News Miner 65
Housing socialists, anti-gay Republicans, Woodland Park schools, Vigil on wealth, criminal justice, anti-trans conservatives, and more.
Colorado Springs’s Housing Socialists
Heidi Beedle has an amazing story about Colorado Springs’s anti-housing, anti-liberty policies. Here is part of what she wrote:
In 2021 the Colorado Springs City Council denied a rezoning request for 420 market rate — not subsidized or affordable housing units—at 2424 Garden of the Gods Road, after residents raised concerns about the impact the project would have on scenic views, bighorn sheep, and fire evacuation times. In March, a proposed 56-unit apartment project in Colorado Springs’ Westside was withdrawn after residents complained about the impact of density and traffic on the historic and cultural character of the neighborhood.
Wednesday, after hours of public comment from residents in North Colorado Springs who opposed a 247-unit housing development, the Colorado Springs Planning Commission heard an appeal to a proposed 50-unit apartment complex, the Launchpad Apartments, in Colorado Springs’ Westside that would help homeless youth attain permanent supportive housing.
My attitude is build baby build. Or, more precisely, give people the freedom to develop their properties according to their own judgment. Unfortunately, the housing socialists have strong political footing here.
Republican Are Still Anti-Gay
Here is one example of this, from Ernest Luning’s account of the Western Conservative Summit, sponsored by Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute:
Hunt recalled that he had been in the same venue during the 2015 summit when news broke that the U.S. Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage, casting a pall of “heaviness and depression” over the crowd. That’s when the late Bill Armstrong, a former U.S. senator and longtime president of CCU, “walked right to this podium, and he said, ‘Fellow patriots, now is the time to mount your horses and ride to the sound of gunfire,’” Hunt said.
What’s Going On in Woodland Park Schools?
As I continually say, it’s so weird how government-run schools become so political.
What’s going on in the Woodland Park School District depends on whom you ask. Here’s Maddie Dermon’s take for Townhall:
From embracing gender ideology amid drag show field trips to enshrining anti-white initiatives in collective bargaining agreements, Colorado teachers’ unions have repeatedly shown their penchant for left-wing politics at the expense of students and communities. . . . Parents from Colorado’s Woodland Park School District, however, have taken a stand against the Woodland Park Education Association (WPEA).
Also, the Independence Institute (for which I write a weekly column) has out a favorable report on a new charter school in that district.
And here is Logan Davis’s very-different take for the Colorado Times Recorder:
From the outside, the events unfolding over the past year and a half in Woodland Park – where a far-right school board won control in late 2021, and has since pursued an aggressive agenda of banning certain books, demonizing the local teachers’ union, cutting funding for mental health services, skirting open records and public meetings laws, approving a highly controversial charter school without due process, and firing staff and faculty for speaking out against them – seem like an extension of the right-wing’s long standing animosity to the public school system. On closer inspection, though, what’s happening in Woodland Park looks like something new: an evolution of that old fight, where the goal is no longer to shrink and dissolve the public schooling system, but to seize control of the system and use it to train up a new generation of conservative voters.
To me, this issue looks pretty simple on one level: Progressives want to use the public schools to instill their values in children, conservatives want to use them to instill their values.
Vigil on Wealth
Rep. Steph Vigil took the news story of the missing submarine as an opportunity, not to wish for the occupants’ safe recovery, but to lament wealth and the wealthy. Here is some of what she wrote:
[W]hat I keep coming back to us how profoundly disappointed the ultra-rich seem to be with their excesses. You must really be running out of new good things that money can buy if you’re shooting yourself into space, or to the bottom of the ocean, or even just haphazardly acquiring companies that you don't really have anything to contribute to.
It’s always tempting to pile onto billionaires, like it’s the antidote to all the misplaced praise and adoration wealthy people receive. But they’re just people. People who have come into such an excessive quantity of money it’s granted them an unhealthy level of power. . . .
No amount of wealth will ever satisfy the ultra-rich, but they just keep acquiring more, and then they’ll buy a $250k ticket to a watery grave in a world where that amount of money would be a life-saving windfall to the vast majority of other humans. What is it all for?
I replied (here with corrected links):
Rep. Vigil is among the “ultra-wealth” by global and historical standards and does all sorts of things that would be considered wild extravagances by most people who ever lived.
Quick Takes
Vetoes: Wow, Jared Polis vetoed ten whole bills. I haven’t looked at the bills in detail. I am glad he vetoed 1146, which would have blocked businesses from disallowing tips.
Police Killing: The details about this event are scant, but at first glass this looks very bad. 9News: “Kimberly Mitchell called 911 on July 24, 2022, about her son, Phillip Blankenship. A short time later, her other son, Matthew Mitchell, was shot and killed by police. ‘I called for help for a suicidal party and wound up with my younger son murdered,’ Kimberly Mitchell said.”
Police II: “Denver police officer being investigated for body slamming man.”
Prosecutions: If Lenore Skenazy’s details are correct, the criminal prosecution of a child care worker over a five-year-old touching a three-year-old was ridiculously unjust. A jury found the woman not guilty.
Prosecutions II: “You may have caught wind of the horrible case out of 18th Judicial District in Arapahoe County, in which a mom and dad are separately being charged with felonies for the [co-sleeping] death of their 2-day-old newborn,” writes Kayla Frawley.
Schools: “Two Black members of the Aurora Public Schools board of education said former Superintendent Rico Munn was ‘not Black enough’ and criticized him for not prioritizing the hiring of Black employees over other people of color, according to a report made by an external investigator,” the Sentinel reports.
Taxes: Leslie Herod is very excited about Colorado offering discriminatory taxes that largely favor wealthy California movie makers. The state should instead charge everyone the same tax rates and lower them across the board.
Republicans: More despicable behavior from the state GOP, reported by Ernest Luning: “The Colorado Republican Party has denounced two GOP state lawmakers and two local officials for signing a letter last month that objected to Montana Republicans’ decision to ban a Democratic lawmaker from that state’s House floor.”
Republicans II: Wayne Williams may be the classiest Republican left in Colorado.
Trans-Exclusionary: A Focus on the Family newsletter has claimed “there is no such thing as a ‘trans kid’” and “there is no such thing as ‘cis woman,’ ‘trans men,’ or ‘non-binary people’ in nature. No one should use those words as if they actually refer to something real. They do not.” Further, reports Steve Rabey, one Christian involved in the anti-trans movement condemned “expressive individualism” and denied that our own bodies are “tools for personal expression.”
Sweetwater: Colorado state wants to turn Sweetwater Lake and the surrounding area into a state park. Some residents there don’t want that. A big concern is road usage (couldn’t that be managed by improving the road?).
Twitter: “Boulder landlord succeeds in evicting Twitter over unpaid rent.”
Moralism: Michael Huemer warns us against “crappy moralism.”
Screens: Keith Schacht emphasizes the potential good from screen use by kids.