Month: August 2024

(Colorado Peak Politics)

Democrat Veep contender Tim Walz will show just exactly how much Colorado voters mean to his ticket when he drops in for a couple of hours this week just to collect campaign checks then split.

Colorado Public Radio broke the devasting news to progressive devotees:

But Democratic supporters eager to see him will be disappointed: his campaign stop will not be open to the public.

It’s a closed-door reception for rich people only at an undisclosed location Wednesday and undisclosed time in Denver.

Surely the local media will be granted an audience to ask him hard-hitting questions, like his favorite ice cream flavor.

IN TIM WALZ’S AMERICA. We are suppressing this video of Governor Tim Walz using police and Minnesota National Guard troops to shoot residents with paint ball guns to stay inside during the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”#copolitics #9News #heynext #harriswalz2024 pic.twitter.com/dYd565274I

— 9MM NEWS (@News9mm) August 13, 2024

Or his military service.

IT GETS WORSE FOR WALZ:

Unearthed footage from 2004 shows then-Rep. Tim Walz telling a Gold Star family that he deployed to Afghanistan and that he and the troops under his command struggled with PTSD.

WOW.pic.twitter.com/wrqIWXBcxH

— Rob Smith (@robsmithonline) August 13, 2024

No word yet on how much Walz is charging to grant an audience with Colorado’s upper crust.

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

The legislative Pension Review Subcommittee on which I serve as a citizen expert (appointed by House Republican leadership) has finished its three statutory meetings for the year, and the news for Colorado’s Public Employee Retirement Association (PERA) is not great.  Not only is the annual actuarial Signal Light report less optimistic than last year, an independent audit of that report using a more rigorous and realistic methodology gives even more cause for concern.

Every few years, the state conducts an audit of the actuary’s report.  This usually involves making sure that the actuary has faithfully implemented its methodology, accurately applying its assumptions and correctly calculating the results.  It almost always results in a clean bill of health because it never questions the validity of the actuary’s approach.

A second pair of eyes

This year, the subcommittee decided to take a different approach, engaging the Swiss auditing firm PNYX to examine PERA’s health and compare its results to those of the current actuary, Segal.  The results were enlightening.

PNYX’s methods differed from Segal’s in several ways, but the most important is that it dynamically models both the liabilities over time and the returns.  It does so by statistically varying the underlying economic assumptions, such as inflation and economic growth, rather than keeping them constant as the actuary does.

Finally, it models returns more accurately during those statistical simulations.  Instead of a simple bell curve favored by most analysts for its simplicity,

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

A hard lesson was learned this week for someone who took her mistrust of voting machines to the extreme and got busted for tampering with them.

Tina Peters is learning that it doesn’t matter what one’s intentions are when they break the law.

The 68-year-old former election official was convicted by a jury Monday on seven out of 10 charges against her.

Now she faces a sentence that could put her in prison for the rest of her life.

From the Colorado Sun:

She faces up to six years in prison on each of her top three felony convictions, and up to 18 months for conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. Each of her three misdemeanor convictions carries up to 6 months in jail.

Her life now depends on the mercy of a judge to sentence her to probation, during which we would expect to see lengthy appeals.

Peak Politics has refused to use the pejorative term “election denier” to describe Peters that’s used by the bias denying establishment media to condemn her and other conservatives who don’t trust Democrat campaign and election tactics beyond the ballot box.

After all, the Democrat Party does have a history of manipulating elections that goes back to the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York, to the outright cheating and vote buying by the Chicago machine of old and long dead politicians in Louisiana and other southern states.

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

You may not have considered a couple of strange things about the failed anti-trans ballot measure pertaining to school athletics. It would not have stopped women (girls) with XY chromosomes born with a rare Difference of Sexual Development (DSD) condition from competing in women’s sports, something supporters of the measure seem to care about. And it would not have prevented school athletics programs from tweaking competition categories to allow transgender girls to compete against other girls—which in my book is totally fine.

But neither the supporters nor the opponents of the measure seem eager to admit those basic facts, because apparently they would rather wage the gender culture wars than actually craft sensible athletics policies.

Let’s begin with a dose of reality. Once biologically typical boys hit puberty, their bodies flood with testosterone, which facilitates muscle growth and other changes. The bodies of men and women vary dramatically in this respect, with men typically having 300 to 1,000 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood and women having 15 to 70 nanograms (says Mount Sinai). Other things equal (please do note the qualifier), in any contest involving strength, men have the advantage over women.

Most people fall inside those norms. There are some exceptions. Women with XY chromosomes and a DSD can be born with a vagina and, with treatments, even grow up to get pregnant and have a child (as I’ve reviewed). One paper I pulled up suggests that women with XY chromosomes can have testosterone levels typical of men.

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

Colorado Democrats are accusing the ICE detention center in Aurora of denying medical care to immigrants and mistreating LGBTQ detainees on the Biden/Harris administration’s watch.

The complaint from U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper, Mike Bennet and U.S. Rep. Jason Crow was issued recently in a letter to several officials in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The conditions at Aurora’s ICE Facility – including a lack of timely and comprehensive medical care – are unacceptable. We are calling on DHS to swiftly resolve these issues for the safety and dignity of those detained there. https://t.co/2XXCpxIDiv

— Michael Bennet (@SenatorBennet) August 12, 2024

Detainees are apparently complaining to Crow’s office that their complaints are not being handled properly.

There are accusations of prolonged isolation, concerns about the treatment of LGBTQIA+ detainees, timely access to medical specialists, and “adherence to notification, hold, and transfer policies related to individuals who are subject to medical or psychiatric alerts or a medical hold.”

This comes on the heels of a death at the facility, also under the watch of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

If not for their open border policies and failed asylum racket, Melvin Ariel Calero-Mendoza might still be alive.

Crow has insisted on government investigations into the Nicaraguan asylum seeker’s death in 2022. His asylum was denied but it’s unclear why he was still being held in detention. The death was never investigated by the inspector general,

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

Gov. Polis shared blatantly fake AI photos on social media Saturday that were intended to misinform about the popularity of a political candidate, then made fun of his constituents who fell for it.

This is the same governor who signed a law in June creating what’s been dubbed by critics as the Ministry of Truth and state censorship operated by the state attorney general, to prevent the spread of factually inaccurate information and instead encourage respectful discussions.

Polis is also the same governor who bragged about attending a symposium on how to “Disagree Better” at the Aspen Ideas Festival, in order to promote civil discourse and find “common ground while respecting different points of view.”

“It’s OK to disagree. There shouldn’t be a stigma associated with it,” Polis said. “But to do so in a way that doesn’t denigrate the motivation of those who happen to be your political opponents, and rather just focus on the issues at hand, is what we need to do more of in America today.”

Here’s how Polis utterly failed to practice what he preaches less than two months later:

Pls retweet the MASSIVE crowds of REAL AMERICAN PEOPLE supporting Harris/Walz to distract her opponent pic.twitter.com/OK3iUt305B

— Jared Polis (@jaredpolis) August 10, 2024

How dare @jrb528 attack the hands of C̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶ real, actual, patriotic Harris supporters. Some people have hands that are shaped differently and it is not up to BIG GOVERNMENT to tell people what their hands should be shaped like pic.twitter.com/ZiKgiqTaQ1

— Jared Polis (@jaredpolis) August 10,

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

A sure sign on the Western Slope that a presidential race is looming — The Biden/Harris administration just remembered the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) “western headquarters” isn’t staffed as promised to signify a strong presence.

Only nine people were left working in the building after the Democrat administration undid all the work initiated by the Trump administration and former Interior Department Secretary Dave Bernhardt.

Their mission was to revitalize the Beltway bureaucratic culture with folks who live and work around the public lands managed by the feds, but city people freaked out and refused to work in real rural America.

So it was with great pride and puffed up chests that the agency has announced another 12 employees have been added to the agency at the western headquarters.

The agency promised 56 workers back in 2022, but that was before Democrats realized they were at real risk of losing the White House and so it never happened.

Now, they are promising to get the workforce up to at least 30 sometime after the November election.

Agency press secretary Brian Hires said in an email to the Daily Sentinel:

“The BLM remains committed to maintaining a strong presence in our Western Headquarters office in Grand Junction. We are moving forward to staff the office space to full capacity of 56 employees and base leadership positions in this office,” he said in an email.

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

DENVER–Governor Jared Polis has consistently said he wants to lower the Colorado income tax, even claiming that legislation passed earlier this year would deliver on that promise.  But new research shows that billions of dollars in special interest tax breaks also passed this year in all likelihood means broad-based income tax relief is off the table for the foreseeable future.

Earlier this year, Governor Polis signed Senate Bill 24-228, temporarily lowering the state income tax rate, on a sliding scale, as a refund mechanism when surplus revenue under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) is more than $300 million in a given fiscal year, with the maximum rate reduction (from 4.40% to 4.25%) kicking in at a $1.5 billion surplus.

TABOR is a constitutional amendment that requires, among other things, state revenues collected in excess of of a formula of population growth plus inflation be refunded back to taxpayers, unless voters consent to forgo those refunds at the ballot box.  An income tax rate reduction is but one potential refund mechanism available to the state.

According to a newly released issue brief from the Independence Institute*, a free market think tank in Denver, the more than $10 billion (cumulative over a decade) worth of what are called “tax expenditures” passed in 2024 will eat up that TABOR surplus, effectively halting future income tax cuts.

“The TABOR surplus revenue diverted to fund new 2024 tax credits will likely nullify potential future broad-based income tax cuts proposed by SB24-228 in subsequent years,” according to the brief,

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

Colorado is now ranked as one of the worst place to retire, coming in at number 44 out of 50 states, according to a study by Bankrate.

Delaware, where President Biden spends most of his time instead of the White House in Washington, D.C., is the number one state for retirees.

The top five best states are:

1. Delaware
2. West Virginia
3. Georgia
4. South Carolina
5. Missouri

The worst states are:

50. Alaska
49. New York
48. Washington
47. California
46.North Dakota
45. Massachusetts
44. Colorado
43. Maryland
42. Texas
41. Minnesota

The rankings were based primarily on affordability, which accounted for 40% of the score.

Overall well being took up 25% and included factors such as access to food and healthcare, and the number of adults over 62 per 100,000 residents.

Colorado’s saving grace is that crime only accounted for 5% of the ranking score.

Weather made up the remaining 10%.

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