THE VERDICT IS IN… BEND OVERÂ
Is there really anyone in Colorado with an IQ over 70 who didn’t see this political screw job coming?
More than a quarter of a million Colorado voters signed petitions to put two amendments to the state constitution on the November 2014 ballot. Those amendments would have given greater control to local governments over drilling and fracking and created 2,000-foot setbacks between oil and gas operations and people’s homes and schools. But on the very day that the signatures were to be turned over to the Secretary of State’s office, they were traded away by Rep. Jared Polis (who had funded the ballot initiatives) to oil and gas industry shill Governor John Hickenlooper. The trade amounted to an exchange of the right of Coloradans to vote on fracking for a Hickenlooper-appointed panel that would make suggestions on better ways to deal with oil and gas conflicts.
Well, Hickenlooper’s panel has now finished its important work and as a result, the same bureaucratic incompetents who don’t regulate the oil and gas industry worth a damn now will continue to not regulate the oil and gas industry in the future. Real surprise there.
In other words, the people of Colorado did not get one constructive thing out of the Polis trade that killed our right to vote on this critical issue.
On a positive note, “Coloradans Against Fracking,” a coalition of a number of local anti-fracking groups, announced that it will attempt to place a fracking ban on the 2016 ballot. Presumably, after this latest fiasco, this new organization now knows to stay as far away from Polis, Hickenlooper and all the other Democratic politicians in the state who are controlled by a few well-known billionaires and their consultants who made a deal to get in bed with the oil and gas industry years ago. It’s past time for real progressives to clean house.
THANKS FOR THE GREAT IDEAÂ
We have a problem in Colorado: too many people are getting murdered by guns. But don’t worry folks, our Senate Republicans are coming to the rescue. They put all their pointy heads together and came up with this fix: more concealed guns, only without the permits.
Not only was this party-line vote bought and paid for by the gun lobby, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Vicki Marble, got her facts completely wrong.
Marble, who apparently slept through math in school, told her Senate colleagues that guns aren’t the problem because they only killed 11,493 people in the U.S. while bats, knives, blunt objects, etc. killed 16,799. Interesting, but not true. The real stats say a total of 16,121 people were murdered and 11,208 of those killers used guns. Which means only 4,913 nongun murders were committed.
But facts have little to do with votes conducted to please campaign contributors and the party’s crazy wing.
Stay tuned for next week’s vote to require all citizens to drive eight-cylinder trucks to combat global warming.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
