Dear Reagan Girl,

Don’t get too excited about Konola posting public notes to Sal Pace on ColoradoPols. You mistook constructive criticism from one nit-picky individual for the attitude of an entire party.  Democrats are not going to abandon Sal Pace in his race against Scott Tipton. We know that Pace has the ability to up his game on the campaign trail; we’ve already noticed him making great progress. Democrats are supporting Pace, even this Democrat. Check out his fundraising results and compare them to your darling Tipton. It isn’t Pace that comes up short.

There is no way Democrats are going to vote for Scott Tipton, especially after he signed on to a bill that extends the Affordable Care Act exemption for Catholic Bishops to all employers and for any objection they may have.  We aren’t going to vote for him after he and his staff refused to understand that there is more to Planned Parenthood than abortions; that in fact, poor women depend on them for birth control and pap smears and mammograms. Even men visit Planned Parenthood for birth control advice and advice on avoiding sexually transmitted diseases.

Tipton’s lack of support for women’s health issues probably drove away quite a few Republican women in Grand Junction and most independent voters at the same time. You see, Grand Junction is an award winning regional medical center, so included in our voter base are lots of doctors and nurses and physical therapists and research scientists. They understand the need for women’s health care, and laugh at Tipton’s lack of understanding.

There is no way Democrats are going to vote for Scott Tipton, since we know he voted in favor of the Ryan plan. Democrats are not going to let Social Security and Medicare be gutted so that you can trickle up more money to the wealthiest people on the planet. In case you haven’t noticed, Mesa County has lots and lots of senior citizens, and they vote regularly. Mesa County doesn’t have a bunch of rich white men making money with other people’s money on Wall Street.

There is no way Democrats are going to vote for Scott Tipton, since we know he is in the pocket of Texans in the oil patch. Democrats don’t mind careful development of Colorado’s natural resources, but we want that development to be regulated. We like drinking Colorado wine that comes from wineries along the Colorado River, just downstream from the Piceance Basin. We like eating Colorado peaches grown in the soil along the banks of the Colorado River. We like being able to breathe air that isn’t polluted with gas flares in the oil patch, especially when winter inversions trap stinky air in our valley. We like being healthy. We enjoy meeting the tourists who come here to enjoy our wine, peaches, and natural beauty. Quite a few of us work in tourism.

If you want to keep quoting Konola in support of your candidate, you may want to check out other things she has written about your darling Scott Tipton. Did you know he touted a bill as creating jobs when all it did was allow banks to recognize losses over seven years? I’m an ex-banker, and I’ve never figured out how changing an accounting practice at a bank was going to create jobs. I mean, they aren’t going to have any more money to lend—it went out the door with the bad loan.

Homework

Bullshit Blog

Yesterday members of Western Colorado Congress of Mesa County delivered a message to Scott Tipton’s office in the form of a check stamped “insufficient Funds.” For some reason people think that oil shale is simply a bunch of oil waiting around waiting to be pumped into our gas tanks. Republicans, looking for a way to pay for a highway and bridge repair bill, and to put American workers back to work, proposed to mandate commercial leasing of oil shale in Colorado in order to pay for the repairs and workers.

The only problem is that despite billions of dollars of federal subsidies already going into experimental leases in Colorado, nobody has discovered a commercially feasible way to turn a really heavy rock into a liquid that is usable in automobiles.  The recipe that actually produces oil from oil shale requires heating the rock to 700 degrees for four years. It can be mined and then heated, or heated in place. Industry has proven that it can be done. It can’t be done in an economically feasible way. And for sure it isn’t going to pay for any jobs bill that puts Americans to work in this century.

Randy Udall said it best at a recent Grand Junction forum on oil shale—oil shale is the energy of the future, and will always be the energy of the future.  It isn’t ready to use today, and it won’t be ready in 10 years, and it won’t be ready in 100 years. We need to stop thinking of Colorado as having oil reserves larger than Saudi Arabia. We do, but they will never be produced in our lifetimes. Instead of putting our future into a rock that happens to burn, we should be looking to support alternative energy solutions. Solutions that might be ready in THIS century.

Homework

KJCT Story About Protest

The most important thing on the minds of Colorado’s GOP is repealing the Affordable Care Act. That was their first order of business yesterday, according to a report by Charles Ashby.  The vote passed along party lines, evidently for the purpose of getting Sal Pace on record as supporting Obama Care. (Please note that Obama said he didn’t mind having his name associated with caring.)

Then in a bizarre statement Pace went on to say, “ We look a little bit too much like Washington, D.C., and I’m reconsidering my future plans if this is what it’s going to be like.” So what does that mean? Pace hasn’t even been elected in one of the most watched races in the nation, and already he’s having second thoughts? Geez that gives me a lot of confidence.

Just to make this story even juicer, Laura Bradford was the only Republican who voted against the bill. She later said that it was a mistake.  We have a Representative who doesn’t know the difference between yes and no on a resolution? Oh, she said she was “distracted.” That makes me feel better! Not good.

But get this: the resolution went even further than calling for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They want to hold a constitutional convention in order to repeal it. The last constitutional convention was in 1787 and we need another one now because a bill passed that was designed to stop abuses by the health insurance industry, and make health care more affordable for all? Or do we need a constitutional convention just in case Sal Pace figures out whether he wants to run against Scott Tipton?

We’ve got the picture. GOP politicians don’t like the Affordable Care Act. The constitutionality of the bill is already making its way through the courts, with Colorado signed on to the side that is claiming it is unconstitutional. We can’t wait for a court ruling, instead we want to throw out the U.S. Constitution and write a new one?

Homework

Grand Junction Sentinel Story About GOP & Health Care

Denver Post Story About GOP & Health Care

Constitutional Convention

The mantra of the Republican Party, thanks to funding by organizations like ALEC and the Chamber of Commerce, is that any regulation on business is bad. They’ve been successful in framing this issue so that the low information voter thinks that regulations on business compromise individual freedoms. Fortunately this belief seems to be waning, as demonstrated by the ongoing and increasing protest on Wall Street.

I was recently involved in an online discussion about regulation in the finance industry. Those on the right were saying that there will be increased bank failures thanks to regulation by the FDIC and the Dodd Frank bill.  That claim is blatantly false. But people like Rep. Scott Tipton have swallowed the Kool-Aid, as demonstrated by his “Jobs” bill to allow banks to recognize losses over a seven-year period, instead of when discovered, thus hiding losses in equity.

Banking regulations, in commercial banks, are designed to protect the depositor’s money. If the bank is getting too leveraged, regulators issue a memorandum of understanding detailing the weaknesses they found in an examination, and requiring management to take corrective action. The regulator issues a report of findings and assigns a CAMELS rating.  C = Capital adequacy. A = Asset quality. M = Management.  E = Earnings. L = Liquidity. S = Sensitivity.

As a correspondent banker, I’ve read many examination reports from banking regulators. If bad loans are increasing, or banks are growing too fast one of the required corrective actions is to raise more capital. If a bank fails to raise that capital in a reasonable amount of time, the bank is shut down. Regulators try to sell the assets and liabilities of the failed bank to another bank, but when they can’t find a buyer the FDIC pays off depositors up to $250,000, but not other creditors. What some people forget is that FDIC gets its funds from premiums assessed on all insured banks. If losses go up, the premiums go up for all the remaining banks.

It seems odd to think of anyone buying the liabilities of a bank, but those liabilities are primarily customer deposits, which is cheap money compared to any other source of funding for bank operations. The bank can collect fees and service charges, and pay zero interest on that money.

Banks don’t fail because of regulations. Banks usually fail because of bad management. There is a story about bank failures linked in the Homework that tells the real story.  It describes how the FDIC required failing Colorado banks to raise more money, then closed them when they could not do so. The FDIC is not the problem; regulation is not the problem; bad management is the problem. (And Tipton’s Jobs plan that allows banks to hide losses in equity is a way for bad management to continue being bad managers, potentially increasing the risk of failure.)

Homework

Occupy Wall Street

Dodd Frank Bill

CAMELS ratings

FDIC Gets No Taxpayer Money

Recent Colorado Bank Failures

Some time ago Rep. Tipton introduced another “jobs” bill. A friend asked me what I thought of the bill, but I deferred comment until I had actually read the bill.  The text of the bill, HR 2842, is linked below. It is known as the “Bureau of Reclamation Small Conduit Hydropower Development and Rural Jobs Act of 2011’’.

Anti-Regulation Tipton waits all the way until the second paragraph to strike regulations. He exempts all hydropower projects designed to generate up to 1.5 megawatts of electricity on federal water conduits from The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. This Act was one of the first bills designed to protect the environment by requiring environmental impact studies on all projects funded with federal money.

There is some logic to exempting these projects from further NEPA analysis, since the land was disturbed with the construction of the original water conduit. However, there are environmental challenges with large projects, which include the destruction of a river ecosystem and its replacement with a reservoir. According to a Texas report, hydroelectric dams, “previously thought of as zero-emissions power sources, actually do emit greenhouse gasses, particularly methane from the decomposition of organic materials.”

As is typical with Tipton, the only mention of jobs in the bill is in the title. It is unclear how jobs will be created by this bill, since it does not contemplate any funding for hydroelectric projects. Any jobs created would be in rural areas by the simple fact that irrigation canals exist primarily for the purpose of irrigating crops in Rural America. The size of the contemplated plants is relatively small—and construction seems to primarily require the pouring of a lot of concrete. There is a companion bill introduced by Nebraskan Rep. Adrian Smith that removes regulations from non-federal water conduits.

Tipton’s bill was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources, and hearings were held on September 14 in the subcommittee on Water and Power. Blogger Coyote Gulch reports that H.R. 2842 is supported by the Family Farm Alliance, the National Water Resources Association, and the American Public Power Association.

My opinion: Increasing the generation of hydroelectric power is a lot friendlier to the environment than the development of oil shale in Western Colorado. It is clean energy, and should be pursued.

Homework

HR 2842

National Environmental Policy Act of 1969

Coyote Gulch Analysis of HR2842

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Hydropower

How Big is a 1.5 Megawatt Hydroelectric plant

My last Free Press Column expressed my opinion about the American Jobs Act, but also about the way that truth gets tortured during campaign season. In the most recent newsletter put out by Rep. Scott Tipton, he brags that he received a 100% rating on the Pro-Worker Score Card.

The score was kept by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I’ve never heard of this institute, have you? But given the name I would assume that it is just another Koch funded organization that looks out for global businesses. Their website does nothing to make me believe otherwise: Their tagline is “Free Markets and Limited Government.” Under “Issues” they have a button for “Labor” but there is nothing there supporting workers. There is, however, mention of their Labor “expert” presenting a position paper at an event hosted by Americans for Prosperity in New Jersey. It seems he ranks New Jersey next to last on his Big Labor vs. Taxpayers Index. The index measures the ease with which unions can organize in each state. If unions can’t represent workers, this organization thinks it is a good thing. (I rest my case.)

I know for a fact that labor unions, who actually do look out for workers, find Tipton totally unresponsive. They have been organizing events all over the state to point out the number of unemployed workers who have asked to speak to Tipton or his staff, but have been refused. Tipton is anti-union and anti-worker, and proud of it, despite gloating about being named “Pro-Worker” by an anti-worker organization.  Where are the truth-in-advertising police when you need them?

Homework

Tipton Brags About Being Pro-Worker

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Big Labor vs Taxpayer Index

Increased Unions Equals Increased Middle Class (Taxpayers)

Scott Tipton was in town for a Town Hall meeting yesterday. The room was packed, but it wasn’t all Republicans. I received E-mails from the Mesa County Democratic Party, MoveOn, and ColoradoWINS asking that people from the left attend so that there might be other voices in Tipton’s head when he’s voting in Washington. I saw lots of friends in the room.

Kudos to the organizers of the event. They tried to be fair about questions from the audience by giving everyone a theatre-style ticket as they arrived. The order of the questions, and the questioners were pulled from a hat. I gave my ticket to a ColoradoWINS member, because I wanted to know what questions the union had for Tipton—I thought I’d give unions an extra chance of being picked to ask a question. Obviously other people had the same idea because he had to hold the tickets like a hand of cards to see if he had a winning number. The odds were against him. He was not called to ask a question.

Karl Castleton, Co-Chair of the Mesa County Democrats did hold a winning ticket. His question was about the future of Social Security and Medicare for a guy like him—in his 40’s, paid into Social Security for 20 years, but wouldn’t get any of it under the Ryan plan and other “fix entitlement” schemes. I never really heard Tipton answer the question. Instead he did his level best to make it known that constituents of all persuasions were welcome to speak--Republicans had an opportunity to demonstrate that they embrace the Constitutional guarantee of free speech. He then moved into a rant about how the Republicans in the House keep passing bills, but the evil Democrats in the Senate refuse to rubber stamp them. Damn obstructionist Democrats in the Senate haven’t even passed a budget, why don’t the Senators put their budget out there.

That’s just one example of the spin presented as truth in this meeting with constituents. The budgeting process starts by the President presenting a budget to the House. President Obama did that. The House then decides if it is the will of the people to enact that budget. The House is controlled by a party whose Senate leader publicly said that his only goal in life is to make Obama a one term President. It isn’t very likely that anything the President wants is going to get to the Senate, let alone escape a McConnell organized filibuster. And with compromise out of the question, we are at another stalemate. Expect fireworks in both houses come September when the next fiscal year is only days away, and government is about to shut down. Again.

I’ve heard the Republican talking point about there not being a Senate budget so many times that even I’m tempted to believe it. But it is spin, and not fact. The process used to get a budget passed in both houses is messy, but there is a budget for this fiscal year that has been blessed by both houses, placed on Obama’s desk, and signed into law. The Senate has not gone 800 days without passing a budget bill. The only truth in that talking point is that no bill regarding a budget for 2012 has become law. That’s what this congress should be, and is working on.

One of the biggest lies told yesterday was spin about “Obamacare.” When a constituent asked if it would be repealed, Tipton replied that the House had repealed it, but the evil Democrats in the Senate refuse to rubber stamp the repeal and Obama promised to veto it. To Tipton’s credit he did make a point of saying it is a law of the land, which it is. It passed two houses and then got a presidential signature. That makes it the law of the land.

After that Tipton went on to promise he will protect Medicare and Social Security for seniors—which, considering his actual votes, makes Tipton either a liar or ignorant. No bill that has been carried by the Republicans in the House has done anything to protect Social Security and Medicare. In fact, the Ryan Bill destroys Medicare while it blows up the budget in future years. Seriously, that’s what the OMB says about the bill. I was gratified to hear Tipton explaining how the OMB is non-partisan and works to give facts to both sides of the political aisle. The Ryan bill destroys Medicare and blows up the budget in out years--the OMB says so. Tipton mistakes a blown up budget for a balanced one and the destruction of Medicare as saving it.

Tipton had a chart on a screen behind him during his talk, which depicted changes in spending and changes in revenue over time. The chart ended in 2077, which was never pointed out to the crowd. The chart showed spending increasing at the same level it has been increasing since Bush’s presidency began, which ignores the recently passed debt ceiling bill and its restrictions on future debt. The chart showed revenue as stagnant, which it will be only if Republicans continue blocking jobs bills until 2077. No responsible analyst would make the assumptions about spending and revenues that were presented in the chart Tipton so gladly displayed. It was a distortion, and designed to keep seniors wallowing in fear.

Ramping up the fear factor, Tipton breathlessly announced that Obama is about to start appointing members of the panel that will be making health decisions for all Americans. OMG, let’s just bring the defunct “death panel” back into the debate. I was sitting next to a nurse, who almost choked when she heard Tipton’s comment. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has no death panel contained within. Obama is not going to start appointing people to any death panel. Honest. The Republicans are just saying that to scare you.

While we were sitting in the room listening to the gullible being led down a spinning path, one of three rating agencies was busy downgrading the credit rating of the United States. In S&P’s announcement, they mentioned that the brinksmanship games played by House Republicans make the United States untrustworthy.

Since most news reporters have been stuck on the set of Ground Hog Day, not much attention has been given to the failure of the House and Senate to reauthorize the FAA. The Senate passed a bill, which the House refused to pass. The argument is over subsidies to rural airports and union worker’s rights.

Now this one should be interesting to Representative Tipton. No doubt he hates the rights of unions to organize and represent workers. No doubt he loves being able to fly into Durango, and Grand Junction, and other Western Slope communities in his district. Maybe he can vote for the proposal on Friday and against it on Monday, just like he did on the debt ceiling bill.

He’ll have a lot of time to think about how to proceed during the August recess announced yesterday by Cantor. Legislators are coming home for August. In the meanwhile, airlines are not collecting the taxes that support the FAA, and the nation will lose about $1.2 billion by the time Congress decides to go back to work. Who knows how much will be lost by the time Congress decides to actually work on this bill? I wonder if those losses will count toward the additional savings anticipated by November by the bill scheduled to be voted on in the Senate today.

Nah. I’m being too cynical. The extreme right wing of the right wing wouldn’t deliberately refuse to collect taxes on airline tickets, mostly used by businessmen and the wealthy. Would they?

FAA Shutdown

4,000 Employees Laid Off

Airport Construction Projects on Hold

Today I posted this note at Scott Tipton’s website, in response to Obama’s challenge last night to contact our representatives. I have little reason to believe that he will read it, or even think about it. I heard last night that within minutes of Obama’s call to action the websites of congress critters lit up. Do your part today…

Text of note to Tipton follows:

Representative Tipton, you do not represent me. There are lots of constituents in your district who do not happen to be Republicans. When will you take the time to understand what their issues are, and represent all of the people instead of the agenda of the Tea Party and Grover Norquist and ALEC? There is not one senior citizen in your district who would support the Ryan Plan, which you voted for--if they read it, as I have. It essentially does away with Medicare as it currently exists, replacing it with a coupon plan that places the cost on individual seniors. Sure it saves the government money, but it doesn't do a thing to cut costs. What it does is takes a program that is working well, and adds to it administrative costs and profits for drug and insurance companies. The net result will be that health care costs more for older Americans. It is a dumb plan.

Then there is the insistence of the 50 newly elected Republicans, of which you are one, that there be no revenue included in any fix to the long term debt problem. Yes, the level of debt is unsustainable over the long term. Yes, there needs to be a fix. But to do all of the fixing at the expense of people on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid without touching the tax breaks that Bush gave to millionaires and billionaires is dumb, and in your case is a guarantee of one term.

Elections are one thing, and governing are another. So far you have proven that you can win one election in a year where Republicans were favored. You have done nothing to show me that you deserve a second term in office. You have voted to gut Medicare, attacked women's rights, and you are unwilling to entertain any compromise on raising the debt ceiling, which is what governance is all about. Your actions are about to cause economic upheaval world wide. I'm scared to death to think of what you might cause in your second year in office, let alone a second term.

FYI, I'm posting this at my blog, and considering writing a scathing op-ed for my Free Press column to be published this Friday. Yes I'm a Democrat, and normally would not be voting for you. But you should know that I didn't work hard to get Salazar reelected, but I will leave no stone unturned in getting you replaced with someone with some common sense, including supporting a primary challenger for you, should one emerge.

Scott Tipton is a nice enough man, he just isn’t the most astute politician to ever hit Washington, D.C. He’s been in office for less than a year and already he’s made lots of enemies. I’m not talking about the kind of political enemy that grouses over votes, but has very little influence over other voters. I’m talking about the kind of political enemy that has deep enough pockets to make the local air-waves vibrate with anti-Tipton ads. And vibrate they will, in fact the radio ads have already started.

The most obvious mistake that Tipton made was believing that the Ryan Plan was designed to save Medicare while representing a congressional district that is as likely to vote for a Democrat as it is to vote for a Republican. The Tea Party mantra only plays well with uninformed voters on the far right who haven’t figured out that Medicare is a government program. (Remember all the old white men showing up at Tea Party rallies with signs yelling “Keep Government Out of Health Care?”) Now that it has sunk in that people like Tipton actually do want to do away with Medicare, some of the luster has worn off of the Ryan promise to destroy Medicare as we know it.

A less obvious mistake that Tipton made was believing his own press. He actually thinks that holding a transportation project in the Roaring Fork Valley hostage because he didn’t think it should include wifi was a good idea. He couldn’t see past the end of his own nose to realize that the people with the most at stake in this project were resorts, and that resorts have investors and clients with real money and real political clout.

Probably not even on the radar screen for Tipton was how women might react to his attack on Planned Parenthood. A nurse friend of mine went to talk to his staff about Planned Parenthood and was aghast at his staff’s lack of information about the importance of Planned Parenthood when it comes to cancer screenings and birth control for poor women, or when it comes to information about preventing sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies for both young women and young men. What Tipton probably does not realize is that Salazar’s tepid support of women’s issues meant that a lot of women didn’t write checks to Salazar in his last reelection bid. But those same women will dig deep to get rid of the anti-women attitude exhibited by both Tipton and his Grand Junction staff.

Homework

Subscription Required Sentinel Story About Tipton

Aspen Story About Tipton And the Bus

Colorado Political Blog About Tipton and the Bus

Colorado Blog About Tipton VS Women

Pitkin County Pissed B4 Tipton Got Off the Bus