The God Plate: News Miner 71
The God plate, sales taxes, West Nile, Casa Bonita, homelessness, sentencing, the KKK, crime, the Gazette, and more.
God Plate: Complete Colorado published my column about the new official Colorado “In God We Trust” license plate. Here are some excerpts: “Here is my question for Christians who supported Colorado’s new ‘In God We Trust’ license plate: Is your God so puny that he needs formal endorsement by the state of Colorado? . . . The obvious practical problem is that government cannot justly or constitutionally favor one religion over another. . . . So is Colorado also going to allow plates with messages such as [‘Allahu Akbar,’] ‘In Gods We Trust,’ ‘In Vishnu We Trust,’ ‘Follow the Buddha,’ ‘Satan Rules,’ ‘Darwin Was Right,’ and ‘In Reason We Trust’? If not, the state is flagrantly discriminating against people who hold unusual religious beliefs (for our region) or atheistic beliefs.” Read the entire piece.
Sales Taxes: Colorado’s sales-tax system has long been a mess because of how many tax zones there are. There’s been some effort to clean this up to some degree. Here’s the latest, from Ed Sealover: “Colorado is spending millions of dollars to boost its underutilized one-stop sales-tax remittance portal, undertaking changes that will make it easier for businesses to use the system and funding a public-awareness campaign to educate employers who haven’t yet signed up for it. . . . A prominent state senator suggested during an interim committee meeting Tuesday that he may run a bill to exempt employers from having to remit sales-tax revenues to cities that have yet to agree to sign onto the statewide portal.” Great idea!
West Nile: The Health Department reports (July 6), “State health officials are reminding Coloradans to take steps to protect themselves from West Nile virus after finding mosquitoes with the virus in Boulder, Delta, Weld, and Larimer counties.”
Casa Bonita: Mandy Connell has the latest from Casa Bonitia, which says (among other things): “As a result of our unique customer experience, we found during our soft openings that guests were leaving tips that were much lower than we expected, resulting in much lower total compensation for our staff. Accordingly, in an effort to ensure fair compensation for our staff, we increased the hourly wage for all of our service staff.” And eliminated tipping, a sensible move here.
Homelessness: Mike Rosen makes a good point: Many in that group are “temporarily down on their luck” or “willingly seek treatment or job training”; others are “plagued with drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness” and “refuse assistance for their problems and don’t want to be constrained by rules.” More than 9,000 people are homeless in the Denver Metro area as of a recent count.
America: Forty-eight children recently became citizens in Denver. America at its best.
Sentencing: Complete: “Michael Fields, President of Advance Colorado is currently pursuing a ballot initiative for 2024 that would mandate violent offenders serve a large percentage of their sentence before being released back into the public.” I’m not too excited about this, but maybe it would prompt the legislature to revisit sentencing guidelines. Remember that overpunishment is unjust, and there is a wide range of violent crime. What we really need to worry about are prosecutors using threats of very-long sentences to coerce plea bargains.
Dearfield: William Oster: In the 1920s the Dearfield colony near Greeley was home to 300 Black residents. Drought drove the people away.
Legislative Secrecy: Sara Wilson: “A conservative group is suing Colorado Democratic lawmakers over a process they say leadership improperly uses to determine legislative priorities. The process, known as quadratic voting, is a secret survey that Democratic representatives and senators fill out anonymously to rank certain bills that require funding in their chamber.” I don’t have a well-formed opinion about this. One advantage to anonymity is that legislators are more likely to express their sincere views.
KKK: Former Westword writer Alan Prendergast appeared on Craig Silverman’s show to discuss Prendergast’s new book on the KKK in Denver. “The past is a lot closer than you think it is,” says Prendergast. Great interview about important research.
American Birthright: If you want to know about all the distant funding ties associated with the conservative social studies standards adopted by Woodland Park, Logan Davis has the details.
Building Transparency: Mary Shinn: “The El Paso County District Court has ordered a business improvement district on Colorado Springs' north side to release all construction contracts, plans and payments related to public improvements, such as roads and water lines.” My take: Government and business ought not be in bed together in the first place.
Hickenlooper: Some leftists want to see him primaried.
Crime: Catie Cheshire: “In lower downtown, crime has actually fallen 19 percent year-to-date in 2023 compared to 2022, according to the DPD, despite what many people think.”
Gazette: This is a damning report by Jason Salzman: “[Megan Schrader’s] months-long investigation of Republican Senate candidate Robert Blaha had been, as she tells it, gutted by [Vince] Bzdek at the insistence of Dan Steever, who was the publisher of the Gazette, which is owned by Phil Anschutz, a billionaire GOP donor. Then . . . after her ‘heavily edited’ story was published, Schrader got a call from Bzdek, demanding—at the request of Steever—that she delete what she called a ‘hard-hitting tweet’ she wrote to promote her story.” Schrader now is the editorial editor at the Denver Post.
Gender in Sports: Speaking of Schrader, she follows some confusing language about women in sports by making the common-sense suggestion that children usually don’t need to be separated by sex or gender.