Zany stuff isn't just in the comic strips any more. It can pop up on any page of the Denver Newspaper Agency's liberal twin dailies. My favorite recently is Don Bain, business leader and tax advocate, complaining in the Post that the media relations tactics of C & D opponents are "like throwing candy at a bunch of monkeys." Um, Don, did you really mean to say that about the local press corps? Also laughable is another tax advocate likening me in the News to John Kerry -- darn, I've searched my house for Teresa and my bankbook for her billions, can't find either of them -- a howler to which my reply appears below.
Less funny than sad is the wildly distorted summation by Post columnist Fred Brown of which governmental branch has power to draw congressional districts, according to the plain written language of both the US and Colorado constitutions. Three different courts, he says blandly, agreed in finding no "sufficient reason to throw out a congressional redistricting plan that was approved by a Denver district judge in early 2002."
Brown's account flunks both Civics 101 -- the legislature's properly passed map was ignored by the first of those courts -- and Basic Punditry -- naturally the judicial branch, having seized supremacy from the legislature, will find self-serving reasons to keep it. I'm telling you, this tyrannical judiciary of ours, federal and state alike, is on borrowed time.
But anyway, after that Kerry crack, here's how I fired back in a letter to the Rocky:
** My opposition to Referendum C and D, the proposal for higher taxes and deeper debt, seems to have upset a couple of my fellow Republicans. But tax advocates Norma Anderson and Katy Atkinson have the wrong suspect.
** I stand up for taxpayers and TABOR more consistently than they do. I support leaner government and stronger defense, just the opposite of John Kerry. Nor am I married to a ketchup heiress. Where is the hypocrisy in any of that, ladies?
** It's true that last year, as Senate President, I voted not just once but eight times for compromise plans that would have dinged TABOR in exchange for the Democrats accepting less rapid growth in school spending.
** But in that game of chicken between the parties, they chickened, and nothing went to the voters in 2004. What went to the voters in 2005 is a turkey, and I hope to see it defeated, no apologies to anyone.