the modern gay rights movement.  Our culture has come a long way since then.  For the most part, but not universally, it accepts and respects gays, along with same-sex marriage.  But that’s not my issue here. I’m just analyzing political tactics.  Stonewall is where I mark the start of the political weaponizing of the words “phobia” and “phobe” by the gay rights movement,

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

When I introduce the First Law of Thermodynamics to my students I use the metaphor of money.  That’s because, at least to broke college students who haven’t had classes on high finance, it is easy to understand. Like energy being conserved, money has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.  This property lets you track it through a process to understand it better.

That’s why I find Colorado’s new Producer Responsibility Program (PRP) so confusing to try and follow.  I’m not alleging a conspiracy or bad behavior, it’s just that it doesn’t seem clear to me who is likely to pay and who is likely to benefit.  Advocates, of course, are pushing this as a low-impact way to get people to recycle.  Consumer goods companies, those that sell or make things that use lots of packing material (think pop cans and cardboard boxes) will simply pay a fee, recycling will happen, God will be in His heaven and so on.  Common sense should be telling you at this point to be skeptical, and trying to assess the reasonableness of this claim is where things are muddied.

In contrast with proposed laws like House Bill 24-1311, which would just take your money directly and give it to someone else, or things like the current crop of measures that merely up government spending so there’s less TABOR surplus to give refunds from, the PRP doesn’t take directly from taxpayers. 

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