News Miner 75
Colorado news sources, prosecuting daycare workers, Polis on abortion, transparency, gun regs, immigration, and more.
Sources of Colorado News
Someone asked me recently about good ways to follow Colorado news—besides this Substack of course!
In my view, ProgressNow Colorado runs the best news aggregator, via email.
Complete Colorado (for which I write a column) also aggregates news daily on its web site. ProgressNow is hard left, while Complete is conservative-libertarian, so between those two you can get a pretty rich idea of what’s going on in Colorado politics.
For all things related to transparency, sign up for emails from the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.
I guess the Denver Post runs its own email alerts, but I find that company horrible to work with. I’m not sure about the Gazette or the regional papers.
CPR, the Colorado Sun, Axios Denver, and City Cast Denver send out good news digests. Colorado Newsline sends out updates on its own work, as does the Colorado Times Recorder (both left-leaning). You can also check with Westword, Denverite, and Chalkbeat Colorado.
The Prosecution of Chaffee County Day Care Workers
Hear’s the headline above Jennifer Brown’s story: “Chaffee County to put second day care worker on trial in case of 5-year-old pulling down classmates’ pants.”
Offhand that seems absurd. Government agents want to lock a woman in a cage because a five-year-old in her care pulled down another child’s pants?
There is more to it than that. From Brown’s article:
The following day, the same boy was in the bathroom with two other children. When a teacher opened the door, she saw that one child had her pants pulled down and that child said the boy was touching her butt. . . . Multiple teachers were aware that the 5-year-old boy was involved in [like] behavior going back to the fall. . . .
So this does seem like a serious lapse on the part of the people working at the facility. If I were a parent with a child in day care, I’d certainly be angry if another child pulled down my child’s pants and the situation was not immediately resolved. It seems like government needs to check into the child’s situation to see if the child is acting out due to abuse elsewhere.
On the other hand, subjecting women who worked at the facility to criminal penalties seems like overkill.
Polis Says Abortion Is Bad
Both Heidi Beedle of the left-leaning Colorado Times Recorder and Sherrie Peif of the conservative-libertarian Complete Colorado think it strange that Jared Polis said abortion is bad. Polis said:
You start with a common ground. On something like abortion choice, Democrats don’t believe that abortion is good. We believe it’s bad, and it should be minimized. How do you prevent unwanted pregnancies? What techniques do you use to make sure people are empowered with the information they need to not become pregnant unless they choose. How do they get good medical care so they don’t face difficult decisions midway through their pregnancy? There’s common ground there and we can have a constructive discussion about how families can be healthier, how people can be happier. It doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on every part of a difficult and challenging issue, but at least you can have a conversation at a better level.
In context, Polis clearly isn’t saying that it’s a bad thing that a woman who needs an abortion gets one. Rather, he’s saying that it’s bad if an abortion is needed. And that’s obviously correct. If a woman needs an abortion, something has gone wrong. The woman has become pregnant without wanting to, perhaps because birth control failed or she was raped. Or she wanted to become pregnant at one point but then her circumstances changed for the worse. Perhaps she contracted a disease or separated from her husband.
The main way to prevent unwanted pregnancies is to use good birth control well.
Polis did not make his point very well, but his point is a good one.
Quick Takes
Housing: “The office-to-apartment boom is bubbling in Denver.”
Black History: “The Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library is reopening.” Look who visited!
Transparency: CFOIC: “Complete Colorado lawsuit challenges HCPF’s [the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing’s] denial of records under deliberative process privilege in CORA [Colorado Open Records Act].” See also Sherrie Peif’s Complete story. At issue are hospital regulations and (in Peif’s words) “coordination between the department and progressive activists.”
Gun Regs: I agree with Mike Littwin that evaluating modern gun laws only according to the “Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” is stupid. However, the law prohibiting adults under age 21 from buying all guns very obviously violates the Colorado Bill of Rights, which states, “The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question.” At least as long as 18-year-olds are forced by government to register for the draft, they should otherwise enjoy their full rights as adults.
Green Regs: Wait a minute; won’t imposing onerous regulations specifically on large buildings encourage people to use smaller buildings that are probably environmentally worse?
Immigration Regs: Marc Sallinger: “Palisade peaches, Pueblo chiles, and Rocky Ford melons all have one thing in common: the farmers who grow them say there isn’t enough labor to get the work done. Now, an industry that relies heavily on seasonal workers is asking Congress to change the visa program that lets foreign workers come to America.”