SchwabBlog: Watch out for a bailout

The Colorado General Assembly, according to the Denver Post, faces a boat load of decisions on issues ranging from public-school teacher tenure to college funding, from medical marijuana to river rafting, during the last week of their legislature.

Watch out for a bailout.

Legislators in the last few years have prided themselves on early wrapups, conducting their business with money-saving dispatch. This year, however, too many unresolved issues will probably push the gang of politicians to the more traditional push back of the clock at midnight May 12, in order to give themselves time on that Wednesday night to do the last of their dirty deeds.

Unless they decide a bailout is the better part of political valor.

Not acting to resolve conflicts is a favorite device of politicians not willing to face the political backlash that results from taking action.

Why do you think it took almost 100 years and seven presidents to gain nearly universal health insurance coverage for Americans? Congress during all that time was afraid to act and face the repercussions of their votes. So thousands of Americans died for lack of care.

Expect the Colorado legislature to make the same choice on at least a few of the issues lawmakers still face. I'd bet river access will be the most likely.

Cry me a river; who wants sacred landowners howling for your skin because you voted to give all Coloradans access to their rivers.

Delay is not what we pay these guys and gals for, so anyone who has any influence over the mob should press them to take all issues to a vote. The time for right policy is always now, not later. At least that's how Schwab reads the news.

Help poor, or yourself; a media no-brainer

The Denver Post would rather provide 100 million people with broadband access than 32 million Americans with health care.

I guess you can't fault the Post for editorially holding such a puzzling dichotomy of opinion, but the newspaper is a business, and business is business.

Logically, what's at stake, is the newspaper's self-interest. Supporting the federal government's expansion of broadband could benefit the newspaper's online business at little cost, while the expansion of health care to the uninsured might cost it some big money.

At least that's the impression the Post's Sunday and Monday lead editorials could give a reader.

Not surprisingly, Monday's editorial following historic passage of health-care reform denounced the action as a "single-minded quest to notch a political victory" for Democrats. The Post has opposed the health-care reform effort in Congress for most of the last six months while basically echoing facetious Republican arguments against it. It didn't much matter to the newspaper that 32 million more uninsured Americans would get health care they deserve as much as richer folks in the nation.

Yet the newspaper's main Sunday editorial hailed a national expansion of Internet access proposed by the Federal Communications Commission. It, too, will bear a cost to taxpayers including the Post. But the newspaper could conceivably benefit from such a huge market expansion because the FCC proposal -- just as health care reform does for insurance companies -- would increase exponentially the newspaper industry's potential to reach new customers, mostly those with money.

There you have it. Help the poor, or help yourself. It's a choice most businesses consider a no-brainer.

An Iranian solution

I write this not because I have any expertise in Iranian politics or much expertise beyond a generalist who is a journalist. Mostly, I write this because I enjoy a right of free speech, and because I can write.

I suggest the Iranian people who feel repressed by their own government hold a "Fingertip Revolution." A fingertip referendum, as it were.

I propose that Iranian adults cut off a small piece of their smallest finger's fingertip and mail it to their president in protest of his regime. Even a pin-prick's few drops of blood would do, if not real flesh.

We Democrats and independent voters in America should have done the same thing in 2000 when our Supreme Court made a political decision to grant the presidency of the United States to George W. Bush.

The Iranian president would have to react to your protest if only to prevent a public health crisis among your country's postal service.

But the small self-mutilation and mailing would at least register itself relatively quickly among the population of your country, and whoever chose to participate would have a lasting badge of courage to display to your neighbors and further express your opinion.

Such a small act would seem hardly worth a government crackdown with thousands of arrests, if that many people chose to participate. After all, what government in the world could arrest everybody in their country who has a cut on their finger.

I suggest this type of democratic protest, however, only in the most dire circumstances.

That's why I say, if someone had thought of it back in 2000, it would have been a good action for the American electorate to take considering the eight-year regime that resulted from George W. Bush being handed the U.S. presidency on a platter.

It would represent the people of a country using their government to register their protest against their government's widespread policy mistakes. It would be shedding blood in the name of freedom, and yet it should cost no one their lives, and really not much of their sacred honor.

If the act could in any way be considered a sin, it could only be a minor one in the eyes of any self-respecting deity.

Call it a bloody non-coup. Raise a fingertip in rebellion!