<$BlogRSDUrl$>

My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2007-03-19

This Must Be Double Super-Secret Party Support

Via Colorado Senate News:

A key Democrat lawmaker said today the governor’s mill-levy “freeze” – proposed last week amid fanfare as a way to raise $65 million for schools – will not be introduced in the Senate after all. Instead, the controversial hike in most Coloradans’ property taxes now will be amended into the annual School Finance Act in the House.

The latest twist with the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t tax hike had critics wondering if the Ritter administration is backpedaling in the face of mounting political push-back since he debuted the proposal.

Make no mistake: Gov. Ritter's proposal is nothing more than a semantically-neutral way of raising taxes--A LOT!

But rather than showing just a tiny bit of political courage and supporting their guy by going out and making a case for this plan, the Senate Democrats--and, in particular, Sue Windels--are going to play a shell game with this tax hike and hope that they can get it through without the public noticing.

Yes, that's right--EVEN THOUGH they have a voting majority, and they know that the Governor won't veto his own plan (oh, wait . . . .), they know better than to try and do this sort of thing out in the open.

There's a lesson in this, Colorado: this state has not gone Blue. Think of all the ideologically blue proposals that the voters smacked down in the last election and look at the dubious accomplishments and approach of the Democrats in the legislature, and you sense that, on a very core level, this state is still very much center-right.

Now, if only we could get some candidates to articulate that effectively and some money to combat the Gill/Stryker/Polis tidal wave, we might actually win something again.

cross-posted at Political Avalanche
Posted by: Michael / 3/19/2007 11:43:00 PM

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?