Calling out the wealthy

It's time for wealthy patriots to step up and put America back to work. Buy GM's new stock. In fact, buy any American company's stock.

Remember all that blather back in 2002 and 2003, after the 9/11 attacks, about how not supporting President Bush was unpatriotic?

Of course that was nonsense, but now I'm not kidding. The patriotic thing for wealthy Americans to do now, even Republicans, is to support the American economy by buying anything.

It will bring down the deficit. Invest in America, it's the patriotic thing do do.

And I'm not talking Tea Party here. Most tea-party advocates are middle-class Americans who wrongly think the Obama administration's efforts to stimulate the economy are surreptitious attacks on the nation's core beliefs of self-reliance and individualism.

But the news of the day suggests otherwise. Unemployment claims are going up again, meaning private business hasn't started hiring again, just as banks have refused to lend to small business.

So we call on all patriots who make more than $250,000 a year, either in investment income or from the great private treasuries of Corporate America. Step up and invest that cash you put away during the Bush years.

Buy America and help restore and preserve its position as the greatest economy on the planet!

Democrats' lesson from Dan Maes

"I'm voting against every incumbent; that's my theory."

Denver Post writer Christopher N. Osher quoted that little bit of wisdom from an unnamed Dan Maes supporter in a story on the front page of the Sunday Post about Maes' remarkable Republican primary victory. Photo credit: Boulder County Democrats

Democrats should learn a lesson from the story. Incumbent U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet beat former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff in Tuesday's Democratic senatorial primary.

If you've read my blog before, you know I would have liked to see Romanoff win, reflecting the same anti-incumbent sentiment in my Democratic choice as was expressed in the Republicans' gubernatorial primary race, where Maes claimed his victory.

On Wednesday, I contributed $25 to Bennet's general-election campaign, and offered to work for him. If my offer is accepted, I'll have to stop writing about him on this blog, so maybe the Bennet campaign will accept the offer just to shut me up.

The contribution, however, won't silence me on the issue because I believe bloggers, as long as they disclose their leanings to readers, have just as much right to write about politics as anyone else protected by the First Amendment. Working for the guy goes beyond a mere contribution, however, so I'll quit writing about that particular race if I actually do some work for Bennet's campaign.

But until then, I suggest the Democratic establishment, who were the real winners in the Bennet nomination, beware of the anti-incumbent sentiment expressed by the Maes supporter.

Many traditional Democratic voters feel the same antipathy toward the ongoing partisanship of Congress, and don't have much sympathy for Democrats who can't use the legislative majorities given them along with a Democratic president in 2008 to affect the "change" in government they had hoped to see come out of Washington over the past two years.

A public option among health-care reforms is just one of those disappointments.

So Michael Bennet had better keep his campaign rhetoric tilting toward the populist view that Washington remains broke, despite his nomination, and he still needs to help fix it. Making up to his establishment mentors and contributors is no task to be undertaken now -- nor ever for that matter.

Ken Buck is going to be coming after Bennet with the Tea Party in tow. Bennet needs independent thinking Democrats and independents in his camp if he expects to overcome.

Hire Bruce Willis, save the world!

Here's a great idea Jay Leno and David Letterman can promote in their nightly comedy routines.

You know that huge ice island that just broke off the Petermann Glacier in Greenland? The Associated Press reported today that the fresh water contained in the ice could keep the Hudson River flowing for two years. Image credit: fandango.com

Why not muster an international team of construction workers and miners led by Bruce Willis, of course, to break up the island four times the size of Manhattan and ship the pieces to the world's worst areas of drought.

Willis can attack the ice island like he did the asteroid in "Armageddon" and save the world from global warming. The ice chunks will melt and restart streams and rivers flowing in the drought regions and the new humidity generated from those regions will create their own rain storms and eventually the planet will start to cool again.

More importantly, Willis will survive this movie and still be available to save the world again when the time comes. It's just a thought.

Keep the kids out of it

Call me an odd blogger, but what struck me most jarringly in the coverage of Sen. Michael Bennet's defense of himself over the Denver Public Schools pension refinancing, was his bringing kids into the political battle.

The Denver Post quoted Bennet as accusing the Andrew Romanoff campaign of "repeatedly trying to score points at the expense of kids...."

Bennet ought to be careful about such a kid-centered accusation while his own campaign is blatantly using his own children to win support for the appointed senator, their Dad.

A Bennet ad currently running on television has each of his three beautiful daughters saying something nice about their Dad's cleaning up of messes created by other politicians.

The mess their Dad has gotten himself into with a high-finance bond scheme meant to reduce DPS debt but which has been turned around on the district during the collapse of the nation's credit markets is a fine mess for sure, Ollie.

Bennet, who gained a business reputation as an inovative financial turnaround artist, used some fancy footwork to conceivably get his district out of a crippling pension burden, but was treated to a little bait-and-switch by the very markets he was so adept at playing.

The deal so far has cost DPS more money than anticipated and now has it entangled in expensive "wind-down" penalties if it decides to back track on the action. The figures being thrown around here range from $25 million to $400 million to $750 million, perhaps small change to Bennet's mentor, Phil Anschutz, but nothing to sneeze at for an inner-city school district.

Bennet also said the New York Times, which reported on the collapse of the DPS deal while Democratic voters are still filling out ballots that will decide whether Bennet gets to stay a U.S. senator, "got it wrong." Yet when you read the story, its details are pretty convincing that "wrong" was the word Bennet should have considered more carefully when the deal was cut back in high-flying 2008.

The Times sometimes gets things wrong, but their authority is a hard wall to breach. Romanoff is right in calling this one a "bet gone bad." Time to close the casino to Wall Street playing with public money. Kids, even bright-eyed neat ones, have no recourse.

Bennet's business record at issue

The most important story in the Denver Post this morning did not appear on the front page, but was placed in the lead, left-hand column of the newspaper's Denver & The West, B-section cover.

It was about Michael Bennet's work for conservative billionaire businessman Phil Anschutz. Photo credit: BoulderCountyDems.com

In the news story, Post writer Michael Booth dissected incumbent Sen. Bennet's business career with Anschutz, which Bennet's rival in the Democratic primary, Andrew Romanoff, has made an issue of in campaign advertisements now running on local television.

The ads try to link Bennet to the Wall Street practices of high finance that helped bring the nation to its financial knees in 2008, and Booth's story tries to explain those practices as undertaken by Bennet during an early part of his professional career when he made millions of dollars for himself and his family.

It was a time, too, when Bennet made many of the contacts he has used to finance a multi-million-dollar campaign for election to the U.S. Senate seat Gov. Bill Ritter appointed him to about a year ago.

It's Bennet's first attempt to be elected to any office, and Romanoff, a former elected state representative and speaker of the Colorado House, has been right to challenge the incumbent senator in the Aug. 10 Democratic primary election.

The ads Romanoff is running are decidedly negative. They accuse Bennet of being a henchman of Anschutz in looting failing movie-theater companies during the early 2000s, when many movie chains were suffering from investing too much in bigger, fancier theaters at a time when movie audiences were actually growing smaller.

I have been a delegate for Romanoff at the state Democratic convention, and I'm going to vote for him when I fill out my mail primary ballot in a few days.

But Booth's story shows that Bennet, as a private businessman, did nothing more than be the kind of predatory private businessman he was supposed to be when he worked for Anschutz. Bennet helped Denver's local billionaire assemble the nation's largest movie-theater chain by buying up chains that were making less money than their previous owners had hoped to make.

Bennet became pretty good at the task, and made himself millions as well as hundreds of millions for Anschutz. In other words, Bennet did a good job.

He did, however, use big-business finance techniques that created wealth on the order of Wall Street leveraged transactions that finally brought down some of the nation's most prestigious financial firms. And he did that in the same decade the Wall Street firms did it.

So you might say Michael Bennet and Philip Anschutz helped lead the way for Wall Street's most infamous financial schemes.

Then again, you might not say that.

Nothing Bennet did was illegal, and nothing he did ought to besmirch his reputation as a successful, high-dollar money maker. He was ethical all the way, and he left Anschutz's employ to become the first chief of staff for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who is now running for governor.

When I interviewed Hickenlooper shortly after he took office as mayor, Hick cited Anschutz's takeover of Regal Cinemas as a pretty admirable accomplishment. I didn't know then that it also happened to be his chief of staff's admirable accomplishment.

If Bennet beats Romanoff in the primary, I'll vote for him in the general election.

He will make Colorado a fine elected U.S. senator.

Self-interest, a Republican earmark

Dick Wadhams, Colorado's cutthroat Republican chairman, says Tom Tancredo's third-party bid for governor is based in his own self-interest.

So what's new about that?

All Republican Party politics in Colorado is driven by the self-interests of its rich, establishmentarian membership. Conservative or not, Republicans in the state consistently argue for the least amount of government in order to preserve their privileged existence. Most of Colorado's executive business community also subscribes to that party line.

Check out the rising percentage of poor children in Colorado: 15 percent of all children in Colorado lived in poverty in 2008 compared with 10 percent in 2000. In 2008, they numbered about 179, 000 kids, said Lisa Piscopo of the Colorado Children's Campaign.

Guess who was in power for most of that time: a Republican governor who did nothing for Colorado's poor through 2006, and diminishing Republican majorities in the legislature, although a quartet of Democratic millionaires started to chip away at that power base late in 2004.

Limited government, which Republicans in Colorado hold up as one of their highest values, naturally limits the ability of the state to care for its poorest citizens, and naturally leads to lower and lower taxes that eventually starve the government of any sustenance at all.

That's the philosophy Republican Party leaders are trying to take to Colorado voters in November, and only the financially struggling Republican middle class are politically blind enough not to see that's what their party stands for.

Tancredo's run for governor will not only split the Republican vote in Colorado, it will cut down statewide voter turnout. Self-interested people don't go to the polls when they know there will be no victor to throw them their rightful share of the spoils.

Gambling for governor

Can a poor man run for governor of Colorado? Can we trust him?

Essentially, that's the thrust of the Denver Post's front-page story today about Republican gubernatorial hopeful Dan Maes.

Maes finally released limited information about his family income on Tuesday, after refusing to release income-tax returns to the Post, as the newspaper had asked, for the past several months.

The information released Tuesday shows why. Maes and his wife are poor people despite Maes' business having had one good $300,000 year.

Again, the thrust of the Post's coverage is: Can Colorado trust a small-business owner who has barely been able to cover the costs of his family's survival for the past 10 years as a governor responsible for maintaining and managing a multi-billion-dollar state budget.

It's a somewhat legitimate question, but it belies the Post's prejudice in favor of the rich and obviously successful. Presuming, of course, that only the rich are successful.

Most small-business owners struggle to make a living; that's why help for small business is a middle-income issue that gets to the heart of an economic recovery. That's why banks resist government calls to increase lending to small businesses. The risks are high.

Maes doesn't have to be ashamed of his small-business record of not-so-great revenue growth. But he shouldn't hide it from voters. Republican money men may not vote for it; even Democrats will not look favorably upon it. But voters should know how much of a bluff his lifestyle has been.

It's the only way for voters to make the safest bet on a future leader.