Archives

What’s in a name? An Attitude. The Denver Post reported that the newly minted Republican State House Majority has not only renamed several committees to announce their disdain for workers, the poor, and the disabled, but threw in a little historical revisionism for good measure (http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/11/12/house-committee-names-included-labor-and-welfare-under-prior-republican-rule/18581/). Yes, delightfully reminescent of other previous incarnations of a similar mentality, the House Republicans changed the name of “the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee” to simply “the House Business Affairs Committee,” and “the House Health and Human Services Committee” to “the House Health and Environment Committee” (signalling the presence of an obviously absent interest in environmental issues, while assuring us of a continuing disinterest in humanity?). They then claimed that they were changing the names back to what they had been prior to the 2004 Democratic takeover of the House, though in neither case were the pre-2004 names what the Republicans now adopted, and in the former case, the pre-2004 name was the same as the one that the Republicans inherited and then dumped. Remember the original Charlton Heston version of “Planet of the Apes”? Republicans = Gorillas, and Democrats = Chimpanzees and Orangutans. Nowhere more true than it is in Colorado, where we’ve been blessed with folks like Dave Schultheis and Scott Renfroe, the former having argued against a prenatal HIV test which prevents the transfer of HIV from the mother to the fetus on the basis that the mothers should have to suffer for their immorality, and the latter for having compared homosexuality to murder (http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/rockytalklive/archives/2009/02/schulteis_says_if_baby.html).

As expected, the 2010 elections left us with a Congress comprised mostly of the Far-Right and Far-Left, and the few remaining moderates from either party badly outnumbered. The Economist reported on the increased power of the Tea Party nut-jobs who have now taken power while remaining utterly clueless, and on the decreased power of moderate Democrats who now comprise a smaller minority of the Congressional Democratic Caucus (http://www.economist.com/node/17465283). Immoderate voters give us an immoderate and polarized government, and a lot of spinning wheels kicking up lots of mud but getting no traction, and getting us nowhere, not even on issues such as deficit and debt reduction.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Topics