On the first day of the new legislative session, there were seven bills introduced by the House GOP, of which five were touted as being part of the GOP’s jobs agenda.  They are all about regulations and are:

HB 12-1002: Creating Level Expectations for Application Review

HB 12- 1004: Colorado Timber Act

HB 12-1007: Require Regulatory Analysis of Proposed Rules Prior to Rulemaking Hearing

HB 12-1008: Establish Transparency in the Rulemaking Process through Stakeholder Involvement and the Publication of Regulatory Agendas

HB12-1009: Federal Funds Transparency Act

I haven’t read all of the bills, but the names alone tell a story. The only one that might possibly create private sector jobs in Colorado is the Colorado Timber Act, which is being sponsored in the Senate by our very own Steve King.

But even it is about regulation. The Colorado Timber Act would force cities and counties to change their building codes to allow wood products made from pine-beetle-killed trees to be used as framing in construction projects. I’m not an engineer. I don’t know if the structural integrity of the wood is damaged by virtue of the method of its death.  

 I do find it amusing that King’s idea of deregulation is to force cities to change their zoning codes. That should create quite a few jobs in the bookbinding and inspection form business. Given the fact that new construction is at an all time low, it may take a while for those jobs to get created.

Colorado’s legislative session begins on Wednesday; I’m in political junkie heaven.

Yes, I know that there is a GOP primary going on in New Hampshire, but there is little that I can say about that, since I have never understood how Republicans think. It is amusing to see Romney finally getting called on his claims of being a jobs creator, however. Corporate raiders don’t create jobs. Corporate raiders destroy jobs. Romney is a jobs destroyer, but that doesn’t keep corporate apologists from defending his record.

Meanwhile, back in Colorado, the legislative session hasn’t even begun and both sides are carping at each other. Let’s hope they can keep the fireworks from blowing the gold dome off of the capital building. Tensions are even higher than usual, with the GOP still smarting from losing the battle of the maps.

As usual, the GOP wants to reduce regulations and the DEMs want to create jobs in Colorado. The two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but both sides act as though they are. From the list of proposed bills, it seems that this legislature is all about recycling. Each side plans to introduce many of the bills that were killed by the other side in 2011. Who was it that said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result?

Charles Ashby reported in the Grand Junction Sentinel today that Bradford and King plan to introduce a bill that will change municipal regulations to allow pine beetle killed lumber to be used in framing of buildings. I don’t know enough about the structural integrity of lumber milled from trees that were killed by pine beetles to weigh in on the issue. If there is no degradation of structural integrity, this seems like a good idea. Maybe some of my engineering readers could post a comment and inform us all? I do find it amusing that the party of local control is trying to use the state to tell local governments what their building codes should look like, regardless of the answer to the integrity issue. Or is THAT the integrity issue?

I’m a little amused because the fireworks I predicted are booming in Republican circles all over Colorado.  They are calling the Colorado Supreme Court “vindictive” because some legislative seats are no longer safe seats for Republicans.  Vindictive seems to be the new synonym for competitive. Vindictive seems to be the new synonym for fair. Vindictive was first used to describe the Colorado Supreme Court by an organization who wants to get rid of all judges appointed by Democrats.

What this is really about is Republican fear that they won’t be able to hold the House after 2012 elections. They currently are in a majority by the slim margin of one seat. Of course Democrats are rubbing salt in the wounds of Republicans.  Mike Ferrandino, the new Minority Leader, said "The main goal for us is to pick up one seat," according to the Denver Post story linked below.

The most amusing part is that if the Republicans hadn’t challenged the first set of approved maps in court, they would be facing fewer “competitive” races. They’d have a lock on keeping the House. They shot themselves in the foot and now are screaming that the result isn’t what they wanted. It just tickles my funny bone!

Republicans are certainly disciplined when they get their talking points. Senator Steve King, my former opponent, used the word “vindictive” in his telephone interview for the 5:00 NBC news, which I watched. By the 10:00 news he had this to say: "It basically Denverizes Grand Junction. Grand Junction will have a representative for the city surrounded by a more conservative Mesa County," and "It's disappointing that the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado is partisan. The Democratic party had this intent right from the very start."

The part that sobers me right up is remembering that these guys who are yowling and snapping about vindictiveness are going to be vindictive in the 2012 legislative session. This is the legislative session where they are supposed to address the court’s challenge to make education funding constitutional.

Homework:

Clear the Bench Responsible for Vindictive

Denver Post Story About Reapportionment

Grand Junction Sentinel Story About Reapportionment

Steve King Morphs from Peacock to Parrot

The Headlines today in both the Sentinel and the Denver Post are all about Colorado’s Governor calling the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate into his office and telling them to stop messing around with the must pass regulatory review bill or he would call them immediately into a special session. Clearly that got the attention of the Republicans because they immediately backed off their position, removed a bill amendment that helped predatory lenders, and voted unanimously to approve the bill, thus ending this legislative session.

Now that the session is over until January of next year, we will be seeing more of our legislators at events here in the Grand Valley. When we do, we need to ask them to spend less time bickering and staking out no-win positions. We need to tell them to start focusing on jobs for Coloradans. We need to ask Steve King, Laura Bradford, and Ray Scott how much time they spend listening to ALEC instead of listening to us. (Back in February Steve King responded to an E-mail that I sent him that he would be guided by ALEC. Laura Bradford noted at a meeting I attended that she got legislative ideas at an ALEC conference in Washington. When Ray Scott was a candidate he once said he was surprised and disgusted to learn that there were people willing to write his legislation for him. He may or may not have been referring to ALEC.)

Speaking of jobs, Hickenlooper is going to a high tech company today to celebrate their jobs creation record. They help companies gather and report data to the SEC, which we should all be celebrating. By standardizing the reporting, the companies can spend less time on these regulations and yet investors will be able to read company reports knowing that information is reported uniformly across industries and companies.

Homework

GOP Backs Off--Session Ends

Predatory Lending

ALEC Writes Legislation for State Lawmakers

Hickenlooper Celebrates Rivet Software

We are three days away from the end of Colorado’s legislative session. Steve King is in panic mode because his Regulatory Recapture Bill hasn’t yet been passed. You may remember that I’ve written about HB 1223 repeatedly. If it doesn’t pass the Senate by midnight Wednesday, it is dead. At least until some bonehead once again decides to put the profits of the oil and gas industry ahead of the health and welfare of the citizens of the state.

Today, King “wrote” an op-ed for the Sentinel using the same tired story that regulations caused the downturn in the economy. That’s pure bullshit. Market conditions caused the slowdown—the price of natural gas went down, so investors slowed down their investing in exploration. Colorado’s oil and gas industry is alive and well, and doing business in the state. The recent trend is toward increased activity, not continued decreases.

The same issue of the Sentinel had a stark reminder of why regulation is so important. Three years ago  there were two spills of oil and gas chemicals that are finally going to have a hearing by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Committee.  May 16 – 18 the Committee will consider fining Berry Petroleum after they reported spilling over 100,000 gallons of drilling fluids into a tributary of Parachute Creek. Later the Committee will consider actions against Marathon Oil, which reported spilling 1.25 million gallons of fracking fluid in the same area.

Regulatory capture is responsible for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Every drilling plan contained the same language, including some that demonstrated the plans were simply a cut and paste job. They mentioned protecting aquatic animals that do not exist in the Gulf, and haven’t for thousands, if not millions, of years. The plans were approved because nobody at the agency responsible for regulations was reading them.

Colorado changed the rules that regulate the industry on state and private lands so that the environmental and farming interests would have a voice at the table. Steve King and Ray Scott want the commission to go back to the way it was, with industry calling all the shots. It is a lame-brained idea that is only supported by small companies and legislators who listen only to this one segment of the industry. The big boys have moved on. HB 1223 deserves a quick death in the Senate.

Homework:

Garden Gulch Hearings

Steve King Op Ed

Wikipedia Defines Regulatory Capture

September 2010 Report Finds Regulatory Capture in Oil and Gas Industry

I am embarrassed for you. Mesa County is still suffering through high unemployment, and yet the only legislative issues that you think are important are conspiracy theories driven by racists who don’t think a half-black man should be living in the White House? When you said, in an E-mail to me, that you were only following ALEC in your legislation, I had no idea that you weren’t thinking about anything on your own. Do you realize that this same stupid bill was just passed in Arizona, and Governor Brewer, who is a Republican and could hardly be called liberal, vetoed the bill? This is legislative nonsense. You are wasting the time of every person who touches this bill until the moment it is killed by adults in the Senate State Affairs Committee.

The bill proposes a constitutional amendment to the already over-amended Colorado constitution. What it would do is place on the ballot in the next election a requirement that all elected officials in the state submit proof of citizenship before taking an oath of office. Somewhat amusing is the relaxed standard for proof of citizenship: A passport, or a legible photo copy of a birth certificate, or a certificate of naturalization, or any document acceptable to U.S. authorities.

I say “relaxed standard” because the federal requirements are a certified copy of a birth certificate. “Certified” means that an official of the state places a seal on the document, saying that the information contained therein is accurate. A photo copy, legible or not, does not contain either the state seal or certification of accuracy.  For the record, Obama posted a certified copy of his birth certificate on line a long, long time ago.

Homework:

Colorado Birther Bill

Yesterday the redistricting hearing took four and one half hours, and ended up with no plan to submit to a vote and Democrats and Republicans angrily shaking their fingers at each other.

The Democrats claim that their maps represent competitive districts, where Republicans and Democrats are relatively equal demographics. The Republicans weren’t saying what the guiding principles in their maps were, which resulted in the accusation that GOP operatives, not the committee members, drafted the maps. The accusation would be amusing, if it were true, because the GOP is essentially arguing for status quo, which are maps that were drawn by a judge after the GOP tried to ram through a redistricting plan giving the GOP a majority of “safe seats” 10 years ago. The DEMs asked the courts for assistance in fighting the GOP actions, which are fondly known as the “midnight Gerrymander.”

What is really wrong with this whole process is that it turns political, and only two parties are at the table. Coloradans are pretty evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. Independents aren’t represented on the committee trying to define voting districts, nor are Libertarians, members of the Green Party, or any other organized political party. When you have two political enemies drawing the lines of the battle ground, an inability to agree on the map should be expected. What probably can’t be expected is a map that makes every politician everywhere actually work to get elected.

P.S. Campaign Finance reports were due from candidates on April 15. Since I’m no longer a candidate, my form was filed a long time ago. It was also a termination report. When I was a candidate, I reported on both my finances and my opponent’s finances in this space. If you want to compare the final reports, they can be found at the Secretary of State’s Office.  Another local blogger (linked below) reported on Steve King’s and Laura Bradford’s reports.

Homework

Denver Post Story About Redistricting

List (with links) to Political Parties in Colorado

Blog About Steve King Spending

Yesterday Colorado’s Senate approved a bill sponsored by Pat Steadman that would approve civil unions. Pat Steadman is an openly Gay legislator, and all around nice guy. What you may not remember is that he was the Senator who carried Steve King’s masturbation bill. Steve King voted against this bill, but three Republican senators, Jean White, Nancy Spence and Ellen Roberts, crossed the aisle to vote in favor of the bill even though it would have passed without any Republican votes.

The bill now goes to the House, where it faces a tougher audience. The Democrat carrying the bill in the House says that he has found Republican representatives who will vote for the bill, but the fear is that it will be killed in committee.

This bill is carefully crafted to give both heterosexual and homosexual partners rights if they are living together, but not married. Steadman argued that the person making health care decisions during health emergencies should be the person closest to the patient. Sometimes people living together have alienated family members, so it doesn’t make sense that those alienated family members should be making health care decisions. They may not have the best interests of the patient in mind.

I support Gay marriage, but Colorado passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. This bill will not undo that constitutional amendment. What it will do is make civil unions available to people who love each other, but for some reason choose to live lives together without benefit of marriage. In the case of homosexuals they make that choice because there is not another choice available in Colorado. In the case of heterosexuals, my guess is that they make that choice because of a fear of the legal agonies of divorce. As a woman who has been married and divorced twice, I would prefer a live-in lover to any marriage proposal. For the record, my current bedmate is a real dog.

Homework

Story About Civil Unions Bill

House Speaker's Tweet About the Bill

Text of Senate Bill 11-172

It has been a really busy week for anyone trying to stay on top of current events. The Middle East is still imploding. Democrats in Wisconsin actually demonstrated a backbone and stood up for unionized public workers by fleeing the state. And Republicans continued speaking with one voice everywhere but in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Last night Richard Engle, Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC news was shown reporting from the studios of CNBC in Bahrain. His comment was that usually the stories coming out of that nation were about business. Today Manama, the capital of Bahrain, looks more like a war zone, with families mourning their dead and tanks patrolling the streets after violent skirmishes in the city.

Bahrain is a tiny island country, but it is important to the US because it hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. The 5th Fleet is there as a show of force to Iran’s military leaders. (It is also only 26 miles from Saudi Arabia, and a four hour drive from the Saudi capital.) In the wake of the violence in Manama, the British government has been trying to decide if they should continue to export arms to Bahrain. Hillary Clinton asked the government to exercise some restraint.

Bahrain is a tiny country with a religious problem. It has a Sunni monarch and Shiite citizens. Expect some Glenn Beck Paranoia about the developments there. Saudi Princes might share some of Beck’s paranoia, as they are not likely to be happy if a fellow Sunni monarchy falls. Saudi’s Shiite minority happens to live in the oil producing areas of that country. Oh my!

Meanwhile, back in the US, Boehner has lost control of his House. Those dang upstart Freshmen Republicans just aren’t voting the way they are told, and yesterday voted down one of his personal pork perks. No problem with Colorado Republicans still staying in line, however. I have it on good authority that Senator Steve King listens only to the American Legislative Exchange Council when he’s looking at issues. If you haven’t heard about ALEC, you should research it. They write model legislation that promotes “conservative solutions.” It figures that King would be guided by them—he’s not known for his original thinking. I’m pretty sure that Laura Bradford and Ray Scott drink from the same well. Ask Laura about her trip to Washington DC to learn all about Red Cards.

There is a theory that ALEC is behind the events in Wisconsin. Clearly a lot of Republican governors are working to demolish unions. It has been a Republican mantra ever since Ronald Reagan took on the Air Traffic Controllers. But it looks as though unions are finally fighting back, especially in Wisconsin. What do Republicans have against unions? They write checks to Democrats. What I can’t figure out is what American workers have against unions.

Finally, I found a story in the American Thinker, a right leaning publication, about how our economic world is about to come crashing down. This represents the thinking of the right pretty well. Anything that helps business is good. Anything that helps workers is bad. You can find this stuff all over the internet, but this one had an amusing coincidence. I’d never heard of the author, so I goggled him. You won’t believe what I found. I’m not sure it is the same guy, but if it is…

The blind are leading the blind in the Republican Party.

Homework

Protesters in Bahrain

US Navy's 5th Fleet

Glenn Beck on Bahrain

Bloomberg Talks About Saudi Arabia and Suni Shiite Sects ßPretty good analysis.

All Is Not Well in Boehner's House

American Legislative Exchange Council

Fighting Public Sector Unions

The Tipping Point is Near

Jeff Thomas Allen Barred by SEC

Regulatory capture is when an agency, which is charged with protecting the interests of the citizens, becomes so close to the industry they are charged with regulating that they do the bidding of the industry instead of regulating it. That’s what the fight was all about in 2007 when the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) was revamped to include environmentalists. Now Ray Scott and Steve King have introduced a bill to allow industry to take back the commission.

Every state entity has a mission statement. The mission statement of the COGCC is to promote responsible oil and gas development in the state. Responsibility includes “the prevention and mitigation of adverse environmental impacts.” If we learned nothing else from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico it is that the industry will not protect the environment unless there are regulations forcing them to do so. Much of the BP spill was the result of regulatory capture by industry to the extent that they were writing their own inspection reports, with little or no review by the federal agency charged with oversight.

House Bill 11–1223 was introduced into the House by Ray Scott on February 9. Co‐sponsors in the House are Representatives Balmer, Baumgardner, Brown, Conti, Kerr J., and Ramirez. It is still in committee, with a hearing scheduled. The lone Senate sponsor is Steve King. HB 11–1223 reduces the size of the commission from nine to seven members; removes the executive director of the department of natural resources and the executive director of public health and environment; removes the requirement that one member should represent local government; requires that five members have substantial experience in the oil and gas industry; requires that any rancher serving on the commission be a royalty owner. My personal favorite language in the bill is “The general assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, and safety.” Right.

According to the Sentinel’s Charles Ashby, Senate President Brandon Shaffer is not interested in revisiting the makeup of the commission, and would rather focus on creating jobs for Coloradans. So, this bill could die in committee in the House and/or never come to a vote in the Senate. We should do more than hope for its demise. We should be expressing our concerns to our Representatives, our Senator, and the leaders of the relevant committees in Denver.

Homework

Text of Bill Sponsored by Scott & King

Definition of Regulatory Capture

COGCC Mission

Charles Ashby's Story in the Sentinel About the Bill