Raise or cut Colo. taxes?

Taxes in Colorado at this time of record unemployment should be reduced, not increased, says John Andrews in the March round of Head On TV debates. Maybe you'd prefer no taxes at all, replies Susan Barnes-Gelt satirically. John on the right, Susan on the left, also go at it this month over the fiscal mess in Washington and the mayor's race in Denver. But they're in rare agreement over Obama's Libyan intervention and Japan's triple tragedy. Head On has been a daily feature on Colorado Public Television since 1997. Here are all five scripts for March: 1. COLORADO FISCAL WARS

John: Liberal Democrats want Coloradans to pay more income taxes and sales taxes so politicians don’t have to control spending like the rest of us. They say it’s temporary. Fat chance. We should instead pass the competing proposal to cut taxes. That would grow the economy and create jobs as we face record unemployment.

Susan: Right. Let's eliminate taxes. Each of us can build our own roads. Home school our kids, K-12. Build our own university, public park, social service system, jail and hospital. We can change the state motto to "me for me, you for you" and have a tea party- bring your own bag, kettle, cup and burner.

John: Nice try, Joan Rivers, but you misfire with your satire. I pay my taxes cheerfully. They are the price of a civilized society. But the power to tax is also the power to destroy. In Colorado's case, the Democrats' tax increase would destroy even more jobs - and voters know that.

Susan: Colorado voters can decide whether or not they want to have great schools, higher ed, public safety, and transportation. Though the legislature can increase fees without the public’s approval, voters determine a tax increase. It may surprise you that Coloradans want to invest in themselves and the future.

2. WASHINGTON FISCAL WARS

John: With an exploding national debt and a deficit of 1.5 trillion dollars this year alone, America will be as broke as Greece unless we get some adult leadership now. Obama’s spending cut of 6 billion is pathetic. The House Republican cut of 60 billion is little better. I say 500 billion or bust.

Susan: I have an idea. Why don't all the Senators and congresspeople who want to cut taxes and abolish programs in order to stimulate the economy, quit their well-paid, richly benefitted public trough jobs and start a business and create jobs? $500 billion is nuts - unless we abolish the Pentagon!

John: Whoa, yesterday you wanted to zero out taxes, today you want zero out Congress. The sarcasm is heavy. We have too many zeroes already, Susan – too much reckless spending, on entitlements in particular. Tackle them as Rand Paul and Paul Ryan want to do, and America can still be saved.

Susan: Yes –and your party’s fiscal hawks are talking straight about social security, Medicare and Medicaid. Au contraire – they are quibbling over pennies when billions are at stake. The squeaky wheels get all the attention – at both ends of the spectrum. America needs a grown up in charge.

3. MAYORAL RACE

John: “Can’t buy me love,” sang the Beatles. Denver mayoral candidates Michael Hancock, James Mejia, and Carol Boigon hope it’s true, as front runner Chris Romer has nearly as much in the bank as the other three put together. Will the deep pockets win, or will the black-Latino-woman factor upset Romer?

Susan: Romer gets to the run off - money, name I D and Daddy. Boigon doesn't get there, despite the big bucks she and her spouse will put into her campaign. Linkhart has name ID, but no juice - a chronic elected with scant vision, leadership skills or backbone. Hancock and Mejia are vying for the second spot.

John: I was Roy Romer's opponent for governor in 1990. He waxed me. Now his son leads the race for mayor of Denver, where my son and daughters are building their lives and raising the next generation. Chris Romer's experience and leadership impress me. I wish I could vote for him.

Susan: Bet he’d welcome your endorsement. None of the top candidates has the experience balancing a complex budget, overseeing strategic investments or managing a large, diverse workforce. The race has no pulse. Denver voters must do their homework to make an informed choice.

4. DISASTER in JAPAN

Susan: An earthquake, a tsunami and the threat of massive nuclear meltdown. Japan is facing unfathomable disaster-8500 dead and 13,000 missing -so far. Radiation contamination threatens lives, food sources and long -term recovery. Though many will try to reap political advantage from this tragedy - it's too soon to reach definitive conclusions.

John: At our house this awful news was personal – my cousin’s family lives in Tokyo. Japan’s threefold tragedy and courageous response should touch all our hearts in a human way and engage our best thinking as citizens of a fragile industrialized society. But let’s avoid panicky reactions against nuclear power.

Susan: Recent events demonstrate there’s no fail-safe energy source: the Gulf oil spill, last year’s West Virginia coal mine disaster, the untold cost in lives and treasure spent to protect our mid-East petroleum dependence. Solar, natural gas, and geothermal combined with conservation must be in the mix.

John: There’s no fail-safe approach to life, period. Earth is a hospitable planet for mankind most of the time, and we are very blessed to be here, but it can turn brutally hospitable in a second. Japan’s ordeal is another reminder of worldwide human inter-dependence – economically, technologically, culturally, and yes, spiritually.

5. LIBYA

Susan: Qaddafi is a mad man and has been for 40 years. Does the US have vital interests in Libya? The despot has been guilty of human rights atrocities for 4 decades. Why are we there now? Obama promises no boots on the ground, but Qaddafi is a cornered animal - capable of anything. We cannot afford another war.

John: Madman vs. weak man. That’s the matchup between Qaddafi and Obama. Under this incompetent president, America has relinquished its role as leader of the free world. That’s what we cannot afford. US intervention in Libya, if any, should be purposeful, fierce, and decisive. So far it’s none of those.

Susan: U.S intervention in Libya shouldn’t be – period. We have no vital interest there – Our resources are spread too thin, with troops be deployed 5, 6 or 7 times. Qaddafi is a monster. But our abuse of American troops may be the real tragedy.

John: Making war is the ultimate act of political responsibility – or for this president, irresponsibility. Obama ignored the US Congress and took his lead from a UN committee, attacking Libya with no clear justification or plan. America these days uses force too often and too casually. Our Founders would be horrified.

Wrong Way Obama rolls on

President Obama has joined Mexico's side by suing Arizona for trying to protect its borders. He has joined unions in opposing the governor of Wisconsin, who is trying to protect the taxpayers. He has defied a majority of the people in this country who agree with God's determination of marriage between one man and one woman as his administration announced it no longer will defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court. Where is the defiance leading and when will it end?

Anti-Zionism abets anti-Semitism

By Pamela Zuker On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazis unleashed unimaginable violence on the Jews of Germany. The wave of atrocities became known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Adolf Hitler, in one of his frequent cynical attempts to cloak pagan barbarism with Christian respectability, declared that the horrors were inflicted in honor of the vehemently anti-Jewish Martin Luther’s birthday the next day.

(Editor: Anti-Israel divestiture efforts at the University of Colorado prompted this historical essay by our friend Pamela Zuker, a scholar and writer in Aspen, on the long and shameful history of Jew-hatred. As she notes, it is a legacy in which Christians have sometimes participated, though without any valid theological warrant -- in repudiation of which, the Christ-followers in my family and church solemnly vow, in much the same words as Zuker quotes at the end from our brave Jewish friends: “Never again.”)

Until Kristallnacht -- despite the enactment of laws prohibiting intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, a national boycott of Jewish stores, the exclusion of Jews from respected professions, the expulsion of Jewish students from German schools, the revocation of the German citizenship of all German Jews, and even the requirement that Jews wear yellow “Jude” stars on their clothing -- many Jews had refused to flee the country, believing that German anti-Semitism would abate.

In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, however, virtually every remaining Jew in Germany attempted to emigrate. Sadly, even after the Nazi atrocities were known to the world, few countries would provide Jews asylum. When asked how many Jews his country could accommodate, a high government official in Canada replied, “None is too many.”? The British, bent on thwarting Zionism (the desire to create a sovereign Jewish State in Israel), imposed a prohibition on Jewish emigration to the Land of Israel, and even refused safe passage to a ship that arrived in British-controlled “Palestine” bursting with Jewish Holocaust refugees. By escorting them back to Europe, the British ensured that when Jews needed their ancestral home the most, it would not be their safe haven.

That dismal chapter in Jewish history finally cemented in the minds of the world’s Jewry the urgent necessity to return to a world with a sovereign Jewish State.

In 136 C.E., Romans forcibly expelled the Jews from the Land of Israel (then called Israel, Judea and Samaria). This expulsion brought to an end more than one thousand years of Jewish reign (with several intermittent periods of external rule by conquest), compelling the global dispersion of the world’s Jews, and inaugurating eighteen centuries of cruel oppression and genocidal persecution. In the nearly two thousand years between Jewish expulsion from Israel and their return, Jews were variously subjected to forced conversions, confiscations of land, money, and personal property, expulsions from several countries, slavery, prohibitions on the practice of Judaism, frequent massacres, the burning of sacred books, the burning of Synagogues, and being burned alive. Several countries attempted to obliterate their Jews, resulting in the annihilation of a third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France, during the first thousand years of exile. The entire population of Jews in England was murdered and/or imprisoned in the 13th century, and in 1472, when all Jews were expelled from Spain, even the descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity were prohibited from attending university, joining religious orders, holding public office, or entering any of a long list of professions. One third of Poland’s Jews were slaughtered in the 1600s, and during the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, Jews there were massacred to complete elimination. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in Russian pogroms in the 19th and 20th centuries. The pogroms that accompanied the Revolution of 1917 alone orphaned more than 300,000 Jewish children.

The staggering Jewish genocide during what Jews have come to call the “Shoah” (calamity) of World War II, saw approximately six million Jews sadistically tortured and murdered at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators. At the war’s end, fully one-third of the world’s total Jewish population had been brutally butchered.

The history of Jews outside of Israel until the end of World War II is largely a history of oppression, genocide, and expulsion – punctuated by burnings at the stake, public torture, and insidious, malicious libel. Remarkably, Jewish “displaced persons” continuously assimilated into other cultures around the world while retaining their unique religion and identity as a people, a feat that Jews all across the globe are somehow still able to accomplish.

Eighteen hundred twelve years after Rome exiled the Jews from their homes in Eretz Yisroel (the land of Israel), and changed the names of the Jewish lands to Palaestinia (the land of the Philistines – so named in an attempt to sever Jews’ ties to their land), descendents of 2nd century Jewish refugees returned home as 20th century Jewish refugees.

In the first year of the existence of the State of Israel, roughly 500,000 homeless European Jews emigrated. Within ten years, the population of Israel had grown to two million. The majority of the Jewish immigrants, including 700,000 refugees from Arab countries, arrived with no possessions.

In contradistinction to neighboring states, Israel established free and fair elections, universal suffrage, a free press, and the right to a fair trial with an independent judiciary. Arab citizens of Israel, regardless of religious affiliation, are afforded the same rights and privileges as Jewish citizens, and all women who are citizens of Israel, regardless of religious affiliation, are afforded rights equal to those of men. In Israel, Jews created a country that allows both the freedom of religion and full access to Jerusalem’s Jewish, Christian and Muslim Holy sites that were denied Jews when Jerusalem was not under Jewish rule.

Despite this, in the rest of the world, particularly in difficult economic times, antisemitism rears its ugly head. Even – or perhaps more accurately, especially – in the world’s most respected international forum, the United Nations, antisemitism is rampant.

On November 10th, 1975, the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht, rather than issuing a statement in memory of the Jewish victims of Nazi savagery, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379 branding Zionism, the reestablishment of a Jewish State in Israel, “a form of racism.” Although renounced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., as “obscene,” it was through this resolution that Jew-hatred was sanitized, repackaged, and propagated globally as politically correct “anti-Zionism.” It took the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had voted in lockstep with Arab nations and other countries with anti-Jewish interests, for the U.N. to officially revoke the resolution, but the damage had been done and the precedent set.

As a particularly ludicrous example of the United Nations’ stance toward Israel, at the International Women’s Year Conference in 1975, a resolution denounced Zionism as an enemy of all women (despite women’s equal rights in Israel) but did not denounce sexism as an enemy of all women because the call for women’s rights was seen as an attack on the Arab-Muslim world.

Appallingly, on June 8, 2010, a Syrian representative at the United Nations perpetuated a modern version of the ancient blood libel to the United Nations Human Rights Council: “Let me quote a song that a group of children on a school bus in Israel sing merrily as they go to school,” he said, “and I quote, ‘With my teeth I will rip your flesh. With my mouth I will suck your blood.’” As shocking as this is, it should not be surprising given that these myths persist not only in Muslim countries, but even, according to anthropologists in a 2008 study, among Catholics and Orthodox Christians of all social classes in places as far from the Middle East as Southeastern Poland.

In November, 2010 the annual UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People featured speeches from Libyan and Syrian demagogues that referred to Israel as, “the cancerous settlement in all the Palestinian territories,” and included statements such as, “Zionism, in reality, is the worst form of racism,” “Israel shows and rears its ugly face,” and, “the word Israel has become synonymous with words such as aggression, killing, racism, terrorism.”

Words like “butchering,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “racism,” “brutality,” “crimes against humanity,” “torture,” “killing in cold blood” and “barbarism” were invoked not to describe the reasons for the creation of the state of Israel, but to condemn it. Opposition to “Judaization” – Jewish presence on what is perceived as Arab territory – was proclaimed and by default, legitimized.

For some reason, the depictions of a “cancerous” Jewish state with its “ugly, bloodthirsty” Jewish occupants – utterances that would be recognized as unambiguously anti-Semitic if spoken elsewhere – are not considered beyond the pale at the United Nations. By the end of 2010, half of the country-specific condemnatory resolutions and decisions ever adopted by the UN Human Rights Council targeted Israel.

Yet somehow, in the face of this, in the 1970s, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had the courage to sign a peace treaty with Israel. In advance of the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously remarked with sadness to Sadat, “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Today in Colorado, Palestinian advocate Michael Rabb and his group “CU Divest” hope to convince the Board of Regents at the University of Colorado to divest its portfolio of any investments linked to our staunchest ally in a troubled and increasingly less stable region. While we have every right to choose to disagree with Israel’s policies, it is essential that we protect, defend, and support its right to exist and to defend its inhabitants from virtually unceasing violent incursions.

One can only hope the University will recognize that weakening Israel will not facilitate peace in the Middle East. In fact, only a strong and globally acknowledged Jewish state of Israel with widespread support from the world’s democracies will allow others in the region to enjoy the human and civil rights taken for granted in the U.S., Israel, and Europe.

In the decades since the Holocaust, the haunting mantra, “Never Forget” serves to define the Jewish people’s role and responsibility to humanity as a constant reminder of the moral imperative to treat every human being – regardless of race or religion – justly and with decency, dignity and compassion. The existence of Israel is a necessity for the world’s Jews as a safeguard against a recurrence of the horrors of the last two thousand years and a protection of Jews’ human rights. But it is also a necessity for the human rights of those surrounding that tiny island of democracy. It is how the world treats Israel that will determine whether it is possible to move toward a world with universal human rights.

The citizens of Israel along with the citizens of other democracies across the globe share a fervent hope that Israel’s neighbors will one day know freedom, prosperity and true peace.

Until then, Israel is their last best hope.

What's Jay Say? No mo' DOMA

President Obama proclaimed that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which states that marriage is between one man and one woman, is unconstitutional. He has instructed the US Attorney General to not defend the lawsuit against DOMA. Didn't the president swear to uphold the laws of the land? DOMA was passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. What else will Obama proclaim? This should concern everyone--unless you like dictatorships, which are being deposed now in north Africa.

Self-government needs newspapers

(Denver Post, Feb. 27) So Facebook brought down the Egyptian regime. Until now, the only thing I knew it had brought down was my productivity – and that of many other Republicans old enough to know better, after we all stampeded there upon hearing how Democrats rode it to victory in 2008. Obama in, Mubarak out, Zuckerberg to megawealth, and “Social Network” to the Oscars. Such is the Facebook scorecard so far, and there is 90% of the human race yet to be tapped – er, “friended.” Well, call me a dinosaur, but I still believe the front line of self-government in a free society is citizens reading newspapers. Your pretty pixels on a shimmering screen are fine. But ink on pulp, served up at the breakfast table for Printosaurus Retrogradus to devour, digest, and act upon, remains the superior medium for effective political engagement in my book. If you are reading this on newsprint – and about half the total audience of the Denver Post now may not be – you probably agree. Our task is to bring along enough of our fellow Americans, especially the next generation, so that newspapers can survive economically and the country, with their help, can keep renewing itself politically.

He’s gone apocalyptic, some will say. He’s a curmudgeon trapped in the 1950s, a technophobic troglodyte. He’s mad because his email service, America Online (itself pathetically passe’), has merged with the Huffington Post – and ISP wasn’t supposed to stand for “incessant socialist propaganda.” His prejudice for the fish-wrapping, birdcage-lining news medium of yesterday over the wild and woolly Web of today is groundless.

Maybe; the 1950s charge isn’t actually that far off. But the prejudice none of us who love newspapers should apologize for is simply a matter of setting value on their more comprehensive, structured, and reasoned interpretation of current events – in contrast to the fragmentary, fleeting, and impressionistic patchwork one is likely to get from the unedited maelstrom of online sources.

I want, and we should all want, the neighbors who share with us the duties of governance in city, state, and nation to be thinkers equipped for deciding responsibly. Does democracy carry the inescapable risk that your carefully considered vote will be cancelled by that of some shallow-minded flake? Boy, does it – which is all the more reason to work for a civic ethos where informed consent is encouraged and impulsive irresponsibility is frowned on.

Editorial gatekeeping and quality control in our news and opinion media cannot be mandated (thank God for the First Amendment), but they must not be lost. Twitter mustn’t become the only game in town. Newspapers didn’t lose their dominant agenda-setting and chaff-filtering function as radio and TV arose in the last century, and we need to hope they don’t lose it as the Internet burgeons today, even though electronic delivery may far outpace print delivery.

Election 2010 would have gone better here, in my opinion, if the Rocky Mountain News had still been around to compete with the Denver Post. But heaven help us if the people’s momentous decisions on candidates and ballot issues had had to be made with only the help of dueling websites and water-cooler gossip, and no Denver Post at all.

What keeps vital democracy-facilitating businesses like this one afloat as the new technology sorts itself out, I don’t know. I do know government subsidies are not an option. My personal crusade is more on the demand side, building readership.

That’s why, at every opportunity in my work on a college campus, I brace these laid-back millennial students to arm themselves for citizenship by reading print journalism and lots of it – the local paper, national papers, newsmagazines, opinion journals. Nothing else feeds your head in quite the same healthy way, I tell them. Please help me spread that message.