Show Opening John Andrews with Mic Partner Krista Kafer and guest Brenda Elliott5:30 Sen. Mike Kopp 6:00Michael Poliakoff 6:30 Theresa Melaragno
Holder & Napolitano must go
Three jihad attacks on US soil in six months should cost Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano their jobs, says John Andrews in the May round of Head On TV debates. But Susan Barnes-Gelt dismisses the Times Square bomber as "an inept dissident" and condemns talk of jihad and sharia as "fear-mongering." John on the right, Susan on the left, also go at it this month over offshore drilling, the Kagan Supreme Court nomination, school reform, and the McInnis-Hickenlooper race for governor. Head On has been a daily feature on Colorado Public Television since 1997. Here are all five scripts for May: 1. NEW YORK CITY BOMB
Susan: Alert citizens and quick response of law enforcement combined to avoid tragedy in mid-town Manhattan when an inept dissident tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. The Pakistani-American claims ties to the Taliban. Stateless terrorism may be the greatest threat to America's security.
John: Susan, please. Your “stateless terrorism” is a meaningless euphemism. The threat to America is fundamentalist Islam. Its goal is a global superstate, erasing America. Obama won’t even mention Islam with its violent jihad and its theocratic sharia law. Fort Hood, Detroit, Times Square, all in six months. This president needs to wake up.
Susan: John, your Fox News talking points ignore the fact that US intelligence caught the wanna be Times Square bomber in 53 hours and no one was injured. Your so-called fundamentalist global superstate is fear-mongering and does nothing to mitigate the need for a watchful public and fully integrated intelligence community.
John: Counting on luck for the bombers to fail and then bragging about catching them is NO way to keep America safe from this fanatical enemy. Jihad seeks the destruction of our country, nothing less. This is a war situation, not a crime situation. Obama should fire Napolitano and Holder.
2. GOVERNOR’S RACE
John: It’s a long way from Athens to Denver, but the Greek financial collapse may determine the identity of Colorado’s next governor. People are starting to realize that taxing, spending, and borrowing all will push every state, including ours, over the edge. Republican Scott McInnis gets that. Democrat John Hickenlooper doesn’t. Advantage McInnis.
Susan: Scott McInnis gives flip-flops a bad name. Does he or doesn't he? Give to charity? Support crippling anti-tax initiatives - Prop 101 and Amendments 60 and 61 - slated for this November's ballot? Is he pro-choice - as he claimed in 1998 - or pro-personhood, as he claims today?
John: You’re really making it too complicated. The choice for governor is between a big-city mayor who’s soft on taxes, soft on spending, soft on debt, soft on unions, and a former congressman, former cop, who’s tough on all those things. Colorado can’t afford Hickenlooper. We need the solid steadiness of Scott McInnis.
Susan: Even the conservative-leaning Denver Post suggests McInnis ought to form a closer relationship with the truth! No one really knows what he stands for, what his vision for Colorado's future includes or what kind of executive he'd be. Coloradans don't want a hot-tempered flip-slopper. Hickenlooper's the better choice.
3. OIL SPILL
John: New research shows that mandating wind energy has worsened air pollution and raised electric rates. America needs all the oil and gas we can develop, onshore and offshore. The big spill off Louisiana is too bad, but this tough old planet has survived worse spills from tankers and rigs. The word is still – Drill, baby, drill.
Susan: You mean spill baby spill . . . thanks to Bush's policies - there's virtually no oversight over offshore permitting or safety. The Minerals Management Service is one of the most corrupt federal agencies. A balanced energy policy may include offshore drilling, but the rules of the game must change.
John: I hope Barack and Michelle invite you to their Christmas party, because you sure do pitch those White House talking points. President Obama and Secretary Salazar took office 15 months ago, not 15 minutes ago. Blaming Bush doesn’t work any more. The spill is Obama’s very own Katrina.
Susan: The spill left 11 workers dead and 17 injured. It runs from Louisiana to Florida and threatens to turn north - up the Atlantic seacoast. It's shut down fisheries, damaged habitats and killed tourism. Lax regulators, pitiful Congressional oversight and corporate greed are to blame. Let's hear it for cheap oil.
4. KAGAN TO SUPREME COURT?
John: Supreme Court should uphold the Constitution exactly as written, so as to limit government and safeguard liberty. The court has no business expanding government or inventing entitlements. President Obama doesn’t believe that. Neither does Justice Sotomayor, his first nominee. Neither does Elena Kagan, his latest nominee. She should not be confirmed.
Susan: Elections have consequences - perhaps none more long-lasting than judicial appointments. And as for expanding government - the court's conservatives have jeopardized individual rights, despite the Constitution. Wing nuts from both parties are angry about Kagan's appointment. She's a smart qualified moderate.
John: At 50, if confirmed, Prof. Kagan could be tilting the Constitution to the left for 35 years. We need an 18 year limit for Supreme Court justices, similar to Colorado’s 12 year limit that was on the ballot. In Colorado, at least we can vote liberal justices off the court.
Susan: Kagan is no ideologue. She was a superb dean of Harvard Law School - bringing together a fractious, high profile faculty to deliver a vastly improved academic experience for students. Her experience as a practitioner, political advisor and senior administrator equip her well for a high court dominated by life-time jurists.
5. TEACHER TENURE BILL
Susan: The best bill that came out of this year's legislative session is the educator effectiveness bill. This law will not single-handedly solve K-12 education challenges. But by connecting evaluations of teachers and principals to student success - the measure recognizes that educators are key to quality education – DUH!
John: Colorado parents, taxpayers, and voters should be outraged at the CEA teacher union exerting its muscle to keep bad teachers in charge of our kids and on our payroll. Teacher reform only passed because a few courageous Democrats stood with Republicans to fight for better schools. For once, the greedy public union lost.
Susan: The alternative public, teacher's union - American Federation of Teachers - endorsed the bill. It takes reasonable people on both sides to solve most problems. The educator effectiveness bill won't be a game changer without lots of additional reforms. There's plenty of blame to go around.
John: I agree, keep pushing Now that teacher tenure is tied to test scores, let’s expand charter schools and parental choice. Hats off to the Democrats who defied the union to support this bill, including Mike Johnston and Christine Scanlan in the legislature, Gov. Ritter, and even the Obama administration.
Obama forgets why Danny Pearl died
Much has been made of the irony of President Obama, refusing to take questions from the press while signing the "Press Freedom Act." The murder of Daniel Pearl has been sited as the reason for this new law which expands the State Department's annual human rights reports to include a description of press freedoms in each country. What appears to have been ignored is the attempt to redefine the pertinent facts in this case. Daniel Pearl was not killed because he was a journalist. He was killed because he was a Jew and an American. The moment before he was beheaded and decapitated, he wasn't asked what he did for a living. He was asked his religion.
One can only wonder why the current party in power, whose stock-in-trade is racial and ethnic politics, would go out of its way to ignore a true and most egregious hate crime.
What's Jay Say: Crises & Cleavers
The oil spill in the Gulf has created a mess. President Obama expressed outrage that no company is willing to take responsibility. In a litigious environment, that is not surprising. Rather than take leadership to discover what caused the problem and what can do to prevent another occurrence, Obama expressed anger at the oil companies. It is another crisis that Obama will not let go to waste, but use it for his ideological agenda. And meanwhile... ===========================
Those who favor strict gun laws should look to China, which strictly controls guns. As a result, guns are not used for mass murders. Instead, other means are used such as hacking bludgeoning and burning. Many of these attacks are made on defenseless school children. The most recent occurrence was a 48 year old man who used a meat cleaver to kill seven children and two adults before killing himself. If guns are banned, as some advocate, the killings would continue without the victims having any defense. Is that what we want in our country?
Wind mandate worsened pollution
(Denver Post, May 16) Wind velocity abated in Colorado last week when the legislature adjourned for 2010. Noxious air masses continue moving across the state, however, flattening better judgment. Hang onto your hat and your wallet.“Cleaner air and cheaper energy” was the slogan when voters mandated wind and other renewable sources for 10 percent of the state’s electric generation with Amendment 37 in 2004. Democratic legislators liked the idea so much that they upped the mandate to 20 percent in 2007 and boosted it this year to 30 percent. One small problem: neither half of the slogan is true.
You know what’s already happened to your rates from Xcel. Will costs level off with more reliance on renewables? Not according to the Energy Information Administration, which says in the coming decade wind will cost about 75 percent more than natural gas, 50 percent more than coal, and 25 percent more than nuclear. And solar will be twice the cost of wind.
But pollution is a different story, right? Surely a silently whirring wind turbine (never mind the bird fatalities) is better for air quality than a plant burning fossil fuels and belching carbon. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong.
During the years 2006-2009 here in metro Denver (designated a non-attainment area for special monitoring of our air pollution by the EPA), forcing wind into the electric-generation mix actually resulted in HIGHER emission levels of sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide, the principal components of ozone and smog – as well as higher emission levels of CO2, widely feared as a greenhouse gas. Oops.
Two obvious questions follow: How so? And says who? The “how” is a consequence of wind power’s intermittent reliability (online only about a third of the time), which requires coal-fired plants to cycle on and off more frequently and burn much dirtier as a result. The “who” is a consultancy called BENTEK [sic, all caps] Energy, based in Evergreen and nationally respected for such research as the wind study I’m citing.
“How Less Became More: Wind, Power, and Unintended Consequences in the Colorado Energy Market” is their report, commissioned by Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States and available at www.ipams.org. The methodology looks solid to this layman, though potential bias stemming from the study’s natural-gas sponsorship was fairly noted in the industry press after its April 19 release.
To cross-check the research, sponsors are seeking peer review from such institutions as MIT, Stanford, and the Colorado School of Mines. On the other hand, as a savvy oilman reminded me, “those guys are all on big federal grants for green research,” so their scientific impartiality can’t be taken for granted either. After East Anglia and Climategate, peer review isn’t what it was.
“How Less Became More” takes a sensible tone emphasizing tradeoffs instead of silver bullets or gotcha points. It recommends that electric utilities can avoid the wind-related emissions spikes by shifting generation from coal plants to natural gas as soon as possible. And this takes on national significance amid the current discussion of a federal mandate for renewables.
The trouble with mandates is that they beget more mandates, which beget more still. The meddling worsens and liberty weakens. So this year’s misbegotten generation conversion bill, HB 1365, sweetening the deal for Xcel at the expense of electric consumers for a speedy switch from coal to gas, was far from the clean green winner that some of my Republican friends believed. More mischief will follow.
Conservatives, so-called, who attempt to engineer kilowatts and particulates, forfeit credibility in criticizing liberals who attempt to engineer health care. Legislators trying to micromanage an industry will never get it right. Never. They’re delusional, like the Indiana House years ago when it decreed the value of Pi.
Markets yes, mandates no. Amendment 37 was backwards from the start.