A sampling of recent editorials from Colorado newspapers:
NATIONAL:
The Pueblo Chieftain, Sept. 7, on how federal health care legislation would try to reduce the deficit:
America is graying due to lower birthrates after the baby boomers came to be.
That means relatively fewer people will be paying taxes to support older Americans on Social Security and Medicare. And Medicare in particular is a ticking time bomb.
One portion of ObamaCare calls for “reducing the deficit” by cutting payments by 21 percent to doctors and hospitals under Medicare. But cutting money for Medicare just as more and more people are eligible would end up cutting available care for seniors just when they need it the most.
Under the legislation, the growth of those payments would be arbitrarily limited, so the cut would be bigger and bigger over time. This would cause havoc in health care for America’s seniors. Many medical practitioners are considering dropping Medicare patients because treating them would actually be costing more than the reimbursements.
Medicare already suffers an unfunded liability of $38 trillion, according to Medicare’s own government actuaries. What ObamaCare would do is loot $2.5 trillion from Medicare over the next 20 years to spend on other entitlements listed in the legislation.
In other words, Congress and President Obama aim to take money from seniors when they need medical care the most and “spread the wealth around,” in the president’s view of our economy.
Congressional leaders have bragged how the Congressional Budget Office scoring of ObamaCare would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion in the first 10 years. But the CBO scoring by law must accept the economic assumptions handed it by the politicians—hardly a good way to run things.
Only in Washington is massive spending incorrectly called the way to control costs. The American people have shown in poll after poll that they clearly understand that dichotomy, even as the ideologically driven congressional leadership refuses to listen to them.
Those leaders should remember that seniors are the most reliable group of Americans to vote. November is just a couple of months away.
Editorial:
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The Daily Record, Sept. 6, on reality of the current state of Iraq as U.S. troops pull out:
America’s combat mission in Iraq, President Obama told us last week, is over. In a televised speech from the Oval Office, the president announced that “we have met our responsibility” in Iraq, that we have moved nearly 100,000 U.S. troops out of the country and that all of our troops will leave by the end of next year.
The overall message was that we gave our troops a job, they completed it admirably, and now it’s time to bring them home.
The real situation in Iraq, however, looks different from the picture implied by Obama’s address. Political exigencies demand presidential optimism at such historic junctures. But Obama did make allusions to the “huge sacrifices” made by Iraqis, the sorry state of Iraq’s central government and our “commitment to Iraq’s future.” The only way for Americans to understand what’s happening in Iraq at this moment is to acknowledge these and other troubling realities.
About our commitment to Iraq’s future: We are keeping 50,000 troops in Iraq. Their mission is to “advise and assist,” but even Obama has said this will include counterterrorism operations. In other words, combat. And though the current plan calls for them to leave next year, that plan could change. As the Denver Post recently reported, 3,400 troops from Colorado’s own Fort Carson are still in Iraq and 800 more are preparing to deploy.
The president said “we’ve closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases,” but we haven’t closed or transferred all the bases, the biggest of which are mini-American cities complete with recreation centers, movie theaters and shopping malls. That’s not to mention the new $700 million U.S. embassy, which is bigger than the Vatican. Such facilities appear to some commentators, especially in Iraq, as a sign America intends to keep a permanent presence in Iraq, even if it’s couched in politically palatable terms.
We’re leaving Iraq in the hands of what Obama called a caretaker administration, which is a euphemism for Baghdad’s utter dysfunction. Authorities have difficulty providing the most basic services, such as electricity, and levels of violence, while down in recent years, remain horrific.
Let’s state the sacrifices in quantitative terms. More than 4,400 military personnel were killed in Iraq. Almost 32,000 were wounded. These figures will continue to climb. Roughly 100,000 Iraq civilians have been killed in the war.
Obama made a campaign promise to pull combat forces out of Iraq. He kept that promise. But doing so was the best of what were all bad options.
America now turns its military attention to Afghanistan. Obama said we will transition out of that war starting next August. As with Iraq, that does not imply Afghan authorities will be ready to secure and effectively govern their own country. They won’t be. And it easily could be more than a decade before they are.
Editorial:
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STATE:
The Denver Post, Sept. 7, on Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper and his education platform:
The education policy that gubernatorial hopeful John Hickenlooper recently released doesn’t introduce any radical new ideas. Still, we’re glad to see it.
The platform as a whole places the candidate in line with other Democrats who consider themselves education reformers.
We suspected as much, given Hickenlooper’s policy positions as mayor and his affiliations, including close ties with the likes of Michael Bennet, the U.S. senator and former superintendent of Denver Public Schools.
We are hopeful the next governor of Colorado—whoever that may be—will continue important education reform work that has bipartisan roots going back nearly two decades.
The movement began with the creation of the Colorado State Assessment Program, or CSAP, under Gov. Roy Romer, and the Charter Schools Act of 1993, which was pushed along through the legislature by then-state lawmaker Bill Owens, who went on to strengthen the state’s accountability system as governor.
The ideas supported by the Republican-controlled legislature and Democratic Gov. Romer in the 1990s revolved around education standards, accountability and choice.
Hickenlooper’s education platform embraces those ideals and supports measures that will further them.
In particular, we were taken with his emphasis on using the power of data to monitor academic progress and performance, an exercise that would include “fair prescriptions for poor performance” and “meaningful rewards for outstanding performance.”
Importantly, the document talks about the need for successful implementation of new legislation that addresses teacher effectiveness.
That would be Senate Bill 191, the controversial bill from this past legislative session that links teacher tenure decisions to student achievement.
The next governor must be committed to the creation of a robust evaluation system that is fairly constructed and holds teachers and principals accountable for the learning that occurs at their schools.
We were glad to see Hickenlooper commit to pursuing the reform, even as state and education officials are disappointed over losing out on a federal Race to the Top grant worth as much as $175 million, which would have helped pay for the work.
Also notable was Hickenlooper’s support for the current work at the state Department of Education to abolish the CSAP exam in favor of tests with results that can be used in real time to drive educational prescriptions.
That makes sense to us. The CSAP, while it was innovative in its time, has outlived its usefulness.
Results are delivered well after the end of the school year, and are not as helpful as they could be.
In some ways, these positions should not be surprising.
As mayor, Hickenlooper successfully pushed for a sales tax to support preschool for more Denver 4-year-olds. And he strongly supported Bennet, a steadfast education reformer, when Bennet was DPS superintendent.
Nevertheless, it’s good to see Hickenlooper’s positions in writing and to have a sense that if elected governor, he would support the important work of education reform.
Editorial:
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The Daily Sentinel, Sept. 7, on Republican Dan Maes opting to stay in the gubernatorial race:
Dan Maes is still the Republican candidate for governor of Colorado, much to the dismay of the GOP establishment, numerous rank-and-file Republicans, a significant number of tea-party types who were once Maes supporters, and voters throughout the state who want a competitive gubernatorial race.
We held out some hope, late last week, that as Maes heard from increasing numbers of Republican, tea partiers and other conservative leaders trying to persuade him to drop out of the race, the Evergreen businessman—who seems continuously caught up in scandals of his own making—would realize it would be best for the party that nominated him, and all Colorado, if he dropped out.
But as the 5 p.m. Sept. 3 deadline drew near, Maes announced he would stay in the race. In an e-mailed statement Sept. 3, Maes said that after listening to both those who wanted him to withdraw from the race and those who wanted him to stay, he decided, “I’m in it to win it.”
That will be a tall order, given the large advantage Democrat John Hickenlooper now has in the polls and in campaign money. Hickenlooper and Democratic leaders may be the only ones happy with Maes’ decision.
Additionally, Maes must overcome the fact that more and more conservatives say they will vote for American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo, the former Republican congressman who became a third-party candidate just before the GOP primary.
On Sept. 3, Tancredo declared that Maes should now be considered the third-party candidate, not Tancredo. Because of the latest scandal over Maes’ false claim about having once worked undercover for Kansas Bureau of Investigation and his loss of support as a result, Maes is “no longer viable,” Tancredo said.
He has a point. With people like stalwart conservative and Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland urging other Republicans to join her in switching their support from Maes to Tancredo, the man who forged a national reputation based on his fight against illegal immigration probably has the best shot in a gubernatorial race of any alternative-party candidate in Colorado’s history.
We understand Club 20’s rule against not including third-party candidates in their election-year debates unless that party has received 10 percent of the vote in the previous election. In most cases, those candidates attract such a small minority of voters that they can’t be considered a factor in the race.
But that isn’t the case in this year’s gubernatorial campaign. When Club 20 hosts candidate debates next Saturday at its annual autumn meeting, we hope the organization will consider offering Tancredo a spot at the debate table, so voters in this region can listen to his ideas and determine if they want to support him.
From a selfish perspective, perhaps its understandable Maes would stay in the governor’s race, despite his very slim chance for victory. As a writer on the Colorado Pols website said last week: “NEVER in his life will he ever be this close to winning a top-tier race again … If he ever tried to run again, he would be crushed from the beginning under the weight of his own faulty resume.”
But Maes’ decision to put his own interests above those of his party or the state as a whole doesn’t necessarily mean the campaign for governor is finally settled. True, there are now only 58 days until the Nov. 2 election. But a lot can occur in that time.
Fifty-eight days ago, Scott McInnis—as yet unsullied by a plagiarism scandal—was the leading Republican candidate for governor. He was solidly ahead of Maes in a Denver Post survey, and he polled well in a head-to-head against Hickenlooper. And 58 days ago, Tancredo was still a Republican, nominally supporting McInnis.
Who can say what the next two months will bring?
Editorial:
