TABOR - A Work of Fiendish Genius

Know your enemy, Sun Tzu tells us, and know yourself and you will always prevail. Knowing the evil genius behind the Taxpayers' Bill of Rights (TABOR) is essential to knowing the enemy we fight and our response is essential in defeating them.

The goal of the Right is to shrink government, normally defined as the amount of taxes they pay, no matter what the collateral damage. In conceiving TABOR, they found a way to shrink government on automatic. During good times, growth of government would be limited by the amendment but then, here's where the genius is expressed, when things turned bad, government would shrink and the decrease could never be recovered. Government would shrink automatically, State agencies would fight over funding and the original authors of the law would be forgotten. Enshrined in the State constitution, the law could not be bypassed without a vote. Higher education, transportation, education in general, services, all would shrink by default and on auto-pilot.

The marketing of TABOR speaks to the gut: Government is wasteful. By repeating that meme, the Right was able to make a case for TABOR despite dire predictions as to what it would do to State and local governments. Let's limit government's growth, they said, in such a way they can't simply vote themselves more money. But the first economic downturn guts government, the other side argues. They're just rationalizing, the Right replies, trust us, they're crooked. In the end, the Right won and TABOR became law.

Almost on cue, the economy tanked. State funding for transportation, higher education, services tanked with it so that our roads require billions of dollars in repair, our scholarship funds are non-existent and we're closing drivers' license offices to save money. Everything went as the "crooked" politicians had predicted and will continue to go as long as TABOR is on the books. We were smart enough in the last election to pass Referendum C to allow us to keep the refund checks we'd grown used to for State funding but that law will expire and TABOR will resume its relentless, automatized gutting of our State government.

We continue to fall for the Right's gut message. Politicians are corrupt, they say, resulting in Amendment 41 despite predictions of its effect in the Blue Book. Now children of State employees are ineligible for scholarships because of 41. They continue to flank us by using the gut argument. Politicians waste your money. Politicians are corrupt. Simple sentences, repeated until they're bored into the collective conscience and so self-evident that no cerebral argument can over come them. Those are our enemies and they will try again. Our only defense is the offense, speak to the gut. But being Progressives, it's incumbent on us to speak to the gut from the heart.

Delusional

If there has ever been an excuse for invoking the 25th Amendment and removing our Leader from office, it's his unwavering support of Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee included "I don't know" more times than I can count and painted a picture of a person unable to fulfill his job. Yet Bush continues his "unwavering support", both of Gonzales and of Wolfowitz.

The man is obviously delusional. I've argued against impeachment or other removal from office of Bush before, mostly on political grounds (he's the best advertisement for Democrats I can imagine, among others). His unwavering support of these two men in spite of reams of evidence that they're either incompetent or evil supports his immediate removal from the office. He's obviously unable to continue his work for reason of insanity.

Tragic Events at Newt Gingrich University

Newt Gingrich made the infinitely dumbassed statement that if the students at Virginia Tech had been armed, they would have gotten the attacker before he got what, two, three of them? I suppose two or three college students are worth less than a historical misinterpretation of a single sentence (the second amendment) but let's fast-forward a few years to Newt Gingrich University on a beautiful day in April.

First a bit of background on NGU. It was established to train young Conservatives in ideology. There are no science classes, no history classes, no civics. Students study what they need to become lawyers, political hacks and charismatic church ministers, nothing else is important. When students arrive, the handbook requires them to bring a laptop computer, a handgun (the 9mm Glock is recommended due to its stability), a bible and a copy of the Bill of Rights for ritual trampling at convocations. An hour a week on the firing range is required and that is where our shooter learned to change clips in his Glock in two seconds.

According to School Doctrine and the Student Handbook, in case of a school shooting, students are expected to defend themselves. So when our shooter comes into the student union and starts firing into a prayer meeting, the students do what comes natural.

They freeze. These are future lawyers and politicians, not people of action. Little people get themselves killed defending others, they are the elite (school motto: Education for the Elite, Work for the Others). Finally, one of them realizes he's armed and pulls his Glock. The problem just compounded itself, as we soon will see. Our shooter is a college student, looks like a college student, dresses like a college student. Our other students look exactly the same. The net result of our first hero's standing and pulling his weapon is that there are now two nearly identical people shooting. So when the rest of the student body comes unfrozen, the result is a free-for-all, a melee, a circular firing squad, a slaughter.

Further complication: The school, castigated by armchair police tactical specialists in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, immediately broadcast over cell phones, e-mail, loudspeaker and carrier pigeon there is a shooter lose on campus. Any loud bang now instigates gunfights campus wide as jumpy college students with weapons but with no tactical training panic and start shooting one another.

The end result, hundreds are dead. The university president the next day announces sadly that it was obvious that the students were under-armed and that next year's freshman class will be required to bring assault rifles, the Glocks just weren't deadly enough. And, in keeping with school tradition, the students take out their copy of the Bill of Rights, carefully tape over the Second Amendment, and proceed to trample the documents into the bloody mud....

Second Amendment - Where's the Dumb Line

When the Second Amendment, the one so often abused by the Right, was penned, the most fearsome weapon fired less than one shot per minute. A musket was good for one shot and, if you didn't hit the person you were firing at, they could take it from you and beat you to death with your own weapon before you could reload. There was a good reason, though, for authorizing the citizenry to bear arms: America was broke. By allowing the citizenry to keep arms for hunting and defense - Kentucky was the western frontier in those days, the nation had an armed pool of recruits for the inevitable next war.

Fast forward to April of 2007. Weaponry has come a long way - one man armed with a modern assault rifle could hold off hundreds of War of 1812 regulars. Or kill 33 people including himself on a college campus. The weapon's manufacturer and the seller to the young man who had been committed to a mental institution without his consent are protected by laws based on the same Second Amendment. The Right would hold, again proving that we disappoint ourselves when we expect intellectual honesty from them, that the young man was perfectly within his right to buy the assault weapon.

Imagine the brouhaha if someone wanted to buy a combat-ready surplus MIG from the Soviet Union. I'm sure those very authorities would defend the right because the Second Amendment doesn't specify which arms we are entitled to bear, the very defense used for assault rifles, yes? They'd be all over the guy. He'd never be allowed to fly it, it would be taken from him by the very people who just defended the right of a disturbed young man to buy deadly weapons. What about nuclear weapons? Are they defended by the Second Amendment? A strict constructionist reading would lead to the conclusion that I, a citizen, given my unrestricted right to bear arms, could buy a nuclear weapon from whomever and keep it in my basement.

Ridiculous? Okay, where's the dumb line, then? I'd place it at the point where someone who'd been arrested for stalking, who'd been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, who was referred to campus counseling for the content of his essays. Perhaps you'd place it at nuclear weapons. That is the unrestricted right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment and the Founding Fathers whose idea of a weapon of mass destruction was a musket volley, one per minute.