A sampling of recent editorials from Colorado newspapers:
NATIONAL:
The Gazette, Oct. 20, on Freedom From Religion Foundation’s opposition to public school signs:
The Freedom From Religion Foundation thumbs its nose at our Constitution by opposing free speech and the free exercise of religion. This is the group that rented billboards in Colorado Springs a few years back that asked us to “imagine no religion”—a campaign that backfired when people tried to visualize a world devoid of most soup kitchens, homeless shelters, AIDS hospices and missionaries.
This silly, yet dangerous, organization—which thinks governments should silence sights and sounds that offend its members—tilts at every windmill it can find. It wants a church scrubbed from the skyline of an Ohio town’s logo. It fights to bring down historic memorials for veterans if they are on public land and have any nexus to religion.
Now, the foundation wants to protect us from high school cheerleaders who love Jesus. We’re not making this up.
Public school cheerleaders in the east Texas town of Kountze, Texas, sometimes hold up banners that quote scripture or say such things as: “Thanks be to God who gives us victory through Lord Jesus Christ.”
It’s a great banner for a sporting event. It speaks of victory as something greater than a mere game on the field.
Yes, this is an overtly Christian message and it may offend those who are not Christian and those who dislike Christians and/or Christianity. That’s OK, because no Americans are able to enjoy freedom without stumbling upon occasional free expressions that offend. We allow offensive religious expressions for the same reason we allow desecrations of religious symbols in government museums. We protect expression, not freedom from expression.
If a Muslim cheerleader at this school has been forbidden to make a banner thankful for Muhammad, we will support the foundation in a complaint.
But that’s not at play in this case. Instead, we have a group of atheists trying to impose their views on students. They are creating a playing field devoid of God, rather than defending a field in which all are free to express their beliefs. They would achieve more by encouraging atheist students to display banners that questions the existence of God.
The foundation’s opposition to free speech led Hardin County State District Judge Steve Thomas to rule in favor of the cheerleaders to allow “their constitutional and statutory rights at all football games and other sporting events.”
This is not Iraq or Afghanistan. Americans have a constitutional protection—in public and in private and on government space—to freely exercise and express beliefs.
“This is a great decision confirming that students do have a First Amendment right to express their religious beliefs in school,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told Reuters.
Members of the anti-free speech foundation will undoubtedly find one or more higher court judges to back them. It is up to freedom-loving atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims and others of all beliefs to defend our constitutional freedoms of religion and speech from those who wish to impose freedom from religion and speech.
Editorial:
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Aurora Sentinel, Oct. 22, on endorsing President Barack Obama:
How many times will Americans go through this?
No matter how hard we try, we cannot wish ourselves out of the economic mess we have created. After months of listening to presidential campaign hyperbole, spin and outright lies, Mitt Romney has made no credible or compelling argument to put him in the White House.
One thing that most Americans can agree on when it comes to presidential politics is that this White House election is about the U.S. economy, or what’s left of it.
Americans are often an impatient, short-sighted and sometimes recklessly forgetful lot. Romney’s growing popularity highlights that.
Just four years ago, this country was on the verge of economic ruin. The United States wasn’t just facing tough economic weather, we came horrifyingly close to having runs on banks, banking and monetary failure, catastrophic layoffs and a monetary tsunami that would have swept around the globe. That’s not hyperbole.
But because of a rare bipartisan moment, a lame-duck Congress, former President George W. Bush and then President Barack Obama were able to pull the country, and the very world, back from the edge of the biggest global calamity in human history.
The phrase, “too big to fail” became part of the global lexicon. It still is.
The country, fighting two consuming and wildly expensive wars in the Middle East, could have stepped back from the developing cataclysm, let massive banking concerns and other industries fail and see trillions of dollars belonging to millions of Americans evaporate. Instead, a majority in Congress and Obama spent hundreds of billions of dollars shoring up the car industry, the finance industry and others. Congress spent hundreds of billions of dollars on backing states that were on verge of failing financially. Money was doled out in huge stimulus projects to infuse cash back into the U.S. and regional American economies.
It was a giant risk that lawmakers agreed was imperative because the greater risk was the disaster assured if the government just stood back.
Now, four years later, the country is emerging with a different job base and many of the same problems. People are still scared. Consumers are still reluctant, and businesses are still struggling or dubious about finances.
Voters can’t make a good decision on the future without understanding the immediate past. That’s what’s led us to where we are today. Minimizing the recent past or rewriting it will lead to a bad decision. Voting for Romney would be a bad decision. It’s unclear just what he really wants to do if elected because many of his plans don’t reveal critical details. Those are details that will affect hundreds of millions of middle class Americans barely able to hang on financially right now.
But this much is crystal clear, the very foundation of what Romney and many Republicans are proposing is undoubtedly the exact same policy that pushed the U.S. economy to the brink of disaster four years ago. Former President Bush also believed that cutting taxes for wealthy Americans would spur job growth and ultimately create more money for the U.S. government to spend or pay off old debt.
The opposite happened. Expensive wars and declining revenue that put more cash in the hands of wealthy Americans only made for a country nearly crippled by debt and wealthy Americans becoming wealthier. The poor, and especially the middle class, suffered slowly for eight years, ending up with less money and fewer opportunities than when Clinton left office. Too much American cash now goes offshore in a global investment economy to benefit the American working class. Romney’s plan would only help feed the economies and banks from other places in the world, mostly China.
To return to a policy of “wishing” that failed policies might work better this time is a sure recipe for disaster here in Aurora, and across the country.
Four years ago, Obama riveted the nation by explaining to them that we cannot do things the same way we have for generations. A global economy fueled by rapid technological and environmental concerns was apathetic to America’s former place in the sun. If we don’t change, we will be left behind. And this is what being left behind looks like, Aurora.
Sadly, we are so impatient and so easily led astray by a media-infused world focusing on sound bites that we are unwilling to do the hard work, back the hard decisions and implement the hard changes to right our wayward nation. Following a misguided Romney vision, we hand over the reins of the world to China, India and the European Union.
We cannot go back, Aurora. The Internet, global warming, outsourced jobs and obsolete industries have changed the world, and we must change with it.
Obama’s plan continues to call for those changes that won’t be easy, nor will they be popular for some time. But unless we make fundamental changes in the economy, health care, in research, in public education, and in civil rights, we will become powerless over the future.
We cannot pull the rug from under the middle class that has built their entire lives upon having Social Security, Medicare, affordable colleges and a reasonable expectation to make a living wage. Romney’s plan undermines just that.
Whether the issue is gay rights, the fate of millions of illegal immigrants, job creation, foreign relations, empowerment of women or how best to make it so we can all afford to get to work and back, Obama has laid out a practical, detailed and sensible route to move us into a future where we call the shots.
Editorial:
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STATE:
The Denver Post, Oct. 23, on Colorado secretary of state allegedly using public funds for personal expenses:
Through numerous steps taken in his first two years on the job, Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler has ensured that his actions will be scrutinized.
In recent weeks, his office budget has been put under the microscope—and the results are concerning.
First, it was learned that a discretionary account intended to cover official state business was tapped to pay for a partisan junket to Florida. Reporting by The Denver Post also showed that, at the end of the fiscal year, Gessler reimbursed himself $1,400 for expenses for which he has no documentation.
The news on Gessler’s spending leaves you to wonder if he is oblivious or obstinate when it comes to the public’s money.
Keep in mind that he complained about the job’s roughly $70,000 per year salary almost immediately upon taking office. (That’s a point on which we’re in agreement, by the way.) Gessler’s conflict-in-waiting solution was to propose moonlighting at his old law firm—where he specialized in election law. After much public outcry, he relented.
A short time later, Gessler lowered fines owed the state by the Larimer County Republican Party by tens of thousands of dollars and then agreed to help them raise money to pay off the debt.
He may have shrugged off criticism about the moonlighting and the GOP shilling, but Gessler will have a hard time ignoring complaints that he misused taxpayers’ money.
Earlier this month, it was learned that he spent $1,452 from his office’s discretionary account to attend a Republican National Lawyers Association meeting and the Republican National Convention in Florida. Questioned as to the prudence of spending taxpayer money on partisan activity, the secretary implied that everybody does it and criticized the scrutiny as politically motivated.
But, as The Post’s Tim Hoover reported last week, Gessler is alone among state officials who’ve used public money to attend partisan events. And if a Democratic official had done it, we’d be critical of that officeholder as well.
Hoover also reported that, less than a year into the job, Gessler cashed out the $1,400 balance of the discretionary account in his office to reimburse himself for expenses. One rather large problem: He did not produce the receipts for those expenses.
The liberal group Colorado Ethics Watch has asked for ethics and criminal probes into Gessler’s spending. We doubt those requests will go anywhere, but his financial dealings continue a trend of tone-deafness that voters should find concerning. And while the sums are small, we think he should repay the taxpayers’ money.
Editorial:
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The Daily Sentinel, Oct. 22, on Colorado’s impact in the presidential election:
When Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan appeared at a rally in Grand Junction Monday night, it shouldn’t have surprised too many observers. After all, Colorado is one of the notorious swing states, and throughout much of the year we’ve been bombarded with political advertisements and frequent appearances from both major-party candidates.
But people may not be aware of the extent that Colorado is in play this year, and its importance in the hotly contested presidential election.
Ohio and Florida are probably Nos. 1 and 2 in each campaign’s swing-state arithmetic because both those states have considerably more than Colorado’s nine Electoral College votes. But those nine Centennial State votes remain critical to both Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama.
That’s especially true because several Electoral College projections place Romney and Obama in a near tie. The winner will be decided by who wins a handful of key states, including Colorado.
And Colorado remains very much a tossup. Although a Rasmussen Reports poll released Monday showed Romney with a 50-46 lead over Obama, the Real Clear Politics poll average Monday showed the two candidates in a dead heat in Colorado.
On top of that, mail-in ballots were sent to voters in Colorado last week, and early voting began in the state this week.
That’s why, in addition to Ryan’s visit to Grand Junction last night, he also made stops in Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Durango Monday. And it’s why he is scheduled to join Romney for a rally at Red Rocks amphitheater outside Denver tonight.
Similar campaign calculations are the reason Vice President Joe Biden was on the Front Range last week, and that Obama plans to hold a rally in Denver’s City Park Wednesday.
Some people locally have questioned why either campaign would devote a lot of resources to a place such as Mesa County. After all, this county, like much of the Western Slope, is undeniably conservative. Betting that Mesa County will give the majority of its votes to President Obama would be a fool’s wager.
But the question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how Colorado’s Electoral College votes are awarded. It doesn’t matter whether an individual county’s vote tally is for President Obama or Mitt Romney. What matters is the total vote throughout the state.
So a vote for Obama in Mesa County is just as important as a Denver vote for the president. The same for Romney.
All this points to the fact that Coloradans this year will play as crucial a role as ever before in determining the outcome of the presidential election. And it makes the usual “Get out and vote” admonishment more imperative than ever.
Editorial:
