NoCoPolitics.com

Test Post

1981: The Warning Signs Came Early

Via Althouse:

There are about a half-dozen hilarious/scarily-prescient quotes in here.  Watch the whole thing.

Six Men Enter, One Man Leave

The fight for the RNC chairmanship is so very on.  Voting begins Friday night.

Here's a pretty good summary of maneuverings to date.  When a party controls the White House, the President effectively hand-selects the chairman.  But this year, with no heir apparent, we have a wide-open race with six candidates. 

There are only 168 people who actually get to vote for RNC chairman, so sometimes the RNC elects someone who the general public has never heard of. 

But lest anyone think that this is a closed process, remember:

1. Go to caucus. 
2. Get elected precinct committeeperson and you get to vote for the executive board of the county party (which, incidentally, happens on February 7 in Larimer County).
3. If you're on the executive board of the county party, you get to vote on the Chairman and National Committeepersons of the state party.
4. If you're the Chairman or National Committeeperson of the state party, you get one of the 168 votes for RNC chairman.

So you, too, can have a say in who leads the RNC.

Colorado gets three votes:

• Chairman Dick Wadhams (who has endorsed Saul Anuzis)
• National Committeeman Mark Hillman (who has endorsed Ken Blackwell)
• National Committeewoman Lilly Nunez

National party chairmen essentially serve three roles:

• They raise money.
• They serve as spokesperson for the party.
• They hire and manage the RNC staff.

That's not always the same skill set.  Someone might be a telegenic and charismatic spokesman but lack the discipline to get on the phone and dial-for-dollars.  Sometimes the best organizers and administrators are completely inept at making the case to the public.

This is going to be interesting to watch.

Draft Diggs Brown for Congress

The Draft Diggs Brown for Congress site is now up at www.draftdiggs.com.

The Coloradoan covered the story today.

The Hill picked up the story as well and covered it on their blog.

First NoCoPolitics.com Endorsement for 2010

Scott Gessler for Secretary of State.

The Short Life of Municipal Wi-Fi

This didn't take long.  Remember the push for municipal wi-fi?

The innovation was hailed as "world changing" by public interest advocates who trumpeted "WiFi for the people." Venture capitalists dusted off their dot.com PowerPoint slides, showing the enormous opportunity. "Ultimately, it all boils down to disruptive economics," touted (PDF) one VC at a 2005 trade show. "The history of technology shows that Cheap and Good Enough always wins over expensive and purpose-built."...

New York City, New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Washington D.C., Boston all moved to seed wireless clouds. Earthlink, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Earthlink and a gaggle of corporate boosters joined the crusade. By Summer 2006, a law review article pronounced the issue decided: "Citywide WiFi as a public service is no longer a bureaucratic pipe dream, but has the backing of America’s technological titans."

And then...

Today the muni WiFi experiment is a shambles. The Philadelphia system was abandoned by Earthlink in June, and sold for scrap. It never performed as promised, and served fewer than 6,000 subscribers out of a population of 1.6 million. It had promised to serve tens of thousands of low-income households; the final tally of such users: 902. Those who did sign-up for $6.95 per month found slow speeds and spotty coverage. Alas, even tech-savvy early adopters eager to sip lattés while browsing via broadband were disappointed...

Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago—all have gone bust. New York City, early on the bandwagon, got bogged down in politics, and now has simply given up. "We don't think municipal WiFi will succeed," offers a city official.

Fueled by the double helix of technological bravado and political hype, the war cry for muni WiFi was "market failure."

Go read the whole thing.

Government making decisions about technology...  Government deciding winners and losers in the economy... Gee, what could go wrong?

The Horrors of the National Health Service

Next up from the people who brought you the DMV... Health care!

From OpenMarket.org's blog section on health care reform, a few stories from Britain's "free health care paradise"...

This is not good:

An expectant mother gave birth on a hospital assessment room floor because busy staff failed to put her in a maternity unit bed.

Lynne Neilson had been waiting for two-and-a-half hours when she went into labour standing up, clutching the side of a trolley.

A midwife who arrived just as her daughter Orla’s head appeared put down a disposable mat, caught the baby and unwound the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.

Even then, Mrs Neilson had to wait a further hour before being transferred to the labour ward.

Then there's this one:

A cancer patient given less than two months to live has been refused a life-prolonging drug until an NHS trust finishes a month-long investigation.

And:

Large numbers of people are going without dental treatment and some even report extracting their own teeth because they cannot find an NHS dentist in their area, a survey reveals today.

Even worse:

So imagine my shock when I saw how some nurses recently treated my elderly aunt.
Annie was a stoical Yorkshire woman, and a devout Christian; she’d dedicated her life to helping others, training as a nurse and midwife before moving to Africa, where she set up several hospitals and nursing schools.

She was so committed to helping the poor that she undertook a postgraduate study on kwashiorkor - a muscle-wasting tropical disease caused by malnutrition.

Yet, with appalling irony, 50 years later my aunt spent her twilight months wasting away in an NHS hospital - as a result of malnutrition. Only this time the cause was a very British disease: neglectful care.

...

Nurses consistently failed to wash her for months, feed her or give her anything to drink - basics that any patient should expect. By the time my aunt was discharged into a nursing home - frail and disorientated -she weighed just 36kg.

...

Even though I knew she had been becoming more dependent on others before this, I was shocked by what I found when I visited her: she was slumped sideways in a large chair, with her hair unkempt and in a gown four sizes too big.

Part of the gown had fallen off her right shoulder, exposing her naked chest in full view of the patient in the bed next to her - an elderly man.

I was very upset, but when I complained to the nurse in charge, she just shrugged her shoulders.

Are You Sure About This, Senator Salazar?

Hugh Hewitt points out that Interior is a legal, political and regulatory minefield.

The Evolution of the Obama Logo

This is pretty cool: the Obama logos that weren't chosen.

NCLA Legislative Priorities

Round-up of the coverage:

NCBR:

The agenda focuses on five major themes -- job creation/preservation and workforce issues; transportation; energy; health care; and water issues.

Reporter Herald (Including Sidebar on the Marostica transparency proposal):

Lobbying for job creation will be the Northern Colorado Legislative Alliance’s top priority this legislative session.

“We have got to get these existing businesses back to thriving,” said Maury Dobbie of the Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp. on Tuesday morning during the legislative alliance’s 2009 legislative preview.

Coloradoan:

LOVELAND - As the national and local economies tighten, Northern Colorado business leaders on Tuesday asked state legislators to focus on jobs, transportation, energy, health care and water.