NoCoPolitics.com

An Opponent for Marostica?

Unknown 30-year old Democrat "Cross" Gambino is running against Don Marostica in Loveland. 

Searching for an adjective.... "quixotic".

UPDATE (and bumped): It turns out Mr. Gambino has a criminal record.

UPDATED AGAIN: Optimism defined: "Gambino: Conviction won't hurt campaign"

School Board Numbers

Of the 11,581 people who have voted in the Poudre School Board election,

5,311 are Republicans (46%)
3,756 are Democrats (32%)
2,471 are Unaffiliated (21%)

8% Higher Ed Increase

Governor Ritter is proposing an 8% increase in funding for higher education.

Gov. Bill Ritter wants to boost spending for state colleges and universities by $59.5 million next year, an 8 percent increase.       

The governor's proposal includes a $7.3 million increase for need-based financial aid, $1.7 million for work-study programs and $800,000 for pre-collegiate programs and scholarships.

The governor said his proposal helps "dig higher education out of the financial hole it fell into during the recession."       

University of Colorado President Hank Brown called the proposal "welcome news" but pointed out CU receives less state support than it did five years ago, even though it has 20 percent more students.

CU received $750 million from the state general fund in 2002, compared with $746.2 million this year.       

Higher education would need an additional $832 million to reach the average level of funding for peer schools around the country, according to a national study.

They don't say where the money is going to come from.

Coffman to Congress?

With Tom Tancredo leaving his seat in Congress, the Post is reporting that Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman will likely run to replace him.

Brits on the British Health Care System

(See Canadians on the Canadian System here.)

So what do the English think of the National Health Service?  Just from the past three days, here are a couple of stories from the British press.

Like the Canadians, they're fleeing the country looking for medical care - for routine procedures.

Record numbers of Britons are travelling abroad for medical treatment to escape the NHS - with 70,000 patients expected to fly out this year.

And by the end of the decade 200,000 "health tourists" will fly as far as Malaysa and South Africa for major surgery to avoid long waiting lists and the rising threat of superbugs, according to a new report.

The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration of often waiting months for operations are fuelling the increasing trend.

Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away.

They're not exactly fans of Michael Moore's rosy portrayal of the NHS in his movie "Sicko":

Moore painted a rose-tinted vision of spotless wards, impeccable treatment, happy patients who laugh away any suggestion of waiting in casualty, and a glamorous young GP who combines his devotion to his patients with a salary of £100,000, a house worth £1m and two cars. All this, and for free.

...

While there are good doctors and nurses and treatments in the NHS, there is so much that is inadequate or bad that it is dishonest to represent it as the envy of the world and a perfect blueprint for national healthcare. It isn’t.

GPs’ salaries – used by Moore as evidence that a state-run system does not necessarily mean low wages – is highly controversial; their huge pay rise has coincided with a loss of home visits, a serious problem in getting GP appointments and continuing very low pay for nurses and cleaners.

At least 20 NHS trusts have even worse problems with the hospital-acquired infection clostridium difficile, not least the trust in Kent where 90 people died of C diff in a scandal reported recently.

Many hospitals are in crisis. Money shortages, bad management, excesses of bureaucrats and deadly Whitehall micromanagement mean they have to skimp on what matters most.

Overfilling the beds is dangerous to patients, in hygiene and in recovery times, but it goes on widely. Millions are wasted on expensive agency nurses because NHS nurses are abandoning the profession in droves. Only days ago, the 2007 nurse of the year publicly resigned in despair at the health service. There is a dangerous shortage of midwives since so many have left, and giving birth on the NHS can be a shocking experience.

And British dentistry under the NHS?  Even the left-wing Guardian can't defend it.

 

Health Care Tax?

What sort of "health care reform" are the Democrats going to propose next year?

How much will it cost?

Here's the Rocky Mountain News

Is the Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform going to lay an egg in January, when by law it must offer its recommendations to the legislature?

It's too early to say, but prospects for the commission's success dimmed somewhat the other day when the price tag was announced for the panel's own proposal - we'll call it Plan Five because the commission will submit four others, too, written by outside groups.

Plan Five's cost: between $1.4 billion and $2.1 billion a year, according to the Virginia-based Lewin Group.

...

Such breadth of support simply isn't in the cards for Plan Five or any other proposal needing an annual infusion of more than $1 billion, and no such sum is available without a tax hike approved by voters.

Are the Democrats going to ask the taxpayers of Colorado to ante up more than $1 billion a year for their health care plan? 

The Origin of a Conspiracy

David Harsanyi's column in Post has an amusing - and scary - case study of how conspiracies get started.

It turns our the "amero" currency... is from Loveland:

Not long ago, Carr, who also casts funny and gimmicky coins, came up with a bright idea. He fashioned a collectible coin based on an imaginary currency called the "amero" - a mix of "America" and "dinero." It is something analogous to the European euro. Analogous but fake. Carr's denominations range from 20 to 1,000.

The fact that this currency doesn't, you know, actually exist hasn't stopped a crush of orders from coming in or paranoia from erupting.       

Scores of people who believe evil globalists, government officials and "multinational" corporate heads are working in implausible secrecy and cooperation to hand over our sovereignty to a shadowy "North American Union" were quick to jump on the amero as proof of a scheme afoot.

As Eco might say: Sometimes a shopping list is just a shopping list.

Education Standards

Mike Rosen eviscerates Mike Merrifield's opposition to legislation that would require high school students to take more math, science, English and foreign language.

Merrifield is of the belief that math and science are the kind of "left-brained" (his wording) disciplines that are already overemphasized in our schools. He thinks this will take the "joy out of learning." He also disparages academic "rigor." Instead, he wants more emphasis on the arts - "music, dance, theater, etc." He thinks three hours of the arts, three days a week would be about right. Merrifield, incidentally, is a former music teacher and choir director. He may be somewhat biased about this.

If you haven't already figured it out, he's also a "right-brained," touchy-feely kind of a guy, the kind whose cockeyed theories have dragged public education down to its current state, churning out kids who can't adequately read, write or calculate but who have high "self-esteem."

Read the whole thing.

We posted on Senator Steve Johnson's support of the legislation here.

Fort Collins Senator Bob Bacon voted against a similar bill last year.

Tancredo to Leave Congress

From the Rocky Mountain News today:

Even if he loses his long-shot bid for the White House, Rep. Tom Tancredo will be leaving the U.S. House of Representatives at the end of 2008.

Tancredo, 61 , waited until after the Colorado Rockies' last out of the World Series on Sunday night before announcing that he plans to retire from Congress at the end of this, his fifth term.

Faith and Politics

My Fort Collins Now column this week is a bit of a departure from the usual local scene.  Instead, I wrote about my experience this fall of helping to lead a seven-week "Faith and Politics" class at my church.

Using the Parable of the Good Samaritan as a jumping-off point, we discussed how our faith influences our sense of responsibility to help those in need... and how those beliefs shape our politics.  My conclusion:

Clearly, we had some lively disagreements. Yet our discussions were healthy and respectful because they came from the same starting point: We all agreed that we were called to help that traveler. I believe most people, regardless of their faith or politics, agree. Just how we go about providing that help, however, is where we disagree. We disagreed in our class. We disagree in our political discourse.

In introducing the example, I wrote this:

Most people, on both sides of the aisle, come to their political beliefs through their religious faith or core values. For the most part, those core values are quite similar. In our class we settled on the Parable about the Good Samaritan as our Christian starting point. Christianity is very explicit: We are called to help the poor traveler who has been beaten by robbers and left for dead in the road. We are called to help the poor and downtrodden. Most other religions and non-religious belief systems share this value.

"Most other religions..."

Then I read this story in the New York Times this week.

Death Reveals Harsh Side of a 'Model' in Japan

KITAKYUSHU, Japan — In a thin notebook discovered along with a man’s partly mummified corpse this summer was a detailed account of his last days, recording his hunger pangs, his drop in weight and, above all, his dream of eating a rice ball, a snack sold for about $1 in convenience stores across the country.

A few paragraphs down:

With no religious tradition of charity, Japan has few soup kitchens or other places for the indigent. Those that exist — run frequently by Christian missionaries from South Korea or Japan’s tiny Christian population — cater mostly to the homeless.